Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

gov.ca.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 319 posts

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#291

Post by palmtree3000 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #149

I have yet to see a cogent validation of the total lives saved by lockdown when considering all other health impacts such as suicide rates from isolation, heart disease/stroke/diabetes from extra sedentary lifestyle etc. not to mention the suicide by fentanyl in a subsequent economic recession/depression. Any aware of such an analysis?

Here's one:

https://www.pandemiceconomist.com/2020/04/costs-and-benefits... TL;DR (copied directly from the post):

With these values, if a lockdown of two years or less will stop the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a good idea. With the current research into treatments and vaccines and the development of testing and tracing strategies, I believe that there will be a medical or public health way to stop the pandemic in less than two years. Notably, the net benefit of a decision to initiate or sustain lockdown goes up over time, because the time remaining until medical countermeasures are available keeps going down.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#292

Post by yingw787 »

spankalee wrote: post #283
yingw787 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal government already looking to adversaries for cooperation. You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in…

This is super hyperbolic. Why would Texas or Mexico invade? Why would the US nuke a people trying to exercise their right to self-determination. It doesn't make any strategic, tactical, or political sense.

Hopefully I'm hyperbolic. I'm not rooting for the collapse of the country I live in, and the country of people who I grew up with and raised me. I just find the truths I trust lie more in laws of nature and laws of power, rather than higher-level societal constructs.

The West Coast is abundant in natural resources, provides good natural port access to the Pacific and Pacific nations, and provides a direct conduit to Alaska and its oil fields. The prospects of invasion depend on a cost benefit analysis.

Maybe cross-border drug traffic increases exponentially without DEA and Border Patrol, and you want to secure a region bent on escalating retaliation. Might also be an opportunity if half the population is too coked out to put up a fight. This was the First Opium War in China and the Century of Humiliation.

Maybe too many Americans are fleeing desperate circumstances into Mexico, and Mexico wants to stop refugee outflows while playing the hero bit. This was Vietnam + Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge.

Maybe global warming causes a chain of collapse towards underfunded and overextended governments in South America, and Mexico is itself invaded from the south and is running north. The collapse of Venezuela is a rehearsal of sorts.

The Federalist Papers contain examples out the wazoo of a "country" turning on itself, as warnings against disunion. Highly encourage reading them.

Quite frankly, it doesn't need to make sense. It needs to be possible.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#293

Post by frank2 »

spankalee wrote: post #40
yingw787 wrote: post #23

Well, that was quick. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354 Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that tomorrow, it might be economic ties, lockstep voting at the federal level, and National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning, where the West Coast slowly splits away from the rest of the country, with other states teaming up and following suit. This isn't the end, and it's the only appropria…

> I fear that tomorrow Why fear? This is my dream! The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily. California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from su…

Structural unfairness in the Senate is a weak argument for splitting the Union. Once the Union is split, Russia, China and probably other countries start playing one fragment of the former Union against another. The reason the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop China from splitting (beyond the existing mainland-Taiwan split) is to avoid a repeat of the bad old times when Japan and European powers were able to play one Chinese-language-using polity against another.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#294

Post by xref »

kelnos wrote: post #208
JoshTriplett wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon has already lifted the restriction on pumping your own gas, for exactly this reason.

Add "not allowed to pump your own gas" to the list of "things that are completely unnecessary and stupid that have been removed because of COVID-19 and never need to come back".

It’s a job creation/protection play, like grocery stores where the union won’t allow self-checkout. No idea if the law is achieving its goals or if it just exists because of historical inertia now, but that’s why it exists.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#295

Post by mulmen »

BurningFrog wrote: post #282
mulmen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is. The Western States Pact is the plan B.

That's my point :) I'm arguing letting the central federal government handle everything.

