This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here.
> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.
Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too.
The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact!
So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths.
tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.
The data shows that there are excess deaths beyond what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, that Covid-19 deaths are themselves not strongly correlated with energy prices, and that excess deaths in 2022-2023 were moderately correlated with energy prices. So we can be somewhat confident that Covid-19 is not the primary causal pathway to excess deaths in 2022-2023.
The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years.
Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices.
Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline.
These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith.
> As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly.
Ugh, does it get any cornier?
I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with:
> Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI
In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.
They have at least attempted to compare these excess deaths with a model of Covid excess deaths (although models are always wrong to varying degrees)
The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
at least from people around me in Germany "younger people" seem to have been more affected by bad Covid cases then at any time before
like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter
but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics
through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch
I’ve observed the same in my peer group. There’s a reason Instill wear an N95 whenever I’m out and about and it isn’t totally impractical.
My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something. Many of them seem
To be on their 3rd or 4th rodeo at this point. Comments like “the first two times it was just a cold, this time it was like a really really bad flu” are common.
Do you have a theory for why COVID would behave in a novel way with respect to worsening on repeat infection? I have not heard of this type of behavior for other viruses. In general there seems to be a willingness to grant COVID special powers among viruses, e.g. the whole “maybe natural immunity doesn’t work at all!” saga. But maybe this does happen for other viruses and I just haven’t heard of it?
Weakening the immune system is not an uncommon property of viruses and Coronaviruses are know to not engender long term, durable immunity. So, with COVID, what we have is not “special powers,” but a combination of both qualities in a more (at the population-level) virulent disease. Natural immunity for COVID works pretty much the same as it does for other Coronaviruses (you can get the same one multiple times per year), but that’s problematic given the disease’s overall severity and propensity to damage people’s immune systems in a way that makes them susceptible to other illnesses (see the recent spate of post-COVID fungal infections).
> My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something.
There have been a few variants that have a markedly change in their ability to spread and also their severity. They might be hitting people differently. I mean, if the same person is getting infected multiple times with carrying degrees of severity, something is changing in the infection.
This doesn't seem like a sound argument to me. Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics into nonsense.
E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID.
People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health.
The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.
I'm not sure what your point is here. You're trying to make some kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about what, statistics in general? Causal analysis is bad because causation is complicated at the intersection of social science and medicine? All models are wrong and therefore all models are useless?
The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany.
The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.
You've identified a lot of complexity. But the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare everything equally unknowable, it's to do the hard work to figure out what's actually going on. That's not something we can do behind our keyboards right now, that doesn't mean their isn't a correct, knowable answer.
>> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.
I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.
My guess is it isn't cold itself that kills, but the effects of living in a cold, and damp, environment.
Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point.
Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows.
This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual.
(I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)
Your medical analysis is badly flawed. When people are cold this causes peripheral vasoconstriction, thus raising blood pressure. Not a problem for healthy young people, but it increases the risk of major adverse cardiac events for frail elderly people. This is common knowledge in the field.
But similarly, COVID-19 studies during last winter may not account for the increased respiratory problems due to high energy prices? It's confounded both ways.
I thought it was rather confusing how people with 2+ conditions died from covid(?) You could also not count them but it would be equally wrong. How hard does one have to sneeze to blame a traffic fatality on covid? It can never be statistically significant with so many people in bed and working from hone.
If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died?
The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?
> if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese
Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.
mRNA vaccine creation is humanity's most impressive technology. We'd be absolutely screwed right now if we didn't have this tech. (Or, more accurately: a lot more people would be dead otherwise).
I don't really think so. Omicron is what did it. I think in Africa only 24% received at least one dose, and Africa is not a giant heaping pile of covid19 bodies.
If I recall correctly (its possible I do not), the latest booster is for BA-5, which was effectively extinct by the time the booster came out. Why its extinct is important: the existing variants had immune escape over BA-5.
The age of the average African is significantly younger than the rest of the world. There's a lot of variables to account for, you'd need a proper study, not just a single data point, to determine if omicron is significantly less deadly than older COVID variants.
That's a continental average. Rates varied (June 2022) from nearly 72% in Rwanda to near zero in neighboring Burundi. You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.
This is common sense and goes without saying. GP does not need to recite the litany about the fact that things are different in different parts of Africa. We're aware.
> You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.
While the mRNA vaccines were great and developed a few months faster, the non mRNA vaccines also worked quite well. At least the J&J vaccine did (although they gave fewer doses and therefore it didn't get as strong a protection).
There's no scientific evidence to support this. Even in the Pfizer RCTs, there were more deaths in the vaccinated group than in the control group (but this wasn't statistically significant, as the overall sample size wasn't large enough to make a conclusion WRT death reduction).
Please don't post this nonsense "no scientific evidence"? There's overwhelming evidence that mRNA vaccines significantly reduced hospitalisations and deaths.
For the initial variants, sure. But those have long since been replaced with much milder variants, closely resembling a mild cold for most. How are you able to attribute the reduction in deaths for this winter compared to the previous winter to vaccines? We had vaccines in the previous winter too.
Having read the actual medical journal papers of the early clinical trials, the MRNA vaccines were wildly effective against the early strains. If you have actual medical data published in journals and peer reviewed, I'd be very happy to see it, and possibly even change my opinion if it's convincing.
How many things are out there peer reviewed and complete BS?
There was huge political pressure and even till this day you can't criticize any of it even here. My prev comment is already hidden. Does that make you trust the data if you can't even question it publicly or you will lose your job?
