I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.
I actually find it refreshing that Wikipedia doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in the theory section of technical subjects. For sufficiently popular subjects, they often have more accessible explanations on their “Simple English” version of the page.
It is indeed a taxable event. People who exchange crypto for “stable”coins are generally doing so to stay out of the KYC banking realm so they can lie about their transactions to their country’s tax authorities.
One could argue that the airline CEOs acted rationally and strategically—they know the airline industry’s importance to the US economy gives them great odds of a bailout if a black swan event were to occur, so there was more value to shareholders generated by stock buybacks than reserving cash for a worst-case event.
> I can assure you if tomorrow we woke up and the world was 2 degrees hotter and people were dying left right and centre from it, the same thing would have happened with climate change.
That’s the point he’s making though, we’re overcommitting resources to this problem because we can see it. Once climate change is apparent enough for people to panic, it’ll be too late.
> Thousands of people are already dying from this in one small concentrated area in Italy, in a matter of weeks. Shall we just say fuck it and let thousands more die here too? Should the whole world say the same thing? Shall we let the entire economy hit the sort of fucked levels we haven't seen since like WW2?
Looking at the data from Italy, 98% of the people who died were retired, had pre-existing conditions, and were making no noticeable economic contribution. I’m not saying that economic utility should be what determines someone’s value of life, but the argument that spending trillions of dollars to save the lives of some 85-year-olds “avoids economic disaster” makes no sense. If a world leader were acting in a purely Machiavellian manner, they would let the virus run its course as quickly as possible so productivity could return to normal.
It’s quite alarming that no country (as far as I’m aware) is taking a more rational approach towards coronavirus policy.
Any attempt to make an argument of this sort in the current panic is being seen as insensitive and met with outrage (“you don’t care about me/someone’s parents/grandparents”).
If the consensus ends up being that we need to put an 18 month hold on all activity and spend trillions of dollars to extend the lives of a few hundred thousand octogenarians, this will be a mistake that resonates for generations.
Also, the current policy being pursued isn’t a simple “spend x, save y lives” trade-off. An extended period of isolation will not only have economic effects (greater poverty, on average, will reduce life expectancy for many), it’ll also result in a higher incidence of mental health issues and suicide. Children will have their educational development severely disrupted. When the calculus on this policy becomes clear, it could be possible that we end up trading many millions of years of aggregate future life to save a million people who’ve already lived very full lives.