generalpass

If you use the government to force people to stay home, when they economically cannot sustain it, what happens?

I went to every grocery store in town yesterday just to get the basics, and still came up short.

It was massive crowds of elderly people.

The microbiologist is James Robb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robb_(pathologist)

Also, Snopes agrees his circulated email is legit:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zinc-lozenges-coronavirus/

Any predictions on Google Adsense revenue this quarter?

And what about Shopify?

> Two problems; factories cannot surge up immediately and all of the actual gouging here is not actually making it to the manufacturers, it's people mass buying out stocks and reselling. So the supply side isn't actually seeing any increased price to increase their supply. The Econ 101 pro price gouging logic breaks down here because of that.

This may be due to the fact that the retailers are heavily threatened by government action, so they take no action to increase prices.

Contrast this with the must-have Christmas toy, which may otherwise be seeing similar unanticipated demand and suddenly the same retailers are incredible pricing experts.

The factories will need to maintain long-term relationships with these retailers and they may also have similar threats from government action.

More likely is that whatever slack there is in the supply chain will be exported to countries which have no such price control policies, because price-control policies do not address the underlying issues of supply and demand.

My prediction is that people will create separate seller accounts that list emergency items at sky-high prices when there is no emergency. Thus, in an emergency they don't need to "increase" their prices.

Excessive and unjustified seem quite subjective.

Not subjective is exporting to Japan.

My bet is that heated lemon-honey concoction gramma made.

The issue I have observed is that management at many companies, most especially in tech, is so terrible that they don't know how to train people (e.g., it used to be assumed that when a company hired a new employee, the employee would need to be trained on the company's computer systems, but now it is required that the employee be hired already proficient in the company's computer systems).

Coupled with being located in very expensive regions, tech companies have to hire at high wages, making training very expensive already.

Something will really have to give somewhere for this to change.

> As an example: "Zero guaranteed financial or operational support for people who should self-quarantine. People are therefore ignoring quarantine because they need to eat. " This exactly lays out how people are behaving. That's not politics.

If you expect responses, you should spend more time making sure you understand what posters have posted, because it seems you haven't read anything I posted beyond one single post.

My recollection is that there could be real problems, but the solutions were already planned and appropriate resources allocated prior to media hype.

I recall being in Seattle on New Years Eve and there were cops everywhere in full battle dress with armored personnel carriers and nobody was out partying like it was 1999, which was a shame because the weather was unusually mild.

> Right, but what is the purpose of statistics like this? The purpose is for them to inform our understanding of what might happen in the future. As mentioned above, since market movements follow a power law rather than normal distribution, the average gives us absolutely no information about what might happen. Thus this statistic fails at the goal of having a purpose; it is just a meaningless number, like those meme baseball statistics about who is the third-best thrower of fastballs on a rainy friday or whatever.

Thanks for restating using almost the same words and using an apparently non-applicable analogy (i.e., the 42% covers all bursts effect on indexes, your sports example covers individual performance). My experience is people who provide such poor explanations usually don't actually know what they are talking about.

Your claim on its usefulness makes assumptions about where to apply the information. The perma-bears use these kinds of numbers to demonstrate why being in stocks during a bubble is a bad idea.

> a normal distribution

Not really clear what you mean here. If you take the peak index value and its value two months into the bubble burst, the average value of this will be ~42% lower than the peak.

When financial bubbles burst the markets fall an average of something like 42% in the first two months.

This the type of analysis that comes from people who spend most of their lives analyzing data. If you were to go into the offices of the elected and the offices of the government, you would generally find the same thing:

The actions they are taking are based on what they feel will serve them best.

This should be the first assumption in the analysis.

AOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96 or '97. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing like AOL of '97.

> Only if you assume they aren't actually important to this crises, which they are.

You feel that converting a pandemic crisis into a political message is what people should be doing?

How does that help?

> Do you reject the statement made by TFA, 'US Labor and Healthcare Policies are a Perfect Storm for Pandemics'?

I have not disagreed with any of the stated facts and I don't disagree with that claim, I'm claiming that the facts have been carefully selected to promote a political agenda.

> But none of those reasons matter - the "why" that insurance is tied to employment doesn't matter because it does and affects this situations reality, right now. Apologizing for that "why" doesn't change the situation one iota.

I seem to have not made my positions clear: The site has a political agenda, which is made clear by the quoted section, which includes statements are selected to support the political policy being promoted.

So, the reason the things I stated matter is that we can easily come to different conclusions, and that is likely why they are left off of the site:

Can't sell health insurance across state borders - fix by permitting sales across borders, putting downward pressure on price.

Insurance is tied to employment because of the tax code - fix by either eliminating the deduction or adding the deduction to personal tax code.

Can't build new hospitals because you have to get permission from other regional hospitals - fix by getting rid of the regulation, thus generating increased interest in new hospital development, in turn increasing the number of beds and putting downward pressure on prices.

You and the other commenter I believe are not seeing other sides to positions, which is common amongst almost everyone.

Those "facts" (facts, themselves, are subjective because they judged so by man) presented are highly selective in order to lead to a specific conclusion.

For example, it doesn't state that you can't purchase health insurance across state borders - also a fact and also contributes to increased prices.

The reason that insurance is "tied" to employment is because only a company can deduct health insurance on their taxes.

