I started hating web dev in general after working in web dev for few years. It's the same CRUD operations over and over again with some massaging of the data. On top of that everyone wants to apply their latest and greatest idealogy (tdd, pair programming, agile) like they are trying to solve world poverty or something.
I moved into high concurrency, low latency back end programming, jvm tuning sphere. Much more demanding and satisfying. Plus, no cookie cutter BS. I never want to go back to web dev again.
Your claim that the ensuing poverty will cause more deaths then corona virus. Do you have anything to support this? You made a claim so the onus is on you to provide supporting data. I don't need to refute anything at this juncture.
I don't think that's the part that's tripping people up. You're kinda just hand-waving over the link between the newly unemployed facing the same conditions that create an increased mortality rate for those in poverty. Not all who are unemployed lack the means to continue living an unimpoverished lifestyle (savings, benefits, depending on a partner, budget reduction, etc) and presumably many of the unemployed will become employed again when economic conditions improve.
This is the part that isn't "blindingly obvious" and requires a bit more of a substantive argument to backup the statement that "the deaths from coronavirus will be nothing compared to the deaths caused by economic destruction".
Is your position that people who will be made unemployed as a result of the economic destruction have enough savings and that we are providing enough benefits for them to survive?
59% of Americans could not afford $1,000 in an emergency. [1]
So you're talking about an optimistic runway of $1,000 + a $1,200 one-time benefit payment. The average person will be in poverty within 60 days.
I think you're dramatically overestimating the wealth of the average American.
Of course I’m not. I’m pointing out why looking at the mortality rate of poverty doesn’t support the argument that the economy implications of shelter in place are somehow deadlier than the disease itself.
The onus is still on you to make a meaningful argument to support that statement.
It's a prediction based on opinion and data, so I'm not able to support it beyond background references.
You're asking me to prove something that hasn't occurred yet.
My point is, poverty is deadly, the coronavirus response causes massive unemployment, unemployment causes poverty and so it's pretty obvious that the economic implications have a death rate associated with them that won't shake out for years. In my opinion, it'll be significantly worse.
I don't like it when people hand wave away the blight of those in poverty for personal safety. These people have awful outcomes, and they're treated as collateral damage.
The media talks about death from poverty all the time, except for now. Why? You cannot pause the economy without dramatic upheavals in industry and community.
For example, one particular study found that from the 2008 economic crisis there were nearly 5,000 excess suicides in a single year. Well, this crisis is substantially worse and will last substantially longer.
It's only "astroturfing" insofar as at least some of these protests are part of an organized drive to protest. I think you'll find that most protests entail some level of organization. Do you think black lives matter protests or women's march protests are "grassroots?" Would you be surprised to learn they are also backed by organizers?
I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were also backed by the same organizers. It would match the push-pull dynamic I imagine I see with online controversy. Not to mention the reported activity on Facebook and elsewhere around the 2016 elections.
This is not astroturfing. I saw the protest in Austin this weekend. 22 million people have been laid off in the last 4 weeks. I've seen the footage of tens of thousands lining up at food banks across the country. This is just getting started.
I don't see the link here. Yes there are 22 million laid off. But given a choice between being alive and being jobless, I think people would choose being jobless. The people protesting are not the same people lining up at food banks.
I have seen wapo video of Michigan protest. People there were angry because they want to get their hair done or buy paint and fertilizer. They want others to go to work to they can stay home.
Think of people having a "vitality score" that decreases with age, and of disease as a stressor that kills people with the "vitality score" under a certain threshold. That's how the yearly flu works, by culling people under the threshold. We attribute the death to "the flu", but we could easily also call it "death by old age".
Most working age people will be just fine. Except they are jobless. Terrible times.
Nitpick: The percentages sum up to 100, and represent the percent of total deaths, not deaths among people of certain age.
Not sure pointing fingers helps. Someone could also point fingers and claim "so you're willing to let people starve in the streets, how altruistic of you". It's a highly emotional and volatile situation, let's keep our cool.
