heartbeats

But taking a week to do it costs money. People won't work productively if they might get laid off any second. By laying them off atomically without any advance warning, they can get back to work quicker.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: It takes a week to lay them off. During this week, productivity will be down 50%. You have 654 employees (ex-post). Say they each cost $200k/year (taxes, office space, etc), that gives (1/52) * 0.5 * 200k = $1.92k/employee in lost productivity, or almost $1.3 million in total.

Why does it matter? If they're fired, they stop being the company's problem. As long as they don't have to pay their salary, any method works.

In fact, it would have been more efficient to simply turn off their computers without any warning and then send them a text informing them about their situation. That way, the 'time-in-flight' is just a few minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faql1idkAcA

Is it that bad? I mean, it looks bad, but no matter how they put it they're still getting fired. And if they don't like it, too bad. They don't work there anymore.

It's sort of ripping off a band-aid: it's better to have it done all at once, than dragging it out over the course of a few weeks.

> Will we fare better or worse than other, similar countries? We can’t know for sure, it’s only after it’s over that we can get a verdict.

That is the whole point - they're taking a gamble. You can draw up a matrix. If they don't do a lockdown, and it turns out to be not-very-dangerous, they will have saved the economy.

If they don't do a lockdown, and it turns out to be very dangerous, they will have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. But the worst consequence that they can suffer is not getting re-elected.

Think of it like Russian roulette. If the payouts are [+10, +10, +10, +10, +10, -1000], your expected value is -158.3, but if your downside is limited to -20, your expected value is +5. It is not morally justified to take a 20% chance of killing 100'000 people for an 80% chance of raising GDP by 5% ($26 billion). That's 20'000 people for $21.2 billion, or $1.1 million per person.

The downsides are of different characters - lockdowns will have a bad but generally predictable downside in the field of economy, whereas not locking things down will have an unpredictable downside where lots of people - how many we do not know - die.

During the Great Depression, death rates went down, so it doesn't seem very substantiated to claim that lockdowns are going to kill people.

> Isn’t the real question why other countries aren’t doing the same?

Perhaps because they are not willing to take a gamble? This is, to put it bluntly, idiotic - you do not play games with people's lives and hope it turns out well.

It's the future they chose.

You can't both clamp down on freedom, and then complain when people pick other alternatives.

Agreed. I read about the coronavirus and decided to pull some of my money out - that's probably earned me 10% so far.

Title is not ideal - suggest change to "Researchers say MS Edge's telemetry has worst privacy among major browsers"

If you're going to plan for all of the one-in-a-million events, you're not going to be able to get anything done. It's more reasonable to round small probabilities to zero and deal with them on an ad-hoc basis.

Well, this was a one in a million thing. Nobody could have predicted the world to just shut down for six months, and it's not productive to plan for it.

It's far more reasonable to do business as usual and then take loans if things go south.

As Matt Levine put it: the dividends they gave since the GFC come to $15 billion, and their equity comes to $12 billion. So it's not even given it would have been the appropriate thing.

> How about all the employees who just had all the blood sucked out of their job security and future livelihood?

Right. It's like banks. How do we handle it?

Insurance: if you want to be a FDIC-insured bank, you must pay the FDIC insurance, and in return they will backstop your creditors up to a certain limit if they go bankrupt.

Why couldn't we do the same for employees? If you're an employer of systemic importance, you must have employee bankruptcy insurance: if you go tits-up, your employees get their salary paid up to a maximum limit of $X/yr until they find a new job. The insurance premiums are set by the free market, purely capitalist.

Toilet paper makers already make large amounts of it - the limiting factor is how often supermarkets can restock shelves.

Well, you want to have an exclusive clientele. If you get people who live in the ghetto going there, it's not exclusive. It just causes a poor vibe.

I mean, some nightclubs have immigrants, but nobody goes there because there are too many immigrants.

It's sort of the same thing here with TikTok: on one hand we say that it's bad to ethnically discriminate in nightclubs, on the other hand we don't go to the 'urban' nightclubs, and take it as a good signal when we read the immigrant patrons online complaining about ethnic discrimination.

Because it's not a good look. They want to use a clean app, but they don't want to see the cleaning being done.

This is what people want. I mean, if they wanted to see ugly people or whatever, then TikTok would show them it. It's not any different than Tinder filtering out the duds.

