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from the lockdowns-were-supposed-to-be-just-one-part-of-defense-at-depth dept.
Economists warn of 'widespread costs' from lockdown:
Blanket restrictions on economic activity should be lifted and replaced with measures targeted specifically at groups most at risk, say economists.
[...] They argue that while the extent to which the lockdown contributed to a subsequent slowing in the rate of new infections and deaths is not easy to estimate precisely, it seems clear that it did contribute to these public health objectives.
However, they say it is "very far from clear" whether keeping such tight restrictions in place for three months until the end of June when they began to be lifted was warranted, given the large costs. They say that the costs of carrying on with such a lockdown are likely to have become significantly greater than its benefits.
Debate over the global dilemma continues.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:15AM (206 children)
No, stupid. Possible death from infection over possible death from deprivation, and which will kill more in the end.
For those of us who do not get paid for spreading stale bullshit on social networks, a working economy IS a mean to life.
See, people with any more braincells than God gave a goldfish do understand, that no matter if one dies from the fashionable virus some months from now, or dies penniless and homeless from tuberculosis an year from now, one ends up just as dead irregardless.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:56AM (204 children)
[Citation needed] on the emphasized
And why are you reacting like "it's the only mean of life" or "only a fully working economy is a mean of life"?
Are you sure you aren't living in the reality where "a life is a mean to a fully working economy"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:38PM (158 children)
Huge parts of Africa today. India today. The entirety of human history. Real poverty (not the bullshit people in the west call poverty nowadays) has always been more deadly than disease. And we're heading straight for it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:43PM (139 children)
Ah, right. You're afraid whoever goes int lockdown gets into a deject poverty.
What happened with your Might?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:58PM (138 children)
Oh stop playing idiot.
Lockdown->Nobody spending anywhere but WalMart and Amazon->All other businesses lose money->Many of them go out of business->Every job they provided disappears->Unemployed people have no money to spend even at the few places that are open->Many of those places end up closing as well->Repeat as necessary to push the entire nation into abject poverty.
It's got nothing to do with any specific individual but with the blindingly obvious and unavoidable consequences to absolutely everyone of shutting everything down for extended periods of time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:15PM
The 'chain of events' you're presenting started happening long before CoViD-19 came along.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:17PM (53 children)
That's why we socialize the cost of sustaining those people and businesses (see what I did there?) during the temporary slow-down, because it's only about 20% of the economy that has shut. If we do that for six months and amortize the cost over five years, that's effectively a 2% hit. Multiply accordingly for duration.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:23PM (52 children)
If most of your tax base is unemployed, there is no tax money to socialize the cost with. And you really should wash statistics that have been in someone's ass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:33PM (17 children)
I guess it is a very select set of people who are carpetbombing the site with "Troll" mods in every place anyone honest would use "Disagree". When honesty thus becomes a disadvantage for everyone else, that does not support making sense in any discussion. Why bother when beloved "deplatforming" just works?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:46PM (6 children)
It's okay, you can just include that in your original comment, Buzz.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:12PM (5 children)
You wish. I don't hide what I think. Not about anything.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:01PM (4 children)
Well if ya gotta troll then troll. Just don't whine about it when you get modded appropriately.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:13PM (3 children)
Wasn't me. I never post AC on the production servers. Not ever. And I have no other accounts on it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:23PM (2 children)
Because absolutely anyone else in existence would disagree with modding absolutely anything you have ever said as "troll." You, quite literally, are the only person alive (or perhaps even dead) who would find that unfair.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:31PM
Someone apparently did, so, yup.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:11PM
It was probably khallow.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:04PM (2 children)
Yes, it is childish, weak, and cowardly to silence opinions you don't like. Respond should always be the preferred response, and if you don't have the time or energy to do that, ignore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:16PM (1 child)
Lol at the troll modfir the wrong think. This is the cancer that is killing the internet
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43AM
Here I thought it was 4chan and the associated trolling where Nazis are just "just a joke bruh" and racists are "just stating the facts bruh."
Perhaps without the brigade of shitposters doing it for the lulz we would be able to maintain a decent level of dialogue. Also pay no mind to the foreign agitators using our tech platforms against us to spread bullshit that is eagerly swallowed by so many.
But ayup, it is the "troll mofir the wrong think" which is the real problem :| Let us all bow to the brave AC, prop up their speech like it is the most valuable philosophical utterance in human history!!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:11PM (6 children)
Maybe try making the point in a calm and logical manner without resorting to childish namecalling?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:23PM (4 children)
Can't. People would think someone had stolen my login cookie.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 31 2020, @12:41AM
It was delicious. *urp*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @02:09PM (2 children)
Maybe that is a sign that your normal discourse is... poor?
Oh and I know people will complain about me being AC, that is just because I never bothered to make an account (either here or on the green site, in fact, the forced accounts were why I don't read the green site).
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:05AM (1 child)
No worries, we won't force you. We'll just use the ancient art of peer pressure. No, not that kind. The one where we round up a lot of Brit Lords and Ladies and pile them on top of you until you surrender.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:45AM
Wish I got invited to those sorts of parties...
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:18PM
Good tactics. Accuse those you disagree with of that which you yourself are guilty. Ive heard its worked out for awhile several times throughout history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:55PM (4 children)
Statistics like: "Most of your tax base is unemployed?"
To be "most" it must be at least 50% +1.
So, douche away.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:31PM (2 children)
That was a potential statistic, thus the "If", dumbass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:51PM (1 child)
So, pulled out of your ass. Please wash it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:04PM
In the sense that speaking of the future from observing the past is pulling something out of your ass, yes, all predictive conversations are pulled from asses.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:32PM
> Statistics like: "Most of your tax base is unemployed?"
Definitions are important here. Who is the "tax base"? If it's "people between 18 and 66 years old", I think that USA has always been in this condition (maybe someone has data?). If we add in "able bodied people" to take off anyone disabled (for any of a huge number of reasons) maybe it's closer to half employed at the best of times?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:12PM (27 children)
If most of your tax base is unemployed, there is no tax money to socialize the cost with.
Then tax somebody else. Wall Street is doing great (thanks to the trillion dollars a month bailouts). It's about time those people start paying taxes on their unicorns.
Let's create a progressive tax system, where upper incomes pay more taxes. They can afford it, fuck 'em!
There's plenty of money circulating around in the rain forest canopy of high finance (more money than on all of main street), let's tax it!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:15PM (26 children)
Learn to English, man. I did not say most of the tax base is unemployed. We're definitely running full steam down the road to it though. Thus the "If".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:30PM (25 children)
You are assuming a tax based on labor.
