Comments by "" (@timogul) on "Thunderf00t"
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@llllllblodllllll The thing is, if we'd taken relatively small, reasonable steps to move away from fossil fuels 50 years ago, then we would be done by now, and it would all be fine. But they said "no, keep burning coal." If we'd made some slightly more serious choices twenty years ago, things would be fine today, but they said "no, keep burning coal." so now the decisions we need to make will be harsher still, and in twenty more years they will be incredibly harsh, but at some point the bill DOES come due. You can't just keep ignoring the problem and hope it will go away. I don't think we can eliminate fossil fuels immediately, as some protesters want, but I do think that we need to be making serious investments today to prevent MUCH more costly solutions in the future.
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Again, criticizing the subject of the video does not meet the copyright definition of "criticism," because it is not criticizing the video itself. If you are criticizing the film-making, the artistic intent, etc., that is fair use. This video and your earlier video about the copyright claim are both fair use on these grounds. Taking the video and using it to make fun of the Musk fans in the video is not a fair use of the material because it is not criticizing the artistic choices of the creator of that video. It is fair to say that you wanted to make fun of the fans in the video, but you would need to pay the copyright holder to be able to do so. People who are around the filmmaker as he films do not remove his copyrights. An easy example of this would be if someone does a documentary about a serial killer, and you take footage of that, and use it to criticize the documentary itself, that is fair use. If you talk about how it handled the story, that is fair use, but if you take footage from the documentary to make your own analysis of the serial killer, not the work of the documentary, but the subject of it, then that is not a fair use.
Also, the "market" in Mahlmann's case would not be "people who want to make fun of him," the market would be "people who want his angle on the crash," which is a different angle than the other videos.
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@christopherpardell4418 That's not true at all. The reductions in fresh water have nothing to do with evaporation, they have to do with shrinking glaciers, reduced rainfall in many regions, and reduced snowpack. The water is still going up, and it's still coming down, it's just doing so in places that aren't as convenient to existing people as they used to be. It's like how Saudi Arabia is seeing less overall rainfall, but also seeing an increase in flash floods.
I think you're also referencing that they've found that some of the particulates caused by shipping and air travel can cause cloud formation, which can lead to lower overall temperatures, but this does not involve evaporation, the available moisture is the same either way, it just is less likely to congeal to a visible point without something to collect around.
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You know, while I agree that this is a stupid idea across the board, there are much more effective ways to design something that does basically this thing. Step 1 would be to have a large, permanent structure, don't build a tower using bricks, just build a large, permanent building that is maybe a couple hundred meter tall. You could even put people in it, or use it for nuclear waste storage or something. Hell, maybe make it a water tower, doesn't matter. Then, instead of using moving cables to move the bricks up and down, you use elevators on the edges of that building, perhaps dropping at a slight angle. then, bricks would be moved to the edges of the building, and moved away from the edges to make space.
So effectively, the life cycle of the bricks would be that a brick would move up to the side of the building (either self-driving our using conveyor rollers), and then an elevator would drag it to the top, and then it would be rolled over to the center of the building, as new bricks shift into position. This way, the elevator mechanisms would never have to move, the bricks would not be swinging around, the tower itself would be architecturally stable, and every brick could move from maximum to minimum height for max efficiency.
It would still be pretty dumb though.
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@sjent Yes, and 3% of the population (of the US) is 9 million people, which is about 8 million more people than the healthcare system can sustain at any given time.
"US has one of the highest infection rates in the world. But i guess if its "working" for you..."
Like I said, in the part that you quoted, "not as well as it might have in an ideal scenario." When Trump completely dropped the ball on the run-up to all of this, we were left with a wide variety of bad endings. The route we took is one of the better available paths from that terrible starting location. Obviously we would have been much better off if we'd started in January to ramp up supplies and jump on early infections, but that ship has sunk. Now it's about what should we be doing about it NOW, and the current policy of "stay at home" is the best way of reducing further damage.
"COVID is fairly mild virus, so most of those who could be infected got infected, rest got scared and take basic precautions like washing their hands. "
Lol, no. Only a tiny fraction of New York has been infected so far, If not for the lockdown, most of them would have by now, and the numbers would be at least ten times worse across the board. Yeah, at some point it would burn out, but not before killing a LOT more people. We know from experience that places with poor social distancing got hit the hardest relative to their circumstances, like in New Orleans and Florida.
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@sjent "All those people would not get infected and develop symptom at the same time. "
Not at the exact same time, no, but we know for a fact that this virus moves FAST when left unchecked. Italy got hit fast, New York got hit fast. New York is already ABOVE its normal capacity and barely within its emergency capabilities. And that's WITH weeks of social distancing. If they had stopped that early, then they would be way over any possible capacity to deal with it. Plenty of other communities all over the country are similarly swamped. Yeah, even if we fully opened up not everyone would get sick literally at the same time, but this is a virus that takes about two weeks to present, and then, for the people hit hardest, will persist for about 3-4 more weeks, so cases tend to pile up. If we opened up, hospitals across the country would be over capacity within a month or so of that and plenty of people would die as a result.
