Corona virus

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I read that the UK is managing to pay out of work bar staff 80% of their wages. I wonder how they pulled that off.

I genuinely hope thats sarcasm and that you know better.

Peace,

-Boem-

If only it looked like this a few weeks ago. If only. Naturally, it took a full heavy-handed closure to make people do the right thing. O for a leader that doesn't wait until it's too late to...lead.

Young people don't give a fuck. Not that I am old but its sad to see how they simply don't care.

I won't generalise. I know plenty of young people (by young let's mean the age group we saw crowding Bondi Beach or Florida beaches this past week) who are aware of the situation. I think it's less age and more age+privilege. I mean, their age itself is a privilege right now, but you won't see underprivileged kids ignoring the warnings right now. They know what's at stake.

In short, I expect most of the idiot brats saying 'we're young, it won't affect us, we're just here to party!' suffer from at least a mild case of affluenza. Let's hope that's all they suffer from in the days to come.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

In short, I expect most of the idiot brats saying 'we're young, it won't affect us, we're just here to party!' suffer from at least a mild case of affluenza. Let's hope that's all they suffer from in the days to come.

I think not as many people are thinking that as you think. This virus isn't being communicated to people very well, most of the people I know are just going about their lives normally, never having given it a thought.

Well, there's one more person who has pretty much zero chance of contributing meaningfully to this discussion.

__

Christ I love Australian understatement. Today's headline as we pass 1,000 confirmed infected cases (surely an iceberg figure if any did exist): 'Not good'.

Yeah, it's a bit like that, eh.

What, they don't have TVs or internet? How can they not know what is going on?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Well, there's one more person who has pretty much zero chance of contributing meaningfully to this discussion.

Ouch, man, c'mon. Don't lump me in with all of you guys.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

What, they don't have TVs or internet? How can they not know what is going on?

Because like 2% of people tops actually look into things. It's not like it's being shoved in people's faces, if you don't actively attempt to learn about it the most you could possibly know is it exists.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

What, they don't have TVs or internet? How can they not know what is going on?

I had a fairly uncomfortable discussion about this with my best friend on the phone today. He's very fit, very ambitious, quite successful as an owner of a small but elite web design business. He will also be the best man at my now delayed wedding, and frankly he took a lot of convincing how serious this is a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago, when I was only considering cancelling my US wedding trip -- we were really worried about affecting guests who had booked bigger trips around the event, all that. You know, back when that was a choice.

Anyway, he calls to check on me. And when I start talking about how things are, how badly we've handled it as a country, he's really ignorant. I start to berate him, but -- and this is very rare -- he lost his temper with me. He has to think about his business and his employees. He's treading water and desperate for ideas, directions for his business that can help him keep his business going. Because his business is largely retail, food service, that sort of thing. They tend to need websites, and right now they're being shut down, hard. So with that on his mind 24/7, he doesn't really have time or room to watch the news that much.

I apologised. I am in a privileged position financially, and we both know it. I can afford to sit here, scanning various sites, twitter, reddit, all that. So I explained to him what things are like elsewhere. How the US and the UK are handling it. Why our schools are still open (sigh). The fact that Australians are great at reacting but we truly suck at proactivity, and how that's really putting us at the very bottom of the list in terms of appropriate response. He took it in, but we soon moved back to brainstorming ways to keep him and his people employed. After all, we don't have much fallback here for a massive, well-coordinated compensation package for the suddenly unemployed hordes.

So that's how I can believe people here might be...distracted from the basic reality of things. We've been raised very capitalist, take care of yourself, unless told outright to do otherwise. And even when told otherwise, the immediate question is: how? You want us to lock down, and still pay bills, shop for food, medication, keep our employees paid, and so on? Right now, this is where we are. Struggling to interpret what we're being told by a government that is reacting days, sometimes weeks too late, and giving 'advice' that is barely feasible with no guidance or assistance.

Maybe it would have been better to lie about the disease and to artificially balloon the death rate so people would be scared and wont constantly break quarantine. Its too late now but maybe in the future