Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January. Can the leaders of climate action actually live up to their own standards?
Without going into the religious bits and more spectacular bits of it there is an extremely interesting story going on in the last part of the book of Jonah in Nevi'im (in Christianity this is part of the old testament):
As Jonah tells the inhabitants of Nineveh about the impending doom they repent and the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes and makes a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance.
Again, without going fully religious, this is an excellent example. When people see their "king" actually doing the thing themselves that they ask others to do, change happens. There is nothing religious about this. Here in Norway, former King Olav V was famous for, among other things, taking the tram during gas rationing in the 70ies.
Old people could still tell me back in the 80ies and 90ies that prince Olav and his siblings had actual porridge for breakfast like other kids.
Today royalty plays less of a role I guess compared to influencers and thought leaders of all kinds, but I still guess it would make a massive difference if next years Davos meeting was announced to be virtual because of climate concerns.
Or if a few tik tok/Instagram stars came out and showed their 2 generation old iPhones saying: I can get a new anytime I want but I actually do care about the environment.
> Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January.
Why?
I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.
Disclaimer: I'm not defending their point of you, just reasoning through it.
My naive take is that it calls into question if the supposed catastrophe (from the 40%'s point of view) is real if the leaders aren't taking it seriously themselves. "objectively true" only works if you understand the problem without, from your point of view, suspicious people explaining it to you. In this case, the suspicious people would be the primary ones telling you that you have to pay this tax while they are mysteriously exempt.
I'll also add that as a "campaigner" working for someone like change.org, you can expect to make less because lots of people want to work in the these activist roles. It's similar to how game developers are paid less than b2b saas developers.
Always seems a shock to HN when the jobs that everyone wants that don’t require a very technical education tend to be on the low end. Well at least for the campaigner role.
The median salary of $50000 still seems a bit low to me considering how real estate must be pretty expensive in Manhattan. An okay-ish 1-bedroom apartment seems to be around at $2000 a month, which amounts to almost half of your salary (and I haven't really delved into the living costs of that area!)
According to the OECD, Americans have more disposable after adjusting for government transfers for things like healthcare, education, and childcare. And it's not even close.
Most unions in Europe are for blue collar work. In the UK (anecdotally) I've seen a lot more developers form cooperatives than unions, and even the cooperatives are fairly rare.
Edit: to clarify, the editorial you linked seems to be a real editorial that said “these questions need to be investigated” - the op-Ed I linked to presented itself as divulging new information. In 99.9999999% of cases this would be an odd use of an op-ed, but it appears to have been the only option since the reporters refused.
It is also worth noting that WSJ has a unique and well-known dichotomy between “brilliant, hard-hitting reporting” and “unbelievably hackish Joe-Rogan-level opinions.”
> That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it
He is/was one of the main editors of The Intercept. He is the second person listed on https://theintercept.com/about/. There is a wide media censorship on this story. If you think it's just this story, they are also squashing reports on the Philadelphia riots.
And all? most? of his colleagues with fairly similar political views and a dedication to good journalism are opposed. Glenn seems to have picked his personal grudge over journalistic integrity
Bolivia's GDP per capita is still one of the lowest in Latin America. It's also one of the lowest in the world excluding African nations. It's easier to grow when you're very poor.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. It’s almost a tautology that it’s easier to double a two dollars than it is to double two trillion. Starting point makes a big difference, and growth alone is not an indication of comparative success.
If a capitalist friendly guy had been in charge, you would not have made this point though. When socialists have success people are always eager to find excuses and when capitalism utterly fails like the Russian shock therapy, people line up to make excuses.
Can’t we just accept that the devil is in the details. Quality of government matters more than you political ideology, with respect to economic growth.
I lived in South America and the amount of Bolivian emigrants, and people in general who leave the country temporarily to use other countries' resources (collecting welfare from other countries and taking advantage of public healthcare in some other South American countries, particularly Argentina) is enough proof for me that Bolivia is not doing very well, whether it is a socialist state or not.
