General News Thread

[Mattias]

Or you could just not spend a trillion dollars on new tanks for wars you aren't fighting.

[Mcjon01]

Tell me a tank won't be at least as effective as bleach for fighting coronavirus you can't

[Tobias]

I mean a tank seems harder to swallow

/or insert in your bunghole

[rxrx]

Despite all these discussions, I think the parties will eventually use the China threat card to win. This will be especially useful for this election since it fits the narrative that China is at fault, but not the leaders of the USA who is, you know suppose to protect the people.

[Rafflesiac]

Tell me a tank won't be at least as effective as bleach for fighting coronavirus you can't

Ahh, the North Korea Solution.

[Trubo]

Same energy

[Twelveseal]

Lol, Reviewers...

[asterism42]

Maybe this is just my 'biased' impression, Toby. But it honestly sounds like to me you're saying 'but the scorpion PROMISED not to sting me! Because if he does we'll both drown.'

[Twelveseal]

4.8% economy shrinkage in the first quarter. Next quarter's expected to be much worse. Potentially as much as 37%, or so I've heard. Considering that fat Republican "tax reform" required something like consistent 4% growth to pay for itself, it's a wonder no one's talking about it. Or getting rid of it for a more progressive model to pay for all this money-printing they're doing...

Go figure, a tax cut for the rich fucks everyone else over. Whodathunk it?

[Tobias]

Maybe this is just my 'biased' impression, Toby. But it honestly sounds like to me you're saying 'but the scorpion PROMISED not to sting me! Because if he does we'll both drown.'

If you want to use the river analogy it’s more like there is a man who say “you could cross using the bridge but it’s about 5 miles that way. It’s a bit of a walk to get there”

and the other guy is saying

”don’t do all that work, I’m pretty sure we can get across if you sat in my shoulders and I walked across the water!”

EDIT:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/opini...ver/index.html

this was worth the read.

[Twelveseal]

If you're using that one, the first guy should warn you the bridge might be out when you get there...

[Pendant]

If you want to use the river analogy it’s more like there is a man who say “you could cross using the bridge but it’s about 5 miles that way. It’s a bit of a walk to get there”

and the other guy is saying

”don’t do all that work, I’m pretty sure we can get across if you sat in my shoulders and I walked across the water!”

The great con of neoliberalism was ingraining in people that politics is actually difficult and complex when it's really not. These are simple resource and distribution choices and we repeatedly make the wrong ones. It's not quite a magic wand because it takes work to set up the apparatus needed for a sustainable national health care system, for instance, but, that sort of groundwork aside, it is quite easily attainable. Through insisting on complicated bureaucracies for means testing and having arcane tax laws elites have, quite brilliantly, managed to confuse a critical mass of people into believing that politics is above their pay grade so that their helplessness becomes internalized and the only solution they can see is to defer to their betters.

If anything the recent Covid bailouts are this very dynamic in action. For all the hand-wringing and concern trolling over the debt and deficit it seems nothing really stops us from making the money machine go brr and throw trillions of dollars as if with a... magic wand.

[SpoonyViking]

Trillions of dollars which didn't even work, apparently.

[Tobias]

If you're using that one, the first guy should warn you the bridge might be out when you get there...

hey you know what, I’ll straight up give you that. And you have to climb through an annoying rocky ass path to get there. And it’s actually 15 miles away because the guy is bad with distance calculations.

sure, I’ll run with that.

[Twelveseal]

Depends on who you ask, Spoony. For me, no. For real estate investors...

[Mcjon01]

If you want to use the river analogy it’s more like there is a man who say “you could cross using the bridge but it’s about 5 miles that way. It’s a bit of a walk to get there”

and the other guy is saying

”don’t do all that work, I’m pretty sure we can get across if you sat in my shoulders and I walked across the water!”

EDIT:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/opini...ver/index.html

this was worth the read.

You say that but I have always picked "Ford the River" every single game of Oregon Trail I've played to date, and I always will

[Tobias]

Replace dysentery with Covid 19 and we are all playing a round of Oregon trail

[Twelveseal]

Nah. Not enough dead people yet for that.

