‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’ | Hacker News Reader

‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’

nytimes.com

250 pointsrbanffy343 comments

This is part of why I am not confident about any economic upside of us opening up.

We've had numerous meat processing plants close down or run at reduced capacity due to workforce illness and people refusing to work due to the concentration of COVID-19 cases.

And I think about how in the restaurant business how a rumor of someone catching food poisoning can kill your business... what's going to happen when a review lands on your Yelp/Google page that a customer took grandma to eat at your restaurant and 2 weeks later she died from COVID-19? Your reputation will be absolutely trashed.

Just seems like everyone is getting set up to fail... except for those who are already able to work comfortably from home.

The 'Back to work movement' just seems like a way to push people off of unemployment.

It seems really hard to imagine how that could be so. Why would random commentators or protesters care so passionately about unemployment budgets?

Here on HN somebody posted an analysis of the websites pushing these narratives. I recall it was two guys selling T-Shirts. They discovered the power of the meme, and align it with their business interests.

Random commentators and protestors don’t. Certain politicians do, and those politicians have done an outstanding job of convincing those random commentators and protestors that this situation is political one, bringing all of the fervor and zealotry that politics brings.

This situation went from being “we are staying inside to defeat the virus” to now “we refuse to stay inside (reopen) because that lets those evil democrats (Republicans) win, and I won’t ever allow that”.

To be clear, no one is asking to stay inside - everyone wants the economy reopened again. But, there's the sensible way and there's the stupid way. The latter method involves just going to back to the way things were and pretend the virus doesn't exist. That is untenable, and the smarter folk who think that a phased opening is a better approach are the ones being shouted down.

One of us is getting media bubbled here. I've seen a lot of people argue that they do not want the economy reopened and everyone should stay inside because it's not safe yet. Attempts to engage in a phased opening have produced headlines like "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice"[1], and major figures are still talking on Twitter about how "No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow."[2]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...

[2] https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1258184774486642688

I want to stay inside. Most people I know want to stay inside. The economy can limp along for the rest of this year just fine. The sensible way of re-opening involves not doing so now.

Texas is still gaining new cases and deaths at a high rate. Our curve is not flattening. And yet with one eye on the unemployment coffers, Governor Abbott is overriding the same local decision-makers he deferred to just weeks ago, and forcing business to re-open. Hair salons open tomorrow, while four of the six days of May so far have set new records for new COVID-19 cases.

Everyone I know who works retail jobs would rather be home. Some of them are being forced back, some have never been able to stop working. None of them are happy about it.

I agree. The beginning of this crisis really did hold promise of 'we are in this together'. And yet it quickly morphed into 'the other guys are out to get us'. I watching all this with genuine worry that things can easily spiral out of control.

They don’t. They’re stirred up by rich people through astroturf groups:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-prote...

Your thesis here is that the movement is made up and nobody actually agrees with it? I guess I don't know how to rigorously disprove that, but it strikes me as unlikely as well. The easiest way to stir people up is to tell them things they already believe! It seems naive to look at even a moderate sized protest and say "oh, nobody actually believes in this cause, it's astroturfed".

I believe that their is real discontent in the face of a deadly pandemic and massive unemployment, but also that rich people are harnessing that discontent to their own, cynical ends. These protests would not exist if we had UBI like Spain or a sane, well-managed response like Taiwan.

I dunno how much history you’ve read, but the rich cynically exploiting the masses to direct their anger away from themselves and towards their enemies or other scapegoats is hardly a novel development.

UBI can't solve this problem. UBI does absolutely nothing if there's nothing to buy because nobody is working. You can't UBI your way around meat plants closing, restaurants not being staffed, stores closing, and so on.

If anything, UBI encouraging more people to not work can only make it worse.

The whole premise of UBI is that there's such a surplus that the only sane thing to do with it is to distribute it. There is now no surplus, and indeed credible threats of shortages. Therefore, it is only logical that the rest of the argument is now invalid. Hopefully, only temporarily.

I said that there wouldn’t be protests like these with UBI or a response like Taiwan’s, not that it solves the problem. Only a working vaccine or wildly effective therapeutic solves this problem.

Giving people a social floor so they’re not going to be out on the street or dead while we work on those is a necessary and proven effective mitigation tactic, however.

What social floor? I don't think you are internalizing that people can't buy things that don't exist. Nobody is going to care how many "dollars" they have if they can't buy food. Nobody is going to feel safe or secure or comfortable. Nobody is going to feel safe or secure no matter how many dollars you throw at them if they visibly are doing worse. There will be protests if people can't buy food and if you try to literally throw dollars into those protest crowds you'll only enrage them more if there is no food to buy with them.

You can't solve these shortages with UBI, or indeed, any amount of money. There is no "social floor" if the economy doesn't function. The whole premise of UBI is broken here.

Yes. It is absolutely possible for you to go to the grocery store and for there to be nothing there. Millions of people have had this experience and you are not immune to it. The warning shots are already being fired. Take them seriously.

I actually don't expect it to progress to this point, but it'll because the people who actually understand this stuff opened up even over the objections of the HN gestalt. TBH even the HN gestalt ought to be getting more shaken then it seems to be; there's been an awful lot of big layoffs in our core going on, you'd think at some point there'd be a bit more concern about indefinite lockdowns. The gestalt is acting a great deal more secure than the evidence available to it justifies. I suppose we have the way the question of what should and should not be opened up going from a scientific/public health question to a political question to thank.

This. US has not seen empty shelves since great depression and I am not sure many Americans understand what it means to an 'average' person living here. I am going to throw in an anecdote here just to spice it up a little. A pawn store owner I am acquainted with bartered ammo for masks recently. UBI means nothing when value comes from things that people want.

We want to encourage people not to work; so much so that we have, as a matter of policy, made it illegal for them to work [0].

Everyone recognizes that some work is still necessary, which is why these bans make exclusions for "essential" work; so that we can continue to produce an adequate supply of essential goods.

The current discontent is not about supply shortages; it is about the segments of the population who are having difficulty accessing those supplies.

There is also the issue of rent/mortgage, which is closer to an issue of financial bookkeeping that real supply concerns (although, medium term, maintaince becomes an issue)

[0] More precisely, made the work that they would be doing illegal.

The whole point of it being universal is that UBI gives incentive to work on top of it for more while providing a maintenance floor for those unable to work while still providing some demand for the products which are still needed.

Things would be far more spartan with more of the population on UBI in a shutdown but they would be alive and their "self support" would be an outsized negative externality compared to what they generate.

I disagree. I think the protests would still exist if we had UBI like Spain - the reason Spain hasn't seen any protests is that their lockdown policies were so strict nobody could protest, and as they loosen up over the next few weeks I (falsifiably) expect to see some. If we had replicated Taiwan's results, sure, there'd be less to protest about.

The rich cynically exploiting the masses is definitely a known thing. But the right response to that can't be ignoring the masses.

No, the right response is social democratic floors and an effectively managed response, both of which impinge on the power and wealth of the American oligarchy. That’s the obstacle. To prevent confrontation with that obstacle, the rich direct anger away from themselves into unhinged fictions and scapegoats.

Again, not a new phenomena in American politics and life.

"the right response is to ignore the masses and follow my preferred social policies, because the only reason someone would disagree is if they've been taken in by corporate propaganda"

That's the only way I can really parse your statement.

What would it take for you to believe that a large fraction of people genuinely do not want the policies you support?

The masses aren’t militia cosplayers camped outside a Baskin Robbins. They’re retail workers, nurses, bus drivers, etc for whom social democratic policies poll at comfortable majorities. And they’re writing op-eds asking not to be sacrificed for the sake of the economy.

What do you think it would take for you to realize this?

I notice a distinct lack of "construction workers", "farmers", "truck drivers" and the like in your list. Also generally regarded as "the masses", and also generally against those social democratic policies. (which you haven't named, but I'm going to assume the normal grab bag)

I'm sure you could easily find some willing to write an op-ed in favor of reopening soon. You'd have a hell of a time getting it published in the NYTimes, of course.

I grew up in a farming community in Michigan, my little brother works construction, and my high school sweetheart was a truck driver’s daughter. I get you just fled here from Los Angeles, but you still seem to be still getting your bearings.

And I grew up in Michigan, and went to school in Michigan. What's your point? That I can't say "there are conservative people out there" because I spent a few years in LA?

For that matter, if you grew up in rural Michigan, why are you asserting that everyone agrees with social democrat policies?

I never said everyone supports social democratic policies. I said a comfortable majority does, which is true. Having grown up in rural Michigan, I'm also quite familiar with bosses at Amway, Steelcase, and GM dressing up their politics as those of the working poor, when that's far from the truth.

Not saying this company is behind this particular set of protests, but it makes a kind of general point: https://crowdsondemand.com/

It's not absurd to imagine a lot of people are manipulated into believing whatever the person writing the check wants. We can't pretend Cambridge Analytica never existed.

Because they pay for those unemployment budgets, perhaps?

You may not agree with that perspective, but it is held by quite a few people.

Yep, and they are kinda doing it with a gun to people’s heads because unemployment will dry up soon.

That’s completely what it is, but also necessary to the process of normalizing masses of unnecessary deaths every day.

It’s stunning that these propaganda narratives work in the face of countries like South Korea and Taiwan, where the response has been safely and thoroughly managed. But American exceptionalism is truly a force to behold.

Nobody actually wants to go back to work. All they want is the financial security they feel from having a job. If any of these people hit the lottery for example would they be begging to go back to work?

It’s not a yes or no thing. Some people don’t like being cooped up and would rather be able to socialize in person at work, etc. Some people are fearful and would rather stay at home. There are many in between.

That's true but you're only cooped up because of stay at home orders. Were people who worked full time from home complaining about being cooped up? Maybe a little but not enough to want to go into an office 40 hours a week. Sure it's nice to get out and escape from your family a little bit and socialize with different people but why does this have to equate to going to work?

the difficulty here is of having to develop a new way to deal with this situation. it's the same problem some people face at retirement. they just have a hard time adjusting to the new situation.

those of us who work from home don't have that problem. neither those that are already practicing a range of activities that don't require going outside. like reading, practicing a music instrument, painting, knitting, contributing to FOSS, etc.

we just spend more time on those. everyone else needs to pick up a new hobby.

if your daily routine consists of going to work, and hang out with friends in your free time, then you'll have to completely relearn how to get through the day, pick up new hobbies and find other new meaningful activities.

Even your examples seem to acknowledge that getting back to the actual work is not what people are after. There are many drawbacks to a lockdown. Not having to do the actual work, as some sort of guilt of not being a productive member of society, very rarely seems to be one of them.

What people want is financial and health security (which in the US are strongly linked), social interactions and some other liberties like working out and traveling. The actual work aspect mostly benefits the owners of the businesses. And I can see that as a small business owner you'd be exposed to the same pressure for financial security, many times over.

But don't confuse "not wanting to stay at home with nothing to do and no clear idea of whether you'll even have a home in a month" with "wanting to work", it's not helpful in analyzing what's actually happening.

Work benefits us all. If owners of enterprises, be they sole proprietorships, coöperatives, state owned, private, public corps, etc., didn’t employ people we wouldn’t have foods, medicines, goods and services. So it’s not only to have purchasing power but also to have things that one can purchase at all.

I never said work doesn't benefit others. It's just that that benefit to other people is usually not what drives people to demand an opening-up.

"Want[ing] financial and health security" is a funny way to say "Wanting to be able to buy food and pay the rent."

Not everyone has the luxury of a work at home job that allows them to put half of their salary in the bank each month.

But we should remember that part of the financial security people feel from having a job is personal security: I'm a real adult, I can support myself, the things I have and the food on my table aren't conditional on the continued generosity of someone else. Handing out money is by itself an imperfect substitute.

True. And yet... is that a good thing? Should that be part of our basis for identity? Is it something to applaud, or to help people recover from?

I think it's something to applaud, but I'm not sure...

If you have a job, the things you have and the food on your table are conditional on the will and whim of your employer, which in the US, at least, can be far more capricious than any government welfare program.

The only people who actually have personal security are the independently wealthy - everyone else lives and dies at the mercy of some greater system, a state or an employer.

By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job?

What we do want, basically always, is for the "average" person to work. And we want that because if most people aren't working we stop producing enough food and other goods/services and we all suffer for it. That's as true now as ever.

