Liwaiwai:

Now we have a reason to apply this level of automation to, well, pretty much everything.

Though our current situation may force us into using more robots and automated systems sooner than we’d planned, it will end up saving us money and creating opportunity, Xing believes. He cited “fast-casual” restaurants (Chipotle, Panera, etc.) as a prime example.

Currently, people in the US spend much more to eat at home than we do to eat in fast-casual restaurants if you take into account the cost of the food we’re preparing plus the value of the time we’re spending on cooking, grocery shopping, and cleaning up after meals. According to research from investment management firm ARK Invest, taking all these costs into account makes for about $12 per meal for food cooked at home.

That’s the same as or more than the cost of grabbing a burrito or a sandwich at the joint around the corner. As more of the repetitive, low-skill tasks involved in preparing fast casual meals are automated, their cost will drop even more, giving us more incentive to forego home cooking. (But, it’s worth noting that these figures don’t take into account that eating at home is, in most cases, better for you since you’re less likely to fill your food with sugar, oil, or various other taste-enhancing but health-destroying ingredients—plus, there are those of us who get a nearly incomparable amount of joy from laboring over then savoring a homemade meal).

Now that we’re not supposed to be touching each other or touching anything anyone else has touched, but we still need to eat, automating food preparation sounds appealing (and maybe necessary). Multiple food delivery services have already implemented a contactless delivery option, where customers can choose to have their food left on their doorstep.

Besides the opportunities for in-restaurant automation, “This is an opportunity for automation to happen at the last mile,” said Xing. Delivery drones, robots, and autonomous trucks and vans could all play a part. In fact, use of delivery drones has ramped up in China since the outbreak.

Speaking of deliveries, service robots have steadily increased in numbers at Amazon; as of late 2019, the company employed around 650,000 humans and 200,000 robots—and costs have gone down as robots have gone up.

Stephen Taylor:

His name proclaimed him a man of the people – Jack being a generic term for the common man. (The term Tar was added because of that substance’s common use in aspects of seafaring, from sealing sailors’ jackets to binding rope.) Yet, among them, he was an outsider, almost another species, who excited profound suspicion ashore. At a time when others of his class might never stir beyond their native valley, he roamed the world like one of the exotic creatures he encountered on his travels, returning home bearing fabulous tales (some of them actually true), curious objects and even stranger beasts. Although while at sea he was as poor as any rustic labourer, ashore he knew brief spells of wealth. Then, fired up with back pay and prize money, he would eat, drink, cavort and fornicate like a lord. Habitually profligate and with a terrifying thirst for alcohol, he was loyal to his ship, his country and his king, roughly in that order. Most of all, though, he was loyal to his mates, and it was this kinship that made him capable of the boldness that marked him in his golden age.

He was, simply, the most successful fighting man produced by his native land which, with its taste for booty, pugilism and foreign adventure is saying quite something. So profoundly did he believe in himself, and so deeply did he awe the enemy, that defeat was never contemplated and rarely experienced. His spirit earned him the respect, the admiration and, sometimes, even the love of his officers.

It bears emphasising, however, that it was not only in war that he was tested. Voyages of trade and exploration took him to the farthest corners of the globe. Jack joined in the discovery of a Pacific idyll, and helped to cast William Bligh adrift when the dream turned to nightmare. He ventured to lands of distant peoples and mystifying customs. In doing so, he encountered perils every bit as dire as those he faced in battle; for, if one thing about his existence is plain, it is that he was far more likely to be carried off by disease or shipwreck than a cannonball.

The dangers and hardships of his life were quite enough to deter most of his compatriots. Samuel Johnson spoke for baffled landsmen in general when he declared: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ One clergyman who ministered briefly to a man of war – and fled as soon as he was able – could not fathom how humans dwelt ‘in a prison within the narrow limits of which dwell likewise Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air; and to these subjoined the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile’.

