[HN Gopher] Russia has halted all flights into and out of the co...
___________________________________________________________________
Russia has halted all flights into and out of the country
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 66 points
Date : 2020-04-04 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| lolc wrote:
| Is it reasonable to assume, at this point, that international
| travel is still a relevant contributor to the spread of the
| virus? Apart from reducing travel overall, I don't see how the
| ban could have an impact once the virus is distributed.
| Especially since domestic flights seem to continue.
|
| Initially, yes. It could have changed things. But this action now
| feels way too late. Like two months late. It feels like a
| nationalistic rally of blaming others for the spread.
| Retric wrote:
| I suspect it's the airports and aircraft themselves rather than
| the destination that's at issue. Small isolated groups may
| become infected, but they are far less likely to infect others
| outside the group. Airports inherently mix people from large
| areas within a country together which crosses those boundaries.
| freefal wrote:
| I thought this happened a week ago when they suspended the
| Candidates chess tournament.
| [deleted]
| jessaustin wrote:
| Wow I wish our executive branch actually did take orders from
| Russia, per the fantasy we all enjoyed for three years. They're
| certainly taking the situation more seriously than we are. After
| several states held disastrous primary elections over the last
| two weeks, Wisconsin is set to hold _another one this week!_
| jonmartinwest wrote:
| So, you wish America was ruled by a Chekist. I would do some
| research into Felix Dzerzhinsky. It might change your mind on
| this idea.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekist
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky
| sambull wrote:
| Amazing, in the same paragraph, acquiescence of power to a
| foreign state and a plea to end democracy.
| jessaustin wrote:
| "Democracy"? Is that what we're talking about? Read the
| transcript: _" We're gonna, you know, choose our standard
| bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the
| road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have -- and
| we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go
| into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick
| the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But
| they could have. And that would have also been their right,
| and it would drag the Court well into party politics,
| internal party politics to answer those questions."_ [0]
|
| Are you advising your aged parents to work at the polls this
| week? Why not?
|
| [0] http://jampac.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/042517cw2.pdf
| jonmartinwest wrote:
| A troll linking to a pdf file. Not suspicious at all.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm not, but do you have some concrete plan for when the
| polls should have been rescheduled to? A democratic country
| can't indefinitely postpone elections, no matter what the
| costs of holding them are.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Let's start with two months. It seems quite possible that
| we'll have a better idea what's going on by June. A
| number of important events that affect my community have
| been postponed until at least then. In June, we can ask
| the public health experts whether we can start ramping
| back up with big public events, including elections.
|
| I wish all the democracy superfans would show some
| consistency and demand all-paper-ballot elections, like
| most democratic polities in history and in the present.
| The closed-source electronic voting box is certainly a
| bigger threat to democracy than several months of primary
| delay. When other nations have exit poll discrepancies of
| over 4%, the UN calls it an indicator of probable vote
| fraud. Our primaries regularly feature such
| discrepancies. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/03/13/is-the-dnc-
| cheatin...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm in favor of paper ballots too! But surely you see why
| it's more concerning to say "alright, elections are
| cancelled, and we won't hold an election again until
| unaccountable public health experts make a subjective
| judgment that it's safe". What would happen if they
| don't?
| jessaustin wrote:
| I'm not sure what would happen... The people can't really
| do much marching _now_ , can we? If we were to march in
| these perilous times, we wouldn't waste it on Hidin' Joe
| Biden. Anyway, elections as currently practiced are more
| important to TPTB than to the people. The show must go
| on.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Or maybe instead of some cabal of TPTB keeping Bernie
| down, maybe people just don't like Bernie. Have you
| considered that? I think some of Bernie's ideas are fine,
| though his priorities are backwards. What I can't stand
| about him though is that he encourages raving conspiracy
| theorists. McCain shut that down when his running mate
| encouraged people to shout conspiracy theories at his
| rallies. Trump and Sanders revel in it.
|
| I don't particularly like Biden either, but he's far and
| away better than the alternatives.
| jonmartinwest wrote:
| Democracy and Democratic governments are two different
| things. The USA is a democracy. China, North Korea, and
| the Democratic Republic of the Congo are Democratic
| governments.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You need to work on your reading comprehension. That is an
| argument for why the plaintiffs don't have standing. That
| is not a description of what the defendants had done or
| even what the defendants wanted to do.
