Monday, July 27, 2020

I guess I'm taking on Mike Rowe today.

Mike Rowe Explains That "Reality" Is Going To Win Against COVID Fearmongering.

"Fact is, we the people can accept almost anything if we’re given the facts, and enough time to get evaluate the risk and make our own decisions. Last year in this country, there were six million traffic accidents and 36,000 fatalities. Tragic, for sure. But imagine for a moment if no one had ever died from a car accident. Imagine if this year, America endured six million traffic accidents and 36,000 fatalities...for the first time ever. Now, imagine if these accidents and fatalities - over 16,000 and 90 per day respectively - imagine if they were reported upon like every new incidence of COVID. What would that do to our willingness to drive? For a while, I suspect it would keep us all off the roads, right? I mean, six million accidents out of the blue is a lot to process, and 36,000 deaths is scary – especially if you don’t know how high that number could get. It would take us a while to access the risk, before we blindly hopped into our cars again. Eventually though - after getting some context and perspective - we'd be able to evaluate the relative danger of operating a motor vehicle. Then, we could decide for ourselves when to drive, where to drive, and how much to drive. And so we do." (emphasis ZH)

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Before I start - I want to restate that I have never advocated the lockdowns. I only advocate the ~ability~ to lockdown. I think you should still be able to move freely, but reducing the amount of people in circulation at any one time is obviously preferred. If we wouldn't have been put on blanket lockdown, companies would not have allowed their people to work from home en-mass reducing the ability to transmit to others.

That said - I think Mikes comparison is kinda crazy. Road fatalities are ALREADY reported like Covid fatalities. It's called the news. Everyone knows about it because it is fairly rare. California only has roughly 3,500 traffic fatalities a year. If there is a traffic fatality in my city you can bet everyone knows about it. You can usually count those on one hand in any given year. A death is a death and are given equal attention. Minimizing deaths used to be a thing. Finding out about Covid deaths are actually slight harder because of hippa. And so many people are dying that no one really cares anymore.

If we started getting traffic fatalities like that - everyone's balls would be one fire, and they would be working to make it stop! Everyone would be horrified. I spent the past five years (at least) attending NITSA conferences where they were aghast at the number of traffic fatalities. Last year that mattered. Sure some of this was marketing hype, but it wasn't only them. A whole industry grew up around that. All of these sensors on cars are made to make people stop dying!

The best most recent example I can think of is the - Takata airbag recall of two years ago, which only killed 24 people WORLD WIDE. Twenty four people. Yet every car in America made in the last 10 years was recalled. No one knows exactly how much the recall will eventually cost but this site claims 25 BILLION. They could have given everyone who died one BILLION dollars and still gotten off cheap. Now all of a sudden we are like - yeah... 40 thousand traffic deaths no big wooP There is a lot of revisionist history going on right now.

It's not really fair to compare car crashes to the same way we freaked about about Covid. To think we would stop driving is ridiculous. Sometimes in a car accident ~you~ die, but sometimes you kill others. Sometimes you just run over a pedestrian. Those are included in the traffic fatality numbers. So.... your overall risk of death is not the same. And..... when you kill others - you have a moral obligation to care in the form of money if nothing else. Unlike Covid.

You don't just get to kill people and say oh whoopsie! You're bad. You should have stayed home.

Additionally, the US had the LUXURY in getting advance notice unlike the 1918 flu. We should be thanking our lucky stars there is any sort of mitigation like social distancing. We will never know what the numbers would have been without that. But people will go on to say that everyone overreacted. We are lucky to have treatments, but even WITH treatment - we are losing 150,000 people. If there were not treatments, again - who knows what the number would be.

I would just like to go on to say that my city is now becoming sort of hot. It's been here for months with less than 200 cases. We have had one death. But the city next to me just popped up with two deaths. They didn't live there, they worked there. Restaurants are popping up and down with workers being infected and needing to close.

My city has been pretty hot and heavy with the Jenny Mcarthys who think this is a hoax. But after the recent deaths suddenly everybody is silent. When it is THIS close - it focuses the MIND.  And you can't just write them off as old people who would have died anyway. I guess I'm really bothered by this mindset.

