I have an old Windex spray bottle that ive filled with rubbing alcohol and I've been blasting everything with extreme paranoia.
Honestly statistically speaking in most areas out chances of coming into contact with the virus are still quite low. There's 300MM+ people here and even if 1MM are infected, those are good odds.
Do we know yet what the probability of packaging borne transmission is? Has anyone seen anything? I saw one study describing virus lifetime on various surfaces but I don't think they tested cardboard.
Also I don't know what they're expecting. They either have mountains of stock or they'll be laying these people back off soon when factories close. I think supplies out of China are still disrupted.
>Why? I feel like a lot of people want to do things that are productive for society
Most of the things that are productive for society require study and practice of skills that aren't particularly interesting to the vast majority of people.
>Sure, these things aren't economically productive
The vast majority of things that are productive for society are economically productive. That's why people pay for things.
We don't need UBI to go toward funding artists and musicians. That's a waste of resources. Particularly considering that far too many people are likely to choose the easy way out, pursuing "what they love", i.e. soft skills like art and music. You also drastically underestimate the number people who are perfectly content with doing drugs and watching TV/playing video games all day.
Unfortunately while resources are scarce, human nature is such that people require incentives to do the things that need to be done.
They have clearly been met. Read the article. People stand to lose money in default conditions. The question is who?
As I posted elsewhere, the first class of bonds default after 2500 deaths in one country and at least 20 in another. China and Iran have long met that condition. So what's going on?
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The [class a] bonds default if pandemic-related deaths reach 2,500 in a single nation with an additional 20 or more deaths confirmed in an overseas country, according to the bank's prospectus.
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The [class b] bonds pay 11.5% annually, but reach default after 250 deaths. The bonds' payout rate scales with the number of additional countries that experience than 20 confirmed deaths.
Well? Why are they dragging their feet? Even the official numbers have seen more than 2.5k die in China and more than 20 in Iran. The only question now is whether this is incompetence or maliciousness.
Just a reminder that this is coming from an organization that
1. Receives part of it's funding from China
2. Has been using China's clearly manufactured numbers since day 1
3. Has yet to officially call this a pandemic though it has met the criteria for weeks ($425MM in pandemic bonds would default) [0]
4. Is led by a man (the very director being quoted) who was accused by the NYT of covering up no less than 3 cholera epidemics in his home country of Ethiopia. [1]
So you're telling me China shut down it's entire economy [2] and put 700MM people under lockdown and/or travel restrictions because of something about as dangerous as the common flu? Note that the Chinese economy is still not back online - don't believe me? Check real time pollution maps for yourself. The air is still cleaner than it has been in decades.
The WHO and CDC are lying to you. You can verify all of this for yourself.
Hell, 8% of Iranian parliament members are infected. Look at the chaos gripping Iran, Italy, and SK. This is not the flu and I'm astounded that not only are official organizations misleading the public to this degree, but people are buying it en masse.
Finally, after a mass petition, a number of journals released all 2019ncov literature from paywall. You can find estimates for mortality and R0 from many sources, and I don't think I've seen a single one below 2. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was at 2. Of course take these with a grain of salt as they may be oversampling severe cases, but they all point to the same grave conclusions, and you can read them yourself. Do not rely on these agencies to digest this information for you when you have unprecedented access to the same information.
>The US learned in 2016 that information is a tool of war
Uh, people have understood the usefulness of information and information control for probably hundreds of years - at the very least since the cold war.
What do you think the CIA, KGB, CCP have been doing all this time?
I swear people just stopped thinking critically when Trump was elected. Things were broken long before 2016.
The only antidote to this kind of profiteering is a cultural shift. And if starts with us, the developers who are building this tech.
Unfortunately most of us are quite powerless to stop it otherwise. As time passes I'm only more convinced that this is an evil which will inevitably be abused by governments in the near future to target dissidents. And possibly other groups - you don't need much information from spending habits and location history to trivially build a profile consisting of religious affiliation, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and general interests. This maliciousness is putting us all at risk in the name of greed.
I think we at HN have a particular responsibility to keep the web free and open. This really is an arms race and only those of us building the tech have the power curtail FAANG's overreach. It might me time to choose a side and firmly push your work toward open web friendly tech.
What do you do? Start growing all of your vegetables in your backyard, and order what you must with a fake identity from behind a proxy online?
I was going to question if we'd reached the point where it is not only impossible to avoid handing over intimate identifiable data, but necessary to participate in society - and I realized that we probably passed that threshold a few years ago, although this does make things seemingly worse.
I wonder how long before they'll ban adversarial masks or hats in the name of safety or some other such nonsense...
The fact that it was mentioned in a meeting doesn't mean it was on the table. I'd more concerned with management if they weren't talking about exit points for a risky venture. A perfectly necessary point of consideration and I don't doubt that the same topic came up at Amazon and Microsoft.
Well, those who are willing to comply.