"Then how US end up where it end up, if it was such a better available path ?"
BECAUSE we got such a shitty start, BECAUSE Trump did nothing for the first crucial months. If we'd been banning travel earlier, stocking up on testing kits earlier, stocking up on PPE earlier, if he hadn't disbanded the anti-pandemic taskforce so they would be on top of things sooner, if there had been nation-wide shelter orders sooner, we could have kept the cases low like in some other countries. The problem with a viral outbreak like this is that things snowball, if they start to get out of control, then they get VERY out of control VERY quickly.
Think of it like a building fire. Ideally you want to put the fire out early, when it's small enough to douse with a small extinguisher, and if you do that, great. But if you don't start dealing with the fire until half the place it lit up, then you don't have the option of just making the problem go away, you need to use extreme measures to salvage any of the structure, and there's no point complaining about water damage or that it's inconvenient you had to miss your favorite show because those asshole firemen made you evacuate the building while they dealt with it.
"Its equivalent of putting a tourniquet on persons neck to stop nosebleed. "
No, it's the equivalent to putting a tourniquet around their arm to stop an arm bleed from bleeding them out. More accurately, it's a medically induced coma. Sometimes you have to knock a patient out to give their body time to heal.
"How do you know that is was lack of social distancing that was to blame ? "
Ok, what's your alternative explanation to why a place like New Orleans would see massively higher rates of the virus than other places, coincidentally right after having a massive street party? I'm open to ideas.
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@sjent "And there are other countries, states and cities that were not. You are presenting exceptions as a rule."
No, I'm presenting the rules as the rules. Viruses don't come out of nowhere. They don't just spontaneously erupt everywhere simultaneously. They travel. They have a point of origin. So in any given region, there's nothing at all unusual about them having zero cases for long periods of time, because someone who has the virus has to travel there. And it's possible for outbreaks to contain themselves, because the people who have it just naturally socially distance, and it sputters out. But in the cases where A. multiple people have had the virus, and B. the people around them did not maintain social distancing, the virus erupts out of control and within weeks gets all over the place. Always. Every time.
"So youre saying that despite imposed social distancing, it makes no difference ? That perhaps there are other factors involved ?"
That's not even close to what I'm saying. You aren't paying attention. What I am saying is that without social distancing being implemented, NY would be WAY WAY WAY worse than it is today. Remember, viral outbreaks have lag. If you start doing a good thing today, then it will have very little impact on infections for a couple weeks, and very little impact on deaths for weeks after that. But that impact will eventually arrive. And if you do something bad today, it won't fix anything tomorrow, but it will make things better in a few weeks, and even better weeks after that. If NY had instituted the current social distancing guidelines two weeks earlier than they did, then instead of ten thousand deaths as of today, they might have been able to keep it to only hundreds, or even dozens. If they had instituted social distancing two weeks later than they did, then they would likely have had fifty thousand or more deaths by this point, but whichever they did, it would have seemed to make almost no difference for a week or two after.
"Thats the problem. If you dont open up it may crash economy and many more die as result long after virus is gone. There is no good solution."
There is no good solution, but opening up is the worse one, because the cost of "crashing the economy" does not result in more people dying than opening up would cause, even in the long term. The people dying from opening up would crash the economy either way, at least this way saves more lives.
"If we did this and if we did that does not qualify as viable explanation. Being smart after the fact does not negate the fact that US response to the pandemic was really bad."
I'm not saying the US response was good. The Federal response was, is, and will remain fucking awful because we have a muppet in the White House. I desperartely wish that weren't the case. But we're talking about the lockdown, and the lockdown has nothing to do with the federal government. The lockdown was caused by STATE governments, and the lockdown HAS been an effective measure taken to do whatever they can to slow things. Obviously this would have been more effective with better federal leadership, but that ship has sunk, so we're all left doing the best we can here, and the best we can do, for the time being, is to stay in lockdown.
"in US itself people need money to feed themselves, to pay their bills. Businesses need revenue to continue to function."
This is where government needs to step up. They need to provide people with the money they need to feed themselves until this is over. They need to provide businesses the money they need to tread water until this is over, so that when it is over, they can pick themselves back up and keep running. Like I said, this is like a medically induced coma, and if you put someone into a coma, but then just ignore them for weeks, yeah, they'll die, so you need to give them an IV drip of nutrients to keep them alive. We've gotten some of that so far, but we definitely will need more. I'm not saying they won't fuck this up, I don't trust them that far, but if they manage it well, it's the best path forward.
"Really, right after ? You dont see the problem with this statement ? Like the fact that virus has up to 2 weeks incubation period ?"
I factored that into my example. By "right after" I wasn't referring to "minutes later," I was referring to "after the incubation period had had the time to display impacts," which is how it actually happened.
"Florida, for example, is a retirement state. And elderly are the highest risk group when ti comes to this virus."
Yes, but it's not the elderly in Florida that turned out to be a specific issue for that state, it was spring breakers, who not only caused outbreaks across the state ( outside of retirement communities), but also spread it to their home/school communities when they returned.
