2020 had some significant silver linings
vox.com
vox.com
Imagine if, one of the labmeat companies becomes so powerful that they bribe the president of Brazil to make deforestation illegal, and so limiting the amount of land available for cattle and cattle food. I'll happily accept this as a weird side effect.
I think we have always known what works, we just weren't willing to do it. I doubt that has really changed.
Things like that do have a trickle down effect.
The wealthy and especially the very wealthy have prospered[2], and those doing manual labor have been left behind. In a society like the US with very low social mobility[3], colloquially referred to as 'the american dream', it is especially crippling to ones future to be born in blue collar family.
[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/decades-of-rising-economic-i...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
http://www.oecd.org/economy/decoupling-of-wages-from-product...
https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
Not to mention, we have little data on actual poverty in 1920, as many of the un-industrialized nations had large proportions of their populations living off the land in ways that did not contribute to GDP, but where they nevertheless wouldn't have been considered poor. It's also important to remember that scientific racism was a majority position in many European and American countries, and much of the data we have was collected through that lens.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
Yes, bad things are happening. But the trends are in the right direction.
Personally I think that if people study the problem they will realize that there are reasons that UBI is universal and that non-universal UBI probably won't work.
I also believe that if you look at the cost of living in the US and the potential federal revenue increase from radical corporate tax reform, it will still not add up.
So I think that we need extreme cost reductions. But beyond that, I don't think the monetary systems we have now actually can support UBI indefinitely. The math just doesn't add up due to the high cost of living. Eventually the poor countries can't tolerate letting the rich countries increase their debt infinitely anymore. This is going to be a big risk for global war in the next few years.
So I believe we need a totally new type of high tech money. One that integrates more information and has more fine-grained controls. I believe the only way we are going to have global security is if this new money is built on a fair international standard.
Or maybe don't automate. The assembly line has given us repetitive tasks that perhaps, for humane reasons, we should automate. But where are skilled manual labor jobs? Construction is the only thing that comes to mind and there is not enough of it.
I strongly dislike UBI because it gives the economically-blessed tier a pass. "I gave at the office," they can claim while stepping over the homeless or passing the very-nearly homeless on the way to their Tesla. (Lets be clear, $1000 a month is not going to suddenly give everyone a home and 2.5 children.)
What's actually in place today in the US is effectively somewhere in between $0 and $1000, in that you get something if you fill out the right forms regularly and aren't denied one day, and many parts of it are a targeted package with limited liquidity(like EBT). These packages in their current form accomplish exactly the thing you describe of UBI: They create a homeless-industrial complex that allows bleeding hearts to proclaim virtue. Barely keeping people alive doesn't get them to the next rung of the economic ladder, it enmeshes them in a one-way dependency not shared throughout the society. "Universal" is a really important component in effective socialized policies.
Doubt it. Its not like the next covid is going to happen next year. By the time its relavent people would have forgotten all about it just like how right now the spanish flu is a distant chapter in the history books.
The one thing that did work well early on is restrictions on travel, which the WHO, China and the press in Western countries campaigned against. The only Western country I know of that applied reasonably sensible travel restrictions early on is the US, and very soon it's going to get a new president who campaigned on the extremely dubious claim that those restrictions made things worse which went basically unchallenged by the press. (In particular, Italy's travel restrictions - which are often pointed to as proof the US ones were stupid and pointless - only blocked people from travelling directly from China, so they could just travel via other countries and Italy had no record of where they came form. I know the UK's government-funded experts concluded that was much less effective than banning people who'd visited China recently.)
Those travel restrictions also wouldn't work for any country geographically or geopolitically close to Italy - they were still reporting basically zero cases at a point when a substantial proportion of the population was infected. This probably put countries which were closer to China than Italy at something of an inherent advantage.
We also moved early and controlled travel to and from the region with a quarantine.
The travel restrictions are essential. But....if you only did that you would fail miserably. Contact tracing works very well! SARS-COV-2 spreads in clusters.
We were at zero cases for months, and we’re back down to 0-3 local cases a day in most of our provinces and dropping.
You’re completely wrong that this can’t be contained through isolation and tracing. The issue was most of the rest of north america basically only tried tracing (doesn’t work), didn’t scale tracing, and also never seriously tried to eliminate the virus despite the clear evidence that their tracing systems were incapable alone. (I’m including the rest of canada here)
I agree with you that travel restrictions are vital but you’re underestimating the importance of other tools. Also the Us restrictions weren’t very effective: people still got through! In Atlantic Canada everyone arriving from outside the region has to quarantine for 14 days.
Where contact tracing fails, incidentally, is if you have an undetected case cluster. SARS-COV-2 can spread asymptomatically, so if you miss one it can grow quite a bit. But once you find evidence of a cluster you can move backwards and forwards through the transmission chain and quite effectively. The province of new brunswick has beaten about seven small outbreaks back down to zero with this method. But it only works if case numbers are manageable: the rest of north america let them grow out of control and didn’t scale tracing to match.
Travel restrictions work great. Test and quarantine everyone who comes in to the country. But you won't have perfect containment, and maybe you choose to make a tradeoff and say you just need the test, which has X% accuracy. So then there must be follow-up behavior, and that's where contact tracing, quarantines, and masks come in. If you reach the point where you can't get a handle with such techniques, then you lockdown and test until they're sustainable.
There are countries who have done much better, and other countries that have done much worse with Covid. And you see that with East Asian countries who experienced Sars, and African countries who experienced Ebola. So, it might behoove the leaders of countries with much more dead to take a look at what others might be doing different.
As far as we know, Taiwan has had 0 cases since April. All cases in Taiwan are cases that are found in border quarantines. I'd call that a perfect containment.
They have had basically perfect containment, but even then you need some backup systems.
It worked very well in Asian countries with relevant experience (and perhaps more obedient cultures). The UK didn't have comparable relevant experience and may even have used it counterproductively (a relative with very early symptoms contacted the relevant helpline to be advised there were no known cases in their area so they shouldn't worry...)
> The only Western country I know of that applied reasonably sensible travel restrictions early on is the US
New Zealand imposed a travel ban on people from the region at the same time but also required its own returning nationals to self isolate. NZ has certain geographical advantages relative to other Western nations which made it easier for them to subsequently expand that scope to the entire world and eliminate the disease in their country altogether, but even before that the NZ administration wasn't accused of focusing its containment efforts on foreign nonresidents whilst loudly downplaying the risk of community spread from returnees amongst its own population because this isn't what it did.
We still have a culture of "us", it simply wasn't fully tapped into in 2020.
