531–540 of 568 posts
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Hence an independent entity. The history is complex. Presently the press are ruled by advertisers. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
There's no such thing as a truly independent entity if someone else controls the purse strings.
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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…
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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 I look in the mirror, I don't see someone wanting clearly biased, opinionated, decontextualized, or downright unfacts, trying to be spun as news, with zero retractions or apologies when it's called out. Those are the reasons journalism sucks, and it has nothing to do with what I see in my mirror.
If you want to know what you really like - check your actual news browsing habits.
If you did that you might note you might click a lot of bait, and read things that micro-trigger you, and the local or boring news just doesn't get the attention.
Obviously, some more than others.
But certainly, the death of 'local news' at the very least is due to the fact we don't care about local stuff. Not only this, but we are also materially less engaged at the local level than at any time in history.
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It could depend on the store. Over here in The Netherlands, most supermarkets have, to various degrees, implemented measures to protect workers (plexiglass, timed restocking, etc.) and measures to encourage social distancing (reminders and lines on the floors, a maximum number of customers via a set number of carts and having an employee wipe down the carts and handing them out manually at the entrance, old-people-ho…
I guess what I’d like is for the gov to provide methods that would allow business to remain open if they complied with certain measures. They shouldn’t need their own expert, the gov should be able to provide measures.
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This goes both ways, though. If you act early-- and way over-react-- and it works, you get to claim to be the savior of the country, even though the reaction was disproportionate. There's no way to disprove it.
But we have other countries that didn't react at all and their crematoriums have been running non-stop, like Iran, China and Italy. We also have NYC, which has brought in mobile morgues for their dead since the standard system can't handle the overflow. Why are we acting like we don't know what outcome we are trying to defend against?
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 are right, but at a larger level the economy itself may be a cure that kills the patient. Pursue economic growth even if it doesn't make us happier and destroys the natural environment. In that sense, the current events can be seen as the antidote to the cure that was harming the otherwise healthy patient.
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Hmm. One of the traits of this virus that makes it so different from past potential epidemics is that it's able to spread rapidly through a population for up to two weeks before it starts becoming "visible" (symptoms start to arrive in large enough numbers to become alarming). At the tail end of those two weeks, the infection may have spread enough to become very difficult to control. So, if we took some kind of midd…
It's also an open question for me. I'm wondering though if, even with the limited data we have now, there are examples of countries that took a similar approach and had their two-weeks-later 'explosion' (or possibly three, is what I've heard).
Wouldn't it be logical to assume this will repeat as soon as people decide it's under control again? How can you go back to normal, before everyone has caught it, and expect the rate not to go back to exponential?
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I’ve participated in Homeland Security pandemic exercises. One in particular had a R0 of about 2, and a death rate of 1.3%, with a hospitalization rate of 10%, and and acute care rate of 3%. All numbers lower than CoVID-19. What happened in the exercise was that all hospitals got over run, very quickly, it took months for the infection rates to flatten. Nobody could get into a hospital and get any proper care, entire…
Your exercises were worthless because they were based on the assumption epidemiology is usefully correct, and it's clearly not. I mean, I wonder how you reach the conclusions you do? Just read your own post back to yourself. You say the numbers in SARS-COV-2 are worse than for your simulation yet the outcomes observed in reality are empty hospitals that need to furlough workers because they are so underworked. Realit…
This seems to be a meme, but I think it started with misinterpretation of elective procedures being cancelled and employees that couldn't be repurposed being furloughed. It doesn't make any sense to equate this with hospital resources in general being plentiful. The point of no elective procedures is that some resources are freed up. Bottlenecks aren't applicable to everything equally.
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Facebook will be in a great position with people having more and more phone time due to the quarantine. Might be a short term hit but a big boost down the road
Big tech companies like Google and Facebook are seeing record usage (i.e. increased costs) at exactly the same time that advertising revenue is plunging. YouTube watches are at record highs while pays per view might be at record lows. This just means that the expenses go up even as revenue falls. It's not a good thing for profitability.
Some weaker shareholders may sell if they're only interested in quarterly numbers, but in the long term their revenues go back up to what their userbase justifies.
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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 peo…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...