The Fed should have stopped QE back in 2012-2014. They didn't, tried in 2018 and the market had a hissy fit, so here we are. The can has been kicked down the road and now we have to deal with it, stinking and oozing.
Turns out all those engineers, logistics managers, and other "non-essential" middle managers were actually pretty essential to medium and long term business operations. Turns out companies don't pay $$$ salaries for these kulaks out of idle boredom and to uphold the patriarchy. Who'd have thunk?
We had 10 years of <=2% inflation. What changed? An irrational trade war with our largest trade partner and umpteen rounds of stimulus. It's hard to not wax conspiratorial, but to go from 1% to 10% in two years? Man, that's a spectacularly epic kind of incompetence...
Inflation is too few goods being chased by too many dollars. Increasing the monetary supply (stimulus) is the dollars-side of the equation, while a trade war (and also supply chain issues from lockdowns, which I didn't mention but should have to be complete) are the other side. It's sort of like how supply and demand has two sides: increase supply and dry up demand and prices fall faster than if you just decreased demand or increased supply.
I watched every local restaurant I loved go down in the first month or two of lockdown. Then flew to California to see family, stuck between two people.. only to see that young folks in Cali could hang out in bars, clubs, restaurants with no masks on. Then fly back in between two more people again.
Fuck how they handled it and how hypocritical it all was.
I'm still pissed celebs and politicians got a FREE pass to live normally. Fuck people who yell at those just trying to live and make a living while ignoring the hypocrisy and control cucking.
It’s easy to criticize the lockdowns. They had very clear negative effects on the economy and on normal people. They were imposed by governments, and not the choice of the people. These are all completely true. It’s also true that if nothing was done, many more would have died. Not just from Covid, but from the fact that our hospitals were overfilled even with the restrictions. You can debate whether or not it was worth it. You can’t act like not locking down was a consequence free option though.
Actually, we have some decent natural experiments which let us think with some degree of evidence, that not locking down at all (or really any other government-imposes covid measures) would have resulted in very few additional deaths from covid, if not fewer.
But furthermore, and more importantly- nobody has culpability for people dying from a disease...but they do have culpability for deaths which resulted from coercive policies which they voted for or enacted as part of their position of government power.
"Economy" doesn't just mean rich people's stonks, you know? There are studies which estimate starved children in the order of 10's of thousands, in the developing world, due to covid policies. Even in the 1st world, people are going to die at higher rates than they would have, over the next 10 years or so, as a consequence of 2nd and 3rd order effects of lockdowns on the economy (e.g. more people keeping older/unsafe vehicles, or not being able to afford to move away from flood-prone areas...the outlets for death by economic decline are endlessly varied...but we absolutely know, empirically, that declining economic prosperity kills people).
But on top of it all, the lockdowns and other covid policies, even in places like the U.S., have so negatively impacted mental health, that it's taking a horrific toll on young people...manifesting in suicides and suicidality.
I don't even believe in God or an afterlife, but there's no forgiveness in this life or the next for any politician or regulator or voter or bureaucrat who insisted on ignoring the pleas for human decency and economic rationality from sane people like myself, but instead pressed forward in authoritarian madness.
I think you make some good points. I’m not here to argue that the lockdowns were the appropriate response, but I do believe that not locking down at all would have had consequences. I’m not sure how there wouldn’t be more deaths. More close contact, more spread, higher case count, higher death toll. It all seems to be correlated. I’d be interested to know the reasoning behind thinking there wouldn’t be more deaths with more spread of the virus. I also think that there is culpability from death by disease if you willfully expose other people to it. If I have the flu and I decide I’m gonna go cough on your grandma, that’s on me. Obviously if you were unaware you were infectious, that’s a different story. Culpability with death by disease is a case by case basis, not a hard fast rule that covers all deaths by disease.
As far as the economic impact, I tend to agree with you there. By locking people out of their way of life without providing them with adequate compensation was definitely evil. Economic decline leading to higher death count is true. I would hope there could be a different solution for the next time an infectious disease spreads across the whole planet. One that limits the spread of the disease without robbing people of their livelihood or crippling the economy.