The government handing out money doesn't create food, or tractors, or houses, or nails, or clothing, and so on and so forth. It helps continue the distribution of the goods we do have in the short term, due to how we choose who to give goods to (i.e. selling them to people with money), but without people directly creating goods or indirectly creating value to sell to other people for goods (the other people being in other countries that are still producing goods) we will run out in short order.

You're putting the cart before the horse. We want to keep everyone in reasonable comfort. A certain amount of work is necessary for that. But it's probably a lot less than half of society doing 40-hour weeks.

It seems to me like the minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it. The economy is what produces all the goods and services we enjoy in the first place. Some restrictions may be worth the cost, but the idea of finding broad sections of business activity that can be shut down without discomfort seems unrealistic.

If we made it our goal? If all our technological effort went into automating away drudgery? If all our persuasive marketing was not driving ever more consumption but making the simplest and cheapest lifestyle changes to improve our happiness?

Sure.

You underestimate how many people are "employed" in making their boss feel powerful and their customers feel special. Or how many people are employed in ensuring that folks working for competitors are unable to sell their products. Most of these are white-collar office workers rather than "essential" workers, but there's still a massive amount of waste that comes from people playing financial or competitive games rather than directly contributing to their customers' well-being.

The shutdown isn't preferentially impacting those people though.

If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste we obviously should (shutdown or no shutdown), but we can't. Or at least that magic wand probably costs more resources enforcing it than those people consume.

When GP says "minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" I imagine they mean "the minimum portion of our economy that we can choose to restart to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" - because we don't have the knob to chose to restart only the good parts.

When the UK went on a 3-day week in the 1970s, productivity was 97% of normal.

I'm hopeful that the crisis could help unblock the shift towards part-time working and/or ensure that the protections that full-time workers get are extended to part-time and gig-economy workers. Right now there's a regulatory cliff that strongly incentivises people to work at least 30 hours/week at a single job rather than working the most productive hours or combination of jobs, and a business-social norm that prioritises spending 40 hours/week in the office over doing productive work. The former is a knob that we can turn; the latter is not entirely under conscious control, but is one of those things that's likely to shift suddenly once enough pressure has built up.

What's included in "reasonable comfort"? All the modern stuff or 10sqm at 18°C and 2500 calories per day per person?

I noticed that you didn't define reasonable comfort. However that definition is critical before we can think about how much work must be done to create it.

A king in 1100 would have a different definition from his peasants. There are people living in mud huts today, and others in slums: both would give different answers. 180 years ago you were medically better off not going to the doctor, today I'd count ability to see a doctor as part of reasonable comfort. I know people who think they can't live if their car is more than 3 years old, and people who was excited to afford a 15 year old used car.

> By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job?

The first sentence is not true in the universal generality stated. I know that it's not your main point, and I know that most people don't have the luxury that I do, but I am a teacher and a researcher, and I would absolutely keep doing both no matter how much money I had. (I hope I'll be able to keep teaching; my university's not so big.)

(The only effect of having more money would be that I would replace grant-writing with periodically sending off handsomely calligraphed letters to funding agencies saying "Can't be arsed. Sorry!")

Yeah, I should have said almost nobody. Obviously there are some exceptions. Most astronauts, many professors, some CEOs, a few really lucky people working in companies...

I know for me personally, I am still working full time from home. For me it's not the desire of financial security, it is the heartbreak of seeing our entire community being destroyed. All of the small shops, restaurants, breweries and things that made this a great place to a live are slowly going out of business one by one. The PPP loans were a joke for saving main street.

I think if everyone had enough to live most people would still work, but they would be a lot less willing to put up with things like bad bosses, crappy hours, being understaffed and all the other things we generally dislike about our jobs. Employers would have to rise to the occasion if the need for the job was lessened.

What kills me is the argument against a basic standard of living tends to come down to 'but who will be the plumbers, janitors, or fast food workers and retail?'

Well, I, for one, would be a janitor and be perfectly happy for the rest of my life - low stress, low pressure. Seems nice.

Fast food workers and retail would be more difficult, just because people would have to treat them like humans, if they didn't need the money from the job to survive. But that's never talked about.

Sometimes those shitty jobs are only shitty because the people you have to interact with make them that way.

In a prior career, I worked full-time retail management. I actually really liked that job, except for all of the shitty people who asserted their authority over me because I needed the job, and they didn't need to see me as a human due to my job.

Unfortunately money isn't limitless.

Unfortunately there are many people that believe it is... That the government can just indefinitely issue people money with no negative consequences, or worse they believe that simply "taxing the wealthy" is a path to that infinite money

These people aren't wrong, though.

Powell has printed $6T, and the DXY has gone nowhere but up, along with the SPY and the QQQ and the DJIA.

Every single Thursday, we report more job losses than expected, and the market screams higher.

As much as we'd like to think there will be consequences to printing money, the evidence is in that there won't be, either in currency value or market confidence. MMT has proven itself correct.

You don't seem to be taking into account that stocks shooting up is itself the inflation. The stock market is completely disconnected from the economic forecast, because money remains easy for wall street despite everything happening on main street.

Has it? The argument could be made that US financial health is worse now than in 2008 and not better. Wall Street gorging on free money is not really a good argument right now if the country is literally on the verge of falling apart.

Short term you are right, as most of the printing has not actually found its way back into the economy in any real way

Long term however you are very very wrong

Further the Stock market is not a good indicator of economic health, never has been. Stock market is largely irrational

The limiting factor isn't cash on hand, we have the resources to help just like other developed countries who are handling this way better. The limiting factors are political and ideological.

$4T go brrr says otherwise. I'm not a fan of the inflationary treadmill in general, but it's an extreme double standard to quickly bail out overextended companies and then tell individuals to basically fend for themselves.

For USD it kind of is. What would it take to screw up the dollar?

Every other country on the planet wants to hold it.

What I don't understand then is why the fed doesn't just print a million dollars for each and every citizen. That's only 300 trillion dollars. We would be the richest country in the world by far, poverty would be solved.

Conventional wisdom says this would reduce the value of the USD against other currencies and that would in turn cause foreign investors to cash out. For other currencies that all seems pretty reasonable, investors would be crazy not to go to another currency.

For the USD where you have excess capital imports which aren't offset by corresponding goods, materials or services exports (e.g. the USA buys products from China then China gives the money earned back to the USA in exchange for treasury bills) then what does it mean for China to cash out?

>> We would be the richest country in the world by far

Confusingly, as a nation you wouldn't be richer or poorer and a persons buying power wouldn't change much. This is a long way to say that printing money isn't the right lever to pull to make everyone richer.

>> poverty would be solved

Poverty is only partly a money supply issue, you'd need to fix the other problems that cause poverty too otherwise you'd have limited effect.

And yet the Fed is able to buy back treasuries and corporate debt with funds conjured out of thin air. There's a person at the Fed who types in the amount of money they need that day. I think they're using a Node.js app feeding Kafka and a Cassandra database. As an illustration I'll show you how it works:

Funds Available for Bond Repurchases: $1,000,000,000,000

And just like that a trillion dollars!

And the question that gets lost somewhere, whenever we talk about those is that it does not just appear without any consequences down the road. The current spending spree practically guarantees higher taxes on everyone if the existing system is to remain in place.

For the record, I agree with the gist of your message. It seems a little too easy to conjure up magical money out of thin air.

The Fed doesn't buy back anything. It buys government and corporate bonds just like any other investor. It just does so with an arbitrarily-large pool of money.

And, as we all know, money is a consensual hallucination. As long as we all play along and pretend it's real, it's real.

Prove it. Take a $500 billion out of the military budget.

But then how would the US invade^W liberate other countries?

Money is limitless, it's restraint in printing too much at once that ascribes value to the existing money supply.

Limits in how to best "share" that money to regular people do in fact mean that money is not limitless, de facto.

Assuming you go over the logistics of what's the best way to actually hand in money to people: through tax rebates? through an envelope sent by the Post Office? through citizens' bank accounts? (then how do you handle the non-banked population?) etc etc the powers that be still have to decide what criteria should they use to send said money: according to one's needs? what are those needs? according to one's contribution to society? but then who decides about another person's real contribution to society?

All these questions were first asked at least 200 years ago (I'd say starting with the French Revolution, maybe even with with the Levellers in the ~1640s), questions for which we haven't found any reasonable and definitive answer so far and we'll probably never will.

you've got the value chain backwards. money isn't printed and then that magically becomes the value of the economy. the money supply is managed so as to try to match the decentralized and organic value created by us in the economy.

that causal chain limits how much money can be printed without adverse effects (and at the extreme, economic and political collapse). if we generate ~$1T/mo of value, printing a couple billion extra here or there gets drowned out in the estimation error of the size of our value creation. we print an extra $1T/mo and we have start to have serious problems.

so money is not limitless. it's bounded by our collective product.

We’re a long way short of running out; this is a political choice at the highest levels to do nothing, not a fiscal choice.

There are two basic frames:

(1) Most jobs were make-work. Parking everyone up doesn't really matter.

(2) Most jobs add a little bit to society. Shutting everything down substantially reduces the buffer between people and a 1,500AD standard of living.

Which frame a person accepts as more reasonable probably determines how they feel about the shutdowns.

This comment seems like it could be insightful, but I'm a native English speaker and I can't make heads or tails of "Most jobs were make-work. Parking everyone up doesn't really matter.".

= Most jobs are not useful, so if they stop nothing important is lost.

Basically he means that many jobs are created just to give people something to do and the jobs do not actually do any real contributions that couldn’t be rolled into another job.

Ohio’s setting up a snitch website for employers to report on employees too scared to return to work, so that benefits can be stripped.

If I were reading this kind of stuff in a history book and the next paragraph said “and the revolution started in...” I wouldn’t be surprised. Punishing people for being afraid of a pandemic is not a smart move.

I honestly, genuinely believe that people are a) too divided, and b) too content to complain online v organize actual change for any sort of revolution to happen.

I genuinely believe it will take a failure of an absolute overwhelming magnitude (internet goes completely down and society collapses) for an actual, classic-style revolution.

Predicting if, or when, a revolution will arrive is a tricky thing. There are plenty of cases where revolutionary participants themselves dismissed the chances of a revolution hours or days before they kick off. They only look inevitable in hindsight.

Regardless; even long short of kicking off a revolution, punishing the populace for being scared is bad politics.

Yes, from Dan Carlin's podcasts I learned of the book The Great Illusion (1909), the illusion being that nations gained through war. In it, the author wrote that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous," concluding that a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long. This was a popular view, yet WWI still kicked off just a few years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

“This time is different” is quite the siren song in several areas of human endeavors.

The oldest joke on Wall Street, or so they say.

Amazing that you can be both so right and so wrong at the same time.

That central thesis is true - WW1 and WW2 were devastating to the economies of the nations involved (many of which didn't survive as ongoing political organizations). He just underestimated the extent to which humanity is irrational, short-sighted, and self-destructive.

It's a classic dilemma. The revolution only succeeds if the "revolutionary group" has a substantial majority support. But if it fails, the "revolutionary group" suffers exaggerated negative consequences. Same for those who jump in too early. Without solid coordination very few risk those odds.

You may be onto something. Most of the people seemed to have been mollified by the ability to share their plight with others via social media or gorging on streaming. Internet made current issues somewhat acceptable in that regard.

If the internet went down, people might not like the silence and their own thoughts.

I initially thought ISPs removed data caps and all those for WFH, but now I think it is part of the effort to keep the society intact.

> failure of an absolute overwhelming magnitude (internet goes completely down and society collapses) for an actual, classic-style revolution.

Once unemployment goes too far past 20% and stays there long enough, we'll see social safety nets fail and serious numbers of folks penniless and dependent on aid for basic survival. That's enough, I think, to precipitate revolution or at least angry people not cooperating, breaking things, making demands, and overwhelming anything the government/police can do to stop it.

Perhaps not a widespread revolution, but something akin to seceding could happen I think. If California and NY decide that being a part of the US isn't working for them anymore that's how a next civil war could start. Something similar was happening in Spain before corona, Catalonia felt that their taxes were supporting the rest of the nation (much like California for the US) and so they wanted to leave. They've not been successful and most of their leaders jailed but a similar sentiment could start if the divisions continue as they are.

