Results for “Cruise ship” 48 found
Covid-19 liability reform for the eventual reopening
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
If an infected but asymptomatic worker shows up at work and sickens coworkers, for example, should the employer be liable? The answer is far from obvious. Liability exists not to shift unmanageable risk, but rather to induce management to take possible and prudent measures of precaution.
Another problem with liability law in this context is that the potential damages are high relative to the capitalization of most businesses. Covid-19 cases often pop up in chains; there have been many cases from a single conference, or in a single church choir, or on a single cruise ship. If a business or school is host to such a chain, it could be wiped out financially by lawsuits. In these cases the liability penalties do not have their intended deterrent effect because the money to lose simply isn’t there…
Another problem with liability in this setting has to do with jury expertise. Are random members of the public really the best people to determine acceptable levels of Covid-19 risk and appropriate employer precautions? Juries are better suited for more conventional applications of liability law, such as when the handyman fixing your roof falls off your rickety ladder. Given the unprecedented nature of the current situation, many Covid-19 risk questions require experts.
Finally, there is the issue of testing. Businesses could be of immeasurable help by testing their employees for Covid-19, as additional testing can help limit the spread of the virus (if only by indicating which workers should stay home or get treatment). Yet the available tests are highly imperfect, especially with false negatives. If businesses are liable for incorrect test results, and their possible practical implications, then business will likely not perform any tests at all, to the detriment of virtually everybody.
I recommend modest liability for some sectors, and zero liability, bundled with a New Zealand-like accident compensation system, for other sectors. And of course some very dangerous sectors should not be allowed to reopen at all, though I am more sympathetic to regional experimentation than are some people on Twitter.
Most Grand Princess passengers not tested
They solved for the equilibrium:
Despite assurances from Vice President Mike Pence that all Grand Princess cruise ship passengers quarantined at Travis Air Force Base would be tested for COVID-19, The Chronicle has learned that two-thirds of them have declined, often at the encouragement of federal health officials.
As of Wednesday, 568 of the 858 passengers screened while confined turned down the test, a federal official familiar with the Travis quarantine and testing told The Chronicle. The low testing numbers align with what passengers were told by officials during a Tuesday afternoon teleconference, citing a 30% acceptance rate for the novel coronavirus test, several passengers told The Chronicle.
“These folks know they are in a 14-day quarantine, if they test positive they are further delayed until they test negative,” said the official, who The Chronicle agreed not to name because they were not authorized to speak to the media, in accordance with the paper’s ethics policy. “They don’t want to stay. They want to be released.”
Interpret the resulting data accordingly, of course. Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
The best economic plan against the coronavirus
I have produced a 7 pp. document, mostly micro- rather than macroeconomics, leaving the pure health and health care issues aside, you will find it here (link is now corrected). Intended for policymakers. Here is the opening bit:
“We need a series of policies to achieve some rather complex ends, and in conjunction. Other than the obvious goals (“minimize human suffering”), these ends are:
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Scale down economic activity in a rapid way to keep people at home, but without devastating the physical, cultural, or organizational capital that will be needed to restore growth and normality.
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Boost the confidence of markets — both retail and financial markets — by showing progress in limiting the spread of the disease. (But note that merely slowing the spread of the disease may not help the economy, as uncertainty would linger for longer periods of time.)
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Keep business in a position to rebound.
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Create incentives for production to bounce back once that is appropriate.
You will notice a tension between #1 and #2-4, which is what makes this policy issue so difficult. The ideal policy mix should both lower and raise output, and at just the right speed. No one ever taught us how to do that.
Furthermore, policymakers need to figure out which sectors a) we wish to keep up and running (food, health care), b) which sectors we want to contract rapidly but bounce back rapidly as well (education), and c) which sectors we do not want to protect at all and would be willing to see perish (e.g., cruise ships, note that most operate under foreign flags and employ mainly non-Americans).
Those classes of sector may require very different economic policies, most of all we should not waste aid on the latter class of sectors. Be nervous of general proposals for “the economy.”
Again, here is the link, please do leave your suggestions in the comments section of this blog post. I thank Patrick Collison for some writing and editing assistance with this document, though of course he is not liable for its final contents or conclusions.
A report from the hospital front, from a reliable source
I visited *** Health Center in ***. They are not a hospital, more like an urgent care clinic funded by the city and state. They act as triage for three area hospitals, take vital signs, can write prescriptions and send serious cases to Hospital ERs. They have been overwhelmed with people worried about COVID-19…They had been testing people for the virus; they have run out of re-agent so they have stopped that….If they were provided with isolation beds and ventilators, could they take 20 patients? No, it is not in their license and an application to change their license takes two years. When NYC reaches maximum hospital capacity, this clinic will not be part of the solution.
