Earlier quoted context omitted.
Covid is not nearly as high on the priority list for many third world countries as it is for the US. Here covid shuts down everything. In many African countries it is an order of magnitude less impactful than malaria.
There's less testing, less reporting and much less transparency and awareness. Doesn't mean there's less infection or less dying.
Europe's Vaccine Disaster
411–420 of 434 posts
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not advocating for "kicking poland out", but giving it a choice or rather impose penalties for it feasting on the imagery of EU as enemy and shit. Membership comes with rules Poland isn't following. Either get in line or get out. I am saying it's in Poland's interest to play along. Hungary on the other hand is probably fucked beyond at this point. > So IMO, you want to fight populism with populism and fight for…
> You mean the cultural diversity of authoritarianism, workers exploitation and human rights violations? Yes, I would like to kill that. Your populism is awful. I know, Virtue Signaling is the best way to earn karma @ Reddit. Not here on HN, though.. Germany is exploiting the polish workers. So I guess Germany should be "kicked out" from EU for that?
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the point, but even if it was, you could also say something like going from Kiryas Joel to New York City is as big of a "shock" as going from Idaho to Australia, even though these two places are in the same state and 30km away. Yeah the U.S is big and varied, but that doesn't mean that the political and societal structures are approximately the same as the EU.
It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states. Then they became a confederacy (twice). There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
The same is true of Canada's provinces and Australia's states – before (con)federation, they were separate British colonies. The big difference between Australia/Canada and the US, is the American colonies rebelled first, and then federated after they had won their independence. The Australian and Canadian colonies federated (with the approval of London) into "dominions", which were more than mere colonies but rather semi-independent parts of the British Empire. (London's power over the dominions gradually declined over the decades to the point that it recognised them as fully independent countries, although neither Canada nor Australia was fully independent at the moment of their respective federations.)
(Australians call it "Federation" and Canadians call it "Confederation" but it is the same thing. Canadian confederation never produced a Confederation in the sense that the American Articles of Confederation or the Confederate States of America were.)
Also, even before the now-independent American colonies formed themselves into a federation, they already viewed themselves as a distinct nation. There was never really any point that New Yorkers (for instance) viewed themselves as New Yorkers rather than Americans or British or British North Americans. American states never functioned as national identities. (Even cases like independent Vermont and independent Texas, they saw largely themselves as Americans waiting to be allowed into the United States, there was never really any independent Texan nationalism or Vermont nationalism.) Prior to the American revolution, there was no difference between Americans and English-speaking Canadians – they all saw themselves as British North Americans. It was only after the American revolution that English-speaking Canadians stopped identifying with the label "American" and began to identify it with the other country to the south instead. The American revolution was really the formative event which split Anglophone Canada and the United States into separate national identities.
> There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
Texas tried to secede as part of the Confederacy, and the attempt was crushed. Whatever rights of secession some Texans claim exist on paper certainly don't exist in practice.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except von der Leyen was sent in as head of the Comission, a position which is essentially the Prime Minister of the EU. The PM's or the head of the Comission's job is to get sh*t done, as opposed to bragging about it and passing the responsability and the blame onto others. Sorry to say but BJ is way better in this regard. He has delivered Brexit and the UK is in a much better position regarding vaccinations.
Yes Legen is a bit like an EU prime minister, but she doesn't have the same prerogatives. The EU has the ultimate authority only on a narrow number of economic issues, but e.g. on borders and health it needs to get the agreement of 27 goverents to act. The EU is a compromise machine designed to manage the expectations and needs of 27 countries, not a presidential system where a Trump or Putin can sign executive decis…
An example of the EU changing the law on a whim was the regulations just published on Friday that imposed a border on Northern Ireland, the thing they just spent the last 4 years claiming would be terrible and provoke terrorist violence which is why the UK would have to basically 'lose' NI as territory. It could happen without Ireland or the UK even being consulted exactly because the EU is constitutionally a dictatorship of the Commission.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#415From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the…
It should be noted that von der Leyen got this job not because she was recommend by anyone in Germany. The actuall suggestion supposedly came from Macron. In the vote for her among governments. Germany was the only one to not vote for her, due to an intervention by the social democratic party that is a member of the current german government.
The closest I've ever seen to an explanation was one well known senior MEP's claim that "the next head of the EU must be a woman". Same thing as Kamala Harris. von der Leyen in turn then insisted that 50% of the Commissioners be women. Constitutionally, the head of the commission does not get to pick the commissioners, the countries do, but if there's one thing I've learned about the EU over the years it's that it's a big fan of law as long as the law is convenient for its own goals. Given it writes those laws that's usually pretty easy, but the moment the rules go against what it wants politically they are very suddenly ignored, often to a breathtaking scale.
Observe how von der Leyen blatantly lied about the contents of the redacted contract to the whole world. She was only caught because the Commission suck at PDF. It's hard to imagine it's the first time she has boldly lied like that.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.
That's the number with restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, etc, etc. In other words while Serbia was hit fairly badly, relatively speaking, the mitigation measures largely worked. This is not a good argument against mitigation measures. The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare agai…
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
etc. And there are many more.
I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but lockdowns have had no impact on mortality. This is seen when examining all the data. Consider Sweden - very little government suppression, and it's got a basically average outcome. In fact when analysed properly they don't have much excess death in 2020:
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions. Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty…
Thank you - I appreciate a correction with sources. I had based my understanding on a report by the Swedish government central statistics bureau, that stated no excess deaths in 2020 on average, but an increase in Q1-Q2 and decrease in Q3-Q4. (Can dig up a link if anyone is interested). It is also clear from your link that deaths was unaffected by government forcing lockdowns. Lockdowns certainly do have an effect on…
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
The summary is that when controlling for population growth there was a very small amount of excess death, that made 2020 comparable to 2012 or 2013 (depending on if you also control for age structure).
NB: due to an unusually non-deadly 2019, which will naturally increase 2020 mortality even without COVID, Swedish stats must be used carefully if the goal is to answer the question "how deadly was COVID in a country that had very few mitigations". Regardless even if you don't control for that additional factor, it's clear that the outcome was very far away from the 'expert' predictions of 100,000+ deaths from COVID alone, on top of all the normal deaths, which would have more than doubled the usual death rate.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
The grandparent's original point still stands, this is not the disaster that the headlines portray. The U.S stands at 1 in 750 people dead from covid, mostly elderly with comorbidities, a rate similar to many other countries. That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you s…
Just take a look at Reuters' stats page. It's easy now as we have just passed 100m infections with 2m deaths. That amounts to 2 dead out of every 100, globally. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m... Death rate is 0.16% in the US though.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You mean the cultural diversity of authoritarianism, workers exploitation and human rights violations? Yes, I would like to kill that. Your populism is awful. I know, Virtue Signaling is the best way to earn karma @ Reddit. Not here on HN, though.. Germany is exploiting the polish workers. So I guess Germany should be "kicked out" from EU for that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have bet 10 times the resources. Cheap compared to the pandemic!
You keep saying this, but you haven't demonstrated any way in which pouring more money into the process would have significantly speeded up production. Do Intel's massive financial resources allow them to profitably manufacture chips on their 10 nm and 7 nm nodes?
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BFI_WP_2...
(summary is in a table on page 6)