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The Swerve

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Re: The Swerve

#71

Post by mistermann »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
danhak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

> Instead we ended up with a large fraction simply denying objective reality in the hope that it would go away. That's not how you deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I find that acceptable, but not in grown ups.

If you had fallen victim to this phenomenon yourself, would you necessarily know? Might there be some materially important imperfections in your model of reality that you're describing here?

Re: The Swerve

#72

Post by SequoiaHope »

voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

I mean Doctorow writes books about communism so I think it is fair to say the answer is yes.

Re: The Swerve

#73

Post by wizofaus »

danhak wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

How do you rate "significantly better" though? From stats I've seen every developed nation did significantly better than the US. But it's true there are plenty of places using a "light touch" approach that have seemingly achieved much the same level of excess mortality etc. of others that took much stronger measures. Having said that, I live in one of the latter places, and one reason our net result isn't so great now seems to be that the strict measures taken in 2020-21 wore everyone out and we're just not prepared to sustain even basic precautions now. Though it may also be due to lower natural immunity levels.

Re: The Swerve

#74

Post by jacquesm »

csdvrx wrote: post #69
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

> Those places would have come out better if we all did this. Evidence required. Alternative claim: "Those places would have come out worse if we all did this" - neither of which can be proved.

You can think for yourself. But to spell it out for you: if all countries had simultaneously shut down travel for a couple of months then we could have all been at the level of New Zealand or Japan. Neither of which crashed their economies. Once vaccines were available we would have been able to open up travel again and we'd have been better off collectively. Even those places where they did shut down, because after they opened up they were still exposed to plenty of people who imported the virus from abroad, something that would have happened at a much smaller scale otherwise.

So you can reason it out, the fact that we can't re-run the experiment is a pity.

Re: The Swerve

#75

Post by jacquesm »

troupe wrote: post #33
danhak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally thought when the only people that were identified as having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the hospital. The places that "DID take COVID seriously" were places that were initially reacting to statistics that didn't consider how many people had already had Covid and hadn't been to the hospital. I wonder if we'll someday look back on some of the things w…

The thing to take away from this is: we got lucky. Very, very lucky. A somewhat longer incubation time, a higher lethality, a bit more asymptomatic spreading and the figures would be entirely different. If the first variant would have been one of the later mutations you'd be looking at a world in mourning today.

Re: The Swerve

#76

Post by 8bitsrule »

dash2 wrote: post #57

Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no. What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge los…

Respectfully suggest that this analysis is more whistling in the dark.

The very idea that human leadership has things under control overlooks multiple events in history - e.g. the Bronze Age Collapse we're still trying to explain - and suggests both amnesia and completely undue hubris. The idea also overlooks the potential for other kinds of simultaneous disaster being heaped on. (CME's for one.) We can anticipate them, but they are beyond our control - and may disable further options.

There was a mass extinction of hundreds of species of megafauna just before our known history begins. Can't agree on the cause - but nonetheless the Moving Hand moved on.

In the past two years, the fear and death created by one little invisible bug, which we declined to prepare for, has badly damaged economic stability. If we continue to overplay our weak hand, who will pay for the damage - and with what?

Re: The Swerve

#77

Post by drewcoo »

jacquesm wrote: post #8

Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…

> The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this

Is that a bigger problem than people who seem to think that they personally are saving the planet by their own actions?

I honestly can't tell the difference between treating gun crimes with thoughts and prayers and stopping global warming by taking personal responsibility. Nether is effective. Both seem delusional. Oh, and those two activities belong to different parts of the political divide. The problem is not "those people" so much as it's humanity, all of us.

Re: The Swerve

#78

Post by adamrezich »

prometheus76 wrote: post #66
majormajor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less environmentally disruptive, technology development wanting to "destroy the world's economy"? Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses. It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or mainframes.

The whole global economy is built around cheap energy sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy. Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but most people in the world do not. So efficient energy storage becomes a huge problem. And we h…

> Increase the cost and reduce the availability of the energy sources and yeah, you'll destroy the economy.

more and more it seems like outright nihilism has led to many people being in the mindset of "And That's A Good Thing!"

these people not only think privately but announce publicly that they don't have any interest in having children specifically because they don't think it's Morally Right to produce and raise children in this Intractably Fallen World we live in today. after all, as everyone knows, western civilization is built upon colonial expansionism, slavery, white supremacy, bigotry, etc. etc., and even the good things it's produced like democracy are outweighed by the civilization-ending threat of climate catastrophe that it directly wrought! therefore, let us ignore the civilizational advances our forefathers fought and died for, because on the whole, our entire society is built upon foundations of moral abhorrence! let it all burn, and all of us with it—we deserve it.

and all of this nihilistic depression and anxiety about the entire global state of the world we live in all started relatively recently in human history, which makes one wonder what exactly caused it—was it completely organic or subversively intentional? because idk about you but if I was a competing world superpower and I wanted to set out to destroy my competition discretely, these last couple decades of getting the middle to lower rungs of society to turn on itself in every which way imaginable, all while discouraging optimism and exceptionalism in a downright institutional manner, would be exactly how I would go about it.

I used to be a fan of Doctorow when I was downloading his free ebooks & converting them to iPod notes format to read in class in high school. it's a bummer to see that he's lining up with the rest of the "we're all gonna die"-types, singing the song of the end of the world to the masses—it's pretty much impossible for me to respect anyone who takes that tack.

Re: The Swerve

#79

Post by [deleted] »

8bitsrule wrote: post #76
dash2 wrote: post #57

Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no. What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge los…

Respectfully suggest that this analysis is more whistling in the dark . The very idea that human leadership has things under control overlooks multiple events in history - e.g. the Bronze Age Collapse we're still trying to explain - and suggests both amnesia and completely undue hubris. The idea also overlooks the potential for other kinds of simultaneous disaster being heaped on. (CME's for one.) We can anticipate t…

[deleted]
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