Can we trust Italy's numbers? They're attributing any questionable death to corona to hide their embarrassing influenza death rate. This can almost explain USA's minuscule death toll at 500 (influenza season averages 200/day).
Visits to emergency for Influenza-likeIllness+Pneumonia is at ~1.5x a bad flu season's peak and ~4x a normal flu season. Admissions for the same are at ~2-3x.
For a week I've been wondering about Germany's numbers. Maybe they are doing something wrong, or maybe it is China and Italy that are giving us bad data.
There are several MSM sites reporting the death toll of US corona victims and they hover around 500 total at the moment. Note that they're very liberally grouping deaths into the corona bucket so I expect the number to be much lower in a post mortem. It's going to be like Trump's 2016 win where everyone was left scratching their heads and wondering how their math/fake science failed them.
My flu death rate of 200/day comes from the CDC's last year figure of 34000 / 6 months (a really stretched flu season).
Thanks for referencing the cdc numbers. Google quickly confirmed that, and is what I was asking for. I hoped to have it per month, but don't see that immediately.
Any chance you know where to find this for other countries?
It is dumb. In the USA Corona deaths @ 150 so far while flu deaths @ 34K/year. Even Swine Flu had 4K deaths and MSM didn't bat an eye. Italy proving single payer socialized medicine has less talented clinicians and administration.
At some point a few months from now, IF you are proven tragically wrong; what action will you undertake?
Apologize and review your assumptions and outlook for all future circumstances?
Or, as I suspect, pretend you never posted this and create a revisionist history of what your thoughts, opinions and stances were?
The first sentence indicates ignorance of math / timescales; second one indicates ignorance of other places; and I'll be genuinely curious if there is any way facts will ever penetrate, or whether you will find some way to rewrite history of your opinions in the future :-/
Guarantee you deaths will be less than swine flu deaths. But you will just say it's because of our amazing response, the same response being treated by MSM as inadequate. Just remember it was the Democrats/MSM willing to go scorched earth on the economy to push this pandemic narrative.
Lots of misinformation in this thread. I host economical listings on airbnb and have had over 300 stays in the last 2 years and get plenty of bad reviews. Half of my guests are repeats who are just there for work and don't bother to review. The other half will leave 2, 3, 4 stars largely because they're not used to being around hispanics and blacks, which triggers airbnb to threaten me with being delisted, which would screw over my returning guests who are happy with the value. I price my listing at the bottom 25% median and clearly state that the neighborhood is multiculturally and socioeconomically diverse. It is a tremendous value for the area but there will always be guests with 5 star tastes and 1 star budget.
100%. The safest cities in America have the least gun control. Maine passed constitutional carry 5 years ago with much resistance and last year was voted the safest place to live in America. Meanwhile cities like Chicago with the strictest laws are murder capitals. Liberals then say but the guns are coming from X, Y, Z! Well why aren't X, Y, Z murder capitals? Let's deal with the root of the problem and clearly it's not guns/the symptom.
Just to get my personal bias out of the way: I'm pro-gun, and strongly pro-individual freedom across the board. That goes up to the extent that I don't even care what types of weapons someone owns, so long as they don't use them to harm others.
That said, the violence problems in Democrat-run cities is not because of the guns, nor is it due to gun regulation. There were a slew of poor governmental decisions that have led to massive inequality, poor social conditions, and fostered an us-vs-them culture through the militarizing of police and criminalizing of the poor.
It turns out that if people feel cornered with no way to improve their lives or escape their poor situation, they resort to organized crime or other desperate measures.
TLDR - Crime is primarily driven by social circumstances. Criminal culture is cultivated generationally by those circumstances.
It doesn't help when there are insane regulations like dedicating double digit percentage of new units to be "affordable"/subsidized/section 8. Anyone with a full time minimum wage job would not qualify for "affordable" housing, you literally have to not work at all, it's such a scam.
Don't get me started on this. I helped an friend get into below market rate (BMR) housing in SF. She paid approximately $330k with almost no money down for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo in the center of Hayes Valley. Today, equivalent market rate units in her building sell for $1.5k to $2m.
Basically, there is a supply of homes that are available to you at three points: 70%, 90% and 110% of the median income. How these three points are chosen I don't know. Very few are at 110% of median income. Most are available to those that make 70% or 90% of the median income.
The reason this is bullshit is because it's estimated that you need to earn about 400% of the median income to be able to afford a market-rate home in SF. This pretty much leaves everyone between 110% and 400% of the median income without any real options.
Worse yet, by making a policy that covers the just above the center of the income distribution to the bottom, you basically disincentivize those voters from becoming active and involved in supporting solutions that help the entire distribution. Basically those between 110% and 400% end up a permanent minority unable to achieve support for policies that will help their cohort.
