Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing To Reopen America May Be Bots (technologyreview.com) 288
According to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. The normal level of bot involvement for U.S. and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events is usually between 10 and 20%. MIT Technology Review reports: Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America. They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.
A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups. "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"
"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."
A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups. "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"
"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."
ummm.... don't "follow" the bots? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't understand how a bot would make any difference to anyone.
human sheep do read them and even take them seriously, and are influenced by the amount of noise.
since there are infinite ways to easily manipulate human sheep you're actually right, it doesn't make much difference.
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Yea use the Term Human Sheep, that will prove to the world that you are an independent thinker, like that term isn't over used.
Look people are being scammed, lets laugh at them for being so stupid. Unlike me who is smart and independent, to join with the group of people laughing at them, vs actually working out how to fix the problem.
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*hits the joint*
Nah, man. To fix the problem you gotta like... You see the government... Like, what I'm saying is that like. To save the sheep you have to be a sheep. You know, man? That way.... *hits the joint* ... you can blow their sheeple mind with what ever this shit is, man.
Anyone have any Funyuns?
It's the retweeting (Score:2)
It is pretty much true that anybody who calls people "sheep" most likely has nothing useful to say, but the point underlying that is valid.
It's not the bots per se that are the problem, it's the people that spread the misinformation by forwarding ("retweeting") them.
Re:It's the retweeting (Score:4, Insightful)
Many (most?) of the retweeters are bots as well, so the tweet looks to the undiscerning that it's extremely popular and many people take it seriously.
Isn't it time for Twitter to go the way of AOL?
Re: It's the retweeting (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. How about the claim, oh, we can't police this by deleting the accounts, they'd just create new ones.
Well there's your problem right there. Stop allowing people to do that. (Don't worry, we all already have accounts.)
This is a mostly solved problem. Require new accounts to verify via text messaging, zero dollar charge on credit card, phone call, Captcha, or hundreds of other ways to prove you are not a bot. Some like cell phone or credit check are pretty hard to get a bunch of. Anyone claiming to live in the USA and likely many other countries should be able to verify their cell number. Someone in Russia shouldnâ(TM)t be able to create an account claiming they are from the USA.
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Because there are a billion twitters a day, and so people just look at what's trending or whatever the AI think matches their search criteria.
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I don't understand how a bot would make any difference to anyone.
The people behind the bots buy followers and pay to have posts boosted via retweets and likes.
They take advantage of trending keywords and hashtags so they appear in searches.
They also tag and dm key influencers likely to spread the message.
There are just enough people willing to blindly share anything they find on social media that vaguely supports their beliefs or they think will make others angry that the occasional bot can gain traction.
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"so can any other human" **IF** they think about it. The very few people that I personally know who follow Twitter aren't high on the "critical thinking" scale.
Re:ummm.... don't "follow" the bots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are naturally social animals.
If they think that an Idea it popular, they will often latch onto it, especially if it seems to be part of group.
This happens all the time, even to you and me.
Do you have an Opinion on Systemd? Do you really have an opinion on it, or just heard a lot of people with opinions on it, thus you have an opinion on it. Even if you use the Stock Linux Distribution.
How about the Removal of the iPhone headphone jack?
The lack on interchangeable batteries in Cell Phones and Laptops?
The inclusion or exclusion of the Betsy Ross American Flag on Nike Sneakers?
That people like Macs over PC?
That people like PC over Macs?
These spammed issues on topic that really do not effect us, while we decided to create a strong opinion on them. Is often due to this herd mentality.
Bots can push an idea from a stupid idea, to a key talking point, where it can still be a stupid idea, but people are giving it more thought then it is worth.
Re: ummm.... don't "follow" the bots? (Score:2)
A short view of Twitter should demonstrate many don't act as you might. Also trending, and the feedback loop of people jumping on things that are trending. Yes this has been shown to have influence. This is a game being played by many parties, and in some senses goes back a long way - e.g ww2 faked radio stations reading out faked messages from soldiers to give the impression lots were tired of the war.
