Of course, but you can say that of many crises. That is my point.

i think my company is about to have a second round of layoffs. they are asking for our weekly billable hours on TUESDAY now.

for reference my office only had one layoff during the entirety of the much slower burn financial crisis and two have already been cut (although this was likely related to oil prices).

as i've been saying i'm anticipating a depression.

That would be our parents, grandparents, in-laws, aunts and uncles and so on. Apparently, the world seems to think their elders are worth risking derailing the world economy over. These aren't faceless old people. My father is a 74 year-old Type 1 who can otherwise live another 10-15 years if he takes care of himself. I'm willing to endure some financial volatility in the short term if it means I can have him around a little longer. My wife certainly feels the same about her mother who had heart surgery a few years ago.

More like 2.5-3 months. Most kids don't go to school during the summer months.

My concern for these kids in terms of their learning, are the ones who don't have high-speed internet (or even any kind of internet) access to be able to live-stream video, or even just watch a video online; like the difference between the kids who attend Compton Unified vs. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified. Supposedly, kids will be able to learn from home from their teachers via the internet, but again, some kids have it better than others.

What part about overwhelming the healthcare system do people not get? If you have a child, you should be freaked the fuck out about that possibility. If your kid chokes on a piece of hot dog while all of the doctors are trying to manage a coronavirus outbreak... well, good luck.

My job pretty much told me today that going forward, only working from home. And to only visit clients if absolutely necessary. We'll be using a lot more of video conference calls as opposed to in-person visits.

we were ordered to work from home in north america starting tuesday. i still have a lot of site visits (to vacant industrial facilities, superfund sites, etc) so for now my schedule isn't super impacted but by mid april im anticipating a massive slump in workload as clients massively pull back budgets and i lose site access.

Period.

Skim reading through this thread, it's funny to see who handles change better and who doesn't.

Nothing lasts forever; I think people get used to a routine and think it's gonna be permanent, like being able to go to the gym, being able to eat out, being able to buy toilet paper, a good economy, being "the number 1 country in the world..."

I don't doubt that some of you are going through the similar stages that you go through in grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance). This happens with any kind of big life change that is beyond your control; I know I went through it when I broke up with my first bf; and then when I experienced my very first job layoff.

Everything you hold dear can be taken away from you in a split second. Health is even an obvious one. Just because you're healthy, doesn't mean you'll always be healthy; and just because you get sick, doesn't mean you'll always be sick.

Again, nothing lasts forever, even a crisis. We'll get through this, people. :)

France already has started producing programs for revising studies for many grades. The country is in total lockdown. Just be creative, this is still better than a World War. Just hunker down.

I have so far absolutely loved working from home. It's just sad that it took a global pandemic for my employer to make this happen.

My child is in a small in-home daycare very close to home with 2 other part-time kids.

No commuting or fossil fuels, more family time and sleep. More efficient work. No need for headphones or dress shirts. Easy access to the comforts of home. I can walk my dog. It's gonna be VERY hard to go back to normal work life after this quarantine.

Exactly.


I am more worried about all the man-made bullshit, the economic disparities, the unaddressed issues of pollution, consumerism and wars than this, if all is taken in a spirit of solidarity.

Yes.

I have been working form home, retiring prematurely from work in Film production, a very wasteful industry in order to work exclusively on my painting. I have never been more fulfilled.

is young daddy tired of home schooling already? :haha:

anyway no, its not disaster to shut down for awhile during a pandemic. meaning like a month or two. its common sense until we have a better understanding. economically it just means q2 is out the window.

beyond that, yes. yes it would be disastrous. schools closed until sept? yes. but we'll see about all that, it isn't written in stone as of the moment. :shrug:

That risk is a much better option than ensuring my child doesn't have a life worth living in the first place.

You're not following anything in this conversation. My child isn't at home, and no one is talking about "a month or two".

You can't possibly think that the leadership of every country in the western world hasn't already assessed the risk of inaction versus the draconian measures that they are now taking.

Why is your child so important to you?

Isn't their child or children the most important thing for 95-99% of people who are parents?

Their children, their wives, husbands, their parents, maybe even their neighbors. But that question is for another day. Let's focus on the economy. Laffta.

I have all of those people in my life too, but in a hypothetical situation of very difficult choices, when push comes to shove, my children would come first.

Before me too of course.

It's clear the status quo of a lockdown can't last forever, but it's necessary when faced with exponential growth. Our best hope is to develop effective antivirals against COVID-19 or to gradually transition to a more Seoul-like situation (which admittedly, will be difficult for Americans).

