This is something we kind of knew already but now we can put a number on it: the actual Covid-19 death toll in NYC is currently about 75% higher than reported. That ratio will go up as time goes on. https://t.co/JKX0q8WQqW
— Clifton (@clifton_r) April 7, 2020
I’m guessing the eventual Covid-19 death toll from the beginning and up to the next eight months will be 300,000 in the US. The real one, figured out with statistics, not the fake reported one.
I don’t want to get too technical for people, but when NYC has more COVID deaths a day than it typically has from all causes combined, it’s probably not because people are dying “with COVID, but not from COVID.”
— Josiah Neeley 🤔 (@jneeley78) April 8, 2020
That’s right. Covid-19 deaths are being underreported. It’s obvious now, but a post hoc statistical analyses will show this definitively everywhere. I guarantee it.
Yesterday 10,000 cars in San Antonio lined up for food distribution.
More than any picture or statistic I’ve seen, this is what scares me. pic.twitter.com/V9JVO724BU
— ashley fairbanks 🍓 (@ziibiing) April 10, 2020
The future is here. And when those folks can no longer afford their car payments they’ll all be on foot. Many people are surprised, but all those people one or two paychecks from starving have been there all along — even as Kevin Drum and others on the “liberal” side have denied it.
This will only get worse, not better. It’s likely to get a lot worse, too.
And no one sits in a car food bank line for hours unless they really need those supplies, no matter if they seem to be driving a “nice” car. This means nothing in America where you can finance an OK car for near-infinity, thus the monthly payments are low. This is a far better choice than driving an unreliable clunker.
This is the world to come, here now; the world we’ve chosen.
Human: You need oxygen or you'll suffocate.
Rob: <Is given oxygen, breathes>
Rob: But you said I'd suffocate! Fuck this Oxygen shit. https://t.co/4SwnhrSDBu— David Stewart Zink (@goofbone) April 10, 2020
That says it all right there. Is there any way to allow people to get past this cognitive failure other than just allowing the worst to occur?
The problem: this is not 1918. The economy is nothing like it was then. It was resilient in a way ours is just not, and it’s too late at this point to change it quickly during a pandemic. Also, then the US was about 40% urban and now it’s about 80% (by population).
Again, this is not 1918 and that time is not particularly instructive.
People really want to believe in a binary of good and bad people. The problem with ppl who think they're good people is that it's not about practice for them. It's about identity — as tho goodness were innate, as opposed to something we create outside of ourselves w effort.
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 8, 2020
This is about Biden. I don’t give a fuck if he’s good or not. I care about his history, what he’s done and what he’s likely to do.
His history: Iraq War, Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas, attempts to cut Social Security, drug war, “tough on crime,” supporting banksters at every turn, bankruptcy bill.
What he’s done: lady-sniffing likely rapist, in cognitive decline, with terrible ideas.
What he’s likely to do: be a bankster-coddling absent president who will not do anything to help people who truly need it, while people like Angie Schmitt claim that the president actually has no power (just as with Obama).
I don’t give a crap about Biden’s vital essence or how his soul “really” is. He’s done bad things and looks likely to keep on doing them. These people are fucking dipshits.
Yes, I would say that to their faces too. I am not just a jerk on the internet. I am also one in real life.
When companies advertise their food as “not irradiated,” I get irrationally angry. I want it to be irradiated! It’s vastly safer that way and lasts far longer. Every food sold commercially should be irradiated.
We need to shift from thinking about this pandemic as a crisis we’ll get through in months and start thinking of it as a factor that will be part of our reality for at least two years.
I’m not sure how we reconfigure our lives accordingly. No one is.
That’s part of the problem.
— Leah McElrath 🏳️🌈 (@leahmcelrath) April 10, 2020
Well, no matter what happens if the economy isn’t opened up again in 2-3 months it won’t matter much. Most people will be starving in the streets. Then nothing politically will happen or be available to change. That’ll all be done.
This is the choice at hand. Fix that first or the rest is irrelevant.
I love in the penultimate episode of Devs how Stewart is reciting the Philip Larkin poem in the tech temple tunnel. And as the head honcho mopey tech bro passes and is asked about it, the disdain with which he treats knowledge of history and art is subtle yet completely effective without being didactic.
So well done, and so apropos to our times. Great poem, too. I had not read “Aubade” since high school. What a lovely work when read aloud well.
Perfect scene, and of course the deeper allusion is to Charon, the ferryman, who shuttles souls into the world of the dead. Because after all, fate was seen by the Greeks as horrifying and inescapable. There’s a reason the word “fatal” means deadly now.
Just a beautiful and terrible (in the 14c. sense) few minutes of television.
Obesity Is Major COVID-19 Risk Factor, Says French Chief Epidemiologist.
But HAES! Of course that was always bullshit, but a good way to die quickly when anything goes wrong is the fragility of obesity. I see fewer people tiptoeing around that fact now and I am glad of it.
I named three colors:
Glisk of Dawn Sky
Carbonated Polyester
Ingenious Cotyledons
Plenty still left to name in the 24-bit RGB color space, so get to appellatin’.
This is why I say that if the economy isn’t restarted by June, there won’t be much of an economy to come back to.
Liberals in particular, but nearly everyone, are gravely underestimating the pernicious and incredibly negative effects this will have. It’s because they are thinking asystemtically and linearly of course, but they just cannot seem to stop.
Imagine that nuclear bombs had been dropped on several major American cities. This is what the economic shutdown is essentially doing. Vital relations and arrangements are just gone. Though those relationships and dependencies are invisible, they are just as real as a road or a building. All of those are being blown away, erased, extirpated — and they don’t and won’t just come back. That’s not how any of this works.
We have some chance if the economy is re-opened by June. If not, the Great Depression will in retrospect be considered an idyllic time.
I wonder if there's a connection between the fact that Hollywood stopped being able to tell coherent stories and then a few years later the State Department, CIA, and media stopped being able to tell coherent stories.
— scientism (@mr_scientism) April 9, 2020
I think so. Dominant ideologies become unable to deal with the existing milieu. Thus, the customary stories have no possibility of making sense as the entire sociocultural environment in which those narratives meant something has evaporated.
That’s the state we’re in now.