I think that you are making the same mistake that you are accusing healthcare workers and officials of making. You are assuming that these protests will "obviously" result in thousands more deaths because it feels that way to you. I believe that that's pretty unlikely, though, since there are probably fewer than a million protestors across the country. Many of the protestors are wearing masks and the protests being outside reduces the risk of spreading the disease. There will certainly be some spread due to the protests, but probably not nearly as much as at grocery stores or churches. You are also assuming that this is just about unjust police-involved deaths; it is not. It is about the many millions of negative interactions with the police and justice system that perpetuate poverty (police lying under oath, egregious sentences for non-violent crimes, etc.) I don't think it's a bad faith argument to say that correcting these injustices is more important than maintaining a totally strict quarantine.
The reason both sides talk past each other is because they have different values and different assumptions. Based on your post your first priority is preventing deaths and your assumption is that these protests will cause more deaths than they prevent. My first priority is living in a fair world, with preventing deaths being a close second. My assumption is that the protests will not cause a large number of excess deaths, but that they do have a high chance of moving our justice system closer towards real justice. I also am making the assumption that living in a fair and just society will increase overall health outcomes over the long term.
I believe that most (but definitely not all) people don't argue in bad faith, they just have different values and make different assumptions. There's not much that can be done about having different values, but better data can help every side have more similar assumptions, which should help opinions to converge somewhat.
R0 on a ship will always be higher than in pretty much any other situation. Most ships are packed to the gills, and in a gigantic ship like a carrier it will be even worse, since most of the crew will be in poorly ventilated areas rather than on deck.
What is wrong with buying a single small item online? If done correctly it should have almost zero environmental impact. The marginal environmental cost for a shipped item is the extra fuel burned by the delivery truck due to the weight of the item (in this case the weight is insignificant) plus the fuel burned while the truck is idling when the package is delivered. I would be willing to bet that the environmental cost for those items is pretty tiny compared to shipping waste, so it's pretty reasonable to complain about the shipping waste.
The problem is that cops (and prosecutors and judges) protect each other from accountability. If you saw your co-worker hit a pedestrian because they made a mistake driving would you lie for your co-worker and say that the pedestrian jumped out in front of the car? I hope not. Likewise, if you saw your co-worker intentionally hit someone with their car would you lie to protect them? If you did, that would make both of you bad, even though you never hit anyone with your car. That's what people are protesting: the fact that police can brutalize people without consequence.
Regarding light pollution:
It's not as bad as it seems, since the satellites really only show up while they are raising their orbits, and usually only during dusk and dawn. Once they're in their final orbit you can't really see them. Also, SpaceX are working on the problem. They are testing a sun screen that will block light from reflecting towards Earth while being far enough away from the satellite to prevent overheating.
Regarding space junk:
These satellites are in low orbits, so if the satellite breaks it will just re-enter the atmosphere and get burned up within a few months or so. I believe they also have a deployable drag device to intentionally de-orbit the satellites at their end of life, or if there's a problem with the satellite.
Also, the average homicide of working age males (87% of police are male) is about 10 per 100,000. This is slightly higher than the rate for police (about 8-9 per 100,000). The remaining 4.9 per 100k police fatalities are mostly car accidents, which is also pretty small considering how many miles they drive every day).
I can understand how it might feel scary, though. Just because they don't have much worse outcomes than the average American of their demographic doesn't mean that they don't have more terrifying experiences than average. That's not an excuse, though. Abusive parents are often reacting to past trauma that was inflicted on them, but we still shouldn't allow them to abuse their children. Protecting the public in a constitutional way needs to be the top priority. Officer safety and wellbeing come close behind, but they should still always be in second place.
We went from discovering fission in 1938 to building the bomb in 1945. I think it's entirely possible that AGI won't happen in the next century or maybe even ever, but history is filled with people who say "this can't happen" and are proven horribly wrong.
Let's look at the subset of people that vote. If they consistently vote and encourage others to vote,
and yet their candidates never win, they are effectively powerless. For them it is no different than living under a monarchy, except for the vague hope that maybe eventually their candidates will win and their policies enacted. Eventually that vague hope makes things even more painful, since they know that their government will never represent them, despite them theoretically having the power to decide their leaders. Either they will resent the system or they will resent their neighbors who either vote for the opposition or don't vote.
