Meta-discussion, but I think "statistical deaths" - deaths where the causation has to be inferred, rather than being completely obviously monocausal - have been a big feature of quality of life improvement in the 19th and 20th century, but are now running into an informational problem. Namely that you have to believe the statistics in order for the process to work, but it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.
Is this a moral fatigue problem? People are fed up of hearing that common action X "causes" Y, regardless of how true it is?
Are we going to go back to smoking, leaded petrol, and polio? After all, the evidence against those was only statistical.
(There may also be diminishing returns / age effects; after all, I'm only 40, and just about remember what a smoke-filled room smells like, or the tang of leaded petrol. For the dominant 60-and-up group of voters, the air is cleaner than in their childhood, so what's all this talk of "air quality crisis?")
> it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.
I'm pretty sure it has always been the case: ""Lies, damned lies, and statistics" can be traced back at least as far as 188x.
Besides, the chain of lies is super long. Sample selection. Data collection. Data analysis. Reporting. Publishing. At each steps, so many things can go wrong: errors, agenda, corruption, bias...
In the case of Covid, we already have plenty of terrible communication from the entities at play, so at this point, it's kinda hard to have an informed opinion.
I think a problem with statistical deaths is that deaths can be double counted. If you did a meta-study and added up all the claimed deaths, wouldn't there be more statistical deaths than actual deaths? I also suspect that it's fairly likely that statistical deaths are based on comparing actual deaths to a hypothetical model in which the statistical cause of death is removed, but if the assumptions of the model are wrong, the statistical deaths it implies will also be wrong, even by orders of magnitude. How do we prove that the models make valid assumptions?
> think a problem with statistical deaths is that deaths can be double counted.
Anyone worth a crap uses some sort of time based metric for loss of life. Wheezing into the grave at 80 instead of 81 is very different than dropping dead a 20 and these sorts of metrics are meant to reflect that.
But those metrics don't get you big numbers with lots of digits in front of the decimal that get your article publishes, posted on HN and then clicked on in droves.
The people doing the primary research often are aiming for accuracy but they are done a disservice by shortsighted people optimizing for a few extra cents of add revenue or a few more upvotes.
So, there are quite a few well known metrics for this in the public health world
* Years of Life Lost (YLL)
* Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY)
* Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY)
They are calculated in an interesting way that is open for arguing and interpretation, but it provides a good baseline for the ability to compare them.
As for the double counting, this is in fact a real problem, as a lot of health problems are interlinked, and having multiple health problems have a multiplying affect on health in general.
It seems to be a constant truism, and yes it's not consistently applied, (e.g war on drugs), but what are you suggesting here? Fairly sure by any reasonable measure of QUALY, COVID has been a bigger problem than any other public health crisis since AIDS.
Might seem meta but by bringing this up you nailed it. This uncovers the pattern in use. The favorite trick for population behavior design. If social engineers exists, then this is the technique they are advising the ones in power to use the most.
"Not having cholera" is also social engineering. And real physical engineering. Insisting that people drive on only one side of the road is population behavior design.
Like everything from firearms to nuclear weapons to face recognition, the questions should focus on who is using the power, for what purposes, how they are held accountable, and so on.
Yes, the anti-COVID measures are social engineering. They're trying to engineer people into not getting COVID.
As you fix the high confidence problems, you get into lower and lower confidence ones, until you are in the region where each study gets a completely different answer because of really small changes in methodology.
I propose a system where deaths are statistically assigned to causes.
Eg. if a person dies of lung cancer, then we roll a dice and say "theres a 1 in 6 chance that was due to pm2.5 emissions". If the dice rolls a 1, then we look around the town for sources of pm2.5, and we find that 1/6 comes from a candle factory. We roll another dice, and if that comes out with a 1, then we say "This factory emitted air pollution that killed this person".
Then we treat it in law exactly the same as if the person had walked by the factory and been decapitated by a piece of roof falling off. Ie. we let the family sue. We send inspectors to see if there is negligence involved, etc.
If we know that a candle factory is causing 1/36 deaths to lung cancer, we don't need such a mechanism (or the involvement of an arbitrary family) to take the operator to court. At least not in the UK.
My backyard bonfire in the UK produces so much smoke I'm sure someone somewhere will be given lung cancer from it. Yet, it's perfectly legal and there is no carrot or stick to encourage me to buy an incinerator or start composting.
