What I found in researching housing is that [the post-WWII Levitt housing developments, which essentially created the suburbs were] a small part of a specific social contract, one in which a house would be the focal point for a white community, a school, a neighborhood, as well as a forced savings vehicle. Income growth, aka raises, would structure the middle class, which was rooted in producing things. The Federal Reserve, though the banking system’s connection to housing, could control swings in the economy, connecting the financial elite to the middle class directly. This contract existed because working class people had power, and were willing to seek other social organizational forms if they did not have their needs met.

Ronald Reagan shifted this social contract, by making the home a financial asset more than a bulwark of community. People no longer really got raises, but they were able to continue consumption by drawing down on savings and borrowing, a substitute of credit for income. The 1980s saw mass offshoring, as America turned increasingly into a rentier economy. The connection from the Fed to the real economy was weaker, but it still held. It was in this era that black people were finally able to buy homes, and so they never were able to build wealth as white people had. And most people were falling behind.

The housing crisis of 2007-2012 snapped the spine of the Reagan-era weaker social contract. Bankers and politician not only didn’t stop the foreclosure crisis, but began asserting that homeownership wasn’t an important social goal. The Federal Reserve’s strategy turned entirely towards buying or selling the financial assets of the wealthy as a means of engaging in macro-economic stabilizing. And so, leaving aside the moral validity of any particular movement, popular radicalism returned, on the right and the left. in the the form of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Trump, right-wing anger at lockdowns, and now protests over police brutality, as well as riots.

To take just one issue, and not the only one at issue, reducing police brutality is a question of leadership, of bureaucratic management, and it requires the ability to come together as citizens and do politics. But since the 1980s, predatory financial elites have worked aggressive to break our public institutions so that we can’t collectively do politics. In some cases, they adopted the rhetorical form of racial tolerance while fighting its economic underpinning, in other cases they adopted the rhetoric of racial backlash. Either way, they have destroyed the ability of citizens to come together and do politics to foster needed social change.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, has dedicated his whole career to blocking democratic institutions from functioning, with the goal of putting conservative judges on the bench so they can write the law, immune from popular social pressure. That’s a brilliant strategy for maintaining rigid social hierarchies, but it doesn’t allow for any release of social pressure except despair and popular explosions.

We now have two paths. Restoring a stable social contract broadly will mean restoring the ability to do politics, to rearrange our productive capacity in ways that are safer, more efficient, and more fair, which will necessarily mean a reorganization of power. Or it will require a far more authoritarian society, one in which we accept a much higher level of security spending to protect a narrow elite from a disempowered and angry populace.

Either way we go, William Levitt understood that people without a stake in society tend to rebel. And that is what we are seeing play out.

Source: Corporate Power, Protests and the Breakdown of a Social Contract

This is so cool!

The bizarre life of the sea’s middle depths has long been a challenge to see, study and fathom. The creatures of that realm live under crushing pressures at icy temperatures in pitch darkness. The fluid environment is unbound by gravity and hard surfaces, so natural selection allows for a riotous array of unfamiliar body parts and architectures. By human standards, these organisms are aliens.

Now, a new kind of laser is illuminating some of the most otherworldly life-forms. The soft bodies of the abyssal class are made of mucoid and gelatinous materials — somewhat like jellyfish, only stranger. They feature mazes of translucent parts and gooey structures, including long filaments, mucus housings and fine-mesh filters for gathering food. Recently, in the depths off Western Australia, scientists filmed a gelatinous type known as a siphonophore whose length was estimated at 150 feet — potentially the world’s longest example of oceanic life.

On June 3 in Nature magazine, a team of seven scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago described an imaging device for studying these translucent creatures. It emits a thin fan of laser light that scans through the animals, gathers backscattered rays from the inner flows and tissues, and feeds those gleanings into a computer that visually reconstructs the living organisms in subtle detail. The device, called the DeepPIV imaging system, reveals the insides much as CT scans do for human bodies.

Source: The Sea’s Weirdest Creatures, Now in ‘Staggering’ Detail

I just ran across this absolutely terrific 2009 lecture series by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. He has a real gift for discussing these topics, in depth, in a fun and memorable way.

Here’s the playlist.

UPDATE: when I originally posted this, I had only watched one of the later ones, where he applies the approaches of several disciplines to understanding a specific topic (eg depression, religiosity, schizophrenia). The ones nearer the beginning are reviews of those disciplines (neurobiology, evolutionary biology, etc) and are pretty skippable for people who already have a decent basic understanding of those topics. I’d suggest starting as I did with one of the later ones to see how you like it, and then watching whichever of the early videos you need an introduction to and jumping back to the second half.

