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Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

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Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#651

Post by showdeadtest »

roughly wrote: post #588
showdeadtest wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more and more people are tired of having their jobs, educations, and social activities toyed with like they are trivial things.

Nobody thinks those things are trivial, but they do think stopping the pandemic is more important. If I told you to leave your house because it was on fire, would you accuse me of trivializing your daily routine?

It’s more like somebody else’s house is on fire, I thought my taxes paid for firefighters, but it turns out those firefighters never bothered to purchase firefighting equipment, so you’re forcing me to spend months putting out other people’s fires using cups of water from my own kitchen while firefighters shout on TV that this is the only possible way things can be.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#652

Post by perardi »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #127
three_seagrass wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pretty expensive too! Dumbbells are going for > $2-3/lb on various websites right now, which is insane. Adjustable dumbbells are going for > $10/lb, which is over twice their usual sticker price. Gyms could lease out their equipment right now and make a killing.

> Gyms could lease out their equipment right now and make a killing. Many have done just that here in Toronto. The equipment went very fast, though.

I sought out adjustable dumbbells for a month. Ridiculous prices on Kijiji, and full of scams. Thankfully I eventually found a place out in Brampton that was welding their own, for relatively reasonable prices.

(And thankfully my gym is now open. Until we get a second wave and it shuts down again.)

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#653

Post by _coveredInBees »

zozin wrote: post #599
showdeadtest wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more and more people are tired of having their jobs, educations, and social activities toyed with like they are trivial things.

The lock downs were premised upon preventing hospital systems from being overwhelmed. We accomplished that relatively easily, at least in the United States. However, politicians and bureaucrats, unwilling to let a good crisis go to waste, have moved the goalposts so much that now the unspoken policy seems to be that a single infection/death is anathema and that everything should be done to prevent it. I don't remembe…

Your views seem completely detached from reality. The only reason hospital systems were not overwhelmed was due to the continued lockdown + social distancing policies. Every state that went ahead and tried to ignore reality and open up for business rapidly found itself facing the very same issue again with hospitals being near full and in some cases having to turn away patients.

Some sources:

https://www.azfamily.com/news/continuing_coverage/coronaviru...

https://www.newsweek.com/arizona-hits-record-high-hospital-c...

So no, the lockdown isn't some moving goalpost made by politicians gone wild. It is an unfortunate necessity given the abject failure of the federal administration and many states in managing a very serious public health crisis.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#654

Post by svnpenn »

arxv33 wrote: post #623
johnwalkr wrote: post #543

Wow with these comments. You going to the gym is not saving the economy. Yes, we can't shut everything down but you'd think the article was about shutting down grocery stores or the stock market. And by not doing your part, your whole community could be stunted for 2 years. Also congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) because you're healthy and passing on the risk to s…

I travelled all over Europe past two months and I must say Europe is quite laxed. And there cases haven’t really gone up. Pretty much every outdoor cafes in Europe were open with a few exceptions and I didn’t see much difference other than people wearing masks and social distancing between tables. I think in US everything is polarized and politicized. To the point that wearing masks is somehow considered against free…

Europe has twice the population of the United States.

Yet despite this, United States has 4 TIMES the cases per day.

Europe can relax because they worked hard in the beginning to get everything under control. The US never did that, most states (like my home state of Texas) did a half-assed closing for 3 weeks, so the numbers never really got under control.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#655

Post by alibarber »

monocasa wrote: post #597
recursive wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this. Under what circumstances are you proposing that we'd be able to open back up? What's different now (or could have been) than it was when you claim we should be been locking down the first time? Certainly no amount of locking down would completely eradicate the virus, so what's the exit strategy?

Look at Wuhan; they're having pool parties with thousands of people. There is an exit strategy, and we'd be part of it if we could have just followed the directions of doctors and epidemiologists.

Whilst I am certain pool parties are indeed happening, something about the fact that they happened and ended up in international news strikes me of being a little, maybe, propaganda-ish.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#656

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

jdavis703 wrote: post #616
mehrdadn wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) The fatality rate of a car crash is also about 0.5% [1], but that doesn't prevent us from driving. That means there's a piece of the puzzle missing here, right? Note that I'm not concluding this means we should go to gyms (or whatever). I'm just pointing out your analysis is missing an important factor, making it faulty/unconvincing. Edit: Changed the statistic sour…

I think this is comparing the lifetime chance of various causes of death against the chance of death by COVID-19 complications after getting infected. In fact, the original report says it's too soon to know what the actual risk of COVID-19 related death is.