Catalonia has a different language and culture, and was repressed under Franco.

It's not just the taxes, or you would see most major cities looking for independence.

People could live at home on a lot less money if not for debt and rent. But there isnt a pause button on the financial system. In fact, a lot of people may just go deeper in debt due to this.

There is a pause button, but we have to demand it. If the state stands down on enforcing those debts, they can't be collected. Simple.

That is a very dangerous door to open. First, at the other end of those debts are things like peoples' pension plans. People aren't going to like their pension plan's income being put on pause.

Second, making (aspects of) contracts unenforceable can be very destructive if it goes too far. A huge amount of society relies on contracts in order to be able to operate; if you destroy that, you can damage society in fairly fundamental ways.

I think a key to a strong and secure economy is to reduce and discourage debt of all kinds. Instead lowering interest rates is used to encourage spending. Debt has its place, but it always comes due.

Or maybe people that are unemployed want to get their jobs back?

This is my understanding as well. The Federal government isn't actually funding the $600/week/worker extra to the states yet and so states are running out of cash.

Obviously the only solution is to drop the states of emergency and order people back to work. It's the only possible way out of this quagmire. /s

100% agree. Shows the power of wrapping anything in “freedom words” can get people to support it, even if it means putting themselves in harm’s way.

> And I think about how in the restaurant business how a rumor of someone catching food poisoning can kill your business... what's going to happen when a review lands on your Yelp/Google page that a customer took grandma to eat at your restaurant and 2 weeks later she died from COVID-19? Your reputation will be absolutely trashed.

tbh, I don't think this would be as devastating as you say. "went to restaurant, died two weeks later" is not as clear a connection as "ordered shellfish, puked guts out next day". the thing that's so bad about food poisoning is that, not only does it suck, but it strongly implies a dirty kitchen. in my experience, people are disturbed more by the abstract thought of an "unclean" kitchen than concrete fears of getting sick.

Commercial kitchen cleanliness is out of customer control. Practicing personal safety and sanitization measures is more under our own control.

That's a very poor review. Given how long the incubation period is, plus the presence of asymptomatic carriers, it is impossible for the average person to accurately attribute the infection to a specific business.

Congress is currently considering liability shields for precisely this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/liability-shield-is-next-corona...

Liability shields would help. Not sure they would solve the public reputation problem? (I've seen the public reputation problem take down restaurants even when the restaurant did not poison the claimant.) But they would give restaurant owners confidence that there would be, at least, no legal liability.

On the balance of probabilities, I'd bet that many people will just eschew dine-in experiences. At least for a year or two. Can you survive the year or two with decreased dine-in traffic? That's the question owners should be trying to answer. If your footprint is small enough, I'd suspect the answer is yes. If you've got a larger footprint than is prudent in the new reality, you'll likely need to make some changes.

Don't get me wrong, it seems batty to me and you make a good point re reputation vs legal consequences. What's even more mind boggling is that Georgia, for example, is allowing restaurants to open but at half capacity. Given the razor thin margins at restaurants, I don't see how this could be seen as splitting the difference. It really seems like the worst of both worlds for the restaurant, its employees, and the customers.

Interesting. More splitting the baby than splitting the difference

To be frank I think liability shields will screw over the people they are trying to help. If there is liability the customers have reason to believe you'll at least try heavily to reduce the spread. With them it is "Nope, not my responsibility." That means anyone with sense (a sadly non-universal commodity) will nope out as it screams "No reason to trust me."

> Congress is currently considering liability shields for precisely this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/liability-shield-is-next-corona....

I guess the real priority is to make sure the brunt of the costs of these decisions are borne by those towards the bottom...

Legal liability will incentivize business to take steps to contain the virus and reduce transmission. Take that away and in many businesses will just go "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not my problem."

The priority is to make sure that businesses essential to our way of life keep operating. No attempt to reallocate the brunt of the costs will matter if meat stops showing up on the supermarket shelves.

Our current way of life is based on a system that ensures that those at the bottom bear the brunt of the costs, it always has

> The priority is to make sure that businesses essential to our way of life keep operating.

"Essential to our way of life" is actually a pretty expansive category, which encompasses a great deal of stuff that not actually essential by any reasonable definition.

Whether business are essential in some broad, cosmic sense isn't that important. The question is which things we can keep shut down for months and months without riots or economic collapse, and that's a pretty small list.

> Just seems like everyone is getting set up to fail.

It does. We are seeing a dithering half-assed response to the pandemic in the USA.

If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable. The way things are going now, it's like we're letting up just enough to keep the damn thing circulating, killing more people needlessly and probably necessitating more lockdowns and prolonging economic consequences in the future.

This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.

If we're going to do a lockdown, we might as well as do a full lock down. Like give everyone a two week warning and then nobody leaves their house for two weeks.

Two weeks, no Lowes, no McDonalds, no grocery stores, no amazon delivery drivers, no postal service, no pharmacy. Only emergency room/icu, fire fighters, emts, cops, and powerplant operators.

Instead we put everyone on house arrest for an indefinite period of time.

I'm concerned that would magnify shortages due to hoarding, among other problems.

I agree, plus a total lockdown such as what GP described would require military enforcement. Urban society would be reduced to Humvees rolling down the streets past empty Costcos and Walmarts with frightened citizens starting out their windows. Instead of protests we would have looting.

It seems lockdowns cannot be implemented successfully no matter what you do. Perhaps a simple public mask requirement would have been better.

Other places in Europe, South America, etc seem to have implemented much tighter lockdowns without having to resort to a Humvee scenario though. Just fining people outside is a good incentive.

I think it's partially cultural as well, though. Americans are all about their individual freedom and "rights", even when it puts others at risk. It's a joke, and really, at times, this country seems like one big death cult.

Lockdown was pretty successful in Italy and yes, there was military on the street and police checking if you were allowed to be around (grocery shopping, essential worker etc.), tracing you back and arresting you if you were lying. It wasn't a looting race.

Yep, as it stands we are just pulling off the band aid in the slowest and most painful possible way. The handling of the crisis by the Trump administration has been so far beyond stupid that there isn’t even a word for it

The UPS guy making deliveries is fine. Having family over for dinner isn't. The situation would look different now, had there been proper leadership in January. When the President says "It's a flu. HOAX!" his fans believe him, and that's why in France, Germany, Italy and Spain new cases are declining but in the US they are still going up.

In my deep red corner of the woods there's different cars in front of each house seemingly every other day and music, too. That's what you do in the face of the plague, you party!

If it goes long enough, perhaps some Darwin effect will kick in...

This would imply there is a political leaning to those treating it seriously and those who don't. From my personal experience, the people I know who are fans of him and the people I know who want nothing to do with him are both not treating this seriously. They are okay with visiting a friend, going shopping just to get out the house, not trying to reduce their shopping trips to once a week or less but instead going out daily. People going out daily to get food from restaurants.

Where I worked a transitioned to WFH for about 98% of the employees, but so many were still stopping by the office that the employees who couldn't work from home and felt they were at increased risk eventually contacted upper management and now every visit to the office is recorded and a manager has to provide a justification for why that employee had to be on site.

I think we have to look at little deeper into the America psyche to see what is driving this.

(As for where I live, the 2016 vote was almost a 50/50 split in the surrounding area.)

That's what I hoped would happen when we started the quarantine. My food/etc supplies were based on expecting a 2w lockdown, so I kept a month of refrigerated food, or two months if we include all the rice/beans/etc, just in case we reach a breakdown scenario.

Instead, here we are. Almost at the two-month mark. And infection rates where I live (NOVA) are even higher than a month ago. FML.

A full lockdown would have to include hospitals, firefighters, EMTs, cops, powerplant operators, food distribution, etc. And unless you quarantined every person individually (and did a perfect job, at that), two weeks is not sufficient. Several months at least.

And even then, the odds of successful containment are pretty low.

It seems that several countries have been very successful in containing the virus, starting with China. The U.S. has been very lax in its response to this virus, and now many people seem to be excusing that with the assumption that, well, it was impossible to contain in the first place.

It is unfair to compare a western democracy with a totalitarian government. China has options that we have collectively decided we don't want to have.

Okay, let's compare it to Australia then. Or South Korea, or Taiwan.

p.s. I don't think Americans collectively decided anything about what options we would use to combat the virus. The federal executive branch effectively decided to do nothing, or nothing coherent and consistent, and states have individually scrambled to come up with their own responses, with varying levels of effectiveness.

New Zealand also doing well with our lockdown!

What's that kung fu line, walk on the right side of the road you are okay, walk on the left side of the road you are okay, walk in the middle you get smashed.

We can decide to take the loss and let most people get infected, or we can be super aggressive about lockdown and contain it. Instead, we seem to have a compromise which is seems to take the loss, but slower with a porous lockdown which will have to last indefinitely. Now the other worlds are imagined in my head, so this may not be the case, but it is hard to look at e.g. New Zealand and not be frustrated by America's response.

>If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable.

I thought the purpose of the lockdown was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed? Maybe that is what you meant by manageable?

My two cents:

Why shouldn't we remove the lockdown if we can manage to do so without overwhelming hospitals?

We have been locked down and covid still circulates through the population, and appears that it will do so until we reach herd immunity and/or have a vaccine, with the likely/hopeful outcome, based on how these types of coronaviruses often behave, being a decrease in the danger posed by this specific virus over time.

Playing devils advocate: How much of a difference do mandated lockdowns even make? Sweden doesn't have a lockdown and they are doing better than a number of other western countries, worse than some others, but pretty much well within the same bell curve given the fuzzy data we have at the moment.

When does it become selfish to tell tens of millions of people they can't provide for themselves because you are scared of the coronavirus. They might not be. The risk profile can be very different for different people.

As long as the hospitals are not overwhelmed why not self-isolate, and let other people do what they want? That was the justification when we started these lockdowns, to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, right?

You are getting down voted, and I'm not sure why. I've grown the opinion that you cannot have any discussion around any measured approach related to COVID.

It seems some people view COVID as guaranteed death and any questioning of lock downs ending means that you are or are about to be a mass murderer.

One reason could be that GP seems to assume that spread to herd immunity is inevitable, ignoring the countries that have had great success in containing the virus.

What countries are you thinking of?

New Zealand has been able to pretty much eradicate the virus through lockdowns and contact tracing, but they only had 1000 cases.

There is no precedent for doing that in a country with millions of cases, like the U.S. It may be too late for that.

So is the purpose of continued lockdowns in the U.S. to eradicate the virus? That is what I am skeptical about, I don't see the evidence that such a thing is possible.

For the 'hard lockdown' crowd, how long can we put time on hold? A week? A month? A year? A decade?

It is an elementary fact that life rides on the derivative. Stop work and no wealth gets created. No meat, no veggies, no crops, no gas, no electricity, no metal, no lumber, no stone, no plastic, no industrials, no dentists, no medical services, no schools, no nothing. Modern people cannot live subsistence lives off the chickens in their backyard and a plot of land within walking distance. Our stockpiles will last for a while, but not forever.

At a second degree, the social connections that enable the amazing collaboration underpinning modern society break down. The longer we are locked down, the harder will be to come back and figure out our place in the grand social puzzle.

It is a terrible situation. Most people are going to get infected, and a non-negligible fraction of them [1%] are going to die. Everywhere where the virus got endemic. Perhaps a handful of East Asian countries will manage 100% border shutdowns and 100% contact tracing for years on end. More power to them, the rest of the world lacks the social cohesion to pull off something like that.

Worse, the impact is going to be unequal. Some social strata will have more options to stay isolated for longer. It will appear, for a while, that they are somehow performing better than everybody else. Rest assured, there will be very few that can avoid the disease for long enough (~18 months) to be on the upside of a hypothetical vaccine. All we can hope is that, eventually, this disease goes the way of the common cold.

Toughen up. This is not Man's making. Nature send a Russian Roulette our way, we have no choice but to play.

In the meantime, try to avoid media that does it's best to paint this disease as the second coming of the Black Death. One of the technique is to cherry pick. Say 'one of my co-workers died', implying that they are next. Instead of '1 out of 73,348 of my colleagues' died. It is unavoidable tragedy that there may be anywhere between 73 and 733 of their colleagues that are going to die before we see the end of this.