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@sjent
"And they have. We are not talking about some remote mountain village. Hundreds of people travel between states any any given day. It is extremely probable, statistically speaking, that at least some of them will be carriers."
Yes, but it takes time. A few people entered the country with the virus before February. A few more after that. And they didn't evenly distribute, they landed largely in coastal areas, international airports. They interacted with people working there. This is a SLOW virus. It's a mean one, but slow, it takes a week or two to be noticeable, another week or two to put people into the hospital, and another week or two to kill, so the lag time between one person showing up and having a noticeable impact can be fairly long. It will reach those random rural areas, but it takes time, and the better everyone socially distances, the less likely that someone who happens to be a carrier will happen to go to a certain place, and happen to bump into people, who will happen to bump into other people. Without social distancing, if everyone is just going about their business, it spreads faster, but can still be hard to notice for weeks or even months in some places.
"Except that world is not uniform and in different places it will manifest differently. So one carrier in state A will have different result that another carrier in state B. Boiling it down to just social distancing is fairly stupid. Especially considering how weak this virus really is."
It's not "weak," more people have died from it already than in an entire year of the normal flu, and that's with aggressive measures to try and slow it down that we normally don't bother with. I hardly even ever get a flu shot, much less socially isolate myself. This virus is a serious killer, it's just a slow moving one. It's Jason, not Alien.
"Its not even presumption, but pure assertion. There is no way of knowing that."
Nonsense.
"Good thing ? What good thing ? I see idiots wearing masks thinking it will save them. Completely oblivious to the fact that virus can enter thru the eyes."
Well, yes, no, and maybe. One, virus is unlikely to just float directly into your eye and infect you that way. It's possible, but highly unlikely. Where the risk lies, is that if you get it on your hands and then touch your eye, that's a higher risk. Now wearing a lame face mask doesn't do a great job of protecting you from getting the virus, a really nice one can be fairly significant, but what even a lame mask does is limit the amount of virus you spread, since we know that this spreads before you even know that you're sick. So that's why it's socially responsible for you to wear a mask, not so that you don't get sick, but so that if you are sick and don't know it, you're less likely to spread it.
Wearing the mask typically doesn't mean that you spread no virus, but it does reduce the range and volume of virus you could put out into the world, making it less likely for someone else to come into contact with it.
Reducing likelihood is important.
"After 2008 recession suicide rates jumped by at least 20%. And that is just one factor out of many."
I would rather have people choosing to take their own life than people choosing to live be unable to because they got this virus. I do not care about suicide rate statistics. Bump up suicide hotlines and social services to try and minimize that effect as best they can, but if ten people taking their own lives saves one person willing to fight to live, then I'm all for that.
"You must understand that this money is not coming from reserves, but simply new green paper is being printed. It is not covered by anything and will directly translate into even more debt. "
You were the one just talking about suicide rates and the danger of a bad economy. Yeah, it drives up debt, and yeah, it would be nice if we had more of a cushion, if the Republicans had not driven us so far into debt before this started, but at the end of the day, "more debt" is still the better outcome than "the cost of not spending our way out of this." The US can sustain WAY more debt than even what we currently have, IF we put it to good use. Paying to mitigate the damage of this outbreak is a better use of that debt than a ton of other nonsense we've spent debt on over the past few decades.
"They tried that during Great Depression, where factories were manufacturing cars and those cars then went directly onto scrap yard, to keep things going. Did not work out that well."
That seems dumb. I would not pay businesses to do busywork, to make junk. I would either assign them to make things that we do need, like medical equipment, or I would just pay them to do nothing. Yeah, pay them to do nothing. He's some money to pay off your monthly expenses, so that you don't go bankrupt, but since your costs are lower than usual too, you don't have to keep the machines running or buy new materials, this should keep you afloat until it's time to move again.
"Except that US is not self-contained economy. Not to mention that this IV is full of nothing but saline. US has no reserves."
The US doesn't need reserves. It operates on a fiat currency which it controls. People are buying up treasury bonds like nobody's business. The US could run up tens of trillions of debt and we'd be fine. Obviously we shouldn't run up more than necessary, but in this case, it's necessary.
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@sjent
"Death toll of OCVID-19, with all the number fudging is closing on 200k(realistically its probably around 40-50k, if that). Death toll of flu, at any given year is between 300k and 650k. Worldwide."
I think you're missing the forest for the trees there. The flu is an endemic issue, it's already everywhere at any given time. CV is a novel outbreak, it started in one location and had to spread outwards from there, so it hasn't hit everywhere that it's going to hit yet. Numerous countries and regions have instituted historic lockdowns to slow the spread of CV, further reducing its impacts. You should not look at those death totals as a sign for relief, you should be concerned at how bad it is even though we're taking every measure possible to reduce it, and how much worse it would be if we just "let it happen."
"COVID-19 can bypass mucous membrane as easily as it can get into your thru nose. It can be transferred by touching infected surface or by coming in contact with airborne droplets."
