vtsnowedin wrote:..................... Fine for you but what about those living in rental housing working a city job?
They are at home being paid 80% of their wage by the government with a moratorium on evictions if rent can't be paid. Oh! The evils of socialism!! They might find it difficult to find a nice place to exercise though as many of the city parks have been closed and it's difficult to grow much food on a flat balcony, if you are lucky enough to have one.
Just how long do you think that can go on? Like Maggy said.' sooner or later the socialist run out of other peoples money'.
It doesn't have to go on. It only has to last until the virus is under control and business can pick up again. Then we can tax the money out of existence to reduce the inflationary pressure. All the hedge funds and major corporations which are making a fortune out of the crisis can pay something back. Most of the inflation will be in the stock market as it has been since the bailouts of 2008 and that is a good thing apparently!
I find it both amusing and extremely annoying that baling out banks and corporations is seen as a good thing as it causes inflation in stock prices but baling out ordinary people is a bad thing and causes inflation. It would seem that they don't use our money to bale out banks but they do if we bale out ourselves.
Ah, I see. The goalposts are now being moved from:
"we need the lock-down to continue to save people"
to
"if people's lives are impoverished or, even, shortened as a result of the economic crash that is a consequence of this lock-down,that is a price worth paying".
I haven't moved the goal posts at all. People's lives will be impoverished if large numbers of people are allowed to die by letting the virus spread not to mention the hell that NHS personel will go through if they are allowed to be overwhelmed by an uncontrolled pandemic. People's lives will be impoverished when the full force of climate change hits us. But as that is sometime in the future we can ignore that can't we because we will be alright. Out children and grandchildren can pay for that!!
We are going to be screwed at some time or another so if we are screwed a bit now it will make it easier further down the line. We can take our share and our children will get their share later.
kenneal - lagger wrote:
They are at home being paid 80% of their wage by the government with a moratorium on evictions if rent can't be paid. Oh! The evils of socialism!! They might find it difficult to find a nice place to exercise though as many of the city parks have been closed and it's difficult to grow much food on a flat balcony, if you are lucky enough to have one.
Just how long do you think that can go on? Like Maggy said.' sooner or later the socialist run out of other peoples money'.
It doesn't have to go on. It only has to last until the virus is under control and business can pick up again. Then we can tax the money out of existence to reduce the inflationary pressure. All the hedge funds and major corporations which are making a fortune out of the crisis can pay something back. Most of the inflation will be in the stock market as it has been since the bailouts of 2008 and that is a good thing apparently!
I find it both amusing and extremely annoying that baling out banks and corporations is seen as a good thing as it causes inflation in stock prices but baling out ordinary people is a bad thing and causes inflation. It would seem that they don't use our money to bale out banks but they do if we bale out ourselves.
I quite agree that the banks and other corporations should not be getting a windfall out of this but doubt the politicians have the brains and the integrity to straighten that out. In the mean time there are only a few weeks that the government (And we tax payers that will eventually foot the bill) can afford to payout the amounts they are spending to both individuals and the banks. It is after al a loan we will have to pay back one way or the other. One month of lockdown was necessary and fine, two months strains our ability and three months will cripple the country for decades. It must end and if the government doesn't end it the people will end it for them.
Just 1.5% antibody prevalence in Santa Clara County ... but Stanford makes a big deal of it ...
This value is more than Austria's 1%, less than our 4% and less than the German and NYC hotspots values of 15%.
These sort of low values suggest that there is plenty of human fodder remaining for the virus ... and thus suggest that multiple lockdowns and waves will be needed before a vaccination appears.
These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85 fold more than the number of confirmed cases
Their statement may be true but doesn't seem too important to me.
Also, there have been criticisms about this report - it makes all sorts of corrections to the data and also their 'random' samples may not be so random after all.
BOSTON — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into� results from universal COVID-19 testing at Pine Street Inn homeless shelter.
The broad-scale testing took place at the shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
* Of the 397 people tested, 146 (37%) tested positive.
* Not a single one had any symptoms.
Similar results were found elsewhere, Testing at a Worcester (MA) homeless shelter found 43% positive for coronavirus, with minimal symptoms evident.
These results are causing a bit of a fuss.
However some have suggested:
* Homeless people are unusually resistant to infections.
* These homeless people were forced to have standard flu jabs, so the testing may have included false positives if a low discrimination test was used.
