While it is true that a 9-11/day is a high rate of death I feel compelled to point out that 9-11 only happened once.
This seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.
I think the 2020 experience has taught us a bit more about people. 9/11 was horrifying and traumatising, but perhaps less because of the death toll (3000) and more because you could see footage of those people dying, played over and over. Sure, 3000+ people died of Covid yesterday, but they all did it out of sight. So it’s possible for some people to dismiss it for any number of reasons - statistics aren’t accurate, those people had other underlying health issues, they would have died of the flu anyway. Most of all, we only see the statistic. We don’t have to actually watch someone die because the virus prevented them from breathing, far away from their family.
Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it.
We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.
Yes, the worst hit areas (Northern Italy, Belgium, Czech Republic) usually get to doubling the usual death rate. So, there is still room to grow. US is much larger and more diverse though so you would have to have a massive surge in all states at once
Here in Belgium tipping is not really conventional, except in higher echelons of society. Some people do give tips sometimes. Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees. (a girl from the middle east working in the kitchen of a bar here in Belgium told me thats how they do it)
> Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees
That, probably, is restaurant specific. Some places pool the tips and the kitchen staff is also part of the pot in other places the server gets to keep the tips.
The American model of tipping (like 20% essentially mandatory) really annoys me. I say that as a person who usually tips quite generously, but it's really not my business as a paying patron to be responsible for the staff salaries.
Raise the damn prices already and let a tip really be a tip.
I don't tip more than a few dollars unless the server did something well or was especially nice. Seems like many servers these days just expect the 20% bonus just for taking an order and carrying food around, regardless of attitude
What I really dislike about the American model of tipping is exactly that: it's basically mandatory. If you don't tip (or tip below the "socially acceptable" for a good service) you are the asshole. Not only that, it's deceiving, I had to always do mental arithmetic to figure out how much things really cost in the end, or be side-eyed by service people when I didn't know better.
And I'm not even including the perverse incentives of constant bajulation of the customer, the fake happiness and cheery attitude ground me quite a bit after the third or fourth restaurant...
I don't need that, I need a menu, someone who can see when I want to order, bring my food and drinks and let me be and enjoy my meal. The constant pestering by waiters if I wanted something else, if I was ready for this or that, it just made me feel like part of some machine to extract as much revenue as possible in the least time.
I ate in quite a few places in the US, from street food vendors to high-end restaurants and I have to say I barely enjoyed most of the experiences, it's just too much.
Culturally, tipping is supposed to be additional compensation for emotional labor.
If you work a job where you you're expected to put on a smile and maybe banter with the customer, even though your dog just died this morning, you might qualify for a tip. If your job allows you to frown occasionally, you don't.
It seems to me, that the problem lies with understanding. You can watch 300 chart and do not understand anything, though, you understand watching people dying. It's not emoution or visual, it's understanding. People don't jump into a hole they know it can kill them, but they will walk into a mortal gas room without noticing, because they don't know it. So yes, there is a huge lack of education and relevant information in society
It is tempting to call this understanding because people switched their mind to the position that the data points to, but I doubt there is any real understanding going on. Their sense of reality was warped by things they saw on repeat in the media that disproportionally highlighted certain outlier examples. This is not an environment where solid understanding happens and good decisions get made. For some it will be a call to action to look at the real data. But I think most people will simply be emotionally manipulated by the cherry-picking and lies of omission. Such people are uneasy allies to reality. They are doing the right things for the wrong reasons. When underlying circumstances change their 'understanding' will fail to course correct and they will again need to be shown what to think. And the media coverage waning will directly correspond to their 'understanding' of the severity waning as well.
So, sarcastic idea here, though I could see it happen in this crazy world: people changing their mind about the pandemic after watching a new, daily blockbuster reality show that follows a family who attracted the virus, and seeing them go through the agony of some of their family members not surviving. Why watch actors somewhere else instead. I don't expect to see this on ABC or NBC, but some of the B-list cable channels would certainly jump on the chance to buy the rights on this one.
If you watch the full video, it's clear that he wasn't suffocated by the police but was experiencing a drug overdose. Doesnt mean the police did the right thing, but he was resisting arrest.
Why do you think video media networks get cult-like following over radio or print (in that order).
Radio and video you can elicit emotion. Video, more-so. Ever listen to Tucker Carlson? His voice is almost hypnotic and he feels like a friend, one I'd love to punch, esp. for making me think that.
