41–50 of 568 posts
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/corona...
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
In undergrad we were taught 2-10M$/life. 60k people in the US puts that cost at a cool upper limit of 600B$. Of course this assumes (1) that you know all the risks/added them in and (2) know the number of people that will die if risk tolerance is exceeded in any specific case.
Right now we unfortunately don't know #1 or #2, if the virus mutates like in 1918 we will have a second wave. If there are a % of the population who do not get immunity or spread the disease after they recover, we will have a very different situation on our hands.
In comparison the planning or preparation methods would have been very cheap! I think Bill Gates is correct in side-stepping cost of measures we are taking now and instead saying "Just fund the research, it will save you money in the future". If you don't like the medicine, get better medicine cause this isn't going away.
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
If we had not done that we'd probably look more like New York right now.
The more effective your measures are, the more it is going to look like they were unnecessary.
Or to reuse your metaphor: A campfire can turn into a wildfire really quickly. If we hadn't thrown the tsunami onto it when it was the size of a campfire, we might have gotten a wildfire burning down the whole state.
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…
In related news I have noticed that most things I search on Google don't show any ads at all. I went hunting for it and found that common household items are showing ads, but other things don't. And most certainly there is no obnoxiousness like an entire page of ads before the content.
uBlock Origin and DuckDuckGo user here, not noticing any change at all in website ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…
I think there are open questions about how much our current actions are preventing deaths vs delaying them, what the difference is in terms of number of deaths caused by stay-at-home order vs more mild social distancing, and what downstream effects and deaths will result from a new global depression (especially in the developing world).
I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.
It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…
This is probably true, but other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread. Our options aren't binary. It's not as if the only choice is "Nuke everything" or "Surrender".
The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. We probably could do something like this:
- Dense city? Quarantine. - Moderately dense? High risk individuals quarantine, everyone else social distances, but works. - etc
Across the board, if your business is the sort that can WFH (such as software companies), then you do work from home. If not, then you're open, but with precautions. Restaurants are open, but pickup only, etc.
The point is, we've used a nuke, and it's not at all clear to me that that was the right decision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have been using the internet to buy things for a while now.
Less than one eighth of commerce (in the United States) is online. And even if it was majority online, not all fullfilment can be done when many places are closed.
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Yep. Maybe we move to a model where low quality/#FakeNews is free but quality costs and, presumably, you then move to a point where pooled subscriptions are a thing under that model. And it costs a substantial amount of money or you get it through a library. There's a lot less accessibility under that model, especially for those that don't really have disposable income. There's also the question of whether enough wil…
>Maybe we move to a model where low quality/#FakeNews is free but quality costs Are you being facetious with the fake news reference? I don't know what the answer to this problem is, but I hope it isn't a system in which we just lie to poor people and they can only get the truth if they pay up. Prestige newspapers might not have been widely available for free, but there were certainly credible news sources that were.…
Not really. Broadcast news is ad-supported too--hence the decline in quality. You either have subscriptions--ad-supported, or taxpayer supported--as has been historically the case in the UK. So, yes, if ads don't work, either only the wealthier get access to higher quality news, people use libraries (good luck with that), or the government funds (which has its own source of issues).
Someone needs to pay for it.