Yes, but you're more likely to encounter the droplets by inhaling them than you are by just standing there and bumping into them. It's an active vs passive interaction. Again, we're talking odds here. And you can NOT get infected just by touching an infected surface, you need to touch that surface and then touch your eyes, nose, or mouth before disinfecting. You could technically get elbow-deep in a soup of CV and not get sick from it, so long as you kept it away from your airways and washed thoroughly afterwards. It is not bloodborne, it cannot pass through your skin, it needs to get directly into your lungs.
"I dont even know what to say on that. I thought this whole discussion was on how to minimize damage."
It is about minimizing damage. I can't be responsible for the choices of people who WANT to die. If I can save their life, I will, but if they are saying "you let that covid patient die or I'm going to cut my own throat," I choose the person who wants to live. If you tell me "course A will lead to more innocent people surviving this disease, but also lead to more people taking their own lives," then I will tell you, then that's the course we're taking, and we'll try to invest in suicide prevention as best we can, but ultimately it's their choice.
"Its not just Republicans. This has been going on for past 40+ years, under various administrations. Its US Government in general, as institution."
Don't pay attention to the presidents, pay attention to the congresses. If you track government spending and revenues over the decades, it's Republicans that tend to run up deficits. They tend to cut taxes to the bone while not cutting spending. Democrats do tend to raise spending some, but only on things that are actually worth spending on. If not for Republican priorities, the budget would be in a much healthier place, with less debt, and what debt we had would have gone to more useful projects.
"Fiat currency that is rapidly losing it extremely inflated worth, as many countries are weening themselves off dollar."
Nah. Remember how in 2008 Wall Street was "too big to fail?" The US is bigger. If the US "failed" it would devastate the global economy, and that will remain true for at least decades to come, and everyone knows that. Even much smaller countries are big enough that the global economy won't allow them to go under. It's a non-issue. National debt is a completely different substance than personal debt, and cannot be considered as if they are similar. It's like comparing plants to animals.
Here' some info about recent Treasuries action: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/07/treasury-yields-edge-higher-as-investors-hope-for-coronavirus-slowdown.html
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@sjent
"Question is, does stalling economy, that may lead to deaths of hundreds of thousands, worth to save maybe tens of thousands."
In this actual situation? Yes, because if we're dealing in hypotheticals, then we have to accept that we would not be "saving maybe tens of thousands," but "maybe saving millions," because that's the hypothetical high end on this, the "if we did nothing" end. You're looking at the end results of extreme countermeasures and saying "well that wasn't so bad," completely ignoring how much worse the data indicates it would have been without those extreme countermeasures. There is no rational argument that "the cure is worse than the disease" in THIS case.
"It always starts and ends with president. Federal budget is something that involves intricate back'n'forth between all branches of government."
Not really. Presidents typically send congress a budget proposal, sure. And if the Congress is friendly to him, then that's what might end up on his desk, but if congress is hostile to him, then it won't look anything like that, because the budget proposal has no legal power. Congress has way more direct control over what does and doesn't make it into the budget, all the president actually gets to do is either veto it or not, so at the end of the process, he very often doesn't get a lot of what he wants, and has to swallow a lot of what he doesn't if the congress is hostile to him.
Back to the point though, if you check the data, Republicans are MUCH more likely to run up deficits during periods of economic stability than Democrats are, while Democrats are much more likely to balance the budget.
"Obama printed huge amount of money and wasted it on completely irreverent feelgood crap."
Nope. Obama balanced the budget much more than Bush or Trump have done. The biggest spending blowouts from the Obama administration, which overshadowed the rest of it, was in the immediate aftermath of Bush's recession, where massive spending was needed to offset a much larger depression. That was a cure that prevented a larger disease too.
"And there is nobody capable, not to mention willing, to bail US out."
The US is. That's the point of large scale national governments, they are self-sustaining. They can't go bust. They don't need the same sorts of "bailout" that businesses or individuals need. They just refuse to die, and so it becomes. You just don't understand how global economics functions and are using overly simplified analogs.
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@sjent
"Have to ? I dont have to do anything of sorts."
Ok, perhaps I should have been more clear. You would have to if you wanted to claim to be making a rational and consistent position.
"In fact it seems that they are grossly overestimated, by the factor of 100 at least."
NO. That is the entire point!
The intention of those projections was not sto say "this is the amount of people that will DEFINITELY die, no matter what." The point of those projections was to say "this is what would happen if we just behaved normally and went about our lives". The fact that we've come in under those projects is not a sign that they were wrong, it's a sign that we did things right to avert that outcome. A common analogy that I've seen, and which mostly applies, is "oh, it looks like our fall has slowed down, I guess we can ditch these parachutes now." Yes, right now we are below those projections, but only BECAUSE we have been "behaving weirdly" in response to the virus. As soon as we start "behaving normally" again, we start heading back towards what those projections said would happen. It wouldn't be quite as bad, because we stalled out a bit of it, but it would be a lot worse than if we kept up the pressure.
"Many countries that do not have those countermeasures in place or have them in far milder state, also have fairly low infection and death numbers."
