I don't have the article to hand or the time to research it properly, but if that flu IFR from New Zealand in the BMJ is the one I'm thinking of, I remember reading it and thinking it was extremely suspicious: it just doesn't seem compatible with the actual flu death figures for the UK. That and the abstract talking about how people compare covid with the flu and that's a Bad Thing rings alarm bells. It seems pretty clear that covid at least used to be a lot more dangerous than the flu, but I'm pretty sceptical of those numbers.
Do you have any information or thoughts about why China won't clear the Pfizer vaccine for use? I hadn't heard anything about that, and it is making the suspicious part of my brain wonder what is in all those reports Pfizer didn't want released for a century.
That does seem to be the reason. I'm confused whether this is a consideration of physical reality ('we don't want to depend on them') or perception ('we don't want it to look like we depend on them, or that they won'), probably both.
Ad "give parents government money instead of government funded daycare". I think that opposition to this comes from a sort of morally conservative perspective - some parents might, and let´s be real, will, use those money on Bad Things (illegal drugs etc).
Oh, sure. They'll also dump their kids in day care and go take drugs, too. But conservatives (in the real sense) should very, very much support the money approach here, because it encourages families to act like families, whereas free day care relatively advantages nuclear families with no help and single parents - traditional help now is effectively competing against free government programs to provide service.
I've observed red tribers being *very* in favor of direct cash xfers to parents, either as direct payment or tax credits, and generally in favor of vouchers.
Regarding the daycare thing, I think it depends on whether the proposal is to create daycares and make them free, or pay for people to use existing daycare.
The latter seems obviously worse than cash transfers to parents, but it’s conceivable to me that extending public education to 3 & 4 yos might be less expensive than creating that much new daycare capacity and if parents are going to use their cash transfer for daycare creating capacity would be important.
Counterargument is that what we're actually found evidence of is that the public daycare (official name: preschool) from the studies is harming kids, but better preschools may exist privately if we let competition happen.
That’s in interesting thought - I had interpreted that study to suggest that any daycare is worse for kids than direct parental attention so that the question was whether subsidizing the cost of parenthood was good regardless (for example if you believed it’s better to have have more, imperfect children than fewer more perfect children).
But I guess if better childcare allowed for the best of both worlds, there’s no reason to make that tradeoff.
I don't have the article to hand or the time to research it properly, but if that flu IFR from New Zealand in the BMJ is the one I'm thinking of, I remember reading it and thinking it was extremely suspicious: it just doesn't seem compatible with the actual flu death figures for the UK. That and the abstract talking about how people compare covid with the flu and that's a Bad Thing rings alarm bells. It seems pretty clear that covid at least used to be a lot more dangerous than the flu, but I'm pretty sceptical of those numbers.
Do you have any information or thoughts about why China won't clear the Pfizer vaccine for use? I hadn't heard anything about that, and it is making the suspicious part of my brain wonder what is in all those reports Pfizer didn't want released for a century.
They do not want to be technologically dependent on Western capitalist barbarians (see also: communist ideology, Century of humiliation)
That does seem to be the reason. I'm confused whether this is a consideration of physical reality ('we don't want to depend on them') or perception ('we don't want it to look like we depend on them, or that they won'), probably both.
So they don't use the other western vaccines either, and only rely on their own? Did they ever say when theirs were released?
Yep. So far, China approved only domestically developed vaccines. See here: https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/country/china/
Very interesting, thanks!
Ad "give parents government money instead of government funded daycare". I think that opposition to this comes from a sort of morally conservative perspective - some parents might, and let´s be real, will, use those money on Bad Things (illegal drugs etc).
Oh, sure. They'll also dump their kids in day care and go take drugs, too. But conservatives (in the real sense) should very, very much support the money approach here, because it encourages families to act like families, whereas free day care relatively advantages nuclear families with no help and single parents - traditional help now is effectively competing against free government programs to provide service.
I've observed red tribers being *very* in favor of direct cash xfers to parents, either as direct payment or tax credits, and generally in favor of vouchers.
Regarding the daycare thing, I think it depends on whether the proposal is to create daycares and make them free, or pay for people to use existing daycare.
The latter seems obviously worse than cash transfers to parents, but it’s conceivable to me that extending public education to 3 & 4 yos might be less expensive than creating that much new daycare capacity and if parents are going to use their cash transfer for daycare creating capacity would be important.
It’s a lot of ifs though.
Counterargument is that what we're actually found evidence of is that the public daycare (official name: preschool) from the studies is harming kids, but better preschools may exist privately if we let competition happen.
That’s in interesting thought - I had interpreted that study to suggest that any daycare is worse for kids than direct parental attention so that the question was whether subsidizing the cost of parenthood was good regardless (for example if you believed it’s better to have have more, imperfect children than fewer more perfect children).
But I guess if better childcare allowed for the best of both worlds, there’s no reason to make that tradeoff.
You keep on misspelling Bob Wachter's name. I'm not surprised because it took me a few months to notice it wasn't spelled like Uatu's job title.