shoshin

I saw some sobering stats this weekend on younger people and how their mortality rates are rising in the last decade. The obvious culprit being suicides and this is backed in some other data that I can't paste here because I'm over the size limit but the increase in suicides would not surprise you as the biggest contributor to this. The Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma explores the numbers in more detail but suicides among teens are up 3x since the advent of social media. 3 times! And depression and other mental health issues also are through the roof. Kids who are about 20 today have lived every year of their lives with prevalent social media influence. If we had a pathogen that bent a mortality curve for our kids like this, we'd declare a medical emergency. As it is, our general reaction to this is "Yeah we know," "It sucks," "What can you do," and "Let me get back to being a bully on my Social Media of choice." What can we do? P.S. My daughter and some friends felt this documentary really unlocked some deep insights for them, similar to what those of us who took a class in high school on advertising might have had happen when we learned how ads manipulated people. I highly recommend it to anyone, but especially if you have kids of any age.

A rise in the fall is like the flu, yes, but this is a pathogen in addition to the flu and where this rise stops is the thing to watch. The reason there's such a push for people to get flu shots this year is that Covid bed needs PLUS flu bed needs is something we want to stay on top of. I wonder if all the flu vaccine doubters have left in the recent cleansing of this place.

These are the numbers to watch. I see us regressing a month. Still only early in an upwards hospital/ICU trend and hopefully it won't continue. The last thing we need is more shutdowns.

Are Republicans all supposed to like Trump?

That number won’t happen. But 10x could happen in certain states that have been low for a long time.

I voted third party in a critically tight swing state last time and won’t this time. Not happy to help give the Dems the seat, and in fact loathe mich of the Dem platform and especially the AOC wing, but Trump and Trumpism has to go. I’d like to purge Gaetz and Graham and the whole lot of unprincipled swamp things that latched on to Trump. It could give the Dems a 5-8 year run but the Reps need to create a more principled opposition party that speaks to the working person’s advantage. Demographically the Reps have a chance—a chance—to go after the Latinx vote, perhaps by focusing on pathways to legal immigration and citizenship and abandoning their anti immigrant rhetoric. If they don’t win a good portion of that demo, the debate in the US is going to shift to socialism vs centrism (like EU politics) and no longer be socialism vs capitalism.

Its not the cases but the hospitalizations that is particularly noteworthy. PA alone is up close to 80% on hospitalizations in 3 weeks. Still manageable but not a trend anyone likes to see. Florida hasn’t stopped leading the US on deaths in forever. Opening will do that and we need to be open but I doubt the Dems have the stomach to see their death counts go to 10x what they are.

Stop with this reasonable dialog already. It's amazing what a few bannings and a bunch of people quitting will do for a board. At this point, I'd say SDS has had a perfect outcome to his intervention.

I brought up the president's behavior in the last week. You "countered" with Congress, which while interesting is a different topic. Stay on target Red Leader.

The thread topic is the presidential race, the topic I brought up is the president's behavior lately. You didn't like that topic. I totally get that.

We were talking about the president’s latest erratic behavior, just to try to keep you on topic.

I’m old enough to remember when Trump halted the Covid stimulus talks and then didn’t.

So there’s enthusiasm in lawn signs and rallies as you noted but not in polls, because answering a poll brings violence? Doesn’t sound logical.

There is an enthusiasm gap for sure but that’s more the tyranny of merit anger. The voting gap is something that I’m not sure DJT can overcome at this point. His erratic behavior (even for him) lately belies his worry. I wonder whether Ds will vote in person enough to decide Nov 3.

This is a town hall with actual audience members. Not the same format—general public runs this one, which is why the slide to virtual makes a bit more sense if Covid is a concern.

Texas in play too? Texas?!?

Deaths down but Hospitalizations starting to trend noticeably. I hope states stay open but I don’t think they will.

Maybe because last time they didn’t get there early enough to get tested and had to proceed on the honors system without masks and it turned out they were in the middle of a Covid outbreak.

Good news: If he's on steroids, that's good for getting over Covid.

This seems pretty normal.

We haven’t had a proper debate since I dunno. If they truly debated as in answered questions and engaged the topics, they would be valuable. All they are now is a chance for each person to make a 90 second canned speech related to the question or not. Last night is about as good as it will get this cycle and that isn’t saying much based on performance. But a talk radio host vs a career litigator made for at least some debate skills. Trump and Biden can’t do it, Trump because he’s so prickly and Biden just because he goes into other topics, though I always like the town hall. It’s that moment when the candidates must be respectful to at least the voters asking the questions.

It’s almost like those of us in the middle to Libertarian end of the spectrum are getting oxygen from under the 10,000 accusations that we are Deep State MSM liberals now that the one-sided post volume and name-calling has been turned down a little isn’t it? The politics here got so black be white that there was little appreciation that most people are 49 (not 50) shades of grey. Reasonable discussion could be possible!

Wait what? In the history of PPP, there are 800K posts. In the last 7 years, DR had 55K posts. That backs up my gut feel but seeing it in numbers is amazing and sad all at once. Hopefully this was his only platform.

No one answered questions last night. They gave 2 minute speeches. That's better than "debate" #1 but still.