Sure, we cant shutdown forever, but I dont understand the rush to sacrifice.

Covid will be with us forever now, and in just a few months we already understand a lot more about it than we did at the start.

The longer we can delay mass infection, the more effective our treatment of the disease will be, and the more likely we will have vaccines.

Lets delay for a while, figure out the best treatment methods, and then let it through.

2 months is too early. Can you name a date when we should open? Can you even name a date that is obviously too late?

I've struggled with the same questions. I noticed that no matter which date I picked, 'let's delay longer' was always the preferred choice. We've got to wean ourselves from the lockdown.

We're in NZ, its feeling likely at the moment that the date will be wednesday.

OTOH we have been incredibly lucky with both our leadership and our island status.

the US is a huge state, with porous borders so the right choice might be different, but the more controlled the spread is, the fewer lives will be lost and the more likely time will help us understand the best treatment.

>The longer we can delay mass infection, the more effective our treatment of the disease will be

You can stay in your house until the treatments get better, which is also a smart thing for vulnerable people to do.

Why not let other people off lockdown if they wish as long as the hospitals are not overflowed? A lot of people face a negligable risk from this.

What difference would it be to you? And look at the cost to them, tens of millions of people's livelihoods thrown up in the air.

Having said the above, I do see the value of lockdowns that prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed. That is different. But it looks to me like we can look at moving past that threat. What do we do next?

Its not about me.

The benefit comes when the community as a whole does it, there is literally no point to anyone doing it alone, unless they are vulnerable.

"What do we do next?"

Figure out the best way to treat covid, and talk about the best time to end the lockdown.

Im in NZ btw, NZ locked down hard and early. Its been six weeks and so far we have 20 deaths from covid.

"What next?" is exactly the question, and I dont think anyone knows the best answer yet.

We are likely to be mostly ending our lockdown on this wednesday. We are entering "level 2" which I believe is all businesses open and running, just some rules around congregation.

I simply do not understand the chorus of calls to end lockdown (or simply never start it) in countries where absolutely nothing is under control.

It will cause incredibly loss of life, and people are doing in a rush.

Im really struggling, on a personal level, to understand the rush in some countries to sacrifice people and not economies.

Surely the economy is there to serve us?

NZ did a great job of jumping on this early. Last week when I looked they something like 1000-2000 confirmed cases? NZ has been able to effectively eradicate the disease there with their early lockdown. It will be interesting to see how things go there over time (second wave? etc)

That is quite a different scenario than in the U.S., where there were hundreds of thousands of infections (millions?), not enough tests to go after eradication at this point, etc.

Were you thinking that the U.S. would be able to maintain a lockdown until eradication, perhaps with contact tracing? Is there evidence that such a plan could work?

I understand your struggle to see my point of view. Ditto! I read a book that posited that people are born with personality differences, and value some things more than others. For example, I feel very strongly about individualism and anti-authority, while others may be more communitarian and authoritarian. The world ultimately benefits from both.

Having said that, I wonder what practical benefits a person who chooses to self-isolate in any of a number of countries where this is endemic gains by forcing other to lockdown against their will when the hospitals are not overflowing. Why should the many young and healthy who face a negligible risk to continue in what is sometimes very difficult circumstances? What is really gained at this point?

Anyways, that was all meant to be a peek into my thinking.

yeah, we got lucky with our leadership and with our island status.

", where there were hundreds of thousands of infections"

well, EVENTUALLY, there were hundreds of thousands of infections. at one point there were, famously, 15...

"Were you thinking that the U.S. would be able to maintain a lockdown until eradication, perhaps with contact tracing? Is there evidence that such a plan could work?"

No, I dont think that would be a long term solution for the US, I dont have any source for my beliefs, but I suspect with the size of the US, the nature of its people and the incredibly porous border it has that a lockdown until eradication would be doomed to failure.

" I feel very strongly about individualism and anti-authority, while others may be more communitarian and authoritarian"

yess....the world does need both. Im not sure where that comes into the decision to lockdown or not, and for how long. I feel like there needs to be a more sciency approach taken there rather than some vague handwavy stuff about personalities.

"Why should the many young and healthy who face a negligible risk to continue in what is sometimes very difficult circumstances?"

I dont know. I dont have much use for the word 'should'.

I think that two things are true, first the young and healthy are at risk from this disease themselves - the stats prove that, and second its almost certainly true that the young and healthy have loved ones who are young and unhealthy, or old and healthy, or old and unhealthy, and....maybe....the young and healthy dont want to catch covid and then infect the people they love.

All I was saying with my comment above, is I dont understand the rush to sacrifice those people who are vulnerable to this disease.

Even here in NZ where we have been very lucky so far it is obvious that eventually we will have to reopen the borders and let the rest of the world in, and at that point infections will start again, but by then we have the best possible chance of understanding how to treat the disease most effectively.

I dont believe "lockdown for eradication" in the US is a viable choice, but I do think "lockdown to slowdown" is a sensible option for a while yet, to give every one of your citizens the best possible chance of survival.

The economy will recover, it always does. It reflects the nature of people, and for that reason is endlessly resilient.

>well, EVENTUALLY, there were hundreds of thousands of infections. at one point there were, famously, 15...

Maybe there were 15 case last October! :-) I'm thinking we could have had thousands of cases in the U.S. before we started testing. But that's water under the bridge at this point. I wasn't arguing that lockdowns were useless, or that they weren't justified a month ago. But given the additional data I wonder about them now.

>I think that two things are true, first the young and healthy are at risk from this disease themselves - the stats prove that

I end up looking at NYC stats a lot... Last week they were seeing 20-25% of sample population with antibodies. I found found April 14 NYC numbers showing 4.5% of covid deaths there were people under 45, and a bit over 14k deaths in NYC as of yesterday. Extrapolating from these numbers I calculate 2500 people under 45 will die before reaching 80% herd immunity. That's 2500 in a city of 8 million. 2016 numbers showed 4.9 million people under age 45. Which works out to just under 1 in 2000 young people dying.

It's interesting for me to think about that number. Is it significant? I looked at some actuarial tables and see that a 45 year old has a 1 in 300 chance of dying in any given year. 1 in 1000 for 20 year old.

I'm betting a lot of unemployed young people want to get on with their lives and wouldn't be worries about taking their chance with a 1 in 2000 risk.

>and second its almost certainly true that the young and healthy have loved ones who are young and unhealthy, or old and healthy, or old and unhealthy, and....maybe....the young and healthy dont want to catch covid and then infect the people they love.

I'm not saying that everyone has to go out and mingle. Everyone is free to self-isolate.

I grant that some people could be put in a difficult position, feeling like they have to go to work when they don't want to, living with someone who won't self-isolate, etc.

Maybe there's away to ease the lockdown and provide assistance to those left in a bind. These would be good problems to talk about, and will probably come up no matter when we ease the lockdown.

Everyone wants to get on with their lives, but at what cost? thats what it comes down to. We will either pay in economic damage, lost lives or (looking likely) both.

Again, I dont understand the rush to throw so many lives under the bus with so little care, its bewildering.

Those people, our vulnerable, can be sacrificed at anytime, but they can only be sacrificed once.

Lets try something else for a few months first, and see how it works.

If nothing else works out, we can always fall back to the "let everyone in society who has an underlying condition of some kind die" plan afterwards.

On a different note, I will say it is massively interesting to me that someone who claims to be anti-authoritarian is recommending everyone in society return to work in an orderly fashion to save the economy.

Which side do of that argument do you believe holds authority at the moment?

Hard Authoritarianism: Do what I say or else I send armed thugs to enforce it.

Soft Authoritarianism: Do what I say or else I convince everyone else you should be treaded like a pariah. See exile, excommunication, cancel culture.

Liberalism: This is the right thing to do, I pray you join me in doing it.

I might be thinking of the word anti-authority different in this context. I was talking about people who could protect themselves by self-isolation forcing others to self-isolate. I don't believe that is as justified as it was when this started.

GP brought out the tired "Give people who aren't afraid the freedom to choose" argument, which misses the point: The Stay at Home order is not about those freedom people. It is about the people those people will infect.

> Why shouldn't we remove the lockdown if we can manage to do so without overwhelming hospitals?

That's a big if. The last stats I saw showed Sweden experiencing 4x deaths per capita compared to its neighbors, which is a clue that eschewing lockdown does make a difference. Every country is different. How do you know that Sweden's approach used in a different country wouldn't overwhelm hospitals? Once you let the pandemic get more widespread in a population, it gets hard to stop. Think very carefully about irreversible decisions.

They have more deaths because they're paying up front. The bet is that over time deaths will be roughly the same, lockdown or not. Considering that we're far off from a vaccine and world economy can't be left on life support for years, I'm inclined to believe them.

> The bet is that over time deaths will be roughly the same, lockdown or not

The total number of infections will be the same up until a vaccine is developed, but the death rate can be lowered by delaying widespread infection until treatments are developed, tested, and deployed, and by keeping the infection rate at a level the medical system can handle.

Can that be a personal decision, for example:

Person #1) I'm at risk and there are no good treatments, so I will self-isolate, waiting for vaccines, better treatment, and/or this to go away.

Person #2) I'm young, my risk is negligable, hospitals are not overwhelmed, and I have to support my family, my kids need to go to school, etc.

Why does person #1 get to tell person #2 what to do?

Unfortunately, if Person #2 chooses to get sick sooner, it increases the probability that Person #1 will get sick sooner. All precautions are multiplicative factors. See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/saving-your-health-one-mask-t...

>Unfortunately, if Person #2 chooses to get sick sooner, it increases the probability that Person #1 will get sick

How does person #1 catch something if they are self isolating and don't interact with person #2?

You mentioned the probability of this, an increased risk for person #1 even if they are self isolating. I can grant that there is some risk associated with this But how does that compare to the impact that these lockdowns are having on tens of millions of people.

What if there won't be a vaccine soon enough, and herd immunity amongst the young is our best defense, and lockdowns just prolonged the economic misery and didn't save lives in the end? Still a possible outcome at this point.

> How does person #1 catch something if they are self isolating and don't interact with person #2?

Person #1 can't be 100% isolated. Person #2 can breathe on produce at the grocery store that supplies Person #1. Person #2 can infect Person #3 with whom Person #1 can't completely avoid interaction.

I can't answer the other questions. I just think we have to proceed with caution because ending the lockdown could cause irreversible spread of the virus.

It may work out that way. But I don't think that was Sweden's intent. Just yesterday I read that the guy who devised their pandemic response was surprised by the deaths. (Sorry, I don't recall the source...)

> They have more deaths because they're paying up front.

ISTM that with equal justification, you could argue that the lockdown countries have (possibly) more economic damage because they paid up front. But one side is paying in treasure, the other in blood.

And it's not even clear that Sweden is reaping economic benefits. Some parts of their economy suffered just as much damage as other countries. And now, many of the lockdown countries are experimenting with loosened restrictions, while Sweden's infection and death rates remain stubbornly high.

It could also be the case where lockdown countries are paying up front in economic damage AND will also pay later in deaths because there won't be a vaccine in time to stop this from spreading to everyone anyways.

> The last stats I saw showed Sweden experiencing 4x deaths per capita compared to its neighbors, which is a clue that eschewing lockdown does make a difference.

The reason why some countries have significantly higher death rates from coronavirus: it permeating nursing homes.

The countries that put in strict controls overall and maximally protected people in nursing homes have the lowest death rates.

Of course, the death rates worldwide are under-reported, and overall, worldwide, on average, the death rate is expected to be double of what is reported. To get an idea of what the true death rate from coronavirus, you would also need to compare previous death rates in previous years--at the same time of year. There is more work to do on that, because you would ideally have projections for if an epidemic never happened this year.

Correlation does not equal causation. I could spin the data to point out that Sweden has a fraction of the deaths as NYC and a higher antibody rate, proving that lockdowns don't work.

I don't think data is the reason why people feel strongly one way or the other about this. Maybe risk assessment is the difference.

We both look at the same data and come up with different conclusions. We might even both agree that this is most likely to peter-out from this point, but that it could get worse. We disagree on how to hedge/address both possible outcomes.

> I could spin the data to point out that Sweden has a fraction of the deaths as NYC and a higher antibody rate, proving that lockdowns don't work.

