Category: reason

China Bans Pandemic Video Game From App Store and Steam

The Chinese government has ordered Steam and the App Store to remove Plague Inc., a popular video game that simulates global pandemics.

The country’s Cyberspace Administration issued the order on the vague grounds that the game includes “illegal content.” Ndemic Creations, the game’s developer, has released a statement saying that it’s still trying to contact the Cyberspace Administration to determine the exact reason for the ban; the company isn’t sure whether players’ ability to simulate the coronavirus outbreak had something to do with it.

Ndemic describes Plague Inc. as an “intelligent and sophisticated simulation that encourages players to think and learn more about serious public health issues.” While the game can be a realistic educational tool, the company stressed that it should not be used as a means to obtain safety information about COVID-19.

Chinese citizens, particularly the younger generation, have been playing Plague Inc. to gain a better understanding of how the virus spreads. At the very least, it gives those who are quarantined or confined in their homes because of COVID-19 something to do.

But Chinese regulators want people to get information about the virus from the government, and apparently only the government. The authorities have censored dissenting opinions about the topic, and there have been serious repercussions for criticism of how the country is responding to the outbreak. Vice reports that last month agents from China’s Ministry of State Security detained a man who had criticized the regime’s response on Twitter. He was reportedly told that 10 others had been arrested that week for sharing online content about the virus.

China’s State Administration of Press and Publication (SAPP) has tightened regulations on the gaming industry for the past two months. Any online game commercially released in China must have a legal license. Apple’s App Store, which so far has circumvented the approval process, is set to begin enforcing the SAPP rules in July.

Now a different virus simulation has taken Plague Inc.’s place in the App Store: Virus Antidote: Pandemic Doom. It’s a Russian-developed copycat that assigns users the task of developing a cure for the epidemic. Players consider it a knockoff, and have flooded it with one-star reviews.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2QddUzY
via IFTTT

U.S. Soccer’s Offensive Defense of the Women’s National Team Equal Pay Lawsuit

Want to see a classic example of bad lawyering with a terrible argument?  Consider the U.S. Soccer Federation’s defense of the lawsuit filed by Alex Morgan and other members of the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) alleging sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) and Title VII.  In the last few days, U.S. Soccer’s attorneys generated a firestorm of controversy in responding to the players’ summary judgment motion.  On Monday night, U.S. Soccer filed a brief arguing that a USWNT player’s job does not require equal “skill” and “responsibility” to that of a member of the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT).   On Wednesday night, the President of U.S. Soccer, Carlos Cordeiro, apologized for the filing–and last night he resigned. His resignation resulted, in significant part, from his lawyers making a terrible argument directly contrary to their client’s long term goals.

The underlying lawsuit was filed in March 2019 by the 28 all members of the USWNT (the current world champions).  The complaint compared the USWNT and the USMNT and argued that “[d]espite the fact that these female and male players are called upon to perform the same job responsibilities on their teams and participate in international competitions for their single common employer, [U.S. Soccer], the female players have been consistently paid less money than their male counterparts.”

The case has proceeded through discovery for the last year, with the case set for trial in early May.  The recent filings that have generated controversy are cross-motions for summary judgment by the USWNT and U.S. Soccer.   The USWNT has argued that there is no genuine factual dispute that the USWNT and USMNT players perform “equal work,” which under the EPA’s implementing regulations is defined as work that requires “equal skill, effort and responsibility.”

In response to this argument, many options were available to U.S. Soccer’s attorneys (from the law firm of Seyfarth Shaw).  For example, they could have simply stipulated to this point about equal “skill”–which is not dispositive in the case.  Indeed, the case’s central issue concerns whether the USWNT bargained for alternative pay arrangements from the men’s team.  But instead of setting to the side the issue of the comparative skills involved in men’s and women’s soccer, U.S. Soccer’s attorneys rashly choose to argue for the men’s absolute superiority.  Here is the passage from the response brief that has generated controversy by suggesting that the U.S. women have less “skill” (some legal citations omitted and emphasis rearranged):

Plaintiffs ask the Court to conclude that the ability required of an WNT player is equal to the ability required of an MNT player, as a relative matter, by ignoring the materially higher level of speed and strength required to perform the job of an MNT player. The EPA does not allow this. Nor is it a “sexist stereotype” to recognize the different levels of speed and strength required for the two jobs, as Plaintiffs’ counsel contend. On the contrary, it is indisputable “science,” as even Plaintiff Lloyd described it in her testimony. See also Doriane Lambert Coleman, Sex in Sport, 80 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 63-126 (2017) (available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss4/5) (describing the scientific basis for “the average 10-12% performance gap between elite male and elite female athletes,” which includes differences between males and females in “skeletal structure, muscle composition, heart and lung capacity including VO2 max, red blood cell count, body fat, and the absolute ability to process carbohydrates,” …).…

