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I like Bill Gates but I find it a little distasteful to see extremely rich people who will not be affected in any way by the economic fallout of this telling ev

I like Bill Gates but I find it a little distasteful to see extremely rich people who will not be affected in any way by the economic fallout of this telling everyone else that we need to sacrifice the economy because it's the right thing to do. For the majority of people who will have to pay that price and go through a recession that could be the worst ever with nothing left, what's right isn't necessarily the same. We are facing the prospects of a second great depression, and I personally don't want my generation to become the second Lost Generation. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have put in place the containment/lock down measures, but that it is absolutely necessary to keep the economy in mind. my concern is more about how long we can keep this up. What price is too much? And do current leaders really have the younger generations in mind?

quietthrow 7y ago
Simply put first comes health then comes wealth. The other way around dosnt work. The problem is your leaders are putting wealth first and health may be second at best. At worse it’s wealth first , re-election second everything else will take care of itself -with “love and protection”. If you don’t want to be the lost generation change your leaders before its to late.
carapace 7y ago
Gates' money doesn't disbar him from expressing common decency. No one's going to starve. The water and power will continue to flow. The factories and trucks are not destroyed. The topsoil isn't blowing away (Dust Bowl reference that.) So really the only damage is people and paperwork. Let's save the people.
- mardifoufs 7y ago
  Economic output isn't just paperwork. It may seem to be just pushing papers for now, but thats because we're only 2 weeks in. All of what we have now is because of the fully functional economy we used to have. I'm all for what the FED is doing right now, but it's just a stop gap. You just can't print your way into actual economic output. there's a reason why we don't just always "push papers" instead of working. Human decency won't be enough to keep hospitals and supply chains running.Again, for a short while everything will keep working but that's an illusion. All of that can look abstract for us since we can mostly work from home and don't get to see the gears that make everything work from our tech jobs. But those gears are still very real. And even remote tech workers will eventually get hit by the impacts of a prolonged shutdown. Also, It's not that bill gates can't have an opinion on this, it's just that he is very obviously not going to be impacted by what he's preaching. Misery for them, because we need to save lives, but not for me.
  - carapace 7y ago
    I feel like you're kind of missing my point. I don't want to downplay the severity of the problem we're having, but this isn't a "corpses in the street" plague, and the core of the economy will not falter (unless we really fuck it up, but we're already starting to get a clue.) The nightmare scenario here is rampant spread, followed by massive spike in demand for medical services just as the people providing them succumb to the virus themselves, followed by the various unpleasant consequences of that (like thousands of people laying in hospital parking lots in tents with improvised ventilators, dying from slow asphyxiation as their lungs rot inside them.) Now, my sister might well lose her job at any moment, and then she won't be able to pay her rent, and then her landlord... is a massive holding company or something based out of NY or S. Korea or something, and honestly who cares what happens to that entity this summer? No sheriff is going to evict my sister and our 80-year-old mother onto the street in the middle of a Goddamned pandemic, eh? The employees of the holding company that owns the subdivision she lives in are in the same boat. As for the owners, well, that's "paperwork": let's keep records and, when the fire is out, we'll sort it all out one way or another. And what do you want Gates to do? Sit in his backyard and rub ashes in his face? Didn't he just pitch in $100,000,000 to help?
erentz 7y ago
How do people have this idea that the economy just goes back to normal? That somehow you tell people to go back to work and just take the millions of dead and everybody just salutes and dutifully goes about it like nothing is happening? That’s complete fantasy land. I’m flabbergasted at how people are now somehow proposing this. They simply do not have any conception of what is going on and how human beings react. The economy is going to be trashed much worse if we don’t manage this pandemic and keep the demands on the health system at manageable levels. We can do that intelligently or clumsily. At the moment we’ve ignored the problem and it has caused us to be in the situation to be reacting very late. That’s why it’s hurting so much. But making that worse by going back to pretending it isn’t happening is not the answer.
- mardifoufs 7y ago
  Sorry but that is not true. The truth is that the majority of the economically active population is not at risk from dying. I get using outliers as a way to scare younger people into staying inside, it's for a good cause. But that's what they are, outliers. The average age of death in Italy is 80 years, most of the younger people in ICUs have severe pre existing conditions or were exposed to much higher virus loads (ie health workers). But you just won't get millions of death, that's a complete exaggeration going by the data we have right now. Right now Sweden is isolating people who are vulnerable, which is absolutely necessary. But people who aren't are free to keep living their daily lives, because the risks for them aee extremely low. And if they end up needing help the hospitals won't be overcrowded by the more vulnerable. That's the way to do it since we now know how non lethal it is for people under 50-60. Still, I'm not opposed to a short full lock down. The question is for how long? Let's say you're right. ok. But for how long can we stay inside? At what point will the virus not be a threat? Months? How could that ever be sustainable ? We need people who aren't at risk to work to keep people who are safe. It's much easier to keep a small proportion of the population isolated while waiting for a virus and having everyone else working to sustain that isolation rather than just shut down everything and hope for things to just go away. Unless there's a clear timeline, this could get catastrophic.
  - erentz 7y ago

quietthrow 7y ago

Simply put first comes health then comes wealth. The other way around dosnt work. The problem is your leaders are putting wealth first and health may be second at best. At worse it’s wealth first , re-election second everything else will take care of itself -with “love and protection”. If you don’t want to be the lost generation change your leaders before its to late.

