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L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

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Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#81

Post by nightstaywalki »

eropple wrote: post #70
nightstaywalki wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “hang your Grandma for my stocks” But people feed their children using the value of their stocks. Do you think it's possible that a seriously damaged economy will lead to more suffering and deaths than are being prevented by the lockdown?

In no realistic permutation. Thanks for asking!

Hmm I'm not as sure, and I'm not sure why other people are so sure. People seem to generally respond 'of course not' and get offended that I've suggested it. I'm not really sure why.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#82

Post by majormajor »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #62
eropple wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not “forbidden” for y’all freethinkers or autodidacts or whatever the term today is to debate such things and to make the claim is dishonest. You’d have to find somebody to debate with , however, and most people are not particularly interested in “hang your Grandma for my stocks”. That is not a restriction of debate, it’s the social dumpstering of people beyond either statistics or empathy and that’s a feature a…

You seem to believe that 'stocks' are some abstract entity and are relevant only to the lives of people without grandmas to hang. We don't live in a vacuum. Economic activity is not some cute thing people do in their free time. Recession also costs lives, including those of some grandmas.

Yes, and one of the interesting questions would be *why is our government so much more effective at propping up "the stocks" while everyone loses their job? There's miles of room for argument over the economic policy response.

But instead what we get is "the economic effects aren't worth it" where none of the assumptions are quantified.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#83

Post by CydeWeys »

christophilus wrote: post #72
CydeWeys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is probably true, but other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread. Which countries might that be? If you're referring to South Korea, they're ahead of the game enough on testing for this to be workable (unlike us). If you're referring to anyone else, they're simply not at that point yet in the curve, but will arrive there.

Various European countries. Sweden comes to mind.

Sweden has more deaths per capita from coronavirus than the US, has an exponentially increasing death rate (i.e. they haven't turned the corner yet), and a very high case fatality rate of 9.4% indicating that they're severely under-testing. This is not what a successful disease prevention strategy looks like.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#84

Post by egypturnash »

renewiltord wrote: post #78

This doesn't matter. Low quality news sources are a dime a dozen, and the good news costs money. You have to be sophisticated enough to be able to differentiate news sources. For instance, as a WSJ subscriber, I'm not going to read the editorials. They're complete garbage in terms of factual content. The business page is gold. And this is very good. All the freeloaders who block ads and only use low-quality news will…

All the freeloaders who block ads and only use low-quality news will get poorer information and they will be out-competed

And they will go vote for the candidates who is best at grabbing them by their poorly-informed emotions.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#85

Post by randallsquared »

pacificmint wrote: post #43
tempsy wrote: post #26

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

Presumably the cases are so low precisely because we have enacted these measures. If we had not done that we'd probably look more like New York right now. The more effective your measures are, the more it is going to look like they were unnecessary. Or to reuse your metaphor: A campfire can turn into a wildfire really quickly. If we hadn't thrown the tsunami onto it when it was the size of a campfire, we might have g…

New York was only a few days behind California. Density matters so much that it's going to take a long time to arrive at good answers for how much lockdowns affected this, and there will be very strong pressure for a long time not to arrive at any conclusion other than "it worked", regardless of whether that's the truth. Which, obviously, it might well be!

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#86

Post by fibers »

renewiltord wrote: post #78

This doesn't matter. Low quality news sources are a dime a dozen, and the good news costs money. You have to be sophisticated enough to be able to differentiate news sources. For instance, as a WSJ subscriber, I'm not going to read the editorials. They're complete garbage in terms of factual content. The business page is gold. And this is very good. All the freeloaders who block ads and only use low-quality news will…

You should lobby your government to ban ads then.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#87

Post by egypturnash »

chrisseaton wrote: post #22
phkahler wrote: post #8

Not in CA, but our governor is deciding what must close, and even what items stores can sell. I suspect any news outlet (sans politics) would be desired to stay open. But you can't legislate everything.

> Not in CA, but our governor is deciding what must close, and even what items stores can sell. I suspect any news outlet (sans politics) would be desired to stay open. But you can't legislate everything. What are you referring to with 'Not in CA'? This is in California. I think you're confused about what's going on here, which is why you're being down-voted. This isn't about whether the LA Times is allowed to stay o…

I think the "Not in CA" sentence fragment is intended to be expanded to "I am not in California".

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#88

Post by StavrosK »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #56
thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…

Sweden has far fewer cases and death rate without a massive lockdown. If this disease is really so deadly, why isn’t their country being massively depopulated? Same for states in the US that haven’t implemented any lockdown measures.

Sweden: https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/covid19estimates/#/d...

Greece: https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/covid19estimates/#/d...

Where would you rather be?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#89

Post by pieix »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #56
thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…

Sweden has far fewer cases and death rate without a massive lockdown. If this disease is really so deadly, why isn’t their country being massively depopulated? Same for states in the US that haven’t implemented any lockdown measures.

The data I have seen does not corroborate this — in fact exactly the opposite.

According to [0] Sweden has 11,445 cases and 1,033 deaths (CFR: 9%) as of 6pm PT 4/14. For a population of 10.3 million [1], this is a confirmed infection rate of 0.11%.

According to [2] California has 23,338 cases and 758 deaths (CFR: 3.2%) as of 6pm PT 4/14. For a population of 39.5 million [3], this is a confirmed infection rate of 0.06%.

By all accounts, Sweden is being hit far harder by this virus than California or Sweden’s own neighbors are, and based on this evidence it is reasonable to infer that the distancing measures or lack thereof have an effect on transmission.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

[2] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#90

Post by volak »

majormajor wrote: post #75
nightstaywalki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. It seems to be forbidden to debate this unfortunately.

I see it brought up quite a bit on HN, and yet... very rarely with much rigor. It is often of this sort of "I feel that the economic costs will be worse than the human life costs" without any hard backing to explain that. Challenging the opinions of the people getting airtime is fine, but only if you've got the material to back you up. Otherwise it sounds just like wishful thinking.

Some quick research

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrl...

100,000 more drug overdoeses per 1% unemployment

Also https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-u...

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