Citizens seem to be clamoring for shutdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19. There is one major difficulty, however. Once an economy has been shut down, it is extremely difficult for the economy to recover back to the level it had reached previously. In fact, the longer the shutdown lasts, the more critical the problem is likely to be. China can shut down its economy for two weeks over the Chinese New Year, each year, without much damage. But, if the outage is longer and more widespread, damaging effects are likely.
A major reason why economies around the world will have difficulty restarting is because the world economy was in very poor shape before COVID-19 hit; shutting down major parts of the economy for a time leads to even more people with low wages or without any job. It will be very difficult and time-consuming to replace the failed businesses that provided these jobs.
When an outbreak of COVID-19 hit, epidemiologists recommended social distancing approaches that seemed to be helpful back in 1918-1919. The issue, however, is that the world economy has changed. Social distancing rules have a much more adverse impact on today’s economy than on the economy of 100 years ago.
Governments that wanted to push back found themselves up against a wall of citizen expectations. A common belief, even among economists, was that any shutdown would be short, and the recovery would be V-shaped. False information (really propaganda) published by China tended to reinforce the expectation that shutdowns could truly be helpful. But if we look at the real situation, Chinese workers are finding themselves newly laid off as they attempt to return to work. This is leading to protests in the Hubei area.
My analysis indicates that now, in 2020, the world economy cannot withstand long shutdowns. One very serious problem is the fact that the prices of many commodities (including oil, copper and lithium) will fall far too low for producers, leading to disruption in supplies. Broken supply chains can be expected to lead to the loss of many products previously available. Ultimately, the world economy may be headed for collapse.
In this post, I explain some of the reasons for my concerns.
[1] An economy is a self-organizing system that can grow only under the right conditions. Removing a large number of businesses and the corresponding jobs for an extended shutdown will clearly have a detrimental effect on the economy.
Figure 1. Chart by author, using photo of building toy “Leonardo Sticks,” with notes showing a few types of elements the world economy.
An economy is a self-organizing networked system that grows, under the right circumstances. I have attempted to give an idea of how this happens in Figure 1. This is an image of a child’s building toy. The growth of an economy is somewhat like building a structure with many layers using such a toy.
The precise makeup of the economy is constantly changing. New businesses are formed, and new consumers grow up and take jobs. Governments enact laws, partly to collect taxes, and partly to ensure fair treatment of all. Consumers decide which products to buy based on a combination of factors, including their level of wages, the prices being charged for the available goods, the availability of debt, and the interest rate on that debt. Resources of various kinds are used in producing goods and services.
At the same time, some deletions are taking place. Big businesses buy smaller businesses; some customers die or move away. Products that become obsolete are discontinued. The inside of the dome becomes hollow from the deletions.
If a large number of businesses are closed for an extended period, this will have many adverse impacts on the economy:
- Fewer goods and services, in total, will be made for the economy during the period of the shutdown.
- Many workers will be laid off, either temporarily or permanently. Goods and services will suddenly be less affordable for these former workers. Many will fall behind on their rent and other obligations.
- The laid off workers will be unable to pay much in taxes. In the US, state and local governments will need to cut back the size of their programs to match lower revenue because they cannot borrow to offset the deficit.
- If fewer goods and services are made, demand for commodities will fall. This will push the prices of commodities, such as oil and copper, very low.
- Commodity producers, airlines and the travel industry are likely to head toward permanent contraction, further adding to layoffs.
- Broken supply lines become problems. For example:
- A lack of parts from China has led to the closing of many automobile factories around the world.
- There is not enough cargo capacity on airplanes because much cargo was carried on passenger flights previously, and passenger flights have been cut back.
These adverse impacts become increasingly destabilizing for the economy, the longer the shutdowns go on. It is as if a huge number of deletions are made simultaneously in Figure 1. Temporary margins, such as storage of spare parts in warehouses, can provide only a temporary buffer. The remaining portions of the economy become less and less able to support themselves. If the economy was already in poor shape, the economy may collapse.
[2] The world economy was approaching resource limits even before the coronavirus epidemic appeared. This is not too different a situation than many earlier economies faced before they collapsed. Coronavirus pushes the world economy further toward collapse.
Reaching resource limits is sometimes described as, “The population outgrew the carrying capacity of the land.” The group of people living in the area could not grow enough food and firewood using the resources available at the time (such as arable land, energy from the sun, draft animals, and technology of the day) for their expanding populations.
Collapses have been studied by many researchers. The book Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov analyze eight agricultural economies that collapsed. Figure 2 is a chart I prepared, based on my analysis of the economies described in that book:
Figure 2. Chart by author based on Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles.
Economies tend to grow for many years before the population becomes high enough that the carrying capacity of the land they occupy is approached. Once the carrying capacity is hit, they enter a stagflation stage, during which population and GDP growth slow. Growing debt becomes an issue, as do both wage and wealth disparity.
Eventually, a crisis period is reached. The problems of the stagflation period become worse (wage and wealth disparity; need for debt by those with inadequate income) during the crisis period. Changes tend to take place during the crisis period that lead to substantial drops in GDP and population. For example, we read about some economies entering into wars during the crisis period in the attempt to gain more land and other resources. We also read about economies being attacked from outside in their weakened state.
Also, during the crisis period, with the high level of wage and wealth disparity, it becomes increasingly difficult for governments to collect enough taxes. This problem can lead to governments being overthrown because of unhappiness with high taxes and wage disparity. In some cases, as in the 1991 collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union, the top level government simply collapses, leaving the next lower level of government.
Strangely enough, epidemics also seem to occur within collapse periods. The rising population leads to people living closer to each other, increasing the risk of transmission. People with low wages often find it increasingly difficult to eat an adequate diet. As a result, their immune systems easily succumb to new communicable diseases. Part of the collapse process is often the loss of a significant share of the population to a communicable disease.
Looking back at Figure 2, I believe that the current economic cycle started with the use of fossil fuels back in the 1800s. The world economy hit the stagflation period in the 1970s, when oil supply first became constrained. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 seems to be a marker for the beginning of the crisis period in the current cycle. If I am right in this assessment, the world economy is in the period in which we should expect crises, such as pandemics or wars, to occur.
The world was already pushing up against resource limits before all of the shutdowns took place. The shutdowns can be expected to push the world economy toward a more rapid decline in output per capita. They also appear to increase the likelihood that citizens will try to overthrow their governments, once the quarantine restrictions are removed.
[3] The carrying capacity of the world today is augmented by the world’s energy supply. A major issue since 2014 is that oil prices have been too low for oil producers. The coronavirus problem is pushing oil prices even lower yet.
Strangely enough, the world economy is facing a resource shortage problem, but it manifests itself as low commodity prices and excessive wage and wealth disparity.
Most economists have not figured out that economies are, in physics terms, dissipative structures. These are self-organizing systems that grow, at least for a time. Hurricanes (powered by energy from warm water) and ecosystems (powered by sunlight) are other examples of dissipative structures. Humans are dissipative structures, as well; we are powered by the energy content of foods. Economies require energy for all of the processes that we associate with generating GDP, such as refining metals and transporting goods. Electricity is a form of energy.
Energy can be used to work around shortages of almost any kind of resource. For example, if fresh water is a problem, energy products can be used to build desalination plants. If lack of phosphate rocks is an issue for adequate fertilization, energy products can be used to extract these rocks from less accessible locations. If pollution is a problem, fossil fuels can be used to build so-called renewable energy devices such as wind turbines and solar panels, to try to reduce future CO2 pollution.
The growth in energy consumption correlates quite well with the growth of the world economy. In fact, increases in energy consumption seem to precede growth in GDP, suggesting that it is energy consumption growth that allows the growth of GDP.
Figure 3. World GDP Growth versus Energy Consumption Growth, based on data of 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy and GDP data in 2010$ amounts, from the World Bank.
The thing that economists tend to miss is the fact that extracting enough fossil fuels (or commodities of any type) is a two-sided price problem. Prices must be both:
- High enough for companies extracting the resources to make an after tax profit.
- Low enough for consumers to afford finished goods made with these resources.
Most economists believe that an inadequate supply of energy products will be marked by high prices. In fact, the situation seems to be almost “upside down” in a networked economy. Inadequate energy supplies seem to be marked by excessive wage and wealth disparity. This wage and wealth disparity leads to commodity prices that are too low for producers. Current WTI oil prices are about $20 per barrel, for example (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Daily spot price of West Texas Intermediate oil, based on EIA data.
The low-price commodity price issue is really an affordability problem. The many people with low wages cannot afford goods such as cars, homes with heating and air conditioning, and vacation travel. In fact, they may even have difficulty affording food. Spending by rich people does not make up for the shortfall in spending by the poor because the rich tend to spend their wealth differently. They tend to buy services such as tax planning and expensive private college educations for their children. These services require proportionately less commodity use than goods purchased by the poor.
The problem of low commodity prices becomes especially acute in countries that produce commodities for export. Producers find it difficult to pay workers adequate wages to live on. Also, governments are not able to collect enough taxes for the services workers expect, such as public transit. The combination is likely to lead to protests by citizens whenever the opportunity arises. Once shutdowns end, these countries are especially in danger of having their governments overthrown.
[4] There are limits to what governments and central banks can fix.
Governments can give citizens checks so that they have enough funds to buy groceries. This may, indeed, keep the price of food products high enough for food producers. There may still be problems with broken supply lines, so there may still be shortages of some products. For example, if there are eggs but no egg cartons, there may be no eggs for sale in grocery stores.
Central banks can act as buyers for many kinds of assets such as bonds and even shares of stock. In this way, they can perhaps keep stock market prices reasonably high. If enough gimmicks are used, perhaps they can even keep the prices of homes and farms reasonably high.
Central banks can also keep interest rates paid by governments low. In fact, interest rates can even be negative, especially for the short term. Businesses whose profitability has been reduced and workers who have been laid off are likely to discover that their credit ratings have been downgraded. This is likely to lead to higher interest costs for these borrowers, even if interest rates for the most creditworthy are kept low.
One area where governments and central banks seem to be fairly helpless is with respect to low prices for commodities used by industry, such as oil, natural gas, coal, copper and lithium. These commodities are traded internationally, so it is not just their own producers that need to be propped up; the market intervention needs to affect the entire world market.
One approach to raising world commodity prices would be to buy up large quantities of the commodities and store them somewhere. This is impractical, because no one has adequate storage for the huge quantities involved.
Another approach for raising world commodity prices would be to try to raise worldwide demand for finished goods and services. (Making more finished goods and services will use more commodities, and thus will tend to raise commodity prices.) To do this, checks would somehow need to go to the many poor people in the world, including those in India, Bangladesh and Nigeria, allowing these people to buy cars, homes, and other finished goods. Sending out checks only to people in one’s own economy would not be sufficient. It is unlikely that the US or the European Union would undertake a task such as this.
A major problem after many people have been out of work for a quite a while is the fact that many of these people will be behind on their regular payments, such as rent and car payments. They will be in no mood to buy a new vehicle or a new cell phone, simply because they have been offered a check that covers groceries and not much more. They will remain in a mode of cutting back on purchases, not adding more. Demand for most kinds of goods will remain low.
This lack of demand will make it difficult for business to have enough sales to make it profitable to reopen at the level of output that they had previously. Thus, employment and sales are likely to remain depressed even after the economy seems to be reopening. China seems to be having this problem. The Wall Street Journal reports China Is Open for Business, but the Postcoronavirus Reboot Looks Slow and Rocky. It also reports, Another Shortage in China’s Virus-Hit Economy: Jobs for College Grads.
[5] There is a significant likelihood that the COVID-19 problem is not going away, even if economies can “bend the trend line” with respect to new cases.
Bending the trend line has to do with trying to keep hospitals and medical providers from being overwhelmed. It is likely to mean that herd immunity is built up slowly, making repeat outbreaks more likely. Thus, if social isolation is stopped, COVID-19 illnesses can be expected to revisit prior locations. We know that this has been an issue in the past. The Spanish Flu epidemic came in three waves, over the years 1918-1919. The second wave was the most deadly.
A recent study by members of the Harvard School of Public Health says that the COVID-19 epidemic may appear in waves until into 2022. In fact, it could be back on a seasonal basis thereafter. It also indicates that more than one period of social distancing is likely to be required:
“A single period of social distancing will not be sufficient to prevent critical care capacities from being overwhelmed by the COVID-19 epidemic, because under any scenario considered it leaves enough of the population susceptible that a rebound in transmission after the end of the period will lead to an epidemic that exceeds this capacity.”
Thus, even if the COVID-19 problem seems to be fixed in a few weeks, it likely will be back again within a few months. With this level of uncertainty, businesses will not be willing to set up new operations. They will not hire many additional employees. The retired population will not run out and buy more tickets on cruise ships for next year. In fact, citizens are likely to continue to be worried about airplane flights being a place for transmitting illnesses, making the longer term prospects for the airline industry less optimistic.
Conclusion
The economy was already near the edge before COVID-19 hit. Wage and wealth disparity were big problems. Local populations of many areas objected to immigrants, fearing that the added population would reduce job opportunities for people who already lived there, among other things. As a result, many areas were experiencing protests because of unhappiness with the current economic situation.
The shutdowns temporarily cut back the protests, but they certainly do not fix the underlying situations. Instead, the shutdowns add to the number of people with very low wages or no income at all. The shutdowns also reduce the total quantity of goods and services available to purchase, regardless of how much money is added to the system. Many people will end up poorer, in some real sense.
As soon as the shutdowns end, it will be obvious that the world economy is in worse condition than it was before the shutdown. The longer the shutdowns last, the worse shape the world economy will be in. Thus, when businesses are restarted, we can expect even more protests and more divisive politics. Some governments may be overthrown, or they may collapse without being pushed. I fear that the world economy will be further down the road toward overall collapse.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/08/exclusive-fda-commissioner-dr-stephen-hahn-coronavirus-antibodies-testing-ramping-up-plasma-based-treatments-on-the-way/
“… his agency is working with private industry leaders to bring more antibody testing and promising potential plasma-based treatments for the coronavirus to the American public.”
Reinfection seems highly likely, or perhaps not getting rid of the virus in the first place …
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus-low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about
Low antibody levels in 30% of people with mild symptoms is not good.
This report from South Korea about people becoming reinfected or not clearing the infection the first time is also bad for any longer term economic recovery. It probably means longer lockdowns of some type and/or a new normal.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/07/51-recovered-coronavirus-patients-test-positive-again-in-south-korea/
Given the above plus all the unknowns, going for herd immunity seems like a fool’s errand. The implications or hopes for any vaccine any time soon are not good either.