I'm personally willing to listen if you think the research papers on the mRNA vaccines that were used to justify releasing the vaccines are flawed, but you have to present an argument against those papers and not just cast aspersions based on a generalization you've drawn from other research papers that had much lower stakes. Presumably the researchers in question on these papers knew the cost of getting it wrong and were very careful. I think you can certainly criticize it here but you have to bring receipts.
> If you have actual medical data published in journals and peer reviewed, I'd be very happy to see it, and possibly even change my opinion if it's convincing.
This shows a bunch of side effects, which is really nice to talk about in hindsight, and from the comfortable position of knowing that the worst is behind us. When the morgues were overflowing and bodies were being put in freezer trucks we cared more about efficacy of the vaccine, and nothing here called the efficacy into question.
Moreover, the majority of those are from 2021. How could decisions made about vaccines in early/mid 2020 even consider taking this information into account during the peak of the pandemic?
It's like complaining that C wasn't designed with borrow detection and that therefore Dennis Ritchie was just trying to cash in with the CIA for introducing security holes for the next 50 years, after all look at all the money Bell was making.
The worst part is, in my life I have never more wanted to be wrong, because the cost of being right is so high.
The irony that I was involved in promoting awareness of this way back before anyone cared is not lost on me.
Is it so hard to believe that a company with an incredibly large financial incentive to lie, did so?
Is it so difficult to believe that these same companies use propaganda to shape discourse online?
The same companies that are happy to promote the body positivity movement resulting in lifelong insulin dependency, yet somehow you refuse to believe that they would try to cash in on a global scale?
> How quiet they become in the face of data. Why are none of these studies being discussed?
This level of discussion isn't constructive. (I was asleep, FYI, not everybody is in west coast US).
The studies listed for the most part all came out after COVID was basically gone. Sure there is plenty that could have been done better in hindsight, but cherry picking a single study showing difficulties with lipids from 2010 "that they should have known about" when the alternative was authoritarian lockdowns is not a helpful position to take.
Constructive discussion has been shut down by vote brigades since 2016 (yes, way before Covid was a thing). They first started prepping the narrative that anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists well before that by slowly increasing the rhetoric over the years.
Have you ever tried arguing with frogs boiling in a pot full of Plato's Cave allegory?
That's what this feels like every day for the past 3 years.
The amount of self-censorship required to discuss anything now is so high, as nothing is allowed to be linked to the dreaded flu of 2019 - Influenza A and B (oh wait, we won't talk about those).
Okay, so what can we talk about? How much anecdotal data do I need before I can Ship of Theseus my way to a conclusion? Since every person I know that has taken the shot have been sick frequently over the past 2 years, one of my dearest friends developing ovarian growths within weeks of taking it, another developing those rashes all over his legs (the same rash you could see on the VAERS reports in the early days).
Okay, so anecdotal data is not trustworthy, sure, I will simply close my eyes to the people around and close to me, and allow their choices to let them become chronically ill?
Fine, let me be that fucking heartless. So then the next question is, what about the fact that the VAERS database suddenly ballooned in size exponentially after 2020? It exploded exponentially in size. "Muh data is anecdotal because its not verified by my propagandists."
DO YOU YET UNDERSTAND WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON?
I am serious when I ask:
WHAT EVIDENCE DO YOU NEED TO SEE TO OPEN YOUR EYES?
This is not me being irrational, or unhinged, this is me asking seriously.
What information would make you believe that you are wrong?
Is there any information that could lead you to that conclusion, or will you keep defending the sunken cost until the end?
If Fauci himself authored a report saying the entire thing was a mistake, would you simply shift the goalposts again, from this being a 100% safe and effective at preventing transmission and fatality, to what, 36%?
And lastly, if you really don't believe I am being genuine when I ask these things, how much are they paying you?
Yeah, and I have a family member who died of COVID, a colleagues teenage child, and a friends parents both died of COVID. All were unvaccinated by choice "for health reasons" because that's what their bubble, much like you, believed in.
I don't care what Fauci or any other authority figure says. I look at the data from actual science journals, taking the study design into account. Yes, there are side effects from the vaccines, but on the whole they are a wildly net-positive prophylactic, after a few things like nutrient deficiencies and antibiotics the most effective tool we have against disease.
See, it seems that people still believe that all people that are against being test subjects for unproven science are somehow against all vaccinations.
Nobody claimed this yet it is the assumption that there is no middle ground.
I don't have any issue with real vaccinations. These products the pharma companies rushed out within months were not and should not be conflated with vaccination as they use entirely different mechanisms for achieving their claimed efficacy. Even so nobody bats an eye when the literal definition is changed in real time in plain sight.
It's interesting how people are so inherently convinced that pharma companies have any other motivation than bottom line.
Besides, how have we not learned the lesson yet that critical thinking trumps blind allegiance to science which is funded by the same companies producing the product they want you to buy?
Did the cigarette lobby teach us nothing?
PS. I am sorry for your losses. Its too touchy to ask whether the people you lost were put on ventilators, which as we know now were responsible for many fatalities.
The mask flip-flopping was unbelievable. In the beginning: masks are not effective, don't use them, stay six feet away. Then, some point later: you're careless and irresponsible of you do not wear masks as you will infect other people. Then, later, We're not sure about six feet, that was an old study regarding droplets and not aerosols. Oh, Covid transmits via droplets and aerosols, so masks are ineffective. Get the vaccine, two shots. No, no, wait, you'll need a booster... Wait, no, you need another one. Wait, wait, you'll need one every few months. Oh and wearing masks can have negative cognitive and health effects if you wear them for a prolonged amount of time. 1000+ days later, the 15 day flatten the curve emergency decree is over!
