(2022-09-29) ZviM Covid 9/29/22 The Jones Act Waver

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 9/29/22: The Jones Act Waver.

The pandemic is over. Long live the Public Health Emergency.

There can be no clearer proof of the abuse of an emergency than extending it after publicly declaring that it is over.

Executive Summary
Covid is over but somehow also still an ‘emergency.’
Potential new treatment for Covid doing well in clinical trials.
Some people will continue to do way too much prevention for a long time.

Physical World Modeling

CDC no longer recommends universal filter masking in health facilities.

Another note of frustration with the stream of misleading Long Covid studies. Even when done right Long Covid studies have a super hard statistics problem to solve in order to be meaningful. Instead we get the same zombie claims over and over again

Survey confirms health care workers show increased levels of emotional exhaustion... Important not to lose sight of a third of nurses having this problem before Covid. That is already super high and a bigger sign of problems than the increase later.

Latest air filtration review finds student performance falls by up to 13% when carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rise from 600ppm to 1000ppm

Keep Summer Safe

Kelsey Piper points us to a thread by Lazarus Long (in profile: #MasksForAll) about the extreme lengths some people will go in the name of preventing Covid-19.

We have the SAG back-to-work agreement, which mandates extreme protocols. We have productions which would shut down on a positive Covid test.

Don’t Look Back

Arnold Kling does a post-mortem.

I would be less inclined to think in terms of grades and blame, and to think more in terms of what we learned about the functioning of various institutions.

In terms of particular disagreements if I was giving out grades:

I would dock Trump for different reasons than those listed, and would emphasize that he did Operation Warp Speed. Many counterfactual others would not have done it. OWS was the most important decision of the pandemic

There was definitely too much stimulus done

I would put more emphasis on the FDA and CDC’s failings relative to the bad grades listed, and was surprised by the omissions especially the FDA

I would give out good grades to private non-vaccine decisions in general

In Other Covid News

The medical system does not want most people to be taking Paxlovid, and will do its best to run them around until they run out the clock.

FTX Future Fund: Change Our Mind

core opinions on AGI timelines and/or AGI risk.

although I think FTX’s position is wrong, I expect the prize here to be unclaimed and believe that the market on this is trading too high

Bad News

The results are in on the FDA’s NyQuil chicken intervention, it went exactly as you would expect except worse and maybe this should be a lesson to everyone involved?

California knows if your kids are all right on the latest standardized test. It is refusing to tell you.

California has two ballot initiatives that would legalize sports betting. Both are private attempts to grab the associated rents

both are ballot measures, which have proven a truly terrible way to do anything, so for overdetermined reasons I urge all to vote NO on both propositions. This reinforces my ballot initiative principle in California, which is to vote NO on every ballot proposition that isn’t a repeal of a previous ballot proposition, in which case I would vote YES. If California wants to legalize sports betting, or do anything else, it can pass a bill.

From NYT: It is impossible, due to a combination of land costs, government regulations and fees, taxes and tariffs to build an affordable ‘starter home’ that costs $200k or so, even in relatively low-cost places

There is also a lot of confusion here about what are costs and what are benefits, and why we would want someone buying a ‘starter home’ instead of renting an apartment or part of a house.

Good News, Everyone

Polymarket has a prediction market on whether Kalshi will be allowed to have election prediction markets.

I wrote a letter in support of Kalshi’s application, as it seems did many in SV. No matter what they did or didn’t do to their competitors, a decision in Kalshi’s favor here opens the door for such markets generally. That’s what matters.

Feeling grateful is one of the few known technologies for having a happier life, and the rich have extra things for which to feel grateful, so this is a periodic reminder that people are in general making a mistake here by not feeling more grateful.

Send to the Balsa Research Department

The insanity that is the Santa Cruz housing market, even worse than SF. Prices seem lower than I would have expected given conditions, and everything gets snapped up right away, so yes, still too low. I firmly believe zoning has to be mostly solved at the state or federal level at this point.

Thoughts on how to fix the problem of student loans.

One worry with such proposals is that such a heavy subsidy to public universities makes it exceedingly difficult to make the math work for private universities

The Ivies and other elite universities would be fine. The less good ones, not so much, so the question is whether we should care.

The other worry is that we would be even more heavily subsidizing college. Do we want to do that?

the question is what percent of college is signaling and especially what percentage of it is that to the marginal student.

The graduate schools are where the biggest problem lies, and where the new repayment systems are going to create by far the largest boondoggle.

Liz Truss, the new Prime Minister of the UK, announced a budget with a bunch of regressive tax cuts that don’t make economic or political sense to anyone,

The Bank of England responding with emergency QE, on the other hand, to protect the illusion of the solvency of pension funds, does seem to be rather ominous

the Jones Act was sufficiently in the news this week acting even more destructive than usual that it seemed necessary to say something quickly

Yesterday, after several days of waiting, the Biden administration finally issued a waiver kindly allowing a ship to, as a favor, unload its badly needed diesel fuel in Puerto Rico.

more than a fifth of the island’s residents — were without power

One might think this was not a controversial position. One would be wrong.

This was quite the dilemma. You can allow people to have what they need to recover from a hurricane, or you can continue to ban shipping in the name of being seen as union friendly

The ship, you see, was not American-built, American-manned, American-owned and American-flagged. Thus, using it to deliver fuel is illegal under the Jones Act.

Labor unions, which have been among Biden’s strongest supporters, have opposed efforts to weaken or waive the Jones Act, including after natural disasters

no move by American shipping to provide supply, every year less and more expensive remaining ‘American shipping’ left, and we know all this because every remaining such ship can be marked on a map there are that few of them left.

The supposed goal of the Jones Act is to strengthen American shipping. It has been around for a century and we no longer have American shipping.

the unions should, for selfish reasons, not want this.

Ports are unionized, through and through. The more activity takes place in the ports, the more union jobs there are for port workers.

The Jones Act is not all bad. It does one very cool thing, which is to be the perfect version of itself. The Jones Act lives its best (worst?) life. It gives us an avatar to embody every completely insane protectionist principle, of requirements and regulations run so far amok.

American shipyards have been effectively destroyed for all competitive purposes by the Jones Act shielding them from competition.

Thus the Jones Act is the perfect test. If someone or some group supports repeal of the Jones Act, you know that somewhere in there is the desire for things to be better rather than worse. If someone opposes repeal of the Jones Act on reflection, they are not primarily concerned with things being better rather than worse. If they oppose emergency Jones Act waivers on reflection, what else do you need to know about them?

Meanwhile, Jones Act advocates then defend other similarly senseless laws on principle.

This effect is explicit on the Dredge Act and Maritime Passengers Act.

For some reason, this past week, together with Moshe Looks and Alyssa Vance, I founded Balsa Research.