They already do train them like the military. In fact, since Obama, they've also been arming them as the military as well, not only with M4's and Barrett 50's, also with up armor MRAPS and hummers. That's not including other tactical wartime gear such as stingrays etc.
Train The cops as soldiers, don't be surprised when cops act as soldiers.
I realize that as we've been millennialing our military into occupying and policing, but make no mistake that's not what they're for. And it's the same issue with cops.
Because for a long time things were interoperable. Many chat services ran off jabber/XMPP. You could easily use adium, pigeon, psi, gajim, and even the AOL IM and iirc yahoo messenger would all communicate interoperably.
In fact, you could even jabber chat with those using Google talk/hangouts until Google decided not to play. Before that iteration was usenet, IRC and ICQ.
Now you have WhatsApp, google chat or whatever it's called now, Snapchat, Facebook messenger, tik tok, zoom, kakao talk etc. But nobody wants you to leave their garden. And Because somebody popular makes a post using some platform, the masses rush there and doesn't leagu leave until they're told to by the new YouTube personality du jour.
So no, i tend to think in the process of millenialing chat services, they made them simple for them to understand, and kept them in the garden so they wouldn't get lost..
A lot of governors "went it alone" because generally, for anyone under 60 who didn't have multiple co-morbidities, this was just a bad flu season. That gave these governors a grand opportunity to implement And enforce bad policies in the name of keeping people safe.
The irony of it is, the policies of these governors effectively isolated quarantined those who were most vulnerable to the virus, those in assisted living and nursing homes with those known to be infected with coronavirus effectively turning them into death camps. Your governor effectively executed them, while quarantining anyone least likely to be affected by the covid. The fallout effects from their actions will be felt long after this is over.
Yeh. You guys did a great job out there.. Hold your heads up high Washingtonians, you have so much to be proud of.. And i think he very much represents who you are.
> Didn't numerous specialized covid hospitals close in Washington without ever seeing a patient?
The Army field hospital, which was set up to treat non-Covid cases shut down because our medical system wasn't overwhelmed as it was feared we could be. I think that our response in WA had something to do with flattening the curve here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...
And yes, I'm proud to say that due to our response we have been able to send equipment elsewhere. We geared up for the worst, responded, and have been able to help our neighbors. I am pretty proud of that.
> A lot of governors "went it alone" because generally, for anyone under 60 who didn't have multiple co-morbidities, this was just a bad flu season. That gave these governors a grand opportunity to implement And enforce bad policies in the name of keeping people safe.
As I write this, over 100,000 people in our country are dead. This is already like 3 flu seasons. I'm one degree of separation from someone who died at 36. I feel that the policies that have been implemented have been pretty good given how quickly they needed to be devised and implemented. And they've been refined over time.
> The irony of it is, the policies of these governors effectively isolated quarantined those who were most vulnerable to the virus, those in assisted living and nursing homes with those known to be infected with coronavirus effectively turning them into death camps. Your governor effectively executed them, while quarantining anyone least likely to be affected by the covid. The fallout effects from their actions will be felt long after this is over.
I don't understand this argument, and I guess I'll assume positive intent on your part. Seeing the death rates in Washington vs other parts of the world and indeed other parts of the US, we have models for how things could have been / could still be much worse. I don't see how instituting policies that kept massive numbers of other people out of the hospitals, thus reserving the hospital capacity for those most vulnerable to infection, could be seen as anything other than mitigating a bad situation.
EDIT: looking through your comment history, please, take a deep breath and try to at least entertain the possibility that you could be wrong. I pledge to do the same.
I tried to understand where these numbers were coming from. The 32,768,000 cases led me to seroprevalence studies (total infection estimates by sampling the population for antibodies).
I think this wired article [1] really covers the signifigance of these results. Some of the issues are the results are not nationwide (Santa Clara County only), the studies weren't peer reviewed before the twitter analysis happened, there may be issues with testing method accuracy, etc.
In any case these are fairly new results (April 11). Our decisions about lockdown were based on data available at the time which had a worse outlook in part due to lack of early action.
I think it's also important to point out the CDC's planning scenarios state "sCFR: ... reflects existing standard of care". I presume this means our current ability, not our ability a month ago when fatalities peaked.
