Coronavirus

[ChiCitySPORTS#1]

Surprised the polls will be open tomorrow. Feel like that's not an ideal place to be -- in line with people, touching a device that multiple people are touching a day. Not good timing at all.

[dice]

Surprised the polls will be open tomorrow. Feel like that's not an ideal place to be -- in line with people, touching a device that multiple people are touching a day. Not good timing at all.

they're supposed to be disinfecting the equipment regularly. should also be insisting that everyone use hand sanitizer prior to voting and maintain distance from person ahead of them in line. just one more reason that early voting/vote by mail options should be widespread

[League Circles]

welp, they just closed my gym for at least the next couple of weeks. seems unnecessary to me. not sure it's even an effective anti-coronavirus measure given that exercise helps the immune system

Smh. Dude, don't be ridiculous. Of course it's an unnecessary risk. You can very easily get adequate exercise away from a gym.

omg, i'm not talking about "adequate" exercise. walking around your neighborhood would obviously provide adequate exercise in the short-term

lol, the point is that many people (myself included) will NOT get nearly as much quality exercise while their gyms are shut down. they're not going to bench press their televisions or squat the end of their couch, they're far less likely to go for a run outside (particularly in bad weather) than use a treadmill, and doing endless pushups and situps alone in their apartments is sheer drudgery. why do you think that people pay for gym memberships?

wtf, i did not say that going to the gym is a necessary risk. i suggested that the risk/reward of shutting down gyms (including the loss of employee paychecks and reduced physical/mental health benefits) might not be appropriate. maybe it is, but it's hardly ridiculous to question

A gym is a place where people are in close proximity breathing heavily. End of story. No need to do endless pushups and situps, just a few sets of that or calisthenics etc. Eat a little less with the decreased activity. Obviously significant lifestyle changes can and need to be made, and gyms and restaurants closing are obvious no brainers. You said it seems unnecessary, and then cite the positive benefits of gyms which is laughable seeing as how those benefits are easily achieved for free by everyone in alternative ways, and absolutely pale in comparison to the benefits of educational, government and restaurants and shops closing. Does it seem unnecessary to you that schools are closing?

[League Circles]

Surprised the polls will be open tomorrow. Feel like that's not an ideal place to be -- in line with people, touching a device that multiple people are touching a day. Not good timing at all.

Yeah I'm not voting. Fortunately (or unfortunately), it doesn't seem like it will make a big difference. Biden and Trump will be the nominees.

[League Circles]

Well i am unemployed for awhile. My little Italian joint I work at is going to suffer. We can't do curbside, too much cost. So now after work we are all getting quite drunk and cooking up ourselves a hell pf a feast. So hey its the little things.

Good luck man, don't despair

I appreciate that. Thank you. I am pretty chipper really. I promise this is affecting me greatly and my life will be very difficult for awhile - especially if they keep restaurants closed much longer than March 31st, which i absolutely expect will happen. I am going to self isolate, stay away from my best buddies infant and newborn, and do a hell of a lot of work on my parents property. It'll actually be very healthy for me to not drink for a few weeks (as a career barman, I make a point to never drink at home unless I'm entertaining guests, and I'm a hermit so that doesnt happen).

Yeah I'm planning on using my energy for some positive self-improvement and project completion myself if I'm off work for a while, or on the weekends. We have to find silver linings wherever they are.

[chitowndish]

We almost need to make our own thread for stories how we scare our stubborn parents into believing they aren't supermen/women anymore lol.

You can try this on your dad. Tell him that even if he survives Corona his lungs might be permanently damaged after it and he might get permanent asthma for the rest of his life and basic flu will be much scarier for him after damaging his lungs for the rest of his life. I did tell that to my mother and I don't even know if what I told her are factual but at least there is more chance that she will wake up. Her 69 year old sister is completely locked up inside her own house and I tried to tell her to call her etc lol. Well that's just small part of what I've tried so far, but yes. These are some extreme cases of stubborn people and they just have to make the decision themselves in the end. It's so hard to make them listen.

