Alright MOFOs, let's get constructive

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

We're getting kicked in the nuts right now, but we'll come through it sometime this summer (hopefully). This thing has exposed our utter lack of preparedness and just how exposed we are due to this whole "globalism" scam that was crammed down our throats so we could all be fat, dumb, and happy mouth breathers gobbling up all of our Chinese plastic bullshit while everything of value was outsourced to our enemies. All for corporate profit and the ability to subjugate cheap labor and externalize all environmental costs. Fuck that shit.

So.........where do we go from here. Now that this huge liability has been laid bare, and the dumpster fire of an Administration continues to prove itself to be a monkey fucking a football, what are some positive things we can do to make ourselves as armored as possible against this shit happening again?

I'll start, you guys who are more well versed than me can correct me and ad your own:

1: Declare certain segments of the economy to be strategic resources. These are things critical to our national defense and health, and they cannot be manufactured overseas. This would include medicines and medical supplies, critical food supply, strategic levels of energy, information and the ability to access it, and military equipment. These are the things that our inability to provide for ourselves can be weaponized against us by those who control the supply lines. Fuck the Chinese, fuck the Middle East.

2: National Healthcare System of some sort. Period. For-profit healthcare has zero incentive to have a safety margin on anything. Why would you have extra respirators ready to go when you usually only need 5 and now you need 20? That's money that could go to your shareholders and make your stock value go up. Fuck that shit. The National health IS National Security.

3: Complete and total control over our borders. I don't mind people coming and going who come through the front gate and have been cleared to do so. But FUCK being able to just waltz in here.

4: Reduce military spending by at least 50%. Shut down at least half of the 800+ military bases we have spread all over the goddam planet. Maintain a force large enough to ensure nobody ever tries to come here, and maintain the ability to strike anywhere in the world if we need. But it's time to stop being the world's police and it's waaaaayyyyyy past time to get out of the ME and pretty much quarantine that entire shit hole. If they ever decide to grow up and join the civilized world in the 21st century, good on them. In the meantime, you fuckers fight amongst yourselves. Raise your head out of the sandbox and we'll shithammer into dust. No invasions, no occupations, no "bringing them democracy". Just fucking annihilate the offenders and then dare the next one to raise his hand and ask for it.

5: Use that money to rebuild our own infrastructure into something a second world country wouldn't be ashamed claim. Put the CoE on this.
- Updated smart grid so we can move toward renewables and insulate it from both attack and natural disaster. A robust electric grid and clean ways to power it will be the backbone of our future.
- Repair of all roads and bridges, and update our rail system to modern standards. We need to be able to move ourselves and our goods with zero delays.
- Replacement of all lead contaminated water system pipes and fittings. What the FUCK is Flint Michigan still doing with lead contamination?!?!!
- National high speed internet. Information and the access to it is one of our most critical resources.

6: National funding of elections. Candidates can accept ZERO dollars from corporations or individuals. Politicians can accept ZERO dollars from lobbyists. Fuck our leaders being beholden to whatever corporation or billionaire foots the bill for their campaign. When the American people foot the bill, you're beholden to the American people and no one else.

[Turdacious]

Isn’t the candidate who advocates that position getting his butt kicked by Biden? Right or wrong it isn’t politically popular.

[nafod]

You got my vote, Alfred, and not just because you’re in your early 60s, you spring chicken.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

Isn’t the candidate who advocates that position getting his butt kicked by Biden? Right or wrong it isn’t politically popular.

I think the only candidate who comes close to that platform has been actively silenced by the DNC. The only thing on that list Bernie is really for us a national healthcare system. I think he's still pretty weak on border security and national security in general. Too much wokeness in the Bernie camp.

[Turdacious]

1. Declare Rachel Carson an enemy of humanity. She wasn't necessarily terrible herself, but the people inspired by her are. Is a healthy population of bald eagles worth hundreds of thousands dead annually from malaria and an rapidly increasing annual risk of kids being born with tiny heads? DDT needs to make a comeback in a big way.