From UNCA’s own Rebecca Helm, whose jellyfish lab I’m dying to go and check out. These octopi are absolutely extraordinary, and Dr Helm’s post includes another five of her favorite videos of them <3

Given the internet’s obsession with both large cephalopods and bizarre animals, you’d think blanket octopuses would be all over it by now. I mean, a two-meter-long octopus dressed like a fash…

Six Reasons the Blanket Octopus is My New Favorite Stunning Sea Creature

This blog has been completely cracking me up today 🤣

This was one of my favorites, but there are lots of other good ones too:

This is an ugly and depressing story, but worth reading. It leaves me pretty cynical about who’s likely to get ahead in the current crisis.

Homewreckers, Aaron Glantz’s recent book about the investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis, is essential reading as we plunge headlong into a new financial catastrophe. Glantz observes that there are two ways a government can respond to a crisis caused by reckless speculation: by stepping in or by stepping aside. During the Great Depression Roosevelt stepped in; Ronald Reagan, dealing with the savings-and-loan crisis, stepped aside. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, alas, hewed closer to Reagan’s example.

The Housing Vultures | by Francesca Mari

God knows I miss the days when New Orleans was cheap as hell and it was easy to live there and be an artist.

The song of American urbanization plays on an accordion. Americans compressed themselves into urban areas in the early 20th century. By mid-century, many white families were fanning out into the suburbs. Then, in the early 21st century, young people rushed back into downtown areas. But in the past few years, American cities have begun to exhale many residents, who have moved to smaller metros and southern suburbs. As with so many other trends, the pandemic will accelerate that exodus. Empty storefronts will beget empty apartments on the floors above them.

The American cities waiting on the other side of this crisis will not be the same. They will be “safer” in almost every respect—healthier, blander, and more boring, with fewer tourists, less exciting food, and a desiccated nightlife. The urban obsession with well-being will extend from cycling and salads to mask design and social distancing. Many thousands of young people who might have giddily flocked to the most expensive downtown areas may assess the collapse in living standards and amenities and decide it’s not worth it. Census figures will show that the urban exodus went into hyperdrive in the COVID years. There will be headlines exclaiming the decline of the American city or, more punchy, “Americans to New York: ‘Drop Dead.’”

Then something interesting will happen. The accordion will constrict again and American cities will have a renaissance of affordability.

“Right now, you see rich people literally fleeing New York for their upstate homes,” Jeremiah Moss, the author of the book Vanishing New York, told me. “What’s happening to New York is traumatic, and strange, and post-apocalyptic. But I reserve a dark optimism about all this, if cities become less expensive over the next few years.”

In the decade after the Great Recession, American cities became very popular—and very expensive. Neighborhoods that were once jewel boxes of eccentricity became yuppie depots. Wealth elbowed out weirdness, and rents soared to suffocating levels that pushed out many of the families and stores that made the cities unique.

“Cities have historically been places for outsiders, but they became ruinously expensive in the last decade when they became popular with mainstream people,” Moss said. “If cities become less expensive in the next few years, it might allow artists and weirdos and the counterculture to come back to New York and places like it. It could make cities interesting again.”

As Moss spoke, I thought of a forest fire that rages through the underbrush and leaves a legacy of ash. To look at the aftermath of the fire is to see little but death and ruin. But in time, the equilibrium of the environment is reset. Sunlight reaches the forest floor. New things grow that couldn’t have before the fire changed the landscape.

The COVID-19 pandemic will leave two legacies for the American streetscape. In the next few years, the virus will reduce to rubble many thousands of cherished local stores. Chains will surge, restaurants will feel desolate, and the density of humanity that is the life force of cities will be ruinously arrested by the disease.

But the near death of the American city will also be its rebirth. When rents fall, mom-and-pop stores will rise again—America will need them. Immigrants will return in full force when a sensible administration recognizes that America needs them, too. Cheaper empty spaces will be incubators for stores that serve up ancient pleasures, like coffee and books, and novel combinations of health tech, fitness, and apparel. Eccentric chefs will return, and Americans will remember, if they ever forgot, the sacred joys of a private plate in a place that buzzes with strangers. From the ashes, something new will grow, and something better, too, if we build it right.