Different countries, different circumstances. Some countries just didn't have a lot of international travel in the first place. Some do have a lot of cases but don't have a lot of testing so it's not as apparent. Some WILL be as bad as the US, but it just hasn't hit yet. The other factor is that these outbreaks grow exponentially, not linearly, so if a country jumps on top of things immediately, they can keep things mellow, while if they catch things even a week later, it can spiral out of control, even if both are doing the exact same things once they get going. The California Bay Area, for example, jumped onto their outbreak faster than most, and all else being equal their rates are TINY compared ot most places that have had an outbreak.
But sure, maybe you know better than all the people who's job it is to understand these things, Mr. Dunning Kruger.
"In addition to that it is a well known fact that countries like US have policy that forces medical personnel to mark anyone who died with COVID-19 as of COVID-19. To greatly inflate numbers and justify those extreme countermeasures."
Lol.
No, wait, people are dying. This is no time for lols.
"Despite the fact that you yourself say that president can veto budget, you them state that president does not have much power over budget ? Do you know what logic is ?"
Because the veto is a binary. Presidents have tired line-item vetoing before and it was declared unconstitutional, so basically they have to take it or leave it, and at some point, that means they need to take it to keep things running. It can be politically disastrous if a President vetos an otherwise more or less ok budget that passed both houses of Congress. Yes, the veto power means that the budget can't be completely offensive to the President's goals, but also he has little power over adding specific things he wants or trimming things he does not, beyond what Congress chooses to offer him.
"Again, contradictions is same paragraph. So did Obama balance budget or did he overspend ?"
He balanced the budget. The deficit he inherited went down considerably during his term in office.
"Running up an enormous deficit and debt that made literally all presidents before him, combined, looking like extremely conservative spenders."
Almost all the deficit spending he did was in his first year, cleaning up the Bush recession. Most economists believe he should have spent more during those early years which would have gotten us out of the recession faster.
"Except that it is not. If US government is so "self-sustaining", then why it cant balance it budget for over 40 years ? Its the opposite of being self-sustained."
Because balancing the budget wasn't the goal, growth was, so instead of balancing the budget, they spent that money on growing the economy. Not always in the most wise ways possible, sometimes in extremely dumb ways like the Trump tax cuts, but at no point did they attempt to balance the budget outside of the Clinton administration. It is worth pointing out that the budget WAS balanced after Clinton until the Bush tax cuts and wars blew it out again. We hadn't yet recovered the entire national debt or anything, but we would have if he'd just left things alone for a decade or so.
"Greece is a perfect example of how one good hit can collapse this house of cards. "
No, Greece is an AWFUL example because they DON'T control their own fiscal policy. They are part of the EU, and their monetary system is linked to the Euro. This means that they CAN'T "print their way out" of a problem like the US can. If they were independent, then they could have coasted right through that crisis. Now I do believe in the EU, and think that ultimately they should continue to grow and improve it, but they need to do a better job of protecting their member states in situations like that. It's basically like if a US state went bankrupt, which can happen. Their options for handling that are much more limited than the entire US has.
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@sjent
"Riight, because there are only two positions - yours and the wrong one.
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There could be others, but the one you were making at the time was not one of those.
"Except that those "projections" were based on nothing."
They were based on scientific analysis. That's how projections work, you use the available data and plot out where past experience would indicate something will go. This is like when they predict the path of a hurricane, and there are multiple models that all point in the same general direction but you don't like their answers so you pencil in your own and claim "it's all based on nothing." https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/D9r2X8iagrE0Q70AO9Q2BiEqvqA=/0x0:2678x1785/1200x800/filters:focal(807x730:1235x1158)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65193692/1172289651.jpg.0.jpg
"There is no reason to believe that those projections had anything to do with reality to begin with."
Yes there is.
"Real numbers are unknown and effect that those measures had on virus are unknown as well. but more we learn about this virus, more it becomes clear that those projected numbers are nonsense."
No, again, the projected numbers were accurate, and remain accurate, IF we did nothing. Because we acted, it cut into those numbers. It's like if you have a crowd of 100 people, and a bus is barreling right for it, and you "project" that if the bus plows into that crowd at full speed then it will kill 35 people (I made that number up, but a scientist could arrive at a better calculation based on things like speed and momentum and fluid density and their result would be scientifically valid), then that would be the initial projection. Now, if that bus slowed down, causing it to impact the crowd with less force, allowing more people to get out of the way before it reached them, then far fewer people would die. That does not mean that those initial projections were wrong, just that the conditions that they were basing it on had changed.
"Now all of a sudden you are on board with idea that those things cant be estimated with any degree with accuracy. All while being convinced that those measures were effective in US."
I believe that they can be estimated accurately based on a given set of facts. "If we do nothing, X." "If we lock down, Y" "If we lock down this week, Z1," "If we lock down next week, Z2." Every country has their own circumstances, so every country needs to be predicted separately. Even individual states and counties need to be predicted separately, and you need to update those predictions based on how people change in response to the predictions. The virus doesn't change, it's behavior is the constant, but people are very flexible in reacting to that virus, so you always have to adapt the models as you go. The predictions are still important though as a way of letting people know where the current course will lead them.
