BenedictGomez
Well-known member
You wont have to read his stuff much longer given he doesn't wish to live in our society anymore. Que lastima.
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You wont have to read his stuff much longer given he doesn't wish to live in our society anymore. Que lastima.
My desire to see the economy reopen as rapidly as possible is 100% motivated by caring for people and workers. Or I should more accurately state, former workers.
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As I said in another thread, Snowbird is not reopening for skiing this season. Too much pent up demand to make it safe and manageable.
Or maybe deep down you're secretly a TRUMP SUPPORTER! In all seriousness, people are on edge and gregnye seems like he's had his brain broken by the hysterics he's likely consumed over the last few months on TV/online. The overwhelming majority of us aren't sociopaths and want to see people around us recover. Giving as much credit as possible, it takes someone with some serious fogginess in judgement to not understand that.
I'd trade a president I don't care for from 2021-2025 over the ramifications of a year+ long shutdown any day of the week. It would be silly not to make that trade because a shutdown that long could easily take a decade to recover from and lead to a ton of socioeconomic unrest along the way. Seriously - good luck having any budget leftover to expand social services under that scenario.
My holy crap moment came April 1st. We support a local charity called End 68 Hours of Hunger. 68 hours represents the amount of time from when a kid leaves school on Friday until they get back on Monday. The charity provides enough food for a qualifying student to have nourishment met through the weekend. It's $10 a child. We pick up the weekly tab a couple of times a year. We live in a small town. Last time we did this was Christmas and there were 21 kids in the program. When things looked bad early March, I reached out to the program director and there was an increase to 28 kids. On April 1st I checked again and they were up to 77 kids! Only now they have to double up and feed them the whole week.
I haven't asked since. I'm afraid to even know. I just send a check at end of month for what I feel I can afford.
We are not what one would consider a low income town. I can't imagine how bad things are in say Chelsea, Mass.
There's just not enough money in charity and government to sustain these job losses. We have to find a way to get people back working safely and quickly. This isn't about haircuts, elections, the stock market or ski areas opening. It's about life or death quite literally.
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I haven't asked since. I'm afraid to even know. I just send a check at end of month for what I feel I can afford.
We are not what one would consider a low income town. I can't imagine how bad things are in say Chelsea, Mass.
There's just not enough money in charity and government to sustain these job losses. We have to find a way to get people back working safely and quickly. This isn't about haircuts, elections, the stock market or ski areas opening. It's about life or death quite literally.
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Good on you! As someone who grew up just south of where you are, it's great to hear this is a cause you're behind.
We're simply not set up to live like this, and when I say "we" I don't mean people just under our economic system. I mean human beings. Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan and gave one of his kinda textbook innocuous and poignant takes on the pandemic when he said something like "If we don't work, there's no stuff". Our society can't borrow to moth ball our economy forever, China can't stay shuttered indefinitely. This is a constraint we have to acknowledge as sensible human beings.
When we don't open schools, some kids don't get fed. Perhaps you've seen the reports of certain suppliers to restaurants being forced to dump dairy and other products that they have nowhere to ship their produce. It's terrible. Apparently, the US hasn't been exporting food abroad like we used to, which means people in the developing world are likely to starve.
While I'm vehemently against sorting people by skin color, those who do like to keep score of such things should understand that the people who are likely to suffer most by a prolonged shutdown are those with more pigmentation than me both in the US and abroad.
BenedictGomez
Well-known member
THIS
Studies show many people only consume news from a source(s) which confirms their beliefs, and if you hold those relevant beliefs, the media as I noted prior is literally, not figuratively, telling people that states which are opening up are behaving "dangerously" & "irresponsibly" by doing so, and "many will die" because of it.
When I noted earlier today that, "everyone in Georgia should be dead by now to hear NBC news or CNN tell it", I was obviously being exaggerative, but the point is real. If I was a GA resident with low-education or perhaps any GA resident who only gets my news from say NBC or HuffPo, etc... I imagine I might be scared to death right now. So in a way, I kind of get how "hysterical" as you say, some of these people are. Tune into CNN tonight and watch how they cover COVID19. After 20 minutes you'll be certain you need to finish off your bucket list this week. It's journalistic malpractice, and it's not based on science.
It's probably easier when you grow up in a right-of-center household to do this (pop culture and school gives you a totally different take than your parents do), but if one isn't consuming both slants on the news, they're not adequately informed. Plain and simple.
