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Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

npr.org

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Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#491
post #485
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I follow your point? Are you saying this is less of a tragety because these people lived 50 years longer?

Is it not? To me, an 18 year old getting mown down on a beach is a much larger tragedy than an 85 year old dying.

Let's not even get started on abortion...

Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.

That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#492
post #6

I don't get it. Unless you're training for a very specific purpose (like an MMA fight or football season), why do you need specific indoor gym equipment? Shelter in place orders are largely lifted, so you can workout outside: run, do pull ups on a tree branch, ride a bike, lift a heavy stone, do an outdoor yoga class, etc. Hell, you only need maybe a 6' x 6' area for a perfectly effective body weight routine, even in…

Going to the gym is a ritual for many people, and rituals can be an essential part of maintaining one’s mental health. I’m not justifying the speakeasy gyms, but I completely understand why someone would feel compelled to use one.

Mental health is the reason why I still go to my crossfit gym. Its small, the same 8-9 people show up when I do. Ive only lived in this town for two years and my only friend moved away earlier this year - no family. I did quarantine when a case was discovered during the rare time I have to be an office and I had two serious depressive episodes in which I spent the better part of three days intoxicated. I've been into fitness for almost 15 years, sure I know I can get a workout 10 different ways on my own but right now I have to have other people.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#493

I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side. A lot of people I know just believe that the virus itself is not as deadly as the reaction warrants. The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and…

Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash. Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.

The Fed are buying corporate ETF bonds, not stocks.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#494
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices... No, it's not; it's arrogant. All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't? So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about dou…

You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu. What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other so…

The flu, in a normal year, kills 35,000 people. Coronavirus, with all the steps we've already taken to stop it, has killed 5 times that.

If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#495
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define 'less healthy' though? In the UK the warning was BMI of over 35 needs to be careful, >40 needs to isolate. That would be a hell of a lot of americans. Plus the diabetics, heart issues, elderly etc.

Not as many as all of them, though.

I don't know what the ripple effect is. Might be very close (after all, less than half the americans do work).

And you don't need that many people to isolate for the house of cards to crumble. Plenty shops need to close because 30% fewer customers isn't enough to sustain them

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#496

Anyone dedicated enough to be still going to the gym is going to be healthy enough that they will have no problem with the coronavirus. The obese, diabetic etc will take any excuse to skip gym.

Went to the gym 3 times a week, cycled 25k every weekday, ran on the weekends.

Now I can only walk, after covid, which I got in early March. I'm hoping to try jogging again at some stage, after CT scans on my lungs, but I think it's a bit of a pipe dream. After 5 months the daily nausea has stopped.

No prior conditions. Early 40s.

edit: can't think of another site on the internet you'd get downvoted for the above, HN is really something

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash. Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.

The stock market recovery is not due to the government "buying the stock market" because they never did that. If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record bre…

Dude (or dudess or whatever), Fed literally has positions in all sorts of stocks, including bankrupt HTZ.

How is that not "buying the stock market"?

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a gross mischaracterizatuon of the posters argument. They are claiming that, based on the information they provided, the people they’re referring to are making a rational choice. Working off of different information is a different matter. They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning, just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid (I cant speak to t…

> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point) Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impac…

> Lightning kills

OP said "hit by," not "killed by." I wasn't able to find a number for people being struck by lightning in a cursory search other than "hundreds more" than are killed by lightning.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#499

I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side. A lot of people I know just believe that the virus itself is not as deadly as the reaction warrants. The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and…

Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash. Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.

Do you have evidence that the government has been buying the stock market to prop everything up? I haven't heard that before.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#500
post #375

I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side. A lot of people I know just believe that the virus itself is not as deadly as the reaction warrants. The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and…

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices... No, it's not; it's arrogant. All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't? So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about dou…

There have been 1424 deaths "involving" coronavirus in the ages 0 - 34 in the US[1]. What happens to that number when you discount for underlying conditions?

Close to 500,000 military personnel (read: military-aged) died in WW2. Sorry to be crude, but what the f*ck are you smoking?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Edit: Keeping the vulgarity for posterity, but on reflection it was quite unnecessary. Apologies.

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