[Jeff]

That seems to be about $2.26 per gallon in the States (3.78L).

[Mark]

Ah, so you are still paying a lot more. I looked today and its down another 10 cents to $1.09/gal.

I thought for sure it was going to start climbing higher when Trump announced he met with OPEC to stabilize prices and reduce output.

[Hank]

Well, since I'm in one of my moods … 23 cents of this are taxes, per liter, this includes the carbon tax, added by the facile Canadian government on 1. April.

Still, this is the lowest price for gas I know of (allowing for buying power, inflation etc.). Looks to me, Alberta is bleeding from a fatal wound. The OPEC+ fiasco and the Wuhan virus mania, wow.

My thoughts are with Alberta …


No, not an altered image; a creek in Toronto simply turned red.

[Jeff]

Poor Alberta. Never did fully recover from the 2014 oil price crash, and now they are hit again by COVID-19 as well as another oil price crash even worse than the first one. Probably going to be until 2030 before things get back to normal.

[Mark]

Now that governors have done the shutdown thing once, I wonder if they will have an itchy trigger finger and do it again for more minor outbreaks of something. How low will the number of affected people be to trigger it.

I wonder if Nancy Pelosi is loving all of this current crisis. Remember, she was the one that said its a shame people have to work to have healthcare. With government run care people could stay at home with their families and enjoy persuing their hobbies like painting or writing a book.

[Danukem]

https://nypost.com/2...by-coronavirus/

Extremely valuable doctors are being traumatized and put at risk or killed and no one is talking about how to protect them (I don't mean masks) and better allocate our resources. The vast majority of patients put on ventilators end up dying after being in a medically induced coma, sometimes for weeks. Those that survive typically have brain damage and other serious permanent damage. The time they spend dying is also torture on the families who can't even visit them. This is incredibly stupid and counterproductive. Patients over 50 who get to the point where they "need" a ventilator should be allowed to die or euthanized by specialists, freeing up resources and reducing the trauma to doctors who are now forced to watch them die and risk exposure to massive doses of the virus.

[Kyanos]

Mark, on 27 April 2020 - 02:49 PM, said:

Now that governors have done the shutdown thing once, I wonder if they will have an itchy trigger finger and do it again for more minor outbreaks of something. How low will the number of affected people be to trigger it.

Trooper Dan, on 27 April 2020 - 04:23 PM, said:

Patients over 50 who get to the point where they "need" a ventilator should be sent away or euthanized by specialists

The first step down a darker road, full of rabbit holes, watch your steps.

It is dangerous to be right when the king is wrong.

[Jeff]

Trump poisons people indirectly, more calls to poison control centers

[Hank]

@ Mark – to add to the suggestion O-Olga-O gave to myself (stop fighting this): the swift WW3 was/is fought without one bullet fired. The masses, world wide, including those in the US submitted willingly, joyfully and thankfully to their masters. Once one lowers oneself to a slave life – game over. Stop getting blinded by the virus scare campaign. Look on how you can take part when the spoils of war are divided up. Not now, but in a year or two, after the inevitable riots and mini uprisings are over with and peace rules with an iron hand.

[Radar]

The media has been lying to us this entire time. They keep telling us "flatten the curve", "flatten the curve", "flatten the curve". They say this means less people will die, because fewer people will get the virus. This is a lie. Rather, it will only serve to relieve the pressure on overworked hospitals. Maybe you think that's a noble goal, but regardless, this is the greatest act of government overreach since the Patriot Act. Flattening the curve will not save lives. Everyone will get the virus. Everyone who is going to die, will die anyway.

[Jeff]

Limiting your contact with people also slows the spread.

[Radar]

A slower spread, but no lives saved, all at the cost of millions of people out of work, and an increase in crime and suicide across the country.

I can sympathize though with people living in desperate areas. I can see how slowing down the deathrate can be a worthy tradeoff in places like Italy or New York, where the rapid death toll is completely destroying morale. But, the same people will die in the end. I'd wager the quarantine is actually killing more people.

[Danukem]

Slowing the spread was never a strong enough justification by itself for the loss of freedom and economic destruction, because, as Radar points out, it just means that the same number of people get sick and die, but more slowly (i.e. more spread out over time). The medical infrastructure argument is not especially strong either -- in fact in some ways doctors and nurses are better off if so many people get sick at once that most people can't get treatment. I mean, you're not going to get PTSD over the patients who stay at home because there was no room at the hospital!

Nevertheless, a lot of us with skeptical inclinations muted our protests for the first six weeks for other reasons: (1) We had hope that the government could rapidly ramp up testing and be able to do contact tracing, which had the potential to allow normal activity for most people. (2) We had hope that new treatments would emerge that effectively made the virus far less dangerous to those with serious symptoms, (3) each of us, personally, didn't want to get the virus because we were told that even if it didn't kill you it was way worse than the flu, and (4) we expected that the time would be used to gather and organize mountains of information for whatever plan unfolded next.

So how did that turn out? (1) There are too many people exposed and not enough testing capacity to feasibly do contact tracing. (2) Not much has changed as far as treatments (edit except remdesivir which improves outcomes by about 30% for the most critical cases). (3) apparently a large percentage of those infected are completely asymptomatic, and (4) There's more conflicting information than ever, and no viable plan has emerged.

