Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
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I am an extrovert (maybe an introverted extrovert since I also need some alone time to recharge).
Being household quarantined due to suspected case/presumed positive, all the worry associated with that, plus feeling a ton of guilt from either bringing this home to my family from my job (high risk for contamination and we have clients who constantly visited family members in the ground zero nursing care facility and who live in other assisted living that have had confirmed exposure) OR putting our many elderly clients at risk because my kid picked it somewhere else and maybe I could have carried it.
Between not getting to chat with people, dealing with worry, feeling under the weather myself, ect I feel like I'm just falling into a hole if depression and though you would think it would boost my ability/desire to log in and play, I find myself feeling very fragile so I do not. And then I feel like I am letting everyone down there and isolating myself too.
I am hoping a planned thing in a couple of days will lift my spirits.
Hope everyone is staying as safe as you can.
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@Jeshin said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Privatizing profits - When the economy is good only those invested benefit.
Private ownership of the means of production is the hallmark of any capitalist nation. This is true even in socialist nations, where people are allowed to own real and personal property. I do not understand why it is morally wrong to retain the profits one earns through one's labor and/or property.
Socializing losses - When the economy is bad suddenly the Government (via taxpayers) should come help a company that was all about profit for their shareholders and nothing else before. Suddenly it's in the national interest.
The fundamental principle of socialism is to enact policy to benefit the most people rather than favor a smaller group. Said another way, government should act in a way that benefits the greater good. Where there is catastrophe, a socialist nation should move to allocate government resources to where the most can benefit, and this is morally good, in my opinion. But this is also, as you put it, "socializing losses." Another way to put it is "insuring against common risk." I therefore do not see how "socializing losses" is morally wrong.
What I believe you are talking about is a government selectively benefiting a small group of people. I concur that this is improper, and would be improper in either a capitalist or socialist nation. I disagree that this means "privatizing profit" and "socializing losses" is morally wrong.
It is generally deemed a moral hazard to advise one group to do something while doing the opposite. Brokers and retirement funds encouraging retail investors to stay engaged in the market instead of pulling out and re-investing once a bottom has established are themselves getting out of the markets or shifting to new markets but not advising the same to their buy and hold customers.
Dissuading investors from pulling all of their investments out of the stock market is exactly what brokers should be saying. The fact that so much of the American economy is dependent upon the steadiness of the stock market is something you cannot reasonably argue against. Consider, though, that such brokers and fund managers also must do as they are told, which is why they are selling off fast -- because, despite their advice, investors are in fact pulling out and this is caving the market. Compare this with attorneys who often advise sensible resolutions only to be directed by clients in completely insane directions.
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@Roz said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Seamus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
just marginally worse than the flu
?????
Yes. Marginally.
Covid-19- Caused by one virus.
- Transmission is essentially the same, though we are still waiting on full confirmation of the ways that it can be transmitted, including the length of time viable in the air.
- We are currently testing the antiviral medicines to see what effect, if any they have.
- There is no vaccine, though we are working on it now.
- Around 207k cases world wide, with 7.3k in the US
- Around 8k deaths world wide, 115 in the US.
The Flu
- Caused by any of several different types and strains of the virus.
- Transmission is well documented.
- Antiviral medicines can address the symptoms and shorten the duration of the illness.
- There is a vaccine available.
- Estimated over 1 billion infected world wide, and between 9.3m to 45m in the US alone, per year.
- Between 291k to 646k deaths world wide, with 12k to 61k in the us.
While the virus still has a LOT of unknowns, what we know right now, it is marginally worse than the flu, but not nearly as lethal. I will stand by my previous statement. Scare Tactics and Scare Media make things a LOT worse than they are.
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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@Seamus
The emergency management information I have been receiving from the federal government as part of managing this disaster disagrees with you. There is neither scare tactics nor scare media involved in this part of what is going on, and I assure you it is not just marginally worse than the flu. I suggest that you start paying attention to what's coming out of the CDC and comply with your local government's recommendations, rather than blowing it off as hype.
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@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Seamus
The emergency management information I have been receiving from the federal government as part of managing this disaster disagrees with you. There is neither scare tactics nor scare media involved in this part of what is going on, and I assure you it is not just marginally worse than the flu. I suggest that you start paying attention to what's coming out of the CDC and comply with your local government's recommendations, rather than blowing it off as hype.
Like this? or This? or Maybe this?
I get it. It's new.It's scary. I am not saying it isn't a big bad, but from everything I have read, unless you actually test for it, most of the non-high risk people wouldn't really tell it was any different than the flu.
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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@Seamus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Seamus
The emergency management information I have been receiving from the federal government as part of managing this disaster disagrees with you. There is neither scare tactics nor scare media involved in this part of what is going on, and I assure you it is not just marginally worse than the flu. I suggest that you start paying attention to what's coming out of the CDC and comply with your local government's recommendations, rather than blowing it off as hype.
Like this? or This? or Maybe this?
I get it. It's new.It's scary. I am not saying it isn't a big bad, but from everything I have read, unless you actually test for it, most of the non-high risk people wouldn't really tell it was any different than the flu.
For the record, I am in the high risk patient zone. I don't take any risks with the flu or anything. I shift to a work from home scenario and and due to my allergen to the vaccine, I stay in a hotel for 2 weeks after my family gets vaccinated, to be safe.
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@Seamus
Yikes. So you've read all that, and you're saying 'marginally worse than the flu' still.
Yikes.
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@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Seamus
Yikes. So you've read all that, and you're saying 'marginally worse than the flu' still.
Yikes.
The flu killed more people in the last season than Corona has to date... I'm kind of failing to see the "yikes" moment?
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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@Seamus
Yeah. I can tell.
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@Seamus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
While the virus still has a LOT of unknowns, what we know right now, it is marginally worse than the flu, but not nearly as lethal. I will stand by my previous statement.
Your own numbers do not comport with your conclusion:
- Around 207k cases world wide, with 7.3k in the US
- Around 8k deaths world wide, 115 in the US.
Based on these numbers, COVID has a 3.86% mortality rate per case globally.
- Estimated over 1 billion infected world wide,* * * per year.
- Between 291k to 646k deaths world wide.
Based on these numbers, the flu has a 0.03% to 0.06% mortality rate globally.
So COVID is between 50 to 100 times more deadly than the flu. It's been going around for a few months, whereas the flu is around the world all the time. And there are flu vaccines. If you extrapolate numbers, if 1 billion people end up being infected by COVID, you're looking at 38.6 million deaths.
I'm not sure how or why your opinion differs from the arithmetic of your numbers and the facts stated.
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@Sunny If you are referring to the fact we have no immunity for it, well that's always my case. The flu has been around long enough, and yet somehow it has managed to kill more people than this new big bad. The flu virus at its height kills around 1.7k people a day. To date, the coronavirus has only killed 7.9k people. The flu did that damage in about 4 days.
Sure it is new, but the numbers simply say it is is not as bad as the flu, at this point. Can that change, sure. It could cause everyone that gets infected to mutate and become carries of the Zombie Apocalypse, or gestalt into a new breed of human beings with super human abilities. Anything is possible, although unlikely. I just look at the numbers, and until the corona virus starts knocking nearly 2k people a day off.. I'm going to say at this point, only marginally.
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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@Seamus
You're just wrong. The facts don't agree with your conclusion. The things you linked to don't agree with your conclusion. The webpage that you're saying proves what you're saying says THE OPPOSITE of what you're saying. That's why I'm going 'yikes'. You told me the sky was green, I asked for proof, you linked me something that said the sky was blue. There is nothing I can say at this point to explain anything to you. Just please, follow the recommendations of your local government (city/county/state in that order) and do what they say, they're not full of hype.
ETA: I mean, Gany just did the math a couple posts up, right in plain sight. 38.6 million deaths.
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@Seamus The flu is only more lethal if you're considering lethality on the basis of overall deaths and ignoring the relative speed of infection. However, that entirely ignores the differences in rates of deaths to infection; by that standard, COVID-19 is considerably more lethal. Yes, it doesn't have high rates of infection that the flu has built over many, many decades. However, its spread right now is clearly at a much higher rate. Our healthcare systems are very used to handling the flu. I'm sure that flu season isn't fun or easy for medical professionals and those in the healthcare industry to handle, but it's very clearly different from what they're dealing with right now. The death rates in Italy are in part because their healthcare system is overloaded. It's not just about the virus itself, it's about not having the infrastructure in place to handle the rate of infection that's happening. Choices are being made about who to let die because there aren't enough doctors, nurses, and supplies to keep the number of survivors where they could be if everything else where equal.
I don't know what else to say. The flu is a serious constant that people absolutely forget how deadly it is. But, at this point in our battle with it, it no longer causes the sort of overwhelming of healthcare that COVID-19 is doing right now. And that's the real danger.
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@Seamus
So the thing about the seasonal flu is that even though it has a tendency to infect a very high percentage of the population in a relatively short amount of time (It tends to spike very very hard in January) it's not known for causing the hospitals to enact emergency measures and start using all their elective surgery rooms as extra intensive care halls. Only a relatively tiny percentage of the Italian population is estimated to have been infected and they are at 200% of their normal hospital capacity. With that in mind what do you think their hospitals would look like if they didn't lock down the country to prevent further spread?
Further aside from deaths directly attributable to the virus itself, what do you think happens to you if you've been in a car accident or have a heart attack while the hospitals get stretched past 200% normal capacity?
The reason that the total number of deaths so far is relatively low when compared to the seasonal flu is because of the extraordinary length that most countries have gone to try to limit the spread.
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I mean.
We're closing our casino.
(That's sort of like saying Waffle House is closed, but we don't have Waffle House in the PNW that I know of.)
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We closed our bars.
We are a military city.
The escort and strip club industries are in shambles.
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@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Jeshin said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Privatizing profits - When the economy is good only those invested benefit.
Private ownership of the means of production is the hallmark of any capitalist nation. This is true even in socialist nations, where people are allowed to own real and personal property. I do not understand why it is morally wrong to retain the profits one earns through one's labor and/or property.
Socializing losses - When the economy is bad suddenly the Government (via taxpayers) should come help a company that was all about profit for their shareholders and nothing else before. Suddenly it's in the national interest.
The fundamental principle of socialism is to enact policy to benefit the most people rather than favor a smaller group. Said another way, government should act in a way that benefits the greater good. Where there is catastrophe, a socialist nation should move to allocate government resources to where the most can benefit, and this is morally good, in my opinion. But this is also, as you put it, "socializing losses." Another way to put it is "insuring against common risk." I therefore do not see how "socializing losses" is morally wrong.
Socializing losses is a direct transfer of wealth from the tax payers to those who own assets. In essence you're telling asset owners that they should feel free to pursue maximum risk strategies with no concerns whatsoever because if anything ever goes wrong, that will be paid by the tax payers.
Now if you genuinely think that the purpose of a good government is to funnel money from those who pay taxes into the pockets of those who own assets, I'm sure you can view that as a good thing. However I happen to think that a good government should be trying to make the people as a whole prosperous rather then a wealthy minority pursuing high risk strategies.
If we're looking at the US specifically. A lot of companies used the low interest rate as an opportunity to take very large loans which they then used to buyback stocks to the benefit of senior executives who get paid in stocks. Now that there is a crisis, those companies have a huge debt and no revenue. Without intervention those companies are looking at a stock value of 0 dollars and a complete asset liquidation.
What possible benefit is it to society at large to bail out the creditors who gave out those loans and executives and investors who benefited from those buybacks? That's a straight up transfer of wealth to people who engaged in reckless behavior for short-term profit.
The correct thing to do in my opinion isn't to bail out the investors and the creditors, it's for the Government to force the investors and the creditors to take the loss, because they deserve that loss and take over the company so it can hopefully be resold to someone more responsible.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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I had a 401k once.
And then I snapped into an anxiety episode so has I couldn't leave my house for a month and had to quit my job so I needed the money.
Guess I'm just terrible at financial security.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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So unrelated.
My most horrible neighbors who live with SIX PEOPLE in a /two bedroom/ (but drive BMWs and buy their TODDLERS fucking Docle & Gabbana shirts and smoke in common areas and are just generally THE WORST) have, according to them, a burst pipe and please guess how very little I think the HoA should pay for their repairs.
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@Groth said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Socializing losses is a direct transfer of wealth from the tax payers to those who own assets. In essence you're telling asset owners that they should feel free to pursue maximum risk strategies with no concerns whatsoever because if anything ever goes wrong, that will be paid by the tax payers.
I'm not telling anyone anything. You are adding words to contort the plain meaning of what I wrote to suit your polemic; to-wit, I did not write the word "asset" or "asset owner" in the paragraph you quoted. Regardless, the vast majority of tax payers in the United States own assets or an interest in an asset, be it a house, a retirement account, or a vehicle.
What I did write, however, was that the fundamental principle of socialism is to enact policy to benefit the most people rather than favor a smaller group. If you read what you wrote, which I will quote below, you will see we agree:
However I happen to think that a good government should be trying to make the people as a whole prosperous rather then a wealthy minority pursuing high risk strategies.
Even so, we already have laws that benefit a wealthy minority pursuing high risk strategies; for example, Donald Trump has taken advantage of bankruptcy proceedings to shield his personal assets from his business failures. These laws, however, may also be used by others, even those who own no assets.
Let's look at some of the other non-adversarial things you wrote:
If we're looking at the US specifically. A lot of companies used the low interest rate as an opportunity to take very large loans which they then used to buyback stocks to the benefit of senior executives who get paid in stocks. Now that there is a crisis, those companies have a huge debt and no revenue. Without intervention those companies are looking at a stock value of 0 dollars and a complete asset liquidation.
I am aware of this, and agree neither with the strategy nor the proposal to bail out these companies, notably those in the airline industry. The next thing to be considered is the economic effect of letting them fail. While it is completely just to let the creditors and executives fall as a result of their recklessness, there would undoubtedly be further economic fallout as large players in the airline industry fall. Their assets may thereafter be acquired by one or two larger firms, who will then be able to lock-up market power and engage in anti-competitive behavior, as is often the case when there is a large-scale market failure (like the Great Recession).
I will not overstate the fallout, though, because the Pandemic is forcing people to consider virtual and online meetings, which will make up for the inability to meet in person. It may push the nation to innovate further, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But while we're on the topic, let's also implement universal healthcare, state-run insurance, and other "socialist" policies. There may be economic damage, yes, but economies actually recover fastest from disaster.