Limbaugh? His voice probably makes some people trust him, or build a rapport with him.
It's all about psychology, just an observation I've had recently. I find if you try to listen to news without 'clinging to personalities' and 'personal biases' (not an easy task), you can get more 'facts', than 'opinion'. Sticking to print media from trusted publications is another way, but then - 'trusted by who' leftists, rightists, centrists?
I'd love to see a media network that's all round table discussions - but you've got like TYT vs FOX vs CNN vs MSNBC hosts on each round-table. At least you get ALL view points, opposed to one.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 total deaths of covid. And they experienced positive economic growth this year. Meanwhile in the USA I think wealthy people were worried that these measures would harm the economy so we let states and counties all decide on their own how to handle things. And the issue of mask wearing became weirdly politicized.
And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message.
Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities?
I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.
US politics has become so tribal that it's pulling new issues in. Anything that makes it into the media will accordingly have two opposing stances on it.
I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
Could it be anything other than the internet? Social media, YouTube, ease of publishing, etc. Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
>Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse.
Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
I'm not American so I overlooked the US-specific question in my response. Things seem more divided in Australia too. We also have social media...
A lot of what you have raised are topics/movements/messages pushed/strengthened via social media, easier publishing, etc. I didn't raise social media to blame Google; I was thinking of what these tools enable alongside the cooking blogs and DIY videos.
OK. I was specifically talking about US politics. Although now that I think about it, a lot of what I mentioned could also be traced back to 9/11 - calling Obama a crypto-muslim wouldn't have been a valid way of spreading FUD about his intentions otherwise. There is also apparently something of a global right-wing/right-populist movement underway. I don't know about Australia, though.
As far as social media goes, I see it as a catalyst - it doesn't create the problems but it does help their effect spread. Deplatforming and regulation of social media might help stop the spread (although I support the former and not the latter) but we still as a society have to address the underlying issues. Something like QAnon doesn't take off simply because it's a viral meme, but because it resonates with people's existing fears and beliefs.
I don't believe that's the question that drives the US. The question that drives the US seems to be "how little money can we spend on the rest of society while still maintaining our own billions"?
Consider the quote: "Give me liberty or give me death"
Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
>Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive, pawns in chess games played with human lives by the elite powers. Even the American Revolution was for the most part a tax revolt by the wealthy against the British Crown.
And none of those wars have been against the tyranny of medicine and science. Benjamin Franklin, the man responsible for the famous (and almost universally misapplied) quote about those who trade a little freedom for security deserving neither, lost his son to one of the many smallpox outbreaks in the early US. In his autobiography, he mentions bitterly regretting not having given his son the smallpox vaccine[0]. He did not once declare that affording his son the "liberty" of dying from smallpox was worth the sacrifice versus the "temporary safety" of vaccination - and this was during a time when vaccination was new, still controversial, and much less safe than now. Rather, he became a passionate advocate for vaccination and public health.
So believe what you like, but the Founding Fathers very likely would not have been on the side of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers or their form of liberty.
>Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive
I don't think you've spent much time with US military types if you believe this to be the case. Willingness to die for a country or cause was even more prevalent in the past than it is now.
I agree the Founding Fathers would very likely not have been on the side of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, they were generally intellectual and on the side of science. However I'm not so sure about the lockdowns, they would almost certainly oppose giving the federal gov. the power to issue a lockdown but may have been okay with local lockdowns.
>However I'm not so sure about the lockdowns, they would almost certainly oppose giving the federal gov. the power to issue a lockdown but may have been okay with local lockdowns.
They would probably be split on that, but also would probably agree that lockdowns in some form were not unreasonable, so long as they were temporary and based on sound science.
If Trump had said "I'M DECLARING WAR ON COVID!! Lockdown is necessary, WEAR YOUR FREEDOM MASK WE WILL WIN!" what would have been the outcome?
I am fairly certain there wouldn't be any of this hand-wringing about "tradeoffs" between rights and liberty.
Deficits only matter when the other party is in charge, elections are only fraudulent when we lose, and science is a hoax when conclusions don't support what we wanted to do anyway.
My main fear is this: Reality may have a "well-known bias" but it also has the benefit of being true and backed by the physical laws of the universe. Eventually reality catches up. We are damn lucky that COVID wasn't much worse.
