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Comment by jdpigeon

5 years ago

This is awesome. Looking forward to the economics research papers on this in a few months

Not sure awesome is the word I'd use in these circumstances.

  • The productive part of it is awesome. We got some organisational ideas from trying to stop people dying before. Checklists, triage, and justification by data visualisation just off the top of my head, but I'm sure there was more.

This is absolutely NOT a good thing. Or 'awesome'. You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home'. You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home'. This is going to have lasting, major effects on the worlds economy. I'm personally selling all my index fund stock tomorrow morning.

  • You’re too late. The expected impact of this event is already priced in. Unless you foresee the impacts being much worse than the few lost weeks, don’t change now. The sell-off you wanted to avoid already happened over the last week.

    • It's only going to get worse before it gets better.

      Coronavirus has showed up at a number of college campuses in the US, and now it's just a waiting game of another week to see if there's going to be any large scale spread in the US.

  • > You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home.'

    Why not? Kids seem perfectly willing to sit in front of screens — they would probably be perfectly willing to sit in front of screens on a group chat, learning from a teacher and interacting with their friends.

    > You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home.'

    A robot factory can! Granted, that switch won't be so great for the human workers who used to do that job.

    • Kids have short attention spans, if you put them in front of a computer, why the heck would they pay attention to boring class stuff, instead of play a game or watch youtube? Learning hands on is essential when you are young. Homeschooling is fine, but remote learning is just not practical.

    • > Why not?

      Because behavior supervision and response is a significant and integral (that is, as well as necessary function accompanying the actual instruction, it is a component of the pedagogy) part of teaching children.

  • ...or we might find that it's not that big a deal to miss a few weeks of work or school so long as everyone knows why and understands it's for the greater good.