Time to tax capital, and the people who have the most.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:33PM (23 children)
Capital is labor.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:52PM (22 children)
No, capital is a bank note, profiting through usury
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:07PM (21 children)
No, capital is labor. All of it. Always. It is labor that someone valued and gave you an abstract token for in lieu of a return good or service. It doesn't matter if it's pictures of dead presidents, Nuka Cola bottle caps, or lumps of gold.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:11PM (20 children)
Nope, they are mere promissory notes, derivatives, traded like baseball cards, nothing to do with labor at all.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:26PM (19 children)
All promissory notes, baseball cards, anything you trade for anything is a convenience abstraction of labor. You just dislike the truth because it interferes with you hating on people you want to hate on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:01PM (16 children)
Their capital depends on forced labor, all those sweatshops and brickyards and fields around the world. Their economy runs entirely separately from the real working economy. You're just being a kiss ass to slave owners
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:16PM (15 children)
No, I'm just not enough of a clueless idealist that I have to say fundamental realities are something other than what they really are to keep my faulty ideals from crumbling under their own bullshit quantity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:32PM (14 children)
No, you're ignoring the fundamentals entirely, working from a singular personal point of view
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:33PM (6 children)
No, I'm telling you the fundamentals. You're trying to bring in second or third order concepts because you don't want to be wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:41PM (5 children)
Nope, you just talk trash politics. You deal in symptoms, never addressing the root cause.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @01:46AM
Slowly even the fusty troll sees through The Mighty Jackass.
High
fucking
larry
us
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @10:48AM (3 children)
What the fundamentals are is not influenced in any way by "the problem". Especially when "the problem" is a third or fourth order issue at the very least. They are and will forever remain the fundamentals. Understand them and your arguments will improve.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 31 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
:-) You only see the veneer, it's all you ever talk about
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:07AM (1 child)
Bedrock is not a veneer, it is what the foundation of the house that holds the cabinet that the veneer is applied to is built upon.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:57AM
:-) Yours is a house of cards, sans foundation
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:43PM (6 children)
It seems to me that "capital is labor" is the kind of phrase people pick up when they tell themselves that everyone has the same opportunities, and if poor people picked themselves up by their bootstraps they would be rich too.
That fact that capital and labour have been in opposition since the industrial revolution began is ignored.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @10:51AM (5 children)
Nah, it's just an actual understanding of what we're trading around. It doesn't dictate policy in any way. The understanding is as necessary for socialism or communism as it is for capitalism.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 31 2020, @05:34PM (4 children)
what we're trading around.
What YOU are trading around. They live in a different world. They get their labor by coercion, military force if need be.
If labor were capital, the prices would match. Wages and pensions would keep up with inflation, but they don't because they see labor as a simple payable expense, not an investment.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:19PM (2 children)
You're absolutely right. With an ever expanding global population wages become of function of the employees' desperation rather than any reflection of the profit that their work will generate.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:08AM (1 child)
That why world poverty is at historic lows, is it?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:22PM
AIUI, global absolute poverty has been decreasing largely because of greater levels of employment in developing countries like China. Just because some of those inhabitants of developing countries are earning more than they were in the past, doesn't mean those wages would appear fair to our western standards. Globalization is a race to the bottom, or, more precisely, a race to the middle, where western incomes deflate to eventually approach the rising incomes of the developing countries. I stand by my claim that it's increasingly a buyer's market for employers, particularly in the west, such that wages increasingly bear little relation to profits.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:23AM
You're selling your services. If you don't like the price they're buying at, sell to someone else somewhere else. There are fifty states and nearly forty cities of at least half a million people in the US. I get what I think I'm worth relatively easily. I've done it in rural OK and I do it just as easily in rural TN. If you can't do it in a major city something is wrong with either your product or price.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:27PM (1 child)
It seems to me that you are logically correct. However with things like hft the capital is abstracted out over a basically unlimited timespan with futures etc. Currency gets syphoned off without any actual capital being created or exchanged. This is why we need better market regulation and real legal borders for public companies, as our societal wealth is being cordoned off from people and accumulated in bank accounts. Imagine the wonders we could build if the markets did not tie up such a huge percentage of our productivity for the benefit of a few who cant even use the wealth they have amassed through a glitch in capitalism and market forces and regulations.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:35PM
I don't completely disagree with you. That's not what fusty has been arguing though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:37PM
> Time to tax capital, and the people who have the most.
If this happens, I see a surge in the mattress-cover business as well as the $100 bill-printing-business and precious-metals... as people squirrel away capital to keep it out of the stock markets and banks (where it can easily be measured).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:44PM
Sure there is, that's bonds exist and you can always tax the rich after things get back to normal to pay it back. These problems are not even remotely hard to solve, we have known solutions, it's just that we've allowed the rich to buy politicians to the point where they genuinely seem to believe that those that aren't rich deserve to starve to death as inferior stock.
The reality here is if they'd have issued a $600 a week UBI to everybody in the country, it would have been less expensive than the half-measures they were taking to avoid helping those in need. A bunch of the money would come back to the government next year as part of the taxes and the remainder could come back in the form of increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy. We don't have a shortage of money with which to fight this crisis, we have a shortage of politicians that care about the people to do something about it.
Or, perhaps cut government spending back to something sane. The defense spending only goes up over time, even though it is itself the largest threat to national security. It's been decades since we fought in a conflict where the other side hadn't previously been funded by the US government.
Unfortunately,t here's a ton of ignorant people like you that seem to think otherwise.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:22PM (19 children)
Except that: A) Governments have the authority to set fiscal policy and can therefore provide extended unemployment benefits, and can provide assistance in reconstituting the economy, if they only get off their asses to do so. (And aren't so beholden to their masters that it becomes a fight over who profits, as it has become.) Can this be done forever? No. But it could have been done long enough to actually flatten the curve. That would have taken leadership, however. B) "Lockdown" was always more than just WalMart and Amazon remaining open and you know that. C) Other nations seem to have been managing flattening their curves rather well, and it seems to be the half-assed measures of the U.S. combined with opening up early that have led to COVID being out of control here. D) Yes there are economic consequences. Of course there are. But the given article was about the UK, which had an equal-if-not-more screwed up response than the United States. I don't think the failed response of either country was due to not listening to the economists.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:35PM (18 children)
No. You are wrong. Governments cannot miracle up money to solve the problem. The instant they start the money starts decreasing in value and it keeps decreasing as long as they keep giving it out. That's not creating wealth, it's spreading existing wealth around. It doesn't matter if you do it via taxation or printing money, the end result is the same.
See, wealth is an abstraction of valued human effort. It's produced when people work but it's also consumed constantly. No matter what you do, if you're consuming more than you're producing for any significant amount of time, you're on the road to Royally Fucked.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:43PM (3 children)
> The instant they start the money starts decreasing in value and it keeps decreasing as long as they keep giving it out.
Time to check the price of your grocery bills and fuel (gasoline) bills. Have they been going up? How about other purchases? Mine (NE USA) have not. I don't see any current sign of inflation and, in talking with my investment guy (smaller management company for my pension money, not a Wall St. monster) he hasn't seen any signs of inflation either.
His comment the other day was that the government can take on a lot of debt right now, at low interest, and paying it off won't be a big deal.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:55PM (1 child)
Cherry pick some more immediate-term statistics when talking about medium-term policy. Maybe you'll convince someone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:06AM
Translation:
"I will not discuss any facts, data, or logic. I will continue to assert that I am correct and you are a stupid nobody."
Hope that helps someone, pretty much 75% of TMB's "arguments."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:39PM
You must not be paying very close attention to your grocery bills. They have indeed been going up in three states ive been to recently. Not sure if more than usual, but i do expect there to be a lag time. The problem with talking about this now using real world examples is that it will all be anectodal until the future when the new numbers come out. Just like total deaths due to seasonal urtis
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:16PM (9 children)
Worked in New Zealand - they miracled up far more money per capita than the U.S., locked down with gusto, and like so many other nations that took this shit seriously they're now closing their borders to the idiot children / slaves of the golden idols because they've eradicated COVID-19 and we have not. Their economies are going to take much less of an overall hit by getting the job done quickly instead of making fun of reality [people.com].
