Chach

Jesus, I never even realised they'd branched into food. They need to be stopped (broken up) before they take over the world.

1) Who said anything about British companies? What even is a British company now if anything other than in name, companies are looking to sell their products to the world. The future is online, borders are going to become less and less relevant particularly in the service industry. Look at Automaticc, billion dollar company started by a guy who is still only 36 now, 1200 employees in 70 countries and no offices. Amazon are the biggest retailer in the world, don't have a single shop, Facebook, Google etc the high street is over. Within a generation no one will be going to the supermarket to do their shopping in person. The ship has sailed mate and Brexit will bring a little back but not very much. 2) At some stage you are going to have to decide if you're a free market neo-liberal or a left winger, left wingers do not rue the end of the European Union.

Yeah I don't think experts are as unanimously bullish about the AI technology boom creating jobs like previous technology booms, drivers of cars and trucks are going to be the first jobs to go which is the job pretty much anyone can currently get, obviously there will be a lot of new jobs for people who know how to code but they're not going to be the people who lose the driver jobs and we already have serious problems inequality now. Regards to WFH I personally don't like it so pretty biased, I like the interaction and camaraderie with workmates and I only live 3km from the office so spend no time commuting/in traffic.

Can you elaborate on this then "This won’t change things for the worse, it will make things better" So far I've only seen this lead to some fairly bad political outcomes and worse working conditions, which is going to get a whole lot worse when artificial intelligence is added to the equation and neither labour nor brain is required. Not saying we should stop progress, just think we should have our eyes open to the realities of creating a new underclass with no place for them in the economy.

What type of jobs do you think automation created for the people it put out of work?

I'd say its almost certainly untrue, they've been trying to rein these things in for years and you'd hope this event is the straw than broke the camels back.

I thought the complete opposite, start with number 1: The job you were told couldn't be done remotely, can be done remotely. No thinking left winger with a basic understanding of Keynesian economics would want to abandon working in offices, the amount of indirect jobs lost from that transition would make the closing of the coal mines look like The Sound of Music. Unfortunately when corporations do discover that the job can be done remotely, stage 2 will that job being done in a 2nd world country by someone who will do it for a fraction of the salary.

"Virus means Virus!" would have been better than "Get Virus Done!" to be fair.

This is the kind of systemic failure that leads me to believe there is no actual plan. If you don't have a plan to treat cancer patients in an event as foreseeable as this then thats a huge failure of planning. There doesn't even seem to be a plan for the other at risk, the diabetics, the asthmatics/people with other respiratory diseases. etc.

Honestly Palfy, you've said absolutely fuck all there. The world will not run on platitudes. Google the word "dialectic" then have a good hard look at yourself.

This is what I am interested in, I am not advocating for anything except what the best solution for everyone might look like. What I do know is that our economies and financial systems have been evolving for about 10k years since the discovery of agriculture, there's certain things we need to sustain life and we have a monetary system whereby we exchange labour/time/products to get the money to buy the things we need to sustain life for ourselves and our loved ones. It's not a perfect system because it's human but it's the one we have. Out of that system the government takes a share redistributes it to where they think its best used to maintain things, provide a welfare safety net for people who can't get money to buy things that sustain life and to provide public services. The thing about money is that it's not a real thing, it's a social construct and it's only worth something if you have a good system where people think your money's worth something, see Zimbabwe* for what happens when people think it's not. If we were to stop all non essential economic activity (food and medicine) for a year the governments revenue will be decimated, governments raise money other than from tax through the issuing of debt, who would buy the debt of a country with no economy*? People will definitely die under that scenario also. We currently have a pandemic and a GFC 2.0 and currently we're staying at home, it's a good idea to slow the spread of the virus because sick people are unproductive anyway but what is the actual plan? I don't think we can hide from it for a year without social unrest the likes of which we have never seen before, change my mind.

How many times are you going to dodge the question Palfy,? Lay off the emotional mind reading and lay it out: If our strategy is that we should stop at nothing to save every single life no matter what the cost, what does it look like assuming a vaccine is 1 year away.

The NZ lockdown is nothing like the UK one. https://covid19.govt.nz/government-actions/covid-19-alert-level/essential-businesses/

Given our entire financial system is pretty much geared up to the passing of wealth from the younger generations to the older generations, who are probably the richest generation who have ever lived on this planet, I am thinking all evidence points to them caring. So as a thought experiment lay it out for me, if our strategy is that we should stop at nothing to save every single life no matter what the cost, what does it look like assuming a vaccine is 1 year away.

This is the Prime Minister of New Zealand going live on FB the first night of their lockdown for all those who feel they're not getting the love they need from their Tory politicians.

Its can't be good for your mental health to go around thinking half of the population have a psychopathology that results in them being indifferent to the death of their elder relatives, Palfy.

Not an argument.

There's vaccines at the final hurdle of human testing for SARS1stopped for want of finance and no sense of the danger.

I've seen this argument a fair bit but it never lays out what is behind door number two, we're a year away minimum from a vaccine. Under the total lockdown, how does it play out?

Fixed.

Is that because construction sites have closed down or were you servicing the general public?

I hope he plans to pull himself up by his bootstraps and invent his own vaccine/treatments.

In the context of Corona Virus is there a way back for Bernie that outweighs the risk of a protracted primary process?

It's bold.

He's implying you have Trump Derangement Syndrome and Trump has done nothing wrong and you can't see straight because of your hatred of him. It's pretty much the only response to genuine criticism of him now because he's so far gone with the handling of this virus that there's no defence.