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Thread: Virus thread, the political one.

  1. #2821
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    Default Re: American Exceptionalism by any other name

    Quote Originally Posted by Too Tall View Post
    Thanks Bob.

    Y'all have two choices as represented by two tabs at the top of this forum. Vote or watch puppies play. Your call.
    If I vote first can I watch the puppies till it's over? Asking for a Friend.
    Frank Beshears

    The gentlest thing in the world
    overcomes the hardest thing in the world.

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    Default Re: American Exceptionalism by any other name

    Ballot received yesterday.
    Delivered to nearest fire station in the afternoon.
    Vote!

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    Default Re: American Exceptionalism by any other name

    https://www.propublica.org/article/u...-wealth-audits

    Great read on taxes and audits of the Ultrawealthy.

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    Default Re: American Exceptionalism by any other name

    "Leona Helmsley told a maid, 'We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.'"

    “There's class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”

    QED
    Jay Dwight

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Walter Sobchak View Post
    Only on our side. 212,000 deaths so far from COVID-19. 58,000 US military deaths in 'Nam.

    Vietnam has 35 deaths from COVID-19. Over 400,000 VC and PAVN deaths in the war. Over a million counting civilians.



    Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is COVID-19.

    The repetition is necessary because the idiots feeding the fire have refused to acknowledge the damage they're doing.
    Not to add to this bemusing exchange, but I agree that repetition is necessary.

    The US comprises only 4% of global population, and yet, a fifth of all deaths linked to Covid-19 are in the US. That's not an accident. That's a major cock-up.
    Chikashi Miyamoto

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chik View Post
    Not to add to this bemusing exchange, but I agree that repetition is necessary.

    The US comprises only 4% of global population, and yet, 20% of all deaths linked to Covid-19 are in the US. That's not an accident. That's a major cock-up.
    Fixed it. No one is going to know what to do with 1/5th.
    Jorn Ake
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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by j44ke View Post
    Fixed it. No one is going to know what to do with 1/5th.
    Drink it?


  8. #2828
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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chik View Post
    Not to add to this bemusing exchange, but I agree that repetition is necessary.

    The US comprises only 4% of global population, and yet, a fifth [20%] of all deaths linked to Covid-19 are in the US. That's not an accident. That's a major cock-up.
    It certainly does bear repeating. And diving into the numbers. I listened to a call-in radio program where a statistics “expert” tried to explain the merits of using the deaths to cases ratio rather than total deaths or deaths per capita. Hogwash.

    Basic math: divide a large number by a small number and you get a (relatively) large number. Conversely, divide a small number by a large number and you get a (relatively) smaller number. To sum:

    Large / Small = Large

    Small / Large = Small

    The statistic you allude to is deaths per million people, and the number in the US is very large. We’re 10th from the top, according to worldometer. If you remove small nations like San Marino and Andorra, we’re even closer to the top of a list we shouldn’t be near the top of.

    That’s the number most often cited by people, and it’s alarming. Literally. Sound the alarm.

    Deaths / Population = Large

    But this is often countered by conservatives, including, the White House, with the deaths per confirmed cases statistic. On this list they say we’re near the bottom, which sounds good.

    Deaths / Cases = Small

    How can that be? Apply the simple math and divide deaths per population (large) by deaths per cases (small) and you get the number of cases per per population. Which is another large number, relative to all the other countries. Worldometer has us 11th, and we move up to 8th if you don’t count Andorra, Aruba, and French Guiana.

    (Deaths / Population) / (Deaths / Cases) = Cases / Population

    Large / Small = Large

    Having a relatively large number of confirmed cases during a pandemic does not sound like a good thing. But this is what I think they’re doing when someone pushes the deaths per cases number.

    I agree, Chik, the number of deaths from the novel coronavirus in the US is literally atrocious. An atrocity. Passive aggressive genocide.

    I voted today. Let’s show the bums to the door. And then let’s lock ‘em up.
    Last edited by thollandpe; 10-15-2020 at 04:16 PM.
    Trod Harland, Pickle Expediter

    Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    It's a lot of deaths. Other countries will catch up. The world will make sense of it in 10 plus years.

    And the US is no. 1 in a lot of metrics. It's the most populated G7 nation. It's the nation that receives the most business travelers. It's the "developed" nation with the largest percentage of minorities (and poverty). All these are significant factors.

    Did any other nation on earth have 50k plus likely infections in its largest city before a single case had been confirmed?



    This is a good article:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...ndemic/616548/

    There’s something strange about this coronavirus pandemic. Even after months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open.