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:29PM (8 children)
No, it didn't. You just deny the undeniable because being wrong hurts.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:46PM (1 child)
Hey, I'm still waiting for how your theory explains how come $1.3T magically printed led to the most severe deflation in 72 years [soylentnews.org]
Perhaps it has something to do with the very basics of "you can't have inflation if the value of goods on the market is above the monetary mass in circulation"? So... ummm... maybe safe to print money up to that limit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:17PM
Already answered that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @06:52PM (5 children)
I know you are, but what am I? :-P
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:36PM (4 children)
Oldschool represent. I'd upmod you but new points don't come out for another half hour or so.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:47PM (1 child)
The other one I love is: Jane, you ignorant slut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91XUyg9iWM&t=65 [youtube.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @10:31PM
All these years later, and I still hear that in his voice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:13AM (1 child)
Promises, promises. Promises by TMB are like petals in the wind, Wild Rose Petals, that later compost among the fetid cottonwood leaves.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @10:53AM
So you're saying I'm poetic?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:03PM (1 child)
I agree with you that ordinarily consumption and production should balance. $1 of existing wealth and $1 of instantly created money leads to the $1 of production out there suddenly inflates in price to $2 and thus devaluing the dollar. Sure.
However, on a short-term basis governments certainly can and do utilize fiscal policy to increase the balance of wealth when necessary (i.e. when it achieves a public goal). There does have to be an accounting at some point for expending 225% of an annual budget in a single year (figuring a $4.79T budget and two $3T expenditures... if the Democrat-proposed 2nd relief package is passed and not the Republican $1T one which would lead to only 184%.) But there will be economic consequences no matter what is (or is not) done. And there is nothing more costly than half-assing something which will lead to still-greater expenses down the road... Like suddenly needing to double the amount of stimulus and relief needed because somebody advocated early opening of the country before the disease numbers justified it.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:39PM
True. A half-assed measure in this situation is literally worse than nothing. I advocate nothing but even I'd prefer a real, complete solution if one could be actually found to half-assed measures.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:45PM (1 child)
No disagreements with mechanics, but a quibble. Thanks to market trading and people storing their retirement efforts in liquid markets, more actual value can be absorbed while everyone is still thinking they have money, and their infrastructure falls apart underneath them and gets sold out to private enterprise (looking at you privately owned toll roads) (telecoms) (power generation), because the caputal is being used as an investment tool and not to generate more and better shit people want like its supposed to.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @10:57AM
Oh there's some shady as fuck and outright criminal second plus order shit being done with people's saved labor. If that were the argument he were making we wouldn't be having one. Here we are though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:12PM (22 children)
I'm in lockdown from early March and I'm still buying my meat from the local butcher and the veggies/fruits from my local greengrocer.
A small sewing and crafts store was listed as "For sale" before covid started. Well, no more, the business is booming - more people staying at home meant more people needed something to do. Bonus: in the last couple of weeks, it sells heaps of fabrics for masks.
Yes, it helps that a good amount of jobs that are "suspended" are paid [ato.gov.au] by social security [servicesaustralia.gov.au]. If you don't have them, it may be as a result of valuing economy above life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:18PM (19 children)
You really should take an economics course, socialist boy. Government money is not magical leprechaun gold. It either has to be taken from someone else or printed and thus taken from everyone. Wealth is created by valued human effort and cannot be miracled up by any government.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:29PM (12 children)
Of course it's not. Of course it will be paid for. In 30 years - that's the term of the bonds that were issued
Of course it helps the Australian govt doesn't need to feed a MIC, so it can afford to borrow money.
Of course it's even more helpful that those money are paid to the people, not to the corporations - they can afford to buy things and keep the economy afloat until a treatment or a vaccine becomes available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:36PM (11 children)
That's not how that works. Printing bonds doesn't decrease currency value when the bonds mature, it does so immediately.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:22PM (10 children)
How marvelously genital theory.
Can this theory explain how come 2 months after the Australian govt magically printed AUD1.3T, the inflation dropped into the biggest deflation in 72 years [9news.com.au]?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:41PM (9 children)
Yes, in fact it can. It's basically a Dead Cat Bounce. Perceived value accompanying a change being completely out of line with actual value leading to short term gains. Keeping that bounce going is like playing Jenga by yourself though; that shit's going to fall no matter how careful and skilled you are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:05PM (8 children)
Except you extracted that from your ass. Nothing to do with the stock market (Dead Cat Bounce being a term used there), but even accepting the extension by continuation outside the domain for the meaning, the deflation came after 11 years of ever-shrinking inflation [companydirectors.com.au].
Those 11 years saw almost stagnant wage growth [abc.net.au] (growth adjusted to inflation is practically zero), the sudden deflation is a sign the population has too little money for buying what's already on the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:19PM (7 children)
Doesn't matter if you're trading stocks or currency. The good in question is irrelevant.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:26PM (6 children)
Ok.
So you have 11 years of "appreciating currency" (decreasing inflation) followed by a sudden spike in the same "appreciating currency" (inflation got into negative territory). That's not the definition of a Dead Cat Bounce in any extension of the term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:42PM (5 children)
No, it's not. And it's also not what you were making a claim on. You were saying "Spending this buttload of money we didn't have this particular year did this wonderful thing" while you're now saying that shit had been trending that way for quite some time and can no longer claim any utility on that particular spending.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2020, @05:36AM (4 children)
It negates you claim of "immediate currency devaluation", tho', letting you with your economic theory still owing the explanation (because it's clearly not a Dead Cat bounce, since there's no bounce). For your convenience, here's what you said:
Yet, in spite of $1.3T injected in the market starting 2 months ago, we now experience deflation: if this is not "increase in currency value" on the local market (same money buys more), I don't know what else is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:04AM (3 children)
No, it doesn't. The currency was devalued immediately. If that was hidden by other larger and more flashy factors, it is what it is but value was still lost. If you don't start understanding that soon you're going to have a lot of pain headed your way in the medium term and completely fuck yourselves in the long term.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2020, @11:17AM
Right. We're getting to matters of faith here, because the evidence don't show such a thing.
Assuming those money were never issued on the market, what would be their value?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 03 2020, @02:11AM (1 child)
Is this like the enormous debt from WWII? Economy grew enough afterwards that the debt kind of vanished.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:29AM
Yup, very much. If OZ wants to devalue their shit and expect the devaluation to be made trivial by growth, more power to them. I personally don't like betting the rent money though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:54PM (3 children)
Your problem is that you have drank the coolaid the rich parasites have been pushing.
The massive tax cuts for the rich cost more than short-term nationalizing payroll, but I don't remember you posting about being upset about fiscal irresponsibility when the tax giveaways were announced. And, short-term nationalizing payroll would have prevented the economic hit.
