DeltaT13

The current situation does a great job highlighting just how lousy the pay and raises are for the service and GIG industry. The safer higher paying jobs got 8% raises since last year (the only jobs left to measure against right now). Ask all those GIG employees how big their raise was in the last year (excluding the current COVID crisis). Probably closer to 1% if anything at all. It's a brutal system in this country.

One of buffalos most exciting years erased by covid. Such a Billsy way to lose out.

Some of the high res models now have KROC completely dry from Friday am until Monday. Seems hard to believe with such a cold pool aloft but I’d be fine with missing out completely if it was only going to be a glancing blow anyway. I either wanted to get legitimate measurable snow or nothing. Maybe I can salvage some yard work yet this weekend.

Hawaii has a 14 day stay in your hotel quarantine

This virus is still very new. Eventually there will be treatments, a vaccine, and herd immunity. There is no reason to think this will persist forever without a solution. The world is going to be all out of whack for a good year or so but things will settle out. When people get sick years from now they’ll say oh yeah I had covid a few weeks back just like we talk about strep throat, the flu, noro virus, colds, sinus infections. It will just be another germ that you occasionally get.

If its going to be unseasonably cold we need to get some snow and set some records. A storm missing too far South is just salt in the wound after a whole season of cutters.

My evidence for us not leading in science and innovation is a bit anecdotal, but any person that says "Let's bring back the coal jobs" obviously isnt on the cutting edge of science and energy technologies. Where to start...... Solar and wind energy has been taxed and defunded. The EPA has been outright decimated, those numbers are out there for everyone to look up. Trump advised the NNSA two years ago to begin shutting down the nation laboratories that were studying fusion science (even though most of it has to do with nuclear weapons testing). He has repeatedly called climate change a hoax (which I'm not sure how that isnt insulting to scientists and generally anti science). Took us out of the Paris Climate Agreement which is just an awesome agreement from a pollution standpoint regardless if you believe in climate change or not. The list goes on and on. Oh yeah, his VP also thinks the earth is 5000 years old. I dunno man, doesnt take a genius to assume that we have taken a few steps back in regards to science over the past few years. I've experienced it personally with budget cuts threatening my job several times. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/482352-trump-budget-slashes-funding-for-epa-environmental-programs A small excerpt if you don't want to read. "President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal 2021 calls for significant reductions to environmental programs at federal agencies, including a 26 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump’s budget would eliminate 50 EPA programs and impose massive cuts to research and development, while also nixing money for the Energy Star rating system. The Energy Star program, which measures the efficiency of electronics and appliances, would instead rely on businesses to pay a fee to participate in the program. The proposed spending reductions mark the latest effort by the administration to chip away at government agencies focused on science, the environment and public lands. The White House budget request would reduce spending at the Energy Department by 8 percent and cut 16 percent from the Department of the Interior's budget." Thankfully congress usually says no to these outrageous proposals but to say that the Trump administration has advanced science is an outright lie. You can like Trump all you want, but agree that there is a loud anti science rhetoric in the current admin.

I’m not condoning China in any way, just saying it’s not all bad. Americans are absolutely addicted to cheap stuff and China makes that happen. All the rest of the social issues I’m right there with you. But I also think China is in for some huge challenges going forward. They have an enormous and potentially hard to control population, that has nowhere near enough young people to support it (one child law will be there downfall). A communist regime that will always be fighting off the potential of uprising (see all of history, and also recently Hong Kong), automation Issues, food shortages, pollution woes, and apparently deadly diseases. China isn’t just skipping along this road of life. I thought the US was absolutely on a perfect trajectory coming into 2016 and poised for continued world leadership and dominance. We were leaders of science and innovation, working on universal healthcare, had a focus on the environment and conservation, funding for all renewables and energy sources, phasing out fossil fuels. Times were we’re looking good. We definitely let China back into the race with this current admin. Such a shame. It will be really hard to recover after 4 more years of science crushing nonsense. What a shame.

I look at china with a far less cynical eye. China in my opinion is in integral part in why America is as strong as it is now. They "took" all of the low skill, low pay jobs, that Americans didnt/shouldnt want or even need (remember the unemployment rate was just recently sub 4%). They do these jobs at pay rates that would be literally impossible to sustain in American dollars and they give us incredibly cheap products allowing us to devour a massive amount of useful products for dirt cheap prices. Furthermore, most of these jobs are and will be automated going forward. The US in the meantime is finding alternative jobs and innovating while China does all the "grunt work". Once automation really rolls through, China will be well behind and face massive job shortages while the US will be cruising along and past the blue collar manufacturing phase of our economic growth.

I can't take all this WINNING. LOLz.... just insane that people buy into Trumps bullshit. Worst. Businessman. Ever. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected

Well that's where we disagree. 13 Billion dollars (and its closer to 30 Billion at the current time) is absolutely a massive amount of money. Our brains are just wildly desensitized in light of recent events. 13 Billion dollars is enough to help 100's of struggling schools, fix flints water problem 20 times over, fund federal science and research programs for years or decades, etc. It's amazing how that money wasn't needed in the years prior, it's almost as if some sort of ill planned "stunt" caused it........... hmmm 13 Billion dollars of pure SOCIALISM given to a bunch of farmers that don't believe in socialism solely because their idiot leader screwed them over in bad trade deals.

I’ll give you that one, but Maine always does well. Just a really nice location that far north. Did Cooperstown get a big storm during the winter? I kind of remember one good event for the capital district, but I might be wrong.

