tic_tac

At least one company in South Korea, Seegene, has produced many tests and it is this aggressive private sector production that is largely reasonable for South Korea's effective testing. There is also a large demand for Seegene's tests around the world indicating that WHO tests are definitely not in sufficient supply.

The private sector stepping in is the best way to get enough tests out to everyone who needs them.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-...

Assuming the WHO stash has not already been depleted due to the global spike in cases, the number of WHO tests available to the US is probably insufficient to be helpful for its over 300 million people. Incentivizing the private sector to create tests on the other hand does have the potential to get enough tests for the whole population.

This is a global pandemic and there are many other affected countries around the world that do not have the ability to ramp up testing production the way the US does. Poorer countries should be the ones with access to the emergency test kits, not the US.

Is 79°F hot?

Alive is just a word. It means different things to different people and any formal definition will necessarily be arbitrary.

This should be its own post on HN! Great story.

So if there is superdeterminism, meaning positions are absolutely determined, either there is minimum scale in the universe (discrete universe) or somehow the universe computes with infinities.

Both are absurd concepts! When probing the ultimate depths of reality like this there are no good answers.

This is a snide and irrelevant comment.

But ratios only express rational numbers, if we had to express location in a 3D continuum it's almost guaranteed that it would be represented by an irrational number.

It is extremely frightening, and it's important that we continue to fight for freedom of expression on all platforms.

Unfortunately so many have an innate bias against the US that any criticism of it is considered fair game regardless of how conspiratorial or absurd.

I understand that if we posit a super-Turing machine in which arbitrary positions on a continuum can be maximally expressed as finite values what I am saying does not logically follow.

However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible. In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

It's not a matter of computability though, it's a matter of exact precision not being physically possible in a continuum.

If superdeterminism is true, it appears to imply that the universe is discrete at the smallest scales. Were the universe continuous, 'definite' position would be impossible, meaning that certainty itself would be impossible. Everything would be 'fuzzy' meaning superdeterminism would be impossible.

The comment I replied to was saying that the lack of testing was indeed a political issue with one side at fault.

You can't just conjure the necessary tests up from nothing. Japan has also had problems with testing. No one is trying to "deny testing". It is a work in progress and is indeed ramping up.

I think there are a lot of Americans writing anti-Trump comments on Reddit, but I think the numbers are boosted by non Americans doing the same thing. It artificially inflates the number of anti Trump posters.

There are two extreme paths we can take. The first is that we do nothing, the other is that we completely lock down our society like China.

While the first option would be unwise, the second would also be unwise.

A complete shutdown for a disease as virulent as Covid-19 will just suppress the virus for the duration of the shutdown. Ignoring the extreme difficulty and impracticality of shutting society down for a moment, recognize that the moment the shutdown ends, the virus will probably reappear and continue to spread.

What then? Another complete shutdown? When does it end?

No, the right solution is a distributed solution in which affected companies and communities deal with the virus, imposing gradual restrictions on gatherings, work, schooling etc in an organic way. Which is exactly what is happening in the US right now.

The point of all this is, what more can the US government do than it is already doing? Send the military in to shut down the highways? Hold scientists at gunpoint until they produce a vaccine?

Many (Media, Democrats) are trying to leverage this to their political advantage, but aside from small changes in approach, what exactly do they want the government to do differently?

Agreed, Reddit is cancer. Reactionary hive mind internet at its worst.

One of the biggest problems with Reddit is that Americans go on boards like /r/politics or in this case /r/Coronavirus, see extreme hostility towards America and Trump and assume that this hostility is all coming from Americans themselves, when really a substantial number of Reddit users (and users elsewhere on the Internet) are not American.

Not being Americans, their hostility comes more from predisposed bias against Trump and America than a careful analysis of what's best for America.

Creativity can really only happen when the mind isn't doing anything in particular. Only then can it wander, and only in wandering can it arrive at novel combinations or alterations of ideas.

Education signals that you are "better" than those with worse education. Smarter, harder working, etc.

We need to create better options for students. We can do this by refocusing education on learning practical skills for real world jobs rather than maintaining an educational system built upon a foundation over 1000 years old that up until 100 or so years ago was intended for the elites and scholars, not the average person looking for a job.

