Amazing. It's not just that COVID-19 is much more deadly than the flu. It's that it's regular influenza whose death numbers are likely artificially inflated:
We'll know soon enough how many deaths can be attributed to Covid-19. You'll be able to compare the number of deaths in 2020 to say the average deaths of the last 10 years in whichever countries accurately count deaths. Unfortunately we won't know for sure until next year sometime...
We already have a fairly good idea of this so far. I posted an article about this in the Covid-19 thread with a twitter thread by one of the authors breaking the numbers down, and it doesn't look good. This is the article.
Maybe they can come and save us from COVID, Wars or re-educate us on how to live with the flora and fauna on this planet. Or maybe they can save the Earth from us.
@MaleficentOne I agreed with @GenderNihilismGirdle 's post because I lived in South Africa from 1988 to 2010, during which time I saw the end of apartheid, the fall of the National Party and the first few years of the democratically elected ANC government. Consequently (generally speaking) the parallels between the attitudes of white people in the US and in apartheid era SA are obvious to me. The original settlers in both the US and SA are cut from the same cloth after all - in both cases they were religious fundamentalists that were disowned by England and The Netherlands respectively.
Understood. When you say 'religious fundamentalists' you don't mean pagan, buddhists or sikhs. So when we say white people we don't mean white people at all. Confusing.
Yes, when talking about the people who first settled South Africa or North America from England and the Netherlands, we are indeed, not talking about sikhs, buddhists or pagans. Not sure why that would confuse you.
So who were these peoples? Why were they kicked out of their motherland?
I'm not interested in giving you a history lesson. You're free to type those questions into google or wikipedia if you're sincerely curious. I will note one thing, which is that you seem to have a partial understanding of early British colonialism of North America. I suggest you look up the Virginia Colony, which was not founded by outcasts and pre-dated Pilgrim settlements.
I was merely pointing out that if someone is going to talk about the power dynamics in a place like the United States or South Africa, they aren't going to talk about sikhs, buddhists and pagans. For obvious reasons. Whatabouting in that context isn't an counter argument, it's a derailing tactic.
I do not need a history lesson from an unqualified forumite. You are right when you say British or Dutch colonialism but blanket statements (whites) are for the uneducated.
Personally, I don't think you need to go back to colonialism to talk about issues of white privilege and a black and brown working class that's treated as disposable -- hell, MLK was murdered while organizing black garbage collection workers. The posters above who cited it were clearly using a rhetorical flourish. But there is a descent of ideas at work here.
Saying that people can't talk about "white" in the context of American history, and the history of labor relations in the country, is a form of political correctness. No one can talk honestly about the history of labor relations in the country, especially relating to the points being made about coronavirus, without talking about things like whiteness, blackness, etc. If it triggers you, I'm sorry, but that's not an honest look at American history. I mean whiteness and blackness were literal legal concepts throughout the country's history up until not that long ago. There are still people alive who were the first black kids to integrate in their school districts, and they're not even all that old.
And yes, of course, it always comes with the caveats of "not all whites" but I don't think it's necessary for folks to have to stop and throw that into every discussion for the sake of some people's sensibilities. Nor would it make sense to pause and mention every other ethnic injustice around the world.
It's an English speaking forum community based around a game that was released in the US. Sorry but that where discussion is going to center.
We are not talking about triggerings or sensibilities, I commented on a blanket statement that shouldn't be made if we are going to heal as humans. As shown in this forum community more than once, people are OK with the current modus operandi that has been in place for decades. Well, most of us outside of this forum community are sick of this trend and wish to move towards reconciliation and healing instead of shoving the knife further into the wound.
People will always have an axe to grind, too bad it's not the Rich Black and Rich White folks that care. They are Rich together. The ones that cling to blanket statements about race are usually the poor and uneducated who don't want to heal, psychological subconscious acceptance of the pain and self loathing that comes with. Depression or acts of ' they make me feel this way' or scapegoatism 'Orange Man bad', 'The Jews are to blame.'
We are more than welcome to make any comments or statements we wish, Western World is still free, statements that bring us closer together are much more freeing.
Saying that people ought not talk about existing disparities that run along racial lines is, again, an argument for political correctness. Saying that we need to "heal" in order to avoid talking about these disparities is meaningless pablum.
Belatedly, there is no real connection between modern pagan and neopagan faiths and pre-Christian religions. In large part many are wholly invented or pieced together from fragments of what we do know from those older religions. Obviously people adopt the iconography and deities from those religions, but I'd hesitate to say who looks to Athena now is responsible for anything Spartans did long ago.
This article covers Trump's increasing attacks on China over what he says were their delays in informing other countries about Covid-19. Wikipedia now has extensive information about the relevant timelines - see here for progress of the disease in November and December 2019.
