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 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Nahh man thats just a pic from my last family reunion.

LOL Good series
Also Matt Swain, you may need to refresh your definition of "Irony" my man

 Yodhrin wrote:

JWBS wrote:
Yodhrin, you really seem like the most hubristic person I've ever encountered, and I mean that sincerely. Between your proclamation that dissent from your own personal opinions is a signifier of sociopathy in the other thread, to your absolute certainty on the science of an unprecedented pandemic (from what is almost certainly the position of a layperson, correct me if I'm wrong), I'm honestly a bit impressed.

Honestly I'm kind of baffled how anyone could consider "I might have to deal with a slight reduction in my standard of living, we should just let half a million people die" to be anything other than sociopathic? That's not "dissenting from my person opinion", it's being willing to sacrifice countless lives for the sake of your hobby budget.

And yes, I am a layperson. That's why I base my views on the sources(and many, many others) I listed, as well as the tangible, observable, factual reality on the ground: Countries that locked down early have low casualties. Countries that adopted a rigorous test & trace response have low casualties. Countries that didn't take this seriously completely fethed themselves. There is no credible, supportable argument for lifting the lockdown in the absence of either a vaccine, or a comprehensive test & trace programme.

Half a million dead is less than the alternative of global collapse and famine. But thats not what I am advocating. I'm saying we need to start reopening at a steady pace, but it needs to start now. Yes, that will cause a spike, but the alternative to that is total collapse.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:


But yeah, if someone's pitting a modest drop in standard of living(oh noes, poor middle class people won't be able to take a foreign holiday every single year sometimes twice? i weep ) against hundreds of thousands of lives, I consider them to be a sociopath.

We're not talking about a modest drop in living standards. We're talking hundreds of millions of people losing their jobs and being unable to afford basic needs. Needs which the government could never afford because nobody can pay any taxes, plus collapse of agriculture leading to worldwide food shortages. A situation which could lead to not just hundreds of thousands of lives lost, but hundreds of millions of lives lost. Which would be a combination of economic collapse, famine, and violence stemming from those 2 previous causes.

It is infinitely better to take a known risk(maybe a few hundred thousand dead worldwide) vs the possibility of worldwide collapse that would lead the millions of dead.

Maybe you'd save your grandfather from dying to COVID, but its not worth it if it means millions of people starving to death fighting for scraps and recovery that could last over a century.

Are you really saying we sacrifice a few people right now to avoid a possible future?

They really are, staggering isn't it. Almost as staggering as the fact they're evidently too oblivious to grasp the fact that the scenario they're advocating doesn't actually prevent all the economic damage they're so concerned about, and the countries which are going to come out of this the best economically are the ones like New Zealand and South Korea who're doing exactly what the people they're arguing against suggest we should do.

 RiTides wrote:
I think easing of some restrictions doesn't have to mean a complete re-opening of things, and even things that do open, should obviously still be practicing social distancing and the like as much as possible. There's middle ground to be had here... sometimes it's hard to find that in a format like this, though

But this is what's lunacy - what I'm arguing for is the "middle ground". Presenting it as "total lockdown forever vs let 'er rip" is a false choice, there is a middle ground, but it requires we put comprehensive test & trace in place first.

No. You are not arguing for middle ground. You are arguing for a shutdown lasting months, maybe into next year. That is utterly unacceptable.

The middle ground is a shutdown lasting for 6-8 weeks tops, which in my area has already gone way past that. With a gradual opening starting at week 6 and working up to full reopening maybe 12 weeks. Anything longer than that is going to not just cripple the economy. Its going to annihilate it.

CA is utterly screwed by the shutdown. We're going to lose all of our small businesses and millions will be unemployed permanently. Its too late for no damage to be done. But its not too late to ensure we only experience a recession, and not complete collapse. Considering how infectious the virus is, we are all most likely infected already. And anybody who isn't will be soon. So there is little point in making life miserable for 100% of the population.