But we have had some of our own fakes here too.
Re:ummm.... don't "follow" the bots? (Score:4, Insightful)
When literally FoxNews uses what's trending and stats from Twitter to indicate that the President has the right idea. I get that a lot of the folks here don't fall for the bots and just as soon as the majority of news networks employ Slashdotters I'll feel a lot better.
But yeah, what's trending on social networks is used A LOT in print, radio, and TV news media. To an incredibly worrying degree.
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just as soon as the majority of news networks employ Slashdotters I'll feel a lot better.
Even APK would be better than most of the Fox News staffers.
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Alright, so you don't. But that celebrity you know? He DOES. And he sees this crap. And he retweets it. And then YOU see it, from a source you think is to be trusted.
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All those websites that tell you exactly what's "trending" right now...
etc.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shutdown now (Score:4)
I was just running into the comments section to write something almost exactly this. So I guess I concur!
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nope, you would have a substitute for twitter or facebook in a matter of days.
there's only one good start, which is to educate people in critical thinking. however, if more than just a tiny fraction of the population were critical thinkers our political and economic systems would implode.
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Exactly. With no facebook or twitter, the vacuum screaming "insert corporation wanting to push a trillion dollar valuation here" won't stay a void for long.
Keep Twitter. Some of them might come here. (Score:4, Interesting)
If Twitter and Facebook were shut down, some of those people might come HERE to Slashdot. Let's keep them on Twitter. :)
The other day I was noticing who a couple of the Slashdot users are. We have some world-class, even famous, technologists here. Some people who have had multiple books written about them are here.
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No need to shut them down, but anybody who talks about Facebook or Twitter as if they're important has to go to Internet Jail.
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Conjecture: (Score:5, Interesting)
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TFA says normally about 20% of accounts discussing contentious issues are bots. In this case it's a lot higher, and for accounts supporting ending lockdown it's even greater.
This is not surprising.
Why not just flag them as bots (Score:5, Interesting)
You need to find a way to flag the bots but in a way that makes it difficult for bots to determine they have been flagged. disabling an account would be an easy detection. If account x doesn't work, register and start account y. But again, you have to flag the bot in a way that coding a way that the bot can't easily determine if it's been flagged. Best way is to leave the interface alone and only show that the bots are flagged from signed in users, but.... only signed in users that haven't been flagged as bots.
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Again, this would have to be implemented in such a way that bots can see other bots and not be flagged. But then you would have to flag bots in such a way that if they see the flags of some bots so that they know they haven't been flagged.
Another way would be to created a tool that flags the bot not in a binary manner but as a 1 to 10 rating of the potential to be a bot. Then they have to create bots that strive for that 1 rating instead of the 10 of definitely a bot.
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They just keep a few real human accounts around to monitor the bot ones for shadow bans, and keep creating new bot accounts on the assumption they will get mass banned sooner or later anyway.
We got on top of the spam problem which is essentially the same thing, we should be able to use the same techniques to fix social media bots.
what about charging for tweets? (Score:2)
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You could create a junk mail kind of tweet, paid, but no astroturfing would be interested in using it because it would be tagged as paid content.
The point is to pretend to be real people.
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For users, no. A twitter clone will pop up that doesn't. There are many struggling along just waiting for twitter to screw up, the way MySpace did and facebook jumped in.
Insufficient information to draw any conclusion. (Score:2, Insightful)
Article does not mention which percentage of pro-lockdown accounts are bots.
Without that statistic this number is pointless in itself, as probably over 50% of the accounts on twitter are bots in the first place.
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ITs a wasteland either way, I have a twitter account to see if my API works.
"may be" (Score:2, Interesting)
How conveniently vague.
Reminds me of another one of these "people who disagree with me are bots" stories from earlier this year. People they called bots had a whopping 2-3% bot rating according to the metrics they used: https://reclaimthenet.org/twit... [reclaimthenet.org]
It's weaponized bot-calling.
