WNash

How big is the credit? You can not only buy groceries, but also pay utility bills with that card so it offsets the cash you’ll have to take out.

My fingers are crossed. I hope we can get though this. But even if we make it through this without killing off a million or more people, we need to seriously rethinking what we have been doing, because it isn’t working the way we thought it did. And I don’t mean to make this a blue vs red argument. Hardly any Democrats are prepared to fix what’s broken, because a few people at the top get to veto what we think of as politically achievable.

The frustrating thing is that the people who minimize COVID-19 infection as just being a superflu aren’t wrong. It’s bad, but it’s not the Black Death, highly infectious and with a 70% mortality rate. But our economy has very little tolerance for contingencies. Wages have failed to keep up with what’s seen as necessary to lead a moderately comfortable life, so personal debt has risen dramatically. The money that used to go to a broader wage base instead goes to the top. Unsurprisingly, this broad structural problem is dismissed as the personal failing of individuals... but the economy depends upon those individuals having the security and stability to keep spending money. If our economy is so fragile that what’s literally a superflu can bring our society to its knees, we are doing something very wrong.

I’m not sure that Hong Kong will be representative of the PRC. They’re both “China” but may have a different set of priorities. There were definitely concerns that HK officials were rushing too quickly to return to normalcy.

In about 10 days, the infection rate will be an order of magnitude larger. Soon after, our medical infrastructure will be overwhelmed, and doctors and nurses will fall ill. At that point, without a commitment to put basically unlimited resources into shoring up this crisis, we could very well be headed into a true catastrophe. It’s almost certain that job losses will result in a huge increase in the uninsured. Without a significant slowing of the spread of this virus, the costs of health care delivery will far exceed the capacity of the system, and the fiscal stability of the entire health care system will be on the verge of collapse. We have created an economy that relies on low cost labor, with low wages and minimal external support in the form of a social safety net. Aggregate consumer demand drives the economy, and we are facing a demand shock that is hard to see being resolved. The loss of liquidity at the top is seen by the people who run this country as more of a crisis then the collapse in aggregate consumer demand. The GOP “stimulus” bill was almost entirely dedicated loosening the credit market and salvaging equity than figuring out how to backstop a health care system that will soon be a fiscal basket case or doing anything meaningful about a death spiral and in consumer demand. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that we can get back to normal soon. I just don’t see it. What appears to be happening is frankly an attempt to justify sacrificing people’s lives to prop up equity values. Maybe we need to think about suspending the market economy and make genuine material sacrifice in exchange for the well-being of society as a whole.

I‘m not surprised there are people who are so committed to the idea that only the strong survive, as you are. I think there are a lot of people in power who feel that way, including a lot of hypocrites who pretend to feel otherwise but only want to protect their power. I just don’t think I hear it expressed with such contempt and rage at the weak and poor. It’s shocking.

You don’t know the first thing about me. You do seem to hate people who you see as lazy, so perhaps you have no problem sacrificing lives to prop up a broken system. But I pity you and pray that people with actual power don’t think like you.

This is either naive or mendacious. This claim assumes that there are equal forces on both sides of any issue that seek to promote a completely one-sided narrative, because they know that people who think of themselves as "reasonable" will split the difference. In reality, only one side takes a completely extreme, zero compromise position on every issue. CNN's mistake isn't in being the opposite of Fox News (or OAN, whose goal is to take even more extreme positions than Fox). CNN's mistake is in thinking that they can designate an authoritative voice that tries to be a fact-checker to counterbalance the absolutely bonkers stuff coming from Trump. The right then claims that CNN (or the NY Times or Washington Post or MSNBC or whoever is trying to fact-check Trump) is just offering another opinion, doubling down on Trump's claim to have a monopoly on the "real" truth. Saying "the truth is in the middle" assumes that one side isn't deliberately misrepresenting what's going on, and claiming that it's "alternative facts." What I have come to realize is that the actual opposite position from Trump is never covered by CNN, MSNBC, the Times, etc., or when it is covered, it's dismissed as "extreme" and never becomes one pole to oppose to the Trump/right wing pole. That's Bernie Sanders, who seems to be the only politician who actually recognizes that we're at a crossroads where the true elites -- rich people who back Trump -- are deciding how many regular people they need to sacrifice to preserve their wealth.

Yeah, we're probably in need of rationing. Birth month or something. There was a guy from Wyoming County at the University Plaza Tops the other day checking out with two overflowing carts. Lots of people who shop there use EBT and WIC, which means they can't hoard very easily.

