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COVID-19 Stuff Here

Derpus

George Gregan (70)
My outlook prefers a world where we are trusted as somewhat intelligent human beings to make informed decisions for ourselves most of the time.

They lost me at the lockdown, quite happy to see prudent advise on distancing and washing hands etc, and yes people were making generally prudent decisions at that stage.

The evidence O/S in areas of low infection, like Aus, that was sufficient (and yes I appreciate the 20/20 hindsight)

I don't like "us" being treated like unruly babies to be chased away from parks and beaches, it made no sense.

Remind us to be safe, don't fine someone belligerent arsehole for sitting a bench eating a kebab by himself Or being asked where I am going on the way to the office

UBI? I don't see how it is anything other warehousing the unemployed under a new, improved label.

Employed people continue to get it as well, essentially.
 

fatprop

George Gregan (70)
Staff member
Employed people continue to get it as well, essentially.


And again, why bother? So they collect a whole load of extra tax, so they can give it back to us?

Most models I see has it as a tax right off for those employed anyway

The only argument I can see is being able to decimate the state and federal social security departments and use those savings to gives all money (with a shit load more unemployed)
 

Derpus

George Gregan (70)
The UBI payment wouldn't be taxed? It's just a method of redistribution in a society where new value produced is being captured by fewer people.

Once it's possible to use capital for production without labor (automation) we will have to re-think a few things. A global shake-up seems like a good chance to preempt that change.
 

fatprop

George Gregan (70)
Staff member
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued updated coronavirus guidelines that now downplay the chances of contracting the virus from surfaces, potentially offering relief to millions of Americans who have been concerned they might catch the disease from purchased groceries or delivered packages.
On its website, the CDC says that coronavirus is "thought to spread mainly from person-to-person." Yet "the virus does not spread easily in other ways."
"It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes," the CDC also states on its site. "This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about this virus."

https://justthenews.com/politics-po...act-infected-individuals-coronavirus-does-not

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-covid-spreads.html
 

Up the Guts

Steve Williams (59)
Sweden is predicted to have a larger economic downturn than Australia and a slower recovery. This concept that they have somehow avoided economic catastrophe because they didn't have a lockdown is a fiction.
Comparing Australia's projected recovery with Sweden's has way too many confounding variables to be an accurate depiction of the economic effects of lockdowns. You not only have all these unobserved differences you can't control for but your whole comparison is conditional upon your forecasts being right and this is at a time when all our forecasts have massive standard errors.

I don't think anyone is denying that certain businesses would have fallen on hardships but there are certainly some that would have been doing better. I mean, only yesterday you were saying that you need lockdown enforcement to get people to comply with social distancing, now you are arguing that it doesn't really matter whether you enforce them or not.
 

Braveheart81

Will Genia (78)
Staff member
I don't think anyone is denying that certain businesses would have fallen on hardships but there are certainly some that would have been doing better. I mean, only yesterday you were saying that you need lockdown enforcement to get people to comply with social distancing, now you are arguing that it doesn't really matter whether you enforce them or not.


You need lockdown enforcement to make people comply with social distancing whilst the threat is perceived as low. Hence why no social distancing has happened in countries without lockdown measures being enforced prior to their being a serious outbreak.

Once the outbreak reaches the level where enough people view going out and doing their normal activities as being a significant danger to their health then they largely stop doing that.

Countries that have prevented major outbreaks acted swiftly to enforce social distancing and close borders etc. Countries that did little and ended up with serious outbreaks didn't act early and subsequently it didn't make a huge difference what they then did because the outbreak was already there and many people were already making decisions that they thought were in their best interests (staying at home because they didn't want to get sick).
 

Aurelius

Ted Thorn (20)
Our Septic friends have powered through 95,000 deaths, in fact they're now over 96k. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Not a word of empathy from the orange one.

While browsing through these awful numbers it's illuminating to note the deaths per 1million of population, as at this morning:

Belgium 804.2
Spain 598.0
UK 542.1
Italy 537.6
France 421.2
Sweden 380.1
Netherlands 335.2
Ireland 326.2
USA 294.0
Denmark 96.8
Finland 55.5
Norway 44.2
NZ 4.3
Australia 4.0
India 2.6

Why is the figure so high in Belgium? The Scandinavian figures seem to indicate Sweden's approach to non-lockdown badly backfired.

India's is suspiciously low. I'm not alleging any funny business, but I do wonder how their medical system would treat and report coronavirus deaths.

Anyway, here's a pretty comprehensive breakdown of deaths by region, worldwide and within America, that makes for some pretty interesting reading.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/what-we-can-learn-from-coronavirus-per-capita-death-rates/
 

Aurelius

Ted Thorn (20)
Whatever you think about the initial lockdown issue, there are all sorts of inconsistencies in the rules emerging on our way out of lockdown. For instance, in WA dining venues can only serve 20 dine-in patrons at a time, but there's no requirement for social distancing on public transport:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/what-we-can-learn-from-coronavirus-per-capita-death-rates/

And from what I hear, New South Wales is going the exact opposite way, allowing 50 dine-in patrons from 1 June but insisting that trains and buses can't be filled past a certain capacity.

Honestly (and I'm not saying this with hindsight) the "X Capacity" rule for restaurants and bars would have made a lot more sense than limiting it to an arbitrary number of diners, whether that's ten, 20, 50 or 100.
 