"Define "tiny" and what are those "most places" ?"
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/11/56/04/19325186/21/420x0.jpg
"Closest Obama came to balanced budget was deficit of 442 billion in 2015. Only two people had it higher. Trump - that guy puts Obama to shame with his rabid spending. And George W Bush with 459 billion in 2008, and it was highest deficit when he was in office."
But Obama did reduce the deficit he inherited from Bush. I mean that's the thing, you can't just wave a wand and balance the budget, it's a giant ship that turns slowly. You can't just say "well we're going to stop spending any money now," because the entire country would implode. If you want to reduce the budget you need to do it slowly over time so that necessary services continue to operate. The changes Bush made made it impossible to balance the budget in only eight years, but Obama did bring the budget closer to balanced than where he found it. He made it better, not worse. Then Trump blew it up again.
"There was this thing called dot-com bubble, that went off like nuclear bomb in late 2000. It damage is comparable to that of 2008 recession(6.2 trillion for dot-com and 6 trillion for 2008), yet Bush did not go on a spending spree and his deficit remained fairly reasonable capping at 290 billion. Comparing to Obama 1.5 trillion it was pocket change."
One, the Bush tax cuts caused a long term deficit problem, not just a one-year deficit problem. A lot of the deficit in Obama's term would not have existed without thos Bush tax cuts being in place, but it's a lot harder to get tax raises passed than tax cuts. Two, Bush's policies led to the 2008 recession that blew up the economy during most of Obama's first term. Three, you don't seem to be factoring in Bush's $700 billion TARP program. Again, a president doesn't get to just decide how much the deficit should be in a given year, so year-on-year figures only tell part of the story. The bigger part is what structural changes they apply, and how those changes impact the next years and decades.
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@sjent
"You cant be seriously comparing predicting hurricanes with predicting spread of a virus. "
True, Hurricanes are much harder to predict. Way more variables.
"How stupid do you need to be to push this narrative ? Whole notion of projections is that they are just a guess. Claiming that they are accurate, without having any evidence to support this claim, is nonsense."
If they were just guesses, then they wouldn't be projections. Projections are based on data analysis, that "based on what we know now about this virus, and based on what other, similar viruses have done under similar situations, the current virus is likely to do X." They aren't just pulled out of thin air, they are calculations based on prior trends, the same as hurricane predictive models. The only real difference is that while hurricanes are completely outside of human control to modify, viral projections can be greatly impacted by human interaction with them. The initial models were based on expectations of "if no changes are made to confront this virus," and now, since drastic efforts were made to confront it, the outcomes have shifted relative to the projections. It's like if you have a car driving towards a wall, you can calculate "I project that in ten seconds we will hit that wall with a force of X Newtons," but then if someone sees that, and hits the brakes, the projection is no longer accurate, the car might not hit that wall, or hit with less force. That does not mean that the projection was wrong, just that you're trying to insist upon it a goal that it never had.
"In this case, there is no way to predict how many people will die."
Sure you can. Not 1:1, obviously, but you can get a ballpark figure. You can estimate the force at which the first people would get hit. You could project how quickly the bus would slow down and how much force would be inflicted on people behind them. You could then take that force data, and using prior data collected on what X amount of blunt force does to a human body, and you could come up with a reasonable estimate of how many people would die from such a collision. Let's say that figure was 6. Would the actual result be 6? Probably not, but it'd likely be within the 3-9 range. It wouldn't likely be "none" and wouldn't likely be "20" either, assuming the methodology was reasonable.
". If bus were to slow down, if would still hit with force, due to it mass, that would kill most people in it direct path, but as it would start weer off and tumble, it would have far greater path of destruction, in addition to that it would be sending everything it hits flying in different directions, resulting in numerous impacts all around it."
A bus is not a bullet, it will not "tumble" upon impact with some humans, especially at low speeds. Humans aren't likely to even get it to tip over, much less roll.
"Did you miss that little line on this chart that says "US average" ? Bay area is not tiny compared to most places, its just that few places are far above average."
One, the Bay Area is still way below that average. If that were all there was to the story, their result would still have been significant. Two, the US average takes into account tons of places that have had few to no cases, because they are too far separated from outbreak locations. They will likely get hit harder at a later date. Remember that this is a virus, it grows exponentially from outbreak sites, it doesn't just spontaneously grow linear everywhere at once. Areas with little to no exposure are likely to remain with little or no cases for long stretches of time, and are less likely to ever get that bad.
The Bay Area is a "likely outbreak location" given its significant international exposure, climate, and population density. There's every reason to believe that they would have been one of those "far above average" locations if nothing had occurred to alter their trajectory from the "natural" state. That it kept the curve low should be seen as an anomaly to any rational observer. If you disagree that the standard social distancing/lockdown methods are responsible for that outcome, you should at least have an alternate theory beyond "just because."
Btw, this is a nice short video about how some of the more recent visual aid graphs functions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3Mlj3MQ_Q
It explains why certain comparisons may seem misleading.
