Health Advisor: Ebola Still Spreading, Worst Outbreak We've Ever Seen

Lasrick writes After four decades of confining Ebola outbreaks to small areas, experts acknowledged in an October 9 New England Journal of Medicine article that "we were wrong" about the scope of the current situation. At the present transmission rate, the number of Ebola cases in West Africa doubles every two to three weeks. Early diagnosis is the key to controlling the epidemic, but that's far easier said than done: "And there are several complicating factors. For one thing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 60 percent of all Ebola patients remain undiagnosed in their communities." A transmission rate below 1 is necessary to keep the outbreak under control (instead of the current rate of 1.5 to 2), and the authors detail what's in the works to help achieve early detection, which is crucial to reducing the current transmission rate.

Comments

Burial customs?

[sd4f]

I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.

Re:Burial customs?

[oic0]

Why do you think hes white? are you stereotyping?

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I say everyone just blockade west Africa. Nobody goes in or comes out and let the problem resolve itself.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

respecting culture is one thing, but not pointing out that a custom they're practising is directly responsible for the death of their families and likely eventually them selves.. doesn't seem like a bigoted attitude

your retort on the other hand.

Re:Burial customs?

[DexterIsADog]

I say everyone just blockade west Africa. Nobody goes in or comes out and let the problem resolve itself.

Funny, the rest of the world is starting to say that about the U.S.

Re:Burial customs?

[bloodhawk]

What did he say that is even the slightest bit racist? It is actually what the WHO and many other organisations are saying. The burial customs involve in many cases, touching, kissing and washing the body, these are massive problems and have been one of the primary vectors of infection. Their culture is killing them, for the time being they need education that they must restrain from those customs, which if I understand correctly is actually happening.

Re: Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The US would be better off if that happened. The rest of the world? Not so much, considering all major inventions and innovations are American.

Re:Burial customs?

[ScentCone]

Quit being such an entitled white racist asshole with your critiques of their culture.

No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.

Re: Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, thanks for adding your insightful thoughts to this thread :)

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dual trolls?

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like reality. He's right about that burial custom, I've seen that on a documentary. But there are a wide variety of strange burial customs including some which have basically wiped out entire tribes by spreading disease. One such caes involved a tribe which would grind the bones of the dead into banana paste and eat it - and when someone got a disease that lived in bone marrow the whole tribe ended up getting it. Of course weather or not such burial customs exist in the areas affected by ebola is beyond my knowledge, and obviously unknown to the parent post, which is why the question was asked in the frirst place.

Re:Burial customs?

[ScentCone]

Do you understand the average education levels in Africa? The average wage? The living conditions?

Yes, and the three countries in the worst shape (as it relates to the spread of Ebola) all have a miserable record of taking lots of external support that could be educating their people, bolstering their healthcare systems, and generally improving the lives of everyone in those countries. But because of cultural inertia and rampant corruption (you know, the people who feel entitled to skim the support cash/material personally and not do things like march out into the rougher parts of their own country to explain to the rural population that they're killing themselves with primitive rituals), those are places that can't shake off the problem.

Do you want to know who is a smug western douche? You are. "Africa" isn't a place you can talk about in sweeping terms like you just have. Your dim, uninformed vision of it as a single, monocultural place with a common level of education and sophistication is absurd (and incredibly condescending, Mr. Holier Than Thou). "The entire continent" isn't the same. Countries like Nigeria have seen cases in this outbreak, but have headed it off at the pass because the population, culture, and approach to things like this are very different there than they are in, say, Liberia.

I'll tell you what, you go to a Baptist church and tell them they need to give up a "ridiculous part of their culture". Or try it at a Mosque.

I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death. It's the 21st century. Billions and billions of dollars in aid flows into the countries most vulnerable to issues like this, and it gets squandered, diverted, or mis-applied because of toxic levels of corruption by comparatively educated people. They want to have a piece of that foreign aid action while also having the lazy inertia of backwards cultures that can't cope with this much human density. That sense of entitlement to both a primitive past and a piece of the largess of other countries that have moved on - it's unmistakable.

Re:Burial customs?

[dbIII]

I'm curious, did that one come from Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer or a drunken Big Brother contestant? If not where the fuck did you hear of such weird shit?

Re:Burial customs?

[dbIII]

Do you understand the average education levels in Africa?

Rapidly converging with the US average. Increased communication is paying off.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Not so much, considering all major inventions and innovations are American."

Damn you, now my american invented cofee is all over my american invented keyboard.

1) No, they surely aren't
2) Yes, some of them are
3) We already have the ones that are already invented
4) You are not really inventing and innovating anything anymore. The people who invent and innovate on your soil are all foreigners. You pay them crappily for it.
5) US would propably be better off it that happened, you'd have to get off your lazy asses and do something.
6) Rest of the world would most likely also be better off for it. We'd have to also get off our lazy asses and do something.

Re:Burial customs?

[x0ra]

So if we mention that African in Ebola's plagued countries are eating bushmeat stored in the worst possible hygienic environment, are we automatically racist ?

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that he is trolling and flamebaiting, not stereotyping.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn dude, don't chimp out or anything.

Re:Burial customs?

[AlecC]

And how do you achieve this? You need to block land borders, plus control a coast along which piracy is growing. There is no navy big enough to blockade that coast, and putting the army in to block the land exposes them to the disease.

Re:Burial customs?

[juanfgs]

grind the bones of the dead into banana paste

I'd think that the cause of that tribe dying might be linked to the fact that they had bones made of bananas in the first place.

Re: Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was lovely how he pretended to give the racist troll the benefit of the doubt. Very disarming. Fantastic!

Re:Burial customs?

[Tyr07]

People are calling the comment about burial rituals possibly spreading the disease racist.

You know what brings joy to my heart? That we can label a bacteria or virus racist. The best part, is the virus doesn't give a shit, not one shit. It doesn't care about your political agenda or anything else, or your self entitled right to do whatever you want without consequences.

I hope everyone who considers what was said racist is somewhere with extreme risk of infection based on their practices and the problem takes care of itself.

Re:Burial customs?

[ultranova]

I'll tell you what, you go to a Baptist church and tell them they need to give up a "ridiculous part of their culture". Or try it at a Mosque.

I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death.

Whether you have trouble or not is not the issue. Whether the message is listened to is. Culture has value, since it helps bind people together and thus serve as a basis of organization, and shared customs serve to reinforce it. If you attack them, you force people into a situation where anyone suspending the custom is seen - even by themselves - as breaking away from the culture, and thus the society. They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.

TL;DR You're that Persian messenger at the start of 300.

Re:Burial customs?

[ScentCone]

They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.

Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.

Culture has value

Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, a good way to eliminate all the people who aren't immune, if "science" was so great it would have made a cure.

Re:Burial customs?

[fintux]

https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content.aspx?page=data-analysis

US is a big innovator. However, it far from being the source of "all major inventions and innovations" - it even is not the biggest source of inventions and innovations. On the innovation output, it is on rank 7.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up ... or else you're a racist

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that you had to view that with a computer that was invented in the US over a global network that was invented in the US.

Re:Burial customs?

[dave420]

And funny you wrote that in a language which was invented elsewhere... If you have to draw arbitrary lines in the sand to denote how awesome your "team" is, you might as well be back at school arguing about Pokémon, as it carries just as much weight and us just as fruitful.

Re:Burial customs?

[dave420]

It was racist (or, more likely, xenophobic and obviously ignorant) because he/she lumped all African cultures together. You're not helping by making massive generalisations, either.

Re:Burial customs?

[dave420]

With regards to Ferguson you are confusing attitude with culture. Attitudes can become culture, but take time. Attitudes can be formed quickly, especially by things like overzealous police and other forms of daily aggravation. That will fester and sometimes boil over if these aggravations continue for a long enough period of time. Ferguson could have been avoided by trying to claw back the ridiculous, heavy-handed actions of the police across the country. Of course their overzealotry can be explained by many factors they have to endure, and so on all the way down. Trying to draw some arbitrary line and claim that is the cause of these problems only demonstrates your lack of ability to actually think impartially about social issues (whether real or simply perceived), and if everyone did that, there would be no progress.

So yeah, you sound like a small-minded racist fuck. I don't think you mean to be, or that you can only be one, as you are merely a product of your genes and societal pressures - the latter of which can be adjusted rather easily.

Re:Burial customs?

[dave420]

No, but if you try to extrapolate that to describe the entire continent, or somehow judge those who eat said meat, you are being irrational to the point of disparaging people for no reason other than your own cultural biases, ignorance, and hair-trigger prejudice.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Political correctness run amok. This is the type of reaction that the wingnuts make fun of.

Re: Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why doesn't the rest of the world just stop dealing with the USA if they're so bad? You all fucking whine about how the big bad Americans ruin everything, yet still you gobble up all the shit they pump out. Do something about it you lazy fucks, or shut the hell up.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

So yeah, you sound like a small-minded racist fuck. I don't think you mean to be, or that you can only be one, as you are merely a product of your genes and societal pressures - the latter of which can be adjusted rather easily.

I'm afraid he/she probably can't help it. Almost every person I've ever met who has this belief is incapable of letting it go. It is part of their identity, and most people will not let go of the identity that was given to them (note: not a single person chooses this identity for themselves, for obvious reasons. It must be brainwashed in, often at a young age, of else the struggles of life will scrape away the irrational thinking).

