The nation's nerds woke up in a utopia this morning, one where everyone stays inside, sporting events are being canceled, and all social interaction is forbidden.
All types of nerds, from social introverts to hardcore PC gamers, welcomed the dawn of this new era, privately from their own homes.
"I have been waiting my whole life for this moment," said Ned Pendleton, 32 -- via text message, of course -- as he fired up League of Legends on his beefy gaming PC. "They told me to take up a sport and that the kids playing basketball and stuff were gonna be way more successful than us nerds who played Counter-Strike at LAN parties every weekend."
Always look on the bright side of life.
[Certainly an element of gallows humor, but it does offer a different perspective from the incessant drumbeat of gloom and doom surrounding the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What "positives" have you seen? --martyb]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:50PM (3 children)
It's not the market that will stampede here. My guess is someone with a perfect haircut, white teeth, and a truckload of empty promises will do the job all under the guise of protecting those programs - printing money to cover obligations they can't dodge, killing elderly patients through neglect to lower demand, taxing more, and of course, forcing as many people as they can off that cliff for that greater good.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 15 2020, @04:09PM (2 children)
The system is global, some countries have limited impact, but the major players in the major markets have more impact on the success and failure of government programs than anything the lawmakers can do. The biggest player of all is consumer sentiment - if too many consumers all pucker up and start hoarding toilet paper, there's no stopping the inevitable messy results - and consumer sentiment affects far more than toiletries.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 15 2020, @06:30PM (1 child)
That's pretty flimsy even for toilet paper. The messy results are negated by private parties making more toilet paper and consumers eventually running out of places to put all that toilet paper. Consumer sentiment doesn't have anything to do with programs like Social Security or Medicare which are demand controlled - you get what you get. OTOH, if you're saying that there are unintended consequences from "major players" due to monkeying around with these huge programs? Well, me too!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 15 2020, @06:44PM
But, does this happen before the shit hits the fan? Not for the majority of consumers who seem likely to run out before restocking happens. In slightly more serious areas: acquaintances of ours work in the prison system, they use face masks year round for protection against various things various inmates are infected with - guess who just ran 100% out of facemasks this morning?
Various forms of consumer sentiment determine the majority of the federal tax income stream. Did Clinton "balance the budget"? That brief, apparently accidental, budget balancing was mostly a result of how the economy was running - including an opening of investor wallets on an unprecedented scale, in combination with a lack of Republican trashing of the federal budget for a few years. It's all tied together.
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