What I do not understand is why there is absolutely no talk about dual-use-of function or gain-of-function research being done. I bet all the virologists have a huge conflict of interest in this theme and that is why it is not being touched. It would be too awful if this was an accident. Although it is the closest possibility. How can a virus splice from pangolins and bats when bats are in hibernation and be so incredibly well adapted to humans? If The virus is from a wet market, which virus for the breathing system makes any problems when being eaten? Considering virus research purposefully producing strange viruses for the purpose of finding vaccines *cough* them should have a vaccine. Obviously they have none. so the prospect for a vaccine is grim. The only thing we can hope for is that our evolutionary knowledge in the form of our immune system can tackle this and also this is not yet clear…
And… another lie bites the dust…
I keep seeing scare headlines ‘Reinfection – Reinfection’
Well….. seems like reinfection is an issue with all types of flu….
Reinfection with influenza A virus was studied by measuring hemagglutination-inhibiting antibody responses to infection in paired sera taken from groups of soldiers and students. Among 62 soldiers severely infected during the first wave of the A/Asian/57 (H2N2) pandemic in 1957, 17 were asymptomatically reinfected with the same virus within six months.
In the 1962 epidemic the rate increased to 41%.
Among reinfected soldiers studied, 68% had an asymptomatic infection; only 10% were severely symptomatic, and they were found to be infected with a virus closely related to A/Asian/57. For H3N2 epidemics, the rate of reinfection was 17% among students studied in 1970 who were reinfected with a virus closely related to the prototype A/Hong Kong/68 (H3N2).
Reinfection with an extremely drifted variant of H3N2 was found to be 32% and 69% in two groups of students studied in 1972.
Reinfection with a related virus was 32% in another group studied in 1983. Among the students studied who were reinfected with H3N2 viruses, the rates of asymptomatic infection were similar to those of symptomatic infection.
The reinfection rates with a virus related to A/USSR/77 (H1N1) were 9.3% and 20% in two groups studied in 1980.
More https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3941288
Dave —- I know I am not worthy… but I will try to follow the trail you have blazed…
In the long term, herd immunity works. We didn’t survive for millions of years with social distancing and lockdowns.
In general, I agree with you, but herd immunity doesn’t eliminate disease altogether. The common cold keeps circulating, without herd immunity helping. Dengue Fever keeps circulating, without herd immunity really helping.
It may be that immunity to COVID-19 is not really “good enough.” Some people will be able to get it over and over again. It doesn’t kill most people, so it can keep circulating.
” herd immunity doesn’t eliminate disease altogether. ”
I agree. the other big killer, the flu has adapted our defenses against not far behind the flu, are a number of viruses including HIV, and viral stds.
Herd immunity doesn’t mean there are no fatalities . Herd immunity means the fatalities are nowhere close to 50% and the long lasting effects are not debilitating.
“It may be that immunity to COVID-19 is not really “good enough.”
What is “good enough” is highly debatable. Historically, the amount of immunity to COVID-19 is good enough. To the modern technocrat, nothing but deaths in the single digits may be “good enough”. Many experts and layman who hang on their every word have latched onto the cause of eradicating disease by aggressive use of antibiotics, vaccine campaigns, and as we see now, shutting everything down to stop a virus from spreading.
The people championing shutdowns and social distancing may be people who think eliminating all potentially lethal germs is a pragmatic goal.
This is another related article on antibody use. It points out that antibody treatments don’t give lasting immunity to COVID-19.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/coronavirus-covid-survivors-treatments-convalescent-plasma-answers/
second wave?
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/coronavirus-when-normal-expert-health-care-172005
“I believe that we’re going to return to a semi-normal life at the end of May — Memorial Day,” Dr. Orlowski said in an interview for a special coronavirus-focused episode of POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast.
“But the other thing that I would say is that we have to prepare ourselves to go through a similar exercise in the fall, in the late fall. If you take a look at the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, and if you take a look at how coronavirus is acting, this is not just the winter and spring of 2020. Probably late November, by December, we are going to go through this again.”
Sounds likely. This is just round 1.
One won’t really notice a lock-down at all in Britain during the depths of November-January: it’s just the normal winter routine to shudder when you look out of the door in the morning and decide it’s best to go back in….. and that’s just the dog.
‘Second Wave’ …. sounds ominous… I’ll have to redouble my lock down efforts….
I made a really terrible mistake today … neighbour came by with peaches — we gave her pears —- we stayed 2M apart the entire time but we chatted for a good 15 minutes… that is absolutely NOT allowed… and her kids came closer than the 2M … M Fast and I may be infected now as kids show no symptoms!!!
Hopefully we survive this first wave – if we do we will be more diligent next time — if I see her step onto the property I will fired a warning shot …. and I will report her using the dedicated email address nhccselfisolation@health.govt.nz
Must Lock Down. Must LOCK DOWN. MUST LOCK DOWN. Red Alert Red Alert.
Second Wave Imminent
How’s that Don?
Fast this is amazing work. You say you’ve never written Fear P. orn before?
That’s right Don, this is my first attempt.
Tell you what Fast, I’m going to promote you to Chief Copywriter of the FP Division. We’ll have you working primarily on the Wuhan thing… but we’ve also got some work for you on the Syrian War — we’re about to drop more CW on another neighbourhood so we need to you to write a frame-up piece so we can finally justify sending a cruise missile through Assad’s front door….
I’ll have that on your desk by lunch tomorrow Don.
Hey Don before I go…. I’d just like to finalize the visual for the above piece before we send it to the MSM network to be published …..
I’m thinking we go with a red wave … you know red alert… red wave… blood in the water…. good way to bring in the Great White Shark angle subconsciously you know….
Ya for sure — if you put an actual shark in the water it would be too blatant… it would lose impact…
Consider it done.
https://www.redstate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/red-wave.jpg
It is the ones with no symptoms that are he most dangerous. LMAO
A lot of people are sounding the alarm of a second wave coming in fall. They base this on the Spanish flu. Is that even a correct assumption/? Remember “It will go away in summer as it is hot” ? Are suppose to believe the experts again?
To me, there is no second wave. It is continuous. It will just burn through the whole year round or until collapse take place
p.s . It is hot in Malaysia and countries around the equator
Ah, but it’s possible that we Northerners are more vulnerable to all kinds of things when our poor old noses get too cold.
Frankly, who knows? Surf the Waves?
The” experts act like no one notices that the virus is active in every single climate where there is a significant number of humans.” When they say that hot weather will deter this virus , it is a bold-faced lie.
How can someone dismiss all “conspiracy theories” when “experts” lie all the time?
The National Geographic article that I cited earlier about how well social distancing worked back in 1918-1919 showed a set of charts with “weeks” under them. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/
Looking at the Natural Geographic’s graphs, the first peak seems to come about 6 to 8 weeks after the pandemic starts. The second peak seems to come 20 weeks after (or sooner, if social distancing restrictions were relaxed). The difference would be about 13 weeks, or about three months.
I notice that the health center a University of Washington on April 6 predicted that deaths in the State of Washington would peak on April 6, and head down thereafter.
https://q13fox.com/2020/04/06/uw-model-predicts-covid-19-deaths-in-washington-state-will-decline-after-today/
It is early to tell if Washington deaths peaked on April 6, because deaths bounce around a lot, and April 6 was a “high” day. A second peak 91 days after April 6 would come on July 6, which is pretty quickly.
I think the “late fall” for a second peak idea came from the idea that perhaps this flu is seasonal. If not, it comes as soon as the social isolation stops.
did China know in November?
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources-70031273
“As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region…”
but the Pentagon denies it:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/08/pentagon-denies-abc-news-report-military-intelligence-knew-about-coronavirus-in-november/
Also, Fast Eddie posted a link showing that the CDC was hiring quarantine officers as of November 15, 2019 in quite a few US cities. Prior to this happening, they had been doing practice exercises, showing their concern about a future epidemic.
https://youtu.be/xCz6S91CU1c
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/04/07/missing-emotional-side-coronavirus/
“Coronavirus Leaves Class Of 2020 Reeling With Emotion: Prom, Graduation ‘All Ruined Because Of This Virus’…”
and most of them don’t realize that their future prosperity, which they all probably assumed would be at 2019 levels, has been downgraded to something approaching poverty level…
If they are getting upset about missing prom… imagine what’s gonna happen when the starvation kicks in ….
We really are a coddled lot aren’t we…. toss a human in the bush … most would be dead in a week. And the rest would need to be plugged into the ICU when they were hauled out.
How far we have strayed…. ironically we believe we are amazing and we mock ‘uncivilized’ people who are living HG lives
Job opportunities have to be dismal. I know that they were in 2008.
I’ve notices that the elites are no longer bombarding us with messages how college education as the solution to unemployment and low wages. Given the recent emphasis on Intersectionality, they are falling back on an old-age use of mass education : social control. Graduates are told that they can get a job if they can portray themselves as a persecuted minority and get employers to feel guilt about the plight of their people.
This is a “conspiracy” because when asked directly about whether job applicants are being discriminated against based on identity, they say that s a lie.
Neighbour just popped by to drop off some peaches… had a chat and she says lots of kiwis she knows are running out of money to buy food…. the govt provides up to 2k per month if you have been laid off — not sure the formula but i think that would be for someone making more than minimum…. the payments are lower if you were on minimum wage
Let’s say you are on half your normal pay …. I think you can get an interest only mortgage — still gotta pay all the other bills — including credit card… 2k per month ain’t a lot…
And food prices are spiking…
Lock her down hard Jacinda!!! How many billion borrowed so far??? What about next month darlin…. you gonna let all this effort go to waste and open her back up?????
The natives are gonna get restless… they’d accept the lock down cuz of The DEATH FLU…. but when their kids are plucking grass and eating and crying mamma mamma I’m hungry — I want a burger!!…. Pappa might decide to take things into his own hands … and pull out the rifle…
This is NZ. One of the most civilized places on Earth. And it’s edging into gnarly….
You have to take into account the amount of credit people are loaded up (“voluntarily”).
Unpaid 2-3carz in the family, big appliances on credit, remodel/mortgage (crazy m3 of living space anyway for heating/AC bills), college debts, vacations etc..
Well, no wonder then in even timid recession this often escalates into massive family budget problems, so even food or utility bills became immediate issue within a span of single week or two not mentioning more serious times like this with likely onset of mega depression.
Amazing Poly (and she truly is amazing) has done lots of research and joined lots of dots in her investigation into who is PR-ing the Covid-19 scare in the US. Here’s a 30-minute sample of her work.
https://youtu.be/cAnSkQojE_4
OMG – ‘it’s a faked event – staged event’….
Be careful Tim….. most people listening to the first 10 seconds will hit stop — then race back here to scream at you….
Fast Eddy will — on the other hand — listen — because I respect your intellect — and I know if you post a video — it must have some merit….
I haven’t watched this all the way through yet but one quick observation – Dr. Colleen Smith is an emergency physician, specialising in resuscitation and with an interest in medical education.
The word ‘simulation’ has caused Polly’s ears to prick up but a background in medical simulation is entirely concordant with Colleen’s skill-set. Training simulations have obvious advantages over working with nearly dead, real people – they reduce costs, patient harm, risk of malpractice suits etc.
Harry – the problem is she does not work at Elmherst… and Elmherst is not overrun with covids…
You can follow up on my call — ask for the covid emergency section +1 718-334-4000
The internet is suggesting she is in quarantine, having herself contracted COVID-19. You could always pop her a note via Linkedin? I’m sure she’ll eventually revert if you are polite.
Harry sorry but no – my question was is there a Doctor who works there by the name of Colleen Smith.
Now that’s a big ol hospital so I did not expect the receptionist to say – oh ya Colleen … we just had a coffee together — do you want me to get her.
The lady said (of course she said) let me check my directory (I assume that’s a computer dbase that lists the hundreds of people who work there). She said after a maybe 30 seconds sorry nobody by that name here. We have another hospital (forget the other location) do you want me to check that one? Yes sure might as well. 30 seconds …. sorry sir we don’t have a doctor working at either hospital named Colleen Smith.
I said thanks and asked about the virus situation and she put me through to ER…
As Tim’s video states – a couple of the main honchos at the hospital suddenly came down with Wuhan along with Doctor Smith… pretty much a day after the NYT Apocalypse story dropped…
How convenient is THAT!
Even if someone wanted to question her or them — or fact check this bulllllshi t story — guess what — and you called the hospital to try to do that — you’d get a ‘sorry sir — all the people in charge are sick — they might be better in a few weeks — try back in say … a month?’
A month is no good. This is old news after a week…. they are already onto their new scam…
These people are pros Harry — they’ve done this many many many times before.
First of all they control the MSM so nobody is going to even bother to ask any questions.
But if someone with say a big time blog got a bee in their bonnet they’d run them around in circles and smash their face into so many dead ends their face would be flat
https://naotw-pd.s3.amazonaws.com/images/sanyo_flatface.jpg
I already know what will happen if I try to pursue this directly with the hospital or to ping Smith on Linked In …. of course I know…
Hey Don…. are you listening in …. I am. What’s your two cents? Fast – Hill and the others are on total media black outs… we’ve got them at a resort in the Bahamas sipping pina coladas till the end of April … anyone trying to contact them will be blocked by the gatekeeper…. you’d have a higher chance of getting a call through to the Pope…. You know how thorough we are Fast…. If your mate Harry wants to waste his time — tell him to go for it — but we don’t want you coming off task for this exercise in futility.
Harry – sorry I’ll have to leave this with you. The job market sucks now and I need to stay onside with Don….
As I have posted she is right – that person claiming to be doctor in the NYT article does not work there… cuz i called… I’d recommend that lady try to contact her on FB and see what she says… I’m not going to do that cuz I know that will be a dead end
Anyway — the thing is … you have all these people clearly willing to play ball here. Quasi doctors politicians celebrities … this is not your standard CIA type psyop or black opp…. where you primarily involve professional intelligence operatives
How do you get all these people to buy in to a scam that is throwing billions out of work … and causing people to starve and suffer? A scam that is costing trillions … a scam that is almost certain to collapse the world
The only way to get them to buy in is if you can convince them that this scam is in the interests of everyone. That we are facing something so horrifying that the agenda that is driven by this scam is in the interests of every person on the planet.
That alternative outcome would need to be extremely horrifying… because the current trajectory is going to take us to a rather nasty place
Maybe a spaceship of mind sucking aliens is on its way here and the PTB are trying to wipe us all out so we do not have to go through the nightmare of having our skulls sawed off an boiling oil poured onto our brains….
Anything is possible – but I am still going with the CDT theory. Nobody wants to see Apocalypse Now Meets Mad Max Meets The Road play out …. throw in a fair bit of cannibalism … disease and then the radiation sickness that is guaranteed….
