It isn’t a hoax however with all the factors it definitely isn’t the killer it’s been made up to be. Between rampant testing blowing up the numbers, false positives and deaths and sicknesses not directly related to the virus, the actual severity is a lot lower than you’re Being lead to believe.

I think you are confused sir. All-cause-mortality is higher than the reported number of COVID deaths, which suggests we are under-reporting. This is with lockdowns that have reduced auto deaths, accidental deaths, flu related deaths, etc. The only numbers that are up are overdoses and suicides, but those don’t offset the savings. In fact, before the virus hit the midwest, many states were reporting a yearly deficit in deaths due to the lockdowns. And remember, this is with countermeasures. What would be the worst case scenario if we hadn’t done anything? A lot worse, which is what they said all along. Not just COVID deaths, but overwhelmed hospitals would lead to large amounts of collateral deaths.

The hoax people are side-by-side with the deniers. They are almost one-in-the-same in how they seem to just not get it. What else was causing a 7.5 fold increase in all-cause-mortality? Expected deaths in New York City in one week was 1,037, and they got 7,863 deaths. What is your explanation?

Just to paint the severity in a different way, New Jersey is the worst state with 1,953 deaths per million from COVID for the year. That is one COVID death per 512 people. In New York City, their mortality is one COVID death per 244 people. Just to extrapolate to the whole country if the whole country eventually saw the same number of deaths, we would have 1.345 million people die. That number is 38 times as worse as the seasonal flu (35k average estimated deaths), and again, this is with countermeasures.

There is no way to disguise or inflate these numbers. When people deny the severity of this pandemic, they are not making a trivial error. To steal an analogy from Richard Dawkins, when describing evolution versus young-earth-creationists, it would be like saying the distance across the United States from Florida to Washington is 73 miles when it is in fact 2,802 miles.

Now to the topic that I came here for:

Would you be willing to get a COVID vaccine in exchange for $1,500 stimulus check?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/03/1500...ould-work.html

I think this is a bad move. I get the idea, which is to incentivize people to go get the vaccine, so we can get the adoption rate above 75%, but America has already demonstrated how defiant they are, and I think this will just be fuel-for-the-fire for any anti-vaccers. I doubt this will happen.

If anyone wants a look into epidemiological tracing then this is good info. Just for clarification, they are not suggesting it is airborne in the classical sense. They are suggesting that respiratory droplets on the smaller spectrum in a presence of air conditioning or wind of a gentle and constant vector could act to transmit the respiratory droplets much further than typical, which suggests that indoor dinning is not without its risks, even if people are socially distancing. In this case, two people were infected from a distance downstream of the infected person--one by over 6.5 meters or 21 feet within five minutes.

https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e415

https://jkms.org/ArticleImage/0063JK...415-g003-l.jpg

It's definitely a bad idea to tie the two together. Too many what-ifs just in the offset.

What if you have had COVID and are on the backend of the availability list, but need the money now?

What if you can't take the vaccine for a legitimate (not just out of fear) reason?

What if the vaccine is delayed to your area because it's a lower risk area, or doesn't have the appropriate storage equipment?

etc..

Its the same with this moronic idea of "forgiving" student loan debt.

What if you were diligent and saved for college so you don't have a loan, but your buddy used his "student loan" to take a spring break trip to Figi?

What if you don't have student loan debt because your parents lived like paupers for 4 years to help you get through?

You get the idea.

I agree on the COVID stuff, as those are all good points, but to your analogy, while I get your point, I’m for student loan forgiveness of some kind, and I think public college should be free. I think certain jobs should get more relief based on the need for workers in that field, so someone majoring in 13th century Asian art shouldn’t get the type of relief a teacher or doctor gets. They should zero the interest on the loans and if someone already has paid more in interest than their borrowed amount then they should be completely forgiven. A salary based repayment system that isn’t as bad as the system we have now would be good too. I could go on. Inherently, any system will not be perfectly fair, but it would be better than the current system where we saddle students with debt and hold that over them, and where we have a system of financial barriers in place to higher education, and where we have a system where wealth and not merit often determines what schools people can attend.

If you get a degree in 13th Century Asian Art you’re on your own. Especially when you graduate and blame capitalism for you not getting a job. Most college students should be in trade schools anyway.

I copy and pasted the wrong value obviously. 18k+ statewide.