Considering that the more data we get with regards to fatality rate, it's looking more and more along the lines of the seasonal flu (which has a vaccine, generally). The drastic measures taken to protect a tiny minority of people are looking to be more and more pointless. We would not tolerate shutting down the world economy to protect people from the seasonal flu, and we should not tolerate it for this.
I would love to bound the death rate, both lower and upper, ideally by age group. Right now I'm torn between 'it's a nasty flu, soldier up' vs. 'it's a supernasty disease that's going to severely upend life once it becomes endemic'. With the caveat that, given how easy it spreads, we might not be able to realistically do anything to prevent it becoming endemic.
Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu' point you made?
The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%. We originally thought that COVID-19 had a fatality rate fo 2-3%, but now that antibody testing is more and more widespread we are finding more and more cases of people testing positive for antibodies - indicating they had and recovered from the virus - without ever having any symptoms.
A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 times MORE infections than originally thought, just that the vast majority of them were asymptomatic.
Should we be focusing our energy on protecting our elderly and immunocompromised? Yes, absolutely.
Should we be mandating that people stay home, putting millions of perfectly healthy people out of work? It's absolutely insane to me that this was even considered, let alone implemented.
I agree, the fatality rates reported in the media smells of overhype. A lot. Over here in WA, the testing policy is along the lines of "Test patients hospitalized with severe lower respiratory illness or people working in critical sectors, and then maybe consider people with 100.4+ fevers and/or shortness of breath" [0]. That population selection has an elevated death risk, and also muddles the positive/negative ratio: symptomatic people test positive, whereas health workers test negative. We get high negative test ratios, falsely indicating we're early in the outbreak, and also high mortality ratios among positives, falsely indicating a high fatality rate. Extrapolating to the entire population is wrong and irresponsible.
The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.
OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.
I don't. Do you? We are 3 months into this mess and have wildly divergent facts that can't be reasonably reconciled.
Some attempts:
* The regular flu season uses 75% capacity of the system. A disease that's 3x worse will lead to 225% capacity needs.
* Maybe this disease is remarkably more contagious than the flu. In a tightly packed place like NYC, you might get all the cases that you're ever going to get flowing through the system within x weeks, whereas a less infectious flu season might trickle the same caseload within 2x weeks.
* This is out of the ballpark deadly, 10x-100x worse than the flu.
Those aren't reconciliations, they are contradicting the assertion that this is just another seasonal flu by identifying a way in which it is worse. I don't know what you mean about having "wildly divergent facts"?
Not all hospitals and morgues are overrun, a lot of them are actually massively under capacity. The media hysterics about this is complete nonsense for the majority of hospitals. NYC is not the US. Hell, NYC is not New York STATE.
How many hospitals or morgues should be overrun before it becomes evidence that we are not dealing with the same kind of problem as we do every flu season?
Ok, NY counted some that they shouldn't have. There's a vast majority of the country other than NYC that is affected by the virus and vast rest of the world too. You decided to nitpick one example and made it sound like a pattern.
Paraphrasing Dr. Birx: "There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. The intent is ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that."
Paraphrasing mostly, but this is Dr. Birx admitting that the government is overreporting by default. So even if you exclude NYC, it doesn't change my point.
That's how that works. Take for example, HIV. Nobody dies of HIV, but because HIV causes immunodeficiency, you can die because of common cold or flu. That doesn't mean the person died because of common cold, they died because of HIV/AIDS.
Similarly if you have type 1 diabetes and you get infected with corona, you probably died with diabetic complications, but without corona you would have been totally fine.
Not sure how that doesn't change your point. In fact you are conflating two different things. On one hand you are arguing about overreporting and on the other hand don't even want to take into consideration common practices in disease statistics. Almost makes me think you are not arguing in good faith.
