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Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

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Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#511

Post by kbenson »

arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #497
nightski wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

How much actual buying and selling have they done? How does that compare to a year ago? How does that compare to the market as a whole? Those are actually relevant, while the government just having some stock is not, so those are what we should be looking at.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#512

Post by jashmatthews »

nradov wrote: post #483
briffle wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the virus hit China, it had around a 4% death rate. Now, in the US, we have 5.6M confirmed cases, and 175k deaths. That is 3% death rate. (although, deaths lag behind diagnosis) You're right, its less than they first feared, but not much. And still 30 times the death rate of the flu. There have been some groups that keep looking at the number of deaths, and compare it to the population as a whole, to make the nu…

The actual best estimate of death rate in the US is 0.65%, not 3%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Sadly 3% is the right number to use for that comparison between observed fatality in the US and earlier estimates https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

The estimated IFR is quite different and can’t be just swapped.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#513

Post by zelly »

alexrson wrote: post #447
zelly wrote: post #409

Virtually all the people who died of covid were fat[1]. If the military forced everyone to exercise (and diet, but that's harder to mandate than exercising) it would have been much more effective than forcing everyone to wear masks. (Masks are still good though.) Most of us are going to get covid even if we stay inside all day (I got it twice) so this should be a wake-up call to be prepared to survive it. Or don't, s…

In the cited article, the only statistic I see on weight specifically is that 74% of critically ill UK patients were overweight or obese, which makes it a risk factor but not the be all and end all, given what fraction of the whole pop fits that category (~65%). It also says that 99% of deaths in Italy were from patients with pre-existing conditions, which would included weight related and non-weight related ones. Re…

The summary statistic leaves out the effect of age. Most of the non-overweight people who died were old. The main reason you'd die of covid if you are young is being overweight or obese:

> Patients with BMIs greater than 40 kg/m2 had higher death rates overall, and those with BMIs greater than 45 kg/m2 had a risk ratio of 4.18. Most strikingly, however, those younger than 60 years had increased risk ratios of 12 to 17 versus 1 to 3 if they were older; high BMI increased risk in men more than in women.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-5677

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#514

Post by hoorayimhelping »

readingnews wrote: post #211

There is a crossfit gym that I pass by every morning on the way to work. It is full, and never stopped during this pandemic. Even at 7AM, it is full of patrons. I would call the "proper authorities", but since there is a State Police car parked outside every morning, and he is in there working out, just like before the pandemic, I doubt calling anyone would do anything. Adding to the post, I read it earlier... it is…

>I would call the "proper authorities"

What would you tell the authorities? That there are people in a gym and that they need to be arrested? What outcome would you hope to achieve by tattling on them?

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#515

Post by s1artibartfast »

jdminhbg wrote: post #498
stinkytaco wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

Wikipedia gives a fatality rate of ~10% with the citation below.

Cherington, J. et al. 1999: Closing the Gap on the Actual Numbers of Lightning Casualties and Deaths. Preprints, 11th Conf. on Applied Climatology, 379-80

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#516

Post by saalweachter »

thekyle wrote: post #313
didibus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, there's been 172k death in half a year for Covid. And if using the worst case data for flu season, it's 61k per year. So it's looking like for a full year, it'll be 344k death for Covid versus 61k death for the flu. That makes Covid 5.6 times more deadly than the flu. But, the Covid numbers here are from a complete lockdown, where people are social distancing, wearing masks, schools are closed, everyone is…

You can't just compare absolute death totals like that. We have a vaccine for the flu which reduces the infection rate. What if the reason COVID-19 has 5.6 times more deaths is because it has 5.6 times more infections.

In the 2017-2018 flu season (one of the worse, which had the estimated 61k deaths in the US) infected an estimated 45 million people in the US; that's roughly in the middle of the range of the number that have caught COVID-19 so far (30-50 million the last I heard; note this is an estimate of total cases, not the confirmed 5.7 million cases, but so is the 45 million).

