Blog 2020 Up and Running
March 6th, 2020 at 7:39:30 AM
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I should have a new entry every couple of days. No ads. The blog is completely and utterly non-commercial.
www.theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/thank-you-to-jean-scott.html
www.theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/thank-you-to-jean-scott.html
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 6th, 2020 at 9:28:15 AM
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link if possible please!
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 6th, 2020 at 9:35:39 AM
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https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/thank-you-to-jean-scott.htmlQuote: DeMangolink if possible please!
Psalm 25:16
Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
Proverbs 18:2
A fool finds no satisfaction in trying to understand, for he would rather express his own opinion.
March 6th, 2020 at 9:39:55 AM
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Easy Button
“You don’t bring a bone saw to a negotiation.” - Robert Jordan, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia
March 6th, 2020 at 10:54:49 AM
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BleedingChipsSlowly, that's a great tagline. I hadn't seen it before.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 14th, 2020 at 9:21:32 PM
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Going to tackle coronavirus issues in the weeks ahead.
https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/gamblers-eye-coronavirus.html
(Mod edit to fix the link)
https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/gamblers-eye-coronavirus.html
(Mod edit to fix the link)
Last edited by: beachbumbabs on Mar 15, 2020
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 23rd, 2020 at 9:43:46 PM
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Blog tackles the sense of individual exceptionalism in the era of COVID-19. Things are happening so fast, the writing could use some polish and edits, but I try to just hammer it out and post it.
https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-individual-exceptionalism.html
https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-individual-exceptionalism.html
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 24th, 2020 at 3:32:08 AM
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Tens of thousands will still die. The flattened curve will just spread it out. And if we keep certain segments of this country shut down, soon there will be no country with all the bankruptcies and resultant loss of jobs.
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 24th, 2020 at 5:01:04 AM
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Quote: DeMangoTens of thousands will still die. The flattened curve will just spread it out. And if we keep certain segments of this country shut down, soon there will be no country with all the bankruptcies and resultant loss of jobs.
All correct. But by flattening the curve thousands, maybe tens of thousands will he saved. As soon as the peak is over here it will be interesting to see the pressure mount to reopen. Even when medically it will not make sense yet. At some point economically trumps medically.
March 24th, 2020 at 5:59:58 AM
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Quote: SOOPOOAll correct. But by flattening the curve thousands, maybe tens of thousands will he saved. As soon as the peak is over here it will be interesting to see the pressure mount to reopen. Even when medically it will not make sense yet. At some point economically trumps medically.
We are spreading the curve, managing infections and deaths over time. The peak is over and Wuhan is reopening. We could eliminate automobiles, cigarettes and sugar in our bodies, amongst other things, and and the short term gain would be a dramatic drop in deaths from those causes. This makes the medical sense you mention.
We are going to have to restart the economy that has been shut down. Sooner than later. More Nanny state is assured but assured destruction awaits the longer the new normal is not implemented.
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 24th, 2020 at 8:00:42 AM
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Quote: DeMangoTens of thousands will still die. The flattened curve will just spread it out. And if we keep certain segments of this country shut down, soon there will be no country with all the bankruptcies and resultant loss of jobs.
I think you're missing the point of the flattening. There's a resource-restricted mortality that can be avoided, and it is significant. I find it fascinating that people are trying to define the United States as a particular thing, namely a collection of capitalist enterprises. There is no law of nature that says the United States must not be like Switzerland or Germany or anywhere else.
This is going to get very Hunger Game-ish. People arguing to sacrifice x number of the old or infirm just so the current structure stays largely intact. One of the main problems with the current structure in this pandemic is that the medical system is primarily for profit, so there is no cushion for emergencies built in because doing so is unprofitable, and you cannot swing resources seamlessly from federal stockpiles or manpower to the medical system. The medical system has to change, because this is not the last pandemic.
I get a kick out of the absurdity of trying to tally "potential suicides" from job losses or staying in as a balancing count against actual losses predicted if there is not a lockdown. That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for a logic to justify disease deaths.