carapace 7y ago

Gates' money doesn't disbar him from expressing common decency. No one's going to starve. The water and power will continue to flow. The factories and trucks are not destroyed. The topsoil isn't blowing away (Dust Bowl reference that.) So really the only damage is people and paperwork. Let's save the people.

mardifoufs 7y ago
Economic output isn't just paperwork. It may seem to be just pushing papers for now, but thats because we're only 2 weeks in. All of what we have now is because of the fully functional economy we used to have. I'm all for what the FED is doing right now, but it's just a stop gap. You just can't print your way into actual economic output. there's a reason why we don't just always "push papers" instead of working. Human decency won't be enough to keep hospitals and supply chains running.Again, for a short while everything will keep working but that's an illusion. All of that can look abstract for us since we can mostly work from home and don't get to see the gears that make everything work from our tech jobs. But those gears are still very real. And even remote tech workers will eventually get hit by the impacts of a prolonged shutdown. Also, It's not that bill gates can't have an opinion on this, it's just that he is very obviously not going to be impacted by what he's preaching. Misery for them, because we need to save lives, but not for me.
- carapace 7y ago
  I feel like you're kind of missing my point. I don't want to downplay the severity of the problem we're having, but this isn't a "corpses in the street" plague, and the core of the economy will not falter (unless we really fuck it up, but we're already starting to get a clue.) The nightmare scenario here is rampant spread, followed by massive spike in demand for medical services just as the people providing them succumb to the virus themselves, followed by the various unpleasant consequences of that (like thousands of people laying in hospital parking lots in tents with improvised ventilators, dying from slow asphyxiation as their lungs rot inside them.) Now, my sister might well lose her job at any moment, and then she won't be able to pay her rent, and then her landlord... is a massive holding company or something based out of NY or S. Korea or something, and honestly who cares what happens to that entity this summer? No sheriff is going to evict my sister and our 80-year-old mother onto the street in the middle of a Goddamned pandemic, eh? The employees of the holding company that owns the subdivision she lives in are in the same boat. As for the owners, well, that's "paperwork": let's keep records and, when the fire is out, we'll sort it all out one way or another. And what do you want Gates to do? Sit in his backyard and rub ashes in his face? Didn't he just pitch in $100,000,000 to help?

erentz 7y ago

How do people have this idea that the economy just goes back to normal? That somehow you tell people to go back to work and just take the millions of dead and everybody just salutes and dutifully goes about it like nothing is happening? That’s complete fantasy land. I’m flabbergasted at how people are now somehow proposing this. They simply do not have any conception of what is going on and how human beings react. The economy is going to be trashed much worse if we don’t manage this pandemic and keep the demands on the health system at manageable levels. We can do that intelligently or clumsily. At the moment we’ve ignored the problem and it has caused us to be in the situation to be reacting very late. That’s why it’s hurting so much. But making that worse by going back to pretending it isn’t happening is not the answer.

mardifoufs 7y ago
Sorry but that is not true. The truth is that the majority of the economically active population is not at risk from dying. I get using outliers as a way to scare younger people into staying inside, it's for a good cause. But that's what they are, outliers. The average age of death in Italy is 80 years, most of the younger people in ICUs have severe pre existing conditions or were exposed to much higher virus loads (ie health workers). But you just won't get millions of death, that's a complete exaggeration going by the data we have right now. Right now Sweden is isolating people who are vulnerable, which is absolutely necessary. But people who aren't are free to keep living their daily lives, because the risks for them aee extremely low. And if they end up needing help the hospitals won't be overcrowded by the more vulnerable. That's the way to do it since we now know how non lethal it is for people under 50-60. Still, I'm not opposed to a short full lock down. The question is for how long? Let's say you're right. ok. But for how long can we stay inside? At what point will the virus not be a threat? Months? How could that ever be sustainable ? We need people who aren't at risk to work to keep people who are safe. It's much easier to keep a small proportion of the population isolated while waiting for a virus and having everyone else working to sustain that isolation rather than just shut down everything and hope for things to just go away. Unless there's a clear timeline, this could get catastrophic.
- erentz 7y ago