    Why, for instance, was there such an enormous death toll in northern Italy, but not the rest of the country? Just three contiguous regions in northern Italy have 25,000 of the country’s nearly 36,000 total deaths; just one region, Lombardy, has about 17,000 deaths. Almost all of these were concentrated in the first few months of the outbreak. What happened in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April, when so many died so quickly that bodies were abandoned in the sidewalks and streets?* Why, in the spring of 2020, did so few cities account for a substantial portion of global deaths, while many others with similar density, weather, age distribution, and travel patterns were spared? What can we really learn from Sweden, hailed as a great success by some because of its low case counts and deaths as the rest of Europe experiences a second wave, and as a big failure by others because it did not lock down and suffered excessive death rates earlier in the pandemic? Why did widespread predictions of catastrophe in Japan not bear out? The baffling examples go on.



    nyccovid.jpg

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chik View Post
    The US comprises only 4% of global population, and yet, a fifth of all deaths linked to Covid-19 are in the US.
    Quote Originally Posted by j44ke View Post
    Fixed it. No one is going to know what to do with 1/5th.
    Several months back I made ^^^this same observation regarding a news article about the pandemic that was getting a lot of attention on social media: isn't it just sloppy writing to "mix metaphors" by combining percentages and fractions in the same sentence? I'm not accusing Chik of sloppy writing; clearly that's how some of the most oft-cited statistics are being presented. Weird.

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bob Ross View Post
    Several months back I made ^^^this same observation regarding a news article about the pandemic that was getting a lot of attention on social media: isn't it just sloppy writing to "mix metaphors" by combining percentages and fractions in the same sentence? I'm not accusing Chik of sloppy writing; clearly that's how some of the most oft-cited statistics are being presented. Weird.
    Yes. I was going to say “Apologies but the editor in me won’t allow percentages and fractions in the same comparison.” I would think good editors would ding that, but I see it in the NYTimes. 75% of x does 1/4 of y.

    I also think that sort of reporting fuzzes the numbers when they don’t break it down. And I think that is on purpose because the stories in news at least are always looking for the angle that will grab people’s attention.

    I think George Carlin used to do a bit that was news report made out of a string of percentages. 80% of 30% preferred 20% of 47% 15% of the time. That sort of thing.

    No criticism of Chik’s writing implied. Nor any comparison to George Carlin.
    Last edited by j44ke; 10-15-2020 at 05:34 PM.

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/healthca...19-performance

    This April, as the novel coronavirus accelerated its global sweep of devastation, pandemic modelers in Addis Ababa and London had dire predictions for the continent of Africa. They foresaw a best-case scenario of 300 thousand COVID deaths and a worst-case of 3.3 million deaths and 1.2 billion infections without mitigation measures. The World Economic Forum substantiated this by declaring that “in Africa, deaths from COVID-19 might far exceed what the world is seeing.”

    Now, seven months later, Africa has recorded 1.2 million cases and 36 thousand deaths. That’s one-tenth of the best-case and one-hundredth of the predicted worst-case scenarios for the continent.

    Let’s put this into a global perspective. The global share of COVID deaths to share of the global population is 5 for the US, 2.3 for Europe and 0.26 for Africa.


    Scientists, health experts and policymakers within and outside the African continent have struggled to find answers for this stunning observation of an exponentially lower than expected Africa virus toll. Finding solutions to this puzzle will have dramatic implications — not only for Africa but also for the rest of the world.

    From presidents to scientists, the continent has taken justifiable pride in these observations. A continent long-inured to being underestimated, misunderstood and subject to colonial stereotyping, has found a resounding public health success to celebrate and rally around.

    How can the earth’s poorest continent by almost any health, income, or education measure, including the UN’s Human Development Index, lead the world? How can a continent where 56 percent of its urban population is concentrated in non-social distanced slums, and where only 34 percent of households have access to basic handwashing facilities, largely avoid this viral scourge? These conditions have resulted in Africa having the highest rates of malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and measles deaths in the world. Not only does COVID not follow this dismal trend, but it has reversed it — demonstrating a dramatically lower toll than any other continent.

    This is explained by significant under-diagnosis and underreporting of cases because of a lack of testing capacity and low-quality reporting systems. To date, Africa has conducted only 13 million tests, covering about 1 percent of the population. Massive undercounting is certainly true for infections, but much less evident for deaths, a more reliable indicator of disease burden. It is estimated that official systems capture only one in three deaths in Africa. But even when this is factored in, a dramatically lower African mortality rate persists.

    The few antibody surveys that have been conducted in Africa revealed a 5 percent infection rate in Kenya blood donors and a 12 percent infection rate in Malawi health care workers. Kenya’s infection rate is similar to Spain’s in mid-May when Spain had 27,000 deaths. Kenya’s toll was only about 100 at the same time.


    https://theconversation.com/covid-19...h-rates-147393

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Long one, sorry.

    I don't believe Strunk & White contemplated how different people digest quantitative information and that it may not be dependent on being faithful to some writing style orthodoxy. In other words, compliance with style standards and making a point effectively don't necessarily overlap.

    When I was a TA for a statistics & probabilities course at an American university many moons ago, I picked up on a couple of things other than the fact that I really suck at teaching.

    By way of background, the course was not attended by aspiring mathematicians, physicists and engineers. It was a course for second year business undergrads, and there were all sorts of students. I was specifically assigned several students that were struggling, at risk of flunking the required course. (Just so you don't get the wrong idea, I'm not a quant, merely functionally numerate. I got my degree by reading dense prose written by hairy men who have been dead for a fair few years.)