[rxrx]

Nah. Not enough dead people yet for that.

I don't think people dying matters as long as the rich and powerful still earn money. Just feed the fools with propaganda and they will support whatever crap the government throws out.

[RacingeR]

Trillions of dollars which didn't even work, apparently.

They weren't adequately used.

Lemme get serious and put on my econ major hat for a moment here and give a bit of a lowdown on how I see the economic situation.

Look, the economy is going to tank no matter what. It either tanks due to months, even a year of nigh-complete paralysis, plus the massive amount of unemployment that is already happening right now... or it is going to tank due to ignoring the quarantine and the resulting amount of death having the same effect anyway. The economy is going to tank no matter what, there really isn't anything to be discussed in this particular angle of the issue.

See, the real issue would be how to contain the resulting economic fallout, how to diminish the impact it will have over the population, industry, and a long etc. as well as to keep like half of your total population sinking into poverty due to unemployment and all these other factors. All of this would help to a faster economic recovery and reactivation.

Of course, accomplishing this is a task more difficult than it sounds, and it requires social action directed to the lower reaches of the society, something that's considered completely heretical in the USA. If those trillion dollars were used there, to improve the chances of economic recovery and to sustain the population during the quarantine period, it wouldn't be an immediate net improvement of the economy, but it would help massively with the recovery that would come after the completely inevitable crisis. Instead those trillion dollars were pissed away to shield the big corporations and their entreperneurs from the crisis, trying to stall it to no much result at all. Of course, you have to consider that Trump is, you know, owner or investor of many of those big corporations and has a vested interest into shielding himself from this crisis.

Now, what has resulted is a very interesting scenario, because the upper bubble that existed as a separate entity in yankeeland got pierced, firstly due to the universality of the coronavirus, secondly due to the fact that the big businessmen and the many parasites that control the US government and became its establishment want to protect their economic interests, which has led them to clash against the "people" in a general sense, who mostly want to live, without losing their job in the process. And this is the first time since... a ridiculous amount of time that this clash happens, while it is a constant in most other countries in the world.

This has also some obvious repercussions in the political scenario. See, Trump's big card was that, in the macroeconomy, and only in the macroeconomy (I'm not quite sure on how the US was looking internally before the coronavirus crisis hit) term, he could claim to have been better than what Hillary would have been, simply due to taking protectionist measures that benefited in overall terms the country's internal industry and whatnot, while Hillary would have picked stagnation and continued with the same policy that Obama continued from Bush and so on in an unbroken string of assholery.

Trump's actions here were interesting because it broke off from the Neoliberal orthodoxy, specifically at thinking long-term while most neolibs are often focused on short-term gains, often murdering the golden-egg-laying chicken in the process. However, the moment the coronavirus hit he switched back to short-term vision and went full blown extreme neoliberal... which now has set-up this confrontation between neoliberal interests and the people who want to, y'know, live.


Which makes this current election pretty ridiculous because it ends up asking you to pick between a neoliberal and another neoliberal who will at least be better for society at large than the other option. That's probably what ends up being so jarring to people now that Trump basically ripped off his mask. The political system in the USA has become so divorced from the country's reality that it spit out an election that has fuck-all to do with the country's current situation. And it should be noted that IMO, people voted in Obama because while he wasn't openly anti-establishment, he had a lot of promises for change weaved in his rethoric. Trump was full-blown anti-establishment and also had a lot of promises for change. That marks a trend where apparently the average yank voter wants change to happen. Which is something to consider in this current political scenario.

You know, somewhat unrelated but, I like to joke (because Macri left our economic situation so incredibly fucked that it can only be mentioned alongside a Brazzers tag) around that Argentina will end up being a world power after all this because everyone else's getting fucked up by Covid while we're somehow managing against it, but given the massive amount of problems the US and China are going to have due to this crisis, we're gonna end up looking at... not quite a shake-up, but definitely a redistribution in the map of power. It could open up to some really interesting changes in a global scale. Hell, might end up with the developing countries that aren't dying by the hundreds to manage to catch up at least a bit. At the very least might blur the first-world and third-world barriers, idk.