The medical side has numbers. The business side is making stuff up as they go along.
Last edited by: redietz on Mar 24, 2020
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 24th, 2020 at 12:14:50 PM
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Quote: redietz
The medical side has numbers. The business side is making stuff up as they go along.
What utter garbage. Let me know when they approach 480,000 deaths, the medical side. Destroying small business is not making stuff up. Folks gotta pay the rent and buy the food. We need to reopen for business with new standards in place soon. Easter sounds good.
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:24:42 PM
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480,000 may come faster than you think and the reopening it likely to expedite that.
"Just because I'm not doing anything illegal, doesn't mean I won't have to defend myself someday." -Chip Reese
March 24th, 2020 at 12:32:54 PM
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Is there somewhere we can bet on that?Quote: Minty480,000 may come faster than you think and the reopening it likely to expedite that.
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:40:03 PM
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The day we put business over the public health is the day America joins the League of Lesser Nations.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction is supposed to make sense.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:45:19 PM
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I don’t want to get political so I won’t respond specifically. I’ll just generally note that this happens in America every day in many industries.Quote: billryanThe day we put business over the public health is the day America joins the League of Lesser Nations.
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:55:00 PM
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We need to coexist. Shutting down the country will shut down the country. No one screams about flu deaths, might end up with what 50,000? No one but the bartender wants to eliminate cars, but that could save 50,000 lives too! Eliminate added sugars to all foods, somebody put a number to that health move!
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 24th, 2020 at 1:03:32 PM
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My question would be on the number that have died. What percentage of those people had compromised health or were in bad health before they got the virus. Bronchitis? Emphysema? COPD? Since it's hitting the lungs...how many were smokers?
We should be seeing a breakdown. We know it's hitting older folks....but we should get an idea on their health issues prior to contracting the virus.
We should be seeing a breakdown. We know it's hitting older folks....but we should get an idea on their health issues prior to contracting the virus.
March 25th, 2020 at 10:39:28 AM
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An interesting side note to this is that the U.S. is a predominantly Christian country. When an allegedly Christian leadership starts suggesting lives-for-business trades, you get into some interesting inconsistencies.
Matthew 19:24 starts the debate rolling.
Then we get into Revelation imagery with the Whore of Babylon. Is anything more whorish than trading money for lives?
One might cut to the chase and ask, as the bumper stickers do, what the Nazarene himself would have to say.
When all is said and done, recommending Easter as the day to resurrect the economy by risking lives might very well come under the aegis of sacrilege. From the perspective of Satan, an inside joke, so to speak.
Matthew 19:24 starts the debate rolling.
Then we get into Revelation imagery with the Whore of Babylon. Is anything more whorish than trading money for lives?
One might cut to the chase and ask, as the bumper stickers do, what the Nazarene himself would have to say.
When all is said and done, recommending Easter as the day to resurrect the economy by risking lives might very well come under the aegis of sacrilege. From the perspective of Satan, an inside joke, so to speak.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 25th, 2020 at 11:00:05 AM
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The short term pains of shutting things down are better than the long term death tolls if we don't. If it had a shorter period without symptoms and was harder to transmit then yeah, maybe we could just chug along but right now it's a question of do we act proactively saving lives and ultimately having more people alive to join the workforce later or let it run its course decimating many areas.
"Just because I'm not doing anything illegal, doesn't mean I won't have to defend myself someday." -Chip Reese
March 25th, 2020 at 12:26:59 PM
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Quote: redietzAn interesting side note to this is that the U.S. is a predominantly Christian country. When an allegedly Christian leadership starts suggesting lives-for-business trades, you get into some interesting inconsistencies.
Matthew 19:24 starts the debate rolling.
Then we get into Revelation imagery with the Whore of Babylon. Is anything more whorish than trading money for lives?
One might cut to the chase and ask, as the bumper stickers do, what the Nazarene himself would have to say.
