Thursday’s Forum
You think today is going to be better
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, April 9, 2020
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102 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I’ve been awake since 1:42, so about 2 hours already. Ain’t insomnia great?
‘When it gets your hospital, it becomes real’: inside a hospital in one of the hardest hit US counties
NYT: Coronavirus Turns Urban Life’s Roar to Whisper on World’s Seismographs
Just in case you were wondering: Federal Support Ends For Coronavirus Testing Sites As Pandemic Peak Nears
The stupid, it hurts.
Kids these days…
On March sixth I posted about how a plane crashed very near to my home. The NTSB has come out with their initial report and their preliminary conclusion for the cause of the accident. Would you believe fuel exhaustion?
The pilot was 67 years old. Still it is hard to think someone can forget about fuel but there was a Medevac plane crash in Illinois less than 10 years ago where the pilots flew the aircraft till it ran out of fuel. My wife knew the couple that was killed in the crash. She spoke to the wife the day of the accident.
Even professional pilots can do stupid things with airplanes.
A headline for our times: Sex toy sales triple during New Zealand’s coronavirus lockdown
I know this has been discussed to death, but here is a complete tick tock of the USS Theodore Roosevelt fiasco:
The Battle of USS Theodore Roosevelt: a Timeline
Here is what jump out at me:
Because protecting the troops comes after protecting the President from embarrassment.
Had to drive to base here in San Antonio yesterday afternoon. Driving on the way back through the commercial district outside the base, I passed a new place called Daiquiris to Go. The drive thru line of cars was backed into the street and continued down a couple of blocks.
I love America.
@OzarkHillbilly: @OzarkHillbilly:
That’s my nominee for headline of the day but the article doesn’t mention if battery sales (for vibrators) are up too.
From the looks of the story, there is no ebook material in it for me. I did write a short story about people experimenting after a hurricane hit and they were all without electrical power.
And I’m still writing another ebook while I endure my 15th day of lockdown. Something about sisterly love* at a Philadelphia sorority house. I have 62 pages and over 18,000 words written and I started a week ago.
I just pray there are still people alive to read it when I am through.
*- No, not incest
Revealed: 6,000 passengers on cruise ships despite coronavirus crisis
Yeah, and they want a bailout?
I spent 20 years voting by mail. I never committed fraud.
Trump says voting by mail is bad. US troops do it all the time
I was more concerned that my vote was actually counted. I always heard rumors that they only counted absentee ballots if the election was close.
@Bill: This makes me wonder if the pilot did his initial flight check. Or if he did, whether he paid attention to the information he was supposedly measuring.
(My flight instructor told me about someone who attempted to take off in a GA aircraft which had its tail missing. You’d think that THAT would be noticed as well.)
@Bill:
There are ways to forget about fuel or to get it wrong. I’d check whether the fuel gauges were in working order, if that’s possible. In the case that came to be known as the Gimli Glider, part of the problem were inoperative fuel gauges on a brand-new 767.
Since then, fuel gauges have been added to the Minimal Equipment List of all commercial aircraft (astonishing they weren’t before!). Short version, if anything on the list is missing or inoperative, the plane cannot take off.
So perhaps this guy thought he had fueled up, or someone told him the plane had fuel, and the fuel gauge didn’t work.
@Scott:
The Grand Moron is trying to draw a distinction between absentee ballots and vote by mail.
That’s like saying URLs are the devil’s work, but Universal Resource Locators are just peachy.
@Kathy:
Those things could have happened and if either of them did, investigators most likely won’t be ever able to prove it.
Pilots or other flight deck crew shouldn’t leave vital checks to anyone. If not, there can be disastrous consequences. Like the 1974 DC-10 crash outside of Paris. If the flight engineer had done a complete pre-flight inspection, the improperly closed cargo door might have been discovered and 346 people may have not died that day.
@Scott: I didn’t know Richard Nixon wrote Trump a letter telling him to run for office. It further cements the notion that Trump is not a usurper of the GOP throne, but its rightful heir.