Having a small chance of a knock on my door and someone saying "Excuse me, but you killed grandpa, plz pay for his funeral" probably would make me change.
In the US we don’t think of pollution as that bad specifically because we dealt with so much of it. In an unregulated country you get events like the Great Smog of 1952 in London which killed 4,000+ people and made another 100,000 sick, and then boom Clean Air Act 1956.
There are finite number of countries and they eventually focus on pollution after people build a lot of factories in the country. Even China is starting to focus on air pollution because they don’t have a choice.
Not quite the end... since a lot of shareholder value was created due to the move, others followed their lead (even without the threat of lawsuits). Now we argue about capitalism, globalization, human rights, etc. but can't seem to reconcile the fact that our world simply _cannot_ be perfect and we should focus on compromises and balances instead; this is exceptionally difficult in such a polarized environment.
It will be interesting to see where the "end" really is.
Trouble is that those statistics are educated guesses. It's not like we have a precise table of fractional causes that could be split up via dice rolls. The first thing the lawyers for the factory would do is challenge the probability estimates.
Wow 9 million a year die prematurely. The environmental crisis is manifold: we have the destruction of species and habitats, the global warming problem, and now also just trash - overuse of plastics is a huge problem, air pollution is pretty terrible.
I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis".
For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so.
The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally very limited window of opportunity to take action. This is true of Covid, but it's not true of smoking or pollution.
A politican speaking of a climate "crisis" is engaging in the same psychological manipulation tactic as a radio commercial telling you to "act now on this limited-time offer", or a used-car salesman telling you that you have to buy that car right now, because this other guy definitely just called and is now on his way to the lot, and will likely buy the car you're interested in as soon as you leave the lot.
> The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally very limited window of opportunity to take action.
My point exactly. The dictionary editors must have noticed that "environmental crisis" entered into common parlance, and didn't fit the pre-existing definitions of "crisis", so they had to invent a new definition to be able to cover it.
Besides: The definition is a really bad one, as it's circular.
Weird I find "Climate emergency" a poor use of words, but I think "Climate crisis" is fine. A crisis can take a long time to play out. Just look at the crisis of the 3rd century. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century> It took 49 years to play out.
It was discrete in time and there was a limited window of time to take action. We’re already too. It’s also going to affect humanity in ways much stronger than any amount of smoking ever could.
Destruction of habitats has been identified as a factor in previous pandemics. Global warming will also result in the destruction of habitats. All this stuff is linked.
That’s the first I’ve heard about Mao and environmental destruction (aimed at the elimination of a disease vector or otherwise, I’m not clear what you’re denying here), and a quick Google/Wikipedia didn’t help.
(The west has also collapsed bird populations in the service of agriculture, just over a longer period and combined with crashing the insect population as well)
Everyone is jumping on the Covid comparison, in their defense U.N.'s staff have been making this point (of millions of premature deaths due to air pollution) in their reports since at least 2014.
And now after the Covid clickbait non-sense people are actually discussing it.
Maybe we can keep using masks? Now that we already got used to them, we may reduce the effects of pollution with good filtering masks. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't address what's causing the pollution in the first place.
This is really the reason why masks were common in Asia. Except Japan.
But their pollution is a lot higher than ours. Pollution here in Barcelona is not high enough that I'd consider wearing a mask for it. And the upcoming bans of old diesels and two stroke scooters will make things even better.
I'll never get used to masks anyway. They'll always be an extreme annoyance. I wear them because it's mandatory and I agree right now they make sense. But as the pandemic turns endemic they have to stop. I'd rather live 10 years less than have to wear them for the rest of my life. Especially outside.
>I'll never get used to masks anyway. They'll always be an extreme annoyance.
I'm definitely in this category, I can't stand the things and haven't worn one since the mandate in England ended. Something about blocking my mouth and nose is just a really unpleasant sensation, it's not the type of mask or the fit rather the essential nature of having something stuck to my face. I think a lot of people really downplayed just how unpleasant mask-wearing actually is for many, charitably this was for the greater good but now I think we have to be open about the downsides too. The pollution from plastic masks is a big issue too, lots of very long-lived litter that's pretty gross in the streets and bad for the marine environment where they eventually wash up into as well.
I too would accept the greater risk of death than wear them for the rest of my days. I'm glad that in my country at least we're not letting this turn into the same kind of ritualistic safety theatre we've seen at airports for the last two decades.
