201–210 of 373 posts
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Do you have any source/reference on the Ebola stuff you're talking about?
I think the book was called The Hot Zone. Here you go. This should be it. http://projectavalon.net/THE_HOT_ZONE_Richard_Preston.pdf
I watched it just last night.
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Bullshit jobs are the job market equivalent of software bloat. They have the same issues: you can take a popular modern webapp or "desktop" app and notice that it's 80% of fat that isn't necessary for it to deliver all its value, but if you zoom in, almost every single piece of that fat can justify its existence because of other pieces. So you can't just start cutting it out piece by piece, you'd have to redesign the…
Defining jobs as "bullshit" requires imagining you can design large chunks of society from scratch. Sometimes you can, but more often you end up with a system as complicated at the current system. In utopia, we wouldn't need any lawyers. But we have lawyers now because we have disputes. Utopian planners always skip to the part where all the disputes are magically settled, or invent a mechanism only tested within thei…
For instance, European countries have lawyers too, but they're not used or involved anywhere near as much as in the US. Societies there run fine without lawsuits as the default method of conflict resolution.
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It has been proved that most of those masks sold simply aren't closely sewed enough to stop the droplets containing the disease. So in general the mask don't help. Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus
Just think about what you're saying. The mask is a piece of material, it has no directionality. Stop repeating ignorance that you hear second-hand and think for yourself.
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Do masks even work on things as small as viruses?
Masks contain spread. They do not protect from it. So if you are sick, wear a mask. Here in Germany you still get publicly ridiculed for it.
The problem is that there are not enough masks to go around. But if there were, i would recommend everyone wears them. Just so it would make it socially acceptable to wear one if you are sick.
I don't understand why we are not trying to interrupt the transmission vectors with masks and hand sanitizer like the Chinese do. They ramped the daily production from 10M to 100M and even advised the use of make-shift masks. The reaction in the west: masks are not protecting 100% and also we don't have any and we are too lazy to produce them, although they are much cheaper than the economic impact covid-19 has. 1. y…
This isn’t Tokyo, where everyone was wearing masks before this crisis and you get one for 400 yen at any convenience store, even inside the rail station.
Authorities in a democracy work mainly by persuasion, and they have a limited budget of how much they can educate and bend people’s behavior. This is what you would expect a system that takes citizen feedback into account, where citizens have a very strong prior that is inappropriate to the current situation.
Note most people in a democracy are strongly against government propaganda, but propaganda is basically state-owned tax on citizens’ attention. Think about how much attention it would take to educate people until they all voluntarily wore masks, whether that education would be politically popular, and also how many dollars in ad revenue that would have cost in the private attention market (ads).
I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…
> scaling back shit that nobody needs The “shit” nobody needs is the main point of living: music, art, science, sharing, pets; the crap you desire versus the essentials. If we only got what we needed to survive (food, shelter) that would be a pointless and depressing life.
Science is one of the essentials. Music and art can and should be done remotely. Pets are fine but if you need pretty vest for your dog this season you might make it yourself instead of paying amazon to force people to crowd by hundreds over sawing machines.
People are flexible with their behavior but they have pretty much innate level of happiness. You can feel as much happiness because of a roof that finally doesn't leak as from new marble patio.
There absolutely is an acceptable way out of this. China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, at least, are going to be just fine. They are focused on suppressing and controlling the virus. Once they get few enough imports from travel (presumably by restricting travel from countries where the virus is uncontrolled) and eliminate local transmission, they can resume life-as-usual, apart from being on high alert for impo…
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I'd like to see a source that they do not protect from incoming droplets. This seems to be completely false.
Surgeon General sufficient for you? Masks still contain droplet, at least reduce them so even DIY paper towel masks help. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
The question was who's officially claiming that they don't mitigate, even moderately, this risk vector.
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Oh come on! Hundreds of minor variations on the 'round blobby SUV with redundant angular surface forms' style; thousands of different variations on 'fat and water emulsified together with a dash of scent' for making your skin softer; fifty gorillion different types of shampoo - 'Because you're worth it!'. I'm all for a Hayek/Friedman approach to the markets, but I think even they would consider above trivialities in…
How exactly does cutting down the number of shampoo brands help fix the Coronavirus crisis? Even if you go from 1000 shampoo variants to maybe a dozen, the amount of shampoo that's produced does not change significantly. The only effect this is going to have is discrimination against minorities with special needs. I have atopic dermatitis and need to buy shampoo at the pharmacy for absurd prices because the regular s…
It will relase the capacity of people that are currently brainstorming how to cram their brand of shampoo into their customers homes instead of all the other brands.
I don't understand why we are not trying to interrupt the transmission vectors with masks and hand sanitizer like the Chinese do. They ramped the daily production from 10M to 100M and even advised the use of make-shift masks. The reaction in the west: masks are not protecting 100% and also we don't have any and we are too lazy to produce them, although they are much cheaper than the economic impact covid-19 has. 1. y…
Part of the problem for the West is that we wear masks when we don't want to get sick. Masks don't really work for this (the rest of the mask-wearer still gets covered in virus). And if we're diagnosed sick, then we stop wearing masks. Again, that's not how the mask thing works, because this is when masks are most useful. Both as a social signal and practical way of reducing infectiousness.
To use masks effectively, we need to stop wearing them when we're scared, and start wearing them when we're infected. But I think the social change to do this will be difficult.