Radiation sickness is NOT a pleasant way to die https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/07/giz-explains-what-nuclear-radiation-does-to-your-body/
I can see Tom Hanks being approached …. and being told Tom … we are going to use this flu story (there is a real flu)…. and we are going to herd everyone their homes… and scare them into not coming out no matter what…. this is going to reduce the volume of global suffering immensely…. most people will obey the instructions because that is was fearful people do….
This flu on its own is not enough because it’s just another flu …. people may work out that we have had 45,000,000 catch the flu in the US in one year … and if they do then they will not respond to the fear message…
So we need a few marquee names to come on board with this and help us with the message that this flu is different.
We’ve got the CDC and politicians on message – they will be supporting you with messaging stating this is a ‘monster’ flu — that you can catch it even if you have no symptoms … etc etc….
We think that a full court press with full MSM coverage will be enough to convince people that this is something that justifies draconian responses…
I know this is a bit hard to take Tom… we’re pretty shaken up here too… but this is the best way to handle this rather grim situation.
Can we count on you Tom?
Yes sure. Of course. Of course.
That’s great Tom. We really do appreciate this. It’s been so great how the Hollywood community has stepped up to support us on all our initiatives … if you see Leo tell him things for lending a hand with the G W… thing…. I know he’s had a hard time with his private jet stuff and that resort he built two inches above sea level… so ya say hi and let him know everyone here in Washington really appreciate his help.
Ok Tom enjoy your time in Australia… we’ve got a really nice villa for you and the wife to ride out the quarantine… lots of great food and wine … you’ll probably not want to leave hehe…
Hehe ya .. sounds great. Stay safe…
And with that … a very sombre meeting ends.
Now this is funny – Dave is asking there are no stars in any of the photos from all the missions…
Legend holds that a dozen astronauts walked upon the surface of the Moon for varying amounts of time. The Apollo 17 astronauts alone were purportedly there for three days.
For the duration of their visits, each of the twelve would have been treated to what was by far the most dazzling display of stars ever seen by the human eye. What they would have seen was many times more stars burning many times brighter than can be seen anywhere here on planet Earth.
Collectively, the dirty dozen took thousands of photos throughout their alleged journeys. And yet, amazingly enough, not one of them thought it might be a good idea to snap even a single photograph of such a wondrous sight.
Of course, endless photos of the lunar modules and the monotonous lunar surface are exciting too, but just one or two photos of that dazzling lunar sky might have been nice as well.
BOOM!
It’s as if someone went to Niagara Falls and the only photos they brought back were of the car they drove sitting in a nondescript parking lot.
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-4/
Eddy, you’re behind in your NASA brainwashing:
Well it is kind of hard to see stars in broad daylight…
Hooray! – a sensible comment – the light contrast must have been terrific – f36 or f64? – it can be bad enough here in the tropics! So I’m in no way surprised that no stars were visible.
The sky is ….black.
Well there’s no Rayleigh scattering from the atmosphere, but there is scattering from the surface of the moon. It’s a pretty good scatterer!
So if you ant to collect photons from the stars, you mostly collect photons from the sun, and therefore can’t see the other stars around
I am not sure you can’t take a good picture Jesse, it is just not the perfect spot for sure. If they went on the moon, I am not surprised that this was not a priority to build a nice device to take star pictures from the moon. Sending things to space, you have priorities, it is a complex task. Nice sky/star pictures existed already in the sixties I guess, so no prorieties to do that from the moon.
I just noticed Gail’s request to discontinue this topic.
Basically that is a signal to the DelusiSTANIS that Fast Eddy has proved his point so stop poking the Great White Shark because she doesn’t want anyone to lose an arm… or a leg.
‘Stay Safe!’
Ever heard of a setting the f number and exposure time to allow light to accumulate? A camera aimed at the stars and not the bright landscape would collect the majestic images with the correct exposure time.
But then, on a trillion dollar trip to the moon, we didn’t have the smarts to do that. We didn’t have the space to take the right kind of camera along. There is no atmosphere to scatter the reflected moonscape light, to reflect or scatter the suns rays going through them. The camera would integrate the star picture perfectly.
FE is right. The starscape would have been then most magnificent star picture ever seen by man….and it was not taken.
Another strangely missing item….or I guess NASA lost those pictures too.
Well if you see the moon, it is because its surface scatters a lot the photons from the sun… A camera on the bright side of the moon would mostly collect photons coming from the sun and scattered from the surface. Therefore you can integrate as long as you wish, you’ll always mostly see photons from the sun and not from the other stars.
I don’t think telescope on earth are looking at stars during daylight…
So you just forgot that the moon surface scatters the sun light all around the pace :). You do not need an atmosphere and Rayleigh scattering to explain why a detector on the surface is blinded by the sun light…
Are you stooo…p I’d or something? Don’t answer because I know you’re are.
There is NO ATMOSPHERE on the moon to scatter the light if you are looking upward.
A camera on the bright side of the moon would mostly collect photons coming from the sun and scattered from the surface.
Not if you pointed it in a direction away from both the sun and the moon.
Last, on the dark side of the moon the sky must look nice though. There you should
be able to see a fabulous show!
Jesse, I repeat the surface of the moon scatters light. Even if you point away from the sun and the surface of the moon you will mostly have light coming from the surface as the moon is not a small object. Shine light from your ceiling, blind most of the direct light, point your camera not on the ground, still you see scattered light from the ground.
By your rationale, there would be no pictures possible from the Hubble.
Point a camera up at the dark star filled sky. Focus it at infinity. The only photons from the moonscape getting to the film will be a few that scatter off the rim of the camera lens. Just a few. If you are implying these few photons will wash out the film, then the film will measure a white picture and not black. You make no sense to me.
“The only photons from the moonscape getting to the film will be a few that scatter off the rim of the camera lens. Just a few” Yes this is what I mean, camera as a certain numerical aperture, you will mostly collect scattered photons from the surface, there are way more photons that you collect like that than what comes from far away stars. If you get less photons from far away stars than scattered photons from the sun you won’t see the far away stars. Scattered light is huge from the moon.
I used to measure single photon stream from single trapped atoms. It is really difficult to isolate single photon detectors from scattered light in a dark room with just computer screen on.
“If you are implying these few photons will wash out the film, then the film will measure a white picture and not black” Yes that’s right.
“there would be no pictures possible from the Hubble” Hubble does not have a freaking huge scatterer just next to it
Ever heard of a baffle? NASA had plenty of smart engineers and scientists. They could have, if they wanted to, designed a baffle to allow the picture. I do not accept that you cannot image the stars from the moons surface with no atmosphere. I believe it is possible. The experiment cannot be duplicated here on earth.
BTW, the Hubble has a huge scatterer… just outside it’s FOV…it is called the earth.
I am not sure you can’t take a good picture Jesse, it is just not the perfect spot for sure. If they went on the moon, I am not surprised that this was not a priority to build a nice device to take star pictures from the moon. Sending things to space, you have priorities, it is a complex task. Nice sky/star pictures existed already in the sixties I guess? so no prorieties to do that from the moon.
Hubble has the earth next to it sure, but first it is not right on the scatterer but a few km away. Second, I can also imagine that Hubble can take picture while being on the dark side of earth during night, in this case it is protected from the sun and any scattering? Am I saying BS? I am no expert of sky observation, so am just trying to guess
https://www.space.com/14874-apollo-11-landing-site-moon-photo.html
https://imgur.com/OUH6eoV
I’m thinking…. (there’s no one in the office yet … so this is just me the novice putting this out there….) that we can do better????
If we can make out a license plate on a car from a satellite camera….. and that’s having to zoom in through the atmospheric distortions… that we might turn the satellite and point the camera the other direction — and with no atmosphere to get in the way …. we’d be able to make out a pimple on the arse of the man who lives up there….
.
It’s responsible for the deepest images of the universe ever recorded.
In late-1995, Hubble’s operators allowed the telescope to stare for 10 days at a seemingly empty sliver of sky. Many doubted whether the lengthy exposure would be of value, but the resulting image, known as the “Hubble Deep Field,” was astonishing.
By looking beyond the Milky Way, it revealed a plethora of never-before-seen galaxies, including some of the most distant star systems ever discovered.
Astronomers repeated the experiment with 2004’s “Ultra Deep Field,” and they have since released several more pictures that use infrared and combined exposures to peer farther into space than ever before.
The newest images contain more than 5,000 galaxies, some of them as far as 13.2 billion light years away. Since the light from these galaxies has taken eons to reach our solar system, it offers astronomers a window onto what the universe looked like only a short time after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.
The Great White Shark has had enough of feeding on minnows… he’s moving along
https://www.coburgbanks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/sharks-corporate-event-ideas.gif
we had to sip at the lie. then gulped it. Now the lie is our everything.
https://youtu.be/AJD-_kpgEvE
A 27 minute video explaining what goes wrong in the attempted bailout, looking at the many pieces. I have only listened to part of it, so far. I am sure I could not explain it adequately in a post.
If interest rates rise (normalize) the price of the bond lowers
if a bond yields 5% a bond yielding 1% is worth a lot less
If a bond is worth less its collateral value is worth less
if its collateral value is worth less then less repo can be lent on it
repo is the life support of the financial system without it default and contagion
so the fed must buy everything as interest rates can not rise to incentiveize buyers
ditto for every asset class re real estate.
We bring money velocity to zero via lock down yet interest rates can not rise if they do its contagion. The fed has to in effect become the market a market that accepts zero money velocity in conjunction with zero percent interest rates. The fed must buy it all with very little help from the “real” market or financial system is finished.
We need “the system” to work, since it is globally interconnected and impossible to abandon in any large or rapid way. If we have no lockdown and self isolation, we can’t say that the health care system won’t be overwhelmed. So the system won’t work. But if you lock up everybody, no work is done and the system shuts down. If the system continues it must collide with a wall of physical limits (for you can’t grow infinitely on a finite planet). So the system wasn’t long for this world anyway. So what’s missing?
not much missing in that…
the world economy could not handle a pandemic and stay running at BAU…
so we are seeing comments that more and more suggest that it didn’t matter what the response was, planned or unplanned, winging it or carefully thinking it through, lockdown or let-it-rip…
the pandemic is forcing an economic reset…
big questions remain…
how quickly to a bottom or a plateau?
will the reset be at the very bottom… no IC… or quasi IC at what % of the 2019 level?
the timing. no one wanted it to be this soon. it was supposed to be a 2025 problem, cough, cough.
Snow storm coming. Just don’t know which snowflake is the one that caused the avalanche.
Americans Not Making Their Mortgage Payments Soar By 1064% In One Month
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/americans-not-making-their-mortgage-payments-soar-1064-one-month
Over 30% Of US Renters Didn’t Pay April Apartment Rent
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/over-30-us-renters-didnt-pay-april-apartment-rent
The Liquidity Crisis Is Quickly Becoming A Global Solvency Crisis As FRA/OIS, Euribor Soar
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/liquidity-crisis-becoming-global-solvency-crisis-fraois-euribor-soar
thanks C T G…
I repeated myself probably too much in 2019 when I said that there was a glue holding IC together and keeping BAU from faltering…
and that was the fact that 99+% of persons with jobs kept going back the next day, and 95+% of those with car loans, credit card debt, rent, mortgages etc kept making their monthly payments…
we didn’t know then what the triggger might be to undo that consistency in 2020…
now we know…
This trigger is triggering the collapse at an accelerated pace. It is just 2.5 months from Wuhan lockdown date. With things falling apart everywhere (from commodities, bonds, massive defaults, delinquencies, unemployment, supply chain disruption, no money to buy food, etc), I will be surprise if it can hold more than 2-3 months (especially those without money to feed themselves – the number of people will be huge)
Very true, CTG, the speed of the break-up is remarkable – but just as we always foresaw given the way in which the structure works.
This is a time of deceptive calm: the real pain from job destruction, lock-downs and chain disruption hasn’t sunk in quite yet, and many are still working; most people -except the poorest who couldn’t stockpile and are now very distressed with food banks running out – have cupboards full of food; we don’t have corpses piling on the streets, no mass looting of the houses of the dead, etc.
But a few months from now? It may not be so calm.
I don’t think even the wisest can hope to see even 6 months from now.
A slow decline to 2025-35 seemed possible then, with all financial problems being papered over and -as you say – most people still employed and functioning in the debt-system: and then we just blew it all up in a few weeks!
I rather expected an ecological disaster (volcanic mega-explosion, repeated crop failures, etc, )to be the catalyst for disruption and collapse, given our proven skill at manipulating the financial environment, something that couldn’t simply be ‘smoke-and-mirrored’ away.
When every country print money, then everyone goes down to a lower level all at the same time. However, these stimulus money is usually one-off but you need jobs to sustain your life. Only a fraction of the people (who are totally not involved in “creating primary sustenence” like farming, fishing, etc) can work from home.
Those who work from home are those who are rather well to do and thus can ask for “lockdown: to slow the virus spread. It is those who cannot work from home that are suffering big time.
What an unfair world!
‘Work from home’ sounds great to politicians and bureaucrats who have no familiarity at all with the daily lives of real workers.
It is hard to believe that this is a surprise. It is not possible to tell people to stay at home without very dire results.
This is a chart from the zerohedge mortgage article.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/delinquent%20mortgages.jpg
I’ve been pointed to the Javits Centre (stadium) that is set up to handle the MASSIVE pandemonium of Wuhan flu cases because the hospitals are full (yet I can find zero full hospitals)
If this is a ho a x I am asked why is a stadium now a hospital?
uh… um…. why is a massive ship parked in the NY harbour with no patients?
Oh that’s a PR stunt from Trump…
oh…
I cannot find any video of pandemonium in Javits — all I can find is some people dressed up like doctors – signed ‘we are all in this together’
Nice tag line Don.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVGgIuWUYAAGKQ6?format=jpg&name=900×900
Too bad Dave is not with us — he’d have a field day with colossal ho a x.
Mostly, the stadium shows how poorly the modeled results match reality, at this point in time.
A hospital ship, with a single ventilation system for the whole thing, is a good way of passing COVID-19 around. We can’t tell COVID-19 patients from others, so there is no way to keep the ship free of COVID-19.
This article fits in with other things we have heard about ventilators being overused.
With ventilators running out, doctors say the machines are overused for Covid-19
Because of our faith in technology, we have made more ventilators the touchstone of an effective response: this is rather deluded.
Finding a cheap pill and making it in large quantity seems like a better approach. I liked the idea of Ivermecitin. https://en.as.com/en/2020/04/04/other_sports/1585963017_478782.html
Ivermectin slashes coronavirus viral load in vitro
This is a cheap anti parasite drug that has been used since the 1980s. It seems to be available over the counter. No one would make much money on it, however.
so here i am amongst a group of diverse critical thinkers. On the real fringe…. There is no covid19 5g is causing this. What say u?
