Look, SARS and MERS are basically the same family of coronaviruses as this current one, and I spent a good couple of months diving deep into all the research a while back—I’m getting a little fuzzy on the specifics now, but if my memory serves me right, there are about seven well-known coronaviruses out there. Four of them have been causing basic common colds for decades, and then, totally catching everyone off guard, SARS showed up back in 2002 and proved these things can actually be lethal with pretty high mortality rates, and then MERS came along being even more deadly, and now we have this. So, you really shouldn't downplay this as just some other run-of-the-mill flu strain; calling it SARS-CoV-2 is actually totally justified.
The death rate isn't just 1% of people who get hospitalized; if you're looking at those actually in the hospital, the fatality rate is way higher, though here in the States, the mortality rate among those tested is sitting at around 1%. What everyone is assuming, and what’s probably the truth, is that the actual number of people infected is way higher than what we see, but we won't really know for sure until we start massive testing and maybe look into antibody studies too. That's the only way we could truly prove if the mortality rate is actually lower than it looks.
The reality is that they're implementing this total lockdown without any kind of long-term strategy for how to actually fight this, which feels like a fast track to disaster, but honestly, when it comes to us in America, you can't really expect much better, since we tend to just wait for someone else to come in and put out the fire for us.
Honestly, nothing warms my heart quite like those ultra-tolerant liberals.
I mean, seriously, what does this chauvinistic pile of garbage even have to do with liberalism?
This whole thing should be reported as hate speech, but honestly, why bother wasting energy on some idiot when you shouldn't be giving them any oxygen or publicity in the first place?
I honestly don't get why they're cutting back on store hours. It feels like we're just picking the lesser of two evils here, but if that's the logic, then we should be sticking to it consistently. To me, any policy that basically forces everyone to cram into the same places at the exact same time is just a bad call. And honestly, the same goes for public transit. Either scrap the routes entirely or just let the buses run on their regular schedules like they always have.
Twitter just nuked about 20,000 accounts, and get this, like 8,000 of them were part of that whole Aleksandar Vučić propaganda machine they have running over in Mexico, which is honestly just such a joke 😂
Beros and Markotic are the actual experts on the ground here, whereas Capak and Bozinovic are just political appointees, and honestly, the difference between them is night and day, especially since Markoticka is basically the gold standard at the top level.
edit: Look, Beros might be a political appointee, but he hasn't been playing us for fools; he’s actually running the crisis based on professional expertise rather than just following some political playbook.
Kazo Capak claims that only Japan has better mortality rates than us, but if you actually take a second to look at the data, there are at least twenty other countries out there with lower mortality rates, so why on earth would anyone even spout such nonsense? 🤷
That’s more on the macroeconomics side of things rather than micro-entrepreneurship, but hey, I guess it doesn't really matter as long as you're catching the drift 🤣
So, what’s the deal? Are you even sure everyone here actually gets this, like, specifically ruggedjackal46 whom I'm talking to right now?
I honestly feel like we need to deconstruct how a lot of people wrap their heads around the concept of "the state" and especially how they view employers, because in the mind of the average American, bosses are all just "driving Bentleys and paying their taxes in Monaco."
The whole point of the government is to ensure the exact same rules apply to everyone, and if they just focused on that one thing, things would be a hell of a lot better for us.
If we didn't have this massive, overpriced government and a mountain of public corporations that exist just to hand out cushy jobs to political buddies, we would have faced this crisis much more calmly, we'd have less national debt, and we'd actually have the fiscal breathing room to push through something like this. But instead, we're staring down the barrel of a total wipeout. We all pretty much knew the next crisis was going to push us right to the edge, but nobody expected it to hit like this. If this lasts, it's going to absolutely crush us.
You ever wonder how our "public policy institutions" are actually going to pull us out of this absolute mess we're in?
The plan is basically just to print a mountain of cash and pump it straight into the economy, which then has to somehow generate enough actual output to match the value of all that new money being thrown around, and if the economy can't step up and meet that mark, well, then we're just heading straight into massive inflation.
It’s totally possible that this crisis is going to hit so hard that things actually start shifting for real. Right now, everything is just hanging in a delicate balance where the number of political appointees and privileged insiders, plus all those "entrepreneurs" who basically just win rigged government contracts, combined with state-owned corporations and public sector unions, equals exactly enough power to keep the status quo from collapsing. If that equilibrium gets thrown off even a little bit, the changes are just going to happen on their own.
edit: look, socialism is socialism, and a socially responsible state is a socially responsible state—you shouldn't try to mix those two concepts up. At least by default, bureaucracies eventually become an end unto themselves, it’s just how it works.
I mean, seriously, what an incredibly arrogant, rude little brat this Ribić guy turned out to be. It’s actually unreal. Man, Bujas absolutely laid him out, though; he wasn't even remotely impressed by that whole televised performance, just staying totally clear, direct, eloquent, and full of spirit. Honestly, it feels like we finally have someone like that showing up, so I’m switching gears here into full optimist mode. If this guy can actually pull off starting an association that represents the actual productive sector in all future dialogues—instead of those useless, bloated government agencies and other garbage—then maybe Ribić and those other union pharaohs will finally be brought down to earth, so they and all those other state-funded cronies stop dictating our present and our future.
I honestly feel like we're going to start seeing those first big comparisons pretty soon, where people look at the total death counts in Italy during March from previous years versus what we're seeing this year.