We should allow all businesses to resume operations, just keep recommendations(not mandates) in place for social distancing and limiting unnecessary trips. Then we focus all efforts on direct treatment of patients and servicing at-risk people. Maybe government programs that can deliver groceries to the elderly and perform periodic wellness checks so they do not need to leave their homes at all. Build temporary hospitals to deal with the extra strain. Focus on helping those who actually need help rather than beating on the healthy portion of the population.

If someone wants to keep operating their barbershop and is themselves healthy, they should be allowed to keep doing it.

 Matt Swain wrote:
I wonder if the people who organized these demonstrations and acts of defiance can end up in prison later for it? If it's proven their acts lead to more corona cases then why not?

Practicality, more than anything else. ID'ing the person a the protest and then tracking them forward to the point where they infected someone who then died is, for all practical purposes, impossible. And without that chain of evidence securing a conviction becomes a practical impossibility if the defense lawyer is even halfway competent. It probably won't ever even be heard in front of a jury as the judge is almost certain to throw it out before that. And on the incredibly unlikely event you do secure a conviction, there will be appeals and it's unlikely the conviction would be upheld. So it's a whole lot of work for a very tiny possibility of accomplishing anything.

And even if you did, there would be screams of political discrimination and a whole raft of conspiracy theories born that the Democrats were coming to purge the Republicans out of the country for good...

JWBS wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Nahh man thats just a pic from my last family reunion.

LOL Good series
Also Matt Swain, you may need to refresh your definition of "Irony" my man

Hmm, people who belong to a persuasion that tends to favor prison sentences for what are often matters of personal choice that do not harm others are now claiming that the restrictions and curtailments of the corona virus limitation measures are an unbearable violation of their freedom because they are often stuck at home with family, unrestricted TV, internet, phone, mail, a choice of what they eat, when they eat and other things people in prison generally do not have.

How is this not somewhat ironic?

Because of the definition of Irony is why. What you're (kinda disingenuously) describing there is a conservative outlook. It's not Ironic. It's not sarcastic, or surreal, or Neo-classical, or French. It's Conservative. That's it. No Irony there mate.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
What is your objection to any form of liberty? I'm not justifying the actions of the people in the article, but you the way you talk is incredibly disturbing.

Liberty comes with responsibility. Your liberty ends when it impinges on the rights of another (the 'your right to swing your fists around end at my nose' argument). For example, your right to own and shoot a gun ends when an innocent person downrange is killed. So your right to gather or worship or protest ends when there's a highly contagious disease out and about killing people in job lots.

JWBS wrote:
Because of the definition of Irony is why. What you're (kinda disingenuously) describing there is a conservative outlook. It's not Ironic. It's not sarcastic, or surreal, or Neo-classical, or French. It's Conservative. That's it. No Irony there mate.

Well, I think we will not come to an agreement here and I'll leave it at that.

Vulcan - That's kind of a clumsy description. You can still do all those things, but with restrictions and with following social distancing.

To let any crisis cause a blanket ban of any protest, for instance, is a slippery slope no one wants. However, in my opinion protests which violate social distancing should result in arrests / more consequences, whereas those that don't (like people staying in cars) should be treated like any protest or act of civil disobedience normally.

 Vulcan wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
What is your objection to any form of liberty? I'm not justifying the actions of the people in the article, but you the way you talk is incredibly disturbing.

Liberty comes with responsibility. Your liberty ends when it impinges on the rights of another (the 'your right to swing your fists around end at my nose' argument). For example, your right to own and shoot a gun ends when an innocent person downrange is killed. So your right to gather or worship or protest ends when there's a highly contagious disease out and about killing people in job lots.

Except that only works if you put no responsibility on the person who gets sick in that case. If Person A catches the virus from Person B who attended a rally, obviously Person A left their house and came into contact with Person B. IE: Unless you can determine that Person B made a deliberate effort to infect person A, they aren't responsible. Person A left their house, meaning all responsibility lies with them. They chose to take a risk and leave their house while a plague is going around. That abdicates any responsibility from other individuals unless those individuals make deliberate and targeted efforts to infect someone else.

If Person B walked up to Person A and deliberately coughed on them and smeared their wet handkerchief on their face then they would be responsible. But anything short of that is the responsibility of Person B.