> I think this wired article [1] really covers the signifigance of these results. Some of the issues are the results are not nationwide (Santa Clara County only), the studies weren't peer reviewed before the twitter analysis happened, there may be issues with testing method accuracy, etc.
For future consideration by others, while the Stanford paper was pre-peer review the deluge of Twitter and media articles denouncing the results based on those limitations is as bad or worse than the drawbacks of the original research. Given that multiple papers from groups around the world have produced similar or more drastic results from serological testing, it seems most likely the Stanford researchers were more correct than wrong and the Twitter crowd (included many scientists) were more incorrect. The wisdom of the crowds is not always that wise. It was largely people disagreeing with the Stanford results for various non-scientific reasons using the limitations as a way to invalidate the entirety of the results rather than understand that the issues would most probably only affect the range of the results but even accounting for that still indicated order of magnitude lower infection fatality rate than assumed from the known case rate at the time. The same reasoning should apply to the early research from Imperial College that had (IMHO) even more serious limitations, but even their results weren't completely invalidated and the current numbers are still within their estimated ranges.
Similar logical failures happened when the WHO stated that there wasn't evidence that getting infected would result in immunity. While technically true and worth investigating, taking it as a justification to extend lockdown or denounce states planning to reopen was unfounded given the paucity of data showing people don't develop some degree of resistance to sars-cov-2 virus after infection. Given there are few viruses that can elude the immune system and prevent immunity, the prior knowledge by itself strongly indicates some level of immunity will be formed. None of the traits of a lingering viral infections were there, aside from a few anomalous results from Wuhan or South Korea. Luckily, later research showed those possible cases of relapse were due to false positives, but it was also a highly likely outcome based on the known of prior information about viruses and the immune system.
Yeh. I've not seen the plandemic documentary. But it's not hard to figure out their take on things.
With The most recent data The cdc released or shows the Stanford studies were pretty much dead on.
But i also tend to think this wasn't about a virus, it was about control. (Yeh your small business is just to dangerous to keep open, please shop at target, home depot, Wal-Mart and Safeway instead).
It's complicated? 538[1] (yeah, I know) did a decent dive into this back in 2018: as her electorate has moved left, she's moved right. The theories for that are pretty simple.
- The Dem/GOP split swung from nearly even to 45-25 over her tenure, so there's no longer any credible Republican competition to force her back toward her original left-of-center leanings
- She can outraise even the most serious Democratic challenger by more than 10-to-1
- She appeals more to pro-business, homeowner, and technocrat Democrats and independents than any other group, who in turn power that fundraising and also are responsible for Democratic plurality in the voter base
So we wind up with this dichotomy of her winning every election and getting booed out of nearly every town hall. The question going forward is whether she can hang on to her seat as easily in a recession California as in a booming one, especially if her constituency shifts away from her under economic stress just as quickly as it shifted in her favor.
I'd be careful of trying to describe Feinsten in terms of left/right when both parties official platforms both include things that are both for and against government micromanagement of people.
She has been very, very consistently pro-authoritarian her entire career. The hate for her is truly bipartisan.
The reason she's still in office isn't because pro-business types like her and give her money. It's because she has so much influence over the democratic party in her state that she can make sure nobody worth voting for every gets enough funding to mount a successful primary against her.
What they think is about as relevant as opinion polls from a misinformed public. People largely have their mind made up about it about the covid because it's more of a religion now than anything else.
Nevermind the numerous serology studies from multiple different countries which show exposure to the virus is highly prevalent with most individuals being asymptomatic. Nevermind the multiple recent studies in the U.S. which show the same. Nevermind the numerous prison facilities, ships or other confined areas which show it being highly contagious yet most asymptomatic. Nevermind studies that show Unless you have multiple co morbidities, if you're under 60 you probably at a greater risk of heart disease than the covid. Nevermind that numerous studies site that transmission from children to adults is low and risk to kids themselves has been pretty low.
