WNash

Part of this crew of professional protesters? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/19/pro-gun-activists-using-facebook-groups-push-anti-quarantine-protests/ What’s the term for fake grassroots protesters who are really doing the bidding of the elites... AstroTurf?

I usually have you on ignore, but I figured you were responding to my comment, so I am briefly unhiding your post. You are conflating the principle of supply and demand, which is *an* input — not the only input— on pricing of objects of commerce with the effect of nominal wage change on real prices. Your claim is a political one, not an economic one. EDIT: I didn’t say anything about scarcity here, but I think the choice to base an economy on conditions of scarcity is a pretty stupid model to use, even if it does allow a relatively small and powerful elite to enrich themselves.

I’ve seen here that some people claim we can’t stabilize wages for the unemployed because of inflation, but a causal relationship between nominal wages and consumer prices is being proven false. We are seeing a significant decline in nominal wages, yet there is no *deflation*, which makes it pretty clear that *inflation* is caused by something other than an increase in nominal wages. I know that won’t make the “higher nominal median wage causes inflation” canard disappear, but at least we can now recognize that when someone brings it up, they’re not basing it on macroeconomics but on their political preferences.

I wonder if this is related to blood type. Some viruses have an affinity to given blood types. Malaria, for instance, affects people with Type A more than other blood types. The COVID-19 causing virus seems to attack the capacity of red cells to carry O2, so it may well hit people one blood types harder than others.

Just-in-time inventory doesn't work for outlier events, it's true. We have to accept that part of our productive capacity must be sacrificed as an insurance policy, which shouldn't affect most people because only a small percentage of people have been able to accumulate surplus wealth during the time that we have save money by destroying our capacity to respond to society-wide contingencies. It's also very clear that medical insurance needs to be separated from employment -- a different but related point. Are hospitals going to recoup all of the revenue they've lost by becoming exclusively COVID-19 field clinics? Some people think that insurance should be part of employment to punish people for being unproductive, and as our health care system is undermined, you can blame them.

I have a 39 year old coworker with zero underlying conditions, great cardio fitness from long distance biking. He and his family got sick. It hospitalized him and almost killed him. He told me "stay inside -- you don't want this". We need to do widespread antibody testing to rebuild a workforce, carrying everyone else with direct payments right now. Then, when we can partially re-open the economy in perhaps a few months, we need a serious regime of contact tracing. I don't like the privacy implications, but it's that or just sacrificing a significant part of the population so a comparative few can recapitalize. The fact that some Fox hosts and even some presidential advisors have been implying that these people would die anyway and many are unproductive retirees sounds like it came from the Final Solution, which is not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the last few years.

I don’t have this experience where nearly everyone appears to be a lazy POS. UE guys I know want the hours and are piling them on. My neighbor who works at GM Tonawanda was hoping to go to the project in Indiana to help with ventilator production, rather than sit at home and collect a check to watch the grass grow, but they have all the hourly employees they need to run a projected three shift/seven day production line. Even at UB everyone I know is working harder because there’s a big administrative workload to move instructional support and student services entirely online. I’m pitching in and helping departments who are short staffed and who have bigger tech hurdles.

I don’t have time to check this, but the last warm April I remember must have been 2015 (following that frigid winter).

They actually have a robust public health system that has kept epidemics to a minimum (no small feat for a country with hundreds of millions of people living in genuine grinding subsistence poverty), but this is no match for them. Social distancing will be very difficult for the vast majority. I agree with you, this is almost certain to be very bad.

My coworker has a moderate case, but she’s getting through it. In her late 50s, relatively healthy. Her husband isn’t showing any symptoms so far.

My wife just found out that a friend is in a local ICU on a ventilator. Public school teacher, 40 years old, healthy and with no pre-existing conditions. Two kids.

Very sad to say that legendary singer-songwriter John Prine is in critical condition with COVID-19. He’s in his early 70s, and is a cancer survivor in not great health, but he was still touring and recording. https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2020/03/29/john-prine-critical-hospital-coronavirus-symptoms/2937229001/ Other sad news from Nashville: Opry member and 90s country star Joe Diffie died from COVID-19.

Irrefutable and damning. It’s very hard for human beings to admit mistakes, but I really pray that people wake up to the fact that Trump failed, and that his failure has been catastrophic. We don’t have to expect this little out of our leaders. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster?fbclid=IwAR1f9vq0h6JfRqQMJahGmBMXhS_VscPGlyvJusnvgBHp1zGxB7DFnPr0v_4

Apparently a UB frat was promoting a big party they planned to hold. Rumor has it that the Buffalo police and UB told them that wasn’t gonna happen.

I bought a switch the day after Trump’s “oh shit” speech (the one that caused stock indices to collapse), figuring we might get a lot of use out of it. Animal Crossing came out a week later, and my wife plays it for hours a day. Even our toddler loves to watch the little critters on the screen. Best purchase I have ever made!

You can download games, or order them from an internet retailer, so the need (as such) can be met without exposing workers to a potentially fatal infection.