A small fraction of the relief money went to keeping folks fed and housed. Our corrupt far-right government used most of it as another giveaway to the rich. If we could get rid of the fascists currently controlling government, we could pay the wages of all who are not at work for less than the corrupt Republican giveaways to the rich just since Trump was elected. If we go back to the corrupt far-right Republican and corrupt center-right to right Democrat giveaways to the rich since Reagan, we could pay for everyone who is of working age to retire today. We could also start dismantling the police / surveillance state the far-right with their allies on the right has been building (also at a huge cost human/economic). And, stop the illegal wars of aggression that have murdered millions, and end the gulag at home also both creations of the far-right and right that have huge costs in both economic terms and human rights.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:56PM (2 children)
Nope. When you engineer a medium term economic disaster, no short term solutions will be anything more than a bandaid.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:55PM (1 child)
Oh, is it 2008 again? Or do you mean that the short-term band-aids of 2008 are finally coming off?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:20PM
Whataboutism? That's your argument? You know it's not going to make you correct no matter what you point at, right?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:29PM (1 child)
In a crisis like this one, printing is -in my opinion- the correct approach to the problem. The fact that everyone's money gets slowly devalued over time due to printing for a short period is a small price to pay for the ability to keep many businesses afloat and people in a job and able to keep paying their bills and buy food and keep the economy going, albeit at a temporarily slower pace. Once a vaccine or other good solution to the epidemic is found, businesses can start to recover and go back to normal, and the printing can stop.
Another side benefit is that debts denominated in the currency which is being devalued also become less valuable, which gives debtors more breathing room. Of course creditors do not like this, so interest rates might start rising eventually. But most creditors are large insitutions which are better able to deal with setbacks than individuals. The vast majority of individuals do not have large amounts of cash in savings accounts so they are less affected by devaluation, but losing their job can cause very serious problems.
The main risk of printing is runaway hyperinflation but I consider that very unlikely to occur. Sure, there's asset bubbles forming in stocks and real-estate in many western nations, but that is nothing new.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:47PM
I don't agree but that at least is a legitimate position that I can respect. I may not always agree with someone but if they put actual thought into their position instead of basing their political stands on feelz, I can at least acknowledge that their opinion is one an adult might be expected to hold instead of childish nonsense.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Jiro on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:28PM (1 child)
"Here are examples of businesses that are doing well" is not "business, in general, are doing well". Your butcher and fabric store are atypical.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:54PM
Well, let me put it this way: only the restaurants and cinemas closed in my area.
Speaking about the restaurants, only those that don't do takeaway.
Yes, the business district is hurt a lot more [abc.net.au] than my suburb and the township nearby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:29PM (33 children)
Had we done the right thing in the beginning (two week quarantine for anyone coming in, social distancing, etc) we would not be in the situation we are in now. But with typical American hubris we ignored the problem until it grew too large to handle without massively damaging the economy.
Now we have a fucked economy and we still don't have it handled because we've politicized everything and even the basic ways to handle a pandemic are now considered anathema to some.
150,000+ dead and counting. Pray to whatever deity you like that these vaccines that are being worked on are effective. There's going to be a LOT more dead if they aren't.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:46PM (27 children)
You realize to even have a hope of efficacy we'd have to be doing most of the above until the virus is extinct or a safe vaccine/cure is found, tested, and approved, right? You get why the US can't close its borders that hard, right? Which is to say, you need to rethink your shiz there, cause it's verging on truly idiotic.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:25PM (1 child)
Not to forget that, when Trump did close the border to China, the left was all "
muslimChina ban! Racist! Go to Chinatown and hug a Chinese!"(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:50PM
WTF's Trump got to do with anything? We're talking the economic impact of various approaches to dealing with coronaids and the fundamental forces behind them not Cheeto Jesus. That you having a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome or are you just trying to move the goalposts?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:55PM (12 children)
You're damned right I realize that. I also realize that the US didn't do any of that, and now we're fucked. What's truly idiotic is the insistence that we don't dare change anything about how we operate in the middle of a fucking pandemic.
I do understand why we don't want to close borders that hard. Sometimes doing what's necessary is hard and difficult to swallow, but if things will go to shit if you don't? You better do it!
We didn't take measures to keep this thing contained. Had we done so, the economic damage would be far less, and recovery far easier. We would have had less death.
150k+ dead and counting. Millions unemployed. Economy fucked. How much worse do things need to get before we do the right things?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @06:47PM
Once the people vote correctly on November 3rd, we'll be back to a blue-pill normal. MSM will pivot to: "150k dead? We know now that's overcounted, that many people die of the flu every year, get back to work, a lockdown would disproportionately affect POC, go buy a Miller Lite."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:52PM (10 children)
We're fucked by a virus that has a fatality rate measured in hundredths of a percent? You know we got along just fine doing nothing much at all with loads of those up until now but okay.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:07AM (4 children)
150k and counting dead Americans would like a word.
You're a selfish bastard.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06AM (3 children)
Oh, you prefer 330 million starve to a couple hundred thousand dying? Fuck off with your gradeschool morality.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @08:00AM (2 children)
Ugh, so more stupidity.
If it wasn't for idiots like yku then we coulda done the proper lockdown and be restarting the economy safely right now. Figures you'd be trying to double down on stupidity instead of admitting you were wrong.
Typical TMB bullshit trumpy emulation.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:41PM
If not for morons like you, we could have not shut down our economy and imprisoned our fellow citizens; we'd be doing as well as Sweden is. "Second wave? Third wave? What is that stupidity you talk about? Let's go have a drink!"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:32AM
Oh, you think the virus would have just said "Well, fuck, they did a thorough quarantine for a month or so. I'd better fuck off and never come back.", do you? And you call me stupid? Moron, this is one extremely contagious and stealthy disease. You can not stick your head in the sand until it goes away. It's not going to.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @02:19PM (1 child)
People that calculate fatality rate by dividing the deaths by the infections are disingenuous.
At this point, many are still sick, thus you divide deaths by recoveries. The number changes from less than a percent more than one percent. That sounds like not much, but remember that the population of the US is over 300m, 1% is 3 million people.
And all of these statistics are before the entire medical field is overwhelmed by the exponential growth that viruses (and all life in a new fertile environment) exhibits. When the hospital usage flips from 95% to 130%, care becomes worse, and so do fatality rates.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:41AM
You want we should use the CDC numbers? You know, the ones where the official policy is if you die of any cause at all but test positive for coronaids, the death gets called a coronaids death? The ones that completely ignore the fact that every time any medical folks do a sampling of incoming patients for active or post-infection antibodies, ten times or more as many have already have post-infection antibodies as they catch active infections? And that's people who even bother going to the hospital. On a disease that can present as trivial symptoms or nothing at all. Thanks, I'd rather pull numbers out of an RNG. They're almost certain to be more accurate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday August 03 2020, @03:01PM (2 children)
Hundredths of a percent? Where the fuck are you getting this number from? Most reliable numbers I'm seeing are in the tenths of a percent. Maybe you're right once we include asymptomatic types, but we're a long away from being able to determine that. I'm sure hoping that one report I've seen is right that some of us already have immunity to it, but I'm not counting on it.
No, we've been fucked economically by our own response to this virus. The "head in the sand" "virus will go away" do nothing magical thinking. Maybe we should pray harder. It would be just as effective.
Meanwhile people will pull back from spending during a crisis with an active virus capable of killing you slowly. Had our leadership taken some mildly painful action early on we could be weathering this without too much fuss. Instead we did nothing until it was too late, and now we have to take very painful measures to keep our medical systems from overloading and causing much higher rates of death.
155,000+ and counting...
