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Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote Abstract European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaese...

It is difficult to overstate the bleak future facing humanity by the end of this century. As global warming continues unabated, more and more of the earth's surface will become unavailable to human habitation, touching off large scale resource wars. We're already seeing resource-driven violence in the Middle East and Central America. On top of that, warming will drive positive feedback forcing from, e.g., the release of methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) from deep sea methane clathrates and the thawing of permafrost. And now this: "Even limiting global temperatures to 2°C above pre-industrial levels – already a best case scenario – will push nearly three-quarters of tropical forests above the 32°C heat threshold we identify. As each degree increase above the heat threshold releases 100 billion tonnes of CO₂ from tropical forests to the atmosphere, representing over 280 years of annual fossil fuel emissions by a country such as the UK, there is a ...

"The researchers say their findings suggest people who have been infected with Covid-19, even if they experienced only mild symptoms, have protection against reinfection of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, for “at least up to 40 days after the onset of signs.” However, it remains unclear whether this protection lasts for longer. Immunity to any virus isn't simply black-and-white, but rather a spectrum – one can experience a continuum of infection levels from zero to full infection and everything in between. Even if you have antibodies to a specific virus, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are totally protected from the infection. Equally, levels of immunity can progressively slip as time goes on. Furthermore, immunity is not all about antibodies; the immune response to a pathogen also relies on a well-trained army of B cells (the white blood cell that secretes antibodies) and T-cells (which directly kill cells that have been infected by an invader). ...

"Scientists from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied 285 Covid-1 survivors who had tested positive for the coronavirus after their illness had apparently resolved, as indicated by a previous negative test result. The so-called re-positive patients weren’t found to have spread any lingering infection, and virus samples collected from them couldn’t be grown in culture, indicating the patients were shedding non-infectious or dead virus particles." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/covid-patients-testing-positive-after-recovery-aren-t-infectious?fbclid=IwAR2WUqo6cB4x1m4vROET8yDHekvRJ1zfbdcNW54HMoEsk5XEnVJDd_DD5rM

The "herd immunity" theory of pre-vaccine COVID-19 is that lots of people will recover and be immune from future infection. The wonderful thing about scientific theories is that they are testable and potentially falsifiable by experiment. So far, the data on herd immunity don't look promising. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/16/21259492/covid-antibodies-spain-serology-study-coronavirus-immunity

This is long and detailed, but worth your time. It is written by a retired postmaster and explains the impact of Amazon on the PO business model. https://angrybearblog.com/2020/05/asking-the-wrong-questions-reflections-on-amazon-the-post-office-and-the-greater-good-2.html#comments

FWIW, if I had COVID-19, I would refuse to take hydroxychloroquine. At this point, I would accept Remdesivir, although the evidence for benefit is thin to nonexistent. Here's a long but well colored out analysis of the current hype, film-flam and general intellectual sloppiness surrounding the quest for COVID-19 therapy. "Although we have not seen a pandemic like this in over 100 years, some things never change. Human nature, for instance, doesn’t change, and, now as then, ph ysicians hate feeling powerless against a disease for which they have no disease-specific therapy, leaving them supportive care alone while hoping the patient can ride out the disease and recover. The culture of medicine is very much biased to “do something, anything” with an attitude of, “What’s the harm?” when a patient is facing imminent death. As Lenzer and Brownlee argue, though, yes, some people will die waiting for properly designed and conducted randomized clinical trials, but in the end that t...