Why would you assume total travel is constrained? Restricting travel from Europe to US will just eliminate that portion of travel, not concentrate it in the US.
Life Care Center in Washington had 120 residents a week ago. Now 19 of them are dead.[1] Does that sound like "just the flu?"
There's plenty of evidence that this is much worse than the flu. R0 is >2, compared to 1.3. Mortality rate seems to be at least 5x higher. And those are low bounds. And this is all adding to the regular load on hospitals. It has observably overloaded hospital capacity in China and Italy.
Nobody cares what you were thinking about. This whole thread is based on the author's decision to insert a push for single-payer healthcare into an article about the outbreak. And the point is that a general agreement that healthcare should be improved doesn't justify pushing a particular, partisan solution in this context. That applies whether you would push for single-payer, medicare for all, or a true free market.
Obviously, the best health policies are debatable. Saying “our system isn’t prepared for this, therefore we need single-payer!” is moronic and insulting to the reader’s intelligence.
According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.
And after 4 generations, less than 1% of the original material remains.
percent remaining = 100 * (r^generations))
Where r is expressed as a decimal 0 <= r <=1.
Even at 90% recovery, over 90% of the original material is lost after 22 generations. The highest recycling rate of any material in the US is lead (mostly from auto batteries). The USGS reports that rate as ~70%, though this may be the amount of recycled material in new production.
Buying people off isn’t a result of capitalism, it’s always going to be a problem because of fundamental human incentives. Any system will fail if it’s administrators are corrupt and simply abandon the system. You’re basically blaming capitalism for the government failing to uphold capitalism, it’s absurd.
How is it a problem that women are looking at the biological realities and choosing motherhood over a 9-5 job? Most people were originally sold on the “problem” being the supposed sexism that prevented women from doing what they really wanted. Now we’re seeing that women don’t really want to work for the man over their children, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe that equal outcomes is the goal in and of itself. Seems like a bait and switch.
Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.
They’re playing the corruption game with politicians, but the rank and file of both sides hate them. That’s a much riskier situation than a big company wants to be in.
The amazing part is that both sides hate them for their own political reasons, not because of any common ground.
On the other hand, I have family members who have been radicalized into crazy conspiracy people who think white men are the root of all evil (can’t remember the direct quote but it was pretty close to that) by watching every news source except Fox News. And I suspect this is true amongst a very large swathe of the millennial population.
