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.