141–150 of 273 posts
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So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
I don't recall saying that, no. I'd wager that nobody would seriously say that, since it's obviously false.
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The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government. If you are going to shutter businesses and put people out of work, you need to pay the business owners and the employees who you have affected. Staying economically viable vs staying medically viable should have never been a tradeoff people had to make here, and Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around.
> The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government It's more complex than that. The UK is keeping things stable/frozen, but with nothing being produced, the value of their money is shifting. You cannot keep paying people to do nothing. You have people in jobs where they are still employed, saving tons (because there's nothing to spend it on) and record buying of future e-waste (Going ba…
The response here in Washington State has resulted in permanent closure of more businesses than deaths with covid within the state.
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Whatever the US did was not near permanent lockdowns, what is allowed to continue and be opened is more lenient than almost every country. The only countries with less restrictions than the US are opened exactly because they did a lockdown and kept the virus at bay. What kills the US economy is the virus being out there and making people afraid to get together into public settings.
I really don’t think many people are afraid to go into public settings. Maybe not into a crowd, sure, but a restaurant? The holdup there is from the government, not the public.
With that said, this is going to vary by region. There is absolutely a large percentage of people wanting and willing to go eat indoors at restaurants right now, I just don't think that number represents a majority.
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As I understand it, we have no saved money, we are just going deeper into debt. In 2020 alone we took on at least 4T of debt when in past years we only take on ~1T debt per year. And all we have to show for 2T was a "woefully inadequate" $1000 check. In order to pay everyone's rent for a year, we would need at least 12x as much, in other words a cool 24 Trillion which would more than double the entire debt the US cur…
In a very real sense, what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"? In places where "social distancing" minimums have been impossible, the places have closed. I'm in one of the most strict places in the entire United States, but I can still go to most every store I want, including hair salons. I'm only barred from places where there's a LOT of breathing (gym, church with singing),…
Destruction of the service industries? Educational handicaps on multiple generations of students?
My point is that it's cheap to wear a mask and socially distance yourself while otherwise carrying on with life. It's extremely expensive on society to force everyone to stay home as much as possible and avoid certain businesses. It's expensive because it pushes the country more rapidly into debt, it pushes millions into poverty, it drives up suicide rates, and dozens more second and third order effects we won't find out about until the coming years.
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At some point, you're experiencing runway problems. 9 women can't produce a baby in a month, after all. They can, however, collectively produce 9 babies, 9 months after the start date.
In an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.
Normal hospitals are already staffed at pretty close to the maximum rate of less qualified to more expert staff for their caseload, and the easy caseload that requires less expert share of time is pushed out of hospitals entirely by the crisis. Surging additional minimally trained staff doesn't help anything.
This is a real and serious problem and I wish people would take it more seriously. The actual solution is addressing the barriers to work created by Covid. I actively promoted the local Little Caesar's. At one point, they had so little business they were afraid they would go out of business, but they are unusually well-positioned to move to less risk of infection because they already had a pizza portal, it just wasn'…
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>The position of the capitalist class, built on successful class warfare first against the pre-capitalist aristocracy and then against the working classes within capitalism, proves this to be false. Name me a socialist/communist gov that did any better. Each implementation grew the class divides even more. So far China, I would say, is the most economically viable model due to their opening to international market pr…
Most socialist Scandinavian countries are doing better than the US by most measures of societal wellness (life expectancy, divorce rates, crime, etc).
Yes, Americans call the Scandinavians socialists, the same way dry rub BBQ pit masters call BBQ sauces the devil's abomination to food. It's either anachronistic hyperbole or just plain hyperbolic. Steps toward socialism sure, but we're not talking about comrade level stuff.
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>The position of the capitalist class, built on successful class warfare first against the pre-capitalist aristocracy and then against the working classes within capitalism, proves this to be false. Name me a socialist/communist gov that did any better. Each implementation grew the class divides even more. So far China, I would say, is the most economically viable model due to their opening to international market pr…
Most socialist Scandinavian countries are doing better than the US by most measures of societal wellness (life expectancy, divorce rates, crime, etc).
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I really don’t think many people are afraid to go into public settings. Maybe not into a crowd, sure, but a restaurant? The holdup there is from the government, not the public.
I think it's safe to say there is a large portion of the population that will continue not eating indoors until they are vaccinated, or the infection numbers in their area go down significantly. I can't find articles to back it up, but I have read from restaurant owners saying that even when they were allowed to expand their indoor capacity, they were never hitting that limit. With that said, this is going to vary by…
Schrödinger's virus: We need lockdowns to save everyone but even if we didn't have lockdowns nobody would go anyway but we still need to lockdowns.
I wonder how anyone at all expected this to turn out. So, businesses had to stop operating. GDP and income earned and spent, dropped. This by definition results in someone becoming poor - with or without bailout - the government does not have any of "its own" money - all money it can possibly distribute is taken from taxpayer's pockets. Call me cynical, but people working in the service industry were the safest ones…
> all money it can possibly distribute is taken from taxpayer's pockets. This is the insanely reductive view of government spending that allows the Republican party to float austerity measures in the worst economic times since the Depression. Taxes are not the only place that government money comes from. How would that even make sense? What do you think the Federal Reserve even does ? Why do you think we have a natio…
Or, it increases risk of default when everyone's savings will be wiped out - except most of the money the rich have are again, in stocks so these won't be impacted nearly as much...
Whatever way it goes, these are not free money. Call me a conservative but stuff just doesn't come for free.
I wonder why is this difficult to grasp - i mean OK, the virtual capital (e.g. startup valuations, or even stock market values) MAY come from nowhere, because they can just equally return to nowhere - these can be pumped to infinity. But we are speaking of consumption money for people living hand to mouth - whatever dollar is given to them, goes to very material consumption. Where this extra stuff will come from, if people don't work more for them to be created? It just doesn't appear out of nowhere if Fed prints some bucks.