We're in partial agreement, and I'm OK with interest forgiveness or working it off over time in the right field. I'm not OK with blanket forgiveness.

In Georgia, assuming you have the grades and do the work to keep them there, and you live at home, public college is basically tuition free thanks to the Hope Scholarship. There are fees and such but anyone with a part-time job could afford it.

The first thing that needs to be done is to fix the loan program to begin with. "Back in my day" a student loan could not be more than the cost of tuition, room and board minus any financial aid you were receiving, and it went straight to the college, not to you. Any additional funds went back to the lending institution to reduce the loan payment.

At least, that's how the one in my financial package, and those of my friends, worked in the late 1970's.

'Free' college or university isn't 'free' - it's paid for by the taxpayers. If you don't have kids or aren't going to college, what percentage of your wages would you be willing to give up to send someone else to college?


Lots of pro and con arguments but I don't think there's a good way to make it 'fair'. The world's not 'fair' and never has been. I don't know what the solution is, or if there's a good one.

At risk of veering way off-topic, I think there's a lot that can be said about this sort of thing.

Personally my parents didn't make enough to qualify for parent salary-based financial aid but were I guess you could say lower middle class. So they required me to work outside of school plus every break (summer, spring, winter breaks full-time). I also had to get scholarships on my own pretty much.

I was also responsible for my apartment rent (they did help with that from time to time if my bank account was close to 0 and I realize a lot of students can't even get that kind of help).

I don't personally think anyone else should need to do that. But on the other hand I do think that just outright forgiving _everybody_ would be a joke to all of us who did work hard to support ourselves and our higher education.

JC used to be free and that seemed to be a good way to do it you could get a lot of your credits out of the way then finish up at a 4 year school. If you wanted Grad school or something past a B degree you made damn sure your career would make that degree worthwhile financially

First jab is planned on the 8th December, someone in Wales will go down in history, hopefully for all the good reasons.

I guess my issue is with the use of the word 'free'. JC might be 'free' to the student, but it's paid for by taxes, which is other people's wages, time and effort. I think that 'subsidized' is a more accurate word.

Years ago my wife, who's in the health care/medical industry was giving a talk to some high school students. One of them raised his hand and asked her 'What do you think of free health care', and she answered 'There is no such thing as free health care' and proceeded to ask them some questions. None of them really had a concept of how it worked - it just sounded good, like 'free ice cream'.

You can call it whatever you want however it strikes some semblance of balance for the pros and cons of how to deal with college educations from a financial standpoint.

Free healthcare is a whole other F story.

Sorry to get us off track on the education thing guys. I really only meant it as an example, but should have known better as this isn't my first rodeo (and fall off the bull).

Well, technically not first given some huge number (30K+ per vaccine or more) have already been involved in the trials but I'm glad to see it moving.

My ancestors (father's family 150 years or so ago) is from Wales. Maybe it will be a distant cousin.

We have also been told that rich and famous people are immune therefore will not be required to self isolate when moving about doing their "business"..

As for distant cousins, my wife is really into this sort of thing, a few years ago we had our DNA mapped through Ancestry.com. We now get updates of cousins, once, twice, thrice and more removed from us.. I was sceptical until last Xmas when my cousin (lives out in Canada) was visiting, I showed him the Ancestry app as someone with his name was showing up as my first cousin.. Turns out that his kids had bought him the DNA test kit for his birthday, he spat into a test tube, put it in the post and forgot all about it!!

I suggest you give it a go, who knows what you will discover..

Or get discovered. That's exactly why I don't do it. Too many skeletons in the Hawk family closet.

The way I see it they are just renting space in my body for a microchip. Sign me up :thumbsup:



(I am joking for those in the back)

If you don't get the call to get the vaccine it just means that you are one of the group targeted for elimination in the worldwide population reduction plan.
May get really quiet around here.

This is why we can't have nice threads.
:tweetz::tweetz::tweetz::tweetz::tweetz:

Uhhh no.

It is primarily paid for by the person going to school, even in a system where tuition is "free". On average, people make more money when they go to college:

So somewhere between $750k to $1 million. Even if that income was modestly taxed at 10% then that is an extra $75-100k in taxes paid. If that income was taxed at 20% then that is an extra $150-200k in taxes. Unless tuition for public school was really expensive, the person will pay back their debt to society in taxes and then some. They will also be more productive member of society and a more educated member of society. They are less likely to take from social welfare systems, and they are more likely to contribute back to society with voting, with philanthropy, while not getting into trouble with the law, etc.

