can’t be worse than this guy:
Brilliant 
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Very good read and man that’s a scary prediction for Americans and health insurance cost rising after this .
They’ll continue to shoot theirselves in the foot whilst the rest of the world shows how good free health care is even with its flaws.
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I was wondering about this, are people possibly being turned away from US hospitals at the moment without insurance? Surely for the safety of the masses they cant be.
Trump is saying that central/federal government shouldn’t be in charge of testing people. Or helping hospitals. It’s now down the hospitals and states to do it themselves. Ending funding for testing yesterday.
America is fucked and they don’t seem to care or understand.
Listening to news reports from the US 3 weeks ago and trumps own gob, they said all virus patients will be tested/treated/recovery for free. Not sure what has happened since. Do hospitals send the bill directly to the GOV or to the patient who has to claim it off the Gov.
Fuck sake. So backwards
There was a story of a 17yr old who was turned away from a hospital because he held no insurance then died heading for another.
Saw so many neddy idiots on brand new Argos mountain bikes yesterday, wobbling around on the empty roads. Might end up a nation of cyclists, since I’m sure a few folk will be selling their car if they aren’t going to use it for a few months. Especially if they’re not getting paid.
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Cycling in general always does well in a recession, for the same reasons you’ve mentioned - cycling levels increased across Europe as a result of the financial crash in 08/09. Just hoping that more dedicated bike infra gets built as a result - some cities are charging ahead with trial bike lanes in place of parking or putting in one-way routes for cars/ dual flow for bikes, others are sitting on their hands. If an 8YO can use that road or lane safely, then it’s legit.
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there are a few different ways this can go, hopefully a few mor eplaces follow this alternative model
essentially redefine the purpose of economic activity so that it provides for everyone within the planetary boundaries.
i think a lot of people will realise how shallow a lot of their lives were and will want something different and will activley choose to live a different way (obvs a load of people also quite liked the shallow consuming life and cant wait to get back to it)
WFH will be much more common
i hope fast fashion is finished, the people in banglasdesh etc could make better quality clothes that last longer and get paid a bit more.
O&G industry is really struggling so it could be the opportunity to stop subsidizing it when . Saudi keep cutting the price to cash out as renewables are clearly cheaper.
i work for environmental charity mainly with big companies and we are waiting to see where ‘sustainability’ stays on the corporate agenda in the new world. signals so far are mixed although a lot are saying it is intergal part of 10 year strategy and this will help, others saying they are in survival mode and that becomes a luxury rather than necessity. many of the ocmpanies dont expect a fundamental shift in the economic model but do expect to see more risk and resilience planning and mitigation measures to avoid being so affected next time this happens.
this will happen again. human encroachment onto animal habitats, impacted the natural defense barrier and the live food markets and poor sanitation etc caused SARS and Ebola and bird flu and swine flu and now this.
and of course the tin foil future - Bill Gates ID2020 forced digital vaccination program (this is a thing and now the law to potentially enforce it already exists in many countries as part of the emergency covid legislation), along with microchip that controls impulses/moods/emotions/health via 5G signals. one world government. lizard crew run tings. a lot of people dismiss a lot of this and to be fair some of them are proper bonkers, but who knows, to me it is just one other possibility amongst a whole load of madness going on. the fact they want to test a load of vaccines in africa is so outrageous and maybe a sign of things to come. mark of the beast revelation times.
and if there is any justice - Boris and the Tories are in prison as they are held responsible for the deaths of the NHS workers who didnt have the proper protective equipment. however given that hideous witch priti patel cant even apologise properly as it would admit liability then i dont hold out much hope. “i am sorry you feel like your family member/colleague died…” media training 101 but so heartless and calculated.
saw an advert the other day begging people to buy the Sun newspaper so hopefully they go bust and cease to exist
I’ve never hated a politician more in my life. Votes for the death penalty and votes against gay marriage. Gets asked to resign and somehow goes back. Wasn’t there something ridiculous on TV when she said she’d been assaulted or something? Or something racism-related? She had to take back whatever it was she claimed anyway, I think.
If it was all just a TV show and she was that awful it’d be hard to take seriously.