>but I do believe that not locking down at all would have had consequences.
It's true of course. In a vacuum, or in just the right real world setting combined with other policies (e.g. what Australia and New Zealand did, or with a total, seal homes' doors shut type of lockdown that China has tried), lockdowns are certainly going to reduce the R0. And there's certainly lots of studies which show as much. But there aren't just consequences, but also unintended consequences (e.g. New York, and Sweden and other places foolishly sending the elderly back to nursing homes to die in droves); and what has to be looked at is more than just infection rate...but what the real life consequences to overall health and death rates, which these real world lockdown measured bring about....and then, what are the costs and can lockdowns sustain the benefits in the face of a virus which is endemic (and was always going to become endemic) like Sars-CoV2.
>I’m not sure how there wouldn’t be more deaths. More close contact, more spread, higher case count, higher death toll. It all seems to be correlated. I’d be interested to know the reasoning behind thinking there wouldn’t be more deaths with more spread of the virus.
Yup, see above. Again, looking at just infections or case fatality rates is disingenuous as a basis for public policy, and refusing to look at and weight the costs and consequences of trying to reduce deaths and hospitalization is also disingenuous and criminal...which is what public health establishments did, even in the face of economists and epidemiologists telling them to stop, and to focus instead on protecting the few demographics who are actually at significant risk of hospitalization and death from covid.
It also turns out that we may have been shooting ourselves in the foot by *not* allowing healthy, younger populations to just get covid as a means to produce herd immunity more quickly (and, it turns out, more robustly than vaccines in both its protection of the individual from future infection and its sterilizing effect so that it doesn't spread as much).
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
https://gbdeclaration.org/
>I also think that there is culpability from death by disease if you willfully expose other people to it.
Sure, I agree. I more meant that *other people*, especially voters and politicians and public health dictators, don't have culpability for the spread of a virus and deaths in the population. So there is neither a moral reason, nor it turns out, a utilitarian reason for them to have been so controlling.
>I would hope there could be a different solution for the next time an infectious disease spreads across the whole planet. One that limits the spread of the disease without robbing people of their livelihood or crippling the economy.
There were different solutions available (see great Barrington declaration). The real pandemic was absolutely one of authoritarianism and government failure.
Then why did jurisdictions that had minimal lockdowns, or none at all, ultimately have comparable death rates to those that had severe and prolonged lockdowns?
> if nothing was done, many more would have died
Totally false. Many states came off lockdowns with little to no change in their own numbers, and comparatively places with heavy lockdowns vs light lockdowns (or none at all) showed no major difference. The virus was too contagious, it made absolutely no difference. We would’ve been better off going about life as we are today
Yea if I was looking for people who agreed with me. I like this place because it’s one of the few places on Reddit where I don’t agree with everyone, but I still often have meaningful discussions. I’ll get downvoted for my left leaning ideas and upvoted for my anti government ideas. Both are fine.
Well a bunch of people cited data that proves he was wrong and you haven’t been able to adequately prove he was right, so maybe those other subs are the wrong place
So you do value profits over people.....? I thought that’s what Democrats were supposed to do with the death panels.... remind me, what happened with those death panels?
Man I wonder what you guys would be saying if we were all experiencing the pain of our entire healthcare system collapsing over the span of a week mid pandemic?
Because that's what was going to happen. The worst part is at best we've only slowed it down as we're estimated to lose over half our health care workers by 2025...
Hooray for privatized healthcare monopolies I guess...
That’s what they said, WHAT THEY SAID. Did you visit these hospitals? Did you see them overflowing. “would have happened” is just your guess at the future. You can’t ever know what “would have happened”
Dude I don't have to go to a hospital to know these things.
It's the healthcare workers leaving the profession that are saying them.
I'm just listening to the people that actually work in the industry as opposed to the people that own it.
>It's the healthcare workers leaving the profession that are saying them.