Nathan Beacom:

One of the first things that struck Dvo?ák about Iowa was its emptiness. If he had come looking for the cheerfulness of home, what he found was this expanse of prairie, this sea of grass and grain that went on forever. “It is wild here,” he said, “and sometimes very sad.” In the bigness of it all, he felt further from home than ever, but, when taken with a closer view – when chatting with the people, when playing organ at St. Wenceslaus, when walking in the fields in the early morning – he felt restored by a deep belonging. Iowa had for him that immense nostalgia, sad and hopeful all at once, when the familiar and the alien mingle, as when we revisit the childhood streets where our friends are no more, or when we return all alone to the site of some joyful memory.

But Dvo?ák quickly made friends here; the town was populated almost entirely by other Czechs, immigrants who came from the “poorest of the poor” in the old country. If he was struck by the lonesomeness of the place, he soon found also the welcome that he had come in search of. He was delighted by Father Bily, the parish priest, and by all the wonderful “granddads and grannies.”

John Miller:

It also reveals what happened when Twain broke the Greek government’s quarantine, evaded the police, and visited the Parthenon by moonlight.

When Twain arrived in Greece on August 14, 1867, he was 31 years old. He wore the familiar bushy mustache, but his hair had not yet turned white. He had grown up as Samuel Clemens in Hannibal, Mo., worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, and, during the Civil War, headed to Nevada, where he failed as a miner but started to know success as “Mark Twain,” the writer. In 1865, based in California, he came to the attention of readers in the East with a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The novels that would make him a superstar of American literature lay in the future.

Shortly after moving to New York City, a magnet for aspiring writers then and now, Twain learned about a five-month cruise to the Holy Land, organized by Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor of a church in Brooklyn and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A group of about 75 would stop for excursions along the way. Twain cooked up the idea to join and got the Alta to pay his way in exchange for a series of regular dispatches. He produced more than 50. Later, they became the basis for The Innocents Abroad.

Twain delivered an amusing and insightful narrative of people and places, back when travel journalism was less consumer-driven than it is now. Rather than offering lists of things to do, he aimed to deliver a vicarious experience for readers who probably never would make the journey themselves. Readers enjoyed Twain’s grumbling about his fellow passengers, whom he deemed too old and straitlaced: “They never romped, they talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting,” he wrote. “The pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse.”

Twain found much to like across the ocean, but he also loved to demolish European pretensions. In Milan, he visited “an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church,” home to The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci. A dozen artists had set up easels to copy the masterwork. “I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to the original,” he deadpanned. This was a major theme: Older things aren’t necessarily better than younger things. His patriotic point was that the Old World should step aside and watch the New World rise. The Innocents Abroad may be read as a cultural declaration of independence. 

Marta Paterlini:

The approach has sharp critics. Among them are 22 high-profile scientists who last week wrote in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the public-health authorities had failed, and urged politicians to step in with stricter measures. They point to the high number of coronavirus deaths in elder-care homes and Sweden’s overall fatality rate, which is higher than that of its Nordic neighbours — 131 per million people, compared with 55 per million in Denmark and 14 per million in Finland, which have adopted lockdowns.

The strategy’s architect is Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, an independent body whose expert recommendations the government follows. Tegnell spoke to Nature about the approach.

Can you explain Sweden’s approach to controlling the coronavirus?

I think it has been overstated how unique the approach is. As in many other countries, we aim to flatten the curve, slowing down the spread as much as possible — otherwise the health-care system and society are at risk of collapse.

This is not a disease that can be stopped or eradicated, at least until a working vaccine is produced. We have to find long-term solutions that keeps the distribution of infections at a decent level. What every country is trying to do is to keep people apart, using the measures we have and the traditions we have to implement those measures. And that’s why we ended up doing slightly different things.

The Swedish laws on communicable diseases are mostly based on voluntary measures — on individual responsibility. It clearly states that the citizen has the responsibility not to spread a disease. This is the core we started from, because there is not much legal possibility to close down cities in Sweden using the present laws. Quarantine can be contemplated for people or small areas, such as a school or a hotel. But [legally] we cannot lock down a geographical area.