Thanks, it's really good to hear I'm not the only one. For me it feels like I'm choking after a while, like an hour or so (less when I talk or exercise). But it's also because I had a childhood disease where I actually almost choked for real several times. It brings the feeling back.
Unfortunately I live in Spain where they have been really relaxed this wave but here they just love their masks. It's like virtue signaling and a feeling of safety for them I guess. They were even mandatory on the streets again and still are in shops and public transport, and work all day long. About 50% of people still wear them on the street.
I really hope that they will relax it soon because I'm ready to find another country again. Too bad because until 2019 I was really happy here.
It seems to be working totally fine in other countries which have stopped them completely and sometimes even have lower vaccination rates. I wouldn't care if they locked down 3 months a year but this masking is just so difficult :(
I have on most occasions throughout the pandemic, except last summer right after the second jab when I thought everything was finally over (and even then continued to wear them in crowded places).
IIRC I only forgot 2 or 3 times even for solitary walks, and some of those were 5 hours long.
To my ongoing confusion, me talking here about my intention to continue wearing masks beyond the point of it being needed resulted in someone going to my blog and posting a few abusive messages on an unrelated entry: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2021/06/14/why-do-some...
At the start of this, I saw a claim that New York failed to repeal their no-face-coverings requirement when making the new masks-are-mandatory requirement.
(No idea if this was accurate or a colossal misunderstanding of how things work, but the claim was made).
I'm only aware of a small subset of laws existing in Europe, but every single example of restrictions to face hiding I can think of predates Muslim presence by many decades. No, those are not driven by fear of people wearing burkas.
I was thinking about the german Versammlungsgesetz and requirements to stay identifiable while operating dangerous machinery in public ("driving"), but apparently I was completely wrong about their age (actually late 20th and late 2010s, I was assuming "possibly leftover from some reich"). Still, those two were not motivated at all by rejection of imported culture, but in terms of timing they might very well have been.
Correction: no, the examples I was thinking of are much younger than I thougt (but nonetheless not aimed at burkas at all, aimed at leftist protesters and at reckless drivers)
Of course this should be an individual choice. Nobody cares about decisions which only affect yourself. It's different from the use of masks for, e.g., covid, where you can harm other people by not wearing yours.
our brains are wired to read faces because weve been doing that since we were apes, theres no way masks dont have a negative psychological and social impact on our lives when used longterm
That's interesting. However, it's not like we're not reading faces all the time anyway, even if we use masks like we've been doing lately. Family, friends, internet, videocalls, remote meetings... I suppose the impact could be greater for kids in school ages, but I wonder what effects could the long term use of masks of those last 2 years produce in our lives.
I doubt masks are even all that important with regard to ability to read faces, because eye muscles are at least as important as mouth muscles in displays of emotional affect.
You can also see this in the difference between Eastern and Western emoticons, the former may use :) as smileys while the latter uses ^_^
i speculate.. anti social behaviours, insecurity issues, (mis)communication issues.
im not sure i follow, we do read faces daily, even in voice/video chat we do. Body and facial language matter.
Cutting off 50% of that as sibling comment points out... even if it doesnt totally prevent us from reading peoples face via the the eyes, that only highlights how important reading faces is, when we cant see the entire face we exclusively look for cues in the eyes.
I don’t think I’ve ever really felt any emotional resonance to an appeal to nature. Not even in my hippie-Wiccan late teens and early twenties.
But I’m endlessly curious about how minds work:
Is “unnatural is the same as bad” a foundational position for you, or is it that you dislike masks and this argument is a metaphorical soldier you’re sending out to do memetic battle for you to support that dislike?
Or is it something else entirely? Like I said, I never “got” this type of appeal. The unnatural is too commonplace and too useful.
I get your point. But pollution is completely unnatural, too. We got to a point where few things are still natural in this world. I don't know if masks are effective against this kind of diseases, but I guess those 9M who die prematurely every year would have chosen to use them.
So let me guess, the "Climate Crisis" is now going to be used as a justification for draconian authoritarian government policy, regulation, and laws. or worse we will new see heads of State, governors etc, just declare "states of emergency" to implement "action" based on the "climate crisis" with no legislative involvement at all.
We have seen this with COVID, using the justification of "saving lives" now we are seeing the foundations laid for transforming constitutional republics in to Dystopian "forever in emergency" Technocracy of "Trust the Experts" dictatorships
Quality of air and water is and always has been the real issue that needs to be tackled. The climate is just a symptom of that and sadly allows distractors to derail constructive progress in tacking what is really an air and water quality issue that nobody can deny.
