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Comment by QUFB | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, CONEXPOAGG is on with 130,000 attendees:

https://twitter.com/LasVegasLocally/status/12371489198988369...

ADDED: The Houston Rodeo with a couple million attendees is also going ahead.

My anecdotal impression is that tech and tech adjacent events are canceling in significantly great numbers than non-tech. Part of the difference is probably that so many tech companies are telling employees not to attend large events, or even events at all, that even if a tech conference organizer wanted to go ahead, they'd lose half their attendees.

While not a universal (I see replies to that tweet about CONEXPOAGG that mention folks from Canada), I feel like tech conferences have an increased amount of international attendance -- definitely I expect a greater worldwide contingent at most tech conferences vs. the Houston rodeo. Imagine if this had gotten loose at CES...

There's probably truth to that. Certainly it was a factor in MWC canceling while there were still other events, including RSA, going forward as planned. (Some companies did pull out of RSA but it didn't reach the critical mass for the organizers to pull the plug on the event.)

I think the amount of international travel is huge part (the Houston rodeo might have 2M+ attendees, but I'll bet 90% of them are from Texas), but so are economics- It wouldn't suprise me if cancelling CONEXPOCONAGG or the Houston Rodeo would bankrupt the sponsoring organizations, whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events.

>whereas google won't even notice cancelling their events

That's something of an overstatement. Companies don't put these things on for fun. But, yeah, they'll manage. And, to a first approximation, all the other companies and individuals who were sponsoring/attending/etc. will manage too and relatively few individuals will be directly and personally out of pocket.

That said, there will be startups who were planning launches around the Google events, there will be indirect downstream effects on people who organize events, do professional speaking, etc.

Google doesn't exactly do it for fun, but I'm sure it isn't a significant source of revenue. Given that most corporate conferences are essentially about marketing, the incentive is to be break-even, or even run at a loss. That's very different than people trying to make a living from an event.

Yeah, obviously it's not an easy decision, but my definition of "won't even notice" is that it even if it's a $20M write off, it's like 0.06% of their 2019 net income. For a lot of independent events (like SWSX) canceling the event means losing most of their operating budget.

SXSW in Austin was recently cancelled and the organization is considering bankruptcy. They laid off 1/3 of their full-time staff due to the cancellation.

https://twitter.com/efindell/status/1237156566564048898?s=19 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-by-southwest-hit-hard-by-...

They won't be the last. There will be plenty of companies going under due to this.

Coachella is being delayed till October.

Source? Neither their website nor Twitter says so.

EDIT: Confirmed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/arts/music/coronavirus-co...

Unbelievable these events are going ahead. A number of travelers returning to Australia from the USA have contracted COVID19, indicating the disease is more widespread than admitted by the government.

The Formula 1 Grand Prix is going ahead in Australia this weekend, which is equally poor.

I always thought the majority of income for F1 is unrelated to the live visitors. and as such it should be fine to do it just without live publicum. ...

I wonder if I'm wrong about it or they are just too irresponsible to cancel the parts involving crowdes?

Irresponsible mostly. Bahrain has already said it plans to hold their Grand Prix in an empty grandstand.

I do think the host tracks would prefer to have a full Grand Stand, due to ticket sales, but I'm not sure how much it would affect F1 as a whole.

Sadly, there seems to be a sense of invincibility almost towards the virus in Western Countries until all of a sudden it arrives and you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of cases.

One non-tech even that was cancelled: Arnold Fitness Expo (Columbus, OH)

This is the dumbest tweet I read today.

>Take THAT, coronavirus! :P

It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods.

Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months, Independent reports Trump admin may be considering declaring a Nationwide state of emergency...I'm losing track of all the clear, obvious evidence of imminently approaching danger from literally all over the world.

> It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming. The vast majority of regular Joes still don't care and think I'm crazy for simply telling them to be responsible and buy some non perishable goods.

Because you have a lot of so-called authority figures (in the USofA at least) telling people it's all under control.

At what point will the lies become criminal?

Have officials in the US ever been prosecuted for telling voters lies that they want to hear in order to validate their own delusions?