I visited [underfunded public health consortium] in ***, which was at the forefront of the response to H1N1 in 2009 and Sandy in 2012. They typically see 150 ER patients a day; during H1N1 they averaged 350 at the peak; they think they will be over 1000 during COVID-19….There is no such thing as a “test kit” which tests for the virus; when people talk about those kits, such as those dropped onto that cruise ship, they are talking about a nasal swab packaged with some reagent, which is then mailed to a facility with a Polymerase Chain Reaction Machine that can look for the RNA from the virus.
You can find PCR machines on eBay for $25,000; such a machine is labor intensive and can do maybe 10 tests a day. The hospital complex I visited, which has been designated a testing center, has been swabbing about 200 people a day and receiving multiples of that number from other hospitals. The vast majority they are sending off to a federal lab. Two weeks ago the turnaround time was three days; now it is five to six.
There are much faster machines. The Roche Cobas 6800 can do 3000 tests a day with very little human interaction; it costs $500k a year to rent, which is way outside a poor hospitals’s budget (while still not providing sufficient testing for the receiving area in the coming months.) Outside their budget until today, when we gave that money (I specified first year only, though they should be sure to ask in a year) as part of a larger check. We also gave money for 10 transport ventilators with two ports, 20 isolation beds, the money to hire 14 nurses for round the clock coverage of those beds for 6 weeks, and other things that they need. Overall it was a $1 million check, with a promise to talk to them in a week to cover anything we might have missed and to talk to them whenever they ask during the crisis. Overall, I was pretty happy with the visit. They were stunned, they work in a bureaucracy where everything takes 3 years.
One thing that they can’t get enough of is N-95s [face masks]. The first thing that almost every doctor I talked to mentioned was the frustration at having to re-use N-95’s, not for multiple patients, but for multiple days.
Again, here are the Emergent Ventures prizes to encourage work to support work to fight the coronavirus, and please support them if you can.
A coronavirus conundrum, on the percentage of asymptomatic cases
New reports suggest that the coronavirus has been spreading in Washington state for at least six weeks, infecting hundreds or maybe more. At the same time, other reports suggest a high “R0 value,” sometimes 3 or more, reflecting that the coronavirus is highly contagious and it spreads very quickly.
It is then possible to have hundreds of cases in Washington state if most cases are asymptomatic, or with only slight symptoms. Yet when we look at the experiences of the coronavirus cruise ships, it seems a reasonable number of cases have symptoms of distress. For instance, on the Diamond Princess six people died and only about half are listed as having the virus but asymptomatic (see the previous link on the rhs). So many others seem to have reported being sick or requiring treatment.
So what gives? I see a few options, none of them obviously convincing:
1. People on the cruise ship were hit especially hard.
2. Significantly different strains of the virus are circulating (all of the sequence that has been done seems to run counter to this).
3. Washington state local public health infrastructure has in fact been overwhelmed as of late, we just thought it was all a very bad flu season.
4. Many of the people on the cruise ship who showed symptoms “thought they were supposed to” but were not actually so sick.
5. Most of the detected cases on the cruise ship in fact were asymptomatic, but the media has been misreporting the extent of actual illness among the passengers.
Any other suggestions? It is quite likely the cruise ship people are older than usual, but will that make up for the entire difference? People, what do you think is going on here?
Please restrict your comments to attempting to resolve this particular issue, as you can put your more general coronavirus observations on other posts.
Robert Solow on the future of leisure
…there is no logical or physical reason that the work year of a machine should not actually increase, say. But it would seem more likely that increased leisure over the next century should be accompanied by a smaller stock of capital (per worker), smaller gross investment (per worker), and thus a larger share of consumption in GDP. Of course, this tendency will almost certainly be offset by an ongoing increase in capital intensity, even in the service sector. Obviously there are other, totally moot, considerations. Will leisure time activities be especially capital intensive (grandiose hotels, enormous cruise ships) or the opposite (growing marigolds, reading poetry)? Show me an economist with a strong opinion about these things, and I will show you that oxymoron: a daredevil economist.
Of course if you really do think the capital-labor ratio will be falling, investment behavior is going to disappoint for a long time to come. The shift to intangible capital will strengthen that tendency all the more.
p.s. Leisure will become especially capital-intensive, at least in the United States.
Here is the full essay, from a few years ago, but I think new on-line, and from this MIT Press book of collected essays, now forthcoming in paperback.
The three kinds of charter cities
First, there is the minimal charter city. During a cruise ship vacation, everyone lives under cruise ship law. This works fine, and is easy to start up, but it also has limited applicability. No one has to make a big cultural shift, as long as they don’t get too drunk while playing shuffleboard out on the deck.