[seeahill]

From the CDC:
Approximately 1,500 malaria cases and five deaths are reported in the United States annually, mostly in returned travelers.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

It's taken so long for a malaria vaccine because there's no money in it outside of donations and government contributions. Can't charge poor brown people $2000 for a cure if they don't have 2 cow patties to rub together. I think they underestimate the number of westerners who would pay that or more to get a malaria vaccine before traveling to the Outside Magazine shithole dejure (see what I did there?).

There's an org that shows you the best bang for your buck on charitable donations. For malaria, it's simply buying bed nets to keep the mosquitos at bay.

[Grandpa's Spells]

Isn’t the candidate who advocates that position getting his butt kicked by Biden? Right or wrong it isn’t politically popular.

I think the only candidate who comes close to that platform has been actively silenced by the DNC. The only thing on that list Bernie is really for us a national healthcare system. I think he's still pretty weak on border security and national security in general. Too much wokeness in the Bernie camp.

Italy and China have national healthcare systems and got buttfucked anyway. We will get it for dismantling pandemic response team and having a walking personality disorder for POTUS.

[Turdacious]

There's an org that shows you the best bang for your buck on charitable donations. For malaria, it's simply buying bed nets to keep the mosquitos at bay.

That's because malaria nets can be purchased with a couple of clicks and are easy for small non-profits to distribute-- but they only help when you're in bed. Larger scale mosquito control programs are hard for charitable organizations to do but has greater results.

[Grandpa's Spells]

Been wondering about WWII and war bonds, and if there’s a way to prop up nonessential businesses that are forced to shutter with long term (nearly) interest free loans that are guaranteed by govt if certain criteria are met. Somebody pointed out that 20% of furloughed workers aren’t just going to sit around and starve to death.

It sounds like the GOP is pushing for $500B payroll tax cut, which will do nothing, but maybe they figure they can threaten to drive the car off the cliff. The only good news is there is time to recover from a recession before the election, and I think Trump will do whatever it takes to pull that off, even if it means putting the brakes on the grift.

[seeahill]

As a guy who has malaria. I can say it sucks. About half a million people a year die from it. Mostly kids under 5. Mostly in Africa. South Asia a close second.

My point to Turd was that we in the US don't suffer from it. He asked if a few bald eagles were worth so many deaths. CDC says there are almost no deaths in the US from malaria.

Or perhaps he was talking about all those bald eagles in Tanzania.

[nafod]

It sounds like the GOP is pushing for $500B payroll tax cut, which will do nothing...

Everybody can see through that one. Reducing taxes on a 0$ paycheck is nuts.

[Gav]

It’s not like you lot to want to run before you can walk
I’d be a lot more worried about what you should be doing right now to stop this shitstorm. Remember you have to be still alive to implement new strategies.

[Turdacious]

As a guy who has malaria. I can say it sucks. About half a million people a year die from it. Mostly kids under 5. Mostly in Africa. South Asia a close second.

My point to Turd was that we in the US don't suffer from it. He asked if a few bald eagles were worth so many deaths. CDC says there are almost no deaths in the US from malaria.

Or perhaps he was talking about all those bald eagles in Tanzania.

It's a new global world and vector threats don't respect national borders.

High risk of malaria in third world countries hurts their economic prospects and has significant economic impact on developed countries (UK data-- https://www.malarianomore.org.uk/file/2 ... n=NLusQJ-m)

Zika is a threat that has crossed our border and caused significant damage to Americans in America. When one of our trading partners has a problem with Zika, it has impacts on us similar to the ones caused by malaria.

[johno]

It sounds like the GOP is pushing for $500B payroll tax cut, which will do nothing...

Everybody can see through that one. Reducing taxes on a 0$ paycheck is nuts.

What are you morons promoting? That businesses closing will have the greatest impact on those who already didn't have a job?

[nafod]

It sounds like the GOP is pushing for $500B payroll tax cut, which will do nothing...

Everybody can see through that one. Reducing taxes on a 0$ paycheck is nuts.

What are you morons promoting? That businesses closing will have the greatest impact on those who already didn't have a job?

