I agree that they will just find a work around but I think it still helps. The more of an effort they need to party the less it will happen. The city can just keep adding problems to the party until it becomes too much of a hassle. They could hire parking enforcers for night shifts and when a party happens start towing cars not parked properly. They can set up police road blocks and annoy people and hassle them. I’m not very creative but I’m sure there are enough ways a city can mess with you to deter a party. They can do property assessments and city could argue due to popularity this property is worth even more and tax them. Just sitting idle certainly will not deter them though.
I’m sure the notoriety that comes from hosting a party so epic the mayor holds a news conference about it will lead to a dramatic uptick in rule-following.
I think you underestimate American willingness to tell authority figures to go fuck themselves.
I don't have a better way of phrasing that.
This is, perhaps, both the best and worst part of our culture.
On the one hand, it gives you rebels that challenge the status quo. That don't take "no" or "that's impossible" for an answer.
On the other hand, it gives you a population that would slice off their own noses if the government told them that having one was mandatory.
I think our best course of action would have been to just... ask.
Across the board.
Republicans and Democrats, carnivores and vegetarians, people that understand that the toilet paper needs to go over the top of the roll and inhuman monsters bent on the destruction of all that is good in the world... all of them needed to agree that Masks Probably Couldn't Hurt And We Should Just Wear The Damn Things.
Do everybody a solid, and wear a mask. No, we won't fine you, or shoot you.
There's nothing to rebel against when people just sort of shrug and go "okay, whatever".
Also, work overtime to make the masks cool.
I think we'd have a higher rate of mask use with the Carrot and the Meh, as opposed to just the Stick.
I admire your ability to see the silver lining. I see it as selfishness to the point of toxicity.
I think the ship has sailed on asking people to wear masks. These people--whether they have a borderline ODD tendency to "question authority" and "stick it to the man" for the sake of "personal freedom" (read: selfish masquerading as principled), or if they just can't care about how their choices affect other people anymore because we are n months into a pandemic with no end in sight--have made their choice.
They are not willing to do the bare minimum such as wear a mask or not attend giant parties. I have to say, as far as measures to slow the spread go, these two requirements are incredibly fucking easy to abide by.
So I say shut the power to their party so it sucks, and make it harder for them to spread the virus even faster. Fines based on a percentage of income would be better.
The late Randy Pausch, in his Last Lecture[1] at Carnegie Mellon University, offered up... well, a lot of great advice, but the piece that jumped into my mind was: "It’s very important to know when you’re in a pissing match. And it’s very important to get out of it as quickly as possible."
This thing looks awfully like a pissing match, and it's not just with the one homeowner in Hollywood -- it's with every person that feels the same way.
I would lay good money the cardinality of that set is not a small number.
Doesn't matter whether or not it is a pissing match. It looks like one.
Were I running the state, I'd rather spend my time and energy on doing things that would actually Get People To Wear Masks, as opposed to another round of Pissing Match: San Andreas.
Yup it does look like a pissing match.
Its not hard to get around shutting off the power. Its not hard to have secret parties.
People have been using illegal drugs for decades, despite the massive punishment that comes with getting caught - punishment that is far worse than illegally shutting off power.
So why would this actual work?
It's actually a little easier to notice and cut off power to a large conspicuous party than it is to notice drug deals are going down to do busts. It's not like all the dealers are screaming YEAH WE LIKE METH and dancing under a stream of cocaine with 20 other people clapping their hands while Billy does a kegstand.
And the action taken to shut down someone's power is to call the power company and tell them to do some clicky clacks on a keyboard.
So definitely an apples and oranges comparison. That said, it probably would be a pissing match ultimately as that person said.
Speaking as somebody who sees friends posting party footage on Instagram Stories, I would not be so confident. There are many places to host parties. With the mayor giving them attention, people will be afraid they are missing out.
That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. We are past that. And it’s completely besides the point—-it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.
If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.
> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.
People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.
> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.
Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.
Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.
Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
I think you are arguing against a man made out of straw. People do not want to live like this, regardless of economics or theory. You can shout argument after argument; it won’t change that more and more people are going to mingle.
> People do not want to live like this, regardless of economics or theory.
That's fine. People are going to do what they're going to do. I'm not quite willing to let them do it behind nonsense arguments and justifications though.