Otherwise, we would have to extend this to all sorts of potentially deadly contagious conditions. We'd have to hold people with a cold criminally responsible if they went out in public to buy some drammamine and while they were at the store left a smear on the counter which the elderly lady behind them in line got infected from, caught pneumonia and died. Which would be utterly ridiculous.

Okay, as of page 103 I see that the battle lines are set, neither side is budging, and there's no point in continuing to read this thread.

Peace, y'all. I'm out.

 Vulcan wrote:
Okay, as of page 103 I see that the battle lines are set, neither side is budging, and there's no point in continuing to read this thread.

Peace, y'all. I'm out.

You're the God of Fire. But you can't deal with this? Ok. The rest of us are screwed then. Thanks for letting us know i suppose.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
The norse countries in general are big on their personal space, which is something I can get behind. However they have the benefit of lower population densities, large open spaced countries and lots of places for solitude which is difficult to find in more densely populated mid European countries.

The lower population densities are somewhat misleading, since the population is rather concentrated. Lappland being huge doesn't really matter when most of the population lives elsewhere.


Also, I don't know where people have been looking, but as a Swede I've seen an absolute avalanche of people, both domestic and foreign, telling us how stupid we are and how we're gonna have hundreds of thousands of deaths. There's a really nasty undercurrent of schadenfreude, with people wanting us to have a large amount of deaths so they can caress their own egoes and tell everyone how clever they were.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
The norse countries in general are big on their personal space, which is something I can get behind. However they have the benefit of lower population densities, large open spaced countries and lots of places for solitude which is difficult to find in more densely populated mid European countries.

The lower population densities are somewhat misleading, since the population is rather concentrated. Lappland being huge doesn't really matter when most of the population lives elsewhere.


Also, I don't know where people have been looking, but as a Swede I've seen an absolute avalanche of people, both domestic and foreign, telling us how stupid we are and how we're gonna have hundreds of thousands of deaths. There's a really nasty undercurrent of schadenfreude, with people wanting us to have a large amount of deaths so they can caress their own egoes and tell everyone how clever they were.

TBH mate, I've been looking at the death vs test ratio, and it seems fairly clear (to me, as someone who isn't particularly adept at statistics or indeed medicine) that the countries that test most have a far lower incidence of mortality. The ramifications of this are obvious so I won't repeat them here, but anyone that cares to look further can see for themselves.

Antibody testing from NYC just showed an infection rate of 20% in a sample population. Needs lots of follow up and confirmation but it would imply both that the virus was more widespread and contagious than previously thought, but also less deadly (0.5% fatality rate - still high but lower than previously indicated):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html

Not something to jump to conclusions over but let's see if it gets confirmed in follow ups...

 Matt Swain wrote:
I know you were joking, but now I have to ask if moonshine alcohol, ethanol, is as effective at killing germs as isopropyl alcohol is? I know isopropyl alcohol is more effective at killing people than ethanol alcohol is. I know it makes a better paint stripper.

They break even, basically, assuming a high enough proof. Neither makes a totally effective disinfectant.

 RiTides wrote:
Antibody testing from NYC just showed an infection rate of 20% in a sample population. Needs lots of follow up and confirmation but it would imply both that the virus was more widespread and contagious than previously thought, but also less deadly (0.5% fatality rate - still high but lower than previously indicated):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html

Not something to jump to conclusions over but let's see if it gets confirmed in follow ups...

Yeah. More tests equals less deaths. Basically fear of the unknown. If we only test the most ill of all of us? Yeah - we get more deaths per test (who would have thought??? ) But if we test loads of people - the ill, the queasy, and the healthy - guess what - less of us die! Anyway. I've said a few times already in this thread - I think we're working on a "Worst case scenario" - and this, whilst "Morally Acceptable", isn't really "Pragmatic" (which, in my opinion, is the most Humanitarian outlook).

 Grey Templar wrote:
CA is utterly screwed by the shutdown. We're going to lose all of our small businesses and millions will be unemployed permanently. Its too late for no damage to be done

I think you posted some pretty questionable ideas in that post but I want to single this one out in particular. Why will millions be unemployed permanently? How could you form such an idea?