My concern is that the social distancing efforts will be diluted so we have a flatter curve, but one that still exceeds our care capacity by several times. A total failure of social distancing would result in millions of US deaths. We won’t hit that, but if the NYC area alone gets to tens of thousands of deaths, a million nationally isn’t out of the question. I suspect that the virus is still being passed freely in much of the country. How much, I don’t know, but if we see 15+ hotspots in two weeks, we are on target for catastrophe.

This is absolutely bonkers. The source is a religious information website in Kansas, but the story goes back to completely implausible, conspiracy-mongering sources like the Epoch Times and Breitbart. You can’t make 21 million bodies vanish. The PRC did their typical thing of trying to hush the virus story, but it was too big to be hidden. With extreme social control and contact tracing, they lowered the infection rate, but the virus is still out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if the infection and fatalities are higher In China than reported, but in the last few days it seems like there’s an increased desperation on the part of the Trump-sympathetic media to claim that China undercounted deaths by orders of magnitude. Why the sudden attempt to make these explosive and unprovable claims? I think that as the horror of the coronavirus situation in the US becomes evident, there is an incentive to inflate the problem elsewhere to make Trump look better by comparison. This has been and still is being catastrophically mismanaged. What should have been a difficult but manageable public health crisis has turned into a runaway disaster in the US. Let’s be clear: at the current rate of infection increase, we are headed for an absolutely historic disaster, demographically and economically. I don’t see much being done to stop the biggest crisis in this country since the Civil War. We should be terrified and we should be enraged at the elites who brought us to this point and who still are trying to play their usual games. It is dumbfounding to see regular people try to fit this into their usual simple formula where everything is the fault of the other party. Every single person in power has failed us, and the people with the most power have failed us the most. We will be very lucky to escape this with only a million deaths and no social breakdown. But if you don’t hold the elites who let this happen to account, you actually deserve the immiseration that is likely going to hit us all.

I think a return of the virus is likely for epidemiological reasons, largely because most western governments won’t do what it takes to track cases effectively. But there is good news that may keep the rate of return slow: apparently the virus has a very low mutation rate, so antibodies and (fingers crossed) a vaccine should be effective for some time to come.

Unless we’re talking about virology, there are no non-political facts to discuss. Somehow, a small elite desperate to ensure they stay ungodly richer than everyone else is ignoring epidemiology and the scale under which the healthcare system can operate without breaking down.

Not the least bit surprising that the same crew that for years has screamed about how many people have been killed by “socialism” are dismissive of the enormity of the death toll caused by forcing a return to capitalism far before we have flattened the curve.

Does it really need to be explained to you that car crashes and heart attacks don’t increase exponentially every few days?

Not going to bother unhiding the original that you are responding to, but Boeing is getting 20x the money that all the arts are getting, and the failure that led to their financial ruin has absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19.

@WesterlyWxI’m glad you refuted that, but when someone posts undiluted excuse-making from Trump practically verbatim, the laziness and stupidity probably doesn’t merit a response.

I think there’s going to be quite the shakeup of our political system if this plays out at a scenario with just a median loss of life. I’m originally from Tennessee. There is a lot of goodwill towards Trump for defending what are seen as traditional values — God, country, family. But when people lose loved ones as Trump rushes a return to normalcy because he sees that unemployment and stock market indices — the metrics he has touted as his great achievements and proof that he deserves reelection — are terrible, they’re going to have a big rethink about what they’re getting out of this whole thing. A million deaths within a few months is an outcome we could see pretty easily. Those deaths will mostly be grandparents and elderly parents, and they will be felt. But there will be many deaths of susceptible younger people, and even deaths of young people who just had bad luck. Some famous people are going to die. And many of the deaths will be awful — people dying at home because they couldn’t even get health care in the richest country in the world. This will touch everyone in a way that nothing has since WW2. But rather than sacrifice to save our family and friends, we will sacrifice our family and friends to pump up stock prices. This is not a victory that free market conservatives want. It will put the lie to so many of their claims that have been used to justify real austerity over the years. Are they going to condemn the dying as lazy leeches, like some conservatives I have heard very recently? We have been told that we can’t have universal health care because it infringes on choice and freedom, but what happens when we have no access to health care and all but the youngest, luckiest, and richest get triaged into dying at home? I desperately hope none of these bad scenarios happens. I have a 78 year old mother in Tennessee. I have hypertension— controlled, but still diagnosed, as does my wife, and we could both lose a few pounds. What’s scariest to me is that my two year old daughter, who was very premature and spent months in the NICU, has chronic lung disease from being on a ventilator for ten weeks. She has no cognitive deficits and is actually ahead of milestones, and is even catching up to normal height and weight, but I am terrified of what this virus could do to her lungs. I have never liked Trump. His scorn of expertise and science, his lack of humility, and his constant search for enemies to bully and blame have been awful to see. But I really hoped that he would look at what we are facing and rise to the occasion. I was prepared to get behind him, as I would if we were going into a war for our survival. But he can’t see past himself, and I can only hope a higher power will spare us from what I fear is coming.