Recently, a new coronavirus has been causing many illnesses and deaths. The virus first became active in Wuhan, China, but it has already spread to the rest of China. Scattered cases have been identified around the rest of the world as well.
There are two important questions that are already being encountered:
- How much of an attempt should be made to limit the spread of the new virus? For example, should businesses close to prevent the spread of the virus?
- Should this disease be publicized as being far worse than flu viruses that circulate each year and cause many deaths among the elderly and people in poor health? The median age of those dying from the new coronavirus seems to be about 75.
Unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers. We can easily see the likely outcome of under reaction. More people might die of the disease. More people might find themselves out of work for a couple of weeks or more with the illness. We tend to be especially concerned about ourselves and our own relatives.
The thing that is harder to see is that reacting too vigorously can have a hugely detrimental impact on the world economy. The world economy depends on international trade and tourism. China plays a key role in the world economy. Quarantines of whole regions that last for weeks and months can have a very detrimental impact on the wages of people in the area and profits of local companies. Problems with debt can be expected to spike. The greater the reaction to the coronavirus, the more likely the world economy will be pushed toward recession and job loss.
The following are a few of my thoughts regarding possible overreaction:
[1] The Chinese coronavirus seems to be extremely contagious, even before a person who has been exposed shows any symptoms. The only way we can be certain to contain the virus seems to be through quarantines lasting up to 14 days.
China’s National Health Minister, Ma Xiaowei, has provided information that seems quite alarming. With the new virus, a person may become communicable shortly after he/she has been infected, but symptoms may not appear for up to 14 days. This allows the infected person to infect many others without realizing that he/she is a carrier for the disease.
Today, the United States and many other countries screen for the virus by checking passengers arriving on planes from affected areas for fevers. Given the information provided by China’s National Health Minister, this approach seems unlikely to be sufficient to catch all of the people who may eventually come down with the disease. If a country really wants to identify all the potential carriers of the disease, it appears that a 14-day quarantine for all travelers from infected areas may be needed.
Such a quarantine becomes administratively difficult to handle for the huge number of people who are likely to travel from China. Such a quarantine would make it impossible for pilots and other airline workers to make a living, for example. They would be spending too much of their time in quarantine to do the work needed to support themselves and their families.
A related concern is that person-to-person transmission is very easy with the Chinese coronavirus. We don’t know for certain how many people each infected individual infects, but one estimate is that each infected person transmits the disease to an average of 2.5 other people. With this transmission rate, the number of people having the disease can be expected to grow exponentially, perhaps for several months.
Based on these concerns, it seems to me that funds spent on trying to contain the coronavirus are likely to be largely wasted. The new Chinese virus will spread widely, regardless of attempts to contain it. At most, quarantines will slightly slow the transmission of the disease. At the same time, quarantines will be quite disruptive of commerce. They will tend to reduce both total wages and total output of goods and services of the area.
[2] Deaths from pathogens are part of the natural cycle. They help prune back the population of the old and weak.
We know that in ecosystems, one of the functions of naturally occurring fires is to clear out “deadwood,” to allow healthy new growth to occur. In fact, some types of seeds seem to require smoke for germination. When inadequate natural burning takes place, bushfires as seen in Australia and forest fires as seen in California become an increasing problem.
Deaths from pathogens seem to play a similar role in human economies. This is especially the case with pathogens that especially target the weak and old. Most flu viruses have this characteristic. Early reports of deaths from the coronavirus suggest that this same pattern of targeting the old and weak is occurring with this virus as well. As noted above, the median age of those dying from the new coronavirus seems to be about 75 years.
Since the 1940s, modern medicine has been able to develop antibiotics and vaccines to counteract the impact of many pathogens. This, of course, makes citizens happy, but it has the disadvantage of changing the population in a way that leaves the economy with a much higher percentage of elderly people and others in poor health. This higher level of elderly and medically needy people makes it easy for viruses and other pathogens to make their rounds, just as leaving deadwood on the forest floor makes it easier for fires to spread.
With this rising population of people who cannot support themselves, tax rates for the remaining citizens tend to become very high. Young workers may become discouraged because they do not have enough income remaining after paying taxes to raise their own families. In effect, they cannot support both their young families and the many old people.
Viewed from this unusual perspective, the operation of the Chinese coronavirus might even be considered a benefit to society as a whole. The world has overcome the impact of measles, typhoid, polio, and many other diseases. In some sense, it “needs” a new disease added to its portfolio, to replace the ones that have been mostly taken care of by modern medicine. In this way, pensions and other payments targeting the old and weak don’t become too great a burden on the young.
[3] If the Chinese coronavirus were simply allowed to run its course, without publicity that it was in any way unusual, somewhat less than 1% of the world’s population might be expected to die.
To see what would happen if the Chinese coronavirus were to run its course, we might look at what happened with the Spanish Flu, back in 1918. At that time, doctors did not have a way of treating the virus and authorities downplayed concern for the disease. The US Center for Disease Control reports that 500 million people, or one-third of the world’s population, became infected. At least 50 million people (about 10% of those infected) died.
We don’t yet know with accuracy how many of those infected will die from the current virus. A recent estimate is that about 2.3% of those who are infected will die of the disease (based on 107 dying out of 4,600 infected). If we assume that the percentage of the population that will ultimately catch the new virus is 30%, then the share of the world’s population that would be expected to die would be about [(1/3) x 2.3% = 0.76%].
The UN estimates that the world’s population can be expected to grow by about 1.05% in 2020. If this is the case, the effect of the Chinese virus would be to sharply dampen the population increase for the year. Instead of population rising by 1.05%, it would rise by only 0.29% (= 1.05% – 0.76%), assuming all of the deaths associated with the Chinese coronavirus take place within a year. While this would be a change, it would be a fairly small, temporary change.
All of these deaths would be tragic for the families involved but, in a way, they would be less of a problem than the deaths that took place back in 1918. At that time, mortality was high for healthy 20- to 40-year olds, making the flu particularly disruptive for families. The total percentage of the population that died was also much higher, about 3% instead of 0.76%.
[4] A major danger of the virus seems to be one of overreaction.
Today’s world economy is fragile. China, like other countries, has a large amount of debt. Debt defaults related to poor profits of companies closing their operations for a time and workers losing income could easily skyrocket.
Closing down transportation from China would risk pushing the world economy into a very bad recession. In fact, simply having a very large number of people out sick from work would be expected to have an adverse impact on the economy. Spending a large amount of money on hospitalizations and face masks cannot compensate for the loss of productivity of the rest of the economy. Thus, the tendency would be toward recession in China, even if no action toward cutting off travel were taken.
China is a huge supplier of goods to the rest of the world. In fact, in 2016, it used more energy in producing industrial output than the United States, India, Russia and Japan combined.
Figure 1. Chart by the International Energy Agency showing total fuel consumed (TFC) by industry, for the top five fuel consuming nations of the world.
China’s economy has been growing very rapidly since 1990. Figure 2 shows this one way, in GDP comparisons using inflation-adjusted US dollars.
Figure 2. GDP of China and the United States, computed as percentages of World GDP. All amounts in 2010 US dollars, as provided by the World Bank.
Figure 3 is similar to Figure 2, except the growth comparison is made in “2011 Purchasing Power Parity International Dollars.” This adjustment is made because typically the currencies of less developed nations float far below the dollar, in terms of what the local currency will buy. The inflation-adjusted PPP comparison compares output on a basis that is expected to be more consistent with what the local currency will really purchase.
Figure 3. Ratios of the GDP of China and the United States to the World GDP. All amounts in 2011 Purchasing Power Parity International Dollars, as provided by the World Bank.
On this PPP basis, China’s GDP surpassed the US’s GDP in 2014. Figure 3 also shows that the United States has slipped from about 20% of the world’s GDP to about 15% on this basis.
We cannot simply cut off trade with China, regardless of how bad the situation is. China is too big and too important now. The rest of the world desperately needs goods and services produced in China, in spite of what is going wrong from an illness perspective. China plays too key a role in supply chains of many kinds for the country to be left out.
Even cutting off tourism becomes a problem. The share of China’s revenue from tourism amounted to 11% in 2018. While not all of this would drop off, even a dip would lead to lower employment in this part of its economy. Jet fuel use would drop as well.
[5] A particular problem today is low prices for many commodities, including oil and other fossil fuels. These prices are likely to fall further, if China’s economy falters further.
We used to hear that the world would “run out of” oil and that oil prices would rise very high. In fact, if the people who were concerned about the issue had studied history, they would have figured out that a far more likely outcome would be “collapse.” In such a situation, prices of many commodities might fall too low. Revelation 18:11-13 provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon.
The problem is a different squeeze than a high-price squeeze. It is more of a growing wage disparity problem, with fewer and fewer of the world’s workers being able to afford the goods and services made by the world economy. This problem feeds back to commodity prices that fall too low for producers of many types. The problem is an affordability issue, rather than one of running out. I have written about this issue many times.
Prices of fossil fuels have been low for a very long time–essentially since late 2014. OPEC has cut back its oil production because of low oil prices. Several US natural gas producers have taken big write offs on natural gas investments. China’s coal production has remained below its 2013 level, because of low prices.
Figure 1. China energy production by fuel, based on 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data. “Other Ren” stands for “Renewables other than hydroelectric.” This category includes wind, solar, and other miscellaneous types, such as sawdust burned for electricity.
If China finds it necessary to cut back on production of goods and services for any reason (excessive sickness within China, visitors aren’t traveling to China, tariffs, customers around the world aren’t buying cars), this reduction in output would be likely to further lower the prices of commodities. More producers would go bankrupt. Countries exporting products as diverse as oil, iron ore, copper and lithium might have economic difficulties.
Lower fossil fuel prices may lead to a cutback in their output, but it is doubtful that this cutback would be offset by an increase in the production of renewables. Falling fossil fuel prices would make the price comparison of renewables to fossil fuels look even worse than it does today. China has cut back on its subsidies for solar panels, and this has led to decreasing Chinese solar installations in both 2018 and 2019.
[6] The best approach might just be to let the Chinese coronavirus run its course. Authorities might also discourage stories about how awful the illness is.
Today, we seem to think that we can fix all problems. Unfortunately, this medical problem doesn’t seem to be fixable in the near-term. We should probably do as governments through the ages have done, which is not very much. We should not publicize the disease as being a whole lot worse than flu viruses in general, for example.
We should certainly look for inexpensive treatments for the disease. For example, there seems to be an effort to examine the possibility of using existing antiviral drugs as a treatment. It seems like an effort could be made to look into ways of treating the disease at home, perhaps using supplemental oxygen for a period. In time, perhaps a vaccine can be developed.
Individuals around the world should be encouraged to get themselves in as good health as possible, so that their own immune systems can fight off pathogens of all types, not just this particular virus. Common sense should be used in washing hands and in avoiding being with sick people. I doubt that it makes sense to encourage the use of masks, goggles and other protective devices.
We, as individuals, cannot live forever on this earth. We also cannot spend an unlimited percentage of GDP on health care: It becomes too high-cost for most citizens. At some point, we need to call a halt to the expectation that we can fix all problems. We live in a world with limited resources. We need to start lowering our expectations, if we don’t want to make our problems worse.
I put this up as soon the answers will be clear, her projection is for 2020. For us the main issue is crops or lack thereof. I can speak directly to this and say that getting 2019 crops out of the fields was a challenging undertaking and some corn around me is still in the fields, surrounded and covered by snow. The growing season was shorter than normal and even a delay of two weeks has a significant effect on crop yields.
The take away is the worst increase of heat projected by IPCC is 1.5 watts per sq. meter where as she has a decrease of 8 watts per sq. meter secondary to solar minimum. Couple this with Gail thinking the worst projections will not come to pass due to uneconomic extraction, closing of coal plants and the difference grows, it does not improve. We perhaps have part of the world population stressed secondary to disease, poor or declining nutrition secondary to declining harvests can’t help.
https://electroverse.net/professor-valentina-zharkova-breaks-her-silence-and-confirms-super-grand-solar-minimum/
“Northumbria University. Northumbria University is ranked 351 in World University Rankings by Times Higher Education.” For reference MIT is number 1 and there are about 1200 recognized universities in the world. If that latter number is important to you, verify it yourself as to size, etc.
Weather is not climate, but it seems to be getting colder here and the winters are more what like I remember in my youth of the 1950’s. Unfortunately, I now have a longer time series of history than I would like.
Dennis L.
It seems like it is a little early to declare that the weather already shows we are headed for a period of cold years. Last past summer was a terrible for US crops, but I am not sure it was for crops elsewhere in the world. This winter seems to have been fairly mild in some parts of the globe.
Incredibly mild in the UK: plants in my garden already think it is Spring and are pushing up and showing buds. Just 3 days of mild frost, none at all of snow. Hardly any snow in the Pyrenees either – and there is usually one really heavy fall.
at the end of the Zharkova article, written in 2018 by the way, is this one:
https://electroverse.net/nasa-predicts-next-solar-cycle-will-be-lowest-in-200-years-dalton-minimum-levels-the-implications/
that article is from 2019:
“NASA’s forecast for the next solar cycle (25) reveals it will be the weakest of the last 200 years.
The maximum of this next cycle — measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level — could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one.
The agency’s results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025…”
science at its very best!
thank you, scientists…
there are some out there who are doing the work, and it shows that global coooooling is almost upon us…
we should trust the science!
Here in Kyoto, I’ve grown rice for 25 years now and after cutting, I hang the crop to dry in the sun. Over that time, the climate has not changed at all, but the weather has been all over the place. There have been three years when it was too wet in September to allow the crop to dry, so I had to take special measures. Those years were 1997, 2016 and 2017. Interestingly, those years coincided with major El Niño events. So I know that when a big El Niño arrives, I can expect harvest trouble.
On the other hand, there have been years when I’ve cut the rice in the morning and the strong sunshine dried it by the late afternoon. Usually, I have to hang it for a week, but the weather in my part of the world is quite variable. In any case, as a farmer, I anticipate where I can and I respond as best i can to whatever whether nature brings.
A few years before I began rice growing, Japan faced a once-in-a-generation rice shortage and was forced to import due to low yields following the Pinatubo volcanic eruption. The eruption cooled temperatures around the world and changed the weather for several years, but it didn’t change the climate anywhere.
Some may call me pedantic, but the word “climate” has been given an Orwellian meaning since the campaign to change the world’s economic system began to rely on the pseudoscience of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change as a pretext for controlling and restricting energy use.
Like ‘sustainable’, and ‘clean’, ‘climate’ has been much-abused.
As peasants have always known, it’s the weather (and the pests) that can do you in….
This seems to be a level headed, conservative analysis presented by Neill Ferguson of Imperial College, London; it is about ten minutes in length, he speaks very softly and listening carefully is required.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=ALQTdCYGISw
Dennis L.
Summarizing some of what is said in that interview: He said usually only about 10% of infections are part of the official infection count. If so, then infections are going to be in the range of 30-40,000 a day. His estimate was higher at 50,000 new infections a day. He also projects the virus to peak in the epicenter in a month and outside that in china in 2-3 months.
I don’t buy the huge infection numbers. The reason why is because if some people had this virus on a cruise ship of 3500 people and only 60 got it, it doesn’t seem to be all that transmissible. Think of how close the quarters on a cruise ship when all those people go to eat a meal and how many communal food areas there are. 60 is only 1.7% which is less than the 2% transmission usually assigned to this virus, but this is on a cruise ship which is like the real world stuffed into barrel.
My own personal view on this virus from gleaning info. from many sources is its transmissible in a variety of ways, but not necessarily easy to get, but once someone has it they better have a strong immune system or there’s a big danger of going into critical condition.
Look at the cruise ship passenger list, mostly well nourished western tourist types.
While the virus is decimating over worked, coal sulfur and cheapo cigarette breathing, low/deficient nutrient diet of Asian/Chinese mainland pop.