That is true I've heard if you have the serious or critical symptoms and recover it still isn't great and you can have long term damage. I think my dad is ok now it's more convincing my little sister but I think things started shutting down in the city and that started to scare her so it's starting to become pretty hard to deny around here. They were just showing a shot of time square and it was pretty much deserted it was pretty shocking to me so I think it's starting to sink in to a lot of people.

[dice]

Smh. Dude, don't be ridiculous. Of course it's an unnecessary risk. You can very easily get adequate exercise away from a gym.

omg, i'm not talking about "adequate" exercise. walking around your neighborhood would obviously provide adequate exercise in the short-term

lol, the point is that many people (myself included) will NOT get nearly as much quality exercise while their gyms are shut down. they're not going to bench press their televisions or squat the end of their couch, they're far less likely to go for a run outside (particularly in bad weather) than use a treadmill, and doing endless pushups and situps alone in their apartments is sheer drudgery. why do you think that people pay for gym memberships?

wtf, i did not say that going to the gym is a necessary risk. i suggested that the risk/reward of shutting down gyms (including the loss of employee paychecks and reduced physical/mental health benefits) might not be appropriate. maybe it is, but it's hardly ridiculous to question

A gym is a place where people are in close proximity breathing heavily. End of story.

saying it's end of story doesn't make it so. the REALITY is that you can quite easily go to the gym when it's not super busy and never be within 6 feet of another human being. particularly when there's, you know, a pandemic unfolding. i did it just last evening. as the importance of the crisis has advanced, so has the spacing at the gym. funny that

No need to do endless pushups and situps, just a few sets of that or calisthenics etc.

which, again, is certainly "adequate." no arguments there. but it's your own standard

You said it seems unnecessary, and then cite the positive benefits of gyms which is laughable seeing as how those benefits are easily achieved for free by everyone in alternative ways

did you not even read my last post? why are you responding by saying the exact same thing you said in your first post, while completely ignoring my points about weight lifting and, again, the REALITY that people simply aren't going to do other forms of exercise as much at home?

again, why do people pay for gym memberships when they can get the same benefits for free? it's truly not difficult to understand

Does it seem unnecessary to you that schools are closing?

no, because schools are not gyms. book learning does not help your BODY, which is what viruses attack. and students are more necessarily in close proximity. also, you can't freaking exercise online

[bulls_troy]

welp, they just closed my gym for at least the next couple of weeks. seems unnecessary to me. not sure it's even an effective anti-coronavirus measure given that exercise helps the immune system

Smh. Dude, don't be ridiculous. Of course it's an unnecessary risk. You can very easily get adequate exercise away from a gym.

omg, i'm not talking about "adequate" exercise. walking around your neighborhood would obviously provide adequate exercise in the short-term

lol, the point is that many people (myself included) will NOT get nearly as much quality exercise while their gyms are shut down. they're not going to bench press their televisions or squat the end of their couch, they're far less likely to go for a run outside (particularly in bad weather) than use a treadmill, and doing endless pushups and situps alone in their apartments is sheer drudgery. why do you think that people pay for gym memberships?

wtf, i did not say that going to the gym is a necessary risk. i suggested that the risk/reward of shutting down gyms (including the loss of employee paychecks and reduced physical/mental health benefits) might not be appropriate. maybe it is, but it's hardly ridiculous to question

Just check out this video from AthleanX

Watch on YouTube

[Habs72]

welp, they just closed my gym for at least the next couple of weeks. seems unnecessary to me. not sure it's even an effective anti-coronavirus measure given that exercise helps the immune system

Smh. Dude, don't be ridiculous. Of course it's an unnecessary risk. You can very easily get adequate exercise away from a gym.