I agree with this. Proximity to live mammals is key to interspecies transmission. Live animal retail markets should be outlawed. Don’t forget the origin of Ebola and Marburg — bushmeat often sold at markets in central Africa.

When Hobbes wrote that line about life being “nasty, brutish, and short,” he specifically was referring to what he called “the state of nature” — that is, human existence without government. Hobbes argued that human being accept a social contract, giving up some of their freedom to do anything they want in exchange for the protection that is provided by a strong central government. Hobbes lived to be 91, a very long life for someone born in the 1500s, so he certainly did not lead a life that was nasty, brutish, and short.

They bought themselves a sure thing. The Bills couldn’t afford another Sammy Watkins type pick.

The tax cuts of the last few years have added trillions of dollars to the national debt ($3 trillion as of last year). This happened in an expansionary economy, when the national debt should be shrinking. Deficit scolds didn’t cry about how we are bankrupting the country. Why? Because it’s impossible to bankrupt the country. The fed added $1.5 trillion to the monetary supply just last week, and no one screamed about inflation, because an increase in the monetary supply does not actually increase consumer prices. Your argument is a moral argument, not an economic one. That moral argument is about to get a very serious challenge, as tens of millions of Americans will he unemployed very soon through absolutely no fault of their own. They’ll find that unemployment and food stamps benefits have been cut dramatically. With no income, what are they going to do? These are hard working people in jobs providing services that have no demand. How are they going to pay rent, pay for food, medicine? Capitalism is giving us the empty shelves that are supposed to be the product of communism. The money is there. It has been taken by the very rich at the expense of everyone else. The graphs in this story shocked me out of complacency: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html There are about to be millions of very hungry and very angry Americans. I lived in NYC on 9/11 and I was far less scared that day than I am now.

I’m a Titans fan. The Texans have done a lot right, and we always seem to end up chasing them, but I cannot figure this one out.

Honestly, Bernie’s the only one I respect. Trump has no idea how to beat him, because unlike basically every other politician, he’s not corrupt. But of course the Democrats, Wall Street, corporate CEOs, and their friends at CNN and MSNBC would never let him win.

Even many of his fans are shook. His MO has been to take what’s gone on in politics where parties demonize each other to make people pick a side (like a team) and apply it to *everything*. In his world there is no objective truth about anything — just Trump’s version of the truth and what he sees as his enemies’ version of the truth. As a result, competent government — an independent civil service — doesn’t exist. As has as he is concerned, there are two kinds of people: one kind who is loyal to Trump and will do whatever they can to make him look good, and another kind, who is everyone else, and he regards that kind as his enemy. The problem is that a virus doesn’t give a damn about anything but replicating. At first, Trump treated it like he treats any bad news: he called it “fake” and offered his usual alternate reality, in which the virus was just a cold and would go away soon. The fact is that they’re weren’t a lot of things that could be done to stop this pandemic. Closing borders is a fantasy. I don’t think any politician would have done what needed to be done — extreme social distancing — before the virus started spreading out of control. It would have been the usual nonsense about “liberals”, the same playbook that they use to try to discredit climate science. But anthropogenic global warming happens on a scale of decades. A pandemic spreads in days, and all but the most brainwashed people are going to acknowledge the threat. But Trump has destroyed his presidency not because he didn’t take steps to enforce social distancing early enough, but because he still sees this as a zero sum battle where he can personally win. The news that he tried to bargain to buy the product of vaccination research from a German company for *exclusive US use* is so stupid that it precludes having any faith in his leadership. It’s a worldwide pandemic and literally every country needs enough vaccine to create herd immunity. You can’t let it run wild in any country, or will create a viral reservoir that could make your vaccine ineffective. Trump thinks he can “win” this and make someone else a loser, but there literally is no winning unless everyone wins. I have strong political views — I think most Democrats are garbage but Republicans are somehow even worse. But under the circumstances, just having any politician with some ability to understand basic science would be so welcome. I’d take any president of my lifetime over this. Trump is apparently incapable of understanding what is happening. He isn’t learning. The only way that he’s not going to get many people killed is if enough people close to him interfere with him enough to allow experts, and people who trust expertise, to do their thing. I wish that his cabinet would declare him incapacitated and let Pence take over. But it seems that at least some of Trump’s voters who agreed with his strategy of maximum division are realizing that he’s not going to learn or change, and no victory over political rivals is worth the damage his incompetence is causing.

