💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 25004508 captured on 2020-11-07 at 00:46:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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These things need to be less politicized and erratic if they are going to work.
Why are elementary schools closed across most of the US, while bars and restaurants are mostly open for reduced in-person service?
Because the teacher unions and dining industries both have enough political power to get their way. There's no rhyme or reason besides "might makes right", and the rules for businesses seem to change every week, so the growing public frustration is very understandable.
I'm proud of these students. It's unconscionable that their institution did not inform them of these installations ahead of time. I've been a student who had to walk a couple miles for groceries, and I held my walking routes to be sacred during that time. If someone put a wall between me and fresh fruits during an exam week with no warning, I would have rioted too. And I bet my grandmother who lived through the Blitz would be rooting for them despite her zeal for giving things up for the public good. The British Bulldog spirit recognizes a difference between austerity and autocracy.
Are schools closed across much of the US? Maybe I live under a rock but I don’t think that’s the case. It certainly is not in my area (NY Metro).
Are schools closed in most of the country? Many states I've been to in the last few months and that hasn't been the case in any of them.
Teachers (public sector) have a guaranteed wage and job security, because they don't have to provide a quality service which people are going to pay for of their own volition. Their is no personal risk to them under lockdown, so they are more than happy to sacrifice the education of children for their own sense of safety.
Bars and restaurants are private businesses which must provide service which people are willing to pay for. If they don't provide the service, they don't get paid. The owners and the employees are naturally more inclined to continue working and not be gaslighted by coronahysteria.
Remember, public sector workers contribute zero to the public purse, and if they are not working, they are contributing zero value whatsoever, yet expect the people who are contributing to continue paying their wages.
Teachers don't go into teaching for the money or fame, and you'll know they provide a quality service when your bridges stay up and your cars don't explode.
Their unions might be overly cautious right now, but we should treat them like essential workers if we want them to act like it.
The problem with the assumption that a quality service is provided, is that when there is a violence enforced monopoly on the service, it is impossible to tell whether or not the service is efficient or where it might be improved because there is no metric to compare it against. The lack of any market signal means you can never really know if your service is providing a meaningful return on investment, and potential ventures which may improve upon it are prevented from doing so by threat of violence.
I find the claim that without the State, cars would explode and bridges would fall very bizarre. There is no basis for this assumption but clouded thinking. Bridges build well before modern governments and regulations are still standing, and vehicles from the 70s function just fine. It has always been in the best interest of product providers to have their products certified by reputable organizations, and they'll pay to have it done. The Underwriters Laboratory has been privately certifying products for 126 years. Many of the government regulatory bodies are much younger. There may even be an argument that private certification would improve health and safety because businesses would be in competition to provide the absolute best, rather than merely meeting a minimum requirement set by the State.
I wouldn't argue against the fact that teachers are essential workers, but the almost state monopoly on provision of this service can't possibly face the scrutiny of individual's choices and expectations - there is no market. I would take a school voucher system like Sweden has over the public school system in the UK any day.
My point about teachers being overly supportive of lockdown is that they have no personal consequence for themselves for doing so. Lets assume for a moment that you are a teacher, but in the private sector. The government enforces a lockdown which prevents you from working, and since you aren't working, the parents of the children you would normally teach are not paying you. You have no income. Do you _still_ support government lockdowns, or do you want to get back to work ASAP and earn money? (You have bills to pay). Public sector workers have no skin in the game - they still have income and they'll have a job to go back to when the government lets them. This drastically affects their ability to THINK, and why they are almost unanimous on their support of lockdowns.
Public sector workers contribute zero to the public purse? I guarantee you we all pay taxes the same way you do. Our net pay is also probably lower for a very similar job.
With remote learning the majority of teachers could be replaced with high quality content similar to how Coursera / edX works and students could learn from the best material available. Instead, basic material is duplicated as a jobs program. We should be having Salman Khan teach millions instead of paying so many teachers.
There is a limit to how many students a teacher can effectively teach at once. It's far below a million.
