Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#421

Post by thu2111 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

spiderfarmer wrote: post #318

camgunz wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be best if we avoided engaging in the despicable, ghoulish practice of valuing one life over another.

This crisis shows you who some people really are. It seems a lot of people can't care less about the life of someone they don't know. That's a good thing. I now know what to think of those people. Who to avoid. But even better: it warms my heart to know the vast majority of people think it's okay to take an economic hit to save lives, to prevent the collapse of our healthcare systems, to buy time on our way to a vacc…

That can be easily flipped around though.

From the perspective of people who see the virus as not in fact that dangerous in the grand scheme of things, it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others: the people who are trapped on their own for months at home under house arrest, the people who spent their lives building a business who tomorrow will have to tell their teammates it's all over, the people who are losing everything, and that's before we get to the risks of knock-on effects like food shortages, critical equipment failures due to the manufacturers of a special widget going bust and so on.

I don't understand people who hear "the economy" and appear to think of going on holidays? Or gambling in a stock market? They don't think of a supply chain that leads to a replacement filter in their local water treatment plant. They don't think of the builders who are trying to grow a family by constructing their house. They don't think of food being harvested in the fields or internet companies linking loved ones by video chat. They think it's all "just a couple of bucks".

It's not just user spiderfarmer above - we've seen actual politicians talk like that, which is terrifying. The economy isn't optional, the economy is life support and everything else that makes life worth living.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#422

Post by thu2111 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

samdamsam wrote: post #416

thu2111 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale. The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense. Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.

Bailing them out of what?

The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#423

Post by Angostura » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

kofejnik wrote: post #414

Angostura wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

You can't simply "protect the salaries", government isn't some omnipotent god who simply needs to do some hand-waving to fix things. There isn't a fountain of wealth that the government is hiding from us! You can print more money (often bad), or make businesses pay salaries while taking no revenue (also bad)

I know that this is a shocking idea, but you can, in extraordinary circumstances, use a variety of government measures, including dipping into reservers to ensure that people don't starve and that businesses aren't forced to lay off people that they will need when businesses restart.

Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#424

Post by totetsu » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

It's like this pandemic is giving a biological counter argument to concepts of ethics that assume a human being is an isolated unit.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#425

Post by austhrow743 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #381

jerf wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you "from the field" that there are plenty of real people who really do feel the lockdowns are being overdone and doing more harm than good, yes, even accounting for the possibility of an increased infection rate. The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and th…

> The damage being done by the lockdown is a big number, and quite concrete; the damage that would have been done if we didn't lock down is a widely variable number under any honest analysis and the minimum of that range quite likely extends below the concrete costs of the lockdown It's really interesting to see that view phrased that way, because I see it oppositely: the "damage" as you put it, is "human lives lost"…

>The latter can certainly cause the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything but hand-wavy attempts to quantify it.

GiveWell calculates lives/dollars for its charities and I think the most efficient one is like $3k/life.

Not some used up, only 2 years left neither of them good life either. That of a child.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#426

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:30 AM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #356

markbnj wrote: post #305

I usually stay out of the political/topical threads on HN but this is personal to me. From my point of view few if any of us commenting here are knowledgeable enough to connect all the disparate data points we keep snatching at and synthesize them into conclusions that are likely to be correct. The people who can do that are working on it, and generally too busy at the moment to post on forums or give interviews. The…

I had to google the ratio of patients to nurses in various countries, because 2:1 seemed very low. In Germany it is 13:1 under normal circumstances and according to a German newspaper it is 5.3 : 1 on average in the US. So something very unusual is going on at your wives hospital or the number of ICU nurses per patient is just higher than in normal stations.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#427

Post by benzoate » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #407

Angostura wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale. The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Most self employed people are eligible to claim up to 80% of the average of their previously declared income up to 2.5K for the last 3 years. There are some notable gaps, but the vast majority are protected.

The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#428

Post by Angostura » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #407

Angostura wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale. The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

"There's nothing we can do" https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-a-grant-through-the-corona...

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#429

Post by colourgarden » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #407

Angostura wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses. In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale. The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

> The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.

Re: Facebook says it has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events

#430

Post by austhrow743 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #146

djsumdog wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even assuming a high undetected multiplier, a small fraction of their population has been exposed. There's not much reason to expect it to slow down any time soon, their overall immunity isn't going to be much different than anywhere else at this point.

Stockholm is at 20-30% so I find it very hard to believe only a small fraction of Sweden has been exposed.