If you have a lot of money tied up in investments like stocks then of course “Wall Street” is the your primary concern.
If you are poor and can’t afford health care, then not getting sick is your primary concern.
It won’t end with COVID-19, there will be another virus in a few years, and another, and another. . . .
Might cheer up this stupid timeline a bit!
We’ve run these numbers before. Even if the actual medical burden is only 10% of what is currently estimated, we are totally screwed. Even at 1% of estimates, our medical infrastructure will be completely maxed out. Unless the estimates are completely off (which is not beyond the realm of possibility) we are in for a very rough ride.
It’s not a very exclusive club. Join a hedge fund and lick railings.
Seriously though. Don’t be a hypocrite criticising hypocrites.
Does the economy exist to serve human beings? Or do human beings exist to serve the economy?
It’s a trick question only because the economy is not something that belongs to everyone equally. Those who are equity partners in the economy, can use it to enslave everyone who isn’t an equity partner. And though they are rarely so honest with themselves, sometimes the truth leaks through anyway.
Agreed but I doubt this virus can be held back now, for more than a couple of months. Especially given the difficulty of detecting asymptomatic carriers.
Can you imagine a world without Wall Street?
Republicans, also:
Right. But it isn’t realistic for everyone who is going to get sick will get sick at once. It’s a fantasy. But if this is going to be a horrible pandemic, the faster it is over the faster we can recover. That is true in principle, at least.
That isn’t much different than what is happening in other parts of the world, where people who do all of that are just staying home. Per another post, we can see the lack of air pollution from China’s industry shutting down.
He has a point, depending how bad this gets, you could have a period of months where no one is working at say Amazon fulfillment centers, or harvesting food, or making toilet paper. or running the grocery stores.
I mean, I could work from home, but if no one is ordering print items, or no one is working the plants to print them, or the mail shuts down to mail them, then I will be sitting at home doing nothing.
As stupid as his comments were, the worry of it fucking the economy - and by extension - EVERYONE is a valid one IMO. And not just Wall Street or stock owners. When there is no work, most of the executives keep their jobs, they let go people like me.
Yes—a sick fantasy being presented as a better scenario than the one we have now.
The faster it spreads the less time society will have to prepare by doing things like ramping up production of needed medical supplies, preparing treatment facilities and stockpiling critical things like food. A rapid spread would also dramatically lower the chances of producing a vaccine in time to prevent at least some people from getting sick.
Simply put there is no scenario in which we’d be “better off if we gave it to everybody” (his exact words) to get it over quickly.
The longer the infections get spread out, the better for every metric I can think of - epidemiological, economic, social, scientific, etc. If it runs through the population fast, there will be more death, more absenteeism, greater panic, less understanding of the disease and our systems for managing it, and we will be less likely to have a better system in place for the next one.
But…I mean of course he is successful on Wall Street because he’s really smart, right? /sarcasm
Correction makes it sounds like they know what’s going on, rather than face-smash from the invisible hand.
… and as if it’s necessarily a good thing.
I helped manage a post-secondary institution tabletop pandemic exercise about 13 years ago for something on the level of undetected SARS hitting Vancouver. Our figures for Greater Vancouver (2007 population 2.1 million) included in excess of 8,000 fatalities; major issues were overwhelmed hospitals, patients being sent home to die because of insufficient staff/beds/meds/nutrients/other related resources to treat them and major issues with corpse storage to prevent secondary plagues (hockey arenas are good coolers for large numbers of the dead).
The population is over 2.5 million people now and things would be much worse.
I also wouldn’t exclude the possibility that Santelli is in fact speaking from a position of panic and terror; but one induced by assorted financial market numbers moving in incorrect ways; rather than one induced by the actual people and events than the numbers are a consequence, at some remove, of.
Given that both his job and (at a minimum his on-air) persona revolve around a relentless schedule of telling stories about financial market numbers as though they are the terrain rather than a map; it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if he has a genuine and intense emotional identification with market numbers, and is desperately worried for them in their hour of need; and perfectly willing to sacrifice some fleshy abstractions if it would help make them better.
Sort of like how a human closer to normalcy would cope with fear induced by an alarming scenario of expanding morbidity and mortality by suggesting that throwing money at the problem is a perfectly natural solution if it might help; except with the conceptions of what counts as the real and what counts as the ultimately expendable abstraction reversed.
If that’s his plan, I think maybe he’s still not realizing just how broken both the economy and society would be in that situation. Even the wealth would be fucked as you’d have a breakdown of the systems that protect them (and even if they can afford private alternatives, those would be overwhelmed as well).
If his notion is that everyone is going to be infected eventually, and it would be better to have it all out of the way at once, it’s less horrible and more incredibly stupid of him. Because by shortening the duration, you’re also increasing the intensity, which means it wouldn’t be better if it were shorter, it would be substantially worse. And it wouldn’t just be worse, it would also be different. (Because increasing the intensity causes other problems, e.g. the death toll would be orders of magnitude worse as the overloaded medical system is not only unable to treat those sick with the virus, but also anyone else who is sick for any reason. Enough people would be incapacitated at the same time to shut down industries entirely, to stop food shipments, police wouldn’t investigate crimes, etc.) There are a lot of reasons why everyone is trying really hard not just to minimize the number of people getting sick, but minimize how many people are getting sick at the same time, and you think he would have noticed that…
Something to be said about timing and slowing the progression.
See Decamerone, where the framing story is ten young people fleeing Florence for the countryside during the plague, and sharing stories to while away the time.
