The fear and media has convinced people like you that crazy things are true like a 20% hospitalization rate. But check out the cdc: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi... . It looks like the hospitalization rate of (cases) is hovering around 7%. That means the positive hospitalization rate of _infections_ (which would include people that never got tested and never went to a hospital, but also got covid) would be even considerably lower than that. Which would square with my experience - being acquainted with ~100 people that have had covid and knowing nobody that went to the hospital.
Doctors and nurses dying is a negligible concern IMO. Yet again - there have been a few highly publicized cases of things like this, but at scale it is just not something that happens at a non-negligible frequency. I have multiple family members in the medical field. None of them report any such issues - including my sister who is a doctor working in a covid unit in Indianapolis.
To me, beyond what it is capable of handling - means that the system gets damaged - not the people that it is treating. What you described is what I would call "beyond it's peaking capacity for treating patients". Not a general "beyond capacity to handle". Imagine driving a car. Not being able to fit all your friends in the car is different than the car frame being crushed because too many people climbed onto it. I'm saying that the former is what we have/will experience - not the latter.
Comments level getting to deep - trying to reply to a sibling. But 1% of planes crashing kills more evenly across demographics. The 1% here are almost exclusively the elderly and infirm who were contributing (directly anyway) almost nothing to the economy - and in many cases actually being a drain on the economy. Just like the parent comment - I'm not saying they aren't worth saving at economic cost, but just saying that them living also is an economic burden.
It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid. Even on HN (among other platforms), which is one of the places where I often go to find good balanced viewpoints, when sharing anything remotely different from toeing the covid line (i.e. vaccines will save the day, everyone must get vaccinated, we must force people to wear masks, schools should be closed, the virus is causing the economic disaster, etc.) I see people get downvoted, censored, etc. to oblivion. It's nice to see that there are other folks out there that don't exhibit the wild levels of fear and concern for what I consider to be much ado about nothing.
I don't agree that it would necessarily tax health care systems "beyond what they're capable of handling" (for my definitions of those words). I also disagree that economies would be devastated if we had avoided all lockdown and economy-affecting mitigations. But I understand that reasonable people could disagree with me on both those issues and that is fine.
Yes - but when we only hear about, think about, and look at the extremes, it becomes too easy to let our thought-processes about the situation become (even subconsciously) skewed. It's too easy to forget that the constant barrage of stories and information is actually about the extremes. It takes deliberate effort to keep the balanced view.
Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. Everyone I know who has gotten covid - several neighbors (and their households), most of my wife's hometown (400 people) - including her parents (in their 70s) and two of her siblings and all their children (15 people) all had it. For everyone it was somewhere between nothing and a bad cold. Nobody has any lingering issues. We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too?
Well - it's damage the world "chose" - via lockdowns, fear and hysteria, etc. When I talk about covid with people, I often notice difficulty to distinguish between covid the virus and covid the event (and associated things the world is doing to deal with it). Some seem to insist on attributing fallout like this to being caused by the _virus_ and as something that was never in our control. That is false. Covid doesn't make measles spread. Covid doesn't force people to not get vaccinated for measles. The culture and mitigation society chose to develop around covid caused these things.
If by "core" - you mean to exclude the mantle, then yes, we don't know exactly how much radiogenic [1] heat generation there is. But if we are using the term "core" loosely here to refer to everything under the crust, then a very significant fraction of the heat is generated via radioactive decay.
But it would otherwise go "up" at a slower rate - so heat adding more slowly but over longer. Pumping heat up is effectively compressing this time horizon - resulting in a difference in rate of heat added. Now if that geothermal energy was replacing nuclear or fossil fuel use, then it might be a wash. But as soon as that energy replaces hydro, wind, or solar (which don't add new heat to the atmosphere - just use heat already there) - then we would increase the rate of heat energy being added to the atmosphere.