Rob42

John Solomon (38)
Whatever you think about the initial lockdown issue, there are all sorts of inconsistencies in the rules emerging on our way out of lockdown. For instance, in WA dining venues can only serve 20 dine-in patrons at a time, but there's no requirement for social distancing on public transport:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/what-we-can-learn-from-coronavirus-per-capita-death-rates/

And from what I hear, New South Wales is going the exact opposite way, allowing 50 dine-in patrons from 1 June but insisting that trains and buses can't be filled past a certain capacity.

Honestly (and I'm not saying this with hindsight) the "X Capacity" rule for restaurants and bars would have made a lot more sense than limiting it to an arbitrary number of diners, whether that's ten, 20, 50 or 100.

I think the federal government has been trying to keep some level of consistency across the country in terms of how these restrictions would be unwound, with the 3-step plan that came out a week or two ago - the initial guidance there was that different states would go through the steps at different time, due to their differing levels of infection, but at least the steps would be consistent. Clearly the states aren't so keen on that idea though.
 

Rob42

John Solomon (38)
Also worth noting that tomorrow will be 14 days since people went a little crazy on the Mothers Day weekend, packing the shops in Sydney, and no doubt plenty of family gatherings that weekend too. But no suggestion yet that it's led to a spike in infections, good news.
 

Dctarget

John Eales (66)
Haha no funny business here lads!
The estimated cost of JOBKEEPER has been nearly halved from $130 billion to about $70 billion.

Just a casual $60 Billion dollar revision of the total cost. Overestimated it by 6 Melbourne Metro Tunnels. Nope, don't worry about it, I just added an extra zero, simple error, my bad lads. Move along.
 

Braveheart81

Will Genia (78)
Staff member
"More than 500 firms alone with one eligible worker reported "1500", which is the JobKeeper payment per person per fortnight."
 

Up the Guts

Steve Williams (59)
Hence why no social distancing has happened in countries without lockdown measures being enforced prior to their being a serious outbreak.
What's the evidence for this? Some of the reports coming in from France and other EU nations is that the virus was circulating in December, well before anyone knew there was any danger. Of course, they weren't 'social distancing' then. Taiwan et al. never locked down their population and the population has followed social distancing laws just fine.
Countries that have prevented major outbreaks acted swiftly to enforce social distancing and close borders etc. Countries that did little and ended up with serious outbreaks didn't act early and subsequently it didn't make a huge difference what they then did because the outbreak was already there and many people were already making decisions that they thought were in their best interests (staying at home because they didn't want to get sick).
Countries that have prevented major outbreaks closed their borders quickly relative to the latent infection spread. One of the hypotheses for India's overperformance, where there are many areas in which social distancing is impossible, is that while they closed the borders at the same time as the rest of the world there had been less latent spread to the rest of the population. For the most part, this is just dumb luck based on geographical proximity.
 

Aurelius

Ted Thorn (20)
"More than 500 firms alone with one eligible worker reported "1500", which is the JobKeeper payment per person per fortnight."


Well, on the upside it's nice to see a massive government programme get over costed for a change.

On the downside - these are the geniuses we've got running this programme at the tax office.

And (slightly self-serving point here) what's the bet that virtually every one of those 500 firms applied to the ATO themselves, instead of using an accountant or tax agent?
 

Braveheart81

Will Genia (78)
Staff member
On the downside - these are the geniuses we've got running this programme at the tax office.

And (slightly self-serving point here) what's the bet that virtually every one of those 500 firms applied to the ATO themselves, instead of using an accountant or tax agent?


In the ATO's defence this could only happen at the initial stage before you actually had to register specific employees or match them to your single touch payroll reporting (which is the only point where you actually get paid).

You would definitely assume all these people filled in the application themselves.
 

Aurelius

Ted Thorn (20)
In the ATO's defence this could only happen at the initial stage before you actually had to register specific employees or match them to your single touch payroll reporting (which is the only point where you actually get paid).

You would definitely assume all these people filled in the application themselves.


Yeah, but you'd hope that the people processing the claims would question how businesses had exactly 1500 employees when the highly-publicised per employee figure was $1500.
 

Braveheart81

Will Genia (78)
Staff member
Yeah, but you'd hope that the people processing the claims would question how businesses had exactly 1500 employees when the highly-publicised per employee figure was $1500.


You'd assume that the system would automatically flag them at that point but certainly there was no human intervention at that point of the application because it was only the first stage.

No dollars were ever going to be paid to those businesses until they completed the next step (which wasn't available at that stage).

The next stage where you actually made the claim involved either using the number of employees paid through single touch payroll or manually entering names, dates of birth and TFNs.
 

Up the Guts

Steve Williams (59)
There was some skepticism over the treasury figures when they first came out, this is a bad look for the government regardless of who is actually to blame. Next move will be based on how much of a vote winner they think it will be having less debt on the books at the next election.
 

cyclopath

George Smith (75)
Staff member
You'd assume that the system would automatically flag them at that point but certainly there was no human intervention at that point of the application because it was only the first stage.

No dollars were ever going to be paid to those businesses until they completed the next step (which wasn't available at that stage).

The next stage where you actually made the claim involved either using the number of employees paid through single touch payroll or manually entering names, dates of birth and TFNs.
Exactly. I'm not typically a defender of this Government, but this is such a "non-story". "People fuck up the EOI phase of something most won't fully understand.........systems pick up the errors..........actual costing is corrected and lower". I read the stuff, and while I'm no accountant, I'm not completely retarded, and it was not exactly clear. Even my savant accountant said it was somewhat opaque. End result, some economic better news.
 

Pfitzy

George Gregan (70)
I think we're overlooking the funniest bit: all the fucking clowns who were screaming that we'd bankrupt future generations.

(A fair chunk of whom give not a single fuck about those future generations in practice, mind).
 
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