Second, there is hegemon-backed charter city. The British empire ran Hong Kong, and the mainland United States (partially) has run Puerto Rico and earlier managed the Panama Canal Zone. By definition, a hegemon is required to enforce the law in the external jurisdiction, and of course such hegemons may be scarce, unwilling, or their rule may be oppressive or counterproductive. Portuguese rule over Goa was not a major success, nor was British rule over India more generally. European extraterritoriality in China proper was an imperialist disaster. One problem is that exporting legal systems without exporting their cultural preconditions can lead to failure.
Third, some charter cities are based on the idea of a complementary exported culture. Singapore did in fact absorb many parts of British culture and law, and some parts of Western mores; it now feels like the most Western part of Asia. The partial export of Western law and culture has been extremely successful, and the role of culture here means there is strong indigenous support, within Singapore, for Singapore being the Singapore we all know and love. These are the charter cities that work best, but they are also the hardest to pull off.
You can think of the original charter city idea as postulating law as a non-rival public good. Why not just spread the best laws to more jurisdictions? But does spreading the law without the underlying culture suffice? You can think of the three kinds of charter cities, as mentioned above, as varying responses to this problem.
And spreading culture does not seem to be a public good at all, rather it involves a lot of hard work and it often fails or backfires.
This blog post is drawn from a talk I gave in San Francisco at an inaugural conference for Mark Lutter’s new Center for Innovative Governance.
Would a multi-planet humanity be freer?
Kevin P. emails me:
Suppose humanity becomes a multi-planet species. Does the percentage of people living in autocratic societies decrease or increase relative to what we see on our planet today? How do the time and resources required to travel between inhabited planets affect this?
Do some people on “free” planets work to help the non-free? More or less than such countries today? Is there some scale that is reached so a free Federation comes to guaranty freedom everywhere? Or maybe a tyrant or tyrants, once they have a couple wealthy planets under their belt are unstoppable because of cooperation difficulties of the individual free planets?
When I think of settling other planets, my base case is one of extreme scarcity and fragility, at least at first and possibly for a long time. Those are not the conditions that breed liberty, whether it is “the private sector” or “the public sector” in charge.
Maybe corporations will settle space for some economic reason. Then you might expect space living to have the liberties of an oil platform in the sea, or perhaps a cruise ship. Except there would be more of a “we are in this all together” attitude, which I think would favor a kind of corporate autocracy.
Another scenario involves a military settling space, possibly for military reasons, and that too is not much of a liberal or democratic scenario.
You might also have religiously-motivated settlements, which presumably would be governed by the laws and principles of the religion. Over time, however, this scenario might give the greatest chance for subsequent liberalization.
America developed to be as free as it did (at least for some people) mostly there was so much free land. Living standards were relatively high, and moving further westward was always an option. It is hard for me to think of an interplanetary version of the same condition. Easy exit and free resources don’t seem to go well together with the concept of space settlement.
Space stations and settlement will give the power to those who control the infrastructure, a bit like Wittvogel’s Oriental Despotism hypothesis, except with both air and water being scarce.
I thus expect that interplanetary settlements, whatever their other virtues, will not do much for liberalism or liberty. Here is my earlier post on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Travel sentences to ponder
“My favorite is when the ship docks somewhere I’ve already visited,” she said. “One time, we were on a ship that docked in Rome. I’ve been there a million times. So everyone else gets out, and it’s just me and my husband on the ship. It’s the perfect antidote to New York life.”
The article is about couples who would rather live on cruise ships. For the pointer I thank the excellent Samir Varma.
Does seasteading have a future?
I was pleased to see their title for the column: “Go Wet, Young Man.” Here is one of the claims:
Counterintuitively, I see the greatest promise for seasteading as a path toward more rather than less human companionship.
…some of the elderly have started living on cruise ships full-time. A good assisted-living facility might cost $80,000 a year in the U.S., more than many year-long cruises. (Cruising could also be cheaper than living in an expensive neighborhood.) Furthermore, the cruise offers regular contact with other passengers and also the crew, and the lower average age means that fewer of one’s friends and acquaintances are passing away. The weather may be better, and there is the option of going onshore to visit relatives and go shopping.
The cruise ship removes the elderly from full-service hospitals, but on the plus side, regular social contact is good for health, passengers are watched much of the time and there is a doctor minutes away. Better health and human companionship could be major motives for this form of seasteading. I could imagine many more of the elderly going this route in the future, and some cruise lines already are offering regular residences on board.
The goal of this seasteading enterprise is to pack people more tightly together rather than to open up broad new vistas for a Wild West kind of settlement. The proprietors make physical space more scarce, not less, to induce better clustering. So seasteading does have a future, but it is to join and build a new and crowded communitarian project, not to get away from one.
Do read the whole thing.