So our current understanding is that COVID-19 is both more deadly and more infectious.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#517

Post by marcosdumay »

dredmorbius wrote: post #400
henriquez wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extension of this is the notion of emergency authorities and people’s perception of the weight they carry. An emergency is an emergent situation, which must be new, evolving, and carry the risk of serious harm. Emergency orders are based upon the idea that executive authority must be wielded to quickly mitigate an emergency situation. But a key attribute of an emergency (by definition) is “new” - if emergency powe…

There can be long emergencies. There is also the sense of an ongoing crises , in the sense of a threat in which there is a very real likelihood of either a very bad, or very positive outcome. The Covid situation strongly resembles this. Too there is the situation that even after the immediate onset of some emergency has passed, dealing with consequential effects carries great significance. To call on one of my prefer…

Ongoing crises are not emergencies. If it lasts for long enough, it becomes normal, and must be dealt with by your normal planning. If your planning can't deal with it, it must be adapted, there is no reason to keep creating exceptional actions for something that is there every day.

That said, it's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep exceptional procedures for an year. That's the minimum planning granularity they use. The GP's 6 months limit does not seem reasonable.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#518

Post by saghm »

andrelayer wrote: post #332

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…

> 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

> The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid

Yes, but what about the other members of the community who aren't below 30 who you might infect? Thinking "I'm under 30, so I'll be fine" and not worrying about the fact that you could still spread the disease to others is pretty much a textbook example of "prioritizing individual choices over the collective health of the community".

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#519

Post by stinkytaco »

abduhl wrote: post #412
polote wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the issue. Best case in term of covid related death is to keep everyone at home, no freedom and get food delivery directly at the door Worst case, is to do as nothing happened There are a spectrum of possible responses. But we have to accept that some people are going to die if we want other to live. Each group can put the cursor where it wants, but you can't have, no death and complete freedom. Some peop…

This post highlights my favorite part of the keep everyone home argument: "get food delivery directly at the door." Who delivers the food if we keep everyone home? There is a subtle classist underpinning to the entire "Stay The Fuck Home" message which really shows how little people value others, especially lower-class (food delivery) or blue collar (food supply) workers. Everyone needs to stay home, except for the d…

Though I agree it is classist (and probably a fair number of other "ists") and it's something that I as a white collar worker am keenly aware of, the fact is that if I can stay home, it's better for everyone -- including food service workers -- if I do. My class guilt will not protect people from infection.

I really don't know what the answer here is, but risk mitigation has to be part of the debate. It feels like the culture wars of class, personal freedom, social risk, public shame, etc have supplanted questions of "how do we keep all of the people who keep the engine of society running safe and how do we compensate them fairly for their work?" and "how do we ensure that everyone else does not engage in risky activity simply because they must do so to live."

This is all starting to get away from the core point of the article, which is that people will always find a way to engage in any activity that is illegal, but perhaps if we could address the issues above, the question of speakeasy gyms wouldn't seem so critical because we'd be safe in other areas of our life.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#520

Post by ben7799 »

A lot of this fretting seems to come down to people who are bodybuilder types.

You don't need to be in a commercial gym to maintain solid functional fitness.

You might need to be in a commercial gym to maintain unnatural levels of muscle mass and body weight for bodybuilding & powerlifting. Even that stuff can still be done in a home gym setting though given an equipment budget.

This is not a health argument, it's not even proven bodybuilding is healthy.. excess mass from body building & powerlifting tends to have negative effects later in life due to the metabolic strain of the extra weight.

Just deal with the idea you can stay super fit but you might not weigh as much.

Gymnasts, rock climbers, etc.. are all ultra elite strength athletes that get by largely with bodyweight exercise & minimal equipment. They just don't have abnormally high body mass.

Outside of these arguments of "I'm too big and strong to get enough home equipment to keep my gains Bro!" it mostly seems to come down to narcissism.. desire to be seen in the gym and to socialize in the gym. If that's such an important part of being in the gym it's no different than not being able to handle avoiding bars.

You can still have a training partner for spotting... just make sure it's the same training partner and you both keep good behavior outside of workouts and it'll be pretty safe.

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