>Some readers may ask why I am not considering the failures of the White House, and making the case that the President is also a joke.
Some readers implicitly understood why when the author presented the pricipal disaster of 2020 as the death of '1/4 of all small businesses' and bailed before 20k words of statue-avi rationalist faux-erudition gave them aneuryisms.
I believe the author was being ironic, as they essentially go on to make an argument based on intelligence (von Neuman, etc.). The tone here is also a light one.
Do you have a source for that? I mean you might be right, but I haven't heard anything like that. Also pretty much every restaurant I went to before (non-chain) and after the pandemic are open today. I know of 1 that closed permanently, with 100s of others that I frequent. Some are even expanding.
> Fourth: caring intensely about making everyone wear a mask, while not caring at all whether it’s a real respiratory filter or a paisley do-rag bandana
Most serious coverings were more effective than nothing. And from what I've seen any fashion/joke-only coverings were denied or criticised immediately.
In my country ( nordics with mask mandates ) the single layer mask is explicitly forbidden and is scientifically proven be worse than no mask at all, as single layer cloth disperses droplets making spread worse.
I would be kicked out of any store if I wore a single layer mask.
In other countries the same scientific dogma states that single layer is not only allowed but even recommended as better than nothing.
You got really close here, but in comparing USA to Taiwan somehow assumed TPTB here want to save Americans from pain and death. Sorry, you'll have to take the class over. Don't worry, they'll give the class again very soon. We had to wait twelve years last time. Now that they've figured some things out, this class will repeat every three years at the maximum.
> It [USA] does not have a government because the thing it calls a government cannot tell its people what to do, and make them do it, which is the basic function of a government.
May be at the micro level governments should have the capacity to force involuntary action. But if it is democratic then I think by definition it is the people telling the government what to do.
> Second: after it took two days to invent a defense against the disease, spending eleven months deciding to use it. Then, eleven months later, not already having made enough for everyone.
Seriously? It took two days [citation needed] to do some chemistry, but the rest of the time making sure that that chemistry had resulted in what was actually a valid and safe vaccine against the disease. And ramping up production is hard, and you don't want to scale up the wrong lab bench process too soon.
I interpreted this as referring to masks? The immediately preceding point included the phrase "new respiratory disease". For that, masks worn in healthcare are more effective than a vaccine could possibly be, and have been for the entire year.
Somehow I skimmed past that one... frankly this undermines TFA. We didn't know in February (with all the suspiciously-timed reports of mutations, do we really know now?) that this vaccine was so effective. We did know that respiratory illnesses are spread when people breathe on each other. Every other nation on earth (maybe there were exceptions, but I don't care) figured out how to get people in masks (and how to get people tested!) Why not us? TFA would like Trump to take credit for saving the rest of the world through reverse psychology, but that's goofy, and besides it emphasizes conflict more than necessary.
There is conflict, political and otherwise, in other nations. Yet somehow they were able to mask up and reduce public interaction. For the good of the public, the public needed to do something the public would prefer not to do, and in dozens of nations, the public did it. TFA is too USA-conservative to notice why.
In USA our rulers are not accustomed to bargaining with the public, because our unions are moribund. In other nations, not only unions but other collective powers as well are regularly heard by the government. In such a situation, it's obvious that people expected to stay in their homes without working need some money in order to that. That's not obvious to our politicians, because they're too busy stealing all they can for their billionaire masters. People without years of salary in the bank find their situations untenable. In other nations they would be fine.
Victoria, Australia has done maybe 5-15k tests per day and had zero cases in I think 61 days now.
They do get false positives, about one in ten or twenty thousand it seems, but most of them had the virus at some point in the past and the test was still detecting dead virus fragments, so the "completely false" positive rate is even lower.
The false positives are re- tested, and it's almost always concluded that they're false. Hence 61 days with no cases - any false positives in that time have been identified as such, so the process taken as a whole has a very low false positive rate indeed.
But even the raw "one in 10k" false positive rate they see is low enough that almost all positive tests anywhere with an active COVID outbreak are true positives.
It could, but it's not showing up in the correlated data that way.
If our rate of tests produced the rate of false positives you claim are possible, what is the reason for the excess deaths across the globe? That occurred simultaneously, and in a delayed rate right along with positive test rates?
HN downvoters can handle humor in small doses. A wall of text like TFA is certain to contain several phrases about which they'll have to think really hard in order to exclude the possibility of wrongthink. Humor is tough! Want to go shopping?
Some readers implicitly understood why when the author presented the pricipal disaster of 2020 as the death of '1/4 of all small businesses' and bailed before 20k words of statue-avi rationalist faux-erudition gave them aneuryisms.