Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Jeff said:

And finally, the ones that will take a picture of it and post it on their community Facebook page or Nextdoor.

No one would see it on my Nextdoor because it would get lost amongst all of the reports of explosions in the middle of the night (is this a thing everywhere or just where I've lived?).

Mulfinator said:

I'll bite. Name one freedom you have given up this week.

This week, nothing has changed, however in the past few weeks there have been checkpoints instituted for travel, there have been mass closings, curfews, and changes to everyone's way of life. When we finally say enough and let's go back to life. Will all of these changes disappear? Or will there be some residual freedom loss?

Will we accept that in the name of safety we need to explain why we are crossing state borders, will we need to accept that when shopping in a store we need to stay away from the products because someone else is currently there, or will we accept that we will have someone deem us safe to enter an amusement park? That is the point I attempted to make about eroding freedoms each passing day.

I am about to pick up and move 1800 miles across the country in a couple weeks, will this require nothing more than going? Or will I continually be harassed along the way about why I am driving across states and will I have to explain myself to someone else?

I was on the phone with the bank the other day, I needed a document with account and routing number to prove account ownership for an electronic transfer. I don't have checks, I haven't written a check in like 10+ years. The representative asked me why I needed such information. I felt like telling her what business of hers is it, I am the account owner, I am asking for it, don't question it. I didn't however for one small reason, because of all the years of working in customer service I know that sometimes people ask for something that isn't what they really need. Maybe she was just trying to get a grasp on what I was attempting to accomplish in order to better suggest a solution for me.

I wasn't happy about giving her more information than necessary, but I wasn't going to quibble over it either because she was just trying to help out. We continue to allow ourselves down the rabbit hole of losing our privacy and actual security, in the name of better security and safety.

People today are extremely comfortable with surveillance and outright spying on us not just by the government, but by large corporations as well. How many of you have an Amazon voice assistant in your homes, how many of you willing post pictures, details, and information about yourselves online? How many of you take steps to actually keep the details of your life from being spread around? Or are you in the camp of its worth the privacy tradeoff for the service that is offered?

These occurrences of disease or terrorism are not the "new norm" or something to worry about in the modern world. These are the same problems that have existed since the beginning of civilization. These are extremely rare events with a statistically insignificant probability of happening, yet we devote a ton of time and resources into them, and are willing to make large changes to our way of life to prevent them. Yet even with new changes and measures that are supposed to protect us, they are still going to happen, we are just spied on and coerced into various new regulations during a time of fear and uncertainty.

Take time to prevent natural disasters, hurricanes, flooding, or global warming. These are all events that are occurring which have a very good chance of affecting our country in the next decade.

I am all about mitigation of risk where it makes sense, we should be working on issues like heart disease that have a good chance of affecting us. Which brings me to this thought, how many people who smoke are holed up right now afraid of catching this disease, who wear masks and look at others funny if they cough or sneeze, yet they participate in an activity daily which is guaranteed to cause death. Maybe it's that whole short vs. long term focus coming into play again, but it just makes me scratch my head and wonder about all of it.

The guy who posts the picture of the dog poop is the guy who has stepped in it in the past and it is clearly someone else's fault, I am now making it my mission going forward to attempt to make as much noise as possible about it and cause a big scene about it. I will jump down anyone else's throat I see for a little power trip.

That person is clearly in the second category, and also is the person who others generally despise the most.

It might be premature to say this, but I'm wondering if this hysteria bubble is about to pop. Not to say that the virus isn't dangerous, but as far as life after the virus goes, it's possible that we might be over the peak of uncertainty and I think the updated models lowering the peak might be driving that.

My family and I are doing a cruise in August. Originally we were going to drive, but I've been exploring flying. Here have been the prices for the same flights (Delta) since I started looking in January. Here were the prices for the 5 of us to fly CLE to JAX roundtrip.

January - $1630

February - $1390

March - $996 (it held this way for weeks)

Yesterday - $776

Today - $966

I'm not an expert at scheduling flights and the timing of it, but I found this change pretty interesting.

Hysteria bubble? Who are the hysterical people?

Just you...

We have images of a mass grave being dug. In a major US city. In the 21st century. I'm not saying that every single reaction to what is happening is completely measured, but to call what's happened in the last 4 weeks "hysteria" is farking rich.