"Bush, total deficit over 8 years - 3.293 trillion. Obama, total deficit over 8 years - 6.781 trillion."
I feel the need to repeat, the deficit is not just the amount spent during a given year, it is STRUCTURAL. A President cannot EVER say "I will just decide to spend X money this year." That's not how the Federal budget works. A President is obligated by decisions made by previous administrations that the US will spend X amount of dollars over the next 5, 10, 20 years. Untangling that is a lot of work. When Obama took office, the US was obligated to spend trillions more over his administration, and if he'd done nothing at all, then that's what would have happened. Over his tenure, he reduced that amount each year. What is important to track is what structural changes they make to the budget, what revenues they add or remove, what costs they add or remove, and by that mesure, Obama cut costs to the federal budget over his tenure.
"Only ? Hitler rebuild Germany in 5 years. Into power that swept over most of the Europe. Granted Germany was neck-deep in debts, but at least he had something to show for it."
I would prefer not following Hitler's example.
"Did you knew that due to US debt-oriented economy it experience financial crashes about every 15 years ?"
These crashes have nothing to do with government spending, they have to do with Republican policies of low Wall Street regulation. Democrats have put forth numerous proposals to fix this, but can't get it past Senate Republicans.
"I would prefer that government would not be involved in such activities in general."
I would prefer ti too, except when it is needed, in which case they need to do it to prevent even worse alternatives. I mean ideally we would be better regulating big business so that they can't get themselves into such precarious positions in the first place, but if they are about to tumble over and crush the economy, then it's better for the government to bail them out (ideally with enough strings attached to prevent it happening again later), than to just allow the crash to happen and drag the economy out of the rubble.
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@sjent
"When it comes to viruses, it is impossible to predict their emergence or how they will evolve."
No more impossible than hurricanes, so long as you don't factor human behavior into it, which is why the predictive models were based on :if we did nothing," and why they deviated significantly when we "didn't do nothing," and will go back to the nightmare scenarios if we "stop doing anything."
"True. Except that predictions for COVID-19 could only be made based on similar viruses, like same SARS, as i have mentioned previously."
And also based on how they acted in China early in this, and updated to reflect how they have behaved around the world since.
"As it is done intentionally to promote panic."
To what purpose? Are the scientists super villains to you? In it for the lulz?
"Hurricanes generally follow same pattern, with little deviations, while virus can mutate and everything goes out the window. We cant even accurately predict it spread."
Viruses don't mutate in ways that would make them terribly unpredictable, any more than minor fluctuations can send a hurricane left when it might have gone right and it ends up thousands of miles off course. Viruses mutate over a period of years, and that typically only results in a change to how well immunized people who already had it are. That's irrelevant to the current situation. Predictive models have nothing to do with such mutations, they are based on evaluating the transmission and lethality rates of the existing virus, and then extrapolating from there, and so far the predictive models have been accurate, so long as nothing was changed about the target location. Predict the course of a bowling ball and how many pins it'll knock down, fine, but then remove several of those pins from play before the ball reaches them, and the result will be entirely different, that does not mean that the prediction was wrong.
"This example is completely rubbish, as aside of the fact that "car" exists we know very little about it.We dont know it size, speed, composition, load, mass, etc. Very little of relevant data is available."
In my example I'm assuming that we know the physical properties of the car and the road surface well enough to make accurate predictions. That's part of the initial premise. Likewise, when the Covid predictions were made, they were based off of data out of Wuhan, and the data being used has held up under subsequent investigations. It does have the infection rate the models were based on, it does have the lethality rate the models were based on, and the models remain accurate in situations where social distancing was not applied and cases were emergent.
"You clearly do not understand physics. Even slow-moving object can flip if it hits obstacle under right conditions. For as long as there is enough force and a proper vector."
There would never be enough "force" or "vector" in a crowd of people to flip a slow-moving bus. The only way that a bus would flip like that is if there were something significantly sturdier and smoother than a mass of people, like an actual ramp, applied to only one corner. People will just slow it down.
"Its not a movie or game where you can just mow down zombies in hundreds."
But neither is it a movie of a video game in which any random collision results in the vehicle doing a backflip (which in movies typically requires springs, mounted explosives, or cables).
"And... ? Majority of areas are below that average, as few areas are far above it. This is how averaging works."
Keep reading. . . It is way below the average AND it has all the conditions that would put it ABOVE that average if they were not behaving effectively. If some tiny town in the middle of nowhere is below the average, that is no surprise, there are plenty of reasons why no outbreak would occur there. When a major, international city with known outbreaks is way below the average, there is a reason for that beyond random chance. If you cannot accept that very simple premise then I cannot accept that you are acting in good faith.
"And it has. For three months. If you think that it will take it a year to reach it peak infection rate, then you are a moron."
Again, depends on social distancing. If we'd done nothing, it would have reached its peak in most places over the previous and following months. Because of social distancing, the peak has flattened out for now, but is likely to plateau for many months to come. If we stop social distancing, we might reach that peak within the next couple months again, but, again, at much higher infection and fatality rates.
"Simple fact is that most people already got it and got thru it without even noticing it."
