Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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@solo-act:
You can print money. You can't print lives.
I know what you're saying, and I almost wholly agree. Certainly when it's lives-vs.-money-printing, you favor lives.

But don't forget the (negative) impact of "printing money." The whole volume of U.S. dollars in circulation (whether electronic or physical), taken together, is just a symbolic representation of the collective value of everything that anybody might want to pay for. (Or, at least, of the value of the things people are hoping to use U.S. dollars to pay for.)

That value isn't accurately-and-objectively knowable, I guess, to anyone but God. Regardless, it's a certain value, which increases as people make-available new goods and services priced in dollars..., and which decreases whenever stuff that used to be valuable ceases to be.

So you've got this giant collective pool of stuff and services, with whatever its total current value is, being "chased" by dollars. And the value of any single U.S. dollar is THAT total value, divided by the number of dollars in circulation. If you print more dollars, but the total value they're "chasing" hasn't increased, then each dollar becomes less valuable. If you double the dollars in circulation, each dollar is half as valuable.

Of course, markets aren't perfectly efficient and, after a big spate of (electronic) money-printing, most folk aren't immediately aware that their dollar now has less value. So the first person to use a "brand new dollar" generally can use it to trade for more value than it's actually worth. (It's a form of arbitrage.)

And who has the first-use of those new dollars? Why, it's the banks connected to the Federal Reserve: They're the first to get hold of that new dollar, as they issue loans backed by those new ledger-entries. When they spend it, each brand-new dollar still has much of its old value because prices of goods and services haven't yet had time to increase in response to the flood of new dollars. So, when they spend it they get nearly full value; but by the time it circulates to your grandma's pocket, it's dropped down to its new lower value.

All of that is to say: We may have to do some money-printing here and there to dig ourselves out of a scrape, but there's no substitute for people actually working and inventing and trading: That's how the real value gets created, which dollars only represent tiny slices of.

I would hate to see the doofuses in D.C. (since unlike coronavirus responses, all money-supply decisions are at the Federal level) decide to double the dollars in circulation, in order to pay for their stimulus, only to find that grandma now has 80% more dollars in her pocket, but her gallon of milk's price just doubled.

It's a particularly sneaky way of shafting retirees, since they (unless they understand the scam) will feel grateful to get that big check from the government. They don't realize their pocket has been cleverly picked. It's especially sneaky that it punishes those who spent their lives faithfully saving a bit of every paycheck, only to have it devalued into nonexistence by "quantitative easing."

So, yeah, you can print money. Sometimes you should: to prevent deflation, for example.

But it's the kind of thing y'don't want to lean on, unless you want to wind up like Venezuela, etc.
 
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As of this morning New York has 15 times more cases than California and 30 times more than Mass.
If most of the rest of the country is a week behind NY as they're predicting...

And they're saying regular people won't have stimulus money in their hands until at least early May.
This is so bad and going to get much, much worse.
 
I encourage everyone to focus on the "Critical/Serious Cases" data, over "Total Cases"... The media is mostly focused on total cases, however those numbers are strongly tied to the amount of testing resources available... a rapidly changing number which varies widely by country/region, and does not really tell us high quality information if measuring the curves slope.

The Critical/Serious cases data / curve gives the best "real time data" we have to analyze how Covid-19 is progressing.

Here's the latest chart from WorldOMeters.info site. I wish the media would lead with this type of chart/data, as it provides the best information:

covid19-serious-critical-cases-2020-03-25.jpg
 
I spread this to another music forum. "SEE THAT COVID! I can spread too!"

Too bad it runs the GPU at 100% or off. The "light" option doesn't seem to do much of anything. And GPU does all the heavy lifting if you want to get the WU's done.
 
I encourage everyone to focus on the "Critical/Serious Cases" data, over "Total Cases"...

Very true. The problem is, different countries have different ideas of what a critical/serious case" is, or differ in their ability to find critical cases, and some countries don't report it at all. Deaths on the other hand are universally understood (although there is still some ambiguity about attributing a death to COVID-19) and almost all countries report that. The sad fact is, that's pretty much the only worldwide statistic that holds up to close scrutiny at the moment, especially in the US where testing has been so poorly administered.

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the milder "S" or the more deadly "L".

If you note the dates on most of the articles talking about two strains, they are usually 2-3 weeks old.
I just googled both the CDC and WHO sites and there's nothing about it making any headlines.
Also hasn't been brought up or asked about in the daily briefings by NYC or DC.
 
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