L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’ • Hacker News Board

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#421

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

gruturo wrote: post #371

tempsy wrote: post #26

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.

> 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. You do realize that there are so few cases because of the lockdown, and otherwise those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher, but also much much MUCH more…

> those cases would not only be an order of magnitude higher

An order of magnitude is a week of the natural virus spread. How long has been the lockdown there? Two weeks would mean imply in a two orders of magnitude difference.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#422

Post by _ea1k » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #303

christophilus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken 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 d…

> The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. You might be right, and I hope you are. But at least 'intuitively' my experience is that the more insular a community is, the more exposed those /within/ that community are because of frequent interaction. So, basically, a big city is not very insular, but people spread the virus via public tran…

I think you are correct. Georgia's heat map approach to graphically displaying infections based upon per capita case rates really highlights this, IMO: https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#423

Post by sigmaprimus » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

easytiger wrote: post #305

rgovostes wrote: post #125

The LA Times's investigation into Purdue Pharma in 2016 revealed internal Purdue documents demonstrating the company's culpability in fueling the opioid crisis. > The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing. I don't h…

At the end of the day, if a doctor is prescribing medication against clinical guidelines, surely the doctor is at fault? If a pharma warehouse is burgled then it's on the burglars. Am I missing something regarding this case? Did they mislead doctors? Edit: Downvotes to -4 with no engagement for asking a question. This place has gone downhill rapidly

You might be right, but it's not an either or situation.

Some sales reps that told doctors Oxy was NOT or LESS addictive and knew that was untrue so they did lie.

Ironically the exact same thing happened a century earlier with Bayer and Heroin, history does indeed repeat itself.

The thieves that burgled drugs from pharma are also responsible obviously.

As far as the fast down votes, chances are everyone knows someone who has been hurt from the opiod crisis. It is a very painful subject for people. Playing the devils advocate is going to get a swift response that just the way it is.

My personal experience with the opiod crisis is typical, I had a friend who got hurt, started taking oxy, got hooked, his doctor cut him off, he spent a ton of money buying pills off the street, when the cost got too high he switched to heroin, when he decided to get help he went to a doctor for methadone, they did a blood test, because of the fentinyl he tested positive for abusing methadone and was refused. Three months later he was gone.

I feel the entire system failed him, ofcourse he was not without blame, everyone played a part in his death, including me for giving him money.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#424

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

DuskStar wrote: post #186

CydeWeys wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these can be explained at least. Landscaping is very non-essential, and it's hard to maintain social distancing while doing it because the way the crews operate is it's a bunch of guys riding together in one truck between each job sites (it's not a caravan of different vehicles, one per vehicle). Additionally, my mom has been complaining about the landscapers where she lives and is angry that they're still al…

I'd say that landscaping is at least a field that has the possibility of operating while social distancing. As for bodies piling up in Detroit... While that's true, additional restrictions added today won't have any impact there. Either the previous restrictions were sufficient, in which case Detroit should be peaking soon, or they weren't sufficient and there'll be several times that number of bodies before these re…

You're missing the point, which is that if you think the situation is bad now, just wait how bad it'll be in two weeks if we don't act even more stringently now. Letting up on the restrictions now would be exactly the wrong thing to do when the healthcare system is already bursting at the seams; it'd make things much much worse in the weeks to come.

The very earliest that it makes sense to even start considering reducing the restrictions is once the healthcare system is back to operating at under its maximum capacity. And you have to ease things back slowly, ready to clamp back down if necessary if the healthcare system seems ready to be overwhelmed again.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#425

Post by gwd » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #369

gwd wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. I've been reading [1] daily more or less since early February, as well as lots of things posted here. I'm certainly no professional, but I think I'm reasonably well-informed for a layperson. If you think there's something I've missed, I think you'd do much better to actually point me to a resource you think is better. I realize that "number reported" is an…

Do you have a link for this 500,000 tests per day? Every article I am reading says they only started ramping up testing in the past few weeks. > And the total number of swab tests done by 4 April was well over 1.3 million. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061 The population of Germany is 83 million. I find it hard to believe that they've tested more than 5 million or so people in 10 days.

So I did mangle my numbers somewhat, thanks for checking. As of April 5th they'd done 1.3 million tests, found 95k cases, and had 1.4k deaths [1]. Presumably there are at least some people tested multiple times; so those 1.3 million tests don't represent 1.3 million people.

The only way to get the "die with the best medical care" number below 0.1% is if you have a million untested people who are sick.

If I was a proper statistician, with those numbers I could probably come up with models or estimates of how many possibly untested people there might be in Germany. My instinct is that number can't be millions, because at least some of those millions would be sick enough to go to the hospital, and then all of their connections would be tested and be found out.

But even then, what we really need is the "would have died without medical care" number, which is what the number would look like if we did a "fast burn" and let everyone get sick at once. For that number to be less than 1% (which would still be pretty dire), we need closer to 2 million unknown cases. I just don't see how 2 million positive cases can hide from the kind of testing Germany is doing. The same goes for Korea.

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#426

Post by _ea1k » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

therealdrag0 wrote: post #128

joegahona wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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. How is this _that_ much different from what's being done now?

Well for example there's lots of non-essential business that can operate while enforcing social distancing. Closing bars and restaurants makes sense. But closing stores were you walk in and walk out does not make sense. Banning fishing doesn't make sense. Very broad strokes have been used to lock stuff down.

I agree... they closed access to waterways here because they were seeing some boats too close together. That makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it, and clearly should not have happened.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#427

Post by gwd » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #359

ceilingcorner wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't that what you just did here? No, because I'm not drowning out the discussion, simply pushing back on the usage of hyperbole for pushing an opinion. > The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator, Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. They also don't factor in the idea that the virus is far more widespread than initially thought, and that thes…

All models are wrong, but 1) some models are useful, and 2) you can't not have a model. If you don't have an explicit model, you have an implicit model. I presented you a model; yes it's oversimplified, but it results in at least some sort of concrete answer; and you can actually examine where it came from and reason about how valid it is. You can make arguments for some other death rate or herd immunity rate. (I too…

Hmm, this one seems unpopular for some reason. I thought it was useful and polite. Anyone want to give me a hint?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#428

Post by londons_explore » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #413

There is no point in advertising if no one can buy your product right now. Retailers, dine-in restaurants, movies, hotels, travel, pro sports, big clothing brands, concerts, events, tourism. The list goes on and it is massive. All these industries are huge spenders on advertising. Then there are all the products and services that _could_ be bought, but consumers and companies have pulled back on because of uncertaint…

Since ads are a supply-demand market, supply must equal demand. There is nobody who can store ad slots in a warehouse and sell them later.

Since publishers are unlikely in the short term to take down their websites just because revenue falls, that has led to prices dropping to near zero on the open market.

The only real revenues now are from advertisers who have fixed price per impression or per click contracts, or who aren't smart enough to see they could drop their bids 90% and still win the same spots.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#429

Post by selectodude » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

streb-lo wrote: post #412

koheripbal wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We exactly need to reward original investigative journalism like this with subscriptions. So few "journalists" do anything more than repeat twitter trends these days.

The journalists are just doing what their employer asks them too. Their employer is trying to sell papers/clicks. No enough people are willing to pony up for good journalism like the parent comment -- I'm generalizing but most people don't even like to read long form journalism anymore. If we want to know why journalism sucks we need to look in the mirror.

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

Steve Jobs

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#430

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

ninkendo wrote: post #283

CydeWeys wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these can be explained at least. Landscaping is very non-essential, and it's hard to maintain social distancing while doing it because the way the crews operate is it's a bunch of guys riding together in one truck between each job sites (it's not a caravan of different vehicles, one per vehicle). Additionally, my mom has been complaining about the landscapers where she lives and is angry that they're still al…

The talking point the anti-governor folks are repeating is that landscaping companies can’t even deliver mulch to your driveway. Which, sure, I guess that’s overly draconian but in the grand scheme of things I can’t bring myself to be angry about it.

There's inevitably the potential for person-to-person contact in business anyway, yes, even running a mulch yard, delivering mulch, getting a receipt signed on delivery, etc. It's not unreasonable at all to shut down all non-essential businesses until our healthcare system starts operating under its maximum capacity again, and to define "essential" strictly.

Given that we're in the early stages of the worst pandemic to hit the world in over a century, like you, I too can't bring myself to be angry about landscaping being shuttered, or jet skis, or whatever other silly unnecessary things people are complaining about. If even one more person dies because a landscaping company opened back up a month earlier, then it wasn't worth it. And that's easily a possibility we're looking at here.