It sounds like he's being a shrewd businessman who has discovered cheap convexity. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

The availability is the same, though. If you manage to prevent reselling, then the choice is rather easy:

* 100 rolls of toilet paper sold to whoever comes first

* 100 rolls of toiler paper sold to whoever bids highest

Right, but those people did enjoy freedom. Now? All bets are off. Since the 1960s or so, we've been through a long process of gradually filing away all the sharp edges. It will continue until we've all locked ourselves into padded cells.

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." –Tacitus

I'm using a psuedonym but my real phone number. I don't see what they would compare it to though. It might as well just be a burner phone.

I do not believe they check it; if you provide an ID scan, it's good enough.

Because you have no choice but to join.

Because China threaten them. If they don't bend over backwards for them, China will accuse them of "Sinophobia" and being agents of the CIA all the rest.

Wer zahlt, schafft an. It's not as if they can just tell the Chinese to fuck off, is it?

They have to stay on the good side of the Chinese, or they will get kicked out.

I don't get why ATS isn't more popular. It's a really cool language.

> in the (old) past they where not only "sloppy" but some (view?) where even malicious in _creating_ a virus which only theire program could handle (but which also didn't do much damage besides annoying the user).

You know what, I don't even care if this is made up, it's a great story anyway. It would be a great plot for a movie.

Ivan Vladimirovich is a Soviet computer hacker who creates computer viruses on behalf of AntivirusCorp. One day, he gets a mission that will come to change his life forever...

Since when? I've never been asked for a selfie.

If you must, it doesn't seem like a big problem still. Go to thispersondoesnotexist.com, hit F5 a few times to find a nice portrait, then Google "driver license template" and apply basic Photoshop skills.

> Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n

Isn't the best approach then to do nothing? To be blunt here: if what she's saying is true, most of the vulnerable groups are going to die anyway. So why not just ignore it completely, and spend the healthcare resources on other stuff?

I mean, if the choices are:

1. 2% of the population dies and the healthcare system and economy collapses completely

2. 2 + ε% of the population dies

Then the second option is arguably preferable.

I'll say the same thing as I always do; what if you're depressed?

A kid drops out of high school, plays video games instead. Two years have passed, now he has a two year career gap. "Eh, I'll just stay home and figure something out." Now he has a four year career gap...

No, it's in the best interest of restaurant owners that there are no documented incidences of coronavirus at their restaurant.

To spell it out: if a manager knows someone has the virus, they will fire them. Therefore, the infected will try to cover it up. This will be the case even if healthcare is free.

The incentives really are not in place. He's just scratching the surface of the rabbit hole. If quarantines become compulsory, the situation will be even worse. Imagine people actively covering up their symptoms and lying to doctors. It would be complete pandemonium.

The title is not great. I would suggest "I spent 9 years at a pizza place, and I'm terrified of COVID-19."

> .... You realise that there are dozens of examples of other countries that have enacted gun control, and then seen gun violence go down, right?

Abroad, I'm only familiar with Australia, which didn't see any significant effects either way. There was a secular decline[0] in firearm violence which continued through the ban, but it doesn't appear as if the ban had anything to do with it - the USA saw an even larger decline, and it doesn't seem to have dropped any faster after the ban[1].

It seems like the easiest way is to just look at the USA, where there is no correlation at all. So on a state level, these regulations are utterly ineffectual. It does not seem to follow that more of the same would have any effect.

It is sort of like metal detectors in airports: On some level, it makes intuitive sense that they should help, but in reality they are just useless security theater - it's possible to build a grenade from stuff you can buy after airport security, and people have accidentally brought guns on planes without knowing it.

> If someone is shooting into a crowd with a bolt action rifle, you are a lot less likely to be shot in the first place. That's literally the whole fucking point: it's a much slower rate of fire.

On the other hand, the opportunities for serious terrorism are arguably worse[2].

0: https://www.gunfacts.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GUNS-IN...

1: https://www.gunfacts.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/austral...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks

I am not sure whether bookmarks or signed sections are "extremely useful". This has some minor advantages, but it's also a large attack surface. At least in this way, you keep most useful features.

As jrowley said, if you trust the reader to sanitize it safely, why not trust it to open normal PDF files safely?