Big difference right there!
Yes, we are ignoring the complicating factor of the very high background pollution in China, and their aknowledged atrocious levels of hygiene, bad habits, etc.
Already seriously compromised lung function I should say. Not that we in the West are not breathing in filthy air too, but on a wholly different level.
This will also impede the recovery of survivors – no fresh air for them…..
The cruise ship is likely to have a lot of retired folks, however.
They only tested 273 out of the 3400 so 64 out of 273 is a high ratio….yes?
They tested the people who appeared to be sick. It wasn’t a random sample.
What was the infection rate on that cruise ship which came down with Norovirus a few years ago? I remember that made the headlines.
This interview was interesting. For me, the video went on to a CNBC interview with someone from Mayo Clinic and somewhere else, talking more about what the US should be doing now. It was interesting, too.
just before the 9 minute mark, he says that it’s not very reassuring that we haven’t seen many deaths at all outside of China, because there is a delay of about 3 weeks from infection to death…
within China, each infected person is transmitting it to 2 to 3 others, in his estimate…
so it’s multiplying within China…
the biggest question to me is if the rate outside of China can stay below 1.0 which would mean the epidemic will not become a global pandemic…
to be continued…
This says the virus will peak in a week… SARS took 6 months and it never got out of control in China …
I think it should read ‘this MUST peak in a week so workers can get back to the factories or the supply chain busts”
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3049577/global-consumers-reel-chinas-coronavirus-containment-stop-work
“The greater the disruption in China, the more likely it is to spread overseas,” Capital Economics’ chief emerging markets economist Neil Shearing said in a Reuters interview. “Given that China is now at the heart of many global supply chains, this will have knock-on effects around the world.”
South Korean carmakers are the first of China’s global customers to feel the direct impact. The nation’s largest carmaker Hyundai Motor suspended all production on Tuesday for a week because it ran out of a crucial wiring component after a worker at its supplier’s factory caught the coronavirus in China, forcing the entire plant to shut.
Ssangyong Motor halted its Pyeongtaek assembly for a week, also because of the shutdown by Chinese suppliers. Kia Motors, the second-biggest South Korean carmaker, reduced its output in Hwaseong and Gwangju for the same reasons, according to local media reports.
The ripples will only amplify before receding, as the coronavirus outbreak shows no signs of abating, even if the recoveries are double the death toll, while a cure remains elusive, some analysts said. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Henan and Jiangsu, the four engines of China’s manufacturing powerhouse, also happen to be among the 10 most afflicted provinces, which means all their factories are sitting idle under the government’s stop-work order.
In Jiangsu province, a manufacturer of explosion-proof forklifts said the forced holiday adds to a number of problems faced by China’s 30 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who generate an estimated 80 per cent of the nation’s jobs.
“We are worried about everything, due to the shortage of labour, raw material and even face masks” to protect staff from infection, said David Zhang, a senior executive at Suzhou Hazardtex, with 50 workers on staff. “It will take at least two weeks for us to secure sufficient supply of raw materials to run our factory at the full capacity. Without enough face masks, we are unable to make full use of our labour force either.”
Henan province in central China has also ordered all business operations to shut. In the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, Hon Hai Precision Industry has 100,000 assembly workers on staff – expanding to 300,000 to fill pre-holiday shopping orders – who assemble Apple’s iPhones, iPads and other electronic devices from fitness bands to smart watches for major consumer brands.
The world’s largest contract manufacturer, also known as Foxconn, said it would take at least one or two weeks to resume full production. That has pushed Apple, which sources some of its components from suppliers in Wuhan and Jiangsu, to give a wider-than-usual range in its March revenue outlook, citing uncertainty over its supply chain as the reopening of some of the vendors’ factories had been moved to February 10, from the end of January.
Meanwhile Cathay Pacific has suspended HALF of its flights for two months. That does not inspire confidence that the virus will plateau next week.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3049654/hong-kongs-cathay-pacific-group-has-cancelled-more-half
On the cup is half full side of this catastrophe, someone regaled me last night with how the collapse of the world’s factory is a good thing because we really don’t need all this plastic junk that is foisted upon us. When I mentioned that auto parts will soon not be available, his response was no problem, countries will simply establish local auto (and other manufacturing) industries.
I hadn’t thought of any of this so it comes as a relief that imploding China will be a good thing.
“I hadn’t thought of any of this so it comes as a relief that imploding China will be a good thing.”
New manufacturers for products no longer received from China would take time and investment, but represent a huge financial risk, because, if the virus wanes and manuf. goes back to BAU in China then there would be big defaults on those loans. So it’s unlikely investors will take that risk unless it is really clear it would work.
The financial problems associated with all of these closures is a big concern.
“This says the virus will peak in a week… SARS took 6 months and it never got out of control in China …”
and yet:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/09/coronavirus-latest-updates-china-death-toll.html
“Coronavirus live updates: China death toll hits 811 as new virus kills more people than SARS”
this took about ONE month…
and of course, these numbers could be higher than reported by many multiples…
to be continued…
Unfortunately for that theory, all that plastic junk IS the modern economy….
+++++++++
The question of course is, could this be THE black swan? The wing of the butterfly? (although quite a pretty big butterfly)
The WSJ has a new article up online today called, China’s Factories Struggle to Resume Operations After Virus Shutdown.
This kind of article may worry stock market investors, I would think. That, plus an article that was up in time for the Saturday paper, China’s Leader Wages a War on Two Fronts—Viral and Political.
«In 2019, the EU electricity sector emitted 12 per cent less CO2 than in the previous year. At the same time, the share of renewables in electricity production rose EU-wide to 35 per cent, a new record. These are the main findings in a study of current electricity data carried out by Agora Energiewende and climate think-tank Sandbag»
https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/press/news-archive/eu-power-plant-emissions-in-2019-see-record-decline/
The EU has been doing pretty poorly GDP-wise. I wonder if all of this emphasis on “Green Energy” has been contributing to their problems.
https://kia723.wordpress.com/2020/02/08/what-are-the-effects-of-coronavirus-on-tech-firms/
Thanks for your on-the-ground report from China.
My summarization would be something like this: Local locations of many firms are currently closed adversely affecting profits. Stock market valuations are falling. The businesses at least temporarily benefitting are the chat sites, delivery sites, and game sites that can be accessed from phones. Tech firms need to recognize contagious diseases as a threat to growth. There is a need for better planning for the next outbreak of contagious diseases, so that spread can prevented without the use of lockdowns.
Ok, here’s some more stats from: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
If these numbers are accurate, and keep in mind there is no secondary, independent source on the ground in China, then here’s a potential silver lining on the Corona Virus: For the past 5 days the increase in infected has been in the 3,000’s. It is no longer going up by ~300 a day. The past 5 days have been 3239, 3927, 3723, 3163 & today 3436. Totaled together that’s a lot, but the trend is encouraging as it suggests a plateau.
Deaths on the other hand are still going up. The past 5 days have been 64, 66, 73, 73 & today 86.
Total reported cases 34,915 of which 6,106 are in critical condition.
It’s because they have reached their capacity to record cases.
One report says that (at least in some places), China has run out of testing kits. Without a testing kit, it is hard to know.
I think inability to test for this disease is a problem around the world. There is also a need to test for antibodies, to see if someone has had the disease and is over it.
‘The problem with silver linings is that everyone comes with a black cloud’. Henry Kissinger.
“It is no longer going up by ~300 a day.”
Gail will be very disappointed now. I expect you’ve spoilt her whole day.
Who in their right mind would believe anything Chinese officialdom reports.
everyone on this website have to understand we are dealing with what i now call ‘malthusionists” a secretive group of individuals who have devised a plan to prepare the world for the end of easy oil it will involve depopulation because the carrying capacity of the earth has been exceeded it is as simple as that. if there is no depopulation then this earth and its inhabitants are toast thanks to the spent fuel pools which will make the earth devoid of all life once all the radiation is released when the grids permanently go down . Yes we can all breathe a sigh of relief there is a plan b
shades of FE on display there, adonis. it’s been awhile since the spent fuel ponds have been mentioned. i’m sure they’ll think of something (TM).
who would have known? (Condi Rice, 2001).
Yep—
The DNA mutating power of nuclear energy is immense. The fear of it makes the humans think about their limits.
Maybe that is why Japan is the leading country in the depopulation – they experienced the mutating power of the nuclear energy. Like Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
I’ll go as far as to say you may be correct there, Adonis. The will is certainly there in some quarters at least.
My big fear is that when The Duke of Edinburgh finally sheds his mortal coil, he may fulfill his heartfelt wish to come back and haunt us.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPj9dzjX0AAnFgC.jpg
Please take this as gallows humor, no disrespect intended, but I can imagine Bill Gates taking the Prince Philip’s cadaver, grinding it down to Royal Jelly, popping it into a bubbling vat of equally unappetizing ingredients, and turning out 6..8 billion doses of Dr. Bill’s Depopulation Elixir.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPkUDaFWAAAt9LA.jpg
That’s actually kind of interesting, because Gates is the one that funded the research work that developed a mosquito released in Brazil that caused encephalitis in newborns in which the brain is no where near the size it needs to be to operate as a human. I was amazed he was never held accountable.
The problem of adverse long-term side effects of solutions that seem to work seems to be very widespread. Researchers can, at best, tell obvious immediate problems. This is a reason to stick with nature’s approaches. Saving a huge number of babies with too small brains burdens the families of these children with problems for many years. Big malpractice claims often relate to children who were disabled as babies.
In the absence of reincarnation, his driving is more dangerous….
“The man inside Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, actor Peter Fonda, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld are among the famous people who have died in 2019.”
so Big Bird was reincarnated as the coronavirus?
isn’t it obvious? 😉
If believing the human population to be in dangerous overshoot makes one a disciple of Malthus, count me in. However, I am not cooking up deadly viruses in my kitchen, because I believe Nature will solve this problem in her own way, just as she did on St Michael’s Island, and that her solution will be far better than any we could devise. Collapse is inevitable; but the devil will be in the details.
Yes, indeed! Now that I am approaching retirement bliss 😁, the planet has plenty of room. For MORE PEOPLE and MORE GROWTH and MORE, MORE, MORE for the foreseeable horizon. Slash those words overshoot, overpopulation, overleveraged, from your vocabulary!😜👍!
Yes, the invisible hand will set things right in due time, hopefully, just not now!
The home range size is an important factor of brain size.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1834002/
“Animals could reduce the size of other expensive tissues in the body (Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, Aiello & Wheeler 1995), or reduce energy allocation to locomotion or reproduction (Energy Trade-off Hypothesis, Isler & van Schaik 2006).”
The humans is a cultivating species that creates its home eliminating the species that endanger the existence of the human species and supporting species that are beneficial to the humand. That is why humans created agriculture and farming as a way of achieving energy security for their big brains.
It was the bigger brain that needed more energy. The bigger brain was created by a mutation caused by drinking water containing various minerals, including those which cause DNA changes. The Turkana Lake is the answer to the human origin.
No, it was not the environment that formed human species – i.e. changing of the clmt, but the mutated brains of apes are changing the environment, so that human environments are created that satisfy the higher energy needs of these more evolved brains.
It was the stimulation of the brains by a mix of the minerals which created the human species, not the adaptation to the environment. The humans proactively create their own environment using energy (e.g. from burning wood or fossil fuels) as the natural environments eliminate the human species.
The ability of the humans to create their own environments with the use of the energy is something which Darwin and the evolutionists did not count with.
Yes, there were species similar to the humans in the history, but only the human species with the highest ability to use energy for creating it’s environment survived, as all other human-like species were eliminated by natural environments and by the prevailing human species that used energy to dominate the world.
I agree!
Interesting. I think your suggestion,
may be at least part of the answer. Cooking food may have been part of it too. Adding more eggs/animal products to the diet may have been an influence as well.
The existence of humans seems to be possible because of a very long list of coincidences. The 2000 book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee gives some of the coincidences needed for complex life. Mutations caused by drinking the water of Turkana Lake may have been another piece of the puzzle.
I keep saying that there has to be some sort of Higher Power, orchestrating all of these coincidences. They cannot happen by chance, as an earlier link showed. The probabilities of associated with simple random selection don’t work.
Even though it looks like we could be reaching the final bottleneck, we really don’t know. With all of the forethought that seems to have gone into a system that works in this strange, self-organizing way, we don’t really understand what is ahead. The changes that are happening are in the hands of the Higher Power, not the politicians who think that they are in charge.
There is a general perception of nature as something “clean”. But the nature is not “clean”, the nature is “wild”, including deadly environments full of toxic stuff etc.
The ability to see the world “from above”, i.e. having some higher thinking capabilities, requires additional energy. The energy gives freedom and safety to think, the ability to grasp the reality in its whole, including its minutest details.
more about 34 year old Dr. Li and his death from the coronavirus:
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/02/07/people-grieving-furious-china-admits-botched-case-whistleblower-doctor/
“Li, 34, was an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital. On December 30, 2019, he wrote a post to a closed group of medical school classmates on the WeChat social media site. In the post called “Seven cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market”, he warned about an outbreak of undiagnosed pneumonia at his hospital.”
so the “outbreak” was already well underway by 12/30/2019…
We need an honest answer, we need an end to speculation, we need to return to civility and we if necessary need to learn from our mistakes.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/white-house-asks-scientists-investigate-whether-2019-ncov-was-bio-engineered
Hopefully we can see an investigation as a question, not a condemnation, we need to understand the problem so we can find positive solutions. An entire nation has ground to a halt, airlines are grinding to a halt on some international routes, cruise ships are docking when they can and I believe staying anchored when they can’t. If that cruise ship is still anchored and passengers are not allowed off, it must be terrifying to be an unwilling person subject to an epidemiological experiment.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/japan-finds-41-more-coronavirus-cases-on-cruise-ship-with-israeli-passengers/
Dennis L.
I agree, Dennis, and I wouldn’t think it should be that hard for experts to know by analyzing its genome. Since that bioweapons lab was only blocks away from the wet market it’s important to know for certain where this came from, and if it did come from that lab, what was the motive for its release?
i will tell you the motive depopulation has now begun in order to prepare the way for a rise in energy per capita the elders have spoken they will cull the worlds population of the weak utilising viruses in conjuntion with technology i will say no more in case they are watching
Depopulating is an idea I’d thought of as something the super wealthy would seek out so the remaining resources would last longer for their progeny. My guess was they would use insect sized drones with injections to cause people to be lethargic and waste away, but this other method works better due to the blame being solely on the wet market, exonerating the lab.
Gentlemen, I hereby warn you. You are supposing human agency in order to deny non human agency. I believe you are badly wrong. This event is not of our contrivance, and serves a purpose not of our devising. Be humble before Nature, for she is our Mother.
Doubtless, you are correct, Robert. But there are lots of actors who believe in never letting a good crisis go to waste, making a drama out of a crisis, taking advantage of the ball Nature has bounced in our direction…
Panic in Singapore. Only code orange. 2hat if it is code red?
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/coronavirus-fairprice-chief-urges-calm-amid-panic-buying-of-groceries-singapores
Supply chain collapse in action
Strangely enough if you look at the “hoarding scene” pictures, they are not buying in excess by any stretch .. People must be living in very small flats in Singapore, no-few storage depots/garages etc.
Because real hoarding looks completely different in other places of the world: overflowing multiple giant carts per person, fights, traffic jams etc..
One supposes that they are not so much hoarding, as actually just getting a bit more in case there is a sudden lock-down to contain infection as in mainland China. All looks pretty decorous and orderly, too.
ADV China videos on Youtube well worth watching: interesting shots purporting to be persecution of Wuhan residents who fled to other parts of China; lady being locked in a box on the back of a pick-up to be taken to quarantine; tightly-packed beds in hospitals, etc.
Importantly, the presenter asserts that people are certainly infected in cities where the CCP maintain that there is no infection at all.