It’s very frustrating that despite a huge increase in capitalization over the last few years, corporate debt rose so high. Maybe supply side support shouldn’t be a priority in good or bad times.

Yeah, they probably should be closing schools, which is going to make the economy worse because we have decided as a society not to scale childcare appropriately to our real needs.

Yeah, I actually told my mother to cancel her trip here and to see her sister in Louisiana next month. That’s a 180 from me in 24 hours. For people who are older than 60, or who spend time around people who are older than 60, you have to do whatever you can to minimize risk. Not to get political, but the secrecy, manipulation of truth, and shortsighted attempts to calm markets by our government is about the worst thing to prevent mass casualties. This is very real and potentially the biggest crisis of our era. We need to accept that controlling this will require genuine sacrifice, and *ask* for sacrifice, rather than concealing it and taking dumb symbolic steps to try to pass the buck and lure people into thinking everything is fine.

By the way, I think it’s probably inevitably recessionary. The loss of economic activity will be dramatic over the next few months. A lot of people are likely to lose their jobs, and the current government has reduced countercyclical measures , trading then for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the highest earners. It only takes two consecutive quarters of lower GDP to be called a recession, and with a mess like this in March, 2020Q1 is almost certainly going to see a decline. Even if the reduction in activity were to wrap in May, it would be hard to bounce back to a non-recessionary GDP for Q2. That said, if you’re thinking on a 2-5 year or greater timeframe, it makes a lot of sense to buy. There *is* a panic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a recession.

During the H1N1 flu outbreak, I went to the funeral of the father of a childhood friend. He was a healthy guy who had just retired, ran a fever one day, then was on a ventilator four days later. His funeral was eight days after his first symptoms. Within days of the funeral, I got sick, as did many other attendees. I was careful about washing hands and physical contact but I still got sick. I have never been more ill. It turned into bronchitis. I couldn’t stop coughing and couldn’t sleep because of it. I got into see my PCP and there was nothing they could do other than treating the symptoms. I was told to go to the ER if I showed signs of hypoxia. I made it though after a week of being very sick (and my wife also got terribly ill). I was in my 30s and felt genuinely scared for my life. The flu shot was famously only partially effective that year, but it was actually 62% effective: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pastseasons/0910season.htm#good-match. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 will only be 62% worse - with zero effective vaccination measures and no natural antibodies, it would be dramatically worse even with a transmission rate as bad as the flux and by all accounts, this thing spreads more easily.

People panic-buy. It’s weird but it happens. My worthless suggestion, based on nothing, is that buying things is an action that people think will help them when they feel completely powerless over a risk. Look what happens in the south with an inch of snow - all the milk and bread gets bought up. I decided to take this seriously and told my mother not to fly up here next week. She’s old, and while she probably wouldn’t get sick from travel, the consequence if she does get sick is extreme. That’s the important issue. The outcomes are terrible for people who get very sick, and there aren’t enough ventilators for acute respiratory distress patients in even a moderately likely scenario. Flu is a valid comparison but *not* to minimize this virus. With widespread vaccination that both lowers the transmission rate and the often the severity of flu cases, we still have tens of thousands of deaths every year. With *no* vaccine, more people will get sick and the number of severe cases will be higher. So flu may be a baseline, but prevention of COVID-19 transmission will be far lower with no vaccine, and severe cases will almost certainly be far higher. It has been a genuinely long time since economic activity was disrupted so extremely. I lived in NYC on 9/11 and what happened did shut everything down for a few days. Gradually economic activity came back. Wars in this country, except the civil and revolutionary wars, tend to see increased productivity. We are accustomed to thinking that economic activity is as natural as the tides, but it’s really just stuff that people do, and if they can’t do things, it stops. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a real shock and nobody likes a shock. We don’t have to be making money all the time. In Italy they suspended mortgage payments! We have to consume essential goods to live, but there’s still enough economic activity to keep food on the shelves, so it wouldn’t be a total social breakdown. We just have a belief in this country that people have to be making money all the time, and that’s just not true.

It seems to be spreading easily in Australia, which despite late summer temps has significantly higher proportion of infected people than the US.

The hype is a bit much, but there’s enough to be concerned about. You’re right though — people don’t treat the flu with the seriousness it deserves. I wish people had a fraction of their current obsession with Purell and hand washing every winter.

There are plenty of Trump supporters who don’t feel the need to offer crackpot, anti-science theories. But enough is enough — reading his posts makes this site less informative to me, so I’m just going to block him. I won’t miss the anti-science comments and I won’t miss the IMBY weather hype.