Corona virus

Not always the biggest fan of Ma, but this is noteworthy.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/16/africa/jack-ma-donate-masks-coronavirus-africa/index.html

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I'm not worried about personally dying, as Scrotie would say, I've had a good 51 years. But I don't want to put others at risk. Besides, there are reports of previously healthy people in their 30s to early 40s who are on respirators.

Your thoughtfulness is appreciated. And yes, especially in places like Italy. I suspect France will be next, given how openly they've been flaunting social distancing recommendations this weekend. It shouldn't need to be said, but a small percentage of a very big number is still a significant number. Assuming you're still caught up on those, which I guess some people are.

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If I were a crazy wealthy guy like Mike Bloomberg, I'd leverage that dough into manufacturing respirators.

This comes back to that NYT article about the small-time Amazon merchant stockpiling hand sanitiser and trying to flog it at a 1000% mark-up. Or, yknow, that more recent article referring to a certain attempt by a certain uber-capitalist government trying to buy a possible vaccine for, well, what we must presume would be ultimately selfish gains.

Where's the line for profiteering in times of global humanitarian crisis? By positioning it as a war with no tangible enemy and thus no tangible allies, do certain deep-seated self-preserving instincts kick in?

The whole thing is gruesomely fascinating right now.

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Boem wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Spoiler

Months. That's what we hope we've prepared for, given Wuhan/China and then Italy, given the math and the global sluggishness for the major Western countries to respond. Months.

And we're barely a week into it.

If a miracle vaccine isn't found and deemed okay for the masses, we're going to be a part of one of the worst years of living history. Airlines are going to go broke. Massive lay-offs in all sorts of industries and sectors. The elderly dying in their homes in the thousands, and then bewildered relatives unsure of what to do with the bodies. Shortages of things we all take for granted, things you probably can't even see coming. Rationed everything. Daily reminders of the haves and the have-nots, although both will be affected by this. And every health care worker, nurse, paramedic, doctor will be forced to act and think like soldiers, right down to choosing in the moment who to save and who to effectively kill.

Grim but difficult to refute if you follow the simplest of logic.

Spoiler

I don't understand this kind of logic, because either it applies always or it doesn't at all.

For example pretending doctors just "now" will be forced to choose who to save and who to let die when this happens all the time. What do you think the price system of a market is for?
Either you are valuable to society or you die in case of emergency or specialized treatment.

I also find the sentiment that we are going to be part of the worst year of living history incredibly childish considering the past century.

I'd list some of the pure evil like nanking of the past century, but really i shouldn't have to.
Humans against a third party(virus) will rally together very easily, this is nothing compared to a century where humans were mass murdering other humans with intend and purpose.

Not sure what corona is at worldwide at the moment but just totalling WWI and WWII amounts to 125 million casualties.

Too much hyperbole Charan, it's bad, but its not "entire city's blown to bits and the smell of human rot and decay everywhere bad"

Be happy we live in an age where the commons can actually be rallied like this to protect the 1%, that's probably a unique thing in human history this amount of society effort to protect the weak instead of just shrugging and moving on.

Peace,

-Boem-

I understand the following comment might come off as offensive, but I feel it needs to be said: it's not worth it. Wrecking that kind of economic harm to ourselves and our way of life is not worth the lives of the 1%.

This isn't a new type of calculus. Peoples have fought wars in defense of their way of life before. Most of the time, those who were sacrificed were not volunteers, but conscripts; the decision was made at a level above them. And we don't look back at the government that compelled those soldiers to, say, fight against Germany IN WW2 as evil for instituting the draft.

It has yet to be seen if COVID-19 is, like Thanos fancied himself, inevitable. It might still be. It is NOT my position that our fight against this 2% Thanos snap has reached absurd proportions, but I see everywhere people all too ready to go there, anticipating it, almost wanting it. And at some point we really should just stop, say no, it's too much. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Economic damage is not something trivial in comparison to human life. Indeed, the main thing the working class does with their waking time is exchange their lives for money, one hour at a time. Shortages and lost wages lead inexorably to problems that shorten lives and cause unneeded deaths. At a certain point sacrificing some portion of our economy is equivalent to sacrificing some portion of our population.

And even then, there is some real risk that all this will be in vain, that the containment won't work, that those vulnerable to the virus would succumb to it anyway.

I mean, sheeit, it would at least be nice if the vulnerable were thankful of what they're expecting. Would a "please" before "wash your hands" be too much to ask?

I neither fully agree nor disagree with this sentiment. I also think it's really easy to get caught up in this minutiae when perhaps it's far from the most pertinent issue right now. Possibly the only way I think it's worth discussing at this moment is the inability to tell need from want. Most of the time our needs seem based what we want; a lot of people are going to review what they really want, as things simplify a little, and then a little more.

Greed isn't always material either. You can be greedy for life, covetous of it. Hungry and ravenous to cling to it. But I suspect why you'd call it gross is because what underpins 'greed' is an eternal disagreement between one person's needs and another's. That and what we 'need' now, we might not 'need' tomorrow...but we might 'need' it later. That's the essence of covetousness, of being tight-pursed even when the times call for charity. You're going to see a lot of that in the days to come.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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If I were a crazy wealthy guy like Mike Bloomberg, I'd leverage that dough into manufacturing respirators.

This comes back to that NYT article about the small-time Amazon merchant stockpiling hand sanitiser and trying to flog it at a 1000% mark-up. Or, yknow, that more recent article referring to a certain attempt by a certain uber-capitalist government trying to buy a possible vaccine for, well, what we must presume would be ultimately selfish gains.

Where's the line for profiteering in times of global humanitarian crisis? By positioning it as a war with no tangible enemy and thus no tangible allies, do certain deep-seated self-preserving instincts kick in?

The whole thing is gruesomely fascinating right now.

Greed is gross. Even more gross in times like these.

That amazon dude did the right thing, because it would result in more households getting a hand sanitiser.

And if you don't understand why that is, you should refrain from posting kindergarden level economic logic.

Peace,

-Boem-

Don't be an inconsiderate selfish jerk...please.

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More chaos and violence at our supermarkets this morning. A stabbing, an assault. It's sad to think that in the shadow of the main disaster, certain events that would normally be big news just won't be. Perspective's a bitch to keep when a single one thing dominates everyday life.

Well, unspoken relief that it was just a stabbing, just an assault. For now.

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The jobless guy who sponges off his parents is giving economic advice. :)

I resemble that comment.

OTOH I was happily employed and on track to an academic career before I got sick so I'm just going to count my blessings.

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A friend of mine asked the very pointed question that so many of us don't want to consider: what about the homeless? Where do they fit into all of this?

No one answered, but we all know the answer. The homeless are meant to do the same thing they've always done: stay in the corner of our eye, whether living or dying. And we can tell ourselves there's nothing we can do. Their people failed them. The system failed them. They failed themselves. Nothing to do with us.

And it's true. Still catastrophic, but largely true.

That's why no one answered her. Not because they can't...but because they can't.