Payroll taxes generally fall into two categories: deductions from an employee’s wages, and taxes paid by the employer based on the employee's wages. If you’re not paying anybody, how does a percentage decrease make a difference?

[Turdacious]

It sounds like the GOP is pushing for $500B payroll tax cut, which will do nothing...

Everybody can see through that one. Reducing taxes on a 0$ paycheck is nuts.

What are you morons promoting? That businesses closing will have the greatest impact on those who already didn't have a job?

Payroll taxes generally fall into two categories: deductions from an employee’s wages, and taxes paid by the employer based on the employee's wages. If you’re not paying anybody, how does a percentage decrease make a difference?

It lowers labor cost in an attempt to offset the decrease in revenue businesses are feeling.

A solution that gave people cash would probably require people to leave home to actually sign up-- little hard to do during a pandemic.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

A little philosophy/life coaching channel I follow on the tube posted this. It's pretty much what I'm getting at here. At some point we'll have to realize that a society based on mass consumption at an ever increasing rate isn't sustainable and certainly isn't conducive to well being on any real level. Maybe we need to rethink how we measure our success as a nation. GDP is a piss poor way of doing it. Cancer and crime are fantastic for GDP for instance, because they both pump massive amounts of money into the system, but they are detrimental to the society at large both mentally and physically. I'd like to see a fundamental change in the world but I don't think I'll live to see it. As productivity has increased due to automation and efficiency, we haven't seen an increase in leisure time or "happiness". What we've seen is an artificially inflated growth in demand of throw away junk to justify keeping noses to the grindstone and feed the GDP growth machine. Not sure what the solutions are, but what we're doing isn't working.

For much of history, the status quo is made to feel impregnable. Nothing new can be tried; every provocative idea is to be batted away; this is the way we’ve always done it and always will. Visionary thoughts for reorganising society, for amending our ways of working, earning, loving or nursing ourselves, are made to feel outlandish and impractical; the current state is inviolable. Except, of course, it isn’t. Crises reveal that - under sufficient pressure, and with the imaginative restlessness bred by necessity - pretty much everything is up for being rethought: the money supply, the education system, the hospital service, community support, entertainment, leisure, love. We might live wholly differently and in some ways, far more fruitfully, joyfully, kindly and efficiently. We have over the years learnt everything we need to know about stagnation; we have a chance, once the storm has abated, to remember possibility. After so much horror that was unforeseen, the non-existence of a beautiful idea - however apparently fanciful - need never again be any sort of conclusive argument against it.

Every brush with death, individually or societally, begs us to address one large and otherwise fatefully ignored question: how would we really, really prefer to live? The storm is our tragic chance to piece together more profound and satisfying answers.

[newguy]

A little philosophy/life coaching channel I follow on the tube posted this. It's pretty much what I'm getting at here. At some point we'll have to realize that a society based on mass consumption at an ever increasing rate isn't sustainable and certainly isn't conducive to well being on any real level. Maybe we need to rethink how we measure our success as a nation. GDP is a piss poor way of doing it. Cancer and crime are fantastic for GDP for instance, because they both pump massive amounts of money into the system, but they are detrimental to the society at large both mentally and physically. I'd like to see a fundamental change in the world but I don't think I'll live to see it. As productivity has increased due to automation and efficiency, we haven't seen an increase in leisure time or "happiness". What we've seen is an artificially inflated growth in demand of throw away junk to justify keeping noses to the grindstone and feed the GDP growth machine. Not sure what the solutions are, but what we're doing isn't working.

For much of history, the status quo is made to feel impregnable. Nothing new can be tried; every provocative idea is to be batted away; this is the way we’ve always done it and always will. Visionary thoughts for reorganising society, for amending our ways of working, earning, loving or nursing ourselves, are made to feel outlandish and impractical; the current state is inviolable. Except, of course, it isn’t. Crises reveal that - under sufficient pressure, and with the imaginative restlessness bred by necessity - pretty much everything is up for being rethought: the money supply, the education system, the hospital service, community support, entertainment, leisure, love. We might live wholly differently and in some ways, far more fruitfully, joyfully, kindly and efficiently. We have over the years learnt everything we need to know about stagnation; we have a chance, once the storm has abated, to remember possibility. After so much horror that was unforeseen, the non-existence of a beautiful idea - however apparently fanciful - need never again be any sort of conclusive argument against it.

