I was mostly joking but I don’t necessarily think we have or will prove anything until we see how supply chains hold up and how the economy holds up. And I don’t think supply chain and other essential workers are really going to be down with continuing on much the same while we all make some massive positive changes. (But honestly not sure what differences you’re talking about for sure.)
A few differences I would love to see are more reliance on local food production, more domestic manufacturing, universal health care, stronger social safety net, and a willingness to pay more for products so that everyone that wants to work can make a living wage. I don’t have much confidence any of this will really change though.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, especially the absolute bullshit about bailing out corporations. (Which is not capitalism.) Our system was never perfect, but it used to be a lot better before it got completely corrupted.
But I think worlwide most every system is currently abandoned. I guess if that means every system sucks, well I can’t say I disagree with that either.
Someone I know operates a cosmetics salon in Austria that was shut down as a non-essential business. She has been informed that she might be allowed to reopen at the end of May which seems fine I guess if the number of active cases keeps trending down.
I’d bet a decent amount of money that blue states relax before a vaccine or miracle treatment is found, resulting in another wave. There’s still very few people out there, including on this board, discussing the reality of how long this will last.
If you’re talking about how we’re doing specifically in regards to dealing with this virus, well at least right now we’re pretty much comparable and not really doing demonstrably worse than a lot of countries in the world. And that is with the terrible timing of having a world class moron and lunatic in charge who just spent 3 years ridding most of the administration of anyone with a basic level of competence. This is literally the nut worst time this could have happened for the US at any point in my lifetime.
WWE was labeled as an essential business by the state of Florida.
WWEs original horrible plan was to pre tape shows over a couple of weeks then send everyone home. Now that has changed though and people will fly into Orlando, for each of the three shows, every week to perform them live.
This was brought up the other day but constantly bailing out farmers has greatly contributed to a broken system where their first response is always to just destroy food.
Imagine if they depended on selling their product to make money and how that would change their behavior.
I can’t read the article because of a pay wall, but I’d caution against drawing too many conclusions here. For one thing, all farmers don’t get bailed out constantly. Usually it’s the big commodity crop farmers that get most subsidies. “Specialty crop” farmers, which include almost healthy fruits and vegetables, don’t see nearly as much money and take on more risk (from what I’ve seen) than big grain/cereal farms.
One issue with fruits and vegetables is that you have a very short window to harvest and get the product to market before it goes bad. So if there is some unexpected problem with the labor that harvests the food, you probably aren’t going to be able to harvest it, and have to turn it under. One other situation (which I suspect is the issue for some of the Florida farms) is that if there is no market for the food, or no one with the ability to pay at least, then it will be much mire expensive to harvest the food than to turn it under. It sucks, and most farmers I would bet, would rather the food go to feed people, but their financial situation may not allow them to take that big a hit. When I was a kid I saw my dad and other local potato growers have to do that on occasion. He was never happy about it.