Article lacks context (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the context? How many bots are pushing the lockdown? How many bots are pushing pro China propaganda? How many bots are pushing FUD? Without some context the article lacks any merit or value. This is nothing more than FUD.
The editors really need to do a better job at clamping down on garbage articles like this. Comment count (user engagement) is significantly down from years past and polarizing articles like this are a big reason why. Stop alienating a significant part of your audience, Please show a little bit of tolerance, I promise it will not actually hurt you or anyone else.
Sounds like it's easy to fix... (Score:2)
"Almost half"? (Score:2)
Question: Who is behind these bots?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibilities:
1. American business interests (for obvious reasons)
2. American government itself (see #1)
3. Communist Party of China (to drag this on and delay investigation)
4. Russia (a usual suspect of these online disinformation campaigns)
5. ??? who else ???
True for any subject, I think (Score:2)
Could have just written "Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts May Be Bots"...
But then you couldn't push an agenda, I suppose.
Updated headline (Score:2)
Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts May Be Bots
FTFY
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the flip side, we can't just shut down the entire world economy for the next six to twelve months until a vaccine has been distributed to everyone. There has to be a happy medium between "Shut it all down or DIE" and "Business as usual".
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Overwhelming hospitals is the only real reason for this. Unfortunately, politicians are doing meme evolution to try to convince you it is about you, average healthy person, not getting it so you do not die. This helps them blame deaths on Trump.
I'd be less cynical if the democrats weren't already screeching "31 million unemployed!" in the same ad only seconds after the latest death totals.
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I'd be less cynical if the democrats weren't already screeching "31 million unemployed!" in the same ad only seconds after the latest death totals.
I'll be honest, if you're basing your ideas on what politicians say, then you're doing it wrong.
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Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a "happy" medium between die and business as usual.
For example,
-only going out when absolutely necessary
-everybody wears a mask (non medical) to systematically prevent any cough from transmitting from one person to the next person
-physical distancing (ensure you're no closer than 6ft to people around you)
-when you do have to go out, send out only one person from the home at a time. (But go out as a family to enjoy the outdoors, physically distanced from other families)
People need to stop freaking out. Yes it sucks, but we endure this shit today, so at some point life can get back to some level of normal in the future. Failure to manage it today pretty much ensures that future won't be recognizable, and if it is, it will be one without many of our loved ones.
Be safe people, and use your heads...
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Unfortunately, it's spring. The crops need to be planted in the more populous northern hemisphere, or much of humanity will starve this year.
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Starve hundreds of millions vs. make Trump lose?
Don't force that choice.
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Interesting)
How many people do you think sit in the cab of a tractor while it's plowing or sowing? How close do people get to each other in the field or orchard while weeding or harvesting? Let me guess, you're a city kid who's never been around an actual farm, right?
Re:And the other half ... (Score:4, Informative)
No megacorps don't own most of the farms. I'm not sure why you think that. I am part owner of a large farm and while I know of some very large farms across Canada, none of them are owned by "mega corps." The largest farm I know is owned by tribal band, who rents it out to another huge farmer who's big but no "mega corp." Farms are consolidating due to the realities of current economics (extremely low margins, increasing costs, low commodity prices), but they are owned by private women and men and their families by and large.
Anyway farmers are busy planting right now across north America. It's shaping up to be a decent year. If you want to see what real farming is about in America, there are a lot of talented folk posting regular content to YouTube so you can get an idea of what it's all about. There're Welker Farms, Millenial Farmer, Harmless Farmer, Cole the Corn Star, Brian's Farming Videos, to just name a few.
There is no doubt there are mega corps involved in agriculture, such as the huge multi-national chemical companies. But the reality on the ground where your food is actually grown is that some of the most talented but humble people I know (not including myself of course!) work long hours to make a living on very slim margins, which feeds every one. As a farmer, no I don't want everyone to think they'll starve. No I'm not worried about my stock price.