Think about all of the left-wing voters in a very Red congressional district or state. Think of all the right wing voters in a very Blue district or state. They are not officially disenfranchised, but their vote doesn't really matter either, so why vote at all? The equation changes somewhat for swing states/districts, but even then it's often a lesser of two evils choice, rather than any major progression towards policy goals. There are some democracies that mitigate some of these issues (getting rid of the electoral college and first past the post would go a long way in the US), but in general democracy leaves a lot of people dissatisfied.
If your major disagreement with the status quo is the tax rate, or certain business regulations, your dissatisfaction with the democratic process is manageable. If your major disagreement with the status quo is police brutality and injustice that make your life miserable, then what is the downside to rioting and destruction? Maybe there's only a tiny chance that something good will come out of it, but it's better than a zero percent chance of enacting change by continuing to vote and lose elections.
Probably a better way to estimate battery capacity is through weight. The article says that the battery weighs "roughly one tonne", and li-ion batteries weigh between 150-200 wh/kg at the pack level, so the battery is probably between 150 and 200 KWh.
When you start making the same mistakes over and over. As long as they learn new things with each iteration it doesn't matter if they blow up 5 or 50 ships. The actual material cost of these prototypes is probably in the low 6 figures. The biggest cost is the labor, but by iterating rapidly they are learning new manufacturing techniques, so if they weren't blowing up these prototypes they would be stacking them in a field or tearing them down anyways, since the value is in the process, not the final product, at this point.
Also, there are only an estimated 300 employees building Starships (although there are probably more working on engineering), so on-site labor costs are probably about a million a week. Since they can pop out a new iteration every few weeks they cost is probably only about a few million per ship. That's a lot of money in some industries, but it's a rounding error in rocketry. They could build dozens or even hundreds of prototypes for less than the cost of a conventional disposable rocket, like SLS.
The idea that the cheapest way to build a rocket is to blow up dozens of prototypes is a bit counterintuitive, but I believe it's the future. Organizations that move more slowly to avoid failures will fall further and further behind, since the tortoise only wins if the hare falls asleep, which SpaceX shows no signs of doing.
Civil engineers are able to use mathematical models to develop bridges because we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and they can build in huge safety factors. Fully reusable rockets have never been built before and can't afford the luxury of large safety factors due to the Rocket Equation, so testing to failure is the fastest way to learn, and when almost all of the cost is labor, fastest = cheapest.
Actually, this is not exactly true. There are actually a lot of people who are infected with the flu who are asymptomatic[1]. Based on my amateur research it does appear that the difference in severity between age groups is more pronounced for COVID-19 than for the flu, though. Part of this may be sampling bias, however, since we are probably catching far more asymptomatic COVID-19 cases than asymptomatic flu cases.
What I'm trying to say is that the number one song doesn't convey a lot of information. The genre of the number one song may be the most popular genre or one of the least popular genres; you can't know if you only look at the number one song. With your example, it could be possible that 0.1% of the population LOVES Beethoven's 5th symphony and exclusively plays it on repeat while the other 99.9% of the population hates classical music. Just to be clear, I'm not making any claims about what's popular or not, I'm just presenting an alternate hypothesis that would also result in the number one song not being representative of the overall population's preferences.
Something to keep in mind: the top track in the world right now is ROCKSTAR, with about 5 million streams per day. The song lasts about 3 minutes, which means the song was streamed for 250k hours around the world. Spotify streams an average of 234 million hours per day, though, which means the number one song represents about 0.1% of the total. We have an unprecedented level of access to all sorts of different genres of music, so the number one song is barely relevant in determining this generation's taste in music. Consider this idea: if 99.9% of the population is listening to classical music, but are all listening to different pieces it's possible that none of the songs they are listening to would show up as number one, since there are many thousands of classical pieces. The number one song is determined by a small percentage of people (maybe even a fraction of a percent) that care about listening to whatever is most popular at the moment. The rest of the population just listens to music from any generation they like.
Check out the poetry it generated in Figure F.1 (especially poem 4). I don't know how many bad poems the authors had to sort through to find these, but this AI is generating real poetry. If I didn't know they were computer generated I doubt I would have even considered that they didn't come from a human. This is a huge accomplishment and the team that created GPT-3 should be proud.
