New Coronavirus - COVID-19

[Xist]

What are the additional expenses right now? I have paid $5 each for milk and eggs. I am going through way more Lysol, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, and liquid soap.

What else?

My expenses do not seem much higher right now, but I am trying to hoard it because I do not know what is going to happen.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

Redpoint, the only vertical line that I see is the one under my cursor:

Right, so a friend posted on Facebook that since unemployment is now paying $600 a week, the government determined that people need at least that much to live...

Daily deaths:



Don't know what you're on about with the other stuff. Politicians don't think, they react.

Regarding minimum wages, they are among the biggest civil rights violations there is. Nobody can tell me how much or how little I can agree to work for. How is volunteering legal? That's less than the minimum wage.

Someone arrest Trump, he's working for $1 per year.

The whole concept is loved by non-thinkers.

As far as bailing out citizens during the shutdown, there's no other option. It comes at a cost to people like me who save for rainy days though (inflation). That's what inflation is; a tax paid by those who responsibly have saved.

[Xist]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Someone arrest Trump [context]

I agree!

Has anyone seen Cotton lately?

Have you posted that two consenting adults should be able to determine how much fiat they exchange for goods and services?

You see, the good people at HealthData.org are lazy [or busy\understaffed]. They are updating the graph and the site automatically wipes the old pink projection day by day, but it really should adjust the projection. It estimates that Arizona is halfway to the peak[!]. Right now we have about 10 deaths per day. Yes, it is highly unlikely that we will hit 47 tomorrow, 50 on the 17th, 54 on the 18th, etc.

I made my own version of the graph, but just to the peak, because this is a bunch of work:

I pulled out the predicted worst-case numbers, figured the percent change from day to day, and applied it to our actual numbers. This is three days out-of-date, so I adjusted the first three predicted points, but not the rest of the line.

Please note that the adjusted worst-case scenario is now lower than their predicted line.

We will see what they say in four days or whenever they update, but it would be great if we have significantly fewer deaths than they predicted.

[oil pan 4]

Seems like its definitely worth destroying the economy.
But on the flip side 70,000 Americans per year were being killed by garbage opiates smuggled in from china and almost no one cared.
An elderly purge is worth shutting down the company...

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

An elderly purge is worth shutting down the company...

Morality aside, don't you think there is a practical problem with this idea? If there are tons of sick and dying people, people will be scared, and the economy would not run at full speed anyways.

You could say "there's no reason to be scared, you only have a 0.3% chance of dying if we let everyone catch it", but to a lot of people that's scary.

Don't get me wrong, I think your view is more valid than a lot of people give it credit for. Large parts of the US have low population density and low mass transit usage. It's just that the fear and danger is very real for people in densely populated areas like me.

[redpoint5]

Those who say we're only going to have 60k deaths are wrong. This is going to continue for another year minimum. Those who say we're going to see a million deaths are also wrong. I'll throw 200k out as a number, but it will take a year to get there.

We're in for multiple waves of sheltering and shutdowns. Hopefully the shutdowns will be more targeted, such as senior homes and other at risk demographics rather than everyone.

It's possible we're in for multiple strains too. If immunity doesn't protect against the other strains, we might get further waves of shutdowns and a continuation of infection spread and deaths.

Anyone else notice 6k deaths on Monday? Looks like nobody wanted to pull the plug before Easter.

Finally, Scott Adams mentioned a better metric of the impact of this virus isn't deaths, but a change in life expectancy. Life expectancy is a proxy for overall health.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by Xist

ISIS formed when President Obama pulled out of Iraq.

Everybody claimed that Saddam controlled the terrorists. He did. Until we invaded they were officially a terrorist state. President Obama pulled out and ISIS filled the vacuum.

That's not how I understand it - ISIS began when GWB attacked Iraq, based on a lie, and created chaos.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Seems like its definitely worth destroying the economy.
But on the flip side 70,000 Americans per year were being killed by garbage opiates smuggled in from china and almost no one cared.
An elderly purge is worth shutting down the company...