In September 2001, it felt as if "we" had been attacked. Just as in 2020, people began signing up and volunteering to take on the cause. New Yorkers, in particular, suddenly noticed their neighbors and pulled together as a community. I saw the same from within the mask-donation and mask-manufacturing movement this year. Thousands of people, in an entirely grassroots way, stepped up to find one another and address a grave and essential problem.
What stymied the response to Covid in the United States most seems to have been a lack of engaged, concerned, and coordinated epidemiological response at the federal level. That it failed is ultimately not "the government's" fault, it is ours, as citizens. That public-safety measures designed to protect us, our neighbors, and our most-vulnerable became political footballs is our fault. We need to find ways to grow our national sense of responsibility toward others -- it is a challenge that each of us can take on.
2020 has been a championship opportunity for all of us. 2021 will be, too.
Becoming a small island with strict immigration controls is a little difficult for the US.
If the US had done those things from the beginning, we'd be much better off.
To be blunt about it: politicians in other jurisdictions were not up to the task. I was shocked to hear that many provinces did not impose self-isolation requirements upon entry. I was shocked to hear how few public health restrictions were imposed upon their businesses, even when things started spiralling out of control. When you have a virus to contain, you need someone who will make tough decisions and deliver clear messaging so things can recover in four weeks instead of dragging on for four months (and counting). While local attitudes may have helped to improve compliance with public health measures, it can only play a role when there is something to comply with.
Claiming 2020 involved lessons in fighting poverty is a lot like walking up to someone, breaking both their legs, giving them crutches and claiming we've made great leaps in walking.
"Fighting poverty" should involve creating large groups of people where it can't really be imagined how they could be impoverished because they are too resourceful and motivated.
2020 was in large part asking farmers, builders and the productive types of the world to support everyone else sitting around at home. That isn't fair and making it a long-term thing ... it might work, but it is going to lead to some pretty severe tensions.
This is pretty funny because ISPs have been using the excuse of "protecting their infrastructure" to justify data caps for years. Now that we've all seen that it's total BS, they just say they want to be "fair" and just charge people who "use more" and go over the cap.
And if you look at the most recent Tesla FSD beta versions, it's progressing fast and already quite amazing.
I also personally think that the size of the Starship prototype made that belly-flop and landing maneuver pretty significant.
For decades politicians had one stable message: Turning the highly “balanced” and austere fiscal machinery system towards spending yields only hyperinflation. They said look at Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Germany etc. And the worlds supposedly best economists produced models that legitimize this view, making it dominant in education and discourse.
We now gave people basically a UBI, got many people out of poverty with, but all the issues they have been saying would appear and all the false excuses they put on the table have not materialized.
Isn’t one very big scandal of 2020 that all of these people have been lying to the population? That we had the tools to fight poverty and create better living conditions all along but deliberately didn’t chose to do so?
It appears they just want to bully and abuse people by artificially creating a bad situation and then bully and shame them that the people are in a bad situation.
Because the $ is the worlds reserve currency... The US moves the burden to ROW (rest of world).
However there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma “The Triffin dilemma or Triffin paradox is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. “
Or are the recipients of all this wealth already so rich they don't even need another sport car, yacht, villa by the sea or even another forward looking company?
I have to admit I don't understand being so rich I don't know what to do with my money. It feels like even if I had billions, I'd try to be an Elon Musk and use my money to create something. Or maybe even buy and bankroll a NGO, a sport team, artists, whatever. Is this already saturated, are all the opportunities that don't look like a sure scam already taken?
I feel so out of touch with this world, I struggle to even comprehend it.
I think it is flawed math if you completely ignore substantial parts of the equation. AFAIK leading analyses in leading economic scientific journals have discussed the excessive spending of inflationary countries as the and only root cause for the inflation.
But, these leading papers often don’t even mention that the worlds biggest economies at these times (e.g. US) have cut ties and imposed economic sanctions on these countries just before the excessive spending and hyperinflation started.
How are these countries then able to buy goods on the international market denominated in USD, if they are basically cut off from the US Dollar monetary system? It’s almost as if an excessive shock of raised import prices propagates to a general increase in prices. This would mean economic sanctions imposed by the US on to Chile put them into a crisis, not their socialist government from back then with its spending programs.
But wait, that would not fit into the narrative so let’s just claim that these countries short term reaction to these shocks (print enough money in hopes to stabilize the economy) is the cause of the shock and hide it behind a wall of math that nobody wants to look at anyways.
Excuse me, I don’t have the classics at hand now so I can’t point sources.
[citation needed]
Specifically what "math" are you referring to? Can you provide a link to a Wikipedia article or some published paper which explains this "math"?
Clearly you would agree that some amount of money printing would cause inflation. At what number of dollars would we cross the threshold? $600 per person? $2000 per person? $10,000 per person? $100,000 per person? etc etc.
When I say “the math must catch up with us”, all I’m saying is that if we kept doing stimulus forever, at some point it will start to matter.
Velocity is low/zero, and so the product will be small/zero.
People have been going on about inflation for literally a decade, since QE1 started under Bernanke:
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
* https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.ht...
Meanwhile Keynesian folks like Krugman have been saying we're in a liquidity trap because of the ZLB on rates:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_lower_bound
Japan has been in this situation for decades, and Krugman has been writing about it for just as long (1998):
* https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/japans_trap.pdf
So we have a testable hypothesis: the inflationistas have been yelling about this for over a decade, and the (e.g.) Keynesians have been saying 'we'll be fine given the conditions'.
Given the (empirical) results, I'll continue to follow the Keynesians. If at some point they end up being wrong, then I'll re-consider (assuming they don't self-correct and figure out why their models got it wrong).
Whether a basic income will address those problems is an open question. It may have a net positive, neutral, or negative effect depending upon the collective psychological response. In addition, how one views the outcome will depend upon their perspective. Suggesting that an UBI will result in people not working is a misleading ideological statement that has no basis in evidence. We simply don't know what the outcome will be. Even studies that indicate positive outcomes are limited by the scale of the implementation.
Besides, it's probably best to look at UBI through the lens of political stability, rather than social well being or economic outcomes.
EDIT: added a very important "not".
Most people might be losing their fair share of the pie in the current economic strategy but the creditor class has made out like bandits over the past 30+ years with no end in sight.
Talk about free market ideals but socialise all losses with corporate bailouts. It’s just win win win.
The only game in town today is “maximise shareholder value”. The pre-70s concepts of keep wages growing in lock step with capital’s gains (since the theory goes that boosts consumption and that keeps the world turning) has gone out the window.