Sorry I got hung up on "there is no plan B". I prefer we have a coordinated response here as well (plan A). That's not happening so the "plan B" is states working together.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#296

Post by robocat »

acid__ wrote: post #288
kelnos wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes no investment in upgrading our hospital capacity and testing & PPE production. At one end of the spectrum you have (mythically) infinite hospital capacity and staffing, testing capacity, and contact tracing ability. In that world, you reopen everything, and let people go about their lives. At current capacity, we need to slow things down. If we can increase capacity enough in the coming weeks and months,…

Things were quite bad but they've improved rapidly over the past weeks and months. Hospitals have actually, counter-intuitively, seen a reduction in usage. The number of hospitalizations has been far lower than expected (~20% of IHME's modeled values) and when combined with the fact that non-COVID patients have been avoiding hospitals (even for serious emergencies like heart attacks and strokes!), many are reporting…

South Korea has excess testing capacity: https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/south-korea-ramps-up-exports...

So far they have done 500000 tests, but they got started early, and controlled their outbreak much better. In recent news the US just bought 600000 tests from South Korea.

“The South Korean companies behind the kits are now churning out enough to test at least 135,000 people per day. The stabilizing situation at home has enabled these firms to export more of this extra capacity.”

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#297

Post by ryandrake »

alkonaut wrote: post #271
sandworm101 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are told not to travel unless necessary. Kayaking is never necessary. The Canadian military, the people responsible for search and rescue over HUGE areas, are themselves locked into extraordinary isolation measures. Many are living far from loved ones specifically to maintain operational readiness for real national emergencies. They aren't going to be very happy if they have to break isolation to rescue a kayak pa…

So you kayak in a lake within swimming distance of shore. This is the thing: people need to be trusted to do the right thing. What we want to avoid wasn’t people kayaking but people requiring rescue. That should just work by asking it of people.

Any policy that relies on everyone to just “do the right thing” is not going to be effective in the USA. We’ve seen this for the last month. People are not voluntarily doing the right thing. People think they are being cool and edgy by ignoring. Or they think everything is a media conspiracy. Or they simply value “muh freedum” more than the lives of their loved ones.

These Stay At Home “orders” are pointless because there is no enforcement. They might as well be called Stay At Home suggestions.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#298

Post by robocat »

palmtree3000 wrote: post #291
maerF0x0 wrote: post #149

I have yet to see a cogent validation of the total lives saved by lockdown when considering all other health impacts such as suicide rates from isolation, heart disease/stroke/diabetes from extra sedentary lifestyle etc. not to mention the suicide by fentanyl in a subsequent economic recession/depression. Any aware of such an analysis?

Here's one: https://www.pandemiceconomist.com/2020/04/costs-and-benefits... TL;DR (copied directly from the post): With these values, if a lockdown of two years or less will stop the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a good idea. With the current research into treatments and vaccines and the development of testing and tracing strategies, I believe that there will be a medical or public health way to stop the pandemic in less…

That analysis strikes me as being very shallow. With that style of analysis, you could come up with whatever result you wanted.

Covid mainly kills older people, so you can’t use an “average” value of a life when calculating costs. I would also expect some discussion on the effects upon the economy of the death of a lot of retirees.

Disclaimer: I’m not an economist.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#299

Post by nostromo »

frank2 wrote: post #270
nostromo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the current rate of infection that plan will require many years of quarantine. We need more people exposed, not fewer.

Are you volunteering?

Yes, I am willing to go about my regular life and risk contracting SARS-CoV-2, and I wouldn't visit any at risk friends or family in person while doing so.

Re: California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

#300

Post by totetsu »

dahdum wrote: post #85

Stay at home is doing enormous economic damage, which indirectly will cause more deaths through decimated budgets of social and health programs. Especially in CA where high progressive taxation amplifies the impact of recessions. So there's a lot of pressure to reopen but no political cover to do so. I think the entire point of this pact is to provide that cover.

This paper by two federal reserve economists argues that that "Pandemics Depress the Economy" more than the measures to stop them. It's a false dichotomy. The alternative to "Stay at home" is not a thriving economy, but a depressed one. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020/03/fight-... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560
Post reply on HN