Because the death rate is way higher than 0.26%. If the CDC really thinks it's that low for the general population then they are wrong. The general consensus I have seen, based on antibody tests in New York, Italy, Sweden, and Spain point to a death rate between 0.75% and 1.25% for most developed nations. For less developed nations (which, to be fair, is most of the world) the death rate will be lower because there are fewer old people. I agree that we don't have to shut down everything, but everyone should be wearing masks as much as possible in public. Public smoking is highly restricted, at least partially because of the risks of secondhand smoke, and the risks of COVID-19 are way higher than that. People can do what they want at home, but we have to share public spaces. It's not right for someone else to make decisions that endanger me and my family just because they don't care about the risk.
The M in both NMC 111 and NMC 811 should be manganese. It's also a mistake that nickel is "cheaper than manganese or cobalt". It is certainly cheaper than cobalt, but much more expensive than manganese. It's still better, since cobalt is quite expensive and there can be some ethical issues with the supply chain of cobalt, but if it were possible to make NMC 181, that was mostly manganese, it would be better.
As for your first point, higher demand typically causes higher prices in the short term, then often lower prices in the medium term due to oversupply of investment, and eventually lower prices in the long term, due to economies of scale.
I think the underlying assumption is that the company will grow very quickly, so that when it comes time to pay you back they are paying you back with a small fraction of their revenue. Look at Netflix, for example: ten years ago they had 1.67 billion in annual revenue. Last year they had 1.87 billion in net income, and they are still growing. There are certainly some ridiculous valuations, but that quote is ignoring both the fact that businesses grow and that not everybody needs a 10 year payback.
More generally, the reason there are high valuations for companies that are growing users by selling a $20 bill for $18 is that they can drive out all of their competitors who can't afford to burn money. Once those competitors are gone, the survivor can raise prices, lobby governments for regulations that make breaking into the market very difficult, and generally employ anti-competitive practices to take advantage of their situation. If they're able to do this without being smacked down by anti-trust regulators they will be a money printing machine. These high valuations mean that the market thinks that governments will remain toothless and easily controlled. It's a depressing future to think about, but there's a pretty high probability that this is how it will be.
That may be true, but the evidence mostly is pointing in the direction of undercounting COVID deaths. In northern Italy the official death count was less than half of "excess deaths", with the worst-hit areas having the most excess deaths. Certainly some of the excess deaths are due to people avoiding hospitals, or higher stress levels, but a lot are due to COVID deaths at home, or undiagnosed COVID deaths. Also, we still don't really understand this disease enough to know what effects it has on the body. There have been reports of people with COVID having strokes at much higher rates than would be expected for the same age demographic. It will be hard to tell which complications were coincidence and which were caused by COVID until later on when we have more data.
That's simply false. If we force people to stay home without providing them with compensation, then yes, people will go hungry and homeless. We have enough wealth to provide for people to make sure that doesn't happen, though. Whether the government will step up is an open question, but this doesn't have to go the way you are suggesting.
Solar panel degradation is tiny nowadays. For monocrystalline cells the degradation rate is around 0.36% per year, which means in 10 years your panels will still be outputting about 96.5% of what they output brand new. Polycrystalline cells are around 0.64% degradation per year.
If the price of oil drops by 20% the demand for oil from marginal sources like tar sands could go down by 70%, since they were barely profitable when prices were 20% higher. On the other hand, oil (or natural gas) prices are only a fraction of the total cost of electricity or gas/diesel, so demand for renewables will probably not drop by too much. In fact, since a sudden shock in the price of oil could kill off a lot of marginal producers, the long term average price of oil could increase from previous expectations. This would make renewables even more attractive. Another factor to consider is that if marginal oil producers die out the price of labor will decrease in many places. This will also serve to make the price of solar lower, since labor costs are a decent fraction of total costs. There are a lot of cascading effects from a change in the price of a commodity as big and important as oil.