In summary the timelines in that early period up to informing the WHO were:
- tracking back the history of the genetic sequence, it's now believed the first case to have been infected occurred in mid-November.
- symptoms of pneumonia with an unknown origin first shown in case notes in mid-December.
- between 18th and 29th December 5 patients with severe pneumonia were admitted to hospital. Results from sequencing the virus obtained from them were available on 27th December and showed the virus was similar to SARS.
- on 29th December the Wuhan hospital convened an inter-departmental panel of doctors who advised the cases shown were unusual and required special attention. They reported their findings to the Chinese CDC the same day.
- on 30th December a lab mistakenly diagnosed the disease as SARS. It was this lab report that the Chinese doctor, who later died of Covid-19, passed on to his colleagues on social media (and received criticism from the local Chinese authorities for that).
- also on 30th December the Wuhan health committee issued an urgent notice to medical institutions about the disease.
- on 31st December the Wuhan health committee informed the WHO that they had 27 cases of pneumonia with unknown cause.
Others can make up their own minds, but my feeling is that the Chinese were actually a bit quicker than I would have expected to recognize this was a new disease and take action against it. That conclusion would be different of course if you believe that this disease was actually introduced deliberately by the Chinese and the whole thing is a carefully prepared plot.
Trump apparently does believe that (or is acting as if he does so anyway) and said yesterday that the Chinese were desperate to get Joe Biden elected instead of him and this was the way they planned to do that .
The BBC article also included a couple of statements that I couldn't help but smile wryly at given that new Covid-19 cases in the US have been on a plateau, but with no obvious decrease (the reductions in New York being offset by increases elsewhere) for more than 3 weeks - just waiting to take off again when given the conditions to do so:
- "I don't believe the polls," the president said. "I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don't think that they will put a man in who's incompetent."
- After more than a month being stuck mainly at the White House, Mr Trump said he plans to resume travel, starting with a trip to Arizona next week. He told reporters he hopes to hold mass campaign rallies in the coming months with thousands of supporters.
Belatedly, there is no real connection between modern pagan and neopagan faiths and pre-Christian religions. In large part many are wholly invented or pieced together from fragments of what we do know from those older religions. Obviously people adopt the iconography and deities from those religions, but I'd hesitate to say who looks to Athena now is responsible for anything Spartans did long ago.
I would agree that a lot of Nordic religions, Asatru for one, have been hijacked by the right. Just like neo-witchcraft, Wicca, has been hijacked by the left. Paganism is not male nor female, it is androgynous in spirit but mimics the world and universe which is full of Male and Female energies. Sun-Moon, Father Sky- Mother Earth, Green Man-Goddess, Athena-Ares, Artemis-Apollo, Adam-eve.
You cannot be a pagan if you only adhere to one energy, if you do then you are Monotheistic and if part of a Coven they are a cult. Witchcraft is both energies Sun and Moon, Sky and Earth. Anything else is Bitchcraft or Ult-Asatru.
Neopagan or Modern Pagan is not Paganism. Changing an established Religions Pantheon in order to make it fit someones lifestyle is not Paganism.
So, apparently the Trump campaign is seeing internal numbers that mirror what the public polls are saying and Trump was.......not happy about the news. The problem is overwhelmingly with senior citizens, who have voted with the GOP consistently for the last 40 years, showing big movement away from him. This isn't rocket science. It's actually pretty simple. If you want to hold on to voters over the age of 65 in the numbers you need to win, you should probably call off your acolytes in the media who are insisting on a daily basis that they should literally DIE to make things easier for the rest of us. Ben Shapiro saying an 80 year-old dying is not the same as a 30 year-old dying (and this is really just a microcosm of what FOX has been pushing for a month) may be generally true, but you know who that really doesn't sound great to?? The 80-year-old.
There seems to be this new belief that senior citizens are just sitting around waiting to die, and that none of them have active and fulfilling lives (hobbies, church, grandchildren) they would like to keep going as long as possible. They KNOW they are at risk because their doctors (who they trust) are telling them they're at risk. And they want to stick around awhile longer. And even if it isn't explicit, they can read what is being insinuated in right-wing media, which is "old people die anyway, let's move on". Hell of a campaign strategy with the group of voters MOST likely to cast a ballot. And Biden, for all his innumerable faults to many of us, is someone they can swallow, because he IS one of them.
Belatedly, there is no real connection between modern pagan and neopagan faiths and pre-Christian religions. In large part many are wholly invented or pieced together from fragments of what we do know from those older religions. Obviously people adopt the iconography and deities from those religions, but I'd hesitate to say who looks to Athena now is responsible for anything Spartans did long ago.
