I work at a clinic, currently. People were walking off with our supplies.

The thing is: Masks used right can provide protection. That part in italics is the problem here--to avoid user error requires some skill, and it's not as straightforward as you'd think once you get away from using it to avoid sharing whatever you've got.

I'd settle for helping the Chinese people get themselves a better government than the PRC. They deserve better than the PRC!

Offhand? No. I suspect it's an issue of moral licensing--"I do so much good for the Feminist movement, it's A-OK if I blow off some women's objections to sexual contact with me!" "I do so much for the Green Movement, it's A-OK if I'm indulging in conspicuous waste!" "I do so much for the Poor, it's A-OK if I screw over impoverished people!"

It's not a good thing for an entire group to paint itself as the side of Good in an epic battle of Good vs. Evil, either, because it just amplifies the entire problem because of stupid human tricks like being convinced that because you're on the side of Good then everything you do is Good...and your enemies are Evil and everything they do is Evil. If nothing else, it means you tend to react like a computer given a logic bomb when they happen to be right.

Mute is nice, but if it is still playing it is still eating bandwidth and using data. Given there are users who are paying for data, and the current bandwidth crunch specifically? Autoplay needs to at least temporarily be an automatic opt-in.

Reductions aren't new in chemistry, that's literally what fire is. (Well, fire is fully a RedOx reaction--the reduction is coupled with an oxidation because in chemistry everything will be perfectly balanced or you start violating laws of physics.) We're talking first year chem major stuff here, described as if it's exciting new stuff and not exactly that accurately.

The thing that really ought to be there is, well, what the rest of the reactants are. Is heat getting added? What about catalysts? I'm not sure I want to click through, and not just because I doubt that I'd get these answers if I did.

The thing is, lots more people dying is quite possible as a result of everybody staying home and the ensuing economic crash, especially if it FUBARs the ability to handle COVID-19 due to shutting down production and transport of vital supplies.

The question really is just what the true death rate is for COVID-19, and the numbers I'm seeing for what is currently estimated for the missed case rates--from the few populations that not only tested everybody but reported their results already--is that we're probably missing maybe a third of infections. (And Italy FUBARed it early by not having isolation measures to keep COVID-19 patients from infecting everybody else in the hospital--which had been proposed by doctors early on and they were blown off.) Incidentally, what I've seen reported as the most effective control so far is "Test EVERYBODY." The people who are asymptomatic carriers or have mild cases are the ones who will spread it the most, which is normal for any and all infectious diseases. Really sick people don't get around as much.

That's actually in significant part because it was decided that psychiatric medicines were magical and would enable people with severe mental health issues to live on their own. It hasn't helped that the people who created the current mental health system's laws did not grasp that some people need the structure provided by an institution to be functional, so those people get stuck in a permanent cycle of being admitted and then kicked out,

You could also change the rules on what the benefits you get as a taxpayer are for writing off or down bad debts, in order to encourage lenders to do so--if you know somebody can only pay you back $10 on the $100 you lent them with it being unlikely that you can get the $90 left, but you will benefit to the tune of $45 or so if you agree to take what they can pay & write off the rest, what would you do? Take $10 and hope you'll improbably get the $90 too, or accept the $55 to call it settled?

Actually, it's more that parents flip out if you tell their little angel that college right out of high school isn't the best choice for them--the skilled trades are paying quite well currently, in significant part because of that. This is particularly a problem for people who actually weren't at all ready for college, and thus ended up picking a degree in Useless, possibly because it was the easy default degree, and maybe even graduating with it. The job market for those is worse than if they'd not gone to college at all in many ways.

Grade inflation in the K12 system is just making the problem worse, and if you want to get rid of the student loan debt problem then you need to work on fixing the K12 system too. Otherwise it's going to be about as effective as treating blood loss while ignoring the cause of it.

