Print

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

[Magistrum]

I'll forever be mad that he didn't take the perfectly good opportunity to kick the bucket there.

Now all we have is this photo:

Spoiler: At least it's a nice meme template... (click to show/hide)

[Zangi]

No worries citizens, there is always round two and if ‘god wills it’, round three to infinity.

[Dostoevsky]

I guess maybe if there was one thing I would like to see from governments it is this: instead of printing dollars, simply freeze all accounts. No bills due, no payments required. You don't get paid, but you also have no bills.  Start from that premise, then figure out how to still provide health care, emergency services, agriculture and shipping so we can still have clean water, electricity, food, and health care without having to have people get paychecks.

There's got to be a way to make that work....

Wouldn't that require kinda-sorta nationalizing all sorts of industries and services, at least temporarily? Not that I'm necessarily against that as an emergency measure, I just think it'd be really darn difficult to do effectively. Especially in the current culture and government (and I mean that broader than just this presidential term).

The funny money approach is terribly inefficient and potentially has long term side effects, but in an 'all this poo just hit the fan' situation is probably more readily deployable and acceptable to folks. Of course, we ended up screwing this up in all sorts of ways too.

[Reelya]

You then have to find people willing to do all that gruntwork without getting paid, while the rest of the population is effectively confined to house detention since everything except those services is closed down due to nobody being able to do a transaction. Sure, it'd be do-able, but only at gunpoint. If you just "freeze bank accounts", people will set up alternate ways of doing financial transactions, so it's not enforceable.

The real problem is that just providing those skeleton services wouldn't usually require a huge number of people, because of increases in productivity, but most of the things people actually do are value-adding that's not that bare-bones minimum needed to survive. If there were no paychecks or bills or ways to provide a service and be paid for your effort, everyone would drop to putting in the literal minimum of effort, and overall the economy would collapse down to a rump of just surviving. For a start, all creative endeavors that require a lot of people such as TV shows would stop production unless the government came in and commandeered them and commanded them to keep making the shows. I'd normally say they'd switch to a taxation based model to pay for the shows to be made, but in this case that wouldn't be viable because they couldn't even pay the people who work for the government any more. So, they'd have to basically conscript people to work in TV production and you'd get standard rations while you did so, not remunerated based on how many hours you actually did your job. You could still get Youtube, however since there won't be an advertisements or other economic support for youtube channels, even that would collapse back to levels of quality circa 2008.

And then you'd be in the situation of the government decided which shows are needed and which shows are not, the same way they're deciding everyone only gets raw apples and bags of flour. because making and providing apple pies is a waste of the scant resources.

[Starver]

My first thoughts on reading that modest proposal was that almost certainly those who say affordable healthcare is Stalinist-Marxism probably would consider that as proof that their whole freakin' world was moving far, far far to the Leeeeeefffffffftttt...

Can't say I'd disagree with that. A veritable Force Majure by an expanding government power-grab. Anybody who considers me left-wing[1] might be surprised by me shying away from a game of Musical Chairs where, when the music stops, the pianist stands up and himself directs things so everyone gets at least one bumcheek on every seat still remaining.

If this is the solution, the problem is indeed dire. I'm a safety-net supporter, I suppose, rather than a seine-net one.

[1] Having known people who are themselves somewhat to the right of Ghenghiz Kahn, that's a given.

[martinuzz]

For example Bolsonaro got infected, but didn't die, so to his supporters, this justifies Bolsonaro's claim that Coronavirus isn't a problem. Now, consider if he had died, they could just have concocted conspiracy theories that he had been murdered somehow, poisoned by the 5th column "doctors" as part of their 'Scamdemic' directed against Trump and Bolsonaro.

Solution: murder Bolsonaro, make a facebook post that claims he was killed by corona, make sure that facebook post has more likes than those made by Bolsonaro groupies, because a facebook post with the most likes is the TRUTH

EDIT: in other news, worrisome:  German doctors discovered that 1/3d of recovered corona patients have scar tissue on their heart muscle.What's more worrisome, a large portion of those were relatively young (age 45-53), didn't even get severe respiratory problems and weren't even admitted to hospital.  So, apparently, even if you did get corona but didn't get really sick from it, you can still be a heart patient for the rest of your life.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/nieuw-onderzoek-bewijst-herstelde-coronapatienten-hebben-vaak-littekens-op-hun-hart~b62d1c45/

[McTraveller]

How do they know that scar tissue wasn't there before Coronavirus?  Is it possible to get an age of the scar tissue?

I mean I know I don't have an existing heart scan to know if I have scar tissue from some random cause, that might just be found now because people are looking at everything with high-powered microscopes.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If so, they'd find a matching frequency of scar tissue in the control group. Presumably they did not.

[Eschar]

I mean, hopefully they used a control group, but I didn't see any mention of one in the article...

[Greiger]

Just had an epiphany while in the bathroom.

What if the coronavirus is just an email spambot rigged into controlling a printer that is using paper from the Death Note?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Covid discussion.

[Iduno]

[Reelya]

I mean, hopefully they used a control group, but I didn't see any mention of one in the article...

You don't need a control group in a situation like this, you just compare it to known population data.

I mean ... these are men 45-53 who have coronavirus. It's not hard to get data about men 45-53 who don't have coronavirus, just look at literally any data on heart disease prevalence published before a few months ago and you have untainted data that can't possibly be conflated with people who have coronavirus.

After all, any control group you form to test the hypothesis would merely be men of that age who don't have coronavirus, so you may as well just look up those numbers from 2019 or earlier rather than bothering to make a group.

[Egan_BW]

Ah, but what if the universal constants of physics have changed slightly since last year and made heart disease more likely? Should use current data just to be safe!

[Reelya]

Actually I thought about why asking for a control group isn't actually relevant in this situation at all.

Say you select a "control group" of people who didn't get the virus and find they have less scarring. Well, this could mean that the coronavirus causes the scarring, or the scarring causes you to be more likely catch the virus, or a third factor causes both. It doesn't actually answer the question. The problem here is that you haven't isolated the variables after all so the control group is meaningless.

[Egan_BW]

Well, clearly what needs to be done is take people who we know have healthy hearts, then intentionally infect them with plague and give them a scan after!