Live data from Hacker News

“I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

twitter.com

111–120 of 373 posts

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#111
post #85

I don't understand why we are not trying to interrupt the transmission vectors with masks and hand sanitizer like the Chinese do. They ramped the daily production from 10M to 100M and even advised the use of make-shift masks. The reaction in the west: masks are not protecting 100% and also we don't have any and we are too lazy to produce them, although they are much cheaper than the economic impact covid-19 has. 1. y…

The anti-mask thing in the west is so upsetting, and it's more aggravating because it's the health care workers giving the horrible advice. I don't care that we don't have enough N95 masks for everybody, N95 are for preventing inhalation of virus. What we need are the disparaged "surgical" masks which are for preventing spittle flying everywhere. And they do not have to be high-tech they just have to cover the mouth. It should be mandatory to wear one out of the house. That's what China did.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#112

David Graeber is a stupid person, and the thesis of that book is stupid. There are boring jobs, and there are jobs that wouldn't exist in utopia, but he has no idea why jobs exist or what function they serve. His book is paradoxically feel-good, in that just because we can imagine a world in which nobody has to shovel shit that we can eliminate all shit-shoveling jobs today. Shit, I actually worked at the kinds of jo…

Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN regardless of how stupid someone is or you feel they are. Even if you don't owe David Graeber better (though you do), you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it. Comments like this add rotational momentum to the downward spiral.

It's a pity, because your comment also makes some good points. But adding poison to the commons is more significant.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#113

David Graeber is a stupid person, and the thesis of that book is stupid. There are boring jobs, and there are jobs that wouldn't exist in utopia, but he has no idea why jobs exist or what function they serve. His book is paradoxically feel-good, in that just because we can imagine a world in which nobody has to shovel shit that we can eliminate all shit-shoveling jobs today. Shit, I actually worked at the kinds of jo…

[deleted]

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#114

Some solutions that already exist, are already in use and could be firmed up: 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…

> You can't get sick if you aren't exposed.

The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives?

One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what if catching it only gives you a 6-month immunity? The only way to stop it would be for the entire world to manage be SARS-CoV-2 free at the same time. Otherwise, we're looking at a situation where the thing might just keep going around the world indefinitely.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#115
post #4

> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). Anyone have sources for this? I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA a…

I just read this preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...

People over ~50 have a ~50% chance of not showing symptoms, under 50 is ~10%. I wonder if there was a flu/cold epidemic 50 years ago that is causing the difference?

I know that some flus have different effects depending on age group due to cohort exposure decades ago.

Though it is a preprint, so could be all sorts of sampling reasons for that outcome.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-consumerism, anti-militarism and focusing on social security is not as rebel and edgy as you seem to think it is. If you get downvoted, it's probably more due to the childish tone of your comment rather than for your opinions

OP doesn't advocate anti-militarism, it's advocate to keep army at home. This is two very different things. A country can keep a top-notch army while not invading another country every decade. Japan is the best example of that, with its use of military largely restricted by the constitution.

Not an American, but the United States and its allies - and actually probably even most of its enemies - derive enormous economic value and peace from its military control of the world, which it achieves by its navy controlling the world seas and general striking power of its armed forces [0]. The United States determines the "world order" by being the remaining world's superpower (China is only beginning to challenge the US, and mostly at a regional level).

Like it or not, the U.S. armed forces underpin the world's current economic system and its relative peace. The prosperity as a result of America's control is called Pax Americana [1].

Some might consider the U.S.' powers undesirable, but I'm not arguing in favor of the general desirability of Pax Americana here. I'm just saying: keep in mind that "keeping U.S. forces at home" and significant scaling back of the foundation of Pax Americana is not desirable from both an economic perspective (for nearly everyone) or military perspective (for probably everyone).

Don't get me wrong - Pax Americana will end at some point, but it's in the best interest for everyone that this will be a mostly gradual change. For all Americans or non-Americans, it's not desirable that the U.S. withdraws its global army for any reason, including this calamity [2].

-

[0]: Nukes aside, the United States army has the sheer striking force to obliterate any other armed force world wide. In a "U.S. versus the rest of the world combined" scenario, the U.S. would still have a good chance of winning.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana

[2]: Not the point of my post, but I don't believe this would even be a reasonable calamity for the U.S. to withdraw its armed forces for at all - outside of a small percentage of reshuffling things. Not playing down the trouble we're in at all, but we should also be making an effort to make a relative return to normalcy well within this year / within a couple of months. This is what's already being done in China.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an alternative model: that people who do nothing productive don't work at all in producing silly products and services, and they can spend their time doing things they enjoy instead. https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Who would choose to spend time working though if they could do whatever they wanted instead without cost?

I believe the idea is to provide financial incentives to work.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#118
post #5

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.

> We just have to adopt a different attitude towards fundamental rights.

This is talk that really drives up any resistance against sensible health support. And the worst part, the resistance is more or less justified.

You don't even know yet if the quarantine worked. We currently have data from countries without it that don't fare any worse. 2 weeks incubation period probably makes the tool worthless, but we don't have any conclusions yet.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#119
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this logic, and I understand it even less now. If we have the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), why not just provide that directly?! No need to go via the "money -> essentials" route... that way you're only indirectly making landlords and grocery store owners rich. For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone…

There’s a lot of research on this in the effective charity set. See [1]. First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on. Second, it takes a huge bureaucracy to manage and enforce controls. Folks still sell their food stamps. 1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...

> First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.

Indeed, and that's kind-of the point: (1) you eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery) that many people are prone to do, but that they arguably shouldn't (to some extent, those products are "predatory"); (2) it provides a minimal standard (survival) yet incentivizes people to work (be productive) to increase their standard of living (e.g. to be able to buy alcohol); (3) avoids inflation, as only a very limited set of products would be affected by increased demand (in particular, not real estate, as "free" housing would only be available in government-owned real estate) that the government can plan in advance.

My prior is that "bureaucracy" can be reduced significantly with modern IT technologies.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#120
post #94

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…

First off, that book is terrible and most of those jobs are perfectly valid. However lets assume we 'eliminate all the bullshit jobs', what do those people do, go home and self-isolate until there's a safe cheap vaccine? No, in this theoretical ideal perfect world you are proposing we conjured into existence in a matter of months, they would take up productive jobs. So they would be going to work, meeting people, soc…

The Wikipedia reference OP provided suggests Universal Basic Income as the solution.

I believe the argument is that UBI could be conjured in to existence.

Post reply on HN