New Covid-19 Thread

[touchring]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Youtube had been censoring a lot of early information on the plague. Maybe Americans should collectively sue Youtube for collaboration with the perpetrators?

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Youtube had been censoring a lot of early information on the plague. Maybe Americans should collectively sue Youtube for collaboration with the perpetrators?

The censorship, propaganda and thought control is so pervasive, I feel like I'm in the old Soviet Union that we schoolchildren were taught to abhor. 9/11 brought us the TSA and the end to travel privacy. Pretty soon we're going to be hearing "Papers, please!" just to be out on the street.

Anybody else notice how, while barbershops and beauty salons have gone out of business and none of us could get haircuts because, social distancing! ... all the news anchors and politicians posing for the cameras are always perfectly coiffed? How on earth did they get their hair and makeup done while 6 feet away from the hair and makeup person? But hey, we're all in this together!

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[QUOTE=shiny!;320318]The censorship, propaganda and thought control is so pervasive, I feel like I'm in the old Soviet Union that we schoolchildren were taught to abhor. 9/11 brought us the TSA and the end to travel privacy. Pretty soon we're going to be hearing "Papers, please!" just to be out on the street. [\QUOTE]

You have no bloody clue, how the old Soviet Union was none, so please don't equate a little hardship to save others and probably your life.

Anybody else notice how, while barbershops and beauty salons have gone out of business and none of us could get haircuts because, social distancing! ... all the news anchors and politicians posing for the cameras are always perfectly coiffed? How on earth did they get their hair and makeup done while 6 feet away from the hair and makeup person? But hey, we're all in this together!

Moaning about getting a haircut really? who is going to see you if your're in lockdown? as for barbershop in London a lot of people start by doing it home and the move to a shop later, with rents going down for shops i expect there will be a quick bounce back to normal times. That goes for a lot of business, some in the home improvement businesses Gardeners, Builders, Plumbers etc should do better as business let their employees work at home more often.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

freedom of the press exists solely for those who own presses. iirc the "fairness doctrine" went away in 1987.

i've seen videos of people screaming about their freedom to refuse to wear masks. for some reason i haven't seen anyone make the obvious response: this store is private property and the freedom of the owners allows them - within the law relating to e.g. racial discrimination - to determine who may enter. if you have no mask the owners may decide that you are not welcome, and if you enter you are trespassing. why does the "freedom" of the mask-refusers allow them the right to enter others private property?

and why does the "freedom" of any individual allow them the right to spread information or communicate at all on someone else's privately owned network?

the alternative is for communication networks to be regulated as utilities. that would stir up its own hornets nest, but would allow for a political "solution."

Well said.

Woodsman and his ilk cry about censorship, when there has never been a time where people of like minds can band together and find the material they say is censored.
You don't even have to leave your house like the old days!

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Youtube had been censoring a lot of early information on the plague. Maybe Americans should collectively sue Youtube for collaboration with the perpetrators?

Oh good idea, good luck in suing an algorithm.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Chris, you were asking why not publish that post as some sort of samizdat? I'd think not for precisely the reasons demonstrated here by our resident communist and big swingin' d*ck MD.

Captain: "You gonna get used to wearing them chains after a while, Luke. Don't you never stop listening to them clinking, 'cause they gonna remind you what I been saying for your own good."

Luke: "I wish you'd stop being so good to me, Cap'n."

Captain: "Don't you ever talk that way to me. NEVER! NEVER!

"What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach."

Nothing wrong with being a socialist, well I see mcCarthyism is still going strong in 20's US.

But hey thank you Woodsman for defending our rights!

Because you Americans are free thinking individuals.

[Woodsman]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[Chris Coles]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

[QUOTE=Techdread;320320][QUOTE=shiny!;320318]The censorship, propaganda and thought control is so pervasive, I feel like I'm in the old Soviet Union that we schoolchildren were taught to abhor. 9/11 brought us the TSA and the end to travel privacy. Pretty soon we're going to be hearing "Papers, please!" just to be out on the street. [\QUOTE]

You have no bloody clue, how the old Soviet Union was none, so please don't equate a little hardship to save others and probably your life.

You need to get hold of a copy of Plague of Corruption, Restoring faith in the promise of science by Dr. Judy Mikovits & Kent Heckenlively, JD and at the least, read the Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, JR. When you do so you will discover that even the Soviets did not stoop so low as to harm the health of millions of their citizens; no excuses, read it.

[touchring]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Oh good idea, good luck in suing an algorithm.

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.

Youtube/Google opening their proprietary code for inspection and criticism?
It would be wonderful but I won't hold my breath. Google has 117 billion dollars cash on hand. I suspect they would be happy to spend ten percent of it on legal fees to keep their code a trade secret. 11 billion dollars will buy a lot of lawyers, several senators, and a few judges.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

I'm pretty sure youtube will be forced to expose their censorship algo in a matter of time. Look at the news.

https://support.google.com/youtube/a..._topic=9282436

I think it is self censored by users hitting a violation button, then if the creator objects a Human will look at it.
The criteria for pulling a video is written for anyone to examine. see above link.

The recommender system is algorithmic, so the computer learns what you like and seems to be optimised for getting advertising views.

[Techdread]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

Proprietary? Tensorflow, Pytorch are opensource . If lawmakers want to know how it works.

