Scrub Shaming

Here's a new one for me (h/t RKW). Activists snap photos of wayward nurses who have the gall to leave hospital grounds wearing their scrubs. Ah, the gentle "coercion" of social stigma.

The (irrational) fear is that nursing uniforms are ambulatory biohazard depositories. Patient please.

Yes, there are problems with hospital-borne infections, and contamination is a perennial threat for biological (and chemical, and radiological, but let's stick to the topic) threat exposure, but please consider your base rates. Of the 2.6 million nurses working in the US, can you recall even a single case where scrubs have been identified as an infection vector? Even one?

Unwashed hands are a far bigger threat to public health (and that's in relative terms, mind you). But you can't take a picture of microbes lurking under someone's fingernails, can you? No, but you can harass someone who just got off a 12 hour shift of keeping sick people alive.

Nursing is not made any more euvoluntary by the meddling of foolish scolds.

Rent-control in the East Village: Is the Below-market Lease an Asset, in Bankruptcy?

This is very interesting.  Someone is finally recognizing, in the court case below, the actual economic implication of the "rent" created by rent control!

If I am a long-time resident, my lease is extremely valuable in a rent-controlled city.  That's why people sub-let, instead of moving out.

But then that means that the lease is an asset.  In a bankruptcy proceeding, that asset can be sold off?  Or...can it?  To admit this would be to admit that the actual value of the apartment is far more than the rent-controlled lease allows.  Can the city face up to its hypocrisy?

Welcome!

I will use this blog to record examples of people or events that clarify, or question, the idea of "euvoluntary exchange."