And winning the war… which we don’t really do anymore, since what they are really about is filling the pockets of billionaires.
7 Likes
When a prolonged war creates factories and new industries, the economies benefit. There’s also the grim benefit of lower unemployment because people are away fighting or dying in great numbers. Once the war is over the converted the factories to produce other items desperately needed because of wartime scarcity, so built-in demand.
The problem is, now, we already have the industries and the factories. If we have another war we won’t be building factories all over the place, it will just be money going from the government into the pockets billionaires who are already churning out armaments. No increase in employment, either, since fewer and fewer people are necessary in modern warfare.
Modern wars are just cash machines for rich people, and debt machines for the government.
4 Likes
Dido ‘Queen of Carnage’ Harding to lead UK’s Institute for Health Protection because Test and Trace went so well
The appointment appears to be a ringing endorsement of Harding’s track record leading the contact-tracing programme, which launched a glitchy website without the promised phone app.
Harding, who was dubbed “Queen of Carnage” on these pages for her role in TalkTalk’s 2015 mega-breach, went on to excel as the decision was taken to "abandon the centralised COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app in favour of the distributed system proposed by Apple and Google in April.
9 Likes
Worth reading: Kai Kupferschmidt’s coverage of WHO pressers.
One major takeaway, as has been stated often but needs repeating: we are far away from reaching herd immunity.
10 Likes
18 Likes
Bets are on what happens in November. Or earlier.
Sidenote: in September, a legal moratorium regarding declaring bankruptcy ends in Germany. I suspect massively bad numbers as of October.
12 Likes
And also, there is a pandemic happening and maybe all the PPP money should not have gone to chain places, but to actual small businesses. The federal government needs to stop propping up large corporations who can find ways to eat the losses right now (or should be able to due to their size) and support actual small businesses.
Yes. Government investment in the private sector was the key in the second world war, not the incredibly destructive, violent, and bloody war part. You can have government investment in any number of areas. Right now, we have a climate emergency and shifting to green energy is going to take government support. We do that, we minimize the impact
The gilded age was marked by HIGH volatility. The rich getting richer (or in today’s case, the stock market doing well) is a shitty indicator of the health of the real economy (meaning, you know, actual human beings, not corporations).
You always invest in people first, from the bottom up, because that is the sustainable way to run an economy, especially a consumer economy. As you note, if individuals can’t spend, it’s has a massive impact on the rest of the economy.
That’s because it is? The “economy” doesn’t exist outside of human relations, and putting the markets before people is pretty much guaranteed to end up in precisely the situation we’re in now, the rich getting richer, and almost everyone else on the verge of disaster.
As I said above, it was massive government investment, not murder on a massive scale that saved the economy. The fact that we were the only functioning economy right after the war helped, too. Plus, when the government tried pulling out of the private sector after the war, there was nearly a crash, and of course a labor uprising. That’s part of the calculus for the Cold War, keeping those private-public partnerships going.
At the very fucking least.
Yes. This is especially true for understanding the post war expansion. And people forget the amount of ongoing private-public partnerships happening during this period.
Yes. It’s not the war, it’s the investment.
And in the case of post-war period, the Marshall Plan included provisions for letting us corporations invest in Europe, which is part of why Stalin rejected it (which they were aware of).
Except in the case of WW2 and the postwar period, it helped create a massive economic expansion that did enlarge the tax base. There is no doubt that Americans across the board (even across the race divide) were materially better off in the years after the war. The government being in debt is nothing new and we have in fact almost always run a debt:
The reality is that running a nation-state is expensive, and the whole point should be the quality of life of people living in your nation-state. All this is about improving our lot in life, and that’s really the only metric that matters.
Should this whole sub-thread be moved?
20 Likes
18 Likes
10 Likes
22 Likes
That’s a really good read, everyone needs to hear that message or a comparable one (of course… everyone SHOULD HAVE by now), thanks @Purplecat
9 Likes
Another interesting face mask design:
17 Likes
16 Likes
Ugh, I’m glad they tracked these folks down:
18 Likes
and worst case, one could probably improvise replacement filters for that pretty easily.
5 Likes
7 Likes
7 Likes
As I have said, we really are learning more about this bug, but that does not make it less scary.
In short, Covid ARDS is not like run-of-the-mill ARDS. It seems it may cause clots in some lung capillaries, diverting blood to others and making them dilate. This results in poor oxygen absorption at the most basic level. ARDS as I know it is due to deficient production a/o loss of surfactant. This is a whole different animal. Would be fascinating if it were not so terrifying. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to improving treatment options, but currently there basically is nothing.
24 Likes
It seems it may cause clots in some lung capillaries, diverting blood to others and making them dilate.
So is there any idea whether clot-busting an option, or is that just asking for trouble on other levels? It’s not clear to me from the article (or anything else I’ve read so far) whether the clots are conventional platelet clots or something more sinister…
Hoping my speculation here is a little better than “bright light shining inside people”… 
5 Likes
