4 ms·

When all the dust settles on COVID, the arbitrary and excessive restrictions on freedom, put in place before any science said it was a necessary precaution, wil

When all the dust settles on COVID, the arbitrary and excessive restrictions on freedom, put in place before any science said it was a necessary precaution, will have been far worse than the disease itself. The amount of lives destroyed, businesses lost, suicides and overdoses, wealth given to the super rich through money printing and government purchases of corporate debt, and all for what? Such a god damn waste.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karmicthreat 6y ago
Clearly what was required was a two year study of COVID's effects and forming a committee.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
Ah yes, let’s criticize a once in a hundred year event which evolved in real time and affected the entire globe. Plenty of blame to go around but you can’t just have a global pandemic and expect a world which was obviously under prepared to have no collateral damage. Have some perspective.
- jazzercize 6y ago
  It sure hasn't stopped the Biden campaign from blaming every..single..death on Trump. Yes, it was a lifetime event. But the failed responses of many leaders shows they shouldn't really have the power in the first place. Democrats were still bickering about Trump's impeachment until the end of January (which turned out to be a big nothing, which we all knew). Trump started the ball rolling when it comes to Covid and started banning flights from China early on. He was called a racist and a bigot for doing the right thing. The Mayor of New York put the elderly back into retirement homes, even after testing positive for Covid. This contributed to many deaths and we still don't know to what extent, because data on it won't be released until the totally random time of the day after the November election. Many other Democrat governors followed suit. The Governor of Michigan has made herself the dictator of the state. She overrules anything she doesn't like with executive orders, essentially making the local government void. Covid has shown us the true colors of our local leaders: they really just want to be petty dictators and aren't really trying to help the people at all. Democrats have pounced on the opportunity to destroy the economy and blame Trump, all in the hopes to win the next election. They've even become anti-vaxxors, trying to put the seeds of doubt into the minds of anything that will listen that if a Vaccine comes out and Trump is president, it's bad and you shouldn't take it. Even big tech is doing the dirty work of the Democrats by censoring all opposing opinions which directly results in election interference.
  - inthewoods 6y ago
    With what we're learning about Trump's response - including re-writing CDC guidelines, no organized Federal response, and an outward positioning of COVID as "it'll go away on it's own" while saying privately that it was deadly, I think it's safe to say that a significant amount of unnecessary deaths are caused by Trump's actions or lack of action. Can't claim them all certainly, but that's politics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ArkVark 6y ago
  Its not a 1 in 100 year event, its a once a decade event exaggerated by a hysterical media and exacerbated by an aged and unhealthy population, and weak regular flu seasons for the past two years leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic Sweden's deaths in 2020 are at the highest since 1993. What happened in 1993? A flu pandemic, that no one has ever heard of.
  - inthewoods 6y ago
    200,000 people (at least) are dead here in the US. That is not a small event that is being exaggerated by a hysterical media.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      That's a really shallow analysis though. It doesn't consider how many of those people would have survived without a pandemic, and it doesn't count suicides and degraded quality of life costs due to the lockdown rather than the disease.
      - inthewoods 6y ago
        You're right but likely in the wrong direction: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02497-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02497-w We may be undercounting the number of deaths.
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        Excess deaths can and have been tracked based on overall mortality and deviation from previous years. The estimate is greater than official COVID-19 statistics for the US, being 248,000 as of 11 September. Worldwide, excess mortality exceeds COVID-19 statistcs (presently nearing 1 million) by 263,000. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
- pc86 6y ago
  I don't think they're expecting "no collateral damage," but especially in the US state responses varied widely (not necessarily a bad thing), and some governors grossly overstepped their authority, as evidenced by courts calling some of the measures taken unconstitutional.
bitdizzy 6y ago
The intervention in the United States was haphazard and underfunded by the government. There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented. Instead there was a spotty, inconsistent response with very little help for people. Like, one 1200 check for people and two loans for businesses? It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  > Like, one 1200 check for people That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
- umvi 6y ago
  > There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
  - karmicthreat 6y ago
    Isn't that exactly what the fed is doing for the wealthy right now by buying up the bond market? They are creating a furious amount of money currently with no end in sight. But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    It means we should've pulled a China and shot people who tried to leave their house for a month. Then we wouldn't be in this situation.
    - hotz 6y ago
      Wow
ashtonkem 6y ago
That’ll require a lot of public amnesia, as restaurant bookings dropped before official lockdown orders arrived in most areas. Huge swaths of the population voluntarily locked down before it became mandatory, blaming the government for the lockdowns would be extremely weird.
- Reedx 6y ago
  It's a combination of voluntary and mandatory. The question is whether the mandatory part overstepped. It's a fair question. Did it do more harm than good in some cases? Did it prevent businesses from being able to adapt to the situation? Like what some ended up doing with moving seating outside, or converting to a different model, etc. But if there's a mandate that "all X must close", you're blocking adaptations and any chance of them figuring out a way to survive.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    That’s a nuanced opinion that wasn’t expressed by the parent comment. As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
statquontrarian 6y ago
Even if we suppose that you're right that the costs of forced intervention outweighed the costs without such intervention, without a control group (the analogy with Sweden is limited), the counterargument is simply that it would have been worse with minimal forced action. My preference is a more Bayesian argument a la Huemer's In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm > Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.
jliptzin 6y ago
Good luck keeping restaurants in business at 20% or even 50% regular volume. In a pandemic, restaurant visits drop sharply regardless of what official government policy is. They would have gone out of business anyway. Even now in places that have been open for months, restaurants are still struggling and/or failing.
- karmicthreat 6y ago
  I think most of the restaurants that are thriving in my area are ones that were able to adapt to the new reality quickly. Many just completely transformed their menu's for takeout centric foods. The city here shut down roads and creating large social distanced out door seating. Enhanced all the alcohol permits for takeout, etc. Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Depends on of the land lord decreases the rent or not.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

karmicthreat 6y ago

Clearly what was required was a two year study of COVID's effects and forming a committee.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