Hey Rob, before you leave send Shane a note with what you want on your brick. Just in case.

There is yet another kind of dog poop person that is really strange. This person bags their poop and then just leaves the bag there on the sidewalk. My subdivision FB page has been up in arms about it the past few weeks. This appears to have been a sales boom for Ring.

Shane, Please put down 'I did it myyyyyyyy way'

As far as the context of the word 'hysteria' being used, you guys are either failing to read or flat out ignore the rest of my statement about uncertainty is becoming less of a thing.

I know English and reading comprehension is hard, but please, continue to focus the one word I said and ignore the rest. Perhaps you can start your own radio show, maybe emulate what the hard right and hard left shows do themselves. *shrug emoji*

HIPAA (Not HIPPA) wouldn’t apply in any case here as HIPPA only applies to organizations under 45 CFR 160.103, none of which are non healthcare related entities, and wouldn’t include parks or other recreational entities.

There May be other PHI or PII related laws that apply by state, but if a park wanted health records to prove something regarding COVID, HIPAA would have nothing to do with it.

I am someone who bags up my dog's poop and leaves it by a light post near the sidewalk. However, I do this so I don't have to carry the bag while I'm walking (my dog likes to get it over with early). I pick it back up on my return trip home and throw it away at my house. It's possible that some people are doing the same thing in your neighborhood. If you're really interested, you can conduct a surveillance operation on the bag to see if the original depositor comes back to retrieve it some time later.

On second thought, don't do that.

Lol. No they are just leaving it. When it happened to me I wasn’t sure what it was thinking maybe some kid dropped a bag on the way home from the bus. It sat for two days so I picked it up. A few days later my wife told me about the uproar on FB.

Hard for me to relate as to the issue as in the 13 years I have had my dog she has not once pooped on a walk and I stopped carrying bags years ago. She is having to much fun walking and I guess figures she has a yard for that crap. 🤣

Mulfinator said:

"He called the ****, poop!" is possibly my favorite line/moment from that entire movie.

You can typically find bank routing info online. Some banks have different routing numbers for different parts of the country. Some of them also have different routing numbers for different things. Such as electronic payments (direct deposits, ACH transfers or automatic payments) and wire transfers. So it makes sense a bank would ask. But often times you can get that info online as well (some banks ask for your zip code and then show you routing numbers for where you are and different types of transfers).

I've been thinking a bit about this and I have a genuine question, mostly directed at Gonch, but really for everyone saying that the downward adjustment of the models' predictions shows that we overdid the precautionary measures. (I'm not even sure if that's Gonch's position, but I think it is).

Imagine it's May 31st and the total US death tool is ~60,000, which is better than most initial estimates and that most transmission rates are quite low. (I'm not making a judgment on whether that death toll is "acceptable" for the cost, but I'm hearing from many people, the cost was too great and a higher death toll would have been "acceptable" if it meant less restrictions.) Some places like NYC got hit relatively hard and other places like Cleveland barely had any impact from the virus. Ignore that we probably still don't have an endgame.

Imagine if you had a time machine and went back to March 1st and all the federal, state, and local officials believed what you said: that if we do it exactly as we did in reality the death toll will be 60k. I'm hearing that many of you would want to move the abstract slider to more freedom & more death. What would you then recommend? Would you say, "The Cavaliers can still play" or "we could probably wait an extra week to implement social distancing" or "in Cleveland you can have dinner with one other family, once a week" or "No gatherings beyond 10 people but you can still go to work"? I'm curious about how you would adjust the abstract slider we talk about, given the very real unpredictability and the extreme cost of a mistake. Do we just take a look at some models, figure out what restrictions lead to an "acceptable" death rate and go with that?

I think one of my takeaways personally from all of this is the reminder that models have some amount of uncertainty (see 2016 election) so we should understand the broad range of what they're really saying and not just what the headlines tell us they are saying.

Honestly, it is impossible to consider every outcome and make the decision beforehand which is why everyone tends to get their panties in a bunch and err to one extreme or the other.Short of calling on Griffin from MIB we will never really know all the possibilities.

With that being said, this is my big problem with all of this, a cure is god knows how long down the line, what is optimistic, 6 months? Maybe 8? Anyways, lets do some math again because we are all poindexters.

Our current case rate in the US is 478,366. That is just 0.146% of the total population.

