tic_tac's comments

At least one company in South Korea, Seegene, has produced many tests and it is this aggressive private sector production that is largely reasonable for South Korea's effective testing. There is also a large demand for Seegene's tests around the world indicating that WHO tests are definitely not in sufficient supply.

The private sector stepping in is the best way to get enough tests out to everyone who needs them.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-...

Assuming the WHO stash has not already been depleted due to the global spike in cases, the number of WHO tests available to the US is probably insufficient to be helpful for its over 300 million people. Incentivizing the private sector to create tests on the other hand does have the potential to get enough tests for the whole population.

This is a global pandemic and there are many other affected countries around the world that do not have the ability to ramp up testing production the way the US does. Poorer countries should be the ones with access to the emergency test kits, not the US.

Is 79°F hot?

Alive is just a word. It means different things to different people and any formal definition will necessarily be arbitrary.

This should be its own post on HN! Great story.

So if there is superdeterminism, meaning positions are absolutely determined, either there is minimum scale in the universe (discrete universe) or somehow the universe computes with infinities.

Both are absurd concepts! When probing the ultimate depths of reality like this there are no good answers.

This is a snide and irrelevant comment.

But ratios only express rational numbers, if we had to express location in a 3D continuum it's almost guaranteed that it would be represented by an irrational number.

It is extremely frightening, and it's important that we continue to fight for freedom of expression on all platforms.

Unfortunately so many have an innate bias against the US that any criticism of it is considered fair game regardless of how conspiratorial or absurd.

I understand that if we posit a super-Turing machine in which arbitrary positions on a continuum can be maximally expressed as finite values what I am saying does not logically follow.

However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible. In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

It's not a matter of computability though, it's a matter of exact precision not being physically possible in a continuum.

If superdeterminism is true, it appears to imply that the universe is discrete at the smallest scales. Were the universe continuous, 'definite' position would be impossible, meaning that certainty itself would be impossible. Everything would be 'fuzzy' meaning superdeterminism would be impossible.

The comment I replied to was saying that the lack of testing was indeed a political issue with one side at fault.

You can't just conjure the necessary tests up from nothing. Japan has also had problems with testing. No one is trying to "deny testing". It is a work in progress and is indeed ramping up.

I think there are a lot of Americans writing anti-Trump comments on Reddit, but I think the numbers are boosted by non Americans doing the same thing. It artificially inflates the number of anti Trump posters.

There are two extreme paths we can take. The first is that we do nothing, the other is that we completely lock down our society like China.

While the first option would be unwise, the second would also be unwise.

A complete shutdown for a disease as virulent as Covid-19 will just suppress the virus for the duration of the shutdown. Ignoring the extreme difficulty and impracticality of shutting society down for a moment, recognize that the moment the shutdown ends, the virus will probably reappear and continue to spread.

What then? Another complete shutdown? When does it end?

No, the right solution is a distributed solution in which affected companies and communities deal with the virus, imposing gradual restrictions on gatherings, work, schooling etc in an organic way. Which is exactly what is happening in the US right now.

The point of all this is, what more can the US government do than it is already doing? Send the military in to shut down the highways? Hold scientists at gunpoint until they produce a vaccine?

Many (Media, Democrats) are trying to leverage this to their political advantage, but aside from small changes in approach, what exactly do they want the government to do differently?

Agreed, Reddit is cancer. Reactionary hive mind internet at its worst.

One of the biggest problems with Reddit is that Americans go on boards like /r/politics or in this case /r/Coronavirus, see extreme hostility towards America and Trump and assume that this hostility is all coming from Americans themselves, when really a substantial number of Reddit users (and users elsewhere on the Internet) are not American.

Not being Americans, their hostility comes more from predisposed bias against Trump and America than a careful analysis of what's best for America.

Creativity can really only happen when the mind isn't doing anything in particular. Only then can it wander, and only in wandering can it arrive at novel combinations or alterations of ideas.

Education signals that you are "better" than those with worse education. Smarter, harder working, etc.

We need to create better options for students. We can do this by refocusing education on learning practical skills for real world jobs rather than maintaining an educational system built upon a foundation over 1000 years old that up until 100 or so years ago was intended for the elites and scholars, not the average person looking for a job.

The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job.

Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity.

And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes with society wide UBI.

The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing money at people to spend on broken institutions like Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in the first place to make them more affordable and effective.

US military dominance is an ever present defense for nations around the world who would otherwise be harrassed or attacked by aggressive neighbors. US military involvement in the Middle East doesn't change that.

Of course you can argue we shouldn't be involved in the Middle East, and there are some reasons to think we shouldn't be, but we can agree on that point and still believe the US should have the world's dominant military.