The importance of D.O.G.E.

Donald Trump has asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead what is basically an audit of the entire US Federal Government.  There is much consternation about this in the expected circles - no doubt due in part of the proclivity of Musk and Ramaswamy to stir the pot and troll their opponents.

I mean, the Department of Government Efficiency?  D.O.G.E.?  Srlsy?

 Fun and games aside, this is a really important project.  It's not just that Elon says you can reduce the Federal budget by $2T/year - nice though that would be.  Instead, it circles back to something that Trump has been talking about for years.  Remember him asking why we can't get a growth rate of 4%?

I wrote this a long time ago, and updated it 6 years ago for the age of Donald Trump.  I think that it's even more important today, with D.O.G.E. explicitly intended to address the issues I called out.

(last ported 2 January 2018)

Why Donald Trump will transform America

Donald Trump understands something that nobody else knows, and he is doing something about it.  If he accomplishes what he is setting out to do, it will completely change America.  To understand what this is, we need to look at what's changed in the past few decades, and before.

Something unprecedented happened during the eighteenth century, something that is a sharp dividing line between the modern world and what came before. The Industrial Revolution transformed first Britain, then Europe and the United States, and then the world.

It started with cloth making, where initially water power drove a set of rapidly evolving machine types that made cloth literally thousands of times easier to make. Prices plummeted, and consumption rose by a factor of 12 between 1770 and 1800. People's lives began to change, as now underwear was affordable to more than just the wealthy.

Then came steam and iron. James Watt invented the first really successful steam engine, but it was only unleashed when Henry Cort approached him with a "grand secret". Up until then, Iron was frightfully expensive, because manufacturing basically had to heat the molten ore until the slag floated off. Cort had figured out how to use Watt's engines to drive huge hammers to beat the slag out of the metal. He could make fifteen tons of wrought iron in twelve hours. Iron production soared by a factor of 150 between 1740 and 1852. The price of iron plummeted, to the point where it entirely changed architecture.

Something was in the air - creativity had been unleashed, and continued in the nineteenth century, infecting industry after industry: Bessemer and Steel, Tennant and industrial chemicals (chemicals manufactured in ton weights, like chlorine bleach), railroads, electricity, internal combustion, aviation, the communications revolution of telegraphy-radio-television-Internet.

 

What was striking about this was that each industry would exhibit precisely the same growth characteristics. The "S" curve described a slowish initial takeoff, an exponentially rising growth period, and then a slow tailing off. All of these industries followed it in turn: cotton, iron, steel, railroads. What was key to the miracle that occurred between 1720 and 1990 was that as one reached the top of the curve and began to falter, a new industry emerged to drive things forward. Income per capita went from around $450 in what would become the United States (in 1700) to $18,300 in 1989.

In many ways, this seems to be spinning down. More and more industries seem to be in the top flat part of the curve. Fewer new industries are emerging with robust growth to pick up the slack. People look towards the future and do not see a doubling of real per capita national income.

We are told that the people are ignorant, and aren't smart enough to know what they're talking about. We're told this by an Educated Class with complex computer models of the financial system. We're asked, what do the hoi poloi know of the grand sweep of the world economic system?

I think that the feeling of dread is well justified, by a good view of the forest rather than the trees. And after all, the financial models didn't predict the 2008 collapse or the stagnation that followed, so a little more humility might be called for. But in general, the critique is correct - people don't know what's causing this, just that they're unhappy. They see a change, which makes them unhappy. They don't know the cause.

Immodestly, I would like to say that I think that I do. It's related to the size of government, but the usual arguments over which side of the Laffer Curve we're on, or what the optimal rate of marginal taxes are pretty much beside the point. Something is slowing the system down, and it's not the 35% that the Fed.Gov takes off the top (OK, a little, but that's a second order effect).

Let's think about fast and slow. The Empire State Building was built in a little over 15 months. The World Trade Center (Tower 1) took 52 months, and that was in 1970. Most recently, One World Trade Center took 7 years to complete.  We're slowing down; we're not as good at what we used to do.

The reason for this is regulation (and its bastard child, litigation). That's the problem. We have buildings full of people that make us stop what we're doing, fill out forms in triplicate, and then wait months or years before we are allowed to pick up where we stopped. Think for a minute what this does. It pushes some of the middle of the S-Curve into the flat part, reducing the overall value of the industry, as resources get sidelined instead of being engaged in production. More damagingly, it pushes the next S-Curve to the right, increasing the time that it takes to bring a new industry online. Most damagingly of all, it possibly completely eliminates some S-Curves from appearing at all, because the risk is too high to attract investors.

