241–250 of 595 posts
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Of course not. Facebook is a corporation; people are what have rights.
In America, corporations are people. Citizens United v. FEC
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I’m too tired at the moment to figure out where I stand on this [issue of free speech / assembly] but I have a general question: I thought the Supreme Court has already shown that there are limits to speech, such as yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. I guess the distinction is how directly the speech leads to harm. Would that apply in this situation where most medical experts would agree that the quarantine is nece…
The "fire in a crowded theater" quote is often cited very disingenuously https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
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This is not astroturfing. I saw the protest in Austin this weekend. 22 million people have been laid off in the last 4 weeks. I've seen the footage of tens of thousands lining up at food banks across the country. This is just getting started.
I don't see the link here. Yes there are 22 million laid off. But given a choice between being alive and being jobless, I think people would choose being jobless. The people protesting are not the same people lining up at food banks. I have seen wapo video of Michigan protest. People there were angry because they want to get their hair done or buy paint and fertilizer. They want others to go to work to they can stay…
Read literally, this says everyone who returns to work will die. For the future, I recommend more nuance in your writing.
Losing your livelihood does carry a substantial risk of increased death.
I guess it is easy to dismiss the message from ordinary people, since they do not express themselves as well as the professional speakers we are used to listen to. If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously? In the movie versio…
But it's not. Folks breaking shelter-in-place orders impose a non-trivial risk on everyone else. This is a classic externality problem and the classic answer, if a market mechanism cannot be formed, is regulation.
Since viruses don't respect cap-and-trade schemes, we are stuck with what we have and we should absolutely punish those who impose substantial risks (2% is absurdly high, are you kidding?) on the rest of us against our will.
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RFI: I'm interested in learning more about an alternative strategy to the lockdown.
Sweden has open schools, movie theaters, restaurants (limited people; tables further apart) and bars (can't buy beer). People are working from home when they can. High risk people and older people are told to self isolate. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed. Their people do no wear masks. They hope the infection can spread slowly and they can deal with it. Sweden is criticized heavily, but if their strategy works, t…
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It's not reasonable. You can't quarantine vulnerable people completely. If everyone gets it, every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID and an enormous number of quarantined people will die. You can't tell who's going to die from it. You can't have everyone getting sick at once. The death rate will go up tremendously if nobody can get treatment when they have treatable symptoms. This is what "flattening t…
"every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID" Just as a random factoid, somewhere I was just reading that someone was doing testing of surfaces in a hospital, and on average they found maybe 80% contaminated with the virus, but the floor of the pharmacy was 100% even though no patients had been in there...
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You're talking about this as if a "calculated risk" is limited to that individual, but it's not. Someone's "calculated risk" is literally death knell for others. In this case, the health of the society as a whole is at stake. Therefore, people need to collectively follow rules, and understand that minor inconveniences such as not being able to get a haircut will only affect them for a few weeks or months.
I don’t think you read his post. You are endangering others‘ lives each time you drive. And yet you’re not inline at the DMV surrendering your license, why? Seasonal sickness also isn’t new. My coworker gave me the flu and I gave it to my grandmother. Who’s at fault there?
COVID-19 could end up sickening tons of individuals at once and contributing much more death.
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I would love to bound the death rate, both lower and upper, ideally by age group. Right now I'm torn between 'it's a nasty flu, soldier up' vs. 'it's a supernasty disease that's going to severely upend life once it becomes endemic'. With the caveat that, given how easy it spreads, we might not be able to realistically do anything to prevent it becoming endemic. Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu'…
The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%. We originally thought that COVID-19 had a fatality rate fo 2-3%, but now that antibody testing is more and more widespread we are finding more and more cases of people testing positive for antibodies - indicating they had and recovered from the virus - without ever having any symptoms. A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 t…
The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.
OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.
[0] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
[1] https://www.quora.com/Excluding-child-mortality-what-is-the-...
[2] https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...
I guess it is easy to dismiss the message from ordinary people, since they do not express themselves as well as the professional speakers we are used to listen to. If instead of saying "I want a haircut.", they would say like Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." would they be taken more seriously? In the movie versio…
What is shutdown and what is open certainly needs to be refined. (Simple example: there is a private park near me that is closed, in spite of it being a good place to get out of the house while distancing) But it's awfully hard to have nuanced discussion when it's drown out by obtuse ignorant nonsense.