The Angry Bear

Will all those who lost their jobs and their health insurance, be asked to pick up the tab?

World Chess Championship Ends The two best chess players in the world faced off this month, undeterred by lockdowns, travel bans or any other restrictions.  They never had to see each other either. It helped that they were both computer programs.  The former champ, Stockfish, is the strongest of the traditional type of program, designed by humans and invested with all the fine points of judgment the best human players can translate into code.  Because...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 16: if new infections have passed peak, what pace of decline can we expect? Here is the update through yesterday (April 15). Significant new items are in italics In the US, the only significant development yesterday was that deaths rose to yet another new daily high, while infections continued to be below last week’s peak. Since I want to look ahead, now that lockdowns appear to have worked and the number of new daily...

What lessons should we draw about the role of government from the COVID-19 epidemic?  I want to address this question in a few posts.  I’m going to start by examining a blog post by the libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan.  Brennan makes the following claims: Many medical journals published misleading papers based on bad statistical analysis and incomplete data; in particular the case fatality rate may have been overestimated because the total number of...

Senator Patty Murray has released a Democratic proposal to increase our capacity to test for the coronavirus.  The report quite rightly emphasizes that expanded testing is critical for containing the epidemic and re-opening the economy.  It criticizes the Trump administration for it’s failure to recognize the need for extensive testing: Democrats demand a clear, detailed plan to rapidly scale and optimize COVID-19 testing in the United  States. This plan...

(Dan here…simultaneous and probably related is the declining testing being done currently, and the federal lack of keeping track of nursing home and other long term care facilities deaths, as this group double downs on the “re-0pening” without precaution.) Washington Post reports: If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on Wednesday made sure they were closed. For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to...

by Dale Coberly A BEAR STORY FOR JASON WITH HOPE [Jason is a “Libertarian”  who recently tortured his brain to produce a proof that we have no obligation to help anyone else, because they are probably bad or will sometime, if given the chance, do something bad.] A long time ago I saw a film clip.  I don’t know who shot it or how. A hero, but not the hero of this story.  The film opens on a mountainside where a bear has found a dead elk, or killed it...

Prairie du Chien Selects Jill Karofsky Over David Kelly! I have previously posted on the highly swingy politicsal nature of southwestern Wisconsin, symbolized by the town there at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, French-founded Prairie du Chien (named for an Indian cheif, it turns out, who was “Dog of the Prairie” in English).  It seems that how SW Wixsonsin goes, so goes the whole state, at least in 2012, 2016, and 2018. Now we can add an election in...

Trump Defunds WHO and USPS: Will Motherhood and Apple Pie Be Next? Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Health Organization (WHO).  It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the coronavirus and the WHO for supposedly supporting China in their supposedly nefarious conduct, alloeing hin to wallow in  fit of xenophobia as well as accusations...

Unemployment has shot up in many countries especially including the USA. Is it time for aggregate demand stimulus ? One interesting thing (noted by Krugman in his newsletter which should still be a blog) is that Keynesians (including Krugman) are not treating everything as a nail, because all they have is a hammer. He (and others) haven’t just reflexively said stimulate until the unemployment rate is normal. This might be a bit of boasting about not...