Now if the focus was upon air and water quality and addressing that, all the things that would need to happen just so happen to be those that tackle all environmental aspects of the climate and we would have more people on the same page addressing the issue over endless debate about it.
Here in Bangkok when I go out I don't double mask because of covid, but because of pollution. I'll be wearing masks indefinitely outside except when it's a low PM 2.5 day
How about actually stopping all leaded gas instead of pretending? Tons and tons of micro-particles of lead sprayed everywhere there is an airport. Don't spend 25 more years phasing it out, make it illegal in 2030 so the investment starts today.
This logic is so clearly flawed. It’s much too easy to say we overreacted to Covid while pointing at death numbers that are much lower precisely because of the “fearmongering” measures that were taken. I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.
Obviously I disagree, and I find it strange that you tried so hard to distance yourself from anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members in your earlier comment when it seems clear that you agree with them.
But we know what happened even with actions taken. In my city all hospitals were saturated, there were so many dead people that the army had to help and move corpses to an old ice rink. And that was stopped only by a full lockdown. I don't need to measure the exact magnitude to know that without taking any measures, it would have been terrible.
Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths in a pretty way does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.
A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80. If the people saved by lockdowns were primarily old people with a few years left to live it would be pretty clear that the lockdowns were a net negative.
> Just because your city isn’t equipped to deal with an unusually high amount of deaths
Nowhere in the world was equipped to deal with the incredibly high amount of deaths that happened, nor with the incredibly high amount of sick people.
> does not mean that the lockdowns saved more quality adjusted life years than they cost.
Yes, because the death of loved ones, the sickness and long-term effects of COVID, the collapse of healthcare, the sick leaves of work and the self-imposed quarantines would not have had any effect in quality-adjusted life years.
It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns. I mean, most people were going to go on lockdown regardless. We all knew people getting sick, going to hospitals and not being able to receive care, family members and friends dying... It wasn't fear-mongering, it was a genuinely scary experience. I don't know if you lived in places that suffered the worst of the pandemic or not, but it definitely doesn't sound like it.
> A year of life is worth far more when you’re 20 than when you’re 80.
A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
> It's incredibly naive to think that life would have continued as usual without lockdowns.
What a truly bizarre strawman.
> A month of lockdown is worse than an 80 year old (who otherwise might live some years) suffocating to death alone in a hospital?
You are very lucky if you got away with just a month of lockdowns.
It might not seem that way, but this is actually a simple mathematical problem. How many young healthy people traded in a month of the best years of their life in order to extend the life of that 80yo?
You can’t seriously tell me that I’m making a bizarre strawman argument and then proceed to repeat the exact thing I’m criticizing. It’s not “simple math”. Lockdowns weren’t just to “extend life of a few 80 yo”, even though I personally think it was a worthy “trade”. What do you think would have happened without lockdowns? How many months of “the best years of their lives” would young healthy people have lost to self-imposed isolation, sickness and loss?
Why do you think that this does not come down to simple math?
The lockdowns either had a positive or negative impact on total QALYs, this is quantifiable.
And even if the outcome was truly positive, was it truly worth the financial cost? Current research seems to indicate that we vastly overpaid in terms of $ per QALY.
Again, the question is “What do you think would have happened without lockdowns?”. Most of the research you mention, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t take into account the amount of damage that no lockdowns would have caused, not only on “life of old people” but on everyone, and not only from direct effects of the disease.
That’s the quid here. What you think would have happened without lockdowns and letting a highly contagious, severe disease run without control.
They do not consider it seriously. Both assume no economic cost from the no-lockdown scenario. Of course in that situation lockdowns cost, but it is an incredibly naive way to look at it. The assessments of those papers can only be done from a place of willful blindness and ignorance.
Things they do not take into account:
- The effect of a saturated healthcare system on the treatment of other diseases and accidents.
- Non-linearity of the death rate. The more people are sick in the hospital, the less resources there are and death rate skyrockets.
- The effect on the economy of thousands of people unable to work at the same time, due to being sick or having to care for sick people
- The mental health effects on people surrounded by sickness.
- Self-imposed quarantines and lockdowns.
- Possible public order breakdown with the combination of stressful situation plus reduced government strength due to COVID.