Now, I'm all for vaccines but I want proven vaccines not half-arsed vaccines approved after a 6 month study on efficacy and adverse effects.
Damn it, they should have had a dedicated team studying these exact things fomr the get-go but mr know it all Faucci was adamant he knew what he was talking about.
They should have been forthright and been truthful with people instead of spoon-feeding them and gaslighting them. We're adults, we can understand we're figuring things out and it's an emergent pandemic --but boy, the propaganda.
This is science. It changes its opinion as more information is gathered. This is a feature, not a bug. If you want universal answers that don't change, look to religion.
Religion was what we witnessed in people when they in unison would follow any new directive without question --without evidence. Also, the establishment is loath to admit any mistakes, when there were many. Mr Faucci also lied to Congress.
Remember how the establishment laughed at Sweden, but it turns out they were right, or at least less wrong about how to deal with this past pandemic?
Sweden tried to go the "herd immunity" route, realize they were about to take it hard on the nose, and changed course to match their European neighbors who were doing better. What do you think happened?
Switzerland didn't have any "lockdowns" either. Non essential stores were closed, as well as public gatherings, but public transport was still running and you could go wherever and do what you wanted.
And Switzerland ended up having much higher COVID stats than surrounding parts of Europe, despite having a generally wealthy, fit and healthy population. But people's individual lives were much less impacted since they could still do outdoor activities and travel. It's all a trade-off.
This is one of those hard things to understand if you don't understand the nordic mentality. Unlike a lot of places you rarely have to mandate something for people to adjust their behavior. So - no there weren't any lockdowns, but social gatherings was very limited, and people for the most part followed through with social distancing.
Based on the assertions you were making above, I was expecting the study you linked to have to do with cognitive impairment and masks. Its only discussion of masks is a theory that perhaps the fact that test administrators wearing masks might have affected the measurement of the results.
"Although all study visits were performed in-person, the inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise impair the understanding of test questions and instructions. Without direct comparison of performance in the same children with and without face masks, it is difficult to rule in or out the potential influence of masks."
How does that compares to the kind of cognitive problems created by long covid, i.e. riveted to the bed and/or unable to read/concentrate/think ever again, etc?
Have you seen what happened to Physics Girl? (and she was vaccinated, but still the likelyhood to get it would have been ever greater without the vaccine)
To lower the proba of getting that, I would eagerly accept any gap in the development of my facial recognition abilities.
It's not news that not seeing faces impedes face skills learning... I'd have guessed it anyways.
It's just not at all the same scale of cognitive damage. On one hand (covid) you get quite a brain substance loss (aka premature brain aging), on the other hand a skill is defavored (faces) which the brain is always happy to compensate with skills about other stuff.
So yeah, in a population that is leaning to believe that covid vaccines have 5G chips in it... you have to select the most important bits of science to know for the emergency, and spend all the time and energy in pedagogy on that. Not really worth to do this kind of effusive pedagogy about why not seeing faces impedes becoming good at faces.
It has been similarly speculated that shutdown of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster has caused more deaths than the disaster itself, due to rise in energy costs:
I mostly find The Economist to be propaganda, for example they try to frame energy vs covid because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures. That's their bias, I find it to be really grating but hey to each their own. What I would have liked to have seen in this article was a breakdown of the causes of death.
It seems like the implication is that energy costs caused people to freeze to death, or at least keep the temperature low and... get more sick? I guess? Not sure. But since energy prices are tied to everything else, how much of these excess deaths were knock-on effects of high energy prices affecting the costs of goods and subsequently human behavior? I would be curious to see a breakdown of the effects because it's hard for me to believe that people are just freezing to death because they can't afford $100/month extra on their electricity bills. Maybe this is true, but I would like to see a breakdown of the causes of death for each person.
One of the things that came to mind is the idea that let's say there's some percentage of people on the verge of suicide on any given day. Could an extra $100/mo on their utility bill, or the inflation from high energy prices, have enough of an effect that they kill themselves?
I think this would be a more interesting analysis than "herp derp energy production is more important than covid safety", especially when the easy argument against the effect of energy costs on an individual is that expensive energy is only relevant when consumers pay for it directly. If the state subsidizes energy production then (assuming no blackouts) nobody is going to freeze to death (which they hinted at in their article, but didn't realize the end conclusion that a nationalized energy sector makes energy costs largely irrelevant to the individual).
Personally I don't really care either way, but I think this post sucks and I don't see why it's so high up.
Disparaging COVID safety measures means it's propaganda now? I absolutely get disliking the economist (they are war mongering at every occasion), but criticism of COVID measures isn't some sort of weird agenda lol. It only makes sense to look back and see what went wrong, and if anything there is a huge lack of criticism of how it all went down.
Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?
> Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?
Yes, I am pointing out their bias. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side, but people aren't posting articles from Mother Jones or Salon or Breitbart on here.
In an article about energy deaths a COVID comparison feels very shoe-horned in. Propaganda can be factual, nothing in this article was not factual, but it's still propaganda. I find that the primary purpose of The Economist is to be propaganda, it has little intellectual value. Which is the point of the rest of my comment.
There's plenty of propaganda for the other side, the difference is that it doesn't get posted to HN. I don't see the value of posting propaganda on HN. There is very little substance to this article. Propaganda doesn't mean "something I don't like" it means something with the primary goal of getting me to subscribe to some belief.
> because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures.
This is simply not a true reflection of the voice of the economist, which has been climate-real (in terms of aligned with the scientific evidence) for more than 25 years
The Economist doesn't do climate denial, they just do concern trolling wrt green energy. "Oh man look at how supply doesn't keep up with demand during the day" and they usually don't acknowledge that market incentives will lead to solutions like storage and arbitrage, because the user is meant to be left with the impression that green energy is a half-baked solution that wont work with our grid.
