US Politics: Get Tested or Get Bested

[Fez]

7 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Well looks like the relief bill is getting shittier as we learn more about it.  NY is not qualifying, whatever tf that means, for the $600 weekly unemployment insurance expansion.  Big surprise that this is mostly a corporate bailout.

That's not true. Please double check stuff before posting it.

What New York, and many other states, have not qualified for yet is the Extended Benefits program. This is the funding that let's people collect an additional 13 weeks of UI after their original 26 weeks of UI. New York's unemployment rate isn't high enough yet to trigger the program. It almost certainly will be in 6 months, when the first people laid off from COVID-19 will be running out of UI.

The extra $600 a week is the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. It's an entirely separate thing from Extended Benefits.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 minute ago, Fez said:

That's not true. Please double check stuff before posting it.

What New York, and many other states, have not qualified for yet is the Extended Benefits program. This is the funding that let's people collect an additional 13 weeks of UI after their original 26 weeks of UI. New York's unemployment rate isn't high enough yet to trigger the program. It almost certainly will be in 6 months, when the first people laid off from COVID-19 will be running out of UI.

The extra $600 a week is the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. It's an entirely separate thing from Extended Benefits.

Yeah, I corrected it before you posted.  Was looking at this : 

https://labor.ny.gov/unemploymentassistance.shtm

Then realized it hasn't been updated since the 26th.

[Fragile Bird]

Donald Trump wants his signature on all relief payment checks.

[TrueMetis]

Who even uses checks anymore?

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

Like many other women, she did not come forth until recently after the me too movement really took off.  She worked for Biden as a low level staffer for less than a year over 25 years ago.  I doubt they ever talked to her.

That's true. But, as we've seen time and again, if there's one accusation, there's usually many other accusations as well. Biden does have the long history of ignoring personal space. If he went over the line into assault once, I'd think he'd have done it many times. And that there'd be many women; at least one of which the Obama folks would've found out about.

Considering how many judicial nominations get held up (and how many openings were therefore left for Trump to fill) over how slowly and thoroughly the Obama era vetting processes were; it doesn't speak well of them if they missed that Biden has a history of sexual assault.

Not saying its not true. But it does make me a bit leery. Also making me a bit leery is the now-deleted blog post where she's talking about how much she loves Putin. Since he is certainly one to benefit from the Democratic nominee imploding. Obviously it could just be a coincidence, but its an odd data point.

[Fragile Bird]

33 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Who even uses checks anymore?

There are people without bank accounts. There are people who don’t receive any kind of benefit check and have never set it up with the government. The US has 325 M people, that could be millions of people. I could not find any estimate what that number could be.

In any event, the idea that Trump puts his name on those checks is disgusting. What’s he going to do next (because his brain jumps from idea to idea) add his name to US currency? Change the law so he can do it?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

59 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Who even uses checks anymore?

Fat taloned BIRDS!?

[Mudguard]

39 minutes ago, Fez said:

That's true. But, as we've seen time and again, if there's one accusation, there's usually many other accusations as well. Biden does have the long history of ignoring personal space. If he went over the line into assault once, I'd think he'd have done it many times. And that there'd be many women; at least one of which the Obama folks would've found out about.

Considering how many judicial nominations get held up (and how many openings were therefore left for Trump to fill) over how slowly and thoroughly the Obama era vetting processes were; it doesn't speak well of them if they missed that Biden has a history of sexual assault.

Not saying its not true. But it does make me a bit leery. Also making me a bit leery is the now-deleted blog post where she's talking about how much she loves Putin. Since he is certainly one to benefit from the Democratic nominee imploding. Obviously it could just be a coincidence, but its an odd data point.

I wondered the same about the lack of other accusations of the most serious sexual assault charges.  According to Reade, she claimed he was surprised when she pulled back and that he stated that he thought she wanted it.  He immediately backed off after realizing his mistake.  Reade claimed that she idolized him before the alleged assault.  It's plausible that he misread her interest, and maybe the incident shook him and he never attempted something like that again.  

