the strong usd

[Southernguy]

Re: the strong usd

Woodsman: A bit up this stream I put the mortality numbers for n1h1 and Covid19 to compare. Well, the ones that are publicly known. Any comments?

Oh yes, rational analysis. Praise the maker for rational analysis for without it all we would have left is our common sense and lying eyes.

In two generations, we've rationally analyzed ourselves from the most free and prosperous nation in the world into an open air prison who must rely on foreign donations of paper masks and respirators, as the rational analysts in command determined that we had no further need of manufacturing capacity.

Rational analysis tells us that a nation decimated by war and invasion, suffering from famine, and incapable of fielding a bomber with more than 2,400 miles range was so dire a threat to an America armed with atomic weapons, that it required a 50-year-long cold war and arms race to defeat, enriching the world's largest corporations and ushering in an unaccountable and unconstitutional fourth branch of government unknown in its previous 177 years of existence.

Rational analysis tell us that a crazed lone gunman seeking personal validation hit a moving target from 81 meters using a defective Italian bolt action rifle, striking a beloved president in the neck and head and killing him in broad daylight, only to be killed himself two days later by a distraught nightclub owner in the basement of a police station while surrounded by armed guards and television cameras.

Rational analysis tells us the North Vietnamese Navy, comprised of a few torpedo boats and corvettes, deliberately launched an unprovoked attack against American ships on the high seas, thus inviting 8 years of round the clock bombing and an invasion by half a million American soldiers resulting in the deaths of more than a million of its citizens following a decade of war.

Rational analysis tells us that the air defense system of the world's most powerful nation was rendered moot by 19 men with box cutters, resulting in the textbook implosion directly upon its own footprint of the most iconic buildings in the world.

Rational analysis tells us Iraq hid its weapons of mass destruction so well that they remain unaccounted for to this day, even after more than a decade of war and occupation.

Rational analysis tells us that Osama Bin Laden escaped the mountains of Tora Bora, only to be found a decade later secluded in a compound less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy and a mere 100 kilometers' drive from Pakistan's capital, previously unbeknownst to either the United States government or that of Pakistan.

And it tells us that an influenza virus that thus far has killed fewer people than last year's ordinary flu is so deadly a pathogen that it can only be defeated by a global shutdown of commerce and civil life, requiring us to submit our freedom of movement and assembly on the word of a government who in every other regard has shown a consistent pattern of truth-telling, openness, and transparency, and with a half-century record of unbroken allegiance to the interests and concerns of the largest majority of its poor and middle-class citizens.

This is what rational analysis tells us.

But the common, plain before your eyes, sense that only raving madmen and ignorant rubes seem to posses tells them something quite different.

It tells those poor, deluded, and ignorant fools that the contemporary events of late have all the appearances of a political coup, one materializing mere weeks after the party in opposition, allied with the permanent apparatus of state and a united elite press corps, failed yet again in their attempt to take down a hated president, this time by impeachment for the alleged - but still unproven or indicted - crime of colluding with the Russian Federation to defeat Hillary Clinton, the candidate whom no less an authority than the New York Times and Washington Post were certain had a 99% chance of winning election.

Only the insane and profoundly ignorant among us, incapable of rational analysis, would look at contemporary events in Europe reeling under an inchoate banking crisis and an ongoing crisis of legitimacy following Brexit portending the inevitable collapse of the entire EU experiment, and infer that its elites would use this virus as the means to grant them extraordinary authority and powers to do whatever it took to secure their union, undermine resistance by Germany, and by doing so force it to abandon austerity and take on the debt of its lesser EU states.

It takes a raving lunatic to infer that these two elite neoliberal cohorts in Europe and America, finding common cause, went for broke and chose to strike their enemies by deliberately attacking the economy using this virus as a cover story.

Only a half-educated, ignorant madman, without reason and incapable of the most basic analytical processing would contemplate even the possibility that this virus was either deliberately deployed or permitted to proliferate so as to serve as a political weapon of mass destruction against a despised outsider presiding over a 50 year low in unemployment, a record stock market valuation, and otherwise seemingly impervious to conventional political attacks by an unhinged opposition and a lock-step united front of opposition by the elite press corps.

Only such a fool would look to the skilled and expert technocracy of Brussels, with their unbroken track record of success and their longtime commitment to democratic processes and open governance, and infer that they would make such an audacious and desperate gambit in the face of their all but certain dissolution and disgrace.

No, it takes quite an insane person to view these events as a crypto-revolution by neoliberal American and European elites rivaling in scale and scope the bourgeois revolutions that swept across Europe and South America in 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Fortunately for those not afflicted by the madness of common sense, rational analysis will provide the soothing answers and comforting rationalizations we have so long relied upon our elite technocratic, financial, scientific, and academic classes to provide us.

