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The world after the pandemic


Altherion

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2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

It's been doing that for a while. It has also been putting out a huge PR campaign to try and cover for the fact that it's mostly to blame for the virus getting out in the first place... I say PR, it's basically propaganda. 

“Chung Kuo” here we come? 

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3 hours ago, Arakan said:

Chinese Equipment and Chinese doctors are on the ground. Be it Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, Africa. You should deal with facts, not with your wishful thinking. China is from a geo-Strategic POV the biggest winner.

It's not obvious that they'll be better off afterwards. It's possible that their relief efforts will ultimately outweigh the fact that they're the ones who failed to contain this virus in the first place (or, for that matter, to prevent the creation of conditions where such viruses breed). This is a propaganda game and they might win it, but it certainly does not outweigh the fact that this is a wake up call regarding all sorts of stuff that has, over the course of the past couple of decades, been outsourced to China.

Think about it: why does China have all of this equipment to give away whereas the US and EU barely have enough for themselves (and sometimes not even that)? It's because our corporate overlords decided that it's marginally cheaper to produce practically all of this stuff in China and ship it elsewhere. In the inevitable reevaluation of many healthcare systems that's coming after this virus, it will be hard to avoid addressing this. Similarly, the electronics giants are having their supply chains disrupted and are going to have to adjust the risk pricing of having these specific supply chains. Of course, the Chinese will take actions to keep their manufacturing dominance and they'll probably manage it in most sectors, but it's not obvious that they'll be better off overall. We'll see.

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@Altherion

I agree. Still too many unknown unknowns out there. And it is a PR game. And right now the US is losing it thanks to Donald Trump. WRT manufacturing we will see. Certain industries will re-evaluate, eg the pharmaceutical industry. 
 

But the reason that for example the UK only has a rudimentary manufacturing base left (IIRC 8/9% of GDP) is not China‘s fault but based on ideological decisions dating back 30-40 years. Same to a lesser extent for the US. I am all for system re-evaluation albeit I don’t see it with Tories and Republicans in charge. 
 

 

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On 3/27/2020 at 1:04 PM, Fez said:

I have no idea about the macro-level changes we'll see after all this is done, there's too many variables still. However, I do have a micro-level prediction that I feel pretty strongly about:

There's going to be a substantial increase in the popularity of facial hair.

Anecdotally, I've stopped shaving, most of my close male friends have stopped shaving, even my dad said he stopped shaving. And no one likes shaving in the first place. I think a lot of guys are going to decide they look alright with beards, and aren't going to start shaving again just because they can once again leave their homes.

Unfortunately for me, beards and being unshaven generally interfere with N95 mask fit. 

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12 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If anything China is going to have to do A LOT to repair its reputation after this is all over. The entire world is in lockdown, huge death toll, massive economic cost.. and everyone will be looking at China for blame. 

Any sensible person will put a blame just as big or possibly bigger on his very own government, who was asleep at the wheel instead of cutting off all links with China when shit happened, who didn't prepare for the crisis, and who didn't bother looking for the disease when letting people in.

Frankly, the only blame I would put on China for what happened outside China (they of course bear the full responsibility and guilt of what happened inside China) is that they didn't cut off their country and self-isolate it entirely, but allowed foreigners to leave and even Chinese people to get out. But that big responsibility is of course a shared one with every country that allowed people who came from China to enter, when all of them should've been quarantined for weeks.

To be blunt, right now, the only people on this planet that I see blaming China for what happens in their very own country are people in the Trump fanbase that can't deal with the fact he let the country down and can't be arsed to take necessary measures to avoid an awful loss of life. It's basically a deflection flamed by the usual propaganda for the regime. Not that Trump's crew is the only one deflecting responsibility like crazy, the same is going on in Europe, except the Big Lie there is that "No one would've done a better job than my government, because no one could've predicted how bad it could be" - which is definitely wrong but is parroted by a lot of European MSM to abuse the citizens and make them believe their leaders actually did a good job, when they definitely let them down.

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Yeah looking at how infective this thing is I seriously doubt any country could've contained it. I mean just look at the slow reaction in the western world as it's hit our shores. And we had months of warning to get our shit together. I honestly think China was one of the best places for it to hit from a slowing the spread point of view. The measures they enacted to try to stomp it out were brutal, and probably not feasible anywhere else aside from North Korea.