Why because they got two snow events in April/May? I don’t think anyone in the entire northeast had any kind of noteworthy winter.

Canada debt to gdp is 34% the USAs debt to gdp is somewhere near 105% This obviously shows we are straight hemorrhaging money and in a far worse place than Canada to be handing out stacks of free cash. Earning and bankruptcies are going to be an all time high the next quarter. Corporations will squirrel away any extra money. The consumers will get spooked and save money just like they did after 2008. The US is in for some massive pain. The oil market getting wrecked is icing on the cake for a huge portion of high pay blue collar jobs. We are getting very close to not being able to print our way out of a real mess when we can’t even afford interest payments.

We don’t need links, it’s just the basic numbers from the past few years. Trade wars squeeze the consumer and we all saw the stories of literal mountains of soybeans sitting on the plains. We all saw the massive insane socialist bailout when tariffs rocked the agriculture section. It’s clear as crystal. You are also smarter than this. Most sides agree the trade war accomplished nothjng excepting ****ing us over.

Trump raised consumer prices on Americans and decimated the farming industry. You’re smarter than this BW. Tariffs don’t work the way you or Trump think.

Debt is important. There is no way to candy coat this. Spending outside your means whether a person or a country is never sustainable in the long term. I agree the house of cards is built on the US but that doesn’t mean we should encourage this shit. Good grief, I’m saying this as a die hard liberal. What in the world is happening.

The Corporate income tax cuts already had us on course for the largest single year deficit before this disaster. That’s not bailing us out. Trump put the final nail in the coffin for this countries deficit issues.

They are just greasing the wheels for inevitable universal income at this point. Fiscal conservatism is officially completely emphatically dead after this administration. Good lord.

Quality is somewhat low but the content is pretty spot on. I’m just an Average joe but I was purchasing masks on January 23rd and considering supplies to stockpile. The info was there all there. The writing was on the wall. What was our government doing at that time? How did I magically know this would be a problem long before them?? The US response has been absolutely laughable at best. The rest of the globe hasn’t done much better but it’s ridiculous that the current admin is continually looking for someone else to blame. Just own it and start fixing it.

This is the third new coronavirus in the last 20 years. To think it would be 100 years until we deal with something like this again is pretty off base. Our intermingling as a species, efficient global transportation, and world food shortages (which create the necessity of wet markets) will certainly increase the likelihood of this becoming much more common going forward. Almost more importantly is how the value of life has changed as we evolve. Just imagine this virus a few hundred years ago. We wouldn’t even know it was new or what it is was. It may have never even spread or took hold. And the people that caught it would just get fevers and coughs and die like many other diseases. In other words, almost no reaction to it. There was no medical system to overwhelm and everyone just lived knowing you could die at anytime from any number or illnesses. (This mindset still exists in third world countries and almost everywhere until the early 20th century) In 2020 every life is treated with incredible value. We try to keep people alive at all costs all the time. The length of life is also a huge metric on overall wealth and stature in society as a whole. This in itself poses major social scruples during a pandemic. All that said, we have just painfully learned we don’t even need a truly deadly new disease to blow up the world as we know it, the fear itself does it because our economies are fragile. Just imagine if we end up with a virus that truly wipes out 10 percent of the population. The panic would be unreal and terrifying combined with an actual loss of people and important skills that would have tangible effects on all our lives. If this current virus ends up as bad as it seems in regard to length and economic destruction, we may have a whole new normal in a few years. I can imagine a global entity signed by nearly every country to continually live in a state where we can handle a pandemic without shutting down by creating a massive “moth balled” medical system that can be expanded to take on orders of magnitude more people at nearly anytime. The entire reason this pandemic exists is because the global health system simply has almost no extra overhead (which I understand from a business and cost perspective). The game may change after this all ends, could this bring global unity? Or will it hasten the next great world war?

I agree, I think some jobs should have stayed online, mine included. I work in research and can easily avoid people if I schedule my day and work alone in my lab. But the blanket non-essential stamp just sent everyone home. Probably too extreme but half the population seems unable to follow directions so they had to just shut the whole thing down. The GIG economy is a tough one though, and thats where the big hurt has been. Restaurants, bars, ubers, its just hard to find a way around that one.

Kind of apples to oranges in my opinion. Sweden is a cute little country with a very high standard or living and a very manageable population of 10 million people. The US has 33 times that amount. We have national basketball tournaments with millions of spectators, International Hockey leagues, the NBA, NFL, concerts, festivals, etc etc. All events that have massive congregations of people. We also have a general urban density in our largest cities that is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than Sweden. NY, LA, and Chicago account for almost 40 million people alone. We take in and sent out millions of international flights a year. The US is not an easy place to manage during a Pandemic.. Just the 3 week NCAA basketball tournament probably encompasses more people and more cross contact of individuals than any event ever in Sweden. If we didnt/don't shut things down, there were/are going to be some incredible hot spots where thousands of people catch this at a single event.

After seeing all these protests I'm happy that we have so many eager canaries ready to fly into the coalmine. I'm going to maintain a lot of distance and shelter in place through mid to late May. If cases suddenly spike, I'll feel bad for the medical professionals, but hopefully I wont be one of the positive cases.

The common cold is also the goldmine for the OTC industry. It's just bad enough to make you uncomfortable for days or even weeks yet rarely kills. The perfect virus to make a myriad or OTC medicine that simply relieve symptoms. I bet a lot of companies would go under if the common cold was ever eradicated.