January 6th was a deliberate coup attempt plotted at the highest levels of the Republican party and the only people going to jail are useful idiots, so in a sense you can say they definitely won. There's no reason for them to not keep trying until they either win or run out of useful idiots.

Small business owners are the worst people on earth.

That's just the median time in the US that homeowners live in one place before selling and moving, but the pattern is real. A suburb gets hot, then the taxes increase to fund the services that the community needs, and people move to the next cheap taxpayer-subsidized development. When I moved here it was some developments in Ross Township, since then Robinson, McCandless, Cranberry, etc. Apparently Cecil is a thing now.

Seconding this, Butler County is where all the worst people from Pittsburgh self-segregate.

Well-known source on community safety, dubya dubya dubya dot alarms dot org.

Love to watch all the hooting and hollering about taxes. The entire purpose of suburban development in this region is to let people move every eight years to avoid paying taxes. Good shit, definitely promotes healthy communities.

Those penalties only exist if the people in charge feel like enforcing them. They usually do not, so the penalties might as well not exist.

> The other day I had one call me a little bitch because I had the audacity to honk at him

 
The other day some guy got out of his car and wanted to fight me at the Armstrong Tunnel entrance because I took my right way of way and he thought a Yield sign actually means "go". Some real fucked up brains around here.

People get really mad when you suggest this for some reason. I have a gas furnace and heat a 100+ year old, 1800 square foot house for less than $120 a month just by setting it to 67 F (63 F overnight).

Ain't me downvoting you, but I added mine just in case.
 
Nobody in Pennsylvania was locked inside their house at any point. Period. Applebee's going to takeout only for a few months isn't a lockdown.

> how much negative press comes with the position

 
Yeah, the negative press that definitely comes out of nowhere and is completely undeserved. Spontaneously-generated negative press.

My sister-in-law teaches at a Coal Region school and makes ~$41k a year, and gets regularly abused by the worst people on earth who think she's an overpaid babysitter. Why would any kid in their right mind want to be a Future Teacher of America right now?

> Sure I should have said resistance not immunity.

Once again, what kind of resistance actually exists if you're just going to catch it over and over at all? Which infection will infer 'resistance'? The fifth? The tenth?

 
> CA has about half the mortality after all their absurd COVID policies

 
What absurd policies?

 
> The long term consequences of how we and the majority of the western world reacted to COVID are still being felt and will be for a long time.

 
You are assigning the negative outcomes of the pandemic to the reaction to the pandemic and not to the disease that we've permitted to run wild. You are implying that had we done nothing at all and just pretended there wasn't a pandemic raging, things would have turned out better. That is an utterly insane idea.

> Repeat after me: The government arbitrarily classifying your business as essential or non-essential is the DEFINITION of a non-market condition

 
Shit happens and businesses fail all the time. Sorry you were open during a pandemic, but the government doesn't owe you jack shit and they certainly don't need to let you stay open when you're a threat to public health.
 
Life ain't fair. Deal.

 

> Are you giving information contradictory to the PA department of health or the CDC? Are you saying a bandana, gator, or steelers-print cloth mask prevent you from catching or transmitting covid?

 
Recommending gaiters, cloth masks, etc was a stopgap measure meant to prevent runs on N95 and surgical masks and the CDC was quite open about that.

 
> If it was so hands-off and reasonable, why have they stopped? Why are there no mask mandates?

 
Because people like you wouldn't stop throwing massive fucking tantrums. So the government gave in. You guys won. There are zero covid restrictions anywhere in the United States and 250K+ people are going to die from Covid-19 every year for the foreseeable future. The very concept of public health in America is dead going forward, and we're going to continue to see precipitous declines in life expectancy of the sort you usually only see in failing societies.

 
Despite winning, you're still all pissed off about imaginary lockdowns that never happened. Just take your victory lap and move on.

> Shutting down businesses, fining business owners who stayed open,

 

Repeat after me: "No business carries a guarantee of a return regardless of market conditions."
 
If a business causes a threat to public health, it's well within the rights of state government to shut them down for the duration of an emergency.

 
> requiring an emergency vaccination that did not go through the standard channels for approval,

 
Both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved through regular channels at this point. You're just crying over something the government has had the power to do for over a century now, mandate vaccination.