And as the days drag on, there's no clear exit strategy for this extremely costly lockdown. Officials and experts still insist on framing the problem entirely as a health crisis due to the virus, as if freedom and the economy didn't matter at all. As I pointed out when the lockdown started, poverty kills people too, and it lowers quality of life.

EDIT: Also, I'm sorry to say this, but nursing homes are where people to go die. It's their last stop, and it's always been like that as long as there have been nursing homes. People in nursing homes should all be treated with dignity and protected, along with those who care for them. But the life expectancy for someone in a nursing home is very short. No one gave a rat's ass about the life expectancy in nursing homes before this outbreak. If the death toll from COVID19 was framed in terms of "expected years of life lost", so that a 48-year old loses 30 years by dying of it, then we would sure get a different picture, wouldn't we?

Quote

The average length of stay before death was 13.7 months, while the median was five months. Fifty-three percent of nursing home residents in the study died within six months. Men died after a median stay of three months, while women died after a median stay of eight months.

^And that was before COVID19

[Morpheus Kitami]

There's also rumblings that because of the way things were handled we could see an increase in food prices at the very least. I think it was Smithfield, but might be others, that are going to have quite a lot of pigs and chickens that can't be processed. Which means there's going to be less meat at stores, and people having shown great self-control, are going to strip the meat aisle bare again. At least despite the dairy section looking quite bare recently, that isn't a problem of supply...yet.

[Radar]

"If we save even one life, it's worth it." is the motto of the rogue.

[Jimmy]

The supply chain has already been crippled. The food shortage is already here, you just can't see it yet.

I was sent home from work today. They said we have to wear masks, and I refused. It's a stupid policy, and too little too late. I guess I have to find a new job.

[Danukem]

MARTYR, on 01 May 2020 - 08:30 PM, said:

I was sent home from work today. They said we have to wear masks, and I refused. It's a stupid policy, and too little too late. I guess I have to find a new job.

With respect I think that was a mistake. It's stupid to have to wear a dress shirt and tie in certain sales jobs but people do it anyway. You have to pick your battles and I hope you pick a different one and live to fight another day. It sounds like you could go back tomorrow if you agree to play ball.

[Kyanos]

MARTYR, on 01 May 2020 - 08:30 PM, said:

The supply chain has already been crippled. The food shortage is already here, you just can't see it yet.

You can see it, not at stores yet but in the price of a hog vs the price of butchered meat, %300 increase in cost of processing. Farmers can't afford to feed livestock that may never see the market.

MARTYR, on 01 May 2020 - 08:30 PM, said:

I was sent home from work today. They said we have to wear masks, and I refused. It's a stupid policy, and too little too late. I guess I have to find a new job.

My line is at forced vaccinations.

[Jimmy]

It's not a mistake. Give them an inch, they'll take a mile. They have no right to make medical decisions for me. It was prohibited for us to wear masks three months ago. Then they made it optional. That was fine.

Forcing the masks is the precedent for forcing the vaccines. "It's for your safety!" I'm so sick of hearing this fucking lie.

[Outtagum]

Wear this.

[Jimmy]

Nobody cared who I was until I wouldn't put on the mask.

[Jeff]

[Jimmy]

The funny thing is you're not allowed to wear a mask made out of a material other than cloth, even though they'd be "safer."

[Jeff]

Around 15 new cases of the virus yesterday from the store where I buy groceries. Holy shit, it's a hot zone!

[Morpheus Kitami]

Jesus Christ, how are you still alive? Someone harvest this man's organs because he's clearly an alien! Pun unintended.

Grocery stores are instituting a limit on the amount of meat you can buy...on certain items. Not everything yet, not the expensive items, just the cheap ones. We'll see how well that stops shortages.

[Forge]

Morpheus Kitami, on 05 May 2020 - 07:48 PM, said:

We'll see how well that stops shortages.

it won't
they're trying to force everyone to get soy-face

[Jeff]

Morpheus Kitami, on 05 May 2020 - 07:48 PM, said:

Jesus Christ, how are you still alive? Someone harvest this man's organs because he's clearly an alien! Pun unintended.

Grocery stores are instituting a limit on the amount of meat you can buy...on certain items. Not everything yet, not the expensive items, just the cheap ones. We'll see how well that stops shortages.

I stay inside 98% of the time.

The frozen vegetable section is cleaned out, and everyone's favorite...toilet paper and paper towels.

[High Treason]

Oy, you got a license for them garbage bags?


Yeah, so apparently now I can't throw out my trash at all. Wonderful. Will try again on Monday, will chain the bike at the end of the road and walk through him if he tries this again, given it's him blocking the public right of way. Shame he didn't call the cops, I wanted him to, they'd have told him to shut up.

[Mark]

I don't have the patience to watch the whole video. What was the issue? Over here when I go to the city dump I have to show my driver's license to prove I live in the city and thus not get charged for dropping off my garbage like out of town people would.

[Forge]

weird.
where i'm at it's either a flat fee for volume, or park on a scale in and out & pay by weight difference. They don't care about residency.