Chile ranks first in Latin America — and 44th among 189 countries — in the United Nations Human Development Index. "The U.N. ranking counts not only economic growth, but also health and education standards."
"In Villa Grimaldi detainees would be electrocuted, water boarded, had their heads forced into buckets of urine and excrement, suffocated with bags, hanged by their feet or hands and beaten. Many women were raped and for some detainees, punishment was death."
Human rights abuses are great! Since you seem to think the ends justify the means, I suppose you'll start to sing praise of China as well, since they've done a very good job of developing the nation despite some unscrupulous actions against some people.
I don't recommend you to use that example again, because it would only make you look bad to anyone who knows what he's/she's arguing about
When Pinochet was forced to step down from power, Chile had a ~39% poverty rate, which if we were to use today's new poverty metric it would be around 70% poverty. [pg17]
X axis is GDP, rightmost is better, Y axis is GINI, highest GINI means stronger inequality
As you can easily see, all the advancements on Chile's development have come since Pinochet stepped down from power and his reforms removed one by one, the source of that data was from the Chilean Central Bank
Also, there was an interview around 8 years ago, where historians outlined that basically the only reason why Pinochet stepped down was because the CIA informed him that the US would not continue to prop up his regime, as Pinochet wanted to renege on the vote to step down from power, but the at the time General in charge of the Navy and the General in charge of the Airforce both of them disagreed with Pinochet, so had the CIA not done so, it could have ended on civil war.
And what's interesting of it all, is that the CIA had documents/assessments which stated that if Pinochet were to continue in power, the already rampant poverty and growing slums in Santiago would work as perfect spots for a hard Communist uprising along the MIR and FPMR, both groups communist guerrillas which had already tried to assassinate Pinochet. So the US stopping support of Pinochet was again, intended to advance their own interests in the country
But yeah, slowly things which were done while Pinochet was in power are being corrected
> ...We show that the sale of state-owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private firms benefited financially from the Pinochet regime. Once democracy arrived, they formed connections with the new government, financed political campaigns, and were more likely to appear in the Panama Papers. These findings reveal how dictatorships can influence young democracies using privatization reforms.
Thanks to social democrats who took over after Pinochet. So whatever Chile is today, a lot of it is thanks to democratic socialism. Still Chile has not gotten rid entirely of its troubled Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys legacy.
"Social democrats" are capitalists. They didn't abandoned capitalism. The current president is an independent who is backed by center-right organizations.
Proper, full PPE? Low. Proper PPE requires diligence and training, but for medical professionals it’s pretty reasonable to expect them to wear it correctly.
The issue is that “proper PPE” is a bad assumption in America. Normally PPE is one time use stuff; you’re supposed to destroy the N95 after use. But we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so doctors have been reusing them for a while. This increases the risk of it failing, which is a huge issue if you’re going to interact with known COVID positive patients.
It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term.
Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older.
If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways.
What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide?
We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election....
No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.
>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks.
>Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open.
I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly 1/3 of Germany's total cases over the past 4 months in a single day. How can you actually point to them and think we can do the same things they're doing here in the US?
The US has bungled it's response so badly it boggles the mind. We have by far the most cases and deaths and even on a per capita basis we have by far the most cases and deaths in the developed world and more than most of the developing world. The idea that we should just open up and let potentially thousands of kids, tens of thousands of their parents countless others die so they can sit in a classroom and have a blue haired liberal arts major blather at them for 8 hours a day is simply ridiculous.
>Death rates are not surging in proportion to cases.
Deaths have a 4-6 week lag and are steadily increasing, at the same time a larger fraction of cases are young people(who are less likely to die) flouting the rules and getting infected in large numbers at bars and social events.
You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID?
I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths.
The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday)
More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road safety, seat belts, etc.
Death rates are surging in proportion to cases, with the expected 2 week delay from infection to death. Yesterday Florida had 116 deaths.