Megan McArdle advocates socialism. For insurance companies. Dems should take this up and use the opportunity to add M4A who want it to Obamacare.
Matthew Yglesias believes winning over the Berniecrats is too great a reach for Joe. If this is so and it likely is, Joe should write them off and pursue center right voters who are troubled by Trump. Quite likely there are more obtainable centrists than unreachable Berniescrats.
Why would any parent or student for that matter, want to be involved in a school run by this horses @ss.
And on the C-19 front: Coronavirus May ‘Reactivate’ in Cured Patients, Korean CDC Says
A similar report emanated out of China last month, needless to say it is not good news. It also raises the question as to whether a vaccine would be effective?
Calling all Cobol engineers-
I took a high school computer science class 42 years ago where I was taught Basic. So this work is out for me even if I did remember more of what Mr. Schepis taught me.
@Sleeping Dog:
In fact, Nancy should add M4A who want it to every economic relief bill that is aimed at corporations.
@Bill:
I’m far less familiar with GA operations. If there is a maintenance log, it may say the gauges didn’t work. If there is one and if that was the case, that is.
Another possibility is the pilot simply didn’t follow a checklist, and forgot to check something as basic as fuel.
There was an incident in Spain, I think, where the pilot interrupted the first officer as they were running through the pre-takeoff checklist, and they never took it up again. As a result, they tried to take off with the flaps up.
@Sleeping Dog: I realized Megan McArdle was a piece of shit when she simultaneously advocated the following things:
1) homeowners who had been scammed into ruinous mortgages should sacrifice everything else in their lives to pay the bank, because it’s important to avoid moral hazard and promote a culture of responsibility.
2) when it comes to issues like banks foreclosing because the payment was $.47 short, banks should be ruthless in using every tool at their disposal to enhance the bottom line because capitalism is important and shareholder value etc.
You got that? In a dispute between poor homeowners and rich banks, the poor homeowners should be pressured to uphold high moral standards, while rich banks should be allowed to act like psychopaths, extracting every dime regardless of the damage to people. In disputes with rich institutions versus poor people, the poor people are the ones who should have a hand tied behind their backs.
I’m glad I’ve never been offered the amount of money it would take for me to write such morally repugnant garbage.
This should be broadcast to the masses.
Cut salaries, taxes to reopen U.S. economy says Laffer, conservative fav
My question is this: 1% owns 40% of the wealth. Isn’t this a disincentive for the rich to create jobs. Shouldn’t we take their wealth away to restore their self-esteem and job creation abilities?
@Sleeping Dog: I’ll just put out my standard McArdle warning here: she is incredibly shallow and in the years before I gave up reading her, everything she wrote that touched on a subject I actually knew about was wrong, and usually wrong in such a way as to show she didn’t even understand the concept. I can’t think of any specific examples right now but, to paraphrase someone else commenting on a different journalist, she’s the type of writer who could do a whole column based on the fact that pennies are worth more than dimes because they are bigger.
@Bill: I once knew Basic, Fortran, and Pascal and I knew a lot of COBOL programmers in the 70s. We’re all old now.
My question is this: I thought we did away with a lot of COBOL systems when we had to upgrade for Y2K issues. There was a shortage of COBOL programmers in 1999 and 2000 then. I guess they were quick patches. More death of expertise.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think we should bail out any cruise line that registers its ships as American, pays US taxes and follows US employment laws. Which, by my rough count, would be none of them.
The effrontery of these tax-dodging assholes asking for tax money. They can go ask Panama and the Bahamas for help.
@scott: If people getting free money makes them lazy and unproductive, then we should immediately stop allowing multi-million-dollar inheritances.
@Michael Reynolds: It is not as if cruise ships are an essential element of the economy. Walk through what happens if the cruise lines go bankrupt. They will go into receivership, reorganize or sell off their assets, investors or stockholders will take a haircut, and then go back into business. I see no reason for taxpayers to be involved at all.
BTW, our good buddies the Saudis have bought at a greatly reduced price 20% of Carnival.