I found this video on ADV China about the coronavirus coverup in China. It is from January 30.
As one who lived in Singapore for 21 years: you are right. I took great pains to find flats with plenty of storage, but for books and videos, not so much food. My last flat had a hallway with 40m of shelf space.
But most Singaporeans don’t cook much; they eat out, And they are, or were, confident that the local Chinese, Malay, Indian or whatever would always be open. If that lifeline breaks, many of them will be in trouble, because they don’t even know how to cook rice without a hitech rice cooker.
As for me, I ate lunch out, or as often skipped it, but always cooked my evening meal at home, because, to be very politically incorrect, most of the local food was bad nutritionally and almost inedible gastronomically. Except for the wonderful Italian restaurant, which imported all its ingredients from Italy, and was my lunchtime treat every other Sunday.
Trump praises China for ‘leading the counterattack’ against coronavirus
https://nypost.com/2020/02/07/trump-praises-china-for-leading-the-counterattack-against-coronavirus/
Poll: 44% Of Americans Skip Doctor Visits Because Of Cost
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/03/26/poll-44-of-americans-skip-doctor-visits-due-to-cost/#15562b626f57
I’m sure we’ll be fine – I’m headed to Starbucks
Regarding Trump – Olive branches of any types are helpful, when the country has already cut off most air transport to China.
The healthcare situation in the US is truly awful. I am sure that the food supply and the lack of exercise are part of the problem as well. A person has to go out of his way to work around the food, especially the restaurant meals. Getting adequate exercise is difficult with all of the long commutes by car and desk jobs.
“A person has to go out of his way to work around the food, especially the restaurant meals. Getting adequate exercise is difficult with all of the long commutes by car and desk jobs.”
Remember the New Orleans flood with people walking with water high up on their waists. Those people looked like they hadn’t walked in years. A lot died from heart attacks.
I’m in East Texas and participated in rescue efforts during Hurricane Harvey. The flooding was nothing short of biblical.
The lesson I took from it was that as long as people believed / knew rescue or recovery was coming they can endure. Greener pastures are just time and a hill away. Panic sets in quickly and spreads. People are terrifying / everyone was armed to the teeth.
If this thing spins sideways and by that I mean a global just in time delivery slowdown (significant) or stoppage all bets are off.
You better believe I’m watching this thing like a hawk and praying like a mother f’er it burns out.
We are at the point where we will feel ramifications globally if it died out this instant and it obviously still has legs.
Good thoughts and luck to you all.
I am afraid you are right. The WSJ had a front page article that talked, among other things, about how unhappy the people of China were becoming about the situation. One question they had was why China’s leader Xi Jinping had not come to the Wuhan area, to personally oversee what was going on.
“Guangzhou City (population: 14 M) locked down. All residential blocks be isolated from each other. So far around 400 million people locked down in #China to contain #coronavirus.”
Almost 1/3 of the Chinese population is now quarantined.
400 million people is more than the population of the US (330 million).
We also know that a lot of the rest of China is substantially cut back. As I mentioned previously, Petroleum University in Beijing is not allowed to hold in person classes this semester. Presumably, a lot of other universities aren’t either. We don’t really know the extent of the cut backs.
“Huawei, Chinese chip makers keep factories humming despite virus outbreak” Reuters
All Western companies have shut down production in China and are now expecting supply chain disruptions.
Maybe there’s something more going on here?
If there is not enough to go around, whose factories do you expect China to give priority to?
To Chinese and to very close friends of China. Samsung is in full operation in China.
https://mobile-reuters-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1ZX0CX?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15811054442906&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Farticle%2Fus-china-health-tech-huawei-idUSKBN1ZX0CX
Interesting!
A Chinese friend who is teacher in a university out of the quarantine area told me they are post pining the start of the semester to the beginning of March.
Yes, they’re doing this in Taiwan as well. There’s also some talk of online classes, though this is not yet part of the plan.
PS. You have to realize that the semester normally starts after Chinese New Year, so they’re only delaying a couple of weeks, not two months (as you might think if you assumed they should be starting right after Western New Year).
But if Chinese New Year fell on 25th Jan, wouldn’t a start-date in March be a five week delay or thereabouts?
The United States peak flu season seems to vary by year, with December through March being the expected peaks. If the new virus is similar (cross our fingers), then perhaps this virus will peak then as well.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/us-peak-flu-month-from-cdc.png
Temperatures in Wuhan warm up for spring about then. Beijing might be a little later.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/wuhan-average-temperatures-by-month.png
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/beijing-average-temperatures-by-month.png
I answered my own question with a Google – it seems that the celebrations for Chinese New Year continue until Feb 8th, so term must start after that at some point. Guess it’s like the Xmas holidays.
This virus seems to be getting a toehold in Thailand, where temps are regularly into the 90’s F.
I checked and Guangzhou is down near Hong Kong. It is not very cold in winter. The average high temperature in February is 66 F (19C) and the average low temperature is 54 F (12 C). It seems like these temperatures would start killing off the virus, if viruses generally don’t do well in warm temperatures. March would be several degrees warmer.
First a disclaimer. I honestly don’ t know what is going on or how to predict, I honestly hope for the best for all for including the Chinese who are making an incredible effort on this problem. My selfish thoughts are what do I an an individual do?
The following, if accurate and it should be stressed there is so much we do not know, seems to indicate there are some serious issues. The posts regarding cruise ships certainly argues that perhaps this will not be the best season they have experienced and decontaminating a cruise ship must be an expensive nightmare. So, once again, from ZeroHedge:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/more-400-million-people-lockdown-guangzhou-joins-quarantine
It is important we keep an open mind on all this and avoid jumping to overly dramatic conclusions. Living entities are tough, they want to keep on existing and so far that has been the case, there is great reason for optimism even if enquiring(yes, I can spell inquiring) minds such as ourselves are very curious.
Dennis L.
I am wondering if simply waiting a while would decontaminate a cruise ship or an airplane. I don’t know how long this would be. Or course, taking a ship out of service for even 36 hours would adversely affect profits.
One imagines so. Logistically a nightmare. The son of a friend provides communications services for the huge commercial freight ships: he has to fly out and get any problem fixed in no more than 48 hrs, or the costs are enormous apparently. Very well paid work for that reason.
Gail, this issue is graphically portrayed in an oratorio by Hans Werner Henze: “Das Floss der Medusa”. Let us hope that Life does not imitate Art!
I find one can combine deep pessimism, with love of the best in human beings and life in general.
They are entirely compatible in my experience.
Harry, and mine also. As many others have said, most recently Reiner Marie Rilke (Die Sonette an Orpheus 23): Dennoch preisen. Also, Job xiii:15.
“If there’s one thing in the world I can’t stand,” proceeded Gussie, “it’s a pessimist. Be optimists, boys. You all know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. An optimist is a man who–well, take the case of two Irishmen walking along Broadway. One is an optimist and one is a pessimist, just as one’s name is Pat and the other’s Mike…. Why, hullo, Bertie; I didn’t know you were here.”
Too late, I endeavoured to go to earth behind the chandler, only to discover that there was no chandler there. Some appointment, suddenly remembered–possibly a promise to his wife that he would be home to tea–had caused him to ooze away while my attention was elsewhere, leaving me right out in the open.
Between me and Gussie, who was now pointing in an offensive manner, there was nothing but a sea of interested faces looking up at me.
“Now, there,” boomed Gussie, continuing to point, “is an instance of what I mean. Boys and ladies and gentlemen, take a good look at that object standing up there at the back–morning coat, trousers as worn, quiet grey tie, and carnation in buttonhole–you can’t miss him. Bertie Wooster, that is, and as foul a pessimist as ever bit a tiger. I tell you I despise that man. And why do I despise him? Because, boys and ladies and gentlemen, he is a pessimist. His attitude is defeatist. When I told him I was going to address you this afternoon, he tried to dissuade me. And do you know why he tried to dissuade me? Because he said my trousers would split up the back.”
From:
https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/P_G_Wodehouse/Right_Ho_Jeeves/Chapter_17_p7.html
“It is important we keep an open mind on all this and avoid jumping to overly dramatic conclusions. Living entities are tough, they want to keep on existing and so far that has been the case, there is great reason for optimism…”
yes, some of us are optimistic that this new virus will mutate and the human race will become extinct in a year or two…
thus greatly reducing human suffering!
but perhaps I’m jumping to an overly dramatic conclusion…
the pessimistic side of me fears that the virus will merely spread worldwide, retain its 2% mortality rate, and cause a severe global Great Depression 2.0, thus bringing even more suffering for humanity…
but the supply chain for dark chocolate has not yet been broken to my locality…
BAU tonight, baby!
It’s been a while since you mentioned dark chocolate: next to oil the second foundation of our civilisation. Well, just imagine life without it!!! 🙂
“The coronavirus outbreak has dealt a painful blow to China’s $43tn property market as builders shut gross sales centres and potential homebuyers delay the seek for new flats. The impression of the disaster on China’s property market, which some estimate contributes one quarter of gross home product, is threatening to drive down the nation’s financial progress…”
https://www.ft.com/content/d9a6f6ec-48a8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
Yep, virus or not that’s the plunge FE had been anticipating and in need of bailing out..
Supposedly holding few hot properties inside HK if I recall correctly? Better be half yr early than ..
Might help a little if FE has mortgages on those HK properties!
“A number of Hong Kong banks including HSBC and Standard Chartered have rushed to introduce measures to relieve the pressure on small and medium-sized businesses and individuals as the coronavirus outbreak threatens to further derail the city’s embattled economy.”
https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3049487/hsbc-and-standard-chartered-among-hong-kong-banks-rushing
The question is, “How will banks possibly get through this?” Extend and pretend will work if it is a two-week disruption, but we can’t count on it for very long.
This virus has to make a mess of the housing market. It would seem like there would be a lot of properties going on the market, but not enough buyers. Sales prices of existing homes will fall.
If new homes are not being built, the need for concrete, steel, copper pipe, and many things would fall. But it might help offset the loss of buyers for resale homes on the market.
“Fears over political uncertainty drive withdrawals from US equity funds. … Private investors in the UK and US are retreating to the safety of cash, in a sign of fears over the market risks of global political uncertainty.”
https://www.ft.com/content/3c58bdb6-4172-4648-b2ad-801bee822081
“Investors may not be as placid as sky-high equity and gold prices suggest, according to one veteran market watcher, who added that commodities are signaling that “all is not right in toy land.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analyst-commodity-moves-scary-and-suggest-market-is-not-all-disneyland-234209589.html
A person wonders what holds up US stock market prices besides share buybacks and bigger companies buying little companies.
US Dow is currently down -280 today.
“…monetary placebos are only effective so long as they are believed. When the herd turns from manic to panic, central bank offsets are insufficient…
“As the People’s Bank of China injected another round of monetary elixir into the financial system last night, defaults are spreading and Chinese stocks went limit down nonetheless.
“Monetary placebos can have some effect so long as they’re believed. But, in truth, central banks have no vaccine to prevent global financial contagion, and that realization is certain to spread.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4321872-central-banks-no-vaccine-against-financial-contagion
“European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde has warned that the world’s central banks have less room to stimulate the economy in case there’s a recession…
““This low interest rate and low inflation environment has significantly reduced the scope for the ECB and other central banks worldwide to ease monetary policy in the face of an economic downturn,” she said.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/european-central-bank-chief-warns-theres-little-room-to-combat-a-recession
“The Bank of Japan (BOJ) would up stimulus if the economy’s recovery was derailed, Deputy Governor Masazumi Wakatabe said on Wednesday, warning the coronavirus outbreak could hurt corporate sentiment and global trade.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1623631/business-economy
“Japan [world’s third largest economy] is in a recession now, and what’s more its economy is on track to shrink on an annual basis in 2020, according to some analysts factoring in the impact of the coronavirus outbreak and the latest disappointing data.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-07/japan-recession-risks-prompt-forecasts-of-2020-contraction
The Bloomberg article says:
That is a lot of shrinkage, and would seem to have started even before the Chinese problem.
My brother has a business on Guam, with mainly Japanese clients, that is down quite a bit.
Translation: the further you kick the can down the road, the harder it becomes to kick it. But the bankers will cling to their false values and insane policies to the bitter end, because the alternative is to admit they have failed, are failing, and will continue to fail.
Inability to stop the current problems was a concern, even before the epidemic. Things are not getting better!
Germany is facing a possible recession again after industrial production plunged by the most since the global financial crisis.
The 3.5% slide in December’s output comes a day after a report showed factory orders declining at the fastest pace in more than a decade.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-07/german-economic-weakness-exposed-again-as-industry-slumps?srnd=premium-europe
And this is before all of the problems in China started hitting. It doesn’t sound good!
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Maybe some good news on the Corona Virus front if you have any belief in the official numbers coming out of China. But what else do we have to go on since there isn’t an independent source. The increased number of confirmed infections on the 5th was 3723 & the increase dropped on the 6th to 3163. Now sometimes daily numbers can drop for a day, then begin another ramp up. But at least it’s a possible silver lining. Also deaths leveled off at 73 for two days in a row. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
I think the numbers are bogus. They are following the model that Chris Martenson showed four or five days ago that some one had sent him. It seems like an “official” set of numbers.
Time will tell.
I don’t think they are bogus. At this point people know there is a new virus in China, that it started at a wet market, people are quarantined, people are in critical condition and many have died. They’ve been forthcoming on the building of two hospitals. I’m not sure there’s much to hide at this point. It’s easy for people to speculate on larger numbers but even the official numbers are worrisome.
Wasn’t China forthcoming on accurate numbers during the Sars and Mers contagion? And didn’t people speculate at the time those numbers were higher than reported? I’m just not buying the much higher numbers at this point. Someone’s going to have to prove any numbers above the officially reported one’s.
I just think it is strange that the numbers for the last four days were announced four days ago by Chris Martenson on his you tube video.
There normally is sort of a pattern in how reports of a communicable disease grow. This is what the R0 is all about. So once a pattern is established, it is not terribly difficult to put together a model of future reports. So the situation isn’t as odd as it seems, especially for a period as short as a few days.
There is always something to hide for totalitarian regimes, that’s how they function.
And we in the West are not far off these days: the most outrageously crude propaganda has been thrown at us over the last few years, really since 9/11 and the Iraq invasion.
Why would the Chinese government lie? The list of plausible reasons is very long, a moment’s reflection would show that.
I am wondering if Japan would also lie, or at least not go out of its way to count those who are ill. It is so close to China that it cannot cut off China. The news seems pretty sparse from Japan.
Mostly what we see stories about is the ship parked off the coast if Japan with infected people on board. There seem to be 61 people out of 3,700 people on board the ship that made stops in China before stopping in Japan that have tested positive according to CNN. I am wondering if the newly sick passengers are infecting others, before they are removed from the ship. If this is happening, it would seem like this could go on for much longer than 14 days. It could start a chain reaction until all 3700 are infected.
It’s 61 out of 273 people who were tested that were ++++
“There is always something to hide for totalitarian regimes, that’s how they function.”
Amen to that, Xabier. The doctoring or withholding of information is built into their governmental structures.
Principally, perhaps, because they always claim to be super-efficient Utopias, superior to any other state, ruled by an all-wise Leader.
The hypocrisy of the ghastly Xi threatening officials who cover-up, given the appalling delay in dealing with the virus,and the persecution of honest doctors, is breathtaking – if not surprising.
I’ve also been reading some sickening sycophancy from the Left on the ‘brilliance’ of China’s measures,and the ‘declaration of war by the People on the virus’, spearheaded of course by the noble Communist Party members, ever the first to sacrifice themselves……
Self-organized systems seem to work better. It is hard to see such a widespread quarantine being initiated in a country that is less “top directed.”
Speaking of sycophants, I have been surprised by the very great lengths the WHO have gone to in order to not offend the Chinese. At press conferences their top brass always go the extra mile in praising the Chinese efforts at containment.
