Why they’re winning. The “elites” (as has been the case for many years now) have not covered themselves with glory here.
6 thoughts on “The Openers”
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Why they’re winning. The “elites” (as has been the case for many years now) have not covered themselves with glory here.
Comments are closed.
33.5 million Americans have lost their jobs in less than two months. Countless small businesses are closed and many will never reopen. A lot of people complain they’re having a hard time collecting unemployment, so they have no income. Meanwhile, I doubt many if any of those self-proclaimed “elites” (they keep using that word, but it doesn’t mean what they think it means) are in the same predicament. Why should they care, they’ve got theirs and will continue to do so. If anything, they likely foresee themselves coming out of this even more powerful than they were before. Some of them are the ones who say that “to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.” Well, they’ve broken millions of eggs but the only ones eating the omelette are themselves.
This. Fortunately I live in Texas and some businesses have started to reopen.
My wife was reduced to part time a couple of weeks ago, still waiting for the unemployment to hit the bank. Supposedly, she has done everything correctly – at least according to the state.
Fortunately, I am retired military and have a contract position with a military related company. Therefore, I still am getting paid, to telecommute. I am collecting full pay to check my computer, mow the yard and clean up the garage. The concept of ‘essential’ needs to be re-looked.
Today we went out for lunch, I left a 30% tip. Not much, but at least I can. While I won’t bankrupt myself, for the rest of the year I will up my normal tip to 30%.
I’m not getting the point of a continued lock down. The stated reason was so that health facilities wouldn’t be overwhelmed with patients. Mission accomplished. Since there’s no vaccine for at least a year, if then, and herd immunity is the only path to full up safety there’s no difference between releasing the lock downs now or in 2 months.
The problem here is that if you don’t replace the lock down with other society-wide behavior that strongly resists spreading coronavirus, then in a few weeks you’ve created that overwhelming peak of patients that the whole exercise of the past couple of months was intended to prevent.
I will continue to practice social distancing and wearing masks in public because we don’t have this thing licked. We’ve just stabilized it for the present. And it is higher lethality than a normal flu – we have several contained groups where we know how many people could be infected and how many died (nursing homes, cruise ships), and it was pretty bad in those cases.
This doesn’t have to turn into a power play for authoritarians, but we need to continue to interact in ways that reduce the spread (particularly, to groups known to be more at risk like the elderly) over a long period of time (particularly, this coming winter), if we want to prevent a number of unnecessary deaths.
Closing things for a couple weeks made sense because that would allow anyone who was sick to show symptoms and to prevent the spread before they did. But stretching things out for months has deminishing returns while hurting the public in far more tangible ways.
Also, most people were still out doing things and crowding together in stores. If people can go out like this and not get sick, what is the argument to keep everything shutdown?
Every statement, assertion, projection, surmise, conjecture, advisory and so on, and so on, about this has not just been wrong but wildly wrong.
All we can hope is that people remember about this for a long time and the next time somebody gets up and starts a presentation with the statement “our modeling shows”, somebody in the audience pulls out a gun and blows his lying head off.