Indeed, we are fortunate to be led by so qualified and expert a cohort.

[Chris Coles]

Re: the strong usd

my experience is that rational analysis works pretty well in modern day medicine, although it is limited because there is so much of which we still remain ignorant. "common sense" is still more limited, though, since it means accepting greater areas of ignorance and more supposition and bias. for me, the closer you stick to the evidence, the more believable your conclusions. that's why i wanted comparative h1n1/covid19 data in order to decide how plausible your conspiratorial argument was.

why were/are these epidemics treated so differently? that's a reasonable question. but merely observing that difference isn't adequate evidence of anything in particular.

A friend, Andreas Muenchow a scientist with a blog, Icy Seas, has just taken the "gibberish" and provided some additional output that might help https://icyseas.org/2020/04/02/data-...lf-quarantine/

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

I'm pretty sure rational analysis of almost anything is difficult.

I'm not a doctor, but I have lots of experience being a patient. Medicine is absolutely just as full of greed, ideology, conflicts of interest, and ego as any other area. If anything it's worse in medicine, because doctors think they are above the human behaviors and emotions and moral failings which the rest of us are subject to because they are scientists.

doctors are human, and subject to every human frailty, but they are diverse and i don't think appropriately painted with such a broad brush. but i know a lot of doctors who i think are jerks, arrogant, poor thinkers, ill-mannered. the letters after someone's name are no guarantee of quality.

but i was not talking about practitioners, i was talking about method.

imo the practice of medicine is not science; it is informed by science. every patient is an N of 1. you can have ideas about the probabilities of a patient falling in some part of the distribution, but you can't know about that individual unless you somehow probe or test. but you sequence your attempts at diagnosis or treatment according to the probabilities.

it sounds like you've had bad experiences with doctors. that's terrible in so many ways. but i don't think that negates the value of thinking logically and analytically about problems of whatever kind. would you prefer a doctor who said he was treating you based on a hunch, or one who had some evidence and explanation of what was wrong and what could be done about it?

[kbird]

Re: the strong usd

rational analysis of political processes is hard, or maybe impossible.

my experience is that it works pretty well in medicine.

I'm pretty sure rational analysis of almost anything is difficult.

I'm not a doctor, but I have lots of experience being a patient. Medicine is absolutely just as full of greed, ideology, conflicts of interest, and ego as any other area. If anything it's worse in medicine, because doctors think they are above the human behaviors and emotions and moral failings which the rest of us are subject to because they are scientists.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

my experience is that rational analysis works pretty well in modern day medicine, although it is limited because there is so much of which we still remain ignorant. "common sense" is still more limited, though, since it means accepting greater areas of ignorance and more supposition and bias. for me, the closer you stick to the evidence, the more believable your conclusions. that's why i wanted comparative h1n1/covid19 data in order to decide how plausible your conspiratorial argument was.

why were/are these epidemics treated so differently? that's a reasonable question. but merely observing that difference isn't adequate evidence of anything in particular.

[Woodsman]

Re: the strong usd

if someone says A was handled one way, and a somewhat similar B was handled quite differently, it's worth knowing the details about each in order to assess whether the difference in handling reflected rational analysis or some form of bias. so i asked about the details.

Oh yes, rational analysis. Praise the maker for rational analysis for without it all we would have left is our common sense and lying eyes.

In two generations, we've rationally analyzed ourselves from the most free and prosperous nation in the world into an open air prison who must rely on foreign donations of paper masks and respirators, as the rational analysts in command determined that we had no further need of manufacturing capacity.

Rational analysis tells us that a nation decimated by war and invasion, suffering from famine, and incapable of fielding a bomber with more than 2,400 miles range was so dire a threat to an America armed with atomic weapons, that it required a 50-year-long cold war and arms race to defeat, enriching the world's largest corporations and ushering in an unaccountable and unconstitutional fourth branch of government unknown in its previous 177 years of existence.

Rational analysis tell us that a crazed lone gunman seeking personal validation hit a moving target from 81 meters using a defective Italian bolt action rifle, striking a beloved president in the neck and head and killing him in broad daylight, only to be killed himself two days later by a distraught nightclub owner in the basement of a police station while surrounded by armed guards and television cameras.

Rational analysis tells us the North Vietnamese Navy, comprised of a few torpedo boats and corvettes, deliberately launched an unprovoked attack against American ships on the high seas, thus inviting 8 years of round the clock bombing and an invasion by half a million American soldiers resulting in the deaths of more than a million of its citizens following a decade of war.

Rational analysis tells us that the air defense system of the world's most powerful nation was rendered moot by 19 men with box cutters, resulting in the textbook implosion directly upon its own footprint of the most iconic buildings in the world.