To be fair if we don't control this thing you have a near 100% chance if catching covid at some point in the next few months. Assuming we have an effective vaccine in 6 months you would then have a near 0% chance of catching covid again. This works out to the lifetime chance of death being the IFR. So between 1/1000 to 1/100 (depending on which study for IFR you look at).

If we don't develop an effective vaccine then given immunity seems to be temporary (as with other coronaviruses) most of us will catch this every year so a really high proportion of us will die of covid eventually (where eventually is in many years).

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#657

Post by csomar »

johnwalkr wrote: post #543

Wow with these comments. You going to the gym is not saving the economy. Yes, we can't shut everything down but you'd think the article was about shutting down grocery stores or the stock market. And by not doing your part, your whole community could be stunted for 2 years. Also congratulations for not caring about a 1 in 200 chance of death (pretty high by the way) because you're healthy and passing on the risk to s…

How is this different from the TSA for protecting you from terrorists? Or how is this different from the Internet and freedom of speech censorship for protecting you from child porn.

Reality Check: It's not different. People should stop from thinking they have a higher moral ground. Nobody does. On the other hand, on a free society, you should not be able to strip people from their freedom, regardless. People should be able to decide if they want to die from Coronavirus or live a semi-paralyzed life in fear. If you are that concerned, then you can confine yourself at home until everything is over.

Also humanity and evolution has a coping mechanism called natural selection. Helping people through medicine is a good idea but I think we are stretching it too much. In a few hundreds year, everyone will be walking on earth on a space suit.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#658

Post by jason0597 »

I think it is a bit unfortunate that the conversation has completely derailed. The article wanted to talk about prohibition and how it doesn't work (it just makes the product unregulated and sometimes dangerous, either it be a gym or drugs), and the discussion here seems to go on and on about mask wearing and social distancing. I'm sure we've all seen this discussion before.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#659

Post by coryfklein »

JeremyNT wrote: post #536
ehnto wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface: I've abstained from going to the gym since we went into lockdown, and even now that we are out of it here. I am looking into equipment at home, and I can at least keep my fitness, if not my strength, by going mountain biking. That said, there are many types of training you can't do without the right equipment, so it's at least a bit more than just wanting to be with others. Strength training/powerlift…

> That said, there are many types of training you can't do without the right equipment, so it's at least a bit more than just wanting to be with others. Strength training/powerlifting/olympic lifting all come to mind. It's often really difficult to keep a rack, barbell and hundreds of kilos of weight at home, and obviously not something people had just lying around in case of an emergency. Yeah, this is pretty import…

> In normal times it's incredibly wasteful for each individual to stockpile their own redundant junk, rather than share a common pool with others

This has not been my experience at all. I used to have a membership to my local gym for my wife, myself, and their childcare program (basically watch your kids while you exercise for 1 hour).

I cancelled that membership and instead put that same amount of money into buying equipment at home (where I have enough space for it) and it only took me about 5-6 months to get enough equipment to replicate about 90% of my routine from the gym. Now I also don't have to wait in line or spend the time travelling to/from and I can exercise whenever I want. For me it has been way more effective.

And when I'm done using the equipment it's not going to go in the trash, I'll sell it in the local classifieds.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#660

Post by dmurray »

mehrdadn wrote: post #629
diabeetusman wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's over your entire lifetime, not a few weeks after getting infected. You don't have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident every time you drive.

You're right, but unfortunately it's beside my point. (I took "chances of dying in a car crash" to mean it was the fatality rate of a car crash, which was wrong.) I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying. (Which I guess leads to the spoiler: this was the distinction I was trying to make. That you can't just draw a conclusion from only look…

> I was trying to find the chances of dying given you have a car crash, not the chances of being in a car crash and dying.

That seems a weird statistic to seek out, because your conclusion would then be "...and we don't try to avoid getting in car crashes to avoid that 0.5% risk of death". Which is wrong, we do and we should try to avoid crashes.

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