The solution that other countries have come up with is to provide free college. Tuition is going up while wages are dropping, so it has never been harder for people to afford to go to school. The widens the income gap, as the rich continue to send their kids to school. In other countries, if you don't go to college prep middle school and college prep high school then you don't go to public university, which is entirely merit based. Private and trade schools might still have some financial aid, grants or support, but the have tuition.

The idea behind forgiving college tuition isn't a free handout. It is a stimulus for the economy for one, and it is a way to free up people's earnings to go towards other things. That college payment could go towards a new car, or it could help someone pay off their credit cards, or it could be used for a down payment on a home, or whatever. Instead of money getting funneled to a few banks, the money can be freed up to be moved back into the economy and unsaddle students with debt, which typically delays buying a car, home, getting married, moving out, etc.

There was something kind of crazy yet undeniably true about SLJ's plan:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3b/56...3e6b8e6041.png

People don't actually mean free healthcare. It obviously comes from taxation, but it is free at the time of use. I frankly would prefer a single payer option like medicare with a private supplement plan like most people have for what is not covered by medicare. The larger insurance pool will keep costs down.

Coupling healthcare with employment is the biggest bad idea. People lose their job, get fired, get laid off, or whatever like during this pandemic then they lose their insurance. If they change employers then they change their insurance, and possibly, their doctor. If their employer changes carriers then they could possibly lose access to the network their doctor is on. If someone wants to go to school or if they want to change jobs then this often means losing their insurance, even temporarily. It is actually a barrier for advancement. I know of people who were offered a per diem position at a higher wage/posiont, but it was without full healthcare benefits, and they didn't want to take a chance of going without insurance until a full time position opened up.

Currently, those that don't have insurance just go to the emergency room and don't pay the bill. Hospitals rely on private insurance to make up the cost for any shortcomings for anyone without insurance or with substandard insurance, which is why premiums continue to go up and up. The inefficiency of people using the ER instead of using doctor's offices and having preventative screenings are one reason why the US pays more for healthcare, but has worse outcomes. We pay high pharmaceutical costs, and for-profit insurance has larger margins here too. We could do better.

Vaccine rollout, from the 8th Dec. nursing homes followed by our General Practice Doctor surgeries (18th Dec).

I personally think that they've prioritised the wrong people, I think it should have been:

1. Frontline workers - healthcare etc.
2. People who can't work from home.
3. Schools - children and teachers.

All your ideas are backwards. Coupling insurance to your job is absolutely a bad thing. However it happened because government thought it would be cool to limit how much someone could earn in the 70's, and yet you want to add one terrible idea on top of another. So instead of allowing government to destroy something else, how about let's eliminate the actual problem, which is government?

You know what the most popular option in countries with single payer healthcare? Private health insurance. That alone tells you they are all failures.

Averages lie. Especially when someone can earn tens of billions of dollars. There is a massive difference between people that go to school for an actual useful stem degree, and those that go to school for a totally useless non stem degree.

College tuition is insane, specifically because they are evil. There is a direct relationship between the amount of government money given out and the vast increase in college tuition. The further colleges move towards being in bed with leftists, the more government money they get, the more they brainwash people into foolish leftist slavery.

I'd absolutely go for free college tuition if it was packaged with fiscally responsible government, a reduction in government by 75%, making it illegal to steal from taxpayers and give to anyone at all for any reason at all, and removing the patently evil income tax and property tax. Let's actually go back to the system the Founders created, they knew a hell of a lot more than anyone living today does. Jefferson wanted free college tuition for everyone, but he also wanted a government that didn't feel its citizens were property, like we have now.

The biggest issue we all have is we view these things as problems, the people that created the system see it as working exactly as designed. They are the Founders worst nightmares, and the Founders were sure the citizens would never allow this to happen.

You say all my ideas are backwards then agree that coupling insurance to your job is bad...???

Private insurance doesn't fix a problem. Here is the problem: I don't have insurance, but go to the ER, and I don't pay my bill. What should happen? Option 1 is you don't let me in without insurance, but what if I am a trauma patient and my wallet is lost in my car or left at home, or I am found unconscious at the grocery store. We can't deny access for emergency care based on a need to immediately prove adequate insurance coverage or an ability to pay back the bill. Ok 2, so if someone doesn't pay then we will send them to jail or take their possessions or have them file bankruptcy. Well, this isn't far off. The number one reason for bankruptcy is medical bills. Meanwhile, the hospital just raises the premiums for private insurance anyways, so whether it is through taxation or through higher premiums, someone is paying for someone else, except in the latter case, it is far more because there isn't a mandate via taxation for everyone to contribute something.

