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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I can understand why people want refunds (it's not their fault), but also understand why SXSW may find it financially impossible to cancel (it's not their fault either).

To be honest, this is the type of call that ought to be made by governments, not individually by private citizens/organizations. Either all conferences nationwide should be cancelled, or none, but that's not a decision any can make individually.

If this is a national emergency, let's take national responsibility and share the burden nationally. Have the government shut down conferences, if that's the right call, and use tax dollars to reimburse the conference organizers to a reasonable level, that they are also forced to use to reimburse attendees to a reasonable level.

Really, how is this any different from flooding or hurricane damage that gets federal money to rebuild? A national emergency is a national emergency, period.

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The sane way to do this would be to let everyone take a slight hit.

Some money has already been spent, so full refunds aren't possible nor are they reasonable -- doing so would leave the organizers in the lurch and torpedo any hopes of a future event when this all blows over. But keeping all the money for a non-event wouldn't be right either.

There should be an equitable way to figure out what percentage of the money can be refunded without anyone going bankrupt in the process.

The government's role could be to vet that math and declare that it's OK and if attendees get whatever percentage refund, they're done and have no further recourse. Cuz otherwise a cranky con-goer will suck the place dry with legal fees.

I agree with that. This is a pandemic, no benevolence, no one's fault, everyone will be hurt in different ways. There are costs to prepare an event, the venue will want to be paid even if the organizer cancels and so on. Force majeure as it is called in insurance lingo. A full refund is not realistic.

Calling it a pandemic is giving far more credit than is due at this point. It's essentially only lethal to elderly or immunocompromised people. It would need to kill [0]220x more people than it already has to even be [1]comparable to the flu.

The media is making a huge deal about it, when really the situation calls for more handwashing for everyone, and an n95 mask for those who are or may be infected.

[0]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-deaths-ch...

[1]https://www.health.com/condition/cold-flu-sinus/how-many-peo...

We will see. I think it can kill 220x more people than it already has if it continues to spread like it has been doing so far.

With awareness as high as it is already, I think most infected people will seek treatment and for the most part they'll be ok. That's not to say it won't have an impact, and it may very well be worse than the flu, I just don't think it warrants the level of paranoia and fearmongering that the news has been pushing.

You can't compare absolute fatality numbers (yet). The flu infects tens of millions of people each year and kills less about 0.2%. (Estimates are between 5%-20% of the US population get the flu each year.)

This coronavirus has only infected a few ten thousand people and has killed between 2% and 20% of the infected population (with the larger %s comprising weakened patients, like the elderly with preexisting conditions or people living in a country without a functional healthcare system, like Iran.

If the coronavirus scaled up to the number of infections as the flu, millions would die.

It drives me nuts when people say that. It's like saying Toyotas are more dangerous than Lamborghinis because look at the fatality numbers!

Yeah, but if Ferruccio himself was cavorting through the streets and giving away Aventadors, the numbers would flip in a hell of a hurry.

Except even the old man himself couldn't give 'em away as fast as this is spreading.

It is technically correct to call it a pandemic since it has spread worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic

Now, the amount of worry based on the connotations associate with the word "pandemic" might be called overblown due to relative amount of risk of death, hospitalizations, and/or overwhelmed heath services. But the term is being used accurately and appropriately.

True, but the term pandemic comes with added emotional baggage. Most people associate the term with the black plague rather than the flu (which has also been a pandemic several times).

Correct. And generally the seasonal flu is exempted.

The best comparisons would be to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic of H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Especially H1N1 seems a particularly apt comparison point, even though it had a dramatically lower mortality rate.

Tax dollars definitely shouldn't be spent bailing out huge, influential tech conferences.

If they choose to run at such thin margins they can't survive one tail risk event and have failed to buy appropriate insurance even after a decade of growth, they shouldn't be able to socialize their loses.

Almost all commercial insurance policies exclude pandemics and terrorist acts.

Where exactly do you propose they buy this mythical insurance policy that includes pandemic coverage?

(On another note, insurance is literally the socialization of losses. It's just a privately run socialization of losses with your fellow policyholders.)

When people complain about socialization of losses, they're talking about socialization across parties that did not consent to bearing those losses, which doesn't cover the privately-run case, so I don't know why you think that comment is applicable.

If I understand correctly, why do you think it's proper for the organizers and attendees of SXSW who would lose money if the event was cancelled, then be compensated for such losses by other individuals who DO NOT consent to bear such responsibility?

I wasn't taking a position on that, I was addressing the oh-so-clever remark that was trivializing complaints of "socialization of losses" with the argument that "duh, that's what insurance is, what's the problem?".

Got it! Sorry. I thought I might not have absorbed the sarcasm.

My original comment wasn't sarcastic.

Insurances that exclude high-cost low probability events... that's funny.

What are they for?

They exclude unmodelable high-cost low-probability events.

The exist to cover modelable high-cost low-probability events.

I mean if we're working on the principle that you take informed responsibility then you can just pass the entire thing onto ticket buyers who didn't even consider getting ticket insurance for their tickets.

Do we have a breakdown of how many tickets are bought by individuals and how many by companies, universities, and other institutions?

I’m sure that one of the conferences my company bought tickets to is going to be cancelled. I don’t expect they care to pursue getting their money back.

Really shouldn't conferences be paying for insurance against X?

Yes but this kind of thing generally falls under "act of god" which you simply cannot buy insurance against.

Now I'd be curious to see SXSW's actual insurance policy, but honestly I don't believe there's anything available they could possibly have done to protect against this.

Force majeure. If that would not be in insurance agreements then every insurance company in the world could go broke in case of a pandemic.

Shouldn't actuaries take this possibility into account?

I am sure they do and that is why it exist. Basically, it is an exemption for Black Swan events that affects a lot of people at the same time.

The problem with this type of call being made by governments, which I hope will become abundantly clear in retrospect, is that governments are incentivized to lie about the severity of the situation (consider CCP response to Wuhan, White House response to unsafe quarantines, etc.).

> The problem with this type of call being made by governments, which I hope will become abundantly clear in retrospect, is that governments are incentivized to lie about the severity of the situation (consider CCP response to Wuhan, White House response to unsafe quarantines, etc.).

No. "[G]overnments" aren't "incentivized to lie about the severity of the situation" any more than anyone is incentivized to lie about anything.

It's true that some governments and some government officials are in the habit of blatantly lying, but that shouldn't be turned into some kind of anti-government generalization. Pretty much all the accurate information and advice we currently have about this outbreak comes from governments as well.

There's insurance for this type of thing, and I'm guessing that the organizers do not have it.

True! Many of the ticketing companies offer insurance in terms the buyer decides to cancel or the event cancels - they still get their money. But it's extra cost, which not everybody is willing to cover!

The government has already shown itself to be wildly irresponsible with regard to testing, allowing community transmission to take place with little hope for contract tracing and effective quarantines, leaving six dead in Seattle.

They should absolutely get their shit together, but we can’t all just wash our hands of our collective responsibility to each other until they do. Adopting their bumbling as a “wait and see” response is just another form of denialism that will cost lives. I’m glad that some companies and events have had enough sanity and courage to respond proactively.

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