Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[AlabamAlum]

[THE_WIZARD_]

No they aren't. But the federal government has no problem with higher speed limits knowing full well they will cause more fatalities. They accept that more will die because it's good for commerce for people to be able to travel quickly to their destinations. Same goes for tobacco use. They know full well it kills millions but they don't ban it...they tax it! Same with many other vices. The government is not in the live saving business. They attach a price tag to each person through these and other things. Yes we have a vaccine for Influenza A & B every year. Yet tens of thousands die anyway. Thanks for making my point.

I hope it blows over soon too. Stay safe.

[iam416]

I hope The Wizard finally catches lightning in a bottle and is right about something. I do think we can keep deaths down to relatively "low" numbers if we continue to shut ourselves in. That doesn't strike me as particularly feasible. My guess is that as we try to open things back up you're going to see things pop back up. The virus will inevitably wait us out because we don't have 12 months of this shit in us.

[THE_WIZARD_]

The precedent has been set. Every time a new virus hits...we slam the emergency brake on a train doing 200MPH...

[THE_WIZARD_]

I hope The Wizard finally catches lightning in a bottle and is right about something. I do think we can keep deaths down to relatively "low" numbers if we continue to shut ourselves in. That doesn't strike me as particularly feasible. My guess is that as we try to open things back up you're going to see things pop back up. The virus will inevitably wait us out because we don't have 12 months of this shit in us.

STFU.

hello

[AlabamAlum]

Yes we have a vaccine for Influenza A & B every year. Yet tens of thousands die anyway. Thanks for making my point.

Exactly. Yes, tens of thousands die even WITH a vaccine. That is correct and that IS the point. Without a vaccine...well, you know, I don't even want to talk about it. So,you can win this. The governments of the world are stupid. Just shoulda kept everything open. I'm sure it woulda worked out.

[Dr. Strangelove]

If letting one car accident go today meant 10 more tomorrow and 100 more the day after that, no the government probably wouldn't just let things proceed.

Even while in the most severe lockdown this country's possibly ever done, we're going to have way more deaths than from a normal year of the flu. If we had just let things run their course the hospitals would have massively overrun, raising mortality rates for everything, not just Covid

[THE_WIZARD_]

If letting one car accident go today meant 10 more tomorrow and 100 more the day after that, no the government probably wouldn't just let things proceed.

Even while in the most severe lockdown this country's possibly ever done, we're going to have way more deaths than from a normal year of the flu. If we had just let things run their course the hospitals would have massively overrun, raising mortality rates for everything, not just Covid

So covid deaths in the US are multiplying by ten each day? LOL.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Yeah AA let's just shut the fucking country down every time a new virus comes out and begins to spread. Brilliant.

[Dr. Strangelove]

So covid deaths in the US are multiplying by ten each day? LOL.

No, they aren't, but I hope you understand the point. Comparing a contagious disease to traffic accidents is stupid. "Allowing" a car crash to happen doesn't lead to exponentially more the next day in the way doing nothing to stop the spread of a disease does.

[AlabamAlum]

Yeah AA let's just shut the fucking country down every time a new virus comes out and begins to spread. Brilliant.

[Hannibal]

Wiz's point is a very valid one. We constantly make economic tradeoffs that inevitably lead to loss of life. Car wrecks might not be contagious but you could, no doubt, save hundreds of thousands of lives with a 35 mph national speed limit. We also could have avoided our war dead from WWI and WWII by pursuing a strict isolationist foreign trade policy that completely ignored behaviors like German Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and Japanese imperialism. But we didn't. Whether social distancing has made fuckall of difference since the beginning of the pandemic is, itself, highly debateable. And the dire death predictions continued to come even after we were on lockdown. They have been on par, accuracy-wise, with global warming catastrophes and the mass extinctions predicted in The Population Bomb.

[THE_WIZARD_]

I'm not comparing the two in the way you think DSL...I'm making a point that the US Government does not care about lives like you think. They accept a certain number of deaths will occur in their policy decisions. It should be balanced based on the overall good of the people as a whole. Seems to me here that isn't the case. We are hunting a hummingbird with a fucking nuclear warhead. Yes we will kill the bird...and cause massive pain in other areas. Like it or not this was a catastrophic approach and will cost this country for decades. $2.2 Trillion spent thus far with a lot more to come...and how many lives will we save with that investment? Hard to say but let's just say for argument sake that we save a million lives and end up spending...oh I don't know $5 Trillion before it's over...that's 5 million dollars per life saved.

You may not like seeing this put into dollars and cents...but the government has always placed dollar amounts on lives in policy decisions.

[THE_WIZARD_]

DEAL!!

[THE_WIZARD_]

Wiz's point is a very valid one. We constantly make economic tradeoffs that inevitably lead to loss of life. Car wrecks might not be contagious but you could, no doubt, save hundreds of thousands of lives with a 35 mph national speed limit. We also could have avoided our war dead from WWI and WWII by pursuing a strict isolationist foreign trade policy that completely ignored behaviors like German Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and Japanese imperialism. But we didn't. Whether social distancing has made fuckall of difference since the beginning of the pandemic is, itself, highly debateable. And the dire death predictions continued to come even after we were on lockdown. They have been on par, accuracy-wise, with global warming catastrophes and the mass extinctions predicted in The Population Bomb.

EFZ