Coronavirus (live in, restaurants, vs.)

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

Basically that's lockdown-lite. It still leaves the world a very sad, uninteresting place.

Come on, jb. We were "locked down" for maybe 2 months in 2020. (I consider having to work from home being locked down.) Those days are hopefully over for good.

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

The country lost its work ethic, casualty of psychological viruses, not the coronavirus.

*Work Ethic*?
You mean that totally bs illusion that the minions are born on this planet to slave away for their corporate masters’ benefit?

*Work* is vastly overrated. THAT is the “psychological virus” to beat them all.

[jbgusa]

Originally Posted by Tulemutt

*Work Ethic*?
You mean that totally bs illusion that the minions are born on this planet to slave away for their corporate masters’ benefit?

*Work* is vastly overrated. THAT is the “psychological virus” to beat them all.

Who should pay the "minions" if not the "corporate masters" and for what "benefit"?

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

Who should pay the "minions" if not the "corporate masters" and for what "benefit"?

Lol. Condescending pay is your justification for slavery effort and wages? Perhaps an at least cursory review of the [anthropological] history of the world would be of interest to you - and other readers.

Start with the a priori observation that NO life forms on the planet, other than modern, ‘civilized’, homo sapiens, engage in labors beyond those necessary for basic survival. And that, furthermore, neither did homo sapiens until the emergence of agriculture 10,000 years ago (known as the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic times), at which point religion and basic forms of governance began to emerge in hierarchical forms … out of which both ruling and merchant classes developed.

My point, however, isn’t that humanity should (or could) return to egalitarian hunter-gatherer existence … but rather that the more we collectively embrace complex lifestyles (and materialism that goes with) - um, the more we will be slaves to our own unnecessary desires and stupidity and species narcissism: believing we are somehow masters of the universe, when in fact we are slaves to our misplaced psychological perspectives … such as *work ethic*.

[goodheathen]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

Basically that's lockdown-lite. It still leaves the world a very sad, uninteresting place.

First of all, that's still much more free and functional than lockdown. Furthermore, life is today only? What about a smaller-than-before-but-not-small wave of hospitalizations and deaths likely coming next month and recurring a few times a year and the economy that hardly recovers and the long-lasting psychological damage to people who, for example, lose loved ones years early or are honest with themselves about the risks out there? The better way, I say, is to defeat the virus as soon as possible.

[sav858]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

Come on, jb. We were "locked down" for maybe 2 months in 2020. (I consider having to work from home being locked down.) Those days are hopefully over for good.

Many businesses were closed down for months to over a year.

[2sleepy]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

The country lost its work ethic, casualty of psychological viruses, not the coronavirus.

That's not how I see it. I think the pandemic gave people a chance to rethink their work life. A lot of people realized that they don't have to accept low wage jobs with horrible scheduling and no benefits. A fair number now work under the table which, others are doing gig work or they work from home. All of those are rational responses to a system that has been rigged against the hourly worker for at least 40 years.

I know that you think it's horrible, but I think it's great to see companies brought to their knees and being forced to offer better scheduling, pay and benefits to their workers, and I don't think it will kill us to pay a little more for fast food or junk from Walmart or Target. In-n-Out raised their starting pay here to $17 an hour, a few weeks later they raised the price of a burger by 30 cents. Big Whoopty Doo.

[goodheathen]

"4.4 million Americans quit jobs in Sept., breaking record set in Aug.
Rising coronavirus cases, problems finding child care and better wages elsewhere have all prompted millions of Americans to quit their jobs in recent months."

What will stop that? I think the only solution for a major economic recovery is getting COVID-19 under control.

[sav858]

How Does This End? Thinking about Covid and normalcy.

Yet Wachter — the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco — also worries about the downsides of organizing our lives around Covid. In recent weeks, he has begun to think about when most of life’s rhythms should start returning to normal. Increasingly, he believes the answer is: Now.

This belief stems from the fact that the virus is unlikely to go away, ever. Like most viruses, it will probably keep circulating, with cases rising sometimes and falling other times. But we have the tools — vaccines, along with an emerging group of treatments — to turn it into a manageable virus, similar to the seasonal flu.


As for long Covid, it is real but rare. It’s also not unique. The flu and other viruses also cause mysterious, lasting problems for a small share of people, studies show.

The bottom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to headlines proclaiming that Covid is defeated. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived.

[goodheathen]

Long COVID isn't rare, so right off the bat that 'expert' is wrong. Furthermore, vs. the seasonal flu, which hasn't impacted the economy in maybe 50 years, the much more contagious COVID-19 is dragging down the economy with no end in sight. I would not bet that whenever medical advances make it easier to affordably prevent or treat COVID that enough people will agree to use them.

People just don't want to deal with reality.