Nah, just the specific part where tax revenues have been whittled away to maximise the wealth of a tiny fraction and public expenditures captured by the influence that wealth commands to further maximise the wealth of that tiny fraction.
all efforts to route around the manifestly broken system are proof that the system doesn’t have enough power.
This part’s essentially correct, though I had a good chuckle at the libertarian framing of ‘not enough power’.
Helps explain all of those stories about unexplained and excessively high death numbers that aren’t being attributed to COVID.
There are lots of deaths being undercounted. We are currently only counting deaths at hospitals and even those are being systemically undercounted. The mortality rate might be lower but we won’t really know if it is or not until we have reliable data.
Uh, yeah , everyone knows that. The bad guy billionaires pay scientists to research novel ideas, and the good guy government pays bureaucrats to ban working tests for pandemic disease. Smart guy 101.
I’m sure that deaths are undercounted all across the globe but cases are surely much more likely to be undercounted than deaths.
HoW CAn wE Pay fOr It?
By taxing the fuck out of billionaires, we’ve been over and over and over and over this. Just not able to process it on a like neurological level, I guess.
I’m kind of mystified about how to interpret this. I mean, we know that the virus was spreading basically unchecked in the US for like at least 6 weeks. It seems weird that we can’t tell between 2.5^10 and 6^10 or 9^10.
With a 1-2% mortality rate, of course. Probably 10-20x more likely.
Left orthodoxy is that governments that issue debt in their own currency don’t have a budget constraint. The money printer, MMT, etc. Did you forget about that?
Whoa think of all the teenagers who won’t be able to steal those rolls to toilet paper their friends houses if you do that. That’s not for adults who can afford to buy toilet paper.
Costco seemed to have a good supply of toilet paper and paper towels the other day and actually moved pallets of them straight to the entrance for people. We just started digging into fresh cases of each at our house and I went ahead and bought more on Monday anyways because I’m trying hard to limit my shopping trips and didn’t want to get caught having a massively overloaded cart on my next trip.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of unreported cases?
lol
I dunno about this. I was pretty hopeful a couple weeks ago that there was a huge stealth epidemic that went unnoticed, but lately the evidence has been pointing in the wrong direction for that theory. Chris has posted some semi-random testing evidence that seems to disprove the idea, at least in Australia, that a big percentage of the population is asymptomatically infected. It’s strange. Really seems like we should be grabbing 1000 people off the street every week and testing them to get some understanding of WTF is going on.
UK coronavirus deaths rise by record 938 to 7,097
The number of people who have died with coronavirus in UK hospitals has risen to 7,097 - a record increase of 938 in a day.
Experts warn against over-interpreting daily figures, since spikes or dips may in part reflect bottlenecks in the reporting system, rather than real changes in the trend.
There have been a lot of those around the world. They mostly find zero antibodies in places that haven’t been hit.
https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/1247727124837994496
meanwhile, in the real world, university research budgets have been decimated, while, coincidentally, jack and peers have gotten unimaginably rich.
Basically it comes down to whether you think having the ultra wealthy pick a handful of the best monkeys to sit at typewriters is better than just having a thousand times more monkeys at typewriters.
So we think it spreads way faster than we thought, but we don’t think an insanely higher number of people had it than we thought.
What do we think we think that means?
Could be that asymptomatic cases are more prevalent than we realized and don’t lead to increased antibodies? Could be that the antibodies don’t last long at all, thus rendering antibody tests kind of useless? Could be that minor social distancing is extremely effective at reducing the effective R0? (What’s that called, Re?)
Could it be that some people fight it off quickly with normal coronavirus antibodies that can’t be detected in a specific COVID-19 test?
I mean it’s kind of out of whack, right? With an R0 of 5.7 we’d expect this to be significantly worse than we’re seeing so far. Shouldn’t it be Italy bad everywhere?