Nothing in this article is non-factual, but their primary purpose is as a propaganda piece. There isn't much intellectual value.
a) even if I grant you your timeline, that's still decades of delay and denial
b) they have still been championing people like Bjorn Lomborg within that timeframe.
c) they appear to have become more US culture war aligned recently as their readership changed which is obviously a step backwards on climate (and COVID)
your comment is still a gross misrepresentation of the economist 'voice'.
I've been a semi-regular reader for at least 20 years, for instance, and have never seen or heard reference to Bjorn Lomborg.
For example, I just logged in and searched for him - there are 5 articles he appears in since 2001.
I struggle to find any sort of COVID skepticism or 'behind the science' viewpoint with their reporting, frankly I don't think this is true unless you can point to an example of it, and as a Doctor I am acutely sensitive to bad reporting on this.
I don't particularly understand the economist hate that periodically appears here, except to acknowledge that there are different viewpoints, and unless you're radically one way or the other as it pertains to the US culture war which threatens every day to engulf normal discourse everywhere - a society in a phase change either to something greater or to a race to the bottom.
I'm not saying The Economist is batshit insane enough to still be pushing Trump style lies about climate change.
But it's an absolute fact that Trump and Putin only managed to get away with such insanities because for decades the right wing, after initially accepting climate science and starting to put measures in place, got bought by fossil fuel interests.
Here's an article from 2022 and yeah it's not Trump level "China Hoax" stuff, but it's still clearly worrying that investing in gas isn't attractive enough, as if that's the big problem we face.
Similarly the current article. Expensive energy kills apparently, so what's the cheapest source of Winter heating? Wind powered heat pumps in well insulated homes? Probably not worth mentioning, just underline that without Russian gas we die.
> Similarly the current article. Expensive energy kills apparently, so what's the cheapest source of Winter heating? Wind powered heat pumps in well insulated homes? Probably not worth mentioning, just underline that without Russian gas we die.
If people are really freezing to death because they can't afford a relatively small exess expense I'd conclude that we need to improve the social safety net. Perhaps raise taxes and subsidize heating for the poor and vulnerable. Not decrease energy prices overall, mainly benefiting large manufacturing industries, while simultaneously causing climate change. But that's not a conclusion you'll read in the economist...
In the UK it was a vast increase in monthly expenses (still is) and yes it was partially subsidised. What nobody did was the obvious step of insulating houses, despite years of protest from Insulate Britain, who were dismissed as weirdos.
It's propaganda because the primary goal of the economist is to convince you of something (that the status quo/neoliberalism should be enforced). Propaganda also doesn't mean nothing in this article was non-factual.
Mother Jones also has a lot of 100% factual articles, but their main goal as a propaganda outlet is to convince people to become socialists. I don't think that belongs on HN either, even though I love Mother Jones.
Is there value in posting a pure propaganda piece to HN? I don't think so, not unless the point of the post is to practice media literacy by looking at propaganda academically. I think it would be more interesting to post something more scientific without the narrative bias. More room for debate beyond the confines of what the author wants to push.
Also I never said The Economist denies climate change. They disparage green energy. All the people replying to my original comment never actually addressed the point I was making, they immediately jumped to "but the Economist doesn't do climate denialism" and got mad at my usage of the word propaganda
Either way, this article is crap and so is most of what The Economist comes up with because it--again--is propaganda.
Climate change denial has moved beyond explicitly denying its existence at this point. At least the kind that can sway otherwise reasonably intelligent people.
> It's not happening
> Okay maybe it's happening but we didn't cause it
> Okay maybe it's happening and maybe we did cause it but we shouldn't do anything about it because insert easily debunkable bullshit about electric vehicles and renewables being impractical or whataboutism involving other countries here. <== WE ARE HERE
> Okay it's happening and we caused it but it's too late to do anything now so lets just keep the status quo.
Does their glowing obituary of Nigel Lawson count:
> His frequent presence on the bbc, arguing against the reality of man-made climate change or, alternatively, that a bit of warming was desirable, depending on the day, outraged environmentalists and scientists alike.
Someone can question the reality of something that isn't real. So they've not even managed that low bar you've set for them.
We have to assume their opinion on this. We know it outrages environmentalists and scientists, but apparently the economists opinion is not relevant or worth stating explicitly?
I mean, it's an obituary. They don't really need to spend an additional paragraph about their opinion on climate change, given that they have articles that are about climate change all over the rest of the magazine. The idea that they're secretly climate change deniers because they don't spend as much time on it as you'd like in an obituary is honestly slightly crazy.
Even robots need energy. If the robots produce the stuff, the robots are "the economy", even if money isn't involved. And if the robots can't produce because of lack of energy, that still hurts people.
The evidence-based research on long COVID is limited and of mixed quality. From what I've seen, there are significant gaps in experimental methodology and a lot of studies based on extremely subjective surveys which don't effectively filter co-morbities. I would strongly caution you to examine the data before adopting a strong position on the issue and applying it to potentially unrelated phenomena.
Long COVID, from what I can tell / have read, is acknowledged by research[1][2]. The mechanism of it, and what is the best treatment for the people suffering from it, I think, are still the subject of ongoing research.
