Lets start with Australia, shall we?

Australia? Australia implemented the world’s harshest lockdowns, at enormous cost. They failed to completely eliminate COVID (they still have both active and new cases), despite (like New Zealand) having a giant moat to quarantine literally everyone coming into the country. And whenever anyone so much as coughs, they immediately trigger “circut-breaker” lockdowns.

I love how COVID deaths (over 300k and counting in the US over the past few months) is equivalent to a bad flu season

I said excess deaths caused by COVID-19 are equivalent to a bad flu season, and I am correct. Either you’re arguing in bad faith, or you don’t understand the difference.

(I mean, ffs, the median age of death for COVID-19 in the United States for whites is 81, while the life expectancy is 78.9. That means a shit-ton of the people who died with COVID would have died in 2020 anyway. That is why excess COVID deaths are a fraction of the total deaths. Why is that so difficult for you lockdown cultist to understand?

Ah, I see... you’re an Australian, and you have a giant chip on your shoulder to prove that your country’s insane strategy of using lockdowns to try to completely eliminate an ILI—for now and forever, despite the fact that no attempt to do so has ever succeeded, and SARS-CoV-2 will circulate seasonally in the rest of the world—isn’t an insane strategy. Further discussion is pointless—like a creationist, your conclusion is already preordained, and no amount of data will budge you from it.

I’ll leave you with this: the virus needs only one mistake, and it’s back. How long do you think a country of 26 million people can be perfect? (Especially when none of the current vaccines can promise sterilizing immunity.)

Good luck with that.

Ay? Where the hell do you get your numbers from? Excess mortality in the USA has been well above average ever since COVID hit.

Scroll down to the pretty graph here ...

Perchance, did you note the title of that pretty graph?

It's Weekly number of deaths (from all causes). Which means it includes all excess deaths, not just COVID-19 deaths. And there have been more than 100,000 non-COVID excess deaths in the United States so far in 2020, thanks primarily to lockdowns. Subtract the non-COVID excess deaths, along with the commingling of deaths with COVID versus deaths from COVID, and COVID excess mortality drops to a bad flu season. It’s there, but it’s negligible in the grand scheme of 7,778 deaths per day on average.

(Had you bothered to actually read the references in my original comment, you’d know all of the above. But of course you didn’t.)

Except in the countries where it [lockdowns] worked and eliminated COVID.

Oh dear lord.

Pray list for me what countries of any significance (>1 million people) managed to eliminate COVID with lockdowns. Because the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Spanish, and basically every other country in the goddamn world where March lockdowns did fuck-all to stop October COVID would really like to know.

(And before you even try: the only reason why New Zealand can claim to have eliminated COVID is because they're a small isolated island nation that had the luxury of the Pacific Ocean's assistance in implementing a rigid quarantine. The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury.)

This is the most ridiculous panic porn in the history of panic porn. This is “delete your account” level stupidity.

I signed into Slashdot for the first time in 5+ years just to comment on how idiotic this article is.

Per the CDC, 2,839,205 Americans died in 2018. That is an average of 7,778 deaths per day, so 3,067 COVID-19 deaths per day is at most 39.43% of the average deaths per day.

I say “at most” because most COVID-19 deaths are in age ranges (80+ and 90+) where, statistically speaking, death is likely to occur within the next 12 months. In other words, there is heavy overlap between the set of people who would have died in 2020 from some other cause and the set of people who died in 2020 because of COVID-19.

The true metric to use for COVID-19 is this: to what degree is COVID-19 causing excess mortality versus the average daily mortality?

And the answer is: hardly at all. If you are under age 18, you are more likely to die from a lightning strike than from COVID-19. If you are under 50, you are more likely to die from influenza than COVID-19. Only when you move into the 70+, 80+, and 90+ age ranges do you see excess mortality, and even then, you have to look for it.

Like influenza and other ILIs, COVID-19 follows Hope-Simpson seasonality. When it is your turn to get COVID-19, you’re going to get COVID-19. NPIs (masks, social distancing) won’t stop it (just look at every European and North/South American country), and lockdowns just delay the inevitable.

Meanwhile, those attempts to delay the inevitable have caused incalculable harm all over the world, such as wiping out almost half of all black-owned small businesses in the United States, and pushing 265 million people in the world to the brink of starvation.

Go read Michael P Senger’s Twitter thread on the horrific harm of lockdowns. By the time you’re done, you’ll want to slap anyone who advocates lockdowns (or posts idiotic panic porn like this) directly in the face.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome

The new Stephen King novel out tomorrow about a small town suddenly encased by an invisible, indestructable dome.