We're also very lucky Trump is not a great policy maker and surrounds himself with sycophants and loyalists rather than ruthless movers and shakers. But he laid down the template and I have no doubt would-be dictators and evil people in both parties are salivating at the prospect of replicating his methods but with much more competence. That is extremely dangerous and something we should all be very afraid of. And I really mean the threat is coming from both directions. Republicans have certainly proven they have no principles, but imagine a populist Democrat cut from the Trump cloth with a dash of competent leadership who decides term-limits are for suckers?
I remember in the 90s when Republicans were all about winning people over with their ideas and actually championed making it easier to vote because if you have good ideas and policies why would you be afraid? You should be able to win hearts and minds. Who knew we'd end up here? One of the many reasons I left the party.
I think that's an eternal discussion, and relates directly to COVID via things like lockdowns. The politicisation of masks though just strikes me as incredible. Wear a mask, sanitise, etc and freely continue some semblance of your regular life while catering for the well-being of all around you - surely that's a reasonable balance?
As I recall, Vietnam completely missed a hospital outbreak in a major tourist destination (having restarted internal tourism some time earlier) until someone who'd visited a patient at the hospital with no other plausible source of infection happened to get tested and came back positive. And then covered up that, their first detected case in a good while, for about a week whilst they searched for ways to blame it on foreigners and failed. Western countries tend to have pretty heavy testing in and around hospitals because they know how bad Covid getting in could be.
Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. I have seen a handful of posts on Reddit from hospital employees who have been told to put Covid as the cause of death if the person tests positive but I won't link them here as they are not as verifiable.
From FactCheck.org's article: [1]
> “If we think it’s presumptive … we can go ahead and put down COVID-19,” Jensen said, “or even in some situations, even if it’s negative.” He pointed to the example of a 38-year-old man in Minnesota whose death was attributed to the coronavirus even though he tested negative.
There are direct financial incentives to list a person who has Covid as deceased by Covid.
> "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."
Funny I have friends "on both sides of this issue" so I went out and did the common sense thing of adding up the CDC deaths, subtracting the baseline average deaths and noticing that the difference between 2020 and previous years is pretty much exactly the number of deaths the CDC attributes to Covid. You don't need to be an expert to do that.
That doesn't explain why more people in general are dying.
Like, if you look at the number of people who died in the past week in the USA, and compare to the number who died during the same period last year, the first number is much more bigger than the second one.
Financial incentives might skew the numbers, but that's why statisticians look at multiple sources of data.
It’s exposed a fundamental flaw in US culture. Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves.
Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others.
Yeah, there's a lot of charity in the US. Which is then often used as an argument for low taxes, so it may be a net loss. But people here do get to tout their individual donations a lot.
> Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves.
While it's true USA'ians are probably more individualistic than many other cultures and that may translate some way even to selfishness, the above quote is a gross, incorrect and offensive description, and I'm a brit.
Maybe a deeper issue is that people don't think of it as protecting themselves.
When the pandemic first got started in China and my Chinese friends started buying particle filter masks en masse, it did not feel like they were doing it for the benefit of others. Same with individual municipalities setting up road blocks or requiring quarantine for travelers from other parts of the country. They were just selfishly trying to keep the virus away.
In contrast to that, once the pandemic reached Germany, I assumed the government would handle it somehow. Turns out a large part of the government response is just telling people to behave as if they were trying really hard not to get infected.
I was also going to comment on how individualism plays in this and US culture. It also doesn't help that the visible "leader" of the US happens to be an extreme narcissist. Due to trickle down culture, behaviors, and attitudes things are getting worse. I'm see the following becoming the motto across a large segment of the population: "Rules (laws) for thee, not for me." Which follows the idea of tribalism and the hidden and unconscious idea of the ingroup and outgroup and that government and laws exist to protect the ingroup from the outgroup. I have had less liberal ideas most my life. I have recently come to say "eff it, climate change whether real or not (I think it's real)and regardless of whether we humans can do anything about it or not (the forces of the universe may still be greater than we can handle and out of our control, we can either come together and take on/fight nature, or we can continue to form tribes and fight each other." Humans seem to need an enemy or something to fight and resist. Let's restore the environment. Yes, there will always be humans who want power, money, and control. Not sure what the best solution is to address that.
I'd suggest that it's the other way around. He doesn't just "happen" to be an extreme narcissist. It's why he was chosen. It trickles up, rather than down.
Is this so very exclusive to the US? Trump takes the biggest spotlight, but there's plenty of trouble in South America, is there not? Europe has generally been a bit luckier, but not by a whole lot, and certainly not Italy, and they're also getting quite nervous again now. But yeah, it seems some Asian countries have done a substantially better job. Yey for South Korea.