If you are a 20 year old dishwasher that got laid off, you're saying he might live to 100 and not work again for the next 80 years?

I mean, how even? The economy in 1918 after the Spanish Flu and WW1 was recovering by 1919 and totally recovered by 1921. Have you heard the phrase "Roaring 20s" before? It wasn't because "millions were permanently unemployed" after following pretty much the same kind of social distancing... and then they had a world war to boot.

 Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
CA is utterly screwed by the shutdown. We're going to lose all of our small businesses and millions will be unemployed permanently. Its too late for no damage to be done

I think you posted some pretty questionable ideas in that post but I want to single this one out in particular. Why will millions be unemployed permanently? How could you form such an idea?

If you are a 20 year old dishwasher that got laid off, you're saying he might live to 100 and not work again for the next 80 years?

I mean, how even? The economy in 1918 after the Spanish Flu and WW1 was recovering by 1919 and totally recovered by 1921. Have you heard the phrase "Roaring 20s" before? It wasn't because "millions were permanently unemployed" after following pretty much the same kind of social distancing... and then they had a world war to boot.

Ok, by "permanently" I mean that he won't have a job to go back to because his employer will no longer exist. This will be true for a huge chunk of the population because many thousands of businesses will go out of business. And with such a large drop in available jobs a huge quantity of people will be unemployed and have no real chance of competing for the few jobs that do exist.

I'll admit, permanent was not an accurate word for what I was conveying. Unemployed for the foreseeable future doesn't really have a single word that sums it up nicely.

Nail Ferguson (No - the Historian - not the Epidemiologist) discusses the epidemic in this vid - apparently Taiwan had the perfect balance between lockdown and life-goes-on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3s6pzmmvEg

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
CA is utterly screwed by the shutdown. We're going to lose all of our small businesses and millions will be unemployed permanently. Its too late for no damage to be done

I think you posted some pretty questionable ideas in that post but I want to single this one out in particular. Why will millions be unemployed permanently? How could you form such an idea?

If you are a 20 year old dishwasher that got laid off, you're saying he might live to 100 and not work again for the next 80 years?

I mean, how even? The economy in 1918 after the Spanish Flu and WW1 was recovering by 1919 and totally recovered by 1921. Have you heard the phrase "Roaring 20s" before? It wasn't because "millions were permanently unemployed" after following pretty much the same kind of social distancing... and then they had a world war to boot.

Ok, by "permanently" I mean that he won't have a job to go back to because his employer will no longer exist. This will be true for a huge chunk of the population because many thousands of businesses will go out of business. And with such a large drop in available jobs a huge quantity of people will be unemployed and have no real chance of competing for the few jobs that do exist.

I'll admit, permanent was not an accurate word for what I was conveying. Unemployed for the foreseeable future doesn't really have a single word that sums it up nicely.

'Temporary' does a pretty fine job.

There will be problems, but there isn't any need to overstate them, or craft overwrought predictions.

Voss wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
CA is utterly screwed by the shutdown. We're going to lose all of our small businesses and millions will be unemployed permanently. Its too late for no damage to be done

I think you posted some pretty questionable ideas in that post but I want to single this one out in particular. Why will millions be unemployed permanently? How could you form such an idea?

If you are a 20 year old dishwasher that got laid off, you're saying he might live to 100 and not work again for the next 80 years?

I mean, how even? The economy in 1918 after the Spanish Flu and WW1 was recovering by 1919 and totally recovered by 1921. Have you heard the phrase "Roaring 20s" before? It wasn't because "millions were permanently unemployed" after following pretty much the same kind of social distancing... and then they had a world war to boot.

Ok, by "permanently" I mean that he won't have a job to go back to because his employer will no longer exist. This will be true for a huge chunk of the population because many thousands of businesses will go out of business. And with such a large drop in available jobs a huge quantity of people will be unemployed and have no real chance of competing for the few jobs that do exist.

I'll admit, permanent was not an accurate word for what I was conveying. Unemployed for the foreseeable future doesn't really have a single word that sums it up nicely.

