[Leica] Whereas I found this article terrifying

[Don Dory]

I am not defending what plans governments are contemplating.   However, the
service workers in particular are being destroyed financially: their work
place is being forced to mostly close and for marginal workers the
unemployment payments are not even close to providing sustenance.   These
folks spend their whole salary every pay period into the economy with the
standard trickle multiplier.

Howard mentioned the pensioners; even sophisticated retirees will freeze up
purchases until more information is known on how long the required freeze
in the economy is in place.   So, governments are faced with how to get
people to put money into the economy.   Britain  is proposing passing 80%
of workers wages to keep employees employed while the Americans are
proposing both sending money directly to citizens they can find as well as
some kind of "loan" to hard hit industries like airlines, hospitality, and
the travel industry.  Whether panic is smart or not governments world wide
are trying to calm their citizens so that the economic fall out is minimal.

I am not hearing about efforts to move workers to where the work is.
 Medical devices will be a boom industry for quite a while, the whole
delivery business will be booming possibly permanently, remote learning may
get the kick start that had been promised for decades.   Other areas will
also be needing workers now.   Waiting to see if the status quo will return
is in my mind like a gypsy staying in Nazi Germany after 1935.  In the US
we had a worker shortage four weeks ago; perhaps some stimulus could go to
training newly unemployed people into new careers where workers are needed.

Let's get creative and help the least among us.

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020, 10:55 AM Howard Ritter via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
wrote:

> Jayanand, the fatality rate is only part of the story. None of us
> individually is likely to die of this, and most of us won’t lose any family
> members.
>
> What’s of greater concern, in my opinion, is the massive economic
> disruption that will be caused by hundreds of millions of workers all
> around the globe, in all parts of the global chains of supply and demand,
> staying home, perhaps for months, and millions of businesses being
> shuttered. Many jobs and businesses are inelastic and vulnerable, and will
> be lost, and regeneration will take years. In the U.S., millions of
> retirees, many of whom depend on income from their retirement investments,
> will see the value of those accounts drop too low to sustain the usual
> withdrawals and will have to make major life adjustments, with knock-on
> effects throughout the economy.
>
> Death rates always increase in times of severe economic disruption. Excess
> deaths due to the coming depression may exceed those due to COVID
> infection. What’s coming may be worse than the Great Depression.
>
> Meanwhile, the Trump administration, with an alarming degree of complicity
> by Democrats, is planning to buy votes by showering cash on us. Perversely,
> those with low incomes will receive LESS money than those of better means,
> and discrimination is to be made only on the basis of income, not of actual
> need – between those who keep their jobs or are able to live on Social
> Security and pensions, and those who don’t and can’t. Money that should be
> reserved for sustaining jobless benefits will be squandered on those whose
> incomes are unaffected.
>
> This is the best that our government can do?
>
> All of that is what terrifies me.
>
> —howard
>
> > On Mar22, 2020, at 0345, Jayanand Govindaraj via LUG <
> lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> >
> > If that is true, all the means is that the fatality rate is way lower
> than
> > it is being reported to be, so, again, why get terrified?
> >
> > Cheers
> > Jayanand
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 10:09 AM Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Because it says that more than half of SARS-2 virus infections come from
> >> undiagnosed asymptomatic people.
> >>
> >> On 2020-03-21 9:20 pm, Jayanand Govindaraj via LUG wrote:
> >>> Why? This is one of the risks of merely living. Being terrified never
> >>> helps
> >>> in making rational decisions!
> >>>
> >>> Cheers
> >>> Jayanand
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 9:45 AM Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> >
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>
> https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221.full
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Leica Users Group.
> >> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
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