@scott: I think we should engage in activities that will enhance Laffer’s self preservation instincts.
@Michael Reynolds: Exactly.
@Bill:
@Scott:
I don’t code or program, though I took BASIC and some Pascal and Logo in high school. In the 90s, we got a payroll software that ran on COBOL. We had to get a COBOL disk so it would run. I was under the impression then that it was already obsolete.
The payroll software was really good. Very flexible, it allowed informative concepts, like hours worked or pieces made, without adding them to the total, and it handled two payroll tax reforms without requiring an update.
@Bill: FWIW running COBOL doesn’t necessarily have to be outdated. Back in the Y2K years I learned there were a lot of banking and accounting COBOL programs running on virtual machines. The code worked, was very efficient and had been field tested for decades, so they would just stand up a virtual machine fire it up and run a single transaction. They could do tens of thousands of these simultaneously. It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. That original COBOL Hardware probably had kilobytes of memory to do everything. It would be hard to get more efficient than that.
@MarkedMan: efficiency was understandably the origin of the y2k problem.
An update on the Trump Administation (with Republican acquiescence) seizing hospital and state purchases of PPE and distributing them to private entities to resell on the open market.
I’m trying to get a sense of the odds of catching COVID-19.
So far, reports of confirmed cases stand at around 3,200 for the country, with about 1,250 in Mexico City and the State of Mexico. I assume this is off by about a factor of ten, as testing is ridiculously low. So that would mean about 12,500 cases in my area.
This goes way up if, as some nebulous reports have it, some people get infected and develop no symptoms at all, or symptoms so mild they don’t even think they’re sick. This could be another factor of ten, 125,000 cases nearby, or more. I’ve no idea. It might be less, too.
Still, even 125,000 cases in a metropolitan area of 21 million makes for 0.6% infection rate. Lower, really, as the State of Mexico is geographically large, with a population of 3-4 million outside the Mex City metro area.
But I do the 11 kilometer drive to work, and then again from work, every day. There are still plenty of people in the office, and who knows what precautions they take. Some in my department even have traveled in the past three weeks (one just arrived back today). I also go to the supermarket once a week, same caveats.
So call it a 12% chance of coming across an infected person (possibly overstated). that’s way too high. So I take all possible precautions. It may be a good idea to start wearing a mask.it would be an even better idea to get other people to wear masks, as they contain stuff far better than they prevent it from coming in.
@Teve:
I seldom read McArdle for the same reasons, but the teaser headline at memeorandum got me to read the article. It was good old Megan, support for corporate interests and to hell with the rest of us. I believe she came to the WaPo as part of their hire the handicapped campaign, she filled the niche for writers who were devoid of logic, consistency and fairness. She really is a dumb sh#t.
The latest from Liberty University, an oxymoron if there ever were one: Jerry Falwell, Jr. wants two journalists arrested for trespassing.
@Scott: I’ve spent the last 20 years voting by mail, first by permanent no-excuse absentee ballot and then a full-blown vote-by-mail system.
As part of a long-term project, I collect ways that the US Census Bureau’s 13-state western region is different from the rest of the country. Vote-by-mail is one of them. Collectively, the very large majority of all votes cast in the region are cast by mail. Five states now mail a ballot to every registered voter in every election (CO, HI, OR, UT, and WA). In two states (AZ and CA) the majority of ballots that will be cast are mailed out. Neither of those two use the term absentee any more; people there sign up for “vote-by-mail ballots” on a permanent basis.
I saw this recently:
AG Bill Barr, on Fox News, refers to current restrictions as “draconian measures” and says at end of April, he thinks we should “allow people to adapt more than we have, & not just tell people to go home and hide under their bed.”
Maybe Barr should go into a hospital and care for some patients, making sure not to wear any PPE (which I’m sure he could get by calling Jared and getting some of his stash).
