Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Doomblade187]

The thing is, McTraveller, governments have the power to pause rent, stop evictions, provide paid leave, and generally make the economy grinding to a halt not end the economy. Problem is, everyone over here is resistant to doing so... Why? What is so bad about ensuring we come out of this with an intact economy and a successful quarantine. Can't we have both?

[Bralbaard]

What sickens me to the core is that worldwide, hospitals and medical institutes report a staggering increase in hacking and ransomware attacks.
People who shut down hospital systems and asking ransom to restore functionality in these times should be put away for life.

Well if it is any comfort, there are also reports (at least in the Netherlands) that crime levels have dropped drastically over the last week. (criminals are apparently following goverment advice to stay at home) and that police has picked up chatter in the dark web that criminals are even telling each other not to interfere with hospitals. But you have good and bad criminals, I guess  .

The most fun statisic was that the reported numbers of pickpocketing had dropped to an insignificant number. Guess their job has become difficult now that people have to keep a distance of 1.5 meters.

[sluissa]

Trump sees China already getting over the quarantine hump.
Now wants Murrica to stop it’s patchwork suggested quarantine measures as soon as possible.

China's numbers are still suspect.

South Korea on the other hand... I'd be more likely believe them. They caught it early, they tested heavily, and they did everything they could to contain it while the numbers were still containable.

All things the US has failed to do.

You can look at numbers like South Korea, or even China and say "That's what we're going to follow." But that's unreasonable to expect after you let it go uncontrolled for so long. And we're still letting people move around far too much domestically, even if we've limited international travel.

On second thought, maybe that's what they're looking at. They realized they've already failed. They realized it's going to be bad no matter what, so might as well go back to the "let it burn itself out quick" strategy and limit the economic damage.

Would not be surprised at all, at this point. I'm with ChairmanPoo at this point.

Western democracies have lost a lot of credibility with me after this. Lots of censorship, media manipulation, and govermenrs covering their own bungling. And healthcare workers being sent to the frontline of the disease without personal protection equipment.
I keep thinking about Chernobyl and the liquidators. And how it has always been portrayed. Lots of moral superiority (from western Europe) But in the moment of truth, when faced with a real crisis? Our goverments are not showing themselves following the soviets' footsteps.

It's like when in a movie you lose suspension of disbelief. It's very very hard to get it back. I doubt I'll look at things the same way.  Turns out that I was more right when I was a teenager than I was three mlnths ago, about all this shit

[andrea]

The thing is, McTraveller, governments have the power to pause rent, stop evictions, provide paid leave, and generally make the economy grinding to a halt not end the economy. Problem is, everyone over here is resistant to doing so... Why? What is so bad about ensuring we come out of this with an intact economy and a successful quarantine. Can't we have both?

Which makes me glad to be in Italy currently, since the government is doing many such things. I don't think it is pausing rent at this time( would be a mess to compensate all landlords), but it is pausing mortgages and allowing every company who wants or has to to send employees on leave paid by the state. And that includes a compensation , if small, to self employed as well. The amount is limited due to crippling debt and already crippled before virus economy, but it will probably help a lot both companies (don't have to keep payng employeed) and workers ( who aren't fired)

[Teneb]

I mean, it's not like the US is alone in that regard.

Remember when I wondered what was going on in Brazil? It looks like Bolsonaro is calling for an end to mass isolation, school closings, and blamed the media for needlessly inciting reckless panic...

WAIT HE'S CALLING FOR AN END TO MASS ISOLATION AND SCHOOL CLOSINGS NOW?

Shit, is he trying to out-Trump Trump? Nobody tell Trump, we don't need a race to this bottom right now!

Yeah, Pocketnaro is not being popular right now. Everyone's turning against him except for his die-hard cattle.

It's real weird to be in a state ruled by a fascist governor who... is actually handling this admirably well. Shit, even Rio's crazed pastor mayor is.

Impeachment talk is going on, and to be honest I hope it does go through. Same for his children, who are also politicians who rode in on his then-popularity.

[McTraveller]

Right - I just don't trust our government to put in place an effective, sustainable emergency plan. I mean the thing in the papers this morning is they are going to offer loans to companies to help them pay employees and rents.  Why not grants?  There's not going to be anything to pay these off with... why require repayment?  Some of the House proposals are for cancelling student debt - WTF will that do if you still can't pay your mortgage or rent?

And I'm grumbling, but I have enough cash for 5 months of "normal" expenses, and I can probably stretch it farther if I have to.  In a worse pinch I'm sure my wife could start working again today if she wanted (she's an RN but has not been working since our kids were born and aren't both in full-time school) because of the current situation.

Also, I don't think comparing US to South Korea is fair; SK is the size of Indiana and has only 2 international airports.  We have way more exposure surface to deal with; 5 times the population but somewhere between 10 and 100 times the exposure surface if you just look at points of entry and border crossings; it just doesn't have the same scaling factor.

Of course hindsight is 20/20; we could have tried to have way more spare bed capacity, way more stockpiles of ventilators, way more willingness to just start testing and lock people up (quarantine is still imprisonment, even if it's not for a crime).