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, all the mouth breathers that are out protesting and demanding "open it up" are the same people who WON'T do any of those things. They'll winge about it violating their rights, and intentionally violate rules, guidelines and other people's personal space "to make a point".
And that's what this misinformation is fomenting. Utter disregard for fellow humans because of conspiracy theories and simple lack of empathy.
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Oh yeah! And I'll be honest, questioning the use of orders like this is an important voice regardless of the specific situation.
But people need to remember that a person is smart but a mob is dumb and dangerous. For some reason when you get a bunch of angry and scared people together, everybody starts talking at once, and only the worst case possibilities seem to make sense. This whole situation ramped up quickly and didn't give time for people to make sense of it before jobs disappeared and all these re
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There is a "happy" medium between die and business as usual.
For example,
-only going out when absolutely necessary
-everybody wears a mask (non medical) to systematically prevent any cough from transmitting from one person to the next person
-physical distancing (ensure you're no closer than 6ft to people around you)
-when you do have to go out, send out only one person from the home at a time. (But go out as a family to enjoy the outdoors, physically distanced from other families)
Why did you omit the most important element? Contact tracing is the key to being able to transition from a general quarantine to a targeted quarantine. It's how you identify cases before they show symptoms (especially since many never will!) and before they become contagious. Find them and isolate them until they're not contagious. We need an army of contact tracers following up and testing the contacts of every person who tests positive. Digital contact tracing (e.g. the Apple/Google API) is useful at
Re:And the other half ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You want a real quarantine, then, not this half-assed stuff we've been doing.
I wonder how many of those people demanding longer lockdowns would feel if things were *really* locked down. Being able to run to the grocery store or Wal-Mart or picking up your favorite take-outthose are all ways and places where you can infect others or be infected.
So I mean *really locked down*: no grocery stores, no Wal-Mart, no fast-food drive throughs, no pizza delivery, no Uber-Eats or Door-Dash or whatever. No Amazon or Target online. No home delivery. No jogging, visiting a park, etc. You’ll stay in your house or else. For food, what you’ll get is a government truck will deliver a box of food for one person to eat for a week, and drop off the boxes at your front doorstep based on the number of people in your household (hope you didn’t lie on the census form!). An armed escort will accompany the delivery person to ensure that no one opens their doors while the delivery person is within 20 feet of the door, so do not open the door too soon.
The ONLY “essential” personnel will be those involved with treating COVID and for delivering the food. These people will be issued uniforms and ID lanyards. So there’s no reason for anyone one else to ever venture outside of their house and anyone on the streets who is not in uniform obviously has no business being there, and will be subject to immediate detention in physical quarantine facilities. If they don't do anything stupid that gets them shot instead.
Let them imagine a real lockdown for a few minutes then ask the question about a vaccine again. Bet the answer is different.
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Vaccine [Re:And the other half ...] (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse than that, who can say that there will be a vaccine for the Coronavirus?
There probably will be. There has never in history been such an intensive research effort as the current effort to make a vaccine, with over a hundred different vaccines being developed. And our understanding of molecular biology is vastly better than even that of a few years ago.
The problem is, if we stick to normal verification protocols, a vaccine would take eighteen months at a very minimum to test and approve, and then months to even years to ramp up production. They are instead fast-tracking verification and testing, which may get the vaccine here faster, but at some risk.
History has shown that skipping quality control in the interests of speed can sometimes be a bad decision. "Move fast and break things" can be a good philosophy to get things done in a hurry... but not if you're one of the people who get broken by moving fast.
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Well, the Spanish Flu had disappeared completely until resurrected by the US Army a few years ago, there's never been a need for a vaccine for that. A better comparison would have been a vaccine for the common cold, since that's often caused by coronaviruses.