I didn't say they don't pay taxes. I said they don't contribute to the public purse. Your taxes are not a contribution to the public purse because your entire wage _comes from_ the public purse. A public sector worker is not adding to the national gain. Their work _may_ provide value to the nation, in that it can be considered an investment - in the case of teaching, the students who graduate and go into the private sector may create wealth that goes into the national gain.
The fact that public sector workers even pay taxes on their income from the State is a bizarre process which merely ties up financial resources into a system where they're taken from a pot, only to be put back into the same pot later on, in a repeated cycle.
It has become apparent that many of the students who graduate from publicly subsidized academies go back into the academies themselves. They are not necessarily providing value to a nation, but its impossible to really measure whether or not that could be the case. The expansion of the public sector has obvious consequences though: less income into the public purse whilst public expenditure grows. There's only one conclusion to this trend if it were to continue: the salaries of all public sector workers will eventually exceed the income tax from private sector workers. Insane.
If more workers were placed into the private sector, then not only does national expenditure decrease, the total income tax increases - those same jobs could add to the national gain rather than take from the pot, freeing up resources for other purposes. There must necessarily be a cap on the size of the public sector, and it is my opinion that the smaller the better.
I'm on the side of health precautions for this epidemic, but in this particular case, the fences not only look very oppressive from a psychological point of view to me, but could also potentially represent a fire hazard. There has to be a better way.
Don't overlook the anger of the students that everyone knew there was going to be a lockdown but they insisted all the students return so they could pay rent. You can't make this stuff up. The students have every right to be very angry, they've been ripped off for money and are stuck in a very uncomfortable place to do lockdown. Everyone knew it would happen, staying home and refusing to return was "discouraged" by way of pure retribution. You don't come back, you forfeit your place and everything you've worked for.
People aren't scared enough of students because apparently naked fear is the only motivator to get these awful politicians to behave with even the smallest shred of decency. Lock them in, claim they were told it would happen then acknowledge that this claim was a total lie. No consequences. All the expense, all hassle and frustration on the students. Milk them harder, that's what they're for say the powers that be.
> so they could pay rent.
this may be true, but your implication is unnecessarily sinister. these organizations have balances sheets and budgets too. like everyone else in the whole world, their business model probably isnt equipped to handle an epidemic. something has to give. maybe it shouldn't have been this, but the premise that colleges dont need money to survive is foolish.
1. in other places, the money that colleges need to _survive_ (especially when they don't actually have to operate fully) does not come out of students' pockets. That's a _choice_ that the UK (and US...) political process has arrived at.
2. You're making it sound like "but my business model depends on it" is somehow a valid excuse to put people into physical danger and through pretty much guaranteed psychological stress.
Something does have to give. Why you think it should be the students is a total mystery to me though.
The university is irresponsibly forcing the students to come on campus to study (a health risk) so they have to pay rent and is desperately trying to restrict their movement/freedoms to decrease the likelihood/speed at which the government shuts the whole thing down and sends everyone home.
The students certainly aren't getting what they paid for. Far from it. There's been a material change in the "product" they are getting and they should be released from the contract from it on those grounds.
If the university can't survive without the rental income and the government wants to save it, then they can do that, but it's not the students responsibility to willingly be defrauded to ensure the financial stability of an institution they have no stake in.
"My business model requires me to lock the fire exits" is something that people have been (rightly) jailed for.
Universities should never have been fully privatized in the first place.
Holy shit the mental gymnastics with this.
> It's okay for a business to knowingly fuck people over because they need money.
A place in the university course, or a place in halls-of-residence, though?
Also if they block through-ways they would only force more people to go through main entrances increasing the likelihood of close contact there.
They also appear to have chosen to use riot fencing that is designed to coercively maximize the difficulty of traversal. They could have chosen fencing for which traversal would require intent, but ultimately allow it.
That's pretty standard construction site fencing which is used in a lot of countries.
The fence would probably also be pretty ineffective as "riot fencing" since it is really high and has a small foot. Meaning it is unstable and easy to push over. Even when the fences are chained that will still be a problem.
Here in Palo Alto the city decided that was a good idea to setup a fence around a kids playground while other activities such as Tenis and Basketball courts, Yoga, soccer were opened. The scenery was very disturbing
I suppose the thought was that parents could relax while young children played, knowing that they couldn’t run off.