Most pagans that i know are either centrists or left wingers. I know a Woman who is a high priestess of Wicca and organized covens to try to prevent prevent Bolsonaro election. It obviously din't worked. But Bolsonaro failed to do everything that he was wanting.
Also, there are African religion and Amerindian religions that are becoming more popular. Yoruba religion for eg. Most people only adopted "desert monotheist" religions because they are forced. This applies to slaves who was brought to North/Central/South America, to Europeans, to Indigenous people, to Arabs and etc. You see more whites doing it because you life in a white majority country. If you are in a white minority country, you will see more whatever is majority in your country moving back to his roots.
Boris Johnson appears to have recovered well from his experience in intensive care and has just fronted his first daily briefing since his return to work. Another bright spot for him is the birth of another son. As things look up for one prime minister though, there's a downturn for another as the Russian PM explains to Putin he has tested positive.
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
Getting rid of the stock market would just ensure that only rich people would benefit from investment in corporations. Unless you want to ban rich people from investing in anything. At least now I can invest my 401k in something more substantial than a bank savings account...
Feel like I'm saying something to this effect for the 1000th time, but it's so at the core of what this country is actually about that it bears repeating every time it comes up. If a group of Black Panthers had done what the militia-types pulled at the Michigan Capitol Building today, every single one of them would have gotten a bullet between the eyes. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
Getting rid of the stock market would just ensure that only rich people would benefit from investment in corporations. Unless you want to ban rich people from investing in anything. At least now I can invest my 401k in something more substantial than a bank savings account...
Sure - but you can see that the current system is broken to some degree, right? I think today was the first time that the weekly unemployment report came through and the stock market lost ground. It probably *should* lose ground when 30,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month or so. if it is not, then it's not responding to the correct stimuli (IIRC, The stock market closed higher on the other Thursdays when the unemployment numbers came in)
In this case, I consider the correct stimuli to be the general economic wellbeing of Americans writ large.
Instead, it seems to respond mostly to the economic wellbeing of the 1%.
Now. I'm perfectly fine saying that's not a flaw of the Stock Market itself, but instead of the fact that the vast majority of wealth is concentrated at the top. We should probably do something about that (For starters, not offer a stimulus package that apparently went overwhelmingly towards larger corporations and not to small business owners and average citizens).
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
Getting rid of the stock market would just ensure that only rich people would benefit from investment in corporations. Unless you want to ban rich people from investing in anything. At least now I can invest my 401k in something more substantial than a bank savings account...
Sure - but you can see that the current system is broken to some degree, right? I think today was the first time that the weekly unemployment report came through and the stock market lost ground. It probably *should* lose ground when 30,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month or so. if it is not, then it's not responding to the correct stimuli (IIRC, The stock market closed higher on the other Thursdays when the unemployment numbers came in)
In this case, I consider the correct stimuli to be the general economic wellbeing of Americans writ large.
Instead, it seems to respond mostly to the economic wellbeing of the 1%.
Now. I'm perfectly fine saying that's not a flaw of the Stock Market itself, but instead of the fact that the vast majority of wealth is concentrated at the top. We should probably do something about that (For starters, not offer a stimulus package that apparently went overwhelmingly towards larger corporations and not to small business owners and average citizens).
The market reflects emotions, not reality. The reason it hasn't tanked is that everybody knows this isn't going to last forever. Even this unemployment isn't real to the extent as say, the unemployment during The Great Depression. Most people will have their jobs back in a matter of weeks to months. Well, that is as long as the places they worked at don't go out of business. That's the real purpose of the stimulus money. Making sure people have jobs to go back to and helping the people (and businesses) bridge that gap in the meantime. If people's lives are ruined by the response to Covid-19, good luck getting people to shut things down the next time a disease like this happens (and it will unless globalization is curtailed - not likely in my opinion).
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
Getting rid of the stock market would just ensure that only rich people would benefit from investment in corporations. Unless you want to ban rich people from investing in anything. At least now I can invest my 401k in something more substantial than a bank savings account...
Sure - but you can see that the current system is broken to some degree, right? I think today was the first time that the weekly unemployment report came through and the stock market lost ground. It probably *should* lose ground when 30,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month or so. if it is not, then it's not responding to the correct stimuli (IIRC, The stock market closed higher on the other Thursdays when the unemployment numbers came in)
In this case, I consider the correct stimuli to be the general economic wellbeing of Americans writ large.
Instead, it seems to respond mostly to the economic wellbeing of the 1%.
Now. I'm perfectly fine saying that's not a flaw of the Stock Market itself, but instead of the fact that the vast majority of wealth is concentrated at the top. We should probably do something about that (For starters, not offer a stimulus package that apparently went overwhelmingly towards larger corporations and not to small business owners and average citizens).