No no.. Let's close the schools to keep the children safe. Let's close houses of worship and other sociologically important places. Let's close small businesses but let's keep big businesses open. Let's allow the ppl to continue to take public transportation to their big box store as well. Let's indiscriminately quarantine everyone, we most certainly can't have them going to the beach or other outside areas where it's well known UV-C kills the virus and transmission risk outdoors is tiny. Let's jail salon owners operating at home and surfers in the ocean but let's release criminals for politically relevant taking points. Let's make sure we don't quarantine or even test anyone in nursing homes even though they are begging the NY governor to allow it (gotta get to 100k somehow).
Yeh no. Every time i see someone outside exercising in mask and gloves i know exactly how and why we get a 2 trillion dollar stimulus package that gives 86k to politicians per month for childcare during this crisis. They're essentially the droid army from clone wars series, just wearing masks.
I get why the govt is doing it. It's about power and control. I can say that i never thought scientism would get such a hold on the people though. If i were musk i would've already been gone from California. And if i were the governors in Texas I'd perma-ban any emigrants from NY or CA.
Most of this is not supported by the evidence, and there’s far more uncertainty in the data and studies than you’re portraying here.
But putting that aside, it sounds like you think that politicians are making this seem way worse than it is, in order to exercise more power and control over people’s lives. OK, not the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard, even if there are some huge glaring holes in the logic there.
What about the scientific and medical community? Are they in on this too? Because I certainly haven’t heard an outcry from epidemiologists and virologists and physicians that we’re grossly overreacting and that the virus isn’t that big of a deal. Why not?
It’s ironic, because to my mind, your first paragraph perfectly captures my impression of your position: misinformed but fervently clinging to a religious position that doesn’t seem to match the view of the actual experts.
The estimated fatality rate with everything taken into account is around 0.5%. That's covering asymptomatic people, etc, etc. Assuming 200 million Americans get infected the result is 1 million additional deaths. That's a lot.
Among what age group, though? Using an average morbidity across the entire population is misleading. Everything I've read indicates that the morbidity scales very highly with age so that it would be something like (making this up here) 0.05% for people under 40, scaling up very quickly as you get to the elderly population. The question then becomes can we effectively quarantine at-risk groups instead of the entire population? I don't know the answer, but I do know that continuing to pursue current policies until some indefinite point in the future is untenable.
Serious question: can you show me the metrics for california with concrete targets that will trigger reopening? The last plan I saw wasn't a plan at all, it was just guidelines.
Targets for early reopening (ie before the state at large):
- 1.5 tests per 1000 people per day
- No deaths in the past 14 days
- Some max number of cases per day that's really low
- Stockpile of PPE (I forget the exact numbers)
- A minimum number of contact tracers (I think also 1.5 per 1000 people, although it may be an order of magnitude lower)
The bay area has a more stringent set of guidelines (minus the number of deaths that another person linked to).
I don't see the difference between plan and guidelines from any practical point of view.
There is a statewide timeline and counties can open slower/faster. There's a list of criteria for counties to consider. This is a slide deck summarizing things at a state level, it notes a variety of metrics that are being looked at:
Here's a plan: when we get to X new cases per day, we will reopen. Here's a guideline: we'll reopen when we think it's safe. The former has concrete goals that you can measure against and take action on. The latter has no clarity whatsoever. If I presented a project plan the way California has presented its Covid reopening "plans" I would be fired.
Except "the population feeling safe" is the only metric that really matters. Everything else is a proxy. If the population doesn't feel safe then they will protest and not resume activities. The other metrics can be golden but if the population disagree you will have trouble in a democracy.
At least in Illinois, opening targets are based on agent-based simulations of disease spread. Specifically, the simulations predicted that if Illinois had reopened on May 1, we would have seen a larger peak than the initial one in June. You can read about it here:
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/greg-hinz-politics/look-insi...
Thanks, it's really confusing because there are multiple conflicting sources with different guidelines and the governor's statements have indicated Phase 2 is still case-by-case and phases 3 and 4 are "sometime soonish". In addition to the metrics that SF Chronicle page is tracking for Bay Area counties, there's also [1], [2], and [3] in addition to the original governor's slides a few weeks ago. I can't find any concrete goals from official sources for completely reopening the state (phase 4).
