My friend who works at the airport in the Galapagos (GPS) was telling me that no one has gotten paid since the tourism stopped. Luckily she can work on farm, but many can't. The local animal shelter there is now out of food, and the dogs will starve if they don't somehow raise money in the next 3 days or so (@patitasgalapaguenas on instagram, you can donate here [0]).
The US is struggling in many ways, but I can't help but think many other less fortunate nations are struggling even more. But the US doesn't show international news so you wouldn't really know unless you go looking for it.
Al Jazeera is always a good source for news ignored by the rest of the world. Here's social distancing in a prison in El Salvador -- not sure those masks will help much.
Sure, but the implementation was still absurdly bad. For example, by imposing a harsh lockdown on cities with no plan for migrant workers, the only thing they could do was head home to their villages, ensuring the virus would be distributed widely across the country.
That’s the rational calculus, yes. But humans have a really hard time balancing suffering today against hypothetical suffering tomorrow, especially when successful intervention makes it appear like the problem was never there in the first place.
It's true almost by definition. Actions sufficient to mitigate a low-probability, high-impact event will seem like complete overreaction for people who can't do this calculation - which is most of them. After all, lots of effort and sacrifice happened, and there was no damage!
Can you point to a study about this? In Bayesian terms most people would put the prior probability in favor of his common sense hypothesis. And you just have to Google for "psychology of risk perception" to get a few more studies in favor of it.
Well yes, of course it's rational. Tautologically, hypothetical suffering tomorrow might not happen whereas suffering today actually is happening - in this case we have only the words of essentially discredited 'experts' (epidemiologists), many of whom are constantly bickering in public and pronouncing each others models useless or broken.
And the idea that mass lockdowns can stop the spread of virus is itself a radical, new idea that's never been tried, and which has its own cadre of experts saying it hasn't been working or is making little difference.
Given what we know now, extending a shelter-in-place order through all of May is catastrophic. It will likely trigger mass civil unrest. The virus just isn't that dangerous.
> And the idea that mass lockdowns can stop the spread of virus is itself a radical, new idea that's never been tried, and which has its own cadre of experts saying it hasn't been working or is making little difference.
You probably could say "has not been tried recently", but mass quarantines has been tried since time immemorial.
No. Preventative mass global quarantine has never been tried anywhere. Even quarantines in classical times were used for the already infected and known to be infectious, not everyone at once. What's being done now has no precedent.
The name quarantine itself comes from a preventative isolation practice.
But lockdowns during pandemics have been practiced occasionally, but always at the city level, due to the nature of governance during past pandemics. Famously Newton and Shakespeare did work during London lockdowns, and some Italian city states distributed fixed rations to peasants to help them stay at home.
What’s new isn’t preventative quarantines, what’s new is global travel and communication.
If that's your comparison, the lockdown has been an outstanding failure because the virus is still spreading widely and pending to go exponential any day the lockdown is slightly relaxed. Heart surgery that can't prevent the heart attack.
Al Jazeera is simply Qatari government propaganda. If they're reporting it and it was 'ignored by the rest of the world', it's certainly only reported for the benefit of the Qatari government.
Donated as I know how hard it is for animal protection efforts to raise money right now (we are a foster home for cats from three protection societies).
I also forwarded it to my network - maybe this helps at least a little bit more in terms of donations.
I'm surprised to learn that animals like dogs (and I presume cats) are allowed on the Galapagos since there is so much at-risk fauna that is unique to those islands.
I was surprised when I first went, the people that live there are allowed on 5 of the islands, with the largest island hosting the town of puerto ayora. The town has 10,000 people, and total population of the Galapagos is 30,000 and growing. It’s an interesting place as people move there from the mainland because of the money you can make in tourism, but immigration is tightly controlled due to the negative effect on nature as the towns expand.
People first started living in the Galapagos a long time ago, in the 1950s they consolidated everyone into the islands they live today. Interesting history for a place that you’d think was purely natural, but human civilization finds a way I suppose.
No. It just isn't following the "whataboutism" logic.
Following this we could say: As there are always young able people in need, why care for old or disabled people who doo not contribute to society and only cost society's money?
Why "donate" taxes for care facilities and such unnecessary stuff?
You're taking this too far. Stop trying to do that.
There is an island on which there are hungry people and hungry dogs. There is a limited pool of donor funds.
The fact that there are people asking for money for the dogs before all the people on that little island have full bellies is just sad.
The dogs will feel no pain from being put to sleep.
Nobody can, will, or wants to even suggest that the children be put to sleep. We will let the children suffer horrible pain before we ever even consider suggesting such a thing.