 

[Martell Spy]

1 hour ago, TrueMetis said:

Who even uses checks anymore?

Publisher's Clearing House? I could see Trump using government funds during a crisis to hand deliver over-sized checks to people.

[Varysblackfyre321]

Trump’s approval seems to going up. It’d be interesting to see if economic conditions worsen if this trend continues.

[Guest]

Do you think that we will finally be able to get ISPs regulated as utilities after this?

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 3/26/2020 at 5:37 PM, ThinkerX said:

tried walking my conservative coworker through the basics of this the morning.

started with the infection rate: 1 person infects 3, those 3 each infect 3 more (up over a dozen total), then the 9 each infect 3 more (27 plus the others), then those 27 each infect three more, making for another eighty new cases, with well over a hundred total.  Then 300...and at that point (I could almost see the little light come on) he goes...'everybody would be infected in a month if that were true.'

 

Me: it is true (allowing for a bit of rounding and whatnot)

CC: but outside of a couple states, the numbers are nowhere near that bad.

Me: That is because our esteemed president has been playing his own numbers game.  He deliberately cut back on the number of test kits.  The states with the highest numbers are the ones where the governors went around Trumps back (ok, grossly oversimplified, but)

CC: but why?
 

Me:  Trump wants to make the plague seem less bad than it is.  Limit the number of test kits, he can claim low numbers.  Yesterday, he actually said widespread testing was a bad idea.

 

CC: He's right.  No way can we test millions of people.   Besides, it'll be over with in a couple of months and we can get the red hot economy pumping again.  

 

 

 

 

You were so close...then he veered right back to the beginning of the argument.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

20 hours ago, Mudguard said:

I think Simon posted on this earlier, but it got no response.  It's undeniable that he has a habit of invading women's personal space and making them visibly uncomfortable.  That's been caught on tape on multiple occasions.  My guess is that many Democrats will either ignore or brush this accusation under the rug.  Biden is carrying around a ton of baggage, and despite the stock market collapsing, a disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic, and a likely recession by the fall, I'm not sure that Biden will win.  It should be a no brainer, but I wouldn't bet money on it.  It's clear that Trump's supporters will excuse anything and will be voting for Trump in the fall.  Will enough Democrats ignore all of Biden's many past failings?  Not sure.

It was strange the silence it received, but I chalked it up to Coronavirus panic. I think this hurts Biden a lot, but even just looking at the post ThinkerX put into this thread about a conversation with a conservative co-worker shows that Trump's base is not faltering. Which is scary as some of his base once voted Democrat. 

 

In response to some of the posts since the one I quoted, I think more women could be out there but possibly don't come out for a variety of legitimate reasons. I also think its possible a person could do this once and not again. A person who assumed due to their privilege this was all good and fine, and read those clear cues of resistance way later than they should have. Either way, I always wondered how Democrats in general would deal with an accusation if it hit a high profile member (say the Democratic presumptive nominee). Silence so far. It's disturbing. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

16 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

I remember back in highschool math classes,  pandemic infections were one of the main examples used to illustrate exponential growth.  Is that not the case for Americans?

You have to understand, if a science teacher in America did that, they'd be run from the profession for espousing anti-Christian messages. How this would relate to that? I have no idea. But it would happen.

[Zorral]

He wants to quarantine / lock down New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Nothing in nothing out.  He just said it.

[mcbigski]

23 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Hospital beds have been cut everywhere, because these days we're healthier. The beds aren't filled with polio victims and measles, mumps and chicken pox patients. Or as many motor vehicle accident victims. Or women who just had babies and stayed in hospital for 2 or 3 weeks. Now its's 2 or 3 days. The US hospital system has one of the lowest utilization rates in the first world - 65%. In Canada our hospital bed utilization rate is 93%.

Do you keep the beds open, or do you throw up emergency hospitals if there's a pandemic?

And, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't Trump's tax cuts hit blue states very hard in the budget, by cutting tax revenue?