'Temporary' does a pretty fine job.

There will be problems, but there isn't any need to overstate them, or craft overwrought predictions.

I agree. Things will be terrible, probably... in the short term. There might be a vaccine in a year, or longer, but 3 or 4 years from now I don't see any precedent for us not having a recovery. I don't see anything right now to suspect this could cause anything near the major fundamental collapse that we're talking about. Even the Great Depression - which was caused by a series of severe issues, the bank failures being only one of them - only lasted 4 years.

Yes, some places will definitely shut down, and we should try to mitigate that as much as reasonably possible. But if you believe in capitalism - and I know you say you do, GT - then the reason those jobs exist in the first place is because they are filling a demand. When normalcy returns, either the demand will as well, or it won't for specific things, and those workers will transition into filling the needs of new demands, just as already happens all the time now due to automation, offshoring, and whatever other mundane reason.

If anything, a perk of this - if it's not obscene to think in terms of perks when tens of thousands have died - is that perhaps our social safety nets will get a little stronger after having been chipped away at and degraded for generations. Perhaps people will remember the essential workers that kept our society functioning despite low wages and no healthcare.

Perhaps not,. people haven't the gratitude of even dogs. But it's a nice dream.

So here is another reason its hard to keep politics out of the discussion....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52407177

Trump is actually suggesting injecting disinfectant. What the actual

Yeah, thats dumb.

GoatboyBeta wrote:
So here is another reason its hard to keep politics out of the discussion....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52407177

Trump is actually suggesting injecting disinfectant. What the actual

Injecting what is in essence high volume alcohol directly into your blood stream...

Not Online!!! wrote:

GoatboyBeta wrote:
So here is another reason its hard to keep politics out of the discussion....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52407177

Trump is actually suggesting injecting disinfectant. What the actual

Injecting what is in essence high volume alcohol directly into your blood stream...

Trying it now, BRB (or not)

Hopefully no-one needs telling, but joking aside, please do NOT inject yourself with disinfectant. That man's a fething liability.

Not even as a joke this is funny.....

Is he trolling us? Honestly - I don't mean to be offensive - I haven't been following world news as of late (the past year or two), but recently I've been forced to, for obvious reasons. Now, I'm a man in his Thirties - I'm from the UK, and was indoctrinated into a Leftist way of thinking in my youth, and I gradually became more Conservative as I matured - All that said, I've lately been watching a lot of Trump and one thing I can say is this -He is HILARIOUS! I'd definitely vote for him

JWBS wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
Antibody testing from NYC just showed an infection rate of 20% in a sample population. Needs lots of follow up and confirmation but it would imply both that the virus was more widespread and contagious than previously thought, but also less deadly (0.5% fatality rate - still high but lower than previously indicated):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html

Not something to jump to conclusions over but let's see if it gets confirmed in follow ups...

Yeah. More tests equals less deaths. Basically fear of the unknown. If we only test the most ill of all of us? Yeah - we get more deaths per test (who would have thought??? ) But if we test loads of people - the ill, the queasy, and the healthy - guess what - less of us die! Anyway. I've said a few times already in this thread - I think we're working on a "Worst case scenario" - and this, whilst "Morally Acceptable", isn't really "Pragmatic" (which, in my opinion, is the most Humanitarian outlook).

Some European governments have estimated an infection rate of 50% in a year without measures That's millions of deaths based on that 'low' 0.5% rate in Europe alone. What is the pragmatic approach to that?

JWBS wrote:
Is he trolling us? Honestly - I don't mean to be offensive - I haven't been following world news as of late (the past year or two), but recently I've been forced to, for obvious reasons. Now, I'm a man in his Thirties - I'm from the UK, and was indoctrinated into a Leftist way of thinking in my youth, and I gradually became more Conservative as I matured - All that said, I've lately been watching a lot of Trump and one thing I can say is this -He is HILARIOUS! I'd definitely vote for him

No, he's just that ignorant. He's a walking, talking Dunning-Kruger Effect.

And the last time he touted a treatment, some pair of idiots self-medicated with bloody aquarium cleaner containing the chemical in question - and died.