How Apocalyptic Is Now? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#51

Post by drevil-v2 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #44

drevil-v2 wrote: post #32

Australia, 98 deaths and 16 people in ICU. Entire economy destroyed. Either we will make money meaningless by printing it out of thin air or coming decades will witness crushing tax. 5 million people unemployed out of population of 22 million. Someone fucked up.

Hindsight is 20/20. Without lockdown it could have been significantly worse. And even if not there was no way to know beforehand. As restrictions are ended any future waves should provide more insight into their effectiveness.

Unelected public officials and local/state politicians seem unwilling to give up their newfound powers. Any objections to or questioning of their rationale or edicts is immediately dismissed as ignorant death wishes of the unwashed masses.

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#52

Post by simondw » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

drevil-v2 wrote: post #32

Australia, 98 deaths and 16 people in ICU. Entire economy destroyed. Either we will make money meaningless by printing it out of thin air or coming decades will witness crushing tax. 5 million people unemployed out of population of 22 million. Someone fucked up.

How many more people would have to have died for you to feel the response was appropriate?

Surely the number of lives saved is the correct thing to measure against the economic cost. It's hard to compare against a counterfactual, of course -- but look at NYC, look at Italy, look at France.

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

jotm wrote: post #47

drevil-v2 wrote: post #32

Australia, 98 deaths and 16 people in ICU. Entire economy destroyed. Either we will make money meaningless by printing it out of thin air or coming decades will witness crushing tax. 5 million people unemployed out of population of 22 million. Someone fucked up.

Money's already meaningless. Indeed, printing more of it is what's going to happen, but it won't help most of those who lost their jobs.

[deleted]

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#54

Post by yogthos » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

oneiftwo wrote: post #45

yogthos wrote: post #21

The article seems to completely forget about climate change. The current pandemic is going to look like a tiny speed bump in a few years when we start seeing regular deadly heat waves, crop failures, and other natural disasters. Billions of people are going to be displaced, and we'll see wars for the remaining livable land. The effects of climate change are all around us already, and they're happening much faster tha…

How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me. This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident. Look, the papers that predict what's more lik…

The scientists did not fail to prepare for the pandemic, and the countries that had scientists in the driving seat handled the pandemic very well. For example, Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge. Meanwhile, countries like US, who dismissed the scientists have the highest death toll in the world.

Climate change denialists don't seem to grasp the concept of basic risk assessment. We don't know exactly what will happen, however we definitely know what could potentially happen. Claiming that just because the scientists might be wrong there's nothing to worry about is the height of insanity. You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere.

People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.

And now we're seeing these things starting to happen, and we're seeing them happen at a faster rate than was expected. Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time.

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#55

Post by unlikelymordant » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

drevil-v2 wrote: post #32

Australia, 98 deaths and 16 people in ICU. Entire economy destroyed. Either we will make money meaningless by printing it out of thin air or coming decades will witness crushing tax. 5 million people unemployed out of population of 22 million. Someone fucked up.

New york city had 0.25% of their population die, I'd say australia dodged a bullet and can be lumped in with countries that best handled the virus. The low death rate is a consequence of good handling, not "someone fucking up".

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#56

Post by Inthenameofmine » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

mathdev wrote: post #43

netcan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link for the taleb commentary?

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1258931279317405696 and there are more tweets on that if you scroll the feed.

I fund it fascinating that in "developed" or "fully western" countries it is the youth that is disregarding the lockdown measures. In Kosovo/Albania it is the precise opposite. An acquaintance of mine in China told me that it is the genX and older generation there too that seems to not understand the gravity. How come this big difference?

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#57

Post by throwaway0956 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #44

drevil-v2 wrote: post #32

Australia, 98 deaths and 16 people in ICU. Entire economy destroyed. Either we will make money meaningless by printing it out of thin air or coming decades will witness crushing tax. 5 million people unemployed out of population of 22 million. Someone fucked up.

Hindsight is 20/20. Without lockdown it could have been significantly worse. And even if not there was no way to know beforehand. As restrictions are ended any future waves should provide more insight into their effectiveness.

[dead]

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#58

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, May 16, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

I take exception to this analysis:

"The numbers killed in terrorist incidents may be small. But the threat is endemic, and the texture of everyday life has altered profoundly. Video cameras and security procedures in public places have become part of the way we live."

The author writes about this as if our response to terrorism is some sort of deterministic feature of the natural world. Instead, however, our response is series of distinct policy choices, none of which were ever inevitable and all of which are subject to change (even if that change is hard to accomplish).

The security theater in (particularly US) airports is not a deterministic consequence of terrorism - it's the result of the policies of the GW Bush administration. The widespread use of CCTV cameras in the UK is not a deterministic response to crime and/or terrorism - it's the result of several governments worth of explicit policy, as evidenced by the remarkably lower use of such cameras in other nations affected by similar phenomena.

Talking about "what has happened" as if it was inevitable, and not the result of choices made by the powerful is dangerous and dampens the possibility of a belief in other outcomes.

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#59

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, May 16, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #18

empath75 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll resist the lockdown again until people start dying in large numbers and hospitals fill up and then it will be too late.

It's evident by this point that you can avoid total lockdowns and still control infections. Permanent lockdown is simply not a realistic solution, so I expect we'll all start tending towards the Swedish model, regardless of how much gnashing of teeth and fiery twitter rhetoric such decisions will generate. As for the apocalyptic atmosphere - it doesn't seem possible to really predict how bad/good things will get. How…

Realistically, the end of WW2 was indeed followed by unprecedented social progress and economic equality in many parts of the world.

Re: How Apocalyptic Is Now?

#60

Post by specialist » Sat, May 16, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

oneiftwo wrote: post #45

yogthos wrote: post #21

The article seems to completely forget about climate change. The current pandemic is going to look like a tiny speed bump in a few years when we start seeing regular deadly heat waves, crop failures, and other natural disasters. Billions of people are going to be displaced, and we'll see wars for the remaining livable land. The effects of climate change are all around us already, and they're happening much faster tha…

How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me. This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident. Look, the papers that predict what's more lik…

Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?

People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise.

Are sportsball predictions qualitatively better than pandemic predictions?