CFR isn't the metric that informs policy... its deaths and potential deaths? IE 141,000 Americans dying this year, which were largely avoidable.
There is no science behind the lockdowns. There is no logic in keeping Walmart open but closing Sears for safety. Yes I believe it is absurd the level to which we have locked down the country.
Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
The purpose was never to stop the virus but to slow it.
Growing cases does not concern me. Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
> Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
NYC metro ordered lockdowns after it was hard hit, because it was hit early on before there was a real understanding of what was going on.
A lot of other places still haven’t peaked, the reopening push in response to overall national case decline was driven entirely by NY being past it's peak while the rest of the country combined was still on the upswing.
> Growing cases does not concern me.
The growing list of places at or near ICU capacity should, though.
> Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
Since the peak death rate was when almost all the cases were in NYC when the NYC health system was overwhelmed, that's unsurprising, we shouldn't see similar death rates in proprtion to cases unless almost all the cases are in similarly overwhelmed locations, which because it hit different places at different times will, even with uncontrolled spread, take a little while.
But with enough cases, you can get a pretty apocalyptic total death toll without going back to the peak death:cases ratio.
> Reporting that they are at capacity intimates that they are packed full of Covid patients and overflowing.
No, it suggests that if the COVID numbers go up, someone who should get ICU treatment, whether COVID or not, won't get it because there won't be capacity. Which is kind of an important fact in places where COVID numbers are trending upward.
If your ICU is at 80% capacity, with 20% COVID and 60% everything else, that means you can DOUBLE the number of COVID patients there before running out of space, whereas if all of the patients were COVID patients you could only accommodate an increase of 25%.
Yes, hitting 100% is bad no matter what percent of patients are there because of COVID. But what percent of patients are there for COVID informs how large an increase of cases can be managed.
I’ve never understood this argument. Places in Europe are opening because they think they’ve got the virus under control. It’s an outcome, not a cause.
Before accusing me of denying science, you should actually read the underlying material and try to think about it critically. The AAP guidelines the article is referencing were written more than three weeks ago, when most states were in the middle of a lull between the first wave that we had in March and April and the second one that is starting. It also contradicts CDC's own, current guidelines, which state that remote learning is the safest option for people of all ages.
Furthermore, the AAP guidelines don't say anything about teachers or school staff. It is written purely with kids in mind. When asked about this in an NYT interview, Dr. Sean O’Leary, who helped write the guidelines, said:
"We’re pediatricians. We’re not educators. We don’t want to tread in space where we don’t belong."
In other words, they don't give a shit about teachers or school staff. Well, maybe we should? At least a quarter of American teachers are over 50, and more than third of them have pre-existing conditions. Reopening schools for in-person instruction will decimate them.
Lastly, even if kids themselves are not strong vectors for transmission, there is literally tens of millions of them in the USA that are of K-12 age. What do you think is going to happen when they go on to infect their parents and grandparents?
> There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
The person you are replying to is talking about frontline healthcare workers. But you ignored that and ran your math to include everyone who works in a hospital, and then you go on to ridicule the OP based on your incorrect math.
> They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population.
This is based on your incorrect math and I'm quite sure is the incorrect conclusion.
> Schools across Europe have opened.
This isn't Europe, though, it's America. The situation is different here.
> Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID.
I'm not sure how to interpret this, but COVID did not start to spread until November/December last year and obviously the numbers were small to start. What do you mean to imply with this stat?
> The CFR of this disease does not meet the threshold for a pandemic
The definition of a pandemic has nothing to do with CFR.
> nor does it merit the level of fear engendered by the press.
I haven't seen any fear-mongering from respected press. Most of the fear mongering I see about COVID is from Fox or similar telling us that the masks are something to be afraid of, due to government overreach or something.
But the normal press mostly just reports the facts. If those facts create fear in you, then I'm sorry, but it's not the press causing that fear.
