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Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

forbes.com

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Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#71

Post by solstice »

rcoveson wrote: post #62
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you counting from 0? What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...

Why are you counting from AD 1, which nobody alive at the time called AD 1? It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is de…

It doesn't matter whether people of the time said AD 1 or not, because the BC/AD b system was adopted much later. It's confusing and ultimately pointless, but if you plant apple trees, the year in which you do that is the first year in which you planted apple trees, not the zeroth year. After ten years elapsed, it is now the tenth year of your apple tree planting phase.

I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#72

Post by lemmonii »

mikem170 wrote: post #68
nostromo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century. The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.

Agreed. The 1968 hong-kong flu killed between 1 and 4 million people. Nobody talks about that now. They didn't talk about it much then, either. Woodstock, which happened during that flu season, gets talked about more. With this latest surge per-capita deaths from covid19 just passed the low end of the 1968 flu estimates.

Something to be considered is that today's population is on average older than in 1968 and therefore there are more people vulnerable to respiratory illnesses than ever(*atleast before COVID19).

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#73

Post by techelite »

mikem170 wrote: post #70
techelite wrote: post #57

I'm more curious what caused the wave of populism in the late 2010s. Was it really Russian propagandists on social media? COVID will be gone in a year or 2, but the economic damage may cause things to be worse. My best hope is a reform of the medical cartels, but that is wishful thinking in the face of a billion dollar lobbyist group.

It was the great recession. I remember reading at the time that it is typical for there to be populist right wing movements after economic calamities, same as happened after the great depression.

Is it only right wing? The left elected AOC and gave Bernie a platform.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#74

Post by Cro_on »

As a matter of fact the 21st century started prematurely in 1989 with the invention of the world wide web. It was officially inaugurated on NYE 2000, and has since been filled with all sorts of interesting things. 9/11, that started the 21st century's great fear, and security obsession. The 2008 financial crisis, started off the 21st century's fury at the fraudulent capitalist finance system. iPhone / android facilitated the 21st century's incessant protest. Trump and social media showed us some gaping holes in democracy, and the allowed an inherent fascism to reveal itself. COVID revealed to us problems of over population, easy travel and access to healthcare. And then? Clearly it's just the beginning, but there was no point when anything started or ended, other than the date. My only speculation is that the 21st century is as it is because of an appreciation for round numbers, and words like millennium. Or that we are definitely not base reality.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#75

Post by mikem170 »

techelite wrote: post #73
mikem170 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the great recession. I remember reading at the time that it is typical for there to be populist right wing movements after economic calamities, same as happened after the great depression.

Is it only right wing? The left elected AOC and gave Bernie a platform.

>Is it only right wing?

That's what it said. I assumed they were talking about how bad economies led to people like Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and since then maybe Thatcher and Reagan, also Putin, and more recently Brexit, Le May, Orban, the leaders of Poland, Brazil, Philippines, etc. Nobody's propaganda did all that. Bad economies and folks scared about change and their future did.

A very interesting book I read called "The Republican Brain" posited that people are born with a lot of their left/right thinking as part of their personalities, but that when the shit hits the fan a certain amount of left-thinking people will become more conservative.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#76

Post by hollerith »

Cro_on wrote: post #74

As a matter of fact the 21st century started prematurely in 1989 with the invention of the world wide web. It was officially inaugurated on NYE 2000, and has since been filled with all sorts of interesting things. 9/11, that started the 21st century's great fear, and security obsession. The 2008 financial crisis, started off the 21st century's fury at the fraudulent capitalist finance system. iPhone / android facilit…

> the 21st century started prematurely in 1989 with the invention of the world wide web

and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#77

Post by rcoveson »

solstice wrote: post #71
rcoveson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you counting from AD 1, which nobody alive at the time called AD 1? It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is de…

It doesn't matter whether people of the time said AD 1 or not, because the BC/AD b system was adopted much later. It's confusing and ultimately pointless, but if you plant apple trees, the year in which you do that is the first year in which you planted apple trees, not the zeroth year. After ten years elapsed, it is now the tenth year of your apple tree planting phase. I agree about your 80s example (of course I use…

I understand the explanation, but your final statement is still wrong. If you're doing "serious date calculations" for any modern organization, and you are asked to make a graph of 20th century data by decade, you will be expected to use the standard decade divisions, i.e. 190_, 191_, 192_. If you include data from December 2000, and get different results from your colleagues, you have failed. The last decade of the 20th century was Jan. 1990 - Dec 1999, according to everybody except the most pedantic of history majors.

And the idea that you could actually do serious date calculations that count backwards all the way to AD 1 while maintaining a precision of 1 year is also ridiculous. There are error bars around the year numbers from that long ago of something like 2-5 years.

I understand the basis for the [1901-2000] definition. However, I really don't think its defense outweighs its huge downsides, especially the split-decade problem.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#78

Post by mikem170 »

lemmonii wrote: post #72
mikem170 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The 1968 hong-kong flu killed between 1 and 4 million people. Nobody talks about that now. They didn't talk about it much then, either. Woodstock, which happened during that flu season, gets talked about more. With this latest surge per-capita deaths from covid19 just passed the low end of the 1968 flu estimates.

Something to be considered is that today's population is on average older than in 1968 and therefore there are more people vulnerable to respiratory illnesses than ever(*atleast before COVID19).

So are you saying the 1968 flu was worse, because per capita across the world it killed as many, or up to three times as many, people in a younger world? (so far, covid19 is not gone yet)

It was pretty bad. The flu has all the long term complications for some people that covid does - the lung problems, heart swelling, brain problems, etc.

I talk to people who were alive in 1968. It just wasn't really on anyone's radar. Rarely made headlines in the U.S.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#79

Post by Izkata »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #37
nostromo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century. The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.

Economic effects of the virus may well be more long reaching though.

Don't conflate the virus with the lockdowns. Knock-on effects of the lockdowns - which were a choice by governments, not some inevitability - are projected to have far worse long-term effects.

Re: Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start

#80

Post by turing_complete »

Izkata wrote: post #79
NineStarPoint wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic effects of the virus may well be more long reaching though.

Don't conflate the virus with the lockdowns. Knock-on effects of the lockdowns - which were a choice by governments, not some inevitability - are projected to have far worse long-term effects.

I agree, but that is also part of what Thiel is talking about.
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