The only positive I can offer is that less people are turned into these sorts of people by their ignorant parents on a daily basis, so the problem should solve itself within a few generations. In the meantime, we can only help these poor ignorant folks to not do as much damage as they want to.

Re:Burial customs?

[BadDreamer]

Actually the computer was invented in Germany, and my CPU was developed in Israel. Most of the rest of the parts were developed and manufactured in Asia.

In fact, I can't find a single component in my computer which is from the US. Nor in my network solution, or the network of my house.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, that is taking political correctness to insanity. he wasn't making generalisations. He stated FACTS, freely available facts. We are talking about countries with the ebola problem, like it or not this is a fact and ignorant people like you are part of the problem who think educating people why they are dying is somehow disrespectful or racist.

Re:Burial customs?

[x0ra]

That's the problem with you progressive. You don't allow people to express a judgement call. Every one who does is automatically tagged. Are they free to eat meat as they want ? Sure. Am I free to believe they must be fracking morons to do so ? Sure, just the same. While the hygienic infrastructure in the west can be seen to go too far in terms of bureaucracy, it exists for a valid purpose, and the best invention ever was probably sewer systems, ie. not living in your own disease ridden dejection.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit being such an entitled white racist asshole with your critiques of their culture.

No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.

entitled? last i checked whites are the only ones who work.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could argue it was ignorant. but NOTHING in it was xenophobic or racist, being ignorant or wrong doesn't make you racist. The OP also made no generalizations so not sure what you are talking about their. really as others have said, people like you are part of the problem, not the solution. You seem to view being politically correct as infinitely more important than saving lives, in my book you are actually the racist one, you treat these people with kid gloves as if they are far to uneducated and backwards to handle the truth.

Re:Burial customs?

[AK Marc]

Nuke them from orbit?

Re:Burial customs?

[ultranova]

Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are.

But not the same cultural programming. Also, you are making the assumption that people base their behaviour on coolly considering rewards and risks, when this is not even remotely true, especially in high-risk situations. What they'll do is follow their habits.

Culture has value

Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.

Cool sermon, preacher. Now, I don't know what personal demons you're addressing here, but what I meant is that culture has value to its practitioners since adherence to local customs shows membership in the local community, to oneself and others. Thus it takes pretty serious incentives for people to break with it, and if they do, there will be a price to be paid in lessened social cohesion.

Re:Burial customs?

[tehcyder]

What did he say that is even the slightest bit racist? It is actually what the WHO and many other organisations are saying. The burial customs involve in many cases, touching, kissing and washing the body, these are massive problems and have been one of the primary vectors of infection. Their culture is killing them, for the time being they need education that they must restrain from those customs, which if I understand correctly is actually happening.

How would you like it if I referred to "American culture" as being inbred, illiterate, murderous halfwits with no teeth and a shitty banjo, because I've seen Deliverance?

Re:Burial customs?

[tehcyder]

You're assuming that because some random person on slashdot says they saw a documentary about questionable burial customs somewhere in Africa, that all Africans are like dogs scratching and scratching at a wound until it gets infected, and are therefore responsible for their own suffering.

At the risk of repeating the obvious, there is no such thing as an homogenous "African culture".

Re:Burial customs?

[tehcyder]

look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology

Without a long history of white police treating black people badly, a single incident would not have sparked such protests.

The truth or otherwise of that single incident is not the real issue, as of course you know.

Re:Burial customs?

[tehcyder]

It's not like they have a choice between a diseased monkey and the finest filet steak, and out of stupidity choose the former.

You probably find it odd that in a lot of places in the world people "choose" to drink filthy contaminated water out of a mud hole instead of opening a clean bottle from their fridge.

Re:Burial customs?

[ScentCone]

Without a long history of white police treating black people badly, a single incident would not have sparked such protests.

Without a wildly higher-than-average rate of violent crime among young black men in some areas, cops in those areas wouldn't be having to face every situation like another one in which they might get killed doing something simple like a traffic stop. And do you really think that there'd have been riots in Ferguson if the breathless media reports immediately in the wake of what happened had been reporting the observations of credible witnesses instead of the absurdly transparent lies of the criminal running buddy of the guy who had just assaulted the cop? But why did the crowds there, and social media, and some mainstream media outlets catch on fire with the obviously false narrative? Because the honest people who saw what happened were afraid of what would happen to them if they got caught telling the truth. Those witnesses weren't afraid of the cops (they went to the police as soon as they could do so quietly), they were afraid of people in their own neighborhoods.

What sparked violent protests was a bunch of deliberate BS that got trotted out in an attempt to gloss over what that 6'-4", 290 lb "sweet child" and his store robbing, warrant-out-for-him sidekick had just done. If he hadn't stood there in front of cameras and spouted a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense about Wilson shooting out the window of his cruiser, or chasing Brown down and shooting him in the back, or shooting while he was on his knees with his hands in the air and on and on about stuff that did not happen, don't you think that might have been a little different? If the people who live right there weren't so scared of guys just like him and Brown, don't you think the many witnesses who were standing right there and saw what actually happened might also have been on video, talking down the idiots? That would have been great. But they're scared - for their lives - of the very people that the cops also have to confront on a regular basis.

You're right, it's not a single incident. It's years and years of people growing absolutely terrified of the rudderless, violent young men in their own neighborhoods. And when the cameras role, those voices of reason are nowhere to be seen, because they don't want to be another statistic in the huge problem of black-on-black violence - numbers that completely dwarf even the most demonstrably real cases of some dumb cop (white or black ... black cops kill black men, too, not that you'd know that from hearing the coverage) acting rashly.

Re:Burial customs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.

Many religions require the body to be washed before it is interred. No fire burning, no cremation, just a clean burial. It is being in proximity of the dead person, but contagious body that causes the disease to spread.

Is it still October 9?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a crazy dream where it was 26th of November and the number of new ebola cases had been dropping for the last five weeks.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[Noah Haders]

you're right, that is a crazy dream because the ebola outbreak tracker shows that the number of new cases has been relatively stable (albeit noisy) for the last couple weeks. contrary to the summary, however, the tracker shows that ebola cases are doubling every 46 days, not 2-3 weeks.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[Kittenman]

you're right, that is a crazy dream because the ebola outbreak tracker shows that the number of new cases has been relatively stable (albeit noisy) for the last couple weeks. contrary to the summary, however, the tracker shows that ebola cases are doubling every 46 days, not 2-3 weeks.

Source is 'Wikipedia'. Hmmm. Be more inclined to take it seriously if it was sourced from WHO, or MSF, etc...

Re:Is it still October 9?

[Noah Haders]

it's a visual representation of up-to-date data on wikipedia that is sourced from WHO. follow sources much? [citation provided]

Re: Is it still October 9?

[Bubz]

Official data is graphed here: https://data.hdx.rwlabs.org/eb...

Re: Is it still October 9?

[tchdab1]

Anyone aware of a site publishing current and accurate infection rate info?

Re:Is it still October 9?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubling every 6-7 weeks instead of 2-3 weeks is still pretty fucking dire.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[jklovanc]

From the Wikipedia page.

Major Ebola virus outbreaks by country and by date – 3 September to most recent WHO / Gov update

Wikipedia's source is valid.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[mcswell]

The Lathe of Heaven.

Actually, that was exactly my thought (minus the dream) when I saw the abstract of this post. In fact an article published 9 Oct would doubtless have been written some time before that--although I suppose they might rush an article on this topic through, meaning it might have been written (and last updated) only slightly before that date.

I went to the NEJM, and the original article is in fact available: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1.... Oddly, down at the bottom it says "This article was published on May 7, 2014, and updated on May 22, 2014, at NEJM.org." I don't understand that, unless they re-published it in October. Worse, though, none of the quotes in the /. post actually appear in the NEJM article, although the general point of needing early(er) diagnosis does come up.

So I'm starting to smell s.t. fishy in this post. Where are the alleged quotes coming from?

Re:Is it still October 9?

[h4x0t]

MY GOODNESS! According to this chart, it would seem that just around Halloween there we -27.4 deaths from ebola.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[ihtoit]

Wikipedia is a starting point for research, not an endpoint. Provided in every page is source citations, in keeping with Wikipedia Rule #1: "No original research".

I trust Wikipedia citations (usually back to source) over Fox News (who don't provide ANY source linkage, just poorly written stories) any day of the week.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[earthminion]

@"the tracker shows that ebola cases are doubling every 46 days, not 2-3 weeks."
The world has put a lot of effort into reducing the rate of spread and we have got it down to 46 days. Great. Only problem is, in 46 days we will have to deal with double the number of cases which will make it twice as hard as now to contain the spread. So unless we double our effort in the next 46 days we will start to see the situation increasing away from us again. Then give it about 6 weeks and it'll be 4 times as hard as now to contain. By which point it'll be back to spreading as bad as it was a month ago. All our best efforts are simply slowing the rate of increase *for now* ... but its still increasing and that is the problem because as it increases it'll spread beyond our ability to contain it.

2 times as many cases
4 times as many cases
8 times as many cases
16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 etc... times as many cases... These numbers look familiar?

Re:Is it still October 9?