What about those pesky regulations that government uses to regulate the insurance industry? Should we throw out those too like laws against denying people insurance or raising their premiums to astronomical levels because they have a preexisting condition or because they are older?

Did you know government healthcare has the highest customer satisfaction out of all insurance providers?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/186527/...satisfied.aspx



I already said that the average person makes more money, so it doesn't matter if someone is making six or seven figures and someone is using their college education as a stay at home parent to better develop their child and will never have a paycheck, THE AVERAGE person makes more money, which is a gain to our economy in higher GDP, more production, less dependency on government assistance, less incidence of going to jail/prison, higher taxes going back into the government, etc. Yes, some pay for more than others, just like with insurance, where some use the system more than others, or with taxes in general, how some pay more than others and some reap more of the benefits than others.

Prices for tuition are much better controlled when college is free and the government sets a standard for reimbursement. Currently, a student takes out government loans and private loans for college, and prices keep going up because people will just take out more loans, and unfortunately, it is the private colleges which typically use private loans that most often are defaulted on.

In a system with no government regulations or support, someone either has the money or doesn't for school, and school is expensive because it isn't federally supported with loans, nor is it state funded, so all we have is private schools with large tuition. This greatly limits who can get into school because only those families and individuals who can pay for college go. But I forgot...we have no regulations. I suppose then students will just find a way to get into school, even if it means taking out private student loans, and then they will just default on the loans and declare bankruptcy and not have to pay their loans. They could do that because we would be getting rid of government regulations, specifically the one saying student loans can't be written off from bankruptcy. I guess we are back to free college.

Wasn't this a thread about some vaccines for the coronavirus?

Fun story. My youngest coworker and I were leaving a job at a well-off middle managers house that is now working from home all the time.

I said something to the effect of "if this whole work from home thing goes much longer, I think we're going to see a lot of people without jobs as companies get smart and move those well paid managerial positions overseas for a fraction of the cost, just like they've done in the past with tech support."

He got a really concerned look on his face and said " no, I'm sure the government would step in to prevent that."

I'm concerned and laughing at the same time.

What thread? We are but waves on the conversation

Sorry sir. I blame my soapbox.

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/72562911.jpg

Due to Covid AU currently has a "job keeper" award that is paid to employers to keep their employees on the books.

From talking to a few people, when the "job keeper" award ends it will be much cheaper to out source alot of local workers

People seem to think that the services will be sub par, I cannot see that being a thing really

Currently we have alot of local sub par workers getting paid top dollar, all it would take is a smart company to cherry pick contacted employees from use usual suspect countries, savings would be substantial

People don't seem to understand the competitiveness for contracted employees from overseas and the cost savings to be had

#mehfuckthemiddlemanagementdrones

everyone thinks once the gravy train starts rolling, there's no stopping it!

in my lifetime, i've watched/listened as production/people were moved from america, to china, and now we're seeing the shift to india.

originally, everything was produced in america for america, because trade routes weren't as well established, the workforce and material was cheap, osha didn't exist, and america in general at the time was a growing nation.

then things were produced in china for america because everyone in america moved up the pay scale, other countries pushing for trade treaties, the overall cost of goods in america rose, and china became the developing country that america had been in the first stage.

now we're starting to see the shift to india for the exact same reasons that brought so much production to china, but now china's population is becoming better off, and the goods/services are now able to be provided by india for a more competitive rate...

it's somewhat interesting to watch in one way or another, both with the rise/fall of trade methods, but also how different forms of government deal with the result. china's subsidized the hell out of shipping to keep manufacturing there.

but with all these countries moving away from production to service industries, it's curious what the future's going to hold as the service model becomes unsustainable as it will eventually, but the countries workforce is too entrenched to re-start at the bottom of the system.

Are you saying that all their DNAs would be an identical match?

:eyebulge:

We are on it and we are "serious".. nothing going to stop us now!!

Vaccine Cards, why are they such a big deal?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn...ard/index.html

Mine will probably end up in the trash, unless someone requires me to present it for some reason