Joe Pompeo:

The years 2008 and 2009 are remembered as exceedingly dark days for the media business. Between the digitally-fueled collapse of legacy revenue streams and the gruesome carnage of the financial crash, the industry began to endure pain and suffering like never before, from mass downsizings—a hundred New York Times journalists here, 1,400 McClatchy employees there, and so on—to newspapers and magazines going bankrupt or being shut down altogether: Farewell Rocky Mountain News and print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. RIP Radar, Gourmet, and Condé Nast Portfolio. (It would take too long to list all the titles that were shuttered.)

Gerd Leonhard:

Last week, I was greatly  “); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>inspired by a postpublished by fellow German Futurist  “); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>Matthias Horx, describing a possible post-corona world, looking backwards from the future.

I often use a very similar approach (sometimes referred to as  “); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>backcasting) — the idea of using one’s insights and intuition about what is certain to happen, in order to deal with the realities at hand, and be better equipped to create one’s desirable future.

This reminded me of an often-used  “); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat”>Milton Friedman quote:

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Reed Stevenson:

Michael Burry, the doctor-turned-investor who famously bet against mortgage securities before the 2008 financial crisis, has taken to Twitter with a controversial message: lockdowns intended to contain the coronavirus pandemic are worse than the disease itself.

Government-directed shutdowns in the U.S., which led to millions of job losses and may trigger one of the country’s deepest-ever economic contractions, aren’t necessary to contain the epidemic and have disproportionately hurt low-income families and minorities, Burry argued in a series of tweets over the past two weeks. He also said some controversial treatments for Covid-19, such as the malaria drug hydroxycloroquine, should be made more widely available.

Burry earned his M.D. at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, but decided to become a professional investor after making hugely profitable bets in the stock market. He shot to fame after his hedge fund’s bearish mortgage wagers were chronicled in “The Big Short,” an Oscar-winning movie based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis.

Although Burry has mostly kept a low profile since then, he started sharing his views more widely last year to warn of a central-bank fueled “bubble” in passive investment products. He’s now focusing on the outbreak that has shuttered economies, killed almost 75,000 people worldwide and changed how millions of people live and work.

Freddie Sayers:

That was one of the more extraordinary interviews we have done here at UnHerd.

Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO, lays out with typically Swedish bluntness why he thinks:

Fabius Maximus:

Joe goes on like this for quite a while. For a more rational report of this news, turn to the NY Times: “N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count.”

“New York City, already a world epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700 victims on Tuesday, after officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it. …

“The city and the state have at times differed in their counts of the dead in New York City. As of Monday, the state said that 7,349 had died of the virus in the city. City officials have complained that they are at the whim of the state, which has been slow to share the data it receives from hospitals and nursing homes. The state Health Department explained on its website that the discrepancy is caused by the city and state using ‘different data systems.’”

Fun fact! The NYC numbers were increased on April 14, a city of 8 million increasing its count of fatalities by “more than 3700.” On April 17, China increased its fatality count by 1,290 for a city of 11 million – a proportionally smaller increase. But the journalists reporting the story about China had amnesia about the NYC news from three days ago, although that gives important context for the NYC story.

Also note the effect of the large, complex, and often conflicting reporting systems in China and America. When this causes confusion (or chaos) in the US, it is business as usual. When it happens in China, conservatives growl about those untrustworthy yellow people.

Extremists undermining our society

The final numbers for employment and GDP take over a year to produce in the US, with its vast and expensive accounting apparatus. Expect only unreliable numbers during a pandemic by doctors trying to save lives (including their own), with accounting a lower priority.

Complex phenomena are not counted like apples – whether CPI, GDP, or deaths from COVID-19. The definitions and accounting systems for all of these are constantly in motion, changed to reflect new knowledge and new collection systems. Before test kits were widely available (January in China, April in the US), clinical data was used to distinguish COVID-19 from the flu. Shifting to test kits changed the nature of the numbers.