Has any government presented a cost benefit analysis of all the available options to address this situation?
Like most things in life this isn't black and white, so where is the analysis of the pros and cons, worst case projections, etc of not doing anything / going into lockdown / other alternatives.
I for one have not seen it.
Shouldn't such an analysis be the basis of any decisions we make? It follows therefore that it needs to be first of all DONE, then publicly presented and argued from all angles before a decision is made.
But, no. A decision has been made and presented to us. We can rest assured, they say, the science CLEARLY shows that this is the right decision. Then - at least in the UK - later they admitted that the economic impact and the following consequences have not yet been looked into.
The arguments should not be about lockdown or not. It is fair and everyone duty to scrutinise government decisions, not because they should have done the exact opposite, but simply because they haven't presented a robust case for what they're doing.
Let's not forget, it is their ONLY job to represent us - a job all of us are paying for -, and do things that are in our best interest, yet they fail to properly justify decisions.
Anyone who without question agrees to locking down the economy might want to consider that bailouts, stimulus packages, unemployment benefits, and anything else the government does is paid for with our money.
Add to this the borderline misleading way covid deaths are classified and a dozen other similar issues and you have yourself a very interesting situation which should be raising questions in everyone.
"Shouldn't such an analysis be the basis of any decisions we make?"
No. We can decided to make decisions based purely on the morality of the decision. Given a death rate somewhere between 1% and 3% the question becomes whether we will accept that many deaths, without taking action. There is no need for a cost/benefit analysis, as we can decide the issue entirely on a moral basis.
You can't know the morality of the action without modelling all the consequences. Morality is a complex thing, and certainly cannot be determined by just a single number (number of deaths from the virus avoided).
Isn't it obvious that cold showers will make you more resilient to cold? Even if we assume there aren't any health benefits - which would be foolish IMO, being resilient to cold is a benefit in itself.
If you're waiting for science to put a number on everything before you consider it you'll be disappointed in the long run.
Solution: Sign up to an aggregator service that's say $15 / month and you can watch any streaming service. When the month is up your $15 is distributed between providers depending on how much you watched each of them.
Nice solution for users, one that will immediately be denied by all providers.
Why take your share of $15 /month if you can easily coerce the vast majority of consumers to pay the full $15 for your service by releasing the next season of <insert popular show here>.
All it took for the masses to immediately flood Disney+ was owning Star Wars and Marvel.
I subscribed to HBO because of Game of Thrones back in the day, I have Prime anyways and share Netflix with 3 other people.
I want what you described but nobody is going to let this happen if consumers who are too tech-illiterate to pirate will pay up anyways.
The brand has a momentum, even if things start getting worse for customers there isn't an immediate response on a large scale.
A certain quality is important for the "true" advocates, but we're a small minority. Growth is driven by at scale customers who don't notice these issues because they're buying the products for different reasons.
In this context, improving quality to keep the hardcore fans happy costs money, but doesn't impact the bottom line significantly in the short term.
Growth is the only goal at this scale and that's driven by other strategies and not hardcore fans.
I guess long story short is corporations are cash machines and product quality does not play an important part at this scale.
How it works is that your brand suffers, and sales drift downwards.
When you attempt new projects outside of your skill envelope - a Maps application, a self-driving car, VR/AR hardware, a move to ARM - you either don't finish on schedule, don't finish at all and are forced to cancel, or you unleash a shit storm of bugs and negativity that costs far more than any nominal savings you might persuade yourself you've made by not doing QA properly.
It's a cultural problem. Not only is skimping on QA
and customer support cheap, it looks and feels cheap. And that's not a good look when you're trying to sell yourself as a premium brand.
To be fair, customer abuse is not unusual among premium brands. Prestige cars are notoriously crap for reliability and build quality.
But Apple is a prestige consumer brand, and the brand experience is the most important asset.
If customers stop believing in the brand, all Apple has left is Dell or HP but with nicer packaging.
I'm sure you have a lot of good advice in the comments, thought I'd throw in how I like to think about this.
Being practical means things that are doable. So it makes sense to limit whatever you do to that, otherwise you'll be in the domain of unrealistic / never gonna work.
The problem is, what is doable is not an absolute. What's practical is different for everyone. You'll define it based on what you experienced / heard about. Fact is you only hear what resonates with you, aka you're not even going to consider things that seem ridiculous, based on your experience.
There's two sides to every story and it seems you're missing one. In my view, being practical is a way of talking yourself out of ideas that you don't want to do.
Look at this way, if you stick to being practical you'll only every do things that have a close to 100% chance of working (in your view). This would only work if you knew everything. Absolute knowledge.
You have no idea what is possible, so do your best (keep trying) and don't overanalyze.
I've heard somewhere you can turn this mentality around by forcing yourself to come up with reasons this could work, rather than why it couldn't. Make a list.
There seems to be a lack of (affordable) tools for doing quantitive research in the early stages of product development, so figured I'd build something for my fellow UXers, Information Architects and Product people.
Currently in early access, goal is to make it as useful as possible with additional features + more research methods and ultimately come up with a pricing if there is interest.
The idea that we can mandate people telling the truth is laughable.
The reason it seems to work in Denmark is probably because honesty is a social norm there.
Secondly, there is no absolute, objective truth and there never will be.
The best we can do is to individually strive for telling the truth and hope for the best.
You accept that honesty could plausibly be a social norm in some countries, yet you think it's laughable that the law might play a role in establishing and upholding that norm?
Who is disputing that there are clearly worse alternatives? Pick almost any part of history.
You're talking about alternatives to the status-quo. Sure, there's lots to be improved, that's not what the disagreement is. The disagreement is whether to have a calm conversations and plan for a better future, or - like the Guardian suggests - burning it all to the ground because capitalism = bad.
> Who is disputing that there are clearly worse alternatives?
No one, and neither do I. That's why I added inevitable. Because the problem is the false dichotomy of Capitalism or Stalinism. It's obvious that the people calling for radical change are not even close to supporting Stalinism. But for some reason this is always assumed when just criticism towards Capitalism is presented.
> The disagreement is whether to have a calm conversations and plan for a better future
Moderates never ever find a "good" time for true change. It should always be delayed and slowed down until it eventually evaporates.
Has any government presented a cost benefit analysis of all the available options to address this situation?
Like most things in life this isn't black and white, so where is the analysis of the pros and cons, worst case projections, etc of not doing anything / going into lockdown / other alternatives.
I for one have not seen it.
Shouldn't such an analysis be the basis of any decisions we make? It follows therefore that it needs to be first of all DONE, then publicly presented and argued from all angles before a decision is made.
But, no. A decision has been made and presented to us. We can rest assured, they say, the science CLEARLY shows that this is the right decision. Then - at least in the UK - later they admitted that the economic impact and the following consequences have not yet been looked into.
The arguments should not be about lockdown or not. It is fair and everyone duty to scrutinise government decisions, not because they should have done the exact opposite, but simply because they haven't presented a robust case for what they're doing.
Let's not forget, it is their ONLY job to represent us - a job all of us are paying for -, and do things that are in our best interest, yet they fail to properly justify decisions.
Anyone who without question agrees to locking down the economy might want to consider that bailouts, stimulus packages, unemployment benefits, and anything else the government does is paid for with our money.
Add to this the borderline misleading way covid deaths are classified and a dozen other similar issues and you have yourself a very interesting situation which should be raising questions in everyone.