Every brush with death, individually or societally, begs us to address one large and otherwise fatefully ignored question: how would we really, really prefer to live? The storm is our tragic chance to piece together more profound and satisfying answers.

Maybe those spring breakers in Florida are right. Fuck it all. The economy. Flattening the curve. Social distancing. Just fuck it all and party you face off at the beach.

[motherjuggs&speed]

Flattening the curve is mostly delaying the inevitable and increasing the cost. We are going to get crushed. When we slow down the production, we are bringing on a lot of other ills. I say it's better to bring on a steep global depression now and get the outbreak and economic collapse over with before winter.

I think the death toll in the U.S. will be much higher than the predictions I've seen. In two months, three tops, we will see a societal collapse. Think Panic in Year Zero. There are a lot of warm fuzzy stories and clips on twitter right now but that won't last. When societies experience economic hardship, civilization disappears and things get ugly. Add a health crisis on top of it and there is no more we. To be clear, I'm not saying the government on any level will go away, it won't. I'm saying that we really don't know how bad things will get since none of us have experienced it. What are people going to do when grandma dies at home and the system is so busy that they can't pick her up today? The family will put her outside, they'll have to. What happens when the only grocery store in a town shuts down due to chaos? It doesn't have to be a full metal riot for the store to say screw this, we're closing. And then the highway is blocked off, so what then?

I would like to think that the spirit of innovation and adaptability will win out, that we'll take this one on the chin, cremate our 10+ million dead, and make things work again. As it is I think we'll have the worst of it: 100 million infected by May, economic collapse with all kinds of knock-on effects to boot, oppressive government decrees, and no hope.

The Starks were right: Winter is Coming.

[Alfred_E._Neuman]

I sincerely hope this virus doesn't knock us down near that far in regards to body count or complete societal collapse. I'd imagine a total lock down and rationing until it died down long before that. I'd also say that the infection rates in the US are MUCH higher right now are known. One mathematician I saw showed how based on positive tests based on the few tests we're doing now probably mean 5-10 cases are unreported for every positive. That means 100k+ have it in the US right now, and it's probably been here for a bare minimum of weeks before the first actual reported positive. That's actually good news if a lot of people who think they have a really bad cold or flu actually have Covid-19 and recover in a few days.

You really think things are that different now to the double whammy of the 30's/40's of Great Depression and WWII? Roosevelt faced down two of maybe the three or four existential crises that this country has faced and we came out the other side. Too bad we don't have a Roosevelt willing to put on the big boy pants and actually lead.

[motherjuggs&speed]

I don't see it that way. To us, the Depression is history and we can look at how good things were beginning in 1949 or so. For 20 years things sucked, hard. To most people, admittedly including me, the Depression was "people tightened their belts and made do". There had to be all kinds of horrors that people didn't much mention, it might be in some scholarly books but it's not in the narrative. Things like the wife becoming a de facto prostitute to get food and the husband beating her up when he found out. The daughter shacking up with some abuser because he was the only one who could feed her. The youngest daughter going to live with a distant relative who made her, um, sing for her supper. Kids leaving home and going out to do who knows what since there wasn't enough food to go around. Those things don't fit in a Ron Howard movie but they had to happen. I think people have always been people. But history, at least popular history, glosses over things.