If you look closely at what those studies actually survey and how that data is collected, it's clear that many possible co-morbid conditions aren't adequately filtered out. There is _no_ objective test or evidence-based protocol that can conclusively diagnose "long COVID." Doctors must rely on checklists of broad symptoms and the patient's word. The CDC page you linked mentions this under "Data for Long COVID:"
>For example, some studies look for the presence of Long COVID based on self-reported symptoms, while others collect symptoms and conditions recorded in medical records. Some studies focus only on people who have been hospitalized, while others include people who were not hospitalized.
Can serious health conditions can arise as a lasting consequence of infection? Absolutely. Can we easily distinguish between those and other symptoms or conditions which may arise out of stress, anxiety, other unrelated conditions, or symptoms which in some (not all) cases may be psychosomatic? Can we accurately draw conclusions as to how many long-COVID patients there are in total, then apply that conclusion in other areas with confidence as the GP commenter has done? Not yet.
Though it is worth noting there is experimental clinical data providing a plausible pathway to suggest long COVID is a result of cell activity dysfunction with plausible biomarkers of dysfunction, and we've known this long enough to know long COVID is a real medical pathology (one distinct from acute infection based on biomarker evidence):
>A unique two biomarker profile consisting of ANG-1/P-SEL was developed with machine learning, providing a classification accuracy for Long-COVID status of 96%.
The first paper used a random forest-based decision tree classifier built on markers in blood assays. Neat.
However, this study has a major flaw. They rated their classifier's accuracy on classifying blood marker profiles of acutely ill COVID patients, long COVID patients experiencing "diffuse symptoms" referred with "no selection process", and a healthy control group. The control group consisted of healthy patients whose blood samples had been banked prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It's not clear whether they compared their classifier's results against people who've had COVID and recovered without issue, versus those who had COVID and continued to experience symptoms long after recovery. That is the entire point of developing such a classifier. This paper is worthless without that comparison.
Second paper has the same problem, and is honest about it:
>The healthy control subjects were individuals without disease, acute illness or prescription medications and were previously banked in the Translational Research Centre, London, ON (Directed by Dr. D.D. Fraser; https://translationalresearchcentre.com/). These latter samples were obtained prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in our region and therefore, were considered not to have been exposed to the virus.
Since this in the Economist, I'm surprised the author didn't go full Swiftean "Modest Proposal", and say that this is a good thing, because it frees up a lot of caregivers to do more productive things.
Reading the comments of for this article, HN -> Reddit (or worse). This is political BS, nothing technical or entrepreneurial. Gresham's Law?
Guess it's time to go elsewhere - have fun, try to stay civil with each other and (somehow) return to tech-related topics. I'll check in at some point in the future.
The comments are talking about politics because the article is politically motivated horseshit, not the other way around.
If you're lamenting the article making it to the front page though I hear you. HN has a weird boomer right wing uncle vibe when it comes to anything to do with the climate or renewable energy. Lots of people repeating the same tired easily debunkable soundbites and getting a disturbing number of upvotes.
To promote an agenda and misleadingly. It's trying to push cheaper energy (either by more negotiation with suppliers, or by way of reducing policies against it in regulations or taxes/tariffs), and it's trying to frame that need by comparing it to something that you might think is a huge killer (which Covid wasn't in the winter of 2022-23, anywhere.)
No, the point is that we all collectively shit ourselves over COVID, absolutely turning society upside-down. But we shrug at so many other existential threats because they are already by accounted for (like traffic fatalities) or happens to “someone else” (like drug dependency).
COVID was dangerous, and ignoring it completely wasn’t an option. But it is a reasonable rhetorical gambit to wonder why we responded to COVID so aggressively while ignoring other risks and threats.
All cause mortality seems to have near universally increase across many countries over the past 12 to 24 months. This can not yet be clearer attributed to something, or at least not publicly. But it is also clearer not covid.
What is most strange is the out right refusal to acknowledge this phenomenon by our ruling elite. There have been examples in the UK where parliament has actively refused to even listen to those that talk about it.
The movement towards renewables and away from reliable, inexpensive fossil generation will continue this trend in years to come. Gas generation is increasingly economically unviable with so much competition from renewables, but it remains necessary in order to provide baseload capacity, fill gaps when renewables are underperforming, and handle significant energy demand (e.g. an extreme winter storm).
The ultimate solution is to dramatically over build intermittent renewables so that the lowest trough of electricity production is enough to meet baseload needs.
The problem (or opportunity) then is what you do with all the excess energy during the peaks. Ideally, you also have a large fleet of responsive consumers that can quickly spin up/down consumption and pay for the electricity and keep the oversupply of energy producers economically viable.
For example, currently your neighbour having solar might, in worst case, cause you to have to pay for energy in peak, if they bump voltage high enough your inverter turns off.
You're also selling (if you don't have net metering) your produced power for pennies on dollar.
If, for example, instead of pushing that energy all the way could store it closer, now grid doesn't need to "do something with it", there are less losses overall, and less waste.
So if say a local muncipality or power company just built local battery storage facility and just "leased" capacity to its occupants:
* people with solar could "bank" the peaks to use it during night
* people without could enjoy lower energy prices overall
* people could "just" buy battery and consume more of that peak (buying electricity for cheap from their neighbours), and maybe even contribute pack.
* power company wouldn't need to push as much power and maybe even potentially do something clever like "preloading" batteries before peak usage so less of that is pushed from the big plants, or "borrow" some energy from the bank to push elsewhere where needed.
But that's complex and requires capital investments, and there is no motivation from power company to make stuff more optimal for customers, just for the investors.
Look at all the research and implementation of carbon-neutral steel production (discussed here: ) - electricity is the TCP/IP of energy - if you can get enough energy deployed as electricity and you have a strong grid (including HVDC lines) then over deployment of renewable generation could usher in a new wave of uses for that excess.
