191–200 of 394 posts
When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you're a virus researcher, every outbreak looks like a pandemic. The facts on the ground don't match the pandemic conclusion. There were two cases in all of Santa Clara County a few weeks ago, now there is one case.
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Regardless of the other three points, it is generally rational to mistrust authority because many authorities have repeatedly failed in the past to protect lives during emergency scenarios.
Conspiracy theorists tend to mistake incompetence for malice; or partial incompetence for total incompetence. Hurricane Katrina doesn’t invalidate health and building codes; education; law enforcement and EPA, FAA, and SEC regulations. Decisions made are both bad and good, but it’s irrational to think the decision makers are generally untrustworthy.
This is one case where it's worth overreacting to. Biological epidemics are the only thing that has had the capacity to kill >50 million people in a year. In my risk classification hierarchy I put pandemics above nuclear war and wayyyy above terrorism. Yet we've spent trillions on the war on terror the past 20 years while there's no coordinated plan in the U.S. for this yet. If there's even a 2% chance of this going…
The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
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> As Hacker News is usually full of people that can provide good advice: Be careful. Comment sections tend to attract overconfident armchair experts rather than professional advice. This is a forum where technology people congregate, not virologists. You may get repeated advice about general prepper techniques, but in my experience the mainstream prepper types can be over focused on unlikely doomsday scenarios instea…
Of course, I'm not going to treat anything here as the absolute truth, but I'm looking for things I might have missed. I read the article, but other than keeping food and not touching your face etc. I didn't see much actionable advice for me. I'm not taking any prescription drugs, I don't have any family members close enough that I could treat them and handshakes are uncommon at my office.
For the rest, we are all essentially about to be victims of math, and the math on any disease with a 14 day or so symptomless incubation period, and high infectivity is uncompromising. It was always going to spread world wide, and there was really nothing anybody was going to be able to do about that.
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The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
> it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do. By about 3-4 orders of magnitude, it is. The flu tends to kill about 60K people annually and most of those are old or very young or already had a compromised immune system. This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%. If left unchecked it would overwhelm available health care capacity pretty quickly. The Chine…
I don't think you're getting your numbers from an accurate source either. The flu kills a lot more than 6k people by every estimate I've seen.
Before you propagate this information and take action, read this post about the psychology of fear mongering, and ask yourself if you identify with it. 1. Do you tend to mistrust authority? 2. Do you feel powerless to control the course of your life? 3. Do you feel like you have special information and insight the rest of us do not? 4. Do you feel comfort when thinking about the end of the world because once it happe…
InfoWars types. Arrogant paranoia often manifested in tribal communities that reinforce similar delusions. Recent example: the mom who killed her husband, brother and kids because she and her new lover believe in an "apocalypse" summer 2020.
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This is hilarious. Isn't 2012 the underlying model they use for everything today? Fearmongering is the go-to default for absolutely every issue the media covers. Then during an actual literal pandemic they take a short break from every other the-world-is-ending story to give us the "don't fearmonger" lecture. If you ever find yourself split in doubt between your own sanity and that of the media's, please for the love…
Two observations: 1. There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints) 2. And they're not insane, editors and social media algorithms are rational and reacting to reader incentives (but it is "insane" to mistake media sources for a rational human, because most media is about covering extreme events[1])…
The overwhelming majority of the media that people consume in the U.S. is created by the same handful of companies, which each have roughly the same rules about what kinds of stories you're allowed or not allowed to publish. Having worked at one, I can assure you that you're not just allowed to publish whatever you want as long as it conforms to basic journalistic standards or whatever.
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I feel like there must be some sort of internet law that says, “gross incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
Pretty sure you are kidding, but for the benefit of future readers: > Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> If you want to get away with it, make it indistinguishable from incompetence.
Here’s a WWII field manual from “them” on the subject. It actually helped me unlearn some bad behaviors instilled by previous bad management. :-)
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Of all the national emergencies in the US since 2000, Katrina, Sandy, Puerto Rico, etc., does anyone know offhand how many were handled properly? Seems like ~20-40% are handled improperly if not more.
Since you're mostly counting hurricanes, here's a list of all category 4+ hurricanes that hit the US, although most were not that strength when they actually made landfall: * Hurricane Isabel (5, 2003) * Hurricane Charley (4, 2004) * Hurricane Ivan (5, 2004) * Hurricane Dennis (4, 2005) * Hurricane Katrina (5, 2005) * Hurricane Rita (5, 2005) * Hurricane Wilma (5, 2005) * Hurricane Ike (4, 2008) * Hurricane Matthew (…
There's also the concern of incentives. The authorities are incentivized to treat every emergency as requiring nothing over and above the standard response, because statistically this is correct. And so you would not expect the authorities to be able to recognize, or be honest about when an unfolding emergency requires an atypical response.