Rational analysis tells us Iraq hid its weapons of mass destruction so well that they remain unaccounted for to this day, even after more than a decade of war and occupation.

Rational analysis tells us that Osama Bin Laden escaped the mountains of Tora Bora, only to be found a decade later secluded in a compound less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy and a mere 100 kilometers' drive from Pakistan's capital, previously unbeknownst to either the United States government or that of Pakistan.

And it tells us that an influenza virus that thus far has killed fewer people than last year's ordinary flu is so deadly a pathogen that it can only be defeated by a global shutdown of commerce and civil life, requiring us to submit our freedom of movement and assembly on the word of a government who in every other regard has shown a consistent pattern of truth-telling, openness, and transparency, and with a half-century record of unbroken allegiance to the interests and concerns of the largest majority of its poor and middle-class citizens.

This is what rational analysis tells us.

But the common, plain before your eyes, sense that only raving madmen and ignorant rubes seem to posses tells them something quite different.

It tells those poor, deluded, and ignorant fools that the contemporary events of late have all the appearances of a political coup, one materializing mere weeks after the party in opposition, allied with the permanent apparatus of state and a united elite press corps, failed yet again in their attempt to take down a hated president, this time by impeachment for the alleged - but still unproven or indicted - crime of colluding with the Russian Federation to defeat Hillary Clinton, the candidate whom no less an authority than the New York Times and Washington Post were certain had a 99% chance of winning election.

Only the insane and profoundly ignorant among us, incapable of rational analysis, would look at contemporary events in Europe reeling under an inchoate banking crisis and an ongoing crisis of legitimacy following Brexit portending the inevitable collapse of the entire EU experiment, and infer that its elites would use this virus as the means to grant them extraordinary authority and powers to do whatever it took to secure their union, undermine resistance by Germany, and by doing so force it to abandon austerity and take on the debt of its lesser EU states.

It takes a raving lunatic to infer that these two elite neoliberal cohorts in Europe and America, finding common cause, went for broke and chose to strike their enemies by deliberately attacking the economy using this virus as a cover story.

Only a half-educated, ignorant madman, without reason and incapable of the most basic analytical processing would contemplate even the possibility that this virus was either deliberately deployed or permitted to proliferate so as to serve as a political weapon of mass destruction against a despised outsider presiding over a 50 year low in unemployment, a record stock market valuation, and otherwise seemingly impervious to conventional political attacks by an unhinged opposition and a lock-step united front of opposition by the elite press corps.

Only such a fool would look to the skilled and expert technocracy of Brussels, with their unbroken track record of success and their longtime commitment to democratic processes and open governance, and infer that they would make such an audacious and desperate gambit in the face of their all but certain dissolution and disgrace.

No, it takes quite an insane person to view these events as a crypto-revolution by neoliberal American and European elites rivaling in scale and scope the bourgeois revolutions that swept across Europe and South America in 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Fortunately for those not afflicted by the madness of common sense, rational analysis will provide the soothing answers and comforting rationalizations we have so long relied upon our elite technocratic, financial, scientific, and academic classes to provide us.

Indeed, we are fortunate to be led by so qualified and expert a cohort.

[Southernguy]

Re: the strong usd

A quick search, as per Wikipedia the n1h1 numbers were: That is, "casso confirmados" is diagnosed ill. "fallecidos" is dead. That's the reason for h1n1 and Covid19 were (are) treated so different. New York is already having difficulties dealing with corpses.

700 millones a 1 400 millones (estimado)1

150 000 a 575 000 (estimado)2

That is, taking both averages a mortality of around 0.03%. Mortality of Covid19, so far, 5%. That is 145 times more. If 1 billion people were infected the death toll could reach 50 million. Something like WW2.
These numbers are no way exact, but they convey an idea....well, to me at least.

if someone says A was handled one way, and a somewhat similar B was handled quite differently, it's worth knowing the details about each in order to assess whether the difference in handling reflected rational analysis or some form of bias. so i asked about the details.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

if someone says A was handled one way, and a somewhat similar B was handled quite differently, it's worth knowing the details about each in order to assess whether the difference in handling reflected rational analysis or some form of bias. so i asked about the details.

[Woodsman]

Re: the strong usd

i think both the cfr and the Ro would make a difference in assessing the risk of an infectious illness...

Guesses, yes. And on the basis of that, an unelected and unaccountable elite have taken decisions that have condemned millions of people to a lifetime of penury, decisions that will most certainly result in increasing morbidity and mortality as much as any pathogen.

And wanting to know those things doesn't make one a pedant, of course not. We must know them, as well the limits of certainty. A certain humility in the face of those limits seems required, too. Alas, humility isn't a trait held in regard by the commanding heights of our medical and scientific elite. That is their privilege and our burden.