It's not the tax rate, it's the regulation rate that's making the economy run down. Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in great haste after Enron's collapse, has all but destroyed the high tech IPO market. Think of that as S-Curves that never came into existence.  The Silicon Graybeard posted about this 7 years ago:

Although the legislators and regulators never consider this, every regulation consumes some amount of time and money to comply with.  The new Finance Reform bill has been estimated to required the development of 250-300 new regulations.  Every regulation slows down, hinders and costs every honest business real money.  Despite the widespread talk of corrupt CEOs and general lack of corporate ethics, I've been working in the manufacturing industry since the mid 1970s, and every company has had an active, if not aggressive, ethics compliance program with requirements for training and seminars every year.  There are exceptions but most companies do their best to be honest and law-abiding.  Government seems to think it's mere coincidence that countries with lower tax rates and lower regulation attract business, and they demonize companies for moving to countries where the environment is better.  

As SiGraybeard points out, Big Business excels at managing the top end of the S-Curve, and they have big offices capable of dealing with the paperwork. Big Business doesn't mind regulation - in fact, if you believe (as I do) that Regulatory Capture is the equilibrium state of any government agency, Big Business uses regulation to hobble small but dangerous competitors. They get the Fed.Gov to do their dirty work, while they extract maximum value from the end phase of their old products. We pay for that in higher prices and lack of better alternatives.

Scale this up to cover the entire economy, as the government has tripled in the post war period, and it becomes obvious why we can't build skyscrapers any more. They don't seem to have trouble with this in Dubai - it's us that keeps us from doing it.

Regulation stifles innovation - quick, name the last revolutionary program that came out of the Department of Education. That effectively transfers wealth from future generations (our children and grandchildren, who will have lower standards of living). The recipients of that transfer are government employees - those folks that read and file your application (in triplicate) and the Big Business that captures the regulatory agency.

We have made so many layers of cruft - allowed so many barnacles to grow on the bottom of the ship - that we're noticeably slowing down. People feel it. People are nervous, because they think it's going to get worse. And while the recent Congresses and the Obama Administration poured gasoline on that flame with Health Care "Reform" (written by Big Pharma, the Insurance Companies, and the AMA), I'd like to point out that the Republicans ran Congress and the White House when Sarbanes-Oxley passed.

One way to look at things is that it's been a good long 300 year run. Too bad it's over, nothing lasts forever. Get used to stasis, with fewer and smaller S-Curves, and get used to declining living standards as Big Business and a bloated government take ever more from National Income, immizerating the masses.

A different way to look at things is government regulation didn't give people affordable underwear, or bleach to keep them clean. Get out of our way, and we'll do it again. The tax rates are annoying, but the buildings full of fussy balls-and-chains telling us that we'll hear back from them in 3 to 6 months are infuriating.

This is what Donald Trump knows.  He knows that there are winners in this game - the Ivy League, the Non-Governmental Organizations, "Big Green" (The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace).  Trump knows that they all hate him, and are engaged in a scorched earth campaign to destroy him. He also knows that the losers in this game are the working classes, who vote for him.  

So what do you think is his motivation?  Is it to change governance to unleash economic growth, rewarding his supporters and humiliating his opponents?  Or is it to fade quietly into the background, sitting in the corner and thinking about his many failings?  To ask the question is to answer it.

This is the big thing that Trump knows that nobody else does.  It's a big idea, which seems to be how he likes to think.  It's transformative.  So far, he has quashed nearly 2000 regulations in his first year, and seems only to be getting started.  And all the geniuses who hate him are so focused on his tweets that they have no idea what's hitting them.

Note: This post is based on one I did 7 years ago.  It's taken this long for a politician to come on the scene who looks like he wants to do something about it.

UPDATE 2 January 2018 22:17: Even the New York Times recognizes this in an (inadvertently) hilarious story.  It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at their attempts to spin soaring business confidence due to reduced regulation under Trump.  Almost every person quoted is a former Democratic administration aparachick, and there are precisely no quotes from business leaders who think that reduced regulation helps business expansion, hiring, and wage increases.  And there's this, of course:

There is little historical evidence tying regulation levels to growth. Regulatory proponents say, in fact, that those rules can have positive economic effects in the long run, saving companies from violations that could cost them both financially and reputationally. Cost-benefit analyses generally do not look just at the impact of a regulation on a particular business’s bottom line in the coming months, but at the broader impact on consumers, the environment, public health and other factors that can show up over years or decades.

Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.  [rolls eyes]

Is there an Extinction Level Event coming for the Deep State?

An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).

Well Donald Trump said he's going to appoint Elon Musk to lead a "Government Efficiency Commission":

Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”

There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined.  Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.

Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.

I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency.  It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization.  Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.

The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone.  And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.

Walt Deeley was a very senior Intelligence Manager.  He is listed on the NSA's web site:

As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.

...


Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.

Bold added by me.  Let me give some additional color around that.  He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization.  His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named.  People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.

One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working.  He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered.  Deeley asked for the Program Manager.  When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday.  It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.

True story - at least I believed it was.  And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.

So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical.  I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.

UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.

FBI security measures laughably weak

The FBI Inspector General has issued a scathing report about the Bureau's lackadaisical  attitude towards protecting sensitive data:

The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.

Drives containing national security data, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information and documents classified as Secret were routinely unlabeled, opening the potential for it to be either lost or stolen, the report [PDF] addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray states.

...

The OIG report notes that it found boxes of hard drives and removable storage sitting open and unattended for "days or even weeks" because they were only sealed once the boxes were full. This potentially allows any of the 395 staff and contractors with access to the facility to have a rummage around.

There is a photo of the storage facility at the link, and it can only be described as horrifying.

I guess they are too busy spying on regime enemies to, you know, take security very seriously.

Just how bad is the illegal immigration problem?

Libertarians have ditched their support for "free markets and free people":

I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.

Read the whole thing, and the comments.  And remember that this is Libertarian Central.  If the Open Borders crowd has lost Samizdata, they've lost everybody.

Britain's National Health Service throws away confidential medical information

And then blames the medical student who had to take out the trash:

A data protection gaffe affecting the UK's NHS is being pinned on a medical student who placed too much trust in their bin bags.

An investigation was launched following the discovery of confidential medical data sprawled across a back alley in Jesmond, a pricier suburb of Newcastle in the North East of England.

The medical student is thought to have thrown the documents into their domestic waste, which was placed outside for collection, but through one means or another, the documents escaped to the freedom of an alleyway off Lonsdale Terrace only to be found by a passerby.

So what can we say about the NHS from this?  Well, they have a terrible process for sensitive waste disposal.  They may actually not have any process at all.  Certainly the evidence does not suggest rigorous training and enforcement.

Also, we see Yet Another circling of the wagons, with a hopelessly weak excuse that blames the lowest guy on the totem pole.  That does not suggest that their process will be improved next week, or next month, or next year.  Remember, the Organs of the State do not self-correct.

But socialized medicine is awesome, amirite?

 

Remember the FISA renewal vote?

You know, the one today?  Guess what?

It's actually got new stuff in it - and you are now required to spy for Uncle Sam.

Yes, you. But fear not, Citizen: NSA no doubt will be responsible in how they use this.

Judge issues restraining order keeping DOE from tracking bitcoin miners

Interesting:

Earlier this month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced its intention to gather basic information about the energy consumed by bitcoin mining. In making the decision, the DOE noted that the share of bitcoin mining happening in the US has shot up by a factor of over 10 just within the last three years, leaving the activity consuming as much electricity as a fairly populous state....

Albright's decision to issue the injunction is based largely on the fact that the DOE's decision to delay going forward with the survey was voluntary and could be rescinded at any time.

But he went beyond that by saying that the mining companies were likely to succeed on the merits of their case. In general terms, he noted that the DOE relied on its ability to enact emergency measures, and those are only applicable if there's a risk of public harm. The DOE will likely try to make the case that elevated carbon emissions and electricity costs both count as public harms, so Albright is suggesting that he's unlikely to find those compelling.

Ah, Climate Change.  Is there anything it can't do?  Except in west Texas, where the Judge doesn't buy the whole "Climate Emergency means more Government" thing.

 

President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's annual bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D.

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet.

Interesting Security News

Item the first: follow the money:

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) held its first-ever automotive-focused Pwn2Own event in Tokyo last week, and awarded over $1.3 million to the discoverers of 49 vehicle-related zero day vulnerabilities.

Researchers from French security outfit Synacktiv took home $450,000 after demonstrating six successful exploits, one of which saw the company’s crew gain root access to a Tesla Modem. Another effort found a sandbox escape in the Musk-mobiles’ infotainment system.

Other popular targets at the three day event included after-market infotainment systems and, more troublingly, a whole host of successful hacks on EV chargers.

