Right, the superior technology and advanced weaponry was what led the US to so quickly and decisively crush insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq using dusty old AK-47s and cheap improvised explosive devices.
In a civil-war scenario, that level of destruction would be suicide for a government's economic and international survival and cause mass military desertion/defection. That counts as deterrence.
What I would encourage people to consider is whether this virus is at the level that we would all be happy to allow military enforced city-wide quarantines or travel restrictions...
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
> but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
Right now the best information I've heard from several epidemiologists who study pandemics is that we are still seeing the results of severity bias, in that people with absolutely no symptoms will be far less likely to get tested. Also, South Korea is not seeing anything close to an exponential increase in cases.
When those same experts see numbers coming out of Italy, they believe very strongly that the number of infected is far higher than being reported because testing is not as widespread.
~0.5% is a very reasonable estimate of the initial CFR when an epidemic starts. It's bad, around 5x as much as the flu, but probably not worth a national China-style quarantine.
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
CFR of 0.6% is a very optimistic figure. It is a naive calculation based on current # deaths / # infections.
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
We can embrace what China has done, or what S. Korea has done, or what Singapore has done, or what Italy has finally started doing. Any of those would have a dramatically positive effect. Right now, we (U.S.) haven't done any of that. That is the problem.
I agree that we should work to determine if there was criminal negligence and prosecute to the highest degree possible, but I find it laughable that you talk about how engineers, capitalism, and private business have completely failed.
The DNC was hacked. The FBI and CIA have had their web sites hacked. The OPM had >22 million people's personal info stolen by Chinese hackers. The NSA itself has had major incidents where essentially cyber weapons were leaked. Those are just SOME of the ones we know about.
Let's stop pretending like government is any more capable, or even as capable, of protecting data than competent corporations. When was the last time Facebook or Google had massive data breach? It's not about 'the corporations maaan' it's about competency and the limited consequences of screwing up so bad.
Exactly this. I don't know where people get the idea that government would do this any better. I think the best regulators could do is make SSNs obsolete. A solution where knowing every possible private data point about a person is useless when attempting to steal someone's identity.
Indeed, I have had my personal data compromised more by government agencies than private (at least, as far as I've been officially/personally notified).
huh? I would not imagine any libertarians would want to overturn the sale as it would completely defy the idea of property rights.
It seems like the residents of this neighborhood are old money NIMBYs and either [ex-]Democrat politicians or donate quite a bit to Democratic politicians.
> I would not imagine any libertarians would want to overturn the sale as it would completely defy the idea of property rights.
There are certainly libertarian arguments to be made for honoring the sale.
But I think it's going a little far to claim that overturning a process in which the government assesses a tax on the ownership of your property, doesn't inform you that you owe it, and later sells that property on your behalf without notifying you, "would completely defy the idea of property rights". You're talking about a contract transferring ownership of property, to which the owner of the property is not a party.
You could make a much stronger libertarian argument that the existence of a property tax in the first place "completely defies the idea of property rights".
I do think most libertarians would agree that the city agents, who have sold the street's rights to someone else due to an arbitrary breech of contract, have acted completely in bad faith and have thus nullified their contract with the new buyer
What the city should have done is physically approached the landowners and done a large public outreach to raise the very small public tax due... before seizing it and selling it to anyone. And now the person who has purchased it wants to seek rent, as if their action is somehow beneficial to anyone but themselves. And the city's argument is that arbitrarily selling community property despite poor serving of papers is how business should continue? Yikes.
