[BBC] A simple mathematical mistake may explain why many people underestimate the dangers of coronavirus, shunning social distancing, masks and hand-washing.
Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire?
Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days?
The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.
If your estimates were way out, you are not alone. Many people consistently underestimate how fast the value increases – a mistake known as the “exponential growth bias” – and while it may seem abstract, it may have had profound consequences for people’s behaviour this year.
A spate of studies has shown that people who are susceptible to the exponential growth bias are less concerned about Covid-19’s spread, and less likely to endorse measures like social distancing, hand washing or mask wearing. In other words, this simple mathematical error could be costing lives – meaning that the correction of the bias should be a priority as we attempt to flatten curves and avoid second waves of the pandemic around the world.
#3
But it's not completely exponential it's more of a logistic map
Remember X(n+1) = RXn(1-Xn) because as more people catch it, it's harder to spread.
This function is actually chaotic (in parts).
BBC drivel here A simple mathematical mistake may explain why many people underestimate the dangers of coronavirus, shunning social distancing, masks and hand-washing.
So why are we not all trillionaires? Because the growth rate of an exponential function HAS to fall as it's change spreads!
This article is so stupid only an academic would think its useful.
#9
"when 150 million Americans will become infected, the infection rate will start going down?"
Of course. That which cannot continue indefinitely will not. In fact, it looks like only about 70 million will ever get infected, for whatever reason. Seems like around 1.5 million will probably die. It will take several years.
#13
Fascinating, #12. I got September3by averaging the death toll over the last 30 days (1,020) and dividing that into 189k-167,761=21 days from now.
Now that's 'science' you can reproduce! Assuming the average continues for the next 21 days.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/14/2020 15:09 Comments ||
Top||
#14
Compound interest. My geometry teacher in 1965 read the class the story of John Jones Dollar.
Anybody else remember reading that story of how compound interest saved universal socialism?
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/14/2020 15:21 Comments ||
Top||
#15
The only creationist is Grom who thinks you could infect more people in an area than live there.
In the real world (not his badly programmed spreadsheets, where he doesnt really understand the maths) all exponents are bounded and the more expansion the more it's bounded.
#17
It's rather obvious that in real life the exponential growth comes to an end, but not before 50-70% of people are infected.
If you do nothing, mandate nothing, the economic disaster kicks in a bit later, because once numbers of infected people reach catastrophic levels, people will socially distance without being told so, avoid shops and restaurants etc.
And since this is a new virus we don't know what damage it can do and could do in the future.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
08/14/2020 23:06 Comments ||
Top||
#18
Someone should paid some of those college students willing to risk getting the virus at Virus parties and spring break to be part in tests to see how infection it is for there age group.
#19
because once numbers of infected people reach catastrophic levels, people will socially distance without being told so, avoid shops and restaurants etc.
That all started before it was mandated in my part of the country, once reports of the situation in Italy started to spread.
[BBC] Hospitals in Madagascar have been struggling to cope with a surge of Covid-19 cases, while the president has been promoting an unproven product he says can cure the disease despite the World Health Organization (WHO) warning against using untested remedies.
Cases have quadrupled in the past month in the Indian Ocean island, with more than 13,000 infections and 162 deaths from coronavirus, which has spread to all but one of its 22 regions.
Despite the spike, President Andry Rajoelina stands by the herbal concoction called Covid-Organics, which was launched to great fanfare in April.
It is produced by the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research from the artemisia plant - the source of an ingredient used in a malaria treatment - and other Malagasy plants.
The drink has been marketed as a prevention and remedy - and for the last four months been offered to children at school.
#3
I can't blame this prez one bit. Give it a chance. It can't be any worse than the addictive rubbish put out by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
[Telegraph via Zero] Perhaps the biggest example of the Western media's inherent biases surrounding its coverage of Sweden's approach to tackling COVID-19. Plenty of media outlets decried the country's "massive" fatality rate compared to its lockdown-favoring neighbors, but failed to add the context necessary to see that the difference was only a couple thousand deaths, and that Sweden's per capita mortality rate was still lower than Britain's, and other countries that favored lockdowns.
When Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden's strategy, said during an interview that he would have done things "differently" if given a second chance, the Western press, including the NYT, rushed to frame this as an admission of guilt for failing to order the types of restrictive lockdowns seen in other European countries. Tegnell later clarified that this isn't what he meant at all.