[vux984]

. Only problem is, in 46 days we will have to deal with double the number of cases which will make it twice as hard as now to contain the spread.

Is -that- what the data is saying though?

Those charts show "cumulative cases", so they can never do anything but go up. If 1000 people a year get ebola, that's not an outbreak, but the cumulative cases will still hit 30,000 in 2030. That's not showing a doubling of the problem relative to today.

To see how close the problem is to being under control we need to trend NEW cases week by week... and see if that's going up or down. Cumulative cases ALWAYS goes up.

Re: Is it still October 9?

[Noah Haders]

The problem is, the rate of new infections is horribly noisy and it's hard to see trends. Much easier to look at the rate of cumulative infections

Re: Is it still October 9?

[tehcyder]

Anyone aware of a site publishing current and accurate infection rate info?

What we desperately need is a worldwide network of computing devices so that information can be disseminated digitally at light speed instead of the current laborious printing and physical distribution process.

Re:Is it still October 9?

[AK Marc]

Nope. Because the disease runs its course in 46 days. So it's 10 cases today, and 20 cases in 46 days (cumulative), but the first 10 are either cured and immune or dead. Never more than 10 sick at one time in those 46 days, so not exponential.

Can we let it run its course?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens if we let this thing run its course?

Re: Can we let it run its course?

[Anonymous Coward]

You will get to puke and shit your organs out along with the rest of us

Re: Can we let it run its course?

[vettemph]

Don't sugar coat it.

Re: Can we let it run its course?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's diabetes. This article is about Ebola.

Re: Can we let it run its course?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taco Bell is the cure for ebola?!

But the press has stopped talking about it...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

So it must not exist any more. Right?

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Republicans were using it before the election to criticize the Democrats. They find it very difficult to pass up an opportunity to panic people.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[davydagger]

the press is going to stop talking about it when it really becomes a crisis because of panic. The press generally overhypes a danger when there is exactly no fear of whatever they are hyping being a real problem.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[QuasiSteve]

How has 'the press' stopped talking about it, if you're reading about a related story in /.?

Even if by 'press' you're thinking CNN, Fox News, WSJ, NY Times: They all have recent articles about Ebola.
CNN: Sierra Leone: Ebola burial team dumps bodies in pay protest
Fox News: US quarantine moves hurting Ebola response in Africa, experts say
WSJ: Ebola Vaccine Appears Safe in Early Test
NY Times: Sierra Leone to Eclipse Liberia in Ebola Cases

All from within the last few hours.

Maybe some others?
Reuters: Ebola vaccine from Glaxo passes early test
AP: AT 1 MONTH, US EBOLA MONITORS FINDING NO CASES
BBC: Tracing the Ebola outbreak
RT: Reported Ebola cases near 16,000 â" WHO
Al Jazeera: Ebola workers in Sierra Leone dump bodies

Just because a new story has been found to shove into your face every 5 minutes on TV and main headlines on the internet (hello Ferguson / snow), doesn't mean that 'the press has stopped talking about it'. It just means you'll have to pay better attention or actually go look for it, rather than sit on your ass passively taking it in as if you were watching Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[BronsCon]

To be fair, both sides do it. Panicked people will do what the fuck ever you tell them they should do to "solve their problem", even if they don't actually have a problem to begin with.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

False-equivalence bullshit. The Dems might do it occasionally, but it's a 24/7 thing with the Republicans.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[earthminion]

The press will start talking about it again if the number of cases are allowed to keep doubling. Exponential growth starts small, but doesn't stay small.

For example, if its currently (lets say), only a chance of one new outbreak taking hold in say a 10 month period somewhere in the world outside of the 3 current main infected countries now, then by the time we have say 10 times as many cases as now, we will be seeing on average 1 new outbreak somewhere in the world each month.

Once you get to 100 times as many cases as now, that changes to 10 new outbreaks taking hold somewhere in the world per month, by which point we are describing a global pandemic, because some of these will spread to more people, making the situation even worse.

Once you get to 1000 times as many cases as now, that changes to 100 new outbreaks taking hold somewhere in the world per month, which is entirely possible as the 3 main infected countries have over 20M people between them and that's not even starting to add in how many more outbreaks add more people, once we start to count in millions of cases.

Also at a rate of doubling every few weeks, anyone who knows binary knows you get to 1024 times as many cases as now in just a matter of months from now. But then even just double the cases is twice as hard to contain the situation, so its quickly getting out of control.

Also, from the number of outbreaks we have already seen the chances of a new outbreak are already more frequent than just 1 every 10 months, so we are fast running out of time to stop this doubling.

The inescapable fact is we can't trace all contacts between hundreds of new cases spread around the world in a month, let alone a few thousand new cases a month. So imagine it getting to ten's of thousands of new outbreaks in towns and cities all around the world each month and that rate and even more is entirely possible.

The problem is human psychology is working against us at almost every turn. First and foremost of which are the very vocal morons who are so distracted with trying to show they are brave that they gleefully and loudly denigrate anyone else for voicing any kind of concern about how this isn't so far contained. (The irony of which is these self-obsessed pretend brave people say more about themselves than they do about the potential for a pandemic, which is of course the defining behaviour found in narcissistic people the world over and they are a loud distraction helping us run out of time to stop this spreading).

The reality is we can't apply biosafety level 4 containment procedures to high traffic areas of major cities all around the world. Places like supermarkets and packed subway trains, to name just two and so many other places, all of which are currently virtually entirely safe now, wouldn't be if we allow this to turn into a pandemic infecting millions, because once we are there, it would soon become billions infected globally, by which time entire industries and even entire countries would start falling. We all need to stop this spreading in all ways possible now, because if its allowed to spread, we risk loosing global containment of the situation and history (and the millions of grieving survivors) will not look favourably on the criminally ignorant genocidal morons in power who allowed it to get so completely out of control when it could have been stopped at the beginning.

We are quickly running out of time and every time it doubles its twice as hard to stop and this doubling has to be stopped and very soon.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Republicans only own a single news channel.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you can suck a golf ball through a garden hose with that mouth. Meet me at the glory hole in a couple hours.

Re: But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Precisely.
Once the press gets to the critical mass threshold they inherently shut up. WTF.
Though social media will take over where the corporate media stops.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[amiga3D]

Go ahead, stick your dick in the hole without knowing what's on the other side. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

You are forgetting a crucial thing. Ebola is fairly hard to catch. Ebola is highly contagious when the people who have it very very sick they aren't going to supermarkets because they can't get up to walk. That's why the cases in the USA were easy to isolate and control. 1000x as many cases would still be easy to isolate and control.

America has a good communication system. We have a strong legal system. We have a government whom in large measure we trust and obey and is thus able to coordinate action. We have a complex economy capable of moving millions of people to take collective action.

There is not going to be a domestic ebola pandemic. It simply cannot happen. Regardless of how bad ebola gets globally domestically ebola won't remotely compare to say traffic accidents, heart disease, diabetes, suicides...

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

"and when the Conservatives want to fuck you they explain why presuming you'll understand it like an adult"

No, conservatives fuck everyone over then tell conservative voters to blame gays, sluts and (of course) liberals.

The only part that really galls is that conservative voters keep... goddamn... falling for it.

Re: But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I lived in your country. In USA things are far less functional.

Our politicians will call for prayer and Jesus, a solution that benefits businesses, and tax breaks for the job creators.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask your dad

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[riverat1]

Obviously Ebola it pretty hard to catch unless you're caring for someone who's in the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease and if you're that sick you're not going to be in supermarkets and packed subway trains. It's been long enough now that we know neither the Dallas nurse who had it and flew in an airplane nor the doctor who went bowling and took the subway in NYC gave it to anybody. None of the folks who Thomas Eric Duncan lived with in Dallas came down with it. If it's that hard to catch I'm not that concerned about here in the US. But until the outbreak in West Africa is contained the threat of it coming to the US remains so we need to attack it there.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people remembered Ebola while all hell else has been happening. Ebola has put the Powers that Be in a spot, and they've kicked the bureaucracy in the ass to get eyeballs on it. There are a lot of people who eat, breath and sleep Ebola on Earth today. They live among outbreaks, trying not catch it while they help those who have.

Ebola should be thought of with respect.

Deep respect.

It kills. You bleed to death.

The virulence of this outbreak is impressive. Something has changed, and exactly what that is hasn't been explained convincingly. The numbers are how many magnitudes more than previous outbreaks? 3, 4? More? Less? Depends on what you chose to believe, doesn't it?

Extraordinary growth. It behooves us to understand the cause.

One thing is crystal clear. People that get prompt and intensive help can beat Ebola. You find that help in strong institutions built in wealthy nations, where the spread has been successfully prevented. To date, anyhow.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash: you only have right wing conservatives over that side of the pond. No point calling then liberals. You could name them conservatives and ultra-conservatives maybe?

Re: But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

Even the Republicans still believe in the germ theory of disease. So far that isn't partisan.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

what if it mutates

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[earthminion]

@"Ebola is fairly hard to catch"

Tell that to the nurse who just touched her face with a glove. Point being it can spread by contact and even hygienists with UV lights have been able to show how far contaminates can spread for decades. Now repeat that thought experiment with a biosafety level four pathogen. Now think about all the mutual points of contact on packed rush hour public subways (like metal hand rails etc..) and then think about even just hundreds of new cases a day using these transport systems. It will spread and it'll spread faster than we can track all points of contact, resulting in more cases which will spread it further infecting more people.

