Coronavirus - Overall
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@Winger said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Kirwan said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@canefan said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Kirwan said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Winger said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Kirwan said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Winger What are your thoughts on Bill Gates?
I always liked Gates because Excel. Much better than Lotus 123. Also MS Dos was cheaper to own due to lower computer prices (half the price of IMB computers). So credit to Gates. Even though he got his start thanks to his mother and IBM. So without being born into an elite family he would be another unknown in the world.
But he was always came across as a strange nerdy type that was obsessed with money and control. And still is. He’s been very successful. But one big failure is giving money away (worth when he started $52 billion now $104 billion). Or is this just marketing hype. Where he claims to want to give his money away but doesn’t and is just using his foundation to reduce his tax bill. And to market himself as he sets up his next money making schemes (digital certificates and vaccines etc).
But credit to Gates. He has everything lined up to make a fortune. He invested in imperial college where they just happened to produce via Neil Ferguson the scary inflated estimated Coved 19 deaths that seemed to kick this all off. He is a big investor in WHO. Is mates and has invested in Dr Fauci etc. etc. etc. And his marketing team has done a brilliant job. His image has changed from a nerdy control freak who violated antitrust laws to a kind of world saviour.
One last point. He needs to choose his friends and foundation investors more carefully.
Was the last line an Epstein jab? Dodgy territory for a Trump fan.
But back to Gates, it’s true he’s increased his wealth but with like most things you see in black and white you are missing a bit of nuance.
His reported net wealth includes his charitable foundation for starters. They key point is that he has given away $50 billion to charities over the years. No matter how you cut it, that’s amazing. Also impressive is him convincing other billionaires to do the same.
His foundation is doing remarkable work, just looking at his vaccine work and halving child mortality in the last 15years, particularly in the third world.
Do you think he’s planning to microchip people?
Antivaxxers would not see his vaccine work as a good thing....
Facts don’t care about feelings.
The facts are that people who follow a more natural approach are often healthier than people who don't. And instead rely on big pharma and lots and lots and lots of pills and injections to make them right.
The 2nd fact is we have had vaccines and lots of big pharma drugs for many years now, Yet here we are. People are so scared of the yearly flu that the economy has been ruined. And people willingly wear masks (that likely do more harm than good) and want everyone else to do likewise and are afraid of getting too close to someone else(even their grandchildren for example) just in case. Its like a collective madness. Where people think we will only be saved by big pharma pill popping or injections.Maybe its time to try a different approach. Rather than even more and more pills (I have meet people who take pills to counter the side effects of other pills) and even more vaccines (compulsory vaccines won't stop at 1). It might be good for big pharma but I don't see overall a healthy population.
It's good to see that you're sticking to it being 'just the annual flu' Winger, and that masks are bad. You can't be happy that your old mate Trump has changed his mind on these this week. I'm sure he'll change it back next week though, so don't get too down about it.
Modern medicine, yet here we are. fuck me. -
this is an interesting little read: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection
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@Bones said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@JC said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Winger Straight question, no bullshit. Do you live in the USA?
I thought he/she is in London (or at least UK).
Polish?
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@Bones Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when @Winger starts saying things like “ People are so scared of the yearly flu that the economy has been ruined. ”, I have to ask, whose people and whose economy are we talking about?
@Winger seems very invested in the USA, which is fine if he actually lives there. But if he doesn’t, conflating what happens there with the rest of the world is pretty dumb.
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@JC said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Bones Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when @Winger starts saying things like “ People are so scared of the yearly flu that the economy has been ruined. ”, I have to ask, whose people and whose economy are we talking about?
@Winger seems very invested in the USA, which is fine if he actually lives there. But if he doesn’t, conflating what happens there with the rest of the world is pretty dumb.
I'm invested in the US because its key to where the West goes (but I currently not living in the UK, NZ or the US).
And in general the Wests economy has been ruined (some of the biggest companies has thrived though). Due to a yearly flu that's been hyped up by the elites with an agenda
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@Winger said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@JC said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Bones Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when @Winger starts saying things like “ People are so scared of the yearly flu that the economy has been ruined. ”, I have to ask, whose people and whose economy are we talking about?
@Winger seems very invested in the USA, which is fine if he actually lives there. But if he doesn’t, conflating what happens there with the rest of the world is pretty dumb.
I'm invested in the US because its key to where the West goes (but I currently not living in the UK, NZ or the US).
And in general the Wests economy has been ruined (some of the biggest companies has thrived though). Due to a yearly flu that's been hyped up by the elites with an agenda
What's the agenda? Sell more respirators?
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@booboo said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Winger said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@JC said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Bones Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when @Winger starts saying things like “ People are so scared of the yearly flu that the economy has been ruined. ”, I have to ask, whose people and whose economy are we talking about?
@Winger seems very invested in the USA, which is fine if he actually lives there. But if he doesn’t, conflating what happens there with the rest of the world is pretty dumb.
I'm invested in the US because its key to where the West goes (but I currently not living in the UK, NZ or the US).
And in general the Wests economy has been ruined (some of the biggest companies has thrived though). Due to a yearly flu that's been hyped up by the elites with an agenda
What's the agenda? Sell more respirators?
Ah yes, the mysterious wealthy and powerful elites. From what I've been able to figure out so far, they make fortunes from renewable energy, but are not invested in coal or oil, and now I guess we can rule out airlines. Or actually, maybe this comes back to the renewables - they've made Covid up to stop the planes, which stops the av gas...
In all seriousness, why wouldn't the wealthy and powerful want to ruin the economy? Makes perfect sense. -
Spain's Covid-19 death toll could be 60% higher than official figure
Spain’s coronavirus death toll could be nearly 60% than the official total of 28,342, an investigation by Spanish daily newspaper El País has found.
