I really wanted to like QAnon as a conspiracy watcher. Unfortunately I was never able to wrap my mind around its stream of consciousness writing. It seemed like a bunch of right wing blather that used buzzwords to tantalize pro swamp drainers.
Looking into it, as far as I can tell it's not meant to be taken seriously. Q is an elaborate practical joke created by "The Hacker Known as 4chan" in order to troll the media into losing their minds. So far it seems to be working.
The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever.
Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
So, it's pretty inaccurate to describe Germany's response as "masks and hand-washing".
Germany still has spikes they need to deal with, but is also doing really well, when in fact people in Germany are not bunkering down in their homes forever. Germany is currently way more open than the U.S. is and is doing way better at control of the disease.
Precisely becuase their response is not limited to "masks and hand-washing". "Masks and hand-washing" and "bunkering down" in fact describes the USA response better than it describes the German response. And Germany is doing a lot better than the USA.
The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position. Neither is actually an effective response; neither actually characterizes the response of countries like Germany who have been very effective in controlling the pandemic.
It is insanity, and we've been stuck in it for six months, I keep wondering when Americans will realize those aren't the only choices; apparently never? Maybe because some people still think there is going to be some magic bullet "when the vaccine" and we can just wait it out until then; that's not how it's going to work, we're going to be dealing with this for years, and need to be finding sustainable solutions, not arguing about whether we should do something insufficient and unsustainable OR do nothing at all.
What Germany's response has involved is massive testing, a quality healthcare system with universal access, supporting people in quarantine, supporting people financially so nobody has to go to work sick or in non-safe situations in order to stay secure financially, and it goes on from there. All of this is somehow unimaginable in the USA, where people can only conceive of "masks, hand-washing, and staying home", or "pretty much ignore it".
Up to 90% of the positive cases in the US would not be positive in Germany due to how PCR tests are performed in each country, and what countries code as coronavirus deaths also differs. Making comparisons between countries is hard. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
That’s a weird retort. At least deaths should be reasonably robust and there is really no comparison there between Germany and the US.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. All the while measures have been relaxed way more here than in the US. “Lockdowns” were also never really harsh in Germany and only lasted a very short time.
Three factors are suspected to be at play there:
* very early testing that detected community spread with unknown origins very early on (using the influenza sentinel system for detection)
* luckily being late in importing the virus, which lead to …
* … politicians being able to “look into the future” by looking at Italy (a place that unluckily imported the virus quite a bit earlier)
As a result Germany relatively quickly (though Germany could have acted a bit faster and have been even more effective) implemented quite mild measures for a relatively short amount of time. Some of those measures are still in place, most were, however, lifted in the meantime.
This lead to a still enduring drop to very low numbers, extremely low numbers if you look at deaths. Even though measures at this point often are much milder than in the US.
Your defensive “numbers aren’t comparable” retort is bullshit. Mostly because, sure, the numbers aren’t comparable. Sure, that’s true. But we aren’t talking about orders of magnitude here.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. No matter what you measure, whether it’s infections, deaths, excess deaths, economic impact. You name it.
The excess mortality is harder to fake or mis-measure though. There are no perfect numbers here (a lesson about measurement in general), but there is no reasonable argument that the US is doing anything but much much worse than Germany.
And yet Germany is not currently "locked down". The argument that Germany is among the best of all countries at handling this is not an argument for "if everyone just wears a mask and doesn't leave their home forever" -- that is not what happened in Germany. At all.
That is Wrong and the linked article does not support your Assertion. German Labs are running the same high (35+) number of cycles that US Labs are. The Discussion to define a cutoff Value is ongoing.
I recently got in a silly argument where the crux of my argument was that the reason the US is mishandling the situation is because the pandemic was politicized since day 1. The response I was met with was: "no, it's all Trump's fault".
> The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position.
In practice, what does this look like? You have Fox reporting on Nancy Pelosi's haircut everyday on the week. You have 1 op-ed from CNN. Both sides think the each other are bad actors. Funding that needs to go out to the people are held up for election purposes.
Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic. It leads to people, who might otherwise be rational people, doubling down to support their side. Whether or not they agree with it. Because both sides are polar opposites, there is no compromise for a middle ground solution.
You're going to call this more "politicization" but the reality is the US government ignored and downplayed the pandemic until it was too late. This isn't really a debatable or left/right viewpoint. After that, criticism of the response was inevitable, leading to the claim that the pandemic was "politicized".
The only way it would have been not "politicized" was if the initial response had been even halfway competent.
No I'm not going to call your comment "politicization". Here is the government trying to act [1].
Both sides include poison pills that they know that the other side won't pass. Why is a new $2B FBI headquarter or SALT reform even in a COVID bill? They both agree to at least $300B directly to the people, just pass that. Now is the time to have unanimous agreement on things that will help, not include provisions to help your constituents.