I'm not saying the US doesn't have the worst numbers, but just that there's still a lot of mismanagement and denial in the rest of the world too.
It isn't. The mainstream American media has been actively misleading the public there about how the rest of the world (including Europe) is doing and how it compares to the US for openly partisan political reasons, especially for example the New York Times.
Two party states lead to tribalism.
The party that wasn't in power at the time was the first to talk about containing it, and that led the other party to practically be against containing it.
Such is how U.S.A. political issues tend to be decided.
How racist do you have to be to equate people in Chinatown with the virus? At a time when there were less than 10 cases in the US, the risk of visiting Chinatown was minimal.
And it's curious that you focus on Chinatown in February instead of 300 days of minimising mask wearing and calling for LIBERATING states from coronavirus restrictions.
Yes, I was obviously being racist instead of talking about decreasing the amount of people going out to restaurants and other public places, which is the main focus of the current containment measures all around the Western world.
And if you think that one set of containment measures is better than another (masks vs shutting down travel vs closing down public places), then that's a separate discussion to OP's comment who clearly stated that one political party tried to contain it while the other one did not, which is complete tribal nonsense.
Shutting down flights from China was for show. The virus was already spreading inside the US, and infected people continued to fly in from Europe. Trump's brand is being tough on borders, so he shut down travel from China, declared victory, and then did nothing.
Months later, after nearly 300k confirmed deaths, Trump still boasts about closing down travel from China - one minimally impactful measure he took early on.
Here's what real containment would have been in late January and early February: ramping up testing and contact tracing as quickly as possible, maybe even locking down cities and grounding flights. That might have been politically impossible back then, but Trump wasn't pushing in that direction at all. He was worried about reassuring the markets.
As an Australian it has been extraordinary to witness the end of the American hegemony in this particular way. The pandemic was not a black swan by any means, the American response to it was.
My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that.
America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.
While it may look like that, I wonder how much of it comes from the leadership and how much from "average US person" behaviour. Thought exercise: how different do you think the collective US behaviour would be if every state (our county) leader was replaced with a Dan Andrews clone, ignoring how he'd get elected? (I don't have an answer, I can imagine many paths)
Yea I recon that matters a lot. But here, even the Lib run states generally had a decent response, with a bit of a 'fuck-off' to Morrison when he started his predictable bullshit. And as a rule, Australian's sense of civic duty carried the day, not so with Americans - as far as I can tell through the media lens anyway.
It's cute to frame the death toll discrepancy in terms of national character, with Americans who don't even _believe in science_ coughing on everybody as their scooters whirr merrily to the nearest hamburger depository, but at the end of the day, most Americans and Australians were killed by the same thing: their precarious positions in society.
It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security.
Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.
Huh? So Americans were killed because of privatisation, casual work and wealth gap, but Australia also has these and the results were different? I’m not quite following your point.
However, in defense of US citizens, the truth was always IMO this one: «You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else -- Winston Churchill»
The terrorist attack was an act of murder - controlled, planned, deliberate, malicious, vindictive. The other is a normal natural occurrence that has been happening since cellular life began and every living thing lives with. And just because the consequences of either can be described with numbers, doesn't mean they can be compared.
You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value.
Refusing to do even the simplest of measures - like requiring masks - turns a disease into murder. Heck, we've used disease as agents of terror and murder. Smallpox blankets, anyone?
I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human.
These things can be compared, even without using numbers.
But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.
Even more disturbing is that people outright refuse to take a look at numbers to check what measures actually did.
Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.
They were indeed used earlier than that (see links), but we don't know if they actually spread smallpox (since the virus was old and the tribes were already experiencing smallpox). Just because we know one instance was false doesn't rule things out. Who knows what we have lost to time.
Natural part of being human is getting hungry, or having to go to toilet, or sleeping, etc. You don't get punished for any those - it doesn't make sense to do so. Murdering ourselves for this and that reason is not part of the daily routine and one can't just decide to go an murder rampage, because
- "meh, it's just that time of the day."
Murders do happen, it's a thing, but that doesn't make them normal.
Your smallpox example it's as sensationalist as the stupid article. Everything around us can be turned into a weapon. One can murder another with a rock. Are rocks deadly now? Do we need to ban fire, because it can be used in incendiary bombs to level down cities?