Could you? My impression is you have too much integrity to do that. Ignoring the obvious difference between a largely rural Nordic country and one of the world's most densely populated trade centers might be hard for you.

>We both look at the same data and come up with different conclusions

I have yet to draw a conclusion. If you read my comment carefully, it's cautioning you against coming to a conclusion too soon.

Agreed. It would be prudent to ease out of lockdowns with the capability to return to them if hospitals are becoming overwhelmed. The county I live in is taking a phased approach to opening businesses based on the risk of exposure for workers and customers. They haven't started yet. I question some of their targets, but am glad that they have measurable targets.

It’s also to slow the rate of infection in order to buy time until we figure out more effective treatments and potentially a vaccine, and also to improve detection and isolation practices. The goal isn't “spread 1,000,000 deaths out over a longer period of time.” It’s also to reduce the number of deaths and infections altogether. Unfortunately, in the US we haven’t used our lockdown time in a useful way. We’ve kept hospitals (mostly) from being overwhelmed for now, but none of the infra that supports an effective test/trace/isolation regime was deployed. Hospitals still can’t get sufficient PPE. Etc.

The purpose of the lockdowns initialy was to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, i.e. Flatten the Curve.

Are there other useful ways to use a lockdown at this point, when there are already millions of infected?

There's no precendent/evidence that anything else can be done at this point, there's too many cases.

Are you thinking that we should change the goal of the lockdown, to be eradication? Is that possible?

This thing is still spreading, even during the current lockdowns.

The purpose of TTI isn’t necessarily to eradicate the virus altogether, which does seem unlikely. It’s the alternative to lockdowns. Like lockdown, it reduces the new infection rate. Unlike lockdown, society is more able to carry on with something resembling regular economic activity and mobility liberties. In the US we have squandered our lockdown time in a way that will make TTI more difficult, more expensive, and less effective because, the outbreak is more widespread. But even with those marks against it, it would be better (in terms of economics, health outcomes, and personal liberty) than extending lockdown indefinitely or “opening up” the economy to what will quickly result in resuming exponential growth of infections and, consequently, deaths.

> Why shouldn't we remove the lockdown if we can manage to do so without overwhelming hospitals?

Because until we have an effective vaccine or treatment, that'd mean something about 2% mortality rate across the infected population, which, without any containment, would be close to 100% as this thing is crazy contagious. That's 6 million dead people.

And keep in mind that 2% is a very optimistic number. Germany has twice as many. In the US about 6% of the confirmed cases are already dead, with only about half recovered. From that 6%, it'd be 22 million dead people.

> Why shouldn't we remove the lockdown if we can manage to do so without overwhelming hospitals?

The premise of the question is false. The states making aggressive reopening moves are largely on upward trends of cases and show no sign of being able to avoid overwhelming their health systems if they reopen (some are on track to so so with their, often already too lenient, “lockdowns”), and even the states doing more measured reopenings that seem to have the caseload situation more in hand (like California) don't have the surveillance in place to detect a new surge in time to effectively respond. The latter approach is risky but arguably responsible given the context of the grossly negligent federal economic response, but the former is just flatly indefensible.

I would agree with your concern about the possibility of hospitals being overwhelmed with no lockdown. But then again that has not happened in Sweden.

You mentioned being concerned with the caseload in states that are doing graduated openings. I was thinking of this mostly in terms of hospitals being overwhelmed.

Are you thinking we can eradicate this in the U.S. with a long term lockdown? I don't think that's possible anymore.

>This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.

From the second the federal government put the "opening up" in the hands of each State it seemed like a massive effort from the top down to distance themselves from any bad outcomes and take credit for any good outcomes.

Maybe it is better to have the Governors in charge, but once traveling/airports begin picking up again...State boarders and policies become pretty meaningless.

> From the second the federal government put the "opening up" in the hands of each State

The federal government never put it there, it was always there because the closing down was always in the hands of each state, because that's where the lockdown orders originated. And that's arguably not the problem, anyway, as those policies are going to need to vary by state (and by smaller areas within states in many cases), anyway, the problem is more the federal withdrawal of support for testing, the failure of support for response needs (and the active redistribution of resources, including direct theft from states who acquired their own) driven by political affinity between the federal executive and state executive rather than public health needs, and the subtle and overt federal pressure (and direct federal mandates, in the case of meat packing) for premature, irresponsible reopening by the states (subtle including things like not providing robust financial supports so as to create bottom-up pressure for reopening.)

Trump could order a nation wide shutdown if he wanted to.

Such an order wouldn't be legally binding outside of federally controlled facilities (and perhaps air and sea ports). For better or worse, US states remain sovereign entities.

While that's true, a presidential recommendation for something, based on sound reasoning and solid evidence, backed by experts, would be very convincing.

>a presidential recommendation for something, based on sound reasoning and solid evidence, backed by experts, would be very convincing.

I'm going to catch hell for this because "politics" but ... we're talking about Trump, here. A man who just recently had to walk back a suggestion that doctors look into injecting cleaning solvents as a possible treatment for COVID-19 as "just sarcasm."

Indeed. I don't see how he'd make a recommendation based on sound reasoning and solid evidence and backed by experts. His recommendations are polar opposite of this.

As for hell, welcome to the club.

In the post-Gingrich hyper-partisan environment, the best thing for any President to do is not make a recommendation, and to leave it to the experts to present theirs and stay out of their way.

If the experts make a non-political recommendation, it has a chance of being accepted by everyone. If the president makes a recommendation, it immediately becomes political and Fox news will either hype the hell out of it (if the president is a Republican) or go to war against it (if the president is a Democrat).

I don't like the way this story ends. The US needs a plot twist.

I have a (joking) theory that Trump's initial lack of action was a calculated ploy to make sure the denser, blue states decided COVID was urgent.

> Such an order wouldn't be legally binding outside of federally controlled facilities

The executive branch has broad quarantine authorities when it determines such measures are necessary to control communicable disease under the Public Health Service Act, and they have been applied with mandatory force outside of federally controlled facilities (mostly in regard to international travelers) in the COVID-19 emergency.

Unless he declared martial law, I don't think he has the authority to do so. If you do think he has the authority to do so, what do you think the legal basis is for that authority?

Whether it is for the opening or closing of the States the federal government would have the constitutional powers to make those orders. States have the primary authority but essentially at anytime the Federal government could invoke the Commerce Clause.

From an American Bar Association (ABA) article from April 2020:

>Through the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress exclusive authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the federal government has broad authority to quarantine and impose other health measures to prevent the spread of diseases from foreign countries, as well as between states although that has never been affirmed by the courts.

>In 1902, the Supreme Court directly addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographical area. In Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, the justices upheld a Louisiana Supreme Court decision that the state could enact and enforce quarantine laws unless Congress had decided to preempt them.

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/yourab...

Between the states. So the President could, for example, close the border between Georgia and South Carolina. But he couldn't, for example, close Georgia internally.

Well that is how the law reads, but its not how it is applied.

Put it this way the federal government uses the commerce clause to regulate everything from farmers growing marijuana; farmer feeding their live stock excess crops they grew; restaurants from discriminating against diners on race; etc... There is no shortage of case law over 200 years showing how States rights have all but completely eroded to the Federal Government through the commerce clause...you don't see many farms or restaurants crossing state boarders but federal government can regulate them on the basis of effecting interstate commerce.

The President could not order Georgia closed internally or close the border between Georgia and South Carolina because the President does not have that power.

Congress could pass a law allowing the President to do so in response to health emergencies or other national disasters (a delegation of its powers under the Commerce Clause), but no such law currently exists.

> but no such law currently exists.

It could effectively be done under the existing broad quarantine provisions of the Public Health Service Act, especially if it didn't expressly order a lockdown but instead ordered that anyone engaging in the kind of activities that would normally be prohibited in a lockdown was subject to summary detention for examination until shown not to be infectious.

The PHSA only grants the power to quarantine someone who is infected, or reasonably believed to be infected.

The PHSA does not grant the Executive the power to issue a broad quarantine that could cover non-infected individuals.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/264

These are interesting references thanks.

The Commerce Clause seems to specifically give the federal government control over people ENTERING the country and people CROSSING state lines, but doesn't seem to address the federal government declaring statewide lockdowns.

It does seem that the federal government can issue quarantine orders to individuals suspected of being infected, but again this is directed towards a specific person, and is an actual hard quarantine order.

The "Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health" says that the state can enact quarantine laws unless Congress decided preempts them. It seems to handle the opposite case: can the federal government prevent my quarantine? And the answer is only if Congress passes a federal law. This is a big hurdle, because the decision doesn't lie in the Presidents or his administrations hands.

No, Congress has the power to issue a quarantine affecting the states, under the Commerce Clause.

The Executive does not, absent a specific law authorizing such a shutdown (i.e., a delegation of Congress' Commerce Clause powers, and no such law currently exists.

I never once said the Executive.

The claim being debated was that Trump had the power to declare a national lockdown. Last I checked, Trump wasn't Congress but the head of the Executive branch.

At all times I said "federal government," someone else injected Trump into the thread, and the person I replied to replied directly to me saying my statement was wrong not the other poster, but clearly my statement references "federal government" and he says "no Congress." Last I checked, Congress is part of the federal government.

> Trump could order a nation wide shutdown if he wanted to.

People are getting lost in the weeds about whether or who has authority to do what. I think that's less important.

What matters more is cooperation between Federal, State and local.

Instead of having those ENDLESS insane ad-libbed monologues at the "daily briefing", a true leader would have been too busy working non-stop with state, key city officials, disease experts, and those who can handle logistics. He could have left the daily briefing to competent spokespeople (I know that's laughable, but imagine any other administration).

>The federal government never put it there,

Maybe you could debate when the federal government put it there, but they did. I think we would both agree that at all phases of a quarantine the Federal Government has supremacy over the States.

Further, Federal government deferring to the State on closures is unrelated to their deferment on opening (legally anyway, the political reasons are likely the same)...In other words just because the federal government deferred to States on closing, doesn't mean they couldn't jump in at any time. In fact with the openings they federal government implemented "Opening Up America Again" which is voluntary, but they could have just the same made it mandatory.

Otherwise, You are highlighting many other failures, which I tend to agree with...which are likely part of the desire for the federal government to distance themselves from any fallout of bad outcomes from reopenings. And rest assured when a State opening outcome is good Trump will pat himself on the back and claim they closely followed "Opening Up America Again" guidelines/phases, and States with bad outcomes failed to follow the same.

You are just wrong on this. The government of the United States is set up so states have supremacy over the Federal Government in many/most areas of domestic policy. I recommend reading up more on this. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/no-trump-cant-force-s...

> The government of the United States is set up so states have supremacy over the Federal Government in many/most areas of domestic policy.

I don't think you are familiar with the commerce clause [1].

It gives the federal government control to regulate anything that would effect interstate commerce which would obviously include spread of a novel infectious virus.

Obviously State issued mandatory lock-downs effect interstate commerce and that where there federal government can begin regulating.

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

Edit:

In 1902, the Supreme Court directly addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographical area. In Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, the justices upheld a Louisiana Supreme Court decision that the state could enact and enforce quarantine laws unless Congress had decided to preempt them.

> It does. We are seeing a dithering half-assed response to the pandemic in the USA.

> If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable.

Exactly. At the start of this it was made clear that lock-downs would be pointlessly destructive if they were eased back too quickly: we'd get all the economic pain for little gain against the virus. But it seems like that's roughly the course our leadership is taking...

The lockdowns were pointless to begin with, where governors shut down all business but let 24/7 subways keep running. In addition, lockdown was only going to flatten the curve, not get rid of the virus. Point being to not overwhelm the medical system and increase IFR. The medical system in the US was never overwhelmed, not even close (40k ventilators demanded by NY, needed 1/5 of it). So, we spent $5T for the same effect of never needing to lockdown (look at countries that didn’t lock down), knowing we’d need to open up anyways because this is unsustainable.

Also, without enforcement, they were more like "stay at home suggestions" rather than stay at home orders. Tons of people around me are out and about, horsing around, and there's no change in traffic down my street. Everyone is treating it as a joke, and there's no enforcement, so it's pointless.

Pointless, besides being $7T in the hole.