The market reflects emotions, not reality. The reason it hasn't tanked is that everybody knows this isn't going to last forever. Even this unemployment isn't real to the extent as say, the unemployment during The Great Depression. Most people will have their jobs back in a matter of weeks to months. Well, that is as long as the places they worked at don't go out of business. That's the real purpose of the stimulus money. Making sure people have jobs to go back to and helping the people (and businesses) bridge that gap in the meantime. If people's lives are ruined by the response to Covid-19, good luck getting people to shut things down the next time a disease like this happens (and it will unless globalization is curtailed - not likely in my opinion).
Well said. I think people should be cautious about just throwing out simplistic solutions like "get rid of the stock market". All that is arguing for is ending publicly traded companies. The public trading of companies is not why we have a huge wealth disparity in the US. Much better, imo, to push for things from the ground up, like greater unionization in workplaces, greater union protection in state laws (i.e. end "right to work laws"), and other things like greater minimum wage, and yeah, even things like universal health care (or some step in that direction a la Obamacare).
Ending publicly trading companies would actually make the financial decisions of the biggest movers and shakers more opaque, not more transparent. At least publicly traded companies have strict reporting requirements to the SEC. A completely private company is under much looser regulation.
The market reflects emotions, not reality. The reason it hasn't tanked is that everybody knows this isn't going to last forever. Even this unemployment isn't real to the extent as say, the unemployment during The Great Depression. Most people will have their jobs back in a matter of weeks to months. Well, that is as long as the places they worked at don't go out of business. That's the real purpose of the stimulus money. Making sure people have jobs to go back to and helping the people (and businesses) bridge that gap in the meantime. If people's lives are ruined by the response to Covid-19, good luck getting people to shut things down the next time a disease like this happens (and it will unless globalization is curtailed - not likely in my opinion).
I agree the market is largely driven by emotion, but I think it's a valid question to ask what the market is actually contributing these days. The theory behind stock exchanges is they serve 2 purposes:
- to provide a vehicle for companies to raise capital
- to facilitate trade in shares, allowing investors to have a more liquid portfolio
The first of those above is normally termed the primary purpose, but that purpose is essentially now irrelevant (at least in developed economies). I think the situation is similar in the US, but here's some figures to give you a feel of the balance between these purposes in the UK.
- in the last 5 years the total funding raised by share issues on the London Stock Exchange is £125bn (and of that 2/3 is from additional shares by companies already listed).
- the total value of trades on the LSE in 2019 was £110tn, i.e. the amount of money raised as a percentage of total trading was in the region of 0.02%.
There is also far more capital available from other sources these days (such as private equity, loan funding and sovereign wealth funds), so the stock market is not essential as a source of new funds for investment.
Its secondary purpose of increasing liquidity is also much less important these days, given the 90%+ reductions in cost associated with digital share dealings and the massive increases in availability of information through digital sources.
There are other fringe benefits from having a stock market, such as their role in helping to regulate the provision of information by companies and as a source of 'invisible' export earnings from foreign investors. However, it seems to me that the essential reason why stock markets in the US and the UK have become more rather than less prominent in the public consciousness over time is because of the marketing done by the people who work in them and those who profit from them (and the carefully formed relationships with governments).
A bit like the health insurance industry in the US, this is a sector of the economy that could be removed wholesale without any significant effect on the 'real' economy. However, the idea that there could be gains to be made by most people from getting rid of an activity that produces so little is not a rationale likely to be accepted by those who benefit from the current situation.
Edit: just reading the comment above from @DinoDin I agree with most of that. However, while I only touched in my original post on the issue of the role the exchange plays in making information available to the public, that was because I thought the post was getting a bit long anyway. I had considered giving more information about that and pointing out that the stock exchange is essentially performing a regulatory role that could be done by government (there's already a considerable overlap in the UK and having a single regulator in this area would not be a bad thing in itself).
The Fed has injected about 6 trillion dollars into the markets in recent weeks. I saw yesterday that there are about 130 million working families in the US. Which means every American family could have received a check for $45,000 if they were valued the same way. It's not just socialism for the rich and hyper-capitalism for the rest of us, but UNLIMITED socialism for the rich. No matter how badly they screw up, no matter how poorly they are prepared for outside forces having a negative effect on their business (*cough* stock buybacks), they will be given a blank check to make them whole. Everyone else?? Here is one payment to cover your rent for one month.
