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Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

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Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#931

Post by ehnto »

b0rsuk wrote: post #925
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…

Can't you do calisthenics ? There's a ton of possible exercise which uses only your body weight, or only minimal equipment like a pull-up bar. Can you do a one-legged squat? Pushup with a hand stand? Dragon flag? Many other exercises on youtube which make you sweat in minutes.

It really depends on your discipline. Powerlifting really starts at 100kg of weight on a barbell, and many need more than 200kg of weight on a bar to perform their training. You could keep healthy with a home fitness regime, but you'll lose some of your total strength, and you certainly won't be progressing.

That's all I'm trying to point out, for many disciplines there is no substitute for equipment. But so be it, these are unique times.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#932

Post by frickenhamster »

divbzero wrote: post #916
frickenhamster wrote: post #911

You want to massively decrease the deathrate of COVID? (and death rates in general) Deal with the 40% obesity rate in the US. Death rates are extremely low if you're not geriatric or not fat. All the top killers are attributable to being fat and living unhealthy lifestyles. COVID is the scapegoat here.

Old age isn’t attributable to living unhealthy lifestyles, so I consider COVID a threat in its own right and not just a scapegoat. But I agree with your broader point that fighting obesity, smoking, and other health risks should also be priorities even though COVID has greater mindshare at the moment.

Its true that old people have a higher deathrate, but we'll see deathrates in general drop in the years following 2020. Most of the people that are dying right now already have a foot in the grave. We won't know the impact of COVID specifically until many years after and a lot of data engineering. At that time, people won't care and the sensationalist numbers will win out.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#933

Post by frickenhamster »

asdff wrote: post #610
zelly wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a barbell, olympic weight set, squat rack takes up half a room and costs $10k vs. a <$30 monthly gym membership.

You don't need all that equipment to work the same muscle groups. Honestly, a $45 set of resistance bands is a great buy and these haven't experienced the same supply runs that heavy, more obvious equipment has experienced. Some great reading: https://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Traini...

Resistance bands are not even close to real weights. The feel is completely different and the resistance scales in a way that is counter productive for a lot of exercises. You don't have a constant measure of strength and progressive overload is impossible. Resistance bands are already as a supplement to free weight training but you can't get the same experience.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#934

Post by lambda-11235 »

ItsAlwaysMe wrote: post #804
polote wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it amazing we can not see short term sacrifice for long term gain. Maybe because nobody successfully proved to these people (me included) that this sacrifice is useful. You can't tell to people, you have no risk of dying (0.5% death rate for population, much much lower for healthy and young people), people who are at risk of dying can protect themselves even around sick people (wearing a mask, staying at hom…

>nobody successfully proved to these people (me included) >sacrificing is the worst solution for everyone >this is not your fault if they [high risk people] catch it >we stop everything for the rest of our lives This is nothing more than a tantrum. Nobody can "prove" it. Humanity is still learning about COVID-19. No model is going to predict the outcome of closing the economy. It has not been done in modern times at…

It is important to differentiate terminology here. According to DDG (which closely aligns with Google's results) the case fatality rate, the ratio of deaths to confirmed case, is 3.5%. For the death rate, the ratio of deaths relative to population size, is 0.01%.

Confirmed Cases: 21,991,954

Deaths: 777,018

World Pop.: ~7,800,000,000

Case Fatality Rate = Deaths/Confirmed Cases = ~3.5%

Death Rate = Deaths/World Pop. = ~0.01%

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#935

Post by lmm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #851
marcosdumay wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 granularit…

What are they then? What are appropriate and/or inappropriate responses? What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows?

> What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows?

The point is that that's impossible. If the crisis is ongoing for months then there is ipso facto enough time for the normal legislative process to apply. Applying some emergency decisionmaking process that bypasses the normal checks and balance is only justifiable for novel events.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#936

Post by randomchars »

lkbm wrote: post #722
randomchars wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I've never found a reasonably answer for is this: Whats the exit strategy? What has to happen for this to end? For what I've read there's a good chance this virus will stay with us for the long term, just like the flu. Waiting for the vaccine is kind of like hoping for a miracle, as it might not even work. So when will all this madness end?