Did someone say there is no Wuhan flu? Don’t recall that.
You are wasting everyone’s time
I think there is a novel flu, that seems to be highly infectious, but mainly kills very, old and very unhealthy people. For example in China, the population smokes heavily perhaps and lives in perpetual lung choking smog. Ever sat on a street corner in Asia with a mob of moped riders revving their polluting 2-cycle engines? You truly do not want to breath it. That is why it is much more normal for Asians to wear cloth masks when out and about, to kind of filter the choking air they have to breath. So Chinese, and possibly Italians from the industrialized north not only smoke a lot, but breath crappy polluted air. So they are vulnerable to the Covid 19 flu.
Now the West has lots of older people kept artificially alive by medical technology, and they are susceptible. And so many die from it. Big deal……
We are killing our economy because of our modern industrialized, (wealthy…at least we still pretend we are) mindset that everyone should be saved…regardless of cost. We spend 13% of all Medicare cost keeping old terminally ill people alive for just one more year of life. And so now we have extended that stupidity to expending our entire economy to do the same.
It is amazing to me that at the end of all this, if the globalists who want to enslave all of us to their tracking and individual marking system, if they succeed, then there will be almost no regard for human life….they will exterminate it at will.
We will go from one extreme to the other.
something is going to break this time. i dont know what but somthing. its too insane. the two politial parties playing their games without a care. printing $ out of nothing and talking about the tax payer. uh the tax payer isnt paying for this the $ are created from nothing. i dont see anyone at the wheel. they are just running their subroutines.
Ah…. excellent the embeds worked perfectly.
I have truly outdone myself with that post huh…huh????
Queue Lash Mechanism…..
Norm — when do I get to the post from you where you admit the Moooooo-n landing was fahke…. and we all have a group chuckle over the whole incident?
Hope and fear clash within me. I am conflicted. Like this dummy and its ventriloquist.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Scroll down to Nevada and look at how many new cases just today; 22,547!
Looks like Nevada helped the US hit a new daily peak for new cases; 45,870!!
Rockin’ the Casbah!!!
The numbers on that site glitched. One minute it had the above totals, then upon refreshing it didn’t, so disregard the earlier post numbers.
45,000 Wuhan Flu (mediocre team)
45,000,000 Flu https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html (Dream Team)
This is like the score if you put the DREAM TEAM on the ice …. the day after a 3 night after party fueled by every powder and pill available to mankind….
With zero sleep …. and you tied our hands behind our backs…
Then had us play the mediocre team.
http://talkhockey.ca/wp-content/uploads/Hertl-Through-The-Legs-Goal.gif
So was shutting down the world for a virus that has infected and killed far fewer than the Common Flu worth it? As the CNN article below states, restarting Auto production and restarting Auto Sales will come with its share of problems. I expect another Gov’t bailout of the Auto Industry.
“GM, Ford and Chrysler are in survival mode”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/auto-industry-coronavirus-impact/index.html
The only answer to that would have been to have no shut down and see what ensued.
Too late for that now.
The flu stats are for a year. The virus stats are just for basically a month here in the US. Let’s see what the stats are like after 11 more months. . .
Most of the 45M happen over the winter months– that’s why the numbers overlap the years e.g. 2017/18
CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
You think we’ll get 45M wuhans? Maybe… but we did NOT shut the USA down when we had 45M.
huh
I only had to use 85 of my IQ points to work that out….. so surely you could do it?
COVID-19 doesn’t give a crap about winter or any season. It will rage happily in the summer months and decimate the population because it is not going away like your “just THE FLU idiocy”. When was the last time a “just the flu” infected nearly all on a cruise ship and killed a great deal of them. I think you should volunteer yourself and your family to be infected, just to see you putting your money where your mouth is. There are some very, very dangerous people infecting the internet.
Why Covid-19 is worse than the flu, in one chart…….
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/18/21184992/coronavirus-covid-19-flu-comparison-chart
I agree that COVID-19 is worse than the flu, but very much disagree with the chart presented in the Vox article.
The R0 number for regular flu is 1.3 (I read 1.25 earlier) but the R0 number for COVID-19 seems to be perhaps about 4. It is higher than 2-2.5. This is important, because to die out on its own, it has to be gotten below 1.0. This is easy with regular flu, but is pretty much impossible with something as infectious as COVID-19. By the time you close down the economy to get the R0 number below 1.0, a huge share of the population is out of work and the financial system collapses.
The incubation time is probably right, with COVID-19 higher at up to 14 days. COVID-19 cases seem to be contagious during the incubation time, and perhaps after the person has stopped having symptoms. Without a huge number of tests (which are often wrong), it is impossible to tell who is contagious. This is a major issue in attempting to stop the disease.
The hospitalization rate is given at 2% for regular flu and 19% for COVID-19. We really do not have very good data on what the hospitalization rate is. There is a huge share of cases that are never counted. The 19% ratio is based only on those with positive test results in the denominator. The Harvard School of Public Health, in its modeling, assumed that 4.4% of the those getting the illness were hospitalized (combining the with and without critical care percentages). It is even possible that only 2% of COVID-19 cases are hospitalized, if the denominator is high enough. (A higher denominator goes with more total cases, and a higher R0.)
The case fatality rate is given at 0.1% or less for regular flu. The case fatality rate for COVID-19 is given as 1.0% to 3.4%. These are too high, because they don’t have enough total cases in the denominator. A better guess might be 0.5%, especially if we can figure out what we are doing wrong in treating patients. Putting them on the ventilator at high pressure is not helpful, for example.
The VOX article is simply wrong.
If we had a way of fixing the COVID-19 problem without killing the economy, it would be wonderful. The only way that theoretically could happen is through the cheap drug route, I am afraid. The cheap drug would be needed now.
COVID-19 doesn’t give a crap about winter or any season.
Covid-19 may not care about the season, but the human body certainly does. Sunlight and fresh air both help to strengthen the immune system, which is why people get more colds and flus in the winter than in the summer. This is one of many reasons lockdowns are stupid.
When was the last time a “just the flu” infected nearly all on a cruise ship and killed a great deal of them.
I don’t think this has happened with covid-19 either. If you are referring to the Diamond Princess, at least officially only 712 were infected out of 3700 people on board and 11 or 12 have died. Agreed, these numbers are large when compared to a normal flu, but they could not be described as “nearly all” or “a great deal of them”.
The death rate equates to somewhere between 0.3% and 1.6% amongst an elderly population. Is this worth locking down everybody and destroying the world economy for?
Is there another cruise ship with worse figures?
We don’t know for certain that only 712 were infected, do we? We are all 3700 tested? Even if they were, there is a very real false negative problem with the test.
There is also a question of what happens to the remaining sick people. Worldometers says that there are still 82 active cases, and 10 of those are serious/critical. It shows 11 dead, so far.
Exactly. I did write that 712 was only the official number of infected. “Lies, damn lies and statistics” was never truer than in the case of covid-19. It’s why I’ve lost all interest in whatever numbers we are given. It’s crystal clear that nobody knows how many people have been infected or what the real death rate associated with the disease is. My hope is that all those people I meet daily who tell me they’ve already had coronavirus and gotten over it within a couple of days are not deluded. Then maybe fatalities will start dropping and we can get back to something like normality before summer begins.
I see your chart and up raise you 45,000,000 (in America alone)
The overall burden of influenza for the 2017-2018 season was an estimated 45 million influenza illnesses, 21 million influenza-associated medical visits, 810,000 influenza-related hospitalizations, and 61,000 influenza-associated deaths
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
As you can see from that above one-liner… some of the team have arrived
Yep – and it’s not like they will magically come out of this even if the flu were to burn out….
This is like a 1000 times worse than the GFC….
I am thinking we were lied to about the bail out scale for GFC … it was trillions … no 750b Tarp….
I am thinking the Fed is smashing he 0 key on the computer — pumping cash into company accounts so they pay people to do nothing.
Did I mention a mate at an investment bank who normally never stops working … is doing at most 3 hours a day? That’s a pretty fat salary to carry for max 3 hours work a day (not sure if they have cut his pay)
Yes, there were post TARP investigations, like plugging holes in foreign banks against the mandate etc. And that was the mere visible layer.
Anyway, the whole world chipped in synchro, the overall post 2008/9 global print fest was to the tune of ~10T or more: the Asians, the Euros, the Gulfies, the RoW, every major CB printed..
So, GFC_ver2 is now estimated to be in the area of 7-15T when done, counting only from the FED side, the others would have to join again, and suddenly we are into low dozens Ts before 2025.. Which is not that much given global GDP and credit pipes, hence some argue we have to wait for proper GFC_ver3 to finally topple the structure, who knows..
Global Coronavirus Cases Top 1.5 Million, Deaths Approach 90k
In a bad year, Global Flu Deaths – 650,000
In a bad year, in the USA, Total Flu Cases – 42,000,000
In the immortal words of Brian Cox
https://youtu.be/0zWKcQy6xPo
(anyone who has not downloaded Succession… I highly recommend it)
Agreed but few will use commonsense. Instead they have bought into the MSM “fear/hype/hysteria train”.
Who cares ? The real concern for most of us here is economics !!!! Your conspiracy meme is pointless?
It’s not pointless because this is what it’s really about, a collective group “blowing up the global eCONomy”. There’s an agenda to this fear/hysteria/hype train.
Those of us that have been following this for ten years already know !!!!! You are beating a dead horse by constantly go over mon landings etc… what matters is what the Fed is doing and ramifications from here on out!
There’s no agenda, just fear, and incompetence. That’s more than enough to knock out an already punch-drunk economy, which was just winging it.
Well Ed have you had the virus? So are we to believe that all the countries…. never mind I don’t know why I am wasting my last dime on communication with you…. you are just a simpleton… with lots of free time and no skills….funny how those who are most scared talk the most… funny how I get blocked but we can get 30 post a day of nothing from you
Ed?
“There’s no agenda, just fear, and incompetence. That’s more than enough to knock out an already punch-drunk economy, which was just winging it.”
thanks p sile…
if govs/leaders were totally competent, then we would wonder…
but obviously they are not…
and fear is the opposite of what we needed from the human population…
Politicians don’t think of it as blowing up the economy. They think of it as doing what voters want. Voters are concerned about the possibility of catching COVID-19. They are concerned about their older relatives dying. Voters assume that the economy is no problem. In fact, the economists tell them to expect a V shaped recovery. An awfully lot of people think that the “real economy” is separate from what happens elsewhere, but there is a lot of connection.
See Norm — Rodster is coming to the After Party ….. the legendary after party…..
If the mediocre team had the legendary after parties —- and the DREAM TEAM had prim and proper gatherings in a library with Scotch and cigars and zero hotties….
Fast Eddy would PRETEND to be mediocre — how would he do that? — easy – he’d just agree with you and Bob and the other members of team mediocrity….. you guys would say hey that Fast is not a bad guy — he’s not so clever….. he’s just like us — mediocre — lame — feeble…..
And Bob would say to Norm… let’s invite him to the Legendary Party… and Norm would say — sure Bob …. Fast is on the team.
It didn’t occur to you to just say yes to everything posted by any member of the Dream Team Norm?
Too late now….. that was another test — that you have failed.
Ya who cares if the biggest story possibly ever….s is exposed as a ho ax eh Dan.
It has no relevance to anything else.
Actually that is probably true — how many times has the MSM lied to you in the past — remember WMD?
Oh but that was just that once… now they are telling me the truth.
https://snbchf.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/huh.jpg
So China is in on this then? And no t one country is stepping out of line. Even Trumpy had an about face. I will believe you when you purposely expose yourself to the virus.
I wish you were right; but unfortunately the ptb are not that smart and organized as you think they are! Would love to have a deep State because they would be more intelligent then what we have now. But it is a nice fairy tale that you are spreading. With your big I..Q you should have something better. I think you can do it son. Ask mom and dad if you can leave the basement for a walk.
They may not be that smart, although who are we to judge, but they are extremely dedicated to an agenda of exerting power and control over humanity—for our own good, you understand. No doubt, it gives them a sense of purpose comparable to that of the nuns working under Mother Teresa, soccer or baseball fans rooting for the team, or me trying to complete a cryptic crossword.
Dan,
According to CDT – all the key players are in on this.
According to CDT the world was about to collapse — including China as they are part of the world — and according to CDT the plan is to pre-empt riots and chaos — get people into their homes using the tried and trued formula that worked so well for WDM — FEAR….. if Fear doesn’t work for some – threaten them (e.g. kill a few)
Then just starve 8B people to death.
You find me someone who — if they can be shown the global economy was going down and mayhem was imminent — who would not agree to CDT.
The first to sign would be Jacinda and Justin — they after all are compassionate leaders who cry over the drop of a hat….. sure they don’t want everyone to starve… but given the choice — rip each others faces off — or crawl into a corner — weaken — starve — die…. I am thinking they would choose b.
I hear starving is not so bad once you get past the first few days. Maybe you see apparitions?
I’ll make sure to save some whisky — starvation and whisky might make for some interesting final moments….
I am trying to think of other theories — but all roads seem to lead to CDT…. the starvation is lapping at the shore…. I cannot see how lockdown ends … and I cannot see how the economy does not implode…
no Sudoku for you?
Are you serious?
Thanks to “deepstate” the US consumer (as the bottom on the pyramid for functioning JITs mil-industrial complex running global empire) was on life support for several past decades extra. This will most likely end before ~2030.
Yep. When will they ever learn…. probably never.
I need to use my filter more to get rid of the trash….
It seems that if the stock market stays up then the ptb can convince the masses that everything is fine. I guess that is why the FED said they would prop up the market if need be.
Yep–
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cefa76d1ca63f4d9be092112ac95877b13a87835eaf3151df208b515049db1da.jpg?w=600&h=626
But it’s not fine. The economy is more broken than ever. The FED could, in theory, buy up everything that wasn’t nailed down, everywhere, not just in the U.S., to prevent asset prices from falling. They have even set up an SPV (special purpose vehicle) to attempt just that. But you’d still have a zombie World economy, even more zombified than before 2020, just waiting for the final headshot, which would probably be delivered by a collapse in the U.S. dollar.
Mind you, we are still in the plugging banking (bond) holes, systemic emergency situation, as of now this is NOT the real stimulus yet as in re-animating the economy and trickle charging to consumers level for real as well.. this might come (or not) only later.
1 trillion dollars a day in the repo markets, which provides all the funny money to juice up the markets and try to re-inflate withering asset bubbles, isn’t the real stimulus?
Can’t wait for the real thing, where the FED essentially attempts to buy up every bit of dog food around the world, just to keep this circus operating for a little while longer.