Is Bill Barr the worst AG in history? I thought John Mitchell had the title, but Barr seems worse, he actually comes off as almost intentionally evil. He also weighed in on other matters:
Barr also criticizes “snarky, gotcha questions from the White House media pool” and says of Trump & hydroxychloroquine, “As soon as he said something positive about it, the media’s been on a jihad to discredit the drug.”
Barr says what happened to Trump in Russia investigation was “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” Probe, he says, was started “without any basis” & steps taken post-election were meant “to sabotage the presidency”
@Kathy: The pre-flight check for GA aircraft doesn’t rely on dial gauges–you actually hop up on a stepladder and use a dip-stick into both tanks to measure the amount of fuel.
@senyordave:
Barr probably would have been a supporter of Draco, a good law-and-order type if ever there was one:
My blood is still boiling over Wisconsin and over the outright corruption of the US Supreme Court. I suggest a new political movement:
Since Republicans hate voting rights and love gun rights, let’s give them what we want — every time they threaten our right to vote, we’re buying guns.
@Kingdaddy:
What”s the line form the Bible…”forgive those who trespass against us?”
@Scott: Vote by mail fraud has been a known thing for years. People with two residences vote in both. People who have two residences tend to be wealthy and/or retired, demos that favor Rs. Somehow, for all their professed outrage over vote fraud, this actual vote fraud never seemed to catch their attention. Until now.
Former police officer arrested for playing t-ball with his six year old daughter in his own backyard!, (Brighton, Colorado/ ABC news)
Have people completely lost their minds?
@MarkedMan: In many cases, old COBOL code is hard to replace because there’s no separate specification. That is, the only documentation for all of the details of what the system should do, and how, is the COBOL code itself.
@gVOR08:
Have never heard this, before.
Link?
@gVOR08: @Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Vote by mail fraud has been a known thing for years
Likewise, Tax fraud by mail.
Solution ? Require hand delivery of tax returns to IRS office.
@scott: I found that article as well and have just posted a response.
@Michael Reynolds: I was going to suggest the Alaska Marine Highway System (the cruise company to Alaska before Princess Cruises discovered there were piers there), but looked them up. Turns out it’s a socialist plot–state owned.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: Mostly something I’ve seen mentioned now and again for years. Best I can find quickly is this from Slate. Deals with other forms more than dual residence. There was also the recent NC case where a GOP operative was collecting absentee ballots and not mailing them in.
Absentee/mail-in fraud happens at a negligible rate. But it does happen, unlike the in-person fraud the GOPs have been up in arms about. I’m not offering this as an argument against hugely expanded vote by mail this year or in future, which we must do. I’m offering Republicans’ sudden concern about mail-in fraud as an example of their absolute hypocrisy in all things at all times.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: There are small amounts of voter fraud in all systems. There are cases of successful election stealing using absentee ballots. All of the ones I am aware of were in rural Southern counties and involved the county recorder forging a few dozen ballots. There are claims of large-scale fraud in vote-by-mail. TTBOMK, none of those have held up under serious examination. A few years back the Republican Sec of State in my vote-by-mail state came up with a list of 4,000 names and addresses that he claimed were persons illegally registered to vote. The county clerks checked the entire list — at considerable staff time and expense — and found four people that were actually illegally registered. All had been registered by the same overzealous worker at a drivers license office who just signed them up without asking. One of the largest sources of such claims has been the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program. They produced on the order of seven million “suspects” each year. As part of a court settlement in 2019, they were enjoined from distributing such lists because not a single one of their suspects has ever been convicted.
@Michael Reynolds: But Michael, you misunderstand. Chartering your company and registering your ships overseas just means you don’t pay taxes here. It doesn’t mean you can’t hire lobbyists here. Nor does it mean, contra Justice Alito’s “Not true”, that you can’t find ways to channel money to politicians here.
@MarkedMan: I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find the “distributing them to private entities to resell on the open market” part of the story you’re citing. Now I know that it’s fun to do the whole “Trump is a big crook” thing and have no doubt that he is, but embellishing stories to include information that they don’t have is still bad form and we don’t like it when Guarneri, 95 South, or the cosplay picture guy do it. We shouldn’t do it either.
