Quote (thesnipa @ 18 Mar 2020 19:27)
False binary. we dont need to entirely shut down society until a workable vaccine or cure is found. we need to take preventative measures, shut down nonvital industries, practice social distancing, eat less food prepared by others, wash hands more. slow down the spread to help the healthcare system work at a reasonable pace while biding time. by shutting down what we can we limit scarcity.
or we can just callously decide we need to not do this and see deaths as unimportant as car deaths, which again, we do a lot to prevent.
it comes down to prevent-ability, what we can do, and seeing time as the 4th dimension. and in any case, i think people should drive less and at far lower speeds than they do.
The bolded is the key part. We can NOT shut down all nonvital industries for months and months on end. The crumbling club, tourism and entertainment industries alone would create millions of unemployed, of declining demand and consumption, of loan defaults. This would lead to further job loss in the construction, event and media industries, to job loss in breweries, clothing, retail, and so on. All the economic downturn and credits which suddenly turn foul would put the banks under a ton of stress, and so on and on.
Certain industries not being vital in the sense of "necessary for immediate survival" does not rule out the possibility that they are nonetheless dominos whose fall could trigger a chain reaction taking down the entire economy, and social order. These industries might not be vital in the strict meaning of the word, yet still system-relevant.
It is feasible, and the right call, to shut them down right now, for a couple of weeks. But keeping them shut down until a cure is found, which might well take until the summer of 2021, is not feasible.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 18 2020 02:05pm