No this has been merely first round of systemic [rescue operation] for the banks, bond market, .. The proles have been earmarked few weeks of pay and quasi guarantees for delayed bills/mortgages due in few next months.
This is NOT stimulus, so far.
That will / must come next in some form or instadoon commences.
I can’t see this will help much, as there isn’t enough money to bail your way out of something like this…
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*QUW1bnscOgilai9S.jpg
Apparently politicians are aware of the imminent disruption of supply chains and are taking measures to mitigate the shock.
“Singapore ramps up rooftop farming plans as virus upends supply chains”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singapore-farming/singapore-ramps-up-rooftop-farming-plans-as-virus-upends-supply-chains-idUSKBN21Q0QY
And in Portugal too, as it seems:
“Government admits to resorting to layoff workers for agriculture. The Government is negotiating with the European Commission some measures, including the use of fallow fields for the production of cereals and grazing, sectors in which Portugal “has some deficiencies in production”.
I love the understatment “some deficiencies in production”. In fact, portugal imports more than 80% of the cereals it consumes, and 60 % in the case of potatos.
https://www.publico.pt/2020/04/08/economia/noticia/covid19-governo-admite-recorrer-trabalhadores-layoff-agricultura-1911606
Important news JMS, thanks.
Just as we assume the supermarkets will always be open and full we don;t let the shadow of a thought about real hunger once again in the West cross our minds.
I agree with Xabier. This is important news.
I think all of us should be thinking in this direction. How can we at least plant some food for our family, if there is extra land around?
Ya I will tell my neighbours to get on that — so I can sneak over and raid the garden at night — that was so much fun when we were kids…
Oops… winter is a month away…
Given that the shutdown of industry and cancelled airplane flights have caused a loss of global dimming, temperatures will be soaring and your winter should be a mild one. /sarc
I guess this is related to the European policy setting aside land, intentionally not growing food in places, basically quota arrangement. Now when they lift the ban there could be nice rejuvenation in some (marginal land) parts of the Portuguese country side.
Who knew, not familiar with RE market there (beside posh residential enclaves)..
Now the world is ruled by dictators with absolute power and the rule of law if gone. Bow and scrap and say yes massa.
Another data point in favor of “Rooftop residential solar does diddly squat.”
https://twitter.com/UpshotNYT/status/1247929445073240067
Interesting! It is hard to keep electricity prices high enough for producers, when demand is falling this quickly. Electricity that is not produced under “utility” type rating tends to have the same problem that petroleum does with low prices.
The thing that struck me is that even though people are at home all day and night, using electricity at home when they’d otherwise be using it at the workplace, that usage was still not enough to make up for the lack of demand from the workplace.
Workplace use is higher and tends to be in addition to home us. Schools and universities not using electricity. Many office buildings closed. Restaurants not using lights over their seating areas. Many other businesses closed.
If you look at electricity use by day of the week, weekends are always lower than week days (at least before the lockdowns).
What has to be done must so be. Mankind must return to LTG scenario 2.
However, I must protest, even if I feel nothing at all about the current situation. It is indeed just a mere curiosity of mine for now.
https://data.whicdn.com/images/290576561/original.jpg
None of the LTG growth scenarios really work, in my view. The one that cuts back greatly and sort of seems to work (Scenario 2?) assumes things that aren’t possible, like keeping population flat (limit births to be equal to expected deaths each year) and an incredible improvement in efficiency. Resources still deplete, but more slowly.
In a perfect world, the LTG Scenario 2 (double resources) only extends the party by another 20 years.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EGyRTHfCAnM/Tc6QCgWmI5I/AAAAAAAADaE/Ke90NRZg6kQ/s320/limits.double.gif
Collapse leads to simplicity, purchase Shakespeare, turn off the internet, save a ton of money and frustration and purchase a nice bottle of wine to have at your side while you see things have not changed as much as one might think.
For the record, I do not see collapse.
All the best,
Dennis L.
the lockdown and th e stimulus/relief/bailout package continue to do what was done before. What has been happening for the last 40-50 years is that the rich have been getting rich and the poor have been getting poorer.
To put it more accurately, over the last 40-50 years there has been a shift on who resources are spent on. Over the last 40-50 years, more resources have been spent on older people who were middle class (and up) and less resources have been spent on the young. Older people are the new face of optimism and success. Young people who are unsuccessful are told to work on their careers and somehow money will buy them success and happiness later in life.
MSM now broadcasting “limit social media only listen to trusted media sources”
Reality distancing
Is this in the US?
Can’t trust people who share empty hospital videos!
France ends hydroxychloroquine trials. It will cause cardiac damage and that will kill the patient in the second wave.
Thanks Yoshua…President Q*Bert will dismiss it as fake news….
https://www.newsweek.com/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-france-heart-cardiac-1496810
Hydroxychloroquine can lead to sudden cardiac death in some patients:
I am not a doctor. My understanding is that hydroxychlorquine has less side effects than either chlorquinine or sulpha drugs for malaria prevention. I was on sulpha drugs for two years continuously in the peace core with no noticeable side effects. I was very young and healthy.
Hydroxychloroquine is widely used in Africa. If it damages the heart why? It is documented covid 19 can use antibodies to attack the heart. How does hydroxycloroquinine increase this or is this mechanism being blamed on hydroxycloroquinine? Just asking? Link to research?
https://www.fidssa.co.za/Content/Documents/Malaria%20Prevention_NDOH%202009.pdf
Where did you see that ? I’m french and in france and not aware about it.
But overall I think “hydroxychloroquine” is a joke, most probably.
And Didier Raoult is still at the head of his Marseille team, as far as I know.
Si vu plai
https://www.nicematin.com/sante/coronavirus-nous-avons-deja-du-interrompre-le-traitement-de-hydroxychloroquine-azithromycine-au-chu-de-nice-489118#Echobox=1586243253
Ok, so a decision from a Nice hospital, but not an overall decision or ban (and again I’m not an hydroxychloroquine or Raoult fan at all).
De rien
All objective virologists agree. Paper tiger.
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Different people have different views, it seems.
Nice find!
We can call this 3 months pre- collaps?
yes these 3 months are not yet The Collapse…
the economy will be worse in 3 more months…
some people and families may have collapsed by then…
then weaker countries may collapse…
the world may not collapse from this, but will be much weaker and maybe almost dead…
If anyone were to study us in the future, they would study February, March and April as the phase of the collapsing king. Where the collapse accelerated
Instead of countries collapsing, it’s my opinion this will be yet another major step down for people unable to make it through the viral infection, stay home, financial recessionary crunch. Just another step down much like the 08 Lehman Bros. debacle, but the numbers of those disenfranchised from their assets will potentially be greater than 08. Countries with power and influence at the top will find ways of hanging on even if reinvented, but people on the financial periphery, not so much. Good luck folks.
If you see society as a machine that can be run slower with less fuel but still produce then step down theory makes since. If you see it as an organism then there is no step down, just damage to organs until a vital organ can no longer do its job then death of organism. Death of societies does not always mean death of species but with our lack of variety it might.
Reality isn’t made to fit abstract concepts in our languages or clever theories and models, it’s the other way around. We can only observe and try to make sense with our words and concepts.
All you need to know is human nature. Behind all the corporations, computer screens and stock markets there are people, all wanting the same thing, to live and enhance their survival prospects. That’s why we can’t insta-collapse because at the end of the day there are people there to make calls and make deals and make things run another day, at least just to ensure their own survival.
What happens is that collapse comes to one person at a time, the ones on the bottom rung of the ladder that live in dire conditions, freezing, starving and prone to catch diseases, and their support is cut off due to diminishing resources per capita.
As long as the lights stay on in key hubs, I believe we can bump along for decades.
I expect that collapse will happen differently in different parts of the world. It could go on for a while, but I would be very surprised if it is decades. A key part, as you say, is “keeping the lights on in key hubs.” Once electricity is lost in key hubs, today’s system cannot last long.
Italy may take a big step down in three months, given its problems.
Just as now we can see that those whose fortunes had fallen low enough over the last decade to need food banks, are now in a very dire situation as those food banks run out of basic stock.
We don’t step down smoothly: we stumble and fall, each bounce leaving us in a worse state.
The very poorest experience first what may well come to all of us in the end.
I came down with the flu 9 weeks ago. I had strong symptoms for 3 weeks and then another 6 weeks with mild symptoms.
I don’t know if this is Sars-Cov-2 or just another virus. It hasn’t killed me, but I can’t kill the virus either.
This is much like what I had. No high fever. But headache keeps going away and returning on a few days by few days basis. Still have stiff neck. With the headache comes extreme fatigue (get up at 8am feel fine by 4pm have to go too bed). I have no idea what I had/have and no testing available. Would love a mail in test. Please any reader know of mail in testing?
I have a running nose in the morning and a cough. Then I’m fine for the day. In the evening I feel a fever.
I took 1000mg vitamin C and 500mg zinc twice daily, Plus, I ran hot air from a blow dryer into my sinuses using a plastic kitchen funnel so as not to burn my face a few times daily. The common cold (corona virus 229e) dies @ 54 degrees C, and believe it or not this therapy worked for me.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Isn’t 1000mg VitC twice daily bit on the extreme side, though?
For how many days in a row?
Your advice + the frequent daily nostrils and throat cle(r)aning (preventive) should at least result in lower viral load on the immune system, hence better chances of recovery.
It’s similar to wearing goggles (as mask) when in very close human-2-human contact situations. The goal of lessening the impact and incoming volume of spray into your mucus membranes (and air channel).
All the information suggest, one should avoid the contact with super spreaders (most aggressive strains), and if you get in contact with them eventually, lessen the load by whatever defensive approach feasible.
Obviously, this should help also in reinfection situation, any %up of improving chances counts.
I strongly suspect I had it in February:all the symptoms, and above all an accompanying fever which lasted a week struck me as odd at the time, and then I just fought it off. I don’t recall having had a fever for years.
Nine weeks total is not good! Any you are not over it yet. You may still have the virus sufficiently to infect others.
“Pharmacists [in the UK] are to be allowed to hand out a range of super-strength medicines, including the heroin substitute methadone, without prescription during the Covid-19 crisis, under emergency measures that official drug policy advisers have warned could trigger a spike in drug misuse.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/08/methadone-to-be-handed-out-without-prescription-during-covid-19-crisis
“It’s not just toilet roll that people are panic buying [in the US]. Some illegal drug users are reportedly stockpiling their substance of choice as restrictions intended to stop the spread of coronavirus disrupt the international supply chain.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/05/uk/illegal-drug-shortage-coronavirus-gbr-intl/index.html
According to the article,
The hospitals are empty because martial law is working! Martial law is protecting you from the deadly corona virus. Without intervention you would perish a horrible and painful death to the last one! Are you grateful? Show it. Demonstrate it. Disregarding charity is as grave offense.
FE, not even close.
Flag still flies. Spacecraft have taken pictures of its shadow.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19050795
The Van Allen belts have been navigated and they can be navigated if one has a basic understanding of their shape. NASA understood and used that shape, the referenced article even reports nuclear blasts were considered to clear a way through the belts. “The radiation environments of both(belts) vary, more dense in some places and nearly absent in others.”
“To monitor radiation exposure during the flights, Apollo crews carried dosimeters on board their spacecraft and on their persons. And these readings confirmed NASA had made a good choice. At the end of the program, the agency determined that its astronauts had avoided the large radiation doses many feared would ground flights to the Moon. Over the course of the lunar missions, astronauts were exposed to doses lower than the yearly 5 rem average experienced by workers with the Atomic Energy Commission who regularly deal with radioactive materials. And in no case did any astronaut experience any debilitating medical or biological effects. And beside, the Apollo astronauts were former test pilots. Flying to the Moon, radiation exposure included, was still a safer day at the office than putting an experimental aircraft through its paces in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base.” https://www.popsci.com/blog-network/vintage-space/apollo-rocketed-through-van-allen-belts/
FE, maybe a bit of research?
You are entertaining in a way, distracting at a time when distraction is nice, sometimes throw up some interesting references. It is easy to lose credibility by lying, or it is easy to lose it by being repeatedly wrong. Generally as we human beings find it necessary to cooperate in groups so not unlike a social gathering we simply walk away literally and figuratively from wrong information unless our need to belong to a group becomes so strong we reject ideas not aligned with our group. This sort of thing leads to polarization.
As for the tree bark, someone wanted a real piece of moon rock, pocket it and switched. Under glass a rock is a rock is a rock. Many have gone missing, many have been found. “Of the 270 Apollo 11 Moon rocks and the Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rocks that were given to the nations of the world by the Nixon Administration, approximately 180 are unaccounted for.” Someone with access wanted a rock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks
This is a wonderful site on which to explore ideas in a respectful manner. We are surrounded by society at both its finest and its most confused. We as humans operate within groups and as such have the strength of a group as well as the weakness of needing to conform to our group. We are working our way through this mess and it is a mess, we are resilient, we discard what does not work either by intelligent design or just literal death of the carrier of the idea.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”
— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
Fact checking is now trivial.
Dennis L.
Now we have two sides of the story.
Sorry but no there are not two sides to this.
As Dave points out focusing on the Van Allen Belts is wrong.
There is no shortage of Moon hoax ‘debunking’ sites out there on the wild and wooly World Wide Web. The majority of them are not particularly well written or argued and yet they tend to be rather smug and self-congratulatory. Most of them tend to stick to ‘debunking’ the same facts and they use the same arguments to do so.
One thing they like to talk a lot about is the Van Allen radiation belts. The Moon hoax sites talk a lot about them as well. The hoaxers will tell you that man cannot pass through the belts without a considerable amount of radiation protection – protection that could not have been provided in the 1960s through any known technology.
And the ‘debunkers’ claim that the Apollo astronauts would have passed through the belts quickly enough that, given the levels of radiation, no harm would have come to them. The hoaxers, say the ‘debunkers,’ are just being girlie men.
As it turns out, both sides are wrong: the ‘debunkers,’ shockingly enough, are completely full of shit, and the hoaxers have actually understated the problem by focusing exclusively on the belts. We know this because NASA itself – whom the ‘debunkers’ like to treat as a virtually unimpeachable source on all things Apollo, except, apparently, when the agency posts an article that implicitly acknowledges that we haven’t actually been to the Moon – has told us that it is so.
They have told us that in order to leave low-Earth orbit on any future space flights, our astronauts would need to be protected throughout the entirety of the flight, as well as – and once again, this comes directly from NASA – while working on the surface of the Moon.
