Lastly, the argument of "if countries outside the US are prescribing it, it must work" is just nonsensical. Doctors prescribing a drug is not evidence a drug works.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/2141...

The danger is that at some point an administration would be so adept at this that it's not painfully obvious. In theory, at the very least the electorate is informed enough at this point that they can consider this information when voting. Admittedly, that's pretty optimistic take on the US electorate however. An educated, well informed public is necessary for a successful democracy, and America's problems with education are well documented.

I've never cared what people refer to me as, and I've never seen anyone voice a preference for it among people I've interacted with.

I call myself a Software Engineer, because pretty much every job title I've had has used that term.

The article talked a lot about their new dark mode feature, how they wouldn't have been able to implement it in their old tech stack, and how they were able to reduce their CSS size while adding a dark mode.

But is dark mode all that important? Even as a developer I don't care at all about FB having a dark mode, did they really need to rewrite their entire site to implement features no one cares about? Also, for a photo and video sharing site, is CSS size really important? I just loaded the page and it loaded 13.2mb worth of data while making 249 requests. Thanks for cutting down your 400kb CSS file though I guess.

We didn't flatten the curve enough to make these hospitals useless. We simply didn't use them despite needing them.

>we kept the infections low enough that we didn't need to use it.

The article specifically said the hospitals were needed despite being unused. The problem was existing hospitals didn't have policies in place to use them, so instead doctors were treating patients in overrun hallways while these beds lay empty.

Maybe what you're describing would work for some people. But to so confidently say it's a blanket solution for everyone and is not actually a problem, is frankly laughable.

Maybe I could make it work, but I would still prefer to have an office to go to most days.

But there's no way I'd be able to be as productive as expected under normal circumstances. I'm lucky if I get 4 hours in.

Is there any evidence that shows this? I would think 4 months of 100% replacement income followed by no longer receiving unemployment benefits provides plenty of incentive to return to work.

>This is a difficult topic to discuss because people reach for strawman arguments about families becoming homeless, but realistically a $60K/year equivalent income is not far from the annual median household income. People can and do find ways to live on that amount all over the country.

I mean, the median household income in 2018 was 62k, and an estimated 78% of the country lives paycheck-to-paycheck. Yeah plenty of people can survive fine on it, plenty of other middle class people would be unable to afford their mortgage on it. Forcing people to sell their houses due to job loss from a pandemic seems like a pretty morally unfair system, as well as a poor economic outlook for the country.

There's more expenses to living than mortgage and utilities. Food, health care, home repairs, funerals, car repairs, etc.

No, I'm not advocating to abort a quarantine and have people return to work.

>It's a fantasy to assume people will just go back to work, the economy will get better, and everything will return to normal

Agreed. I'm advocating we stop believing in this fantasy and face reality that this is the start of a long term recession.

We're not going to emerge from this and just hit the unpause button. Yes some industries will bounce back quickly, but 9 million people over two weeks losing their jobs is an absolutely massive number, and we haven't hit peak yet.

There's no way they'll just be simply rehired when this is "done".

Visible symptoms aren't the only concern, you can be contagious without symptoms, and there are studies showing that 50% of all infections could be asymptomatic - https://eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.20...

>It's not a very helpful comment

I would think understanding the problem would be the first step to solving it. I'm not sitting here pretending I have all the answers. I saw an opportunity to shed some light on the situation so I commented. It seems weird to me that your critical of me for not contributing thoughts related directly to a solution, when you haven't contributed any thoughts about a solution either.

To each their own I suppose. But consider me thoroughly uninterested in discussing this further, which, seems to be what you wanted from me anyway.

Hoping zoom and other companies prioritize the public good over profits is foolish, and the solution is to align profits with the public good.