Capital takes 100% of the growth. Labour is easy to keep distracted - divide and conquer: “Hey, gay people/single mothers/people from other countries/people with brown eyes are taking free stuff at your expense...”
https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
It's only when the spending exceeds the amount of otherwise idle capacity that inflation occurs, as too much money chases too little real production.
It's evident that the economic shocks this year have idled a great deal of economic capacity.
If I have a cash surplus that's where I'm most likely to use it.
AFAIK there were a few weeks in the first wave of the pandemic where people fled the city and landlords would face sudden issues to fill their apartments but this time is over. Speaking from anecdotes by friends trying to get apartments in the big cities thoughout Europe it has not gotten easier at all.
They might not, but could you ELI5 why they shouldn't be? Because as the interest payment on national debt grows, what happens eventually if not hyperinflation? You can't keep borrowing money to pay interest on existing debt, so you'll have to start printing money, right? How do you avoid eventual hyperinflation when you keep borrowing more and more money to increase your debt even more?
The central bankers are hired for a fixed-term (though renewable) and are given a mandate:
> The Federal Reserve works to promote a strong U.S. economy. Specifically, the Congress has assigned the Fed to conduct the nation’s monetary policy to support the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. When prices are stable, long-term interest rates remain at moderate levels, so the goals of price stability and moderate long-term interest rates go together. As a result, the goals of maximum employment and stable prices are often referred to as the Fed’s “dual mandate.”
* https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does...
If 'printing money' helps to accomplish that mandate they will do so, but they will (theoretically/ideally) not print money just because it would be convenient for political purposes.
It should also be noted that in most/may modern economies, private banks actually create the money the supply through issuing loans:
* PDF: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Good video by Ben Felix on the topic:
Do you trust Congress to manage the money supply? I don't. I think they'd use it to buy votes rather than to do what's good for the country, and the result would be disaster.
Inflation is where the value of dollars goes down. As long as you don't print more dollars than people are demanding, you won't get hyperinflation.
The U.S. dollar, for one reason or another, is in high demand all over the world. Other national currencies are not, so when they printed too much of their currency they got hyperinflation.
If the U.S. printed too many dollars too quickly, or demand for dollars dropped quickly, the dollar could see hyperinflation too.
And either way, then doesn't "nobody in the field worries about hyperinflation for developed economies" seem utterly misguided? It seems quite worrying given what I just described.
Actually, you probably can. The long-term trend of interest rates, at least in the West, has to decline over the course of 700 years:
* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...
There have been many gyrations, but the trend is pretty clear. It's easier to pay past (more expensive) debt with new current (cheaper) debt. The UK is still rolling forward debt from the South Sea Bubble (1700s), Napoleonic Wars (early 1800s), Crimean War (late 1800s), and World War 1 (1910s):
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying...
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/31/uk-first-wo...
As a person, your accounts come 'due' in your lifetime, so when you die your estate holdings will be sold off, and remaining debts will be paid off. If there's not enough to pay it off, then the creditors are S.O.L.; if there's extra left over your heirs can get something.
A country/nation on the other hand just 'keeps going' (short of revolutions or being conquered), and so there's no cut-off date when accounts have to be settled.
if i understand correctly, from reading bits here and there, its basically as long as you have something to offset the printing with (taxing out of circulation, ensuring the excess money is spent, taking out of circulation with bond offerings etc) then the "negative" value of the taxing/spending/bonds prevents the in-circulation (positive) cash to cause inflation.
its basically the debts vs liabilities balancing each other out on a national scale: as long as you balance the assets with some kind of liability, you are 'ok' afaiu
basically, modern monetary theory*
Yes, that's it in a nutshell. Even the standard 1940s mainstream Keynes doctrine is quite clear on the no hyper-inflation scenario - additional money supply will not result in excess inflation unless the economy is at full employment. And by full employment, it doesn't mean the headline unemployment rate of ~5% quoted in media. It means high labor force participation rates (currently at historical lows), low underemployment (currently at historical highs) and low unemployment rate. The fact we see persistently low inflation rates throughout the developed world for decades is intimately tied to these stats.
By finally having time to read Keynes directly from his own works, it's amazing how prescient the man was. Sans the dandy early 20th century English, these quotes are just as applicable today as they were in 1930s:
> ...the richer the community, the wider will tend to be the gap between its actual and its potential production; and therefore the more obvious and outrageous the defects of the economic system.
> [on classical economics] That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. [...] That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress [...] commended it to authority.
> professional economists, after Malthus, were apparently unmoved by the lack of correspondence between the results of their theory and the facts of observation;— a discrepancy which the ordinary man has not failed to observe
And of course, the hyperinflation episodes of those countries (and others) did really happen
But maybe the issue is giving the money directly to people instead of using it to pay government debt
Keynes worked after stagflation as well:
> I just do not think that is right. Stagflation is very easily explained: you just need an ‘accelerationist’ Phillips curve (i.e. where the coefficient on expected inflation is one), plus a period in which monetary policymakers systematically underestimate the natural rate of unemployment. You do not need rational expectations, or any of the other innovations introduced by New Classical economists.
[…]
> Stagflation did not kill IS-LM. In fact, because empirical validity was so central to the methodology of macroeconomics at the time, it adapted to stagflation very quickly. This gave a boost to the policy of monetarism, but this used the same IS-LM framework. If you want to find the decisive event that led to New Classical economists winning their counterrevolution, it was the theoretical realisation that if expectations were rational, but inflation was described by an accelerationist Phillips curve with expectations about current inflation on the right hand side, then deviations from the natural rate had to be random. The fatal flaw in the Keynesian/Monetarist theory of the 1970s was theoretical rather than empirical.
* https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2014/06/understanding-new-c...
> But my small quarrel with Simon involves how we got into this state. He dismisses the stagflation of the 1970s, on the grounds that IS-LM macroeconomics quickly adapted to the new information. Indeed, this happened very fast: by 1978 both the leading undergraduate macro textbooks, Dornbusch-Fischer and Gordon, had accelerationist Phillips curves and extensive discussions of stagflation. (Compare this with new classical macro, which failed decisively in the 1980s, but never adjusted at all.)
> Nonetheless, I remember the 70s quite well, and stagflation did indeed play a role in the rise of new classical macro, albeit in a subtler way than the caricature that it proved Keynes wrong, or something like that.
> What mattered instead was the fact that stagflation had in effect been predicted by Friedman and Phelps; and the way they made that prediction was by taking a step in the direction of microfoundations. Specifically, they asked what a more or less rational price-setter would do in the face of persistent inflation; their answer was, raise prices preemptively, and if everyone did this it would shift the Phillips curve up by the amount of expected inflation. Sure enough, the Phillips curve did seem to shift as predicted.
* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/stagflation-and...
What "other models" are you referring to?
The accelerationist Phillips curve and various types of rational expectations based microfounded models you reference are, for better and for worse, the newer 'other models'.
Arguments advanced upthread that Keynes (and recent events) implies that the government could eliminate all poverty and unemployment through continuous money printing without consequence, or 1960s Keynesian arguments the government could at any point trade slightly higher inflation for lower unemployment (which were influenced by but not made by Keynes) were the casualty.
One thing both the original Keynes and modern mainstream interpretations have in common is they viewed large deficits as a tool for fixing the imbalances of a recession rather than the natural way of paying for things.
This is because most of the money injected due to a stimulus is quickly locked up due to structural issues where excess savings is quickly funneled to corporate profits, landlords and the ultra wealthy. These funds do not recirculate do the velocity of money drops and inflation doesn’t materialize. In fact the structural issues are so strong in places like Japan that deflation has will naturally result if the money supply isn’t increased with constant stimulus measures.
This creates a company store economy where the underclass or government has to perpetually roll an increasing amount of debt.
Maybe the solution could be to run an unbalanced book. Money and debt are often created together, but if all actors of the economy really want to be cash positive, then maybe it calls for having more money than debt.
Could be a component, just like in Germany. When your central bank rate is zero:
* https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/interest-rate
And your borrowing costs are negative going out thirty years:
* https://ca.investing.com/rates-bonds/germany-government-bond...
That's a pretty good indication that spending should increase.
Demographics is often said to be a major component. The older a population is, the less spending there tends to be, which tends to impact economic growth, and has a pretty good correlation with (low) interest rates:
* https://financialpost.com/opinion/the-natural-rate-of-intere...
* PDF: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/why-are-...
While this strategy in the short term dramatically increases capital investment in a country in the long term it seems to come with a demographic drag. Workers simply stop having children as they are the largest consumption driver. Long term this creates profound demographic changes that ultimately are culturally fatal.
When the supply of dollars outpaces demand, then you get inflation. The only remedy there is to somehow decrease the supply of dollars, usually through increased taxes.
It’s only been, what, 6 months? And we’ve only done one stimulus. Give it 10 years and a hundred stimuli.
The key is for your country to not have a significantly higher debt to GDP than competitors of similar economic development. The USA has further advantages in that much of its debt is owned by other Americans (who have strong vested interest in the ability for the USA to pay its debts).
That being said, we could have spent FAR MORE and increased debt FAR MORE in the USA without serious downsizes - even if COVID hadn't happened!
It turns out that "fiscal responsibility" literally does not matter and is in fact DETERMINTAL to the economy. The velocity of money is all that matters. This is why VCs who are never profitable are still a net positive for the economy, because they facilitate velocity. The US govt pumping money into the economy PREVENTED A FAR WORSE LIQUDITY CRISIS which we were at serious risk of earlier given that it looked like we'd be seeing DEFLATION rather than inflation earlier on...
However the virus broke out, China knew full well after SARS 1 that wet markets and e.g. traditional Chinese medicine were huge pandemic risks and did nothing. After SARS 2 broke out there was a very well evidenced cover up and misinformation campaign which apparently without which could have saved 95% of cases.
But instead of the media keeping that in collective consciousness we get pieces like this.
As they rightly say the next pandemic could be considerably worse. The absolute lack of any political or economic pressure on the country most likely to cause it directly informed by a media who appear to no longer care about that fact will be a big factor.
If you think I am being unreasonable, just do the thought experiment and imagine the US or UK had done what china did. You would not hear the end of it and sanctions and actions against them would be instant and severe.
But don't worry, at least zoom seems to work ok.
the US and UK may have done terrible wrongs but they are held endlessly to account. I don't want to get into a dreadful endless debate about foreign adventures (I am not a fan of the Afghan or Iraqi wars by the way) but there is just a world of difference between a totalitarian state and a democratic one.
Imagine the police turning up and arresting you for that comment and you disappear never to be heard from again. That is the reality for many Chinese dissidents. Don't undervalue the freedoms gifted to you by the imperfect state in which you live.
There's also the question of effectiveness. Iran has been under sanctions for most of my adult life, and still appears to be islamist. Ditto north korea. Going further to provoke a war is much worse.
The uighur situation is far more concerning than the errors of the pandemic, which was like Chernobyl a mistake and misgovernment rather than intentional.
https://twitter.com/_SecondThought/status/133274617257067725...
The CCP (who have all but destroyed and coopted the great history of ancient China) are a despicably evil state who will cause a great many FURTHER deaths if the world doesn't start taking note and action.
What is a journalist for if they don't even tell the truth when the elephant in the room is the size of a meteor? Not a single mention in this article and most I read recently.
America acted to address the issue and prevent future outbreaks. China is doing precisely the opposite, and looking to save face rather than save lives.
Anybody with half a brain should be aghast at what's going on very blatantly right in front of their eyes. The next pandemic might not have a 0.4% case mortality rate mostly affecting those at the end of their lives/with comorbidities.
Taking the point separately about disease prevalence in Asia - absolutely, and there are many reasons as to why - the wide biosphere, the broad consumption of many species not consumed abroad, the prevalence of high risk animals with similar biology to ours but higher tolerance for e.g. fever/respiratory disease (bats are unfortunately extremely good at this) - this is precisely why we have to be extremely vigilent there.
This is also what makes the Chinese refusing to allow serious investigation into the outbreak (now only permitted via the highly questionable WHO) along with them opening wet markets shortly after the initial outbreak and worse of all the undenaible cover up particularly egregious.
Perhaps the next pandemic would be unavoidable even with China doing all they could to prevent it - but for them to play dice with the future of civilisation with what control they have is unforgiveable.
This is not exactly the same, but police searched the home of a Florida data scientist and confiscated her computers, because she kept reporting Florida coronavirus statistics, when the state government would have preferred to keep true numbers secret.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944200394/florida-agents-raid...
I think they will be more interested in the enthusiastic adoption of totalitarian measures by hitherto democratic societies.
If so, that is as totalitarian as requiring people to stop at red stoplights.
The pattern is entirely that of emergency 'enabling law' examples from the past when equally scary things gave them apparent justification.
Boiling things down to 'just asking to wear a mask' is at best deeply naive and at worst arrogantly dismissive. Break out of the soundbites and take a moment to think about what's happening in historical context.
