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Why are we reopening in the first place? What could be more predictable than this result? I hope the case succeeds. I can go onto amazon right now and by a game

Why are we reopening in the first place? What could be more predictable than this result? I hope the case succeeds. I can go onto amazon right now and by a game console. Why? What hope do we individuals have against business if this doesn’t go through?

darawk 6y ago
We're re-opening because we have to. We cannot realistically stay closed until a cure comes out. Very optimistically, that's not going to happen until the end of the year, at best. We have two choices: 1. Reopen the economy now, prevent further economic damage, but lose a lot of lives to coronavirus. 2. Reopen the economy later, and lose the exact same number of lives, but with a bunch of economic damage to go along with it. The choice is easy, but nobody wants to be seen making it, because all of the options result in large numbers of deaths.
- monadic2 6y ago
  > We're re-opening because we have to. We cannot realistically stay closed until a cure comes out. Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries. By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world. This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from?
  - darawk 6y ago
    > Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries. People are starting to go crazy. Personally I couldn't be happier with lockdown, I love staying inside. I'd be happy to do this for the rest of my life, but almost everyone else I know is losing it. And that's not even to speak of all the people who've lost their jobs and can't make money. It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy. > By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world. Many countries are already open. Sweden, China, Japan, Korea. Reopening isn't pointing a gun at others, it's pointing a gun at ourselves. My point isn't that the gun isn't there. It's that we're getting shot no matter what, the only choice we have is whether we also want to lose a few million more jobs and a few trillion more dollars of GDP. > This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from? I'm just looking at the outcome potentials as I see them. A cure, optimistically, is 9-12 months away. Every month we keep the economy closed, more businesses blow up, because they aren't generating revenue to meet their fixed obligations. They are firing employees, and then those employees can't make rent, and then the landlords can't make their mortgage payments, and on and on. This stuff will cascade throughout the economy and destroy it, and it gets worse the longer we wait. You can fix some of this with cash transfers, but not all of it, and the long and medium term effects of large scale cash transfers of the kind that would be necessary are not well understood. Originally the purpose of lockdown was supposed to be "flattening the curve" so as not to overwhelm the medical system with peak demand. That is and was a good goal, that we have more or less achieved. The goal of lockdown was never to just wait out the entire virus, because that's just not realistic.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live. > It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy. At least people could know they have food and shelter. We live in a death cult. I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins with personal servants and massive stores of resources. Hell even in the last year we ran Evo Morales out of one of the greatest runs of poverty reduction in contemporary times and he was replaced with a fucking nazi. Your attitude is mask-off homicidal.
      - darawk 6y ago
        > Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live. For a little while. But things will start to break. There are all sorts of things that can be done for a bit, that cannot be extended indefinitely. > I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins. I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich.
        ozzyman700 6y ago
        >I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich. > it doesn't have much to do with inequality either > hurt the poor more than the rich. ...seems like the poor and rich, are quite inequal. Possibly the rich could have rigged the rules in their favor using their wealth. One could then say, that is an issue of planning, as the rich should not hold greater political sway than the majority.
  - makomk 6y ago
    No clever currency manpulation tricks will help when the things you want to buy don't exist and no-one could sell you to them if they could. We're also seeing rioting all over the world, children aren't getting vaccinated[1], that kind of thing. Currency manipulation tricks probably can't help that either. There doesn't even seem to be much they can do about the fact that a lot of smaller businesses simply won't exist soon. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52911972 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52911972
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    People are starting to commit suicide at higher death rates than coronavirus deaths. This was posted to HN not too long ago.
    - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Wait, suicide deaths are higher than coronavirus deaths? That can't possibly be true. I think you misunderstood whatever it was you read.
      - mehrdadn 6y ago
        I didn't mean globally, sorry if that's where your confusion was. I said "starting to" to mean it's happening in some places. > Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus. > "We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks." https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-during-pandemic-death-by/6201962/ https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-duri...
