How effective are masks? If I can smell the guy next to me with my mask on, I am sure I can catch his virus also.
The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
161–170 of 363 posts
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Societies with largely rational, educated populace are weathering COVID just fine, wrt. democracy and respect for human rights.
I'm not sure how Hitler winning 1932 German elections improved human rights in Germany and overall Europe. Instead it turned into dictatorship, tyranny and mass murder. And you can not say that Germany at the time was not rational and not educated populace. It was a Physics mecca of the world with people like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein. My point is education does not equal to…
Germany 1932 was massive mess. It was not rational place in a lot of ways. It was also quite violent place.
Physics and art mecca of few Germany cities were outliers within Germany, not the norm.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
QE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. Luckily for us everyone else that matters (that is, who's not New Zealand) is equally fucked, so it's not entirely a losing proposition, but for someone of moderate means and with an income/savings that do not track the stock market these are perilous times indeed. Whatever cash or cash equivalent savings they had are turning into a pumpkin withi…
QE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. 22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years. But we are still nowhere near Weimar levels of money printing, so that’s something. Except in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela of course but that was happening before COVID.
> 22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years.
I think you're looking at M3?
Yes, currently 2.94T, up from 2.3T at the start of the year, so 22% of current money would be about 700B out of 3,000B.
From June 2007 to June 2008 went from 1.5T to 2.3T, so it was valid to say in June 2008 that "34% of all US dollars that exist were created in the last year"
On top of that M3 carried expanding:
From March 2007 to March 2009 went from 1.4 to 2.6T, where you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"
Inflation from 1996 to 2006 was an average 2.54%
Inflation from 2006 to 2016 was an average 1.76%
So for the response to the pandemic, measured in M3, to have the same affect as the M3 from 2008, the US would have to create another $1.6T by January 2022. Then you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"
So far the increase is 74B a month, or 1.8T over 2 years.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#164In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions. People gleefully discuss Sweden and almost openly hope that their lockdown-free plan fails. The article makes it sound as if the erosion of democracy is coming from the top. In the USA, it’s coming from the bottom. It’s coming from everyday citizens.
Enforcing restrictions for closed spaces or making people wear a mask is not corrosion of democracy. If you think that making you wear a mask attacks your freedom you are a moron. Corrosion of democracy is when these rules are used selectively and for political reasons. So I think you comparison to Sweden in a bit unfortunate. Also the virus was not the reason for the corrosion of the democracy where it happened, it…
Banning people from traveling, meeting each other, and working to earn a living and support themselves, are very much erosions of liberty, and people have been seriously impacted (particularly the poor). You are right, however, that they are not directly erosions of democracy.
However, there are plenty of direct erosions of democracy, even here in the United States. Our democracy in the US is applied through the rule of law, and many mandates have been issued in a manner inconsistent with the law: arbitrary, capricious use of power not authorized by the law. This is why, for instance, a court struck down Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer's extended use of emergency powers.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
QE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. 22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years. But we are still nowhere near Weimar levels of money printing, so that’s something. Except in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela of course but that was happening before COVID.
This did help to stave off (if not prevent) the total systemic collapse of the world economy though. So let's not lose the sight of that.
It had no general inflationary effect at all.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m with you. I have voted for an Nth party every presidential election since I was 18. Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. Every single time, I was told that this was the most important election of my lifetime, and just this once, I needed to bite the bullet and vote for a major party. Not doing it. That entire narrative needs to change.
> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up. I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be signifi…
So just set aside freedom of the press? You've stated a goal of suppressing polling; what's the legal mechanism you use to do it?
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
France was doing worse than Germany in the first wave, and is doing worse than Germany in this second wave. In fact Germany is doing much better right now than the European average. The only "evidence" that countries that did worse in the first wave do better now seems to come from counties that decided that reducing testing is the easiest way to make the numbers look good.
You fail to understand the fact that everyone's going to get it. You can't control that fact, not even by blowing up the economy. The best thing you can do if you're afraid is to wear a mask and take vitamin-D (or go outside to get some). Unless there is a miraculous breakthrough in vaccines, which seems unlikely in current year, this disease will be with us for the rest of your life. Just like the flu. If it works l…
You can do reasonable steps (masks, distance, no big events) that keep the infection rate to a minimum until we can get a vaccine approved and administered to 95% of the population in 1-2 years time.
Maybe we will live with strains of the virus forever, but that's not the problem. We have many diseases among us that are harmless in childhood and much worse later in live, but they are much more harmless both because people are exposed to them starting in early childhood, allowing them to build some immunity; and because vaccination is an option. That's a much more harmless situation than the initial outbreak ripping through a population that has never seen the virus.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#168In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions. People gleefully discuss Sweden and almost openly hope that their lockdown-free plan fails. The article makes it sound as if the erosion of democracy is coming from the top. In the USA, it’s coming from the bottom. It’s coming from everyday citizens.
People aren't asking for authoritarian restrictions. People have been asking for common-sense coordinated and effective measures that we can all rally around (like wearing masks). Instead we have ineffective politically driven responses marked by indecision and incompetence. People don't want lockdowns, but we recognise that because our containment measures have failed, we have no choice but to shut things. If you do…
> we have no choice but to shut things
Genuinely curious; where is the evidence and statistical analysis that shows the variance of infection rates across the world can be explained solely (or overwhelmingly, as you suggest) by lockdowns?
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#169In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions. People gleefully discuss Sweden and almost openly hope that their lockdown-free plan fails. The article makes it sound as if the erosion of democracy is coming from the top. In the USA, it’s coming from the bottom. It’s coming from everyday citizens.
>In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions.
Wait til you start to pick up on the undercurrent of jealousy and resentment this board accrued from hearing about successful startups.
Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
World War II has been over for a while and Germany has a scientist as the leader of the country. Human rights in Germany improved as a result of WWII because Germany - unlike any other country - has seen first hand what will happen when you let human rights slide.
I think it's more that Germans, unlike most nationalities, had great psychological and political incentives to imagine themselves as the victims of human rights abuses, but unlike real victims of human rights abuses, didn't face an entrenched establishment designed to keep them from asserting their rights. It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw fi…
Yes to some extend in relation to holocaust.
No in relation to Nazi victims in general. Jews were not only German victims of it all and most killed Jews were foreign. (German Jewish minority was rather small). As any other regime, it had huge amount of other victims too.
The crimes against non-jewish germans are part of the whole thing and part of reason for robust rights. So was the destruction of Germany after all of that which was pretty profound.