When you're looking at 20-40 dying per day with COVID, its a completely negligible value, really a function of how widely the testing is being performed, and lower than the average annual deaths from influenza, which is about 70 per day:
Its impossible to subdue a society little removed from the 7th century, unless you're willing to replicate the actions of Alexander the Great, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Abdur Rahman Khan:
That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].
All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.
We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:
Basically, they found that Customer A spent $100 on games, and consumed 50 units worth of Piracy.
But Customer B spent only $30 on games, and consumed 10 units of piracy.
They then concluded that piracy lead to more consumption.
The obvious rebuttals are:
1. More voracious consumers of games will probably buy more and pirate more anyway
2. It sucks if you are one of the pirated games (eg. singleplayer, non-DRM), who loses out from this equation
3. Its great if you're eg. Fortnite or Steam, where pirated games serve as the enticement to join the ecosystem, and when customers do eventually spend, it comes to you given your huge size.
And in particular their fertility rate, which remains stubbornly high at 3.33 children per woman.
A popular meme has been that as countries and people get richer, they have fewer children. But, that is not occurring in Egypt, which is about twice as rich as India or Bangladesh, but has about 50% more children.
Really, its just Egyptian and Muslim culture which prioritises volume of children ahead of all else. Egypt will suffer if they cannot bring their population to sustainable levels.
American population is driven solely by immigration, given that the average fertility is far below replacement.
If you don't want one billion Americans, then you need to propose and support:
- Ending refugee programs and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees
- Sending refugees back to safe countries
- Building walls along the southern border
- Ending the H1B visa
- deporting illegal immigrants already in the country
- Disallowing citizenship by birth
- Ending chain family migration
The bigger issue here is that Americans are moving out of States with huge pension bills, into 'younger' states with lower taxes and fewer legacy costs. Its basically a death loop playing out at an inter-state migration level.
They closed nuclear plants because of strategic-level corruption: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Shroder accepted a senior position at Rosneft as soon as he left politics:
There was no hospital overflow. I live in Ukraine and even with a totally rudimentary health system and routinely ignored lockdowns, the health system functioned like any other flu outbreak. The temporary hospitals setup in the USA and UK were never used.
If anything I am quite sure that the few lockdowns we did have worsened the spread of COVID, or at least concentrated it over a shorter timeframe, since people were now packed into shopping centres at reduced hours, were forced to socialise in smaller 'speakeasy' venues, and had a greater interaction with grandparents given the closure of schools. Without lockdowns, the virus would have spread slowly and steadily, and been concentrated in younger groups who have more social interaction with eachother, like influenza each season.
Even under a 'best case' scenario for Lockdown, and using Sweden as an example, we have spent about 50 months in Lockdown in order to save 1 month of life - statiscally for someone of advanced age and with serious existing health problems:
Its been the same with lockdown. Enforce totalitarian restrictions and tracking on the plebes, whilst the rich and connected routinely ignore or are excluded from the rules.
Its possible that Lockdown is a ploy to distract from the trillions of dollars of money printing that has gone on during the pandemic, to suppress the inflation generated, as well as to normalise location and biological data collection and arbitrary interference in personal liberty and private businesses.
It seems unlikely that the motivation is really the health of the populace, when deaths and ill health from air pollution and obesity, and from the interrupted medical treatments during Lockdown itself, are routinely ignored.
You can follow the same logical pattern for all the other major issues of our time. Are the massive migration inflows of violent military-age males into Europe from MENA really about humanitarian aid, or about injecting cheap labour into the continent and providing justification for giant intelligence agencies, tracking and banning of encryption?
The same for critical race theory - is the goal the betterment of humankind, or to set the working class against eachother and to distract from insane wealth capture of the 1%?
But we're already going to be building those batteries anyway: Electric cars.
What we need is a proper international standard for cars to be able to interact with the grid, to be able to charge and discharge based on grid conditions and pricing.
Its stupid to have everyone coming home from work at 6pm and plugging in their cars to charge right at the existing afternoon demand peak, when solar is waning. Just getting those cars to delay charging until around midnight (allowing user override) would shift a huge amount of peak demand.
Same concept if you don't use your car during the day - it should be able to discharge right into the morning and afternoon peaks, at your control. The user should be credited for this onto their car account.
It might even make sense to have dedicated high-voltage circuitry in houses and apartment blocks, to be used for EVs, solar, etc.
And we should really figure that out immediately since EV production is ramping up right now. We can't just rely on single automakers (Tesla) to work out these societal problems.
"In a form of what is now considered illegal front running and self-dealing, a bucket shop holding a large position on a stock, and knowing a client's vulnerable margin, might sell the stock on the real stock exchange, causing the price on the ticker tape to momentarily move down enough to exhaust the client's margins. Through its opportunistic actions, the bucket shop thereby gains 100% of the client's investment.
The term bucket shop came to apply to other types of scams, some of which are still practiced. They were typically small store front operations that catered to the small investor, where speculators could bet on price fluctuations during market hours. However, no actual shares were bought or sold: all trading was between the bucket shop and its clients. The bucket shop made its profit from commissions, and also profited when share prices went against the client.
Bucket shops were made illegal after they were cited as a major contributor to the two stock market crashes in the early 1900s."
We still have widespread chip and computer shortages, and in some regions of the world electricity shortages, because of the amount of silicon and energy being wasted on mining.
600,000 Brits died in 2019 from any cause, 1,643 per day:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/281488/number-of-deaths-...
When you're looking at 20-40 dying per day with COVID, its a completely negligible value, really a function of how widely the testing is being performed, and lower than the average annual deaths from influenza, which is about 70 per day:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1676118/
This whole thing is just fear porn from the COVID lockdown industry intent on keeping the charade (and their revenues) running as long as possible.