r/news • u/Big-Heron4763 • 5d ago

Passenger ordered to pay more than $5,000 in fuel costs after flight diverted due to bad behavior

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/travel/australian-airline-passenger-fine-cost-fuel-intl-hnk/index.html
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u/Sourpowerpete 5d ago

Lets not pretend it was just a "couple of weeks". Hell, it's still difficult to find nearby events for my hobbies that haven't gone fully online meetings only.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

It would have been had everyone followed the plan. Not following the plan is what made it take so long. Thats the reason there was a plan in the first place.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 5d ago

I agree that it was frustrating how all the adults in the world behaved like kindergarteners with a substitute teacher, but I am unwilling to pretend that the “plan” was ever rigorous & robust enough to deliver what it promised. Let’s just be honest and accept the fact that we as a society were and still are unprepared for global pandemics with 8 billion people on earth. We’re but clever apes, at the end of the day.

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u/Poundaflesh 5d ago

President Trump dismantled the Pandemic Response Department built by President Obama just to shit on him. I was a front line nurse. There were stores of ventilators and PPE all over the nation when Obama served. Where’d they go? We wore garbage bags and used masks meant to be discarded after every patient for a week or more! There’s no accountability for this (criminal act, imho). Nothing investigated. Just watched us die. Trump is a mass murderer and you’ll never convince me otherwise.

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u/SocraticIgnoramus 5d ago

After 9 years of this shit and yet it’s still true of Trump that literally every new fact I learn about him sounds like the worst possible thing and yet the next one will feel like that too. It’s exhausting just trying to keep receipts on how absolutely morally bankrupt a POS he actually is.

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u/Poundaflesh 5d ago

Right?? There is no bottom to his depravity!

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u/oceantraveller11 4d ago

Close to 50% of our country is still willing to vote for him; it demonstrates just how morally bankrupt society actually is.

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u/Poundaflesh 4d ago

I’m not sure I believe that. I do believe the electoral college needs dismantled.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

I can agree with that but it wasn't a decision individuals should have made for themselves against the advice of experts. They only made the opposite choice on purpose out of spite for being told what to do even though it was the better choice. If everyone worked together things would work out better for everyone. The fact it was painful to them while not complying is a feature not a bug.

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u/Argos_the_Dog 5d ago edited 5d ago

Covid was always going to kill a ton of people regardless of what we did. Could we have done better? I suppose, although I don't know that it was mask mandates that really did a lot of good. I think it would have been a lot more effective to say "if you're over 65, obese or have immune issues (or all three) wear a fitted N95 or similar when in public", and then had the government provide these for free. I think more people who were high risk in that scenario would have been more likely to use masks more often, especially in parts of the country with low trust in government etc. But hell I'm in NY where masks were mandated in one form or another indoors on and off for a couple of years (my work had a mandate for two years straight), and we had the same waves everyone else did. It's a highly aggressive, easily transmissible airborne virus. Especially the early strains, was always gonna be bad news for people in the vulnerable categories.

Edit: spelling

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

Lots of people also not in the vulnerable category died too. Either way, the point is they shouldn't have actively worked against the plan. Because they did I blame them for the failure. Frankly it's just a good way to identify people not to associate with.

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u/Argos_the_Dog 5d ago

~75% of US deaths were people over 65. Of those deaths the large majority were people 75 and older (about 612,000). What could we have done that might have helped? Legally confined people over 65 to their homes and just delivered meds and groceries? Asked them if they had ever considered just not being old? And consider that those numbers are deaths with and not necessarily from Covid-19. Many of the people who died already had other severe illnesses and Covid was just the last straw. For many others they tested positive upon admittance for something else that was about to kill them back when hospitals were still testing everyone and died of whatever that was, not Covid itself.

I don't think before the vax much of anything was doing any good except making people stay home to the degree some states did that, which was neither economically or socially sustainable long-term. And even when vaccines arrived a bunch of mouth-breathers wouldn't take them despite being in the high-risk category so I dunno. Morons gonna moron.

In terms of the masks, I think a perfectly fitted N95 type or better not being removed all the time probably provides some degree of personal protection, but a dirty cloth or surgical mask under the nose or however people wore them wasn't doing jack shit.

Source for the stats: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

Again I don't care whether the outcome could have been different (i do reject the premise that there was nothing we could do but we can skip that for now), I care that people actively tried to make the plan fail for selfish reasons, and despise them for it. I'm glad they self identified though so I can avoid them in the future.

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u/Argos_the_Dog 5d ago

There was about a three-week window in 2020 when I thought everyone was going to pull together in some WW2 sort of collective effort. Then hope faded for me. Was glad to get the vaccine so fast though.

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u/SkiingAway 5d ago

Eh, probably not. Unless you meant globally, which was never going to happen.

That's not to say the measures many places tried to take were a bad idea based on the information we had at the time, or wrong for the situation at a time where it was more deadly + healthcare systems were overloaded and risking additional deaths from lack of capacity.

But knowing what we know now, it's pretty unlikely we'd have managed to eradicate it by the time anyone was starting to take it seriously.

So regardless, you'd probably have been still left with a state of semi-paralyzed society through at least early 2021, and longer for places with less vaccine access. Fewer deaths - sure.

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u/Beautiful-Story2379 5d ago

Well, the goal wasn’t to eradicate it, since that wasn’t possible. The goal was to lower the number of cases at any one time and to lower the number of deaths.

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u/flictonic 5d ago

It would have been had everyone followed the plan. Not following the plan is what made it take so long. Thats the reason there was a plan in the first place.

Insane statement in 2024. Let's get 7 billion people to "follow the plan". No country avoided COVID, including the ones with the most authoritarian enforcement.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

I'm still going to blame the people who actively did the opposite of the plan rather than those who put the plan together and did their best to mitigate damages. It would be stupid to blame them for the failings of others.

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u/flictonic 5d ago

People should have complied with mask mandates but endless lockdowns was nonsense and never had a chance of working.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

Thats the problem it only needed to be 2 weeks, without full compliance the virus was still free to spread. Could have been over in 2 weeks.

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u/flictonic 5d ago

That is a fantasy, you should know better in 2024.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

Only because of non compliance. So I blame the non compliers.

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u/Elliebird704 5d ago

There is no reality where billions of people comply with literally anything, so making a plan that relies on it and trying to execute it is inherently pointless. Despite knowing this, that's still the solution they tried to go with.

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u/Sythic_ 5d ago

I dont care I blame those who didn't follow it and im not changing my mind.

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u/fun_boat 5d ago

they are talking about getting covid and staying home.

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u/Sourpowerpete 5d ago edited 5d ago

Oh I'm sorry I thought we were talking about my weekly hula dance routine group meetings being put on hiatus.

Yes I'm aware of what we are talking about.