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:45AM (1 child)
Or we could have done nothing at all to control it except around those at high risk but instead put our efforts into increasing treatment facilities and resources and it literally wouldn't be possible to cause an outbreak anywhere in the US anymore by now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:47PM
Ah yes, the "prepare for the best, hope it's not bad" approach. Insanely stupid considering what happened in Italy and Spain.
Completely irresponsible when dealing with a new relatively unknown threat. "Lettin' 'er rip" through the population without any idea about the long term effects of the virus is beyond idiotic.
Your belief is completely unfounded and not backed by the science. Why you continue to promote it I will never understand.
Over and out...
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:18PM (10 children)
You get that the US borders are getting closed that hard for them by the countries that have beaten COVID-19 and aren't interested in killing their people for American tourist money, right?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:53PM (9 children)
So double down and make double damned sure we economically buttfuck ourselves is your answer?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @01:57AM (4 children)
I'm sending my kids to school, not because it's good for the country, but because it's good for my kids. If the teachers have a situation where COVID concerns them about their health and/or life, I consider that their problem - stay home, try to collect unemployment or whatever - I'm in no position to change the dipshit policies of a clown show of a national administration and every sub-circus under them, state, county, schoolboard and principals.
On the other hand, I'm keeping my younger son home on weekends, we're not doing 6 yard sales and 2 libraries plus miscellaneous thrift stores, flea markets, etc. every Saturday like we did for hundreds of weekends before COVID because A) half that shit is closed anyway, and B) it's disrespectful to the people at risk to go around like there's nothing to be worried about. These days for Saturday we mask up and hit one used book store for 10 minutes and we're done. I do believe the 150K dead figure, and I don't want to be adding to that number for no good reason.
Yes, those two positions are schizofrenic, but the way I look at it is: if the schools are shown to be a serious problem, we can always keep the kids home at a moment's notice for as long as necessary, but if we sign up for our county's "I plan to remote school my kids this year" program, that's it - boom, we've signed away any chance of the kids having face to face (mask to mask) socialization and learning, probably for the whole next year. Teenage brains only get so much opportunity to learn, and my kids need all of that opportunity they can get.
As for economics, I started working from home fulltime in 2013, got pushed 40% back into the office in 2015, but as of COVID corporate has told the namby pamby "we think it's better to see each other face to face" managers to shove it and we're back 100% home working and more or less as productive as ever. That's my fortunate position, I don't work in a restaurant or bar. I watched that shit reopen as fast and hard as they were allowed to around here and it was obvious this R-bounce was going to happen, but apparently the Governor of Florida doesn't have the stones to tell people to just give up a couple of more paychecks so we don't end up having a restaurant shutdown period 3x as long, so he had to take the gamble and lose instead.
I'm seeing R-stats around here at 0.99 now, hopefully those resemble the truth. Because: when the hospitals are overflowing and there aren't enough people to dispose of bodies in a timely fashion (and it's not a scare-bluff, an R of 1.4 for a couple of months would get us that), things sure as fuck are going to shutdown and hard and that will be worse for the economy overall as compared to doing the smarter thing and kicking COVID-19's butt as fast as possible.
What's really disappointing is that the COVID-19 got let out of the bottle as far as it did. Relatively speaking, we kicked ass on H3N2 in 1968, H1N1 in 2009, and I remember some shit in China in 2003 that was shutting down flights when I was trying to get a job with Black & Decker's home appliance division and the VP was all bent that he couldn't go oversee the factory like normal. I'm pretty convinced that we knew how to handle these things more effectively, we used to do it, and Cheetoface McI'm the biggest Asshole you've ever seen seems to have managed to blow this crisis wide just to watch the world burn and maybe try to jockey for advantage somehow in the chaos.
Make me king, I'll fix the world. Most people will hate me, but 50 years later the ones that are still around would thank me. Scary? Yeah, that's why I'm not running for office.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:25AM (3 children)
Joe, your kids are statistically in more danger riding to school than they would be if they all had to lick an infected person as they walked in the door every day. There have been pretty much no cases of kids without a compromised immune system dying of the stuff.
As for the rest of us, Tuberculosis has been killing way more people than coronaids every single year and nobody's been wearing masks everywhere or crushing the economy over that. Healthcare workers take it seriously as all hell but most folks don't even have any idea what it is unless they've seen Tombstone.
The other scary viruses they tried to get us to panic over? No masks, no economic shutdown, and most people don't even know which one is which. This shit ain't the black plague back in the day that killed a third of Europe, 99.9% of us are going to survive it if absolutely nothing is done and add a few more nines to that for kids.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @12:33PM (2 children)
Clearly, we're not worried about our kids' safety from COVID, they've eaten enough dirt they're fine. We're 1% concerned for ourselves, not dying of COVID-19 (mid 50s) but maybe spending the rest of our lives with some nasty after-effect of it. 1% is not enough to keep the kids home from school over.
See, I don't think they tried for panic, I think they actually controlled it - and fast. 2003 did literally shutdown flights to China - that would have been somewhere around March to June, and I think the restrictions lifted toward the end of the year, but there were a lot of Asian faces wearing masks in the news starting then. 2009 also got it under control, but I was distracted enough I forget the details. Both of those used the liberty flaunting methods of contact tracing and isolation of cases that did reach the U.S. - kept R 1.0, and the flat-earth inclined can remember them as a big hoax because nothing actually impacted them personally. This go around, my opinion (opinion because the facts are too spun out by the reporting chain) is that we had less objective, scientifically driven, monitoring in Wuhan at the source of the initial flareup, which allowed it to spread wide enough that contact tracing and isolation was overwhelmed and therefore ineffective in places like New York, Miami, California...
Anything big like this comes around, there are sharks out there that live for the chaos - think they're gonna be able to leverage the situation to jump a couple of levels up - gamblers who figure this is their chance to play the long odds and maybe be big a winner for once. The initial spin on this one seemed really slanted to help COVID spread.
Oh, and if you want to take a shot at AIDS as a "scare tactic" that only threatens gays and needle sharers... get to know some first responders: EMTs, Firefighters... AIDS is real for everyone, especially them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:04AM (1 child)
Right now estimates are there are ~13 million people just in the US with a latent tuberculosis infection that could wake up and eat their lungs any old time it feels like it. Ten million diagnosed in 2018 worldwide, up three million from the year before. A million and a half died. But that's ordinary and expected, so nobody who doesn't wear scrubs for a living bats an eye. Let that sink in and then tell me why coronaids warrants shutting down the whole country but tuberculosis and the flu skipping around like they own the joint every single year doesn't even warrant water cooler conversation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:15PM
Because TB and the flu are known, and the status quo has a known rate of spread, infection, death, side effects, etc. We, as a society, are set up to deal with the sickness and death of TB and the annual flu - we've been doing it forever. We've presumably "done our best" for those and all the other extant diseases. Everybody dies eventually, and statistically TB and the flu occupy their little niches supplying the grim reaper.