The country’s official death toll includes people who were formally diagnosed with coronavirus, not suspected cases who were never tested.
A lack of widespread testing, particularly in the early stages of the outbreak, means the official count could underestimate the virus’ toll, like in many other countries.
By counting regional statistics of all suspected and confirmed fatalities from the virus, El Pais reached a total of 44,868 deaths. If accurate, that would make Spain’s outbreak the second deadliest in Europe after the UK.
Not huge news, I admit.
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Is there an economics forum? If so, pls move mods.
It is sometimes said that governments wasted the global financial crisis of 2007-09 by failing to rethink economic policy after the dust settled. Nobody will say the same about the covid-19 pandemic. It has led to a desperate scramble to enact policies that only a few months ago were either unimaginable or heretical. A profound shift is now taking place in economics as a result, of the sort that happens only once in a generation. Much as in the 1970s when clubby Keynesianism gave way to Milton Friedman’s austere monetarism, and in the 1990s when central banks were given their independence, so the pandemic marks the start of a new era. Its overriding preoccupation will be exploiting the opportunities and containing the enormous risks that stem from a supersized level of state intervention in the economy and financial markets.
This new epoch has four defining features. The first is the jaw-dropping scale of today’s government borrowing, and the seemingly limitless potential for yet more. The imf predicts that rich countries will borrow 17% of their combined gdp this year to fund $4.2trn in spending and tax cuts designed to keep the economy going. They are not done. In America Congress is debating another spending package (see United States section). The European Union has just agreed on a new stimulus funded by common borrowing, crossing a political Rubicon (see next Leader).
The second feature is the whirring of the printing presses. In America, Britain, the euro zone and Japan central banks have created new reserves of money worth some $3.7trn in 2020. Much of this has been used to buy government debt, meaning that central banks are tacitly financing the stimulus. The result is that long-term interest rates stay low even while public-debt issuance soars.
The state’s growing role as capital-allocator-in-chief is the third aspect of the new age. To see off a credit crunch, the Federal Reserve, acting with the Treasury, has waded into financial markets, buying up the bonds of at&t, Apple and even Coca-Cola, and lending directly to everyone from bond dealers to non-profit hospitals. Together the Fed and Treasury are now backstopping 11% of America’s entire stock of business debt. Across the rich world, governments and central banks are following suit.
The final feature is the most important: low inflation. The absence of upward pressure on prices means there is no immediate need to slow the growth of central-bank balance-sheets or to raise short-term interest rates from their floor around zero. Low inflation is therefore the fundamental reason not to worry about public debt, which, thanks to accommodative monetary policy, now costs so little to service that it looks like free money.
Don’t fool yourself that the role of the state will magically return to normal once the pandemic passes and unemployment falls. Yes, governments and central banks may dial down their spending and bail-outs. But the new era of economics reflects the culmination of long-term trends. Even before the pandemic, inflation and interest rates were subdued despite a jobs boom. Today the bond market still shows no sign of worrying about long-term inflation. If it is right, deficits and money-printing may well become the standard tools of policymaking for decades. The central banks’ growing role in financial markets, meanwhile, reflects the stagnation of banks as intermediaries and the prominence of innovative and risk-hungry shadow banks and capital markets (see Finance section). In the old days, when commercial banks ruled the roost, central banks acted as lenders of last resort to them. Now central banks increasingly have to get their hands dirty on Wall Street and elsewhere by acting as mammoth “marketmakers of last resort”.
A state with a permanently broader and deeper reach across the economy creates some opportunities. Low rates make it cheaper for the government to borrow to build new infrastructure, from research labs to electricity grids, that will boost growth and tackle threats such as pandemics and climate change. As societies age, rising spending on health and pensions is inevitable—if the resulting deficits help provide a necessary stimulus to the economy, all the more reason to embrace them.
Yet the new era also presents grave risks. If inflation jumps unexpectedly the entire edifice of debt will shake, as central banks have to raise their policy rates and in turn pay out vast sums of interest on the new reserves that they have created to buy bonds. And even if inflation stays low, the new machinery is vulnerable to capture by lobbyists, unions and cronies.
One of monetarism’s key insights was that sprawling macroeconomic management leads to infinite opportunities for politicians to play favourites. Already they are deciding which firms get tax breaks and which workers should be paid by the state to wait for their old jobs to reappear. Soon some loans to the private sector will turn sour, leaving governments to choose which firms fail. When money is free, why not rescue companies, protect obsolete jobs and save investors?
However, though that would provide a brief stimulus, it is a recipe for distorted markets, moral hazard and low growth. Fear of politicians’ myopia was why many countries delegated power to independent central banks, which wielded a single, simple tool—interest rates—to manage the economic cycle. Yet today interest rates, so close to zero, seem impotent and the monarchs who run the world’s central banks are becoming rather like servants working as the government’s debt-management arm.
Free markets and free lunches
Each new era of economics confronts a new challenge. After the 1930s the task was to prevent depressions. In the 1970s and early 1980s the holy grail was to end stagflation. Today the task for policymakers is to create a framework that allows the business cycle to be managed and financial crises to be fought without a politicised takeover of the economy. As our briefing this week explains, this may involve delegating fiscal firepower to technocrats, or reforming the financial system to enable central banks to take interest rates deeply negative, exploiting the revolutionary shift among consumers away from old-style banking to fintech and digital payments. The stakes are high. Failure will mean the age of free money eventually comes at a staggering price. -
@Hooroo said in Coronavirus - Overall:
What I would like to see at the end of the year is the year on year death rates. Did 'X' amount more people die this year because of Covid in the world or was it the same (or was it less due to all the lockdowns)
Apparently Australia's death rate for the flu is down 300 on last year...