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53 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

Yeah looking at how infective this thing is I seriously doubt any country could've contained it.

But this is the terrifying part: it's not actually all that infectious or all that deadly compared to some other things nature has thrown at us. A truly airborne disease (like measles or chickenpox) can be an order of magnitude more contagious than this virus. We could have contained Covid-19, it's just that every country (starting with China, but certainly not ending there) didn't take it seriously until it was much too late. There's not reason the next one can't be much worse in every way; that's why when this is over, we have to take stock of what we did wrong and how to prepare for the next one.

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16 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If anything China is going to have to do A LOT to repair its reputation after this is all over. The entire world is in lockdown, huge death toll, massive economic cost.. and everyone will be looking at China for blame. 

Yeah, no.

China's initial handling of the situation was poor, but once they realised what they had on their hands, they've made the best of a bad situation. Western Governments on the other hand...

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I will say just one thing. This is relevant for all wealthy Western countries. Analyse rationally and challenge the current system. 
Countries like the US, Germany, UK are unbelievably rich. We can „afford“ this. Other poorer countries not in the slightest. 
 

One example of how rotten neoliberal capitalism is: in Germany a law has been passed that rent payments between April till September can be postponed and paid back until June 2021. A law with a clear objective. Those who cannot pay their bills right now due to C19 should not lose their apartments. A good, sensible law. What happened? 
A company like ADIDAS decided to not pay any rent for their stores beginning from April. A company which made 23 billion EUR turnover in 2019, 2 billion EUR profit (after tax) and who decided a few weeks ago to pay out 40% of this profit as dividends. This system is rotten because to many companies have no ethical conscience whatsoever left. It’s disgusting behavior. There are many more such „war profiteers“ out there...

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10 hours ago, Altherion said:

But this is the terrifying part: it's not actually all that infectious or all that deadly compared to some other things nature has thrown at us. A truly airborne disease (like measles or chickenpox) can be an order of magnitude more contagious than this virus. We could have contained Covid-19, it's just that every country (starting with China, but certainly not ending there) didn't take it seriously until it was much too late. There's not reason the next one can't be much worse in every way; that's why when this is over, we have to take stock of what we did wrong and how to prepare for the next one.

I'm not sure that China could have reasonably acted faster to clamp down.  You have to keep in mind that this was a new disease with symptoms similar to the flu that popped up during flu season.  It took some time to realize that the cases of pneumonia that were popping up weren't from the flu.  At that point, they probably ran tests for other pathogens that could have caused the pneumonia, again coming up empty.  They probably suspected then that they were dealing with a new pathogen, and to identify it takes time (isolating the virus and sequencing its genome from scratch).  Then it takes time to develop a reliable assay.  Just ask the CDC. 

Even after all this was done, it wasn't clear how big a problem this new virus was.  The first SARS and MERS were deadly but did not spread quickly.  How deadly and how quickly this new virus spread were completely unknown and extremely difficult to determine when case numbers were so low and it was unknown how long it had been spreading before being discovered.  People TODAY still argue about how deadly the disease really is and how fast the infection spreads, and we now have the benefit of a massive amount of data.  

The genome was uploaded to a public database by a Chinese researcher in early January.  Creating and deploying a diagnostic test in a week or so is extremely fast.  They quarantined Wuhan on January 23rd.  I haven't seen anything that shows that they just sat on this or that they tried to hide or downplay how dangerous the virus was after they found out.  If you have evidence that shows otherwise, please share.  Compare China's response to that of Trump, who was downplaying the danger into March.  

Really, my major complaint with how they handled things was how they punished the doctor for warning his friends in a private communication.  But that is a separate issue from how well they responded to the outbreak.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.rfi.fr/en/france/20200325-coronavirus-covid19-food-agriculture-france

Now that's food enough for discussion (ha ha) but the funny thing is that the initiative is an incredible success with more people volunteering than necessary (to be specific, people registering faster than the needs being identified, with 150,000 volunteers in a weeek). It might have potential to fuel platform cooperativism as a whole. 

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On 3/28/2020 at 9:12 AM, Arakan said:

Different aspects. PR? Yes. Real action? Yes. Chinese Equipment and Chinese doctors are on the ground. Be it Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, Africa. You should deal with facts, not with your wishful thinking. China is from a geo-Strategic POV the biggest winner. The US under Republicans, especially Trump, loses on every front. But don’t listen to my word. Read „Foreign Affairs“. 
 