I suppose we can go with the China plan and just pretend like there are no new cases to force people back to work.

The Economy wont be "destroyed" things will bounce back pretty quick once this all passes.

But its not going to be fun for sure.

And I suspect you'll see a lot less public support and fanfare for "globalized" economic models, with countries and companies looking to keep things closer to home now that the instability of the world (something we haven't dealt with in decades) has come back to punch us all in the face.

The Chinese miracle has turned out to be a Chinese nightmare, the days of being able to outsource your manufacturing to China are probably going to end.

Yes well, you know, if your child is allergic to peanuts, and the daycare has no policy in place for that, your child is in deep s..t.

On a macro level, who knows if the measures we are experiencing are over or underkill?

Doctors are faced with dealing with all kinds of people, and their Hippocratic oath determines that they need to care for all. The push comes to shove is something we all dread having to confront.

Barring this force majeure, I don't think the idea that self isolating measures vs the Economy is a major dichotomy.

Alain Deneault, a well-known philosopher in the French speaking world who hails from your neck of the woods, writes about the loss of the original meaning of economy that was closer to ecology. In the seventeenth century the concept of Economy as we surmise it today emerged, and the idea that human trade was totally removed from ecological concerns, and became the norm.

The economy, as we know it now is a net of transactions that is wholly based on confidence and currency. These two components are the keys to controlling the rest. If those two don't take over the massive debt, salary remediation, then , yes, we may be effed.

But you know, we have witnessed so many controls over the economy by nation states, that before this crisis of zero% US Federal rate, we were close to nought, anyway.

Interesting, if there' a push to manufacture more products stateside once thi subsides it can lessen some of the economic damage,

Thats been happening already as the cost benefit to China actually maxed out and began to decline a few years ago.

Actually you will probably see Mexico take the majority of the manufacturing we are used to China doing.

You will also likely see some of our basic manufacturing switch to SE. Asia and India and away from China. High Tech and Value added will still be done in the USA Canada, and a little in Korea and Japan.

What we generally get from Europe is the same, High tech value added and specialty items (BMW's, Computer parts etc)

Of course China has raised a lot of its masses out of misery too, and, our cheap power tools and computers and countless other things are made there. We still are more wasteful on average in North America than they are... but they are learning. The Chinese are buy far the biggest spenders in the luxury retail category when they visit France. It is a known fact.


The Chinese government also detains most of the US debt in treasury bonds...
That is where the real confidence game becomes critical...

take it easy, cheese. its just a joke. :haha:

a month is as much speculation as a year as of now.

I don't think we're that far apart. I readily admit that I don't always act 100% in selfless devotion to the well-being of my kids.

But when the rubber hits the road, they're the #1 priority I always go back to.

I think the argument here is that some people's children (as well as their own lives) are more important than others.

I guess I missed that. Obviously that does not fly.

I'm just speculating, but I've been on this forum long enough to figure out the m.o. of some of the online personas here. It's about the only thing for which my social science degree is useful.

Yeah, well I believe the origins of the notion/word "economy" are related to the wise use of one's resources. Not necessarily to accumulate as many resources as possible personally - potentially to the detriment of others.

This is kind of in line with what Deneault says.

I'd also add the word "economy" entered the English language via the French word "économie" (and the verb "économiser" meaning "to save"), which clearly evokes "savings" a lot more than it evokes "accumulation".

This is an interesting (French) interview about his concepts with ex-Le Monde journalist Aude Lancelin in the days of Coronavirus spread. It was taped five days ago in Paris.


He goes further into the greek origins of the word economy and its subsequent diversions.

There is a Navy hospital ship headed to NYC.

ohhhh, that sounds like a fun little cruise......











awwww, too soon?

All expenses paid? ;)

Welcome to the S.S. California...

Let's shed some light on this (and digress from the stupid levity in a serious situation)--which I know because of the 26 years I spend in the Navy Medical Corps.

These 2 ships, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy are nornally kept in reserve on the east and west coasts respectively. In port, they have Military Sealift Command crews aboard them but no medical personnel, which is crucial. When they deploy, medical personnel normally working in US military hospitals providing standard medical care to active duty troops and their families, some of whom (likely many) will be affected by the coronavirus, staff them which means they abandon their work in the fixed hospital buildings to work on the ships.

The ships could also be staffed by reservists (and sometimes reservists can backfill at the regular military hospitals) but these reservists are doctors and nurses who are already hard at work in civilian hospitals. In other words, to staff the hospital ships with medical staffs requires taking doctors and nurses out of other hospitals where they are already providing care.

