Hungry New Yorkers form quarter-mile line for free food in Queens
- You don't need the audio, but you do need the video
Still, such decrees are tricky, she cautions. “Not everyone who gets the influenza vaccine is immune to the flu, so you want to be sure whatever mandate you’re putting into place will achieve the result that’s intended without creating a host of other issues, like employees being demoralized or feeling they have no choice,” she says.
Meanwhile in Morlocks v. Eloi news, Covid-19 Is Dividing the American Worker. Sad: K-street. Glad: K-shaped.
Dr. Acemoglu also agrees that policy, which in the U.S. is often crafted by corporations, plays a huge role in how underlying trends in technology, and its ability to give capital the upper hand over labor, play out. In one of his recent papers, he concluded that the current U.S. corporate tax system actually incentivizes companies to replace workers with robots, even when those robots are no more productive than humans.
Meanwhile, Austin city hits its limits: Austin Produced Willie Nelson and Others. Can Its Music Scene Survive Covid-19?
City Hall, which sits next to a statue of Willie Nelson and breaks every city council meeting for a live-music performance, took the charge seriously. City staff outlined dozens of recommendations and held years of meetings with the musical community to find out how to help. Few of their ideas came to fruition, however.
Many in the music community are angry that venues weren’t among the recipients of Covid-19 relief money that the city gave out under the Cares Act.
Mr. Adler said in an interview that there were too many immediate needs for city leaders to prioritize a single industry, but the city might have other funds that can help. The city is also lobbying in Washington, D.C., for venues that were found to be ineligible for other federal assistance to receive it, he said.
“Music came to Austin organically and the fear is that if we ever lost it, it would be hard for it to come back,” he said.
For the record I fucking hate Austin and everything it represents but this sort of thing is happening everywhere. 90% of independent music venues are doomed unless the government does something, and the government isn't going to do shit. The only modern artists most Americans know are Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe because while conservatives will go out of their way to point out how terrible art is, liberals always cower rather than stick up for anything that doesn't make Google money.
Coming in from the "of course they won't do anything" department, Coronavirus Lifts Government Debt to WWII Levels—Cutting It Won’t Be Easy.
For now, governments shouldn’t worry about mounting debt and instead focus on bringing the virus under control, said Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.
“The war analogy is exactly the right one,” said Mr. Hubbard, dean emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. “We were and are fighting a war. It’s a virus, not a foreign power, but the level of spending isn’t the problem.”
After World War II, advanced economies brought down debt quickly, thanks in large part to rapid economic growth. The ratio of debt to GDP fell by more than half, to less than 50%, by 1959. It is likely to be harder this time, for reasons involving demographics, technology and slower growth.
In the optimistic era after the war, birthrates boomed, leading to gains in household formation and growing workforces. Circumstances were ripe to reap the benefits of electrification, suburbanization and improved medicine.
Through the late 1950s, economies soared. Growth averaged around 5% a year in France and Canada, almost 6% in Italy and more than 8% in Germany and Japan. The U.S. economy grew almost 4% a year.
“We’d be lucky to have half that over the next decade,” said Nathan Sheets, a former undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs and now chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income, the investment-management business of Prudential Financial Inc.
In recent years, the U.S., U.K. and Germany have grown about 2% a year. In Japan and France, it has been closer to 1%. Italy has barely grown at all.
Dunno if the "Alphabet Economics" video is above or below the paywall, but it's worth it just to see all the tea leaf reading masquerading as sober scientific thinking.
Meanwhile in non-American fuckups, Spain Caught Off Guard by Resurgent Coronavirus
“We need to hire many more people,” says Ms. Legido-Quigley, lead author of a letter recently published in the Lancet medical journal, calling for an independent evaluation of Spain’s handling of the pandemic.
The government in Madrid responded that it was taking “appropriate measures to prevent the spread of the virus” and that it was being very active in tracking and detecting it.
Health experts point to signs that it isn’t doing enough. For instance, the percentage of positive tests among all virus tests conducted—a measure of whether testing is sufficiently comprehensive—has risen from around 1% to 7% in the past two months, higher than in other European countries, suggesting that many infections probably remain undetected. In Italy, by comparison, positive tests are 1.6% of total tests, according to figures collated by Our World in Data.
“Things are not going well,” Fernando Simón, the head of Spain’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, said last week. “Although the epidemic is not out of control at the national level, it is in some specific areas.”
There's murmors (a murmur-rumor, get it? I'm going to call that an am_Unitionism) of primary kids going back to in-person schooling if we can get our cases per 100k under 75 for "a few weeks." We were under 75 last week. Our tests-per-case is at about 14, or 7%. Next door in Chelan County? Frickin' 20%.