Corona virus

"

The_Impeacher wrote:

Facebook isn't working for the good guys.

I'm sorry about your country, Charan. Authoritarian science deniers should never be elected into positions of power.

I feel like this is the culmination of a handful of years of letting the wrong people steer the ship. You know what I'm talking about, so the point need not be laboured.

I'm genuinely shocked how quickly I've become anti-government. This isn't like me at all. I waver whenever I dwell on it. It's that much against my nature. But the evidence is too strong now. These idiots are ploughing the bus into a wall and the worst thing is they've watched other buses do it first.

Oh, 36.3c. Slight headache, but that's probably just stress/tension right now.

Had to arrange for a plumber just now -- hot water system leaking. The GF can deal with it, but she'll be wearing a mask if only to impress upon whoever attends the job that we are not taking this shit lightly. Anyone could be an asym.

Supermarkets are starting to arrange special 'at risk delivery hours' for seniors, immunosuppressed and other vulnerables. I've applied, but I don't think I provided anywhere near enough information. I hope they call my doctor for confirmation, or request a letter.

BTW My name's not Charan. Leave that to the people who don't care to know or understand me. Call me W.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/17/hello-italy-your-future-is-grimmer-than-you-think/

This all rings true. Even the banal stuff about how busy they are now with this new way of life. Self-quarantine is not the holiday it seems to be. Life goes on. Things have to be done. If anything, I'm busier now than I have been for ages. Keeping up with relatives, the news, friends, things we can do for further preparation.

It's weird. I'm both more disconnected from my local world and yet feel more connected with the larger one. I chat with people in Denmark, the Netherlands, USA, UK, Canada, Japan...people I haven't heard from in years but who read my updates check on me, and I on them. We discuss our countries' responses, our personal preparations.

I'm not saying I like it or that I feel this positive change outweighs everything else. It really doesn't. That article develops from 'our strange new life' to 'for god's sake please don't follow in our footsteps'. But I do like that in these rarest of events, we do come together as best we can despite oceans and timezones, rallied by nothing if not the collective disbelief at how poorly the powers that be have handled this.

Being surrounded by the netherlands and the UK is quite funny.

They both opted to go the herd-immunity route so that will be interesting to watch develop.

I have a good laugh with how many politicians are calling for "civic duty" now because the word "nationalism" is taboo over here, because apparently everybody's nationalism in europe is of german flavor, but everybody knows what is implied.

Also had a laugh today when the news interviewed some guy in his late 70's and the interviewer was asking "have you ever seen this kind of crisis before".
He looked at her funny and reminded her of europe's past while i was laughing my ass off at home.

He wasn't taking the situation lightly btw, just looked a bit dumb founded at the relatively young interviewer asking what is bassicaly a dumb question to a person who was alive around the build-up period post WWII.

All in all the solidarity is nice to see but the goverment still needed to declare official policy's to make it clear to some to deal with this appropriatly.
Mostly young people seem to ignore it at this stage which is normal, but that will probably shift in a day or two.

So far the goverment did everything at the pace i predicted to my mom a week and a half ago, missed the "lockdown" by a couple of hours but im fine with that.
She looked at me funny when i told her there will be 10 people death by the end of today, which was confirmed a few hours later in the evening news.
Amazing how numbers work i guess.

All in all if we get the young people to follow suit things look ok over here.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Italy's total number of cases rose 12.6 percent to 31,506 - the slowest rate of increase since the first cases were reported on February 21.

Looks like the lockdown is finally taking effect (or there are simply not that many people left for the virus to infect). France will hopefully show similar results looking at what they are doing.

My #1 way of losing a game of Plague, Inc was being too infectious, not lethal enough. I'd simply infect the whole world quietly, fail to kill enough of them, get detected, get cured.

Normally I'd view Covid-19 that way, as a highly infectious but ultimately ineffectual plague, but since I'd probably fall into the 'insufficient dead' category, it's serious enough for me. :)

"

xMustard wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5CZ7SS06es

This was a good video, but not quite a great one.

My main complaint is that it does a particular thing that a lot of "skeptic" vids do, which I'm going to call "refusing to name the stupid." The RationalWiki types like to label such behavior "dogwhistling," but refusing to name the stupid is not dogwhistling because dogwhistling is a coded signal and refusal to name the stupid is a lack of signal. Whereas dogwhistling is an encoded indication of group membership, refusing to name the stupid is usually the silence of a content creator with moderate views and a radicalized audience who is neither willing to radicalize themselves, nor risk alienating his audience by attempting to moderate their views. It's not an indicator that one is a crackpot or even a crackpot sympathizer; it is an indicator one likes taking money from crackpots and is vulnerable to self-censorship in fear of being cancelled.

In any case, I don't like that the video refrains from actively calling out the "COVID19 is a false flag" crackpots.

But overall the video is good, because whether or not a potential solution makes sense has more to do with the solution itself than the problem it's trying to fix. For example, medieval doctors would respond to the very real problem of human illness by prescribing bloodletting and applying leeches to drain blood. It was well known by then that a person who loses blood gets weaker and, if enough blood is lost, dies; this didn't prevent it from being advocated as treatment. It's totally possible for a problem to be thoroughly legitimate and its proposed solution to be complete horse shit.

Our current response to COVID19 is almost completely horse shit. We are prescribing a cure that is worse than the disease, and will ultimately kill more people than the virus would have if it had ran through humanity completely unopposed. Only a fool would set about to destroying his society in the hopes of saving 2% of it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Well, our government has decided that '100 people indoors' is somehow the new threshold for okay. Who the fuck are they kidding?

Our Chief Medical Officer flat-out said,

“A short-term, two to four week shutdown of society is not recommended by any of our experts. It does not achieve anything."

I don't think our politicians realise you don't play chicken with a pandemic.

Meanwhile schools are not only still open, they're aggressively enforcing attendance, but have taken...measures to keep parents off school grounds?

There's more threat to children from riding school buses than there is from COVID-19. I wouldn't go so far as to say that canceling school "doesn't achieve anything," but what it does achieve against COVID-19 is not worth the cost.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

I'm genuinely shocked how quickly I've become anti-government. This isn't like me at all. I waver whenever I dwell on it. It's that much against my nature. But the evidence is too strong now. These idiots are ploughing the bus into a wall and the worst thing is they've watched other buses do it first.

God bless President Trump for his role in leading you to enlightenment.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

BTW My name's not Charan. Leave that to the people who don't care to know or understand me. Call me W.

In that case, I demand you refer to me as Mike Degrassi Tyson.

I mean sheeit, I don't even get on people who call me Scott.

https://www.news.com.au/national/scott-morrison-schools-should-remain-open/news-story/98825afacacafcd126aca1f0d8c0760b

This is going to have disastrous repercussions. They're all but saying 'it's too early to go into lockdown, but we probably will at some point'. I'd almost be more understanding if they were just plain stupid and saying 'we don't need lockdown, period'. But this whole 'well, we will later but it's not serious enough yet'...in the face of a confirmed pandemic where extreme seclusion works (shit, Kansas is shutting down their schools for the rest of the YEAR), is utterly untenable.

Did China close down its schools?

The situation in the US is getting worse and worse. Looks like Trump couldn't scare the coronavirus away. Wonder if the country will become the next epicenter, it did get infected slightly later than Europe.

Right now it's a race to the bottom between the UK, the USA and Australia, but going by their leaders that's probably been true for a while. My money's on the UK. Closer to Europe, especially the virulently nonchalant France, trying to pull off the 'herd immunity' desperation attack before their super meter is fully charged, and much more into pub-gatherings to watch sport than either of the other two.