 

> limiting travel based on vaccination status,
 

If you've ever flown out of the country you'd know this happens all the time, pandemic or no.

 
> requiring PPE that was proven to not work,

 
This is the sort of crackpot shit I'm talking about.

 
> printing trillions of dollars to smooth over the damage done by the previously listed policies..

 
"It wasn't the pandemic that caused the problem, it was the response!" is more crackpot shit that rests on the assumption that had we just ignored the pandemic and done nothing at all, things would have turned out better. Magical thinking with no basis in reality.
 
> yep, totally the same as not eating at Applebees

 
The great majority of Pennsylvanians saw no more onerous government restrictions than restaurants being closed for a few months and kids learning from home. Comparing your "plight" to interment is some incredible self-satire.

 
You people live in an oppositional defiance fantasy world where you're always the victims.

Yes, the government interring Japanese Americans during WW2 is exactly the same thing as you not being allowed to eat in the Applebee's dining room for three months. 🙄

 
Listen to how absurd you are.
 
Public health is a basic function of government going back millennia. If you sincerely believe that the government has no place guarding the public health, you're the crackpot here.

...What unprecedented overreach? The US government has used state power to control disease outbreaks many, many times in the history of this country. Many times within your lifetime, as a matter of fact.

 
You people have made up an alternate reality in your head that you live in full time.

Reminds me of the time everyone was complaining about "drug dealing" in Market Square so they took the chairs and tables away, which meant that a group of older black men who played chess down there every morning couldn't play chess anymore. Problem solved from the commuter point of view, I guess.

That's extremely accurate. Can you tell me when the government forced you to stay in your house under the threat of law in Pittsburgh or in PA? You can't, because it didn't happen.
 
The dining room at Applebee's closed for a few months and schools went remote. That's about it.

There were no hard lockdowns anywhere in the United States at any point. Even at the depth of what few restrictions there were, you were free to go hang out at Home Depot all day and lots of people did.
 
There have been zero restrictions on bars and restaurants in PA since early 2021. Florida reopened their beaches in April of 2020.

 
You people have made up an alternate reality where the government closed everything down and locked you inside for three years. It never happened.

There have been zero Covid restrictions in Pennsylvania for about twenty months now. What are you even on about?

An accepted government function, going back thousands of years, is public health.
 
Distilling public health down to a personal consumer decision is completely apeshit.

> Yes we've had considerable immunity for a long time at this point.

 
Obviously not, since hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year and people are contracting covid-19 multiple times.
 
If you can keep catching it, you don't have immunity to it. Fuck's sake.

 
> ut it's never going to be killing people to any degree which is worth worrying about.

 
It has been the leading cause of death in America besides cancer and heart disease for three years running, what are you talking about? It killed ~268K Americans in 2022. It's knocked nearly three years off the American life expectancy since 2020. That is insanely dire and usually only happens in collapsing societies, like Russia in the early nineties.

 
You are engaging in magical thinking. This pandemic isn't going to get better until we do something to make it better. Pretending it's 2019 and ignoring the monster in the room while it eats people is not making anything better.

So you're repeating the Great Barrington stuff, which postulated that we'd hit herd immunity within three months and the disease would fade from view.
 
We're going into the fourth year of this disease, it's still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, and it should be quite clear at this point that herd immunity isn't going to happen.
 
> That would mean letting the young healthy people especially live as they wish and start building that immunity.

 
I know people on their fourth infection. If you can keep getting it over and over, what immunity are they building?

 
Do you own a restaurant or something? Your approach here seems to be "don't hinder businesses in any way, let all the weak die, and if we ignore it maybe it'll go away eventually."

 
We've basically been doing that for the past twenty months, and it isn't working.

 
"If we stop looking at the monster maybe it'll go away" isn't a public health policy, it's just magical thinking. This idea that society, schools, businesses, etc could have just carried on as normal during the largest mass death event in American history is just more magical thinking.

It looks like what you're saying here is that we shouldn't have mounted any sort of societal response to covid-19 at all, and just went about our lives as though nothing was happening.
 

Do you think things would have went better with a highly contagious respiratory pandemic if we completely ignored it and pretended it wasn't going around killing people? What's the end game with that sort of approach?