What's more, in Sweden, deaths have declined nearly to zero. And since the country's economy has remained open this whole time, there's little risk of resurgence when whatever minimal restrictions are still in place are finally lifted.
Hat tip to Powerline blog whose Scott Johnson notes that the writer George Perry is a former prosecutor. This is a long article which includes excerpts from both of the autopsies that were conducted. You can read the whole thing at the link. The paragraphs below are merely the introduction. Original article appeared in American Spectator. Spoiler alert: Fentanyl.
[KnowledgeIsPower] At long last, here’s my article published yesterday by The American Spectator regarding the death of George Floyd. After being featured on Real Clear Politics and by my friends at Powerline, it’s generated a great deal of comment pro, con and outright angry.
Here are two points that I did not address in the article.
First, as you will see, when approached by the police, Floyd was foaming at the mouth. When the police asked about that, Floyd replied that he had been "hooping earlier." "Hooping" is a street term that, in some locales, means placing drugs in one’s anus. Some junkies believe that absorbing drugs in that manner will produce a more intense and pleasurable sensation than that resulting from ingesting the drugs orally.
Since I am not familiar with Minneapolis street vernacular, I decided not to attempt to define "hooping" for the AmSpec readers. It could be a reference to playing basketball or some other innocent past time. But given the context, I doubt it.
Second, in addition to a drug overdose, there is an equally persuasive cause of death related to the autopsy findings that Floyd had severe coronary artery disease and had in his blood stream fentanyl and methamphetamine. Combine those findings with his agitated, incoherent and out of control behavior throughout his interaction with police, and it is entirely possible that he died of "excited delirium" which caused cardiac arrhythmia. In fact, a civilian recorded on the police body cam exclaimed that Floyd looked like he was about to have "a heart attack", and one of the police officers expressed concern that Floyd’s deteriorating condition could be due to "excited delirium".
Since lengthwise the article was turning into War and Peace, I decided to leave out the cardiac arrhythmia discussion. Just be aware that cardiac arrhythmia induced by excited delirium is also a leading contender for the cause of Floyd’s death.
#2
Floyd was just a convenient excuse. If it hadn't been him it would have been the next [appropriately colored] thug who fatally botched being arrested.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/14/2020 1:56 Comments ||
Top||
#8
M. Murcek's deep dive article at #3 is also very good.
It would seem that if the cops are to blame for anything it is failure to recognize Floyd's symptoms soon enough to call for emergency medical aid at the outset of the encounter. But cops are not doctors. It would also seem that Floyd was going to die that day no matter what the cops did.
The problem now is that if and when the cops are acquitted, riots will almost certainly follow. Mainstream media types and reckless Democrat politicians will demand it. So be it. They can turn their own neighborhoods into burned out ghost towns but they better not come to mine.
BLM people say they want justice but lynching those cops because George Floyd overdosed himself is not justice.
Real justice would involve putting a stop to the flow of fentanyl and other poisons into our country. It seems reasonable to ask if politicians who oppose Trump's border wall have a vested interest in the continued flow of poison.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/14/2020 12:20 Comments ||
Top||
#9
They seemed to understand he needed an ambulance and one had been called. This was before all the trouble started. Now, antifa "medics" and BLM "activists" would probably have prevented an ambulance from getting there anyway or EMTs getting near him if they did. If they had it to do over, I'm sure they would have blocked his vehicle in and said "you ar3en't fit to drive, just sit there and wait for the ambulance."
BTW, the SUV was a Mercedes according to reports. Whose vehicle was that and why was Floyd in the driver's seat?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/14/2020 14:13 Comments ||
Top||
The lie went round the world while Truth was still tying its shoes. Copious details at the link.
[AmericanSpectator] They have a dismal record of blowing up "racial killings" that turn out to be nothing of the kind.
I read the "Second Amended Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial" filed August 12 on behalf of George Zimmerman against Sybrina Fulton, Benjamin Crump, et al. without illusion. The major media will shrug off the suit, and even the trial if it comes to that, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) will likely continue on its meretricious way.
But maybe not. BLM was launched in 2013 "in response to" Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin a year earlier. In predicting that "Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all," Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump captured the confused mood of much of black America.
I attended the Zimmerman trial in July 2013, visited with Bob Zimmerman, George’s father, and surveyed the scene of the crime. At the time, I was writing a book on the case with a deadline six-weeks post-trial. I was guided in my research by the excellent, crowd-sourced deconstruction of the incident done by "Sundance" and his fellow "Treepers" at the blogging collective, "The Conservative Treehouse."