In some places, yes. In the US as a whole, you must be joking. If you actually believe that to be the case, then I am sad for you. you have a rough year ahead of you.
"No, there is not. Places with significant international exposure, population density and climate are dime a dozen. Bay Area is not some unique hub for travel, all roads do not lead to SF."
That's my point. It's not unique. It has a similar profile to major cities like LA, NYC, DC, NO, Chicago, Seattle, etc.,*and yet* it has maintained a MUCH lower Infection rate. It is WAY below the US average, and while obviously large portions of the US would be below that average, common sense would indicated that the low end of that average would be made up of communities with smaller, more isolated communities that have has few incoming cases. They aren't "below the average for a major metropolitan area," they are "below the average that includes the middle of Kansas." It's also worth keeping in mind that this is based on imperfect testing. The Bay Area has had more testing than most areas, so what cases they do have, included on that graph, would more accurately reflect the reality of their situation, whereas a lot of other communities "below the average" have seen little to no actual testing, so their actual rates, not reflected on that chart, would trend significantly higher.
"That study from Stanford, where they tested people and a huge amount of people were found to already having antibodies for virus, without actually being officially infected, kinda shows how little we know about this virus. Or how (in)effective those "counter-measures" are."
I think you misunderstand what is happening there. Those people had been infected, they just did not display symptoms. That's one of the things that makes this virus so dangerous, that people can "look fine" but still be contagious. Ebola, by contrast, is a lot less risky as a pandemic, since if you have enough Ebola going on to be infectious, you look like a hot mess and are easily contained.
"No, hes not. In fact every next president tends to trash a lot of what previous president started. Obama joined Paris Agreement, Trump said "fuck that". Dances around taxes is a goof example as well - democrat rises them, republicans slash them."
They can try to change things, but typically that takes an act of Congress, and some things are easier to manage than others. Again, the President can't just decide to ignore previous budgets, they can only take action to change them. In many cases, backing out of a previous deal costs more than staying in it.
"Here we go again. Every president, on both sides, has given ground and helped banksters. Yet some morons still try to pile it all on Republicans."
Because when it happens during a Democratic president, he only did it because Republicans in Congress held major priorities hostage if he didn't agree to those changes, like when they try to shut down the government unless they get their way. It's always the Republicans that get the ball rolling, all Democrats have ever been guilty of is not stopping them when something more immediate was needed.
"No. Period. Once government gets involved, it will always go downhill. At first it may seem good, but further it goes, worse it will get."
Lol, government is the only hope we have against the corporations. They may not be perfect, but they're all we've got. Even you agree with that, noting that government hasn't done enough to thwart the big bangs and Wall Street. Well, without any government intervention, there would be even less standing in their way.
"No. Again. This mindset is exactly what causes those problems. At first those businesses are doing whatever they want. and avoid paying taxes. But when things get hard, they just expect taxpayers to bail them out. It always seem to go in one direction."
I agree, but it's still better to bail them out than to allow them to collapse, in some cases, at least. Now that doesn't mean that you should let them just go back to business as usual, there should be iron strings attached to those bailouts to limit their ability to do it all again. The Democrats imposed some of those onto the most recent bailouts, and wanted to impose more, but the Republicans fought them on it tooth and nail, and nothing could get passed without passing the Senate.
I have zero sympathy for the businesses themselves, but a lot of innocent people would get caught in the crossfire if they were just allowed to implode, and the rich people who build, invest in, and run those businesses would walk away with millions either way, so allowing the business to die would not be punishing them in any practical way.
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@CineSoar I'm not investing in one of these companies or anything, I'm just saying that IF this works as claimed, then it MIGHT have practical applications. As for the energy cost of generating that green light, I was thinking that a more efficient method would be to take white light from the sun, and use a specific prism to split off the wavelength needed for this process, while deflecting all the other light in a different direction. Then you use this green light to evaporate water, and the other light is used to power some different process, such as photovoltaic, or solar heating, or just growing plants perhaps, whatever could be efficiently housed in the same facility. The best solutions are ones where you figure out how to make the most out of ever "waste" aspect.
Also, I don't believe that the claim was that you needed only this very specific wavelength to see any benefit, I believe they were claiming that this was the most efficient form of their process, but I think you would still see some gains the closer and closer you got to it, even if you didn't check every box.
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@CineSoar Look, again, neither of us are in any position to debate whether it works as claimed or not. Either it does or it doesn't, we can't know that from here. If it doesn't, then any further point is moot. If it does, then there can be discussions about how it might be used. As I said, I'm not running out to spend money on this idea, and don't think anyone should, that IS "wait and see."
As to the economic feasibility of a project like you describe there, I could see it maybe working out. It would use less space per gallon of water processed than "just pools" and would produce more energy as well. It would be taking the incoming sunlight and putting it all to use in the most efficient ways possible, so gaining the maximum benefit. Major operations are often undertaken just to get an added 5-10% efficiency gain, so 300-400% seems massive if you can achieve it. And I would think that things like prisms, while a potentially significant up front cost, should at least be low maintenance.
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