Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#41

Post by bigcorp-slave »

ggggtez wrote: post #36
aaron-santos wrote: post #13

Being The Economist I suppose it makes sense they left out the absolutely massive shift in the trending of Marxism[1](~+900%) in the last few months. [1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F065...

I'd like to point out that you are data-illiterate here. Here is an alternate explanation: Very few people search for 19th century political philosphies on Google, compared to the number of people who search for "hangover". Therefore all it takes is 1 news article, interview, book, movie, etc to cause people to do a quick search and find out what a word means. So called "using google as a dictionary" is all you are s…

This is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#42

Post by NoOneNew »

wolco wrote: post #31
NoOneNew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, was going to say the same. I'm personally sick and tired of hearing "the new normal". No, it's temporary, get over the doomsday fetish. I swear this is worse than those hardcore preppers who pray for an apocalypse. Every person that goes, "the end is near" over every damn thing is literally the least or naively prepared person for such a thing. It's just a fetish developed by people unable to cope with any state…

Not sure you are using the right word. If a prepper subscribed to your idea wouldn't they think they are better off not equal because of the investments they made.

That's fair.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#43

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Seems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms.

For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chosen. I can easily mimic the HTTP headers sent by a common web browser, thereby making my request indistinguishable from one that is intentionally submitted by a user, chosen from a list of common browser headers.

By having large swathes of users all appearing to search for the same or similar terms I can make it appear to, say, the Economist, that the public at-large is interested in a given topic. From there, the Economist will make assumptions about the population at-large and then make conclusions about what this means. Then they will publish these "findings" as a story. Many readers will be swayed by the Economist's conclusions. At that point I will have effectively influenced what those readers now believe. All it took were some phoney searches.

Later, I could remove the code in the next auto-update.

By the time something like this was discovered by a user MITM'ing the app traffic and reverse engineering the app, chances are I would have already accomplished my objective: to influence people -- perhaps investors -- to believe a story like the one reported here by the Economist. (Note: I am not suggesting the Economist's conclusions are wrong in this case.)

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#44

Post by rsa25519 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #43

Seems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms. For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chose…

Are you suggesting this has actually happened, or are you just saying it's theoretically possible?

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#45

Post by asaph »

Barrin92 wrote: post #37
rossdavidh wrote: post #24

"Covid-19 seems to have changed [x] for good" is not worth reading, for all values of x, until we have gotten to a post-pandemic environment. It's like saying, in the seconds or even days after a car crash, that the car crash has changed your driving styles for good. Wayyyyyy too early to say.

Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever" or "will we ever go back to bars?". Bars and handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

> Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever"

I hope so. Handshakes are pathogen vector I can easily do without. And they don't seem essential to anyone's livelihood.

> handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

Our understanding of infection has advanced since then. Let's apply the knowledge.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#46

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

rsa25519 wrote: post #44
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #43

Seems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms. For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chose…

Are you suggesting this has actually happened, or are you just saying it's theoretically possible?

Purely hypothetical. The only things I know for sure are that there is an enormous amount of 1. web traffic being sent automatically by people's devices which they are wholly unaware of and 2. willingness to allow "auto-updates" where no user ever looks at the contents of the code that comprises the update.

It also seems like there is a trend of increasingly important decisions being made based on assumptions arising from analysis of web traffic, however I could be wrong on that observation.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#47

Post by imgabe »

There is a thing with the media where they seem to take every trend as "the new normal" and extrapolate out to infinity anything that shows even remote signs of being embraced. It's usually not the case.

Sure, there may be some lasting changes that arise from Covid-19, but it's probably not going to be as drastic as is being implied.

Every time something new arises, the media is quick to declare "This is it! This is how things are now and always will be forever!" while ignoring the fact that a change just happened which would seem to imply that another change will probably happen again at some time in the future.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#48

Post by rossdavidh »

Jedd wrote: post #34
rossdavidh wrote: post #24

"Covid-19 seems to have changed [x] for good" is not worth reading, for all values of x, until we have gotten to a post-pandemic environment. It's like saying, in the seconds or even days after a car crash, that the car crash has changed your driving styles for good. Wayyyyyy too early to say.

Your point is true for some, but I dispute 'all values of x'. Post-pandemic, yes, some items from that page are going to return to pre-pandemic numbers, I'm sure - hangover, restaurant, ticket, etc. But for people who've discovered that stuff they grow at home - from herbs on the balcony to tomatoes in the yard - taste much better, are unlikely to just forget that. Similarly people discovering this year that they enj…

Not saying "not true for all values of x", I'm claiming "not worth reading for all values of x", because it's way too soon to make predictions about what will stick and what won't. I could imagine that _something_ will stick, I just don't think the Economist or anyone else is going to be any good at predicting what.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#49

Post by mindslight »

AlexandrB wrote: post #2

This article is premature. There are many regions still either under partial lockdown or where people remain uneasy about going out. These trends may be interesting if they continue a year from now, but it's too early to tell.

Srslywtf? Why is this article talking as if Covid-19 is anywhere near over? If the graphs were focused on say New Zealand I could understand, but taking the world as a whole (and the US specifically) we're still in the thick of it.

I certainly do look forward to having beers and dinner out at a restaurant some time. That time is just well into 2021, iff we are lucky.

Re: 90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good

#50

Post by DoingIsLearning »

chrisandchips wrote: post #40
Barrin92 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever" or "will we ever go back to bars?". Bars and handshakes have survived thousands of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

I agree with you and I’ve been repeating this point to my close circle, though this article did (for the first time) make me sort of excited to see what will stick, if anything. Take the searches for yeast and recipe, for example. I don’t think its totally farfetched to imagine that a sizeable handful of people have wondered, maybe for the first time, how to bake things like bread and cookies or how to make meatballs…

I agree with the general feeling of promoting home cooked food and having/learning the skill set for it.

However, specifically on the bread making aspect, we should probably do some back of the napkin estimations before supporting this more long term.

One good thing about a bakery is that it uses huge ovens, in which multiples trays of bread are baked, at the same time, with minimal dead space.

Contrast that with the scenario where we all decide to start baking our own bread, in a normal oven, raising it to very high temperatures, for a long period, to bake a single loaf every 1 or 2 days. This sort of makes me worry what would be the carbon impact of that consumer change?

Post reply on HN