Included by the White House, according to the article you posted. Which also mismanaged the initial response, so hardly surprising.
> SALT reform
According to the article, it was a temporary elimination on the SALT cap, not wholesale reform. Temporary tax relief during a recession should hardly be considered a poison pill.
Do you not see your own bias? I'm criticizing both sides for using a pandemic for political gain while you openly shun one side and trivialize the same behavior of the opposite.
Sure, I shouldn't have said reform. But are you seriously going to pretend that it isn't a political move by the Democrats when they were so vocal in 2018 in their opposition? [1]
Money quote:
"""
Cuomo said New York will challenge a provision of the law that limits how much Americans can deduct from their federal taxes for payments made to state and local governments. Many of the people most affected by that provision live in states run by Democrats, which tend to have higher state and local tax rates.
"""
The irony in all of this is that I'm not a US person. I can't vote and am not on the path to residency. I have no dog in this fight. This is a literal replay of the silly argument that I got into recently that started this thread.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm aware I'm biased. You just picked a bad example. Just because lifting the SALT cap temporarily is politically advantageous, doesn't mean it doesn't help lots of people. All kinds of tax relief are on the table[1][2][3] as part of the Covid response, so why call just this one "political"?
If you live and work in the US, you probably pay US taxes, so you do have a dog in this fight whether you like it or not.
> Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic.
On the flip side, one would think one’s opinion on how government handles things would have a rather large impact on one’s political affiliation, and the more significant those things are the stronger a factor it would be.
Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.
You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences).
Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])
This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.
You should follow through on some of those links to the actual papers. They have structural problems. The first assumed that there was a 50% chance of the individuals living to 100. That is not realistic. But the business insider article does allow for people to sensationalize and feel smug in their knowledge that the long term economic and existential damage from bunkering and collapsing the economy was all worth it.
Van Gogh tried to sell his art for more than the price of parts. He was unsuccessful in his life due to being ahead of the curve. Much like Betamax, he died before being appreciated.
Let’s play make a Facebook. You need profile information. That’s information that’s access as block. We can use documents for that. We then want to track relationships. Friends. Friends of friends. We can use a graph. We might need a lightweight cache. Opaque entries accessed by key. We can use a key value store for that. ArangoDB does all of theses. Some times you want to join documents to documents or any other form of pairing. ArangoDB does that too.
You can then scale this across multiple machines as necessary. The benefit of such a design is that your team only needs to learn on technology not many. You don’t need to know redis, postgres and Neo4j to derive the same benefits.
At a high level, you could say that you can model your data in either, so either can implement the other, and you can also include relational DBs in that too. They are all "equivalent" in an abstract sense. But it doesn't mean they support all uses equally well.
A graph DB is optimised for a traversing a general graph structure, whereas a document DB is optimised for a tree-structured document and sometimes queries can't traverse links between documents.
Optimised means performance, layout in storage (so locality, retrival and join patterns), the kinds of query operators that are offered, and even that the language they use is more suited to different ways of modelling data.
once you’ve implemented a graphDB you have a document DB.
In a graphDB you may query all vertices with a property x=foo, which translates to get all documents with field x=foo
Effectively you can market a graphDB as a document DB, the reverse isn’t true. What am I missing
You're missing that the documentDB will be faster and simpler to use for some kinds use cases, is simpler to understand in some ways, and that the query/update language used by the documentDB will funnel application design towards storage and access patterns that work better with a documentDB.
Of course you can implement a documentDB on top of a graphDB, or market the latter as the former. And of course there are applications running on a documentDB that would be as fast or faster on a graphDB.
The differences are one of "impedance mismatch" rather than insurmountable differences.
For example, if you query all vertices with a property x=foo, then query all properties of the vertices, and then traverse all tree-child like properties to more vertices, and continue doing this recursively, that query will be like getting all documents with x=foo. But that's more complicated to express in a graphDB QL than a documentDB QL, and likely to run slower on the graphDB (due to data non-locality) if there are many properties or much tree depth.
In general a documentDB stores all the data for a document clustered together without being told to, and likes to retrieve them as a unit. Because that structure is clear, applications tend to be designed around it as an assumption.
Direct democracy is bad. All one has to do is whip people into an emotional frenzy. Essentially you are arguing that the people should further circumscribe Individual rights like entering into a contract. Now people that made extra money, probably needed extra money, will be denied this option because the people will put the requirement of health benefits onto the contracting company.
You can do this with a republic. California’s direct democracy has shown itself time and again to be a bad idea. People vote emotionally. They approve expenses without requiring funding. They vote property taxes down. Ultimately you need the buffer of a republican system to cool heads.