But taking a Socratic tone and making a show of it, as master to student, well maybe just a little pedantic.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

Are you usually this pedantic, or is it some special sauce just for little ol' me?

Again, as of right now Covid-19 is higher based on the available data (1.x vs 4.x or thereabouts). Once there's a more complete picture it might be lower or higher. The point, yet again, comparing apples to apples regarding the response, one choice is far and away more drastic than the other and does not take into account what happens after the big game is over and cheering stops.

Fundamentally, we have to look at the big picture, aka the now familiar tune of "not letting the cure be worse than the disease." Sudden-stopping every economy in the world, bringing commerce to a halt, empowering government with emergency powers, and the like, might indeed mitigate the present crisis but at a far greater cost in terms of lives and treasure once the immediate event has passed.

But I've said that, and others have said that, and others have amplified it, all to no avail. The medical/scientific elite have decided for us what we will do and have made the decision that we are to be made paupers while they sit secure in their sinecures.

The political leadership is content to defer to them in the short run, making the calculus that it's better to appear to act decisively now since nobody will be paying much attention to the ongoing body count once "victory" is declared.

Besides, should they prove wrong, the medical/scientific elite can be just as easily sacrificed and made to take the fall. And the rest of us can pound sand, either way.

Then again, "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley, an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, for promis'd joy!" I'm sure I'm not the only rube sharpening my pitchfork. And we'll remember in November.

i think both the cfr and the Ro would make a difference in assessing the risk of an infectious illness. i don't know those numbers for h1n1 and we have guesses for covid.

if you're going to compare how 2 epidemics were handled, it's worth knowing how serious they were/are and those 2 numbers tell us. otherwise any comparison of the responses is meaningless.

if you think wanting to know those things is being pedantic, please tell me how to assess the performance/reactions of those tasked with responding to them. or do you suggest that anything with the word "epidemic" should be handled in an identical manner.

actually those 2 facts are just the beginning, because you'd also like to know about morbidity- covid patients can be in icu's for weeks, even those who recover. that's a lot of resources. but cfr and Ro is a start.

[Southernguy]

Re: the strong usd

Checked for first time John Hopkins site. Extremely up to date. Deaths in Uruguay 4 (2 died this morning).
Total world death rate a 5.14%. Few days ago it was 4.7%. We can sepeculate about number of undiagnosed light cases, but death rate seems to grow day by day. One probable explanation: as healthcare systems are overwhelmed more people die.
Videos about situation in Ecuador are circulating: People abandoning corpses in the streets in Guayaquil (second city) because no institution shall take them. Imagine the situation on a tropical country. I have some second hand but fairly trustworthy information that this is real. In Uruguay, for now, things seem more or less under control. Cases grow at a 4-6% daily rate. Mortality today over 1%. The problem: what happens in 30 days when things, eventualy shall be more or less the same as today. We do not have the "exorbitant privilege" of making the world's reserve currency.

[Woodsman]

Re: the strong usd

and do we know what the Ro was?

Are you usually this pedantic, or is it some special sauce just for little ol' me?

Again, as of right now Covid-19 is higher based on the available data (1.x vs 4.x or thereabouts). Once there's a more complete picture it might be lower or higher. The point, yet again, comparing apples to apples regarding the response, one choice is far and away more drastic than the other and does not take into account what happens after the big game is over and cheering stops.

Fundamentally, we have to look at the big picture, aka the now familiar tune of "not letting the cure be worse than the disease." Sudden-stopping every economy in the world, bringing commerce to a halt, empowering government with emergency powers, and the like, might indeed mitigate the present crisis but at a far greater cost in terms of lives and treasure once the immediate event has passed.

But I've said that, and others have said that, and others have amplified it, all to no avail. The medical/scientific elite have decided for us what we will do and have made the decision that we are to be made paupers while they sit secure in their sinecures.

The political leadership is content to defer to them in the short run, making the calculus that it's better to appear to act decisively now since nobody will be paying much attention to the ongoing body count once "victory" is declared.

Besides, should they prove wrong, the medical/scientific elite can be just as easily sacrificed and made to take the fall. And the rest of us can pound sand, either way.

Then again, "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley, an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, for promis'd joy!" I'm sure I'm not the only rube sharpening my pitchfork. And we'll remember in November.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

Lower, obviously. But it wasn't so obvious in the middle of the pandemic. The rate that prints today wasn't known until the event was largely complete. But again, the response to it was vastly different even when we were uncertain as to the severity.

and do we know what the Ro was?

[Woodsman]

Re: the strong usd

what was the cfr for h1n1?

Lower, obviously. But it wasn't so obvious in the middle of the pandemic. The rate that prints today wasn't known until the event was largely complete. But again, the response to it was vastly different even when we were uncertain as to the severity.

[jk]

Re: the strong usd

what was the cfr for h1n1?