If someone's unwilling to give up going to the gym, so be it. When they couch it (as some have here) as them actually doing it for the benefit of everyone else by helping the economy, I'm going to loudly and vehemently call bullshit.
If they say they just aren't willing to change and don't care about any of the data, well as long as they actually know the data, then I'll have nothing more to discuss with them.
What I'm saying is that if someone shows they are completely unwilling to either look at the facts, or just don't care that their actions have such an outsized negative impact, what can I do? They are literally holding everyone else hostage because they don't want to change. That's not negotiation, and the only "policy" that will work for them is "whatever they want".
That said, I don't think this is how people are. I think people are living in a deep cognitive dissonance and refusing to see the facts, not acknowledging them and saying they don't care.
That's not a policy problem, that a problem of educating people that do not want to be educated. Should the rest of the populace just shift our views away from reality so people that don't want to face it can get a better deal out of some policy? That won't lead to an acceptable outcome either, when the policy in question is about public safety.
To clarify, your original argument was made in bad faith. You don't like sacrificing for the greater good, so you'll make arguments to appear substantive, but really, you want to 'mingle'.
The original idea was that there was no way that policy was being informed by the trade-off described by parent, so it was a moot point. I think I was not clear enough.
Social activities are most certainly trivial when compared to a pandemic. Right now my kid’s school is starting remote only primarily because teenagers and early 20’s somethings couldn’t stop going to parties over the summer. Actions have consequences.
I think we see the consequences of a plan that is idealistic and unrealistic. I don’t believe any amount of moral handwringing and shouting is going to make it work.
And we'll all be paying for reduced quality of education of these kids for the rest of our lives. In my son's school, the only requirement to get an "A" last semester was to turn in _any homework at all_, doesn't matter if it's complete or correct - nobody checked. There are now a lot of "A" students.
It’s more like somebody else’s house is on fire, I thought my taxes paid for firefighters, but it turns out those firefighters never bothered to purchase firefighting equipment, so you’re forcing me to spend months putting out other people’s fires using cups of water from my own kitchen while firefighters shout on TV that this is the only possible way things can be.
I think a more accurate analogy is "there's a wildfire and firefighters asked you to conserve water so they can fight it, but some people decided to run their taps 24/7 out of spite and now there's rationing"
I think this is closer, but perhaps needs a slight change. I don't think it's out of spite; it's not like people are taking _more_ risk AFAICT. So maybe something like:
"there's a wildfire and firefighters asked you to limit water use to only drinking water, but some people decided to keep taking long showers, washing dishes, etc"
While on paper that analogy is sound, I feel in practice the asks being made are more extreme and disruptive than short-term water conservation. Others may disagree.
Yeah, and again, the issue isn't that your house is on fire or that there's a wildfire, it's that there's a global pandemic that in absence of any "conservation" measures on your part displays a superlinear growth path - so, yes, the asks being made are much more disruptive, because the event that's occurring is much more dangerous.
You know, your house being on fire doesn't necessarily mean it's going to burn down. Quick response from firefighters can really do a lot to reduce the amount of long-term damage. Sure, you'll have some water damage to deal with, but that's manageable too.
Of course, if you just arse around in the house and don't get out of the goddamn way of the firefighters, it's gonna be a hell of a lot harder to put out the fire and I imagine there's gonna be a lot more damage before all's said and done.
The lock downs were premised upon preventing hospital systems from being overwhelmed. We accomplished that relatively easily, at least in the United States. However, politicians and bureaucrats, unwilling to let a good crisis go to waste, have moved the goalposts so much that now the unspoken policy seems to be that a single infection/death is anathema and that everything should be done to prevent it.
I don't remember giving my elected officials the authority to pursue such extreme policies, especially based on incomplete science. Scientists didn't realize the virus mutated until months after the mutated version was the predominantly spreading version. They waffled on masks and even know there's evidence to suggest that masks can cause more harm because people do not use them properly (they are not washed enough/at all, they are constantly fiddled with (i.e., people touch their face), etc.). Now the latest excuse to extend the lock downs indefinitely is maybe, just maybe a C-19 infection may have long-term negative health externalities.
Mind you, this is all being pushed by the privileged few who have home offices with webcams and fast Internet, food and groceries delivered on a whim, and a Peleton in their home gym. The whole situation is preposterous; it's like we're living in a Monty Python skit.