Not (directly) an accusation about you or your motives; I just can’t find that part of the story on any of the links in the TPM article and don’t see it in the original article either. Help me out.
I once sat through a COBOL tutorial. It felt as though someone were reading the Necronomicon aloud. Thanks, I’ll stick with programming languages that pose less of a threat to my sanity.
@Kingdaddy: Not really. Falwell Sr.’s definition of “liberty” was bog standard Dominionist–the freedom to do as one pleases while impinging on the freedom of others.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: The whole line–it’s from The Lord’s Prayer–is “forgive us our trespasses [in the same manner] as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But to be fair, I’ve never known anyone, myself included, who really wants equal treatment in that sort of sense.
Long ago in a University far away my intro to programming (FORTRAN) class had a chapter on COBOL. Does that qualify me for a job like Vic’s in Dilbert. He has a sinecure because he wrote the company accounting system “a million lines of undocumented spaghetti logic”. “The Holy Grail of technology!!”
@grumpy realist: “The pre-flight check for GA aircraft doesn’t rely on dial gauges–you actually hop up on a stepladder and use a dip-stick into both tanks to measure the amount of fuel.”
I took one flying lesson once — a gift from a friend — and the very first thing the instructor had me do was to walk around the plane to check the gas in both tanks…
When it comes to voting by mail, I wonder how many husbands fill out their wives ballots.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
@gVOR08:
The Times had a couple of articles on mail voting this morning, here is one.
Based on what I’m seeing on Twitter, rightwingers have a new talking point: Trump has saved 900,000* Americans! To criticize him means you don’t care anything about the 900k American lives he has saved!
* I’m assuming they mean that some were predicting a million deaths from Covid-19, so if only 100,000 Americans die, Trump has saved the other 900,000.
@Monala:
The unstated assumption is that Trump didn’t have to save any of us. We should all bow down in thanks, both Republicans and Democrats. And so what if 100k had to die: we needed the lesson.
@Kit: I hear this a lot. Living in a vote-by-mail state, I suspect the answer is “hardly any.” One or more felonies are involved. If it were happening, it would show up as part of background in divorce proceedings and restraining order applications.
@Michael Cain:
I hope you are right. That is the one aspect of vote by mail that bothers me on more than just a speculative level. Maybe men are better than I give them credit for.
@Bill:
I had half a year of COBOL in high school, about the same time. It was already nearly archaic then, in terms of new system development. My paid work a couple of years after that was in FORTRAN and (Hewlett Packard’s spiffy expanded version of) BASIC. Five years after that, it was all Pascal and C.
@Sleeping Dog:
Yeah…I don’t give the Times my $
From what I can tell the problem, if it exists, is miniscule.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: Right now, the Times is offering their articles related to coronavirus free to the public.
Also, tip: if you have a columnist at the Times that you like (say, Paul Krugman or Charles Blow), you can subscribe to their column and have it delivered to your email inbox, without paying the Times a dime.
After Colorado had been through a couple of vote-by-mail elections, one of the polling outfits tucked the question “Should Colorado retain its vote-by-mail system?” into one of its larger state-wide polls. 85% of Democrats said yes. 80% of independents said yes. 75% of Republicans said yes. It was heavily favored across all of urban, suburban, and rural respondents. Apple pie doesn’t poll that well here, and Mom ought to be worried.
The writing is on the wall. Within a decade, the American West will vote by mail and districts will be drawn by commissions that can’t favor one major party over another. Both red and blue states.
@Bill:
I wrote my one and only COBOL program in the summer of 1976. I was a paid intern for the Nebraska Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s office. They had realized they needed some software tools, but didn’t know exactly what, and I was writing little prototypes for them. I wrote a recursive PL/I program for one of the things they wanted to look at. That one was so handy they asked if I could rewrite it in COBOL, since that was the only language actually supported by the statehouse IT staff. I went to the used book store, bought a beginning-to-intermediate COBOL book, and started. At least at that time, COBOL didn’t support recursion. It barely supported arrays flexible enough to simulate recursion. Eventually the program worked properly. I swore a mighty oath that I would never touch COBOL again, and have stuck to that for almost 44 years now.