Last year we were celebrating people living to 116 fairly regularly. A modern medical marvel. And now 70 year olds would have died soon anyway. It's just bothersome.

I do agree with Mike that reality is going to win. Just not in the way he thinks. People are lazy by nature and this virus takes diligence.

4 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, July 28, 2020 11:00:00 PM

    Mike Rowe missed something that takes a while to understand, and if you're not exposed to events in a sort of "light absorbing colored pill" kind of way, you might not ever think about this at all ...

    Here's what Mike Rowe doesn't get: being reasonable sounding is not the same as being reasonable is not the same as being rational is not the same as being right.

    People mistake points on this axis of accuracy in words because they are essentially lazy and apply a genetic coding-style algorithm to information pattern processing.

    This means that if all of their preferred information receptors get some nice belly rubs and their inner cats get a snack, everything resembling criticality tends to get switched off.

    This is not about reality eventually winning the day.

    This is about good old-fashioned fatalism, especially whether it's worth it to many people to worry about what appear to be outlier risks.

    Give up, says the stance of old-fashioned fatalism, you're going to get this anyway because everyone gets coronaviruses eventually!

    PANIC NOW AND AVOID THE RUSH! :-)

    While I'm stuck inside, what am I doing?

    I'm looking at public cameras across the region, because it's not like I can go anywhere for a while.

    Now I understand why I'm stuck here: down in Bellinzona and the area around it in Ticino, there are people who have survived the mess there who are enjoying life in little cafes where they aren't concerned very much about "social distancing".

    Some towns are still locked up with the public squares full of police and traffic barriers, while others are open for something resembling business as it used to be before The Rona Crazy.

    Those people doing the cafe stuff can only do that if they're relatively certain that outside risks (including me) are being monitored so they can feel relatively safe about going back to what they were doing.

    Keep in mind that Ticino at first made New York look safe.

    And so from that perspective, I don't mind this so much.

    Besides, my delivery people apparently are used to dropping-and-dashing with everything from groceries to take-out meals, and so this hiding behind a door for now doesn't seem highly anti-social. :-)

    BTW, I just figured out what captchas remind me of ...

    Japanese tourists in the 1960s through 1980s taking pictures of all sorts of odd public utility crap. :-)

    MOAR TRAFFIC LIGHTS PLEAZE!!! :-)

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  2. I do think that media driven fear has done way more damage than the virus itself. And it'll continue to do so. Numbers keep changing, how to count the numbers keeps changing, instructions for keeping safe keep changing (and with a remarkable lack of proof of how the change is for the better in many cases). And otherwise reasonable people just keep soaking in the panic without actually LOOKING at what they're being shown. Yes, its a nasty virus, and yes precautions need to be taken to keep the vulnerable safe. But this mad screaming panic was not and is not the solution that's actually going to fix it. And in the mean time, by panicking, we've fucked over the country so badly I'm pretty sure its not going to be fixable any time soon, and I KNOW its only going to continue to get worse.

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  3. "Besides, my delivery people apparently are used to dropping-and-dashing with everything from groceries to take-out meals, and so this hiding behind a door for now doesn't seem highly anti-social. :-)"

    I've done the contactless delivery a couple of times. I sort of love it in a way. Not because I'm freaked out, but because I hadn't showered or looked presentable. And yes - I do care what delivery drivers think of me for that two seconds they are collecting payment and dropping off food. :P

    "Those people doing the cafe stuff can only do that if they're relatively certain that outside risks (including me) are being monitored so they can feel relatively safe about going back to what they were doing."

    Oh... I don't know. Maybe they are out because they are tired of cooking. I have eaten out from a restaurant every single weekend of the pandemic. Truck picnics, outside dining. Turns out recreating all your favorite dishes is quite a bit of work and we need a break. Also selfishly - I want them to survive so they will keep cooking for me. My favorite ramen place in Fremont I was tipping 100 % for the first couple fo months. Not because I am selfless - because I want them to be there when this is over. I don't want to learn to make ramen.