I suspect that they delayed announcing a global health emergency due to pressure from the Chinese and when they finally did announce one, WHO Chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that, “The… declaration is not because of what is happening in China but because of what is happening in other countries…. Let me be clear, this declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China…”
The WHO is part of the UN and so should not, in theory, have any sovereign obligations or bias. So why are they so fearful of upsetting the Chinese government?
As to why the WHO might avoid upsetting China, two reasons come to my mind. First, many common respiratory infections tend to originate in China (at animal markets and in mixed and intensified livestock-crop farms), such as influenza. That is, new strains tend to develop there and then go global. WHO needs the cooperation of China to be involved in controlling their spread. Second, many public health officials are frustrated authoritarians. China’s public health apparatus — especially its rule by edict and powerful enforcers — is what officials at WHO, CDC, and other public health agencies would love to have. The perfect sandbox for playing out control fantasies, regardless of whether they actually protect public health.
I received a link today to something called the 2019 Global Health Security Index. It looks like this has been “in the works” for a while, before the coronavirus. It looks like another high cost, mostly worthless, study. There are three layers of overall preparedness. China is in the middle category, as are Spain, Germany, Norway, Italy and India, among others.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/overview-preparedness-based-on-gobal-health-security-index.png
It includes lots of recommendations such as:
“Governments and international organizations should develop the capabilities to address fast-moving pandemic threats.”
and
“Plans should be developed to assist countries with challenging risk environments and to bolster preparedness in countries bordering those at increased risk.”
I think the situation is a little like unemployment numbers. How do you define such numbers?
China is counting only those whom they test. In fact, that is happening elsewhere as well. They don’t have the staff and the testing equipment to test more. Without transportation running, people cannot get to hospitals to be tested. The areas around Wuhan are so overloaded with patients that they cannot test more. And even when they do test patients, there is a lot of difficulty determining with certainty that they have the virus. The CDC in Atlanta has expressed concern that the US test isn’t fully accurate. I can imagine that is the case there as well.
Imagine the ill-luck of being dragged off to a huge quarantine centre when you are not in fact infected: another medieval twist for us, recalling those who were thrown in to pits alive.
After reading about the 10 found the first day, the 10 found the second day, and the 41 found the third day (leaving spouses onboard), I got to wondering if this was mostly a way of passing the infection around. It seems to be communicable before we can identify people with the disease.
On Feb. 8, only two more people were added, bringing the total to 63 with infections.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/02/08/coronavirus-cruise-ships-diamond-princess-cases-rise-japan-coast/4693112002/
This is only the start for Macy’s
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/macys-is-closing-roughly-125-stores-heres-a-list-of-the-first-round-of-closings/ar-BBZFPZ6
Macy’s will close roughly 125 stores, a fifth of its locations, over the next three years.
After previously announcing that it would close 29 locations, Macy’s said Tuesday that it will now shutter nearly 100 more.
The retailer also said that it is cutting about 2,000 positions , eliminating 9% of its corporate and support positions.
“We are making deep cuts that impact every area of our business,” Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette said Wednesday during the retailer’s Investors Day. “These changes are painful but they are necessary.”
Macy’s, once the model of the luxury department store, has struggled to stay afloat during a time when Amazon has remade the shopping landscape and one time retail giants like Payless and Toys R Us are going out of business.
The retailer says that shutting weaker stores in lower-tier malls will enable it to focus on locations with stronger sales as well as its online operations.
Wait till the recession hits
Department stores everywhere have been going out of business. Instead, we have a wide range of store selling a mixture of cheap goods. Or they are aimed at a particular market, such as oversized men, or fancy imported goods of some type. Such stores tend to be high-priced. Buyers who don’t want to spend all day looking for reasonably priced goods that meet their specifications (particular type of battery, for example), end up ordering on line, because it is easier.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Peak-Shale-Will-Send-Oil-Prices-Sky-High.html
Wow, a mainstream article about peak oil.
“Much of the cheap oil has been produced, and the oil industry is increasingly relying on costly reserves. While the world is awash in supply right now, the market may begin to tighten up in the next few years, forcing prices higher.”
“But the global economy will begin to sputter as a result of higher crude prices. “The current economic system cannot sustain oil prices above $100 a barrel, and engage in genuine growth in the real economy for very long,” warned the report, authored by Dr. Simon Michaux and published by the Geological Survey of Finland. “Alternatively, producers cannot sustain oil prices as low as $45 a barrel and still make a profit.”
“The financial stress sweeping across the shale industry may bring forward the peak in shale production. But the precise date is not all that important. The problem is that the plateauing of U.S. shale, and the resulting increasing in prices, could spell trouble for the global economy. Michaux, author of the Geological Survey of Finland, cited the 2008-2009 global financial crisis as an example. Saudi oil production stalled out in the years preceding the crisis, precipitating a massive price spike in 2008, which contributed to the financial market meltdown.”
?This has been debated just few pages back, Michaux consulted Gail on the topic, and supposedly afterwards turned around completely his initial thesis..
Is OilPrice.com mainstream? They have copied quite a few of my articles over the years, always using a different title than I use.
A whimsical lateral way to look at the corona virus story.
https://medium.com/@ebonstorm/a-coronavirus-comes-to-dinner-99177b57f483
Interesting.
We have a healthcare system in the US that is too much focused on making money for the practitioners, the drug companies, and sometimes the hospitals. There is more incentive to produce drugs that will treat an illness that will sicken just a handful of people that there is to work on backup antibiotics. The current virus will raise awareness on the need to work on more antiviral drugs.
We think of ourselves as the top predators. It is really microbes that are, especially if fossil fuels leave us.
U.S. Health Care Ranked Worst in the Developed World
https://medium.com/@harsh.singh.clif/u-s-health-care-ranked-worst-in-the-developed-world-1d397cd291c6
The United States health care system is the most expensive in the world with an annual spending of $3 trillion or $9,523 per person, accounting for 17.5 percent of the gross domestic product. But, consistent analysis shows that the healthcare system in the US is one most underperforming among developed nations. It was ranked last in the 2014 Commonwealth Fund survey 2014 for the fifth time.
This is a chart I cut out a few years ago, showing the trend in the US female life expectancy compared to that of a number of other advanced nations.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/figure-1-6-female-life-expectancy-at-birth.png
It is difficult to be this bad at the same time health care costs are the highest in the world and ever-rising.
We have the best “healthcare” money can buy in the world!!!
USA USA USA USA USA USA USA!!!! Merica #1
Hmmm, let me look at that chart again.
Fake news
Fiat-Chrysler Latest To Warn Of Looming Supply-Chain Chaos As White House Says ‘Don’t Worry’
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/fiat-chrysler-latest-warn-looming-supply-chain-chaos-white-house-says-dont-worry
Lady my wife works with has had a nissan something or another in the shop for 2 weeks because their is no parts. I just laughed and told my wife to stock up on TP.
Gilead Sciences Inc
NASDAQ: GILD · February 6, 11:04 AM EST
69.04
▲ 3.17 (4.81%)
Gilead Sciences Inc is a major player—
California and Massachusetts are where the game is played.
I wonder why? (sarc)
Hint:
remdesivir
May be a drug that helps——
Largest U.S. Biotech Hubs: Boston and the San Francisco Bay
https://www.thebalance.com/boston-and-san-francisco-biotech-hubs-375641
Interesting, if one wants to stoke the fires of one’s paranoia, that Chris Martenson, who has been posting daily updates on the coronavirus, which are sceptical re the mainstream numbers and narratives, and garnering good, six-figure viewing figures, has just had his Wiki entry deleted on the basis that he is a “non-notable individual’ and a “conspiracy theorist”.
It’s an interesting development: ironically, just the same as the Chinese officials telling the rather heroic deceased doctor, who tried to raise the alarm in December, that he would be punished if he continued in his ‘stubborn’ attitude. Chris Martenson’s Social Credit is now in debit.
Martenson is conducting wild speculation. Keep in mind there is no independent source on the ground in that region of China reporting, so any random totals people decide are more accurate are speculation. The cats out of the bag now on this virus, so what benefit is there for China to massively reduce the numbers?
Maybe we’ve just all gotten so use to Trump lying about everything that we presume other leaders do as well, but in this case if there was a massive difference in numbers from the official numbers, that truth would come out at some point and constitute what the Chinese call ‘losing face’. They dislike nothing more.
you are right of course
the ”losing face” thing is paramount to the chinese psyche
it will override everything else
Deception is universal in politics and statecraft. Perhaps for you President Trump’s lies are transparent, but on the other hand perhaps you are taken in by the lies of more sophisticated American politicians and for that reason you don’t realize that they are not more honest but merely more inveterate, more consummate and more congenital liars than he is. Just perhaps.
As for the Chinese leadership, what expertise can you call on in forming an opinion of where these people are coming from or even what conceptual universe they inhabit? This is a culture in which a change of dynasty has almost always been accompanied by a massacre of the previous regime and their cousins and their cousins’ cousins. The present regime are well aware that if they fall, they will not be able to retire in disgrace like Nixon or the Kaiser, but are quite likely to be butchered en masse by the incoming regime.
China is a totalitarian society in the sense that when they go, they go all the way. It’s only a hundred years ago that they managed to end the practice of foot-binding, for Christ’s sake! Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions of people, and the excuse given these days is that officials increased the numbers on food production and decreased the numbers on malnutrition because they were afraid of what might happen to them personally if they reported accurately.
While you are agonizing over Trump’s plans to stop the entry of illegal aliens to the US, stop and think for a minute that China has 13 million people who were born in the country to Chinese parents “illegally” and are therefore non-citizens without basic human rights, which are in any case more often honored in the breach than the observance.
Are you aware of the ruling party’s official attitude to the Tiananmen Square protests—none in China dare call it a massacre—to whether force was justified or to how many people were killed in the incident and subsequent to it, to take just one case?
A number of Chinese people I know personally have let slip in conversation that there are many things that one just doesn’t discuss in China because expressing a dissenting opinion is asking for trouble, to put it mildly.
What benefit is there for China to massively reduce the numbers?
While we can speculate all we want about possible motives, since we don’t know who may have ordered the numbers reduced may have made that decision, it would be idle speculation. But China has a long history of reducing the numbers when it suits someone to reduce them and increasing the numbers when it suits someone to increase them. Indeed, it would be foolish to rely totally on official numbers coming out of China on anything including the numbers of cabbages produced.
Fear is considered unacceptable, even if it is appropriate or natural. The system is based on confidence.
I looked up a few names some of us know, to see who has Wikipedia pages:
Christopher Martenson (note that his has been taken down US Wikipedia)
Dennis Meadows – Yes
Donella Meadows – Yes
James Howard Kuntzler – Yes
Richard Heinberg – Yes
Dmitry Orlov – Yes
John Michael Greer – Yes
Rob Hopkins – Yes (Transition Towns)
Nafeez Ahmad – Yes (Investigative journalist who writes about EROEI stuff)
Charles A. S. Hall – Yes (Brief one that editors say “reads like a press release”)
Gail Tverberg – No in English; Yes in French
Kjell Aleklett – Yes in Swedish
Francois Roddier – Yes in French
Steve Andrews (Founder of ASPO USA) – No
Nate Hagens – No
Looking at this list, I think that selling a fair number of books (even if they are self-published) is a good way to get a person a Wikipedia page. It really depends upon whether a person has friends who want to put up a Wikipedia page for them. Chris Martenson certainly has peers who have pages up.
Interesting. Neither David Korowicz nor Nicole Foss appear to have Wiki pages.
I am just intrigued to know who issued the edict for Chris Martenson’s page to be removed and what their specific motive for attempting to undermine his credibility might be.
I generally find him measured and thoughtful, and when he is speculating he admits as much. It seems a little sinister that some branch of officialdom somewhere is trying to discredit him as a conspiracy theorist and crank.
I noticed that Robert Rapier is not listed in Wikipedia either.
Most Wikipedia articles are just short blurbs about a person. The person listed wouldn’t notice whether the page was up or not.
I don’t whether Chris Martenson was using his Wikipedia page indirectly for marketing. If this were the case, he would be more sensitive to the page being deleted. Also, trying to use the page for marketing might tick off the Wikipedia powers that be.
The R word looks REAL….Reality is a B#TCH….Surprise, surprise😜
Surprise German Factory Order Slump Shows Worst Isn’t Over
Jana Randow
BloombergFebruary 6, 2020, 2:29 AM EST
(Bloomberg) — Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here.
Germany’s manufacturing recession looks far from over after latest data showed factory orders falling at their fastest pace in more than a decade.
The report is a blow to Europe’s largest economy, which had shown signs of working its way out of a slump that left it with the weakest annual growth since 2013. Orders are a key gauge because they indicate future output.
While the government has raised its 2020 growth forecast to nearly twice last year’s pace on the back of a resilient labor market, the momentum remains sluggish and new risks have appeared. China’s coronavirus is disrupting global trade, the U.S. has revived threats of tariffs on European imports, and the pressure is mounting on companies to address climate change in their business planning.
What Bloomberg’s Economists Say
“We suspect the economy has reached its low point and expect momentum to gather pace gradually in 2020. Still, there’s no evidence of a significant recovery.”
— Jamie Rush. Read the EMEA WEEK AHEAD
The euro gave up earlier gains after the report, and was little changed at $1.1000 at 8:25 a.m. Frankfurt time.
Labor unions are nervous about the outlook. IG Metall, Germany’s biggest union, has called on employers to refrain from cutting jobs and instead constructively work toward a strategy for future growth. While union representatives are seeking wage gains in the current bargaining round, they haven’t made specific demands.
The Economy Ministry said in the report that the outlook for industry continues to be subdued, with orders dropping 0.5% in the final three months of the year. In December alone, factory orders from the euro area plunged 13.9%, and investment goods slid more than 20%. Domestic orders rose for a second month.
Now for some song and dance from Elton…the B#TCH is BACL
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfW72XxmwY
401ks will be crying very soon
It is a problem that the world economy was in terrible shape before this virus came along. Any little “bump in the road” becomes a big bump in the road.
More on delusion, as in a previous post to Xabier (basque name after 16th century saint, Xavier, with remarkable longevity) my deepest hope is that delusion is reality, positive thinking which I strongly promote, but in case you have questions, this might be on interest.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/02/pandemic-lies-and-videos.html
This one is not even from Zerohedge.
It is a beautiful, snow covered day here in MN, 12 degrees F, and all the nasty viruses are dormant, positive outlook.
Dennis L.
Yes indeed we need a discriminating virus.
Xabier translates, unpoetically as ‘New house’ – etxe beria. Historically, the house was the basic social unit, and you were named after it.
There’s a famous poem among Basques:
‘I will defend my father’s house against taxes, governments, enemies, time, even Death….’
“And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
and the temples of his Gods”
Macaulay, of course, the story of how Horatius kept the bridge.
Let’s just say that the world can stop the spread of the virus outside of China. If there is any truth to the articles like this one.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594
There is a chance that some industries can’t restart. If you compare the mortality rate not against the rate of infection but against the reported released data we’re talking about a 60% survival rate.
If you lose 30% of your senior management what happens?
Considering how dependent the world is on Chinese manufacturing I see an infrastructure collapse coming quickly on the heels of this just when it’s needed most.
The 34 yo whistleblower doctor who tried to warn his colleagues and was detained and questioned by authorities has died.
“The doctor who tried to raise the alarm about coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan died after contracting the disease. Early reports of the death of Li Wenliang were retracted, only for the doctor to succumb later in the day”
WOOOOOOOOOOO…han!!!!!!!
let’s see… a doctor who presumably would have had access to the best local medical care…
let’s see… only 34 years old!
I mean, let’s not go all in on con spear a see theoreees, but…
is it much worse than what is being reported?
the survivors will have a story to tell…
Good point. Either the poor 34-year-old guy was allowed to die on purpose or made to die on purpose, or else this bug is nastier than we thought.