The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job.

Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity.

And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes with society wide UBI.

The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing money at people to spend on broken institutions like Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in the first place to make them more affordable and effective.

US military dominance is an ever present defense for nations around the world who would otherwise be harrassed or attacked by aggressive neighbors. US military involvement in the Middle East doesn't change that.

Of course you can argue we shouldn't be involved in the Middle East, and there are some reasons to think we shouldn't be, but we can agree on that point and still believe the US should have the world's dominant military.

I suppose you think we should not defend ourselves?

It has an impact if singular events (of which there are millions each day) can severely affect social cohesion and stability. Regardless of what you call it, the inevitability of emotionally triggering events each of which has the potential to reach everyone in real time and impact them will lead to extreme social instability.

Similarly, too many unregulated synaptic connections or overexcited neurons in the brain can cause seizures.

How does it bode for society if, for example, every single instance of racial animosity between people is broadcast for the whole world to see? Even if the rate of occurrence of these sorts of interactions is incredibly small, there will be many per day, driving entire segments of our society apart and causing even more such negative interactions in the future which are just fuel for the fire.

But Google's, influence on society comes from its ability to control all the information you see - if you use Google for all searches - over an extended period of time.

Crucially, we are exposed to political advertising from many different sides of the political spectrum. I regularly see both Bloomberg and Trump ads. The domain in which we see political advertising is not controlled by the advertisers themselves, so that is a fundamental difference from Google's influence.

The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control.

It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half her money and now Bloomberg will inevitably drop out of the Democratic primary even though he is outspending everyone else combined.

People have far more agency than armchair psychologists and sociologists would like to believe.

I don't think people who drive cars are "pro-car" in the sense your thinking of. They simply use cars because it's convenient for them, and in general public transport doesn't make much sense in their communities so they ignore it.

In big cities on the other hand many people don't have cars and you find people who both use public transportation and passionately advocate for it. They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.

Which is enabled by cars, so it's really a non issue. People who fetishize public transportation fail to see that there are many community types in which cars make perfect sense. In big cities congestion is obviously an issue, but in smaller cities and towns cars are really great.

It's a bit of a tired trope that we always have to mention "racism, etc" when taking about things like small towns, as if it's an established fact when it's really more a prejudiced assumption about how people from small towns or certain parts of the country feel.

If someone is an upstanding member of the community and fits in with cultural norms, they will usually get by fine regardless of skin color. Of course sometimes this is not the case, but it is no more so than in cities where people of different races often self segregate into distinct communities and there is often latent racial tension.

For those who have had bad experiences in small towns or communities, it's dangerous to generalize personal experiences to vast regions or large groups. That just perpetuates bias and prejudice.

That hasn't been my impression. While they may not be business owners, I think many of the yellow vests could be considered working middle class.

While I have not read the Hayek work you mention, it is probably drawn from the same philosophical waters as a work that I recommend to anyone with an interest in this sort of thinking: "The Opium of the Intellectuals" by Raymond Aron. Aron was a French philosopher who contemplated the Intellectuals' fascination and infatuation with socialism and, at the time and place of writing (1950's France), Communism.

You are assuming the "yeomanry" mainly consists of the old, but I think that's an overly narrow and basically false assumption. The participants in the yellow vest protests in France - largely members of "yeomanry" I would think - are as much Gen X and Millenial as they are Baby Boomers.

As for the oligarchs, there are certainly wealthy individuals entrenched in the traditional fossil fuel industries, but the number of these individuals is dwarfed by the oligarchs in Media, Finance, Government, Technology etc, who are much farther removed both in business and culture from traditional modes of energy production and as such are able to take and advocate for radical positions on environmental policy without regard to the consequences for the "yeomanry".

This story plays out across the spectrum of issues that society contends with today. In general, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons, elites in the corporate world and also members of the "clerisy" both desire a breakdown of traditional society to further their own agendas. In the case of the former that agenda is defined by profit seeking and in the case of the latter it is defined by philosophical and social beliefs.

So you see, I think while this piece is vague and steps on its own toes at points, it is addressing a real conflict that exists and is growing in contemporary society.