When all is said and done, recommending Easter as the day to resurrect the economy by risking lives might very well come under the aegis of sacrilege. From the perspective of Satan, an inside joke, so to speak.
This is no longer a Christian country and government. Hasn't been in quite awhile. They threw prayer out of schools, allowed 60 million + abortions not to mention Homosexual marriage and unwieldy national debt. Just the highlights. With economics, a long shut down of a lot of the economy will bring forth more misery than you are ignoring. So how many tens of thousands will die by common flu? Not a peep out of you. Is that not hypocrisy?????
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 25th, 2020 at 12:29:34 PM
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Obviously no one looks too closely at those flattened curves they love to throw at us. Notice where more die, the right side of the curve?
When a rock is thrown into a pack of dogs, the one that yells the loudest is the one who got hit.
March 28th, 2020 at 5:53:20 PM
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I just wanted to report that, based on the last 36 hours or so, I have been too optimistic. I think the president will walk back his Easter idea in the next couple of days. Probably just let it die on the vine and let Pence explain that "the president has decided" something else.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 28th, 2020 at 7:57:16 PM
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Quote: redietzI One of the main problems with the current structure in this pandemic is that the medical system is primarily for profit.
You could not be more wrong. Our for profit medical system had TRIPLE the number of ventilators when compared to socialized medicine country, like, say, ITALY! (per capita) So we were starting as WAY MORE prepared for such a disaster than they were. We have had more cases now than any country. No American has died for lack of a ventilator.
The for profit motive has the US developing MOST of the new drugs and treatments in the world.
FOR PROFIT leads to innovation. Just think Apple. If it was up to a socialist government to be responsible for innovation, you'd still be dialing to make a call.
March 28th, 2020 at 8:38:39 PM
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The plague was good from the surviving laborers position. Enough workers died that the ones remaining had a little leverage as there was a shortage of laborers. So, at least there's that.
March 28th, 2020 at 8:51:14 PM
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March 29th, 2020 at 5:23:43 AM
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my wife works in health care
we're both old
if we get it resources are going to be used for younger people
the older people will be left to die if there's not enough resources to go around
I can accept this
but I feel strongly that it should be legal to assist anyone in this situation to die painlessly
that's my two cents worth that no one in authority will probably ever listen to or consider
we're both old
if we get it resources are going to be used for younger people
the older people will be left to die if there's not enough resources to go around
I can accept this
but I feel strongly that it should be legal to assist anyone in this situation to die painlessly
that's my two cents worth that no one in authority will probably ever listen to or consider
Please don't feed the trolls
March 29th, 2020 at 8:14:35 AM
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Quote: petroglyphhttps://www.ghsindex.org/
Global health security index.
That's what I thought...in 2019.
The 2020 and 2021 scores should be interesting.
If you read other nation's papers or listen to interviews with other countries' epidemiologists, you get a sense of how sorry they feel for the American public.
I listened to an interview last night with one of South Korea's elder statesmen of epidemiology at their pandemic institute. I will dig it up and post it -- it was March 24th. It's subtitled, but it covers a lot of ground and is very Dragnet matter-of-fact. He makes the point that a country like South Korea would normally need 10 years to develop a solid, practical vaccine, but that the U.S., if everything goes absolutely perfectly, may be able to have one in 18 months. He also has some opinions on wearing masks and what doctors need most after two months of the pandemic there. His answer was "rest, but you cannot rest during a war."
He felt that Europe and the U.S. seemed overconfident regarding the virus, and that their cultures were not designed to handle something like this easily.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 29th, 2020 at 8:29:28 AM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAk7aX5hksU
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 29th, 2020 at 9:05:22 AM
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Quote: redietzI just wanted to report that, based on the last 36 hours or so, I have been too optimistic. I think the president will walk back his Easter idea in the next couple of days. Probably just let it die on the vine and let Pence explain that "the president has decided" something else.