People aren't catching type 1 diabetes because they are sick by coronavirus - they already had it. Comparing it to an immunodeficiency disease is not the same. It makes zero sense to generalize the fatality rate across a healthy population and include those with pre-existing conditions when trying to gauge the response for an entire state/country when the vast majority are healthy and those who are dying are not. When I want to know the risk to me or my family, I don't care that an 81 year old with stage 4 lung cancer died when he got COVID-19 - I want to know what my chances are among healthy people - but the media hysterics cling to the vulnerable people when it has no bearing on healthy ones.
We need detailed demographics of infections and deaths. We need to break down the risks, because a blanket totalitarian response of "SHUT DOWN LITERALLY EVERYTHING" is absolutely ridiculous when the general population is going to be fine. We didn't shut down the world economy for SARS, H1N1, MERS or any particularly bad flu season and we shouldn't shut down for this. We should focus our limited resources on protecting the vulnerable and let everyone else get back to work. More lives will be destroyed from an extended shutdown than this virus ever could.
May be for healthy, but not for the people with certain underlying conditions like diabetes, high BP, obesity etc. Also even if you are not vulnerable to the disease, you could be spreading this to the others who are even without showing symptoms.
Look at Sweden. They decided to let the people at risk stay home while others go out and about their business. Didn't work out too well for them.
Sweden has about the same per-capita death rate as the US and Switzerland, and lower than the UK, Spain, and Belgium. (See https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/). It's certainly possible that they'd be doing better with more restrictions, but if their strategy is as disastrous as many people seem to think then they'd be at the top of the charts, and they're not.
That sort of proves my point. UK didn't even want to restrict anything. Netherlands, Italy and Spain acted too late. Sweden decides to selectively restrict. In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity and no wonder all these countries are worse off as far as fatality rate goes compared some other countries like Germany or India.
It's just odd that I constantly hear how horribly Sweden is doing, and not a peep about Switzerland.
In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity
How many additional COVID19 deaths would you accept to avoid a crippling economic depression? If the answer is zero, you are not being serious. If the answer is more than zero, then as Churchill noted, we've established what kind of person you are and are now haggling over price.
I'm thankful right now that I live in Canada where every week—sometimes multiple times a week—measures are added or adjusted in order to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks. Some businesses have faltered or are closing permanently, but many others are receiving substantial support.
We're currently beating the projections in Ontario, and while this is not an easy time, every action necessary is being taken to at least try and prevent as many deaths by this thing as possible.
I think things would look different if the United States had taken different measures to support people during this crisis.
The barber in this narrative should receive enough aid to get by, and enough support for their business for it to persist until it can reopen—and the people who just want their hair done should just have to wait.
Sure, if the government replaces your livelihood, it becomes much less of an issue.
Of course, such measures can only work for a while until things start breaking down. We can do without barbers for quite a while, but the more professions are offline, the worse the accumulated effect is.
I don't think these measures were ever intended to be in effect in perpetuity. They're widely understood to be a stop-gap. It seems like a good strategy to me because it appears to be working. It's not perfect, but it's definitely helping. It's even making me believe in good government. Not perfect, but good.
The "choice between being alive and being jobless" is a matter of probabilities, which people are not great at. If you are not elderly, you likely have a higher chance of being unemployed than dying of COVID-19. So the choice is not between being alive and being jobless, it is an abstract unknown person getting sick and dying vs. you personally losing your income.
It's not just a personal calculation though. People that are infected spread the disease and consume medical resources. Those things both impact the rest of society.
What makes it astroturfing is that the organizers are being paid by GOP donors. You can agree with their objective or oppose it but it meets the definition of astroturfing.
Part of astroturfing is getting the grass roots to participate.
Are you implying that the "other side", insofar as it exists, is a grassroots movement? That seems to be the implication of pointing out that people who want to reopen the economy aren't grassroots.
No, it's a guy in Florida who went through and parked a bunch of domains with the same pattern. Maybe because he believed in the cause, and maybe because he wanted to make a few quick bucks.