I would add to all of this that the people who are causing a lot of the chaos with the supply chains are focusing on only the most current and urgent problem--and what's worse, they're not even doing that particularly well as some of the supply chains they're disrupting are actually ones we need intact if we want to ramp up production of the medical supplies we need...and get them to where they're needed, too. Politicians are not selected for their ability to grasp that items don't just magically appear in boxes at your door.

The next to last sentence pretty much nails precisely what the problem was: The way CDOs were set up meant that it was not the bank's problem, until suddenly it very much was. It didn't really get sorted out, though, because a significant part of the problem was owned by the government and nobody there actually got punished for their 'clever' ideas.

Fun fact: Under US law, if you don't have the paper to back up the debt--it doesn't actually exist. That's why the standard legal advice for what to do first when somebody comes to try to collect a debt from you is never to admit it exists until they've proven it does. (If you admit it exists, congrats, it now does even if there was no proof for it.)

But yeah, the debt jubilee in Germany after WWII was in huge part because it just wasn't going to be worthwhile to try to work out who owes what to whom--even if successful, you'd almost certainly have lost money in the process. That isn't a problem we are likely to have here, especially with some of the less FUDdy death rate projections--and the ones which control for differences in mortality rates due to age groups and known issues with how some countries will fudge reporting causes of death. (Apparently there are reports that Italy is attributing to COVID every death they can, possibly so they can deny that the doctors who had wanted COVID patients kept in isolation wards maaaaybe had a point about the vital importance of avoiding nosocomial COVID-19 infections.)

I've seen mentions of it elsewhere, mostly in discussions of the implications having a high rate of people with asymptomatic-to-mild disease does to your ability to deal with its spread and just what made some countries' responses more effective. You can't, as a practical matter, put everybody into lockdown indefinitely. If nothing else, after a certain point you're going to have too many people deciding they'd really rather die, thank you. A high false positive rate isn't as much of problem if it allows you to do well-limited and -targeted quarantines, either, which people are going to be better about complying with. (And which won't risk as much wreck your ability to obtain compliance in the future, too.) Toss in protections against being fired if you're under a quarantine and maybe some limited support if your job doesn't provide PTO, and you probably will have nobody caring if they got a false positive...unless it gets found out in time for them to not get their full block of time off.

Actually, a lot of the preliminary evidence is--concerningly enough--that the flu in a bad flu vaccine year may actually have a worse death rate, because the handful of places we actually do have the necessary data set to properly calculate just how deadly COVID-19 is are showing that we've got high rates of asymptomatic carriers (who are capable of infecting others but just plain not showing any symptoms) and mild cases. If those data sets are any indication, a significant percentage of cases are going under the radar and being left out of the death rates.

Basically? It means that probably, we all know somebody who has had COVID-19 without anybody noticing...and from an epidemiological standpoint, those people who are missing from most of the data sets are the ones we need to be catching because they're the ones who do most of the spreading.

Note: I am not trying to downplay COVID-19's risks here by comparing it to a bad flu year. There is a reason at the front end of this the CDC was basically trying to get some of the panic to get applied to the flu, because we don't really take the flu as seriously as we should...except when we panic and panic is just never good in a public health emergency as people with panic-induced hypochondria add to the stress on the system.

A lot of the panic is, to put it bluntly, the media trying to get clicks. I'm not really sure if they've quite realized that they're a significant part of why they're dying, we have any sort of fake news problem, and the trust in them has been plummeting. Did they watch Network and think that the dark satire of the 70s precursor of clickbait journalism was supposed to be inspirational...?

Though none of this actually explains why a request to be forgotten should not specify any and all URLs you want delisted (and if you miss some you file another request) nor does it justify a ban on notifying the site's owner.

Credit agencies are actually in the business of maintaining accurate files. Search engines, ones that are not hand-indexing the internet, are just in the business of just giving you the equivalent a few truckloads of files that match your request and may be mostly irrelevant. If the goal was to help people live down rumors and the ilk, then the EU would likely benefit more from investing in teaching people such basic media literacy as just because some page on the internet says so does not make it true.