I don't think vaccines are a miracle. They're not certain, but that doesn't make them miracles. The exit strategy should be to enough of a lock-down to get rates very low. This would likely have to be combined with quick-turnaround testing and contact tracing. The US largely failed with this. Other countries show what an exit strategy could have looked like. I'm not sure if it's still viable, but maybe. This is what…

> The exit strategy should be to enough of a lock-down to get rates very low

But if you get the infection rates very low, and reopen, the infection rates will go up, unless something fundamental has changed.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#937

Post by csomar »

Uehreka wrote: post #732
csomar wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also humanity and evolution has a coping mechanism called natural selection. So the phrase "Survival of the Fittest" refers in the abstract to the idea that, given fitness function F, members of a species who pass fitness function F will out-survive members who fail function F and then reproduce in higher numbers. But natural selection itself does not define any fitness functions, and makes no mention of a "univers…

> The fitness functions that nature comes up with are pretty arbitrary, and don't necessarily align with cultural ideas about merit, fitness or attractiveness.

nature's fitness is not arbitrary. it's about survival. culturally accepted fitness is arbitrary or linked to a particular evolution era. nature is constantly evolving, so what's fit in this era is not fit in the next.

> the millions of children who don't pointlessly die of infant diarrhea each year would probably push back a bit

I didn't say I don't like medicine. I do and do visit doctors. My main point was about freedom restrictions and how people should have free will to decide.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#938

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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.

The US had a concert with thousands of people just last week. I'm sure we can agree it shouldn't have, that it was a very dumb decision for Smash Mouth to do it - but I don't see much reason to believe that this Wuhan pool party was a smart decision.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#939

Post by Animats »

ceejayoz wrote: post #565
donor20 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are the one not listening. In EVERY other country you can buy masks, and they were strongly encouraged, that prevented YOU from getting sick. South Koreas KF94 masks come to mind, very good coverage and fit (3 parts including one under chin). And despite the lies basically posted by you and plenty of others including health authorities (don't wear masks if you are "healthy", masks can't protect you from covid…

N95s are still quite difficult to find here in the US. Cloth and non-medical disposable masks are not considered protective (although it's likely they block some inbound particles, and there's evidence they may thus result in a gentler illness on average) but do reduce transmission. You're right that there are multiple kinds of masks; in the US, it's kinda pointless to talk about N95s. No one's wearing them, in part…

N95s are still quite difficult to find here in the US.

Yes. That's pathetic at this late date. Worse, many of the off-brand ones don't do much. Some tests found masks performing around the 20% level, instead of the 95% level. This problem should have been fixed months ago. Part of the problem is that manufacturers didn't want to invest in the equipment, because the epidemic was supposed to be over by now.

Good N95 masks use a clever technology. The inner layer is a stretched film with holes. That layer can stop particles smaller than the holes - it's an electret, with a permanent static charge. Anything solid small enough to get through the holes gets pulled to the edge of a hole electrostatically and sticks. This has the interesting property that it works better on smaller particles; the static charge pulls them in more easily. So these can filter solids far below the hole size. Masks lacking that technology either don't work or obstruct breathing too much.

3M 8210 masks work that way. You can get them expensively on eBay, and cheaply if you're willing to wait 60 days for delivery. The "8210 Plus" model has a better elastic strap, which mostly matters for long-term use or storage. Aging of the elastic band is the weak point in the base 8210 model.

There's a vast supply of cheap "surgical" masks available. At least get a supply of those. Only ones with a bendable nose clip. Anything that leaks around the nose is worthless.

Machines for making N95 masks are available for sale, although some of them look like prototypes and are far too slow.

Re: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

#940

Post by dredmorbius »

skapadia wrote: post #208

We haven't evolved to constantly evaluate our actions against things we cannot see right in front of us (in this case a virus). Nothing actually happening during this pandemic is surprising in the least.

"Manifestation" or "tangibility" are generally really big problems in terms of getting people to understand what they cannot immediately see, hear, touch, or smell. Or what their worldviews have not prepared rhem to see, or worse, trained them the specifically not see.

This turns up in many places in technology --- bugs, design flaws, architectural errors, implicit assumptions, security issues, unintended consequences, UI affordances, algorithmic biases, data corruption, ...

A typoogy of various forms of such cognitive biases would be interesting. Too small, far, distant in time, transparent, big, diffuse, etc., etc.

See also Robert K. Merton's Manifest and Latent Functions.

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