Ah yes, let’s criticize a once in a hundred year event which evolved in real time and affected the entire globe. Plenty of blame to go around but you can’t just have a global pandemic and expect a world which was obviously under prepared to have no collateral damage. Have some perspective.

jazzercize 6y ago
It sure hasn't stopped the Biden campaign from blaming every..single..death on Trump. Yes, it was a lifetime event. But the failed responses of many leaders shows they shouldn't really have the power in the first place. Democrats were still bickering about Trump's impeachment until the end of January (which turned out to be a big nothing, which we all knew). Trump started the ball rolling when it comes to Covid and started banning flights from China early on. He was called a racist and a bigot for doing the right thing. The Mayor of New York put the elderly back into retirement homes, even after testing positive for Covid. This contributed to many deaths and we still don't know to what extent, because data on it won't be released until the totally random time of the day after the November election. Many other Democrat governors followed suit. The Governor of Michigan has made herself the dictator of the state. She overrules anything she doesn't like with executive orders, essentially making the local government void. Covid has shown us the true colors of our local leaders: they really just want to be petty dictators and aren't really trying to help the people at all. Democrats have pounced on the opportunity to destroy the economy and blame Trump, all in the hopes to win the next election. They've even become anti-vaxxors, trying to put the seeds of doubt into the minds of anything that will listen that if a Vaccine comes out and Trump is president, it's bad and you shouldn't take it. Even big tech is doing the dirty work of the Democrats by censoring all opposing opinions which directly results in election interference.
- inthewoods 6y ago
  With what we're learning about Trump's response - including re-writing CDC guidelines, no organized Federal response, and an outward positioning of COVID as "it'll go away on it's own" while saying privately that it was deadly, I think it's safe to say that a significant amount of unnecessary deaths are caused by Trump's actions or lack of action. Can't claim them all certainly, but that's politics.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ArkVark 6y ago
Its not a 1 in 100 year event, its a once a decade event exaggerated by a hysterical media and exacerbated by an aged and unhealthy population, and weak regular flu seasons for the past two years leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic Sweden's deaths in 2020 are at the highest since 1993. What happened in 1993? A flu pandemic, that no one has ever heard of.
- inthewoods 6y ago
  200,000 people (at least) are dead here in the US. That is not a small event that is being exaggerated by a hysterical media.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    That's a really shallow analysis though. It doesn't consider how many of those people would have survived without a pandemic, and it doesn't count suicides and degraded quality of life costs due to the lockdown rather than the disease.
    - inthewoods 6y ago
      You're right but likely in the wrong direction: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02497-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02497-w We may be undercounting the number of deaths.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Excess deaths can and have been tracked based on overall mortality and deviation from previous years. The estimate is greater than official COVID-19 statistics for the US, being 248,000 as of 11 September. Worldwide, excess mortality exceeds COVID-19 statistcs (presently nearing 1 million) by 263,000. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
pc86 6y ago
I don't think they're expecting "no collateral damage," but especially in the US state responses varied widely (not necessarily a bad thing), and some governors grossly overstepped their authority, as evidenced by courts calling some of the measures taken unconstitutional.

bitdizzy 6y ago

The intervention in the United States was haphazard and underfunded by the government. There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented. Instead there was a spotty, inconsistent response with very little help for people. Like, one 1200 check for people and two loans for businesses? It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.

bpodgursky 6y ago
> Like, one 1200 check for people That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
umvi 6y ago
> There was no reason for any business to go bankrupt while a proper lockdown was implemented What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
- karmicthreat 6y ago
  Isn't that exactly what the fed is doing for the wealthy right now by buying up the bond market? They are creating a furious amount of money currently with no end in sight. But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  It means we should've pulled a China and shot people who tried to leave their house for a month. Then we wouldn't be in this situation.
  - hotz 6y ago
    Wow

ashtonkem 6y ago

That’ll require a lot of public amnesia, as restaurant bookings dropped before official lockdown orders arrived in most areas. Huge swaths of the population voluntarily locked down before it became mandatory, blaming the government for the lockdowns would be extremely weird.

Reedx 6y ago
It's a combination of voluntary and mandatory. The question is whether the mandatory part overstepped. It's a fair question. Did it do more harm than good in some cases? Did it prevent businesses from being able to adapt to the situation? Like what some ended up doing with moving seating outside, or converting to a different model, etc. But if there's a mandate that "all X must close", you're blocking adaptations and any chance of them figuring out a way to survive.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  That’s a nuanced opinion that wasn’t expressed by the parent comment. As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

statquontrarian 6y ago

Even if we suppose that you're right that the costs of forced intervention outweighed the costs without such intervention, without a control group (the analogy with Sweden is limited), the counterargument is simply that it would have been worse with minimal forced action. My preference is a more Bayesian argument a la Huemer's In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm > Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.

jliptzin 6y ago

Good luck keeping restaurants in business at 20% or even 50% regular volume. In a pandemic, restaurant visits drop sharply regardless of what official government policy is. They would have gone out of business anyway. Even now in places that have been open for months, restaurants are still struggling and/or failing.

karmicthreat 6y ago
I think most of the restaurants that are thriving in my area are ones that were able to adapt to the new reality quickly. Many just completely transformed their menu's for takeout centric foods. The city here shut down roads and creating large social distanced out door seating. Enhanced all the alcohol permits for takeout, etc. Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
rightbyte 6y ago
Depends on of the land lord decreases the rent or not.