In additional to Daskalakis' thesis that finding the Nash equilibrium for an economic system is a PPAD-complete problem, neoclassical economists have yet to acknowledge the other elephant in the room: the fact that economic systems are chaotic, which makes it impossible to build long-term models that in any way correspond to reality.

In fact, we can trivially prove that economic systems are chaotic, because weather greater affects economic systems (e.g., a drought that affects farmland productivity), and weather systems are famously chaotic.

There is an object lesson here. In 1948, U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall infamously summarized the attitudes of scientists and other learned men when he asserted:

"The conquest of all infectious diseases is imminent." - U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall, 1948

If there ever was a statement that scientists wished they could take back, it would probably be Marshall's. Because microbes have spent the last 60 years humiliating us for our hubris.

Unfortunately, only the Austrian economists have figured out that this statement is every bit as laughable and contemptible as Marshall's:

"An economy can be successfully planned." - neoclassical economics

Somewhere, Ludwig von Mises is still hoping that the rest of us will get it, too...

I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.

But those limits are not so easily fixed or defined.

The microchip is the perfect example.

It doesn't exist before 1958. It's economic, technological and social impact scarcely felt before the 1980s.

If it's caused by malware there's no mens rea.

The better torrent sites have RSS feeds of their various categories (TV XviD, TV HD, DVD-R, etc.) The feed is simply a list of named links to the .torrent files in each category. You can set your BitTorrent client (I like to use ktorrent with the Syndication plugin) to search for strings within the link names and download based on a set of filters. You can use regex filters, or just standard wildcard format (eg. "*ig*ang*eory") and even set the season and episodes.

Sure beats the old timer on the VCR routine.

Did you really just compare a method to get food with killing an unborn baby? Really?! *sigh...*

good luck with that strategy.

I mean, it'd basically be a packet-switched network, but with cars instead of pieces of data. It's a relatively benign IT problem.

What a great idea! Why not simply have Mr Speedy Pants organized into a packet that gets lost in transmission? The one that gets resent after the NAK can look alike but its still a new packet but perhaps without the hidden corruption!

Here's a little exercise for you: calculate the markup on the soft drinks, candy bars, and chips in the vending machines in your place of work, versus what you'd pay for those same items if you bought a pack/case of them at the grocery store.

I bet you'll find the markup far exceeds 30%.

Why? Because the the business model of vending machines is to entice the consumer to pay a massive premium in order to have the product right now. It's all about enticing and encouraging the impulse buy. Thus, there's nothing unreasonable about what TG-Gold-Super-Markt is doing. Hell, for a vending machine, their markup is astoundingly low.

Moreover, these gold vending machines have another advantage working for them, in that most people don't know where or how to buy precious metals. If I don't want to pay a 30% markup on that soft drink, I can go to the grocery store and buy a case for a far less odious premium per bottle/can. But if I want to purchase gold or silver in small quantities (because let's face it: most people aren't wealthy enough to be able to purchase them in large quantities), where would I go? How would I do it? In that light, a 30% markup for the convenience of having to research the answers to those questions myself might not seem like such a bad deal.

If you anticipate widespread unrest and civil breakdown, you should be stockpiling lead, water, food, silver, and gold, in that order.

If you don't necessarily think that society is about to come unglued, but you'd like to protect the government from surreptitiously stealing your wealth (by inflating the currency and thus devaluing the currency you're holding), buy silver and gold, in that order.

(The Moneychanger has lots of useful information about buying gold and silver, and also offers a monthly allocation plan. The Northwest Territorial Mint sells gold and silver, and their bulk prices for silver rounds and bars are actually quite good (~8% over spot), because they mint them themselves. Finally, you can often find good deals on eBay, as long as your stick to common bullion coins with a low premium over spot, and purchase only from high-volume sellers with lots and lots of positive feedback.)

If passed, this could have the effect of a de-facto outlawing of Linux.

Not a chance. Believe it or not, the NSA and the DoD actually know what Linux is. And a lot of their advice for securing Unix and Linux systems is actually quite good.

And this without even considering the larger question of why the government should have any control over the software private users run on their own computers.

They shouldn't.

But they don't need to have that control. All they have to do is say that any system that is owned by the federal government or interoperates with federal government systems has to comply with the security guidelines. They'll get the states to fall in line via the usual mechanism: by withholding federal funding until they agree to implement the federal guidelines at the state level.

And if you're thinking, "Well, that only affects people who are the government, contract with the government, or work with the government," ponder that thanks to Bush and Obama, that combined class of people will shortly be the majority.