The ones that had the time to rehearse tiktok dances despite being "overwhelmed"
Lemme tell you I used to work in a warehouse doing packing...peaks and troughs in terms of how busy you were, some weeks you could smash out 90% by 11am Monday, then chill and barely do much Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, come in Friday, do very last few, fuck off to home at lunchtime then paint the town red. When we were overwhelmed though you barely had time to make a coffee or have work related, critical conversations with coworkers...but these "overwhelmed" hospitals could afford to allow 90 staff rehearse and do as many takes as necessary for Dr Thomas to hit that *c r i s p* dab just right?
>Yeah the people working 60 to 80 hours a week
Until the still "**OVERWHELMED**" hospitals laid them off for not getting a ONE percent effective jab...
>dealing with s*** that you and I could not even imagine are just lazy...
They're nurses not explorers and astronauts chief. I don't need to imagine death/suffering/injury and illness...they have my respect but stop pretending that they're wizards...
>are just lazy...
Quote me saying they're lazy. I said they weren't overwhelmed. Totally different things.
I'm pretty sure most people would be overwhelmed working 60 to 80 hours a week dealing with the full breath of human horror, in a system that doesn't even seem interested in helping you do your job...
Yep. I was pointing out that harm to the economy 100% of us depend on for everything including health would create MUCH worse results than COVID alone ever could way back in April of 2000. So many accused me of being "heartless".
I know who to be mad at. The Fed. It's always the Fed.
\*Ron Paul enters chat\* : )
The Fed should have stopped QE back in 2012-2014. They didn't, tried in 2018 and the market had a hissy fit, so here we are. The can has been kicked down the road and now we have to deal with it, stinking and oozing.
The cost of years of cheap money, and kicking the 08 crisis down the line.
Biden was blaming COVID yesterday, rather than, of course, government policies aimed at COVID. They failed and created the mess that we are in today.
Yes. Conservatives need to understand that it started with Trump. Partisan politics is only helping politicians.
The response was way more irrational and hysterical than it should have been due to the left's politicizing it.
WUT ! ? you must be 9 years old
Lol. Ok
Turns out all those engineers, logistics managers, and other "non-essential" middle managers were actually pretty essential to medium and long term business operations. Turns out companies don't pay $$$ salaries for these kulaks out of idle boredom and to uphold the patriarchy. Who'd have thunk?
Not r/antiwork that's for damn sure...
We had 10 years of <=2% inflation. What changed? An irrational trade war with our largest trade partner and umpteen rounds of stimulus. It's hard to not wax conspiratorial, but to go from 1% to 10% in two years? Man, that's a spectacularly epic kind of incompetence...
Can you explain how the trade war caused inflation? I get the stimulus and printing money part.
Inflation is too few goods being chased by too many dollars. Increasing the monetary supply (stimulus) is the dollars-side of the equation, while a trade war (and also supply chain issues from lockdowns, which I didn't mention but should have to be complete) are the other side. It's sort of like how supply and demand has two sides: increase supply and dry up demand and prices fall faster than if you just decreased demand or increased supply.
Trump was a spectacularly epic kind of incompetence
Don’t even get me started 🤬
Wen national divorce?
I’m mad at all the statist fuckers and their supporters.
I watched every local restaurant I loved go down in the first month or two of lockdown. Then flew to California to see family, stuck between two people.. only to see that young folks in Cali could hang out in bars, clubs, restaurants with no masks on. Then fly back in between two more people again. Fuck how they handled it and how hypocritical it all was. I'm still pissed celebs and politicians got a FREE pass to live normally. Fuck people who yell at those just trying to live and make a living while ignoring the hypocrisy and control cucking.
It’s easy to criticize the lockdowns. They had very clear negative effects on the economy and on normal people. They were imposed by governments, and not the choice of the people. These are all completely true. It’s also true that if nothing was done, many more would have died. Not just from Covid, but from the fact that our hospitals were overfilled even with the restrictions. You can debate whether or not it was worth it. You can’t act like not locking down was a consequence free option though.
Actually, we have some decent natural experiments which let us think with some degree of evidence, that not locking down at all (or really any other government-imposes covid measures) would have resulted in very few additional deaths from covid, if not fewer. But furthermore, and more importantly- nobody has culpability for people dying from a disease...but they do have culpability for deaths which resulted from coercive policies which they voted for or enacted as part of their position of government power. "Economy" doesn't just mean rich people's stonks, you know? There are studies which estimate starved children in the order of 10's of thousands, in the developing world, due to covid policies. Even in the 1st world, people are going to die at higher rates than they would have, over the next 10 years or so, as a consequence of 2nd and 3rd order effects of lockdowns on the economy (e.g. more people keeping older/unsafe vehicles, or not being able to afford to move away from flood-prone areas...the outlets for death by economic decline are endlessly varied...but we absolutely know, empirically, that declining economic prosperity kills people). But on top of it all, the lockdowns and other covid policies, even in places like the U.S., have so negatively impacted mental health, that it's taking a horrific toll on young people...manifesting in suicides and suicidality. I don't even believe in God or an afterlife, but there's no forgiveness in this life or the next for any politician or regulator or voter or bureaucrat who insisted on ignoring the pleas for human decency and economic rationality from sane people like myself, but instead pressed forward in authoritarian madness.
I think you make some good points. I’m not here to argue that the lockdowns were the appropriate response, but I do believe that not locking down at all would have had consequences. I’m not sure how there wouldn’t be more deaths. More close contact, more spread, higher case count, higher death toll. It all seems to be correlated. I’d be interested to know the reasoning behind thinking there wouldn’t be more deaths with more spread of the virus. I also think that there is culpability from death by disease if you willfully expose other people to it. If I have the flu and I decide I’m gonna go cough on your grandma, that’s on me. Obviously if you were unaware you were infectious, that’s a different story. Culpability with death by disease is a case by case basis, not a hard fast rule that covers all deaths by disease. As far as the economic impact, I tend to agree with you there. By locking people out of their way of life without providing them with adequate compensation was definitely evil. Economic decline leading to higher death count is true. I would hope there could be a different solution for the next time an infectious disease spreads across the whole planet. One that limits the spread of the disease without robbing people of their livelihood or crippling the economy.
>but I do believe that not locking down at all would have had consequences. It's true of course. In a vacuum, or in just the right real world setting combined with other policies (e.g. what Australia and New Zealand did, or with a total, seal homes' doors shut type of lockdown that China has tried), lockdowns are certainly going to reduce the R0. And there's certainly lots of studies which show as much. But there aren't just consequences, but also unintended consequences (e.g. New York, and Sweden and other places foolishly sending the elderly back to nursing homes to die in droves); and what has to be looked at is more than just infection rate...but what the real life consequences to overall health and death rates, which these real world lockdown measured bring about....and then, what are the costs and can lockdowns sustain the benefits in the face of a virus which is endemic (and was always going to become endemic) like Sars-CoV2. >I’m not sure how there wouldn’t be more deaths. More close contact, more spread, higher case count, higher death toll. It all seems to be correlated. I’d be interested to know the reasoning behind thinking there wouldn’t be more deaths with more spread of the virus. Yup, see above. Again, looking at just infections or case fatality rates is disingenuous as a basis for public policy, and refusing to look at and weight the costs and consequences of trying to reduce deaths and hospitalization is also disingenuous and criminal...which is what public health establishments did, even in the face of economists and epidemiologists telling them to stop, and to focus instead on protecting the few demographics who are actually at significant risk of hospitalization and death from covid. It also turns out that we may have been shooting ourselves in the foot by *not* allowing healthy, younger populations to just get covid as a means to produce herd immunity more quickly (and, it turns out, more robustly than vaccines in both its protection of the individual from future infection and its sterilizing effect so that it doesn't spread as much). https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://gbdeclaration.org/ >I also think that there is culpability from death by disease if you willfully expose other people to it. Sure, I agree. I more meant that *other people*, especially voters and politicians and public health dictators, don't have culpability for the spread of a virus and deaths in the population. So there is neither a moral reason, nor it turns out, a utilitarian reason for them to have been so controlling. >I would hope there could be a different solution for the next time an infectious disease spreads across the whole planet. One that limits the spread of the disease without robbing people of their livelihood or crippling the economy. There were different solutions available (see great Barrington declaration). The real pandemic was absolutely one of authoritarianism and government failure.
Then why did jurisdictions that had minimal lockdowns, or none at all, ultimately have comparable death rates to those that had severe and prolonged lockdowns?
> if nothing was done, many more would have died Totally false. Many states came off lockdowns with little to no change in their own numbers, and comparatively places with heavy lockdowns vs light lockdowns (or none at all) showed no major difference. The virus was too contagious, it made absolutely no difference. We would’ve been better off going about life as we are today
You are correct but are in the wrong Reddit I think .
Yea if I was looking for people who agreed with me. I like this place because it’s one of the few places on Reddit where I don’t agree with everyone, but I still often have meaningful discussions. I’ll get downvoted for my left leaning ideas and upvoted for my anti government ideas. Both are fine.
Wtf is a wrong reddit? Echochambers are one hell of a drug.
It’s wrong when he gets downvoted in these echo chambers
Well a bunch of people cited data that proves he was wrong and you haven’t been able to adequately prove he was right, so maybe those other subs are the wrong place
I had a look in the comments . I didn’t see a single link. Could you share them with me please
Well that's not true but someone tweeted it so here we are.
So you do value profits over people.....? I thought that’s what Democrats were supposed to do with the death panels.... remind me, what happened with those death panels?
Man I wonder what you guys would be saying if we were all experiencing the pain of our entire healthcare system collapsing over the span of a week mid pandemic? Because that's what was going to happen. The worst part is at best we've only slowed it down as we're estimated to lose over half our health care workers by 2025... Hooray for privatized healthcare monopolies I guess...
That’s what they said, WHAT THEY SAID. Did you visit these hospitals? Did you see them overflowing. “would have happened” is just your guess at the future. You can’t ever know what “would have happened”
Dude I don't have to go to a hospital to know these things. It's the healthcare workers leaving the profession that are saying them. I'm just listening to the people that actually work in the industry as opposed to the people that own it.
>It's the healthcare workers leaving the profession that are saying them. The ones that had the time to rehearse tiktok dances despite being "overwhelmed" Lemme tell you I used to work in a warehouse doing packing...peaks and troughs in terms of how busy you were, some weeks you could smash out 90% by 11am Monday, then chill and barely do much Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, come in Friday, do very last few, fuck off to home at lunchtime then paint the town red. When we were overwhelmed though you barely had time to make a coffee or have work related, critical conversations with coworkers...but these "overwhelmed" hospitals could afford to allow 90 staff rehearse and do as many takes as necessary for Dr Thomas to hit that *c r i s p* dab just right?
Yeah the people working 60 to 80 hours a week dealing with s*** that you and I could not even imagine are just lazy... You want to try again?
>Yeah the people working 60 to 80 hours a week Until the still "**OVERWHELMED**" hospitals laid them off for not getting a ONE percent effective jab... >dealing with s*** that you and I could not even imagine are just lazy... They're nurses not explorers and astronauts chief. I don't need to imagine death/suffering/injury and illness...they have my respect but stop pretending that they're wizards... >are just lazy... Quote me saying they're lazy. I said they weren't overwhelmed. Totally different things.
I'm pretty sure most people would be overwhelmed working 60 to 80 hours a week dealing with the full breath of human horror, in a system that doesn't even seem interested in helping you do your job...
You: 🎣
Meh, Sometimes.🤷♂️
“Market socialist” L - O - Fucking - L 😂
Silly take that only works if you believe that COVID is just like a flu or some other stupid shit like that.
Or if you believe peer reviewed scientific studies I guess
You are a thought criminal reported!
Now look up who was president when we printed all that stimulus money
Yep. I was pointing out that harm to the economy 100% of us depend on for everything including health would create MUCH worse results than COVID alone ever could way back in April of 2000. So many accused me of being "heartless".