Given two choices:

A: Don't do Stay At Home = Lots of people die + medium economic loss

B: Strictly enforce Stay At Home = Fewer people die + large economic loss

...somehow America managed to choose:

C: Half-ass Stay At Home = Lots of people die + large economic loss

> The medical system in the US was never overwhelmed

So you think the solution was pointless because it prevented the problem from ever occurring?

At the start we still collectively believed it was about flattening the curve, not containment. For some reason a lot of folks have become convinced containment is/was a real possibility. A competent response from the gov't would be to bend all our resources during the lockdown phase towards correcting our ill-preparedness.

> This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.

Paul O'Neill died recently (not COVID-19 related). I don't have many business heroes. O'Neill was one of the them. (Andrew Grove is the other.)

Here's how O'Neill turned ALCOA around when he took it over in the 80s:

A few minutes before noon, O'Neill took the stage. He was fifty-one years old, trim, and dressed in gray pinstripes and a red power tie. His hair was white and his posture military straight. He bounced up the steps and smiled warmly. He looked dignified, solid, confident. Like a chief executive.

Then he opened his mouth.

"I want to talk to you about worker safety," he said. "Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and machines that can rip a man's arm off. But it's not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries."

The audience was confused. These meetings usually followed a predictable script: A new CEO would start with an introduction, make a faux self-deprecating joke--something about how he slept his way through Harvard Business School--then promise to boost profits and lower costs. Next would come an excoriation of taxes, business regulations, and sometimes, with a fervor that suggested firsthand experience in divorce court, lawyers. Finally, the speech would end with a blizzard of buzzwords--"synergy," "rightsizing," and "co-opetition"--at which point everyone could return to their offices, reassured that capitalism was safe for another day.

O'Neill hadn't said anything about profits. He didn't mention taxes. There was no talk of "using alignment to achieve a win-win synergistic market advantage." For all anyone in the audience knew, given his talk of worker safety, O'Neill might be pro-regulation. Or, worse, a Democrat. It was a terrifying prospect.

...

Within a year of O'Neill's speech, Alcoa's profits would hit a record high.

Here's an extended excerpt from Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: http://txti.es/duhigg-keystone-habits

Imagine a president who came out in February, even early March, with a message like that. Imagine our response had been organized around that message:

"I intend to keep all Americans safe, rich and poor, old and young. I intend to go for zero deaths."

> Imagine a president who came out in February, even early March, with a message like that ...

Considering the virus was spreading in the US in late January any action at that time would have been much too late.

South Korea was hit with this virus at about the same time. In some ways they're more vulnerable than we are: higher percentage of older people, higher population density.

They've been FAR BETTER at controlling this thing than the USA.

The key difference? Leadership: they don't have a mental-case at the helm of their government. Trust: their populace heeded warnings and acted accordingly.

I expect that when this is all over, we'll see that even some countries that have been referred to disparagingly as "banana republics" will outperform the USA in handling of the crisis.

I agree with those two points and I think there are some others. Culture: (1) wearing masks was already socially accepted, (2) detail-oriented nature performing early full contact tracing by any means necessary even if manual; (3) big wake-up-call from a super-spreader.

I think part of the strategy here is to minimize the perception of risk associated with the disease and fact that it's preventable/manageable but at a cost to the current economic structure we have.

If labor in the US begins to normalize or minimize the perception of risk of death associated with COVID as just another threat "out of their control" (now proven not to be the case), they'll continue working and producing as before--e.g. like risks associated with car fatalities, seasonal flu, heart disease/obesity/diabetes deaths largely influenced by sedentary lifestyles, etc.

Bob and Alice go to work, Bob contracts COVID, has serious illness, and dies two weeks later. Alice and friends are fine and give a moment of silence, "well, that's just the way things are, what could we do?", then continue on, just like we do every day. It's not until you're directly effected do you seem to care about other's lives, pretty terrible way to live IMHO.

A potential sideflip is that the gamble doesn't work and people start dying, perception doesn't shift, and a social, political, and cultural revolution take place resulting in demands for significant changes for labor rights in the US. I don't see that happening though.

I think the divide we're seeing about this lockdown is that people are really growing tired of their precarious situations (housing, food, essentially things tied to finances and necessary debts to survive) created by business trends and are starting to internalize just how little employers really care about them, regardless of the nearly insulting propaganda/advertisements about appreciation for front line workers.

They're being exploited, putting their lives at risk, and a few folks are profiting drastically off of it while propping these people up as heroes in marketing campaigns when many pretty much have to continue if they don't want to go into financial ruin (effecting critical life needs like housing, food, health insurance,, some ability to do things they want to do...happiness).

The worst part is that it's not just businesses. This culture of transactional relationships and financial focus we've allowed to permeate everything from friendships, family, community, etc. has brought out the absolute worst in people. Some of those mostly unaffected, working remote, continuing with gainful employment are showing they too want their transactional culture to continue. "I don't care about your life, I want my haircut." Some on the other hand don't have money and realize its necessary to survive so they blame the government lockdown for their precarious financial situation when its really the highly leveraged labor market the US created that's at fault.

It's pretty disgusting all around.

> This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.

Also a profound lack of reading the future.

It's easy to say we should just stay in lockdown until things are manageable when you have a job that allows you to work from home.

I have several friends who are directly impacted by this. Two of them work at small businesses that will shut down in a couple of months. I have one that has no income because he lost his waiter job and supply teaching job at the same time. I have some friends that are suffering from mental health issues. One person I know is living 5 people in a one bedroom apartment.

This is a very hard, almost impossible situation, so don't be so judgemental against people that want to end the lockdown. I fully understand why they want to, because realistically there's no end in sight and even 2 months is a very long time for people to do nothing and starve in their apartments for both food/money and interaction.

^ This

Without exception, everyone I've seen or heard of advocating for continuing the lockdowns/shelter in place have remote-friendly jobs with direct deposit. I'd wager most have months of cash reserves. While their 401k's have suffered, they're still paying their mortgage, feeding their families, and - at the worst levels - are exceptionally bored.

On the other side, I see people (friends and family) choosing to wait to pay their rent in favor of groceries.

* I'm in Austin, so almost 2 months in counting the SXSW cancelation on May 6th.. which was a good idea in that it probably prevented us from being a NYC or New Orleans in the short term.

I advocate for the continued lockdown, but then I also advocate for universal basic income and universal healthcare, which are usually dismissed as "socialism". The way it is in the US, with healthcare tied to a job (or paid at insurance market rates) and pretty much no social safety nets is a disaster waiting to happen.

It turns out the disaster doesn't need to wait anymore.

Comrade don't admit so many things in one place or no one will join the party.

We have free cake. Don't underestimate its power.

Also, the fewer survivors, the easier the revolution gets.

> Also, the fewer survivors, the easier the revolution gets.

That's oddly appropriate explanation of communist thought in the 20th century.

If you consider they needed to engage in armed conflicts not unlike most independence wars, that's understandable.

This time, however, it's the Trump supporters who really want to engage in behavior that has about 5% of chances of getting them killed.

> The way things are going now, it's like we're letting up just enough to keep the damn thing circulating, killing more people needlessly

That was the objective by our president, from the get-go. Remember who is in office: a malignant narcissist with sociopathic tendencies.

When an authoritarian ruler (even a soft one) says something, even if it sounds like an exaggeration, like "lock her up" or "I Could Stand In the Middle Of Fifth Avenue And Shoot Somebody And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters", you should absolutely believe them at face value. They are not people to be messed with.

Also, in the US, a death from something adverse is nothing more than a statistic. The 60,000+ deaths (likely to be double based on the deaths reported compared to previous years) are nothing more than a statistic. Remember that. It is sick but true.

You should take a look at the countries that are part of the European Union, that are east of the Iron Curtain. They have dealt with crises before, and relatively recently, and they seem to have done pretty well in the circumstances.

The IMHE group at the University of Washington, which is a world-renowned team, posts projections on COVID-19 statistics both in the US and from EU countries [1].

[1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

> If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable.

Oh? And what exactly is "manageable" in your (apparently well qualified) eyes?

It's impossible for most people in America to lockdown for more than 2 or 3 months and not make income. People are living a pipe-dream if they think America will just stay inside for a couple of years while a vaccine is developed, if there is ever one developed. Even other countries with extensive social networks have to eventually fail because they don't have unlimited resources in an economy that produces nothing.

That depends on context. There are cities and counties without a single Covid case to date. If I lived in one, I would feel more comfortable going back to Work. Also, those with low Rick businesses or mortgages are probably eager to go back

Trump and Republicans are pushing to open up as an excuse not to pay people to stay home. They are pushing this back on the American people and it is not right. If we get a UBI or 80% wage guarantee (like the UK did) then we could wait this out. Instead the Federal government is refusing to do its job and putting the blame on the states and individuals. We are being played.

Sure, clearly we should just be printing even more money...why stop at 80% wage? Why not 100%?

What works in England doesn't necessarily work in the US, and presuming that Republicans are just being greedy is naive and counterproductive.

It would work as would UBI. We can print money everyone else is. It'll cost even more otherwise.

Sure it has to work out fiscally. But America is spending hugely on public assistance now (housing included). One scenario is to cease those programs and turn to the UBI. It adds up very similarly.

At some point, digging into the details, you find the single largest obstacle to a UBI is entrenched ideas and naysayers. Call them Republican or whatever you like, but they're the ones being naive and counterproductive.

Got some major red pilling for you on corona virus. As you are probably aware, there's several corona type viruses that infect humans, one is covid-19. You know what else is a corona virus? About 20% of the common cold. After centuries of fighting the common cold, what are the odds we'll figure out a vaccine for this novel corona virus within the next year? Probably close to zero. Maybe with all of this extra attention, something might get done, but it would honestly be a miracle. So any plans about reopening that involve a vaccine are out the door.

Next, let's talk about any plans that involve "testing" as part of the plan to reopen. How much testing would you need? And what kind of testing would you need? Remember, you're not in a hospital, you're just a person who is trying to go back to work or into a grocery store. First, there's a kind of test that takes 3 days to turn around. That's useless, because in that 3 days you've gone around and infected tons of other people. Second there's the tests that take 5 minutes to turn around. Okay, that's great. So you take that test, and you're negative. Perfect. You're allowed to buy groceries today. What about tomorrow? Or the next day? How many tests would we need to make this really work? And how many of that type of test are reasonably available within the next 6 months? It's not going to happen. So any plans about "testing our way out of this" are out the door.

What does this mean? Basically there's some limit of economic destruction that is going to be worse than the virus. Nobody can predict exactly what that is. Is it closing everything for 6 weeks? 3 months? No one knows. The hard truth is we're just going to have to eat it, and by eat it I mean take a lot of deaths. Hopefully in a way that doesn't overload our hospitals. What will really get your goat is realizing that public leadership has known that testing and vaccine wasn't going to work since very early on. And we've just been keeping hope alive based on lies and magic thoughts.

20% of the cold is not one corona virus; it's several. A vaccine for the cold would have to handle most of them, along with the other 80% that are noroviruses. Vaccinating against one strain of the cold doesn't do you much good when there are maybe 100 of them.

Covid-19, on the other hand, is a much simpler target, just because it's one target. (Yeah, they're talking about different strains emerging. I don't know if they have drifted too far to be covered by one vaccine, though. Even if they have, three to five strains is still much simpler than the cold.) So there is more hope for a vaccine than you are saying. (That doesn't mean that I think we're going to see one next week. Maybe not even this year.)

As for testing: We either need to test everyone, then quarantine everyone who's sick and trace their contacts, or else we need to test everybody, frequently. I don't see either of those happening very soon.

For testing, are you suggesting we should execute 300+ million tests within a very short window (like a few days short window), and then quarantine the sick? Do you believe we have the testing resources to accomplish that? Do you believe we can lock our borders down tight enough to not let more infection in? How will you manage to execute such tests without getting everyone to gather in big testing facilities which will surely infect some of the people who tested negative? Try to play out the logistics of this in your mind for how we'd really accomplish this in the real world. It's not real any time soon.

The absolute best case scenario by Fauci for a vaccine was 1 year. Let's assume even that miracle occurs. Do you really believe shutting down the economy for a year is feasible without a collapse of civilization as we know it? Then you have the same logistical problem of making and delivering this vaccine to literally billions of people. It's technically doable, but not in any kind of short time frame. I'm sorry, but it's just not real, and it never was.