"America has a good communication system. We have a strong legal system."
Which means nothing. They won't shut down systems of transport for fear of (short term) economic effects and once it gets into thousands of cases in a country (any country) then it becomes beyond that country's ability to track all cases.

Also did you read what I said? I was talking about new outbreaks around the world increasing the numbers of cases spreading around the world. Also why is it so often some Americans only think about America and America isn't immune to spread. With millions of cases in the world America wouldn't stay clear of a pandemic. We are a very interconnected world. For example international trade would be devastated by a pandemic. You can't disinfect every box, packet and bag in every cargo container entering your country from every country.

Its closedminded morons like you who can't see possible ways it can spread who will ironically allow it to spread in your country.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[earthminion]

Its not that difficult to catch. If it was really difficult to catch then why the need for biosafety level four containment for decades around the world.

Also its a PR myth about the only catchable in the final stages. Viruses grow exponentially and at any point its possible spread it to others, its just that at the end of life its really easy to spread it everywhere as the person is leaking all over the place.

Also what is the first thing most people do when they cough? ... They put their hand up to their face. Then they touch other surfaces with their mucus covered hands and ebola is known to be spread in mucus. Now imagine even just dozens of people a day using subways *all around the world* spreading a biosafety level four pathogen. Will millions of cases in the world will spread it enough around the world for it to become a threat to even Americans. An IR thermometer won't stop it entering your country. It'll enter on surfaces as much as it'll enter in people and these surfaces will then be touched once inside your country. With millions of cases you won't contain the virus so it has to be stopped before it gets to millions of cases.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

Tell that to the nurse who just touched her face with a glove.

She didn't get it from touching her face with a glove. She got it from touching an extremely sick person with a glove and then not handling the glove properly. Humans are a vital part of the incubation process. Humans are extremely ill at the time they are producing large quantities of the virus. Because the virus' first objective is the circulatory system which isn't an unsued part of the body when they are running around on a rush hour subway.

People who are contagious (to any measurable extent) do not take subways. Similarly:

For example international trade would be devastated by a pandemic. You can't disinfect every box, packet and bag in every cargo container entering your country from every country.

People who are contagious do not work in factories packing goods. We wouldn't need to to disinfect every box because it wouldn't get on the boxes in the first place.

  And BTW we can disinfect most boxes. Most cargo entering America could be heated to 150 degrees (Fahrenheit) and be undamaged. Yes we could rather easily set up such a process as part of our standard unloading processes. Or do it to the containers using mobile generation systems when they ae loaded onto trucks. The truck can certainly handle it (though the driver would need to be out of the truck at the time). And we could easily not import things that couldn't like food for a while.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

Africa is kind of the worst case as far as poverty, density, bad governments... There are places in Asia which are bad but again it would be contained to isolated areas. South America I'm having more trouble seeing where the problem is. Those countries have a health and communications infrastructure. too.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

Obviously Ebola has had way more chance to evolve in the last 6 months than it has in the previous 2 centuries. There are two likely mutations for Ebola:

1) Becoming more contagious.

2) Not destroy the target's ability to move around at the point of maximum infection.

  To do both of those it has to do less damage to the circulatory system before spreading to the rest of the body. That is become much less lethal and slower moving in the body. That is start acting more like a flu and less like a killer virus. Flus still kill people but the survival rate is much much higher. We know how to handle flus type virus we do it all the time.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[earthminion]

@"She didn't get it from touching her face with a glove"

Try reading the news, e.g. http://uk.reuters.com/article/...

@"BTW we can disinfect most boxes. Most cargo entering America could be heated to 150 degrees".
How can you say such things and not see them as wrong?! ... Most packaging in a supermarket can't be heated to 150 degrees! ... and these packs etc... come from other countries which are loaded into containers by people ... people who can become carriers of the virus and so help spread a virus if they become infected and during a pandemic with millions of cases such events become very possible. If you want to model points of contact you need to think wider than what is just in front of you.

@"People who are contagious do not work in factories packing goods".
You don't know that and your ignorant prejudice is showing through. Also are you seriously trying to say you are so ignorant that you can't imagine a global pandemic where more people can spread it further?

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[riverat1]

So you think the fact that nobody in the US besides the two nurses who were caring for Duncan at his sickest have come down with Ebola is just dumb luck? The fact is the Ebola virus unlike the flu virus does not survive outside of the body for any length of time. Once any Ebola containing mucus dries out the virus is history. If there were any examples of random people catching it by the methods you speculate about I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint but it hasn't happened. I won't be wetting my pants until it does.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The more cases we treat in our hospitals full of "superbugs", the more likely it is to mutate into something far far worse.

Isolationism is going to save...whoever...if shit gets explosive. Whether house, city, state, or national level, the people that are cut off from an over-agressive virus are going to be the people that avoided it entirely, not the people that were exposed to (and caught) it.

Re: But the press has stopped talking about it...

[EdmundSS]

The Republicans only pwn a single news channel.

FTFY.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[jbolden]

Yes read your own link
may have touched her face with the gloves of her protective suit while caring for a priest who died of the disease, a doctor treating her said on Wednesday.

She got it from a very sick person. And that's what you keep ignoring. People don't walk around and spread ebola. There is no global pandemic because the contagious are limited in who they infect.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[AK Marc]

a biosafety level four pathogen

That's related more to the lethality and treatment, rather than the contagion. Contagion isn't the sole determinant of safety level required.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[AK Marc]

Most packaging in a supermarket can't be heated to 150 degrees!

So you are asserting that Frosted Flakes will go bad at 150 degrees? Or is it the Doritos that go bad at 150? There's more to supermarkets than bananas and milk.

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[AK Marc]

Its not that difficult to catch. If it was really difficult to catch then why the need for biosafety level four containment for decades around the world.

Because it has a high death rate, and no vaccine. It's not because of the ease of catching, but what happens after.

Also its a PR myth about the only catchable in the final stages.

It's a mostly correct simplification. It's theoretically possible to catch it earlier. But nobody ever has. You are arguing that your theory is more important than reality. Sorry, but I'll trust reality over you. And the experts don't agree with you either. Or is there a global conspiracy to infect the USA with Ebola? And you are the lone champion on the side of the USA to keep out blood pure?

Re:But the press has stopped talking about it...

[BronsCon]

I see, you assumed that since I said something bad about your pet party that I must be a member of the opposition and, therefore, would be sucked in by your oh so witty retort, right? No, both sides suck dick equally. Nothing false about that equivalence.

Keep deluding yourself thinking that, though.

well, the good news is the NEJM was wrong

[turkeydance]

and they admitted it.

Re:well, the good news is the NEJM was wrong

[mcswell]

Pointer?

Actually doubles in 60 days

[MickLinux]

Regardless of sourcing the information, the information is incorrect. According to this graph, Ebola is doubling every 60 days now -- so there has been some improvement.

Best way to keep up on this, that I can tell, is to google "ebola africa timeline wiki", and pan down to the timeline, near the bottom of the article. You'll see the graphs.

My favorite graph for keeping track is the logarithmic scale based on population , because it's easy to see where infection totality is: it used to be at 1 1/2 years, and now is about 5 years out.

Another thing of interest that I noted, though: The infection rates before a country mounts a serious response, can be as fast as doubling every 3 or 5 days. For that reason, I think our CDC's active attempts to STOP a proper response, was the worst thing they could do.

Just something to think about.

Re:Actually doubles in 60 days

[Solandri]

Your graph shows Sierra Leone and Guinea cases growing at about the same exponential rate as in the past. Most of the "slowdown" is due to Liberia cases tapering off, but there's a huge comment in the middle of the graphic saying this is likely due to a breakdown in Liberia's ability to accurately track the number of cases, rather than an actual slowdown.

Re:Actually doubles in 60 days

[MickLinux]

You are, of course, correct. And my round figure of 60 days is only a round figure. Anyone who is interested can try it themselves, with as much accuracy as they needed.

I had actually noted this the |irst time I tried to comment, but I went to log in, and my comment evaporated.

Specifically, I had said that if you believed the data, it was 60 day doubling. But if you didn't, you had to go back to the previous curve.

We will find out, in time, whether the infection rate was on the slower curve shown, or at the faster, previous rate.

The one consistant thing I've seen.

[koan]

Is the string of experts saying how wrong they were after the fact.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[DexterIsADog]

Is the string of experts saying how wrong they were after the fact.

Well, they're one up on the austerity fetishists who have been predicting runaway inflation for the last 8 years unless we slash government spending.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol your comment got downvoted

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much validated the comment as well.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

The Fed created a couple trillion in new money to feed to the government for spending. That might have been enough to cause a currency collapse except for 2 things: other currencies were mostly worse, and the Fed paid banks billions (I'll wait while you recover from the surprise) to store a couple trillion in reserves with the Fed - so the net money in circulation didn't actually change much.

But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.