The severity of COVID-19 was completely unknown in January, it had the crematoriums in Wuhan working 24-7 - that alone should warrant some kind of response. As I said before, we've proven that modern society is capable of corking these kinds of Djinnis back into their bottles multiple times in the past decades - how we respond matters. COVID-19 could have been another H3N2 or any of the other "insignificant" flus that got contained, but instead it's blown across half the planet like we're back in 1918 - I guess this is how you MAGA, by regressing 100 years. What's worse is that half the planet has contained it, so we're going to be in a corona standoff with them for a long long time. Looks like Trump is getting those border walls erected and paid for, not by Mexico, but by every country that managed to contain COVID-19 and doesn't want to just let it run and see what the uncontrolled death and serious injury rate is, it's already proven to be higher than TB and seasonal flu combined, and we're in summer when corona isn't supposed to be as virulent or deadly.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:16AM (3 children)
Ah, one of the idiots who thinks that the fictional human creation "the ecomony" (insult in there you un-cultured swine) is more important than human life!
The economy needs us WAAAY more than we need it. It will bounce back better with more people alive, and it will crash and burn when the people destroy shit over the easily prevented mass deaths. You're lucky Florida is full of MAGA idiots. Well sorta, I'm not sure what is worse, some buildings with broken windows and graffiti or tens of thousands of dead people.
Hmmmm, head scratcher!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:26AM (2 children)
The economy is us, moron.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @01:11AM (1 child)
So then you should be on board with lockdown so we preserve human lives and can re-start the economy which "is us" you blight stricken moron?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:05AM
You can't restart an economy with bankrupt employers. Those jobs aren't on hold, they're gone for good.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 03 2020, @02:34AM
It's been working pretty well where I am. Most stuff has reopened, though at reduced capacity. There's an uptick in cases, 50 the other day and there's 5 cases in hospital out of 5.1 million people. Few actual orders besides to keep Americans out. Looks like schools will reopen and not be that different then normal. My life hasn't been much different this year then usual, biggest things are having to line up at times to go into a store and avoiding getting close to strangers.
The economy is going to be in the shitter for a while, but we're still producing enough to keep people fed, clothed, sheltered, given healthcare etc.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @06:35PM (3 children)
We have a fucked economy b/c the Bolshevik scum shut all the (cowardly, brainwashed) small businesses down illegally. It's ok. when shit gets bad and there's cover, These motherfuckers will get killed like they deserve.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:54PM (2 children)
Wow that's stupid. Nasty too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:20AM (1 child)
White Russians are always like that, before the Red Army under Trotsky finds them. They rely too much on Cossacks, who being mercenaries, can easily be persuaded to switch sides. This is Trump's problem right now. The worm is about to turn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:27AM
No they're not. White Russians are cold, delicious, and approved by The Dude.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 30 2020, @09:19PM
ray to whatever deity you like that these vaccines that are being worked on are effective. There's going to be a LOT more dead if they aren't.
The vaccines aren't going to "work", they're really just a way for Bill Gates to implant everyone with microchips to track them. It's on YouTube, so it must be true! Conservatives tell me this about the vaccines all the time.
Also, don't forget, Donald Trump isn't actually President any more. He signed his powers over to FEMA. It's on YouTube!
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:12PM (3 children)
Not gonna happen! Your error, Oh Mitigated Buzzard, is to think poverty is an absolute property of economies! Poverty is a matter of distribution, it is relative. For decades now American has been storing up wealth in the 1%, for just such an event as this. Now all we have to do is tax the bejessus out of the rich, and the economy will be just fine. We can even tax you, if it comes down to it. After all, you own a boat, which makes khallow want to suck up to you!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @12:00AM (2 children)
You really need to read up on economics. Try the recent economic woes of Greece if you're feeling homesick. Or try the Great Depression if you want to see a US example of how bloody stupid economic circumstances can cause chain reactions leaving most wealth to just disappear, poof, gone and poverty to become very much concrete and real in its own right rather than a relative bullshit word used to rile up class warfare every few years.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday July 31 2020, @12:18AM (1 child)
What caused the Great Depression was an inequality in the distribution of wealth that was almost as great as that of today. It did not end until a more equitable distribution was achieved, due in a large part to government spending, a national mobilization for a World War, and a 90% tax rate on the highest incomes under the Eisenhower administration. You need to brush up on actual economics, Buzzbart, not the right-wing propaganda that libertarians traffic in.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:30AM
The hell it was. The causes had nothing whatsoever to do with wealth distribution. And the 90% tax rate brought them no more revenue from the top 10% or the top 1% than they were making before. All it did was enrich accountants.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:49AM (1 child)
> Lockdown->Nobody spending anywhere but WalMart and Amazon->All other businesses lose money->Many of them go out of business->Every job they provided disappears
Wait... whut? I thought Job Creators create jobs. Shouldn't we be showering them with incentives? I honestly don't understand.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:37AM
Job creators who can't make ends meet are no longer job creators. And most of them won't be able to become job creators again after the panic is over because that takes a significant amount of the capital they had to burn through trying to survive this bullshit and no longer have.
Subsidize them? No. Just stop fucking them in the ass by making it illegal for them to make an honest living. Unhindered by the government they should sink or swim on their own.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:11PM (17 children)
Poverty and disease go hand in hand.
We'll see how people think when food shortages hit. I've been watching for announcements of shortages of one item, then another, and then a snowball effect.
Meat packing plants have been in the news already for large numbers of Covid cases. Even before the Wuhan flu, we've had instances of contaminated foods being recalled around the country. Not being a mystic or anything, I can't say what foods might run short first, unless it's processed meats. But, if people aren't working, food shortages are likely.
Food prices? We've not seen price gouging yet. Is it likely to happen? If it does, are a lot of inner city people going to start going hungry? How about the somewhat wealthier working middle class? If the working middle class has no income, how do they pay for that food being price gouged?
Everyone just seems to presume that government has things under control, or some such. The spoiled children rioting in the cities now? Maybe they're just practicing now, for the food riots to come.
Things COULD get really bad, before they get better.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:36PM (10 children)
Get worse before it gets better? Who said it would get better?
Seriously though: I was going to give an upvote until I saw the "Wuhan Flu". Just stop with that stupidity. It's not clever and it tainted a perfectly good post.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:01PM (9 children)
Would you prefer Wu Ping Cough or Kung Flu?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:13PM (8 children)
Trumpvirus.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @03:29AM (7 children)
And this is why you lose. Your lot aren't funny.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:19AM (2 children)
It wasn't meant to be you jackass.
Trump had the power to get the US responding properly, and 5 months in he is RELUCTANTLY doing so while poisoning his own efforts to do so.
You were predictable before, now you're pathetically so.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:38AM (1 child)
Blah blah blah blah. This is a Funny thread. Fuck off to a Troll thread.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @01:13AM
You have serious personal problems, hope your life gets better so you stop being a massive trolling douche.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:22AM
Runaway Virus? Works on so many levels! "Runaway COVID-1956" See?
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 03 2020, @02:47AM (2 children)
The scariest thing around here are Americans, you guys have totally fucked up due to people like you and your weird economic theories. Richest country in the world couldn't do a slow reopening while supporting the people. I guess as you believe low income earners are not worth much, might as well sacrifice them.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:17AM (1 child)
They're objectively not. Every single day around here, we as a society vote from our wallets on what matters to us. How much you're paid is a probably the best gauge there is on anyone's value to society, because society does the paying. So when reality TV show producers make thousands of times more than teachers? That's because society cares about The Voice more than their kids being morons. WalMart execs and WalMart workers? Same same, the execs are the ones making sure we have plenty of cheap shit from China to buy but the store workers mostly just do what they're told without giving a shit. If we cared about better service we'd give our money to someone who provided it but what we care about is having plenty of cheap shit from China to buy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:07AM
I'm going to have to disagree. Especially in a country like America where the biggest indicator of earnings is what your parents made and the odds of a valuable person getting paid more for being valuable is far out weighed by earnings reflecting the social status you were born into. Those Walmart executives are likely there due to connections, and those reality TV people getting such high pay is a reflection on the rest of society rather then their value.