The point is that the job of MNT player (competing against senior men’s national teams) requires a higher level of skill based on speed and strength than does the job of WNT player (competing against senior women’s national teams). …

Alert VC readers will recall that Professor Coleman (cited above) has previously blogged here on the topic of scientifically based strength differentials between men’s and women’s athletes.  But whatever the merits of this point, in using this differential as a basis for unequal pay, U.S. Soccer’s lawyers appear to have forgotten that one of U.S. Soccer’s missions is to promote gender equality in soccer.  Thus, regardless of the argument’s legal merits, it directly contradicts U.S. Soccer’s values.

This view about the argument’s incongruity is not just mine.  In a statement released Wednesday night (as the USWNT was winning its most recent competition by defeating Japan 3-1), U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro formally apologized for U.S. Soccer’s brief.  He said that he “sincerely apologized for the offense and pain caused by language in this week’s court filing, which did not reflect the values of our Federation or our tremendous admiration of our Women’s National Team. Our WNT players are incredibly talented and work tirelessly, as they have demonstrated time and again from their Olympic Gold medals to their World Cup titles.”

In light of that apology, commentators called for Cordeiro to resign. For example, Grant Wahl (one of America’s foremost soccer observers) wrote in Sports Illustrated on Thursday morning that Cordeiro “who presided over a disgraceful legal strategy citing ‘science’ to belittle the world champion U.S. women’s national team based on its gender, should resign immediately.”  Former members of the USWNT criticized the sexist language.  And making the criticism near universal, the USMNT player’s association joined in the attack.

To his credit, Cordeiro realized his responsibility for the filing and, last night, he resigned.  In his letter of resignation, Cordeiro explained that he failed to fully review the brief quoted above and the he took responsibility for failing to do so. Cordeiro stated that, “[h]ad I done so, I would have objected to the language that did not reflect my personal admiration for our women’s players or our values as an organization.”

The lack-of-equal-skill argument strikes me as one of the worst ever advanced by skilled lawyers in complex litigation.  In a scorched earth defense, they raised every conceivable argument that could have led to a favorable verdict–even an argument that flatly contradicted U.S. Soccer’s goals.  Against a backdrop of well-documented second-class treatment of the women’s team, arguing that the team (the defending world champions) somehow possessed a lower level of “skill” was worse than tone deaf.  Not only has it led to the resignation of the head of U.S. Soccer, but it will now lead to complicated questions of how to unwind the damage.

U.S. Soccer has plausible arguments to explain any pay differential (a fact that itself is in dispute).  For example, the strongest argument for U.S. Soccer is that the women players bargained for an alternative pay structure.  Given the fact that women’s professional soccer leagues do not pay nearly as much as do men’s leagues, the women have sought guaranteed annual salaries.  But whatever the strength of U.S. Soccer’s argument on that point (I take no position on that here), U.S. Soccer’s attorneys have now created an issue of fact about whether the purported lack of “skill” was the true basis for the alternative arrangements.  Given that U.S. Soccer has been forced to admit that this position was sexist and inconsistent with its values, the finder-of-fact in the case will presumably have to weigh that point in deciding the case.

As of this writing, U.S. Soccer has yet to withdraw the offensive language from its brief.  Perhaps a short submission to that effect will come soon from U.S. Soccer’s new legal team (Latham & Watkins).  Until the language is formally withdrawn, it is hard to disagree with the USWNT that the apologies thus far have been nothing but cheap talk.

No doubt, even with a withdrawal, lawyers for USWNT will not let the matter disappear so quickly.  In view of the factual disputes, look for U.S. Soccer’s summary judgment motion to be denied and for the case to head in the direction of a trial.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2wSFDz2
via IFTTT

Chelsea Manning Freed Again, but Her Refusal to Testify Comes With a $256,000 Price Tag

Chelsea Manning will be released from federal detention, but her freedom comes with a court debt of $256,000. Such is the price of resisting a subpoena.

Manning is famous for passing along archives of military documents to WikiLeaks while she worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. She was caught, arrested, and convicted of several espionage charges (but acquitted of having “aided the enemy”). She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and freed her near the end of his second term.

Yet her troubles weren’t over. The Department of Justice was still trying to build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It subpoenaed Manning and tried to force her to testify to a grand jury about her relationship with WikiLeaks. She refused to cooperate, even after they granted her immunity, and was jailed for this almost exactly a year ago.

Even after Assange was charged with several counts of espionage (itself a dangerous assault on the First Amendment rights of anybody engaging in the act of journalism), the feds hung on to Manning, imprisoning her again after the first subpoena expired.