On June 24, 2005, NASA made this rather remarkable admission: “NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration calls for a return to the Moon as preparation for even longer journeys to Mars and beyond. But there’s a potential showstopper: radiation. Space beyond low-Earth orbit is awash with intense radiation from the Sun and from deep galactic sources such as supernovas …
Finding a good shield is important.”(http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/24jun_electrostatics.htm)
You’re damn right finding a good shield is important!! Back in the 1960s, of course, we didn’t let a little thing like space radiation get in the way of us beating the Ruskies to the Moon. But now, I guess, being that we are more cultured and sophisticated, we want to do it the right way so we have to come up with some way of shielding our spaceships. And our temporary Moon bases. And figuring out how to do that, according to NASA, could be a real “showstopper.”
As NASA notes, “the most common way to deal with radiation is simply to physically block it, as the thick concrete around a nuclear reactor does. But making spaceships from concrete is not an option.” Lead, which is considerably denser than concrete, is actually the preferred material to use for radiation shielding, but lead also isn’t very popular with spaceship designers.
In fact, word on the street is that one of the main reasons the Soviets never made it to the Moon was because their scientists calculated that four feet of lead shielding would be required to protect their astronauts, and those same scientists apparently felt that spaceships wouldn’t fly all that well when clad in four feet of lead.
Now NASA is thinking outside the box and contemplating using ‘force fields’ to repel the radiation, a seemingly ridiculous idea that, whether workable in the future or not, certainly wasn’t available to NASA in the 1960s.
Below is NASA’s own artist rendering of a proposed ‘force field’ radiation shield that would allow astronauts to work safely on the Moon. As you may have noticed in the earlier photos of the lunar modules, our guys didn’t bring anything like that with them on their, uhmm, earlier missions to the Moon. And you may have also noticed that the modules did not have any type of physical shielding.
How then did they do it? My guess is that the answer lies in that gold foil wrap. While it may look like an amateurish attempt to make the modules appear more ‘high-tech,’ I have a hunch that what we are looking at is another example of the lost technology of the 1960s – this time in the form of a highly-advanced superpolymer that provided maximum radiation shielding while adding virtually no weight.
So all we have to do is track down a few leftover rolls of that stuff and we should be well on our way to sending guys back to the Moon.
According to Charles Buhler, a NASA scientist currently working on the force field concept, “Using electric fields to repel radiation was one of the first ideas back in the 1950s, when scientists started to look at the problem of protecting astronauts from radiation. They quickly dropped the idea though because it seemed like the high voltages needed and the awkward designs that they thought would be necessary … would make such an electric shield impractical.”
What a real journalist would have asked here, of course, is: “After dropping the electric shield concept, exactly what did they decide to use to get our astronauts safely to the Moon and back on the Apollo missions? And why can’t we do the same thing now, rather than reinventing the wheel? Don’t you guys have some of that gold foil in a closet somewhere?” No one in the American media, of course, bothered to ask such painfully obvious questions.
The 2005 report from NASA ends as follows: “But, who knows, perhaps one day astronauts on the Moon … will work safely.” Yes, and while we’re dreaming the impossible dream, let’s add a few more things to our wish list as well, like perhaps one day we’ll be able to listen to music on 8-track tape players, and talk to people on rotary dial telephones, and carry portable transistor radios, and use cameras that shoot pictures on special film that develops right before our eyes. Only time will tell, I suppose.
The Van Allen belts, by the way, trap most Earth-bound radiation, thus making it safe for us mortals down here on the surface of planet Earth, as well as for astronauts in low-Earth orbit (the belts extend from 1,000 to 25,000 miles above the surface of the Earth).
The danger is in sending men through and beyond the belts, which, apart from the Apollo missions, has never been attempted … well, actually there was that one time, but I think we all remember how badly that turned out. In case anyone has forgotten, the astronauts returned to a world dominated by extremely poor acting, apes speaking with British accents, and a shirtless Charleton Heston. And I don’t think anyone wants to see that happen again.
The 2005 report was not the first time that NASA had openly discussed the high levels of radiation that exist beyond the Van Allen belts. In February 2001, the space agency posted a ‘debunking’ article that argued that the rocks allegedly brought back from the Moon were so distinctive in nature that they proved definitively that man had gone to the Moon.
The problem though with maintaining a lie of the magnitude of the Moon landing lie is that there is always the danger that in defending one part of the lie, another part will be exposed.
Such was the case with NASA’s ill-conceived The Great Moon Hoax post, in which it was acknowledged that what are referred to as “cosmic rays” have a tendency to “constantly bombard the Moon and they leave their fingerprints on Moon rocks.”
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-3/
one question Eddy, if I may
Do you ever stop to eat, or has Mrs FE got you fixed up on an intravenous drip
(and of course a drain system at the other end?)
Is it possible that Fast Eddy is a front man … a fast-typing minion…. or multiple fast typing minions working on shifts (nobody would work 16 hour shifts would they…) who is fed scripts from a team of ‘thinkers’ and researchers that get transcribed onto OFW?
Surely it is not possible for a single person to have the time (or ability) to think these thoughts …. and type them onto OFW as well….
Might it be that when FE says he has a 700 IQ … he is actually adding up the IQs of say 5 people with average IQs of 140 (genius level)…. And when he says his IQ is sometimes only 500 could it be that someone is on leave that day?
Is Fast Eddy kinda like ‘Dave’….
Dave put out a hell of a lotta of incredible stuff on that website… he’s not only an incredibly talented writer… a Larry David-level comedy writer (hmmmm… Larry David.. he’s a tribal cat….) …. and to boot he’s an expert photographer (see his detailed take down of the photos associated with the mo on landing — all of which are lost… funny that — they are all lost…)
Let’s think big … could Dave’s site be part of Fast Eddy ‘enterprises’…. the business model is remarkably similar … Is Lidia M Fast…..
Bigger? Ok let’s go BIGGER…. is Fast Eddy enterprises an extension of something much much much bigger…. maybe associated with the e l ders and project pro tocols… Fast Eddy seems to know quite a bit about that as well huh….
Was there not a hint in one of yesterday’s post about the reason Dave’s trove was dumped onto OFW… just as the train approaches the brick wall?
Could it be that Fast Eddy ‘the concept’ was launched post GFC…. in an office in the the Fed building … when the great powers that work there decided that before the imminent extinction … they wanted to toot their own horns a little and come out from behind the curtain — so they launched FE and identified OFW as the site that all brilliant minds have congregated on (along with some total meat heads…but they don’t matter… they won’t ‘get it’)….
And FE ‘the team’ has been drip feeding truths onto this site for years now.
Don Draper has been referenced by FE on a regular basis… might Don Draper represent the FE team? And if so then is it possible that Madmen (which has some VERY DEEP messages … if you are a brilliant thinker and able to decipher them)…. was also an invention of the e l ddders….
Surely Fast Eddy can’t be a single person… could he?
If he is then obviously he is a force of nature… we have never seen anything like this.. ever…
It’s almost as if he is a supernatural force…..
It’s a difficult choice… either FE is front man for the Dream Team (Norm – if that is the case then sorry but you actually never had a chance… the Dream Team doesn’t recruit from OFW)….. or … or ….. he is the maker of the matrix…. the entity that created the virtual reality that you are experiencing (aka God)….
Impossible to know —- while you are alive at least…..
If the latter is correct then soon we can meet for a cold beer (with pizzsa?) … and have a laugh or too.
Like I said … it’s a rather loney situation…. (if it’s the latter)….
If it’s the latter would FE do all of this for FREE????? Wouldn’t he drop a link at the end of each post (like Wolf and Steve and Chris do) allowing you to support him with a monthly tithe? Remember George Carlin’s take on the tithe thing…this all powerful guy in they — but he needs MONEY!!! He always needs more money!!!
But FE doesn’t appear to need or want money…. What would George make of all this if he were alive?
http://krapps.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/LadyHuhFINAL.jpg
thank you Den nis… quite wonderful…
ya there’s the flag … i see it…
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/61904000/jpg/_61904332_61904331.jpg
About collaps i am sure 100%only make me Crazy when . For organize food . Gardening. Solar panel . Generator. Frozen. Is very important
Gardening, homesteading channels on YT, 100% increases of viewers in a month in some instances, many tools for gardening sold out, .. , .. lot of people getting the message..
/obviously few are grasping the over-all net surplus dimension, because there is always some ext. input into gardening-farming, and if not the surplus is VERY tiny (non marketable)..
Harder and harder to buy stuff from the suppliers, certainly.
Many of them will probably give up disillusioned after the rush.
As for a kitchen garden, It can really only be a supplement to government rations but a most worthwhile thing to do for that reason -the little that can make all the difference in health and mental functioning.
I cannot even buy a bag of fertilizer here in NZ…. all retail is closed.. no online ordering either
That’s fine … I’ve given up on the veg garden thing years ago….
Pros don’t buy fertilizer, they make it for themselves on their premises.
Here in New Zealand, the impression I get is that most people see the current economic malaise as being a result of the virus and the efforts being made at stopping the virus. There are disagreements over the need for and application of the lockdown, but it is believed that everything would otherwise be okay without it. The general assumption looks to be that once the Covid-19 situation has passed – with the further assumption that it shall – everything will be back to normal. Back to normal being taken to mean back to long term economic growth with work being done to make that growth sustainable.
As we all know here on this blog, reality is something very different and far less optimistic. Not only in terms of the state of the global economy prior to the onset of the virus situation, but also in terms of what we may reasonably expect moving forward.
Yes, we have had panic buying here, but that may well be a matter more of some people panic buying in order to get ahead of some other people panic buying. Or, it could just be a reflex. Even something almost pavlovian, perhaps.
“As we all know here on this blog, reality is something very different and far less optimistic.”
Understatement of the century! LOL! Doomers love it at this blog, and it appears that many here will be very sad when we all don’t die in this pandemic. Gail has an opinion of what she believes is going on, and she does a good job of arguing why she believes her views are right. Fine and good, we’re all entitled to have our opinions. But reality oftentimes is much different than any one individual’s perception. Yes, the world economy is going to be a shit show for at least the next decade, no question about that. But humans will adapt and thrive, just like my great grandparents did in the 1930s. You’ll see. Be of good cheer!
The journey is fascinating and becomes ever weirder, but I worry about the destination. Proponents of AI and quantum-computing expect them to be hugely transformative in this decade. I live in hope but doubt that same hope massively.
Marco,
Gardening is very hard, once the garden works animals find it easier to eat in one place, fence needs to be high enough for deer, deep enough for digging animals.
Solar is a pain, it does not work unless you make it big enough, sell excess to the utility at their loss, pocket their profit and buy the stuff from their battery which is the conventional power.
We live in groups, surviving alone is almost impossible, most recent example in N. America is probably the mountain men, if I recall the average age at death was about 37 years give or take.
Nice to read comments from Italy, your English is better than my Italian.
Dennis L.
I dream resilient comunity from years. In blog of irv. But never was possible
Holland close to eurobond. Tomorrow try again and Paris help too. Goldman Sachs see pil of itali -11next year plus 7 . Of course if virus dissolve tomorrow
Don’t know if anyone has mentioned this here. Denmark has officially legalize censorship last month, since now authorities can silenced anyone who dares to question the official version of covid-19!
And as if that were not enough, the Danish parliament put into law the mandatory vaccination against covid-19 when the vaccine arrives! In other words, danish will be required by law to subject to an invasive clinical procedure, as if their will counted zero, as if they were domestic animals. I am not against vaccines, far from it (since i wouldn’t be alive without some of them). But mandatory vaccines I only admit for dogs, because of rabies.
So dissent in the kingdom of Denmark is therefore prohibited, and its people have been officially demoted to pet status. Congratulations to them,
But I think when human beings let their owners treat them as creatures without will or rights, better to throw yourself at the sea with a ton stone tied to the neck.
Totalitarianism ensues.
sources:
https://www.thelocal.dk/20200313/denmark-passes-far-reaching-emergency-coronavirus-law
On April 2, 2020, the Danish Parliament passed a new law that makes it possible to close websites and to impose fines or imprisonment on persons who publish information about Covid-19 that does not follow the authorities’ guidelines.
https://newsvoice.se/2020/04/danmark-forbjuder-corona-policy/
Wow! Amazing all of the things that people do to make sure that the official belief system is followed.
If you can’t get your animal to do what you want with training, praise, and food you get desperate and bring out the whips. If that doesn’t work you either let it go or shoot it and eat it.
Seems that some of the folks are not grasping the salient point here so I’ll provide a summary that will make Denmark’s action easier for you to understand:
We are getting rid of false and misleading information that has the potential to kill our citizens, we are going to censor it. We see what “freedom of speech” is doing to make many Americans ill, with a very high death incidence, and for the time being, we will not let that happen here. We will resume societal norms when we have moved past the pandemic.
Hope that helps.
“We are getting rid of false and misleading information …”
And who decides which information is false and misleading? But of course: the very authorities that have the most to gain from false and misleading information. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
LOL!!!
Sorry, but your the Perfect Dupe!
https://images.app.goo.gl/u81pn9qmj1BwvqYN6
Such idiots to censor, as they only reinforce the conspiracy theory loons and people will end up believing anything and everything rather than reasoning.
https://www.facebook.com/323950777458/posts/10158322386852459/
The World Trade Organisation sums up the global trade situation in 2019 pre-coronavirus:
“Trade was already slowing in 2019 before the virus struck, weighed down by trade tensions and slowing economic growth. World merchandise trade registered a slight decline for the year of ‑0.1% in volume terms after rising by 2.9% in the previous year. Meanwhile, the dollar value of world merchandise exports in 2019 fell by 3% to US$ 18.89 trillion.”
And forecasts:
…a decline in global trade of “between 13% and 32% in 2020 as the COVID 19 pandemic disrupts normal economic activity and life around the world.”
https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres20_e/pr855_e.htm
China retrenchment from Europe was ~25% in 2019 already, obviously not their primary target, but too much just for mere re-balancing towards Asia.. everybody was clearly hunkering home to their region, MAGA-tariffs etc, ..
meant as investment category-metrics (not trade that was obviously less affected then)..
Wow!
Just a quick note to those who thought the anecdotes from Dave’s site have ended… sorry to disappoint ya’ll but I’m not going to get to essay 4 today and do a ‘harry’ and post the greatest hits…
I will be back with more tomorrow so stay tuned.
