jfnixon

Yeah, if only we were more like the EU, where the top scientist working on this problem (checks notes) just resigned due to all the political infighting. Why can't we be more like... oh, wait.

Some antibacterials have antiviral properties.

https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/36/3/646

Infrastructure will begin to break down if we don't do regular maintenance. That means spare parts, which means manufacturing, which means raw materials. Food has a similar supply chain issue.

Break the infrastructure enough that public sanitation stops working properly, and the Covid-19 deaths will be a rounding error in the excess death rate.

And if it did in this case or the next? The docs go on strike? C'mon, that would be saying "don't call my bluff."

How would that work? Doctors go out on strike?

It is just a bad choice to cut emergency preparedness. This is California, how many mass transit boondoggles survived the 2011 budget cuts?

Are voters in California suppressed?

"Corona directly kills people"

I'm not so sure about that. Covid may grease the skids, but the vast majority of people dying have health complications already. Kids aren't dying. Teens aren't dying. 20s and 30s aren't dying in numbers. If Covid were directly killing, we'd see kids dying.

Flu kills children, covid-19 doesn't. Not sure if there is an 'expected' percentage of flu deaths in children, but if so, we might estimate the covid effect by looking at those numbers.

I think the wrong model is the problem. Surgical masks provide small protection to you, but significant protection to others. It isn't for you, it is for everyone else. Think of a mask as portable social distancing.

By catching droplets from (asymptomatic) infected wearers, it reduces the virus on surfaces and in the air. That's the benefit.

Singapore and HK are cities, really, and the Singapore approach, aggressive contact tracing with mandatory stay at home orders, doesn't scale.

Taiwan and Japan are outliers so far, and they are monocultures, with famous compliance rates.

Korea is somewhat similar to Japan, but took a hit early, and has managed to beat it back.

China appears to have peaked, but did this with massive application of governmental policies which would never fly in the West.

Flatten the curve doesn't change that a large number of people are going to get this disease. The best news is danger increases with age, unlike the Spanish Flu. Africa is very young (media age), the US and China are roughly the same, while the EU in general is older (Italy and Germany especially). What matters is not hospital beds per capita, but ICU beds per capita. The US does much better by that measure. You don't need an ICU bed to give oxygen, which is what most serious clinical cases require. MIT Sloan gave a prize last year for a less expensive, simpler ventilator designed for most cases in countries with limited resources. We have options that aren't explored yet.

The cite doesn't mention it, but the NYT article reports the Washington State public health authorities shut down Dr. Chu, not the Feds.

"While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency during which so many lives could be lost. On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether."

The vast majority of infections are mild. Roughly 15% require medical intervention (beyond self-quarantine), and of that, less than 1 in 3 require ICU care. 100K infections is roughly 15K medical intervention, with 5K in the ICU.

Cite, please. The FDA and CDC bureaucracies are the groups hewing to the Business As Usual rule following. No need for the WH to reject WHO tests, the FDA is happy to fill that role.

The WH is ultimately responsible for the FDA/CDC, but if the Cabinet level needs to intervene to get the massive Federal government acting with urgency to this sort of threat, we should eliminate Civil Service protections and give Agency heads a bigger stick pour encourager les autres.

Laundering is used to disguise the bad original of counterfeit money as well as money obtained by unacceptable means. That is the point of the laundering analogy. I think counterfeit money is a better fit in the article’s analogy. Cargo cult Science would be an even better term.

To be clear, I do not propose ignoring anyone’s feelings except when actual harm is likely. No one would, I hope, argue that if an anorexic feels he is too fat doctors should write prescriptions for diet medications. Actual harm is likely, and feelings should take a subordinate role.

Facts are true to disinterested, objective observers, feelings are subjective. Laundered counterfeit money is worthless in its original form, and it is disguising the original form that tricks people into ascribing value to laundered counterfeit money.

Not every emergency manifests as a textbook case. It isn't too farfetched to imagine an intermittent short running the trim motor on an intermittent basis rather than continuously. I'd still shut off the trim motor as a possible remedy, but I'm not an airliner pilot, just a guy who flys for $100 hamburgers.

It is also possible he is being a guy who knows exactly what he is talking about and has the qualifications and experience to back it up.

If an aircraft starts pitching down, and it wasn't commanded by the pilot, and resetting the trim (temporarily) fixes the problem, the issue is almost certainly with the trim. If it is MCAS and a malfunctioning sensor or a failing motor that occasionally kicks on and drives the trim to its limits, the pilot response should be the same. This is what I hear Walter saying, and it makes sense. MCAS just makes it more probable to manifest.

If Japan had hundreds of acres of solar panels back when the tsunami occurred, they would be resting out on the ocean floor, leaching heavy metals into the water. Definitely better, right?

Annnnnd the downvotes start. What is it about nuclear energy that terrifies the ycombinator crowd?

I/O takes seven eternities in microcode-ville. It doesn't hurt too much to wait for the speculation to be resolved before changing state visible outside the microarchitecture of the CPU.

C'mon. The Obamas attempted to buy the property. That's the point. The people who keep telling us AGW is real and is going to flood the coasts don't act as if the global consensus is true. I don't see any exodus of wealthy people from exposed coastal areas. Aren't they supposed to be the far-sighted ones who plan ahead?

Yeah, after all mob rule > rule of law, at least nowadays.

That's not quite correct. Hospitals can't turn away patients with life-threatening conditions until they are stable. In practice that means everyone gets triaged. A better system would run public clinics, staffed by PAs and nurse practitioners (with possibly a physician) near the ER, and force the people who have had a cough for two weeks to go to the clinic first. Work everyone near the top of their training, and give hospitals safe harbor for sending non-emergency patients to the clinic first.

That's just one sensible (I think) proposal. We don't need to refinance the current system, we need to completely reengineer it.

Proof please that only one party consistently pushes the envelope.

The original question was how climate activists could convince people, not lobby for policy. Of course non-saints can advocate policy, but animal rights activists who wear furs and leather should not expect to be taken all that seriously. Same for jet-setting climate activists.

Pull off and top, same as would happen if the car suffered a mechanical failure.

Let me see if I have your argument down... one can ignore hypocrisy in personal behavior because collective actions are hard to do? Is that it? If so, it isn't a very strong argument. If not, what is your claim about personal hypocrisy?

Your crystal ball is cloudy. I am interested in the Science. I'm not interested in being hectored by some busybody who knows less about the Science than I do, espcially when their behavior is hypocritical.

Are you interested in the Science? Here's some test questions: how do you explain the lack of warming signal for the past 15 years in the gold standard temperature dataset from the USCRN? What percentage of change in global cloud cover would account for 2C of warming and how does it compare to the accuracy of the IPCC model ensemble in predicting changes in global cloud cover?

I'm not denying a warming climate, but I do think there are significant error bars surrounding calculations of Climate Sensitivity. Until someone can provide me with better answers than "what does it hurt to err on the side of caution" I'm going to be a skeptic of predictions of catastrophic warming.

Now are you going to ignore Science, or are you going to ask for hard evidence of extraordinary claims?

How to convince me there is an existential threat requiring huge changes? Stop flying. Period. Stop eating meat. Period. Move into high density housing, and forego cars and just take public transportation or bike. That'll work for table stakes if you want to lecture me about the sacrifices I need to make. Put up or shut up.