Jump to content

Thetexashammer

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    3496
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Thetexashammer

  1. Iran building mass graves. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/middleeast/iran-coronavirus-mass-graves-intl/index.html France and Spain are joining Italy on complete lockdown. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51892477 Lockdown sucks. It really sucks. It can't last more than a month to six weeks I don't think.
  2. Worth mentioning that one of the things no one has calculated is the cost to states and localities in terms of their pension plan unfunded liabilities. Basically, they were fucked before this. They are mega fucked now. Bunch of downgrades coming, Illinois leading the way down. There are specific requirements to keep pension funds funded. Politicians made deliberate decisions not to fund the pensions appropriately. It's no different than simply paying a portion of your weekly paycheck. It's theft, which is ordinarily a crime. I personally believe the people responsible should be thrown in jail, but I have no hope of that ever happening. I'd be OK with drawn and quartered as well.
  3. Because muslim isn't a race?
  4. You know how I know you're old?
  5. This may be heretical, but I was starting to be concerned that people were locking down too early. You can only stay home for so long before people start to run out of money and starve and commit crimes and such. Point being that you can go on lockdown too early, and then when you're forced to abandon the TTP's that kept the virus at bay, you just have another outbreak and people just live with it since they don't want to starve to death or go bankrupt. The ultimate answer is herd immunity, obviously.
  6. I'm not eyes on in terms of what you can and can't trade. But what about the other exchanges and dark pools? Maybe a retail customer can't trade, but there is all kinds of trading that goes on outside of the major exchanges. When one exchange shuts down, that's only the one exchange.
  7. If you're killing folks who have passed their age of reproduction, you aren't culling the herd in a meaningful way.
  8. There is an east solution. I can't imagine what immamac is waiting for.
  9. Quite a few more carabinieri out and about now. They appear to have deployed military as well. I guess they don't have posse comitatus here.
  10. All these "market pauses" are kind of a joke nowadays. There are lots of off exchange pools where you can trade anything. If the NYSE closes, it means virtually nothing. All the firms can clear trades on other exchanges. It's all digital nowadays.
  11. At some point, if you have a fever and cough, a test is irrelevant, you go quarantine yourself. That's not to say you shouldn't get a test, since you need to know if you are immuneish, but as a social practical matter the testing is kind of moot. The tests themselves aren't perfect either. They miss people who have COVID, and they test positive for some who don't have it.
  12. I was a eucharistic minister for many years. I'm under no illusion that my little "wipe the cloth across the edge of the chalice" was in any way effective at sterilization. No soap, no bleach, just a feel good little shaking and stirring the bugs around like a mixed drink in a cocktail shaker
  13. Listen, I know there's a pandemic but that's no excuse for ending a sentence with a preposition.
  14. I was here before the Lombardy lockdown, and was watching CNN when they declared the nationwide lockdown and my phone exploded. It's not different than you would expect. Italy is an economic and social disaster. All of the locals I've talked to hate the economy. There is no economic opportunity, so my area feels like a small Texas town where all the young people left. Rush hour is a little lighter than before, but I was at a grocery store yesterday and it was a pretty normal looking crowd. There is a piece of paper that you're supposed to have with you when you're out. You list your reason for being out, there are several like going to work or going home. But as best I can tell, checkpoints are only on the autostradas. They shut down the football games and other events natiowide last week I think. Rome is probably pretty empty, as is I expect Firenze, and the Milan Duomo shots that the BBC has been doing are pretty stark. Tourism is probably their biggest industry. Italy is dominated by small and family businesses. So the complete shutdown is going to kill these folks. I talked to the guy at my hotel and he said his wife just got 15 days off unpaid from work. She has some sort of sales job and there were no customers. I've never really wished I spoke italian, but I would kill for a translation of italian news right now. Gotta be amazing to watch. I guess what's really striking is the reactions of people I've talked to. Some of them are freaking out. They're very polite, but they don't realize how little impact the disease has on the young and healthy. I am at very, very little risk, for example. For anyone who still thinks that police or military will ride to the rescue, that is certainly not the case here. People are largely left to their own devices. I really haven't seen police at all out in public. I mean, I see them sitting in their cars doing nothing, as usual I suppose. Banks are open, restaurants are open, hotels are open, trains and airports are open. I googled, tourism is 10% of the Italian economy. The original idea of just ring fencing the virus was stupid. But the social distancing thing is likely to be fairly successful. So let's say it works and Italy calms down. How long can you last with the majority of your population sitting at home, probably out of work? If they really try and ban being in public, won't crime start to increase at some point? When do people run out of money and start to get hungry? Few people do like I did, and store up supplies. You'll eventually get to social mayhem, and the quarantine has to end. But there will still be a reservoir of virus (third world countries), so you're back to a panic again. The goal is herd immunity. You WANT the healthy people to get it, and become immune. You want the risky people to isolate. Alternatively, you can vaccinate the public, but that vaccine doesn't exist yet. After a month or two you may be able to ramp up purel and surgical mask production. If everyone wears a mask, that measure alone is effective at stopping the spread. Allegedly. So I think everything shuts down for a while, the kids get out of school in a couple months etc. Maybe we have some solutions by then. And I expect the worst health outcomes might be avoided. And that leaves the financial outcomes. America will bounce back, because we were already growing. Europe, Italy especially, is in long term decline. This will accelerate that economic decline, and the social and political changes that come along with it. It's another leg down economically, they're already down around 10% from 2008. Just turning up the temperature on the pressure cooker. And that's the good outcome. But really, who the fuck knows.
  15. Youre referring to a reddit thread, right? This one? The one that got deleted? https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses
×
×
  • Create New...