    It took me a little while, but I eventually realised that different people absorb quantitative information differently. Yes, it seems counterintuitive. Simple data gets processed differently. As I entered the lowly world of commerce, just half a notch above politics, it became more obvious that there is a "diversity" of people in this regard. By and large, there are 3 types. One group is functionally numerate and immediately appreciates that 20% is synonymous with 1/5. These people have the luxury of pondering style. Another group thinks 1/5 is an insignificant quantum but somehow thinks 20% is significant. Another group thinks 20% is not worth thinking about but 1/5 gets their attention. It might be that 1/5 can be visualised more easily: one out of five donuts and such.

    This may simply be a reflection of the company I keep, but the first group is a minority. Of the majority, my completely unscientific observation is that there are more that fall into the third group than the second. In other words, Jorn, my feeling is that there are fewer people who know what to do with 20% than those who are mystified by 1/5.

    Similarly, stats like deaths per capita or per million, and indeed deaths per case, are a bit too abstract for many, which is why deaths per case can be used to suit an agenda. For these students that were struggling to understand what seemed like simple concepts, I had to think of a way to paraphrase it so that it can be expressed from a different perspective WITHOUT interpretative manipulation, examples of which were covered in the course, such as a Volvo advert from, I think, the 80s in which they made some convenient use of stats to make a point about the durability of their motor cars. (I forget what Volvo said exactly, only that it was a very clever, selective (ab)use of stats although it's entirely possible that the copywriter didn't realise that it was manipulative, just that it sounded good.)

    All that said, I've also noticed that many people who love throwing around a lot of numbers are not functionally numerate. Ironically. It's not uncommon for someone to go off and talk about the number of deaths in another continent rising and possibly catching up to that of the US or how it might evolve in a number of years. And, we're left wondering how those numbers support the thesis being presented or if there is a thesis at all. Regardless of the noise, the point remains: there's a shed load of deaths in the US. Far too many. TODAY. But not enough people appreciate it. Hence the necessity to repeat and to occasionally present the same data in different ways.

    The number of cases and deaths are very high in Belgium, partly because of the way they count deaths, but the point still remains: there are too many. Apparently, we have the highest population density in Europe. I was a bit stunned when a native told me that because I never would have guessed. That doesn't justify our numbers. That's not an excuse. And, neither does the fact that we're doing better than the US.

    There is generally a scarcity of people who actually understand numbers, simple numbers. Perhaps the journos were simply trying to cut through the fog and make a point.
    Chikashi Miyamoto

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    The seven most impacted countries in Latin America, former Spanish Colonies

    Mexico: Population 129M, Covid-19 deaths 85,285, Deaths per 1M 659
    Colombia: 51M, 28457, 558
    Argentina: 45M, 25342, 559
    Peru: 33M, 33577, 1014
    Chile: 19M, 13434, 701
    Ecuador: 18M, 12306, 694
    Bolivia: 12M, 8407, 717

    Total population- 307M. Total deaths- 206808. Deaths per 1M- 674.

    United States- 332M, 222717, Deaths per 1M- 672

    The statistical consistency is tragic.

    And for farce, let's throw in a collapsed society. The 8 largest Spanish-speaking Latin American countries including Venezuela have a total population of 335M (an additional 28M). However, Venezuela has only reported 720 deaths. A number which, of course, we can trust. That brings down the deaths per 1M for LA's largest to a respectable 619. Better than the US!

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    ...
    Dan in Oregon

    ---------------

    The wheel is round. The hill lasts as long as it lasts. That's a fact. Everything else is pure theory.

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Not sure where I posted about a political sign made of hay-bales torched, but this is an important follow-up to that:

    https://outline.com/zBupwX

    The man who set the fires lost his son in August: motorcycle accident. Has a problem with drink that this did not help. If you knew Dicken well enough, you'd totally understand why he'd be compassionate. But that's not a story for me to tell here.

    As an addendum, this book review is well worth reading:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/b...&section=Books
    Jay Dwight

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by ides1056 View Post
    Not sure where I posted about a political sign made of hay-bales torched, but this is an important follow-up to that:

    https://outline.com/zBupwX

    The man who set the fires lost his son in August: motorcycle accident. Has a problem with drink that this did not help. If you knew Dicken well enough, you'd totally understand why he'd be compassionate. But that's not a story for me to tell here.

    As an addendum, this book review is well worth reading:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/b...&section=Books
    Thanks Jay.

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Today, Forever Impeached White Nationalist Terrorist says: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots!”

  19. #2839
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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Sbti View Post
    Today, Forever Impeached White Nationalist Terrorist says: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots!”
    The convenient thing about comments like these is they are a direct window into his mind. Just swap people for I, and you know exactly where his head is at.

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    Default Re: Virus thread, the political one.

    The local paper had an article on this, their description of the incident was disturbing in that Trump's impulse control seems to be gone.

    I know his father died in his early nineties but I have to wonder when his dementia started presenting. This is beginning to look a lot like that.
    Tom Ambros

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