We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
1. Police taking biological samples as a matter of course, even after the crisis. A sneaky politician or official manages to turn this in to DNA sample collection, maybe by sequencing swabs on the side to "catch criminals." Nobody stops it because everyone is focused on the virus.
2. Local governments end up with expanded power to shut down businesses, this eventually gets abused for some kind of extortion in a small town somewhere.
3. Police gain generalized "indefinite detention" powers instead of specific "court-ordered quarantine" powers in some jurisdictions, creating a ticking time bomb set to explode the first time a mayor wants to get rid of a protester.
4. Efforts to stamp out counterproductive conspiracy theories result in legal and bureaucratic infrastructure which sits around and is eventually used to suppress a very productive conspiracy theory.
5. Playing on the above, Google builds a system to delete every video that says 5G and COVID-19 are linked. This is eventually used to delete every video that suggests Darkriver Mercenaries Inc. and the scandal in Kumran are linked.
All of these cases share one thing in common: a bad, over-generalized law gets passed because legislators are panicking and not taking the time to think about civil liberties. The virus spreads fast, but not so fast that you can't take the time to legislate effectively.
For example in CA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-24/l-a-coun...
Temporarily closing gun shops, like shops for anything else not required for daily life, is absolutely reasonable.
If you claim that guns are required for daily life, that says more about your country than any other point here (and not in a good way).
Maybe, but I've yet to see any plausible proposals. Do you have one?
So, this doesn't seem like an approach that has a materially different desired effect from what we're already doing. The policy's goal is to achieve temporary shutdown of businesses and prevent transmission of the virus. You're just using a more convoluted, less effective route to get there. As an added drawback, limited liability almost guarantees that many companies would cease respecting the rules (since their value will be zero if they respect the rules, due to bankruptcy, it costs nothing to go about business as usual and just shut down if you get unlucky).
I guess what I was asking was whether you have any ideas that have any likelihood of being more effective than current approaches. I can think of dozens of things that would be less effective than what we are currently doing. That doesn't really help us very much, though.
That's the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in FEMA death camps.
History does not support the most hyperbolic speculations, but it does support the idea that the USG files away at the base of lady liberty every time the public's back is turned. Remember the Patriot Act and 9-11?
Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.
Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]
Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.
And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...
