31–40 of 373 posts
I'm sure if china can shut people inside their houses to prevent spread, so can we. We just have to adopt a different attitude towards fundamental rights. Besides, medicine development seems to go rather quickly. I am sure it will be mostly dealt with in a years time.
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
Do we know what nobody needs, for real? Sure, there might be some low-hanging fruit, but this seems like an area where Chesterton's fence would apply in spades, lest our judgments age as well as Rick Perry talking about the Department of Energy.
And there's also the fact that it's demand for non-essential things that employs the large portion of people who moved out of farming and other necessities because we got good enough at production that they didn't need to be there.
We might be able figure out how to fund productive things that incentives don't automatically align for, but this sounds trickier than it might seem at first glance.
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
Are you proposing a centrally planned economy, or how do you intend to ensure that people work only in allowable jobs and produce only acceptable products and services?
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the…
> tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.
The productivity loss only happens when testing is inaccurate and entire communities are told to stay home for months just because it's hard to identify exactly who is coughing out germs each day.
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the…
> tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.
However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
But the countries where almost everyone is participating in the production of essentials, and nobody is doing Bullshit Jobs, are the poorest in the world with the lowest life expectancies.
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the…
We do need a better standard of privacy, though, than what South Korea is currently offering to the unfortunate souls who are infected. The tracking data is supposedly anonymized, but nobody gives any thought to the fact that anonymized data from multiple sources can be easily combined to de-anonymize them.
1. Working from home.
2. Ordering online and getting takeout.
3. Using self checkout.
4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet.
You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector.
We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote to a global crisis is not a global solution. It's a local solution.
When Ebola was initially a problem, the epidemic was stopped by African tribal elders, not advanced Western medicine. They told their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital" because you would go for something fixable, like a broken leg, and die of Ebola.
They blockaded the roads and stopped letting outsiders in. They quarantined those who were infected and left food on the doorstep to take care of them.
If the food stopped disappearing, they burned the hut down.
We know a lot about how to stop this. What we currently lack is some means to get people to do all the basic stuff we already know works, like wash your hands, stop touching your face and don't lick your fingers to separate bags.
I'm disappointed in seeing this handwringing, angsting piece at number one. It's not really factual. It's someone being emotional.
It isn't 1918. We have vastly better technology and information these days.
We just have to deploy it and leverage it. This is mostly about shaping culture. The primary question is "How do you get people to voluntarily comply instead of blowing it off as usual?"
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
> You know where the downvote button is. Don’t do this. It makes for boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your post was otherwise filled with pretty bog-standard leftist stuff that does just fine on HN.
Speaking of boring reading...