SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980

Jay wrote:

Because anything you offer me will require raining my own taxes to pay for. I'd rather cut out the middleman and self fund.
The thing about the safety net is that it is always there while your income isn't guaranteed. Not throughout your life, not throughout the rest of the year even.

Some post up you mention being overextended?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England
Again, you're not offering me anything. Please come up with an example of a government agency that is competent, and performs a job with efficiency equivalent to the private sector.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980

Jay wrote:

Again, you're not offering me anything. Please come up with an example of a government agency that is competent, and performs a job with efficiency equivalent to the private sector.
There is no private sector enterprise that will give you money to feed your family if you and the wife lost your jobs.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England
You wanna offer me single payer health insurance? Is it going to lower my insurance bills? No, you're likely to make it a progressive tax, which will raise my costs. That's just the initial impact. After you've gained political control over the health industry what happens next? Is the government going to play the bad guy that they currently pay the insurance companies to be? No, people will whine and the politicians will demand that everything under the sun be paid for. Costs would explode. You gonna cut payments to hospitals? To the people that are megadonors to the Democratic Party? Not likely.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
I was talking about food stamps. Where is the private alternative to food stamps?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I was talking about food stamps. Where is the private alternative to food stamps?
It's called getting a job, earning money, and buying food at the store.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I was talking about food stamps. Where is the private alternative to food stamps?
It's called getting a job, earning money, and buying food at the store.
Our unemployment rate is worse than the great depression. Where do you find a job now?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I was talking about food stamps. Where is the private alternative to food stamps?
It's called getting a job, earning money, and buying food at the store.
Our unemployment rate is worse than the great depression. Where do you find a job now?
It's worse than the great depression due to government action. So we need government because government put millions of people out of work? Impeccable belief system you have.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
There are 80,000 Americans dead due to the virus that almost killed you and your wife. That is with all of the restrictions put in place. If the shutdowns didn't happen, and the virus was let to run wild the economic damage would be just as bad.

The U.S. economy is geared towards the free market and has a smaller safety net than the Europeans. This is your belief system put in practice.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

SuperJail Warden wrote:

There are 80,000 Americans dead due to the virus that almost killed you and your wife. That is with all of the restrictions put in place. If the shutdowns didn't happen, and the virus was let to run wild the economic damage would be just as bad.

The U.S. economy is geared towards the free market and has a smaller safety net than the Europeans. This is your belief system put in practice.
It didn't almost kill us. We're relatively young and healthy. It was a minor inconvenience for both of us.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Larssen
Member
+99|2147
We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
You got lucky. It's killed healthier and younger people. I have seen pictures of you. You are not healthy.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

SuperJail Warden wrote:

You got lucky. It's killed healthier and younger people. I have seen pictures of you. You are not healthy.
I don't think you understand how luck works. I didn't get lucky. There was a 99%+ chance that we would be perfectly fine. We would've been very, very unlucky to have a worse case.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980

Larssen wrote:

We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
Jay would sacrifice every single one of us today so his kid can make macaroni art in September. I would be surprised if schools open back up in September at this rate honestly. Schools have no idea what to do.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I thought of that the moment Jay mentioned he was sick. I didn't want to say it though in case he was "very, very unlucky".

On a long enough time line every eventually becomes "very, very unlucky" from something.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

Larssen wrote:

We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
I would not sacrifice 2% of the population if I thought it could be helped. Why would anyone do so? I said that this disease was likely going to be a lot less lethal than the projections that were being thrown around, and it turns out I was correct. I said that the cure would likely be worse than the disease, and I've largely been correct.

What I'm not willing to do is sacrifice all of humanity to save a few. And this is the issue I have with left wing ideology in general. You focus on the hard cases. The minority. You're perfectly willing to tax everyone in order to potentially, and I mean potentially, save a few. You're willing to throw everyone out of work and force them onto the dole in order to potentially save a few thousand lives of people waiting to die in nursing homes. You focus on the stories that tug at the heart strings and turn them into causes, even though they might in fact be very minor things in the grand scheme of life. You let the media and politicians manipulate your high empathy levels at every turn and you get told that you would be an unsympathetic, uncaring, unfeeling bastard if you opposed the taxes and the new authoritarian impositions on daily life, so you embrace it, and try to take the moral high ground against people like me instead.

Last edited by Jay (4 years, 8 months ago)

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

SuperJail Warden wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I thought of that the moment Jay mentioned he was sick. I didn't want to say it though in case he was "very, very unlucky".

On a long enough time line every eventually becomes "very, very unlucky" from something.
I am Jack's dwindling timeline.

There's no survivorship bias in play here macbeth. If the odds of someone in my age group ending up in the hospital is 1%, I have a 1 in 100 chance of ending up in the hospital. For me to then end up in the hospital I would have a lucky roll of the dice, but because it's a negative outcome, I would be unlucky. This is not difficult. Getting covid is not a death sentence for people in their 30s. It's a minor inconvenience for a few days, unless you are very unlucky.