No one should be cocky about this. It's nothing but intellectual arrogance to claim you know how this will play out over the coming decade.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the Fed will destory the money they created. Their role is not just to create it, but also destroy it according to demand.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

The only mechanism they have for that is one they've long abandoned: raising the "fractional" in "fractional reserve currency" above 0. And they weren't aggressive about that during the Carter years, no reason to assume they'd do it here. A return to 5-10 years of 10-15% inflation is possible - heck it may even be the goal of the Fed (we'll certainly never pay down the current debt without something like that).

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[ultranova]

But as the economy recovers, the banks will likely withdraw that money from the Fed and invest it more profitably, putting those trillions into circulation that the Fed minted over the past decade or so. What happens then is anyone's guess - no nation has ever done this trick before, and there's no way to know what will happen to the currency.

What will happen is that the banks will invest the money in various "financial instruments", creating fortunes that'll never exist anywhere except on paper and melt away when the next crisis hits, at which point the bankers already have their bonuses (which also get "invested"). Not a single penny goes to real economy, thus it can't inflate - or stimulate - it.

Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't see runaway inflation? Are you an 11-yo weinerdude living in moms basement or just a fool! Now we spend $11/lb for beefsteak that in-the 1970s cost $0.79/lb. But -- Obama.lamaz, babymomaz, wettbakkks and bangerbois get their meal-tickets punched. Need a postcard pad're ??

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[DexterIsADog]

The long-awaited runaway inflation is like cold fusion - it's coming, and we were wrong before (actually, they never admit this), but it's definitely coming.

The situation is not so much that honorable, well-meaning people are wrong in their predictions, but that they are a pack of craven fear mongers who are attempting to make the current inequities much worse, to the long-term detriment of the U.S., in order to provide their clients with more short term advantage.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.

Every single economic recession in history looked like that. But we're already well on the upswing. Certainly everywhere around me (in the Seattle area) is hiring, from the minimum wages jobs to the construction sites to the tech companies.

The usual cycle starts up when people start buying durable consumer goods again: you put off buying that replacement car or washing machine or whatever when the future looks bleak, preferring to limp along with a somewhat-broken one. That demand broke out of the doldrums in early 2012, went back down for a year, and now has taken off like crazy. That's usually the spark that ignites recovery (or, questions of causation aside, it's reliably the sector that comes back first in a recovery).

As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit

There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?

I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol your comment got downvoted

Pretty much validated the comment as well.

The leftist trolls are easily manipulated, because they have no brain or impulse control.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[DexterIsADog]

I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?

I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.

Your first response was reasonable, but now your sarcasm just demonstrates willful ignorance. You didn't think about what I wrote, did you? You're on the side of the shameless thieves who are willing to degrade U.S. infrastructure, ruin countless lives, and stunt the country's recovery, for what... to put a relatively small percentage of additional wealth into the pockets of the rich.

What they're doing is like the mugger who bashes in the head of someone who earns $100K per year for the $50 in his wallet. But hey, you're entitled to pick your friends.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

Wait, what? Oh, wait, do you actually believe in cold fusion? Now I'm just confused ...

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[ultranova]

There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.

And what will they be spending? You can be utterly convinced the future is an endless parade on gold-plated streets, but if you don't have money right now you can't spend it either, unless you get consumer credit. And if you do get credit today, what will you spend tomorrow?

People aren't sitting on giant piles of treasure they're only refraining from spending out of fear, they're sitting in giant holes of debt they have no chance whatsoever of filling before the next collapse comes. It's not an issue of the total supply of money, it's the issue of how large fraction of it Joe Average gets - and the answer is "not enough".

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[DexterIsADog]

Ah, thank you, you do understand the point. You just don't care. I'm puzzled why you would still advocate for such destructive policies, but everyone has their own pathologies.

Good luck with that. Hope you don't have children.

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

People aren't sitting on giant piles of treasure

Part of being a responsible adult is having enough savings to get you through hard times. Really.

One reason the crunch went on a while was "deleveraging" - maybe you heard the term - people deliberately paying down personal debt as they re-learned that lesson about adult responsibility, sobered up, and spent a few years borrowing less, to be less at the whim of the economy. Part of the reason for Japan's "lost decade" was carrying that to extremes, becoming I think the nation with the highest personal savings rate, which meant the economy went nowhere for a decade as people saved instead of spent (Japan had other issues as well, and no one understands that whole story yet).

Ultimately demand drives the economy - until people feel safe spending instead of saving, that won't happen. That's not so much about salary as it is about unemployment - unemployment needs to go down steadily for 12-18 months before people will generally switch from pessimism to optimism, as we tend to base our outlook on the past 1-2 years of personal experience, not abstract economic data (it's one reason individual investors tend to do poorly).

Also, you'll find most people don't switch from "keep my head down" to "I'm not paid enough!" only when we're well into economic upswing. From minimum wage fights to actual revolution, it's a sure sign of a growing economy when people start shouting "grow faster!"

Re:The one consistant thing I've seen.

[lgw]

OK, I have no idea which side of this argument you're on, so I'll just leave this here.

Ebola isn't the enemy...

[MindPrison]

...it's people and their vast ignorance.

Around here people treat the news about Ebola like it's just another H1N1 outbreak and think nothing further of it. The schools are literally a walk-in petridish and the hygiene at the cafeterias are terrible, kids just dash in for seconds and dab their spoons gleefully into the pots and pans for more, and the next week - half of the kids and teachers are sick with the common flu. Imagine that scenario when we've got Ebola on the move.

We have lots of people who have families in Africa, they come over with their friends ALL the time, and they attend the same schools as the natives do, it's just a matter of time before this becomes a uncontrollable problem.

Proper hygiene needs to be taught, and before we know how to control this, we should limit the traveling from and to infected countries.

Personally I've stacked up like crazy, I've filled my house to the brim with food and stuff needed to cope with that time when the outbreak will be at its worst. Again - it's not Ebola I fear...I fear the people who will get desperate when they reap the fruit of their own ignorance.

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[Anonymous Coward]

"We have lots of people who have families in Africa, they come over with their friends ALL the time,"

Would you mind telling us which metro area you live in ?

Just curious, because it will probably be one of the first points where an outbreak
of significance occurs.

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, true, but our health infrastructure is still quite ahead of what they've gotten in Africa. And World War Z isn't going to happen because of this outbreak, though you may want to stock up if food gets contaminated, which probably won't happen either, with our infrastructure.

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[riverat1]

If Ebola was that easy to catch don't you think some of the people on the airplane with the Dallas nurse or some of the people who were on the subway with the New York doctor or especially some of the people Thomas Eric Duncan was staying with in Dallas would have caught it? The only people I know of who have caught Ebola are medical workers caring for those who are at the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease. I think the chances of a major outbreak in the US are close to zero.

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you will about the Mormons, but they got that prepping thing down!

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[Anonymous Coward]

If even Nigeria can control ebola then yes!

Re:Ebola isn't the enemy...

[AK Marc]

We have lots of people who have families in Africa, they come over with their friends ALL the time, and they attend the same schools as the natives do, it's just a matter of time before this becomes a uncontrollable problem.

I've never seen that problem. Maybe in NYC around the UN or around DC where there are embasssys or such. But most of the US doesn't have places with "lots" or people with families in Africa, and if they did, they don't visit that often.

Proper hygiene needs to be taught,

It is. It just isn't followed.

and before we know how to control this, we should limit the traveling from and to infected countries.

We already know how to control it, and we already have travel restrictions in place.

Personally I've stacked up like crazy,

Crazy being the operable word.

What? Oh, haven't noticed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, we had a kid get shot after trying to disarm a police officer over here. Haven't been paying attention to African's dying.

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

Paranoia much?

If there was an intelligence test here, you failed it.

Ebola's not going away

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people in America seem to think the Ebola threat to them has gone away because a few cases that arrived here have been successfully dealt with and that the 'scare' is over. They don't realize that the worst is yet to come once it really breaks out of the 3 African countries where is is pretty much out of control. If it gets out into Asia, in particular I think we can kiss the human race goodbye. And if it goes airborne at some point there will be no stopping it.

Re:Ebola's not going away

[amiga3D]

It's not 100 percent fatal. The human race can survive it. The present society will of course perish.

Re:Ebola's not going away

[khallow]

They don't realize that the worst is yet to come once it really breaks out of the 3 African countries where is is pretty much out of control.

The thing is, it is under control in Guinea with new cases declining. Liberia and Sierra Leone seems to be the true make or break cases, but with some success in the past few weeks. It's still exponential growth, but doubling time has lengthened considerably. Even if they fail to contain Ebola in the end, this buys us some time.

Re:Ebola's not going away

[ledow]

Hyperbole much?

Ebola, and it's like, have come and gone countless millions of times over the years. Granted, our population density helps them spread a little, but that's vastly outweighed in scale by just the existence of simple hygiene - let alone medical knowledge. A few hundred years ago, in some European countries, it was normal to defecate inside the house, and wear one long shirt that was also your underwear.

We're talking about a disease spreading in one of the poorest and most deprived regions of the world where medical assistance is almost non-existent and where getting some means mingling with thousands of others who are also ill.

In the entire history of humanity, we have "cured" exactly two diseases. Smallpox (which recent science articles suggest may be making a comeback in a mutated form) and rinderpest (ever heard of it? I haven't - because it only affects cattle).