Boris Johnson is out of intensive care.
YOU NEED TO READ THIS…IT WILL MAKE YOUR BLOOD BOIL.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ppe-and-ventilators-becomes-patronage-in-trumps-hands
The Snitch is dead.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I’ve put my sources for this claim in previous citations. Here is one, from Gov Pritzker of Illinois via Talking Points Memo
This from the NYT:
The Trump administration denies they are seizing supplies at the border, but there are about a dozen cases where states or hospitals that say that’s exactly what they were told by their distributors.
From Vox:
From Crains:
And…
@Monala:
Odd. I know of no state governor named Trump.
@Kit:
What I have heard generally from women is that they vote for who the hell they want to vote for despite their controlling husbands. I am sure in Vote by Mail states, the wife is going to make sure she mails her own damn ballot.
And if I am not mistaken, those states have had a gender gap for years
From Vanity Faire:
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I have to admit that I resent being lumped in the same category as RWNJ’s (or LWNJ’s for that matter). I always try to cite my sources, and if something proves incorrect or unfounded I retract it. In the case of the post where you accused me of going all Trumpian, I didn’t repeat my citations but I’ve been posting them for a week or more in other threads.
@Michael Cain:
Wow. It’s almost like someone who would willing take someone’s agency away by deciding how they are going to vote would care about it being a felony or that it would even cross their mind. Considering abusive spouses have been known to commit other felonies such as identify theft and misrepresentation for finances and government forms, filing out a mail vote wouldn’t be a second thought.
Most of the women it’s happening to aren’t getting divorces or restraining orders because they’re still stuck with their abuser. They never get free and you’ll never hear from them. It’s also a lot harder to prove then bank fraud or signing her name on a check since it’s supposed to be a secret ballot. Hell, the wife might not even know she “requested and submitted” a ballot in the first place!
I’m not claiming it’s rampant but it’s definitely more then “hardly any”. Any abuser who’s got you on lockdown in terms of your agency, finances and free will isn’t going to let you freely vote. You’ll do what they want, when they want…. if they even let you know what happening in the first place.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: From the article you referenced:
@Bill:
Nuns? Nuns do love everyone. Good choice.
Maybe a short story collection with every form of sister, culminating in a tale of Sista Soulja discovering that her sorority sister, Whoopie Goldberg, is her real sister, on the set of Sister Act 12.
@KM:
So, like Trump or Bernie voters then…
Over at Lucianne.com, Cult45 has decided that Dr. Fauci, that Hillary Clinton-loving Deep State slimeball, is sending hand signals to Jim Acosta, apparently as part of a plot to bring down Trump. They got this notion from The Conservative Treehouse.
@Gustopher:
Sorority, LUGS, I will let you figure it out.
@MarkedMan: Thank you.
@Bill: Fuel exhaustion happens quite a bit in general aviation (or at least more than it should). Usually involving the pilot using the wrong tank by forgetting to switch or accidentally switching to the wrong one etc. In your case the pilot might of been just too comfortable with flying and missed some of his check list.
@CSK:
because emailing or sending secure messages with Whatsapp or Telegram would be too complicated in this day and age?
@Sleeping Dog:
A lot of people haven’t yet processed quite how much”socialism” (or rather, state intervention) is going to be required as this crisis continues.
It verges on an economic “out of context problem”.
And no wishful thinking about an “early restart” will avoid it now.
To avoid economic collapse due to collapsed incomes of individuals, companies and sub-national government, national governments and central banks are going to have to hit the problem with a tidal wave of fiat money.
Further on, the secondary crisis will be the need to restart an economy whose physical and human capital is still extant, but where claims of debt (and “rents” generally) may need quite radical limits to avoid recovery being choked off as it begins.