All 'democracy' is bad. People should just decide for themselves and not for others and not enforce their opinions ("laws") on others using government force.
It’s not just encourage. What we’re finding is that the government has to be authoritarian. China welded people into their homes to keep them from spreading COVID. They literally caged them like animals and threw them into trucks. Now Mexico is denying children potato chips.
Think about universal healthcare and alcohol. How much money is spent on alcohol related issues? The best answer is to ban its sale. Same for tobacco. Enough people have shown then are unable or unwilling to do the right thing. As a result junk food, booze and smokes need to go the way of freedom of speech. We need to ban them.
That doesn't really go any way towards explaining why Canada, Europe or the Oceania[1] democracies have done so well in the crisis - nor does it explain how Brazil has done so poorly.
I think there is more counter evidence then supporting evidence for authoritarian governments being necessary for dealing with pandemics.
1. Please note - comparatively well, Canada, Europe & Oceania aren't doing perfect they're just doing significantly better than the states.
UK, Sweden, Italy, Spain, and Belgium all have had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than the US. And France has a rate nearly equal to the US.
UK, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, and Netherlands all have worse case fatality rates than the US. And so does Canada. (But, this may be because the US has done more testing.)
Also, authoritarian governments often lie to protect their "authority". Their "authority" is based upon this illusion of infallibility, which goes against democratic principles like openness.
The United States has done poorly because we are a country whose population hates each other. It’s a country comprised entirely of people whose ancestors said, “You know what? I hate you so much that I’d rather cross an ocean, face bears, wolves, and the elements than to spend another day with you.” That’s why we won’t wear masks.
I mean - Canada is in the same boat right? Canada might even be worse off since the country was originally french and then that entire population (along with first nations & Metis which are a more significant portion of the population up here) was second-classed when the English won a war that one time. Quebec secessionist is far more serious than any state in the US[1] and western Canada tends to begrudge the arbitrary french bilingualism while wondering why Mandarin or Punjabi isn't the other official language.
All that said - Canada is still a country that identifies as a country. If anything is causing a real divide in America it's the entirely manufactured hatred of modern divisive politics. As someone who grew up in Boston I went to school with a wide array of skin tones and original nationalities - there weren't Irish and Italian gangs beating up the black kids - there were suburban entitled white-kid gangs beating up the black kids... Any sort of origin based racism left in America is from more recent immigrants - it's totally bullshit and needs to stop - but I've never met anyone in America that said "Hey - you look Prussian - I don't like Prussians since they moved in on my Pomeranian ancestors. I don't take kindly to you folk."
I am uncertain where you've observed it, but I certainly never saw it in either New England nor the south west.
1. That isn't to say they're leaving tomorrow, there is just actually a serious portion of the population unlike all of the US states.
I have occasionally observed anti-Polish racism in the US. Perpetrated by generically “white” Americans against anyone with a Polish last name or Polish accent.
There's a difference between allowing adults and children to consume things. Children have limited agency and we consider it a social duty to protect them from some of life's extremes until they're better capable of understanding the consequences of their actions.
You don't have to ban things not be authoritarian. Smart governments just price in externalities, which is why you slap tobacco and alcohol with extra taxes to offset the increased costs of health care and reduced adult lifetimes.
Or... how about we provide treatment for people who are abusing alcohol, drugs, etc? There are billions of people who can responsibly use alcohol. Banning it doesn't make any sense for those who aren't addicts.
Doesn’t matter. Look at those who try to ban guns and free speech. Millions use both responsibility every day. Besides science has shown little benefit to alcohol and tobacco and no benefit to junk food.
What we need is to ban cooking at home. Government soup kitchens. All consumption needs to be documented and controlled.
This needs citation, seriously. Cooking at home, even cooking "insanely unhealthy" butter injected baked chicken at home, still seems to be a lot healthier for you than a hungry man dinner, so I think that the real issue is related to the preservatives and the salt & sugar required to mask those preservatives - that are used to unnaturally extend the self-life of pre-made and frozen food.
All of which would be banned by the government kitchens. I’ve found that people don’t really need or want choices. They want the government to take care of them from cradle to grave. No matter how crappy government, people want to give it more power. At this point we should.
You are being downvoted (nice username btw haha) but you are onto something. My belief is that for certain things, the government MUST be authoritarian: Public Health, education and safety (police, firefighters, etc). That's why I think a more centralized government like the one in Mexico might find it easier to implement sensible policies and apply them "in an authoritative way" to the whole country without state resistance.
Now, if only the government was not as corrupt as it is in Mexico...
Why distribute the compressed air? If you have the ability to store compressed air, you can put a generator on top. When you have an overabundance of power, you run the compressor. It pushes air into large underground holding facilities built in various geologic formations. When you need power, you run the compressed air through your generator. Dot the land with these systems.
