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

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

#191

Post by scotty79 »

gwd wrote: post #114
DoreenMichele wrote: post #39

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…

> Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives?

Seems perfectly fine to me. Some essential jobs require manual skills but I think those can be organised to avoid most of the physical human contact.

Some can be phase out by more automation.

And we have so many inessential jobs in this economy that shedding them might be beneficial to us all.

Do we really need new snowboard clothes every season?

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

#192

Post by Gupie »

mcsb4 wrote: post #165
wisienkas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been proved that most of those masks sold simply aren't closely sewed enough to stop the droplets containing the disease. So in general the mask don't help. Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus

Please stop spreading this false information and have a look at the infection numbers in China. The masks stop droplets coming from your mouth and nose and if everybody wears them, then they are a very effective mean to massively slowing down the spreading of the virus. No, the masks are not 100% virus tight. Yes, they prevent spreading of diseases. That's why they are worn by surgeons. They are 20 cents a piece, tha…

This is the advise we are getting

"If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection."

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

"If you are not sick, do not buy a face mask. If you have one already and you are well, it is not recommended that you use it."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-compr...

Is this in your opinion "false information"?

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

#193

Post by keiferski »

scotty79 wrote: post #182
keiferski wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is a good idea or good tool at all. I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. I used the example of "Anti Social" behavior as a joke and I thought that was obvious...but apparently not. The idea is entirely antithetical to a free society. As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through personalized incentives and social enc…

> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peop…

As I said in the original comment:

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.

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

#194

Post by scotty79 »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #22
rapsey wrote: post #3

Is covid-19 the biggest world event since WW2?

Depends how you measure and what you call a "world event". * Mao Zedong killed 40 to 80 million people during his rule after WW2, but "only" in China. * 2-5 million died in the Second Congo Civil War between 1998-2003, but to a first approximation only Congo and its immediate neighbors even noticed. * The US response to 9/11 killed around 500,000 people directly (war violence) and a lot more indirectly (health, econo…

Covid could kill 40 million people globally in just the first wave of infections and not counting deaths caused by collateral damage.

Just multiply half of the world population by mortality rate of 1%.

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

#195

Post by sokoloff »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #161
wisienkas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been proved that most of those masks sold simply aren't closely sewed enough to stop the droplets containing the disease. So in general the mask don't help. Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus

> So in general the mask don't help. Is that proven? > Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus Doesn't this contradict your first statement? In fact the statement contradicts itself, stopping spreading the virus from one person to another by definition protects from receiving the virus.

Not necessarily. If the primary vector is respiration but the reception can be through mucous membranes, then a mask that doesn’t cover the eyes (or doesn’t protect hands which later rub your eyes), then a mask would be more effective on those infected than it would be for those not infected.

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

#196

Post by QuesnayJr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
QuesnayJr wrote: post #58

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…

Bullshit jobs are the job market equivalent of software bloat. They have the same issues: you can take a popular modern webapp or "desktop" app and notice that it's 80% of fat that isn't necessary for it to deliver all its value, but if you zoom in, almost every single piece of that fat can justify its existence because of other pieces. So you can't just start cutting it out piece by piece, you'd have to redesign the…

Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Sometimes you can, but more often you end up with a system as complicated at the current system.

In utopia, we wouldn't need any lawyers. But we have lawyers now because we have disputes. Utopian planners always skip to the part where all the disputes are magically settled, or invent a mechanism only tested within their own minds. They leave the messy work of actually making working systems to the rest of us.

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

#197

Post by growlist »

The acceptable solution is for society to adapt. That includes everyone accepting their lives will change, and rich people in particular accepting they'll be poorer for a while. And if we have to move to a war footing to stop people dying, then that's what we have to do. To say 'it's either continue as close to normal or people will die' is a false dichotomy.

Also: there's this 'oh well' attitude afoot here in the UK that we can't enforce curfews etc. because the people won't have it. To this I say: we lock people up here for hurty words on the Internet. The only reason it can't happen is because some people in power don't want it to happen.

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

#198

Post by QuesnayJr »

dang wrote: post #112
QuesnayJr wrote: post #58

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 pleas…

And I definitely don't owe David Graeber better. He is a public menace who actively removes understanding from the world.

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

#199

Post by scotty79 »

wwweston wrote: post #33
black_puppydog wrote: post #15

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…

> scaling back shit that nobody needs. 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 a…

> Do we know what nobody needs, for real?

Fashion, advertising. You probably know the few. Free market under covid pressure will tell us what was the unnecessary crap that was basically just excuse to pay people so they can live.

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

#200

Post by Havoc »

mcsb4 wrote: 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…

You’d think that if the west gets the concept of condoms this wouldn’t be that far fetched...
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