Children don't vote.
Why don't they close the University? My Uni has been closed the whole year now. Been working from home ever since.
Which university?
The government rhetoric was that universities should not only remain open but must do face to face teaching.
Without this, the landlords of student accommodation would have been deprived of a years income.
Here in Seattle, despite the University of Washington turning to online instruction for courses, the frat houses were all open.
To the surprise of nobody, those frat houses are now the center of the worst coronavirus outbreak the city has seen this year.
It's a shame that the university failed to consider teaching the most important lesson of all - social responsibility for your fellow neighbours.
Very good. All those lockdowns, which are privations of liberty worse than what happen under war time (while yielding way less deaths), are totally incomprehensible for people like me who lives in countries that don’t do it and still handle the situation way better. Europeans need to revolt against those measures which are clearly too harsh for the problem at hand, and which are destroying the local economies.
Have you considered an alternative view? "People need to revolt against lack of country's social support which is clearly needed during for the problem at hand". Why is it health vs economy that's always raised rather than economy vs economy?
Also, countries which did serious lockdowns are doing relatively well in the end (NZ / Oz)
Some oppose lockdowns for reasons which greater state welfare payments cannot help, e.g. the lack of socializing opportunities. Namely, as someone himself pretty advanced in years, I don't think it fair to shut down all the places where teenagers and young people could engage in courtship and all the other rituals of youth, for the sake of protecting mainly the elderly who weren't deprived of those things in their time.
Are they? They locked down for 5 months in Oz. They have no herd immunity. They had the worst economic quarter on record:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/economy/australia-gdp-recessi...
Long lockdown was only in Melbourne, and for shorter time in regional Vic, not Oz overall. But the result is no local cases. Economy can do its thing now. On the other hand, Europe still has the ongoing trio of massive death count, restrictions, and bad economic outcomes.
Nobody has herd immunity yet. The idea of infecting younger people while shielding an ill defined vulnerable group never worked, and it turns out that "long covid" is a thing.
Like people said below, "long COVID" is mostly Facebook groups and Reddit users with self reported symptoms. One of the so called studies was recruiting people from Facebook, people that couldn't even prove they ever had a positive PCR test or antibody test.
"Long COVID" is overwhelmingly laypeople sharing their self-diagnosis on the internet. These are just the same kind of people who, pre-COVID, would have claimed to have "chronic Lyme" or whatever.
Of course scientists are finding some cases of people with symptoms lasting many weeks, but this does not appear to be common enough that special strict public health measures should be instituted for it, just like we do little to prevent flu or colds that affect a small segment of the population with long-term complications. It is the elderly demographic that remains the real cause of concern for public-health officials.
_shrug_ I know enough people personally who've experienced some of this - and before, enough chronic pain/underdiagnosed conditions - that there's definitely something there.
(Someone spent fifteen years reporting chronic pain to their doctor before finally getting an endometriosis diagnosis...)
> It is the elderly demographic that remains the real cause of concern for public-health officials.
Yes, and this is also very bad. It tends to sweep through nursing homes, and is often brought in by the young staff who may live in shared accomodation with other young people, or have children in school, etc.
I have no doubt that people who self-report "long COVID" really feel distress. I just don't believe that distress is COVID-related, just like it was almost never Lyme disease-related when that was the faddish self-diagnosis.
"Long Covid" is a myth. People claim it exists all the time, but there is no evidence for it (excluding very rare, isolated cases).
The countries that sacrificed their old people like Sweden, Italy and Spain don't have herd immunity either.
Somehow putting Sweden into same bucket with Italy and Spain does not seem right. Sweden was widely criticized for not imposing any lockdown measures while Italy and Spain has seen one of the most aggressive and longest lockdown restrictions ever. Still Sweden lags behind Italy and Spain in terms of lives lost.
> Sweden had a fatality rate of 442 per million. Denmark had 126, Finland 65, Norway 52. So in terms of regional performance Sweden was very poor.
Sweden messed up, but not in the way people are making it to have. They messed up because their care homes and their entire care system for the elderly was poorly managed, but not because they somehow let the disease rip through the general population.
> Still Sweden lags behind Italy and Spain in terms of lives lost.
