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> This resulted in a marked decrease in hospital admissions, traffic accidents and domestic crimes.

That was the same worldwide because nobody was outside.

Holy retcon, Batman!

Traffic accidents actually went up in the US. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-08/traffi...

Generally speaking, emptier roads encourage more speeding and reckless driving, increasing the severity of car accidents.

The US isn't the litmus test of everything though. In the EU, road deaths dropped sharply in 2020. https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/

The EU had wider scale lockdowns that lasted longer, IIRC.

sure, but the claim was "worldwide"

even in your link some EU countries reported increases.

That's down to US road design I suspect: Wide multi lane roads with clear sight lines encourage drivers to think it's safe to go very fast. If these roads are normally congested with traffic then you don't see this downside, but when traffic dropped during the pandemic & it became possible to drive far too fast on these roads that's exactly what happened, with the inevitable consequences.

The miles really melt away when your doing 160, love those open roads and wide curves in the southwest. Yeh Eisenhower! :)

The biggest problem I run into is two lane highways where the semi trucks constantly block the left lane going just at the speed limit while trying to pass other semis in the right lane going just under the speed limit - literally a 1mph difference between the two. The speed limit for cars is 10mph above the truck limit but your lucky to do the truck limit consistently. California was particularly bad in that regard.

People from Oaklahoma are also a constant scourge on the road, they can not tolerate someone going faster then them, so if you try to pass on the left they will pull in front of you and bumble along at the speed limit or one mile over (def a culture thing, cops in OK have a zero tolerance policy for speeding, no margin, regardless of conditions, passing, etc.). On an open road you can just pass them on the right but in any moderate traffic they cause a lot of problems. Check the plates the next time someone does that, pattern isn’t hard to see.

Roads in West Virginia are basically paved over goat trails, I watched some douche in a pickup take a blind 5 mph turn at about 85mph trying to blow past a small sedan he obviously thought was going to slow and wedged himself in a stream about forty feet beyond the road. Luckily nobody was coming the other way around he turn or it could have been really tragic.

I noticed a bigger increase in www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars submissions in the last year or so. People are really driving like idiots in traffic, let alone what they do on empty roads in the middle of nowhere.

Looks to me like there's a general societal breakdown, also looking at the proliferation of videos of people walking out of stores with stuff they didn't pay for.

Guess we should have banned alcohol again.

Yes, so it's not the only cause, but the reductions in SA were like 65% compared to the UK at about 25%

But your article also says that SA has major issues with the regulation of alcohol consumption, issues that do not exist in a country like the US (according to the article).

The thing about human psychology is that if you tell someone not to do something, especially something that is not outright harmful to themselves or others, they will yearn to do it.

The answer to alcoholism is to de-glamorize it. Young impressionable minds are susceptible to such glamorization.

If governments around the world are seriously committed to reduce alcohol consumption, better shun it, rather than putting in laws to prohibit or restrict it.

Ultimately, if the people reject it, it will come down. And that is the only way it works.

I wonder if they simply banned alcohol advertising what the effect would be. That was a big thing for tobacco in the 90s. I still remember “joe cool” the camel on the back of my parents magazines.

You can see a general non-acceptance of smoking in public. There has been a consistent decrease in the number of smokers, in absolute terms over time.

I still remember the jingle from the Camel ads on TV, which were outlawed in 1971.

"Interesting" perhaps... but our definitions of "cool" vary widely.

Cool because data is always cool :)

More seriously,because it would simply be impossible to run these social experiments in normal circumstances.

There are other examples; New Zealand and Australia tested a "closed border" approach, Sweden adopted a "personal responsibility" approach. Some places had curfews. The shere variety and scale of the last two years have generated enormous amounts of data, and matching data to long-term consequences will keep anthropologists busy for years.

And just might inform better choices when the next one happens.

The closed border approach had fascinating consequences.

Little impact on many factors that had previously been put down to population growth.

It decisively proved that overcrowded infrastructure and inflated house prices were definitively supply side problems, rather than demand side problems.

Not sure that was proved at all - at least where I live, demand was almost certainly propped up by significant numbers of cashed up people in the prime of their working life selling up overseas and buying property when moving home. borders would need to be closed for longer to allow that affect to work out before you could truly see how it would be without immigration.

For some, data is not needed to figure out that tyranny isn't worth investigating.

I think possibly we have different definitions of tyranny

>many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions

Regardless of how you define tyranny, how can you be so blithely supportive of rule-by-decree in supposed democracies? Especially for the purpose of running "social experiments?"

Covid Restrictions gained the grudging mandate of the masses, and in many places only by a hair, due to legitimate public-health concerns. Even in that context the subversion of legislative processes should be concerning. Running "experiments" on a non-consenting populace is at least the definition of dictatorship or oligarchy, if the word tyranny doesn't work for you.

> how can you be so blithely supportive of rule-by-decree in supposed democracies

Because that is the reason we life in a democracy with checks and balances implemented. In Germany some decrees were canceled by our (up to the highest) courts, others were declared to be in line with the constitution.

We elect officials (setting the policy) every four years to rule us in our name. So we hand them the right and the power to "rule-by-decree" as long as they do not leave the grounds of the constitution (and we have courts to check against that).

> for the purpose of running "social experiments?"

I actually think (and believe) that most politicians in most countries tried to safe people. As much people as possible while also taking other factors like the economy and the health sector and stuff into account. And yes: They overshot sometimes. Yes, they made massive mistakes. Yes, they sometimes filled their own (or buddies') pockets. Yes, the more this pandemic progresses the less I think our politicians really know what they are doing.