So the US has about 5% more beds per 1000 people than Canada (2.9 v 2.7 according to the stats I saw).  I get that all not all beds are ICU with ventilators etc, but the US could handle a 50% surge in hospitalizations while Canada could handle an 8% increase.  For beds at least, no idea about staffing.  Serious zero snark question, why such a large difference?  Utilization is higher in Canada when patients have no or at least vastly lower marginal cost?

But the socialized version doesn't seem as robust, does it?

18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of long time posters who stopped posting have returned.

Where the fuck is @TrackerNeil!!!

He's been around in the last year or two, I think, but three times now I've seen the Coronaman thread and though Coco was back at first.

18 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I'll take my side's rapist. It's one thing to have treated governing a state as a zero-sum exercise of political gamesmanship but Republicans literally set the decency bar at 0.

Joe could rape ten women this month and as long as he looks moderately ashamed of himself when questioned, he's my guy.

Is this a grab em by the pussy reference?  That was so clearly in the context of women that willingly use their sexuality to chase celebrity instead of say, soup kitchen volunteers or nuns or women as 3.5 billion at large category, that I think it's a terrible disservice to try to conflate that with sexual assault.

There was also that group of people that said Trump assaulted them in first class, but that's about as credible as the Kavanaugh spiking the punch for rape gang accusations considering the stakes and especially the timing.  If there's another incident I'm missing, I'm sure it will be pointed out.

I really wouldn't put much stock in the Tara Reade accusation though.  At least unless the National Enquirer starts reporting it.  They were way ahead of the curve on Rielle Hunter story, so when it comes to reporting on Democrat sex scandals, I'd trust them ahead of party mouthpieces like NYT or WaPo or Vox.

All that aside Jace, it's illuminating to see you take sexual assault so not seriously when it's potentially your guy as the accused.  Frankly I think this is going to get traction precisely because 2020 version of Biden is such a terrible candidate, but the DNC is going to have to feather it just so to get Biden aside, their pick in, and keep Bernie out.

18 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

One never knows what thread to post in...

Last week at this time there were 18,000 coronavirus cases in the US. There are over 100,000 today. 18+18=36, 36+36=72, 72+28=100,000. 72 x .4=28

If this continues at a pace, 100+100=200, 200+200=400, 400+160=560,000. 400 x .4=160

That's going to cause some serious political problems.

 

Exponential growth is always and everywhere only a short term approximation.  There are always limits.  We need more testing of the at large population to get a better handle on actual rates of infection, recovery, and fatalities.

Infection rates are always going to be partially a function of testing rates.  Testing rate has gone up, cases have too.  Even fatalities per capita is an inelegant measure, unless they were testing everyone who died of non trauma causes.  But it is a much better measure.

Perhaps what you meant to say was "hopefully framing it this way will cause some serious political problems for Trump".  Seems to be why the media is enamored of absolute cases this week, while when POTUS said more tests done than anyone else, it was all "you have to use per capita".  Party of science lolz.

17 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

they don't appear to grasp the concept of 'near exponential growth.'  I tried explaining this to one of my conservative coworkers a few pages ago; his reaction was much the same as these people 'huh? that can't be right.'

Also (again linked to a page or three back) is a right wing article pointing out the COVID 19 numbers are all wrong; according to them we are on the downside of the curve because the true CV pandemic was over the holidaze.  (and because a lot of people were deathly ill in that time frame, the claim garners a bit of traction)

As said, total infections are going to be more like a sigmoid curve, there's a part where that's exponential growth, but there are certainly going to be limiting factors.  I happen to agree that social distancing etc is a good idea right now, but let's not get married to extrapolations even once more data may become available.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

@Mlle. Zabzie,

Escape from New York City seems to have been a wise decision.  

[Altherion]

3 minutes ago, Zorral said:

He wants to quarantine / lock down New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Nothing in nothing out.  He just said it.

That would be insane (because of food and other supplies) and it's not what he said:

Quote

Trump, however, said that possible quarantine would be "enforceable" and "restrict travel" from those parts of the tri-state area. He also said any quarantine wouldn't affect truckers from outside the New York area.