You're basically pushing a class based system where your value is decided before you've accomplished anything besides being capable of filling up a diaper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @10:33PM (5 children)
Not to mention the preceding shortages! Shortage of education! Shortage of intelligence! Shortage of knowledge! Shortages of justice and equity! These are the shortages that led to Trump being elected, which led to COVID-19 running amook in the USofA. Runaway has acutely experienced these shortages!!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @10:44PM (4 children)
So long as you are left running amook, we'll all experience these shortages, acutely and obtusely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @02:41AM (3 children)
Amok? Or just another dog whistle?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 31 2020, @02:48AM (1 child)
fish whistles - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amook&redirect=no [wikipedia.org]
See the post to which I replied - if it's a fish whistle, it started there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:21AM
Fair enough! That post was hidden, apologies for the false accusation. Can you at least take your finger off the trigger?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:28AM
If you must know:
Evidently Runaway is possessed by a hantu belian, or demon semen. Hard to tell without an in-person exorcism.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:41PM (44 children)
Stupid, when they'll be counting the dead from deprivation, the time for making decisions will be long past. You cannot help the dead, a dead economy included.
And why are you piling up meaningless words as if trying to sound clever while carefully not stating anything?
Is it you obliquely hinting that governments all over the world will be feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, housing the homeless, and all that for free, for years and years while the hide-under-the-bed game goes on and on? Very political of you, if so; when the manna fails to materialize, you can proudly tell all gullible fools you promised them nothing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:08PM (43 children)
It seems to me you are equating lockdown with shutdown. Lockdown will shutdown only the activities that bring people in close contact, inside narrow spaces.
Even if it's total shutdown of all activities, it would be for 2 weeks, not years and year.
Fortunately, it doesn't need to be years and year. Look at the plot for daily cases in US [worldometers.info] - in May/June it started to go down with only a lockdown, essential businesses continuing - in 2 month time, you could have brought it under control. But no, the re-opening needed to happen, so there you have it, 2 months later, US is at double the max infection rate until may.
Now, honestly, do tell me: did you see the anything essential going missing from the shop shelves during the lockdown?
Look mate, I'm in lockdown since march (and it wouldn't be for so long, were not for some untrained and idiotic security guards hired for the hotels designated as quarantine for repatriating Aussies, guards that took and gifted covid to their families).
I look around me and all the shop are stocked with food (actually with everything). Yes, I need to wait a bit to my butcher, small shop, only 2 customers can be inside with the imposed space. True, we're wearing masks; not such a big deal.
And that because the farms can function in the conditions of social distancing, by its nature. In fact most of the production can go ahead with managed risks. What need to be shutdown or reorganized are the activities that make easy for the virus to jump; restaurants/bars/theaters/sports/parties/etc. Don't tell me those are essential for the society's survival and not doing them means famine.
As for your "years-and-years" - even if you can't eliminate the infections over few months (New Zealand did, let's say PartTimeZombie and his co-nationals were lucky), you can keep it burning low control until treatments or vaccines are discovered.
Look, what if a treatment gets discovered in September, don't you think it will look stupid to have sacrificed 3-4 times more people only for... what?... some extra profit in the accounts of the corporations?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:16PM (16 children)
Meat packing plants? How are they faring today? How many hot spots have been discovered in them, to date? Has anyone collected all that data into a nice yummy package?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:26PM (10 children)
Wasn't his question. Are you unable to get meat currently? Dunno about where you live, but where I do prices rose a bit and sometimes the rack thinned out a little, but it has always been available.
What products truly went off the shelves that are not explained by initial waves of hoarding / profiteering attempts?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:36PM (8 children)
There are no real shortages - yet. Are we all happy to just sit on our asses, and wait for them to happen?
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:09PM (7 children)
I can't help feel a loss of potential comedy at using meat packing plants here instead of fudge packing ones.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:13PM (6 children)
OMG, tell me there is no shortage of fudge to pack!!
ROFLMAO
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @12:19AM (1 child)
Get a room, you two!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:41AM
How're we going to practice social distancing then? I mean I'm not poorly endowed but my shit ain't no six feet long.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @11:43AM (3 children)
There is a shortage of fudge. Because almost no one knows how to make it.
It's tricky, and seems to involve experience in judging the precise moment to interfere with the way sugar crystalizes.
There is no shortage of things called fudge, made with chemical emulsifiers and other components rather than rely on this critical judgement.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
Candymaking still requires attention and timing, but infrared thermometers make it way easier than trying to judge by sight, water test, or candy thermometer.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 31 2020, @05:34PM (1 child)
So candy is still dandy but liquor is still quicker?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:20AM
Nah, even the fastest yeast you'd ever want to drink anything made with still takes a couple days to ferment a batch of wort; then you still have to distill it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:38PM
(Hiding under the bed in a burning house) "Where I am the air is only somewhat warm, and nearly no smoke at all."
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:52PM (3 children)
About 3-4 closed in the entire state, one reopened after the cluster was eliminated and the business disinfected.
See for yourself [covid19data.com.au]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:13PM (2 children)
Disclaimer:
That topmost graphic is useless to a color blind old man like myself.
The chart below it is of some value. Public housing towers ranks higher than ANYTHING? Who'da thunk it? Informative, but it doesn't specifically address the food processing industries, which I was addressing.
1. Cedar Meats
2. Somerville Meats
3. JBS Abbatoir
4. Australian Lamb Company
5. Diamond Valley Pork
So, in Australia, public housing, health care, and retailing are the highest risks, in order, with a number of families figuring into total count. It appears that food processing ranks well below either public housing, or healthcare (to include nursing homes).
Interesting . . .
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:25PM (1 child)
Sorry, I don't have other source of info.
Yes, because they are as densely populated as New York [abc.net.au] (the link has a photo)
With the note that those are "infection clusters" and not "hotspots" - no, the Aussie families don't have hundreds of members. The name of the cluster is linked to where the origin of the cluster has been traced to. Many of these origins are now clear.
The worst hit are the age care - they can't isolated themselves more dependent as they are of a carer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @11:50AM
Sounds like his OS should have a feature whereby he could point to a pixel on the screen and get its RGB value.
Or a perhaps more useful one that imposes a time-varying transformation of RGB values so that the colour axis he doesn't perceive will be represented by easily perceptible continuous change in one of the colour axes he can perceive.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 03 2020, @02:54AM
They're fairing pretty good in Canada now, after some adjustments. It has made us aware that they're too concentrated and there should be more smaller plants. While some types of food might get thinner, I doubt that anyone is going to go hungry who wasn't last year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:51PM (20 children)
Stupid, WHAT "2 weeks"? What is it with you and honesty, a bitter breakup?
"Coronavirus India lockdown Day 126 updates | July 28, 2020"
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-coronavirus-lockdown-july-28-2020-live-updates/article32209098.ece [thehindu.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdown_in_India [wikipedia.org]
Two months and some change on top, dude. Which achieved, as to stopping the virus, Exactly. Jack. Shit.