If you want a serious and reasoned analysis of the worries, concerns and threats under these circumstances (at least from a UK perspective) I firmly recommend you view Lord Sumption's thoughts on this matter (recently retired judge from the supreme court of the UK with a long and highly respected career in the judiciary) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amDv2gk8aa0
Unfortunately under circumstances such as the covid-19 mess we all live under (and thank your lucky stars you are in a 1st world country, the 3rd world will suffer at unimaginable levels, highly likely considerably moreso due to covid-19 aid cuts than covid-19 itself) things are considerably greyer than 'conspiracy theory nuts vs. just asking to put a mask on'. If only it were that simple.
There are an infinite number of things which one might be worried could happen, and it is good to stay vigilant to those things. I have little fear that once the pandemic is mostly behind us that these temporary restrictions will be lifted -- we already know that many republicans think it is a political hoax, and I don't know of a single liberal who wouldn't love to get back to normal.
I am not advocating some absolute zero-measure approach but I also don't agree with the lockdowns which have repeatedly failed to work on any kind of permanent basis and whose costs are entirely ignored.
The rational approach is a measured one taking into account all costs. Unfortunately politics, especially partisan ones don't work that way...
The costs are not being ignored. Government frequently talks about the need to keep schools open to avoid some of those costs; we've recently had rapid release of suicide stats (no rise so far, but lots of caution needed); we're v worried about access to other forms of healthcare (London has today said they can't guarantee ambo service to home birth delivery that goes wrong) etc etc.
People are constantly checking we've got the balance right.
But the fact remains: covid kills lots of people and it seriously harms very many others. Those people who are harmed take time to recover and that has long term financial and health implications for them and their families.
https://twitter.com/rupert_pearse/status/1342020644247130113
Even if you believe these are means to a noble end in the context of COVID-19, I think it is hard to deny that the response has used quite a few tools from the totalitarian toolset. Even explicitly, the early calls for lockdowns used China as a positive example.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I don't think we're in a traditional auth. situation now. It's a classic "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" in my mind.
Sure we're seeing some signs of government overreach, but the impetus is to save lives, not some consipriacy to control the masses. Doing so misses the mark and distracts from the real issue at hand.
Because I think most reps are acting in good faith, and nobody wants these lockdowns - they are just necessary. Why would someone want to continue them after Covid?
I suspect more extreme up-front measures would actually stop the virus up-front. As a result, the other restrictions like masks wouldn’t be necessary for as long. So overall, one might say that the approach of nations like China, while more strict up front, had resulted in less overall restrictions in the long term, many fewer deaths, and even more economic activity. In the case of an out of control virus, people would be too scared to fly, for example, so economic activity would still be severely hindered. (Even with no restrictions at all.)
What are the alternatives for dealing with pandemics which have the possibility to entirely destroy human life and society? If nothing at all is done by governments, it becomes up to individual responsibility and the markets to control the situation. This only works if people are too scared to do anything or go anywhere, which means things would have to get really bad (read: a lot of death) before it would work.
What is the purpose of government if not to provide a safe and stable society to live in? We (unless you’re an anarchist) want laws and enforcement so that we can be free to live our lives without threat from others. You could even argue that infecting others when you knew you could avoid it is something we should restrict. In that way, wearing masks isn’t totalitarian, instead it’s a law which protects us from others.
And if we were to allow these "more extreme measures," what's to stop a hostile actor from weaponizing our submission to totalitarian regime, by creating and releasing more viruses, in order to extend and increase said concentration of power?
You assume benevelonce. You really WANT Drumpf to go full Pol Pot on your ass?
"Only if he does what /I/ say, which is good for society, and not anything else!"
Don't you see the flaw in your logic here? Haven't we see this play out in history many times before?
In the first case, the measures don't benefit the politicians much. People hate wearing masks and not being about to congregate in churches to discuss non-political topics.
In the second case, the measures are usually targeted at suppressing negative sentiment against the political appointees.
But in the cases of the democratic nations and their measures throughout, negative sentiment against politicians and the government who implement these measures are all allowed to run rampant by the government (in some cases by other politicians themselves). Protests are still held, and the government is still scrutinized and criticized by civil society.
So going by your definition, there are important domains of society that the government does not attempt to dominate, that continue to serve as a check. Only those that are essential to the COVID-19 response are temporarily weakened.
Did your government really just ask?
My local government responded by drafting and frequently, but irregularly, updating an increasing complex document—by decree rather than through the legislature—the violation of which was a misdemeanor (or, for businesses, may result in being closed down). To this day, individual businesses are asking the government what steps they need to take in order to operate. The answers they receive are not in any legally drafted document. Effectively businesses are asking government what they need to do to avoid the scrutiny of government; not what they need to do to stay within the law.
This was a massive insertion of government control into the lives of individuals, which is the essence of totalitarianism. I agree that wearing masks, washing your hands, and avoiding unnecessary contact with others are all good things to do. I do those things voluntarily; and would have done so if asked, even if it wasn't a misdemeanor not to do so. That doesn't mean I'm blind to the totalitarian measures some governments took to get there; or to the risks that imposes for the future.
Restricting the density to... Zero? Is that what they are calling the forced shutdown of indoor and outdoor restaurants, gyms and other places of business and subsequent jailing of violators now?
(And jailing of mask violators as well, despite mounting evidence that mask mandates don't work and/or make the problem worse)
Here is a new study (not published) that suggests mask mandates are counterproductive https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1340725086278434821?s...
Would be nice if the mainstream media covered any of this.
>Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions became effective
>From both sets of modelling, we found that closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders and closure of all non-businesses was not associated with any independent additional impact
>Conclusions: A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives
Yes, you provided a link to a site which has links to 24 other papers. Providing proof in this case required you to cut and past a URL; you are asking me to read and rebut 24 papers, and I'm not about to. However, I did look them up and the wikipedia article about them [1] said the scientific community has condemned their positions on COVID, which is herd immunity -- everyone should get sick, we should live with 3M deaths in the US, so businesses can get back to selling stuff like normal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_for_Economi...
I have zero worries that this is part of a power grab by evil overlords; they have nothing to gain from this, unlike the power grab to make encryption have government accessible backdoors, or routing all internet traffic through NSA scrapers.
> jailing of mask violators as well
Where are they being jailed? None in the US that I know of. I'm sure there are a few people who have created such a disturbance that they had to be removed by police, but that is ancillary to the reason they are getting nabbed, such as the guy at a Costco screaming at people and threatening to hurt them because they told him to put on a mask. He was arrested (but not jailed) for threatening people, not because he didn't wear a mask.