Needless to say, I don't live in California anymore, despite earning almost 3x what she earns because I can't really afford to buy into the market. California is fundamentally broken.
> She paid approximately $330k with almost no money down for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo in the center of Hayes Valley. Today, equivalent market rate units in her building sell for $1.5k to $2m.
How does that work if/when she wants to sell the place? Is there some sort of cap on what she can sell it for?
She can only sell it for the purchase price adjusted for changes in the median income. If the median income in the city goes up (which it does over time because lower income renters are eventually forced out of the city), then she can sell it for more. It obviously won't increase as fast as market rates, but it will go for more than she purchased it. The house needs to be sold back through the BMR program. It can only be willed if her heir(s) also qualify for the BMR program at the time of death.
At the end of the day, she gets the benefit of not having to tie up cash in home equity. While other people are paying $6000 or more a month in a lease, she's paying a little over $2000 a month in a lease and gets to put all the excess she has into more liquid assets like an index fund.
There are several ways to handle this, but a common one is to have a deed restriction that sets a maximum resale price and requires the buyer to meet income eligibility criteria.
The entire idea is preposterous. The solution to affordable housing is oversupply of housing. Gov should incentivize new construction to reduce prices and let the market fix it.
Strong disagree, the solution to affordable housing includes a very large amount of private/free market housing, but the free market won't really address the needs of people below 30% of the median income. Additionally, good affordable housing is one of the best anti poverty tools that we have. IMO the long term solution is robust private market housing construction for the middle class, and a robust public housing construction system for those who truly need it.
Anyone using Japan as an example of housing prices does not understand Japanese housing.
Zoning in Japan is done at a national level, not local. Once an area is designated for housing, housing goes there. Because of this there is a constant flow of new housing, which drives the price of old houses down.
This is not possible anywhere zoning is done at a local level. Anytime one person has the ability to stop another from building you immediately create NIMBYdom and where the NIMBY exists, more housing does not because the NIMBY cares about nothing but their own property value. But that also feeds into the insane American idea of housing as an investment rather than a place to keep birds from crapping on you.
Until the NIMBY is eliminated, and housing is no longer sold as an investment, housing costs will not go down.
> the free market won't really address the needs of people below 30% of the median income.
Why? Do you think a poor person's vote is worth more to the government than their wallet would be to a house builder?
Is it impossible to make an acceptable house at 30% the cost of a median earner's house?
Your reasoning is valid for people whose productivity approaches zero, in which case welfare can indeed be needed. But the current housing problem is systematic and touches a far bigger percent of the population, and thus shouldn't be solved with charity.
Imagine you are a property developer. You borrow money to buy land and want to build as many housing units on that land as you are allowed to and sell them for as much as you can. Buying granite counter tops in bulk and selling the housing units as luxury is going to make you a lot more than trying to cater to the bottom of the market, so nobody does, unless forced.
Do it enough times and there will be an oversupply of such housing, pushing price down to the cost of land + construction. With no profit margin at that price developers will target higher and lower price points. The solution is always just more construction.
The problem is that in most areas the government is primarily voted in by existing landowners, who don't want more housing, and don't care if lower-income renters are being forced out.
The non-landowners are either not abundant enough, or only plan to live here for a short enough period of time that they don't bother to get involved in local politics.
While this is the whole "NIMBY" thing... is that really a problem? No one complains that Americans can't vote in Britains elections, to set their laws. The whole point of voting is that the people who actively live there get to decide what happens to their city.
Yes, that's a problem. Nobody that bought a home on the vague notion that they HAVE to make money off of it when they sell it will ever vote to have a homeless shelter built across the road.
I think the cause and effect is intertwined. Many of the people who now plan to only stay for a few years have that attitude because they feel disenfranchised and locked out of the planning process, while at the same time being priced out of the ability to put down roots.
Here in New York, at least, the eligibility for those units is based on the median income in the neighborhood where the building is. In some cases these affordable units end up with requirements that are pretty substantial, e.g. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/housi...
SF and NYC in a nutshell: High taxes to fund entitlement programs like "affordable housing" and the homeless industrious complex, high regulations that only allow mega corps to succeed, landlord unfriendly laws so no chances taken on good borderline tenants, and no firearms for law abiding citizens so criminals are emboldened.
On the flip side: high taxes means access to things like public transportation, meaning that you don't need to own and maintain a car. And crime rates in NYC, at least, are at absolute historic lows. The firearms part of your statement really makes no sense at all.
Some other pluses: a huge concentration of culture, entertainment, dining. Regional transportation hubs to travel to other cities is relatively quick.
As far as taxes go, yes voting left tends to result in that, but in my experience high housing costs is not a left vs right issue. Where I live most left-leaning voters would choose legislation that would bring down housing costs.
