373uehedhd

> The democrats are not in control of the country, they are in control of a few states...<

Yes but (assuming I understand your point correctly) the U.S. federal government isn't in control of the country either in this context. They certainly could have been more cooperative with states in terms of distributing supplies and communicating new developments as they came in but, short of bringing in troops and asserting themselves by force, they lack the authority to implement a hard nation wide lockdown. Given the early panic over the virus it's hard to imagine a federal level quarantine not resulting in violence.

>No one would say NY would be better off if they hadn't cut it down a lot and shut down.<

I'm not sure if I phrased my first post badly or if we agree here. When I said the lockdowns were egregious compared to Rep. states I was speaking relative to the present. I agree things would have been much worse if early and cautious action hadn't been taken.

>Now look at Texas where their daily positive covid 19 detection has double in the past weeks from about 750 a day to 1500 a day. They are going to have a lot more people getting really sick, because that just following from daily exposure.<

This is basically the entire national debate. We've seen increasingly that just getting the corona virus isn't a death sentence for most people. Texas' infections have been rising, which will by extension lead to some amount of additional deaths, but Texas also has an extremely low death toll compared to other states in terms of deaths per million people (going by Worldometer). The significance of this is that most infected arent going to die and dying after infection, for the most part, isn't a random lottery and so whether it's wise or not to continue to force people to remain in lock-down is a value/political judgement rather than a distinctly scientific one. This holds especially true when people in need are refraining from visiting hospitals for fear of getting the virus and instances of depression and suicide have risen dramatically as a consequence of lock-down policies. You can argue fewer people might still die with heavy lock-down measures in the present but those deaths arent the same people and so what's ultimately being dicussed is whether or not it's fair to drive certain individuals to death or unnecessary physical suffering in order to save people they largrly have no relation with. And that's before discussing the small business owners who have lost their life's work due to government mandates (consumers didn't stop going out by choice after all).

My point about the parties themselves was purely meant to highlight that at this stage both sides could probably be managing their policies better (regardless of value distinctions) but neither wants to make it look like the other team was correct. The irony is that neither side would be taking the same actions since for Dem states like California this would be loosening up a little while for Rep stated it would be tightening up or at least implementing financial support for at-risk individuals and their cohabitants. From here, my broader point was that it's an election year and so, regardless of if any particular state is actually beholden to a particular plan of action, anyone who breaks too far off from the party line (in a manner that risks bad optics) is going to lose clout within their party. I'm not endorsing that as the way things should be but that's the apparent state of things going by the predominantly partisan split in terms of current lock-down action.

What you're describing is the competitive advantage of shoppers preferring Amazon though, at least from how I'm reading your post. If a seller alliance or rival omnicorp can't entice consumers then they need either better marketing or better deals, competing in short. If they can't succeed at either of those in a manner significant enough to challenge Amazon then how is targeting Amazon with legislation actually helping consumers? It seems like most policy proposals boil down to making Amazon less competitive rather than cultivating an environment that results in more platforms capable of reaching Amazon's combination of scale and popularity. If Google was worse at Search there'd be more competition in the space but it'd hardly be a win for consumers unless you change the definition of a win.

There's nothing stopping an increase in competition is the problem. Sellers want the visibility of Amazon's platform with the benefits of rolling their own. There's nothing physically preventing a merchant alliance from forming its own platform, merchants (that aren't Walmart) simply don't do this because they know they're still getting more value by being on Amazon instead. Online retail isn't new or novel at this point, merchants have had all the time in the world to figure out a more favorable system.

Political realism is about optics. If the Democrats back down on their egregious lockdowns they'll look even more disorganized than they did in the primaries so it's not worth the risk when the progressive arm of the party is still throwing a tantrum and Biden is struggling to unify the party. On the other side, many Republican states have constituencies that see COVID as a matter of personal responsibility and which feel that nearly any restriction is overreach by the government. So neither group has an incentive to back pedal even if both would probably benefit from pivoting. Couple this with the reality that the scientific communities seem to have embraced making normative statements outside the direct scope of their fields (sometimes even acting against or excluding peers with political differences) and you have little reason for people to act on good advice anyway.