Yes, the shutdowns are having bad consequences for a lot of businesses. There is a pandemic after all, and pandemics cause negative consequences.
> mounting evidence that mask mandates don't work and/or make the problem worse
I'm sure such studies exist, but there are plenty that contradict your claim, and I do not believe there is a trend in your direction. There are also people who believe condoms not only doesn't reduce the spread of AIDS but makes it worse [1]. Otherwise smart people can believe also sorts of outrageous stuff if it comports with their existing belief system.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/17/pope-africa-co...
It is happening in the US, you just haven't heard of it. https://www.krtv.com/news/crime-and-courts/sheriff-slaughter...
>I'm sure such studies exist, but there are plenty that contradict your claim, and I do not believe there is a trend in your direction
I'm interested in these studies you mention, can you share them? I shared 25 different studies below that support my assertion.
So that is a bad example.
History tells us govts that gain powers during emergencies are extremely reticent to give them up once the ostensible emergency is over.
Injustices are always justified but never just.
Requiring people to wear something in public? They already do that too with shirts and pants. And again, I think most people prefer it that way.
E.g. the Patriot act...
The thing with stuff like that is people like me who point this out will get sneered at at the time, but later when these powers are abused you'll forget that we warned you. This is NOT trivial. This is NOT small.
New Zealand had a 8-week lockdown from late March to early May, and then they had perfectly normal general elections in October. The government that ordered the lockdown 7 months earlier, did nothing draconian to prevent the free elections taking place.
This feels like a way of contrasting the current situation with measures take post 9/11, which I think are much more nefarious and unjustified.
To be clear, I’m sure historians will be interested in the measures taken to fight this pandemic, just not for some “totalitarian control” reasons but rather for the necessity of fighting the virus on a global scale. The scale of the measures are unprecedented, but locking down isn’t some crazy novel idea. I mean even in Camus’ “The Plague” there is mention of that kind of strategy.
If you really imagine that any country in the world has either the means or the will to impose sanctions on the US or the UK, you definitely live in a different international community than I do.
And blaming China, which was giving correct information about the virus by January, for so many states refusing to take serious measures EVEN TODAY would be a total farce.
China did try to cover up the virus in December of last year, and should be condemned for it. But they then showed the world how to deal with it and shared all of the relevant information as early as February. The failed responses by all European states and the US, most/all Latin American states, most Middle Eastern states etc. can in no way be blamed on China.
If you want to see what a non-story this virus could have been if there were political will to do the right thing, you need only look at Vietnam. They are a 100M-people state taht have 4 times fewer cases in total by today than 10M people Sweden gets each and every day.
Edit: China tried to downplay -> China tried to cover up
I don't think you've been following much of the recent news about brexit or the trade wars with China. Of course countries can condemn and criticise others for their actions. Nearly the entire western press corps have been non-stop criticising your sitting president for the past 4 years. So I think we live in the same world. Why can't the press at the very least be honest and consistent about China?
>And blaming China, which was giving correct information about the virus by January, for so many states refusing to take serious measures EVEN TODAY would be a total farce.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
Jan 14th - as reported by China. They repeatedly lied (demonstrably) about their death figures and the nature of the disease. Evidence emerged that actually China NEVER reported the pandemic nature of the disease but rather it was (still rather complicit) WHO staff on the ground who reported it.
They also permitted international flights but not domestic ones once that virus was known about, hoarded PPE and spread a conspiracy theory about the US having originated the virus.
I also find it astonishing that you seem to think a country that could have prevented 95% of cases having not covered it up should be lauded for giving advice about self-isolation and lockdowns after it caused them. The families of 0.95 * 1.5M people thank you so much for the clarification.
>China did try to cover up the virus in December of last year, and should be condemned for it. But they then showed the world how to deal with it and shared all of the relevant information as early as February. The failed responses by all European states and the US, most/all Latin American states, most Middle Eastern states etc. can in no way be blamed on China.
The contention that delayed lockdowns (delayed due to China lying up until January and continuously lying about their death figures) would have saved all these lives is honestly laughable. The trade off between lockdowns and the economy is very difficult as is contact tracing in a non-totalitarian state.
>If you want to see what a non-story this virus could have been if there were political will to do the right thing, you need only look at Vietnam. They are a 100M-people state taht have 4 times fewer cases in total by today than 10M people Sweden gets each and every day.
Apples and oranges. Centres of European trade who have considerably wider travel arriving at them and no culture of e.g. mask-wearing and governments ill-adopted to authoritarian measures vs. a communist country with considerably less is not the same at all. And we mustn't forget the impact of climate (hotter climate = considerably less impact).
China had a warning in 2003 to shut down their wet markets and arrogantly ignored it. They reopened the wet markets shortly after covid-19 broke out and covered up the outbreak. This is not even getting into the quite plausible walked-out-of-the-lab theories and it's still clear they're responsible for the pandemic.
The CCP are a dreadful totalitarian government who should be held to account. Instead they sabre-rattle, lie, spread misinformation and attack any country that dares question their narrative threatening economic consequences (see e.g. Australia).
Chinese people are the biggest victims of them. Many more millions will die before that awful group get overthrown. But their time will come.
In no way do I think China should be lauded. They should obviously be condemned for failing to contain this while it was a localized epidemic and not a pandemic, and for actively hurting and silencing the doctors that tried to do so. The CCP is a despicable regime that has caused much harm to its own citizens and to the world in general, in this crisis and in others.
However, I can do little to change the regime in China. However, I have much more power to influence and change the regime in my own country, and so I am much more interested in how they handled the crisis at least once information got out, and it is hear where I think the press should also focus, as they rightly have.
China's reputation for covering up should have been ample reason to start pandemic preparation in December or at least January, as Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries with successful responses did.
European countries and the US instead chose to believe China's early lies. They then added their own lies on top once China started telling (some of) the truth, claiming that masks are not useful, claiming that the disease is not that bad, claiming that it will go away in the summer and myriad other lies.
They then avoided as long as possible to take any serious measures that could have curtailed the spread of the disease early on extremely effectively, with some more serious but very short term economic impact, leaving the rest of the year for growth.
Instead, they chose lukewarm 'lockdowns' where many stores remained opened, they chose to only do contact tracing for direct contacts (serious countries were contact tracing and isolating up to 3 levels of contact), they chose to not even recommend masks until the second half of the year (particularly stupid regimes like the one in Sweden have only recommended them last week!) etc.
These are all things for which we can hold our politicians accountable. We can't hold the CCCP accountable.