You seem to have misunderstood me. This leads to you vehemently arguing against something that is not my position.

I said that this is what it would take in order for testing to work. I didn't say that I thought it was doable; in fact, I think it is not.

As for a vaccine, I think that one is possible, but not certain, and not immediate. And I said so, rather plainly.

Yes, apologies. I missed the very last bit of your OP, "I don't see either of those happening very soon."

What's your take on the estimated death toll from the lockdowns?

I've seen projections of 1.4m additional deaths from tuberculosis over the next 5 years, half a million cancer deaths, and pretty much uncountable additional deaths from other reasons (suicide, substance, hunger, lack of exercise among elderly).

The list goes too long - for example, people stopped coming to ER for strokes and heart attacks (a 40% decrease of ER visits) and die at home. There are 200m additional people now on the edge of starvation.

I also note a correlation between a country's wealth and level of healthcare. If a country has less money, it typically has less healthcare and more deaths from ridiculous, easily preventable causes. Having a good economy appears to save lives and improve life outcomes across the board.

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
...

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

Howl by Allen Ginsberg for anyone else who didn't know the reference - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

This is poetry? It doesn't rhyme.

There was an old fellow called Hugger,

Who was captain and mate of a fishing smack;

When a yacht crossed his bows,

He said: “My word!

It’s an awfully good thing it wasn’t a liner.”

Poetry hasn't been structured in rhyming stricture for ~150 years or so. In English, Walt Whitman was kinda the first 'famous' person to abandon rhyming and meter [0], and dive into 'free verse'. His Leaves of Grass, revised over his entire life, has numerous examples. Some of his best work is here:

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-wal...

Even centuries after his death, I find his poetry to be some pretty wild stuff.

Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.

Fun Fact: Whitman, a staunch anti-authoritarian and overall structure hater, is one of the few English Poets taught in Chinese schools, as he is considered 'a man of the people'.

[0] Super crazy debate on who was 'first' here, if that can even be a thing that can be measured.

anglo-saxon poetry is also not interested in end-rhymes. The metric stress and alliteration are the repetitive linguistic features that shape those works, which are the direct ancestors of modern english.

Listen! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes

in the old days, the kings of tribes—how noble princes

showed great courage!

Allen Ginberg's Howl : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

A very good essay on Howl and Moloch here : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

"I raised Moloch to Heaven and all I got was a Disneyland with no children"

That article from Slate Star Codex is a miracle. Stars aligned and Scott peaked.

And here it is read by Jeremiah: http://traffic.libsyn.com/sscpodcast/Meditations_on_Moloch.m...

This is why I'm so sick of all the "we're in this together" stuff coming from celebrities/rich people/brands. We are very clearly NOT in this together, socioeconomic factors are huge in your potential survival of this and executive teams are giving themselves bonuses while laying off workers or asking for permanent pay cuts. This faux positivity helps nobody.

If the US had a decent social healthcare in place, it would be. You pool together resources so everyone has a chance. Instead you are either lucky or rich.

Not really. In the event of an untreatable disease, no amount of free healthcare would make me feel better about being obligated to work in a factory if I'm vulnerable to the disease; even if factory work were the best damn job in the world.

That's communism though!

Can you point us to an executive team giving themselves bonuses?

I can point you to multiple giving themselves paycuts.

Disney is the easiest one to find, I’m sure there are many many more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/22/disney-heir-cri...

I can't find any after a few minutes, though, I expect searching for it is a bit challenging.

Goldman: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5e76b864c5b63c3b6491cbd8

Denver Health Medical Center: https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-denver-he...

Salesforce: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-top-executives-ca...

Oxy: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=9&ved=2ahUKEwj...

Liberty mutual: https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2020/03/02/liberty-m...

That’s what I got in 3 minutes. I still would bet there are a ton more.

The articles written about CEO pay cuts are PR puff pieces intended to placate us into not taking back what the oligarchs have stolen from us.

Thanks! Most of those (Goldman, SFDC, Liberty Mutual) don't seem to be laying people off, though, so I'm not sure why this is a problem.

I won't bother getting into a discussion about "what the oligarchs have stolen from us."

Getting mad because someone was paid this year for the salary they earned last year is a bit of a stretch. I am a lowly coder at a bank and I got my bonus and profit share last month for the work I accomplished in 2019. What will suffer is my bonus and profit share for 2020, which I will be paid in April of 2021, if there's anything to get.

Executive compensation tends to be tied to bonuses and stock, not base salary. Taking a pay cut is much more minor than it may seem.

Yeah but cutting stock compensation doesn't really do much for you anyway since it's not real in the sense that it's not an operating expense; it's not cash. The equity is conjured up and pre-allocated meaning the cost to business is in the dilution at grant time.

You could make an argument that either:

A) The company should issue more equity to pay for furloughed/laid off workers

B) The company should reallocate equity from executives to the furloughed workers. This may not be possible for a host of legal reasons, tbh, so I'm not sure it's actually possible.

My favorite American joke: what do you call someone who you think doesn't deserve healthcare, doesn't deserve happiness, and should die so that you can maintain your standard of living?

A hero!

Don't worry, Time Magazine will declare "The Essential Worker" as Person of the Year 2020, and that will make up for all the minimum wage and unsafe working conditions.

Why do we even consult economists when it comes to a pandemic response? Economics is already provably not great at doing its core task.

Don't ask economists how to manage a pandemic. Listen to the epidemiologists. Consult the economists to determine how much money is needed to keep people fed and sheltered until the epidemiologists say that the threat will be passed.

*I'm stereotyping economists here, but they've participated in too many conversations I've witnessed where they wade well out of their bubble of relevance. I read this somewhere on HN once, and it stuck with me: know what you're being asked to be an expert on. Economists aren't experts on infectious diseases. Fuck off, you're killing people.

My humble apologies to the majority of economists that aren't megalomaniacs like the ones they seem to find for TV interviews and Government advisor roles.

I think most economists are pretty crap. That belief, however, doesn't mean that economic effects aren't real. It doesn't mean that epidemiologists are particularly good, or even trying, to counter balance health risks with health risks due to economic harm, because that's not really their job and its more or less an unprecedented situation.

Economic shut down kills people too. Especially poor people. Especially especially poor people in poor countries with food insecurity. So fuck off yourself. It's not that simple. Crime, authoritarianism, famine, (more) disease. You're just claiming the moral highground because you have a point source of death that is more likely to affect people in your local community.

Most epidemiologists say the threat won't pass. The idea that there's some policy response to eliminate the threat, rather than finding ways to mitigate and live with it, originates with politicians.

> Economics is already provably not great at doing its core task.

Can you cite any proof of this "provable" fact? ...and also a source that defines Economists "core task"?

Economics has become the tool of political ideology. It's modus operandi is language that's impenetrable to the non-economist.

My problem is primarily with politics as opposed to pure economics. Politicians use arguments provided for them by pet economists that allow them to hide behind the economy as a reason to avoid making hard decisions. Lo and behold, the status quo is best path forward ad infinitum.

Political economic decisions are often historically provably wrong and have the opposite effect to that which was the stated intent (whether or not it was the actual intent). Australia and the US recent re-implementations of trickle-down economics, by 30 years of experience, is not effective at doing what the politicians say it will. More subjectively: climate economics.

It's a complex argument but you're right to call me out on hyperbole. It's politics staining whatever it touches.

Semi-related interesting article about economics relationship with politics: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/july/1435672800/ric...

Is this another thread where everyone argues for their preferred side of the lose/lose situation we're encountering (lose income vs risk to health)?

Unfortunately, each state will make it's own decision on how to resolve this situation, and your state's decision may not line up with your preference. I can understand the frustration for those in a reopening state who are terrified of a big outbreak & getting sick, or those in a shut down state that are terrified of not having the money they need to survive from being out of work.

insert anecdote

insert politics

What am I missing? I can't view any of the NYT articles posted here; all I get is a overlay with subscription options. Same goes for most WaPo, Bloomberg and economist articles.

Is everyone else on HN a subscriber to all these publications or am I missing something?

You're missing developer tools in your browser, I think. :)

I think a lot of HN members are subscribers to these publications, just as a matter of culture.

As for what you're missing? If you weren't already a subscriber to the NYT, you probably aren't that interested in it. I find the NYT, especially editorials, to be extremely long-winded. This could have been summarized as "My opinion: MTA is a horrible employer that conditions my employment on coming to work when we don't have the sanitation and protective supplies or procedures that MTA tells us to recommend to our customers".

This article is an op-ed, not an editorial and only 1000 words

A Tweet can be long-winded; it's about the content.

Typically people will post a link to bypass the overlay using something like http://archive.is/, or https://outline.com/

I believe there is also a social rule here on HN that it is fine to ask for a bypass link, but it is not fine to complain about websites trying to stay solvent

EDIT: here is a bypass for the article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to the NYT

http://archive.is/jA5jJ

In this case the article is considered part of NYT's Covid-19 coverage, so is accessible with a free email-based signup.

you can circumvent most paywalls just by using reader mode on firefox. for the sites where that doesn't work, this usually does: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

Pick a browser you never use and wipe the cache and cookies between articles.

The paywall of any

    www.nytimes.com

article can be bypassed by changing the hostname to

    www.nytimes.com.

with a dot at the end.

Wow. TIL

Hmm.. it screws up CORS to get user subscription info. Good find! (and good lesson)

Could you explain that in more detail? I understand that the dot tells the DNS resolver that it's an absolute domain name rather than relative, but after that I'm lost.

With noscript, both NYT and WaPO works without any issues (just some images are missing). It is also much faster than with scripts.

Pocket (getpocket.com) gets around many paywalls.

This is an interesting issue.

RMT Union was absolutely up in arms against automation of their jobs, which would have made them much less vulnerable today. I wonder what MTA employees thought about the automation and if automation was even considered by NYC Subway or rail operations.

Maybe we'll finally get proper automation after this is over.

"As a conductor, when I stick my head out of the car to perform the required platform observation"

I can't really believe that the country that managed to send man to the Moon is not able to put a camera somewhere in the train or on the platform, so conductor does not need to do something like this...

If camera is too much, maybe a properly installed large mirror would do the trick.

Honestly the fact that we have cars driving around neighborhoods and highways by themselves but we haven't totally automated train driving is pretty ridiculous.

It's political more than technical. Automating the trains means eliminating the driver's job, and the Transit Worker's Union is opposed to the elimination of those positions.

No, it's both. The NYC subway system has the option of automated train operation only on a few lines.

This person is a conductor though. They sit in a cab in the middle of the train and operate the doors.

So... The solution to the issue today is - eliminate their job by automation(aka progress), but that is something they staunchly oppose.

Sounds like a catch 22

It's not really a catch-22.

Progress should be made. Having machines do jobs we don't need humans to do will always be better for everyone in the long run, and it is better if we do it sooner rather than later.

Luddism never helped anyone.

It doesn't help, because it doesn't work, once it's at the scale where people will assemble to fight against it, it's too late, you cannot prevent progress.

However I would point out that the original Luddites, who were middle class, mostly died in abject poverty.

We should not prevent automation, but at the same we should not just brush aside the plight of the displaced workers. New jobs will be created, but probably not for them.

They actively and explicitly don't do this to promote paying attention

Sending a man to the moon was done in the context of this military industrial state's show of might and veneration of the individual. Utilitarian arguments aside (especially given that investments into rail very directly translate into value for the populace it serves), rail transportation infrastructure investment wouldn't have quite the impact as far as propaganda manufacturing is concerned.

Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? In part, it's a delivery on the promise of self-driving cars we were imagined would be our eventual retrofuturist societal inheritance.

> Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company?

Point taken, but I don’t think the name “The Boring Company” is going to inspire many people even if it was a making weed-burgers for baseball fans.

On stations with curved platforms there are in fact monitors installed at the conductor's stopping position.

For the rest of the stations, optimizing for the case where it's unsafe for the conductor to stick their head out seems odd; why is there a crowd on the platform then?

There are two checks that the conductor does. One is to ensure that all the doors are "platformed", i.e. won't open into the tunnel. This is done by pointing at a striped bar hanging from the ceiling. They lean out the window and point because it's one of those "hacks" that makes compliance with the procedure more likely. (Kind of like how checklists dramatically increased aviation safety.) The second thing they do is check that the train isn't dragging anything when it's leaving the station. People do get caught in the doors (usually their clothes or bags), and you don't read about them dying because the conductor is paying close attention and stops the train.

Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect.

So I think a pretty good engineering compromise has been made here. Going to the moon happened because there was an unlimited budget and we only had to do it a few times. Seeing if your train is platformed correctly and that it's not dragging any customers to their death has less funding and has to happen thousands of times a day. Hence, we have a person in the train to do that, instead of a machine learning sensor network.

There are a million approaches to this. Minority of the solutions are CV. Most are already solved engineering problems.

Elevators manage to not drag you, but multimillion dollar train cars can't?

Your thought process is one of over-engineering. Don't overengineer.

Elevators don't run outdoors at 60 miles an hour in a blizzard. Trains are taken out of service all the time because the door opening/closing machinery has stopped working. A sensor that can detect the sleeve of your shirt caught in the door would have to be more precise than what elevators use, and operate in significantly harsher conditions.

(In Japan, platform doors are common. Every installation I've seen has multiple e-stop buttons to press if you get caught in them. Clearly they don't trust the sensors, if there are even sensors. And those doors are static and don't move with the train.)

London Underground operates in the same conditions and have figured it out, without the emergency stop buttons, or platform side doors.

The Victoria line has been operating semi-automatically with driver only operation, and not getting out of the trains (because the windows don’t open) since 1968.

These aren’t insurmountable problems, and they’ve been solved for a very long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_1967_Stoc...

> Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect.

The London Underground has figured this out, and figured it out decades ago. No tube driver gets out of their cab, or puts their head out of a window (they don’t have one that opens).

Stations are equipped with cameras and screens that allow drivers to check doors. The doors are designed to detect obstructions, including items of clothing trapped in them.

For Crossrail TfL has invested huge amounts of money into their new trains to further improve the door sensors, due to the extreme length of the trains. The doors have been tested for their ability to not just detect trapped items, but also the difference between bad (someone inside with a scarf trapped) from emergency (someone outside with a scarf trapped). [1]

All of this is done to not just improve safety, but also capacity. In London at least, the biggest restriction to capacity is the amount of time trains need to spend at platforms for people to get and off. They’ve already optimised the hell out of transit period between stations.

And all of this has been done on the oldest underground network in the world, and trust me it’s age shows. No Victorian ever imagined the tube would be so busy (or they wouldn’t have stuck us with tiny 6” high passenger compartments).

[1] https://www.londonreconnections.com/2018/crossrail-cutting-f...

While pushing for safety is a good thing, ultimately essential workers are the same as non-essential workers, except with an option to work. This is except for anyone being forced to work (there are certainly a few categories here, like the military). So while I am sure some people feel they are being sacrificed, and there are some individual circumstances that don't make sense, most essential workers are better off than non essential workers and both parties know it.

Anecdote: I work a lot with low income people and the vast majority want to be considered essential with the ability to earn. This is because they, like most people, are smart and are able to understand the risk and make decisions for themselves and their families.

So while I think pushing for safety is good and important, and extreme cases should be addressed, I find it odd that the dominant narrative around essential workers right now is not how workers are clamoring to be considered essential. It is the story not being told.

>This is because they, like most people, are smart and are able to understand the risk and make decisions for themselves and their families.

Come on, nobody has done these calculations. Not even the experts. I bet less than 1% of the population could give you even a reasoned estimate of the risks to themselves or their families.

I don’t think the OP meant a numeric calculation. it might be more a balancing of pros and cons.

An example might be:

PRos- I am young, healthy, and my work involves no human contact. If I don’t work I will lose my house

Cons - I know there is a non-zero risk and I need to find a new caregiver for my elderly parents.

That's not a balancing, that's an enumeration. You can't balance unless you have some idea of how big the sides are. I agree that there are a lot of people who enumerate and then think they have balanced, though.

But you can def estimate how big the two sides are.

100%: I will lose my home if I don't pay for it

x%: I or my family may get seriously ill or die.

We don't know x exactly, but we do know some bounds. We know it is better than a coin flip. I've heard estimates of worst case being around 20% if hospitals get overwhelmed. However, we know that this affects young, healthy people far less than others. But let's say it is 20%. When you are poor, your risk tolerances change. I know people who would willingly take a 1 in 5 chance for death to get back to work. And likely, their chances are more like 1 in 1000. I know vastly more people who would take that chance.

1 in 5 chance of death for working one or two months earlier? I have a really hard time believing that, it would imply that for five or ten month's minimum wage, a rich person could find willing quarries for human game hunting or something like that. Sounds like a sci-fi plot in the making (and potentially an underestimation of the poor's value on their own lives.)

Enumeration of this kind will always be comparing apples and oranges.

That said, it is fairly easy to get a ballpark for risk. If nobody in your city or county has contracted the virus, your short term risk is very low. If you don't contact anyone in your daily activities and practice basic hygiene, your risk is very low.

> Anecdote: I work a lot with low income people and the vast majority want to be considered essential with the ability to earn. This is because they, like most people, are smart and are able to understand the risk and make decisions for themselves and their families.

Absolute bullshit.

We don't know the true prevalence. We don't know the true incidence rate. Without that, we don't know the true mortality.

Epidemiologists and infectious disease docs can't give you a reasonable "understand(ing of) the risk ... for themselves and their families" right now, only the general bounds of best- and worst-case scenarios.

Anyone else claiming to have that knowledge or understanding is deluding themselves and/or others. To point to people desperate to not end up homeless/jobless and say they're making a rational decision with understanding of risks involved is absolutely ludicrous.

I'm pretty sure the worst-case scenario for a healthy person under 30 is around 0.1% IFR. Other estimates are better than that.

I would wager that under 30 it's probably a good bit lower than 0.1% IFR. This is the problem with trying to come up with an overall IFR for the disease. It makes a certain sense at a macro level, but for assessing your own exposure it doesn't mean a lot. People under 30 have a really low risk, people over 70 should probably weld their doors shut.

Oh, certainly! I meant that the worst case under-30 IFR - the one corresponding with something like 5% overall IFR - is around 0.1%. Something like 0.01% is easily within the bounds of possibility from what I understand. (For reference, the death rate for SCUBA divers is ~16/100,000/year - or 0.016%/year. Yes, SCUBA is risky, but it certainly puts things in perspective)

I think we'd all benefit from an effort to put perspective on the risk of this disease. E.g. if everyone knew that the one-time risk from COVID is approximately equal to their annual risk of all-cause death, it would be easier to reason about.

The general bound of worst-case scenarios is about equal to all-cause mortality risk over a year. That's bad, but not apocalyptically bad - well within the range of risks that an individual could rationally decide to accept.

Even more so if you're in a low-risk demographic - for instance, "healthy person under 50".

>Absolute bullshit.

A child can make a first order estimation of personal risk. For example, I live in California and there are 2000 cases a day for 4 million people. I think I am safer than the average person, so my risk is less than that.

It isn't perfect or numerically accurate, but gives a ballpark result which can be used.

You are safe until you are not. That's how the exponential works.

True, but growth is not exponential in the US and has been flat since the start of April.

If growth increases, you know it is becoming more dangerous. If growth decreases, you know it is becoming less dangerous.

Growth is still exponential in many places in the USA. What you are witnessing is Simpon's paradox. Basically factor out NYC and a few others and you see the exponential. Also all it takes is letting off the brake and where growth is flat will accelerate again.

Also what we want is a 14 day decline in new cases. Then we should consider re-opening.

People refused to social distance and ruined it for everyone.

You don’t see exponential for any of the top 10 states.

What does a 14 day decline mean for a state that never had a significant outbreak.

I have seen zero evidence that there is a meaningful spoiler effect. If you have any data, I would be very interested.

It would mean 0 new cases.

That strikes me as a unproductive threshold to maintain a lockdown. what do you think?

Also, I check and there are no states experiencing exponential growth.

You are wrong on both parts here.

Show me one state with exponential growth.

You can see each state here: https://datacat.cc/covid/

Country: US District instead of country: Yes Cumulative Cases: no

Any state with exponential growth should show increasing cases.

Alternatively, you can look at data on washington post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...

With the "option" to work is a spectacularly naive way to phrase it.

Their "options" are to work (with potentially tremendous risk to themselves) or quit without unemployment - losing their health insurance and income simultaneously.

That's hardly an option.

> While pushing for safety is a good thing, ultimately essential workers are the same as non-essential workers, except with an option to work. This is except for anyone being forced to work (there are certainly a few categories here, like the military).

But getting that "option" may not lead to much of a real choice, since gaining it may mean losing better options. IIRC, nonessential workers who've become unemployed due to shutdowns qualify for unemployment, but workers whose employers have opened do not.

Giving them the "option" to work just presents them with a choice between going back to a potentially unsafe workplace and having no income, while not provides it means they can stay safe with some income.

Small Restaurants will die. There is no way to break even on 50% capacity / delivery only. The margins are too small to have anything less than 100% capacity.

Sure, we _can_ reopen, but we can't force people to sit next to one another, and risk getting Covid-19 to continue to keep small businesses alive.

The only solution is to ensure the workers are paid, rent freeze for both business and personal leases.

Bad things need to happen for people to realize they are being exploited day by day. The "good" thing is they will forget about that when bad goes back to normal - yes normal not good.

There are a whole bunch of people who do not qualify for any benefits, have little savings, and are blocked from going to work.

In a recent press conference, New York Governor Cuomo failed to provide any reasonable response to a reporter when asked about someone in a very similar situation (the person qualified for benefits, but checks have not arrived).

What is to happen to these people? Is the lockdown to protect them from something truly worse than not being able to buy food?

Anyone care to address this single point without going off-topic?

Enable them to collect benefits: pay for them to buy food, cancel their rent payments, cover their healthcare.

It's not hard, we just have a weird culture in America that couples all these basic human essentials to your work.

> Enable them to collect benefits: pay for them to buy food, cancel their rent payments, cover their healthcare.

> It's not hard, we just have a weird culture in America that couples all these basic human essentials to your work.

The requests for these things have already been made and are not reasonably being acted on.

So make them demands, not requests. Organize collective action like rent strikes.

https://archive.is/jA5jJ

How are they sacrificial? They can walk away from their job if they think it's too dangerous. There are plenty medical jobs out there that don't require front line covid treatment

To quote Tommy Boy:

Ray Zalinsky: Goin' a little heavy on the pine tree perfume there kid?

Tommy: No, it's an auto air freshener.

Ray Zalinsky: Good, you've pinpointed it, now the next step is washin' it out.

> Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

Ayn Rand

I am not a follower of hers but on this particular topic I am reminded of her quotes a lot

Hers is a perversion from aspect blindness that talks about rights in a vacuum without concern or care about harm. Right (i.e. morally correct) and the right (i.e. morally allowed) are often not the same. A person has the right to deny food to someone who is starving, but it makes the denier repugnant, and I would rather not have them in my society. Rand starts from the faulty premise that the two are the same and descends into madness from there.

> I am not a follower of hers but...

How are you both not a follower of hers and also driven to conjure quotes? That looks a lot like when someone says "I'm not racist but <overtly racist thing>". (I'm not calling you racist. I'm drawing a similarity between "I'm not X, but").

I'll go further than the parent commenter and say that I think Randian ideals are absurd and anyone who sincerely supports or buys into them is deranged. But I think the quote is interesting in this context because it's so obvious and so relevant that capitalism is resulting in the same dehumanization that Rand ascribes to socialism.

To put it another way, it would be easy to imagine this variant of the quote being real (to be completely clear, it isn't):

>> Capitalism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to the capitalists, that the only justification of his existence is his service to the capitalists, and that the capitalists may dispose of him in any way they please for the sake of their own profit.

> -Karl Marx

...and that claim, unlike Rand's, would have been both accurate and relevant.

It doesn't describe what the doctrine of socialism is, the problems it claims to solve, what socialists actually believe, or the way socialist societies actually behave. And you could replace "socialism" with "capitalism", "society" with "employers" and "tribal, collective good" with "the benefit of the shareholders" and have an equally banal rebuttal, suggesting there's no specific insight behind it at all.

But, those minor flaws aside, it is, indeed, a quote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com