dave_b

Why would you assume total travel is constrained? Restricting travel from Europe to US will just eliminate that portion of travel, not concentrate it in the US.

Right and it wasn't the president's decision. Not sure what your point is.

Life Care Center in Washington had 120 residents a week ago. Now 19 of them are dead.[1] Does that sound like "just the flu?"

There's plenty of evidence that this is much worse than the flu. R0 is >2, compared to 1.3. Mortality rate seems to be at least 5x higher. And those are low bounds. And this is all adding to the regular load on hospitals. It has observably overloaded hospital capacity in China and Italy.

[1]: https://www.chron.com/news/education/article/Washington-viru...

Nobody cares what you were thinking about. This whole thread is based on the author's decision to insert a push for single-payer healthcare into an article about the outbreak. And the point is that a general agreement that healthcare should be improved doesn't justify pushing a particular, partisan solution in this context. That applies whether you would push for single-payer, medicare for all, or a true free market.

“Improving health care” != “single-payer system now!”

Obviously, the best health policies are debatable. Saying “our system isn’t prepared for this, therefore we need single-payer!” is moronic and insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.

Buying people off isn’t a result of capitalism, it’s always going to be a problem because of fundamental human incentives. Any system will fail if it’s administrators are corrupt and simply abandon the system. You’re basically blaming capitalism for the government failing to uphold capitalism, it’s absurd.

How is it a problem that women are looking at the biological realities and choosing motherhood over a 9-5 job? Most people were originally sold on the “problem” being the supposed sexism that prevented women from doing what they really wanted. Now we’re seeing that women don’t really want to work for the man over their children, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe that equal outcomes is the goal in and of itself. Seems like a bait and switch.

Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.

They’re playing the corruption game with politicians, but the rank and file of both sides hate them. That’s a much riskier situation than a big company wants to be in.

The amazing part is that both sides hate them for their own political reasons, not because of any common ground.

On the other hand, I have family members who have been radicalized into crazy conspiracy people who think white men are the root of all evil (can’t remember the direct quote but it was pretty close to that) by watching every news source except Fox News. And I suspect this is true amongst a very large swathe of the millennial population.

It’s also an old article, and the unemployment rate has since dropped to new lows. [1]

1: https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

I’d also argue that, on average, the negative impact of an opioid-related death is greater than that of a smoking-related death. The latter tends to manifest as chronic health issues that extend into old age. Terrible, yes, but these people have at least had relatively full lives with the opportunity to have children and be productive for most it. It’s more akin to obesity than a drug overdose.

Opioid-related deaths tend to involve the rapid destruction of lives, often of young people full of potential, culminating in sudden death due to overdose. Their friends and family then have to live with that horror for the rest of their lives. In terms of lost potential and the psychological trauma inflicted, there’s no comparison. It’s understandable that people consider opioids to be a worse problem than smoking.

He didn’t say it’s irrelevant, he said it’s secondary. And he didn’t argue that the overall thesis of the article is incorrect, he argued that it did a bad job of addressing the topic.

I think the heterogeneity of empires is a contributing factor to their eventual dissolution though. They tend to last a century or two at their height, and then start to break apart as more cohesive nations emerge. That’s not such a long time as far as societies go.

And the issue at hand isn’t whether homogenous societies could “compete” with empires, but whether they’re more likely to persist (and have less alienation among the people).

It’s all well and good to encourage understanding and whatnot, but the question is what actually works in reality on a societal level. It might sound nice to say “a strong economic system is not based on greed but on a willingness of each person to contribute to the best of their ability,” but it turns out that philosophy doesn’t work very well when dealing with large groups of people. I think the same could be said about your statement.

Business model has nothing to with anti-competitive behavior, it’s about being in the same industry / providing the same service.

He also never intended to be public about it, he kept his memo internal and posted it in a place that was soliciting feedback on the topic. It only became public when one of the activist types leaked it.

Literally the only evidence presented was a polite call for discussion, and a picture of the guy wearing a MAGA hat. Then the org directly responded, saying they reviewed the evidence and found he violated the code of conduct. Regardless of what they may claim or of how much anyone may try to dissemble, the MAGA hat picture was clearly the impetus for the decision.

It’s just a confusion between two different valid definitions of the word public, not some indication of the state of the culture.

Public/private can refer to government vs commercial, or it can refer to “out in the open for all to see” vs “the privacy of your own home.” “Public space” is a common phrase that uses the latter definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space

Still, the car’s seeming confusion doesn’t inspire confidence in the readiness of this feature.

By “public space,” I meant the predominant avenues for public discourse (maybe not the best choice of words). Mainstream media, tech platforms, and universities are the specific things I had in mind.

Progressives of the past were all about the principle of free speech. Now that they have the power to control the public space, all they seem to care about are the technicalities of the first amendment.

Arguments like that in the comic revel in enforcing groupthink because the author thinks it will be used in a way he finds favorable. If you take a step back, it’s obvious that every censorious organization has very strong reasons for silencing badthinkers, and they use the same type of self-righteous language when justifying it. Just look at how The Chinese government talks about Hong Kong.

edit: Point being, either you uphold the principle of free speech, as argued in the linked article, or you end up with those who control the platforms dictating their own worldview. They will always come up with some smug justification for why society will fall apart if they don’t, and anyone who’s silenced deserves it anyway.

Right, one example I remember from watching the games back in January was stalker micro. The high EPM of the AI allowed it to micro them picture perfectly and blink every single one away right before it died. In doing so it won a battle against impossible odds, and the announcers even commented on how it was way beyond the capabilities of the best players.

I imagine the breakout of total war would cause moderate to severe traffic congestion.

If you care about some people more than others, then you have an ingroup and an outgroup. Would you really want to not care for your own family members any more than you care for a random person on the other side of the planet? That’s what striving for no outgroups entails.

I think that’s a horribly misguided mindset. A better approach is to tolerate the outgroups and facilitate live and let live arrangements. Then you can focus more on appreciating your tribe and less on fighting the others.