If we did nothing and pretended that COVID-19 didn't matter - it would kill MILLIONS in the US alone.

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

We're in for multiple waves of sheltering and shutdowns. Hopefully the shutdowns will be more targeted, such as senior homes and other at risk demographics rather than everyone.

It's possible we're in for multiple strains too. If immunity doesn't protect against the other strains, we might get further waves of shutdowns and a continuation of infection spread and deaths.

. Life expectancy is a proxy for overall health.

Life expectancy has been in reverse several years, there has been an increase in recent years of deaths in the young with
the elderly death rates going down.

Next our country will likely start to go to business as usual if this continues too long sort of like how a corpse cart became an everyday sight during the Black Death.
Eventually the oxygen leaves the room and nobody cares, similar to the real man movement in Africa in opposition to aids prevention measures.
that is why we all need to hope this is more or less done for a while after June
or things will move into the macabre with a new normal

[Xist]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

That's not how I understand it - ISIS began when GWB attacked Iraq, based on Colin Powell's presentation, and created chaos.

Fixed.

I have shared this before, but nobody lets facts get in the way of their narrative.

The war was pushed by the Bush administration, but it was authorized by both Houses of Congress, with a majority of Democrats (29 to 21) joining Republicans in the Senate (49 to 1). The authorizations of October 2002 sailed through, with especially enthusiastic rhetoric from Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Harry Reid, and Jay Rockefeller, who all had the same access to U.S. and foreign intelligence that the Bush administration did.

The war was not just about WMD. Congress was on record as supporting 23 writs for the removal of Saddam Hussein by force, and at least 20 of them had little if anything to do with WMD. They included Iraq’s noncompliance with the 1991 ceasefire agreement; its “brutal repression of its civilian population,” which included genocide of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs; its 1993 assassination attempt on former President George H. W. Bush; its firing on coalition aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones; its “continu[ing] to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations,” including one of the architects of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; its bounties to families of suicide bombers; its aggression against its neighbors — and on and on.

What immediately prompted the invasion plans of 2003 was not just the nation-building hopes of neoconservatives, but a number of recent developments in a post-9/11 climate. The sanctions were breaking down. The oil-for-food embargo was collapsing, and in any case was riddled with fraud and insider deals. Sweetheart Iraqi oil concessions with Russia and France had made it nearly impossible for the U.N. to be sympathetic to American efforts to ratchet up the pressure on the Hussein regime.

Our allies had tired of over a decade of no-fly zones, and the burden had shifted almost entirely to the Americans. After 9/11, the focus had turned to rogue nations that had used their oil wealth to subsidize terrorism, war, and genocide. Saddam’s body counts easily trumped those of the Assad regime and of the Qaddafi dictatorship. The former autocracy was later threatened with red lines and ordered to abdicate by Barack Obama; the latter was removed by force without either U.N. sanction or congressional approval. Both Syria and Libya are now wastelands and incubators of terrorism.

Stocks of WMD even today continue to turn up both in Iraq and in Syria; some may have fallen into the hands of ISIS, suggesting that the full story of Saddam’s chemical and biological arsenals still has never been fully told. Just recently President Obama was forced to deny that chlorine gas — which is being used by Syria today, and which proved so deadly in the World War I battles of Ypres and Caporetto — is a weapon of mass destruction.

We had also recently defeated the Taliban and easily beat Saddam the first time.

We thought it would be easy.

As I mentioned, people claim that Saddam controlled the terrorists. He did, they worked for him. He was a vile dictator that did despicable things to his enemies and even his own people.

Were we right to invade?

I don't know.

Was it worth it?

I don't know that, either.

However, I don't believe anyone that says they always opposed the invasion of Iraq. Politicians claim they warned everyone about the impending housing crisis, but I have not found any support for their claims, except this guy.