By the way, I'm neither a citizen nor a resident of the USA, Trump is not 'my president' in any sense of the word.
If a similarly dangerous flu mutation jumps from a pig to an undocumented agricultural worker in the United States, and goes viral across the globe, will you also refer to that as 'unleashing a pandemic'?
Animal rights advocacy groups have for decades been reminding us that conditions in modern farms are dangerous and unsanitary, so it's not like we don't have any advance warning for it.
... Also, it became incredibly clear to anyone that was paying attention that COVID was a serious threat in January. Yet, most of the western world collectively sat on its hands for the next month and a half. Will your historians also leave a few chapters on the subject of just how incapable our societies are at dealing with epidemics?
We squandered a lot more than two weeks of time in reacting to it.
Given the low quality of press coverage, and of public accountability in the US for how the pandemic was handled, I can't imagine how it would have been any better if we had patient zero.
Also, note that the CCP cracked down hard on the leaders responsible for the failure in handling the pandemic. Many senior politicians lost their jobs. The US, meanwhile, nearly re-elected the president, did re-elect the senate, and most of the state governments up for election.
You look at that, and tell me - which of the two countries actually held their political class accountable for its failures? Note that the scope of failure in the US was two orders of magnitude worse...
After the first US covid case was detected in Washington state on Jan 20th, the Seattle Flu Study scientists wanted to use their existing flu swabs samples to test if coronavirus was already spreading in the wild in Seattle (it was). But state and federal government did not allow them to. Finally on Feb 25th, they started testing their samples without permission, and found community spread.
There are other interpretations of this story, but any sensation-seeking newspaper would surely run this story as the government attempting to cover up that the virus is already spreading.
> To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
>If a similarly dangerous flu mutation jumps from a pig to an undocumented agricultural worker in the United States, and goes viral across the globe, will you also refer to that as 'unleashing a pandemic'?
Absolutely, why on earth would you think I wouldn't? I'm borderline offended by the implication and this subtle-not-so-subtle 'if you criticise x you're racist' narrative is dangerous nonsense. Refrain from it please.
>Animal rights advocacy groups have for decades been reminding us that conditions in modern farms are dangerous and unsanitary, so it's not like we don't have any advance warning for it.
Absolutely, and spillover from ecological incursions is a huge issue. I hope there is more emphasis put on the risks now. I recommend the book 'spillover' on this topic.
However it's vitally important to realise - some countries are at higher risk than others for various reasons, China being a HUGE flashpoint for this issue, and there ARE things we can do.
Wet markets are disgusting horrific places and also HUGELY risky from a spillover event perspective. In 2003 and SARS 1 (note covid-19 is literally SARS v2) this is precisely how the virus emerged. China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture. The world remained silent and no pressure was put upon them to change this. We already had our warning.
They additionally covered up the outbreak and punished those who reported it. Do not defend this either implicitly or explicitly. There are reports that, had they immediately reported it, we could have avoided 95% of worldwide cases. 1.5M * 0.95 is quite a lot of deaths to be directly responsible for isn't it?
As I said in another comment, it is very possible another pandemic could break out even if China did everything they could to prevent it. But to ignore serious points of vulnerability which indeed caused a previous outbreak and then to try to cover it up is unforgivable. There is a genuine case for that being considered at the very least a crime against humanity if not an act of war given the consequences.
>... Also, it became incredibly clear to anyone that was paying attention that COVID was a serious threat in January. Yet, most of the western world collectively sat on its hands for the next month and a half. Will your historians also leave a few chapters on the subject of just how incapable our societies are at dealing with epidemics?
China told the WHO there was no human-to-human transmission in January as per their famous tweet. And it came out later evidence to the contrary came not from Chinese authorities but in fact WHO representatives on the ground. So believing the WHO and China is part of why.
No question most countries utterly fucked this up however, and there is much to improve, but to ignore the totalitarian, evil government responsible for many millions of deaths and who harvest organs and put people in concentration camps and to do the whole 'oh but you'd never say that about the USA lol' thing is really not on. I would be just as firm on any country responsible and if they did not do EVERYTHING in their power to prevent and mitigate this I would castigate them, even if it were my own country.
In China doing that gets you disappeared. Remember that and remember the privilege you have to disagree with me. The Chinese do not have that luxury.
What you say about China is true, there's a one-party state that has done some brutal things.
The disappointment is that we in the west thought we had a better way to govern, but the state where the disease originated is doing quite well despite all those criticisms, and the states where people are supposedly free are the ones where people are locked up in their homes unable to celebrate Christmas with their families.
We had a head start, we had sources that knew the truth about the disease, we'd seen smaller outbreaks before, and we have more money.
It's also simplistic to blame China for the whole thing. "They could have saved 95% of lives" is not the whole ethical story. If you know you're living next to someone unreliable, you need to take your own precautions.
Because in this very sub-thread, you're making statements like:
> China's response was, as now, to only briefly close these horrific places of animal torture.
In contrast to what? The horrific places of animal torture from where our supermarket meat comes from?
Pardon my skepticism, but I'm not sure you're applying the same standards to their barbarism, as you are to our barbarism. You don't seem to be applying the same standards to their ineptitude and malfeasance as you are to our ineptitude and malfeasance.
It comes off as nationalistic baiting, which is incredibly frustrating, because it's happening in the context of lordnacho's post. There's a prevailing zeitgheist in the US that all our problems are the fault of other, bad countries - which is used as a diversion from finding actual solutions to these problems. We've seen this play out over the past year, to the tune of 250,000 dead.
You're surely familiar with the meme of a an incompetent authoritarian regime that's busy blaming everyone around them for their domestic problems, while their people starve. Over the past year, we've been living this meme. We should be looking back at it with self-reflection, as opposed to cheerleading it.
You can't put sanctions on them. The world economy would collapse if countries stopped allowing Chinese goods into their economies. We can't just retool overnight.
The reason they get away with their concentration camps is precisely for this reason. There is very little leverage the rest of us have to stop them.
The best the world can do is slowly twist the screws until they are less powerful. This is already happening. You can see some manufacturing is already moving out of China into other parts of Asia because the US is making small but steady changes on how goods from China can be consumed. This is the only option right now unfortunately.
That is not true. China main product is physical goods. If the western world would stop consuming irrelevant physical goods (like cocktail umbrellas) and limit itself to essential (and food and western media) then China would be gravely impacted. To be fair, the whole world economy would be impacted, not only china.
But the western world only pays lip service to the "Never again" mantra and will do nothing that affects its standard of living, camps or no camps.
The problem is that we're not able to compete with China because of all our regulations and morals.
