Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

cthia wrote:The Venezuelan gunboat Captain was simply bored from all of the quarantining. "Hey guys, let's pit maneuver a train."

The cruise ship had a reinforced hull to take on icebergs.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Annachie wrote:Lol, the Trump administration ordered 3M to stop selling the N95 resperators to the only country that provides the raw material to make the masks.


3M told them no. Because following that order would work wonders.

I wonder how many hours it will take to modify the processes at an American pulp and paper mill to produce the specialized material that is needed for the masks. We even have one idle mill near my home that could be restarted just for this purpose.

This article explains the problem. The US like Canada has allowed to many industries to be outsourced to China. Now that certain products have become vital for survival, China controls the supply. This of course suggests a motive for China to develop the Chinavirus and unleash it.

https://www.spencerfernando.com/2020/04 ... make-them/

Political economists use “growth models” to describe what countries do to promote growth under normal circumstances, but these models also indicate how countries are likely to respond in the event of a crisis.

[...]

Trade-dependent growth models, such as those found in northern and western Europe, tend to have large welfare states that act as “shock absorbers,” helping to mitigate the effects of economic shocks. In general, the more open a European country’s economy is to international trade, the bigger the welfare state it constructs to act as a buffer in case trade shuts off. Large welfare states also allow their citizens to carry large amounts of debt, since they effectively insure them against periods of unemployment; the most indebted people in the world are not Americans but the Danes and the Dutch.

In contrast, countries with growth models of the Anglo-American variety, especially the United States, tend to have weaker states, lower taxes, and large financial sectors. They have highly flexible labor markets rather than large welfare states, which means they ultimately depend on wages to drive growth. Since those wages have been buying less and less over time, credit cards, student loans, and medical debts have become a standard part of U.S. household budgeting. When those household budgets shrink sharply, their debts are not compensated by the shock absorbers that countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have in place.

This lack of shock absorbers is integral to the U.S. growth model, and under normal circumstances, it is a feature, not a bug. When systems such as the American one are hit by shocks, they tend to bail out their financial systems to keep credit flowing and let the real economy absorb the blow through unemployment and austerity policies. The assumption is that with no shock absorbers in place, prices and wages will adjust quickly, capital will be redeployed, and growth will return without the need for state intervention. But these are not normal circumstances. And as U.S. policymakers are quickly realizing, the usual playbook is of limited use in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

During a global economic crisis, the United States has one major advantage over other countries: it prints the global reserve currency. Other countries need U.S. dollars because their banking systems lend in dollars even though they can’t print them. During previous crises such as the 2008 financial crisis, sharp falls in global financial markets have been put right by Federal Reserve actions such as rate cuts and bond-buying programs. But this time, Federal Reserve action has not had its usual calming effect: financial markets have continued to fall, and the dollar’s dominance has failed to prevent a flight into cash. Although Congress finally passed a $2 trillion economic stabilization package, its continuing inability to agree on whom to bail out—companies or consumers—reflects tensions in the underlying growth model. The United States typically opts to protect capital and to simply let labor adjust through unemployment. But this instinct—to protect the big players and let workers take the hit—is also a key reason why the coronavirus pandemic is a disaster amplifier for the U.S. growth model in a way that is not true for Germany or even the United Kingdom.

American policymakers’ instinct to protect the big players and let workers take the hit is a key reason why the coronavirus pandemic is a disaster amplifier for the United States.
The U.S. growth model works well as long as there is little unemployment, wages are being earned and spent, and credit is being recycled to cover the difference between wages and costs by consumers and companies. But when markets freeze and cannot price assets correctly (no one knows how much United Airlines stock is worth because they don’t know when Americans will be flying again), the growth model collapses. Once that happens, it is hard to find a bottom. The Federal Reserve and Congress can try to put a floor on asset prices by bailing out companies, but there is no bottom for the broader crisis of consumption that occurs when a third of the labor market is laid off and the other two-thirds are locked at home for an extended period of time. In this world, bailing out capital and expecting labor to adjust through wage cuts and unemployment is simply impossible given the scale of the shutdown.