I'm open minded enough to hear out a lot of takes and really try to avoid ad hominem, but thinking one can get a good picture of the world with all lefty or all righty news is myopic and moronic. Edit: I'm not suggesting anyone in particular actually thinks that way.
slatham
Well-known member
You have to create a blend, but it's time consuming. CNN, NBC, NYT, WSJ, FOX, BB. It really is amazing how biased some of these networks are, and certainly specific people. Too much opinion wrapped in the cover of "news". Sad.
BenedictGomez
Well-known member
I've always suspected that, but I dont know if it's ever been sociologically tested to know if it's true or not. It seems logical though. If you grow up right-of-center your whole life the news is almost always challenging your opinion or presented in a view you disagree with. If you're left-of-center, your whole life news is almost always presented to you in a form you're predisposed to agree with, so I imagine it would be jarring in the rare cases when the news doesn't reinforce your belief.
Yeah that's my guess although it's totally unscientific.
I still remember my mom explaining to me that Hollywood is rife with bloviating hypocrites when I was about 10. Guess she was about 20 years ahead of the Ricky Gervais curve.
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VTKilarney
Well-known member
I wasn't suggesting that a hospital closure was devoid of any negative economic consequences. My point was that a hospital closure is generally a symptom of a town in economic decline, not the cause.
VTKilarney
Well-known member
The best evidence of this is Belarus. Citizens of Belarus have kept going to hockey games and parades. Not only have they failed to lock down, they have thumbed their nose at the very concept of a lockdown.
And... they have a grand total of 151 deaths out of a population of 9.5 million. Even if the number of deaths is underreported by a factor of ten, it is still shockingly low.
Rowsdower
Member
Belarus is a dictatorship with very, very poor transparency and basically no press freedom. Not to mention they have a very weak health infrastructure to begin with. It's one of the poorest nations in Europe. And nobody cares about Belarus. It's not as though a spotlight is on them to be truthful about this stuff.
VTKilarney
Well-known member
I have been watching Youtube videos from a British Youtuber who is traveling around Belarus. Anecdotally, the situation in Belarus seems to be exactly what you would expect. Healthy people are living their lives and going to work while less healthy people are staying home. So, yes, their numbers may be off. But the dictatorship that you refer to is giving their citizens a whole lot more freedom than our democracy is giving us.
The only actual evidence I could find that they are faking their numbers is a report from a Russian film crew. They filmed several fresh graves and claimed that the death toll is worse than the government is reporting. I could only count six fresh looking grave. The town has a population of 15,000. "Fresh" could mean a couple of weeks or a couple of days. It was hard to tell from the video. It could have been the normal amount of graves you would expect to see during regular times. Or perhaps it wasn't. It is also possible that some burials were springtime burials that involved deaths over the winter.
I am not saying that Belarus is being honest. I am just saying that I can't find much evidence that they aren't being honest. But, as I said, even if they are off by a factor of ten, the death toll is still shockingly low for as open as they are.
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Rowsdower
Member
Like I said, nobody cares about Belarus. If they're lying its not like anyone has an interest in shining a light on them. They're not China. And I watch Bald and Bankrupt too, but just because healthy people are walking around outside doesn't really tell us anything. He was made to quarantine too for what its worth.
Point is, its a pretty unreliable metric to rely on the Belarusian govt when you've got a lot of other data to look over from better sources.
VTKilarney
Well-known member
Belarus is the one nation in the western world that has decided not to lock down in any way whatsoever. Everyone should care about Belarus right now. An epidemiologist who is NOT watching Belarus is utterly incompetent.
Rowsdower
Member
Again, that only really works if you believe the numbers they give you.
Plus I think there's other instances of places without much in the way of health policy set up against this. There are developing countries don't have the infrastructure, or the interest in doing anything about it so its not a unique situation. But again, its hard to get reliable data from those places.
Former Sunday Rivah Rat
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Japan has not had a strict lockdown, restaurants are open. They all wear masks.
Japan has kept their deaths low: 678 for such a dense nation. 5 Deaths per million population vs 262 per million for the USA with a much more strict lockdown and social distancing policy.
Masks are proven to work:
Quote from a Surgeon friend:
"I’m a surgeon. For over 100 years, we surgeons have been wearing a mask while operating on patients, - - - with our mouth, nose and face just 18-inches from the large open wound in your body. And the mask has been so effective at keeping you from being infected by us, that the practice has NEVER been changed – in over 100 years! There is NO NEED for people to be six-feet apart. "
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-19/japan-gambles-on-lockdown-lite-to-fight-coronavirus/12153924
Rowsdower
Member
I mean, your surgeon also doesn't operate on you while he's sick.
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