ArkVark

How do you explain deaths in Sweden, UK, New York and other hotspots hitting essentially zero?

Cut out the middleman - fund national healthcare directly with a tax on air pollution and sugar.

The idea that nationalized healthcare (paid for by the middle class) will encourage politicians to tax the unhealthy food of the lower classes is fantasy - this has not manifest itself in other Western countries which do have nationalized healthcare systems.

Contact Tracing is not recommended (and basically pointless) for mild respiratory illnesses like Coronaviruses because for the vast majority of people, they are asymptomatic or lowly symptomatic, and the spread can be extensive.

Its only recommended for more serious viruses like Ebola.

Intel has been hollowed out by contractors and H1B workers. I don't think the raw talent is there anymore. The company is just running on inertia.

AdoreTV has a video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo

That's literally how herd immunity works. People with no or mild symptoms go out and spread the virus, people with heavy symptoms stay home. Virus is encouraged evolutionarily to be as non-symptomatic as possible.

Unfortunately we have totally broken this with our lockdown strategy, which has meant that heavily symptomatic people are allowed out to get medical treatment and spread the virus in clinic and hospitals, whilst everyone else is forced to stay home.

Lockdown kills too. In Australia there were about 700 excess deaths from January to April 2020 due to people being unwilling or unable to access normal medical care:

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2020/07/covid-19-drives-up-...

For the UAE overall crude oil makes up 28% of exports:

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

and Refined petroleum 15%

If you want to see an Arab country that has run out of oil, look at Yemen.

Its also worth considering that Norway has a highly educated, intelligent population and an open, protestant culture. Countries without these traditions or a less educated population are more prone to corruption and mismanagement.

The median age of death from COVID is about 80, and those people have serious existing health conditions. Statistically people in this group will have a life expectancy of about another 5 years. This is not a group that you have to worry about side-effects.

The death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher - from excess suicides, poverty, crime and violence - that anything we can do to alleviate the panic and get back to normal life is worth it.

Atheists and Agnostics have the lowest marriage rates and the lowest fertility rates: https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-pr...

The wikipedia article on John Byng (the ultimate source of the quote) is fascinating, particularly this section:

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

"Naval historian N. A. M. Rodger believes it may have influenced the behaviour of later naval officers by helping inculcate:

"a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten, so that [the latter] went into action with an invisible disadvantage which no amount of personal courage or numerical strength could entirely make up for.""

So it seems that Morale did actually improve!

Its likely that Viruses like COVID-19 have come and gone over time, and been completely unnoticed.

The difference being now that we have much older and elderly populations, often with chronic health conditions and deficiencies, kept alive 'artificially' by modern healthcare.

For example, approximately 50% of COVID deaths are to people in nursing homes. Without this population, the virus would be put down as regular influenza/pneumonia, albeit an unusually virulent strain.

And even if you had the solar power, what would you do with it? There is very little industry or value-add in Arabia outside of oil. It would be easier for Europe to just build solar power in the south of Spain, Italy or Greece.

Not all demand is equal. If your customers are Indians, Chinese, and Filipinos, your ability to sell $100/barrel oil (needed to balance budgets in many of these countries) is much weaker than if your customers were Americans, Germans, and Japanese.

It is unfortunate from a short-term local human perspective but Saudi Arabia devolving into anarchy would be excellent from a climate change point of view - a huge amount of CO2 would be locked into the ground and the price spike would dramatically speed up electrification of transport.

I can find you the same articles pre-2020 with the cause being influenza.

This is unlikely as they have the advantage of neither cheap labor, nor a highly intelligent workforce: https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

They are limited by an ideology/culture which discourages women from participating in the workforce or receiving an education, and also encourages cousin marriage (60-70% of marriages in Saudi Arabia) which lowers IQ and leads to birth defects https://english.alarabiya.net/en/life-style/art-and-culture/...

I think its more likely that Arab leaders will siphon off as much wealth as possible then flee to London and other tax havens. The survivors will be left to fight over the scraps and places like Saudi Arabia will come to resemble Yemen (which is a country which simply exhausted its oil reserves faster than the rest).

Assuming we capture about 10% of COVID instances as actual cases, then the US is getting 770,000 new instances a day.

Stockholm burnt itself out with 20% of the population getting immunity (determined via antibody testing).

So (328,000,000 - 37,000,000) / 770,000 = 378 days until herd immunity, considering the existing cases.

What is more likely is that the case numbers will ramp up significantly though, to over 100,000 per day at some point. In that case the USA will have herd immunity within the year.

This is nothing new. Influenza hits about 20% of the population (60 million people) as well and then burns out for the season. We struggle yearly with keeping influenza out of nursing homes and with the surge of hospitalization that it creates.

The good news is that right now there are no excess deaths in the USA and that hospitals all over the country are handling the virus and not running out of space (more beds can be always be converted to ICU, ICU capacity is not infexible, same as is done for influenza).

"Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S."

They seem to be getting that part right...

Why does this feel like the USA cutting Japan off from metal and oil shipments months before WW2?

The point is that instead of looking to reduce the population of the West and East Asia, which will have an impact on humanity's economic, cultural, scientific output, we should look at reducing populations (though education and family planning for women) in less-productive areas.

The top 10% is people who earn over $18,000/year, which probably includes most of HackerNews readers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...

Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output.

For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs

Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger.

When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.