The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever

A few updates:
1)
I imagine that y’all have all seen Trump’s plan to “let” states loosen restrictions. It’s actually a lot better than I expected from him, since it contains metrics that the states should base it on:

States that attempt to restart their economies will be responsible for setting up testing sites; tracing the contacts of individuals who test positive; and conducting “sentinel surveillance” aimed at identifying individuals infected with the coronavirus but not displaying symptoms, and then tracing their recent contacts, Birx said.

I forget where I saw them, but there are specific metrics for each of those conditions that Trump expects states to meet in order to loosen up.

2)
Important info: I’ve been mentioning caveats to the IHME (U Washington) model for a while, but it turns out it’s much worse than that; they’re not doing any epidemiological modeling at all, just superimposing the Wuhan curves onto US data. From StatNews (yesterday):

HME uses neither a SEIR nor an agent-based approach. It doesn’t even try to model the transmission of disease, or the incubation period, or other features of Covid-19, as SEIR and agent-based models at Imperial College London and others do. It doesn’t try to account for how many infected people interact with how many others, how many additional cases each earlier case causes, or other facts of disease transmission that have been the foundation of epidemiology models for decades.

Instead, IHME starts with data from cities where Covid-19 struck before it hit the U.S., first Wuhan and now 19 cities in Italy and Spain. It then produces a graph showing the number of deaths rising and falling as the epidemic exploded and then dissipated in those cities, resulting in a bell curve. Then (to oversimplify somewhat) it finds where U.S. data fits on that curve. The death curves in cities outside the U.S. are assumed to describe the U.S., too, with no attempt to judge whether countermeasures —lockdowns and other social-distancing strategies — in the U.S. are and will be as effective as elsewhere, especially Wuhan.

3)

So where can we find better models? There are a bunch out there, but I’m not sure which ones are considered the best. Does anyone else have a good sense of that? The StatNews points to a couple, calling out this machine-learning-based one as especially accurate so far, and also mentioning this one.

InsightMaker is an interesting site where you can look (in a somewhat intuitive/accessible flowchart-ish way) at models created by other people, and tweak them yourself, as deeply as you like (or even build your own from scratch). They probably won’t be as good as the most accurate ones out there, but they can be pretty damn good.

4)

At least for as long as we maintain the current level of social distancing it seems like we’re past the first-derivative peak nationally (ie the number of new cases per day is clearly going down), which is an enormous relief. I don’t necessarily think we’re at the peak of cases yet, although I think hopefully that’s coming soon as well, as the number of new daily cases descends toward zero. Does anyone disagree? I’m sure it’ll continue to get worse in some specific places, but it overall we’re headed in the right direction as far as I can tell (see for example the “new cases” and “daily growth rate” sections here).

Of course that may all change the minute we start relaxing our current social isolation, if we do that badly. But it’s very good to know that we’re able to clamp down enough to keep it under control.

This Vox article on testing is really good. The NYT has an update on testing today as well. And you can see state-by-state testing updates at covidtracking.com.

I wonder what is the percentage of testing is, that constitutes adequate surveillance?  anyone know?

I’ve seen numbers ranging from 150k/day to 22 million/day (in that Vox piece, from Paul Romer — by far the highest I’ve seen).My thought would be that it depends dramatically on the situation — if we’ve managed to get fully past this first outbreak and we’re just stamping out small local outbreaks with testing & tracing, the number could be pretty low. If it’s still everywhere and we’re trying to open things back up, we would need an enormous number.

Other stuff I’ve read in the past few days that may or may not be of interest (none of them are urgent):

• James Heathers describes why we can’t rush into treatments like hydroxychloroquine without thorough testing first, by looking at the history of bone marrow transplants as an example of how that can go badly wrong.
• UnHerd argues that things are actually going fairly well in Sweden (with much less lockdown).
• UnHerd tries to consider how long lockdown can last politically (somewhat UK-centric but applies well to the US too).
• Rolling Stone thinks that the main reason the current situation is so exhausting is that our day-to-day decisions carry way more moral weight than usual.
• SlateStarCodex investigates who did a good or bad job predicting this situation, and why.

Coronavirus patients in areas that had high levels of air pollution before the pandemic are far more likely to die from the infection than patients in cleaner parts of the country, according to a new nationwide study that offers the first clear link between long-term exposure to pollution and Covid-19 death rates.In an analysis of 3,080 counties in the United States, researchers at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that higher levels of the tiny, dangerous particles in air kno

Source: New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates – The New York Times

Study:

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/covid-pm