But I never felt, that policies were implemented for the purpose of running an experiment. But the different implementations now offer the possibility to learn from them for the future. Like scientists looking at different implementations of daylight savings time and learning from that. Or different implementations of regulations regarding wearing helmets while driving motorcycles, regarding seat belt usage or even regarding the ability for contraception and abortion.

The fact that we are allowed to disagree and publicly argue against restrictions, to challenge them in court imho shows that we are living in a democracy.

But yeah - keep going on arguing about a straw man (that nobody but you put in place) like:

> Running "experiments" on a non-consenting populace is at least the definition of dictatorship or oligarchy, if the word tyranny doesn't work for you.

No, I was specifically responding to the person who said that it was "cool" that governments used covid resstrictions as a pretext for running "social experiments." I am specifically quoting an individual, not creating a strawman. Read the comment thread I was taking part in carefully for evidence.

For what it's worth, I think many of the covid restrictions were at the time believed to be necessary measures, but that's actually not the debate that's taking place here.

They were "experiments" in the sense that the actual outcomes were predicted (or not) but in normal times would be difficult to achieve at scale.

I'm not suggesting that they were unrelated to the issue at hand - and I'm not implying they were unethical.

I believe most govts acted in good faith, with limited information, and (quite literally) no experience to draw on. Even today we don't really know what the "best approach" was, what we can say though is that a future pandemic will have better data to work with.

Had all countries had the exact same response we would not really know if what we did was best or not. Lockdown, travel restrictions, alcohol bans, closure of businesses, closure of sport, limited social mobility, police enforcement, no enforcement - all these and more were tried in one place or another.

They were experiments with forseen, and unforseen consequences.

Sure there was over-reach here and there, but for the most part it was a best effort response from no known experience.

I don't believe it could be called tyrannical.

Not to minimise your experience, but in most countries the actions were not politicised as they were in the US, and were applied to a very much consenting populace.

It was understood this was a temporary health emergency, and the primary goal was to save lives. In most places, most people, saw this as a fair trade-off - and least in the immediate term.

One interesting analysis in years to come will be the effect of politisizing a health emergency as a party-political event, as distinct from there being broad political consensus to the action taken.

>> a very much consenting populace.

My WW2 knowledge isn't deep but I seem to recall this being a big problem back then. But I guess it's all good now.

>> Cool because data is always cool :)

Tell that to the families that had loved ones in the Unit 731 experiments?

I'm just saying that by prefacing something with "well since we're in a state of tyranny it would be neat to [do a thing]"... it doesn't always fly and not all data is necessary to have when it comes at a cost of human lives.

I feel maybe too much is being read into the word "experiment". I meant it in a hypothesis-action-result sense.

Every action taken by every govt was in effect an experiment since nothing of this sort had occurred in living memory, and past instances occurred in a very different world.

In SA there was a hypothesis that reducing the burden on the health sector was a priority, and that a significant contributing factor to hospital load was alcohol, hence limiting alcohol consumption (via limiting sales) was worth testing.

The experiment upheld the hypothesis, but at the same time highlighted negative impacts on the alcohol sector as a whole. To determine the best hospital outcome, while balancing industry requirements, a number of approaches short of an outright ban were tested. These outcomes will likely influence policy moving forward and equally provide important data for the next time hospitals need to be protected in this way.

New Zealand experimented with a sealed border, and eradication approach (successful), Australia did the same with somewhat less success. Again the impacts of those policies can be studied for sometime to come.

The opposite of these experiments was to experiment by doing nothing (Sweden for example) - even doing nothing was an experiment.

I'm not saying covid was fun, or that the very real human cost should be minimised, but clearly some countries fared better than others. Being able to understand why that is the case will be really important next time.

>One cool thing about the pandemic is that many countries took the opportunity to run large-scale social experiments under the guise of Covid Restrictions. I expect social scientists will be digging into this data for years to come.

So I wonder how much was learnt from the error rates and signal strength variations from wifi enabled devices in a phased array radar setup in order to track human beings walking around their homes. I wonder what patterns were discovered and if it was possible to discover when arguments and falling outs showed up. What other data was garnered that could predict certain behaviours?

I also wonder what would be discovered which will help with the isolation of space travel, like limited human contact, small human group dynamics, things like that.

It's not like the Prohibition was the first or the last such attempt. The one I'm personally familiar with was Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. It was also beneficial on paper, with statistically significant improvements in average health etc. But it was similarly flouted in practice. My family lived in an apartment in panel housing at the time, and if you went out onto the balcony and looked around, every balcony around you had some kind of glass flask or jar brewing fruit wine.

The question you should be asking wrt South Africa is how they're enforcing the ban on sales - because people will sell regardless. The general problem with any kind of ban that goes against what a significant part of the society enjoys is that it either goes most unenforced, weakening the rule of law in general; or is mostly enforced, and then you end up ruining numerous lives by running them through the law enforcement grinder.

The alcohol ban on sales was temporary and lasted around 3 months. There was minimal enforcement required - shops simply didn't sell it. The time scale was too short to develop home brewing to any significant degree.

Yes, the effect of a permanent prohibition is well known (illegal alcohol production, which given how easy alcohol is to produce at home is unenforceable) but this was not that.

That's interesting. In my state in the US, government took an opposite approach due to the pandemic to where now cocktails can be ordered "to-go" and curbside. It started as an emergency order and was recently passed as law.