  - jcims 6y ago
    The economy is more than dollars. There is a global supply chain of things and services that create an unbelievably complex graph of dependencies. Want your farmer to be able to put crops out? John Deere's entire supply chain needs to be operational. I have no way to vet this list but it looks perfectly reasonable to me: https://csimarket.com/stocks/suppliers_glance.php?code=DE#mobilead https://csimarket.com/stocks/suppliers_glance.php?code=DE#mo... If there's a material interruption in this network, including suppliers of all of those suppliers, John Deere can't put out equipment or new parts. No equipment and no parts? You start impacting food security. You think shits popping off now?
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  > 2. Reopen the economy later, and lose the exact same number of lives This is in direct contrast to the advice of the epidemiologists. Reopen the economy later has the effect of saving more lives - at least the lives of those who wouldn't have otherwise caught coronavirus. The point may be moot in the US, however, as coronavirus is so widespread already. That's almost the only justification for re-opening I can think of: the damage is already mostly done so continuing the lockdown effort isn't going to have anywhere near the effect it would have if it was done earlier. Which is a sad indictment on the leadership.
  - darawk 6y ago
    > This is in direct contrast to the advice of the epidemiologists. Reopen the economy later has the effect of saving more lives - at least the lives of those who wouldn't have otherwise caught coronavirus. I think you are misreading the advice. The advice of epidemiologists was that we need to flatten the curve, to avoid overwhelming our medical system. The absolute number of infections is going to be the same in the end regardless. There's not much we can do about that. There are only two ways to change the absolute number of infections: 1. A vaccine, which is way too long away to wait for. 2. A vigorous and comprehensive test and trace program, which Americans are totally unwilling to accept. This is what has worked in China and Korea.
    - joeberon 6y ago
      The number of deaths is not the same if the curve is flattened
      - darawk 6y ago
        I'm aware. I'm in favor of flattening the curve. But we have already flattened the curve. Staying closed now does not serve a curve-flattening purpose. Whether or not you flatten the curve, the absolute number of infections is the same. So what you want to do is keep the infection count at a level just below where it overwhelms your medical system. The goal is not zero infections. The goal is suppressing infections just enough that the medical system can cope, so that the death rate is as low as possible. We have already kept the economy closed long enough that the curve has flattened. We should be slowly reopening it, while monitoring the infection curve so that it doesn't get too steep.
- mcv 6y ago
  Letting people get sick and die will also cause economic damage. I think the ideal solution would have been a quick lockdown to stop the exponential growth of the spread, and once that's under control, loosen up the restrictions one at a time while ensuring the spread doesn't increase again. This is what Netherland has been doing, and it seems to be very effective. Schools have been partially open for 2.5 weeks now, and the numbers keep going down. But in a country where half the population is determined to sabotage any attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, where leaders call it a hoax and spread misinformation, I can imagine that any attempt at lockdown is doomed to fail anyway. Might as well open up and let it run its course with all the damage that will do, because too many people insist on inflicting that damage anyway.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    >>> Letting people get sick and die will also cause economic damage. Quite the contrary. A few percents of elder dying might literally save many of the European pension systems that were on the hedge of collapse. Besides there are way more people than jobs (double digit unemployment even before the lockdown). A calamity reducing the workforce would stimulate the economy and make it easier to get a job. That's quite the opposite of economic damages.
    - rusticpenn 6y ago
      This is the most inhuman thing I have read on Hacker news. Life is life and every life is important. Many skilled people are irreplacable, there is no economy without customers.
