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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: 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.