jnbiche

Modern warfare is very different than war 150 years ago. Look at Bosnia and Syria for typical examples.

And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.

No, no. Internal civil strife.

That question depends on how Brexit goes, doesn't it?

I agree. I'm surprised more HNers aren't aware of this potential. To be clear, I condemn those pushing us toward political violence, but it has a decent chance of arriving in the next 6-12 months even.

I appreciate this comment and mostly agree with the contents of it. But I take exception with the use of words like "evil", "monsters", etc.

I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.

I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.

If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.

I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.

And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.

(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).

By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.

I'm sure you think that's clever but there are plenty of respiratory diseases that don't require sustained contact.

Measles, for example.

The point is sustained contact, not the route of transmission.

I agree with you about parks and beaches.

But restaurants and hairdressers are known to be places where COVID-19 can be actively spread to large groups of people. And gyms are even worse.

We should be encouraging people to go outdoors, and to not congregate in large groups.

Finally, bear in mind that public officials, like scientists and laypeople, are just figuring all this out, too. It's a novel infectious agent, after all. But it's important to self-correct quickly.

Ironically, it looks like masks may turn out to be one of the most effective interventions, yet there's a huge political backlash against them that many pols are stirring up, so 20-30% of the country will never wear them.

> The primary way to spread a virus via droplet transmissions is to spend a sustained amount of time around lots of other people in an indoor space

In some ways, very similar to TB, although a much shorter exposure time is sufficient for transmission.