rweir

very cool - looking forward to seeing the rest.

nope, obviously that's a continuum but it's been found to be much further towards the airborne end than was originally generally thought: [here](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2....)

very serious, during the day and evening, between zone 1 and eastern zone 2, I see extremely high compliance. it appears to vary enormously by area, which is very surprising to me.

> covid has kept him fairly serious.

no it hasn't, it's kept him doing what he always does, wandering from tactical decision to tactical decision. the March lockdown only happened when public pressure became unbearable, he allowed the treasury to subsidise people eating in restaurants, he continues, in month nine, to hand large contracts to unqualified mates, both wasting money and reducing the ability to deal with the pandemic, and despite it being a once-in-a-century pandemic, did not ask for an extension on the disorganised negotiations with the EU, meaning that in the middle of December, it's still unclear how trade with EU, including...food and medicine, is meant to work in 12 days.

his entire career is just making the easy choice in the moment with no forethought.

yes, obviously things mutate, but all your other information in this comment is out of date - the current information is the strain they're talking about is 70% more infectious.

No other western country has actually been willing to do what NZ or Australia did - strict contact tracing, strict lockdowns, and a near-complete ban on entering the country, with those that do being picked up the police or military at their plane and driven to quarantine hotels where the doors lock from the outside.

I don't know why everyone keeps going on about other countries not getting the same results - no other rich country has even talked about trying, as far as I know.

> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%

where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last week.

Just the US value from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... vs #2 (Switzerland) is $US800 000 000 000 for all US residents in extra spending.

people getting their groceries locally instead of driving in to the centre of a city is a good outcome, though perhaps not for all of the inner city supermarkets. I am deeply unconvinced this is a broader problem - e.g. Regent St or Oxford St are still global-level retail hubs even though driving there is a nightmare.

> This is true but complex. It depends on the type of service you receive.

I feel this is never adequately priced into these discussions. everything about healthcare in the US is expensive and complicated, even if you "have insurance", even if you have expensive, seen-as-good-insurance.

saved you a search: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/15/statista-how-far-behind-us-i... . includes this depressing factoid, "American workers took an average of just over 17 days of vacation in 2017, the highest level in seven years".

this may be the most depressing post in the whole thread - healthcare is fucked, insurance is too expensive for normal people, but hey, bankruptcy is pretty easy!

I disagree, a combination of cost of health care even for insured people, enormous worst case out of pocket costs and terrible wages means that people are conditioned to not go to the doctor (and conversely that some people are conditioned to go to the doctor to get "use" of their insurance) even when they are "insured".

this is a common pattern I see in discussions, the idea of "going to the hospital and not worrying about bankruptcy" is just unintelligible and so you end up with discussions like this, about how "pregnancy-related-costs are often covered by Medicaid" which completely ignores the conditioning and fear and logistics that means that loads of people in the US simply don't go and get routine preventative care, even if they have what they consider to be "good" insurance.

I don't understand your point? Nuclear testing occurred in Australia but not by Australia.

Australia doesn't have nukes because they don't want them, not because the US told them not to or promised to use them on it's behalf. it's so historically uninterested that it doesn't even have a nuclear power industry.

facebook and twitter have also been uncritically spreading false rumours from trump and only in the past couple of months have done anything to arrest the swirling hive of insanity/bad faith/malicious interference that is qanon.

if it was me, I'd skip straight to Qi-only just to avoid the amount of whinging they would have to endure (here would be among the worst) about "omg another cable change!!11" for their...second cable change in two decades.

it's already a weird USA-specific question, even in Australia, world leader in rich-country-shitty-internet, it's not an expensive addon.

they got rid of stupid puzzles at least.

why do any police forces get military hardware at all? it seems mad to take an already over-armed group and then give them APCs and even more guns.

blimey that's some niche spam!

London was under lockdown until June, everyone is already acting like it will be locked down again in the next week or so, and has had strict mask and hygiene and social distancing rules for six months, had a government direction for everyone "who can" work from home to do so for ~4.5 of the last six months (it was briefly rescinded then reinstated), crash built hospitals in convention centres to try to handle overload from hospitals and still is currently at the same new case rate as April[0]. Fortunately death rates are still fairly low. I don't know if a vaccine/other interventions will prevent it being a yearly disaster but it certainly currently is.

[0]: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--ca...

the US hasn't even been able to match the measures[0] Sweden put in place, though? there's still thousands of people showing up with no masks to breath on each other at rallies etc

[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coro...

uh because presumably if you ask people if they want safe water, they say yes, and yet ...

if Flint isn't an indictment of US democracy, what would be?

Could we all just wait until there's a (reviewed) paper in Nature or something?

It seems very unlikely they'll be able to resist burning it, though.

It shouldn't have been a vote without an actual /plan/. "Would you like to 1) no change or 2) SUMMARY OF A DETAILED PLAN INCLUDING E.G. WHETHER THE U.K. REMAINS IN THE SINGLE MARKET OR THE CUSTOMS UNION OR HAS A HARD 1980s STYLE BORDER WITH IRELAND ETC" is one thing. "Would you like 1) no change or 2) some vague thing everyone can project their desires upon and scrawl fantasies on the side of a bus" is not a great way to make policy decisions.

yes

> Are there no provincial or city income taxes?

no. there are "rates" paid to city/town for garbage collection, etc, but that would be on the order of $2000 more, for home owners only, for the nicest parts of cities.