I mean this with no offense, but thinking that the only "bad" outcome of not having lockdowns is "a few more people die but that's it" is stupid. You should think seriously about it. There was no pretty way to come out of the initial wave of COVID. Lockdowns were awful but I really prefer them to the alternative. In fact, I would have preferred them to start earlier. If the lockdown had started seven days earlier we probably could have shortened by a month.
They did. Economic downturn, massive amounts of people being stuck at home ( either in isolation due to being sick or old/immunocompromised/etc. afraid of going out).
Given the virality and case fatality rate we knew at the time, we were on track to lose hundreds of millions of lives from covid back then (assuming no vaccines and hospital infrastructure collapse).
Even with those worst case scenarios, there was still significant pushback to taking immediate global actions.
And this is no where near the same scale of a threat.
CFR was something like 1% early on, and higher in Wuhan where there was a partial collapse of health systems. World population is >7 billion, so 1% gets you 70 millions deaths.
If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions".
(This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc lockdowns if hospitals were overwhelmed, and global spread might have been slowed.)
Non-random samples get you to up to 10% fatality rate. I have the data for my region and in march-april 2020 the IFR was 10-15%. Of course, that was due because there weren't enough tests and only the ones that were really sick entered the statistics. But for the original strain, IFR was around 1% and that number was pretty consistent among a broad number of studies.
Also, take into account the amount of diseases that are getting late treatments due to healthcare saturation. I don't know of any formal studies but you only need to talk with any doctor to see that they're consistently seeing diseases in later stages and therefore harder to cure.
Pandemic or no pandemic, wearing a high filtration respirator (N95/FFP2 mask at a minimum) on the tube, where air pollution levels regularly exceed Beijing and Delhi, is advisable. Also sensible on inexplicably still diesel choked busy London streets above ground.
While I spent the pandemic in Berlin and didn’t notice much change here, 20 years ago I was in the UK and the daily walk past the A27 was radically improved by the truckers blockading the entire UK petrol supply in protest against fuel taxes.
'Climate lockdowns' are already an established conspiracy theory among the nuttier end of society, I really think the news industry has a moral responsibility to avoid alarmism because of its inherently destabilising effect on society.
Of course, alarmism is excellent at driving engagement and ad revenue so I might as well have asked for someone to write a program that solves the halting problem. I don't know how inventives can be put in place so that the news industry is an asset to society rather than a liability but I wish I did.
As for the best of the list - you’re being hyperbolic. I wasn’t never locked down for years, forced to get a vaccine to keep my job or go into a restaurant. Likewise, I have no idea what a “green” pass is and assuredly don’t have one. Maybe all of these things are happening to someone somewhere, but it has never been my situation. Where do you live that all of these things have happened to you?
and remember, is not a conspiracy theory if is writen by Klaus, it is a plan.
if he is going to succeed or not, is another story, but he has clear plans about a different world which is greener than the actual. I can't blame him, he is so disconnected from reality that I trully believe that he has good intentions, but has no idea of the real impacts of his acts.
remember that people called the great reset a conspiracy theory, this is literally stated on WEF page, on Klaus books, and on his talks. And this is a key factor for a cleaner economy, since economical control at the individual level is required to create a more strict compliance mechanism.
Conspiracy theory is a thought-terminating cliche, it's like offering a bumper sticker as an argument. I wish there was a neutral website that tracks fringe theories and their development
I’m already expecting the same protocol used for covid crisis (fear, restrictions, fines, divisiveness) will be once again applied for the impending climate crisis.
I'm sorry, but I'm totally over this type of nonsense. "Expert says" just signals bullshit to me at this point. Clickbait. I'm exhausted at this point.
I feel your pain, but let me ask you: how should we manage this as a society?
The fact that air pollution kills massively is not 'new'. Should we stop reporting on it? Should we continue, but use other headlines?
Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I'm heading up infosec in our company, and it's a similar "inconvenient truth" type of situation. My approach so far is to appeal to "coherence". You can pretend that disk encryption isn't necessary, but only if we all agree that leaking data is not an existential threat.
That's what this type of article does: put in context the number of Covid deaths, and ask "is that coherent?"
If COVID crisis has been any indication, common gut feeling has proven right on many occasions such as mask, airborne, lab leak etc. It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work. The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
You don’t need to be an expert to understand air pollution is bad. Common sense and symptoms tell you it is. If anything this is an excuse for experts to collude with policy makers to pass on whatever the agendas they are working on.