Compare this pandemic to other pandemics. What about this is so hard to comprehend? Don't compare it to states of war, because that is stupid. I know it's clickbaity and such an irresistible lure for easily influenced people that bite on anything without giving it an ounce of though, but it's so trivial to catch it.
Other pandemics, like.. H1N1?
Or maybe you were thinking about smallpox, polio, measels, and the like? You know, when we would enforce quarantine?
Or the 1918 flu outbreak, which was worse because of non-reporting on the American side and also had anti-maskers (though, I think quarantine was actually enforced).
If you are talking about deaths, it is natural to compare it to other high-death abnormalities. War and pandemics are the easiest to compare absolute death numbers, and helpful for pointing out people's inconsistencies - like caring for 3k deaths in a day when it is an act of violence, but not caring if it is disease. Change things for the folks for 9/11, but not for continuing deaths - some of which are preventable. I'll go right ahead and compare.
Yeah, other pandemics. Finally some progress. You even got a good example with the Spanish flu. It was utterly terrifying, considering that it wiped between 1% and 6% of the global population in a sparsely populated world where nobody could easily travel anywhere they wished at any time - vastly different from today's world, which is ideal for an infectious disease.
9/11 was direct act of violence against the US, of course people will take that more personally than something that not only is a whole separate kingdom from the one we're in, but it doesn't even qualify as a living thing. Had it been proved to be used as a weapon and the pandemic - a deliberate attack, people everywhere would take it so personally and dearly that nuclear weapons would be casually flying every day since March.
Therefore, 9/11 and the weaponized germs stuff you linked just doesn't make sense in our context. Go make another thread dedicated to weaponization of stuff, you can even include k-t extinction event as well for color, sky is the limit.
Deliberate murder is common in nature as well, down to cellular level. If you want to classify failing to fight an infection as natural behaviour, I'm not sure why murder wouldn't be as well. This is not a great logic.
My post is about the ridiculousness of comparing pandemic to an act of aggression. I made no comments on the measures being taken. Please, invest an effort into reading and comprehension. Following the logic of the article, i can dismiss the severity of this exact pandemic, because WW2 nets much more casualties than COVID.
Then if you want to classify deliberate murder as something natural, i can come and simply murder you and it will be perfectly OK. And as viruses have killed more people than the sum of all wars and homicides, it will be literally of no relevance to anyone.
I don't know how long you've been living on this planet, but not knowing the difference between being murdered by someone who shot you and dying from a disease speaks of immaturity i can't do nothing about.
The problem is with the response. The way I see it, it’s a moral spectrum. You can trade the diseased blankets, be nonchalant about a spreading disease, or spend some effort reducing infection. The US is taking the middle path and its resulting in 100’s of thousands more deaths than the third path would (as observed from a country that took the third path and has nearly zero infections now, and comparable economic consequences to the US).
No it’s not the murder of Al Qaeda but I feel that it’s negligence (of leadership) that leads to death.
The problem with the response is its own problem. Comparing two incomparable things is the object of my post and no sane logic can deny that.
Compare the negligence that allowed terror to flourish and eventually lead to the global War or terror to happen to the same negligence that allowed WW2 to happen.
Compare the response to COVID to the response to other similar pandemics.
3k Americans died, we all know what that means. It's time to invade some unfortunate oil producing country and kill 200k of its population. Maybe Scotland? Or Brasil?
Not all countries react poorly, some even reacts pretty well, so that's not an attribute of our species. If anything, that's more an attribute of the maturity of a society.
I think what's outrageous is that the deaths per capita from COVID in that one day in US is comparable to total COVID deaths per capita in some countries.
US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009%
Ok, you may argue that the numbers may be fake, but is there any reason to believe that the ones for the countries you cited are any better? Anyways, even if the numbers are off, there is no denying that China is doing much better than others.
Side note: I think by SK you mean Sri Lanka (LK), not Solvenia. Slovenia has a global death rate of 0.02%. Relatively good for Europe, but not particularly remarkable.
The same could be said about many European countries. Singling out the US seems to be motivated by a desire to affirm a particular political narrative that favors mandated subordination to the state.
The arguments for number of death seem to always miss an important part: quality of death. One cannot ignore the difference between dying in a hospital bed, most likely next to loved ones and under some kind of drug to alleviate as much pain as possible, vs being burnt alive next to others burning alive or jumping off a building "on purpose" to avoid the said fiery death.
Coronavirus victims tend to be much older, and generally closer to the natural end of their life. Every day thousands in the same demographic die from cancer and heart disease too.
