it's definitely not news that people are gathering in big crowds on purpose during a pandemic

It'll give them another excuse to revise the death tool again.

additional deaths are a very good excuse for changing the death toll, true

Nancy DeVos funded an AstroTurf movement which Fox News boosted to convince petty bourgeoisie business owners to cosplay as their employees so Trump could establish a fiction of popular support for reopening the economy too early.

oh, whoops: https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/kentucky-sees-highest-spike-in-coronavirus-cases-after-protests/

Too soon for those to be related yet.

Yup. The real concern is that a lot of interior states are still a week or two, maybe more, from their expected peaks under the stay-home orders (if any), and the relatively low numbers so far are giving the small business tyrants a lot of false confidence.

"small business tyrants".. love that turn of phrase.

What you should be really concerned about is when the trillions in corporate bonds start maturing in these corporations which have no revenue, and they have to refinance it all as junk. Then they layoff tons of people to try and get lean to weather the storm. Then household debt defaults start.

I mean, that's kind of the argument for the fact that there is a deadline for opening things back up whether we are ready or not. At some point the mechanisms of our economy will fail, wealth will just disappear, and we'll end up accepting a really bad outcome to avoid a bad one. It looks more and more likely that the optimal solution won't be a choice between, "open back up now", and "control the virus as well as possible", but rather we'll need to look for a global minimum. Meanwhile, the orange man doesn't know the difference between medicine and disinfectants.

I heard that when companies go bankrupt, they take sledgehammers to the machines.



But yes, anglo-american liberal economies aren't capable of adjusting to deal with a crisis like this one. Our economies are rigid, interlocking systems of rents. Our landlords are leveraged to hell, our businesses have no savings (the median small business went bankrupt a week ago), our citizens have no savings, our supply chains have no slack, and our governments don't even have the wherewithal to effectively distribute aid or economic stimulus to ordinary people. This is all funneling into a system-wide collapse in aggregate demand that is pretty much guaranteed to send us into a deflationary spiral.

That said, money printer does go brrr. So at least the conglomerates won't have to default on their share repurchase debt! yay!


On the plus side, at least this is just COVID-19 and not something more serious. When anglo-american society is inevitably defated by its own growth model we can all pretend that it was a high-minded debate about sacrificing a couple percent of old people to save the economy. We'd still have to reopen if the mortality rate were 60%, but it wouldn't be as easy to pretend it was a deliberate choice.

Labor isn't fungible.

I heard that when companies go bankrupt, they take sledgehammers to the workers.

[quote=Richard Levitan, emergency doctor]There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter.

Pulse oximetry is no more complicated than using a thermometer. These small devices turn on with one button and are placed on a fingertip. In a few seconds, two numbers are displayed: oxygen saturation and pulse rate. Pulse oximeters are extremely reliable in detecting oxygenation problems and elevated heart rates.

Pulse oximeters helped save the lives of two emergency physicians I know, alerting them early on to the need for treatment. When they noticed their oxygen levels declining, both went to the hospital and recovered (though one waited longer and required more treatment). Detection of hypoxia, early treatment and close monitoring apparently also worked for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister.[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-testing-pneumonia.html

(I bought one of these on a marketplace site but paid triple the retail price :-/)

If you loan it to someone wearing nail polish be sure to turn it sideways to that the lights are going through their finger and not the covered nailbed or it will look like they are asphyxiating. Also fun fact it will show full saturation with CO poisoning since it doesn't measure O2 directly but (I think) hemoglobin saturation which the CO will accomplish.

It really seems like the past decade of 'growth' wasn't so much a strengthening of business fundamentals, but a trimming of all safety measures within business. In other words, improvements were due mostly to making every part of business riskier. The whole deeply interlocked system is now facing existential threat, and the fed is just printing money hoping it finds its ways into repairing these issues before they nuke the whole system.

This is fine, I'm sure the economy will come back. It's not like they've upped risky behavior to the maximum or anything, I'm sure they can find more risky behavior to engage in. Until eventually, that is, the federal reserve begins having its teeth pulled out and it can no longer backstop the economy and we see a collapse of the house of cards.

I think I'm missing something fundamental. We all stayed home for months, they're starting to reopen stuff here in WA (state parks, boating, fishing, construction, elective surgeries, and on May 4th, apparently a ton of businesses that were forced to close down will be reopening). The virus hasn't gone away so as soon as people start mingling again it's going to start spreading again. So then, what? We're going to close down everything again? The "curve" was "flattened" but it will just spike right back up again.

Yeah, China is struggling right now with a 2nd wave.

In areas, ideally yes. This is the part that the advocates call “the dance”. You make the pandemic stretch out as long as possible without constant extreme measures, even if it means intermittent extreme or moderate/targeted measures. Once the initial spike is gone you reopen a little, and continuously adapt your measures to keep the hospitals from ever being overloaded.


What I think will actually end up happening though is we all just reopen everything and leave it that way, let our healthcare systems collapse, and rack up the highest mortality rates in the world. Because by transitivity, we actually have no socially acceptable way to get food to people without coercive labor markets, so everyone’s going to starve anyway.