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There has to be a happy medium between "Shut it all down or DIE" and "Business as usual".
there is, and that's what most of the world is at now. it will take a while to perfect, though, "shut it all down" was just a necessarily drastic emergency response, in the absence of better ideas.
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Keep in mind every death is used politically, even though we know it will roll through the population one way or another.
A win is keeping oldies and so as safe as possible while not letting hospitals get overwhelmed.
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FTFY
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That's not the flip side of the post you are responding to.
The flip side of "There is no testing plan, there is no tracing plan, there's nothing but dismissing the 100K deaths so far as expendable people." is "There is a testing plan, there is a tracing plan, there's mourning the 30K deaths so far as unavoidable misfortune."
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Those of us with healthy immune systems are generally asymptomatic so the worst that happens is we transmit it someone else.
i get natural selection and all that, but as an educated and empathic human being the last thing i want is infecting someone else. imo the messages sent out in general stress to much on "how not to catch it" and too little on "how not to spread it". i assume that's because fear is a stronger motivator than responsibility, but it's still the wrong message.
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There has to be a happy medium between "Shut it all down or DIE" and "Business as usual".
Then the easiest thing to do is let the sick, infirm, and old to die and let everyone else go about their business.
Original post should have been "There has to be a happy medium that doesn't involve people saying "just let people die."
And there should be. The current isolation technique is to isolate healthy people, because we don't know who is contagious. A better plan would be to isolate the sick people, and that would require a lot more testing.
The second thing to do is to try to stop the super-spreader events. Much of the transmission is not one sick person infecting two or three others; it is a very small number of sick people infecting a dozen others.
They're the ones most susceptible to covid-19. Those of us with healthy immune systems are generally asymptomatic so the worst that happens is we transmit it someone else.
I'm really hoping that you are intending this as ironic. Due to Poe's law, it's hard to tell.
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Just imagine how badly Engler would have fucked up the response, and count your lucky stars.
Re:And the other half ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not normally very negative on this site, but the two of you are a sick fucks.
Seriously, you'd up-vote this other douchebag who feels the easiest thing to do would be to let people die because he's sick of hearing about people not being able to connect to VPN?
Wow!
Here's a dose of reality: When we open back up, people are going to get it. It's going to increase again. The entire point of this was to avoid overwhelming the hospitals and other medical facilities. Good in theory, but now it's gotten ridiculous. People are getting sick and dying because they aren't able to have their routine medical care because their doctors offices are closed or they're scared to go out. The economy has lost trillions and trillions of dollars. Many businesses won't return. People are going to lose their homes. They're going to default on student loans. They're broke. A lot of people don't qualify for unemployment because they're self-employed, and $1200 is a joke. (It won't even cover my or my colleagues student loan payments.) They're whining about a shortage of doctors, while meanwhile a lot of doctors have had to close their offices, throw in the towel, and either retire or go Galt. A lot of them are pissed that every other news report or "thank you" they see on TV is for "doctors, nurses, teachers, and first responders," conspicuously exempting them. One doctor on the news the other night was estimating that because of the lockdown over 80,000 cases of cancer have gone untreated or undiagnosed.
Eventually the country will hit a breaking point. It will collapse into unrest and civil war. The only question is whether the shooting starts before or after the inevitable economic collapse.
Funny thing is, China will probably economically recover from this. The United States, if it holds together, is going to wind up in a war with China when China wants us to pay back all the money we've borrowed. War is probably inevitable a few years down the road because of the economic devastation that we've done to ourselves.
Think about how many people will get killed in that, and then ask yourself who the sick fuck is here.
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Hey look, your point is valid whether it plays out exactly like that or not.
But you're looking at one possibility. What happens if the virus is allowed to run unchecked? Sooner or later you end up in the same situation, except with many-digits of people dead.
I can say where I am in Canada, we started this lock down before you guys did in the US, not by long but technically before. In my province (state) for the last week or so we haven't had any more than 1 new case per day reported. And businesses are
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The entire point of this was to avoid overwhelming the hospitals and other medical facilities.
