This one made me lol pretty hard

Between the Berried and Me?

Pro tip: Google "conditional probability"

End the teachers and police unions. Implement universal healthcare. IMHO.

I could teach you. But I have to charge.

Haha yes indeed!

Statistics is a tough field. Causality, confounding variables, statistical significance, etc.

Yup it was a perfect storm but besides George Floyd we all probably know names of multiple black folks murdered by cops and probably like 0 white folks. Given the statistics on such events it is clear the media has a bias in one direction. Fear and anger generates clicks and revenue, and making things seem like some sort of police race war helps generate the fear and anger.

One example that sticks out to me is a man who was running from cops and killed himself with a gun running into target. The cops caught up to him and tried to help. People on Twitter posted the videos of them standing next to him, and within minutes the target was looted and destroyed because people just assumed what happened. The genesis of these skewed perceptions is the media.

Awful = opinions I don't like. Best hot takes on politics on Reddit = sort by controversial

Democrats have successfully convinced their electorate that racism is such a big problem that they've forgotten to fight for much bigger problems like healthcare reform. Sad to see, but whatever. Dems are getting paid off just like the Repubs. It's all part of the plan!

I formed my opinion (media and Americans at large get selectively angrier at police brutality instances depending on the racial makeup of those involved) on events prior to this one. Ex: look up tony timpa. White guy who had a similar incident to George Floyd. No one cared, seemingly.

Bingo. Kiddos and work keep me too busy

Seriously never heard of it. Looks way worse than the George Floyd incident now that I googled it. Seriously doubt the response will be as large simply due to the races of the cops. I'm not siding with the cops, just pointing out how dumb racializing the police brutality issue is.

Lol so true

Johnny's in Wilmerding?

Yep people did largely step up to the plate in my experience. We could reasonably handle things without, say, forcing bars and restaurants to close or limit capacity when both the patrons and employees want to be there and are willing to take their own risk. Lost a bunch of local businesses. One friend had to sell their house just to keep the business going.

Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

My main point is that our reaction to COVID was poor. No matter what we did, many people were going to die. Look at California vs. the worst state in the USA for COVID deaths per capita. CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies. Meanwhile some states did almost nothing and probably had a lot of old and at risk people avoiding vaccines, but the end result wasn't much different. While this was impossible to predict in early 2020, we didn't amend our approach to be commensurate with the actual risk as we knew more even later that same year.

The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time. It's not just economic loss. Excess deaths are still elevated, but those attributed to COVID cannot explain all of the excess.

Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point. Sweden did a largely hands off approach which the world should have followed. People are going to get COVID forever but it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about. We have plenty of tools to help elderly and at risk people. I don't own a business but am good friends with multiple who do.

Just focus on protecting elderly and higher risk people. At that time we didn't even know if and when vaccines would be around. We basically had to rely on herd immunity. That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity. The only time any draconian policy would be necessary is when hospitals are actually stressed. That period was very brief and concentrated in a select few areas. Like NYC where they had huge outbreaks in nursing homes

Forcing businesses to close or limit their capacities (unless they are Walmart). Then spending billions in relief to fix the self imposed financial crisis. Requiring kids to have school remotely so parents might even have to resort to limiting their own work and income to support it. Requiring vaccine mandates for jobs outside of the medical field resulting in people quitting or being let go if they didn't want to get it. Media scaring the hell out of people with a death counter on screen 24/7 so that they continue to support any policy which might save literally one more life on Earth (at least from COVID).

Yes. That's the amazing thing.

It's the worst it's been since I started working downtown 10 years ago. It declined very sharply after our overreaction to COVID, as expected.