omg, i'm not talking about "adequate" exercise. walking around your neighborhood would obviously provide adequate exercise in the short-term

lol, the point is that many people (myself included) will NOT get nearly as much quality exercise while their gyms are shut down. they're not going to bench press their televisions or squat the end of their couch, they're far less likely to go for a run outside (particularly in bad weather) than use a treadmill, and doing endless pushups and situps alone in their apartments is sheer drudgery. why do you think that people pay for gym memberships?

wtf, i did not say that going to the gym is a necessary risk. i suggested that the risk/reward of shutting down gyms (including the loss of employee paychecks and reduced physical/mental health benefits) might not be appropriate. maybe it is, but it's hardly ridiculous to question

Just practise what you preach. You really aint doing that now .

[Axolotl]

According to the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team there are only bad options with the coronavirus.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/news--wuhan-coronavirus/

The basic options are mitigation and suppression. With mitigation, the health care system will be owerwhelmed and there would likely be a death toll of hundreds of thousands.

The other option is suppression. At the minimum it requires a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members, perhaps supplemented by school and university closures.

They say that epidemic suppression methods need to be maintained until there is a vaccine. If not, the virus will just start spreading again, and we are at the mitigation scenario, but with the economic hits taken with suppression.

[dougthonus]

i've long held the position that there should be a balance between the freedom of the individual to achieve/innovate and the needs of society. as such, unsurprisingly to me, the happiest societies are the ones where total taxation is around 50%

There's a lot of problems with the numbers you put in. The first is simply implementation.

The size of the country makes a huge difference. If you raised our tax rate to 50% and actually taxed our top 1% at that rate, they would simply leave and take their companies with them. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen. Corporations have already been shifting overseas considerably to save on way less tax money than you are trying to put on them.

This likely puts you in a worse position overall in terms of taxes collected. You could combat this with other types of policies, perhaps raising tariffs, VAT, or some other approach to ensure spending gets collected here, but it's probably still a huge net loss in the end.

When you're comparing that to much more homogeneous populations with similar cultural beliefs and standing, where the threat of moving isn't as large, the big business isn't nearly so big (or as transferable) then those countries aren't faced with the same challenges and the results are simply different.

The second is that if you could find an implementation that has enough barriers to keep the money in the country and not have all the wealthy flee and remove all the loop holes to make this work, you are relying on the group that would be most financially harmed by these rules implementing them. Hard to believe they would ever do so and still not create loopholes and backdoors for themselves that would have the whole thing come crashing down.

If you could solve those problems, then I think it'd be a good solution.

[dougthonus]

FAILING to flatten the curve is what necessitates more drastic measures. we have thus far failed as a nation to flatten the curve and are suffering the consequences. both humans and businesses are in a triage situation

It's impossible to say whether we are successfully flattening the curve due to inadequate amount of testing going on to show what the real numbers are. We're also so early in the number of cases that we aren't at the critical point of failing to flatten the curve. Our hospitals aren't over run yet, and we can still treat people.

It seems like Asian countries have generally been successful flattening the curve.

I do agree the worst case scenario is that you attempt to flatten the curve, but fail, and end up with both the economic impact of not flattening the curve and still have the mass death and overrun hospitals.

[dougthonus]

You're not getting it. You can't keep people from working for as long as it takes to find a cure. That's not a thing that can happen without hundreds of millions of people's livelihoods being at stake. The virus looks like it could be pretty bad, but a great depression would be even worse. That's why (some of) these measures can't last for months on end without suffering even more major consequences. There is always a threshold.

You can't play things out in multiple ways, but it could also be the case that if you did nothing that as soon as it hits a ton of people and hospitals shutter their doors because there are 20x as many sick as there are people to care for them, that you end up in the same economic position and also a medical crisis of epic proportions.

There is no straight forward answer IMO.

[dougthonus]

welp, they just closed my gym for at least the next couple of weeks. seems unnecessary to me. not sure it's even an effective anti-coronavirus measure given that exercise helps the immune system

Gyms are huge breeding grounds for illness generally. You have people breathing heavy over everything and tons of shared surfaces you're touching. You are also in a confined space, so anything that's airborne is an immediate problem.