Yes, the death rates scale with age. However, the permanent damage persists even in younger folks. It’s not as cut and dry as “x number are asymptomatic, and that mean 1 million will die. But those are mainly older folks so we act accordingly.”
The problem is:
1. The virus causes permanent damage in people. Even if they live and survive they’ll be dealing with the damage for a long period of time. Some lung damage can take months to heal.
2. The virus immunity exists in the short term immunity of the body. Which means depending on the person in 6 months to a year - Surprise theyre reinfected. We haven’t seen reinfections yet, but we have proven immunity is short term and not life long.
3. This effectively means the risk of this virus becoming a yearly thing is exceptionally high. Not to mention herd immunity isn’t as useful. Due to the fact we’ll always have people losing immunity and becoming sick.
What this essentially means is that 0.5% number (which I think is wrong, but I digress) is a yearly number and will compound over time.
And yes - After a few cycles the percentage (should) drop due to our older folks dying off. However, we’re also going to see people with organ damage 6 months on being reinfected which could result in a higher mortality in itself.
I have shared this opinion before (in person) and it went poorly, but I’ll try again here.
If one of my 75 year old parents (whom I love dearly) dies from COVID-19, that is less of a tragedy than if a random teenager in my city does. My parent would have lost fewer years or “years of quality life” than the teen.
For the same reason, IMO, if there was only 1 kidney available, an 18 year old should get it before a 50 year old who should get it before an 82 year old, if all else is equal.
In that limited way, I do think the lives of the young have more value than those of middle age or the elderly.
Is age the only measure? What about the contribution or potential contributions to society? Is the life of an 18 year old unmotivated ne'er do well worth more than a 50 year old with children or a 6o yr old who has made great contributions to society and wants to enjoy their last 30-40 years?
There's just no way we can assume that age is the great qualifier.
Yes, but the goal of social distancing and everything has not been to drastically change the number of people that are ultimately infected, just to slow down the rate of spread. The disease is out there now. If you haven't gotten it already, you very likely will eventually.
That depends on how much we slow it down; after a vaccine (in a year), we DO drastically change the number infected. Other countries (South Korea, NZ, Taiwan) have changed the number infected, and will probably end up with much fewer infected.
For now, we want to drastically change the outcomes; for example, a month ago, you would have been given chloroquine, which doesn’t help but has side effects; maybe in a month we would know about therapies that reduce mortality and long term effects by a significant percent (or maybe not :)
Tons of testing and contact tracing would probably let the US end up with fewer people infected.
They've drastically changed the number of infected for now, during a continuing lockdown. Once planes start flying again, and people start travelling again, infections will continue.
I agree we want to change outcomes, and flattening the curve is part of that. Delaying infections until better treatments is part of that. But we can't commit to waiting for a vaccine, and we can't commit to waiting for a good treatment. We may never get either.
Why can’t we wait? I’m not arguing we should, but I’m not sure we can’t.
What I think is that we sorta can and sorta should; we need to figure out the trade-offs, as best as we can, and decide what measures we want to keep for another year (will vary by country/state/city).
Exactly. I have the luxury of some patience here (married and can WFH) and even I’m not excited about forfeiting 1 of my ~50 years of “healthy, active adult lifespan” for limited gain.
If you estimate that the lockdown takes 50% of life enjoyment away and each of us gets 50 healthy years of self-directed adult life, a year of lockdown is equivalent to sapping 1% of total life enjoyment. That’s not exactly the same as 1% increase in population deaths in a year, but it’s comparable IMO.
Most probably but a non-trivial percentage would rather wait indefinitely. I'm seeing many liberals who equate opening things up to literal human sacrifice for corporate profit.
Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation.
I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will.
For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.
I’m surprised the article didn’t go back a few more years, when computer networks were controlled by a handful of companies that regularly censored content.
Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers.
We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example.
Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.
I didn't go back further because there was enough to say about what is happening now. I allude that this is not just something that is happening now, but figured for everyone's sanity it was important to focus on the now. :)
Train The cops as soldiers, don't be surprised when cops act as soldiers.
I realize that as we've been millennialing our military into occupying and policing, but make no mistake that's not what they're for. And it's the same issue with cops.