The COVID-19 pandemic is a terrible thing. In both the short- and long-terms, it will cause immense suffering throughout the world. But it's conceivable that some good things will also result. Any ideas for what those might be?
I don't get why this is good for the average worker in developed countries, to be honest. Doesn't this just open every job up to insane amounts of competition with the lowest price of living areas in the country, not to mention other countries? I feel like I must be missing something
> Doesn't this just open every job up to insane amounts of competition with the lowest price of living areas in the country
Remote jobs will have a much bigger pool of applicants to choose from, but likewise applicants will have a much bigger jobs to choose from too. So the two should cancel each other out.
Stress testing the system. Imagine if this viral of a disease had a 25% mortality rate on all age brackets. It would be pandemonium.
Businesses get more robust, start having a larger margin of safety. It reminds me of how banks got deleveraged after 2008 because Dodd Frank forced them to keep more cash on hand.
People eat all those random items in their pantry that would sit there uneaten for 10 years without a virus.
People realize that it’s possible to survive and thrive under the constraints of not going out much at all.
Parents are forced to cope and learn how to parent their kids instead of putting responsibility on teachers and schools.
Online education because more normal.
Work from home will be desirable if people successfully adjust.
People are going to spend more time with themselves - learning more about themselves and their families, improve closest relationships, find new hobbies, learn new things. A lot of people will come out of this with their habits changed in a positive way.
Many countries will have their economies halt - causing them to bring forward new laws and cut on taxes and different costs associated with owning a business, a lot of extraneous work and spending will be cut away and bureaucracy will be slashed,
healthcare will be taken more seriously.
Startups that were gonna die in 1-2-3 years because they dont have any real market fit will die out and the overblown ones will have to reform the way they approach business.
But mostly, this will be a push for Universal basic income and into a "more socialist" direction for many countries.
I mean ... none? This thing has been a disaster of information. The John Hopkins map was made by engineers and it's arcgis in a damn iframe. It has terrible visualizations. No one seems to remotely be displaying any of the data in ways that are helpful. No one knows the actual infected to confirmed rate or even has a decent guess.
We're told ~70% of people won't need to be hospitalized .. we're also seeing hospitals overrun in Italy with perfectly healthy people in their 40s dying.
We're in a wash of really bad information and panic and we have people criticizing those who are trying not to panic. And none of us are really talking to each other, because we can't.
sciugo.com is a site which gives biomedical researchers sharable repositories for their research.
If the site gains traction amongst COVID-19 researchers, it will be the first time researchers document their results in a format that can be easily be reused by other researchers across the world forever.
Any data shared on sciugo.com can be exported with a few mouse clicks to a clean spreadsheet for reuse by other researchers.
If this platform for data sharing gains tractions, it will significantly accelerate the rate of scientific discovery!
We're always looking for feedback from biomedical researchers.
Also, we're hoping to recruit software engineers to help build the product.
is sciugo your site? there is almost no information on the page about why i'd want to use this. Show me other papers or organisations that are using it, allow me to browse datasets. Have a paragraph about what it's for. Also, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that the data will survive for a long time, even if your company/organisation dies/you lose interest. Maybe partner with archive.org, or automatically generate dois for dataset versions.
There are many more people walking outside with their families. I’ve never seen so many people in the parks. If this helps stop the obesity epidemic that would be great, because realistically overweight & obesity related disease is much more of a problem than coronavirus. This is assuming we didn’t do anything to stop coronavirus at all it would still be less deadly than heart disease/diabetes/cancer.
We’re also seeing a rise in remote work. If we can go to the office 1-2days a week for 6hrs and work from home for the rest I think that will be a much better for us.
Universal basic income is being more seriously considered. When we realize that all these service industry jobs were non-essential. I don’t think they’re coming back to the extent that we would all imagine.
We also are in the middle of an unprecedented tax upon the healthcare system. Right now is absolutely the time to switch to a Medicare for all system. Coronavirus does not know rich vs poor and it will infect and kill both.
Lastly I think we’re going to take a long hard look as as a nation about what kind of education we need and how to pay for it. We will have a lot of young workers not working right now. What if we started to make CS/IT degrees free for all the people who were laid off? Something like https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate... but actually free and taught by laid off developers.
Like you say, these effects don't counter the immense human suffering happening.