Well I for one are glad you are back Eddie. This comments section had gotten pretty boring while you were gone. I think the moon landing hoax posts are highly relevant to the current situation. I read the article you posted yesterday and thought it was excellent, very convincing. My wife says way too many people would need to be involved to create a hoax pandemic. I say not that many just a few key players feeding stories to the media and a few higher up figures like Boris Johnson to provide dramatic news. Bill Gates is obviously involved with this. These people have known about the impending train wreck from resource exhaustion and economic collapse for a long time. This is how they have decided to manage the situation. That’s my take on it.
i suggest we have 2 hats
a hoax hat, and a conspiracy hat
each doomster or guest doomster writes his favorite hoax or conspiracy of the day,, then puts them in the relevant hat
each of us picks one out, and runs with it for that day
That way everybody’s hoax/conspiracy gets a fair share of airtime/lafftime
Tom, your wife is correct. If a conspiracy involves more than about three people, someone blabs and it falls apart. This is well understood in the field of critical thinking. There is a good discussion of conspiracy theories and the cognitive problems underlying their belief in episode 126 of the Rationally Speaking podcast. Also The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories website (https://conspiracypsychology.com/) has a bunch of good psychology-based articles examining the issues with belief in the goofy conspiracy theories, including the recent COVID-19 denial conspiracy.
Which isn’t to say that conspiracies don’t occur. They do, and there’s a huge face-saving operation by the CPC in China regarding SARS-CoV-2, but it is laughable, as is the idea that the virus doesn’t exist.
In the case of the COVID-19, bursting the conspiracy would take one person working in healthcare who noticed that the beds at their institution are empty despite the reporting saying they are full. That’s it. That COVID-19 actually isn’t happening is beyond absurd.
Fast Eddy’s writing might be entertaining. It is certainly hilarious, but at the same time sad. If you actually believe much of what he writes, you have some serious soul searching to do. Look at his track record here on this site. For years he has been convinced that “this is it” and announces that he’s going to hole up and watch it fall apart. It has never happened and he always returns for the next big doomsday event.
I returned to OFW because of COVID-19, just to see how folk were taking it. Unfortunately, I see conspiratorial thinking has become dominant. It’s so bad that finding any believable information involves wading through absolute crap. Since that’s the case, I’ll be taking my leave for places with a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I would describe the situation not as conspiracy, but as self-organizing belief systems that converge around some way of believing/acting that seems to be beneficial to a large number of participants.
Historically, there have been many people who came up with religious beliefs/ theories. The beliefs that “stuck” were ones that a lot of people could see the day to day benefit of. “Thou shalt not murder (other people in your in-group)” is a way of believing/ acting that seemed to have benefit for many groups. Thou shalt not steal was another. I understand that some African religions have myths about bad things happening to people who steal.
The current coronavirus is one which people together can see the harm of, so they try to figure out ways to “wall it off.” The catch is that the approach that worked historically doesn’t work well. It simply comes back. We can’t identify the virus well enough. The immunity may not really be very strong. After all, cold viruses are coronaviruses. They seem to have similar characteristics. We have never gotten rid of them, either.
@Rural
People do not blab if there is blackmail. Nor if they are part of a cult.
I know someone who recently died of Covid 19. Soon everyone will have a friend ,relative or acquaintance who is very sick or has died. When reality intrudes it might be harder to believe it’s all fake.
The overall burden of influenza for the 2017-2018 season was an estimated 45 million influenza illnesses, 21 million influenza-associated medical visits, 810,000 influenza-related hospitalizations, and 61,000 influenza-associated deaths
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
This is for the United States.
https://sd.keepcalms.com/i/keep-calm-its-only-flu-season.png
“These people have known about the impending train wreck from resource exhaustion and economic collapse for a long time. This is how they have decided to manage the situation.”
we can disagree here…
I don’t see much of any “management” since the Wuhan lockdown in January… just a bunch of leaders/govs making it up as they go…
the global lockdown is mismanagement…
it will only lengthen the spread of the virus, and of course mostly wreck the global economy…
the point is the virus will be blamed, not a failure of governments or the stem sector.
I am thinking of raising money on Go Fund Me…. aim for say $1,000,000 — the goal is to use the money to pay people $1000 to read and summarize Essay 1 from that site.
I wouldn’t actually have to raise any money because legions of people would then read the essay just to find out WiTF anyone would pay $1000 to read and summarize an essay
Nothing I like better when I get up on a morning than visiting OFW and finding there’s a list of new Fast Eddy comments to read through. Fast Eddy is the most entertaining commentator there’s ever been…probably ever will be. Thanks for giving up your time to keep us amused.
Agreed !
It was a sad day on OFW when he got bored with this place and left to agitate those at peak prosperity.com and wolfstreet.com.
Wolfst yes (but very sporadically) … Peak Prosperity never. Must have been someone else
I agree too. We need good entertainment in these times more than ever and Fast Eddy delivers it. In response to Rural I don’t think the virus doesn’t exist. There is a really bad flu going around, as has happened before. We never shut down the whole economy because of it, so why now. What are the goals and objectives of this shutdown and how does it relate to the end of the fracking boom and the bursting of the debt bubble are very relevant topics for discussion on this board it seems to me.
Here’s a thoughtful analysis of the likely deadly consequences from lack of food due to the lockdowns:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/04/07/getting-the-economy-wrong/
Doomphd — I’m putting you on the team — you get to be the waterboy…. now get Tom a jersey …
And Norman — if I find that you have not accepted the invite…. I will relegate you to stick boy…
And in the offseason both of you will have positions shining my shoes…
Doom you can do the left one … and Norm you get the right one…. no you cannot alternate…
One DelusiSTANI… one shoe — and always the same shoe
I don’t have 10 hours to train you on how to do the other shoe… Can’t you see I am a very busy.
Well said Tom:
https://democriticreviews.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/bravo.gif
you can rely on me to put L and R in tippex on them
so you don’t confuse them every morning
And lace them together so when you find one the other will be close by
FE, happy to be selected to be on the team, and am seriously honored to be working with Norm. Unfortunately, keeping my left straight from my right has always been a personal challenge, but i will do my best to keep both upper and lower lips stiffined and to carry on in these trying times.
BTW, too bad this global lockdown BS over some new flu virus has messed with your End of the World party plans. I was looking forward to visiting with you and Mrs. Fast in NZ.
Good article but the question is… is it the virus that is causing these problems — or is it the MSM hyping the virus that is causing these problems.
I posted this earlier
Global Coronavirus Cases Top 1.5 Million, Deaths Approach 90k: Live Updates
In a bad flu year we get 650,000 deaths globally.
42 million infections in the US alone.
I fail to understand how 90k deaths — is enough to shut down supply chains. What is shutting down supply chains is fear — inspired by the MSM.
Again – we know nurses in various places in Luzon — they are wondering WTF is going on — they are like the maytag repairman — sitting around with nothing to do because nobody is going to the hospital for normal procedures because they fear getting Wuhan or think the hospitals are jammed with Wuhan…. and there are very few Wuhan patients…
Same being reported out of the US….
I am getting similar reports out of Bali….
All roads (and lies and hype) lead to CDT.
How can such a massive fraud happen without anyone knowing — well people do KNOW — there are people filming empty hospitals across the US…
But when most people look at those videos — they dismiss them — they PREFER to go with the MSM narrative….. EVEN though there are no videos of bulging hospitals — and CBS has been caught using video from an ICU in Italy and pretending it’s the US…
It’s a brave soul (e.g. politician) who tries to scream against the MSM hurricane…. and a short trip to being labelled a nutcase conspiracy theorist…..
Bolsonaro is a case in point — everyone is laughing at him for insisting that Brazil will stand and fight rather than drop to its knees and put its head on the chopping block….
Lockdowns do not work. You can never unlock.
The right strategy is to stand and fight — just like the US stood and fought when they had 42M infections 650k hospitalizations – and 61k dead on 2017/18. They won that battle rather easily. In fact it was more of a skirmish – I was not even aware that it happened.
Sweden is the only country in Europe that I am aware of that also has no lockdown, as of a couple of days ago. Everything, more or less, continuing there as usual. The BBC article that mentioned this was of course very condescending of the Swedish government, and expected them to fold and join the lockdown flock asap.
I tell my work colleagues (we all work from home, for now) that I think we will be back to work (the buildings) within a couple of weeks, but I am met with – ‘what are you talking about?’
What I mean is, if the govt can see the extreme damage the lockdown is doing to finance and economy, they will tell everyone to get back to work asap, but everyone I know seems oblivious.
Difficult to see how the govt (here in the UK anyway) can now tell everyone to go back to work when they, and the MSM, have been telling the masses they risk death going to work, and the masses believe it.
Sweden is not showing a real flattening in New Cases yet. Its deaths relative to population are similar to Switzerland. They are lower relative to population than Netherlands, France, Italy, and Spain. Looking at the results, it is hard to make an argument that the lockdowns are all that useful.
Cases seem to depend on population density and use of public transport to get to work. Shared ventilation systems at work or in living spaces raise transmissibility.
Given that this is a marathon rather than a sprint, a person probably needs to look at the long term result. What happens after two years, for example?
Most people are on board with the lockdown ‘we’re in this together’
If you point out the medicine is worse than the disease and that we’ll be right rogered shortly if this continues….
There is stunned silence …. as the brain searches for the next sound bite that it absorbed watching the MSM …. then — we have to lockdown because if we don’t civilization will end.
I assume they realize that ‘right rogered’ is the same as….. only it’s coming sooner and harder….
But then I realize they are only humans….. why would I make assumptions about a life form that is operating on a marginally higher intelligence level than a donkey…..
Now some might be taken aback by that comment and saying that’s hyperbole Fast Eddy … there is a huge difference between the intelligence level of a donkey and a human
To which FE says ….. actually if you add a little context it is not.
Let’s say a human is Earth (E) And a donkey is the M. And FE is Pluto P)
The distance from E to M is 387,000 miles
The distance from E to P is roughly 5 BILLION miles
Distance = IQ
For those looking for a Challenge….
What does M stand for?
And what is Gail going to do to you if you know that answer and you post it?
Here’s a hint (sorry Gail that’s the only good one I could find… ignore the nun outfit…)
https://i.makeagif.com/media/7-25-2015/vSpb3c.gif
The full team…. is obviously now … in the house.
Hey Larry how’s it goin? You know what — What’s that Fast?
Since S10 is your last Season … I’ve been rationing it…. kinda like how that kid in Willy Wonka rationed his bits of chocolate…. I watch like 5 minutes at a time … And I must say S10 is your magnet opus bud…. really eh – you like it that much…. that’s great to hear – appreciate that…
Hey Leon’s picking me up after shift … why don’t we call go down to Latte Larry’s … I’ll get Jeff to meet us and we can have some coffee and shoot the sh-it… if anything good comes out of it we’ll try to squeeze in an 11th episode before the shi t show hits….
That sounds good Larry…. Oh but one thing Fast…. what’s that Larry…. don’t forget out no defecating policy …. oh right ya you only have urinals in the men’s room I remember that now…
Just wanted to remind you Fast… cuz Joe will absolutely not let you take a dump next door if he’s seen you with me…. That’s not a problem Larry — I’m pretty regular — I’m a morning dumper…
Oh ya? me too!…. Wow that’s amazing — we’re both morning dumpers… the great thing about that is you never get into a meeting and it’s like uh-oh…. excuse me…. and you run out the door like the building is on fire…. and you leave everyone sitting their wondering where the F is he going ….
But hey Fast — you know that’s not what they are thinking — they are thinking that guy is gone to take a sh it!!! Nobody will admit it but that’s what they are thinking …..
Ya you are right Larry — and then when you come back 10 minutes later without that urgent look on your face…. your all relaxed like… smiling…. their thinking this guy just took the mother of all sh -its.. look how happy he is…
That’s right Fast… and isn’t it amazing everyone can just pick up where they left off talking serious business talk… nobody bursts out laughing…. nobody says hey bud — how was your sh it? Looks like it was awesome!!!
Nope all is forgotten…..
Ok Fast… I’ll leave you to it…
I told you there was a Dream Team — did I mention Larry was part of this…. now the above is not scripted … we JUST had that conversation …. now if there is a episode 11 of Curb (the current season finished at 10… and yes I am rationing it… )…. and the above discussion ends up in that episode
Then ….. (IQ Test Time)… if this happens … what does it mean?
Of course if the coffee meeting doesn’t go so well and nothing amusing comes of it then odds are there won’t be an E11….. hard to justify a full episode if you only have a single idea….
I wonder if there might be some way to bring the E M P thing into this … that would be something Leon might riff on …. hmmmm….. if we can make that work then we’ve pretty much got E11 in the can….
Tim Watkins has written another very fine post.
One point that is easy to miss:
It is expensive taking goods across the country, if the truck is not full, or if it cannot be filled up for the return trip. The same problem occurs with boats carrying containers. If these boats don’t have a full load, it becomes more expensive to transport the containers. And of course, they need a product [waste for recycling?] for the return trip.
🙂
I was thinking that the Moaners and Whiners…. are kinda like how I am a Great White Shark … I have to keep moving and hunting for meat…. they have to keep moaning and whining or they suffocate….
It gives their lives meaning.
Let’s have a contest for the best Moaning Face:
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/03/christchurch-terror-attack-jacinda-ardern-preparing-for-gun-law-changes/_jcr_content/par/video/image.dynimg.1280.q75.jpg/v1552864548996/Jacinda%2BArdern%2BNewshub%2B1120.jpg
https://assets.change.org/photos/8/nx/zw/WGnXZWVCfBhaUhK-1600×900-noPad.jpg
If I thought voting was not pointless… I would definitely write Trump onto the ballot over both of these World-Class Moaners.
My biggest decision of the day:
Should I filter ‘Norman’ now and see what The Verdict is (on Dave)…. or should I just randomly browse (looking for meat to feed on or Core comments to give me a glimmer of hope in a world filled with mediocrity and ideeeocracy
Well, it’s understandable you looked hard for some sort of primer type of material on the whole issue in order for people with very limited historical or technical background could easily digest, but “Dave” reveals on occasion not insignificant errors and omissions.
For example, the Nixon angle is a bit laughable, as the fix must had been (at least optional) since early / mid 1960s when the slippages and quality problems in various sub projects and information on the radiation became a pressing issue and when all the subsystems where developed for completely tight oversight, for example the ground control room with dozens of engineers was fed training simulation data link, and they could not discern mere exercise or live mission on their watch. This angle needed lot of infrastructure in place, so one could estimate at least ~3-5yrs prior to launch the plans for faking the mission must have been in place already.
So, in short Nixon got this on the plate already precooked and gladly glanced about it. Similarly, Dave, doesn’t mention the A12 mission, which was not televised as they supposedly in accident burned the camera by pointing it in the sun, which again strengthens the point of overdoing the charade with the next A13..
I can go on and on with other points, perhaps just matter of taste, but in my view it’s better to stick with first gen researchers or authors who actively taken part in the development at that time or interviewed them when alive and so on. Again, people should start with Bill Casing, Ralph Rene, Bart Sibrel, or Jarrah White for the technical analysis. Mr. Dave is an interesting prose with some key points, but it’s just a derivative commentary..
OK, around the chapter ~10 he gets into some interesting stuff, near my points above, the Gemini->Apollo was likely the threshold barrier going full fraud, so I partly retract my criticism..