Last edited by Jay (4 years, 8 months ago)

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
Atheist shouldn't be so flippant about death. If you believe that death is non-existence you should try to protect life as much as possible. At least a convinced Christian genuinely believes you are probably better off dead.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England
Why? If I'm dead I won't know that I am dead. I will cease to exist. It's not like I'm going to be living in regret or sitting on a cloud somewhere.

I'd be more scared if I believed in Christian eternity. You get to live what? 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years and then get to spend the rest of eternity looking back on that time? That sounds awful. All that time to reflect about mistakes and missed opportunities and no way to ever fix anything. Yeah, gimme some of that purgatory. No thanks.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Larssen
Member
+99|2147

Jay wrote:

Larssen wrote:

We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
I would not sacrifice 2% of the population if I thought it could be helped. Why would anyone do so? I said that this disease was likely going to be a lot less lethal than the projections that were being thrown around, and it turns out I was correct. I said that the cure would likely be worse than the disease, and I've largely been correct.

What I'm not willing to do is sacrifice all of humanity to save a few. And this is the issue I have with left wing ideology in general. You focus on the hard cases. The minority. You're perfectly willing to tax everyone in order to potentially, and I mean potentially, save a few. You're willing to throw everyone out of work and force them onto the dole in order to potentially save a few thousand lives of people waiting to die in nursing homes. You focus on the stories that tug at the heart strings and turn them into causes, even though they might in fact be very minor things in the grand scheme of life. You let the media and politicians manipulate your high empathy levels at every turn and you get told that you would be an unsympathetic, uncaring, unfeeling bastard if you opposed the taxes and the new authoritarian impositions on daily life, so you embrace it instead.
Jay,

Your claims about this disease being not so deadly or that the cure would be worse were from the very start completely totally baseless. A hunch. Fantasy. Fiction. An imagination. Are you telling me national policy where lives are potentially at stake should be based on people's uninformed guesstimates?

The problem is that almost noone alive today has ever experienced a real crisis of any magnitude. You know, the type you read about pretty much every chapter if you open a history book. That safe, risk free experience has caused an enormous amount of people to be wholly convinced that every problem will solve itself, that every situation can be nuanced, that there's never a reason to really worry. Why would there be, none of us have experienced it. Well, this pandemic has presented itself as that once-in-a-century moment. If you had paid attention to the information coming from China in january or february, you would've been clinically insane to argue that it's all just a big ruse - you can pick out the world leaders who at this moment have proven themselves to be mentally not all there.

The death rate statistic has been quite well established now. It's around 2%. That is still lowballing it as global average is 3.5%. The extreme optimist could argue closer to 1%, but that number wouldn't be fairly accurate as we can't account for the death rate if all hospitals are filled and there's no breathing equipment available to treat ICU admissions. The ICU admission rate - I'm not sure and working from memory now but based on hospital admissions, it's somewhere between 5-10%. That means between 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 end up in a situation so bad they need medical assistance to survive. Imagine if that medical assistance is no longer available due to overflow in the hospitals.

I don't focus on the minority. The numbers are bad enough that they affect the majority. Had it been let loose, everyone, you included, would personally know people who would die from corona. I'm thinking about the human impact of millions not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones, about the logistics involved in disposing of hundreds of thousands of bodies in a matter of months, about the impact it would have on hospitals, doctors and nurses who would have to work under such extreme pressure, space and time constraints it's a certain bet many would come out with PTSD. I'm also thinking about the economic impact of losing a substantial number of your population in record time and what this would mean for capital movement and insurance. I'm also thinking about the morality of letting so many people die.

You have not thought this through and keep proving that time, and time, and time again. Use that engineer brain and at the very least make an inventory of all factors that ought to be considered.

Last edited by Larssen (4 years, 8 months ago)

Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

Larssen wrote:

Jay wrote:

Larssen wrote:

We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
I would not sacrifice 2% of the population if I thought it could be helped. Why would anyone do so? I said that this disease was likely going to be a lot less lethal than the projections that were being thrown around, and it turns out I was correct. I said that the cure would likely be worse than the disease, and I've largely been correct.

What I'm not willing to do is sacrifice all of humanity to save a few. And this is the issue I have with left wing ideology in general. You focus on the hard cases. The minority. You're perfectly willing to tax everyone in order to potentially, and I mean potentially, save a few. You're willing to throw everyone out of work and force them onto the dole in order to potentially save a few thousand lives of people waiting to die in nursing homes. You focus on the stories that tug at the heart strings and turn them into causes, even though they might in fact be very minor things in the grand scheme of life. You let the media and politicians manipulate your high empathy levels at every turn and you get told that you would be an unsympathetic, uncaring, unfeeling bastard if you opposed the taxes and the new authoritarian impositions on daily life, so you embrace it instead.
Jay,

Your claims about this disease being not so deadly or that the cure would be worse were from the very start completely totally baseless. A hunch. Fantasy. Fiction. An imagination. Are you telling me national policy where lives are potentially at stake should be based on people's uninformed guesstimates?