The Fed has injected about 6 trillion dollars into the markets in recent weeks. I saw yesterday that there are about 130 million working families in the US. Which means every American family could have received a check for $45,000 if they were valued the same way. It's not just socialism for the rich and hyper-capitalism for the rest of us, but UNLIMITED socialism for the rich. No matter how badly they screw up, no matter how poorly they are prepared for outside forces having a negative effect on their business (*cough* stock buybacks), they will be given a blank check to make them whole. Everyone else?? Here is one payment to cover your rent for one month.
There is a better chance that those companies would invest the money given while families would just spend it. I am speaking in general terms, so please din’t go cherry picking companies that aren’t investing it or families that are.
Investment allows companies to keep the working class employed.
Just giving money to people to spend on anything even the likes of food and rent, increases inflation and makes those commodities more expensive.
Now is 6 trillion a bit extreme to give to these companies? Debatable, and I would probably say yes figuring who is doling it out, but as Balrog said, if these companies don’t exist, then jobs don’t exist. Should there have been more restrictions on what the companies could spend the money on, or encourage better rewards for workplaces that are unionized? Yep definitely.
But the argument of we could have given this money to X instead ignores how our economy actually works.
The Fed has injected about 6 trillion dollars into the markets in recent weeks. I saw yesterday that there are about 130 million working families in the US. Which means every American family could have received a check for $45,000 if they were valued the same way. It's not just socialism for the rich and hyper-capitalism for the rest of us, but UNLIMITED socialism for the rich. No matter how badly they screw up, no matter how poorly they are prepared for outside forces having a negative effect on their business (*cough* stock buybacks), they will be given a blank check to make them whole. Everyone else?? Here is one payment to cover your rent for one month.
There is a better chance that those companies would invest the money given while families would just spend it. I am speaking in general terms, so please din’t go cherry picking companies that aren’t investing it or families that are.
Investment allows companies to keep the working class employed.
Just giving money to people to spend on anything even the likes of food and rent, increases inflation and makes those commodities more expensive.
Now is 6 trillion a bit extreme to give to these companies? Debatable, and I would probably say yes figuring who is doling it out, but as Balrog said, if these companies don’t exist, then jobs don’t exist. Should there have been more restrictions on what the companies could spend the money on, or encourage better rewards for workplaces that are unionized? Yep definitely.
But the argument of we could have given this money to X instead ignores how our economy actually works.
I think the issue is that these companies are not investing their profit in a way that is advantageous to the working families that are employed by them. They’re investing the money to make their shareholder’s happier. It would be one thing if they raised wages, improved benefits, and hired new workers to spread the work around. They didn’t.
The Trump tax cuts are a great example of this. The corporate tax rate was lowered substantially - and companies made a big show of investing that money in bonuses and improving their workforce’s quality of life, but when the dust settled - and insignificant amount of that money was actually invested back into the community. The majority of it was used for stock buybacks and to improve the financial outlook for shareholders.
To use your own language: The argument that corporations will invest their money more to the benefit of its workers than the workers will spend that money ignores how capitalism actually works.
This gets at it a little - although they frame investment here as being purely for r&d, and I think investing in your workforce is the more salient consideration.
Edit - to be clear: I don’t think we should just throw 6 trillion dollars to the population - but I am also equally uncomfortable handing 6 trillion to corporations. Especially since the rationale for doing so is to protect job, when it seems abundantly clear that their workforce is less important to them than shareholders.
Sadly, to have a successful business it often means to please investors rather than employees. There are plenty of employees to hire compared to investors to attract.
long ago, when I was a company director I had to sign a government document stating that I had read and understood all the aspects of company law relating to the obligations and responsibilities of a director. The one that stuck in my mind and is very salient here is basically this: A company director is legally obliged to put the interests of the shareholders first, over and above anyone else - employees of course come right at the bottom of the pecking order.
It's becoming increasingly clear the "plateau" in the United States is really just what is rapidly becoming the new normal. For almost a month now, we have been seeing between 25,000-30,000 new cases per day, and roughly 1800-2500 deaths per day. There isn't any real indication the States that are doing soft re-openings have even met the basic criteria for doing so. That 74,000 I talked about just 48 hours ago?? That isn't going to be blown past in August, it's going to be blown past on May 6th or 7th. 100,000 is now clearly low-balling the death count significantly. We're probably ALREADY at 100,000, we just aren't counting them yet. The way this is heading we're probably going to be talking a quarter of a million by the end of the year.
Sadly, to have a successful business it often means to please investors rather than employees. There are plenty of employees to hire compared to investors to attract.
I think this is exactly true. I think (hope) that effective regulation by the government could help to even out the legal ability to put shareholders so far above workers in terms of importance.
Unfortunately - as long as money is a driving force in politics, getting that kind of change out in place is a pipe dream.