It's a great problem to have, and we should strive to get there. In the meanwhile keeping baseload technologies that aren't massive carbon emitters is a good thing.
The "large fleet of responsive consumers" is polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzers, that produce hydrogen for making steel, fertilizers, plastics, and industrial chemicals. PEM electrolyzers can start up in seconds.
> The ultimate solution is to dramatically over build intermittent renewables so that the lowest trough of electricity production is enough to meet baseload needs.
Not always feasible. We had multiple months where winds were at historic lows for Europe, with lots of clouds, which meant much lower than usual wind and solar energy generation[1]. You can't overbuild enough for such a scenario.
Please explain how dramatically over building renewables will keep the lights on along the US West Coast after sunset? Where are we going to get power when there is little wind blowing and no sun shining anywhere in North America?
The reality is that the only way for renewables to provide base load is through huge amounts of storage. There are a variety of proposals for this but so far with current technology none seem to be economically viable at the scale needed.
No, that isn’t the case. The article did not try to imply that green energy is to blame.
But let’s pretend it did, is that not a perspective we should analyze? If we are going to actively restrict sources of energy, we should quantify the externalities. Not to convince anyone that we shouldn’t take those steps, but because these are real trade-offs with real costs. I’m sure that someone who earnestly feels that climate change is an immediate existential threat would welcome the analysis.
> No, that isn’t the case. The article did not try to imply that green energy is to blame.
The point of this article was to reinforce the idea that cheap energy is important to a safe and stable society, which is true, but it ties into their overall narrative that green energy in its current form is inconsistent and poses a danger to our grid. Which is why the parent comment immediately had this reaction.
> is that not a perspective we should analyze?
Yes, it is, and it would be foolish to think that the green energy sector is not tackling this already. We are all familiar with the famous "duck curve" and when energy is in demand at certain parts of the day there is a market opportunity. There are tons of companies in the storage and arbitrage space using batteries, flywheels, whatever.
The Economist does not engage with this argument in good faith, it usually just does basic concern trolling. They will point out the issue with renewables, and they oftentimes wont outright give any possible solutions, but their implication is clear. They are a newspaper for the enforcement of the status quo after all.
as far as I can tell from the free accessible part:
their analysis seem to only make sense if you assume that Covid magically went away
and/or Covid death are reliably detected even if the person dies at home in a context where "ways through which covid can kill you" happen to also be what they base their analysis on...
but at least personally I know of more cases of more serve Covid last winter then pretty much any time before, not very surprising given that Covid didn't disappear, still mutates but Germany had noticeable less steps to prevent Covid then before
and this are all cases which didn't in anyway decrease their usage of heat (i.e. earned enough to be able to cope with increased heating bills)
so idk. but from the parts which are not behind a paywall this looks like a very questionable analysis, which also happen to fit multiple political agendas very well, surely just coincidence but interesting anyway
Whats striking from the statistics is how younger ages (under 45) have been affected this winter compared to during the Covid pandemic https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
This was also predicted to happen and politicians ignored (or worse, actively silenced) the predictions. Even mildly cooler conditions in winter for old people can inspire tons of respiratory infections
They're ultimately victims of their own political leaders who increased dependency on Russian gas in order to irrationally kill nuclear fission energy.
Anti-nuclear energy activists will likely go down in history as villains.
Also, didn't Trump get laughed at by many of his European counterparts when he advised them at the UN that it was against their best interests to go all in on Russian energy.
I would get to the same answer via a slightly different path. Their corrupt leaders sold their country to Russia and they pulled it off by exploiting their constituents with anti-nuclear fear mongering.
More generally, supported by fossil fuel industry.
They were and still are the useful idiots serving the interests of carbon emission industry, who exploited their amygdala because it's easier to be scared of acute nuclear risks than by diffuse GHG risks.
> I was too young to remember these events firsthand, but learning about Grozny in the history books, I am mystified that the world was so eager to cooperate with Russia such a short time later. Putin completely destroyed a cosmopolitan city killing thousands of civilians. The Russian military offered the defenders safe passage out of the city and mined the road overnight before they left.
I think it was vain hope that the cooperation and "playing nice" will cause shift in russia into more civilized country and shift the iron curtain thinking of EU being "the enemy" instead of "partner in making more wealth for the citizens".
It's only in hindsight that you can say the hope was "vain"; many Eastern European countries are doing fairly well, as are most Balkan (former Yugoslavia) countries. Further back you can also look at post-Franco Spain as a success, or Germany after the second world war.
At some point you got to say "okay, we'll try again with you guys". Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. There's a fine line to walk here, but in the end it's the only option there is other than perpetual hostilities.
> it was vain hope that the cooperation and "playing nice"
yes especially given that the US torpedoed any chance of really nicely getting along with Russia when we go far enough back to a point where Russia could have gone in a different direction
but there where many many clear indications that any such chance had passed since many years ago to a point where it was clear that going forward with the "playing nice" path would not work
Through I guess part of the reason they tried anyway is because while the US is for the EU the most close aligned super power, there are still many differences. At the same time a major US <-> China conflict is on the horizon since decades and the EU is not and likely never will be in a position to go to war with China. Also in some few point the EU is closer to China then the US in their views. To cut it short AFIK an escalation of an US China conflict has a non small risk of the EU being torn up between the fronts (more economically then military), but a EU with strong ties to Russia would be string enough to not fully enter the conflict and in turn might come out more powerful then both the US or China
9/11 was the point where a lot of things were forgiven, or at least ignored, because "we're all fighting terrorism". Putin played that angle masterfully, too - he was the first foreign leader to call Bush, for example. Here's an example of what was in the press at that time:
If you are to take the realpolitik posture, and take the best of your worst picks - of course bad actors outside of your own continent are a better option than bad actors next door.
