12 Comments
Apr 16, 2020Liked by Claire Berlinski

Working hard to meet the deadline. In the mean-time recommend looking at your twitter thread from 2 Feb..... very interesting (read all replies). And no, pundits mess it up all the time but no need to fire.... they usually have little more insight or info that the average Joe, but give us something to bitch about (i.e. keep us entertained).

Expand full comment
author

Which Twitter thread? There's probably 100 from that day, which suggests what I was probably doing when I should have been reading The Lancet.

Expand full comment

It's an early thread on CV..... right after the travel ban started.

Expand full comment
author

You mean the one in which I insisted the world had gone insane? That the overreaction was worse than the virus? There are many. I screwed this one up *bad.*

Expand full comment
Apr 16, 2020Liked by Claire Berlinski

You and 7.49999 Billion other people... Like I said, not passing judgment but the thread is an incredibly interest array of reactions. So you're not fired (I want very much to past a DJT Apprentice picture here, HA! Check Twitter)

Expand full comment
author

Here's the thread, if anyone's curious: https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski/status/1251050509428981760. As for "not passing judgement," I don't know why you wouldn't. We need to make judgements of how people perform: Otherwise, incompetence gets rewarded and people who shouldn't be are promoted to positions they can't handle. I deserve judgment for this, and the judgment, clearly, is "I failed this test." This doesn't mean I have failed overall as a pundit, and doesn't mean I am a bad and worthless person, but this requires of me a certain amount of introspection: I need to understand why, or I may do it again. As I say here: https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski/status/1251057197162934274

Expand full comment
author

Fortunately, I have almost zero power and influence, so my screw-up didn't result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. But the people whose screw-ups had exactly that result should be conducting a similar review.

Expand full comment

US worst outbreak in the world. Think again, combine the EU countries and the death rate is massively greater there with only a slightly larger population than the US.

China is not reporting the scope and extent of its epidemic. Do you believe their numbers? I don't.

NY and New Jersey account for almost half of the cases and deaths. The geniuses in charge there left the subways, buses and trains open for three weeks and told people to go to work and might I add enjoy the shows and night life to boot! Statistically, there is a direct correlation between the extend of the outbreak by city and the use of mass transit.

Why are we isolating the entire population when we know that the vast majority of deaths are amongst the elderly with serious preexisting conditions! My position as an economist is that everyone under 50 go back to work and school and let the senior citizens self isolate to protect themselves until we have a therapy or a vaccine. Most of the seniors do not work anyway.

Expand full comment

It was the fusion bomb which generated the concern of igniting the atmosphere, not fission.

Expand full comment
author

No, no--it was fission they were worried about.

Expand full comment
Apr 16, 2020Liked by Claire Berlinski

Call this a tie. In the paper written to answer the question during the project, the fission bomb was certain to not do so while the fusion "super" was still a prospect of achieving the necessary 10 Mev temperature.

So yes it was a concern for the fission bomb first.

Expand full comment
author

I could have written that sentence more clearly to reflect that. But, yes.

Expand full comment