So every dollar spent on the starving dogs is a dollar that could have prevented some pain for the humans there. It would cost no money and no pain to put the dogs to sleep and ease the pain of some children.
So stop trying to bring the rest of the world into this to win the argument. This is a localised problem on one island, and every dollar spent there should be spent on reducing harm.
You might enjoy reading the utilitarian philosophy work of Peter Singer [1]
A lot of charity donation is based on feelings rather than calculations about saved lives. Otherwise there would only be one charity, and it'd be distributing malaria nets and deworming tablets in Africa.
In my experience, if someone donates $20 to animals in response to lowpro's post, that's not money subtracted from their fixed charity budget that would otherwise have gone to humans. That's money subtracted from their household budget, that otherwise would have been spent on hobbies and bills. People who have fixed charity budgets simply don't donate from them in response to social media posts.
> The dogs will feel no pain from being put to sleep.
> Nobody can, will, or wants to even suggest that the children be put to sleep. We will let the children suffer horrible pain before we ever even consider suggesting such a thing.
Sounds like the proper solution is to convince people that putting kits to sleep is OK, then...
(Not really, but it does seem to follow from your statements)
I may get downvoted for this and I would not advocate this under normal circumstances. But dogs are a source of protein that would be a shame to put to waste given that people are starving otherwise.
By extension of your statement:
Given that there are always people starving somewhere on Earth at all other points in time too, isn't it immoral to feed pets at all? They should be put down and that food should go to people! Dog food in general is immoral, because it could instead be given to someone starving somewhere.
It's a question of scale, and balance. Yes, I think it is ridiculous to ask for donations to keep unwanted dogs alive when there are people on the same island who are suffering.
There are many bad things happening everywhere. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and stack-rank them, in order to allocate funds effectively. There's diminishing returns to everything[0]. As you throw money at problem #1, it becomes more and more expensive to make a marginal improvement, so eventually, it swaps places with some other problem in the ranking.
There are many criteria you could use for making such ranking of problems (a popular one is minimizing dollars per lives saved, or dollars per QALY added). Living in a free society means people are free to decide how much (if anything all) they want to spend on charitable causes, and on which ones. But in one's individual spending, it's worth to think about how to get maximum "bang for your buck", in terms of alleviating suffering.
Six months ago the shelter didn't need money because people had money and donated it willingly. Now the people around there are starving and can't waste money keeping random strays alive when their own children are starving.
And the people running this shelter, knowing that donor funds are limited, are asking for it to be spent on keeping unwanted dogs alive when there are people starving. It's more humane to put the dogs to sleep. They will feel no pain.
But nobody is going to even begin to consider putting the children to sleep are they? Those kids are going to suffer badly, and you're here arguing that the dogs are more important?
These are unprecedented times, and you can't just waste money.
This is not at all different from what's going on across the US for anyone who works in a service role, and most people still haven't had their UI claims processed / payments made.
> This is not at all different from what's going on across the US for anyone who works in a service role, and most people still haven't had their UI claims processed / payments made.
Exactly. Most of my old team is simply floating on what savings they had, partner's salaries and any money from the family funds we are offered (small grants of $1200 depending on need and availability for FT employees). Some don't qualify for unemployment, as they're just furloughed waiting for a re-open date, or are still dependents and got screwed out of the $1200 checks sent out.
I stepped down from my role as a chef in late January to focus on SpaceX interview(s) and had budgeted accordingly and was ok with passive income sources, but those dried up as the Market tanked, so I had to get really creative this month to make ends-meet because I thought after my interview in February I'd be employed by May. My landlord has made it clear he still expects payment on the 1st, which made me ask serious questions about my current situation.
Ultimately, I have realized I have to go back to tech now as these past years in culinary to get to this point have been incredibly financially precarious, so I took some refresher classes on Coursera and sent out some CVs.
I've heard back from one potential employer so hopefully that pans out as our stay at home requirement is being lifted at the end of this month in CO. My family in CA is still required to stay at home and less than half can work remotely so its putting a strain on things.
This is very true. And OPs point is good: the HN/millennial technorati is really out of touch with how much pain will is and will be descending upon the world.
Source for “most people?” As of April 11, 71% of people who have applied have received benefits: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/coronavirus-unemplo.... And state’s have geared up processing since then. (Maryland launched new computer system last week.)
The US is struggling in many ways, but I can't help but think many other less fortunate nations are struggling even more. But the US doesn't show international news so you wouldn't really know unless you go looking for it.
[0]: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&busines...