The point in sensible places was to lock down and get the level down far enough to be able to keep the rest in check with contact tracing. Or completely down to zero, like a few places managed already.
The places that locked down sensibly are now able to open up safely. The places that stayed open to save the economy are now having to stay closed and fuck up their economy. If they don't stay closed, people will be afraid to go anywhere and that will fuck up the economy anyway -- or the virus will return and
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The economy has lost trillions and trillions of dollars.
Lost it to where? We didn't generate some value, but we've also used substantially less in goods and services. The losses are minimal.
People are going to lose their homes.
Why do you accept that banks should be allowed to collect payments when the rest of the economy is paused? I would think you'd demand changes in the lending industry, not 'open up so I can die to make the rich richer'
They're going to default on student loans.
Why do you accept that moneylenders should be allowed to collect payments when the rest of the economy is paused? Same issue - you should demand changes to the lending industry.
They're going to default on student loans.
Again and again, each point you raise is - people have to risk exposure because they have to pay loans. Why do you accept that moneylenders and landlords are allowed to demand payment when the rest of society is on hold? Shouldn't they, like everyone else, be expected to suspend collection? This goes beyond Covid - think about people in natural disasters or family crisis. The lending industry is intensely predatorial - you should demand changes to that, that should be the focus of your outrage.
A lot of people don't qualify for unemployment because they're self-employed
... yes, because unemployment in the US is a farce. It's designed to put the entirely of blame on the individual and coerce them in supporting the upper class. That's how you get healthcare, that's how you get stability. You should be outraged at the broken economic system, not the necessary shutdown. This was a problem long before Covid.
They're whining about a shortage of doctors, while meanwhile a lot of doctors have had to close their offices
Yes. Because doctors too have blindly accepted that they must repay bills rather than acknowledge and work to fix a broken lending industry. Moreover, the healthcare system has become entirely profit driven - so disconnected MBA-types are furloughing and firing the medical staff to keep the company profitable. This was all a problem before Covid, Covid just makes it more obvious because it stresses the entire system at once.
I don't mean to downplay your concerns, they are entirely valid. But I think your anger is focused on the wrong thing (the shutdown) instead of where it would actually make a longterm difference (our broken lending and healthcare industries).
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I just realized the flaw in my math. Those numbers assumed we were starting from a single patient, and ignored the few hundred thousand who have already had COVID-19. So it's actually more like 327.8 million sick all at once, not 328.15 million. Apologies for being unnecessarily alarmist. :-)
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Random internet doofus doesn't understand any reality.
Really, not understanding that eventually the virus will spread regardless of how long she hides under her bed, and that meanwhile no one is producing the goods and services that keep us all living is just the ultimate fail.
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There is no evidence that the virus will spread eventually. It isn't spreading in the places that locked down and got rid of it.
Why is the US so particularly inept that what works elsewhere can't work in the US?
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Thanks to our failed national leadership, most of the push is simple cheerleading.
i tend to see that as intended, thus a success more than a failure. just a matter of perspective. i get the point, though.
There is no testing plan, there is no tracing plan, there's nothing but dismissing the 100K deaths so far as expendable people.
reality is stubborn. in all likelihood there will be more deaths. and more dismissal. at some point things will change one way or the other.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No testing plan? You are a liar. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have symptoms and drive up
I don't know where you are, but in Washington State, getting tested requires a referral from a doctor or proof of membership in one of several special groups (at-risk, first responders, etc.) The state government is fighting tooth and nail to keep from doing any epidemiologically valid testing, lest they ruin their carefully crafted mortality statistics.
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About Half of the Population has below average intellect.
However most people think they are smarter than most people.
So the Smart People know they are smart, and the Stupid People believe they are smart.
Then there are different types of intelligence, where different people will fall above or below the average.
While I agree the national leadership has made tribal partisan cheerleading much worse than ever before. I feel it is more of a symptom of the problem, than the cause.