Well, even plain old pneumonia can take out even fit young men rather quickly, so no foul play need be necessary: almost happened to the brother of friend, a strapping young farmer -quite out of the blue, too.
How do we know this bug isn’t plain old pneumonia?
Or to put it another way, how do we know that this bug is any worse than the many other viral strains that cause plain old pneumonia?
Also, how do we know that a lot of cases of pneumonia haven’t been caused by vaccines given to people in an attempt to inoculate them against various strains of flu and viral pneumonia? Combined with the heavy pollution load people live with year in year out in places like Wuhan, which damages their lungs and their immune systems in several ways.
The “killer fog” that hit London for four days in December 1952, left an estimated death toll of at least 12,000 people, with around 150,000 hospitalizations and thousands of undocumented animal deaths. Nobody blamed that on a virus. But was Wuhan in December 2019 any cleaner than London in December 1952?
Forgive me, I’m on a roll today. 🙂
The picture I am seeing now is of a virus that is spread as much by fecal matter as by airborne transmission. Chinese sanitation (or lack thereof) very much plays into this spread. I made a comment earlier about toilets in China and the hand washing situation there. Chinese population density is important as well. I heard that six undergraduate college students would share a single dorm room. I saw workers with shared housing stacked in very tightly as well.
The other issue is that the virus is easily killed by warm weather and by humidity. It is spreading now in China because it is cold there. Warmer weather will help stop the spread. The virus will not do well in warmer or wetter countries. Countries with better sanitation and more access to drugs that treat the disease will do better.
The strange death rates we are seeing by area are an artifact of the different “tips of icebergs” we are seeing in different parts of the world. In the immediate Wuhan area, only the very sick are admitted to the hospital. Many of these die. In outlying areas, many people who are much less ill are included in the base.
The illness problem may substantially subside by summer. It may be mostly localized to China, because other areas (especially rich areas) will have the ability to treat the smaller number of cases they have. The financial problem could be much bigger and go on for a much longer time.
“If you lose 30% of your senior management what happens?”
Depends on which 30%. Based on my long experience as a consultant, losing the right 30% would be the best thing that could happen to most companies.
Back when collapses happened before, epidemics led to huge drops in population.This led to big opportunities for young people.
Previously, the problem had been one of too high population relative to arable land and other resources. The world already had enough merchants, farmers and craftsmen. The situation would not be too different from what we have today.
When quite a few of the middle aged and old people were wiped out by epidemics, it opened up opportunities for young people. Suddenly, there were opportunities for would-be farmers, merchants and craftsmen.It often was the epidemic that that did the necessary reduction of population, so that the system could restart on a better basis.
Greatly increased annual mortality – after a brief illness – among older people would certainly help to rebalance things, freeing up real estate at lower prices , reducing the cost of care and end-of-life treatments, pensions, etc.
The challenge and burden of caring for so many is one that really cannot be met – in the UK, services are almost at breakdown already and just not functioning in some regions.
Here in Japan, the nursing care industry prefers brain-dead or, failing that, comatose bedridden clients. They need a lot of care, but it is predictable care. Monitor them via a video camera and go in a few times a day to turn them over, change diapers, replace feeding tubes, give them a bed bath, etc, and you’re done. On the other hand, the active elderly can be extremely troublesome and difficult to deal with.
The government found a neat way to pay for nursing care in the shape of nursing care insurance. A small premium is paid by everyone from age 40, which rises to a more hefty premium at 65, which is deducted from the pittance of a public pension that the state pays, thereby impoverishing healthy and self-reliant old folks to fund care for those who are unable to care for themselves.
And no, I don’t have an alternative, since leaving the old and sick to their own devices would be too cruel to contemplate, but the current system is one more straw on the backs of the poor overburdened camels who support all these wonderful state-supported solutions to society’s problems.
Tim, Japan is merely following the pattern set by the rest of the developed world: tax the productive to support the unproductive. Or, in my rather more harsh terms: steal from the producers to subsidise the parasites. Those are not chickens flying around the world, they are giant gryphons; and they are coming home to roost.
The Black Death set the stage for the
Renaissance.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
How true. When I was at The Guardian, the whole management team – with the exception of one very capable individual – could have been wiped out and replaced the next day with much higher calibre people almost without a pause.
Xabier, the advice I never dared to give, in no particular order.
* sack the Director of Human Resources, who encourages the company to treat its employees as resources, not as humans.
* sack the Director of Marketing, who tells his staff “sell to the boardroom, not to the users”, and adds the sage advice “a big lie is more believable than a small one”
* sack the Director of Product Development, who supervises products of ever greater useless complexity, so as to reinforce his silo with endless maintenance and “upgrade” requirements.
* sack the Chief Accountant, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and who will cheerfully loot the company for the benefit of the shareholders, and to the detriment of the employees and customers.
But I’m sure all that sounds familiar.
This is a problem that rate cuts and stimulus cannot fix. It’s a can that cannot be kicked.
Watch what happens when people figure this out. There will be a mad dash for the shops.
Already in many countries you cannot buy alcohol gel hand wash or masks.
This is how it ends. In total chaos.
The bunker doors will be slamming shut shortly.
Yep. As I alluded recently, as of Jan ~24-26th most of the European shops and distributors were out of stock for the appropriate sub micron grade masks and goggles. Let me stress again that was weeks before the current msm elevated attention to the possible pandemic situation, hence the already low(ish) winter flue season stock at that point was likely depleted just in few days by the very few precautionary behaving professionals in the know, i.e. various pathogen related labs, perhaps gov/mil medics etc. There is always someone front loading incoming uneasy trends..
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3872149
Taiwan’s new mask-rationing system goes into effect today
Effective today, there will be a limit of 2 face masks per person per week
By Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer; 2020/02/06 11:10
Mind you these are the almost useless ordinary masks, the sub micron grade needed for such virus outbreaks start at ~ $4 (good only for few hours at best).. and are not as much mass produced anyway..
More for show than anything else. The mask reassures, that’s all.
Hmm, what do we call this: ‘cargo-cult medicine’?
Just the image, not the reality.
Ironically enough, lot of the TW/HK people could definitely afford the semi-profi full scale facial/filter masks but at the moment wearing it in public would be seen as overkill and socially not acceptable.. Hence using only these thin basic make believe hopee stuff..
Or Chinese communities ahead of the game……
I have to say, it’s great so far: no Chinese tourists at all, we can see our beautiful city once more. They’ve made life hell for us over the last few years, and spend next to nothing on their visits -only tacky tourist stuff, which has displaced real shops.
If you need a laugh, just visit Zerohedge: great headlines related to the madness of a dying over-complex system
US military develops uniforms that kill bio-weapons in minutes’
‘New solar panels to harvest the energy of deep-space’
Let’s go invest!
“China plans to halve tariffs on 1,717 goods it imports from the US as the country faces the fresh challenge of the coronavirus. Chinese officials said tariffs on some goods would be cut from to 5% from 10%, and on others from 5% to 2.5%.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51353503
“China’s banking and insurance regulator (CBIRC) asked lenders last week in some cities to assess the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on their borrowers, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter… the CBIRC has urged banks to lower the interest rates and extend loans to targeted companies that have been affected by the outbreak…”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-bankimpact/china-regulator-asks-banks-to-weigh-virus-impact-on-borrowers-sources-idUSKBN2000LA
“Talks between officials from OPEC and its allies spilled into an unprecedented third day as Saudi Arabia and Russia remained split over their response to China’s coronavirus.
“Delegates gathered again in Vienna on Thursday after two days of meetings weren’t enough to shift Russian resistance to deeper production cuts…”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/opec-technocrats-prolong-talks-russia-210954121.html
Understandably as they don’t posses as direct access to global fiat spigots as the Saudies-Guflies..
China will really need to “extend and pretend,” (that there is no problem).
..incredible..
China really needs to prop its economy up as much as possible. If it can get a little goodwill from the US, that might be an added benefit.
Financial markets remain confident the [coronavirus] crisis will soon blow over… The breezy confidence of the markets is based on three assumptions, all of them questionable:
First, that the authorities in China – who are regularly accused by financial market analysts of massaging the country’s growth figures – are telling the truth about the scale of the problem…
“Second, that coronavirus is going to be a rerun of the Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in 2002-03, when there was a brief downturn lasting one quarter before the Chinese economy snapped back.
“But China accounted for only 4% of global output in 2003 and is now four times as big. It matters both as a source of global demand – for German machine tools and Land Rovers – and as the hub of global supply chains responsible for everything from TV sets to mobile phones. Even if coronavirus is contained as quickly as Sars, there will be a more marked impact.
“Third, if coronavirus does prove to be more serious than Sars, central banks will do whatever it takes to prevent a global stock market meltdown. Yet of all the world’s major central banks, only the US Federal Reserve has much scope for cutting the cost of borrowing. Interest rates elsewhere – in the eurozone, Japan, and the UK – are at, or close to, rock bottom.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/05/coronavirus-markets-black-swan-dive-chinese-outbreak-economy
“The probability of the U.S. Federal Reserve issuing another rate interest rate cut is increasing, economists say, and the spread of the coronavirus may speed up that decision… Fed chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference following the central bank’s January meeting that he was “very carefully monitoring the situation…””
https://business.financialpost.com/investing/coronavirus-could-force-the-fed-to-cut-rates-sooner-than-expected
“Southeast Asian central banks signaled strong policy action this week to counter a hit to their economies from the new coronavirus.
“The Bank of Thailand cut its benchmark interest rate Wednesday to a record-low 1%, while Singapore policy makers indicated there was room for further easing in the currency. The Philippines underscored its willingness to ease…”
https://www.investing.com/news/economy/central-banks-roll-out-antivirus-efforts-in-southeast-asia-2077525
It seems to me that the virus may indeed drop back down, as warm weather hits in May, because the virus cannot withstand warm weather.
The question is whether all of the cutbacks will lead to serious financial problems around the world. Also, will anyone really trust China to be their main supplier for anything any more? More tariffs to keep out Chinese goods may become popular.
“It seems to me that the virus may indeed drop back down, as warm weather hits in May, because the virus cannot withstand warm weather.”
Yes, however it may become seasonal:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/06/coronavirus-wuhan-china-recurring-winter-illness-flu/4665482002/
“But many researchers think the new virus, called 2019-nCoV, might be here to stay. Like swine flu, it could become a regular ingredient in a winter soup of respiratory bugs that cause common colds and other illnesses — only without the fanfare of travel restrictions and global commerce disruption.”
Car manufacturers and airlines could really do without this virus.
“Last year brought the steepest decline in demand for air freight since 2009, newly released IATA data shows. Freight tonne-kilometres fell 3.3%. “This was the first year of declining freight volumes since 2012, and the weakest performance since the global financial crisis in 2009…”
https://www.flightglobal.com/air-transport/2019-the-worst-year-for-air-freight-in-a-decade-iata/136563.article
“Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways asked its 27,000 employees to take three weeks of unpaid leave, saying preserving cash was key for the carrier and that conditions were as grave as during the 2009 financial crisis due to the virus outbreak.
“Cathay is also asking suppliers for price reductions, putting in place hiring freezes, postponing major projects and stopping all non-critical spending…”
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/business/862214-situation-as-grave-as-2009-financial-crisis-cathay-pacific-pushes-for-unpaid-leaves
“Toyota has warned that it expects a dent on car sales in China as the coronavirus outbreak hurts consumer sentiment in a market that was already slowing before the epidemic spread.”
https://www.ft.com/content/166b69ec-47eb-3c96-a7ba-343d57aec637
Germany joins Korea and Japan in posting dismal manufacturing numbers for December before the coronavirus had even become an issue:
“The downturn in German industry has intensified, after orders in the country’s manufacturing heartlands fell for a second consecutive month in December, defying predictions of a rebound and making 2019 order books the worst for over a decade.”
https://www.ft.com/content/c6c7fe58-48b8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
Reality finally catches up with the Germans after a good long run: the political results of this will be fascinating. No jobs for all those new un-skilled immigrants…..
Not so fast, instead the slaves of their supplier chain inside CEE could work even harder for less pay, before turning to the well fare issue of domestic un-skilled immigrants. That’s typical German logic at its best.
“One of Fiat Chrysler’s European facilities is as little as a fortnight away from halting production because of problems sourcing Chinese parts, the company warned, in the first prospective European car plant shutdown resulting from the coronavirus outbreak.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7cef6996-48e1-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d
Yes, the cutting corners over achievers such as Fiat-Chrysler or Renault(Nissan) are likely the most exposed to this situation.. Not sure about the sub assemblies logistics for Volvo, but perhaps that also went “partly” to Asia after the change of ownership.. And they have been not doing well lately anyway..
I’m kind of siding with the unlucky faith of S Koreans there as they evidently upped their game in past decades and even overtook German/Japanese in many consumer as well as industrial segments. I bought their HQ audio stuff ~20yrs ago when Japanese folded on further innovation, their cars are now often better value for money vs many traditional W (or JP) brands and so on..
Sad if the ~virus wars~ will end this trend suddenly (directly or indirectly). You see they were always part of the Northern club of stubbornness and inventiveness, e.g. having the heat floor heating similar to other top ancient civilizations, wood working-craftsman tradition etc.
No kidding! If people aren’t being let out of their homes to go to the university (in Beijing), they certainly are not going to be in much of a mood for car purchases.
Debt defaults are not too far away?
“In December 2019, air freight cargo volumes fell 2.7%, as capacity was lifted 2.8%.” This doesn’t sound like a formula for profitability. More capacity as demand shrinks. And the situation has to be much worse for the first quarter.
We are almost certainly now weeks away from total collapse:
IF CHINA CANNOT GET THIS UNDER CONTROL AND FACTORIES DO NOT RE-OPEN VERY SOON YOU CAN REFER TO KOROWICZ ‘TRADE-OFF’ TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THE SHELVES IN WALMART.
The workshop of the world is closed. China is on a total-war footing. The Communist Party has evoked the ‘spirit of 1937’ and mobilized all the instruments of its totalitarian surveillance system to fight both the Coronavirus, and the truth. Make GDP forecasts if you dare.
As of this week two-thirds of the Chinese economy remains shut. Over 80pc of its manufacturing industry is closed, rising to 90pc for exporters.
The Chinese economy is 17pc of the world economy and deeply-integrated into international supply chains. It was just 4.5pc of world GDP during the SARS epidemic 2003, which some like to use as a reassuring template. You cannot shut down China for long these days without shutting down the world.
CHINA MUST BE LOCKED DOWN OTHERWISE THE VIRUS WILL GO MEGA VIRAL AND OVERWHELM/COLLAPSE COUNTRIES WITHOUT ROBUST HEALTHCARE. I SUSPECT IT WOULD OVERWHELM ALL COUNTRIES BECAUSE IT CAN BE SPREAD WITHOUT SYMPTOMS MANIFESTING.
Views differ but it is striking how many global experts – when not under political pressure – say it may already be too late to stop the spread. “It’s very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” said Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
It is the same warning from an “increasingly alarmed” Peter Piot, head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The danger is that it will become endemic and circulate everywhere like flu, a manageable headwind for rich countries with good health care but a Sword of Damocles having over Africa or South Asia.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/05/chinas-coronavirus-not-remotely-control-world-economy-mounting2/
The virus is not under control in China and looks to be impossible to control. Hospitals are turning sick people away, who spread it further. And people who do not have severe symptoms don’t bother to report to hospitals so they continue to spread the virus as well.
If the factories do not open within the next few weeks, the global economy will unravel, and collapse.
