HN user
I wonder how many people will die from the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown. I wonder how many lonely older folks will wish they were dead now that they can no longer receive the few visitors they had.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.
Yes, and this is why - the population of investors is honestly not all that panicky. If people start dying, investors will watch the death rate, and companies' share prices will reflect some instability but it will be somewhat in line with the actual economic impact, which traders are smart enough to price it at the small level it would actually be given the mortality rate.
By imposing lockdown, we have created a real economic slowdown, that traders are smart enough to deem catastrophic (because a month or restauranteurs going without wages is actually catastrophic and represents a much larger loss of future incomes that the still-small-but-blown-up-in-the-media death rate from the unchecked coronavirus.) Unlike the non-lockdown option, there is no optimistic case. You can't say, "earnings are slow, but people will be sorry if they panic sell because when the media frenzy dies down things will settle." You have to say, "earnings are slow, and might not actually pick up again because the lockdown lost a bunch of people their job."
Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.
The numbers matter here. Go up by how much?
If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.
There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.
My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.
Yup, my gut feeling is that follow on effects from rampant unemployment and financial insecurity will have a much larger effect (via stress-induced heart attacks, suicide, etc.) than the 3.4% mortality rate among reported cases (WHO numbers, not all infected, maybe not even most infected.)
I would love to see an actual statistical comparison. spookthesunset is making an excellent point. Unless we know that deaths from the virus are greater than the deaths caused by the second-and-third-order effects of panicking, you can't say for sure that the lockdown is the best thing to do right now.
I've been on a team with a super productive whiteboard user, who made ideas more clear by the ability to draw diagrams. I have also been on a team with a unproductive coworker whose whiteboard drawings were confusing, took lots of time to draw, and were generally unhelpful.
Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.
How do people do error handling in K? Or is the data typically well-formed in real programs? Not bashing anything, I'm just genuinely curious.
The interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a viable business in that particular type of support.
I feel the same. I do full-time ClojureScript - at least a few jobs exist! If you would like a job doing ClojureScript, email me at the address in my bio.