I have seen companies take profits and not pass along their growth to the workers enough to have serious doubts about how a bailout like that will do much more than give money to the people on the top. I worked for a company in the 08 slump that had almost normal profits in 09, in 2010 they had their most profitable year ever. Did they pass that along? Not even close. In 2013 they were still telling their employees that the economy wasn't doing well enough to give pay increases. But!! From 2011 to 2013 they spent 5 million for a consulting company to plan a new waste water treatment plant that they never intended to build, purchased two warehouses(they only ever used half of one), one factory(stands empty to this day), a mansion(which they leveled to build a parking lot that they didn't need and never built), and three farms, that altogether cost over 39 million. So why would they do something like that and not pay their employees more? Tax write offs. Thank god my company was an outside contractor right? Wrong. My company negotiated for a 7% increase every year but I never got a dime more than what I got from promotions from 2008 until I quit in 2016, 10 of the people working for me never got a pay increase in that time no matter how much I lobbied for it.
I know many people who have had similar experiences with the companies they worked for. Some were corporations, some like my company and the one we were contracted out to are privately owned but all were the same. Trickle down is a unicorn, a mythical beast that doesn't actually exist. Can it help the economy, sure it will! I know someone that can draw a beautiful unicorn, even know someone who could sculpt one but when they say they will give you a unicorn you know without a doubt that you will never be able to ride it off into the sunset.
To believe that giving that much money to corporations will be more beneficial for society than the people at the top of those corporations skimming the profits seems to me to be nothing more than willful ignorance. Alex P Keaton, oops I mean, Ben Shapiro would be proud of you.
Comments
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
And the Twitter thread:
Just in case anyone missed it, the Pentagon has declassified some UFO videos.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6873561/ufo-videos-pentagon-declassified/
Maybe they can come and save us from COVID, Wars or re-educate us on how to live with the flora and fauna on this planet. Or maybe they can save the Earth from us.
We are not talking about triggerings or sensibilities, I commented on a blanket statement that shouldn't be made if we are going to heal as humans. As shown in this forum community more than once, people are OK with the current modus operandi that has been in place for decades. Well, most of us outside of this forum community are sick of this trend and wish to move towards reconciliation and healing instead of shoving the knife further into the wound.
People will always have an axe to grind, too bad it's not the Rich Black and Rich White folks that care. They are Rich together. The ones that cling to blanket statements about race are usually the poor and uneducated who don't want to heal, psychological subconscious acceptance of the pain and self loathing that comes with. Depression or acts of ' they make me feel this way' or scapegoatism 'Orange Man bad', 'The Jews are to blame.'
We are more than welcome to make any comments or statements we wish, Western World is still free, statements that bring us closer together are much more freeing.
I use Farina instead of Pablum, it's the food of champions and go getters. Also essential part of any social justice warriors diet.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/helicopter-crash-canadian-navy-fredericton-1.5549654
However, there is a problem in modern paganism that needs to be dealt with. That is to say, white supremacists. https://medium.com/@amyhale93/the-pagan-and-occult-fascist-connection-and-how-to-fix-it-d338c32ee4e6
In summary the timelines in that early period up to informing the WHO were:
- tracking back the history of the genetic sequence, it's now believed the first case to have been infected occurred in mid-November.
- symptoms of pneumonia with an unknown origin first shown in case notes in mid-December.
- between 18th and 29th December 5 patients with severe pneumonia were admitted to hospital. Results from sequencing the virus obtained from them were available on 27th December and showed the virus was similar to SARS.
- on 29th December the Wuhan hospital convened an inter-departmental panel of doctors who advised the cases shown were unusual and required special attention. They reported their findings to the Chinese CDC the same day.
- on 30th December a lab mistakenly diagnosed the disease as SARS. It was this lab report that the Chinese doctor, who later died of Covid-19, passed on to his colleagues on social media (and received criticism from the local Chinese authorities for that).
- also on 30th December the Wuhan health committee issued an urgent notice to medical institutions about the disease.
- on 31st December the Wuhan health committee informed the WHO that they had 27 cases of pneumonia with unknown cause.
Others can make up their own minds, but my feeling is that the Chinese were actually a bit quicker than I would have expected to recognize this was a new disease and take action against it. That conclusion would be different of course if you believe that this disease was actually introduced deliberately by the Chinese and the whole thing is a carefully prepared plot.
Trump apparently does believe that (or is acting as if he does so anyway) and said yesterday that the Chinese were desperate to get Joe Biden elected instead of him and this was the way they planned to do that
The BBC article also included a couple of statements that I couldn't help but smile wryly at given that new Covid-19 cases in the US have been on a plateau, but with no obvious decrease (the reductions in New York being offset by increases elsewhere) for more than 3 weeks - just waiting to take off again when given the conditions to do so:
- "I don't believe the polls," the president said. "I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don't think that they will put a man in who's incompetent."