Now a judge has finally ended her detention, ruling yesterday that “Ms. Manning’s appearance before the Grand Jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose.” United States District Judge Anthony Trenga then ordered her immediate release.

But she also was being fined $1,000 per day for contempt for her refusal to testify in addition to her imprisonment. Trenga is maintaining that judgment against her, ordering her to pay $256,000 in fines she racked up during that time, stating that the payments are “necessary to the coercive purpose of the Court’s civil contempt order.”

The imprisonment appears to have been terrible (again) for Manning, and earlier in the week her lawyers reported she had attempted suicide. She also attempted suicide during her original sentence for her leaking back in 2016.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2QbcCFi
via IFTTT

China Bans Pandemic Video Game From App Store and Steam

The Chinese government has ordered Steam and the App Store to remove Plague Inc., a popular video game that simulates global pandemics.

The country’s Cyberspace Administration issued the order on the vague grounds that the game includes “illegal content.” Ndemic Creations, the game’s developer, has released a statement saying that it’s still trying to contact the Cyberspace Administration to determine the exact reason for the ban; the company isn’t sure whether players’ ability to simulate the coronavirus outbreak had something to do with it.

Ndemic describes Plague Inc. as an “intelligent and sophisticated simulation that encourages players to think and learn more about serious public health issues.” While the game can be a realistic educational tool, the company stressed that it should not be used as a means to obtain safety information about COVID-19.

Chinese citizens, particularly the younger generation, have been playing Plague Inc. to gain a better understanding of how the virus spreads. At the very least, it gives those who are quarantined or confined in their homes because of COVID-19 something to do.

But Chinese regulators want people to get information about the virus from the government, and apparently only the government. The authorities have censored dissenting opinions about the topic, and there have been serious repercussions for criticism of how the country is responding to the outbreak. Vice reports that last month agents from China’s Ministry of State Security detained a man who had criticized the regime’s response on Twitter. He was reportedly told that 10 others had been arrested that week for sharing online content about the virus.

China’s State Administration of Press and Publication (SAPP) has tightened regulations on the gaming industry for the past two months. Any online game commercially released in China must have a legal license. Apple’s App Store, which so far has circumvented the approval process, is set to begin enforcing the SAPP rules in July.

Now a different virus simulation has taken Plague Inc.’s place in the App Store: Virus Antidote: Pandemic Doom. It’s a Russian-developed copycat that assigns users the task of developing a cure for the epidemic. Players consider it a knockoff, and have flooded it with one-star reviews.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2QddUzY
via IFTTT

U.S. Soccer’s Offensive Defense of the Women’s National Team Equal Pay Lawsuit

Want to see a classic example of bad lawyering with a terrible argument?  Consider the U.S. Soccer Federation’s defense of the lawsuit filed by Alex Morgan and other members of the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) alleging sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) and Title VII.  In the last few days, U.S. Soccer’s attorneys generated a firestorm of controversy in responding to the players’ summary judgment motion.  On Monday night, U.S. Soccer filed a brief arguing that a USWNT player’s job does not require equal “skill” and “responsibility” to that of a member of the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT).   On Wednesday night, the President of U.S. Soccer, Carlos Cordeiro, apologized for the filing–and last night he resigned. His resignation resulted, in significant part, from his lawyers making a terrible argument directly contrary to their client’s long term goals.

The underlying lawsuit was filed in March 2019 by the 28 all members of the USWNT (the current world champions).  The complaint compared the USWNT and the USMNT and argued that “[d]espite the fact that these female and male players are called upon to perform the same job responsibilities on their teams and participate in international competitions for their single common employer, [U.S. Soccer], the female players have been consistently paid less money than their male counterparts.”

The case has proceeded through discovery for the last year, with the case set for trial in early May.  The recent filings that have generated controversy are cross-motions for summary judgment by the USWNT and U.S. Soccer.   The USWNT has argued that there is no genuine factual dispute that the USWNT and USMNT players perform “equal work,” which under the EPA’s implementing regulations is defined as work that requires “equal skill, effort and responsibility.”