Building a new hospital is nearly impossible due to, among many other regulations, being required to get permission from other regional hospitals before building a new hospital. This both increases prices and reduces the number of available beds.

And to yet further demonstrate my point, we can see that even mentioning the political agenda on the site generates discussion on the politics.

> Relative to Other Countries, US Labor and Healthcare Policies are a Perfect Storm for Pandemics > > Zero universal guaranteed paid sick leave > Even among those with paid sick leave, the covered time frame is often on the order of days, not the weeks adequate to account for prolonged illness. > Zero guaranteed paid family leave to care for sick members > Zero guaranteed financial or operational support for people who should self-quarantine. People are therefore ignoring quarantine because they need to eat. > Many people are uninsured. Given where things are right now (cryptic transmission and no available vaccine), the insurance companies have a moral obligation but have no financial incentive to improve testing and ensure access to care. > In the USA insurance is tied to their employment, so when they get sick they are also vulnerable to bankruptcy. In a pandemic year this is devastating for an economy.

> Never has there been a clearer case for single-payer health care as a public good. The voting public in the US need to care as much about “keeping their doctor” as they do about keeping their doctor alive. Doctors worldwide are getting pummeled on the frontlines of this crisis, the lack of protective equipment is causing them to get infected, and themselves unable to get the care they need. For a personal lens on this, have a look here, but this is by no means unique; the accounts are flooding in.

If the site is not pursuing a political agenda, why put that stuff in there? All it does is interfere because people who disagree with all of those claims may ignore the whole thing.

If it doesn't help, take it out. Otherwise, it's about politics.

Nobody ever accused journalists of being statisticians.

> Gold goes down during a recession.

Everything goes down during a recession. The goal is to find things going down less.

> With a backdoor for governments... So meh!

Well, maybe see my comment below for more, but backdoor implies a backdoor was required. With no encryption, as was the case with iOS and Android, no backdoor was required for communication intercepts or device, and you're only referring to BlackBerry Messenger. Users could install their own messaging apps and larger customers could opt for BES.

> >it was only for messages traversing Indian or Pakistani networks, and my memory was that BlackBerry did not hand the keys over, just answered all of their requests

> They handed over their "global encryption key" to the RCMP, see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160414/10482434186/canad....

> They jumped from "most secure" to "least secure" effectively immediately once they did that.

That article is an absolutely fantastic example of how the press treated BlackBerry (average consumers might come away thinking that BlackBerry devices are insecure).

It is after BlackBerry was dead from a market share perspective, so this isn't really applicable to the period I am referring to, which was from iPhone launch to maybe as late as 2012, when BlackBerry went from hero to zero.

> Maybe because Android and iOS came out at the same time as people were learning that Blackberry's "security" was a pastiche.

> In order to operate in some countries, all Blackberry traffic had to be routed through that country's government servers.

> It's been a long while, but I'm pretty sure that India was one such country. And at least one Middle Eastern country.

This was only related to the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and even then only on the standard consumer phones. The corporate servers had their own keys, IIRC. Plus, it was only for messages traversing Indian or Pakistani networks, and my memory was that BlackBerry did not hand the keys over, just answered all of their requests.

Even at that, this level of encrypted communications was not otherwise widely available for consumers. The actual migration from BBM to whatever iPhone and Android were offering were downgrades.

I'm not aware that BlackBerry devices were ever rooted, and they were default encrypted with 128-bit AES. The OS required users to grant permission for apps to access resources, such as GPS. This took something close to a decade to be installed and enabled by default in iOS and Android.

There was a big story where 3rd-party apps installed by providers contained malware. It was a huge story run everywhere and headlines made it sound as if every single phone had this vulnerability. However, they didn't mention the vulnerability could not affect BlackBerry devices because BlackBerry had a contract with all providers that the provider could not install any software to the device.

Not security-related, but a big complaint from devs at the time was that BlackBerry had so many different devices that it was very expensive to develop for. Apple, for sure, and maybe Android promised this would never happen on their platforms. Only the truly naive could believe this.

My takeaway was that BlackBerry somehow pissed-off all of the tech journos and suffered appropriately. That's why they got nothing but bad press.

The other thing they suffered from was this "co-CEO" nonsense. For whatever reason, it seems nearly universal that if more than one person is in charge, nobody is accountable.

Edit:

And something even I forget about is that prior to the Snowden releases, concerns over government snooping were only for the tin-foil hat donned black-helicopter dodging conspiracy theorists. It just wasn't on the public's radar.

If you work in a position that requires prompt, professional responses, the UX apex was the Bold 9900. With the touchscreen, touchpad, and highly ergonomic physical keyboard, profession email responses were a cinch.

The only times it was required to "reply when I get back to my computer" was when document editing was required.

Plus replaceable batteries and especially high capacity batteries meant pretty much never worrying about charging while out and about.

> It's ironic to think that one of the main selling points of Blackberry was end-to-end security (the devices talked to an on-premises server via a dedicated mobile APN which had to comply with a number of requirements), and yet its on-device security model allowed an app to take over such critical functionality _by design_.

While true, the initial versions of iOS and Android represented a step down in security. (BlackBerry at least encrypted the phone, by default - maybe even required?)

I was always baffled that the tech media would never mention how insecure Android or iOS were.