Ebola might well kill people. Lots of people. It may even creep into first-world countries, even with proper medical control. But the fact is that there are ten times worse things out there, spreading just as virulently, and we are either ignoring them or we have them under control because they can be made not as deadly. Before the 1980's, nobody had heard of AIDS. Now your life expectancy with it is about the same as that without it, so long as you live in range of a hospital that can diagnose and treat it.

Ebola is nasty. I sure wouldn't want to come in contact with it. But if you think that it poses a threat to the human race as a whole, you're sadly mistaken.

The Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people - estimated at around HALF of the population of Europe at the time, before America was even discovered - in less than 10 years. It killed nearly a quarter of the entire world.

That's a serious pandemic. It's still around, 700 years later. There are outbreaks every now and then still. And it can be effectively wiped out with simple antibiotics. And we don't even have it on the notification list for the World Health Organisation any more.

Ebola is localised, contained, vulnerable to basic medical practice, and actually pretty treatable. And all the cases outside Africa have been contained and nobody containing them (apart from one very stupid nurse that can't obey simple medical practice) has died. That tells you just how vulnerable it is. And most of those cases were seeded by people HELPING OUT Ebola patients in the origin countries.

The problem is not that Ebola is going to come over into the first world countries and wipe us out or decimate the population. It's that the countries where it is present at the moment have notoriously inadequate medical facilities generally. But nobody focuses on that. Everyone is much more concerned with whether their health insurance would cover them if they got it.

And, I'll be honest, in Europe (who are much closer to Africa and have already seen Ebola-infected refugees cross the notoriously-difficult-to-police waters into Italy, and who have free-movement laws across the continent - except for the UK), it's not even a news story. Hasn't been for weeks. Nobody is worried.

Your worries about Ebola are caused by watching too much Fox News blowing things out of proportion for the sake of entertainment, not any basis in fact. If you were that worried, you'd send $10 to Médecins Sans FrontiÃres.

Out of date maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.... October 9th issue of NEJM, with a submission deadline of perhaps September 9th, summarizing data through perhaps August 9th? Today is November 26th.

Re:Out of date maybe?

[turkeydance]

of course it is. this post is already out-of-date. every-damn-thing is out-of-date by now.

clearly...

[argStyopa]

NEJM is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy harping on the dangers of Ebola merely because faux news tells them to?

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

those who are really in power in the US actually want this to happen.

I doubt it. Those "really in power" will die out at the same rate as everyone else. This is the reason biological weapons got outlawed in the first place -- you cannot control them. As far as government genociding its citizens at the first opportunity -- they still add poison to ethyl alcohol, I am totally with you on that one.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Living with a hostile police force that won't hesitate you kill you in a no-knock raid is substantially more of a crisis than an Ebola outbreak in a town with access to advanced medical care and a disease-control organization that is halfway-decent. You are both massively overestimating the virulence of Ebola as well as underestimating the intimidation factor that police have on non-white individuals.

Oh wait, you're a racebaiting trollmonger. BTW, Ebola is an equal-opportunity shit-blood-out-your-mouth disease while cops are never going to shoot up your pasty white ass.

Re:Idea

[khallow]

The political-military industrial complex has forced the oil producing countries to only accept U.S. dollars for their oil. Every other country that needs oil must sell products to the U.S. for U.S. dollars in order to buy oil.

No, they can buy oil in other currencies like Euros. The problem is that there aren't many reliable currencies out there. Despite the inflation of currencies like the dollar or Euro, those still are the best choice for long term contracts.

Good luck Ebola-chan!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck Ebola-chan! May she bless us all with her touch.

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[mark-t]

While I wouldn't ordinarily excuse the ad-hominem, when you feel like you might need to resort to a physically violent confrontation just because someone's challenged your credibility online, it only kind of affirms the possibility that they may actually have been right

Life is not a disaster movie

[dbIII]

I fear the people who will get desperate when they reap the fruit of their own ignorance.

When shit gets real there's more "the spirit of the blitz" than Mad Max. Compare the hysterics of meteor movies with Russian dashcam footage where the real thing is not even enough to turn down the stereo, let alone stop driving.

What if I told you there's a cure?

[rs79]

I realize extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But rather than make it easy let me show you how to find things like this

Maybe you can figure this out too. Let's play a game.

Google "ebola gabon immunity" (without the quotes)

You'll find some newspaper articles, the French one points to a PLOS paper. In that paper find what man and bat have in common. It's near the end and obvious.

Now go to google scholar and google "ebola zaire selenium" and find THAT 1995 paper.

Now look at where Africa fits into South America. Look up the obvious food product in the NIH papers. Remember what man and bat have in common.

Any idea why of the Americans in America who caught EBOV, a disease that's 70.8% fatal not one died?

Have you seen the numbers in Africa? What are they. Calculate the r-naught and look right around mid october. Notice anything different?

The NIH was told how to fix this on Oct 17.

TFN is from Oct 9. Y'all can stand down. And my, weren't those racial epithets just charming.

Re:What if I told you there's a cure?

[mark-t]

Any idea why of the Americans in America who caught EBOV, a disease that's 70.8% fatal not one died?

Of the 17 cases of Ebola that have occurred outside of Africa, 4 of them have died. One of them was in the USA.

Granted, a lot lower than 70% mortality rate, but by no means are Americans immune.

Re:What if I told you there's a cure?

[mark-t]

BTW... had it ever occurred to you actually link to the things you are talking about instead of just pretending to sound like you know what you are talking about by just expecting everyone else to do the same research that you allegedly did?

If you are going to claim to know something, then post the friggen links to the relevant material instead of just saying to other people that they should just go do it themselves like you claim you did... otherwise, for all anyone else knows, you're just full of a lot of hot air... which to be honest, is how your post comes across. Particularly since there is at least one factually incorrect statement. Specifically, the claim that no americans have died from the virus is false... one has, to date. While that's still a small number, the claim of none is still factually incorrect. Of course, even being factually incorrect is not necessarily unforgivable, if you show that you at least made an honest attempt to do some reseearch on the topic, and the detail about which you are incorrect does not detract from your main point. But again, this too requires that you cite your sources, so that people will be able to replicate your research. Typing stuff into google doesn't replicate anything because a page rank can easily change.

Re:What if I told you there's a cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009126

"Together, these findings show that a large fraction of the human population living in forested areas of Gabon has both humoral and cellular immunity to ZEBOV. In the absence of identified risk factors, the high prevalence of “immune” persons suggests a common source of human exposure such as fruits contaminated by bat saliva."

I'm pretty sure he's suggesting that eating fruit contaminated with "Bat Saliva" is the new "Ebola C".

Variolation existed before effective treatments for small pox as well. People would insufflate dust made from small pox scabs. That doesn't mean that we have a "cure for ebola". It's a long road between a snotty kleenex and mass produced flu shot vaccine. Small pox still killed millions of people after the Chinese started grinding up scabs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#China

Re:What? Oh, haven't noticed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clevelands turn to burn now.

12 year old. White cop. No reason being reported.

They're letting 12 and white sink in good before they tell us anything.

The Age of Outrage. Arm up.

Re:Idea

[Opportunist]

Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.

Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.

If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.

A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.

Re:Idea

[Opportunist]

So far the US bombed every remotely important country wanting to sell oil for Euros back into the stone age. Last time Ahmedingbats pondered aloud that he plans to have the Iran do so caused him to be pushed into the Axle of Evil.

The moment the Dollar is pushed off its pedestal of being the world economy currency its exchange rate goes into free fall. And the US know that very well.

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[ihtoit]

wouldn't it be funny if someone called you on that? And publicly beat the snot out of you?

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

roman_mir's karma is in the basement again...

Re:Idea

[Dorianny]

The biggest problem with the economy is wage stagnation. I think that supply and demand is a terrible way to set wages as a job is a necessity for nearly everyone. Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not and wages will bottom out and as they do so will demand for goods, effectively creating a catch-22.

Re:Idea

[DNS-and-BIND]

Great post about Ebola. Wait, you didn't talk about Ebola at all, you just tried to show how USA = TEH COMMUNISM!!!@#!@$%##$#!@# OMGZLOLZOR.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the police would be more accommodating of blacks if they didn't commit nearly 60% of all crime while being only around 12% of the population.

Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, make it interesting at $100,000 and I'll see you outside the internet in 10 minutes.

Ebola, AIDS, ISIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Are weapons of mass control thru fear.

nothingofvaluewaslost?

[addie]

At the time I'm reading this submission, it's tagged with "nothingofvaluewaslost". I can't fathom what this is supposed to mean. Lives in West Africa are worthless? Deaths in a developing country are meaningless because there's no economic impact? Am I missing some subtlety or other message here?

What a cynical, awful tag.

Re:nothingofvaluewaslost?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't agree with the tag's sentiment, I do think I understand its origin.

We've had decades of data points where the results of the question of "do you value you or your partner's or community's life enough to resist random fucking, or, failing that, wearing a condom?" is persistently and categorically "no". Some readers probably find it difficult to value their lives more than they themselves do.

Incidentally, this behavioral pattern hardly applies only to West Africa. Mostly, they in particular are simply unluckier or more ill-prepared for the consequences. Nothing about this post changes if applied to, say, the U.S., when their "luck" runs out.