But that case rate doesn't reflect everyone because so many people have it with no symptoms, studies say 5x to 10x the reported rate. Tell you what, I'll give you 20x.

478,366 Cases x20 = 9,567,320 which is still 2.92% of the US total population.

That leaves a massive uninfected group that is ready to create the next peak.

If this is wicked contagious, then short of continuing everyone staying home until we can cure it, then more people will infect. This being said based on numbers and infection rates and so on, if we chose next week to return to normal, we should then be in a position in a few more weeks after that where we are on the exponential curve again and everyone is crying out that we need to stay home again.

So what do we do? We cannot simply stay home for 6 months, that will lead to a whole new problem.

ApolloAndy said:

I've been thinking a bit about this and I have a genuine question, mostly directed at Gonch, but really for everyone saying that the downward adjustment of the models' predictions shows that we overdid the precautionary measures. (I'm not even sure if that's Gonch's position, but I think it is).

Yeah, that's not quite it. I don't think we did, I'm asking if we may have...or could have gotten away with less.

I'm curious about how you would adjust the abstract slider we talk about, given the very real unpredictability and the extreme cost of a mistake.

Honestly, I don't know. I don't understand (I don't think we understand) enough at this point - and may never given the variables involved - to truly know.

We've already made these decisions though. We've planted the flag in a specific spot and accepted the outcome. My wife and kid still go to work 6 days a week because we've decided hotel rooms and pizza are worth the additional risk of keeping those contact points in place.

That's as simplified as I can make the concept. Could we reduce the spread further by not deciding hotels rooms and pizza are essential? Absolutely, but we didn't.

I've had a delivery truck (UPS, FedEx, Amazon) at my house almost daily since this started (been a great time to finish the little home projects after getting back in behind the tornado). We've decided that everyone touching those boxes and bringing them to my house is worth the risk so that I can get new doorknobs. If lives were all that mattered, we'd eliminate all the contact points where we pack, move, load, ship, unload and deliver those doorknobs to save more lives. But we didn't.

On the flip side, Ohio kept grocery stores open. We decided that risk was worth it. But then we readjusted and added limits to how many people at a time could be inside. We felt that reducing those contact points made sense in the tradeoff of inconvenience for lives.

This is what I suggest examining. What's worth it and what's not? If saving lives were the ultimate goal, we'd have a national month-long lockdown enforced by the government through various means. We haven't done that. We've accepted some balance of loss of lives vs inconvenience already - we initially thought that'd be 100,000 to 200,000 lives in exchange for the level of normality we went with.

It looks to be coming in below that at this point. That's a huge win. That's like a sale. Only 60,000 lives for the level of convenience we were willing to pay 100k-to-200k for. How did we get that deal? We need to look into that. And could we have relaxed something and gotten more normality for the same 100k we were willing to trade?

These are very real questions. It's not like this is some weird taboo thought process. Assuming you're not going full-on enforced national lockdown, it's the only process. You're either shutting **** down or you're deciding which concessions to make.

TheMillenniumRider said:

So what do we do? We cannot simply stay home for 6 months, that will lead to a whole new problem.

I don't disagree, but as you say, if we reopen things slowly and hit another exponential spike, then that's not good either. Just because staying at home for 6 months is super bad, doesn't mean the alternative is better.

Out of all of this craziness I am hoping that the biggest takeaway is that people do not need to congregate in one place to run a business. Call centers, cubicle jobs, office buildings can certainly become permanent work from home occupations. This not only solves the contact issue short term, but reduces traffic, time wasted, and not to mention countless amounts of office space which can save on resources, power, water, and this will lead to reductions in carbon emissions. It is a benefit for the employee and the company, I never could understand why people are required to drive to work to then just sit behind a computer screen.

Lord Gonchar said:
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"He called the ****, poop!"

Speaking of poop. Apparently it's being studied for traces of Coronavirus. Ew....

Results are that there are more Coronavirus cases in MA than reported. Not sure how one can determine that... do what you please.

The Pants Industry is behind it. There is big money in pants.

One reason and we are find this out is we do not have the telecommunications infrastructure for everyone to work from home or educate. At least in many areas and certainly those that live in more rural areas. Since this has started my cable internet has been very spotty and it can crawl anytime of day.

Data security is also an issue.