*A Notable Woman*
The descriptive subtitle is The romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt. She was a British woman who started keeping a journal in 1925 at the age of fifteen, and continued until her death in 1986. Usually books like this bore me after fifty pages (or less), but this one I am finding consistently entertaining. Here is one bit from her cruise ship voyage at age 23:
My physical needs as a normal woman are badly wanting fulfillment. I’ve got to somehow make them understand that I have no anchor; that an ordinary and full-sexed woman must centre her interests on one man, otherwise she must inevitably go to pieces.
I’ve learnt a lot from this voyage, and one thing from Nev which is forceful and important — that platonic friendships are impossible. To show my trust in my little boyfriends I left my door unbolted; although they had drunk too much, I knew I could trust them. But I’ve bolted it again.
She lost her virginity eight years later, at age 31:
When he had played with me in the French manner (too long I think) to work me up to the Crisis, the Big Moment Passionate and so on, I left him to make my preparations and then lay back on the bed and said in a sepulchral voice, “Now I’m ready for the worst!” Well, it was damned painful, though I didn’t know it was going to be.
I have quite recovered from my pain in the stomach and am in a rare good humour, have been all day. It is such a relief to feel one is no longer completely ignorant.
Here is one good review of the book, with a photo of the diarist as well. Here is another review.
Sunday assorted links
1. Rent control for Silicon Valley? (NYT)
2. The fallout from Obama’s visit to Cuba.
3. “Each guy paid for his date’s dinner or drinks, as guys who go out with women are generally expected to do. Each then used Venmo, the peer-to-peer payment app, to request that his date reimburse her share after the fact.” Link here.
4. Which cruise ships have the best libraries? By the way, bigger ships are often worse.
5. “Homeless people in San Francisco say the sprinklers at Bonhams are turned on at night to soak their belongings and discourage them from staying on the sidewalk” There is also this sentence: “Still, anti-homeless design features are ubiquitous around the city.”
Tuesday assorted links
The world’s longest interview
Defying the stereotype of the tight-lipped Scandinavian, popular Norwegian crime writer Hans Olav Lahlum set the world record for the longest interview on Thursday after spending more than 30 non-stop hours chatting in an online broadcast.
Lahlum, who rarely paused for more than a few seconds, discussed topics ranging from U.S. presidents to his fictional characters during the online show hosted by VG Nett, the online arm of Norwegian tabloid VG.
The new record awaits approval from Guinness World Records.
Fast-talking Lahlum, who is also a left-wing politician, historian and top chess player rarely stumbled during the gabfest, which also covered such scintillating topics as his preferences for mixing puddings and kebabs.
“I think I can safely say that tonight I might go to bed a little earlier than usual,” he said as he and interviewer Mads Andersen beat the old record of just over 26 hours.
Shortly after surpassing the previous record, Lahlum plunged into a weighty discussion on world literature in general and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in particular.
“Do you have a plan for how you will get Lahlum to stop talking when the interview ends?” one viewer asked VG on its online forum.
There is more here, and the article explains this is part of a broader Norwegian trend toward “slow TV”:
Norway, a pioneer in slow programming, has spawned several lengthy television hits in recent years, and public broadcaster NRK earlier this year aired a 12-hour show centered on a burning fireplace with experts discussing the intricacies of fire wood.
In 2011, it broadcast 134 hours non-stop of a cruise ship going up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic, bagging the world record for the longest continuous TV program along the way.
And an earlier broadcast of an eight hour train journey from Oslo to Bergen was so popular, NRK had to repeat it.
As I’ve mentioned before, so far the Norwegians are having an awesome century.
For the pointer I thank Øystein Hernæs.
How signals work on the dance floor
Here is some new research:
The results showed that women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone. The men with the lowest testosterone in turn got the lowest attractiveness ratings. "Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance," Lovatt told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "And women understand it — without noticing it."
In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite. Dancers with high levels of testosterone moved more parts of their body, with their movements being somewhat uncoordinated, while those with lower testosterone made more subtle movements, especially with their hips. The male students found the latter style most appealing…
The men who got the female students hot under the collar danced with large movements which were "complexly coordinated." But it's a fine line between hot and not, however: Those men who made big moves but who were less coordinated came across as dominant alpha males — and were unlikely to win women's hearts. The researchers also found that the size and complexity of the dance moves decreased in parallel with testosterone levels.
The full story is here and the article is interesting throughout. This bit on the researcher caught my eye:
Lovatt knows his subject matter well — he himself was a professional dancer until the age of 26. He performed in musicals in large venues around England and also worked on cruise ships. The thought of an academic career barely entered his head at the time. He wasn't even able to read until he was 23, having left school without any qualifications. When he looked at a page in a book, "all I saw was a big black block."