San Francisco wasn't the same after Rodney King. The riots there were nowhere near L.A. level but they were bad and things changed afterward. The cops were a lot more aggressive and stayed that way, the blacks were much more aggressive, I mean every single white person I know including me was jacked at least once, and people in general were not as energetic anymore. People say we got through it but did we really? We changed a lot after 9/11 and it can't go back. People have lost so much of themselves, submitting to so much tyranny. In large ways and small, things changed. You all can think of specific little or not so little things in your area. The attitude in general changed too. One example of what I mean by a "small" change: In 2000, people could go into the county office building to use the restroom. Just walk in, no problem, and if someone who worked there saw you it was "how ya doin?".After 9/11 you had to sign in. Then show an ID. Then you couldn't get in at all without having official business and showing an ID. Thousands of those things make life different and worse. And change the prevailing mood.

I also have a different view of FDR but let's not get sidetracked. Certainly we can't expect sound or inspiring leadership this time. I watched a couple of Governor Cuomo's pressers and while I don't agree with all of it, he seems to be making a real effort to do what he thinks best and to explain that well to the people. His leadership has been impressive and inspiring. There isn't and won't be anything like that nationally.

We lost over 400,000 people in the war. Millions more wounded and many men who made it were never the same again. I don't think the long view is correct because we don't live in the long view, we live in the here and now.

[nafod]

I don't think this is the BIG pandemic. There is plenty of room for a virus that is either more lethal or more contagious, or both. Which will come someday in the future. So might as well get in the practice with this one.

I think this is going to be a nut punch to globalism. The problem with a totally interconnected world is that you can get these big Black Swan events blowing through the system. Having small tightly integrated networks with weak interconnects between the small units gives robustness. Pandemics, economic crises, or both at the same time.

We can bring this thing down to manageable levels by mid-summer. There's a test in the works that could take 45 minutes. Once we have things squished a little, we can use a shit-ton of testing and contact tracing to keep it in control while people get back to living. If we location track with cellphones, we can insta-contact trace. Requires giving up some civil liberties for a bit.

The country made it through the Civil War, where 1/8th of the men died in fighting or disease. We'll make it through this too.

[motherjuggs&speed]

600,000 people died in the Civil War. They didn't make it through anything.

And there is no giving up civil liberties "for a bit'. It's a ratchet, it never goes back. Every temporary measure is eventually permanent. Income tax was temporary to pay for the war. The draft was temporary.

And it doesn't matter to me, nor should it matter to any of us, if 50 years from now people look at 2020 and say "we got through it". Lots of us won't. Many others will have to make really grim choices. All of us are going to have a reduced standard of living, some very much so. All of us are going to be subject to martial law whether it's called that or not. And I don't buy the temporary point either, even if it were true. The CBP stopped and hassled me for a while just because (not at the border). You could say that was temporary. My view is that I was prevented from going about my life and held there while they asked insulting and intrusive questions which they have no legal authority to do. I refused to answer most of them and I'm sick over answering any of them. You could say "nothing happened" but it was an imposition on my life and also scary since who knows what they were going to do, check out YT for some dash cams of this going really badly for citizens going about their lives.

People will say it's necessary but it's too late for containment. How many cases do we really have? 100,000? More?

[Turdacious]

I don't think this is the BIG pandemic. There is plenty of room for a virus that is either more lethal or more contagious, or both. Which will come someday in the future. So might as well get in the practice with this one.

I think this is going to be a nut punch to globalism. The problem with a totally interconnected world is that you can get these big Black Swan events blowing through the system. Having small tightly integrated networks with weak interconnects between the small units gives robustness. Pandemics, economic crises, or both at the same time.

We can bring this thing down to manageable levels by mid-summer. There's a test in the works that could take 45 minutes. Once we have things squished a little, we can use a shit-ton of testing and contact tracing to keep it in control while people get back to living. If we location track with cellphones, we can insta-contact trace. Requires giving up some civil liberties for a bit.

The country made it through the Civil War, where 1/8th of the men died in fighting or disease. We'll make it through this too.

My guess is that the real death toll is going to happen in the third world, with the comorbid factors there that we don't deal with here. Things like malnutrition (Venezuela, North Korea, etc...), untreated AIDS (sub-Saharan Africa), plagues of locusts (Africa), or constant war (Yemen, Afghanistan, etc..). If a stable country like Iran is facing huge death tolls, I can't imagine the scale of death and misery these other countries are gonna face.