Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

epsilontheory.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 206 posts

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#141

Post by azinman2 »

zinekeller wrote: post #86
brundolf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not especially "intune with Europe", and that conflict ended when I was a small child, but I knew the violence extended to civilians. Not sure why you assume people wouldn't know that.

I'm referring to the average American populace and not to the average HN poster. For example, I knew the details of the Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks and know that it was caused by a "new religion" cult but an average person outside Japan wouldn't really remember that as clearly as I am (unless you are somehow in Western Australia since a farm area there was refurbished to produce sarin). It is like 9/11 outside America: a…

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a well known song, don't forget. It wasn't that long ago that the IRA was putting bombs in trash cans. I think this is far more known in the US than you'd think, especially given it's intra-Christian violence.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#142

Post by drcross »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #111
drcross wrote: post #100

I'm Irish in Ireland, I've been following the matter closely. Ireland had one of the strictest lockdowns in most of Europe since March, no pubs, nightclubs, limited restaurants, churches, limited sports, 5km travel restrictions were on and off. We masked up early and our national broadcaster was constantly warning everyone non-stop. Schools were open however. We were the poster boy for lockdown success up until at le…

Thank you. I honestly believe that there is a non-trivial percentage of the population that _likes_ the COVID world and wants to keep it going as long as possible. Some may like working remotely, others may like the wider acceptance of meal and grocery delivery, others may prefer the reduction in greenhouse gases. That is the only way I can rationalize the insistence of lockdowns here on HN and elsewhere. Either that…

I agree. I think it's a combination of factors-

The people who are currently on a good WFH salary are seeing their savings grow thinking they are doing well for themselves because soon they will buy a house but what they don't realise is that eventually they will have to pay for the 400k people on the pandemic unemployment payment, the 5 billion that was lost this year in tourism, the 10 million we are spending weekly on PCR testing. This all adds up and with only 2.3 million wage earners in Ireland they are going to be stung for a lot of tax to pay for this.

There are people with short term or part time jobs who are happier to be paid 350 per week for staying at home. Why would you want to work a menial job if you didnt need to?

Like Prof. Johan Giesecke from Sweden said, the western countries got themselves into a lockdown without thinking of a plan on how to get out of it and no one wants to be seen as the person who made the decision to kill loads of people.

There's also the vaccine angle which is sure to make those companies lots of money this year.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#143

Post by JackFr »

stretchcat wrote: post #95
zinekeller wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The HN crowd vastly overestimates how unknown these can be on an actual person. Even when they knew about the explosions in the (London) Docklands and in Manchester, they would only knew it to be terrorist attacks, not specifically the provisional Irish Republican Army (unrelated to the Irish Army). Edit: definitely not the Australian city of Docklands (and not any city named Manchester ouside England!)

I think the [Provisional] IRA is well known in America. Every other American seems to think they are 'part Irish' and I think the average American's awareness of The Troubles is high, at least compared to other foreign conflicts (at least for Americans old enough to remember the 90s at least anyway.) Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the con…

If you think giving a drink a tasteless name is bad, the reality is a lot worse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/0...

Through the 70’s and 80’s much of the money and many of the guns came directly from the US.

Thatcher, Reagan and to some extent Tom Clancy ended that.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#144

Post by georgeecollins »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #116
Barrin92 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.

If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people. Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people. So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public…

The US government is based on the idea that "citizens" (note: lots of problems with the way they defined them at the time) elect people who make decisions on their behalf. It was designed to have more and less democratic institutions so that there would be block on the popular will.

They believed that the purpose of democracy was to be able to remove the people who ruled you, to ultimately prevent autocracy. They didn't believe every decision should be a plebiscite.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#146

Post by wiredfool »

Fordec wrote: post #13

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…

I'm not sure that it's really a 2 week thing.

It was going badly before Christmas, compared to earlier, and the break of Christmas/St Stephens made a gap in the testing, and then it slammed upwards over the next week, overwhelming the IT and health professionals dealing with turning positive swab numbers into confirmed cases.

By NYE, there were 9k tests in limbo that weren't in the stats.

At the point where the daily positives get over 2k, that's with a different test population. They're no longer testing contacts of people with COVID, they're testing people with symptoms. The positive rate went from 8% -> 40% in that time.

Anecdotally, I had no 1st order contacts with Covid (i.e., I know them well, rather than my sister's friend sort of thing), and over Christmas that went to more like 5 in three separate clusters.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#147

Post by daniel-cussen »

legerdemain wrote: post #103
stretchcat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How devastating? I expect few if any would starve; we grow more than enough grain to keep people alive. Potatoes farmers would be put in a hard financial situation, but they'd probably get bailed out and could replant with other varieties for the next season.

I don't think the bar is as low as "could the government make enough gruel to keep you from starving." And, given the current experience with vaccine distribution, even that is not certain. Think of all commercial food products that contain potatoes that could no longer be produced for a time. Potatoes are a significant source of cattle feed. Potato starch has many non-food industrial applications. Perhaps we wouldn'…

> Perhaps we wouldn't have millions of deaths, but a year without potatoes would be an historic catastrophe that Americans would remember for decades.

Much better than a historic catastrophe from which Ireland never repopulated.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#148

Post by waterhouse »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #116
Barrin92 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.

If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people. Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people. So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public…

> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

Not necessarily. I think some people have said that democracy is designed to imitate revolutions without actually being violent: that if much of the populace is armed and not that many people have enough gear and training to make them enormously more effective than a random person with a gun, then "one person, one vote; majority wins" approximately reflects what would happen if there was a violent revolution, so people don't have much to gain by adding violence. If that's true, then appeasing the mob by letting them more or less get their policies implemented may be best even if those policies are not the best—because the alternative is risking a bloody revolution followed by the mob implementing their policies anyway.

That's one perspective, anyway.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#149

Post by ska »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #116
Barrin92 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.

If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people. Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people. So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public…

> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.

What you are describing is leaning towards "direct democracy", which nobody tries to implement, vs "representative democracy" which is what we all experience. In the latter it absolutely is a feature that representatives will go against the preference of the majority at least some of the time.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#150

Post by djrogers »

aidenn0 wrote: post #89
School-Cotton wrote: post #60

The author’s argument for why it’s implausible that a lot of people don’t get tested is literally “c’mon, man.” That not satisfying to me. I was sick for a few days over the summer. Was it a mild case of Covid? I don’t know, or care. Why should I get tested when that information will change literally nothing about my life?

1. It's not literally "c'mon man" it's "look at these graphs, then 'c'mon, man'." 2. They stipulate that lots of people didn't get tested, but believe it to be an order of magnitude less than the CDC estimates.

> 2. They stipulate that lots of people didn't get tested, but believe it to be an order of magnitude less than the CDC estimates.

That would imply that we've verified 23M out of a total of only 30M infections. Given how much of a hassle it is to get tested (even more so 3-4 months ago), it would be utterly shocking if we've tested ~75% of those infected.

Post reply on HN