      - mehrdadn 6y ago
        Interesting discussion on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 Excerpts: > GONZALEZ: Valuing people differently was kind of tried once in 2003. The EPA, under the George W. Bush administration, was considering a new clean air standard. How clean the air should be. And the EPA was like, well, people over age 70 have fewer years to breathe clean air. They should count less. And a lower value on some lives would essentially mean looser clean air standards. > MALONE: The EPA suggested that, perhaps, older people should be worth 37% less money. > STEVENSON: It became known as the senior discount. > GONZALEZ: The senior death discount, actually. People protested. They held up signs that said granny for sale. It did not go over well. > STEVENSON: The backlash was so intense they, very immediately, walked away from that, and you haven't seen any kind of similar proposal since.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Staying closed for longer saves lives. There is, of course, a trade-off, but saying it does nothing is wrong. First thing is the whole "flattening the curve" thing. The less cases on a given time, the better treatment is. So even if the number of cases will ultimately be the same, it is better if happens over a long period of time. There is also a simple mathematical argument. Let's take this simplistic model : - Start with 1024 cases - The pandemic will last for 6 months until a treatment is found - Every "open" (O) month will cause the number of cases to double - Every "lockdown" (L) month will cause the number of cases to halve - To avoid overwhelming the health care system, we automatically go into lockdown when the number of cases reach 4096 Open early model: O(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 18432 Open late model: L(512) L(256) O(512) O(1024) O(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 8448 In both cases we have the same number of lockdown months and the same number of cases in the end (that's a property of multiplication), but the cumulative number of cases is lower when we open later. The parameters are wrong, but the logic is the same no matter the values you choose. For example I used a very optimistic 6 months for the time before we have a cure, that's just to make the calculation shorter, you will get the same kind of result by making it 4 years. The only case where the two strategies give out the same result is if you expect no cure will be found and go for herd immunity. I hope we won't get to that because it will mean millions of death in the US alone.
- one2manydeps 6y ago
  So sick of this culture & mindset. Hey you’re just 1 in 7 billion too, and don’t matter. Because all of reality will implode if non-essential business doesn’t open? “We have to” is a conditioned response. Wonderful example of exceptional human behavior. Don’t work. Society falls apart from ideology not being satisfied. Work. Society falls apart from pile of dead bodies. So we can have Nintendo’s and virtual sports? This is why America is a shit hole country. Go do work growing some taters, cretin. Humans at scale don’t owe materially spoiled westerners.
- malandrew 6y ago
  There is also the option of re-opening the economy now with lots of precautions and lose more lives than remaining closed to coronavirus (but fewer to things that are not coronavirus), but also lose fewer lives than opening now without precautions. Not everything is binary.
trhway 6y ago
>Why are we reopening in the first place? our collective psyche reached the stage of negotiation. We've been through denial, anger (total lockdown), and now we're into negotiation (opening with specific rules).

darawk 6y ago

We're re-opening because we have to. We cannot realistically stay closed until a cure comes out. Very optimistically, that's not going to happen until the end of the year, at best. We have two choices: 1. Reopen the economy now, prevent further economic damage, but lose a lot of lives to coronavirus. 2. Reopen the economy later, and lose the exact same number of lives, but with a bunch of economic damage to go along with it. The choice is easy, but nobody wants to be seen making it, because all of the options result in large numbers of deaths.

monadic2 6y ago
> We're re-opening because we have to. We cannot realistically stay closed until a cure comes out. Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries. By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world. This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from?
- darawk 6y ago
  > Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries. People are starting to go crazy. Personally I couldn't be happier with lockdown, I love staying inside. I'd be happy to do this for the rest of my life, but almost everyone else I know is losing it. And that's not even to speak of all the people who've lost their jobs and can't make money. It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy. > By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world. Many countries are already open. Sweden, China, Japan, Korea. Reopening isn't pointing a gun at others, it's pointing a gun at ourselves. My point isn't that the gun isn't there. It's that we're getting shot no matter what, the only choice we have is whether we also want to lose a few million more jobs and a few trillion more dollars of GDP. > This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from? I'm just looking at the outcome potentials as I see them. A cure, optimistically, is 9-12 months away. Every month we keep the economy closed, more businesses blow up, because they aren't generating revenue to meet their fixed obligations. They are firing employees, and then those employees can't make rent, and then the landlords can't make their mortgage payments, and on and on. This stuff will cascade throughout the economy and destroy it, and it gets worse the longer we wait. You can fix some of this with cash transfers, but not all of it, and the long and medium term effects of large scale cash transfers of the kind that would be necessary are not well understood. Originally the purpose of lockdown was supposed to be "flattening the curve" so as not to overwhelm the medical system with peak demand. That is and was a good goal, that we have more or less achieved. The goal of lockdown was never to just wait out the entire virus, because that's just not realistic.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live. > It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy. At least people could know they have food and shelter. We live in a death cult. I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins with personal servants and massive stores of resources. Hell even in the last year we ran Evo Morales out of one of the greatest runs of poverty reduction in contemporary times and he was replaced with a fucking nazi. Your attitude is mask-off homicidal.