It may sound like the virtuous choice, until we all become part of China.
We frankly don't even have access to the information we need to make an informed choice. Even things that don't say "made in China" most likely have some Chinese made parts inside.
The alternative is to shrink government spending to the minimum possible and put everything into the economy, liberalise the economy so that we can start producing cheap products like China does.
But let's be honest, this is never going to happen. Politics keep idiots fighting between each other while our society gets slowly boiled alive by the Chinese Communist Party.
I wonder if it's because they already bought us and we don't know yet or if it's just sheer incompetence.
There are countries that have done quite well with Covid. Taiwan comes to mind. Others could have done similar. But instead those others put trust in a system of distrust; an unstable system that they actively contributed to and participated in. That's not on China's shoulders.
Furthermore. There were previous respiratory virus pandemics. Where were the lessons learned from that? The stockpile of masks? The stock pile of PPE?
I'm not suggesting China is innocent. But as governments go, it's not alone in its guilt.
I'd sure hope, that the western world would put more pressure on China, but instead it seems we'll be facing even bigger pandemic threats in the future..
Thanks for that, I viewed that some time ago and found it very informative. I am not sure I'd agree it plays a big economical role, rather it became an alternative outlet for some producers but mostly it appears to be a luxury item for the rich and thus entirely viable for China to ban.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if poor people ate such animals to survive (as with a lot of 'bush meat' in Africa) however that isn't the case.
China have no excuse for not closing these, at all. Traditional Chinese 'medicine' where they grind down very many animal parts in extremely unclean environments is another big flashpoint.
The risk is at the species-extinction level yet the actions by the world and the coverage by journalists is so low. Astonishes me.
Ok, so what? Adapt.
Like the rest of the planet did. As an example, Restaurants also play a massive economic role in the western world and pretty much everything involving gatherings of people. Or my grandparents doing their groceries without risking their lives. So we managed to more or less adapt to the new reality.
Wet market importance pales in comparison to the changes to the rest of the planet, honestly.
As far as sanctions go, they only make sense if you're goals are strictly economically related. Punishing China with sanctions for the pandemic largely ineffective strategy because you're hurting your own side just as much.
Not much changed, lure of the totalitarian regime with nice commie tint that can tell plebs what to do is still strong.
Also exotic animal trading has been seriously crashed down in China early this year. I bet you won't be able to see it happening in the following decades at least.
Not once in my life did I think 2020 would be the year when many middle eastern countries sign peace deals with Israel. Heck there’s already Israeli Jewish weddings in Dubai!!!
The us government who helped broker these deserves a peace prize. If not with their help and assistance these peace deals would not have occurred.
I look forward to what 2021 will bring with the Middle East better aligned to future industrial and cultural growth.
Gives me hope than we’ll see a peace deal with the West Bank and Gaza Strip within the decade.
While 4 years ago there was some hope, it is now impossible to imagine that:
(1) there will ever be a peaceful 2 state solution to the Palestinian crisis
(2) there will ever be another deal between the US and Iran
The fact that a handful of arab states have agreed to join Israel's side instead of Palestine's is in no way an end to the threat that the conflict between the two creates.
And let's not forget that the war in Yemen is still ongoing, with US military support for the aggressor, Saudi Arabia.
If the peace continues to last, sure, we can acknowledge those who were involved. But it's way to early to acknowledge anything yet.
Some of them weren't even that, with the two countries already having unofficial trade, security, and diplomatic relations and this new deal just making it official. And they got or will get US arms deals out of it.
It will take quite a while to see if these agreements actually make the region more peaceful or they were just going through the motions to get access to US arms.
In the case of the Morocco deal, there is a decent chance it will lead to more violence, due to it including the US recognizing Morocco's claims over the disputed Western Sahara.
the future is not extract resources until a lucky few can escape to space, it's to fight together for climate goals (US failed here) and find a way for humanity to live sustainably with what we have.
So far, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last ~70 years have come to fruition. Actually, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last 2000 years have.
We will adapt.
I see this as far too demanding for everyone, and far too short for viable alternatives to come up to be a realistic target. On the other hand, this year has shown that people are far more prepared to make huge sacrifices for what we think is the greater good than I would have expected just a year ago.
Thus far, every reasonably scientifically based prediction for the past two decades has consistently been conservative.
The IPCC has existed for about 30 years now. We are now starting to have data to compare their climate reports with. Independently of how you look at the data, we are mostly tracking the worst expected outcome. Everyone has a duty to do this for themselves. All the data is public.
2013: "Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert" begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
2014: Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data." http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.B31A0515K
2016: Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning)." https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening”" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716
Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36130346 "Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models)."
As for climate change, just let it happen. It will happen anyway because if someone reduces their carbon footprint they only leave money on the table for others to grab - and those others will produce MORE carbon for the same amount of goods produced, because their energy efficiency is lower - so any attempts to "fight for climate goals" is destructuve and counterproductive.
Just do a fair assessment of future climate changes and proceed with regulatory actions to mitigate them (for example, ban any new capital construction on land which will be flooded in case of 4C temperature rise).
The rebalancing of the US energy sector to natural gas has locked it into a new fossil fuel economy, at the very time that we need breakneck renewable investment. Oncoming carbon regulation, consumer reaction against gas, and the declining price-point of renewables, mean that the US is sitting on a carbon bubble waiting to explode.
One of the real silver linings of 2020, conspicuously absent from the Vox article, is that South Korea, Japan and China all committed to reach net zero emissions by around mid century, while the EU also brought forward it's targets. I would add that the Iranian nuclear deal is now being revived, breaking the power of militaristic hardliners in Iran, and quashing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Note that both were achieved despite the US: it left the Paris Agreement and reneged on its commitment to the Iranian nuclear deal.
As far as I know Biden has not taken any step toward this so far, but many House Democrats are urging him to do so. At the same time though powerful lobbying interests are pushing for the deal to be renegotiated under stricter terms, so I wouldn't count our eggs too early.
More importantly, I would think this is entirely negated by the fact that we just murdered two of their country's most prominent public figures. Diplomatic relations might improve, but I have to imagine that a lot of Iranians would be radicalized by these events and not really care which particular administration is responsible ultimately. Trump might catch the blame, but these type of targeted killings in Iran of scientists and other civilians go back much further than just the last term.
Iranian contempt for the United States is nothing new. It didn't block an agreement in both party's interests last time, and it doesn't have to now.
No technology victory is ever final and complete, especially not between nations. What we have done can be copied. China has shown itself to be really good at copying, and they have some really smart people. They certainly can do it, if they choose to.