Predicting if, or when, a revolution will arrive is a tricky thing. There are plenty of cases where revolutionary participants themselves dismissed the chances of a revolution hours or days before they kick off. They only look inevitable in hindsight.

Regardless; even long short of kicking off a revolution, punishing the populace for being scared is bad politics.

It's a classic dilemma. The revolution only succeeds if the "revolutionary group" has a substantial majority support. But if it fails, the "revolutionary group" suffers exaggerated negative consequences. Same for those who jump in too early. Without solid coordination very few risk those odds.

You may be onto something. Most of the people seemed to have been mollified by the ability to share their plight with others via social media or gorging on streaming. Internet made current issues somewhat acceptable in that regard.

If the internet went down, people might not like the silence and their own thoughts.

I initially thought ISPs removed data caps and all those for WFH, but now I think it is part of the effort to keep the society intact.

> failure of an absolute overwhelming magnitude (internet goes completely down and society collapses) for an actual, classic-style revolution.

Once unemployment goes too far past 20% and stays there long enough, we'll see social safety nets fail and serious numbers of folks penniless and dependent on aid for basic survival. That's enough, I think, to precipitate revolution or at least angry people not cooperating, breaking things, making demands, and overwhelming anything the government/police can do to stop it.

Perhaps not a widespread revolution, but something akin to seceding could happen I think. If California and NY decide that being a part of the US isn't working for them anymore that's how a next civil war could start. Something similar was happening in Spain before corona, Catalonia felt that their taxes were supporting the rest of the nation (much like California for the US) and so they wanted to leave. They've not been successful and most of their leaders jailed but a similar sentiment could start if the divisions continue as they are.

That's true but you're only cooped up because of stay at home orders. Were people who worked full time from home complaining about being cooped up? Maybe a little but not enough to want to go into an office 40 hours a week. Sure it's nice to get out and escape from your family a little bit and socialize with different people but why does this have to equate to going to work?

Even your examples seem to acknowledge that getting back to the actual work is not what people are after. There are many drawbacks to a lockdown. Not having to do the actual work, as some sort of guilt of not being a productive member of society, very rarely seems to be one of them.

What people want is financial and health security (which in the US are strongly linked), social interactions and some other liberties like working out and traveling. The actual work aspect mostly benefits the owners of the businesses. And I can see that as a small business owner you'd be exposed to the same pressure for financial security, many times over.

But don't confuse "not wanting to stay at home with nothing to do and no clear idea of whether you'll even have a home in a month" with "wanting to work", it's not helpful in analyzing what's actually happening.

True. And yet... is that a good thing? Should that be part of our basis for identity? Is it something to applaud, or to help people recover from?

I think it's something to applaud, but I'm not sure...

If you have a job, the things you have and the food on your table are conditional on the will and whim of your employer, which in the US, at least, can be far more capricious than any government welfare program.

The only people who actually have personal security are the independently wealthy - everyone else lives and dies at the mercy of some greater system, a state or an employer.

You're putting the cart before the horse. We want to keep everyone in reasonable comfort. A certain amount of work is necessary for that. But it's probably a lot less than half of society doing 40-hour weeks.

> By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job?

The first sentence is not true in the universal generality stated. I know that it's not your main point, and I know that most people don't have the luxury that I do, but I am a teacher and a researcher, and I would absolutely keep doing both no matter how much money I had. (I hope I'll be able to keep teaching; my university's not so big.)

(The only effect of having more money would be that I would replace grant-writing with periodically sending off handsomely calligraphed letters to funding agencies saying "Can't be arsed. Sorry!")

What kills me is the argument against a basic standard of living tends to come down to 'but who will be the plumbers, janitors, or fast food workers and retail?'

Well, I, for one, would be a janitor and be perfectly happy for the rest of my life - low stress, low pressure. Seems nice.

Fast food workers and retail would be more difficult, just because people would have to treat them like humans, if they didn't need the money from the job to survive. But that's never talked about.

Sometimes those shitty jobs are only shitty because the people you have to interact with make them that way.

In a prior career, I worked full-time retail management. I actually really liked that job, except for all of the shitty people who asserted their authority over me because I needed the job, and they didn't need to see me as a human due to my job.

= Most jobs are not useful, so if they stop nothing important is lost.

Basically he means that many jobs are created just to give people something to do and the jobs do not actually do any real contributions that couldn’t be rolled into another job.

That is a very dangerous door to open. First, at the other end of those debts are things like peoples' pension plans. People aren't going to like their pension plan's income being put on pause.

Second, making (aspects of) contracts unenforceable can be very destructive if it goes too far. A huge amount of society relies on contracts in order to be able to operate; if you destroy that, you can damage society in fairly fundamental ways.

To be clear, no one is asking to stay inside - everyone wants the economy reopened again. But, there's the sensible way and there's the stupid way. The latter method involves just going to back to the way things were and pretend the virus doesn't exist. That is untenable, and the smarter folk who think that a phased opening is a better approach are the ones being shouted down.

I agree. The beginning of this crisis really did hold promise of 'we are in this together'. And yet it quickly morphed into 'the other guys are out to get us'. I watching all this with genuine worry that things can easily spiral out of control.

Your thesis here is that the movement is made up and nobody actually agrees with it? I guess I don't know how to rigorously disprove that, but it strikes me as unlikely as well. The easiest way to stir people up is to tell them things they already believe! It seems naive to look at even a moderate sized protest and say "oh, nobody actually believes in this cause, it's astroturfed".

These people aren't wrong, though.

Powell has printed $6T, and the DXY has gone nowhere but up, along with the SPY and the QQQ and the DJIA.

Every single Thursday, we report more job losses than expected, and the market screams higher.

As much as we'd like to think there will be consequences to printing money, the evidence is in that there won't be, either in currency value or market confidence. MMT has proven itself correct.

What I don't understand then is why the fed doesn't just print a million dollars for each and every citizen. That's only 300 trillion dollars. We would be the richest country in the world by far, poverty would be solved.

And the question that gets lost somewhere, whenever we talk about those is that it does not just appear without any consequences down the road. The current spending spree practically guarantees higher taxes on everyone if the existing system is to remain in place.

For the record, I agree with the gist of your message. It seems a little too easy to conjure up magical money out of thin air.

The Fed doesn't buy back anything. It buys government and corporate bonds just like any other investor. It just does so with an arbitrarily-large pool of money.

But then how would the US invade^W liberate other countries?

Limits in how to best "share" that money to regular people do in fact mean that money is not limitless, de facto.

Assuming you go over the logistics of what's the best way to actually hand in money to people: through tax rebates? through an envelope sent by the Post Office? through citizens' bank accounts? (then how do you handle the non-banked population?) etc etc the powers that be still have to decide what criteria should they use to send said money: according to one's needs? what are those needs? according to one's contribution to society? but then who decides about another person's real contribution to society?

All these questions were first asked at least 200 years ago (I'd say starting with the French Revolution, maybe even with with the Levellers in the ~1640s), questions for which we haven't found any reasonable and definitive answer so far and we'll probably never will.

you've got the value chain backwards. money isn't printed and then that magically becomes the value of the economy. the money supply is managed so as to try to match the decentralized and organic value created by us in the economy.

that causal chain limits how much money can be printed without adverse effects (and at the extreme, economic and political collapse). if we generate ~$1T/mo of value, printing a couple billion extra here or there gets drowned out in the estimation error of the size of our value creation. we print an extra $1T/mo and we have start to have serious problems.

so money is not limitless. it's bounded by our collective product.