The world is rife with other very similar examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdowns [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:15PM (19 children)
You're idiot. If everybody stays at home in quarantine two weeks, then everybody who is not seek can get out. During that time, whoever is sick can get treated in isolation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:38PM (9 children)
You need to not call others idiots when your solution is to eradicate the virus from $region and call everything solved. It doesn't solve anything. Not at all. It merely postpones it. And not for very long given the ease of contagion of this particular virus.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:08PM (7 children)
Probably needed to be clearer.
Theoretically**, one could eradicate the virus in an area by going a hard lockdown. It is idiotic to come with examples of non-hard lockdown that fail to eradicate it (as the comment I replied to did).
Practically, one needs only to keep it so that:
1. the impact on the health care system manage to cope with the load; and
2. to the best possible, avoid deaths die to the disease.
Both can be achieved without hard lockdown, as long as common-sense infection countermeasures are followed in a disciplined way.
Many countries managed to do it even without a lockdown, have South Korea as an example [worldometers.info] (daily cases currently under 100, without a lockdown [alarabiya.net]; but of course also without "It will go away. Could you look into drinking bleach? Masks are unpatriotic and brake mah liberty")
---
Practically, it has been done by New Zealand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:13PM (6 children)
While I appreciate that is a more thorough answer, it still neglects the undeniable fact that any eradication of a virus this easy to spread is going to be so extremely short-lived as to be pointless unless it's also accompanied by universal disbursement of an effective anti-viral medication, vaccine, or other avenue to immunity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:33PM (5 children)
Eradication is hard and will work only in special circumstances, yes.
Managing the covid pandemic with can be done with reasonable cost, but it does require a good plan and discipline (the South Korean example).
In the absence of those two, economists can whinge all they want, there will more costs related to the pandemic they can't even imagine [soylentnews.org], much less quantify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @05:03PM (4 children)
There are costs to either alternative that people can't imagine. Anyone who tells you they fully understand the economy is a damned liar and anyone who tells you they can predict anything beyond some very basic influences on it is lying and wants something from you. The shit these guys are saying is extremely basic and well proven. That doesn't guarantee they're correct but it makes it a hell of a lot more likely than the rebuttal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:58PM (3 children)
Well, *you* certainly seem to spend a great deal of time expressing how fully *you* understand the economy the moment anyone expresses their own understanding of the slightest subset of it.
So, doctor, thyself and so on.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @03:38AM (2 children)
I do understand the fundamentals fairly well, yes. And they are the most fundamental driving forces of the economy, so understanding them well and basing your predictions on them may land you with egg on your face occasionally but at least not for spouting shit based on things you don't remotely understand. Which is what most of the folks chipping in on this are doing, both here and elsewhere.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @05:31AM (1 child)
See? This is why we need the #fakenews moderation!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:42AM
Okay, you earned that upmod. *hat tip*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @12:48PM
It is a local, temporary solution, which has to be butressed with travel restrictions and testing and contact tracing for the few cases that didn't quite get eradicated.
Put enough local solutions together and you'll achieve a wide-area solution.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:01PM (6 children)
> If everybody stays at home in quarantine two weeks
Are you a physicist? We are not talking spherical cows here, and many people can't stay at home no matter how strict the lockdown measures put in place. For just one obvious example, health care workers have to take a break, they can't stay in their hospital/nursing-facility for two weeks.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:28PM (4 children)
By formal education.
They don't need to (my fault, should have made clear that's totally a "thought experiment" to show that one doesn't need years-and-years).
New Zealand managed to do eradication with lockdown.
South Korea managed to get an upper hand an keep the infection under control (currently new daily infections steady at around 100) without lockdown - just applying well thought countermeasures early and with a disciplined population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:25PM (3 children)
Problem with arguing on SoylentNews,
You might be arguing with an actual rocket scientist, or brain surgeon. [dailymotion.com]
"It's not exactly brain surgery, you know."
"Not exactly rocket science, is it?"
So, Buzzard, what do you do?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @03:40AM (2 children)
As little as possible unless it involves fishing. Why?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:24AM (1 child)
Just gauging that intellectual capability.
A 3 out of 10 on the Morty scale.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @11:46AM
I'm good enough at what I do to rarely have to do any of it to make ends meet. So that's exactly what I do, make ends meet and keep the rest of my time for myself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @12:18PM
As far as I know, the health care workers in Toronto where there was a SARS outbreak *did* stay in quarantine on hospital grounds 24 hours a day, treating patients while they were still capable of doing so competently.
They squashed the outbreak completely, but not without some deaths.
Afterward, they received the highest honour Canada has to bestow for courage in the face of life-threatening danger -- one normally bestowed only in military personnel.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by slinches on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:22PM (1 child)
For one, it isn't two weeks. It would be two weeks as many times over as there are people who are cohabiting that location that have any symptoms (months in some cases). And those who realize they are sick after the quarantine starts would not be able to seek care, since they likely won't have the necessary medical professionals and services available to them without breaking isolation.
Quarantine only works if you can quickly identify and collect the sick people into an area where they can be treated and isolated from the rest of society. The lockdowns were never intended or able to stop the spread, only limit it to prevent overwhelming the hospitals. For the most part, we can call that a success. Continuing the lockdowns on people with the lowest risk while there's excess hospital capacity available might delay a few deaths, but it also incurs huge costs on society in terms of the economics, mental and emotional wellbeing and delays the development of immunity/resistance within the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:28PM
Incorrect. You do not isolate individuals, you quarantine areas, and wait for that area to reach a herd immunity, to stop being a locus of spreading infection. Or, you go Medieval, and burn the entire neighborhood to the ground. Preferably from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday July 30 2020, @08:09PM (4 children)
I guess if you don't count toilet paper as essential. Or meat. Or PPE. Or disinfectants. Then, no.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 31 2020, @03:41AM
Bread, coffee, and dairy products as well here.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @12:23PM (2 children)
Yes, some things disappeared for a short time until the stores ha the time to restock. When I went to shop one day, intending to buy, among other things, some rice, I was surprised to see that there was only one bag of rice available -- an eight kilogram bag of Thai basmati rice. I could not buy less than that.
I now have enough rice to last me a very long time. And it's very good rice.
But that shortage was very short-term as a result of one-day panic buying. The store had restocked within a few days.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @12:32PM
I've used about 25 lbs of rice since the pandemic started, out of the 50 lbs I bought. Now it's easy to find, however.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday July 31 2020, @01:20PM
Disinfectant wipes are still not available and have not been at any store in our area since March. The same with rubbing alcohol. Two weeks ago I saw the first sanitizing (Lysol type) spray since March. Bleach was out of stock for all of March. Up until May, toilet paper and paper towels were hit and miss. You might find a few and you might not depending on when the supply truck arrived.
This was not one-day panic buying. There was some hoarding/profiteering but supply chains were broken and manufacturing shut down in many places and demand for certain items skyrocketed based on need. (see PPE, ventilators, disinfectants, etc.)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 31 2020, @12:44PM
Indeed, it's a balancing act. Physical (often misnamed social) isolation vs. essential services.
Even if you consider only the economy, you need to realize that failure to control the pandemic will also have severe economic consequences.
-- hendrik