It may already be impossible for many of the factories to open already. Wuhan is a massive factory city and already too many factory workers there may be too sick to work or dead, even if the government ordered the factories to re-open. Workers all along the supply chain in China will be affected so just opening factories does not solve the problem.
https://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-dont-panic-too-much-.png
https://ibpf.org/sites/default/files/pets.jpg
Even in rich countries beds for intensive care are more or less at full-occupancy in the winter months which are favourable to this virus, therefore very easily over-whelmed if there is a high complications rate. Moreover, here in Britain the elderly are increasingly taking up lots of space in hospitals, not only due to their need for treatment but deficiencies in the general care system. Demographics meet virus…
His comments about Asia and Africa in general are perfectly correct, of course.
For China, the situation is truly bad. I would expect that if it spread to Tibet, it would be bad as well, because it is cold, and has low sanitation standards. It is fecal transmission, as much as airborne, that is a problem.
In warmer areas and in areas with better sanitation, it will not be as much of a problem. The article you transcribed also says, “Interferon works and it has quite a bit of benefit.” That gives a second possible treatment for those with the virus. There was a combination of AIDS drugs that seem to work as well.
It *has* spread to Tibet (they found like, one case), but the population of the Tibetan Autonomous Region is pretty sparse relative to land area. Also, there’s lots of sunlight (with relatively intense radiation).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html
“The fatality rate in Wuhan is 4.1 percent and 2.8 percent in Hubei, compared to just 0.17 percent elsewhere in mainland China.”
The article states the above, but doesn’t answer the question; Why is the virus more lethal in the epicenter?
This thing is beginning to steamroll: new infections in just the past 2 days: 7650
Mass quarantine centre = plague lazaretto. I’d rather die at home, thanks….
Hmm, mis-reporting, doctored stats? Just a suggestion.
We cannot really on any figures from China, or our own authorities, not in the slightest.
Perceptions are being managed -even with some good intentions, I’ll allow.
It is easier to go with managed perceptions. I deeply want to believe that all will be well, I deeply wish for the absolute best from the incredible efforts the Chinese are making to stem this problem, they are to be respected, wished well and aided wherever and however necessary. Whatever the cause, it is past, now we need to hope, pray and assist them in this time of need. Seems like sort of a version of a gifting society – seems like that is more or less what the US has done over all these years.
Dennis L.
Partly, the issue is that people who come to the hospital to be tested are in reasonably good health at the time they are up to traveling to the hospital. It takes several days for some of these folks to die. The virus started in Wuhan, so it took a while for people farther away to get infected. We are partly dealing with a lag problem.
But I do agree; the very low figures outside the immediate area do look strange, unless they suddenly came across a large supply of a drug that works to keep people alive, or something of that sort.
CLSA Conference call with Coronavirus expert
Overnight in Asia, we hosted a call with professor John Nicholls a clinical professor in pathology at the University of Hong Kong and expert on coronaviruses. He was a key member of the research team at the University of Hong Kong which isolated and characterized the novel SARS coronavirus in 2003. He’s been studying coronaviruses for 25 years (full bio here). The recording of the call can be found on our website HERE. Below are my notes transcribing the call. The first 30m are worth listening to.
Quick summary: look at the fatality rate outside of Wuhan – it’s below 1%. The correct comparison is not SARS or MERS but a bad cold which kills people who already have other health issues. This virus will burn itself out in May when temperatures rise. Wash your hands.
My notes from the call below:
Q&A Session with Professor Nicholls:
What is the actual scale of the outbreak? How much larger is it compared to the official “confirmed” cases?
People are saying a 2.2 to 2.4% fatality rate total. However recent information is very worthy – if you look at the cases outside of China the mortality rate is <1%. [Only 2 fatalities outside of mainland China]. 2 potential reasons 1) either china’s healthcare isn’t as good – that’s probably not the case 2) What is probably right is that just as with SARS there’s probably much stricter guidelines in mainland China for a case to be considered positive. So the 20,000 cases in China is probably only the severe cases; the folks that actually went to the hospital and got tested. The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.
You mentioned a shortage of testing kit can you talk more about that?
There are two ways to detect a virus. 1) Through the genetic material – DNA or RNA or 2) to detect the protein of the virus. The rapid tests used in a doctors’ labs look at the protein. The problem with that is that you need an antibody to pick it up. And it takes 8-12 weeks to make commercial antibodies. So right now for the diagnostics tests they are using PCR which give you a turnaround in 1-2 hours. But then you need to run a machine and run 96 runs in 1 hour but then you have to a batch of samples so there’s another delay of 5-6 hours for patient presentation. So that will lead to some problems you can’t turnaround in 5-10m which is what you want when a patient shows up to the emergency room. Because right now you also have influenza going around so what you want is to be able to rule out influenza so you can treat the patients correctly for coronavirus. So that may be why they missed some of the earlier cases.
Your colleague at HK university estimated that the size of the infected population on Jan 25th was 75K with a doubling time of 6.4 days. So by feb first we would have 150k infected. How accurate do you think these models are and how accurate have they been in the past?
Those figures did not take into account restriction on travel, quarantine etc… These reports are likely on the high side. This is not taking into account social distancing. Historically these models have not been all that accurate.
When do you think this thing will peak?
Three things the virus does not like 1) sunlight 2) temperature and 3) humidity. To make you guys really worried. A coronavirus can survive on a stainless steel surface for 36 hours. It hangs around for quite a bit.
Sunlight will cut the virus ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13m to 20m. Sunlight is really good at killing viruses. That’s why I believe that Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they are in the middle of summer. And Wuhan and Beijing is still cold which is why there’s high infection rates.
In regards to temperature, the virus can remain intact at 4 degrees or 10 degrees for a longer period of time. But at 30 degrees then you get inactivation. And High humidity the virus doesn’t like it either. That’s why I think Sars stopped around May and June in 2003 – that’s when there’s more sunlight and more humidity. The environment is a crucial factor. The environment will be unfavourable for growth around May. The evidence is to look at the common cold – it’s always during winter. So the natural environment will not be favourable in Asia in about May.
The second factor is that of personal contact. With Sars once it was discovered that the virus was spread through the fecal oral route there was much less emphasis on the masks and far more emphasis on disinfection and washing hands. HK has far more cleanliness (than China) and they are very aware of social hygiene. And other countries will be more aware of the social hygiene (than China). So in those countries you should see less outbreaks and spreading. A couple days ago the fecal-oral route of transmission was confirmed in Shenzhen. In China, most of the latrines are open- there’s more chance of phermites (?) being spread. But in other countries the sanitations systems tends to closed. My personal view is that this will be a bad cold and it will all be over by May.
People talk about the vaccine and this is the big problem that people get from movies. Where in the movie they come out with a vaccine and then three days later it’s all over the world and everybody is saved. In reality this does not happen because for a vaccine you need to go through clinical trials – is it safe and will it work. The last thing you want to do is rush a vaccine too early. If you get any severe reactions, then the anti-vaxxer will just say “I told you so”. You are talking about a working vaccine in 1 to 2 years. With SARS, in 6 months the virus was all gone and it pretty much never came back. SARS pretty much found a sweet spot of the perfect environment to develop and hasn’t come back. So no pharmaceutical company will spend millions and millions to develop a vaccine for something which may never come back. It’s Hollywood to think that vaccines will save the world. The social conditions are what will control the virus – the cleaning of hands, isolating sick people etc…
What do we know about the transmission rate? It’s been estimated around 2.2 to 2.68. What percent of the patients are transmitting while being asymptomatic?
This is a big problem when you talk about asymptomatic that means you have a good diagnostic test- where you can say they are asymptomatic (which we don’t have with this virus).
We actually looked at this with MERS where people were saying it had a high fatality. We went to Camel abattoirs and took serums from the abattoir workers and found that quite a few had low infections with no symptoms. This is what should have been done at the initial stages at the seafood market. But to do that you need a good diagnostic test. A good diagnostic test is necessary to determine to the transmission rate. Now we have normal human airways and we can now look at how long it takes the virus to replicate in that environment. And that will be very useful to determine those who are asymptomatic carriers.
Any sense of whether the estimates of the reproductive number the Ro of 2.5 or 2.7. Do you think that is high or low. What does that mean?
Measles was about 10-15 and influenza is just below 2. I think it’s about 2.2 as it’s being transmitted within the community.
Have we seen any super spreaders? We saw that with Sars and Mers.
There’s talk about that but the epidemiologists are still overwhelmed so no clear answer. But I don’t think there are any super spreaders.
What is the percentage of people transmitting the virus while being asymptomatic?
Unlike SARS, patients were symptomatic at about day 5, some of these cases may be asymptomatic until about day 7. That’s based on the first publications. Asymptomatic is probably the first 5 days.
There’s a paper published looking a familial cluster with a boy who was shedding the virus and he was asymptomatic.
That’s something about kids and we saw this with Sars. Very few kids had very severe disease. We are trying to determine if this is a virus which we call low (unintelligible) kind of inducer or high (unintelligible) kind of inducer. SARS is high [unintelligible] kind of inducer. This means that when it infects the lower part of the lung, the body develops a very severe reaction against it and leads to lots of inflation and scarring. In SARS what we found is that after the first 10 to 15 days it wasn’t the virus killing the patients it was the body’s reaction.
We are doing testing on this now. Is this virus in the MERS or SARS kind picture or is this the other type of virus which is a milder coronavirus like the NL63 or the 229. I think this will be a mild (unintelligible) kind inducer.
Case fatality is about 2.5% or so? Do you expect this to change over time? And are you seeing any difference among the young population and older population in terms or mortality rate?
SARS went really for people in their 30 or 50 years. And MERS on the other hand basically is if you have co-morbidity – try and find somebody in the middle east who does not smoke or does not have high blood pressure etc… The data coming out of China seems to indicate that it’s those with the co-morbidity are most at risk. For the seasonal influenza that’s also what we find. It’s the people with the co-morbidity that have the increase mortality rate. Having said that there’s a guy in the Philippines who died in his mid-30.
I think this looks more like the seasonal influenza where those who die have to co-morbidity. Now that we have better case control definitions outside of mainland China, we will get a true assessment of the fatality rate. I would now put it at about 0.8% to 1%. When you look at all the death reports – separate out the deaths from mainland China and outside China.
Mortality rate in China – is much higher? Why?
Its related to the environment. In the high income countries you don’t have as high a population density, higher level of environment control and hygiene. In Indonesia – it’s unlikely to spread much as it’s very hot and humid. Would this virus move to Africa? I think that’s unlikely – too hot there’s not a lot of travel there.. Europe – possibility higher transmission but environmental care is higher.
At this stage it’s a really bad cold which can cause problems in people. People are talking about the “lethal virus” but seasonal influenza can cause deaths in elderly but we don’t call that “the lethal influenza”
There’s news reports that antivirals are being used and that it’s working what are your thoughts on that?
With SARS it didn’t seem to work at all with the commercially available antivirals. But there seems to be good effects with the case in Washington with the Gilead agent. And it sounds like China will be using it.
Interferon works and it has quite a bit of benefit.
The problem with the antivirals – because the virus has different ways of replicating within the cell, finding a nice common target has been difficult. But the Gilead agent appears to me to be very promising. We now have the virus growing in our labs/cultures so can now test it to see what will work and not work.
Would the opening of the hospitals in China change anything?
What we found with SARS in HK was that a contributing factor to the spread was the overwhelming of the HK healthcare system. Hospitals and doctors were overwhelmed. When China built these Wuhan hospitals – it’s to take the work load off the staff which is likely exhausted.
In HK with SARS we found quite a lot of infection of healthcare workers as they are close and doing invasive procedures. But this time around there is not much evidence of the healthcare workers getting sick or dying (but maybe China is not reporting it) so this may suggest that I think it is not being spread by close aerosol contact but more by the fecal-oral route or with droplets. So it will not be as contagious within hospitals. So getting the two hospitals built it will take a lot of the work load off the other hospitals so it should be a big benefit.
The recovery rate now higher than the deaths rate? Thoughts on that?
What we found is that in HK with SARS we didn’t know how long to treat a patient for. Now in China they are using the SARS model but treating patients for shorter time periods so that they don’t get the secondary problems that they did with Sars. Getting actual data on recovery from the mainland is still a bit of a challenge.
I’d consider a patient recovered if he’s been discharged. The problem is that with SARS, there were quite a bit of people where the steroid were very beneficial to treat the acute stage and we didn’t know how long the virus would live for so we kept them on the steroids for a long period of time and they came out with all sorts of secondary problems due to the immunosuppression.
I haven’t seen any data on the quality of life of those who have been discharged.
Evidence of E-coli?
Secondary infection are most likely the cause of deaths of the patients in the Philippines and HK.
What does it mean for a patient to have recovered?
That means the patient has been discharged from the hospital. That’s the criteria for Hong Kong. But there’s no good data or guidelines on this.
What is the probability that this will be contained and eradicated or will it be endemic in the human population?
If it is like SARS it will not be endemic. It most likely will be a hit and run just like SARS. People talk about mutation but what we found with SARS was that there was no mutation and we have been tracking MERS and we have not seen any severe mutation. This is unlike the common coronavirus which when they replicate they don’t have a ”spell check” so they mutate. So if this virus follows the same path as SARS or MERS it won’t mutate. This will not be endemic. I think it will burn itself out in about 6 months.
Does mortality rate or fatality rate typically increase over time? That was apparently the case with SARS.
With SARS we didn’t know how long the virus was alive for. So with SARS in the later stages people were not dying of SARS but of the complications of SARS which is why the mortality rate increased. But now people are much more aware of the dangers of over immunosuppression. So the death rate shouldn’t be more severe. Especially with the new hospitals being established which should take some of the workload off of the healthcare workers from Wuhan.
If we look at the serious cases being reported it’s about 13% of the total cases being reported. If we assume a 50% mortality rate for the severe cases than we are looking at a mortality rate of 5-6%. Is that a fair assumption?
In Hubei, the milder cases are not making it to the hospital. Because they are so overwhelmed that milder cases are being sent away. So that’s why it’s important not to look at the mortality rate in Wuhan but to look at the mortality rate in Shanghai or Shenzhen or outside of Wuhan. It’s very important to dissect it out.
Would it be too early to make conclusion outside of Wuhan? It’s still really early days outside of Wuhan? Are we making assumption with very little data and very early data?
That’s all the data we have to work with. When you are dealing with an epidemic at the early stages – there’s such a variable. But now for political reason people are far more aware of the virus so it won’t be as epidemic as it was early on. There’s far more awareness and controlled environment and changes in social behaviour. Which I’m not sure is taken into account in the models. So it should spread far less outside of Wuhan. http://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp00364
VS
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3048772/striking-coronavirus-mutations-found-within-one-family-cluster
I guess Ann Margaret is not coming then. Thanks for the update that is helpful intel.
Thanks for transcribing all of this. It sounds very reasonable.
I thought the part about the growing conditions for viruses was very interesting:
This is why flu and cold seasons are always in the winter. Changes toward warmer weather will cut back on the transmissibility. Humid areas will also be much less at risk for transmission.
Regarding transmission within China, years ago, the standard restroom was essentially a large shared outhouse. I believe that outhouses have disappeared in urban areas, but I would not be surprised if they still exist in some rural areas. I cannot imagine these outhouses are heated. These would be a great place for the transmission of the disease, I would think.
Modern restrooms are basically the “squat” type, without any cover available when the units flush. I would suppose that viruses fly all over.
When it comes to washing hands with soap and water, I never saw soap for hand washing in China in rest rooms. What I saw was cold water faucets, no soap, no paper towels, and no hand dryers. Perhaps this has changed in some places. If a person wanted any type of paper products, the situation was strictly, “Bring your own.” In airports and hotels, western style toilets would be available, but there were nearly always waste baskets next to the toilets with signs next to them: “Place toilet paper in basket, not in toilet.” The sewage system is/(or was) not up to handling paper products. This doesn’t come across as the best practice either.