We all knew Zimmerman was innocent. We all thought he would be acquitted in anything resembling a fair trial. And we all suspected, but could not prove, that the State of Florida’s star witness, the girlfriend allegedly on the phone with Martin at the moment of his death, was a flat-out impostor.
In his stunning 2019 documentary and book of the same name, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud That Divided America, Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert proved what we all suspected: The prosecution’s key witness, Rachel Jeantel, was an impostor. To close the case, Gilbert went and found the real girlfriend, Brittany Diamond Eugene, a then-16-year-old Haitian-American woman.
With impressive clarity, the Zimmerman lawsuit lays out the case against the defendants — Trayvon’s father Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s mother Sybrina Fulton, Eugene, Jeantel, Crump, and HarperCollins, the publisher of Crump’s compendium of lies, Legalized Genocide of Colored People.
A crocodile, livin' in style,
Abode by de banks ob de Nile,
Detesting conservatives,
And -- bless dose preservatives! --
He'd be Boss again, arter while.
#4
It matters not a bit. Some people....deluded....think black lives matter to Black Lives Matter and can't allow themselves to find out otherwise. Everybody else already knows it's been a scam since day one.
Still, if a number of people named can be punished, that would count for something.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
08/14/2020 7:55 Comments ||
Top||
#5
The left huxsters have become adept a pushing hoaxes for for political purposes, e.g. the Russian collusion hoax. There are many left-wing dupes who are all too willing to be fed this pap that the MSM news spoon pushes and swallow it all without question.
[LinkedIn] I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.
Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. I could start any type of business. I could meet people. I had family, friends, opportunities. No matter what happened to me, NYC was a net I could fall back on and bounce back up.
Now it's completely dead. "But NYC always always bounces back." No. Not this time. "But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again." Not this time.
"NYC has experienced worse". No it hasn't.
A Facebook group formed a few weeks ago that was for people who were planning a move and wanted others to talk to and ask advice from. Within two or three days it had about 10,000 members.
Every day I see more and more posts, "I've been in NYC forever but I guess this time I have to say goodbye." Every single day I see those posts. I've been screenshotting them for my scrapbook.
#2
There's the rub. To get the excitement you want you have to tolerate the excitement you don't want. If enough people come for the excitement you don't want, you get Portland.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/14/2020 3:00 Comments ||
Top||
#4
upper class is leaving but moving to other big cities, e.g. Atlanta, Miami
working class, e.g., delivery workers, cleaning crews, etc. are still there
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/14/2020 10:13 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Guiliani saved it once. It can be saved again. With the wealth fleeing as it did it might take a lot longer to recover though and DeBlasio isn't the one to do it.
#6
All delivery service will be severely reduced. Insurance coverage in areas unprotected by Police will stop. This is happening now. Why risk losing a claim when you knowingly entered a hazard zone. Can you imagine insurance coverage for a business in these areas. No, they have doomed themselves. Numbers will all go negative. Bail them out?, why bother if no effort is made to secure areas.
[Right Scoop] Earlier today when Kamala and Joe were doing a teleconference, at the end a reporter started asking Biden questions and his campaign handlers immediately cleared the room:
As the tweet and video shows, even CNN’s Brianna Keilar thought it was strange, saying "couple notes....one, not a whole lot of questions from reporters there. I mean we keep pressing the Biden campaign; there needs to be more questions from reporters. We know that."
And then it happened again. After Biden and Kamala’s short speech a little while ago, reporters immediately started asking questions and Biden just responded "We’ll talk about it later."
Uh yeah, sure Joe. Whatever you say.
Dana Perino was asking Ari Fleischer about this today, asking him if this unwillingness to take questions is sustainable. His short answer was yes, if the media lets them get away with it. And he’s right. If it were Trump doing this there would be segment after segment on Trump being afraid to answer questions. But with Biden it’s just a 10 second mention on CNN and that’ll probably be about it.
I’ll leave you with this clip of Biden saying that we need a national mask mandate because it saves lives ’expedentially’:
[American Thinker] If you’re like me, you keep seeing headlines popping up about this or that retired military officer lambasting Trump as a dictator and, in some cases, offering wargame scenarios about how to evict Trump from the White House. These officers believe that Trump will lose the election and then, instead of leaving the White House, he will engineer a coup attempt with help from the DHS and those of his many supporters who own guns. (Never mind that it was Obama who already conducted a coup attempt.) Kurt Schlichter, who knows the military, thinks that if things go sidewise in January, many generals would join with the Democrats.
