I’ve been having a long discussion with a nonbeliever over on Quora. He’s convinced the virus is real but the deaths are made up propaganda, and as such the government shut downs are unnecessary. It’s a challenge to convince people like that of reality, when they refute all sources of data. Part of what leads to such denials is the fact that the data is in fact wrong. But it is...
The REM song popped up on my shuffle playlist. Wait long enough and all song lyrics become relevant. None more than this one in these times. Polyphonic thought so too, and gave us the history: The REM video needs a refresh: Bob Dylan’s doesn’t (it’s mentioned in the Polyphonic backgrounder): Although… there was once something of a refresh, and I don’t know a better...
As the U.S. and Europe hit the peak of the Coronavirus Pandemic infections and deaths, these countries have begun the debate on unlocking the lockdowns and quarantines. Let’s look at this graphically to estimate whether this discussions are premature or not. Here’s today’s view of infections, courtesy of The Financial Times and John Burn-Murdoch (with the US curve highlighted by...
The coronavirus pandemic is laying bare quite a lot of the normally hidden features of our modern capitalism system. And the government reactions to the economic shutdown is demonstrating that we don’t actually live in an capitalistic system, but something of a hybrid with the incentives and rewards of capitalism (when times are good) but the downside cost of socialism (when the economy...
Over 100,000 people have (so far) been killed by Covid-19. More than the 119,686 listed on the John’s Hopkins website tonight. Those are just the dead who passed away in the hospital, who were already tested for Covid-19 before they passed away. As the weeks of deaths roll by, what is becoming clearly evident is that a lot of people are dying at home, dying in the ambulance on the way to...
APRIL 2020 – As I write this, we are a few days from the projected peak day of death from the pandemic here in the United States. With that “light at the end the tunnel” economists are starting to predict what comes next for the economy. McKinstry this week published a prediction. TL;DR: U.S. GDP drops by 8%-13% in 2020. Personally I don’t understand how 15%+ unemployment...
The flood of ignorance coming from government leaders, the media, and social media is maddening. The world has suffered from and survived global pandemics before. The last one like 2020’s was just 102 years ago, in 1918. That pandemic’s infection rate was “flattened” in some cities, with social distancing and lockdowns just as we’re doing now. So while it seems that...
You may have seen this map of social distancing, with the commentary on how certain parts of the U.S. are not “getting with the program” about staying at home. Reuters Most of the commentary on why is about politics, despite the other fundamental, underlying issue of income inequality. Reuters When the same data is sorted by income, unsurprisingly the people with the lower incomes are...
As the Tibetans say, “Tomorrow will be worse.” March 3rd there were less than 100 known cases of Covid-19 outside of China, and the only lockdown was a few tens of millions of people in Hubei Province. April 3rd, over a million known cases, over 55,000 dead, and over 4 billion people locked down. We knew a pandemic was eventually coming, but the speed of this particular pandemic has...
