SocraticGadfly: COVID week 80: Jobs and housing and calling bluffs

October 19, 2021

COVID week 80: Jobs and housing and calling bluffs

The "Great Resignation" is accelerating, per the Atlantic. COVID, and its modest uptick in federal safety support net aid, was just the fulcrum prying this open.

But, the British version of Wired is expecting a "Great Boomerang." Anthony Klotz, a prof here at A and M, says he doesn't expect everybody to return to something like their old jobs immediately. Indeed, he says that it could take five years. Inflationary pressures from the Great Supply Chain Snarl could speed that up, as I see it, if inflation is worse for a longer period of time. Others think that for other reasons it will also get shorter. Related question: Will this further increase gig work rather than permanent and in-house jobs for the longer term?

Is the Lege, Senate half's, attempt to give federal COVID relief money to homeowners only, and not renters, a bill of attainder? That's unconstitutional under state as well as federal constitutions, and this renter wants to know if Team Biden will raise an objection if it's not challenged in the state court system.

Those vaccine lotteries? In arguably the largest real-world test of behaviorial science / behavioral economics / behavioral psychology, they have been a big fat fucking fail. Somebody alert Dan Ariely, then Danny Kahneman and disciples of the late Amos Tversky.

The horse dewormer fans won't give up on lawsuits trying to force hospitals to use it on their loved ones, almost certainly unvaccinated. Were I a hospital CEO, I'd consider making a deal: ivermectin for a jab, the shot coming first.

Four states didn't have ICU bed room for an unvaccinated man who eventually died of a COVID related hematoma, and who in confusion started yanking tubes from himself hours earlier. Get a shot, and no, no "thoughts and prayers" for the family if they abetted his antivaxxerism. 

Worldometers has the US death count at nearly 750K and it's surely low. Don't believe lower estimates.

And, you can't call bluffs on the families of patients who have led to a surge in violence against doctors, nurses and other hospital employees. 

I personally wound up blocking somebody on Twitter. They weren't a Great Barrington type COVID obstructionist, or a fellow traveler like John Ioannidis. They weren't even totally a true COVID contrarian. But, they were a COVID zero summer and Overton Window shifter who wouldn't look at their own illogic. John Nutt, apparently British, was a zero-summer by saying only the science research he posted counted. On masks, most of it was by a Lisa Brosseau. She's legit, but claims that cloth and surgical masks are almost worthless in workforces. Problem? She didn't actually say worthless, and other studies, maybe smaller, disagree. (That said, I think some of her work is meta-study). Overton Window problem? We weren't talking about masks of various types in the workforce only; we were talking about various types of masks in general. Illogic? He said he opposed both mask and vax mandates (and to others in comment threads on various Patheos sites), but said he supported the government buying N95 or KN95 or better masks for workers across the country. Even Britain isn't doing that, not with Bojo trying to slash the NHS. And, if it did? It would buy those masks on the presumption people would use them, and if it worried they didn't? It would MANDATE them.

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