In the first wave we saw that covid was taking people on average 12 years before they would have died otherwise, and most of them needed no assistance in their day to day living before they were hospitalised and died.
That's not the frail cohort you're making them out to be.
And that was only true of the first wave. The second wave is seeing death in younger people.
I don't know about the US statistics, but the average age of death of coronavirus victims in the UK and Italy was 79. Deliberately not mentioning that amounts to fearmongering, no matter how noble the intentions.
I haven't seen any evidence that the infection fatality rate for younger demographics is higher for the second wave. Do you have any raw statistics to back that up?
Looks like that dovetail pretty well with gp's point - people loose 10 year or so of their expected life span (or a little over one tenth of their time on this earth) - if I put in 79 and male here, I get an average expectancy of 90:
Yeah, too many people, for some reason, don’t understand that “Life expectancy at age N” is not at all the same, in general, as “Life expectancy at birth minus N”.
Does that account for the high rates of co-morbidities associated with coronavirus deaths? I remember reading that 99% of Italian victims had co-morbidities.
In any case, I wouldn't doubt that the victims had their lives cut short by several years. The same could be said about other illnesses where most fatal cases are among the elderly, e.g. if the typical elderly victim of cancer hadn't contracted it, they would likely have lived for several more years.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadThis seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.
Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it.
We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.
You often only tip if you see the person. If you don't see them(e.g. line cook), you don't tip. Such a strange way of compensating people.
That, probably, is restaurant specific. Some places pool the tips and the kitchen staff is also part of the pot in other places the server gets to keep the tips.
The American model of tipping (like 20% essentially mandatory) really annoys me. I say that as a person who usually tips quite generously, but it's really not my business as a paying patron to be responsible for the staff salaries.
Raise the damn prices already and let a tip really be a tip.
And I'm not even including the perverse incentives of constant bajulation of the customer, the fake happiness and cheery attitude ground me quite a bit after the third or fourth restaurant...
I don't need that, I need a menu, someone who can see when I want to order, bring my food and drinks and let me be and enjoy my meal. The constant pestering by waiters if I wanted something else, if I was ready for this or that, it just made me feel like part of some machine to extract as much revenue as possible in the least time.
I ate in quite a few places in the US, from street food vendors to high-end restaurants and I have to say I barely enjoyed most of the experiences, it's just too much.
If you work a job where you you're expected to put on a smile and maybe banter with the customer, even though your dog just died this morning, you might qualify for a tip. If your job allows you to frown occasionally, you don't.
Radio and video you can elicit emotion. Video, more-so. Ever listen to Tucker Carlson? His voice is almost hypnotic and he feels like a friend, one I'd love to punch, esp. for making me think that.
Limbaugh? His voice probably makes some people trust him, or build a rapport with him.
It's all about psychology, just an observation I've had recently. I find if you try to listen to news without 'clinging to personalities' and 'personal biases' (not an easy task), you can get more 'facts', than 'opinion'. Sticking to print media from trusted publications is another way, but then - 'trusted by who' leftists, rightists, centrists?
I'd love to see a media network that's all round table discussions - but you've got like TYT vs FOX vs CNN vs MSNBC hosts on each round-table. At least you get ALL view points, opposed to one.
And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message.
Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities?
I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.
I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse.
Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
A lot of what you have raised are topics/movements/messages pushed/strengthened via social media, easier publishing, etc. I didn't raise social media to blame Google; I was thinking of what these tools enable alongside the cooking blogs and DIY videos.
As far as social media goes, I see it as a catalyst - it doesn't create the problems but it does help their effect spread. Deplatforming and regulation of social media might help stop the spread (although I support the former and not the latter) but we still as a society have to address the underlying issues. Something like QAnon doesn't take off simply because it's a viral meme, but because it resonates with people's existing fears and beliefs.
Not 2020, surprisingly. 1918. Idiots have been getting upset about mask mandates for a while.
What's the correct tradeoff between an individual's right to life/liberty vs. well-being of the whole/society?
People fall on different sides of that tradeoff all the time, and that question is at the core of almost all political disagreements.
Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive, pawns in chess games played with human lives by the elite powers. Even the American Revolution was for the most part a tax revolt by the wealthy against the British Crown.