    - darawk 6y ago
      > Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live. For a little while. But things will start to break. There are all sorts of things that can be done for a bit, that cannot be extended indefinitely. > I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins. I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich.
      - ozzyman700 6y ago
        >I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich. > it doesn't have much to do with inequality either > hurt the poor more than the rich. ...seems like the poor and rich, are quite inequal. Possibly the rich could have rigged the rules in their favor using their wealth. One could then say, that is an issue of planning, as the rich should not hold greater political sway than the majority.
- makomk 6y ago
  No clever currency manpulation tricks will help when the things you want to buy don't exist and no-one could sell you to them if they could. We're also seeing rioting all over the world, children aren't getting vaccinated[1], that kind of thing. Currency manipulation tricks probably can't help that either. There doesn't even seem to be much they can do about the fact that a lot of smaller businesses simply won't exist soon. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52911972 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52911972
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  People are starting to commit suicide at higher death rates than coronavirus deaths. This was posted to HN not too long ago.
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Wait, suicide deaths are higher than coronavirus deaths? That can't possibly be true. I think you misunderstood whatever it was you read.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      I didn't mean globally, sorry if that's where your confusion was. I said "starting to" to mean it's happening in some places. > Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus. > "We've never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time," he said. "I mean we've seen a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks." https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-during-pandemic-death-by/6201962/ https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-duri...
- jcims 6y ago
  The economy is more than dollars. There is a global supply chain of things and services that create an unbelievably complex graph of dependencies. Want your farmer to be able to put crops out? John Deere's entire supply chain needs to be operational. I have no way to vet this list but it looks perfectly reasonable to me: https://csimarket.com/stocks/suppliers_glance.php?code=DE#mobilead https://csimarket.com/stocks/suppliers_glance.php?code=DE#mo... If there's a material interruption in this network, including suppliers of all of those suppliers, John Deere can't put out equipment or new parts. No equipment and no parts? You start impacting food security. You think shits popping off now?
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
> 2. Reopen the economy later, and lose the exact same number of lives This is in direct contrast to the advice of the epidemiologists. Reopen the economy later has the effect of saving more lives - at least the lives of those who wouldn't have otherwise caught coronavirus. The point may be moot in the US, however, as coronavirus is so widespread already. That's almost the only justification for re-opening I can think of: the damage is already mostly done so continuing the lockdown effort isn't going to have anywhere near the effect it would have if it was done earlier. Which is a sad indictment on the leadership.
- darawk 6y ago
  > This is in direct contrast to the advice of the epidemiologists. Reopen the economy later has the effect of saving more lives - at least the lives of those who wouldn't have otherwise caught coronavirus. I think you are misreading the advice. The advice of epidemiologists was that we need to flatten the curve, to avoid overwhelming our medical system. The absolute number of infections is going to be the same in the end regardless. There's not much we can do about that. There are only two ways to change the absolute number of infections: 1. A vaccine, which is way too long away to wait for. 2. A vigorous and comprehensive test and trace program, which Americans are totally unwilling to accept. This is what has worked in China and Korea.
  - joeberon 6y ago
    The number of deaths is not the same if the curve is flattened
    - darawk 6y ago
      I'm aware. I'm in favor of flattening the curve. But we have already flattened the curve. Staying closed now does not serve a curve-flattening purpose. Whether or not you flatten the curve, the absolute number of infections is the same. So what you want to do is keep the infection count at a level just below where it overwhelms your medical system. The goal is not zero infections. The goal is suppressing infections just enough that the medical system can cope, so that the death rate is as low as possible. We have already kept the economy closed long enough that the curve has flattened. We should be slowly reopening it, while monitoring the infection curve so that it doesn't get too steep.