To understand what’s happening, you should start with Byron York’s excellent rundown of the fantasies that high-level retired officers are putting forward. In their fantasies, Trump, who has consistently abided by the law and with judicial decrees, will suddenly go rogue and, having lost the election, will then refuse to leave the White House:
A number of President Trump’s most implacable critics are fantasizing about deploying the U.S. military to remove him from the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, based on their assumption that a.) he will lose the election, and b.) he will refuse to leave office on his own.
Recently, two retired Army officers speculated about deploying a brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division to overpower Trump’s "private army" that they believe the defeated president will use to try to cling to office. Another retired officer, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, imagined the military in battle with armed Trump supporters, the result being that "all bets are off as to how much blood might flow." In addition, a group of former government officials, political operatives, and journalists concocted a scenario in which Trump actually won reelection but Democrat Joe Biden refused to accept the result in hopes that the military would side with him against the president.
Read York’s article to understand the true lunacy driving these officers’ speculation. What’s worrisome is that, when a group ironically named "Transition Integrity Project" did a wargame about what would happen if Biden, like Hillary, won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, it was the Democrats who wanted to go nuclear. They imagined Democrat states seceding, D.C. and Puerto Rico joining as states, and a possible military uprising to support Biden.
What should make people nervous is that, while it would once have been inconceivable that the American military would dream of turning the U.S. into a military dictatorship (because that is what always happens when the military is involved in a leadership battle), it’s conceivable now. In this regard, there are two articles you should read.
#1
The higher you are up the general officer ladder the more a politician you are. Your last set of steps up the ladder are approved by the White House.
We've had too many still fixed in the mindset of 1950 and unwilling or unable to refocus out of the 'world's policeman' mentality. Just another form of Deep State.
Any such act would break the military because while too many in the upper echelons think that way, the middle and lower ranks swing mostly the other way towards America first.
#4
People used to ask their opinions, and then ignore them. Now they don't even ask.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/14/2020 11:53 Comments ||
Top||
#5
I was re-reading the importance of M.I.C.E on the motivation of people who defect against their home country (Money, Ideology, Compulsion , and Ego. These days they are saying Ego, seems to be the most important. Tips offs are they are often they are narcists , have poor relations with their fathers and They tend to be alcoholics.
Sultan Knish
How much did it cost to buy Biden's VP Spot? About $3.5 million.
That's how much Senator Kamala Harris' virtual fundraiser for Biden brought in back in June.
That not only beat Hillary’s total, but swamped every other Democrat fundraiser for Biden, except the Obama one, which brought in over $6 million for his old incontinent flunky, and Warren, who brought in more money in total, but had the misfortune of being a white woman.
The virtual fundraisers were the real beauty contest for the money hungry Bidens. And Kamala Harris won them in a swimsuit of money long before the official announcement was even made.
Susan Rice could hardly compete with a paltry $24,000 donation to Biden.
"She’s been a fighter and a principled leader and I know because I’ve seen her up close, and I’ve seen her in the trenches," Biden gushed about the California politician.
The trenches that Biden had in mind weren’t in the fields of France, but at high-end fundraisers.
Another one of Kamala’s virtual fundraisers for Biden in July brought in another million.
It’s been estimated that Kamala raised a total of $5 million for Biden.
What was Kamala's secret? She's plugged into a network of wealthy donors who got her to the Senate. And then poured over $40 million into her failed presidential campaign.
The fundraisers showed Biden what Kamala could bring to the party. And it wasn’t just money.
A Kamala fundraiser for Biden featured Diplo, DJ D-Nice, Jermaine Dupri and DJ Cassidy. It probably doesn't hurt that Kamala's husband is an entertainment industry lawyer.
It wasn’t just Willie Brown who got Kamala to the top. It was money.
Kamala had built her political career on tapping into big money in San Francisco and then statewide. She routinely outspent her opponents in her political campaigns. In 2016, she bought the Senate race by raising over $15 million and outspending her opponent almost 4 to 1.
More than half of her presidential campaign was funded by $23 million in large contributions.