Your views seem completely detached from reality. The only reason hospital systems were not overwhelmed was due to the continued lockdown + social distancing policies. Every state that went ahead and tried to ignore reality and open up for business rapidly found itself facing the very same issue again with hospitals being near full and in some cases having to turn away patients.
So no, the lockdown isn't some moving goalpost made by politicians gone wild. It is an unfortunate necessity given the abject failure of the federal administration and many states in managing a very serious public health crisis.
^ that was more sensationalism after the death rate started to flatten. The ICU rate then declined after following the death rate. AZ never locked down like CA did.
And pretty much any way you slice it, opening up prematurely resulted in a huge ballooning of cases, deaths and hospital/ICU bed utilization by late June, early July. Perhaps you should look to getting your news from more reliable sources than some dude on twitter with a clear agenda...
It also doesn't help when the Governor of TX was actively hiding data related to hospital bed availability, etc to mask the complete failure of his head-in-the-sand approach to leadership in the time of a major public health emergency [1]
This is not categorically true. E.g., South Dakota is doing fine and never locked down. Same with Wyoming.
Personally, I think the federal administration has done a fine job--most, if not all, of dealing with this situation should be up to the states, not the feds.
Not sure that those states are "doing fine". Per capita, they have a much higher number of cases and the number of cases are also rising in comparison with states like NY and NJ that had things worse but were aggressive in handling the situation [1].
I mean those states are nowhere near the front lines of where COVID would first strike or spread, but the complete apathy to the threat of COVID is going to have consequences. The numbers are already beginning to show that.
> However, politicians and bureaucrats, unwilling to let a good crisis go to waste, have moved the goalposts so much that now the unspoken policy seems to be that a single infection/death is anathema and that everything should be done to prevent it.
Why do you think politicians want to shut things down?
What worldview do you ascribe to people where the view is "wow, this is a great chance to kill off people going to bars and bankrupt our city/state, I've always wanted to do that!"???
It's not strictly because "they want the opposite of what the other guy wants", it's more to drive enough of working class to such desperation that any form of UBI will be widely demanded and then celebrated.
There's no Trump and dem opposition in the rest of the world, yet lockdowns have still been applied. US internal politics really is not the only reason why things happen.
I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about. Preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed was not the only purpose of the lockdowns. The lockdowns have not continued indefinitely. A single infection/death is not anathema and nobody is doing everything to prevent it no matter the cost. If that were true then why has every stay-at-home order been lifted?
While you raise a good point, I question the wisdom of relying solely on hastily devised rules and accompanying sloganeering to solve such issues.
I understand the pandemic is an emergency, but it was predictable. If we got caught with our pants down, we got caught with our pants down. Personally I think it’s time to put the hysteria aside and start discussing the longer-term view.
To amplify this, while I appreciate the passion some people have for community health, there has been a pattern of bald-faced lying that is unsustainable and potentially counterproductive. I can see somebody going to the gym and not feeling bad about it for that reason alone.
As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview.
Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.
Lives are at stake here, so the "Stay the fuck home" crowd, as you put it, has a right to express feelings that may be stronger than "educational and pleading."
You might feel the stakes are higher than other people, just like there are people who probably elevate issues like, say, gun control to a similar level of urgency. That's the whole basis for discourse in a society.
If it was truly that urgent I would hope the "stay home" crowd could act pragmatically by taking a more receptive tone. That's belied by a truly frightening undertone of violence that I see simmering underneath the messaging, e.g. "Can't we just throw all the anti-maskers in prison?"
But that's precisely the problem. While you may think this way, someone else may not. So when you try to convince that person from an assumption that they agree with you on the importance of the premise, you fall flat.
Lives are at stake for every single large scale event or decision. McDonalds changing the price of their fries, in either direction, has lives at stake.
If you can't calmly and dispassionately discuss "lives at stake" situations you have no business in any conversation of importance.
Interestingly. Many have been clamly and dispassionately discussing a "lives at stake" situation called Climate Change and there hasn't been much meaningful action.
Also, i find this rebuttal interesting. Why do humans have to be dispassionate? We are humans. Getting rid of the passion really seems dehumanising.
I think few are willing to sustain a COVID-free lifestyle indefinitely. Using induction some people probably conclude that they might as well not bother.
I see the reasoning and don’t think the ethics of our pandemic behaviors have been fully discussed.