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there was the trip to israel that she didnt tell anyone about - isnt that what she had to resign for?
she clearly came back as boris and cummings wanted someone who would just say whatever they required with not even an ounce of humility or humanity. she can wheel out the most draconian racist policies and becuase she is asian then no one is allowed to say its racist as they will get called a racist for daring to mention race when discussing policy with a non-white politician.
When she went on ‘holiday’ and had a secret meeting with the Prime Minister…
It wasn’t that, it was some meet-and-greet thing for TV.
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Yep, he just seems like he’s trying to use some of his money and his brains to help others.
I admire your optimism but I see the exact opposite happening.
On a domestic front austerity will return and government spending will be tighter than ever. The reliance upon “the markets” to kickstart the economy through the idea of supply side policy will lead to further deregulation. Coupled with Brexit the Singapore model is almost a certainty.
The strong will destroy the weak, small enterprise without the capital to survive the shutdown will cease, we’ll become almost completely reliant upon multinational corporations and “western” Governments the world over will allow a reduction in the standards we currently enjoy and justify it through the necessity of rebuilding their economies. The use (and cost) of natural resources will go into overdrive, the welfare of poorer citizens in manufacturing countries will plummet (as will quality) and every corner that can possibly be cut will be.
We’re not headed for a fresh new idealistic start, we’re plowing head first into the last desperate throws of capitalism from a world that doesn’t know any other way.
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We’ve been hearing we’re in ‘late capitalism’ since the 2008 crash. So far, no western society looks like abandoning it, even for the capitalism-lite of social democracy. I can’t see the current crisis changing things economically, unfortunately. The mechanisms for people-led change just aren’t there anymore - no unions, no socialist parties. Wasn’t the internet meant to shake things up? Feel like you’re right, inequality will become even more entrenched.
yeah dont get me wrong - i am not an anti-vaccer, my kids had all the injections and i think is really a huge problem that things like measles/mumps/TB have come back in UK as a significant enough proportion of people chose not to have the vaccines.
bill gates has also done talks about the need for de-population and he cant have it both ways so it just comes down to i dont trust him or big pharma
on topic of africa, it was more the colonial attitude of those french doctors saying we can do this in africa to see if it works - (ie treat them as guinea pigs) - why not test it on french people first?
when uk people had called out china for exploiting africa and its resources more recently i did think that was quite something for any british person to make any comment at all about someone else exploiting africa. one interview i saw with africans who worked in chinese mine made the point “at least they are paying for the resources and paying us to work which is a lot more than britain ever did”
where are we going - i just read ‘the uninhabitable earth’ - nice bit of light reading that paints such a bleak picture of the next 20 - 50 years . i honestly think this is the last gasp of current state capitalism for no other reason than it will not be possible for humans to carry on living like this for much longer as all the problems we have created will catch up with us. that doesnt necessarily mean that change at the scale required will happen at the speed required, and the impacts will hit certain regions harder than others, the feedback loops will increase, more droughts, more floods, more hurricanes, more wild fires while ‘extraction and consumption’ carries on unabated - the increasingly dramatic change from one year to the next will be a shock and then swiftly normalized and we will keep getting used to a ‘new normal’ . once in 100 years or 500 years events are already happening every year and most of the worst of the problems will be due to emissions generated since the 1980’s when the problem was already well understood by scientists.
i really hope it goes a different way and the school strikers generation do what our generation could not and change the course of humanity to one that does have a livable future. this is the problem of working for environmental charity , while it is nice to feel like you are trying to make a difference it is so depressing to be constantly reminded of the monumental short-sightedness of western humans. if (or when) it does all go tits up then it will be our fault for not having the vision and courage to move beyond capitalism even when we saw it was destroying the only place we have to live. it is easier to forsee the end of the world than to consider the end of capitalism.
my wife is christian and takes comfort in her faith that this is not all there is to it, i dont share that faith but i have done plenty of acid and know that how we perceive the world is not the full picture and there is a connection between all living things that are essentially different frequencies of vibrating atoms - we ignore that connection at our peril, but ultimately we are just a speck of dust in the infinity of space, the earth will carry on with whatever inhabitants it does or doesnt have.
fingers crossed eh?
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Just learned a mate’s sister-in-law has died of Covid. She was in hospital for some lung thing in December and had been fine since, went in again and died.
Barely knew her but seeing this affect a mate makes it much more real.