- After more than a month being stuck mainly at the White House, Mr Trump said he plans to resume travel, starting with a trip to Arizona next week. He told reporters he hopes to hold mass campaign rallies in the coming months with thousands of supporters.
I would agree that a lot of Nordic religions, Asatru for one, have been hijacked by the right. Just like neo-witchcraft, Wicca, has been hijacked by the left. Paganism is not male nor female, it is androgynous in spirit but mimics the world and universe which is full of Male and Female energies. Sun-Moon, Father Sky- Mother Earth, Green Man-Goddess, Athena-Ares, Artemis-Apollo, Adam-eve.
You cannot be a pagan if you only adhere to one energy, if you do then you are Monotheistic and if part of a Coven they are a cult. Witchcraft is both energies Sun and Moon, Sky and Earth. Anything else is Bitchcraft or Ult-Asatru.
Neopagan or Modern Pagan is not Paganism. Changing an established Religions Pantheon in order to make it fit someones lifestyle is not Paganism.
There seems to be this new belief that senior citizens are just sitting around waiting to die, and that none of them have active and fulfilling lives (hobbies, church, grandchildren) they would like to keep going as long as possible. They KNOW they are at risk because their doctors (who they trust) are telling them they're at risk. And they want to stick around awhile longer. And even if it isn't explicit, they can read what is being insinuated in right-wing media, which is "old people die anyway, let's move on". Hell of a campaign strategy with the group of voters MOST likely to cast a ballot. And Biden, for all his innumerable faults to many of us, is someone they can swallow, because he IS one of them.
Most pagans that i know are either centrists or left wingers. I know a Woman who is a high priestess of Wicca and organized covens to try to prevent prevent Bolsonaro election. It obviously din't worked. But Bolsonaro failed to do everything that he was wanting.
Also, there are African religion and Amerindian religions that are becoming more popular. Yoruba religion for eg. Most people only adopted "desert monotheist" religions because they are forced. This applies to slaves who was brought to North/Central/South America, to Europeans, to Indigenous people, to Arabs and etc. You see more whites doing it because you life in a white majority country. If you are in a white minority country, you will see more whatever is majority in your country moving back to his roots.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/29/congress-stocks-coronavirus-221742
I don't know a single person who wouldn't support an iron-clad law barring stock ownership among current elected officials. Though when you see what the stock market is doing even when almost 30 million people are unemployed, maybe we should get rid of the stock market altogether.
Getting rid of the stock market would just ensure that only rich people would benefit from investment in corporations. Unless you want to ban rich people from investing in anything. At least now I can invest my 401k in something more substantial than a bank savings account...
Sure - but you can see that the current system is broken to some degree, right? I think today was the first time that the weekly unemployment report came through and the stock market lost ground. It probably *should* lose ground when 30,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month or so. if it is not, then it's not responding to the correct stimuli (IIRC, The stock market closed higher on the other Thursdays when the unemployment numbers came in)
In this case, I consider the correct stimuli to be the general economic wellbeing of Americans writ large.
Instead, it seems to respond mostly to the economic wellbeing of the 1%.
Now. I'm perfectly fine saying that's not a flaw of the Stock Market itself, but instead of the fact that the vast majority of wealth is concentrated at the top. We should probably do something about that (For starters, not offer a stimulus package that apparently went overwhelmingly towards larger corporations and not to small business owners and average citizens).
The market reflects emotions, not reality. The reason it hasn't tanked is that everybody knows this isn't going to last forever. Even this unemployment isn't real to the extent as say, the unemployment during The Great Depression. Most people will have their jobs back in a matter of weeks to months. Well, that is as long as the places they worked at don't go out of business. That's the real purpose of the stimulus money. Making sure people have jobs to go back to and helping the people (and businesses) bridge that gap in the meantime. If people's lives are ruined by the response to Covid-19, good luck getting people to shut things down the next time a disease like this happens (and it will unless globalization is curtailed - not likely in my opinion).
Well said. I think people should be cautious about just throwing out simplistic solutions like "get rid of the stock market". All that is arguing for is ending publicly traded companies. The public trading of companies is not why we have a huge wealth disparity in the US. Much better, imo, to push for things from the ground up, like greater unionization in workplaces, greater union protection in state laws (i.e. end "right to work laws"), and other things like greater minimum wage, and yeah, even things like universal health care (or some step in that direction a la Obamacare).
Ending publicly trading companies would actually make the financial decisions of the biggest movers and shakers more opaque, not more transparent. At least publicly traded companies have strict reporting requirements to the SEC. A completely private company is under much looser regulation.
I agree the market is largely driven by emotion, but I think it's a valid question to ask what the market is actually contributing these days. The theory behind stock exchanges is they serve 2 purposes:
- to provide a vehicle for companies to raise capital
- to facilitate trade in shares, allowing investors to have a more liquid portfolio
The first of those above is normally termed the primary purpose, but that purpose is essentially now irrelevant (at least in developed economies). I think the situation is similar in the US, but here's some figures to give you a feel of the balance between these purposes in the UK.
- in the last 5 years the total funding raised by share issues on the London Stock Exchange is £125bn (and of that 2/3 is from additional shares by companies already listed).
- the total value of trades on the LSE in 2019 was £110tn, i.e. the amount of money raised as a percentage of total trading was in the region of 0.02%.
There is also far more capital available from other sources these days (such as private equity, loan funding and sovereign wealth funds), so the stock market is not essential as a source of new funds for investment.
Its secondary purpose of increasing liquidity is also much less important these days, given the 90%+ reductions in cost associated with digital share dealings and the massive increases in availability of information through digital sources.
There are other fringe benefits from having a stock market, such as their role in helping to regulate the provision of information by companies and as a source of 'invisible' export earnings from foreign investors. However, it seems to me that the essential reason why stock markets in the US and the UK have become more rather than less prominent in the public consciousness over time is because of the marketing done by the people who work in them and those who profit from them (and the carefully formed relationships with governments).
A bit like the health insurance industry in the US, this is a sector of the economy that could be removed wholesale without any significant effect on the 'real' economy. However, the idea that there could be gains to be made by most people from getting rid of an activity that produces so little is not a rationale likely to be accepted by those who benefit from the current situation.
Edit: just reading the comment above from @DinoDin I agree with most of that. However, while I only touched in my original post on the issue of the role the exchange plays in making information available to the public, that was because I thought the post was getting a bit long anyway. I had considered giving more information about that and pointing out that the stock exchange is essentially performing a regulatory role that could be done by government (there's already a considerable overlap in the UK and having a single regulator in this area would not be a bad thing in itself).
There is a better chance that those companies would invest the money given while families would just spend it. I am speaking in general terms, so please din’t go cherry picking companies that aren’t investing it or families that are.
Investment allows companies to keep the working class employed.
Just giving money to people to spend on anything even the likes of food and rent, increases inflation and makes those commodities more expensive.
Now is 6 trillion a bit extreme to give to these companies? Debatable, and I would probably say yes figuring who is doling it out, but as Balrog said, if these companies don’t exist, then jobs don’t exist. Should there have been more restrictions on what the companies could spend the money on, or encourage better rewards for workplaces that are unionized? Yep definitely.
But the argument of we could have given this money to X instead ignores how our economy actually works.
I think the issue is that these companies are not investing their profit in a way that is advantageous to the working families that are employed by them. They’re investing the money to make their shareholder’s happier. It would be one thing if they raised wages, improved benefits, and hired new workers to spread the work around. They didn’t.
The Trump tax cuts are a great example of this. The corporate tax rate was lowered substantially - and companies made a big show of investing that money in bonuses and improving their workforce’s quality of life, but when the dust settled - and insignificant amount of that money was actually invested back into the community. The majority of it was used for stock buybacks and to improve the financial outlook for shareholders.
To use your own language: The argument that corporations will invest their money more to the benefit of its workers than the workers will spend that money ignores how capitalism actually works.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/annemarieknott/2019/02/21/why-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-tcja-led-to-buybacks-rather-than-investment/amp/
This gets at it a little - although they frame investment here as being purely for r&d, and I think investing in your workforce is the more salient consideration.
Edit - to be clear: I don’t think we should just throw 6 trillion dollars to the population - but I am also equally uncomfortable handing 6 trillion to corporations. Especially since the rationale for doing so is to protect job, when it seems abundantly clear that their workforce is less important to them than shareholders.
I think this is exactly true. I think (hope) that effective regulation by the government could help to even out the legal ability to put shareholders so far above workers in terms of importance.
Unfortunately - as long as money is a driving force in politics, getting that kind of change out in place is a pipe dream.
I know many people who have had similar experiences with the companies they worked for. Some were corporations, some like my company and the one we were contracted out to are privately owned but all were the same. Trickle down is a unicorn, a mythical beast that doesn't actually exist. Can it help the economy, sure it will! I know someone that can draw a beautiful unicorn, even know someone who could sculpt one but when they say they will give you a unicorn you know without a doubt that you will never be able to ride it off into the sunset.
To believe that giving that much money to corporations will be more beneficial for society than the people at the top of those corporations skimming the profits seems to me to be nothing more than willful ignorance. Alex P Keaton, oops I mean, Ben Shapiro would be proud of you.