You say that, but you are drastically underestimating how quickly know-how and infrastructure disappear. Let's say Boeing goes under. If someone comes along and buys them immediately, great, life will continue. But who is going to do that? It's a massive, capital intensive company that has just gone under. Who has enough money to invest in something that will be a massive money pit for years? If no one buys, and they have to stop operations, that's it. A huge number of people will retire, and that knowledge will be lost. Everyone else will try to go to other industries. A lot of people will be out of work and have to switch careers. Not just Boeing, but all their hundreds of suppliers as well. If you try and come back six months later and restart everything you won't be able to reorganize everyone back into effective teams anymore. There will be too many gaps. You'll suddenly have to start reverse engineering a huge amount of stuff that people just knew. All your suppliers will be in a similar situation. Most of that tooling literally will get a sledge hammer taken to it. What can't be auctioned off will be incredibly expensive, but incredibly specific machinery that has no value outside that production line. That's all going to get broken up and sold as scrap.

Look at what happened to the Saturn V program. Once they finished the last one, that was it. There was no going back and making more. That's why they'll go to so much effort to keep production lines open. Trying to go back and restart programs like that costs almost as much as starting from scratch.

Except if Boeing goes ‘under’ it won’t actually go under because the company has good fundamentals and is just being grossly mismanaged. It will get a bail-in or chapter 11 bankruptcy, or at worst a chapter 7 bankruptcy and be forced to sell its non-distressed military business to someone like Raytheon and then reorganize their civilian aviation arm in receivership.

None of their creditors have any interest in Boeing ceasing to exist or ceasing operations. It would not happen.

Do not drink the Wall Street kool aid. Bailing out Boeing’s incompetent management does nothing except vindicate the grossly negligent financial practices that Wall Street has pushed onto the S&P 500.

This is a hypothetical situation. I don't think Boeing is going to go under right now for those reasons. However, a lot of civil aviation companies have folded in the past. That's why the airline industry is a duopoly right now. If things get particularly bad in the market for long enough, it can cause issues. Boeing takes significant and ongoing investment to continue to function. In an economy with a sustained global drop in consumer demand, it's quite possible that it would be hard to scare up buying who are willing to make that big an investment for long term returns rather than simply cutting losses. Boeing isn't a terribly profitable company at the best of times.

While Boeing's leadership has it's issues, I disagree that failure to prepare for something on this scale is incompetence. It doesn't make sense for every company to have to hedge against every possible unforeseen disaster. It's not an effective use of the market, and the market won't do a good job optimizing for it.

"Prepare for something on this scale"??

Boeing has retired 25% of its stock since 2013, spending $43 billion to do so. Last October they announced a $20 billion accelerated share repurchase plan to rebound stock prices after the MAX fiasco, which was to be paid in part by a $9.5 billion line of credit. They then borrowed another $13.8 billion line of credit in February, and only just cancelled their ASP after their own customers started suing them for not refunding deposits for planes they will never be able to deliver.

I'm not sure which "something" you're talking about. Boeing's management has clearly worked very hard, for many years, to make Boeing as unprepared as possible for anything of any scale.

Possibly the only company that deserves to go through chapter 11 more than Boeing is Home Depot.

I just think after the US bailout we rename Boeing to Aeroflot, managed by some politburos as a state-run enterprise. We can calm the people about the safety of MAX with monthly articles about American safety in the Pax Americana issue of Pravda.

And yeah, when you're doing copious share buybacks, and leveraging your corporation to the max to do it, you're not just "not prepared", your management is ACTIVELY inverting "prepared", it's straight weakening the company and making it more susceptible to failures.

There's a goddamn reason buybacks were made illegal in the 1930s and were only overturned in the neoliberal era.

I've been remote accessing my workplace in NYC from two states away for the past 8 weeks. I just don't feel like going back to the city when the health system there looks like it is on the brink of collapse and getting food/supplies is difficult. Why even live in cities when I can just remote access most of the time...

OH MY GOD there are literally a million economics books written about this.

1.) Good question

2.) There is no good reason you shouldn't be able to do this

3.) Most people will never be allowed to

It's probably the biggest and easiest real thing we could do to stop carbon emissions.

Sure, if that mattered.

I think what's important wookie (and what our sponsors want you to know) is that it matters that it doesn't matter.

more like it doesn't matter that it matters

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young-people.html

[quote=Ms. Gay]
Through them, I became an amateur expert. This is the advice they gave me. Here’s what I’m telling my family and my friends: If you can, get an oximeter, a magical little device that measures your pulse and blood oxygen level from your fingertip. If you become sick and your oxygen dips below 95 or you have trouble breathing, go to the emergency room. Don’t wait.

If you have chest symptoms, assume you may have pneumonia and call a doctor or go to the E.R. Sleep on your stomach, since much of your lungs is actually in your back. If your oxygen is stable, change positions every hour. Do breathing exercises, a lot of them. The one that seemed to work best for me was pioneered by nurses in the British health system and shared by J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series.

Nearly a month later, I’m still sleeping on my stomach and still can’t go for a run. But I will be able to do those things, and much more. For now, every conversation with an old friend brings a new rush of love. Every sunny day feels like the first time I saw the ocean as a child and wanted to leap right in.
[/quote]



https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1247155118300000257

Got my Zacurate 500DL Pro in the mail today. My baseline oxygen saturation levels vary from 95 to 100.

There were a few on Amazon for $40 but they seem to go in and out of stock from various sellers. There are a lot more on Mercari (where I got mine) and ebay, with prices varying from $40 to $90.

Would this be enough to kill companies like Uber, WeWork and Airbnb?

I would not expect WeWork to survive for long even without COVID thrown in the mix, they were already in a spiral.

Maybe all it takes is WeWork to say they *maybe* developed a vaccine.

Can't be a commercial microleasing arbitrageur if there's no commerce.

Oh man, maybe I should stay the hell out of NYC.