It's almost time for Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's a good thing you're here because you can enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
00:07:05.040And if we'd only been arguing without the benefit of an animated graph, because it was the animation that brought it alive.
00:07:13.020Now, I'd like to tie this point to the point I've been making since day one about the task force.
00:07:20.620You've seen me just complaining endlessly that the task force gives you raw numbers and doesn't put them in context.
00:07:27.800So, I don't care how many masks you delivered, unless I know how many you needed.
00:07:34.080It doesn't tell me if you got 10% as what you needed or 110%.
00:07:38.460And my point is that they had the wrong people working, so that the task force simply didn't have anybody on their team who was as talented as Tyler Morgan.
00:07:50.640So, you know, a guy on internet just totally nails his data visualization.
00:07:56.860Honestly, this is the best data visualization I've ever seen in my life, in terms of getting you to, you know, an answer in a way that just ends the conversation.
00:08:07.360It's probably the best one I've ever seen.
00:08:10.320So, somebody like him should have been working with the task force to give us a picture, give us a graph, give us some kind of visual sense of are we getting close to getting enough supplies or not.
00:08:24.060I think we're going to overshoot the supplies.
00:08:27.640And I was happy when Dr. Brooks was talking about the system.
00:08:31.860Because, you know, I always obsess about a system.
00:08:34.040You know, rather than saying it's our goal to get everybody enough stuff, I always say, well, it's great to have a goal, but what's your system?
00:08:43.400If you don't have a system, you're not going to achieve your goal.
00:08:46.700So, Dr. Brooks, for the first time, gave a little detail of the system.
00:08:50.600So, apparently, at the federal level, they do have some visibility into the hospitals.
00:08:54.320It's becoming apparent that at least part of the problem for them getting numbers about how much people have and how much they need, and I think this is very clear now, is that the hospitals were lying to them.
00:09:31.360The system causes everybody to try to maximize their individual benefit, and you hope things work out in the long run.
00:09:37.620But if they start hoarding, that doesn't work.
00:09:43.460You know, capitalism works even when everybody's selfish, because the rules of capitalism and the transparency and everything allow that to work.
00:09:55.220So, Cuomo was saying he needed 30,000 ventilators.
00:10:04.980So, what I think is that now that Berks has described the system in which the federal government has some visibility and they're overruling the requests from the individual areas, which I think is exactly what I wanted to hear.
00:10:21.240Because in order to make sure that the places with an immediate need can get, you know, get ventilators and stuff transferred to them, is the government needs to look at their numbers of all the hospitals reporting,
00:10:35.100and then act like an adult and say, you don't need a million of these.
00:10:41.560I know you want a million, and I know you'd feel better if you had a million, and I know you can pay for a million, but maybe this isn't statistically where we need a million masks.
00:10:52.000So, when Berks, the doctor, described that that was their system where the federal government had visibility, that was the first thing I needed to know that I didn't know.
00:11:04.260I didn't know that they had visibility.
00:11:06.580And then also they were doubting the requests.
00:11:11.880I want the federal government to be playing the adult and, you know, doubting the need of individual things and putting a larger, you know, analytical frame on it so that they can adjust things.
00:11:24.080With that system in place, and absent the government saying, uh-oh, we have a big emergency in this one supply,
00:11:32.960if the government thought they were going to run out of supplies at this point, you know, as of today's vantage point,
00:11:39.880I'm almost positive you would be hearing something like this, you know, we're really short on this supply.
00:12:22.800So, I'm going to give the task force a C plus for reporting about how many materials that we need.
00:12:35.400I did give them an F yesterday, based on the fact that they provided no context for us to know whether the numbers they were reporting were enough or too much.
00:12:46.780But, I'm revising that today because now with the understanding of that they have a system,
00:12:54.360the system is completely rational from, you know, me as an observer.
00:12:58.120I would say, yeah, that is exactly the system you needed.
00:21:14.180He's saying that all these conservative types, who he calls right-wing, but they're, I would just say they're conservative.
00:21:21.960They're suggesting that the numbers might be inflated in an effort to paint President Trump as doing a worse job.
00:21:30.260And, I think that the evidence of that is that Dr. Birx said at the press conference that if somebody comes in with two conditions, let's say diabetes and also coronavirus, and they die, that they call that a coronavirus death, not a diabetes death.
00:21:51.180If they come in with hypertension and coronavirus, they call it a coronavirus death.
00:21:56.940Now, I think that a lot of conservative people are saying, wait a minute.
00:22:00.700Between the fact that you've already admitted that you can't tell what they died of, and yet you're coding them all as coronavirus death just because they have coronavirus in them.