Re:nothingofvaluewaslost?

[MildlyTangy]

At the time I'm reading this submission, it's tagged with "nothingofvaluewaslost". I can't fathom what this is supposed to mean. Lives in West Africa are worthless? Deaths in a developing country are meaningless because there's no economic impact? Am I missing some subtlety or other message here?

What a cynical, awful tag.

You give the masses anonymity, you get to see the worst of humanity. Try not to let it get to you. As a species, we suck, but not all of us are bad.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to me when the virus isn't doubling every 2 to 3 weeks. It's hard to get stung by a bee if your careful, unless you're trying to juggle beehives.

Re:What? Oh, haven't noticed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that because he pulled out a real looking toy gun when police approached him?
Or was that a different 12 year old kid?

Re:Idea

[TuringTest]

Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not and wages will bottom out and as they do so will demand for goods, effectively creating a catch-22.

That's why a universal basic income is such a beautiful concept. It would remove from the equation human survival as an individual incentive - thus reducing the supply of workers when the work offers are not attractive enough, solving that particular problem.

If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury.

The main fear against the UBI is that those incentives would not attract enough workers to support the needs of mankind as a whole, but I don't see evidence that this would be the case - the drive to be creative and improve your personal status are pretty strong ones.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

prices rise because government actions (like the one you suggest) continually devalue the currency,

Yeah, because currency would not devaluate without government actions, right?

Captcha: liberty

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Idea

[CrimsonAvenger]

Oddly enough, the more I've come to realize that we're gradually drifting into a post-scarcity economy, the more I've come to believe that that your "universal basic income" (I've tended to think of it in terms of a "basic living stipend" but what's in a name?) is increasingly becoming necessary.

Along with a tax structure that'll make it work. Progressive and high, but the BLS isn't taxed at all, at any level (which means no more sales tax, gas tax, and of that POS tax crap - income tax only, at all levels of government).

And I'm one of those right-wing SOBs most of you are always bemoaning the existance of....

He is forgetting a LOT more than that.

[denzacar]

He assumes constant or rising speed of spreading of the disease and constant or increasing contact with the diseased.
While ignoring ANY possibility of lowering of those factors by various means.

From governmental blockades of travel, through people avoiding contact on their own, up to changes in weather as we are moving into a winter which will make moving of humans and viruses across continents slower, harder and easier to spot.

In short...
http://xkcd.com/605/

Re:He is forgetting a LOT more than that.

[earthminion]

@"From governmental blockades of travel"
The politicians all around the world have repeatedly come out against blockades & whole country quarantines. They won't blockade until its too late by which point they will say look blockades & quarantines won't work which is what they want. Blockades cost money and the politicians think of money first, people second, plus some see a pandemic as a means of population control without looking closely enough at what damage it'll do to their own countries and families as well.

@", through people avoiding contact on their own"
If you were infected and had the finacial means to do so, wouldn't you try to get to somewhere else that had a better medical system? This will help spread the virus further.

@", up to changes in weather as we are moving into a winter which will make moving of humans and viruses across continents slower, harder and easier to spot."
First of all, what winter in most of Africa?! Second, us modern humans here in the 21st century have invented coats and means of travel to allow us to travel between all continents in hours. I think you are thinking the world is stuck in about the 17th century.

Re:He is forgetting a LOT more than that.

[tehcyder]

Why are you using @"xxx" instead of the quote HTML tags?

Just curious.

Re:He is forgetting a LOT more than that.

[AK Marc]

Blockades cost money and the politicians think of money first, people second, plus some see a pandemic as a means of population control without looking closely enough at what damage it'll do to their own countries and families as well.

The blockade would stop workers and aid from getting in, and former workers from getting home. Travel restrictions are in place now. If you are going to fully blockade a place because it's infected, you should pull out all the non-locals, close the borders, and nuke it from space. You are doing the same, but slower, by issuing a full global blockade of the place.

If you were infected and had the finacial means to do so, wouldn't you try to get to somewhere else that had a better medical system? This will help spread the virus further.

Those aid workers who contracted it in Africa who were flown to the US (and other places) all got better and lived, and none infected another person. So, it wasn't their financial means that did it, but the medical community helping the sick that did it, and it provably didn't "spread" the virus, as the virus may have left the country, but died shortly after, with no spread.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

See how the BLS worked out for the Peoples' Republic of Haven ;-)

Re:Idea

[pastafazou]

The USA is the largest consumer market in the world where per capita consumption is higher than any other country. Yet you're making the claim that there's a shortage of demand, and you're getting modded up as interesting? Wow.

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a 2007 study commissioned by the Canadian Embassy in the United States, Canada–United States trade supported 7.1 million American jobs.

so yea lets cut yournation right the fuck off.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_trade_relations

there goes 7 million of your jobs and all the lvoely taxes they pay

we in canada will find other partners to trade with

again FUCK YOU

from that link
In 2012, U.S. merchandise trade with Canada consisted of US$324.2 billion in imports and US$292.4 billion in exports

get ready for hell when trade stops.....
good thing we start free trade with europe next year....we can then stop buying your garbage and form your middle men

YOU IN SERIOUS TROUBLE when 66% of canada doesnt vote conservative will vote with there wallets...

usa is not a big innovator

[Anonymous Coward]

the usa is a big patent troll and military sales machine...

it also is great for hollywood and lawyers....

pick one of 3 thats all you are now....

you can't even get to the space station without russia's help ROFL

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want person A to create a prodcut and pay person B to purchase that product? That's going to workout well. Except for the fact that it never has.

Re:Idea

[Mspangler]

"And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers."

True only to a point. Then diminishing returns sets in as well. For instance, I could buy a camper, but I have little free time I could use to go camping. I could buy a new TV, but it would be only marginally better than the old one. I am sitting on brand new chair, which was bought because the old one wore out. The same thing happened to the dishwasher last month.

As far as material goods go, I'm down to basic replacement, and the increasingly desperate screeching of "BUY! BUY! BUY!" is having ever less effect. Buy what? For what purpose? Large blocks of Time, which I actually could use, are not for sale at any price.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not

There is no shortage of demand for work. I could easily rattle off ten things that I would pay money to have people do. The question is why is there such a shortage of money? Money should be easy to produce, as we print the stuff. What you describe is an deflationary spiral. Since we can print arbitrary amounts of money, a deflationary spiral is pure incompetence.

The biggest problem seems to be that we are using the money that we print incorrectly. For example, quantitative easing has worked beautifully to prop up stock prices. Buffett says we're in another bubble. What if instead of diverting money to prop up investments we went back to purchasing government bonds? Then banks could either loan out money to individuals and businesses or let it sit. They wouldn't have the option of loaning it to the government.

If banks just let the money sit, we could increase the reserve requirement. That would increase the seigniorage from expanding the money supply and reduce deficits, which would put more pressure on banks to loan money. It's a virtuous cycle, not a negative one.

Re:Idea

[Mspangler]

"If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury."

But the taxes needed to pay for the universal basic income would prevent anyone from improving from that basic status. Now Krugman stated a few years ago that the well-off were status-crazed workaholics who would keep on working even at 100% marginal rates. I don't agree, but then I am not a workaholic.

Another side effect is that you would have to shut the border to the point North Korea looks like a free trade area.

On the other side, as the robots take over, and I firmly believe that will keep happening, we will have to come up with something. Even on the right wing people are starting to mutter that it would be cheaper to have a universal basic income than 30 or 40 separate government programs doling out benefits. And there are voices on the Left who don't like it because (as usual) they don't trust people to be able to look out for themselves; they need government help to select what is in their own best interests (as determined by that ever benevolent government). See Bloomberg and his big soft drink ban. The overlapping government agencies ensure there is meticulous and continuous supervision of the rabble.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 20 years.

Re:Idea

[khallow]

So far the US bombed every remotely important country wanting to sell oil for Euros back into the stone age. Last time Ahmedingbats pondered aloud that he plans to have the Iran do so caused him to be pushed into the Axle of Evil.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. And it's worth noting that Iran hasn't experienced any serious consequences from the US for its alleged Euro-based oil trading since it doesn't sell its oil to the US.

People's Republic of Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucked for the Dolists, but the Legislaturists and Committee for Public Safety made out like bandits, with the latter protecting the former from everything else... But was it just a story, or was it inspired by actual people and events?

A Thanksgiving Day Letter to the American Negro

[Anonymous Coward]

A Thanksgiving Day Letter to the American Negro

Can we have some fairness

[Anonymous Coward]

The former president bush is personally blamed for laying charges on the dykes in New Orleans in order to kill black people. Can we at least lay similar claims against President Obama, and claim he personally infected Africans with Ebola so that black people would die. I mean fair is fair.

Re:Idea

[Richy_T]

The fed is not committed to maintaining inflation to stimulate investment. That's just the excuse they use to help themselves to the wealth of others.

Re:Idea

[Richy_T]

I'm all for it. I'd quit my job tomorrow. Well, Monday. We're off tomorrow.

Regarding parent's and grandparents post, If there is too much supply for demand, the logical outcome is a fall in prices. This is called deflation. Inflation is exactly the wrong answer especially as it steals wealth from everyone and returns it in the form of money to the few wealthy bankers who get it handed to them.

