Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Permanent Assumptions

More people wake up every morning wanting to solve problems than wake up looking to cause harm
Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever
A big group of people can get smarter and better informed over time. But they can’t, on average, become more patient, less greedy, or more level-headed during periods of upheaval.

COVID-19 Will Win

Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that 100K’s of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.

Instagram Look Dies

As Instagram has grown to more than 1b monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular aesthetic: bright walls; artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast; and millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post. It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”

the sooner all this garbage burns to the ground, the better.

80% not susceptible to COVID-19?

His models suggest that the stark difference between outcomes in the UK and Germany is not primarily an effect of different government actions (such as better testing and earlier lockdowns) but is better explained by intrinsic differences between the populations that make the “susceptible population” in Germany — the group that is vulnerable to Covid-19 — much smaller than in the UK.

Even within the UK, the numbers point to the same thing: that the “effective susceptible population” was never 100%, and was at most 50% and probably more like only 20% of the population. He emphasises that the analysis is not yet complete, but “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be 80%.”