It sounds like whoever managed to get political support in that community is making the economic decisions, rather than “themselves”. Individual property rights simply devolves that control to the individual or the family. Communal property rights would place control of property into the hands of the elites. I’m not saying the current system is perfect, but I’m the system to you’re describing I don’t see how someone gets a new technology to market without the support of the elites. It’s at least possible today, and leads to the collective increase in standards of living.

The system we live in is one in which everything is in the control of the elites. Who makes all the decisions about technology? The CEOs of massive tech firms. Who makes all the political decisions in government? To a person almost exclusively the rich, those who hoard capital.

I’m not going to argue that our political and social economic systems don’t have flaws. I do think directly merging political and economic power into the same institutions would only make it worse.

Obviously this is a personal preference. For example. I think they’re awful. I don’t think these pants are the solution though. I do appreciate the effort.

If you keep the infection rate low enough you can keep the hospitals from being over capacity and also delay infections until after a vaccine is developed and administered, thus preventing the infection. Both of these states would have the benefit of reducing the total number of deaths. When the lockdown talk started, I thought that was the point.

I’m a layman, but the paper reads more like a series of assertions. Maybe those assertions are self evident for an expert in the field (Id love if someone could reply with follow up information if that’s the case), but it just doesn’t seem to present actual evidence to back up the claims.

If you’re an expert in this field and can elaborate, I would love to read more. I’ve read the paper, but as a layman it’s difficult to discern why something is a “smoking gun” vs nature at work.

I’m not an expert. The entire content of the paper is the exposition of a series of four published studies, with Wuhan researchers involved, that took a coronavirus and enhanced its ability to infect the human respiratory system, through the mechanisms we are seeing in action now. They argue that these characteristics are known to be originated in the lab, from these previous papers.

I’ve read stories indicating that some of these companies are ramping up production prior to approval in order to have batches of doses to distribute soon after approval happens. Having a government that will protect said company’s intellectual property helps reduce financial risk to the company, making that preproduction a bit less risky overall. It’s also arguable that protecting that IP is a moral justification for the same reason — saving lives. There might not be as many companies developing vaccines and committing to large production runs before they’re even approved without it.

Keep in mind, I’m not outright saying you’re wrong. I do think you’re way oversimplifying things.

Yep, sharing information may be important, but generating the information to begin with is even more important. Whatever we do, the incentives must align so we have as many people working on the problem as possible. It is critical that there is a guaranteed revenue stream as reward for developing a vaccine; the world does not have enough scientists that can/will volunteer their time. IP is the established way of doing this. Maybe there are other solutions, but if they haven't been implemented at this point, it's already too late.

I rescheduled the second date with my now wife at the last minute. Worked out well for us, but I was so tired from work that there’s no way that date would have gone well (busy period of a project at the time).

I mean, even with all restrictions lifted a significant enough percentage of people would engage in behavior to avoid the disease that would have a real impact on the economy.

We aren’t talking about 3.5% unemployment vs 20% unemployment. We’re talking a deep recession in both cases. One with a deeper recession and less death, and a less deep recession but more death. Good luck trying to quantify that. I’m just gonna keep working from home, and avoiding bars/restaurants/shopping until it passes.

Of 328 million people if 70% became infected, with a .65% fatality rate, we’d have around 1.3 million dead. The typical leading cause of death (heart disease) kills like 600k a year. Seems like racking up the dead to me. And it would probably be higher if we just pretended like things were normal and let hospitals get overwhelmed. That fatality rate is with a huge reaction by the country.