And none of those wars have been against the tyranny of medicine and science. Benjamin Franklin, the man responsible for the famous (and almost universally misapplied) quote about those who trade a little freedom for security deserving neither, lost his son to one of the many smallpox outbreaks in the early US. In his autobiography, he mentions bitterly regretting not having given his son the smallpox vaccine[0]. He did not once declare that affording his son the "liberty" of dying from smallpox was worth the sacrifice versus the "temporary safety" of vaccination - and this was during a time when vaccination was new, still controversial, and much less safe than now. Rather, he became a passionate advocate for vaccination and public health.
So believe what you like, but the Founding Fathers very likely would not have been on the side of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers or their form of liberty.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/
I don't think you've spent much time with US military types if you believe this to be the case. Willingness to die for a country or cause was even more prevalent in the past than it is now.
I agree the Founding Fathers would very likely not have been on the side of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, they were generally intellectual and on the side of science. However I'm not so sure about the lockdowns, they would almost certainly oppose giving the federal gov. the power to issue a lockdown but may have been okay with local lockdowns.
They would probably be split on that, but also would probably agree that lockdowns in some form were not unreasonable, so long as they were temporary and based on sound science.
I am fairly certain there wouldn't be any of this hand-wringing about "tradeoffs" between rights and liberty.
Deficits only matter when the other party is in charge, elections are only fraudulent when we lose, and science is a hoax when conclusions don't support what we wanted to do anyway.
My main fear is this: Reality may have a "well-known bias" but it also has the benefit of being true and backed by the physical laws of the universe. Eventually reality catches up. We are damn lucky that COVID wasn't much worse.
We're also very lucky Trump is not a great policy maker and surrounds himself with sycophants and loyalists rather than ruthless movers and shakers. But he laid down the template and I have no doubt would-be dictators and evil people in both parties are salivating at the prospect of replicating his methods but with much more competence. That is extremely dangerous and something we should all be very afraid of. And I really mean the threat is coming from both directions. Republicans have certainly proven they have no principles, but imagine a populist Democrat cut from the Trump cloth with a dash of competent leadership who decides term-limits are for suckers?
I remember in the 90s when Republicans were all about winning people over with their ideas and actually championed making it easier to vote because if you have good ideas and policies why would you be afraid? You should be able to win hearts and minds. Who knew we'd end up here? One of the many reasons I left the party.
From FactCheck.org's article: [1]
> “If we think it’s presumptive … we can go ahead and put down COVID-19,” Jensen said, “or even in some situations, even if it’s negative.” He pointed to the example of a 38-year-old man in Minnesota whose death was attributed to the coronavirus even though he tested negative.
There are direct financial incentives to list a person who has Covid as deceased by Covid.
[1] - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...
> "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
such nonsense
Like, if you look at the number of people who died in the past week in the USA, and compare to the number who died during the same period last year, the first number is much more bigger than the second one.
Financial incentives might skew the numbers, but that's why statisticians look at multiple sources of data.
The above would be the Truth, if only someone on HN had the balls not to fight it to death.
BTW: this headline will become very popular soon:
+ + + RIP MSM. Cause of death: the TRUTH + + +
From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'
Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
Lol, what a crock of shit. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou...
The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others.
Individualist != selfish.
While it's true USA'ians are probably more individualistic than many other cultures and that may translate some way even to selfishness, the above quote is a gross, incorrect and offensive description, and I'm a brit.
Please don't broadbrush entire cultures.
When the pandemic first got started in China and my Chinese friends started buying particle filter masks en masse, it did not feel like they were doing it for the benefit of others. Same with individual municipalities setting up road blocks or requiring quarantine for travelers from other parts of the country. They were just selfishly trying to keep the virus away.
In contrast to that, once the pandemic reached Germany, I assumed the government would handle it somehow. Turns out a large part of the government response is just telling people to behave as if they were trying really hard not to get infected.
A lot of the things the Chinese government did was only possible because they're not a democracy which has to answer to the courts
I'm not saying the US doesn't have the worst numbers, but just that there's still a lot of mismanagement and denial in the rest of the world too.
Such is how U.S.A. political issues tend to be decided.
Pelosi was encouraging people to go out and visit Chinatown in February, while Trump was talking about shutting down travel from China in January.
Which one of those approaches sounds like containment to you?
And it's curious that you focus on Chinatown in February instead of 300 days of minimising mask wearing and calling for LIBERATING states from coronavirus restrictions.
And if you think that one set of containment measures is better than another (masks vs shutting down travel vs closing down public places), then that's a separate discussion to OP's comment who clearly stated that one political party tried to contain it while the other one did not, which is complete tribal nonsense.
