411–420 of 711 posts
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Can you keep the comments like this on Reddit and away from HN, please? For the non-UK users reading this: almost all of the bullet pointed statements are either incorrect or exaggerated.
[citation needed]
It's one of the few industries she didn't privatise.
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They could, they just don't want to pay for it. The government has no interest in being known for easily handling a huge spike of traffic during a crisis. They can just take the lower road and get by with less and saying 'try again later'. There's no repercussions here because it's the government. Hence mainframe maintainers should really move to charging $1 million/year in a decade or two.
They aren't choosing to have crap infrastructure, their infrastructure is intentionally defunded as part of a political campaign to engender distrust in government functions and increase privatization. Government is incompetent because if it is, its easy to justify selling off the country to the incredibly wealthy so they can get wealthier.
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> after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now Not so. Pandemics travelled around the world before globalization. The black death, smallpox in the americas, syphllis. This just increases the speed.
Speed is, however, an important factor in the severity of the impact.
Under a less intertwined system, this likely would have spread heavily within each area, and that area would have little info form outside on what to do. Every place a potential Wuhan.
Of course not. Its an artificial unemployment spike (provoked by very real, fundamental forces in the world i.e. covid-19).
It will be VERY interesting to watch how state governments react to this spike. The federal government has monopoly money but state governments are VERY MUCH concerned with debt levels.
We'll see how long these isolation orders last. States will have to chose between unemployment, pensions, welfare programs, transit operations, etc. I wonder who gets the axe first. You could very easily see states go bankrupt and whole classes of the social safety net depleted for a generation.
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In Australia, they closed all the 'non-essential' industries. Which turns out to be about 30% of the workforce. I keep thinking that big shift will be when people come out of this they won't allow themselves to be 'non-essential' ever again. They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net.
> They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net. This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies after experiencing suffering without them wouldn’t be a bad thing. Sometimes things must get worse for them to get better.
I suspect that they will both have failures and successes that will largely be localized and that we'll find out that those features that made a healthcare system robust don't correlate that much with being a public system or a market system. It will probably correlate more strongly with culture.
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They could, they just don't want to pay for it. The government has no interest in being known for easily handling a huge spike of traffic during a crisis. They can just take the lower road and get by with less and saying 'try again later'. There's no repercussions here because it's the government. Hence mainframe maintainers should really move to charging $1 million/year in a decade or two.
So, legitimately, how to we make it so the government does have repercussions? I see a lot of people making jokes about guillotines and nooses, but is there no better way?
Once you have more people who can understand that there are scientific and moral issues with manifest destiny, and religion isn't going to solve global warming, there will be some shifts in the public discourse and public policies.
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> I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. Sure, just like the Depression did. And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated until the next similar event.
After the depression the US emerged as the global hegemon because of major shifts in power that happened as a part of WWII. The US was uniquely adapted to grow to be the global super power at the same time that European nations were taking a huge hit from the war. I suspect this will ultimately lead to China as the new hegemon. We're seeing key advantages to the Chinese state that the US cannot adapt to. Decades of p…
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> They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net. This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies after experiencing suffering without them wouldn’t be a bad thing. Sometimes things must get worse for them to get better.
> wouldn’t be a bad thing. Well, unless we libertarians were right all along and these progressive policies are unmaintainable over a longer period of time. At this point, I think we're about to find out one way or another.
That's a really vague statement.
And this is just the start. While I think the US response to Corona was slower than the response in my country I feel the US is the only country that's seriously discussing economic repercussions and debating the medical experts. In EU (at least in my country) it's doctors running things and we are in "stop the pandemic at all cost". Everyone is in panic due to Italy situation. But doctors are only trained to see the…
I think it's a fair discussion to take, but how are you going to run an economy with the health service in permanent overload? That is what would happen if you just let the thing pass. Those charts of "squashing the sombrero" have the number of beds at a very low place compared to the expected hump of cases. On some of them you can barely even see the gap between the red line and the zero line, due to the scale of th…
You start rapidly building additional capacity to handle the load.