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I have the same name as an entrepreneur who had a fairly successful exit and is now an early stage investor. As a result, I get a slow trickle of cold intro emails with hot* start-up funding opportunities.

*definitely not hot


Maybe it's like prostate cancer in that it changes so slowly that often something else kills you long before the prostate cancer has a chance to? [0]

[0]https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/understanding-prostate...


Very few people want to spend $40 on a fire extinguisher every few years until the moment when their kitchen is actually on fire.*

*That is, unless, history repeats itself and we lose ~1-2% of the world population[0] this Fall. That might provide sufficient motivation. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu


>spend $40 on a fire extinguisher every few years

Gosh, I hope they last longer then that!

I have a (genuine) Halon fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. According to the internets, Halon was banned in 1994!

The pressure dial on it is still in the green.


"Stored pressure ABC extinguishers are very common, and they often require internal maintenance every 6 years and hydrostatic testing every 12 years. Other types of extinguishers may vary in their internal examination and testing intervals." -https://www.cintas.com/fire-protection-services/fire-extingu...


The same year. What started as a bad flu in Kansas in the Spring of 1918 morphed into a super-killer by the Fall of the same year.[0]

[0]https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurge...


I'm going to venture a guess that lifestyle is a huge factor in the difference. People are generally more active out west (better weather, more open spaces/ parks/ mountains, better beaches, etc.) and smoke far fewer cigarettes.


Eliminate all of the wildlife in the yard? Some people actually prefer a diverse array of wildlife over a neighbor's pet.


Seems passive aggressive to eliminate your neighbors pet. I'm not a social person, and I typically let me neighbors do as they please (as I want them to do with me) but if I have a problem with an animal I'll approach the owner.

If my neighbor kills my cat and makes my kids cry without talking to me about it first, I'm probably going to create problems for that neighbor that involve the local police department.


The butterflies & migrating birds would likely beg to differ.


Everything? Amazon is crushing it and clearing out the space for essentials. Costco Online is selling out of food and sundries as soon as they refresh the web page.

Anecdotally, I'm getting UPS packages delivered at any time between 8am - 10pm. The night driver has to use a headlamp to read building numbers.


HN hive mind: At what point are there sufficient numbers of survivors to establish herd immunity and get some semblance of normalcy?


I think we need to shoot for "a new normal" where better cultural germ control practices are a more normal part of the world.

In which case, we don't need to shoot for herd immunity. We just need to shoot for "Hey, stupid, don't do stuff like blow your nose at the restaurant table or conference table, good god."


Or: “Don’t show up at the office sick, you’re not ‘dedicated’, you’re just an asshole.”


I always wondered about this. For COVID, the recommendation is that you have to be symptom free for 14 days before you are considered not contagious. Adding another 7-10 days of actual disease, you will be asking people to take 21-24 days off for a disease ? That is simply not accepted in American corporate culture, where many mothers return to work 2 weeks after giving birth


Then we need to start accepting it. Those that don't will be the assholes who kill their employees and co-workers. Legislating sick time off, like every other developed country in the world and many that aren't, is what we really need to do. Along with healthcare for everyone. But it all starts by not accepting the assholes at the office trying to kill you as normal.


Realistically, I mean symptomatic (coughing and sneezing). It’s not perfect but people are typically most contagious while they have symptoms.

Plus, when you don’t need bed rest, you can still do any work that can reasonably be done from a remote location. Most companies haven’t done much to push that boundary in the past, and that’s a good idea, but it’s not a complete solution by any means.


Are there any studies that prove that asymptomatic people are less contagious ?


Filed under "People I would like to slap, except it involves touching them."

Yeah.

But in order to enforce that, we need different sick leave and health care policies and ...stuff.

And that's very much a world I would like to see born of this mess, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes.


That’s really the only hope I’m clinging to at this point, that over the next hundred-plus years the cultural changes might be worth all the damage.


Let's shoot for a five year time frame for some major cultural changes and I'm in.

Let's start on fostering them today. If we jump on it, we could flatten the curve with less economic pain this very year.


That ship may have sailed, unfortunately.


Let's build another.


The threshold is 1 - 1 / R_0 [1]. Using the commonly quoted R_0 ~ 2.5, that's 60%. The highest estimate I've seen is R_0 ~ 5.7 [2], in which case more than 80% of the population would need to be immune.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics

[2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article


At about 60-80% immunity you gain herd immunity and the expected infection chain length is less than 2.


The people talking about herd immunity are talking about 60% to 70% of the population having had, and survived, covid-19.

The trouble is how to achieve that without killing 10% of everyone over 50, or anyone with comorbidities.


I remember reading 70%.


Anybody semi-capable can easily modify a stick built house. And Americans _love_ to modify their houses. DIY stores are big business here. I, myself, am adding some recessed LED lights into a couple bedroom ceilings this weekend. When I'm done, apart from the light fixtures themselves, you will never know the work was done 50 years after the house was built because there are no cable raceways and no external plugs.


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