And I wonder if the water treatment plants are always up to doing what they should be doing. Water treatment plants may work adequately when the system is not overwhelmed with extra rain water, for example. I know that people generally boil their water before drinking it, or drink bottled water. But they still wash their hands in it. I saw a website saying it was OK for visitors to brush their teeth with it; just don’t drink the water.
if you shouldn’t drink the water, you shouldn’t be brushing your teeth in it, either.
you can tell this expert is very knowledgeable. thanks for this posting this interview.
My mistake about the earlier article. I meant to say that before the coronavirus outbreak china planned to rewrite the bible according to socialism.
And then coincidentally the outbreak happened.
How could we characterize the environment suitable for the human species?
The presence of enough of the human dominated energy creates the environment suitable for the human species.
This explains why some people consider otherwise uninhabitable planets as suitable for the human species, if the excess heat of their environments or the stored energy in the form the chemical substances present there can be used for the creation of the human environment.
That is why the humans do not need nature. We can live even without our gut bacteria, if we handle the creation of the food that is processed for our intake.
The history of the processed food for humans is the history of the human species. The presence of the human dominated energy allows for the elimination of other species needed for the creation of the human diet.
That way humans started agriculture, so that they have stable supply of suitable ingredients for their food.
This explains why we have in the Bible the forbidden fruit and the man earning his food in the sweat of his face, i. e. energy expenditure.
The reason why humans left Africa, the place of their origin, is that they needed better environment for their development. That way the upper part of the Nile river can be considered as the Eden, while the delta of the same river as the place where the human species strated. This is the most probable way how the human species developed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans
https://linearpopulationmodel.blogspot.com/2016/04/fossil-find-shows-early-humans-settled.html?m=1
It is interesting that the place of the origin of the human species is the Lake Turkana valley which has no outflows, i. e. it is the place of accumulation of minerals.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151207-the-remote-lake-that-tells-the-story-of-humanitys-birth
The place where the biggest religions strated, i. e. the Dead Sea valley, has got the same characteristics, i. e. no outflows.
The reason why the delta of the Nile was the start of the human civilization is easy to come to: the first humans could be carried down the river on a trunk of a tree – The Tree of Life as we know it from Eden.
Trace Elements in Water, Sediments and the Elongate Tigerfish Hydrocynus forskahlii (Cuvier 1819) from Lake Turkana, Kenya Including a Comprehensive Health Risk Analysis
High levels of Lithium, high levels of Zinc, high levels of Cadmium in the fish from lake Turkana:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00128-015-1603-8
“The concentrations of elements in the water and sediments showed no sign of pollution. In fish muscle, Li, Zn and Cd showed relatively high abundances, with mean concentrations of 206, 427 and 0.56 mg/kg dw, respectively. The calculated target hazard quotient values for Li, Zn, Sr and Cd were 138.7, 1.9, 4.1 and 0.76, respectively; therefore the consumption of these fish poses a health risk to humans in the area.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412017321025
“Childhood cadmium exposure was associated with lower intelligence in boys, and there were indications of altered behavior in girls for both prenatal and childhood exposures. Findings are of concern as similar exposure levels are common world-wide.”
http://www.aaem.pl/Effects-of-blood-lead-and-cadmium-levels-on-the-functioning-of-children-with-behaviour,71768,0,2.html
“The effect of lead on the developing organism of a child has such behavioural consequences as attention disorders, hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour which, in turn, may interfere with children’s functioning in the home. A negative effect of cadmium on the functioning of children with behaviour disorders in the home was not proved.”
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2013/898034/
“Cd can increase the blood brain barrier (BBB) permeability”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257072267_Developmental_neurotoxicity_of_cadmium_on_enzyme_activities_of_crucial_offspring_rat_brain_regions
“Maternal exposure to Cd during both gestation and lactation results into significant changes in the activities of acetylcholinesterase and Na(+),K(+)-ATPase in the frontal cortex and the cerebellum of the offspring rats, as well as in a significant increase in the hippocampal Mg(2+)-ATPase activity.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50595132_Cadmium_Toxicity_Revisited_Focus_on_Oxidative_Stress_Induction_and_Interactions_with_Zinc_and_Magnesium
“This article gives a brief review of cadmium-induced oxidative stress and its interactions with essential elements zinc and magnesium as relevant mechanisms of cadmium toxicity. It draws on available literature data and our own results, which indicate that dietary supplementation of either essential element has beneficial effect under condition of cadmium exposure. We have also tackled the reasons why magnesium addition prevails over zinc and discussed the protective role of magnesium during cadmium exposure.”
What interactions of the minerals and the apes ancestors of the humans happened in the Turkana Lakey valley that lead to the development of the human species?
Interesting thought!
The stable supply of food became necessary as the newly developed humans had higher energy needs as their ape predecessors. The origin of agriculture was stimulated by the need for higher energy security of the humans who needed more energy for their bigger brain. The more energy for their bigger brain made the rest of their body naked.
I.e. the mutation that caused their brain to be bigger started the interest of the human species in the stable supply of food.
It must have been such mutation caused by drinking the water containing minerals, including toxic ones, that caused such variety of mutations that coexisted in the time of the first humans. And it was the agriculture that made the mutation with a bigger and smarter brain to survive over other mutations. As it was a smart idea to cultivate food in the deltas of rivers, with its constant supply of minerals.
Hunters and gatherers survived on the outskirts of the new species that created the agriculture, while these smarter hunters and gatherers eliminated other mutations.
The hunters and gatherers have never been a central group of the new species with a bigger brain. The hunters and gatherers were a relic from the pre-human era.
It was the energy needs of the new species created by the mutation that created the agriculture, i.e. reshaping the natural environments so that they are human environments. The humans started to eliminate predators so that they had more meat for themselves. There was no more wilderness, the nature was cultivated by the humans to provide benefit to them.
The art of cultivation, the creation of agriculture were the invention of the new energy hungry mutation, namely humans.
The first was the mutation, then came the need for more food and other energy. It could not have been the other way.
The term “the cultivating hunter and gatherers” is a more precise term for humans. The humans eliminate predators like weeeds and carnivorous animals or other species that eat the same food as humans. That way other similar mutations of apes were eliminated, but the apes not eating meat survived.
So the meat eating, as the way of providing more energy in comparison to plant based food, is a characteristic of the bigger and smarter brain mutation.
The humans are cultivating species. This covers both their way of hunting and gathering and the growing of plants and animals. First they kill the predators on their food and then they eat the food itself. That is why all big predators like Smilodons are extinct, as they were eliminated first.
the next time i do something really stupid, i’m gonna blame it on the Cd in my food.
The ape predecessors of the human species maybe could drink the water of the Turkana Lake lake with its special mix of the minerals.
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/rwanda/News/Researcher-observes-gorilla-drinking-water-for-first-time-/1433218-2906936-209lxtz/index.html
http://www.turkanabasin.org/2016/02/shaping-the-turkana-basin-river-and-lake-systems/
“The second major water system that shapes the geological formation of the Turkana Basin is the lake. The level of the lake has risen and fallen drastically over millennia, creating distinctive cycles of environments. There are moments in the past when the lake didn’t exist, and the land was dominated by river systems, and other times when the lake was much larger than today, being fed by a few key rivers.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4730479/
“Many documented studies have shown that cadmium produces various genotoxic effects such as DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations.”
On more recent human development, it is estimated that ~8-10x attempts have been made on sustained settlement in the northern climate, throughout past ~.5M yrs by humans and ~humanoids. Only the very last attempt since the previous Ice Age was successful, although this was obviously in between punctuated by several cultural boom and busts and various realignments to changing climate and biomes around. This last “most relevant” episode therefore has very little in common with the much older African roots, sorry.
More specifically, one of the key forcing for hyper change rate of specialization was several ~waves~ of abrupt change, pun intended, notably the suspected tsunami floods of the former North Sea landmass called Doggerland and also tsunami floods in E ClubMed area affecting / destroying early civilizations there. In particular these events rapidly decreased the prime coastal area “real estate” of ease frivolous living of the Mesolithic era and instead forced people into more agricultural practices in the hinterlands, which again as new mega trend greased the wheels for further rounds of specialization, innovation, and consequent maladaption (soil erosion, habitat / species destruction, human settlement induced problems, humans farming other humans and all the socioeconomic factors etc).
There are at least three good intro documentaries on this whole subject, search for “Doggerland”, e.g. the TimeTeam of Channel4 did at least 2x one hour segments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P9wQj6qX2I
There are a lot of coincidences we don’t understand. This new virus could be another coincidence with strange, unexpected impacts as well.
Interesting. Thanks for the links.
We modify the environment, and for a time it works: then it all breaks down and it eliminates us.
Ambrose Evans Prichard is alarmed about the economic fallout from the ccoronavirus epidemic. And he may well be right to be. His article in the Telegraph today is not behind a paywall and is well worth browsing.
Commodity markets have taken the crisis on the chin because they are instant barometers of actual demand. Equity markets are instead shrugging off the Wuhan virus as media noise, betting that China’s factories will reopen on February 14 or thereabouts as Beijing brings the epidemic under control.
This is a brave assumption and I can only marvel at analysts suggesting that the infection rate may be tailing off based on each day’s official data. Are they aware of the astonishing accounts of Kafkaesque reality in Wuhan, Huanggang, and soon no doubt the 35m-strong megalopolis of Chongqing, where Britain has just closed its consulate?
Are they reading dispatches by Caixin or the South China Morning Post revealing a desperate shortage of testing kits and tales of the walking afflicted (transport has been shut down) queuing for hours at hospitals, only to be turned away and sent home to die undiagnosed.
These glimpses of truth are about to vanish. The propaganda police have ordered those within their direct reach to conduct an “editorial review”. Stories are being censored aggressively. Outsiders will be silenced in subtler ways.
The coronavirus numbers are patently fiction. Far more have died than the official tally of 493. A Lancet study last week by the University of Hong Kong estimated that the Chinese authorities have understated the epidemic tenfold. This was based on a spread rate of 2.68 per case and a doubling in total numbers every 6.4 days, matched with known travel movements within China and globally since the outbreak.
It calculated even then that the true figure for Wuhan was likely to be 76,000, and that Chongqing, Changsha, Nanchang, are already riddled with the disease. “Independent self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable,” it said.
Views differ but it is striking how many global experts – when not under political pressure – say it may already be too late to stop the spread. “It’s very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” said Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
It is the same warning from an “increasingly alarmed” Peter Piot, head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The danger is that it will become endemic and circulate everywhere like flu, a manageable headwind for rich countries with good health care but a Sword of Damocles having over Africa or South Asia…..
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/05/chinas-coronavirus-not-remotely-control-world-economy-mounting2/
Thanks! I just got a chance to look at this article now. Also, I looked at the linked Lancet article. The linked Lancet article suggested that other major Chines cities are only one to two weeks behind Wuhan. That would fit in with what we have heard about widespread quarantines in China.
The big concern raised in the Lancet article is spreading the virus to other countries. It would seem like Japan would be as much at risk as any area, given its close proximity to China and the amount of travel between the two countries. Japan has issues fewer restrictions than other countries (perhaps because it realizes how linked its economy is to that of China). An article dated Feb. 4 says
A person wonders if we will start hearing about problems in Japan soon as well. It has lots of elderly people and wide use of public transport, where germs can be shared. People are packed almost as closely together in Japan as China, but sanitation is better in Japan. Japan is also a relatively cold country, aiding transmission at this time of year.
I suggest tracking the virus infections here. I have been following the numbers reported there for several days now. :
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
If their data is accurate (i.e. their sources are complete, which I have no way of knowing) then China has contained this virus. Almost no new deaths are being reported, so my belief is that probably it’s under control.
If so, the question now will be whether the surrounding countries can also control infections. Likely the worst is now over and soon China will reopen for business, the media will lose attention and start following something else. We’ll know for sure in another week or so.
It may be a bit soon to draw that conclusion. Here’s a different link w/stats:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Keep in mind it’s 4:00 AM in China right now. The new daily stats tend to come out late in the day PST time. That link ‘currently’ shows 3223 in critical condition, so that represents a lot that could add to stats in the coming days. But let’s hope you’re right about the virus in China being contained.
I just went to that link I provided and it shows 72 deaths so far today, 2/5/2020, which is already more than yesterday’s total increase of 66. New infections per that site for the day is 3096, and may go higher before the day is out. So the virus infections and deaths has still not peaked.
From the Ro or R Naught as it’s called, the transmission rate which is pegged at somewhere between 3-4 on the link provided in the previous post (which is much higher than the flu at 1.3), and with the corona virus located in all provinces of China, it looks likely that this is far from peaking.
A major issue is that hospital beds (except for the new ones being added) are already filled. Lack of hospital beds, and the need for a diagnosis of the new virus before being admitted, is limiting how many can be admitted to the hospital.
There isn’t public transport to the hospital except for taxis, and taxi drivers may not want to give rides to sick patients. That leaves at least some patients without a ride to the hospital.
I don’t think we know much from the statistics we are being told, except that the true number who are ill is much higher than we are being told.
All good points, Gail, but without a more official stat site at least for now I’m going with https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
They do a good job of providing the key numbers, like the Ro transmission estimate, incubation period, etc. and update the numbers of infected and deaths daily.
But even with those numbers to me it seems like a very troubling situation. For example the increase in infections per day now exceeds 3,000. And with a 13% rate of going into a critical state, those are worrisome numbers. To my mind at least within China, it seems unlikely they will be able to stop it. If that’s the case it will likely over time go everywhere in that continent and islands. If it does that it seems unlikely to stop it from going pandemic.
All you need are upside down cardboard boxes glued together the same height as a bed, with a pad-like surface, and that’s the bed. Instead of landfills, we should be shipping discarded cardboard boxes to Africa majorly.
They could order PLA drivers to do the job, pay bounties to drivers, extra ‘social credit’ and privileges, etc.
In the 16th century in Venice plague workers were promised the equivalent of £50k if they lived,and the job got done.
There was indeed a big jump in the numbers today, after I posted the above.
Update (1100ET): At this point, most people who have been paying attention probably understand that the coronavirus pandemic probably won’t be ‘contained’ within China
But in case you had not yet been disabused of that notion, we’d like to turn things over to the WHO, which has repeatedly defended China’s response and transparency. In what looks like an attempt to shore up confidence in the numbers being released by Beijing, the WHO have “confirmed” that more than 3,100 new cases of the virus were discovered in China over the last 24 hours.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a Wednesday afternoon news conference in Switzerland that the reported cases are “the most cases in a single day since the outbreak started.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/president-xi-says-china-has-coronavirus-under-control-nearly-2000-quarantined-hong
I wish I had a time machine and could go forward a month and come back and report what I saw. If this is in fact a cover up it will be known soon enough. What will be people’s response if it is?
Cover up and response, where and to whom?
If this stays mostly in Asia, the damage is already done, HK was already massaged properly in “color revolution” meddling road book anyway, causing huge long term damage. Also the recent days confirmed int capital moving away from China, which will be further demoted from the aspirations of top economy via tariff war.
Yes, collateral damage occurring everywhere, as mentioned in articles e.g. Korean car assembly lines having problems with availability of Chinese sub components etc.. Well, you know but there are other big car manufs residing in Europe and US, perhaps not having such exposure, besides the masses are driving too much anyway.
You have to tweak your optics, even depressions make money or at least keep the privileges (for someone)..
You have to tweak your optics, even depressions make money or at least keep the privileges (for someone)..
Gilead (GILD) may be in store for a bump despite being down (BTFD).
“At the same time, Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak – and also significantly bolster Gilead’s bottom-line going forward.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology – based in the central Chinese city at the epicenter of the epidemic – has applied for a patent in China for the use of Remdesivir, an antiviral therapy used to treat infectious diseases including Ebola and SARS.
The application was made on Jan. 21 along with a military academy, according to a Feb. 4 statement on the institute’s website”.
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/gilead-falls-post-earnings-but-china-wants-to-patent-its-coronavirus-drug
Unofficial reports suggest that the Gilead drug is quite simple: hawing sex with a virgin confers immunity from the virus.