"Astroturfing" would be when paid shills or robots spam FCC comment boards. It's not astroturfing when thousands of genuine supporters of a cause show up at a protest, whether or not there is coordination (surprise, all protests need coordination).
Trying to turn this into a sinister conspiracy -- and not genuine discontent -- is a cheap mental shortcut which lets you discount that a lot of people feel differently than you.
I read the links, and like I said in the original comment, I think it's very disingenuous to equate "national political organization with real human supporters" with "artificial or paid shills"
You could use that logic to brand the ACLU or other civil rights organizations "astroturfers", because they are trying to coordinate or bootstrap local movements. Do you think that Black Lives Matter protests have to independently, randomly coalesce in cities for them to be real movements? Obviously not. Social change is hard, and claiming "oh, but there's someone out-of-state helping them organize" is just a cheap way to invalidate any protest you don't like.
It's no better than Putin branding all NGOs as "foreign agents", to trash any civil society the Kremlin doesn't like. We can do better.
It's astroturfing, but astroturfing organizations have the same free speech rights as any other party: unions, NGOs, nonprofits, and evil corporations.
This is a deeply disingenuous statement and essentially false.
a) The protestors at the rallies clearly believe in their cause. You can't delegitimize their opinion.
b) CNN just published a study showing 2/3 worried about opening to early 1/3 worried about not opening soon enough.
That's 100M Americans, out of them it only takes a few to be very concerned.
The snippets from a recent protest of individuals describing how they are going out of business, will lose their livelihoods, homes and going destitute cannot be dismissed.
S. Korea has no lock-down with tracing. Sweden has no lock-down and is going 'kind of ok'.
It's deeply disturbing to see major companies suppress individuals' right to reasonable expression and it's not helpful to diminish their views just because a few idiots in Russia may like it.
The protests are fine, except for all the guns, which is a little spooky.
As another guy from India who was on H1B and started a company. You can start a company but you may not work for it. You can attend the board meetings and that's the extent of your involvement. If you do anything, even clean the floors of the office you are technically breaking the law as your h1b allows you to only work for the employer that sponsored your Visa.
How do they enforce these things? I'm sure if you do something silly like show up in the company's payroll you'll suffer consequences but this rule is pretty nuanced.
The law and the practical application of the same by USCIS are different. Although doing things on behalf of your own company without receiving cash compensation could still be considered work requiring work authorization, USCIS is most concerned about receiving cash compensation - this is a line you cannot cross. But as noted above, this analysis is nuanced so I would recommend that you consult with an attorney before taking any steps because, for example, there are steps you could take that would allow you to work for your company now without leaving your current job.
Problem is finding people who have enough experience and skillset that matches with that experience. One of the places I worked at, I interviewed 4 candidates, but they couldn't even explain the stuff that they wrote on their resume or answer basic technical questions, questions related to simple data structures or questions about their primary programming language.
We literally gave up on the position and after two years the position is still not filled.
There isn't dearth of candidates, just the competent ones.
I did the exact same thing. Worked for two huge multinational corps and now working for a company thats is about 12 year old and employs about 30-35 people including the founders. I love it. Mostly because the people I work with are very easy to get along with and I have freedom to propose ideas and implement them.
First time in last 10 years I haven't updated my resume after being at a job for an year.
So I think you're asking, "why prosecute a victimless crime?"
There's a couple reasons. Some people want the law to uphold societal moral standards. Some say that victimless crimes aren't actually victimless.
- In this case, it's not clear that the male in the video consented to the distribution of the video.
- The video shows a girl who may not legally able to consent to the sex act (The male is presumed to be an adult, but an age was not given in the case).
- She enabled the further distribution of the video by giving it to a friend who passed it on to other students.
I moved into high concurrency, low latency back end programming, jvm tuning sphere. Much more demanding and satisfying. Plus, no cookie cutter BS. I never want to go back to web dev again.