    I hit my favorite in town chicken place twice the week before and they got hit with the virus. Now closed. I also leave every place I go more disinfected than when I went. I will wipe down a ~whole~ table with alcohol swabs.

    From one nihilist to another fatalist - I didn't think I cared either. Then I decided - I didn't work this hard to hand over all my shit to my family. It would just be like it for them to do nothing their whole lives and then wind up with all of my shit Scott free. FUCK THAT.

    "But this mad screaming panic was not and is not the solution that's actually going to fix it. And in the mean time, by panicking, we've fucked over the country so badly I'm pretty sure its not going to be fixable any time soon, and I KNOW its only going to continue to get worse."

    Well.... what is the solution that is going to fix it then? Everybody keeps talking about an exit strategy. There is no exit strategy. We are simply buying time. And the quicker people accept that - the better. We don't know how long this will take. It normally takes years for vaccines.

    You can blame the media as much as you want - but the President isn't trying to push through legislation to prevent COVID litigation for no reason. Baby - you know that people are going to sue the shit out of any business where they get sick. I know you know that. You can't just leave open the economy and leave those businesses vulnerable to that. It's WORSE than shutting down. In a perfect world everything would be...... perfect. But it's not.

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  4. Capital of Texas RefugeeWednesday, July 29, 2020 4:06:00 PM

    "I didn't work this hard to hand over all my shit to my family."

    Not that the US Constitution has many teeth to it anymore, but according to the 14th Amendment, there's still the legality of my residence in Florida.

    And so my will filed with the probate court in Florida that disowns the worst of them continues to be in effect.

    There are better and nicer people in the world to get my stuff.

    "Maybe they are out because they are tired of cooking."

    Yes, but there's take-out for that.

    What I saw was people settling in for "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" out on the piazza with close tables and prolonged exposure to other people.

    One town in Ticino apparently ceased to give a shit.

    Yeah, I know, it's supposed to be Tessin but it's Ticino in Italiano svizzero, and many years ago I almost moved to Bellinzona.

    Oh, haha ... yeah, Seattle references, had to sneak in a reference to "The Stranger" again at some point I guess.

    "Everybody keeps talking about an exit strategy. There is no exit strategy."

    Oh, but there is a strategy, the "No Exit" strategy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

    "Ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril: l'enfer, c'est les Autres."

    Or while it's French Literature Heure des Temps, perhaps we should be quoting from Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"?

    Bitches, I want more carrots, Estragon's been holding out. :-)

    Enjoy the instruments of darkness.

    "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même change." :-)

    Ruth: "But this mad screaming panic was not and is not the solution that's actually going to fix it."

    Most people don't actually do something even resembling thinking because it's an expensive use of resources.

    Ever considered how much additional caloric intake you need per day just to keep your mind from switching off and processing data according to that genetic pattern matching algorithm I mentioned?

    Depending on the person, it may involve as much as an additional thousand big-C Calories per day (or kcals to the people around here), which means that it not only costs energy but also a pretty good bit of money.

    And so most people want "solutions" that don't require them to think and to have to pay attention because that means they'll actually have to work for the results, and they've typically proceeded with life on the basis that once they're done with their "day job" that work is over for the day.

    That's more or less why I think Mike Rowe's idea of people "thinking" about this "rationally" is so unbelievably full of crap.

    When was the last time you actually saw it happen with people in everyday life?

    Was it reassuring or actually point-of-fact very scary?

    "Why does Cap of T look so angry?"

    That was from a friend's daughter of about five years old who hasn't had a lot of experience around INTJ types whose normal way of going about things looks a lot like Henry Rollins.

    "Intensity" just means you don't switch off your attention because it's easy.

    Eventually I figured out that I could just feed it three Krispy Kreme doughnuts with that white cream filled gunk every day, and that'd satisfy the additional carbs and fats energy cravings without my gaining weight.

    I'm still working out how I'm going to do that here, but so far it involves croissants and little bags of cream filled Italian "breakfast" pastries.

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