|
| Your poor comprehension has turned you into a conspiracy
| theorist.
| jessaustin wrote:
| My interpretation of that passage is the same as that of
| the plaintiff's attorney and the court.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I don't think that's the part sambull had a problem with
| gjs278 wrote:
| amazing, a clueless internet poster
| lolc wrote:
| You're really taking an overly broad and negative reading
| here. The commenter you replied to obviously referred to the
| current U.S. administration when wishing for them to take
| orders from Russia. The joke being that the alleged
| conspiracy would have a favorable outcome compared to the
| bumbling response we observe. The comment doesn't suggest (at
| least to me) that this should be a general policy.
|
| Similarly, calling conventions disastrous during the current
| pandemic is well in line of discourse about limiting the
| spread. Interpreting this as "a plea to end democracy"
| overinterprets things much. Is a democracy really a democracy
| if it is so fragile it could cease to exist when a few
| conventions cannot be held?
|
| Please show a bit of good will when reading others' comments.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Lots of countries have.
|
| I was on one of the last flights to transit through Taiwan. Here
| in the UK, the government have been talking about a program to
| get brits back from Australia because many of the places you have
| to stop and refuel are closed even to transiting passengers.
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-travel-re...
|
| https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/australia/return-to...
| gambiting wrote:
| Weirdly enough, I had a quick look at Heathrow arrivals and
| departures, and there's still loads of flights leaving every 10
| minutes, to all kinds of destinations. Multiple flights per day
| to Rome - I guess if you absolutely, positively have to be in
| Italy right now! In comparison, my local airport in North of
| England had a single flight the entire day.
| shartshooter wrote:
| My understanding is that if airlines stop running flights
| they may lose their access to a given airport or terminal. So
| they run flights even if they aren't full or in major demand.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that rule got temporarily banned in....EU.
| Oops. No idea how it affected the UK.
| lower wrote:
| > My understanding is that if airlines stop running flights
| they may lose their access to a given airport or terminal.
|
| This used to be the case, but the relevant rule has now
| been suspended.
|
| https://www.euractiv.com/section/aviation/news/eu-council-
| jo...
| JadeNB wrote:
| > This used to be the case, but the relevant rule has now
| been suspended.
|
| Your sibling commenter gambiting
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782078) points
| out that, as your link shows, the suspension is an EU,
| not a UK, decision.
| lower wrote:
| The UK is still bound to the EU rules until the end of
| the year.
|
| Here is an article stating this explicitly in connection
| to the "ghost flight" rules:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/eu-
| airlines...
| opless wrote:
| Right now the only aircraft over London are police
| helicopters.
|
| https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com
| heurifk wrote:
| I suspect this is to deter Russians from coming home for the
| Orthodox Easter which is way more important than in the West.
| krasin wrote:
| I am a Russian living abroad. I know literally no one coming
| back to Russia for Easter. It's the first time I even heard of
| this idea.
|
| Summer or New Year are the times when Russians are more likely
| to go to visit their relatives and friends.
| option wrote:
| same here. what a weird idea
| gambiting wrote:
| Do you have any idea why that is? Length of travel? Cost of
| travel? I'm a Pole living abroad and every year I try to go
| to visit my family for Easter, it seems like a pretty normal
| thing to do.
| vkou wrote:
| Orthodox Christianity is not a big thing among the current
| generation of Russian diaspora, so Easter doesn't have any
| cultural significance to most of them.
|
| Summer is a good time to visit because of the mild climate,
| and New Years', because it has always been a big holiday,
| culturally.
| krasin wrote:
| Thank you for sharing that! It's amazing that this
| tradition exists in Poland. Do Poles come to see family for
| New Year / Christmas?
|
| Oh, and by the way: Russia has state holidays from Jan 1st
| till Jan 10th (+/-, every year is slightly different),
| which makes it a lot easier to meet everyone.
|
| Easter does not have any state recognition in Russia, so
| everyone would be quite busy with their regular errands, I
| guess.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeah, we go home for Christmas too. So per year I'll
| usually go for Christmas and for Easter. Maybe if the
| year is really good we'll try to visit at the end of
| summer too.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-04-04 23:00 UTC)