mcv 6y ago
Letting people get sick and die will also cause economic damage. I think the ideal solution would have been a quick lockdown to stop the exponential growth of the spread, and once that's under control, loosen up the restrictions one at a time while ensuring the spread doesn't increase again. This is what Netherland has been doing, and it seems to be very effective. Schools have been partially open for 2.5 weeks now, and the numbers keep going down. But in a country where half the population is determined to sabotage any attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, where leaders call it a hoax and spread misinformation, I can imagine that any attempt at lockdown is doomed to fail anyway. Might as well open up and let it run its course with all the damage that will do, because too many people insist on inflicting that damage anyway.
- user5994461 6y ago
  >>> Letting people get sick and die will also cause economic damage. Quite the contrary. A few percents of elder dying might literally save many of the European pension systems that were on the hedge of collapse. Besides there are way more people than jobs (double digit unemployment even before the lockdown). A calamity reducing the workforce would stimulate the economy and make it easier to get a job. That's quite the opposite of economic damages.
  - rusticpenn 6y ago
    This is the most inhuman thing I have read on Hacker news. Life is life and every life is important. Many skilled people are irreplacable, there is no economy without customers.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Interesting discussion on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 Excerpts: > GONZALEZ: Valuing people differently was kind of tried once in 2003. The EPA, under the George W. Bush administration, was considering a new clean air standard. How clean the air should be. And the EPA was like, well, people over age 70 have fewer years to breathe clean air. They should count less. And a lower value on some lives would essentially mean looser clean air standards. > MALONE: The EPA suggested that, perhaps, older people should be worth 37% less money. > STEVENSON: It became known as the senior discount. > GONZALEZ: The senior death discount, actually. People protested. They held up signs that said granny for sale. It did not go over well. > STEVENSON: The backlash was so intense they, very immediately, walked away from that, and you haven't seen any kind of similar proposal since.
GuB-42 6y ago
Staying closed for longer saves lives. There is, of course, a trade-off, but saying it does nothing is wrong. First thing is the whole "flattening the curve" thing. The less cases on a given time, the better treatment is. So even if the number of cases will ultimately be the same, it is better if happens over a long period of time. There is also a simple mathematical argument. Let's take this simplistic model : - Start with 1024 cases - The pandemic will last for 6 months until a treatment is found - Every "open" (O) month will cause the number of cases to double - Every "lockdown" (L) month will cause the number of cases to halve - To avoid overwhelming the health care system, we automatically go into lockdown when the number of cases reach 4096 Open early model: O(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) L(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 18432 Open late model: L(512) L(256) O(512) O(1024) O(2048) O(4096) Cumulative cases: 8448 In both cases we have the same number of lockdown months and the same number of cases in the end (that's a property of multiplication), but the cumulative number of cases is lower when we open later. The parameters are wrong, but the logic is the same no matter the values you choose. For example I used a very optimistic 6 months for the time before we have a cure, that's just to make the calculation shorter, you will get the same kind of result by making it 4 years. The only case where the two strategies give out the same result is if you expect no cure will be found and go for herd immunity. I hope we won't get to that because it will mean millions of death in the US alone.
one2manydeps 6y ago
So sick of this culture & mindset. Hey you’re just 1 in 7 billion too, and don’t matter. Because all of reality will implode if non-essential business doesn’t open? “We have to” is a conditioned response. Wonderful example of exceptional human behavior. Don’t work. Society falls apart from ideology not being satisfied. Work. Society falls apart from pile of dead bodies. So we can have Nintendo’s and virtual sports? This is why America is a shit hole country. Go do work growing some taters, cretin. Humans at scale don’t owe materially spoiled westerners.
malandrew 6y ago
There is also the option of re-opening the economy now with lots of precautions and lose more lives than remaining closed to coronavirus (but fewer to things that are not coronavirus), but also lose fewer lives than opening now without precautions. Not everything is binary.

trhway 6y ago

>Why are we reopening in the first place? our collective psyche reached the stage of negotiation. We've been through denial, anger (total lockdown), and now we're into negotiation (opening with specific rules).