Catweazle wrote:............... We raise livestock because the profit ( with subsidies ) is better than trying to compete with veg imports from abroad, but that's an economic issue that might soon change.
We raise livestock because 60% of our land is best suited to raising grass. Last time I heard most people don't eat grass. You also forgot to mention that the vegetables from abroad also attract the same system of subsidy from the EU.
Yes, you can raise vegetables on it but it requires high labour inputs and, as has often been pointed out, most people in this country don't want to do the hard work required. Given a choice between working the land and starvation most will choose the work.
Both the studies that I have seen on a Zero Carbon Britain say that we will have to reduce meat eating considerably so the best land can go to food production and the worst into energy production and wildlife. What would have been hay to feed horses becomes willow and other coppice to produce fuel for tractors.
Our land is only grade 3 best used for grass production but we have turned a small are into good quality vegetable producing land by building raised beds. We can produce large amounts of food from it but the labour input is high. Much of the unemployment caused by the loss of production of useless "stuff" will be taken up by food production from raised beds and polytunnels. Nasty factory works replaced by working in the open air. What could be better than that.
That graph, especially the solid line, to anyone accustomed to reading graphs, just shows the idiocy behind the notion that economic growth can go on for ever. If you project it forward it goes vertical - infinite growth every year for ever!!!! Growth has to stop sometime and the longer it goes on the greater the fall will be.
LJ, do you want to be the one who works harder and harder and longer and longer in order to consume more and more to keep the graph on an upward curve? Or would you prefer to live life as you do and just import tens of thousands more people into the country to keep the graph going up?
We have to forget growth and find some other metric to measure our lives by.
Catweazle wrote:................I know this because the fields around my smallholding alternate between sheep, barley, kale, rape, wheat, corn etc., depending on market conditions in a particular year. Up in the hills the land is only suitable for sheep, it's too high and strewn with boulders, but that's a fairly small part of the overall land available.
Have you not heard of that quaint old practice in farming called crop rotation?
And all food crops are subsidised in the EU because governments require cheap food to keep the sheeple quiet. If you payed the full cost for your food and somehow took land out of the investment industry farmers could do without subsidy.
Agree, we may have to grow more food crops and cut back on livestock rearing, but a lot of land is not suitable for arable farming.
My friends in North Wales have a very considerable acreage of poor land, historically only used for sheep grazing.
They keep cattle which is successful provided that a hardy breed is kept and that they have plenty of shelter.
Arable farming was tried on their land during the last war, but was not successful. (some of the work was done by POWs, two of whom perished from exposure, leading to an investigation)
There is a lot of similar land in the UK.
Nearer home, I know a farmer who rears beef cattle very successfully, Much of his land floods regularly and therefore cant grow crops. It makes fine grazing between floods, and the grass grows well when other farms are suffering from drought. The cattle are easily moved to high ground in time of flood.
"Installers and owners of emergency diesels must assume that they will have to run for a week or more"
fuzzy wrote:...........Hills are low by world standards but often steep [glacial ice boundary] with lots of stream gulleys. It certainly doesn't look an easy life, or simple to change land use in many places.
In those beautiful areas the main factor that makes farming and especially the growing of crops difficult is the fact that the bedrock is only two to six inches (50 to 150mm) below the surface to the soil. Also the rainfall is high so any bare soil and a lot of the nutrients get washed away. Most of it is kept under permanent grass for this reason.
vtsnowedin wrote:.................It is after al a loan we will have to pay back one way or the other. .........
The only reason it is a loan is because of the control that the banks have over government. Why on earth should a government go to a bank for a loan when the bank doesn't have that money to loan. The money is magicked up by the bank and the bank charges interest on that money it didn't have and couldn't have until the government asked for a loan. The government should just magic up the money itself and wave two fingers at the *ankers.
OK, the *ankers didn't cause this crisis but they caused the 2008 crisis and then made a lot of money out of it while Joe and Jo Public paid through the nose. The same will happen again if we let it and Trump is in the lead in making it happen. Our government are doing their best to cover Joe Public in order to keep the economy going after the crisis is over. They are paying 80% wages, have stopped evistions for non payment of rent and mortgage and given holidays on those payments. Trump is looking after himself and his mates while allowing Joe Public to go to hell in a handcart.