And I'll add Idaho National Lab [5] to that list - particularly the MOOSE multiphysics finite element code [6] is a largish project with significant momentum/funding:
I think a present-value calculation of the cost to buy+run+maintain would be a more accurate/useful metric (i.e. present value of cash flows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Net_present_valu...) - although perhaps it is too sophisticated to be done well in practice for a crowd-data-aggregation project like this. If something costs me $100 to buy, and $10 every year to maintain for 20 years, that is not the equivalent of costing me $300 dollars today - because most of those dollars are spent in the future and need to be discounted by inflation and opportunity-cost investment rates. So it might actually only have a net present value cost of $200 in today's dollars. Somehow you have to account for the time-value-of-money factor in order to properly combine the up-front cost with ongoing operation/maintenance costs.
I acknowledge that we are choosing between two bad alternatives here. I personally believe that we should trade all N hundred thousand lives for a normal school year for 56 million kids.
Everybody has a cost above which they are not willing to pay to save someone's life. If you can't admit that, then there is nothing we have to discuss.
I agree. Perhaps it is because we are rapidly approaching the date when most schools around the U.S. begin opening back up (or not) after summer vacation. So this is on many people's minds and many decisions are being made about it at local and state levels currently. This is why it is on my mind particularly anyway. I think people are way underestimating the negative consequences economic, social, psychological, etc. of covid mitigations generally. I think we have long passed the point where benefits are worth the costs.
Yes - in some imaginary world it might be easier to close schools without adverse consequences. But we don't live in that world. We live in one where closing schools has lots of bad short and long term consequences. So acknowledging that we must decide between existing alternatives - not between fictitious ones - what do people want?
Adverse affects of closing schools for a year on 56 million elementary, middle, and high school students? Or maybe 500,000 people dying a bit early (just making numbers up on this one - adjust up or down depending on various factors)? That is not so one-sided obvious as many people on the internet seem to want to make it.
But how many people? Should 10,000 kids lose school and all the problems that can avalanche into for the future to save 1 year of 1 life of one person who already has degrading health?
Sure - but the point/principle still applies. Every day we confront unknown risks that we don't fully understand. But we just keep on living. I think we have enough data for people to evaluate their own personal risk and generally take appropriate personal measures for safety. We can and should make efforts to accommodate those who assess their personal risk to be significant. But when you/others ask schools to close - are you really considering what the short-medium-long term costs of those choices really are? I have personally taken neighborhood kids to pick up free lunches offered by schools while they were shut down - because those kids' parents didn't care to take them and neither cared to help them feed themselves. I've seen working parents leave their young children at home because child care logistics and cost were not acceptable for their circumstances. I know kids down the street that are basically ignored by their parents that are not likely to have a healthy structured school environment they can count on.
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
You perhaps were being sarcastic, but there is truth in the statement. And while it is unpleasant, I think it is an aspect of this pandemic that is worth considering - not necessarily in an of itself, but perhaps as a way to begin discussing our culture's unhealthy view of prolonging life at all costs. I don't want to spend my last days/weeks/months slowly rotting in a hospital bed.
I've personally heard from several tens of parents that they are primarily worried about the economic and social affects of all these so-called safety measures governments and communities are taking. Just because it's easy to measure cases and deaths and hard to measure lost human connection, depression, children being left in environments of neglect, delayed/paused innovation and economic growth, etc. doesn't mean that those costs are less than the loss of life incurred from not being "safe". I would rather my children (and I have 5) grow up not being told they need to be afraid of everything. I would rather they grow up being able to learn with and interact with their peers face to face. And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren and great grandchildren can grow up in a better world.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
This is a prototype for the upper (second) stage of spacex's next-gen rocket [1] they are developing that uses their new full-flow staged combustion raptor engine [2]. This is the ship they plan to use for upcoming mars, moon, etc. missions that will basically replace all other spacex rockets as soon as they can figure out how to get it operating. This prototype is missing the nosecone, control surfaces, and other details, but has the most important parts - engines (one instead of 6 like it will eventually have) and fuel+oxidizer tanks.
My anecdotal experience from discussing these issues with people of many demographics, political pursuations, etc. is that there is a great deal of animosity from people that were more heavily hit by the lockdowns, rules, etc. imposed by the goverment. And people wearing masks is a "signal" that that person is likely on the side that was driving the lockdowns, restrictions, etc. to occur. This includes: people that have lost their jobs, people that have young kids (in schools that were closed), etc.
Statistically, you're almost certainly not going to die of covid (or even be unusually sick for that matter). But you are guaranteed to be lonely if you don't get out there.