PS - you should apologize for the racism comment.
Shutting down flights from China was for show. The virus was already spreading inside the US, and infected people continued to fly in from Europe. Trump's brand is being tough on borders, so he shut down travel from China, declared victory, and then did nothing.
Months later, after nearly 300k confirmed deaths, Trump still boasts about closing down travel from China - one minimally impactful measure he took early on.
Here's what real containment would have been in late January and early February: ramping up testing and contact tracing as quickly as possible, maybe even locking down cities and grounding flights. That might have been politically impossible back then, but Trump wasn't pushing in that direction at all. He was worried about reassuring the markets.
My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that.
America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.
It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security.
Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.
However, in defense of US citizens, the truth was always IMO this one: «You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else -- Winston Churchill»
There are other flavours that do better.
You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value.
Modern media is just... pathetic.
I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human.
These things can be compared, even without using numbers.
But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.
Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...
Murders do happen, it's a thing, but that doesn't make them normal.
Your smallpox example it's as sensationalist as the stupid article. Everything around us can be turned into a weapon. One can murder another with a rock. Are rocks deadly now? Do we need to ban fire, because it can be used in incendiary bombs to level down cities?
Compare this pandemic to other pandemics. What about this is so hard to comprehend? Don't compare it to states of war, because that is stupid. I know it's clickbaity and such an irresistible lure for easily influenced people that bite on anything without giving it an ounce of though, but it's so trivial to catch it.
Again - Compare this pandemic to other pandemics.
If you are talking about deaths, it is natural to compare it to other high-death abnormalities. War and pandemics are the easiest to compare absolute death numbers, and helpful for pointing out people's inconsistencies - like caring for 3k deaths in a day when it is an act of violence, but not caring if it is disease. Change things for the folks for 9/11, but not for continuing deaths - some of which are preventable. I'll go right ahead and compare.
Smallpox links: [1]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...
9/11 was direct act of violence against the US, of course people will take that more personally than something that not only is a whole separate kingdom from the one we're in, but it doesn't even qualify as a living thing. Had it been proved to be used as a weapon and the pandemic - a deliberate attack, people everywhere would take it so personally and dearly that nuclear weapons would be casually flying every day since March.
Therefore, 9/11 and the weaponized germs stuff you linked just doesn't make sense in our context. Go make another thread dedicated to weaponization of stuff, you can even include k-t extinction event as well for color, sky is the limit.
Then if you want to classify deliberate murder as something natural, i can come and simply murder you and it will be perfectly OK. And as viruses have killed more people than the sum of all wars and homicides, it will be literally of no relevance to anyone.
I don't know how long you've been living on this planet, but not knowing the difference between being murdered by someone who shot you and dying from a disease speaks of immaturity i can't do nothing about.
No it’s not the murder of Al Qaeda but I feel that it’s negligence (of leadership) that leads to death.
Compare the negligence that allowed terror to flourish and eventually lead to the global War or terror to happen to the same negligence that allowed WW2 to happen.
Compare the response to COVID to the response to other similar pandemics.
-- Diffuse vs. concentrated in who is affected
-- Slow and steady vs. acute and sudden
-- Apparently familiar / understood vs. unknown / frightening
Maybe this is just our vulnerability as a species, and takes inordinate amount of effort to fight against.
Confronting climate change falls into the same category of course.
US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009%
SK COVID deaths per capita: 0.001%
NZ COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%
SG COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%
TW COVID deaths per capita: 0.00002%
Vietnam: 35/95540000 = 0.00003%
Thailand: 60/69799978 = 0.00009%
China: 0.0003%
Ok, you may argue that the numbers may be fake, but is there any reason to believe that the ones for the countries you cited are any better? Anyways, even if the numbers are off, there is no denying that China is doing much better than others.
Side note: I think by SK you mean Sri Lanka (LK), not Solvenia. Slovenia has a global death rate of 0.02%. Relatively good for Europe, but not particularly remarkable.
That's not the frail cohort you're making them out to be.
And that was only true of the first wave. The second wave is seeing death in younger people.
I haven't seen any evidence that the infection fatality rate for younger demographics is higher for the second wave. Do you have any raw statistics to back that up?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
In any case, I wouldn't doubt that the victims had their lives cut short by several years. The same could be said about other illnesses where most fatal cases are among the elderly, e.g. if the typical elderly victim of cancer hadn't contracted it, they would likely have lived for several more years.