Let’s just drop the key parts here — for those who prefer to remain in their boxes… they can just skip those posts and go back to their discussion of who’s more awesome Justin Bieber or Mylie Cyrus
Motive is the most difficult … but he puts some interesting theories out there including distracting from various war crimes (my term) that the US committed in vietnam and cambodia during this time
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-3/
Look, it’s the simp twins!
J.K Rowling is cured from Covid-19.
Great, now she can write another book for the nerds, about a teenage boy and his magic stick.
Try one of her books for adults. I read “The Casual Vacancy” and liked it very much. Her mysteries were well reviewed.
Adult mythology? I’ve already the Corona fever…so I’ll pass.
“The Casual Vacancy” was just a regular book about life and death in (not-so-idyllic) small-town England, no magic or mythology.
She writes fiction for women over the age of 18. Most of them are neurotic, not nerdy. Nerds can only be male.
A few years ago a friend and fellow peak-oiler suggested a new website (then) called The Automatic Earth. Like Our Finite World, it is a spin-off from the old The Oil Drum website. TAE focuses on financial and economic news stories from around the web, usually, and sends out a daily email if you subscribe. Probably many are already familiar with this site.
I am inclined to believe that prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the global economy was in dire straits, or rather, so says most of the financial experts that TAE refers to. The best was David Stockman, he might still be, but he went behind a paywall that is rather pricey.
Global debt is now approaching US$300 trillion, where 300 T = 300,000 billion or 300 million million, which is coincidentally is about how much plastic we have dumped into the oceans measured in grams. 300 million tonnes = 300,000 M kgs (it can take as few as 4 kg to kill a sperm whale) = 300 MM grams = 300,000 MM milligrams = 300 MMM micrograms (microplastics being measured in milli and micro grams).
Big numbers but I guess the point is there is zero chance of that $300 T dollars ever getting paid back. Not only that, trillions in various currencies are manufactured out of thin air every year, with zero chance of getting paid back, in order to keep the whole system going. Gail’s articles describe an economic system that does not work any more, and the end result is huge and increasing amounts of debt. You don’t have to be an economic’s professor, and indeed it is preferable you are not, to think that maybe printing so much money out of thin air every year is eventually going to end badly.
David Stockman over the years, when his articles were freely accessible, did a few on American-based multinational corporations – ones that were / are in debt up to their eyeballs (and with high stock prices). Will be interesting to see how these corporations cope with the current financial and economic hiatus, if they don’t get bailed out.
“Will be interesting to see how these corporations cope with the current financial and economic hiatus, if they don’t get bailed out.”
They won’t cope – bailed out or not…
maybe certified ocean plastic will be the new currency. They would probably debase it with virgin plastic though…
I expect that a large share of future payments/credits will be defaulted on.
Those with bank loans will often default of them. Businesses and government with bonds will often default of these. Payments that are “sort of” promised like Social Security and Medicare will stop as well.
The price of practically every asset depend on other people’s ability to get a loan to pay for it. Thus, the prices of assets can be expected to fall.
Insurance companies, pension funds, and banks will (at some point) default on their debts, unless somehow governments at least temporarily prop them up.
How should we deal with credit card debt? Let’s say one’s income is negligible. But they have roughly 10 K in debt to a bank. It’s possible that the bank will fail (but we can’t be sure whether or when). With considerable luck and effort, one could pay off the debt in 3 years. We don’t want the bank to take all our property if we owe them. But if we were sure that this wouldn’t happen, would it make sense to spend on something else over the three years?
40% of the world population in lockdown. Tourism is dead. Airlines are all cancelling close to 90% of the flights. Number of ships on the sea is lower than normal. People are not driving. Only trucks are running. Refineries are in financial trouble. Feed stock for chemicals are also slowing. China not consuming a lot.
Normally we are around 90-100m barrels a day (depending on where you are taking the data from). The experts are expecting just a 5-15% drop in demand. Am I missing something?
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig6.png
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
I’m thinking more like a 50% … or higher? Drop in oil consumption????
Oil consumption is crashing big time.
China down 3 million bl/d
EIA Estimates total world demand drop of 18 to 20 mb/d.
That’s approximately the whole output of Saudi and USA combined.
There is no way Russia and Saudi cuts can prevent further oil related bankruptcies.
If I believe the EIA weekly data with respect to petroleum, US petroleum consumption dropped to 14.4 million barrels per day, in the week ended April 3, 2020. The comparable amounts had been 21.3, 21.9, and 21.5 million barrels per day for the weeks ended February 28, March 6 and March 13 respectively. Based on this comparison, US demand alone is down a little over 7 million barrels per day.
Realistic. And likely heading further south
A Coronavirus infection will give mild to no symptoms among 80% of the population and lead to a quick herd immunity.
Like all good viruses it will mainly kill the old and infirm…so…let’s do it ten times worse by a global lockdown and crash the economy while people are in self quarantine, locked up in their homes.
The protest and riots that follows, will be met by martial law…which will make the situation even worse…all in the name of saving lives of course.
“… and lead to a quick herd immunity.”
there was just an article here saying that about one third of survivors have little to no antibodies…
though I agree, the global lockdown will soon be realized to be perhaps the worst decision in human history…
“European Union finance ministers failed to agree in all-night talks on more support for their coronavirus-hit economies and their chairman said on Wednesday morning he was suspending the discussions until Thursday.
“Diplomatic sources and officials said a feud between Italy and the Netherlands over what conditions should be attached to euro zone credit for governments fighting the pandemic was blocking progress on half a trillion euros worth of aid.”
https://www.france24.com/en/20200408-eu-finance-ministers-fail-to-clinch-coronavirus-rescue-deal
“The research institutes on Wednesday predicted a GDP slump by 9.8% [for Germany in Q2], emphasizing that this would be the sharpest decline ever recorded in the country since quarterly national accounts became available in 1970.”
https://www.dw.com/en/economic-researchers-see-germany-head-toward-deep-recession/a-53057069
“In its worst performance since 1945, the French economy shrank around six percent [sounds like a huge underestimate to me] in the first quarter of this year as the coronavirus pandemic decimated business activity, the Bank of France said Wednesday.
“Official figures showed previously that the economy shrank 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2019, meaning that with two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the country is now technically in recession.”
https://www.france24.com/en/20200408-french-economy-drops-by-6-in-first-quarter-officially-in-recession
Colour me unsurprised. The purpose of the Euro was to lock the South into an overvalued currency they could neither control nor leave. A classic looter technique; Britain tried something similar with her American colonies in the late 18th century, and we all know what happened next.
Yes i agree. My uncle had factory for Hugo Boss in Italia. He DID milion of Money. Me solded houses ti german people goes in pensione in Italia . After euro all factory closed and no more Germania people goes to live in Italy
Good observation, funnily enough even the EUR system has got its tax avoidance sub structure to various degree or specific functionality (EUR area corporate-MNCs, foreigners) e.g. Cyprus, Luxembourg, Austria, .. That’s by design, agreed upon in the club, obviously this further enables juicing out the “South” as dividends outflow is not or only marginally taxed.. And moreons from DB then loose it all on Wall st./City casinos anyway, hopelessly trying to act like the big boyz for which they lack the proper bold “pirate mentality”. What a circus of folly..
EU members have little interest in tying to bail out each other. Everyone is in trouble.
“Even with a record stimulus package, Japan’s economy is heading toward a record contraction of 25 percent this quarter after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka and some other parts of the country, according to Goldman Sachs.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/08/business/economy-business/japan-economy-25-percent-contraction/#.Xo2EPchKjIU
Japan is reporting very few COVID-19 cases. This doesn’t quite fit with everything else going on.
An addendum to the CDT:
This flu (90k Wuhan flu deaths vs 650k in an bad flu year) — was created and dropped into the sea food market to justify a massive last gasp of trillions of stimulus to buy BAU a few more months to get her things in order before she dies.?????
And yes I am making this up as I go along because I am pretty much trying to make educated guesses….. sifting through a sea of lies and obfuscations from the MSM and the stooges…
I’d like 30 minutes to chat with Bolsonaro… off the record.
You couldn’t. Bolsonaro doesn’t speek english, so you would need an interpreter (unless you take a fast course of portuguese!) to speek to him, and therefore you hardly could never talk alone and openly.
I dont pay much attention to brasilian politics (or politics in general) but Bolsonaro doesn’t seem someone who’s worth talking to. Just a greedy and corrupt moron, afaik, who probabbly doesn’t shat about anything.
“The number of ratings downgrades is skyrocketing. Defaults and bankruptcies are sure to follow. The pandemic is going to open quite a few cans of worms. One of those cans is the new New York Fed plus FDIC rule that banks don’t have to disclose balance sheets for the duration of the pandemic.
“This is… government complicity in banks lying to the public and institutional depositors and investors. Little children are taught that lying is always Bad.”
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/is-this-going-to-be-worse-than-the-2008-financial-crisis-202004071321
“The eurozone banking system entered the coronavirus crisis in a weakened state with the sector’s profitability declining in 2019 for the first time in three years, according to new data from the European Central Bank.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a1a62090-eb86-49e8-a326-dda868110d46
“Everyone knows that fighting a pandemic is costly. What’s even more worrying is how the costs of a slowdown—the sudden pressure on incomes and demand, in particular—will widen pre-existing cracks in the Indian growth story…
“The weakest link in the Indian economy is its banking sector.”
https://theprint.in/opinion/why-indian-banks-could-make-the-covid-19-economic-crisis-only-worse/397515/
“The economic dislocation from Covid-19 threatens to add 5.6 trillion yuan ($790 billion) of bad debt — more than double the amount Chinese banks already sit on — according to S&P Global Inc.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-07/china-braces-for-wave-of-soured-loans-with-new-bad-debt-manager
“”…An induced economic coma over more than three months could cause a self-feeding credit and liquidity crisis. The economic and financial storms would then reinforce each other to overwhelm the defensive system.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/04/07/world-banking-system-cannot-weather-long-lockdown/
Regarding India,
Fitch Ratings sounds like an optimist.
If banks don’t need to publish balance sheets for the duration of the pandemic (which could be years), all they need to do is sort of have enough funds for those who make withdrawals to take them out, it would seem. The banks could be induced to make lots more loans to young people with no income, to try to prop up the system, it would seem. Of course, at some point it would become obvious that they could not pay them back.
“Nearly one-third of U.S. adults who anticipate receiving a stimulus check say the money wouldn’t be enough to sustain their financial well-being for one month, according to a new Bankrate. com report.”
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-how-far-will-your-stimulus-check-go/2960784001/
“The U.S. government’s massive effort to nurse the economy through the coronavirus crisis was billed as a send-money-and-don’t-sweat-the-details flood of cash to people and businesses in a $22 trillion system that has ground to a halt.
“So far, the checks are not in the mail.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-usa-fiscal-analysi/wobbly-u-s-fiscal-response-could-deepen-coronavirus-recession-idUKKBN21Q0GO
“US coal production will fall by 22% in 2020, as coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders drag down demand for electricity and coal mines have been idled for extended periods as a result of Covid-19.”
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/us-coal-production-to-slump-22-this-year-eia-2020-04-08/rep_id:3650
And stimulus also proving insufficient in the UK:
“Hidden within [Chancellor] Rishi Sunak’s announcement that he is to bolster his interruption loans for small businesses is a startling confession; as of last Friday, of 130,000 enquiries made by businesses, just over 900 had been approved by banks…
“Suddenly Sunak is asking the banks to take nearly half of the risk on loans to companies whose prospects are intrinsically uncertain as they face the greatest economic meltdown of our times.”
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/business-economics/sunaks-small-business-rescue-plan-has-one-major-flaw-the-banks-dont-want-to-lend/07/04/
“[UK] banks have cut half of their mortgage products in just over three weeks in the biggest cull since the last financial crisis.”
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-8197529/Banks-pull-half-mortgages-just-three-weeks.html
The response really can’t be enough and soon enough, anywhere.
“‘Universal stay-at-home is the most devastating economic force in modern history And it is man-made. It very suddenly reverses the gains of underprivileged groups, kills and creates drug addicts, beats and terrorizes women and children in violent now-jobless households, and more. It bleeds deep anguish and suicide.’”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/big-short-investor-who-made-a-killing-during-the-financial-crisis-the-economic-shutdown-is-worse-than-the-coronavirus-2020-04-07
In the US, it seems to be the low wage workers who are most prone to getting the illness (from meeting the public up close, very often, on public transport or on the job). They are also the ones most likely to be laid off.
“With each passing day, the 2008 global financial crisis increasingly looks like a mere dry run for today’s economic catastrophe. The short-term collapse in global output now under way already seems likely to rival or exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years.
“Even with all-out efforts by central banks and fiscal authorities to soften the blow, asset markets in advanced economies have cratered and capital has been pouring out of emerging markets at a breathtaking pace. A deep economic slump and financial crisis are unavoidable…
The problem, however, is that we are experiencing not just a demand shock but also a massive supply shock….
“I have not even touched on the profound political uncertainty that a global depression can spark. Given that the 2008 financial crisis produced deep political paralysis and nurtured a crop of anti-technocratic populist leaders, we can expect the Covid-19 crisis to lead to even more extreme disruptions.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/08/the-2008-financial-crisis-will-be-seen-as-a-dry-run-for-covid-19-cataclysm
A person wonders which bank will fail first and which derivatives will go bad. Not to mention overthrown governments, and governments defaulting on their loans.
“Legitimate questions will arise about IMF resource adequacy… IMF staff are preparing for the possibility that more resources will be needed to weather the storm.”
https://www.omfif.org/2020/04/imf-facing-financing-quandary/
“Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday the International Monetary Fund would be guilty of “discriminatory behaviour” unless it provides $5 billion in emergency funding to help Tehran fight the coronavirus outbreak.”
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/08/world/middleeast/08reuters-health-coronavirus-iran-imf.html
“The IMF has approved the disbursement of $21.13 million to Sierra Leone.”
https://todaynewsafrica.com/imf-approves-disbursement-of-21-13-million-to-sierra-leone-amid-coronavirus-economic-crisis/
“The ghost of the financial crisis flies over the Colombian economy. “Iván Duque’s government announced on Tuesday the request for a $ 11 billion line of credit to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to try to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in that sector.”
https://theunionjournal.com/colombia-asks-the-imf-for-11-billion-to-ward-off-a-financial-crisis-amid-the-pandemic-economy/
Etc. etc.
Foreign aid: the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. I lived in one of those poor countries; I saw it happen.
I can believe this.
Everyone needs money. Expects times will be better in the future, to pay it back.
It looks like they both need increase the amount of money that they can lend and make this money less contingent on austerity measures. The article says: