771–780 of 799 posts
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Occupy Wall Street was not meant with violence and it was huge headline grabbing protests that went on for weeks. It didn’t do anything meaningful.
> It didn’t do anything meaningful How do you know? Do you have an alternate timeline of history to compare it to?
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I'm not promoting or condoning violence. But Apple shut down their retail stores over this, so it definitely is impacting "the elites" to some extent.
I own shares of Apple via my retirement plan. Am I elite?
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0.026% dead As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey…
You could say the same thing about the September 11 terrorist attacks. They killed only a tiny number of Americans, so why even care? Similarly, the 40,000 who die each year from traffic fatalities are only some miniscule number of Americans, so why care about those deaths either?
Should we become more risk averse as population grows because the numbers of deaths become so staggering? Or is percentage deaths a more relevant measure?
If you have 10000 people in your medieval media sphere, and ONE PERSON DIES EACH YEAR from an ox cart accident, we probably don't stop using ox carts. What if there's ten billion people in your media circle and therefore A MILLION OX CART DEATHS PER YEAR, should we therefore abandon ox carts?
I don't feel 100% on the answer, maybe the answer is something like.... we should spend the same percentage of resources avoiding unnecessary ox cart deaths as we would at the small scale? That would be a lot of money toward better ox carts, but we wouldn't shut down the world because OMG ONE MILLION either.
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0.026% dead As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey…
The rate seems small because you're apply it across the whole population. So, your number 2 choice is not quite accurate. The question is are people ok with many of their parents and grand parents dying this year? > 0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19" My wife's grandmother had COVID-19. At 80 years old, she was a lucky one and was asymptomatic. She's in a nursing hom…
"I know a few people who know somebody who died" sounds consistent with what you might expect from 0.026% if everyone communicates with about a hundred people... crudely (and wrong, but order of magnitude): 0.00026 * 100 * 100 = 2.6 = "a few".
I phrased it pretty carefully, but I agree it didn't immediately clarify that mostly the victims will look pretty old.... just bebcause "people who are likely to die within several years" is going to be dominated by people over 70. FWIW a few different measures of "likely to die within 5 years" looks like one of the simplest single-index predictors of covid19 survival, much better than just age. If you're 40 and likely to die before 45 due to a serious health condition, Covid will be roughly as dangerous to you as if you're 82.
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0.026% dead As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey…
> 1) Everyone stays in their huts for 6 mos to a year with all the impacts and suffering that entails Probably doesn't even have to be that long. A large portion of Europe is pretty much back to normal already.
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You sort of address it here: > An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years. The death rate is not an equally weighted distribution over the whole population. In fact, it's very weighted towards middle age and up, with younger people dragging it down. So in your example it's likely to be…
I see, applying it across the population age distribution, yes. This virus is dangerous to the elderly, but not nearly as relatively dangerous as the flu is to the young: https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-1... If the young had political power, the response would be a lot different, but because the wealth/power lie with the elderly, the current response is predictable. Fascinating times
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You sort of address it here: > An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years. The death rate is not an equally weighted distribution over the whole population. In fact, it's very weighted towards middle age and up, with younger people dragging it down. So in your example it's likely to be…
I see, applying it across the population age distribution, yes. This virus is dangerous to the elderly, but not nearly as relatively dangerous as the flu is to the young: https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-1... If the young had political power, the response would be a lot different, but because the wealth/power lie with the elderly, the current response is predictable. Fascinating times
The article also uses 60k flu deaths as the average baseline which is incorrect. The 60k number was a particularly bad flu season. Last season flu deaths were ~34k [1]. This season could be much lower because of the lockdowns.
Comparing COVID to the flu is hard, and really should have never been done. Without taking into account the respective IFRs, CFRs, R0, etc... any comparison is going to be severely lacking. It's also hard to get accurate numbers while in the middle of the pandemic. I hope as things open up that COVID just becomes a memory. Unfortunately, that doesn't look like the case so far.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html I'm not really sure how the author got to a 60k average unless 2007-2009 was really bad. The years on the CDC site only have 1 season greater than 60k. Errors like this do bring all of the statistics into question.
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> 1) Everyone stays in their huts for 6 mos to a year with all the impacts and suffering that entails Probably doesn't even have to be that long. A large portion of Europe is pretty much back to normal already.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to see those portions of Europe "back in the hut" again in December. That said, it does seem like if you're on the lookout, have very low case numbers, and are doing strong contact tracing, "sitting in the hut" is unnecessary except to regain control if you have a surge.
I said we're back to normal, but I wasn't 100% fair: our borders are still semi-closed. We'll probably have another surge if we restore travel in the future from countries where Covid is active.
All in all I think it was a very small price we paid to be back on the tracks in only two months. Some companies are getting out of Kurzarbeit already (government help).
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There were reports of planned riots in rural Polk County. Knowing they didn't have the resources to cover wide spread area, the sheriff instructed citizens to shoot anyone who broke into their home. I support this. Telling citizens you can't help them, and they must protect themselves is very different than threatening that the state itself will kill you. https://twitter.com/FOX13News/status/1267539936401592320
Complete nonsense - if you believe for one second that those “reports” were legitimate or that this was a genuine public safety measure you’re an absolute rube and a mark. This was just an elected official pandering to his electoral base of suburban fascists by validating their heroic-murder fantasies.