quartzite's comments

How can China become zeroth world shortly when half of the country is still living in third world conditions? I suppose if you only consider how the wealthiest in Shanghai and other Tier 1 cities live their lives then yes China is approaching parity with the West but that ignores that America's per capita income is almost 5 times higher than China's.

China also has the nasty problem of many of its best and brightest wanting to come to America and the West where they will have political freedom and more broadly freedom of expression, something that cannot be bought in China no matter how wealthy one becomes.

Hard to have a war economy when winning the war means shutting your economy down.

Yes, and it's the best proxy we have.

That's irrelevant, what matters is that a high IQ society has a vested interest in measuring IQ as a proxy for general intelligence and standardized testing results should reliably correlate to IQ and general intelligence.

This is exactly correct.

Those who fight for fair admissions on the basis of intellectual ability and academic potential should hold up the SAT and standardized testing as a cornerstone of the admissions process.

Standardized testing significantly levels the playing field for students across income brackets. Returns on study investment quickly diminish, and reaching a plateau on returns doesn't require much investment at all (internet connection and the purchase of a few large study manuals).

At my high school in sophomore year I remember speaking with a wealthy friend whose father had signed him up for flying lessons so he could "stand out in college admissions". There are many, many cases like this.

Admissions should disregard such superficial peacocking and focus on metrics like the SAT that disentangle intellectual and academic potential from wealth.

Which is precisely why this bailout will cause inflation.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. We have massive debt and our Federal Reserve is now resorting to buying treasuries again but in spite of that yields are rising! This should disturb everyone. Helicopter money won't necessarily cause hyperinflation but it will cause some inflation along with massive new debt.

Here's a reality check: MMT and related ideas are nonsensical. They cannot work. They will destroy economies where they are implemented.

And the problem is that during an extended period of curve reduction there will still be people pushed out of medical care due to surging cases (but not spiking!). The total area between the number of patients and hospital capacity curves may be similar in both cases.

Exactly. All this talk of "flattening the curve" is counterproductive if the curve remains flattened right at capacity for an extended period of time, which is what these measures will cause, rather than spiking for a short period.

It will be impossible for us to permanently stop the spread with half measures. As viral spread continues due to half hearted social distancing, when will we be able to return to normalcy? Given the characteristics of this virus even a few cases floating around seem to be enough to reignite contagion.

So we persist in stasis for a month or a year with no end in sight while the economy begins to collapse, which will also destroy lives and lead to humanitarian disaster?

And all of that on shoddy evidence which probably is not counting the true case fatality rate due to woeful ignorance of the total number of infected people?

This article from a Stanford Professor makes the case that COVID-19 mortality is not as high as initial reports make it seem:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

We also have potential treatments emerging that could alleviate much of the strain on the healthcare system.

We need to make rational and strategic decisions here, not decisions based out of fear.

Massive and systematic society wide testing is the first step, the second step is the bulk manufacture of demonstrated COVID-19 treatments. The third is ramping up hospital capacity.

All of this is so that we can reopen society in a reasonable amount of time prepared to deal with the inevitable spread of this virus.

In the US at least we have massive tracts of wasteland perfectly suited for this purpose. Beats pumping poison in the air everyone breathes.

That's not true. Most of the iron smelting cultures in Africa dissolved on their own without European interference.