Its the search engine that is a trade secret i believe.

[Southernguy]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

So much for a "banana republic" as someone here dared call us.

Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?

Mac Margolis
21 hrs ago

Counties with the most COVID-19 cases



McConnell: Next stimulus bill will be 'final' one

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As the novel coronavirus cyclones through Latin America, it has staggered almost every nation. So how to explain Uruguay? Its infection rate of 2.1 cases per million inhabitants is the second lowest in South America and already falling, with just 22 fatalities by May 27. Ahead of many of its neighbors, Uruguay is already glimpsing a safe return to economic normalcy.

It might not have turned out this way. The nation of 3.5 million people is rife with risks. It is the Latin American nation with the largest share of elderly, and all but 4% of the national population lives in cities. Those are the kind of demographics made for contagion. Uruguay is wedged between ailing giants: Brazil is the pandemic’s new epicenter, while Argentina was already nearing economic collapse when it defaulted on its debt last week.
And yet — stricken neighbors take note — Uruguay has not only contained the outbreak, it has done so without a lockdown, harsh quarantines or heavy-handed policing. Most schools and restaurants closed their doors, but shops and businesses were allowed to stay open. Unlike its outsize neighbors who mostly flew blind into the pandemic, Uruguay built its crisis response on proactive testing and tracing — it has the second highest testing rate in South America — and cajoling its citizenry to do the right thing, as in this national mask-wearing campaign.
Its liberal social engineering strategy is similar to Sweden’s, yet Uruguay has managed to avoid the Scandinavian country’s soaring death toll. Its policies have drawn praise from the World Bank and earned Uruguay favorable comparisons to New Zealand, minus the benefit of being surrounded by ocean.
A near-universal health care system, years in the making, has helped. So has the country’s relatively low population density (Montevideo is about half as densely occupied as Buenos Aires) as well as Uruguay’s overall well-being. The Boston Consulting Group in 2018 ranked Uruguay as Latin America’s most prosperous nation. It boasts one of the region’s highest scores on the human development index. Extreme poverty has all but disappeared.
But perhaps Uruguay’s biggest assets are its intangibles. Uruguayans, while hardly complacent, tend to follow rules and heed authorities. Mind you, social distancing doesn’t come naturally to the gregarious Charrua, as its natives call themselves. “People crowd the Rambla [a shoreline drive] on Sunday, share the cup of mate tea and congregate for barbecue on Sunday,” said Benjamin Gedan, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America program.
Uruguayan voters also share a political culture that allows adversaries to disagree without descending into toxic dissent. A center-right political alliance narrowly won the election last year, after a decade and a half of rule by a left-wing coalition, but the switch was not the product of the same popular revilement that sent millions to the streets across Latin America. “In a region roiled by political chaos and uncertainty, we have seen social stability and a considerable degree of political consensus,” said Ignacio Munyo, an economist who teaches at the University of Montevideo.
Tellingly, the most remarkable protest in Uruguay was last year’s mass march for the rule of law and against a controversial amendment to crack down on a crime surge by creating a national guard with praetorian powers. The bill was defeated. A message hoisted by a lone leftist partisan in the crowd gathered to hail conservative president-elect Luis Lacalle Pou’s victory last November became a unifying national meme: “Congratulations. If you fare well, so will I,” read his placard.
So far, Lacalle Pou has mostly returned the favor. “While this is definitely a government of the right, it’s also a broad coalition,” said Nicolas Saldias, a Latin America scholar at the Wilson Center. “You don’t see wild policy swings. Lacalle Pou has mostly maintained the social and labor policies from before. There’s broad agreement among political actors despite their differences.”
Shared commitments could presage a quicker recovery. Although the International Monetary Fund reckoned the Uruguayan economy will shrink by 3% this year, the regional contraction will be far more severe: 5.2%. What’s more, the fund touts Uruguay to log the region’s sharpest rebound (5%) in 2021.
That forecast affords Uruguay a rare chance for a reset. The economy was already in a five-year rut heading into the health crisis. The World Economic Forum ranked Uruguay poorly in hiring and firing policies and worker-employer cooperation, and 108th among 141 countries for overall labor flexibility. The country also must deepen pension reform to provide for the quickly graying population. “This is the right moment to restructure,” Munyo said. “That’s critical for putting Uruguay in the center of multinational sights for investment.”
In this way, Uruguay’s penchant for national accord can be good medicine. Shared sensibilities could not only help inoculate its struggling economy with vital structural reforms but also spread a salutary message to the rest of a region riven by politics.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

[shiny!]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

God bless Uruguay! You guys are doing just about everything right.

[Southernguy]

Re: New Covid-19 Thread

God bless Uruguay! You guys are doing just about everything right.

Thanks for your generous comment, Shiny. Not so much as that, there are a lot of not so good things to say about Uruguay. But the present gov. (which I did not vote, by the way) is doing things relative to Covid 19 mostly right. The most important: they called the scientists and followed their advice. Also the scientists themselves, before the first cases appeared (March 13) were already hoarding test kits. They knew the thing was coming and acted before the old and new government did. In fact, in my opinion both (the past one who stepped down March 1) and the present should have taken some measures (quarantine passengers from places where the virus was circulating as Europe for example) at least one month earlier. All in all, yes, we are so far faring very well in this respect.