Nobody has any sympathy as to how Russians feel about anything while they are invading Ukraine.
Algeria is absolutely better in essentially every way. In particular, they're not invading neighbours, murdering tens of thousands of civilians or attempting to erase a culture and a language from existence.
Wrong[0]. Algeria has an important role in the ongoing Western Sahara conflict, caused by its rivarly with Morocco. Also wait till you learn that Algeria has strong ties with Russia. Hint: they conduct joint military exercises and buy weapons from Russia.
> In particular, they're not invading neighbours, murdering tens of thousands of civilians or attempting to erase a culture and a language from existence.
Source for tens of thousands of dead civilians in Ukraine?
Btw following this logic what should we say about the USA with Iraq or Afghanistan? The count of dead civilians goes to the hundreds of thousands, and that's only counting those caused directly. If you add the civilians deaths caused indirectly by bombing two countries to ash then this starts to look like a genocide.
Because right now Europe is buying a lot more gas from the USA, all to the USA's profit of course. If the parameter of choice is "number of dead civilians caused by wars" then Europe should still buy Russian gas.
> The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is not remotely like an atrocity like the destruction of Grozny.
Why is that?
At least, Russia has rebuilt Grozny since then, whereas NATO just left Serbs to their own devices.
Neither do Russians care that much what people of the EU feel. We have our own mental resources to reflect on the shit we made, so the NATO countries are encouraged to reflect on their own shit and stop nagging us. And take your NGOs with you.
Meanwhile we still have a war to win, or at least to end.
I'm not sure if you genuinely think the extent of the destruction in Grozny is comparable to the extent of the destruction in Yugoslavia after the NATO intervention, but it wasn't, and neither was the need to rebuild. NATO did not grind any Yugoslav cities to dust, and killed hundreds, not thousands, of civilians. Furthermore, NATO did not invade and conquer Yugoslavia, which seems like a key point in regards to rebuilding. The Chechens did not get the opportunity to rebuild Grozny themselves because Russia destroyed their government, tricked their leadership into being slain while withdrawing, and re-created their state as Russian. The Chechens wanted to be left to their own devices to run their country. Russia invaded in response, and killed and destroyed until there was nothing left to defend.
Can you recognize the absolute distortion of perspective it takes to look at Russia invading Chechenya to prevent its independence, destroying its capital to force it to surrender, and then say "well at least Russia rebuilt it after they conquered it!"
>NATO countries are encouraged to reflect on their own shit and stop nagging us
Your country invaded a NATO-friendly nation on the border of NATO. You are not being "nagged" when that country's government calls the world for aid and the world, shocked and appalled at the actions of your bloodthirsty regime, responds.
Look, I won't even attempt to convince you any further - either your government will collapse and the harsh rays of sunlight will expose the truth for you, or your government will continue to close its doors to the outside world until what you believe won't matter at all anyway. I don't imagine I have the rhetorical ability to break through your distorted worldview myself.
You lost this war in 2021. At this point, it's just a question of how many Ukrainian and Russian lives you will waste before accepting it.
Your comment is a masterful exhibit of an imperial thought, deciding for the conquered people that their independence is "untenable", because after all those people are just "criminals".
Might have as well thrown in some other classic Russian quotes about Chechens having "no morals, nothing to distinguish them from wild beasts" (that one is from 1824).
Of course you're blind to how Russian imperialism creates and perpetrates this condition, blinded by imperial greed to acquire and hold onto the lands, while being always brutal, after all they are all "beasts" and "criminals", Chechens, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, whoever else the eye of a conqueror falls onto. Happy that the other countries dropping bombs somewhere else give you a carte blanche to bomb hospitals and apartment buildings methodically and with glee. Being proud of bringing more suffering into this already troubled world.
Imagine you are Putin in 1999 and you have to solve the problem of Ichkeria right there right now. You can't go back to 1824. Or 1944. Or 1992.
What do you do? I've described the context.
If you do nothing, Ichkerians will hostage or rob more people and your popular support will dwindle because of your inaction and somebody more eager takes your place.
I am patiently explaining it to you for some reason, whereas in context of Iraq, Lybia and Syria this is completely moot.
Oh goody, Mariupol is being rebuilt! Mostly as a vehicle for good old fashioned construction related corruption, and at a pace that'll take 50+ years, but hey, nice of you to throw that in there! Is the replacement of thousands of civilians butchered by Russia's "liberators" also under way?
I can see that you expect Russians to be better people than Germans or Americans, while having worse prior history and being overally more poor and miserable.
That would be a noble expectation, but you could predict that it will not be uphold. Maybe because it is not possible in practice, or at least highly implausible.
Russans, in general, are people. People go to war when told to do so by their superiors. People rationalize what happens in the moment, to reflect on it and be outraged later.
If you were doing that in a good faith, good for you, but as you can see that's not how the world works.
>> I can see that you expect Russians to be better people than Germans or Americans
More Germans opposed Nazism than Russians oppose Putinism.
"It has been estimated that during the course of World War II 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities. It has also been estimated that between 15,000 and 77,000 of the Germans were executed by the Nazis."
Nothing comparable exists in Russia. You like Putin more than Germans liked Hitler.
And allegedly upwards of 700,000 Russians have decided to NOT got to war and have fled the country! This source is 7 months old. You've got to figure that even more have fled since!
Who said they do? They want to be respected members of their community and want to keep their country intact, leaving the moral character stuff to Immanuel Kant.