Both sides are really scared of
Re:And the other half ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the propaganda strawman that the whole thing is about. There's nobody out there that believes this. The archetypal article calling for a hard lockdown [medium.com] is doing it on the clear economic grounds that getting the shock over more quickly will make it less harmful. The basis for this is historical experience.
The clear belief is that opening up too soon will cause more economic damage as well as killing more people. Possibly even more importantly, we don't talk about how many people will be permanently or at least medium term disabled due to lung damage. These types of problems cause real economic problems.
Semi isolation [Re:And the other half ...] (Score:2)
...Realistically we could fairly safely send everyone under 40 back to work and see no increase in fatalities or serious illness above the normal background rate ...What we really needed was an earlier lockdown for vulnerable groups, and no lockdown for low risk groups.
Nope. The lockdown (by which you mean "social isolation") is to decrease transmission, and although the younger people without pre-existing conditions do have a less severe presentation, they transmit the disease very efficiently.
Unless you can build an impermeable wall between young people and older people, no, that doesn't work. Remember, the most effective transmission is within families. Once you get that virus into a family (via the less-severe-symptoms population saying "I don't need to isolate")
Re: Of course they are... (Score:2)
Well you'd be wrong. Well established that such bots exist across many issues. But you'd be right that many won't have been made solely for this issue.
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How well established is it really? This story certainly doesn't establish anything. Half "may be" bots? Best case they are just guessing. Worst case they are knowingly making claims their data doesn't support, so they throw a "may" in there.
What's well established is a pattern of calling people bots because of political bias. Always seems to go in the same political direction, doesn't it?
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Please, go ahead and make the case for reopening. But be very sure to describe how much risk *you* and your family are going to incur.
Right now, I only see reopening cries from people like the Fox anchors; they are broadcasting from their homes, while talking about risks that other people should take.
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It wouldn't surprise me if it was Rupert Murdoch behind this and not the Russians.
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Wow, you ask a very short simple question. (sarcasm) Ok here is my try... (American perspective)
Preface: Keep the political views out of this, such as saying it's only Fox news anchors, etc. Viruses don't care if you lean D or R, and I challenge your statement. I've talked with people in my local community and have had people who want to reopen from both sides of the aisle.
What is being accomplished by staying home? We are staying safe by not passing the virus around, and we are "lowering the curve" to
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What is being accomplished by staying home? We are staying safe by not passing the virus around, and we are "lowering the curve" to help our health care systems. Well, the healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, which is good. So what is the end game then? What are we waiting for?
That's circular logic. In most areas the healthcare system hasn't been overwhelmed because people are staying at home. Your logic seems to imply despite staying at home healthcare systems are not overwhelmed. Perhaps you should talk to a doctor in a place like New York City. They have been taxed. Or a local doctor. I know a local ER doctor. The ER is fine for now but the hospital is nearing capacity and we are not in an outbreak area.
Are we waiting for a vaccine? That would be almost a year from now at best. Our economy, and sanity would not be able to handle that. They would collapse. Not to mention people who can't work will not put up with staying home for that long. That is already being seen now.
How would the economy and sanity handle a million deaths or more? If proje
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7-digit userid, short, meaningless string of characters as username...bblb definitely not a Russian troll.
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lol. You've got me all wrong, I said you're definitely not a Russian troll!
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I think it's far more likely that half of Americans are just sick of having their liberty trampled than it is that there's folks out there programming bots to support the case for reopening.
Well, they're all welcome to go swap germs somewhere else.
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It's funny how every time something starts trending that runs counter to the popular and socially acceptable narrative being pushed it's suddenly found that half of it is from bots.
I think it's far more likely that half of Americans are just sick of having their liberty trampled than it is that there's folks out there programming bots to support the case for reopening.
Even funnier is how all those accounts were created within days of each other.
(oh, right, it's all those citizens got fed up being trampled on the exact same day...)
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"Papers, please. Do you have government permission to be out?"