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With morgues brimming, Texas and Arizona turn to refrigerator trucks:
Officials in Texas and Arizona have requested refrigerated trucks to hold the dead as hospitals and morgues become overwhelmed by victims of the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
"In the hospital, there are only so many places to put bodies," Ken Davis, chief medical officer of Christus Santa Rosa Health System in the San Antonio area, said in a briefing this week. "We're out of space, and our funeral homes are out of space, and we need those beds. So, when someone dies, we need to quickly turn that bed over.
"It's a hard thing to talk about," Davis added. "People's loved ones are dying."
Related Story:
Crematorium Data Prove China Was Lying About COVID-19
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With Morgues Brimming, Texas and Arizona Turn to Refrigerator Trucks
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Saturday July 18 2020, @03:52AM (6 children)
Exactly. The government is running up a big debt owed to the RBA, which is owned by the government. So the debt is owed to itself. Might as well just cancel them out.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 18 2020, @08:43AM (5 children)
Unfortunately, TANSTAAFL. Otherwise, it would be possible for a govt to keep all the people at home all the time doing nothing, everybody's happy.
As a poor metric as it may be, money does cover the value creation. And staying** at home, you, me and many others aren't creating that value now. That debt is a measure of how much value we did not create. Cancelling it out means that we consumed for free - that's not fair for those that continued to create value, like farmers, sparkies that maintained the electric grid, etc.
** I can and work from home, I'm programming, that's fine. My sister is a cook, she's staying at home - well, she doesn't actually stay and do nothing, but is not something that she can exchange for money or barter with others to get the food and grid power she needs to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 18 2020, @12:52PM (4 children)
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=38484&page=1&cid=1022267#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Follow down a couple of posts and there is a link to read the actual book*. He makes a very good case that most of "employment" is bullshit makework. Society could function quite well on less than half the "work" that people do. In the end he makes a very good case for a UBI.
We are seeing now just how right that is, those with essential jobs are keeping society running while all the "bullshit" employees sit at home worrying that the rest of us will realise that they are not needed.
*seriously, read the book, it's pretty short. Even if you don't agree with him it is very entertaining. Lots of humorous anecdotes to illustrate his points.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 18 2020, @01:56PM (2 children)
I will.
Well, I might be a bit outdated, but I'm still keen on the idea of fairness.
I mean, look, what that farmer is doing is certainly not bullshit makework. Without his work, I'll probably die of hunger.
Seems unfair that most of others will have their life the easy way, while he may need to spit blood to make his payment to the banks, especially during drought of floods or bush/grassfires.
I am OK with the idea of UBI, but there's a big risk into it. If the deal is unfair to the actual value creators, two things can happen:
1. the value creator will act unfair towards the society too. And then inflation climbs until no matter how much the state wants to give a UBI that covers the survival needs, it never happens
2. the disillusioned value creator start questioning what good all his toils are when he can survive on UBI like all others? Fair question, isn't it? Except suddenly there's not enough income for it to be universal anymore.
---
My definition of "value": look at the hierarchy of human needs [wikipedia.org], anything that contributes to satisfying those needs is "value".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 18 2020, @02:29PM (1 child)
Best way to start would be to take the current social security budget - the dole, govt pensions, disabled payments, salaries for all the bureaucrats etc. - every govt payment out there and the salaries of the fatcats who administer them - split it evenly over the whole population. Throw it all in the pot and then divvy it up equally to everyone.
Seriously, our current society probably needs about 5 hours of real work per person per week. Things have just gotten that efficient. That farmer would have more help than he knows what to do with. People would be queuing up to do real work just to fill in time and feel good about themselves.
A few hundred years ago the renaissance occured mostly because the ide rich could amuse themselves with science and the arts while riding on the backs of the peasants. We have inproved efficiency and automation to the point that we don't need the peasants. We could have a new renaissance without grinding anyone down. So what if 90% of people are just going to play on facebook and twitter, the output from the truly creative remainder would be staggering.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday July 18 2020, @03:07PM
You thinks so?
I see "queuing up to do real work" as plausible, but let me tell you, amateur farmers will be more a liability to the professional one, degrading the efficiency of the operation (necessarily so, that farmer's business was self-sufficient with reduced personnel, anything else added is still bullshit makework).
You yourself noted/pointed that the world doesn't need so many "peasants". Those "helpers"? Simply won't have enough opportunities to learn how to do "professional farming".
I'm too tired now to go on a rant, so I'll jump over a lot of details and say... how about, before introducing UBI, the govt makes all education (tertiary included) free? At least the current "make-work professionals" can actually get to a level of knowledge/skill and a larger horizon so they are less restricted in their choices of meaningful work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:49AM
https://web.archive.org/web/20160307003524/http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [archive.org]
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.