So people can't leave, but trucks can come and go. Also, it's not obvious he has the authority to do that at all without the governors of these states.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

He's been around in the last year or two, I think, but three times now I've seen the Coronaman thread and though Coco was back at first.

Who is this Coco you speak of?

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER!!!!

[Fragile Bird]

5 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

So the US has about 5% more beds per 1000 people than Canada (2.9 v 2.7 according to the stats I saw).  I get that all not all beds are ICU with ventilators etc, but the US could handle a 50% surge in hospitalizations while Canada could handle an 8% increase.  For beds at least, no idea about staffing.  Serious zero snark question, why such a large difference?  Utilization is higher in Canada when patients have no or at least vastly lower marginal cost?

But the socialized version doesn't seem as robust, does it?

You know what they say, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. 

The post was in response to the claim that first, Cuomo was cutting hospital beds, and second, cutting funding to Medicaid. Ergo, my response that hospital beds have been cut everywhere because people are healthier.  The US health care system is largely private, and extremely expensive, twice as expensive as Canada's, for example. Does the US have those hospital beds because of the generosity of your system or because of the medical business's ability to extract more and more money out of the public? Are the beds empty because you are so healthy or because people can't afford hospitalization? Canadians, btw, have a longer life expectancy than Americans, and your rate of maternal mortality is the worst in the first world. Beds in hospitals are so full in Canada not for some failing of our medical system (and it ain't perfect by any means), but because there is a shortage of long term health care facilities ie nursing homes. People are in hospital while they wait for a bed elsewhere. If we have a 'surge' they'll do exactly what NYC has done and open beds in a conference centre for non-covid cases.

And, incidentally, can you explain why the US has more than twice the number of Covid-19 cases, proportionally, than Canada does, and 4x the fatality rate? Surely under our shitty socialist system our numbers would be so very much worse, would they not? Knock on wood, ours don't get worse and your numbers improve. Unfortunately, even though the US has at least twice as many ICU beds as Canada, I think it's you guys who are running out of capacity.

And about the cuts to Medicaid comment - iirc, everyone said Trump's tax cuts seemed to specifically include provisions that would cut tax income to blue states. New York was hit hard, wasn't it? Please, correct if I'm wrong, and blue states did not lose revenue from taxation.

37 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Exponential growth is always and everywhere only a short term approximation.  There are always limits.  We need more testing of the at large population to get a better handle on actual rates of infection, recovery, and fatalities.

Infection rates are always going to be partially a function of testing rates.  Testing rate has gone up, cases have too.  Even fatalities per capita is an inelegant measure, unless they were testing everyone who died of non trauma causes.  But it is a much better measure.

Perhaps what you meant to say was "hopefully framing it this way will cause some serious political problems for Trump".  Seems to be why the media is enamored of absolute cases this week, while when POTUS said more tests done than anyone else, it was all "you have to use per capita".  Party of science lolz.

 

Canada has tested waaaaaaaayyyyyy more than the US. Per capita. And the argument "oh, now it's about per capita" fuck yeah, of course it's about per capita. How the hell else do you know the extent of the problem? I have no idea how long exponential growth will last, but I don't think it will disappear in the next 7 days.

And when I said exponential growth is going to cause some political problems, well, just who exactly is running the country? Who said 'there's 15 cases and that's it"? Who said "don't talk to the governor of Washington and that woman in Michigan"?.

Also, every state that is still not taking things seriously.

And still there are not enough testkits. The governor of Nevada said yesterday they've asked 4 times for testkits and have been sent none. Oh, wait, could he possibly be a Democrat? I just looked that up, I didn't know. Why am I not surprised? They got 1,000 shipped in from Macau by a casino owner, for crying out loud. Stuff like that is going to cause political problems.

After this is all over there should be a joint Senate/Congressional commission to find out how things got so screwed up. Somehow I don't think "Obama left me a totally broken system" is going to be the reason.