I'm still kind of conflicted on this particular case, but if someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater should the theater owner be able to kick them out? What if the fire alarm is going off, but a so-called "expert" is claiming that the fire alarm is just malfunctioning? Should the theater owner be able to silence them? Deep down I think I still believe that free speech should be protected even if it costs lives, but it's getting harder to hold onto this philosophy in recent years. Misinformation and propaganda is a plague that is nearly impossible to beat since it takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute a lie than to spread it. The only ways I can think of to solve this problem are either to restrict free speech or to spend huge resources on teaching the public critical thinking skills and the scientific method. The second option will take decades to work, if it's even possible at all.
I don't know if this is the reason, but one potential advantage of tank water heaters is the ability to use off-peak power. This can be a big cost advantage, and even if it's less energy efficient it can theoretically be better for the environment by allowing water heaters to act as distributed renewable energy storage. At the moment, though, the efficiency savings probably make tankless water heaters a bit more environmentally friendly.
I think,if anything, that this new data validates the lockdown. New York City has been hit hard by this virus (0.2% of the population; for comparison 0.3% of the US population died in WW2) and there are still approximately 80% of the population that hasn't gotten it yet. If 70% of the population of NYC ends up getting it over the next few months, that would mean something like 50k to 60k dead just in NYC. If 70% of the US population ends up getting it that would be 1-2 million dead. Locking down in the face of those numbers is not an overreaction, although maintaining lockdown until a vaccine may be an overreaction. I think we should be devoting huge amounts of resources to manufacturing face masks and testing kits so that we can safely ease out of lockdown without causing more outbreaks like we saw in New York or Italy. Ending the lockdown without a plan, though, is highly unethical in my opinion
I think that there are certainly some issues with an artificial scarcity of doctors as well as overly restrictive regulations requiring MDs for certain procedures that don't require MD training, but the evidence shows that this is not the main driver of high costs. Physician salaries are only about 8% of healthcare spending[1] and according to my own research, only about 20% is due to all healthcare worker salaries (including physicians, nurses, physician assistants, etc. The remaining 80% is medicine, medical supplies, capital costs (MRI machines, hospitals) and administrative costs. Unfortunately there's no single cost that could instantly solve everything if eliminated; there's just a lot of middlemen each taking a tiny portion that add up to a huge total cost.
There are a couple of reasons for that, most likely. First, only 4.5% of the known cases in Iceland are over 70 years old. In Italy, around 16% of the population is 70+, so given that this virus has much higher death rates for the elderly, we would expect a much lower death rate than Italy. Second, there are still 11 people in intensive care (compared to six deaths). I'm not sure what the mortality rates are for patients that require intensive care, but I assume they would be much worse than average. I think I remember seeing about 20-30% mortality for ICU patients from a study in Italy. Finally, the majority of cases in Iceland are still ongoing, whereas many villages in Northern Italy have gotten through the worst of it, with fairly few cases unresolved. I bet that the age adjusted fatality rate in Iceland will end up being fairly similar to Italy.
South Korea is an extremely democratic country. They have one of the highest voting rates of any country and have a very strong culture of protesting against injustice. The reason they are doing OK is because they rose up to remove their former president, who was the daughter of the former dictator and who was abusing her power, and replaced her with a much less corrupt leader. The entire country is working together from the bottom up instead of being forced to do things from the top down. Koreans feel allegiance to their country, rather than their leader (although their president is fairly popular among most people), so when they are asked to wear masks and such they do so willingly. I guess I don't see how caring about your neighbors is authoritarian.
The US actually has a problem because our government is a bit too centralized. The state governors are often afraid to take initiative because Trump may withhold resources if they don't go along with his narrative. We also put too much faith in the CDC and FDA to develop tests quickly.
Strong leadership is different from authoritarianism. Non-authoritarian leaders produce results by inspiring their communities to help willingly. Authoritarian leaders have to micro-manage everything, which can sometimes work, but fails miserably if they are not competent. We are paying the price for electing an authoritarian who values obedience and loyalty over everything else.
I'm not sure about Germany, but South Korea was and is extremely effective at testing their population. They also did and are doing a fantastic job tracing infections (although part of this is due to being able to mostly focus on a single super-spreader rather than many simultaneous outbreaks. I think that South Korea probably confirmed 70-80% of their actual number of cases, while Italy probably has at least 2-3 actual cases for each confirmed case. Testing and tracing en masse is really, really hard, and is basically impossible if you don't catch it soon enough. I think that hospital overloading is definitely able to double or triple the death rate, though.