The problem is that almost noone alive today has ever experienced a real crisis of any magnitude. You know, the type you read about pretty much every chapter if you open a history book. That safe, risk free experience has caused an enormous amount of people to be wholly convinced that every problem will solve itself, that every situation can be nuanced, that there's never a reason to really worry. Why would there be, none of us have experienced it. Well, this pandemic has presented itself as that once-in-a-century moment. If you had paid attention to the information coming from China in january or february, you would've been clinically insane to argue that it's all just a big ruse - you can pick out the world leaders who at this moment have proven themselves to be mentally not all there.

The death rate statistic has been quite well established now. It's around 2%. That is still lowballing it as global average is 3.5%. The extreme optimist could argue closer to 1%, but that number wouldn't be fairly accurate as we can't account for the death rate if all hospitals are filled and there's no breathing equipment available to treat ICU admissions. The ICU admission rate - I haven't seen any statistics, but it's somewhere between 5-10%. That means between 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 end up in a situation so bad they need medical assistance to survive. Imagine if that medical assistance is no longer available due to overflow in the hospitals.

I don't focus on the minority. The numbers are bad enough that they affect the majority. Had it been let loose, everyone, you included, would personally know people who would die from corona. I'm thinking about the human impact of millions not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones, about the logistics involved in disposing of hundreds of thousands of bodies in a matter of months, about the impact it would have on hospitals, doctors and nurses who would have to work under such extreme pressure, space and time constraints it's a certain bet many would come out with PTSD. I'm also thinking about the economic impact of losing a substantial number of your population in record time and what this would mean for capital movement and insurance. I'm also thinking about the morality of letting so many people die.

You have not thought this through and keep proving that time, and time, and time again. Use that engineer brain and at the very least make an inventory of all factors that ought to be considered.
Your estimate is off by a factor of 10. The number, at least in the US, is closer to 0.2%. Not 2%.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980

Jay wrote:

Why? If I'm dead I won't know that I am dead. I will cease to exist. It's not like I'm going to be living in regret or sitting on a cloud somewhere.

I'd be more scared if I believed in Christian eternity. You get to live what? 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years and then get to spend the rest of eternity looking back on that time? That sounds awful. All that time to reflect about mistakes and missed opportunities and no way to ever fix anything. Yeah, gimme some of that purgatory. No thanks.
That's your idea of heaven? The Simpsons was right about Protestants
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Larssen
Member
+99|2147

Larssen wrote:

Your estimate is off by a factor of 10. The number, at least in the US, is closer to 0.2%. Not 2%.
I don't know where you get your number but it doesn't correspond with literally anything published by the scientific community thus far. Lowest estimates I've seen were 0,7% BUT with 1% of those under 30 needing hospital admission, up to 20% if 80 and older. So even then the number hasn't been controlled for all the cases that can't be treated once some 3-4% of the population requires medical aid. You keep glossing over this fact. Even IF the current death rate is low, it's low because pretty much all critical cases are treated.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3980
Jay is right about needing to reopen the country though. I am bored. I want to see some drama and destruction.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5618|London, England

Larssen wrote:

Larssen wrote:

Your estimate is off by a factor of 10. The number, at least in the US, is closer to 0.2%. Not 2%.
I don't know where you get your number but it doesn't correspond with literally anything published by the scientific community thus far. Lowest estimates I've seen were 0,7% BUT with 1% of those under 30 needing hospital admission, up to 20% if 80 and older. So even then the number hasn't been controlled for all the cases that can't be treated once some 3-4% of the population requires medical aid. You keep glossing over this fact. Even IF the current death rate is low, it's low because pretty much all critical cases are treated.
Because most places have incomplete data and the media is only publishing confirmed case numbers. As I've said repeatedly, confirmed case numbers are going to be heavily biased towards the most severe and wildly undercount the carriers and people with minor cases.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/corona … 60406.html
Here, they found 6% of Miami county already had virus antibodies as of late April. 165,000 people were infected already, but only 10,000 or so officially at the time. New York has had 20% of its population infected based on randomized antibody testing. LA County came up with a 0.1-0.2% death rate. Miami was around 0.2%. New York City was higher, at around 0.7%, but that may be because of how they were classifying deaths.

This is not hard math larssen. As the number of people tested continues to widen, you're going to see that many, many more people have been exposed than the official tallies currently indicate.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat

Board footer

Privacy Policy - © 2025 Jeff Minard