It would probably be one of the absolute first things I would shut down.

If you look around on the internet, you can easily find lots and lots of exercise routines you can do on your own, in your house, with no equipment.

https://darebee.com/ is a good site that has probably thousands of routines you can do with no equipment.

There are lots of apps you can download that will give you video workouts you can follow as well (though most require some form of subscription to get access to all of their workouts).

[League Circles]

omg, i'm not talking about "adequate" exercise. walking around your neighborhood would obviously provide adequate exercise in the short-term

lol, the point is that many people (myself included) will NOT get nearly as much quality exercise while their gyms are shut down. they're not going to bench press their televisions or squat the end of their couch, they're far less likely to go for a run outside (particularly in bad weather) than use a treadmill, and doing endless pushups and situps alone in their apartments is sheer drudgery. why do you think that people pay for gym memberships?

wtf, i did not say that going to the gym is a necessary risk. i suggested that the risk/reward of shutting down gyms (including the loss of employee paychecks and reduced physical/mental health benefits) might not be appropriate. maybe it is, but it's hardly ridiculous to question

A gym is a place where people are in close proximity breathing heavily. End of story.

saying it's end of story doesn't make it so. the REALITY is that you can quite easily go to the gym when it's not super busy and never be within 6 feet of another human being. particularly when there's, you know, a pandemic unfolding. i did it just last evening. as the importance of the crisis has advanced, so has the spacing at the gym. funny that

No need to do endless pushups and situps, just a few sets of that or calisthenics etc.

which, again, is certainly "adequate." no arguments there. but it's your own standard

You said it seems unnecessary, and then cite the positive benefits of gyms which is laughable seeing as how those benefits are easily achieved for free by everyone in alternative ways

did you not even read my last post? why are you responding by saying the exact same thing you said in your first post, while completely ignoring my points about weight lifting and, again, the REALITY that people simply aren't going to do other forms of exercise as much at home?

again, why do people pay for gym memberships when they can get the same benefits for free? it's truly not difficult to understand

Does it seem unnecessary to you that schools are closing?

no, because schools are not gyms. book learning does not help your BODY, which is what viruses attack. and students are more necessarily in close proximity. also, you can't freaking exercise online

It's a difficult time. I guess if you can't get to the gym you may have to see your current flawless physique transform into a grotesque immunocompromised blob.

Schools have MANDATORY physical exercise.

Being at home does not cause a person to exert themselves physically less than at a gym. It's all in your mind.

If you insist on dying on the elitist hill of needing your gymy gym workout to bump your immune response to the perfect level, let's see some immune PER or immune RPM stats that show what exact levels of exertion are ideal for immune maximization. Because surely you know that exercise can also weaken your immune system as well right?

Just go with the flow man. **** is shutting down. Better safe than sorry. It's intellectually reasonable to wonder if it's better to open or close gyms. It's not reasonable to use that theoretical ambivalence to suggest that maybe gyms shouldn't be closed. Because overwhelming evidence simply doesn't exist that they should be open, they should obviously be closed.

And FWIW, I'd guess most employees will still get paid.

[coldfish]

The thing is there's no simple answer to this problem and perhaps no complex answer to it either. The standard of living for people living paycheck to paycheck has probably never been higher, and there have always been times where that is true. Unless you create a system where basic needs can be provided to every person then you will always have this issue.

People put themselves in this position. There is a view that every person should be able to live independently and move out of their house and support themselves. That may not be a realistic and sustainable goal for our society if you don't want people living paycheck to paycheck. Blaming the wealthy won't actually fix this problem. People make poor financial decisions.

That's not to say wealth distribution isn't a valid problem. I think it is, as do I think think the ever increasing amount of wealth moving towards capital providers rather than laborers, but even if you had a better distribution of wealth, you wouldn't remove these problems you're talking about where people are just forever willing to overextend themselves and then look for help from somewhere else.