I sincerely hope that you find a way out of a violent and destructive mindset. The only one to blame for Russia's isolation and woes are Russians themselves.
The day that Russia stops sabotaging elections, bribing officials, and murdering innocents is the day that Russia will be accepted openly.
Whataboutism is always the recourse for someone who doesn't see a moral imperative to stop doing bad things. "Everyone does it. What's wrong if we do it too?" Well the point isn't to sink to the lowest low humanity has to offer but to try to be better than everyone else, and you can't claim the moral high ground by arguing from the bottom of the hill.
And what do you think about the good old "mirroring" tactics of Russian psy ops: accusing the other party of what they're doing themselves? (which you are maybe doing right now by accusing somebody to be a psy op)
By the way Putin's Russia［edited from just "Russia", to clarify we're speaking about nowadays' Russia, not Soviet Union］ has killed hundreds if not thousands of children, and has wrenched thousands of them from their parents. Just so you remember.
I am deeply sorry for your relatives. I would like to point out that communism have killed way more people inside Russia itself.
Unfortunately, a great many number of people in Russia still do not understand the extent of damage that communism has inflicted on the country and its peoples. So basically you may just ignore me while many Russians still approve what was done not only to you but to themselves, but here my condolences go.
Yes, the so called communists managed to inflict the most damage to their own people. That sure is something
Being from Bulgaria, I've met plenty of Russians. We're friends with another family - guy is Russian, and his wife is Ukrainian. Plenty of baggage but the guy had enough self awareness to recognise what was going on nearly a decade ago when the war started.
Also, as a gamer, I am often matched with Russians on a regular basis. 9 out of 10 are the worst team mates ever. While annoying, I feel sorry for these guys because it's clear they are just victims. I can only imagine the hellish environment they have been brought into.
Now I'm afraid my comment came as rather insensitive... my apologies...
I was speaking about Putin's Russia, to clarify.
I think it's fair to get justice for any war crime, and any crime against humanity, be it from Russia or from US. I just honestly feel that the crime bucket of Putin's Russia is fuller than US' one during the same era!
So what, you're denying the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them well-documented and many resulting from massacres rather than "mere" indiscriminate bombing, because jihadis also showed up and tortured some POW for religious reasons? I don't even know how to characterize your comment without swearing profusely, so I'll just say it left me rather speechless.
You are thinking what by mere mentioning actions of 'some jihadis' I already deny 'deaths of tens of thousands of civilians'. You also completely ignore who were these jihadis and why they 'showed up'.
But it looks like you are totally okay with jihadis 'torturing some POW', including beheading on the cam and straight up shooting them, indiscriminate raping of civilians along with a very discriminate ones. Ask Yelena Masyuk how she feels about those 'freedom fighters' she loved before. Hint, it's not mentioned in Wikipedia what they did to her, but I think there are still videos of that somewhere on the Net.
And of course you absolutely ignore (because you don't even know?) what happened before that and how 'civilians of cosmopolitan city' behaved with the people of improper origins. Or what happened after that. Here, refresh your memory: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/09/world/4-foreigners-are-fo...
The vast majority of the residents of Grozny who were killed by indiscriminate artillery fire levelling much of the city were not engaged in these kinds of activities. Quite a few of them were ethnically Russian, even.
Ukraine probably wouldn’t have been invaded at all without western backing, would it? It is a lot like the Poland situation in WWII. They still would have lost land since they have a weak negotiating position, but the west staying out would have saved many lives (now thrown into a meat grinder for some lines in the dirt).
Not even Europe, more a bunch of elites like the European Commission and governments. The Europeans who have been impacted most by Europe joining the war are the same who didn't have any choice in it, specifically the poorest that can't afford to keep up with energy prices in order to keep their house warm.
At the same time the elites who filled their mouths with words like "sacrifice" are those who didn't have to change their lifestyle in the slightest.
It reminds of the tightest COVID lockdowns, rich people would post videos from their mansions/villas telling people who lived cramped in flats to stay home and be responsible.
I'm a bit late to this, but as far as I can tell that comment was flagged just the same as yours was.
I should say, though, that if you're asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35894833 - that comment was clearly against the site guidelines. It was far worse a violation of the guidelines than the parent comment you're asking about. Please don't post like that, regardless of which comments users happen to flag.
Also- if you want to ask us a question, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "@dang" is a no-op, and I only saw your comment randomly.
People should have been able to adapt to the need to use less heating energy. 1. Wear warmer clothing. 2. Very substantially cut down on the portion of the house you live in and consequently need to heat...
I don't disagree, but there are many elderly people with an irrational relationship with money in their later years. A friend talks about his 80+ year old neighbour with money in the bank and literally no family at all to leave an estate with. They fret over tiny financial decisions every day that would otherwise bring them comfort or purpose.
I remember my grandfather in his 80-90s not using the air-conditioning during heatwaves to save money. The price of power wouldn't have been a serious factor in his mind, just that it cost anything at all.
I assume decades of frugal behaviour makes for extreme conditioning that is hard to undo.
I find it kinda funny, I know few pretty rich people and you can notice which one started from something small and worked for it with frugality. Like boss wanted us to do a bunch of tweaking to run servers a bit hotter to save some on AC (we have small closed datacenter with like 2 racks). Absolute tiny savings in company hiring 50+ developers alone but hey it's savings
People should have been and to adapt to the need to fight off COVID. 1. Wear a respirator. 2. Live a healthy lifestyle to avoid obesity and chronic health conditions so the body is better and to fight off infection.
See? Being a twat is easy. Actually having a bit of compassion is the hard part.
