Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 22, 2021
A free Krispy Kreme doughnut every day if you get a Covid-19 vaccine
This has some people worked up over comorbidity issues, but it's silly to get overheated about it. If a doughnut is the incentive necessary to get more people to vaccinate, then so be it. ■ The beauty of liberal democratic capitalism is that we don't need for everyone's motivations to be as pure as the driven snow...just, on balance, more good than not. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. ■ We are extremely close to having a surplus of vaccines available and not enough willing patients to vaccinate. That crossover moment could be just a few weeks away. Whatever it takes to get the reluctant over their hesitancy and into the clinics to get the shot is a victory for herd immunity. ■ Almost nobody is going to take such frequent advantage of the Krispy Kreme offer that it will change their BMI, and even if they did, then the slow expansion of a few waistlines is better than sending thousands of additional patients to the hospital with a deadly respiratory virus. The person who will go to get a free Krispy Kreme doughnut every morning wasn't going to have a bowl of Wheaties and go for a 5-mile run instead. ■ As Greg Mankiw puts it in his authoritative textbook on economics, "People respond to incentives". If a free-doughnut offer is enough incentive to push even a few hundred people over the line, then Krispy Kreme is doing a giant public service while also earning a lot of publicity. Pure? No. But definitely good enough.
March Madness never seems to teach us Math Mania
Every March, millions of Americans pick their NCAA brackets and watch them get blown up almost instantly...then go right back to complaining that meteorologists, economists, and pollsters can't predict the future with perfect certainty.
Taiwan situation draws US and Japan closer on defense
Given the general thrust of US-China relations, it seems surprising that we don't hear a more robust debate about a statehood option for Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas. China's government makes no apologies for rattling its sabers all over the Pacific right now, and it really is surprising that we aren't talking about binding our far-flung territories a little closer.
Lawyer who took center stage in Trump election claims now says she was making it all up
In a court filing, Sidney Powell claims "no reasonable person could conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact". This sort of spectacular bravado would be worthy of applause if it were merely a matter of showmanship. But it wasn't -- it was a set of claims that went directly to the central matter of a Presidential election, and the lies ultimately served the undermining thereof. Benjamin Franklin wrote that "To err is human, to repent divine, to persist devilish." It seems pretty clear that this behavior -- malignant disingenuousness -- would fall under "to persist".
With no disrespect intended to those who are helping people to express themselves and to bear with their feelings, there is some hazard involved with telling people that they can have a "truth" that is independent of objective facts. So writes Elisabeth Braw: "[E]stablishing the real facts isn't easy, and in a liberal democracy, citizens have the right to challenge experts. But the real problem is when enough people decide they're not even interested in seeking the truth, preferring their own ideas about how the world works instead."
Idle thought: It's hard to come up with any real-estate deal that has paid off quite like the one that Virginia got in exchange for DC. The state gave up a few square miles, took them back 57 years later, and today has three of the highest-income counties in the country.
Some people are patient by nature
For the rest of us, there's the ability to speed up podcast playback to 2.4x speed. Superficial as it may seem, that kind of hyper-customization of the listener experience is a huge advantage in favor of on-demand streaming services and reinforces how important it is for radio broadcasts to focus on their core competency: Being live and talking about what's immediate.
