Second part, you're dead wrong in two areas. Manufacturing of essential goods continues in haste. And, stimulus is essential for people have lost their jobs and need to buy food. So take your theoretical keyboard economics degree and leave it at the door. Let's take away your source of income, ability to work and see how you feed your family.
It will keep people in their houses in the very short term, but it won’t fix the overall economic problems if the economy is frozen for a year or more.
Don't mess around in the US for peanuts if you can speak/read/write Mandarin and English. Head to Shenzhen without delay. If you happen to be white, then you're worth your weight in gold. If you can do technical things, then you're a magician too. Furthermore, you could even sell yourself as a manual proofreader/editor/translator as well.
Relocate your abilities where they can be best utilized and compensated where things are designed, engineered and/or manufactured.
Come and help us source centrifugal compressors from Chinese factories on openvent.org ($50 ventilator project. Yes.). Need to call up factories and ask about their production capabilities and to send out samples. Very interesting group of people have gathered around the project and you will get some good contacts.
Davidzweig, thanks for posting. I'll take a look at your initiative. I'm already involved in one COVID-related volunteer effort, but may be able to spare some time.
Wow. Thanks. I never even thought of moving to Shenzhen, but that's a smart idea. I wonder whether I have any 1st- or 2nd-degree contacts over there who could help me get set up.
Not to be a downer, this is great advice but sadly bad timing, with the virus turning many countries isolationist (I think China is not allowing foreigners in, right now), and the next few months' economic outlook will be uncertain, in China as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-26/the-secon...
But well, when the world returns to the way it was, going to China is a great idea.
I've never worked in China but I spent years wanting to work in Southeast Asia and being put off by visa requirements. Eventually I learned that the way to do it is come over on a regular business visa you just get like a tourist visa, then find someone to hire you and then the employer sorts out the visa. If you don't find a job before the business visa runs out, just do a visa run to Hong Kong.
$23.6 trillion plus whatever else this situation will cost. I would guess $5-7 trillion more, at a minimum, because it will cost $1.2 trillion a month for shelter-in-place UBI.. and then however much of many trillions in loans go into default or are forgiven.
Some additional spending on unemployment insurance, SNAP, and some other programs that are going to be hit harder with millions of people out of work overnight. But overall, there is actually more spending directed towards businesses here than towards individuals ($775b for business vs $560b for UBI and unemployment).
It's pretty funny to see Democrats patting themselves on the back about what a good deal they got for working americans. This is pretty much a handout to big business, and they wrote you a token check to get it shoved through.
No, what passed was a one-time payment. Due to the Senate recess it was pass their bill, unmodified, or pass nothing at all.
There is some general talk in the house (in particular on the left) that this isn't really enough to handle what is shaping up to be a 4-6 month crisis at absolute minimum and we should do additional payments in the future but that's not what passed, and it's unclear whether the Senate has any willingness to pass anything further.
The Senate took off from DC for a month so nothing will be done before they get back. On this or any other coronavirus-related legislation.
I stopped eating meat about 8 years ago and think about this almost every day. It's far worse than just pandemic evolution by keeping too many animals too close to wild animals, to each other and to humans.
- Climate change
- Antibiotic resistance
- Peak phosphorus
- Nutrition availability
- Water usage
- Pollution of air, water and soil (lakes of pig shit sprayed into the air)
somewhere down the list is animal cruelty, but most people are selfish, unconvinced and don't care if it happens elsewhere as long as they don't have to watch it.
If humans are to survive, meat (and resource-intensive substitutes) and fossil fuels have to go bye-bye because they're too risky in the long-term.
Chocked full of misleading, regurgitated government propaganda:
- Facemasks work if worn, fitted, tested and removed properly. Plus, it's not just about the person protecting themselves, but protecting others. The problem is for-profit hospitals and ineffective government (HHS' SNS) failed to prepare, and just-in-time inventory doesn't work during a crisis. It's like telling people to plant trees or recycle to "fight" climate change. There should've been billions of masks and respirators ready and given to anyone and everyone. I happen to have a dozen or so 3M NIOSH N95 respirators because of one of the worst forest fires in decades, but there aren't any hospitals for miles.
- Eye protection, with indirect or no venting, is also essential. Droplets in the eyes is a no-go.
- Hand washing doesn't have much to do with this current outbreak because it's not the primary mode of transmission. This is habits-manipulation health theater. Maybe some people need it, but this comes across as hygiene theater bikeshedding.
- Manipulating people into grossly under-preparing (two weeks? what a joke.) and making unnecessary trips, putting themselves, their families and others in danger is irresponsible. 3-6 months of shelf-stable food that would be eaten anyways is a more sensible number, and reduces risky trips by 90%.
From "the paper of record" that decides what people "should" believe.
There's already a 45-minute rtPCR test from Cepheid and a simple 10 minute ELISA test from SureScreen (which serves a different need, antibody detection rather than infection detection).
It doesn't appear to have an FDA EUA so it may not be immediately usable in the US.
The user-friendly UX and compact size seem good.
The cycle time seems to be on the slow side when minutes count in an ER / ICU situation. ~9 tests per day per machine seems slow, costly and likely to occupy a lot of space for the machines and the cartridges (which contain reagents that have to be kept chilled).
This seems overall like a timely product to solve immediate needs. It could've been better but it was designed quickly.
The lag time between that much money turning into a country-size amount of equipment that can be used by ordinary people without error might well be longer than the quarantine period.
I've seen some manufacturing miracles, but that's a really tall order.
> that can be used by ordinary people without error
Social media has been great for airline oxygen mask designers as it has shown the failure rates of real world emergencies. I imagine that even with highly trained people like medical staff, the problems of proper PPE usage are just so much worse. People have a really hard time understanding things clearly.
Second part, you're dead wrong in two areas. Manufacturing of essential goods continues in haste. And, stimulus is essential for people have lost their jobs and need to buy food. So take your theoretical keyboard economics degree and leave it at the door. Let's take away your source of income, ability to work and see how you feed your family.