Then, these factors will also quite likely produce the need for measures to limit inflation without crippling interest rates; (temporary?) limits on asset valuations and returns, and central bank debt cancellation (and probably state “management” of effective debt liabilities of large debtors to avoid both some forced insolvencies and some potential debt-offloading shenanigans).
All this is going to radically alter the financial/regulatory/legal foundations of Western economies.
Take just a second to try to imagine what kind of shitty person would downvote that comment. If he’s that shitty, I’m sure he’s a Trumper.
@JohnSF: I’ve been hearing that hyper inflation is right around the corner for 30 years. And yet the inflation rates for the last 10 years have been 1.5, 3.0, 1.7, 1.5, 0.8, 0.7, 2.1, 2.1, 1.9, 2.3, 2.3. For the time being I’m going to keep dismissing these claims.
I just got some very interesting news. Which I can’t really talk about. But it’s like the clouds parted and the sun broke through on a project from the 90’s. Kind of like we’d been stalled at the starting line of the marathon for years and now, all of a sudden, we’re at about mile 7 or so. Hope is really annoying.
@Teve: Having lived and worked as a laborer during Stagflation and the subsequent Carter “national malaise,” I, too, will have to see it to believe it.
@Michael Reynolds: Then don’t get your hopes up 😛 , but congratulations just the same if they turn out appropriate.
@Teve:
Likewise, I’ve tuned out the incessant squawking of “monetary conservatives” that soaring inflation was due real soon now, often morphing into goldbuggery, or more recently bitcoin enthusiasm.
When I bothered to reply it was along the lines of:
If you think hyperinflation is imminent follow these steps:
1) Borrow as much as you can at fixed rates
2) Borrow more
3) And more
4) Invest in productive physical assets likely to be in permanent demand e.g. farmland, mines, energy, manufacturing and profit enormously as your debt is wiped out.
And, above all:
5) Don’t come crying to me when you lose your shirt because hyperinflation doesn’t occur.
Because of central bank monetary management and market constrained prices.
(And arguably mis-allocation of effective demand due to wealth inequalities).
However, the scale of monetary and fiscal intervention required now is off the charts.
Like nothing since the Great Depression and WW2.
Inflation effects are likely to be limited by supply constraints being balanced by demand reduction.
But there is a lot of potential for some nasty side effects when the real economy starts to revive.
Hyperinflation is eminently avoidable; but doing so will need fiscal and financial/monetary measures that will give a lot of people set in conventional “conservative” economic thinking the screaming abb-dabs.
And may set others to thinking that, if such management of effective wealth is possible, why not use this beyond the present emergency…
@Michael Reynolds:
Hmm…lemme guess…you’re attached to a reboot of The Princess Bride, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Westley and Megan Fox as Buttercup?
GOP hawks want to punish China for coronavirusWhat? Like it’s China’s fault that you guys bumbled and dithered and played politics with the problem for a month or so? Really? That’s all ya got?
@Michael Reynolds: Michael Bay’s Animorphs?
@Teve:
Don’t look at me! I was in bed 😐
We have a serial down voter here (tt, is it you?), so there’s little use on speculating what any single vote means. Still, if you read what @KM wrote, I think that @Robert Sharperson might come across as slightly blithe.
I find it somewhat off putting to brush off the concerns, especially after having given the issue a quick look online. Hell, I suspect my own father of at least low-level intimidation towards my mother in this regard.
@Teve: @Kit: It could just be someone with fat fingers and a tiny smartphone screen too.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I’ve seen/heard similar. They basically want to assess some kind of penalty on China for both creating the conditions (basically, allowing wet markets) and letting it get out of control/lying about the spread.
Everyone wants someone to blame, but no one wants to face the logic that the next pandemic absolutely could begin here. Everywhere that humans encroach on wilderness presents a risk, and the US is no different. We don’t have wet markets but we do have plenty of other gathering places (the fact that an early cluster was at a wet market has confused people into thinking it was food that spread it–that is flat-out wrong. It was simply the gathering place.)
Arrogance and sticking heads in sand are apparently conservative traits.