As Defense Sec. Espy put it:

https://news.usni.org/2020/03/18/tru...-coast-support

Bottom line, the ships may not be in current use, but all the doctors and nurses are. We don't have any doctors and nurses just sitting around doing nothing who could staff these ships. So the value of using them is somewhat dubious but probably makes certain politicians like NY Gov. Cuomo shut up for a minute or two.

The economy didn't shut down to save a "few" lives, it shut down to literally save millions of lives that would be lost in an uncontrolled epidemic.

And it's not only saving the elderly. In an uncontrolled epidemic, the mortality rate for even the young would be higher - maybe as high as 2% even 3.5% because the hospitals wouldn't be able to handle and treat the majority of cases. If 40% of Americans caught the virus within a six month span, say 130 million people, we might be looking at the better part of 5 million deaths, with at least a million of them being young people, and maybe as many as 2 million being people under 50. In a typical year, around 2 million Americans die, so that would be a doubling or tripling of deaths. That, by itself, would hot the economy hard.

That doesn't even account for the 10+ million people who would live, but with reduced lung capacity due to lung damage. That would become a financial drain in the economy for the next 40 or 50 years, both in terms of treatment and in reduced wages and tax revenues.

And when young people lose young friends, it impacts productivity. And if they take as a lesson that society doesn't care about them as much as it does the economy, it affects productivity, too. Especially with millennials. Doing nothing would be an unmitigated disaster in the long term. Taking our medicine now is really the only choice.

Anyway, as far as local impacts, starting on Monday downtown Chicago started looking like it does on a slow Sunday morning, even at rush hour. Not a ghost town, but very much slower and less populated.

a little levity amidst a serious situation is never stupid.

i would in fact argue that it's vitally and essentially human.

the other option is to completely lose our damn minds.

and fuck that.

See also: Comic relief

I don't think any reasonable person isn't aware that there will be more deaths tomorrow, more infections tomorrow, more people out of work, more unpleasant societal changes... Or that the bigger tragedy is that a great deal of it could have been prepared for, if not prevented.

So yes... we can make a joke or two about cruise ships.

11 AM at Bay and Bloor in Toronto - basically TO's equivalent to Chicago's Magnificent Mile

https://twitter.com/cbctom/status/1240296857051504641

Most doctors/nurses aren't in hosptials, though. Why wouldn't those reservists be made available? Of course they aren't "just sitting around doing nothing" but their dermatology practice in Ohio probably isn't essentially to the current fight. Wouldn't the armed forces have the right to call them up?

The Max Brooks and Mel Brooks social distancing public service announcement is good.

Sure the armed forces has a right to call them up. But if you tell a dermatologist he's going to have to provide primary care or, worse, care of acutely ill virus patients, he'll tell you, "Sorry. No way. I don't have those skills," and in many cases he'll be correct.

Specialists are not interchangeable. These days, general and rotating internships where future specialists learn about things they'll never do again are pretty uncommon. And even if a dermatologist learned how to take care of an accutely ill person, they likely remember little of it.

The point is that there's literally nobody to work in new hospital capacity we might create except people already working in existing hospitals.

What may be useful is developing the ability to segrgate virus patients from everyone else. I saw one proposal to use the hospital ships to provide continuing "regular" medical care--appendectomies, strokes, heart attacks and all the rest--while we turn one or more hospitals ashore into exclusive use for virus patients. That, along with suspending elective hospitalizations for any reason, could make a lot of sense because it keeps hospitals from being places where peopkle who don't have coronavirus can catch it.

But I'm not sure the politicians understand the distinction.

One additional point: I saw reports that the Chinese brought in thousands of "military doctors" to work in their temporary hospitals. That might be true because in China, if reports can be believed, the disease was remarkably localized to Hubei and, somewhat, to Beijing so medical personnel may have been available in the rest of China to use in Wuhan. America is not so lucky. The disease here (and in Europe) seems much more widespread around the country (and getting more so--it's in every state now) so there aren't medical people in unaffected places to move to affected places.

London will lock down on Friday. Heading to the country.

so what are people's thoughts on carry-out from restaurants?

my wife mentioned possibly ordering dinner tonight from the corner bar and grill at the end of our block (they're open for carry-out/delivery only).

on the one hand, i want to help and support them.

on the other hand, i'm scared.

I've begun an intimate relationship with DoorDash. I'm going to support all the local restaurants I can right now because God knows they'll need it.

We've done takeout all week. People touched your (fresh) food from the supermarket too.

If you want to support them, but are scared of eating food you didn't cook, you could just buy a gift card or contribute to one of the myriad GoFundMes.