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Alien Invasion Imagine an invading alien force which quite accidentally came to Earth via an errant asteroid. The aliens themselves are quite unusual. They are passive, non-sentient, and they multiply under the right conditions. Most alarmingly the aliens are quite small, they invade humans, multiply and pass from human to human... and they are miniature, unpredictable, terrorists who seemingly at whim, can kill the human host they have invaded including themselves. A sort of miniature non-sentient suicide bomber who kills the host and themselves without much rhyme or reason... although statistically we can detect a pattern regarding which hosts are more likely to trigger the attack. There is also much evidence regarding how they multiply and propagate from human to human... oddly they can be modeled on something from Earth we more commonly know as a "virus". In a world with a proper government whose responsibility is to protect individual rights from domestic and foreign invaders, a council is assembled, and the issues debated... How do we protect the individual rights the very right to live of our citizens from this blind insidious invading alien force? [Edit: not sure if this should be added here or added as a new thread... actually I'd like to request Dream Weaver move it to a new thread called "Aliens and Proper Government" ]

One thing that has struck me about the social impact of this outbreak is how much the character of the social response is altered by the advance in communications technology. In 1957-58 there was the pandemic of the H2N2 virus. I was only nine and didn’t retain much memory of it. According to the CDC note linked below, it killed about 116,000 people in the USA. That is twice the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. The population of the US in 1957 was about 172 million, whereas today it’s about 330 million. So percentage-wise, it would today be as if about 200,000 Americans were killed. I attach also a study I found on the US response to that pandemic. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/bsp.2009.0729

In my case, the explanation helped. It was rather cryptic,. save for the intellectual lights.

Yes, tentatively. I say "tentatively" since the Worldometer numbers change often and ceteris paribus. Based on the following numbers captured only minutes ago, the mortality rate for Italy is about 7.4 times that for Switzerland. I added Spain and the USA this time. Date Country Total Cases Total Deaths Tot Cases/ 1M pop Tot Deaths/ 1M pop Deaths / Cases 3/25/2020 Italy 69,176 6,820 1,144 113 9.86% 3/25/2020 Spain 47,610 3434 1,018 73 7.21% 3/25/2020 Switzerland 10,171 135 1,175 16 1.33% 3/25/2020 USA 54,963 784 166 2 1.43% Also, the age distribution of the countries' infected populations may differ and mortality rates vary significantly by age regardless. For example the following are mortality rates from the 2016 US Life Table. Death probability Age Male Female 65 0.015808 0.009761 70 0.023122 0.015413 75 0.035963 0.025035 80 0.057712 0.042539 85 0.096603 0.073763 90 0.163689 0.129706 Recognizing the caveats, I believe it is still safe to say that Switzerland's health care system is handling the pandemic much better than Italy's or Spain's. Based on this page, it seems that Spain's health care system is very much under government control with patients paying very little. There is some private health insurance.

Beautiful! Consider the Helios Overture of Carl Nielsen.

@Easy TruthTry: Covid-9 + a healthcare variable = 0.013%—0.098% (truncated) mortality. South Korea contrasted with Italy by Mises Institute.

"With all due respect , my tradition is older than yours, older than anyone else's. My profession was the first one man ever made, and it'll be the last one to go [in response to being called a Silver-Grey]. It's the one that makes all the others possible. So what do you say?" He held up the card [of the Warmind's instructions] for the third time. "Does our civilization deserve to live, or not?" — Marshall Atkins The Golden Age — John C. Wright

I may be misunderstanding but “square roots (plural) of the positive real numbers” is defining a universal, it has many referents, it does not "only" referer to “square root of 17.”

You are making a circular argument. For a universal to be real does not imply that it's a concrete. That's only true under the premises of a non-realist metaphysics. You are assuming a metaphysics in which only concretes are real, and then telling me abstractions therefore cannot be real because only concretes are real. But it's your premise that I'm disagreeing with in the first place. The distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" is whether some thing is universal or specific - not whether the thing exists or not. The question of the reality of universals is a question of whether there are metaphysical natures, whether there are such abstract "kinds" in reality, or whether everything in reality is purely a specific and concrete, not of any real class or kind (other than those subjectively invented and justified). (side note, when someone uses the phrase "existed metaphysically", what they really mean is "existed physically" - they don't really understand the term "metaphysical". The "metaphysical" is not another realm of existence out there in the heavens above the physical. There is one realm of existence: the universe. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things, and whether things have such a "nature". If a given thing has a metaphysical nature that means it is of a kind (a "kind" meaning a type or class of things). The thing itself is the concrete: it is entirely a specific particular. The type or the kind of which the concrete is an instance or examplar is the abstract: it is a universal, and stands for an unlimited number and variety of possible instances or examplars. The only question of what "exists metaphysically", are exactly these universals, that's what metaphysics is. Hence such arguments from materialists and positivists and nihilists, et al., that "metaphysics" is a dead subject.)