We can draw a meandering line from this tweet back through at least 2000, when a US presidential candidate dismissed his opponent's quantitative reasoning about climate change as "fuzzy math".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_math_(politics)

[flagged]

> Meanwhile Mecca is shut down, Italy instituted a Nationwide lockdown overnight, UK hospitals are running out of capacity, China shut down it's entire industry for two months

Those countries are not American. They are reacting reasonably to a virus that has 20x the mortality rate of the flu, with no known vaccine.

Italy is reacting to overflown hospitals unable to deal with crises.

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're making a lot of inflammatory statements without providing any references to support your claims. Fearmongering does not benefit anyone.

It's all over the internet at this point. Major outlets are reporting on it. Why the hell do you think the stock market tanked into recession territory? They're already calling it "Black Monday" in the news.

Why would I bother continuing to post references when I only have downvotes to look forward to for my effort? Spend two minutes on Google. Do you know how many billions of dollars have been already lost to cancelled events? SXSW was cancelled. Japan has been talking about postponing the Olympics for months. What more do you need spoon-fed?

It's not like you even need to do anything drastic! Just stock up on some non perishables and be prepared to stay home for a while if you can. That's literally all a responsible adult needs to be doing right now.

But whatever. I'm not taking this personally. Everything will be clear in the next 1-4 weeks. We're lagging behind European countries by 10-20 days, and like a typical epidemic the growth is exponential. Things are about to get interesting locally. I certainly hope I'm wrong but the constant trickle of literature out of China since early January (in legit journals like Lancet and PubMed) paints a very dire picture.

> Why the hell do you think the stock market tanked into recession territory? They're already calling it "Black Monday" in the news.

There was a small matter of oil prices dipping as a result of negotiations breaking down between Saudi Arabia and Russia, which may have played a minor role in Monday’s events.

I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but there was more to the events on Monday than a virus.

Why would a stock market tank because of low fuel price?

Insolvency for US producers, followed by cascading loan failures.

Go here and click on your country: https://studylib.net/coronavirus

Then click on Italy. 2 weeks ago they had 320 cases. Compare that to your country now. Look at the trend line for your country.

I’ve yet to hear someone explain to me how most countries won’t end up like Italy. The ones that stand out are Korea and China, but nobody seems to be taking the same action as them.

It seems pretty clear at this point that there's not going to be a shortage of nonperishable goods. Everywhere that's been hit by coronavirus, food's still available and stores are still open - the only severe shortage so far has been ICU beds. People seem more receptive (although still not universally receptive) to more helpful advice like "start washing your hands a lot more" or "don't go to any big events".

If there is an outbreak, you want to avoid going to places like stores - not just for yourself but to minimize your chances of contracting the virus and exposing others. It's the socially responsible thing to do.

I get almost all of my non-perishable items with Amazon and Amazon Fresh (left at my door without human interaction).

Not sure how much safer that is, but I imagine it's less exposure in total, if I'm careful about hand-washing.

Delivered by a robot? or minimum wage coughing worker?

It's about risk mitigation. It's not 100% guaranteed physically impossible to pick up the virus from a delivery package, but it's a very low risk, much lower than other infection vectors most people will be exposed to. Unless you're planning to hermetically seal yourself into your home for the next 8 weeks, the risk is probably so low it's not worth thinking about.

>Unless you're planning to hermetically seal yourself into your home for the next 8 weeks

Way ahead of you

Minimum wage coughing worker. I'm just figuring it's lower risk than going to a store with numerous coughing/breathing customers and employees everywhere. I believe the risk is higher when you're directly exposed to another person, compared to the virus being on an object's surface.

The issue isn't food shortages.

It's that you should have enough to not go out and expose others if you get sick.

And inversely, if you're well, fewer trips out to common spaces where exposure is possible.

> It's really hard at this point not to feel like people deserve what's coming.

Please try harder. The people most harmed by this will not be the people making the dumb decisions. It'll be the people they infect. And of course their loved ones, some of whom will soon be watching caskets get lowered into the earth.

Read somewhere that funeral services are banned in Italy. Didn't see any exception for household relatives.

Wow. That's even worse!

> UK hospitals are running out of capacity.

What’s your source for this statement?

The UK was in that situation before the virus.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/25/hospital-be...

Thanks, that’s a helpful link.

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