The U.S. growth model is built in such a way that it simply cannot shut down without inflicting catastrophic damage on itself. Because the model is designed to adjust through reduced wages and employment rather than increased welfare outlays, political leaders can contemplate temporary unemployment benefits for a banking-induced shock, but not semipermanent cash transfers—which is what the British are doing—and a near-total collapse in asset values. The British solution is too politically toxic to be anything other than a short-term expedient in the American context. So, once it became clear that—at least according to the Imperial College London model—the epidemiologically correct response was to put the economy in hibernation for several months, U.S. leaders started looking for other solutions.

One alternative solution, put forth by U.S. President Donald Trump but with proponents in many states, is to simply “restart the economy.” The direct cost of doing so, according to the Imperial College London model, could be the deaths of as many as 2.2 million Americans—or, as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick bluntly suggested in a recent interview, old people need to die to save the economy.

[...]

The United States, with its 330 million people, 270 million handguns, 80 million hourly workers with no statutory sick pay, and 28 million medically uninsured, faces challenges quite unlike those in other countries. Putting the economy in a freezer for six months or longer would destroy what’s left of its social fabric along with its growth model. But restarting it could turn the pandemic into a plague that could cause as much damage as the freezer.

[...]

If the coronavirus pandemic plays out according to the Imperial College London model, reopening the United States will simply compound the damage inflicted by the U.S. response. If the pandemic takes the course described by the Oxford model, other countries’ economies will sustain less damage than the U.S. economy and will rebound faster because lockdowns cause less economic damage than allowing uncontrolled infections. The U.S. stock market may soar if the Oxford model turns out to be correct, but that will do nothing for the millions of hourly workers who have been laid off, the thousands of small businesses that have gone bankrupt, and the millions of extra infections that will result if the United States opens for business too early.

If the United States goes down this path, it may finally have reached the moment former President Bill Clinton said would never come: when people make money betting against America. After all, if U.S. leaders’ best strategy in a pandemic is to “let it rip,” the rest of the world will soon stop regarding the United States as a model, for growth or anything else.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I wonder how many hours it will take to modify the processes at an American pulp and paper mill to produce the specialized material that is needed for the masks. We even have one idle mill near my home that could be restarted just for this purpose.

Joat42 wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I wonder how many hours it will take to modify the processes at an American pulp and paper mill to produce the specialized material that is needed for the masks. We even have one idle mill near my home that could be restarted just for this purpose.

The problem with changing a mill to produce something different isn't something that is done in days, we are talking weeks if not months.

A mill is geared towards one type of product, if it's paper for magazines it takes A LOT of work and parts to get it produce for example toilet-paper. The type of pulp used is also dependent on the final product, so you need to change your pulp-process to fit the product and that's also something that takes time.

On top of that you need to tinker with all the machines that are going to cut the paper to the right widths and lengths for packaging and some machines can't even be used for different types of paper than what they where designed for.

It can be done, but don't expect it to be quick in any way.

Joat42 wrote:

doug941 wrote:As to comparing apples and oranges in country by country data? Since the numbers I quoted were supplied by the WHO, they should have had much of the national idiosyncrasies ironed out.

No, the measuring methods differ which makes it impossible to directly compare them. The only way to do any type of comparison is look at the trends.

Here's good article describing the problem:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... tes-differ

Even if you’re careful to compare the same type of fatality rate across countries, it’s easy to see how testing more, or fewer, people would change the results.

In fact, the lack of widespread, systematic testing in most countries is the main source of discrepancies in death rates internationally, says Dietrich Rothenbacher, director of the Institute of Epidemiology and Medical Biometry at the University of Ulm in Germany.

As a result, the current figures are “not at all” directly comparable between countries, he says. This is because, to get an accurate figure across a population, it is necessary to test not just symptomatic cases, but asymptomatic people too. Having that data would give an accurate picture of how the pandemic is affecting whole populations, not just the sick.

“Currently we have a huge bias in the numbers coming from different countries – therefore the data are not directly comparable,” he says. “What we need to really have valid and comparable numbers would be a defined and systematic way to choose a representative sampling frame.”

Daryl wrote:"People are dying who have never died before"

Daryl wrote:Guess who?

Jan 22 "We have it totally under control - just one person coming in from China"
Feb 10 "You know, in April it dies with better weather"
Feb 25 " the 15, in a couple of days it is going to be close to zero"
Feb 30 "it will disappear, its like a miracle, one day it will disappear"
March 4 'we are talking about very low numbers in the United States"
March 5 "our numbers are just about lower than anybody"
March 18. " People are dying who have never died before "