Re:Idea

[liquid_schwartz]

The solution is to give extra income to people who work (as in physically show up). If you are unemployed there should be labor centers where you have to show up to get your check and that keep you busy for the day. I get that we can't have them competing with private enterprise as that would be unfair but until no charity needs volunteers, until no old folks in retirement homes are lonely, until all litter is picked up, we can keep these people busy and pay them. I'd suggest funding it with a tax on imports, with a bias against low income countries like China. This would stimulate domestic demand by putting money in the 99% instead of the 1% and it would not create a culture of laziness. Thoughts and comments welcome.

Re:Idea

[liquid_schwartz]

I'm not sure that's true. I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing. They tend to be the disability types, always long on excuses and short on anything useful. Making people work for their wages makes sense. That's why I support a universal bonus income for people who work (coupled with a minimum wage to make sure that the bonus doesn't become a new way for the 0.1% to screw over the rest of us). The other half of making work people work is always having something for them to do. That's why I support the notion of work centers where people can show up and work is always available. It's the answer to the situation of telling someone to get a job when jobs aren't available.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

We're in a crisis here, it seems... hmm, maybe this comment will also get -1?

Re:Idea

[BadDreamer]

We have 100% marginal rates and people keep working.

Re:Idea

[Urkki]

I think that with BLS there should be no progressive tax rate. Instead, there should be flat tax rate from any income, to be paid immediately, preferably automatically, no excemptions. You get money, you pay your share and rest is yours. The more you work (or smarter you invest), the more you get, linearily.

Also no tax evasion or loopholes, and no bureaucracy.

This would apply to individuals, whether they were employed or self-employed, and taxation would only get more complex with bigger businesses.

Re:Blind hate

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit being such a misguided social justice warrior with your knee-jerk reactions.

Re:Idea

[AK Marc]

Nope. The lazy people who are financially well off, and not punished for working, actually get more active, and start doing more things. When weaned off the support, they turn their interest into a job. The capitalist stays home and faps, while waiting for his portfolio to increase 1/10th of a basis point, before selling, shorting, and twitting a false and damaging rumour about the company.

Giving to the poor and lazy makes more jobs than giving to the rich.

Re:Idea

[AK Marc]

Read Animal Farm. Nobody liked the cat. But the cat didn't kill anyone. If Animal Farm were written today, the pigs would have blamed all the problems on the cat, despite no problem ever having been caused by the cat. That's the country we live in today.

Re:Idea

[TuringTest]

I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing.

You say that as if it was a bad thing. How does it affect you negatively?

Making people work for their wages makes sense.

That's not a given, in particular if the work they would be forced to do is not productive but "show off", as you suggest. Do you mind to elaborate that idea and justify it, to explain what it makes sense to you?

Re:Idea

[tehcyder]

No because the niggers will spread the nigger disease far beyond themselves.

And still the pox infested wankers in government here in the UK will not SHUT the borders cus they are shit scared of the shirt lifters in the EU .
Raving faggots the lot of them

We need to shut the doors tight no one in at all plenty out only thou one way jobs back to Somalia Nigeria Pakistan India China Japan and on and on and on ..

You appear to have forgotten to preface your interesting remarks with the customary "I am not a racist/homophobe but..."

Re:Idea

[tehcyder]

This would apply to individuals, whether they were employed or self-employed, and taxation would only get more complex with bigger businesses.

It is not feasible to separate businesses and individuals, since high earners use business arrangements to reduce their tax burden.

Those billionaire business owners who pay themselves (through the company they control) an annual salary of $1 salary a year are doing so for tax reasons.

Re:Idea

[tehcyder]

I'm not sure that's true. I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing. They tend to be the disability types, always long on excuses and short on anything useful. Making people work for their wages makes sense. That's why I support a universal bonus income for people who work (coupled with a minimum wage to make sure that the bonus doesn't become a new way for the 0.1% to screw over the rest of us). The other half of making work people work is always having something for them to do. That's why I support the notion of work centers where people can show up and work is always available. It's the answer to the situation of telling someone to get a job when jobs aren't available.

You're then talking about "work centres" which just dole out busy work. When we had National Service in the UK there were people who spent a couple of years painting coal white one week then cleaning off the paint the next.

The ideal would be not to make everyone work x hours a week regardless, but to divide the work up so that everyone does y hours each, which hopefully with increasing automation would be about 20 hours a week.

Re:Idea

[drkstr1]

Perhaps the police would be more accommodating of blacks if they didn't commit nearly 60% of all crime while being only around 12% of the population.

You must be pretty stupid if you think those shit head statistics mean anything, when there is an obvious selection bias at play (EG. Minorities are statisticly targeted for investigation and prosecution). Do you even think for yourself, or do you just regurgitate shit you hear from your drinking buddies? You are either stupid, or have deceitful agenda. Either way, I don't like you.

Re:Idea

[Opportunist]

Since we're far from having a shortage of workforce, I highly doubt the world as we know it would grind to a halt just because 10% of the people are lazy dicks. So let them do nothing. If they're content with just barely getting by with no form of "luxury" whatsoever (no car, no cable TV, no vacation, a tiny apartment...), let them be.

If you want more than existence, if you want to actually live, you better work.

Re:Idea

[Opportunist]

The problem is also the distribution of wealth. As you correctly identified it, you being able to buy a TV is worth jack (for the economy) if you have no need for one because yours is already top of the line. But there's others who would want one but can't afford it.

To pull a blunt example, if you have 100 bucks and so do I, we can both go and buy a DVD player for 80. If you have 180 and I only have 20, you can buy one, but it's rather unlikely that you'll buy two.

Now, of course someone will butt in and say "but he'll buy something else for the 100 he has left". Ok. Then multiply the whole spiel by 100 and have the first person furnish his mansion while the second can't even buy a couch for his one room apartment. The point is that the first person will have money left over after he has everything he can sensibly buy (in both, goods and services, you don't need two haircuts, do you?) while the second person WOULD buy more stuff if he just COULD.

What is currently needed is a way to sensibly and fairly distribute the wealth we have. I'm all for someone who works better/harder to get more/better goods and services, but for the sake of the economy we have to enable more people to spend and become a part of the demand side.

Re:Idea

[lsatenstein]

Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.

Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.

If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.

A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.

I fully concur with your statements. As corporations outsource jobs, the local net net discretionary income disappears. Only essentials are purchased. It's sad, as the American society has become a for profit everything, from public education to medicine. Even the military is a for profit institution. MacDonalds has become the location of "lets go out for an evening's supper"

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It worked well for Star Trek

Re: Idea

[baristabrian]

"Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job..." Nobody? You forgot about Big Gov. Just ask Obama; he's been "creating jobs" ever since he assumed role of Emperor. He's been saying as much for years.

Re:Idea

[uninformedLuddite]

Giving to the poor and lazy makes more jobs than giving to the rich.

when the financial crisis hit in AU they did exactly that and it seemed to work.

Re: Idea

[Opportunist]

Well, that's because government's primary concern is not to make more money for those who rule it... erh ...

Never mind. I'm stuck in the times when politicians worked for their country rather than having their country work for them.

Re:Idea

[ahodgson]

You say that as if it was a bad thing. How does it affect you negatively?

Because I have to pay taxes to support them? Not only directly to them, but for all the other social services that they feel entitled to despite not paying their share of taxes to support them, especially (in my country anyway) health care.

That increases the cost of my labour, and that of the other people still willing to work, making us less competitive internationally. Which causes more jobs to be outsourced or just vanish due to being economically unproductive.

Re:Idea

[Urkki]

A rich person lives in a House. The money for maintaining it comes from somewhere. He eats with his family, money comes from somewhere. He uses a car for personal purposes, money for that comes from somewhere. He does a personal investment with money.

In my idea, all that money came to him as taxable income, no loopholes. Anybody spending a lot of money would have to (either eat into existing savings or) use taxable money for it. If company pays directly, it's still income and company needs to pay the tax toi. Flat tax rate is important here, no deductions, so there isn't complex tax calculation to be done, just $X (money or benefit) received by the person, then $Y paid in taxes would come directly from flat tax rate.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean work for food, work for love, work for money, or work for the sake of working, or do you mean to fool yourself into thinking that you are working when plainly you are not, or trying to fool others into thinking that you are?
Is there no room for chance or irony in your mind? What do you feel is missing most from your own life experience?

Re:Idea

[TuringTest]

Because I have to pay taxes to support them?

Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent.

...making us less competitive internationally. Which causes more jobs to be outsourced...

Do you realize that those arguments wouldn't apply if the rent was truly universal? I.e. if *all* people could apply for them, not just people from a single country, all workers in the world would face the same increases in costs, thus not making any difference in their competitiveness.

...or just vanish due to being economically unproductive.

Again you're assuming 1) that such thing would happen and 2) that it's a bad thing. Why?

Re:Idea

[TuringTest]

What if the product is not created by a person but by a robot? That option didn't ever exist in the past.

Re:Idea

[TuringTest]

I said "Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent"... or also if you can't choose and are forced into it. Life is long and you never know what tomorrow brings.

With a basic income, you have a choice that you didn't have before. This is what those extra taxes are buying you (in addition to reducing competence because other people will choose not to apply to the remaining jobs). Being universal, you also benefit from them.