Sweden had a fatality rate of 583 per million. Denmark had 126, Finland 65, Norway 52. So in terms of regional performance Sweden was very poor.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
That's called cherry picking. The UK and France and Italy and Spain are all part of the same region.
> They have no herd immunity.
Neither does anywhere else.
Other places simply stabilized at a higher # of infections/day, because they have worse compliance with social distancing, lockdowns, and basic hygeine. But even bad compliance is better than nothing, and brings R0 down.
Stop compliance with all of those things, and you get a second wave that dwarfs the first.
I agree that lockdowns are tough,
but the economy is going to be trashed anyway if people are sick, disabled, dead or simply feel unsafe.
And the lockdown wasn't so bad, and the economy not so badly damaged if you did it properly the first time. - Life's pretty good in New Zealand right now.
European lockdowns cannot be called "improper" in comparison to New Zealand. NZ is an island served by container shipping that could fully close its borders. European states, on the other hand, are not self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs after centuries of trade and decades of the single market, and the borders had to remain open to at least freight trucks and movement of agricultural workers.
The UK is an island nation too.
Closing the borders is not the problem, at least initially.
Getting cross-contamination level between households down to effectively zero, and keeping it there long enough for 2 infection cycles is the hard part.
NZ did it.
Australia managed it eventually.
A number of Asian countries have done well too. Possibly off the back of experience dealing with the prior SARS/MERS scares.
Some of the African countries have done pretty well, possibly because of experience dealing with Ebola.
New Zealand gets plenty of goods via air-freight, along with a continuous stream of returning ex-pats and foreign workers.
and ships aren't so slow that the crews (and goods) are automatically safe to interact with when they get here.
But it can be managed - we're managing it.
You can't just compare all countries as they were all the same. Europe managed it quite well while it was spring and summer (surprisingly in line with all the standard respiratory diseases stats from previous years). Australia (and their biggest outbreaks were controlled just as the seasons were changing).
Then you can't compare Europe or US with Africa. Just look at the structure of the population and the age groups, most of the African nations have extremely younger population than Europe - exactly the ones that are at the most risk are the ones that are a majority in a lot of countries.
> The UK is an island nation too.
True, but it also has an open land border. There are a bunch of subtleties to the definition of island nation¹, some of which make UK borders erm… interesting².
Âą
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_nation
²
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_the_United_Kingdo...
> while yielding way less deaths
For some perspective I feel it is worthwhile to point out that COVID so far has resulted in the deaths of only 19% less Americans than the second world war.
Absolutely. Americans too.
French case: « Le ministre de la santé a justifié le recours au confinement expliquant, sur la base des modélisations de l’Institut Pasteur, que « si nous n’avions rien fait, il y aurait eu 9 000 patients atteints du Covid en réanimation à la mi-novembre ». Si le confinement est bien respecté, 6 000 patients seront en réanimation à cette échéance ; « la seconde vague sera alors moins intense que la première », a poursuivi le ministre. »
https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/11/05/covid-19-c...
So basically 67 millions French are under lockdown to avoid... 3000 additional people being hospitalized. Pure madness.
3000 people _in one month_, from a disease that exhibits exponential spread through the population.
If you look closely the mathematics is all Gompertz-Functions. Big expansion in small groups, burning locally too fast to maintain a continuous exponential fire. This results in seasonal dynamics just like a corona-virus.
Usually if you look at death by "date of death" you see Gompertz-Functions all around. If you look at death by "reporting date" you often see a very uneven lag forming some exponentials...
Logistic spread, actually.
> 3000 additional people being hospitalized.
Not merely hospitalized, but in intensive care units. Do you know how many intensive care units we have? 9000 people in ICU is the saturation point, that's why it's quoted.
This looks like a prison riot, the "free" West is turning into a gulag that can't even reach its stated aims of containing COVID.
About time people start to stand up against certain measures. It has become pretty obvious that governments are using the pandemic to figure out how much they can fuck with citizens without them rioting.
In the last 8 months, the so-called freedom in the west has been put to a pretty harsh test. It has been demonstrated that almost everything we learnt about democracy and freedom at school has been a blatant lie.