[Frumple]

It's not just Trump - nobody wants the draconian quarantines.  I mean I'm already down to 50% my normal pay, and if things don't change soon - like in 4 weeks - I'll likely lose my job entirely.

World leaders have a tough job - they have to weigh things like "do I really destroy my economy for all 300 million of my country to save the lives of 2 or 4 or 10 million? Or do I just eat those deaths - as horrible as it sounds - so that the remaining hundreds of millions have a more or less normal life?"  And that's even if you have a leader that doesn't present as a pompous child.

Honey, it's literally goddamn impossible to have more or less a normal life when you're dealing with additional casualty counts in the millions, nevermind tens of them. There is no normal if the world's looking down the barrel of experiencing a fucking world war's worth of bodies to deal with. The economy's fucked regardless, either by the lockdown or the secondary effects of dealing with thousands and thousands of new corpses and some multiple of that of people too sick to work, it's just a matter of how many people die in the process.

[mko]

The thing is, McTraveller, governments have the power to pause rent, stop evictions, provide paid leave, and generally make the economy grinding to a halt not end the economy. Problem is, everyone over here is resistant to doing so... Why? What is so bad about ensuring we come out of this with an intact economy and a successful quarantine. Can't we have both?

With work and factories stopped, economy is suffering. Now the question is who will pay for it.

"intact economy" is a mirage, the best we can do is "not collapsed economy".

Some things are obvious and not introducing them is insanity (paid sick leave), some have limited problematic effects but likely should be done (stop evictions for nonpayment), some would have negative delayed effects and are likely bad idea (give pile of cash to every citizen), some are idiotic (bailout foreign companies that should not exist in the first place and are completely unnecessary - like cruise ships).

Western democracies have lost a lot of credibility with me after this. Lots of censorship, media manipulation, and govermenrs covering their own bungling.

Censorship? Where? Manipulations and hiding bungling is typical in any government, democracies have plenty of this but still better than other systems.

[ChairmanPoo]

Oh here it happens in the news all the time for the last two weeks. It's disgraceful

[coalboat]

Oh here it happens in the news all the time for the last two weeks. It's disgraceful

Xi/Putin/Kim:" Nobody knows more about censorship than I do..."

[ChairmanPoo]

They're probably better at it. Eg: not cutting people off on tv after saying one phrase diverging from the official stortboard

[Max™]

Economies recover, it's really hard to permakill one, but it's a lot harder to start an economy back up when you're trying to figure out what to do with an actual mountain of corpses and a populace just slightly bothered by suggestions like "...I dunno... burn 'em?"

I mean, hey, once we're sure the stock market has bottomed out, funerary services, crematoriums, coffin manufacturers, whichever vulturous branch of the insurance industry feeds off of collapsed life insurance companies, ptsd therapy programs, all seem like they might be horrifyingly hot stocks to catch on the rebound.

[wierd]

Hey Poo--- Maybe you can get the files I need (or want..)

My little nursing home is out in the boonies, and not terribly rich. We have absolutely no full-automated respirator of any kind in our kit, and would be unlikely to get one.  We DO have a crash bag with a manual bag respirator.

I also have a (crappy) 3D FDM printer, and a mostly new spool of ABS.

I would like to print out a Leitat 1, but cannot find the STL files anywhere. I understand that it was developed, tested, and approved in Spain. If you can get your grubby little doctor claws on the data for me, I would be appreciative.  It occurs to me that the time to invest in printing is BEFORE we end up with it in the facility, not after.

For those wondering:
https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/leitat-presents-first-medically-validated-industrialized-3d-printed-ventilator/

Its basically a simplified bag squeezer. 

While not approved for use in the US, I would rather face angry bureaucrats, and not have dead residents.

[Dostoevsky]

Right - I just don't trust our government to put in place an effective, sustainable emergency plan. I mean the thing in the papers this morning is they are going to offer loans to companies to help them pay employees and rents.  Why not grants?  There's not going to be anything to pay these off with... why require repayment?  Some of the House proposals are for cancelling student debt - WTF will that do if you still can't pay your mortgage or rent?

It's an awkward program they've set up, likely so that it will fit better into existing administrative entities (i.e. so they don't have to bootstrap up a new group of people to handle it). They're technically loans under the Small Business Administration because that's a thing SBA does, but as long as the company doesn't do bad things with the money (defined, of course) the loan auto-forgives after a period of time.

So kind of a loan, kind of a grant. This also lets politicians use the word they prefer - some get to call it a loan because bailouts are bad, some get to call it a grant because loans are callous.

[Max™]

Big kudos to the 3d printing community for jumping on this shit with a geeky and noble zeal to help save lives and fuck any motherfuckers trying to squeeze out a profit during a crisis like this.

Smaller kudos to Mercedes for having a commercial with a fortune teller or some shit and she says "gesundheit" to the guy and dude then tucks his nose in his elbow and sneezes. Small touch but nice to see.

As for student debt: ask literally anyone with a significant amount of said debt what they would do immediately with the money that would have gone towards paying it down, I'm pretty sure all of the answers end up translating to "pump it straight into the economy" via mortgages, cars, healthcare, relocating/moving from rent to ownership of homes, and many other such methods.