This is a good strategy - show me the hack, I'll show you the money.  More, please.  Plus, good on them picking automotive computing as the target.  Long time readers will recall that this is something I've been harping on for quite some time.

Item the second: SEC gets pwned (same link as above): 

We had our suspicions when Twitter/X blamed the US Securities and Exchange Commission for the account takeover that led to the premature release of news the regulator would allow Bitcoin exchange-traded funds– and those suspicions have been confirmed.

"The SEC determined that the unauthorized party obtained control of the SEC cell phone number associated with the account in an apparent 'SIM swap' attack," the Commission admitted last week.

For those unfamiliar with this form of attack, SIM swaps involve convincing a telecom carrier to transfer a phone number to a new SIM card (a shift for which there are a variety of legitimate reasons), giving an attacker control over communications going to and from that number – like a second authentication factor.

That didn't matter, of course, because the SEC also admitted it disabled multi-factor authentication with Twitter support in July last year "due to issues accessing the account," but no one bothered to turn it back on.

"It made security too hard and then we forgot all about it" is an excuse that I suspect that SEC investigators wouldn't accept.  Top. Men.

Why, oh why?

People like to (as The Queen Of The World likes to say) complicate a cornflake.  Case in point: dimmer switches.  I've been swapping dimmer switches for simple on/off ones for literally (mumble mumble) decades.  It's dead simple.

Except now it's not.  Most new light bulbs are LED type, because Congressional Lobbyists for General Electric wanted all of us to pay $5/bulb instead of 50 cents.  Thanks ever so much, Congress.  But the Twilight Lone experience doesn't end just at sticker shock.  Consider the failure points:

1. Your LED bulbs must be "Dimable".  They won't dim if they're not, and you'll pay a premium for this.
2. Your dimmer switch must be for LED bulbs.  It won't work with normal incandescent ones (assuming you can even get these anymore).  You will (wait for it) pay a premium for this.
   
3. The new dimmer switches are bigger than the old ones.  This isn't a problem if you have only one switch in the electrical box; this is a big, big problem (see what I did there?) if you have multiple switches in the same box, covered with a multi switch face plate.

That last one means that there are lights that I simply cannot dim, because I can't swap out an existing on/off switch for  one of the new, high-falutin' (and expensive) LED dimmer switches because it simply won't fit. 

Gee, thanks for jacking everything up, Congress.  Nobody's life, liberty, property, or sanity are safe when you're in session.  Jerks.

3 "Only Ones" arrested for theft

TSA agents stole money from passengers at screening points in Miami:

Three Transportation Security Administration agents who work at Miami International Airport were arrested on fraud charges.

According to investigators, Elizabeth Fuster, Josue Gonzalez and Labarrius Williams worked together to steal cash from passengers’ purses and bags while they were being screened at the airport, June 29.

The agents were removed after a TSA employee followed up on a complaint, watched surveillance video and shared findings with the police, who took immediate action and placed them under arrest on Thursday.

But remember, only government agents can be trusted with firearms.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has been saying for years that TSA is a total waste of money (c.f. the 90+% failure to detect phony bombs during testing), and that if he were put in charge of it he would give all the budget back to the treasury.

 

Has WWIII already started?

Very in-depth and thoughtful post at E.M. Smith's place.  The comments are thoughtful, too.

For the life of me, I can't see what compelling interest the USA has in war with Russia.  I can see what the US Military Industrial Complex has with a war like that.  And as they say, "War is the health of the State". 

But I don't see what's in it for us.

UPDATE 31 January 2023 11:18: Chuck Pergiel has a related and very interesting post about who the chief clowns running US foreign policy are.

Update 31 January 2023 15:35 : Link corrected

Heh

 Stolen from Comrade Misfit.

Vince Gill - One More Last Chance

So some Covid Karen tells us we all need to forgive and forget about the damage, deaths, and pain inflicted by the Covid lockdowns.  Lots of folks are talking about this - I particularly like Aesop's. Better people than I have written eloquently about the death and destruction, and about how forgiveness requires repentance.  I really don't have anything more to add about that, either.

But one thing struck me about Karen's (actually Brown University Economist Emily Oster) article.  Specifically, this:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

Whoa, slow down Cowpoke.  There wasn't any luck involved at all.  Case in point, Borepatch, March 22, 2020 - a week after lockdowns were imposed:

There are three very interesting Coronavirus narratives emerging in just the last day or two:

1. The virus looks to be less bad - and perhaps much less bad - than we had feared.  As we learn more, we learn that the worst case scenario that had been put forward is much less likely.
2. Government actions have been a factor in making the outbreak or response worse or of using the outbreak to cover up their failures.
3. The government response is strangling the economy.  By their own admission (i.e. bills being discussed in Congress), there is at least a Trillion dollars of damage so far.

