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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

541–550 of 675 posts

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#541
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shots are NOT truly protective. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective. I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)

Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021.

It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#542
Is is possible to have some kind of vote, how many actually agree with his unsaid plans.

For me,2 captures why I don’t join a church. It seems hypocritical. One day I will ask who really believes the tenants of the church and what is the churches stance on being a member without believing them.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics is simply preference, some people prefer to speed, some would rather drive below the limit. They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.

That characterization doesn't match my experience at all. You presume we all want to go in the same direction, but that our main disagreement is about speed. In my experience, the main source of political conflict is direction, not speed.

I should have said velocity to clarify that people aren’t trying to go to the same place, again due to the diversity of preference.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#544
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.

We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind witho…

Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#545
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature is unpredictable and always changing. This is why any attempt at planning markets is destined to fail. And it has - the specter of famine was always-present during my life under communism. Darwinism means adaptation. In markets, when people are free and allowed to keep their (majority of) gains, they will struggle to learn, change and adapt. Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the on…

"Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the ones bringing the economic collapse." Erm, no, its the briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation. The free-market has ensured that the entire continent of North America produced Zero medical masks in the first year of the pandemic because there is no meltblown production on the entire continent. There wa…

There is no free market when it comes to producing and selling medical equipment in the US. I remember reading about a business able and willing to start mask production but choosing not to because of the onerous requirements and not being allowed to raise price to the required levels.

In other, less-regulated countries, KN95 masks where missing for just a brief period of time in March then they were readily available again for the rest of the pandemic, of course at a higher price reflecting the demand.

> briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation

Such a statement is quite funny in the context of the FED printing a fifth of all USD supply just in 2020.

Even funnier is to comply about disrupted supply chains in the context of countless heavy restrictions imposed by... you know... governments.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today. Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough t…

My point was that the definition of progressivism is, literally "support for or advocacy of social reform", while conservatism is "seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions." If you want to see social change, then you're progressive. How you think that should happen -- whether it is measured or radical -- is secondary.

Under that definition, a self-proclaimed libertarian would be a progressive, as would someone who wants to replace public schools with religious institutions. A neocon, who wants to forcefully bring democracy to a foreign country, would be a progressive in that country. Perhaps different terms are more useful.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#547
post #496
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time. Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer? Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money? Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs? For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place. The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.

Isn't that the point though? The implied meaning of Chesterton's fence is simply: Understand the root motivation that belies a rule/norm/etc before you contest it.

A big problem is that people don't agree on the root motivation.

I believe that policies against women being religious leaders is based in historical misogyny. But if you go ask people in these organizations, they'll say that women are fundamentally less capable of leading religious groups and that God made this rule for a reason.

What do you do then? I'm pretty darn sure that the stated reason is not actually true and bigots rarely say "the reason we are oppressing this group is because we hate them" but instead make up rationalizations for their policies. A bias towards keeping social systems and policies as long as there appears to be a justification for it enables oppressive systems to defend themselves more effectively.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rat…

Not enough ICU (too late when you get there anyway) is a political problem. In my country they reduced it with state funding (you got money for reducing beds, active monetary incentives) and now they ponder about vaccination mandates. This is infantile blaming of others in my opinion. Worse, you don't even hold those that are really responsible to account. So my sympathy if you fail to get an ICU is limited.

It is not practical to have hospitals to cater to extreme spikes - it takes trained doctors, nurses, infrastructure to run all which is in limited supply. Further, even if that can be managed, during normal periods, all that excess capacity wouldn't maintain itself. You need a balance of additional capacity and responsible behaviour supported by science/medicine/evidence. Ignoring that is infantile.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#549
post #453

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible…

>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.

[1] https://yle-fi.translate.goog/uutiset/3-12220417?_x_tr_sl=au...

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismi…

Or you avoid the topic, keep your fingers crossed that they won't get sick, and can at least have a normal conversation about the weather without hating each other.

Interesting, the Ostrich algorithm as applied to RealLife(tm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm
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