You are right...once something is free, the tendency is too look for it instead of working for it. But, if health care is made easier as the first step, that will give a guideline for other things. And, basic food items should be affordable for everyone. That is better distribution of wealth or socialism but it provides a path for study.

There is a fine balance between getting rich through hard work/innovation and getting rich based on monopoly, corporate connections. The system has to differentiate between those two and not let the second group become the majority rich which is what it seems to be happening.

i've long held the position that there should be a balance between the freedom of the individual to achieve/innovate and the needs of society. as such, unsurprisingly to me, the happiest societies are the ones where total taxation is around 50%

world happiness report will be released on friday, but using last year's rankings:

1 finland ($48,580 per capita GNI, 54.2% total tax rate)
2 denmark ($56,410, 50.8%)
3 norway ($68,310, 54.8%)
4 iceland ($67,050, 40.4%)
5 netherlands ($56,890, 39.8%)
6 switzerland ($68,820, 27.8%)
7 sweden ($54,030, 49.8%)
8 new zealand ($39,410, 34.5%)
9 canada ($47,590, 31.7%)
10 austria ($55,300, 42.7%)
11 australia ($50,050, 27.8%)
12 costa rica ($16,700, 21.0%)
13 israel ($39,940, 36.8%)
14 luxembourg ($72.200, 36.5%)
15 UK ($45,350, 34.4%)
16 ireland ($67,050, 30.8%)
17 germany ($54,560, 44.5%)
18 belgium ($51,740, 47.9%)
19 USA ($63,690, 27.1%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)_per_capita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio

and so the question becomes, how best to utilize government funds. i personally believe that broad-based government health care should be available for all citizens at low out-of-pocket cost (co-pays only - to avoid having hypochondriacs abuse the system). something that every industrialized nation other than the USA has. i also believe in quality free public education. to what age/level that goes i'm not sure. i also believe in the concept of a universal basic income (UBI), which i came up with independently about 20 years ago, not realizing that it was a fairly widely discussed topic already:

-concept dates back to 16th century
-advocated by "father of the american revolution" thomas paine
-widely discussed as "state bonus" in early 1900s
-we've had one for the elderly in the form of social security since 1935
-family allowances implemented in UK in 1946
-"negative income tax" experiments in canada and US in '60s and '70s - nixon proposed one
-alaska has had a "permanent fund dividend" for all residents funded by state oil revenues since 1976 ($1-2K a year to all permanent residents)
-broadly discussed in europe since the '80s

I have absolutely no idea how they come up with a tax rate like that. Every working person gets 15% of their income sent to the federal government right off the top. Then you add in federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, business taxes, capital gains taxes and a bunch of other miscellaneous taxes.

When you add up all the layers of government in the US, they take up roughly 35 to 40% of GDP. You simply can't get there with a 27.1% tax rate.

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/is-government-spending-really-41-percent-of-gdp

The US spends slightly less than the OECD average. Given that we are just about the only one without some form of public health care, that's amazing. When you look deeper though, there are a few issues:
- Massive benefits and pensions of government workers
- Massive defense spending
- Just general inefficiency from so many layers of government

my basic vision is a 50% flat income tax w/ no other forms of taxation (no business tax, no sales tax, no property tax, no...parking tickets/fees!). whatever money the government does not spend gets rebated to all independent citizens (w/ a fractional share for dependents, to be distributed to their caretakers). government expenses itemized and distributed along w/ rebate checks. incentivizes lawmakers to limit government expenditures. based on the USA GNI of $63,690 and assuming that the government uses 40% of its 50% tax revenue, that would leave $6,369 per citizen (around $7300 per adult and $3650 per dependent if doing a 2:1 ratio) to be distributed annually in the form of a UBI

If I add up all my taxes, I'm roughly at 43%. That is to say, for every dollar my wife and I get paid, $0.43 goes to some form of government. I'm already pretty close to your 50% number and I suspect a lot of people are. I bet you are underestimating just how much our government spends. IMO our UBI would be much, much lower than $6369 after our governments got their hands in the stream. Your numbers seem like, way off.