So look at this situation: things are not as bad as we feared, governments are to some extent demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy, and the draconian crackdown/overreaction is destroying businesses, jobs, and people's lives.

Man, I sure was lucky in that analysis, wasn't I?  But I guess that I'm particularly lucky because a month later I wrote this:

Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway.  Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.

But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences.  Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:

And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.

Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.

But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.

Man, that's two in a row for Borepatch!  How lucky can you get?  But wait - there's more!  Posted here September 3, 2020:

A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.

Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.

Bold in original.  That's some medical response, right there.

In all honesty, this really isn't controversial at all.  We've studied the health effects of unemployment for decades and decades.  We know what happened to employment, and how many people lost their jobs.  Applying known health impacts to those people allows us to quantify mortality due to the lockdown.  It's just math.

What is interesting here is the analysis of age at death.  For virtually all (90%) of Covid deaths, the patient was very old.  This means that there were few "life years" left for that patient.  However, for unemployment caused mortality the age at death was much younger, and so there were many more years for each of these people.

The process of higher mathematics gives the result that is in boldface in the quote.

It's hard to see a more counter productive government response.

Man, I must be the luckiest man on the face of the earth, stringing these analyses and predictions together like that.  I'd better buy a Powerball ticket for tonight!  [/snark]

So what is it that makes me so much smarter than a Brown University Professor?  I wrote about this in the April post linked above, specifically:

Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again.  Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future?  To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people?  Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months?  Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months?  That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.

It's the Unseen.  And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor.  That it is Unseen is not by accident.

And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation.  Of course the resulting public policy is hideous.  Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference).  You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine.  No doubt this is all a coincidence.

Even a private University like Brown cannot exist without the generous support of the Government.  Professor Oster has a financial incentive to follow the government with respect to this policy, and when a person's dinner depends upon their support for a particular policy they tend not to see any evidence that runs counter to that policy.

Oh, and no doubt Professor Oster did just fine during the lockdowns while working class people in Providence lost their businesses.  No doubt this was all a coincidence, too.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

Point of order, Professor Oster: it wasn't the pandemic that caused all this damage.  Rather, it was the government imposed lockdowns (supported by "experts" such as yourself) that did.  Some of us called this very, very early: April 21, 2020 to be specific:

There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore.  We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown).  Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed.

We knew this from the very beginning, but dim-bulb "Experts" like Professor Oster got this public policy wrong all the time.  They got it was catastrophically wrong. Yet somehow the "experts" keep wanting another chance to get things catastrophically wrong again.  And again.  And again.

Professor Oster wants us to give these same "experts" one more last chance.  There's a Country music song about that.

(Best country music cameo ever)

One More Last Chance (Songwriters: Vince Gill, Gary Nicholson)

She was standing at the front door
When I came home last night
A good book in her left hand
And a rollin' pin in the right
She said you've come home for the last time
With whiskey on your breath
If you don't listen to my preachin' boy
I'm goin' to have to beat you half to death

Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

First she hid my glasses
'Cause she knows that I can't see
She said you ain't goin' nowhere boy
'Til you spend a little time with me
Then the boys called from the honky tonk
Said there's a party goin' on down here
Well she might've took my car keys
But she forgot about my old John Deere

So give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

The "French Haircut"

E.M. Smith has a typically thoughtful post about what is happening in Europe right now:

Do note that at present the EU & UK are having about a 10% to 20% reduction in their natural gas flows. This is about 5% to 10% reduction in their “Carbon”. Now both currencies have dropped about 1/3 of their value vs the $ US (that is also losing value fast to inflation….). They also have a political revolution in the starting phases, governments being turned out, and massive marches in the streets. It isn’t even winter yet… With that small a step toward the WEF “Decarbonization Goal”, this is what you get. What do you think will happen with a double of that “decarbonization”?

He then goes on to point out that the EU's "accomplishments" to date are only about 10% of the decarbonization goal and that to meet these goals each of the next ten years will have to do even more than what the last year has seen.  He points out:

Street Protests in the EU / Europe writ large are the prelude to riots that are the prelude to insurrections and revolts. I’ve often said these Elite need to remember “The French Haircut”. Yet they do not.

A lot of folks in Europe are going to die this winter.  We'll see what things look like in March, but I wonder how many of the EU governments will still be in power by then.