Twenty minutes ago, Dr. Fauci reported projections that basically take the low end 80,000-if-we-quarantine projections out of play. We are more in line for numbers two or three times that, which is to be expected, given the results of the last 48 hours.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
March 29th, 2020 at 10:25:31 AM
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Historically females are not elevated to shackled pedestals when their labor is desperately needed.Quote: petroglyphThe plague was good from the surviving laborers position. Enough workers died that the ones remaining had a little leverage as there was a shortage of laborers. So, at least there's that.
March 29th, 2020 at 10:39:47 AM
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I wold agree that the profit motive provided the excess capacity and the stimulus for innovation, I just wonder why implementation often lags. Consider VCR recorders? Smart Phone freight handling systems, connectionless payment systems. Other countries just don't have benefits paid by paper checks.Quote: SOOPOOFOR PROFIT leads to innovation. Just think Apple. If it was up to a socialist government to be responsible for innovation, you'd still be dialing to make a call.
March 29th, 2020 at 10:57:42 AM
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Quote: redietz
He also has some opinions on wearing masks and what doctors need most after two months of the pandemic there. His answer was "rest, but you cannot rest during a war."
He felt that Europe and the U.S. seemed overconfident regarding the virus, and that their cultures were not designed to handle something like this easily.
It is the abundance created by the profit motive that gives us the ability to rest, to shift resources.
Overconfidence? I might agree with that. I think of the beautiful cities of South America surrounded by barrios of filth and poverty. In the USA, there tends to be an isolation from evil.
July 3rd, 2020 at 12:27:37 PM
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I'm supposed to ask permission, so no direct blog link. But here's the update on the blog itself.
Basically, got everything more or less correct for four months regarding the virus and U.S. responses to it. I received a handful of compliments, which I greatly appreciate, including from a few book authors and a national columnist.
The point about today and why I bumped this. Back on May 18th, in an entry called "Outside the Box," I made the point that instead of restricting those most vulnerable to the virus, one way to think outside the box was to evaluate the individual differences in ability to spread virus and restrict those who likely spread the most or restrict specific behaviors that lead to the most spread. I suggested banning singing in church.
Well, today (July 3) California banned singing in church, which was probably a compromise move to enable churches to stay open.
Basically, got everything more or less correct for four months regarding the virus and U.S. responses to it. I received a handful of compliments, which I greatly appreciate, including from a few book authors and a national columnist.
The point about today and why I bumped this. Back on May 18th, in an entry called "Outside the Box," I made the point that instead of restricting those most vulnerable to the virus, one way to think outside the box was to evaluate the individual differences in ability to spread virus and restrict those who likely spread the most or restrict specific behaviors that lead to the most spread. I suggested banning singing in church.
Well, today (July 3) California banned singing in church, which was probably a compromise move to enable churches to stay open.
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
July 4th, 2020 at 1:22:04 AM
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Congrats. It's nice to feel acknowledged that way. I do feel that other than bars, beaches and nursing homes, I tend to hear the most about churches being hot spots.
I also wonder how effective different measures being taken place on a statewide scale are versus more universal policy. I get that different states have different needs, but I am really curious as to how many people are travelling from states with fewer restrictions to states with more restrictions.
I also wonder how effective different measures being taken place on a statewide scale are versus more universal policy. I get that different states have different needs, but I am really curious as to how many people are travelling from states with fewer restrictions to states with more restrictions.
"Just because I'm not doing anything illegal, doesn't mean I won't have to defend myself someday." -Chip Reese
July 6th, 2020 at 4:17:09 PM
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Quote: MintyCongrats. It's nice to feel acknowledged that way. I do feel that other than bars, beaches and nursing homes, I tend to hear the most about churches being hot spots.
I also wonder how effective different measures bei Kodi nox ng taken place on a statewide scale are versus more universal policy. I get that different states have different needs, but I am really curious as to how many people are travelling from states with fewer restrictions to states with more restrictions.
o think outside the box was to evaluate the individual differences in ability to spread virus and restrict those who likely spread the most or restrict specific behaviors that lead to the most spread. I suggested banning singing in church.
Last edited by: BITIFADISA on Jul 7, 2020