I share the mindset with OP that experts as they exist today in the form of soulless gatekeepers feeding their egos with peer reviews can’t be trusted.
For the COVID stuff... the worst thing was the communication failures and outright lies all around.
> It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work.
The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad, they just went ahead and claimed against better knowledge that masks were not needed - at best, some asked the population to leave masks to the hospitals and help themselves with woven-cloth selfmade masks.
> The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
I would only classify this as a partial communication failure. All the hygienic measures introduced worldwide drastically brought down the numbers of virtually all infectious diseases, which meant that hospitals now had more capacity to deal with COVID cases. On the other side, while a lot of German public offices (most notably, parliaments) have air filtering systems installed, the rollout of these devices in schools is ... underwhelming (and that's putting it mildly), with courts denying lawsuits asking for their installation with the simple excuse "if ventilating by opening the windows every twenty minutes makes you cold, use better clothes" [1].
Given that ridiculousness, it is definitely legitimate to claim that there is a significant interest of the governments to save money at the expense of parts of the populations that don't have political representation.
> The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad
How is that the fault of globalisation, and how is globalisation the fault of current governments? For reference, France had mask and PPE stockpiles for the swine/bird/whatever flu, but the last administration let them expire because they were considered a waste of money. (Decades into globalisation)
> and how is globalisation the fault of current governments?
Specifically for Germany, the last 16 years had seen a Conservative-led government under Merkel which had done virtually nothing to react to a number of analyses and warnings (e.g. after the OG SARS/MERS pandemics) that the pandemic and other crisis preparation was inadequate - after the German reunification, the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the subsequent end of the Cold War, a lot of the stockpiles that Germany held had been torn down and sold off.
As for other governments: Sometimes one has to admit as a politician, that the country has failed, even if the blame actually lies on a previous administration, and promise that at least the current administration will learn from the failure and make things better.
Dismissing stuff because just you can attach a particular label to it - in this case "expert" - is intellectually and socially weak sauce. Why not instead engage with the claims and dispute them at face value, rather than resort to name calling? (Especially when the insult of choice here is "expert")
> Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I predict that is what the solution will be. The path to reduction in total consumption worldwide (a proxy for pollution) will only come about from reduced population.
Similar to how any other organisms reach the boundary conditions of their environment, and then experience population loss until they are within survivable parameters again.
> Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I think increasingly that will be the solution. The rational approach to threats is exhausting. People are going to go back to "ignore" and "panic" as the two outcomes, neither of which will be well grounded in actual risk measurement.
A laundry list of institutions lost functionally all of their credibility in the eyes of the public during covid. Speaking on behalf of the government, a prestigious university or having a blue check, none of those things mean squat anymore. Sure they make you credible than some Youtube talking head but that's a low bar. Rebuilding that credibility (or building replacement institutions) will take time or it will take force.
So yes, "just ignore it and keep chugging along" is an option and IMO it's probably the better one.
We've both been on this site for a long time. I've signed off from the typical news for quite some time at this point, but it keeps seeping in. This site used to be full of enthusiasm, but it's changed.
It is what we make it. And yes, it has changed, this has been observed many times now in the last couple of months, but that's no reason why it can't change back.
Use your voting power, submit good articles, upvote good articles on the new page and message hn@ycombinator.com about behavior that crosses the guidelines.
Also: the 'New' page has a 'more' link at the bottom, this really should be used more often, the new pages moves ever faster as more stuff gets submitted to HN so plenty of good items scroll off the new page before they catch enough upvotes to make it to the homepage, so you can have a disproportionally high impact by voting for something that is at 3 or 4 upvotes on page 2 or 3. (The 'new' page only gets a fraction of the traffic that the homepage gets.)
Fentanyl is a working class problem. No-one remotely close to power (journalists, influencers, politicians) really care about working class people any more.
In fact as George Orwell put it, they are probably disgusted by them, and pretend to care about them to advance their own "socialist" leanings.
Is this a moral fatigue problem? People are fed up of hearing that common action X "causes" Y, regardless of how true it is?
Are we going to go back to smoking, leaded petrol, and polio? After all, the evidence against those was only statistical.
(There may also be diminishing returns / age effects; after all, I'm only 40, and just about remember what a smoke-filled room smells like, or the tang of leaded petrol. For the dominant 60-and-up group of voters, the air is cleaner than in their childhood, so what's all this talk of "air quality crisis?")