In response to this argument, many options were available to U.S. Soccer’s attorneys (from the law firm of Seyfarth Shaw).  For example, they could have simply stipulated to this point about equal “skill”–which is not dispositive in the case.  Indeed, the case’s central issue concerns whether the USWNT bargained for alternative pay arrangements from the men’s team.  But instead of setting to the side the issue of the comparative skills involved in men’s and women’s soccer, U.S. Soccer’s attorneys rashly choose to argue for the men’s absolute superiority.  Here is the passage from the response brief that has generated controversy by suggesting that the U.S. women have less “skill” (some legal citations omitted and emphasis rearranged):

Plaintiffs ask the Court to conclude that the ability required of an WNT player is equal to the ability required of an MNT player, as a relative matter, by ignoring the materially higher level of speed and strength required to perform the job of an MNT player. The EPA does not allow this. Nor is it a “sexist stereotype” to recognize the different levels of speed and strength required for the two jobs, as Plaintiffs’ counsel contend. On the contrary, it is indisputable “science,” as even Plaintiff Lloyd described it in her testimony. See also Doriane Lambert Coleman, Sex in Sport, 80 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 63-126 (2017) (available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss4/5) (describing the scientific basis for “the average 10-12% performance gap between elite male and elite female athletes,” which includes differences between males and females in “skeletal structure, muscle composition, heart and lung capacity including VO2 max, red blood cell count, body fat, and the absolute ability to process carbohydrates,” …).…

The point is that the job of MNT player (competing against senior men’s national teams) requires a higher level of skill based on speed and strength than does the job of WNT player (competing against senior women’s national teams). …

Alert VC readers will recall that Professor Coleman (cited above) has previously blogged here on the topic of scientifically based strength differentials between men’s and women’s athletes.  But whatever the merits of this point, in using this differential as a basis for unequal pay, U.S. Soccer’s lawyers appear to have forgotten that one of U.S. Soccer’s missions is to promote gender equality in soccer.  Thus, regardless of the argument’s legal merits, it directly contradicts U.S. Soccer’s values.

This view about the argument’s incongruity is not just mine.  In a statement released Wednesday night (as the USWNT was winning its most recent competition by defeating Japan 3-1), U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro formally apologized for U.S. Soccer’s brief.  He said that he “sincerely apologized for the offense and pain caused by language in this week’s court filing, which did not reflect the values of our Federation or our tremendous admiration of our Women’s National Team. Our WNT players are incredibly talented and work tirelessly, as they have demonstrated time and again from their Olympic Gold medals to their World Cup titles.”

In light of that apology, commentators called for Cordeiro to resign. For example, Grant Wahl (one of America’s foremost soccer observers) wrote in Sports Illustrated on Thursday morning that Cordeiro “who presided over a disgraceful legal strategy citing ‘science’ to belittle the world champion U.S. women’s national team based on its gender, should resign immediately.”  Former members of the USWNT criticized the sexist language.  And making the criticism near universal, the USMNT player’s association joined in the attack.

To his credit, Cordeiro realized his responsibility for the filing and, last night, he resigned.  In his letter of resignation, Cordeiro explained that he failed to fully review the brief quoted above and the he took responsibility for failing to do so. Cordeiro stated that, “[h]ad I done so, I would have objected to the language that did not reflect my personal admiration for our women’s players or our values as an organization.”

The lack-of-equal-skill argument strikes me as one of the worst ever advanced by skilled lawyers in complex litigation.  In a scorched earth defense, they raised every conceivable argument that could have led to a favorable verdict–even an argument that flatly contradicted U.S. Soccer’s goals.  Against a backdrop of well-documented second-class treatment of the women’s team, arguing that the team (the defending world champions) somehow possessed a lower level of “skill” was worse than tone deaf.  Not only has it led to the resignation of the head of U.S. Soccer, but it will now lead to complicated questions of how to unwind the damage.

U.S. Soccer has plausible arguments to explain any pay differential (a fact that itself is in dispute).  For example, the strongest argument for U.S. Soccer is that the women players bargained for an alternative pay structure.  Given the fact that women’s professional soccer leagues do not pay nearly as much as do men’s leagues, the women have sought guaranteed annual salaries.  But whatever the strength of U.S. Soccer’s argument on that point (I take no position on that here), U.S. Soccer’s attorneys have now created an issue of fact about whether the purported lack of “skill” was the true basis for the alternative arrangements.  Given that U.S. Soccer has been forced to admit that this position was sexist and inconsistent with its values, the finder-of-fact in the case will presumably have to weigh that point in deciding the case.

As of this writing, U.S. Soccer has yet to withdraw the offensive language from its brief.  Perhaps a short submission to that effect will come soon from U.S. Soccer’s new legal team (Latham & Watkins).  Until the language is formally withdrawn, it is hard to disagree with the USWNT that the apologies thus far have been nothing but cheap talk.

No doubt, even with a withdrawal, lawyers for USWNT will not let the matter disappear so quickly.  In view of the factual disputes, look for U.S. Soccer’s summary judgment motion to be denied and for the case to head in the direction of a trial.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2wSFDz2
via IFTTT

Chelsea Manning Freed Again, but Her Refusal to Testify Comes With a $256,000 Price Tag

Chelsea Manning will be released from federal detention, but her freedom comes with a court debt of $256,000. Such is the price of resisting a subpoena.

Manning is famous for passing along archives of military documents to WikiLeaks while she worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. She was caught, arrested, and convicted of several espionage charges (but acquitted of having “aided the enemy”). She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and freed her near the end of his second term.

Yet her troubles weren’t over. The Department of Justice was still trying to build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It subpoenaed Manning and tried to force her to testify to a grand jury about her relationship with WikiLeaks. She refused to cooperate, even after they granted her immunity, and was jailed for this almost exactly a year ago.

Even after Assange was charged with several counts of espionage (itself a dangerous assault on the First Amendment rights of anybody engaging in the act of journalism), the feds hung on to Manning, imprisoning her again after the first subpoena expired.

Now a judge has finally ended her detention, ruling yesterday that “Ms. Manning’s appearance before the Grand Jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose.” United States District Judge Anthony Trenga then ordered her immediate release.

But she also was being fined $1,000 per day for contempt for her refusal to testify in addition to her imprisonment. Trenga is maintaining that judgment against her, ordering her to pay $256,000 in fines she racked up during that time, stating that the payments are “necessary to the coercive purpose of the Court’s civil contempt order.”

The imprisonment appears to have been terrible (again) for Manning, and earlier in the week her lawyers reported she had attempted suicide. She also attempted suicide during her original sentence for her leaking back in 2016.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2QbcCFi
via IFTTT

New York Bans Gatherings of 500 People Unless They Are Children Penned in Enclosed Spaces

Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency for the city of New York yesterday, banning gatherings of more than 500 people in order to stop community spread of the coronavirus. The only exceptions to the ban—which wipes out Broadway, among other entire sectors of Gotham’s economy—are hospitals, nursing homes, public transit…and schools?

“There are three things we want to preserve at all cost,” de Blasio explained at a press conference, in which he predicted that the number of cases in the city would grow from 100 to 1,000 within a week. “Our schools, our mass transit system, and most importantly our health care system.” The possibility of that first imperative wiping out the third has left many parents, teachers, and scientists spooked.

“We can say with confidence that the actions of local government in the coming days and weeks will substantially impact the course of the epidemic in our city,” a joint letter from 36 New York City infectious disease scientists stated yesterday, hours before de Blasio’s declaration. “It is our view that New York City government should act now. We recommend that social distancing should be actively implemented, not merely recommended. Events with large numbers of people should be prohibited. Perhaps most importantly and controversially, schools should be closed within the next few days.”

Italics mine.

Virologist Paul Bieniasz, who signed the letter, explained the reasoning to Forbes: “NYC schools represent ~1700 gatherings typically of >500 people that are repeated daily. Closing schools is likely to dwarf the effect of stopping one-off 500 person gatherings….Can you imagine a more effective way to spread a respiratory virus than sending one or two family members (children) off to mix with hundreds of others, having them return to their families in the evening, and repeating that process every day?”

There is some momentum locally for heeding the scientists’ advice. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson this morning said in an interview and then tweeted that “It is time to close our public schools.”

The Movement of Rank and File Educators, a sort of aggro caucus within the locally dominant United Federation of Teachers, argued yesterday that “it is past time to close the school system entirely,” explaining: “We are of course concerned about the effects that this will have on students and their families. However, it is clear that the socially responsible course of action to #FlattenTheCurve on the outbreak. Transmission is clearly already happening in the schools and the sooner it stops the fewer people will die.”

New York’s private schools, including those run by the Catholic Archdiocese, are shutting down at a rapid clip, as are local universities.

So what is de Blasio’s justification not just for adopting a less aggressive social-distancing posture for public schools than the less-infected polities of Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, San Francisco, Bergen County, and the entire country of Estonia, but for attempting to keep these germ-swapping laboratories open “at all cost”?

Part of it is that New York schools provide social services, including to many poor kids. “We know that for many families, school is the only place to get meals for the day and that need continues even if a school closes,” an Education Department spokeswoman told PIX 11. “If a school is closed for 24 hours we’re prepared to serve grab-and-go breakfast and lunch for any student who wants it.”

De Blasio also warns, as he did this morning on WNYC, of a “huge domino effect”—not of kids infecting each other and then infecting their more vulnerable family members, but of working families working less. “Where do our children go?” the mayor asked at Thursday’s press conference. “And if our children have nowhere to go, then their parents can’t go to work, and that includes a lot of parents we depend on, first responders, health care professionals. It’s a very slippery slope.”

Most worryingly from my perspective as a local parent, de Blasio is suggesting that children’s comparative resilience to the virus is a factor in his thinking, when it’s their potential as transmitting agents that should be the focus.

“I worry that [coronavirus] is becoming sort of the cause for making a bunch of decisions that actually alter all the rest of our life, including in some very bad ways,” he said on The Daily Show this week. “Let me give you an example. Some people are saying, ‘Close our schools.’ Now, we have a lot of evidence that this disease, thank God, does not really have that much of an impact on healthy children. When you think about folks saying close everything…a lot of parents say to me, ‘Our kids need the schools not just for their education. It’s where they get their meals.'”

Italics again mine. The mayor this morning contradicted that logic on WNYC, disparaging what he called the “fallacy” that kids pulled from schools “would be in perfect isolation.” It seems odd to worry about people’s potential transmission effects only when they are no longer being corralled with hundreds of others in close quarters.

Faced with the very real domino effect of cascading positive tests, parents at my daughters’ two Brooklyn schools have been yanking their kids at a very noticeable rate the past two days. (This will be my 11-year-old’s last day.) It is possible that the combination of parent/teacher walkouts will spur a reluctant government into action; it is perhaps more probable that the sheer exponential velocity of spread will produce facts on the ground that will render Friday unrecognizable by Monday morning.

The question then will be: Did de Blasio’s paternalistic instinct to use government schools as social service providers paradoxically risk the lives of his constituents?

“Other cities that hesitated when action was needed are paying a heavy price,” warned the virologists’ letter. “We should not gamble with the lives of New Yorkers.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33m9CLN
via IFTTT

New York Bans Gatherings of 500 People Unless They Are Children Penned in Enclosed Spaces

Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency for the city of New York yesterday, banning gatherings of more than 500 people in order to stop community spread of the coronavirus. The only exceptions to the ban—which wipes out Broadway, among other entire sectors of Gotham’s economy—are hospitals, nursing homes, public transit…and schools?

“There are three things we want to preserve at all cost,” de Blasio explained at a press conference, in which he predicted that the number of cases in the city would grow from 100 to 1,000 within a week. “Our schools, our mass transit system, and most importantly our health care system.” The possibility of that first imperative wiping out the third has left many parents, teachers, and scientists spooked.

“We can say with confidence that the actions of local government in the coming days and weeks will substantially impact the course of the epidemic in our city,” a joint letter from 36 New York City infectious disease scientists stated yesterday, hours before de Blasio’s declaration. “It is our view that New York City government should act now. We recommend that social distancing should be actively implemented, not merely recommended. Events with large numbers of people should be prohibited. Perhaps most importantly and controversially, schools should be closed within the next few days.”

Italics mine.

Virologist Paul Bieniasz, who signed the letter, explained the reasoning to Forbes: “NYC schools represent ~1700 gatherings typically of >500 people that are repeated daily. Closing schools is likely to dwarf the effect of stopping one-off 500 person gatherings….Can you imagine a more effective way to spread a respiratory virus than sending one or two family members (children) off to mix with hundreds of others, having them return to their families in the evening, and repeating that process every day?”

There is some momentum locally for heeding the scientists’ advice. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson this morning said in an interview and then tweeted that “It is time to close our public schools.”

The Movement of Rank and File Educators, a sort of aggro caucus within the locally dominant United Federation of Teachers, argued yesterday that “it is past time to close the school system entirely,” explaining: “We are of course concerned about the effects that this will have on students and their families. However, it is clear that the socially responsible course of action to #FlattenTheCurve on the outbreak. Transmission is clearly already happening in the schools and the sooner it stops the fewer people will die.”

New York’s private schools, including those run by the Catholic Archdiocese, are shutting down at a rapid clip, as are local universities.

So what is de Blasio’s justification not just for adopting a less aggressive social-distancing posture for public schools than the less-infected polities of Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, San Francisco, Bergen County, and the entire country of Estonia, but for attempting to keep these germ-swapping laboratories open “at all cost”?

Part of it is that New York schools provide social services, including to many poor kids. “We know that for many families, school is the only place to get meals for the day and that need continues even if a school closes,” an Education Department spokeswoman told PIX 11. “If a school is closed for 24 hours we’re prepared to serve grab-and-go breakfast and lunch for any student who wants it.”

De Blasio also warns, as he did this morning on WNYC, of a “huge domino effect”—not of kids infecting each other and then infecting their more vulnerable family members, but of working families working less. “Where do our children go?” the mayor asked at Thursday’s press conference. “And if our children have nowhere to go, then their parents can’t go to work, and that includes a lot of parents we depend on, first responders, health care professionals. It’s a very slippery slope.”

Most worryingly from my perspective as a local parent, de Blasio is suggesting that children’s comparative resilience to the virus is a factor in his thinking, when it’s their potential as transmitting agents that should be the focus.

“I worry that [coronavirus] is becoming sort of the cause for making a bunch of decisions that actually alter all the rest of our life, including in some very bad ways,” he said on The Daily Show this week. “Let me give you an example. Some people are saying, ‘Close our schools.’ Now, we have a lot of evidence that this disease, thank God, does not really have that much of an impact on healthy children. When you think about folks saying close everything…a lot of parents say to me, ‘Our kids need the schools not just for their education. It’s where they get their meals.'”

Italics again mine. The mayor this morning contradicted that logic on WNYC, disparaging what he called the “fallacy” that kids pulled from schools “would be in perfect isolation.” It seems odd to worry about people’s potential transmission effects only when they are no longer being corralled with hundreds of others in close quarters.

Faced with the very real domino effect of cascading positive tests, parents at my daughters’ two Brooklyn schools have been yanking their kids at a very noticeable rate the past two days. (This will be my 11-year-old’s last day.) It is possible that the combination of parent/teacher walkouts will spur a reluctant government into action; it is perhaps more probable that the sheer exponential velocity of spread will produce facts on the ground that will render Friday unrecognizable by Monday morning.

The question then will be: Did de Blasio’s paternalistic instinct to use government schools as social service providers paradoxically risk the lives of his constituents?

“Other cities that hesitated when action was needed are paying a heavy price,” warned the virologists’ letter. “We should not gamble with the lives of New Yorkers.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33m9CLN
via IFTTT

Coronavirus. We Got This.

Last night, around 6:00 P.M. at the Whole Foods Market on the corner of Bowery and Houston streets in New York City, people frantically picked the store clean of just about everything, especially frozen and canned goods. This store is always crowded—I’ve been told it’s the busiest Whole Foods in the country—but the checkout lines were the longest I’ve ever seen them. The bare shelves there looked disturbingly like ones in Venezuela circa 2017. Similar scenes played out all across the biggest, most-populated city in the country, where folks were desperate to stock up on food, toilet paper, and other staples as the coronavirus spreads. Especially in Manhattan, desperation is creeping into everyday life.

Just a couple hours before, Mayor Bill De Blasio had declared a state of emergency without really explaining what that meant, other than extra vigilance in officially reporting coronavirus cases, plus letting 10 percent of the municipal workforce telecommute. He promised that a full quarantine of the city was “unrealistic” and not in the cards, but also stressed that the situation was changing on an hourly basis. So who knows what diktats might come over the weekend from one of the least-liked and most-knuckleheaded elected leaders on the planet? This is the guy whose first action upon taking office in 2014 was to try to ban horse-drawn carriages from Central Park and move all the horses up to a retirement farm upstate.

Earlier in the day, another widely distrusted politician, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, had banned gatherings of more than 500 people across the state. Broadway theaters, museums, and legendary venues such as Carnegie Hall announced they were locking their doors for the foreseeable future. Suddenly you could ask yourself: Is this Fun City or a grim reboot of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death?” Cuomo had also instituted the nation’s first “containment area,” a sort of soft quarantine, in New Rochelle, a cartoonishly inoffensive Big Apple suburb best known as the place where the fictional Petrie family lived in the old Dick Van Dyke Show.

“We will ultimately and expeditiously defeat this virus,” declared President Donald Trump in a widely panned speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night. Amidst official next-day corrections of the president’s remarks, the markets tanked; Trump’s optimism has done little to buoy spirits. The cancellation of annual college basketball tournaments and the rest of the NBA and NHL seasons, along with the delay of baseball’s opening day and a number of high-profile movie releases, underscore that we’re at the early stages of a pandemic that might kill anywhere from a few thousand Americans to 1.7 million of us. (That latter figure comes from a worst-case scenario exercise conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Only two things, one inarguable and one more speculative, seem clear at the current moment. The first is that the federal government’s response has been generally incompetent and ineffective from the get-go. As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey has written,

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.

Mass fingerpointing is underway in the political arena, with Republicans and Democrats now fighting over who exactly is to blame for all this and what to do next. Unsurprisingly, political leaders are pushing stimulus programs that are remarkably similar to the legislative agendas they had before anyone knew what the coronavirus was. After all, there’s an election to win (or lose) in November.

Second, as governments at all levels try to redeploy our public-health apparatus more effectively, individual citizens will take more responsibility for their own roles in reducing the pandemic and securing not just their own health but that of their neighbors. If the CDC and other government actors screwed up by insisting on a tightly controlled, centralized, and sclerotic response to the coronavirus appearing in the United States, there’s every reason to believe that regular Americans are doing everything they can and should do to minimize the spread of the disease, from being more careful about hygeine to voluntary “social distancing” and minimizing contact.

As important, shortages of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and the like can be unnerving but are almost certain to be temporary and short-lived. Market economies are remarkably good at ramping up production, creating workarounds, and generating substitute goods and services in all sorts of ways.

The most surprising thing about the scene last night at Whole Foods in New York wasn’t that it was so crowded. (Like I said, it’s always crowded.) It’s how chill people were, how polite and respectful. These are the first days of a health crisis that will unfold over weeks and maybe even months, so I’m cautious about loading too much significance into any early indicators. A month down the road, perhaps we’ll be at each other’s throats like warring factions in a zombie-apocalypse flick. More likely, we’ll have minimized the spread of the disease thanks to changes in our behavior, increased the effectiveness of our institutional responses, and learned how to get along a little better than before.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Qezt2T
via IFTTT

Coronavirus. We Got This.

Last night, around 6:00 P.M. at the Whole Foods Market on the corner of Bowery and Houston streets in New York City, people frantically picked the store clean of just about everything, especially frozen and canned goods. This store is always crowded—I’ve been told it’s the busiest Whole Foods in the country—but the checkout lines were the longest I’ve ever seen them. The bare shelves there looked disturbingly like ones in Venezuela circa 2017. Similar scenes played out all across the biggest, most-populated city in the country, where folks were desperate to stock up on food, toilet paper, and other staples as the coronavirus spreads. Especially in Manhattan, desperation is creeping into everyday life.

Just a couple hours before, Mayor Bill De Blasio had declared a state of emergency without really explaining what that meant, other than extra vigilance in officially reporting coronavirus cases, plus letting 10 percent of the municipal workforce telecommute. He promised that a full quarantine of the city was “unrealistic” and not in the cards, but also stressed that the situation was changing on an hourly basis. So who knows what diktats might come over the weekend from one of the least-liked and most-knuckleheaded elected leaders on the planet? This is the guy whose first action upon taking office in 2014 was to try to ban horse-drawn carriages from Central Park and move all the horses up to a retirement farm upstate.

Earlier in the day, another widely distrusted politician, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, had banned gatherings of more than 500 people across the state. Broadway theaters, museums, and legendary venues such as Carnegie Hall announced they were locking their doors for the foreseeable future. Suddenly you could ask yourself: Is this Fun City or a grim reboot of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death?” Cuomo had also instituted the nation’s first “containment area,” a sort of soft quarantine, in New Rochelle, a cartoonishly inoffensive Big Apple suburb best known as the place where the fictional Petrie family lived in the old Dick Van Dyke Show.

“We will ultimately and expeditiously defeat this virus,” declared President Donald Trump in a widely panned speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night. Amidst official next-day corrections of the president’s remarks, the markets tanked; Trump’s optimism has done little to buoy spirits. The cancellation of annual college basketball tournaments and the rest of the NBA and NHL seasons, along with the delay of baseball’s opening day and a number of high-profile movie releases, underscore that we’re at the early stages of a pandemic that might kill anywhere from a few thousand Americans to 1.7 million of us. (That latter figure comes from a worst-case scenario exercise conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Only two things, one inarguable and one more speculative, seem clear at the current moment. The first is that the federal government’s response has been generally incompetent and ineffective from the get-go. As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey has written,

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.

Mass fingerpointing is underway in the political arena, with Republicans and Democrats now fighting over who exactly is to blame for all this and what to do next. Unsurprisingly, political leaders are pushing stimulus programs that are remarkably similar to the legislative agendas they had before anyone knew what the coronavirus was. After all, there’s an election to win (or lose) in November.

Second, as governments at all levels try to redeploy our public-health apparatus more effectively, individual citizens will take more responsibility for their own roles in reducing the pandemic and securing not just their own health but that of their neighbors. If the CDC and other government actors screwed up by insisting on a tightly controlled, centralized, and sclerotic response to the coronavirus appearing in the United States, there’s every reason to believe that regular Americans are doing everything they can and should do to minimize the spread of the disease, from being more careful about hygeine to voluntary “social distancing” and minimizing contact.

As important, shortages of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and the like can be unnerving but are almost certain to be temporary and short-lived. Market economies are remarkably good at ramping up production, creating workarounds, and generating substitute goods and services in all sorts of ways.

The most surprising thing about the scene last night at Whole Foods in New York wasn’t that it was so crowded. (Like I said, it’s always crowded.) It’s how chill people were, how polite and respectful. These are the first days of a health crisis that will unfold over weeks and maybe even months, so I’m cautious about loading too much significance into any early indicators. A month down the road, perhaps we’ll be at each other’s throats like warring factions in a zombie-apocalypse flick. More likely, we’ll have minimized the spread of the disease thanks to changes in our behavior, increased the effectiveness of our institutional responses, and learned how to get along a little better than before.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Qezt2T
via IFTTT