A hyperpower who seems incompetent, which Trump USA not only seems but is, is done. A hyperpower who cannot protect its own citizens even though it has the biggest economy in the world, is done. 
 

Just ask the Soviets. 

This one may not have aged well.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52092395?

Quote

What’s wrong with the equipment?

On Saturday, the Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 face masks. The equipment had arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on 21 March, and had already been distributed to front-line medical teams.

Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate,

"The rest of the shipment was immediately put on hold and has not been distributed,” a statement read. “Now it has been decided not to use any of this shipment.”

Spain’s government encountered similar problems with testing kits ordered from a Chinese company.

It announced it had bought hundreds of thousands of tests to combat the virus, but revealed in the following days that nearly 60,000 could not accurately determine if a patient had the virus.

The Chinese embassy in Spain tweeted that the company behind the kits, Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology, did not have an official license from Chinese medical authorities to sell its products.

It clarified that separate material donated by the Chinese government and technology and retail group Alibaba did not include products from Shenzhen Bioeasy.

Turkey also announced that it had found some testing kits ordered from Chinese companies were not sufficiently accurate, although it said that some 350,000 of the tests worked well.

PRC is definitely on a media press worldwide to get in front of this, but the BBC isn't exactly the RNC. 

While we're on a three initial tear, here's some CDB.  There's always been a lot of people sayin that America's fixing to fall.

 

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8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.rfi.fr/en/france/20200325-coronavirus-covid19-food-agriculture-france

Now that's food enough for discussion (ha ha) but the funny thing is that the initiative is an incredible success with more people volunteering than necessary (to be specific, people registering faster than the needs being identified, with 150,000 volunteers in a weeek). It might have potential to fuel platform cooperativism as a whole. 

We have a similar thing going on here, but the past week farmers kept appearing on TV saying that they can't afford to pay Germans minimum wage and don't expect Germans to be hardy enough for the job anyway and therefore will just let this year's harvest rot.

The whole system is just fucked...

I should note however that I believe the food prices in Germany have been far, far, far too low for quite some time and the ridiculous price dumping competition is the main root of why the farmers have this rotten attitute towards everything that may increase their expenses.

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I think we will throw ourselves back into the hedonism until global warming grills us all in 2030. And we’ll be offended that all the canned food and 20kgs of flour (/toilet paper and hand sanitizer) isn’t saving us. 

either way, I can’t wait for the coronavirus themed dystopian young adult novels and their Netflix adaptations. 

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4 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

I think we will throw ourselves back into the hedonism until global warming grills us all in 2030.

I'm not so sure. There is a lot of discussion about capitalism and socialism suddenly (by that I mean, not just here, but in mainstream media as well).

 

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5 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

I think we will throw ourselves back into the hedonism until global warming grills us all in 2030. And we’ll be offended that all the canned food and 20kgs of flour (/toilet paper and hand sanitizer) isn’t saving us. 

either way, I can’t wait for the coronavirus themed dystopian young adult novels and their Netflix adaptations. 

Throw ourselves back?

Were we supposed to quit at some point?

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4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I'm not so sure. There is a lot of discussion about capitalism and socialism suddenly (by that I mean, not just here, but in mainstream media as well).

 

Right now we are seeing a lot of evidence that the political system is not the important factor in controlling a pandemic but the intellectual abilities of those elected to lead us is important.

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1 hour ago, maarsen said:

Right now we are seeing a lot of evidence that the political system is not the important factor in controlling a pandemic but the intellectual abilities of those elected to lead us is important.

I think we're seeing that both are very important.

Political systems (and ideologies) determine how important healthcare is for a society. Even differences that are a priori small can lead to significantly different outcomes.

Also, I'm not sure the "intellectual abilities of those elected" can be disconnected from the political system anyway.

I think it's tempting to look at what's going on and see how some leaders are more efficient than others (with some being laughably incompetent). However, I think one should bear in mind that i) how a leader reacts to the crisis doesn't say what more he could have done and ii) some leaders are much better at communicating than acting.

TL:DR: Maybe not political systems per se, but political ideologies do matter. A LOT.

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