That, and not small donors, is what Biden has been running on. After Kamala Harris dropped out, the Biden campaign "aggressively" pursued her donors. Now he doesn't need to. After the DNC’s clown car primary with its obsession with small donors, the jackass party is jettisoning the pretense that it cares about anything other than big donors and their giant wads of cash.
As CNBC notes, "her addition to the ticket could help push the Biden campaign over the top in the cash race with Trump."
Michael Kempner, a top Democrat donor and the head of one of the country’s biggest PR firms, gushed, "she has a strong and active fundraising organization. She will be an important and immediate addition to the Biden fundraising effort. She is a fundraising star."
It’s about the money. It was always about the money.
Did anyone seriously think that Biden would pick Stacey Abrams, Rep. Karen Bass, or Susan Rice, when he can marry Mrs. Moneybags for her money and the donors that come with it? And the fact that she can pose as "law & order" candidate based on her history won't hurt with Democratic voters shocked by Antifa/BLM riots.
#1
Kamala will push for the no-border policies that will drive down wages by getting middle class Americans to subsidise these migrants, with the benefits accruing to the donor-employers.
Then she'll increase regulation so that these employers face little competition ensuring they can raise prices as their costs fall.
[PJ] "The Palestinian leadership rejects and denounces the UAE, Israeli and US trilateral, surprising, announcement," said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. That was just one indication of how welcome, how much of a breath of fresh air, the agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel really is. The Palestinian leadership has encouraged the murder of Israeli civilians and boasted of the ultimate destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. If Abbas and company are unhappy, the free world should be happy.
Israel currently has peace agreements with only two Muslim Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, and those are cold friendships indeed, marred by a steady flow of hateful anti-Israel rhetoric in both Arab countries, and worse: Ahlam Tamimi, who aided the 2001 jihad massacre at a Sbarro’s pizza parlor in Jerusalem in which 15 people were murdered and 130 wounded, lives in Jordan, where she is a national hero and a popular television host. The United States has filed charges against her, as Americans were killed in the attack, but Jordan refuses to extradite her.
Words are cheap, but the UAE-Israel rapprochement doesn’t seem, at least at this point, to be a grudging, reluctant, cold peace at all. The official statement announces that "delegations from Israel and the UAE will meet in the coming weeks to sign bilateral agreements regarding investment, tourism, direct flights, security, telecommunications, technology, energy, healthcare, culture, the environment, the establishment of reciprocal embassies, and other areas of mutual benefit. Opening direct ties between two of the Middle East’s most dynamic societies and advanced economies will transform the region by spurring economic growth, enhancing technological innovation, and forging closer people-to-people relations."
To be sure, the agreement is based on a quid pro quo that takes the wind out the sails of Palestinian outrage: "As a result of this diplomatic breakthrough and at the request of President Trump with the support of the UAE, Israel will suspend declaring sovereignty over areas outlined in the President’s Vision for Peace and focus its efforts now on expanding ties with other countries in the Arab and Muslim world. The US, Israel and the UAE are confident that additional diplomatic breakthroughs with other nations are possible, and will work together to achieve this goal." Now if only the Qatari clan leadership gave up supporting terrorism...
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[BBC] Hospitals in Madagascar have been struggling to cope with a surge of Covid-19 cases, while the president has been promoting an unproven product he says can cure the disease despite the World Health Organization (WHO) warning against using untested remedies.
[Right Scoop] Earlier today when Kamala and Joe were doing a teleconference, at the end a reporter started asking Biden questions and his campaign handlers immediately cleared the room:
[American Thinker] If you’re like me, you keep seeing headlines popping up about this or that retired military officer lambasting Trump as a dictator and, in some cases, offering wargame scenarios about how to evict Trump from the White House. These officers believe that Trump will lose the election and then, instead of leaving the White House, he will engineer a coup attempt with help from the DHS and those of his many supporters who own guns. (Never mind that it was Obama who already conducted a coup attempt.) Kurt Schlichter, who knows the military, thinks that if things go sidewise in January, many generals would join with the Democrats.
[PJ] "The Palestinian leadership rejects and denounces the UAE, Israeli and US trilateral, surprising, announcement," said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. That was just one indication of how welcome, how much of a breath of fresh air, the agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel really is. The Palestinian leadership has encouraged the murder of Israeli civilians and boasted of the ultimate destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. If Abbas and company are unhappy, the free world should be happy.