Well, no, I made that up. But in my defence I claim it is Art imitating Life.
I think it was Wikipedia that said medical stocks did well at the time of the 1918 Spanish Flu. There needs to be a silver lining to every cloud.
There definitely is a silver lining to everything. None of those people who die from this virus will get dementia. This is such a beamingly optimistic site!
“None of those people who die from this virus will get dementia.”
Good point! It is a worrisome issue.
A Wall Street Journal article made it sound like a particular combination of AIDS drugs might works to reduce symptoms. The article was China’s Coronavirus Outbreak Prompts Patients to Scramble for Remedies
The article also talks about an elderly person with the virus taking the drug and showing improvement.
I think that this is the same drug I referred to earlier that is made in India in large quantities (as a generic) for treating AIDS patients in Africa. But there is not enough of the drug for everyone with the current virus, it doesn’t look like, at least not yet.
.
Remdesivir does have good response MERS, and probably to the new virus.
Not so much to Ebola.
I see that the author of the report by the Government of Finland mentions Gail Tverberg.
There’s a link to the report in the article.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8848g5/government-agency-warns-global-oil-industry-is-on-the-brink-of-a-meltdown
Reference to Nate Hagens, a series of YouTube summaries of the course he taught at UM. It is broken into about 12 segments, perhaps 15 min or less per segment, easy to listen to in the background. Most here have the general ideas presented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsgxopIZzto&list=PLdHV4AV3ixB0n2OE8ent9k2RsJfomrGpC
Dennis L.
Nate Hagens is a great presenter, with interesting ideas.
A fellow mushroom hunter also– he has tried to get me to show him some secret spots,
That is not a matter of life or death, it is more important than that.
There may be a duplicate post here, something happened, if so please forgive.
This was posted on ZeroHedge, sobering. Again, comments and opinions welcomed. I suspect through data mining the actual numbers can be approximated, there seem to be few secrets anymore.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/did-chinas-tencent-accidentally-leak-true-terrifying-coronavirus-statistic
At the end mention is made that the leaders’ can’t reveal the real data in order to keep their positions, there is some wisdom in that as a leaderless society probably becomes chaotic quickly. One might guess the dead are being cremated not so much to hide the cause of death as to limit the possibility of spread, recall some relatives at ebola funerals contracted the disease.
Bats have been around for a long time, people have been eating them for a long time; it would seem something is fishy about the bat story.
While you are looking for something else to worry about, seems locusts are eating East Africa out of house and home.
Dennis L.
I’m afraid you are missing out something important about the “wild animals” story..
The way how the Chinese/Asian “wet food markets” operate is that such diverse group of wild animals (thrown outside their biome/habitat) is suddenly caged in very close proximity and unsanitary conditions (none or shallow stall bedding). Moreover this animal situation is magnified as they are pushed into this very close contact with the human vector as well, incl. its own low sanitary conditions, latent diseases etc. In short it’s a giant unnatural pandemonium for contagious disease fast prototyping and spreading.. which we know from past direct experience tend to work like this.
Now, it’s true that lot of these wet markets inside large urban agglomerations have been shut down in recent years (this point conceded even by the swamper propaganda YT channels lately, who ran wildly with this info/video first). And it’s also true we have to depend on expert assessment where the virus likely originated, which could be wrong or intentionally nudged-omitted-falsified information.
In any case if the pandemic turns out to be Asian pop bias specific, we don’t have to ask any other questions as the Western IC hubs will “yet again” get “miraculously” few months/yrs extra for keeping the privileged position.
The Zerohedge link no longer works.
This one seems to work. Perhaps it is only the last part of the article.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/did-chinas-tencent-accidentally-leak-the-true-terrifying-coronavirus-statistics.168566/
here’s the article:
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594
Tencent may have accidentally leaked real data on Wuhan virus deaths
Tencent briefly lists 154,023 infections and 24,589 deaths from Wuhan coronavirus
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…han
how ’bout those numbers, peeps?
I’m tired…
anyone care to refute those big numbers?
those are SARS death rates. if so, then no wonder the reactions to its spread.
Folks don’t understand how grave the Coronavirus situation is. If you trust the official numbers
of some approximately 600 recovered and 400 dead then, that is insanely scary. That is a near
40% rate of lethality. Folks are doing the math wrong. They are dividing the number of cases by the number of deaths. That is like deciding a binary election by counting the number of voters. It assumes all the active cases will recover. That is wrong. The only way to get a feel of the true mortality is to divide the number of deaths by the number of recovered. It looks plain awful. And it appears to be as contagious as a common cold. And the official numbers are likely fudge a lot. So, even the official numbers from yesterday I saw of 600 recovered and 400 dead mean a near 40% mortality rate. God help us if that is right.
I don’t think we know what the right numbers are yet. It is not until we get numbers outside of China that we can have any confidence that the numbers aren’t very much “adjusted” numbers. But even then, it is not necessarily easy to figure out who has the illness and who doesn’t. We also need to be able to test for antibodies, to tell who already had the disease and is over it.
Hopefully, there are a lot of people with light cases who recover at home. They would not be in your calculations.
But that may well be 600 recovered and 400 dead of the final-stage patients with severe complications who required hospital treatment.
It seems that it may be possible to have a mild form of the infection which does not turn so nasty, just as with less aggressive coronaviruses.
I’m more concerned about the bizarre inconsistencies emerging regarding freedom of international movement, quarantine rules, and the ridiculous ‘move around freely and then self-quarantine if you feel ill’ policy. It’s all a mess!
Gregory, I think that is wrong. The numbers you quote are based on those admitted into the medical system. First, that is a small minority of those exposed, and probably also a minority of those infected. Secondly, even those infected but who are not seriously ill are unlikely to be admitted into the system: basic triage.
So I suspect the death rate overall is rather less than these numbers show. How much less? That, alas, we do not know.
Hi Gail, I’ve been reading your dispensations for a very long time and enjoying it immensely, however, I feel that you look at the ” big picture” through a very blinkered lense and that’d be fair enough if there wasn’t more to see but there is and that’s where some of your arguments regarding certain aspects of our current delema start falling short. I think most of what you talk about is highly accurate but you seem to forget that there are other economic models other than neo liberal capitalism that might just fit the bill. For example, the conflict between renewables and fossil fuels that you speak of so regularly is artificially created by the capitalist system. Yes I agree, renewables will not power things the way they currently are but neither will capitalism and so we need to find a mutual thread that will sustain us all in the mean time so as to maintain the status quo that will then hopefully, with a little bit of luck keep the “capitalist system” going for a little big longer so that we can transform society into a realm that will be manifestly just and one that can provide for us all in a sustainable way while keeping old people alive, everybody else healthy, managing population and looking after the environment in a non extractive manner within realistic bounds.
The global economy is a self-organised complex system that relies on an ever-rising throughput of energy, bar the odd recession (recessions being perhaps analogous to a forest-fire or a snake shedding its skin) in order to not collapse.
In other words it is not the product of intentional design. Political decision-making may give us humans the illusion of control but it actually exists primarily to facilitate the growth-rate that the totality requires.
This is David Korowicz on the possibility of orchestrated de-growth:
“[There is this] confusion that because the globalised economy is human-made it is therefore designed, understandable and controllable – humans can do this in niches, but the emergent structure of multiple niches interacting on many scales over time is not.
“This mirrors the sort of argument made famous by William Paley in his Natural Theology who said that the existence of living organisms proved the existence of a divine creator/ designer by analogy with how the finding of a watch would lead one to believe in the existence of an intelligent watchmaker.
“Half a century later Darwin and then his followers showed that natural selection could do emergent design without a controller- the ‘blind’ watchmaker in Richard Dawkins words. But as believers in Man’s progress we seem to have taken on the role that Paley once ascribed to god – that is, as the creators of the complex globalised economy it is therefore designable and controllable and potentially perfectible if only the right people and ideas were in the cockpit.
“We find all sorts of confusion arising from this when attempts are made to take linguistic dominion over the economy by confusing complex interdependent emergence with intentional design (as in, the economy is capitalist/ neoliberal/ socialist, or, we need to change ‘the monetary architecture’). So even without getting into details about irreversibility in complex systems or the myriad practical problems with a controllable de-growth, the power of the belief in its possibility seems, to me at least, to represent Titanic hubris.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-19/how-to-be-trapped-an-interview-with-david-korowicz/
Or putting it another way: a system which is not a product of rationality cannot fundamentally be remedied or transformed rationally.
A political – or conventional economic – perspective over-emphasises human agency.
As my mathematician neighbour said the other day: ‘De-growth? Oh, they mean collapse!’
It’s a comforting word though: like de-tox.
Just take this, and it will purge all that nasty complexity…..
The Korowicz interview really is an excellent find, very well worth reading. He explains how he came to think about these issues.
Thank you, Harry, a most eloquent and (in my view) correct analysis. Whether it will move David Nicks out of his delusion of human omnicompetence is another matter, but it certainly resonated with me. As the saying goes: Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.
I’ve seen the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
god looks just like us
giving everybody the collective finger
I think that a “gift economy,” where everyone gains status by the amount he or she can give away, is the only economic system that really works in the long run. It is the hunter-gatherer type of economy. It also is related to what has been used in Africa and perhaps some of India. People who win lottery tickets would not possibly think of keeping them themselves. They would share the proceeds with all of the family/kin/friends. Hunter-gatherers were around for a long time.
This kind of system only works with very small groups of people. (Probably no more than 150 – 180) These groups throw out people who keep more than their share. These people have no way to succeed outside of the system, so they likely die.
They also throw out, or band together to execute, psychopathic and mal-adjusted members of the group who have a history of harming others. Pretty sensible and effective, and they don’t get to bring up kids like themselves.
I think we’ve all encountered people who are no good to anyone else and harmful to the whole community – if only we could get rid of them as simply…..
When families try to keep food to themselves, it’s also usual to group-shame them into sharing again by loud and repeated protest,a s far as I have gathered.
Well, it all worked well for tens of thousands of years,which is why we are here.
When hungry humans come looking for food you either share or get ready to fight.
Can’t help but think that we have a lot of hungry humans in our future.
What about those who have no surplus?
Dennis L.
In a hunter-gatherer group I read about, they had a fairly dependable base diet of roots, etc, and the variability in supply only really came in with the results of hunting for meat – variable luck, some men better hunters than others so ending up with a surplus, etc.
‘They’re starving us! They should give us some of that!’ would be used to apply moral pressure when such lucky family groups tried to hold back their surplus meat from the rest, until they gave in and distributed it.
They viewed meat as the premium food, something to get really excited about.
If food ran short, they moved to other territories, negotiating with neighbouring groups in a reciprocal arrangement.
They hoped that others would share with them.
I expect that there were promises made, as well. “I will take care of the children while you go out hunting and gathering, if you agree to share your findings with me.”
There is status in giving. There is also a human impulse to give, to share, and to love.
“OPEC consulted with China in an urgent assessment of how the coronavirus may hurt oil demand, and what measures the group could take to stop prices falling any lower.
“The unusual appearance at the cartel’s headquarters of Wang Qun, China’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, underscores how the outbreak has upended the global market.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/opec-asks-china-assess-coronavirus-impact-oil-demand-200204194835233.html
“Commodity trading houses and oil majors are scrambling to find spot buyers for crude oil outside China, where demand is depressed because of the coronavirus outbreak and where some buyers are asking to delay buying, Asia-based traders told Bloomberg on Tuesday.
“Cargoes of grades ranging from Russia’s ESPO to Brazil’s Lula to Iraq’s Basra Light are being offered for delivery in a few weeks time, an unusual pattern because they would have already been traded weeks ago, according to the traders who spoke to Bloomberg.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Traders-Scramble-To-Find-Oil-Buyers-Amid-Falling-Chinese-Demand.html
I expect that in not very long, we will be hearing about boats floating around with no-one to sell their oil cargos to.
China will require a lot less oil.
If, by some miracle, this all blows over, then China will suddenly need a lot more oil.
I read that one ‘silver lining’ is that if prices keep falling, the Chinese may take advantage of the savings and start hoovering up more oil for their strategic reserves.
“Monday’s market sell-off in China was the worst in many years and wiped nearly half a trillion dollars off the value of the country’s biggest companies.
“Now the Chinese government has to find ways to stem the panic before the coronavirus epidemic makes things even worse.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/04/investing/china-markets-coronavirus/index.html
“China’s biggest health crisis since at least 2003 has worsened the outlook for defaults in the world’s second-biggest bond market, likely tipping a raft of distressed borrowers over the edge this year.
“With scores of millions of citizens barred from travel, and companies, factories and retail outlets shuttered for a period of weeks, strains on cash flow add an unexpected layer of stress on Chinese borrowers.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-epidemic-threatens-broader-wave-210001992.html
Curious….could that be the increase in the U.S Stock market? Money Moving around?
Also I noticed on CNBC that private payrolls increased to their highest level in 5 years; Where does this number come from and who reports it? Can it be manipulated? Is it manipulated? Conveniently comes out after Trump state of the Union Speech and the day of impeachment vote. I wager that numbers are being manipulated all over the place every country and everywhere…..maybe that is why the REPO market is getting scared and the FED is having to prop it up all the time?! The truth is very hard to find these days…
Daniel you are on to something. I too wonder about the timing of this latest report and if the numbers are actually accurate. I think the Clinton administration was notorious for manipulating numbers and I think that the current one is no stranger to lying and manipulating numbers. I have not been able to find where these numbers are coming from either…In my line of work I am not seeing wages rise like that either and most people I talk to agree the same. It reminds me of when the stock market was collapsing in the beginning of the depression they had someone go on the floor and start buying up all the stocks that they could. This worked until it didn’t. The U.S is running very high debt levels and it is never really discussed anywhere; Also strangely seems to get little attention here as well being that is the biggest elephant in the room. Nicole Foss an oil drum writer said that the U.S would be the last best horse in the glue factory. She said this about 15 years ago and I think she was very accurate. I think that people are slow to talk about the debt levels because they don’t want to get in the political fight….but it is amazing that no matter how smart someone is and how much they seem to get it as soon as you throw politics in they get stupid. As soon as someone starts espousing a hidden political agenda I shut down as I know they are being led by the ring in their nose. I am even cautious about this site as it tends to lean right on a lot of thinking- can’t be too careful these day 😕
The next step for the U.S will be an infrastructure package of about a trillion dollars; probably won’t get it passed but you never know…
As for the corona virus one should read spillover by Quamen; I read this some years back and I am not that concerned about this virus. Yea it will disrupt markets but they will come back after the fear wears off. I have been reading this site for a long time and love the writing that Gail does but I can’t tell how many times everyone on here has said this it!! This is the year!! Of the Great collapse!! Yes it is coming but so is the collapse of all of us individually- prepare yourself! Heathens!! 🙂
I see “Spillover” by Qaumen has a full title of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. It is a highly rated book that was originally published in 2012. I ordered a used book for myself.
Never buy a used one if it is about pandemics.
LOL!
The Chinese government has a huge job ahead of it. The Chinese stock market was very high-priced before the virus came along.
“The outbreak of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus in central China has sparked concerns that an already fragile global economy could tilt even closer to recession. We examine which economies have the most exposure…”
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/which-economies-are-most-exposed-to-a-chinese-slowdown-202002041636
“ASX banks like National Australia Bank Ltd (ASX: NAB) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ASX: ANZ) are worried about the Australian economy.
“According to reporting by the Australian Financial Review, economists at ANZ and NAB think that the Australian economy will shrink in the first three months of this year because of the coronavirus and the bushfires affecting an already soft economy.”
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/australia-enter-recession-banks-worried-032311285.html
How much of anything will China be importing from Australia this quarter? How many people from China will be moving to Australia?
How many tourists will be coming to Australia with all of the forest fires?
These seem to be the countries with greatest exposure: