Sunday, November 01, 2020

Coronavirus News (303)

With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead Exports jumped and local governments engaged in a binge of debt-fueled construction projects. Even consumer spending is finally recovering.

Can Raphael Warnock Go From the Pulpit to the Senate? The pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, is betting that Georgia is ready to send a religious progressive to Washington. ............  the South’s most prominent Black preacher ......... He castigated them for neglecting “the poorest of the poor” while providing for “the richest of the rich.” He accused them of distracting the country with bigotry and division. He took care to poke fun at himself when he got carried away by emotion. (“Y’all be careful,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”) And he called, as he so often has, for the expansion of the Affordable Care Act. “I’ve read the Gospels a few times, and Jesus spent a lot of time healing the sick,” he said. “Even those with pre-existing conditions.” .................  Dr. Warnock considers himself a disciple of the flesh-and-blood Dr. King, who was not only an avatar of nonviolence, but also a rabble-rousing champion of the poor. ........... the Savannah, Ga., housing project where he grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, and declares that children there today “have it harder now than I did back then. That’s got to change.” ............  his future vocation seemed so obvious in high school that his friends called him “Rev.” ........... Black liberation theology, a system Dr. Cone once described as “an interpretation of the Christian Gospel from the experience and perspectives and lives of people who are at the bottom in society — the lowest economic and racial groups.” ...............  He supports abortion rights and gay marriage  



Hearings Behind Them, Republicans Close In on Barrett Confirmation The Senate Judiciary Committee lined up a vote for Oct. 22 on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, as Democrats warned Republicans would rue the day. 

Startups, It’s Time to Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns  growth-at-all-costs methodology, which the Valley’s top players are exceptionally good at, only works in the strongest bull markets, in the most optimal conditions. ............ Camels are able to survive for long periods without sustenance, withstand the scorching desert heat, and adapt to extreme variations in climate. They survive and thrive in some of Earth’s harshest regions. ...............  three strategies: they execute balanced growth, they take a long-term outlook, and they weave diversification into the business model. ............ Right-pricing from the start. .......... Cost management through the life cycle. ......... Changing the trajectory. ......... camels don’t avoid growth or venture capital funding, but their scaling trajectory and associated burn rates will be less extreme. ......... Survival is often the primary strategy. This allows time to build the business model, find a product that resonates with the market, and develop an operation that can scale. Competition will exist. But the race is about who will survive the longest, not about who goes to market first. ................... Quizlet just raised a $30 million Series C round, which valued the company at $1 billion in May of this year. The company did not take any funding until 2015, when it raised a Series A for just $12 million after 10 years in business. ............ As we prepare for the tough challenges ahead, the answers won’t be found within Silicon Valley’s insular bubble, but by learning from camels at the Frontier, who have had the solution all along. 


To Foster Innovation, Cultivate a Culture of Intellectual Bravery   Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy buries boldness. Efficiency crushes creativity. From there, the status quo calcifies and stagnation sets in. ..............  Whether or not your company has a culture of intellectual bravery depends on your ability to establish a pattern of rewarded rather than punished vulnerability. ........... the team members didn’t seem worried about social risk and spoke up regardless of hierarchy and power with energy and enthusiasm. I watched a new team member push back on a senior leader’s suggestion. Another person asked a naive question. Another shared a mistake she had made and wanted to discuss. In short, the level of psychological safety in the room matched the level of personal exposure required to challenge the status quo. ..................  the team’s ability to maintain creative abrasion and constructive dissent without collapsing into debilitating tension, personal attacks, or silence. ............  assign specific members of your team to challenge a course of action or find flaws in a proposed decision ........... connect things that aren’t normally connected. Of course, you must manage the process carefully and discern when constructive dissent is giving way to destructive derailment. .............. Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team. ........... Encouraging psychological safety isn’t easy; it requires a high level of emotional intelligence and a highly controlled ego. Arguably, a leader’s most important job — perhaps above that of creating a vision and setting strategy — is to nourish a context in which people are given air cover in exchange for candor. That’s how you create a culture of intellectual bravery. 

A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions Many decision-making frameworks aim to help leaders use objective information to mitigate bias, operate under time pressure, or leverage data. But these frameworks tend to fall short when it comes to decisions based on subjective information sources that suggest conflicting courses of action. And most complex decisions fall into this category. ............ 

CDC study says tons of people catch COVID-19 in the one place that’s supposed to be safe 102 out of 191 people who came in contact with a sick person contracted COVID-19, with transmission likely occurring inside the home. ............ The novel coronavirus spreads with ease in indoor settings. ........... public health experts keep recommending the same measures that can reduce the risk of transmission, including face masks, social distancing, and frequent hand washing. ............. the most dangerous place for someone to be when it comes to coronavirus transmission is the home ......... People are unlikely to wear masks at home, and social distancing isn’t always possible. If one person in a household is infected, others are likely to get COVID-19 as well. One of the reasons that favor infection is the fact that a person can be contagious before the onset of symptoms, which might warn others that transmission is possible. ............... household COVID-19 transmission occurs rapidly, with secondary cases appearing even faster than expected. ......... COVID spreads very rapidly and very quickly inside a home.” .......... “Once it’s in your house, it’s very hard to keep from spreading, and you don’t know who in your home will be susceptible, and they’ll need to be hospitalized.” ............. young children and teenagers can infect other members of the family just like adults. .............. persons should self-isolate immediately at the onset of COVID-like symptoms, at the time of testing as a result of a high-risk exposure, or at the time of a positive test result, whichever comes first” .............  “Concurrent to isolation, all members of the household should wear a mask when in shared spaces in the household.” .........  researchers advise isolation inside the home whenever possible and avoiding contact with the outside world. ........... persons who suspect that they might have COVID-19 should isolate, stay at home, and use a separate bedroom and bathroom if feasible. Isolation should begin before seeking testing and before test results become available because delaying isolation until confirmation of infection could miss an opportunity to reduce transmission to others. .............. “If you or anyone in the family goes outside the bubble and does anything that’s risky — large groups, bars, not wearing your mask — they can come back into that bubble and put everyone in that bubble at risk”

As Washington delays stimulus, the Fed is running out of ways to help the economy  In the four-month March-through-June period as the pandemic began, the Fed’s balance sheet grew 66% to $7.13 trillion

Millions poised to lose unemployment benefits in ‘enormous cliff’ at year’s end  

Coronavirus News (302)

Worried About Covid-19 in the Winter? Alaska Provides a Cautionary Tale The state is seeing record case numbers, adding to evidence that the virus is poised to thrive as the weather grows colder. ...........  winter could bring the most devastating phase of the pandemic. .......... the coronavirus is more virulent in colder weather and lower relative humidities ...........  some viruses persist longer in colder and drier conditions; that aerosolized viruses can remain more stable in cooler air; that viruses can replicate more swiftly in such conditions; and that human immune systems may respond differently depending on seasons. ............. “It’s going to be a very tough fall and winter for the entire world” ..............  One of the challenges that Dr. Zink has consistently faced is convincing residents to wear masks and stay distanced, two tools that public health experts have said can help reduce the spread of the virus. 


How to Keep the Coronavirus at Bay Indoors Tips for dodging the virus as Americans retreat from colder weather: Open the windows, buy an air filter — and forget the UV lights.

‘It Has Hit Us With a Vengeance’: Virus Surges Again Across the United States Unlike earlier outbreaks concentrated in the Northeast and South, the virus is simmering at a worrisome level in most regions.


How Data Science Can Win the Debate on Police Reform solving the problem starts with better data. ........ bringing academic rigor and science to what is often a very emotional debate .......... Last year alone, police were responsible for almost 2,000 known deaths in America. It’s a leading cause of death among young men, right after heart disease and cancer. ........... bias manifests at so many levels in the system. ............  we’re massively underestimating the problem because of data limitations and the poor quality of existing statistical analyses. ........... How do you quantify racism? ............. that entire source of bias that went into stopping someone in the first place. ............. What about the upfront work in hiring and training that would help root out bias in police departments? ................. we can dial back or eliminate many controversial aggressive tactics because their purported benefits just aren’t supported by the data. I’m thinking of things like police militarization and no-knock SWAT raids that the data shows seem to damage police from a public perception angle, but they don’t actually make officers safer, which was the promise going in. ................. the role of diversification, which is one of the oldest proposed hiring reforms in policing ...................  female officers use far less force. ........ the best evidence we have right now says diversification can help .............. a study in New York looking at stop-and-frisk during the mid-2000s, which was out of control in its volume during that period. Upwards of 90% of people being stopped on the street were found to be guilty of no crime, and the vast majority of these stops were of young Black and Latinx men. ..................  officers in many ways are like a lot of other bureaucrats that we’ve studied for a long time. They respond to incentives, they want a paycheck, they want to please their boss or at least not get in trouble. We can use some of those same managerial tools to change behavior. .................. we spent a substantial amount of time over the past year critiquing a study that was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prominent journals in the world. They claimed there was no racial bias in police shootings, and that study was recently retracted after a year of our critiques. The study was widely cited in the media and in Congressional hearings, but when you stripped away all the statistical jargon, it became clear that all it was really showing was that most people who get shot by police are white. ....................  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so we need more transparency about civilian complaints and how allegations of officer misconduct are investigated. .............. We have 18,000 police departments in this country.

A Biden Landslide? Some Democrats Can’t Help Whispering Democrats are still haunted by the ghosts of 2016. But some are allowing themselves to contemplate a Biden victory big enough to reorder the nation’s politics. ......... Biden could pull off a landslide in November, achieving an ambitious and rare electoral blowout ........... Democrats see flipping states like Texas and Georgia as key to a possible landslide ....... a commanding victory that sweeps Democrats to control of the Senate as well would set the stage for a consequential presidency, not just one that evicts Mr. Trump. ......... “That the people want to address climate change in a big bold way. They want to address health care in a big bold way. And they want to address education in a big bold way.” ............  a huge Electoral College victory and help Democrats retake the Senate. ......... “Lincoln was not an abolitionist, F.D.R. not a socialist or trade unionist, and L.B.J. not a civil rights activist,” Mr. Shahid said. “Three of the most transformative presidents never fully embraced the movements of their time, and yet the movements won because they organized and shaped public opinion.”