[dougthonus]

When you add up all the layers of government in the US, they take up roughly 35 to 40% of GDP. You simply can't get there with a 27.1% tax rate.

One real problem is that the real tax rate for people is also skewed way too highly towards the poor / middle class. When you factor in property taxes and sales tax, you see the effective tax rate for people in those classes often ends up higher than the effective tax rate for the upper class.

The US spends slightly less than the OECD average. Given that we are just about the only one without some form of public health care, that's amazing. When you look deeper though, there are a few issues:
- Massive benefits and pensions of government workers
- Massive defense spending
- Just general inefficiency from so many layers of government

The most important thing the federal and state governments could do, is stop all new pensions. It's a massive problem in Illinois and will lead to the insolvency of the state. I don't know if it is as bad everywhere else, but it's really bad here.

The defense spending is also ridiculous and over the top.

I'm not sure if our government is really less efficient than other governments or not that have comparable size and breadth of scope. I think there aren't really a lot of comparables there, but the larger you get, the more inefficiency you get IMO.

[coldfish]

When you add up all the layers of government in the US, they take up roughly 35 to 40% of GDP. You simply can't get there with a 27.1% tax rate.

One real problem is that the real tax rate for people is also skewed way too highly towards the poor / middle class. When you factor in property taxes and sales tax, you see the effective tax rate for people in those classes often ends up higher than the effective tax rate for the upper class.

We ask for our tax code to be progressive but the reality is that it is bell shaped. The people in the middle pay the highest taxes. Whenever someone talks about raising taxes, they target the rich but end up hitting those in the upper middle. When they cut taxes, they again, don't help that group. The Trump tax cuts had little impact on me.

That's what generally pisses me off when people start going on about taxes. A lot of us already pay a ton of it and we really don't get a lot for it compared to other nations.

I also have experience dealing with europeans. They cheat. Like mad. When greece was struggling a few years ago it came out just how much of a black market economy they had. The US has the highest tax collections rate in the world. Most analysis don't take that into account.

[League Circles]

Is the Happiness metric similar to PER?

I notice it was conveniently ignored that most countries in the top 20 are taxed roughly closer to us (including several at our level including arguably the best country in the world -switzerland) than they are to "50%", and that the only countries actually at 50% are extremely tiny countries with super low population density and culturally homogeneous populations. It would be just as accurate (and just as disingenuous) to assume their happiness PER is due to being a tiny homogeneous country as due to an arbitrary ideal tax rate.

Whatever we do, IMO we should focus on taxing the hoarding of wealth and consumption, as opposed to income. Businesses shouldn't be taxed at all IMO. One of the only good things Trump has done was slash the absurd corporate tax rate IMO.

[chitowndish]

I don't think there is any way we are flattening the curve in the Chicago area. We just had a weekend where large masses of people packed into Costco to hoard buy everything in sight to prepare for social distancing. It isn't like obscure stores either I was seeing people post stores that I knew with people lined up outside at 4 in the morning to get in like it was black Friday. The Jewel by me is still stocked (I went in Monday at 6 AM) but there is a massive dent.

Then you have that fiasco that just happened in O'hare where they packed all of the people coming from Europe into a hallway for something like 6 hours so they could have them all write down that they didn't have the coronavirus and then release them into the city. This also isn't unique to Chicago, Dallas had the same exact thing happen a massive weekend of hoard buying followed by the same O'hare situation in DFW.

I feel like this war was lost before most people really even knew what was happening. I'd say we see a big surge Wednesday-Friday and then we see a second surge 4-5 days after what happened in O'hare. Then they probably really lock things down and at that point we don't know, we're basically following the Italy model so we just watch what's happening there and see if the lockdown can slow it enough.