LOL Stimulus check. It's an advance on next year's return which means most folks give the government interest free loans all year long. Just means you'll be $1200 poorer at tax time next year, in a country where a large chunk of people couldn't withstand a $400 emergency. Kicking the can down the road.

Not correct (at least on the advance part)

Yeah, it's not an advance. It's free money to people that hardly pay any taxes anyways.

Don't want to kick the sick guy when he's down, but the stimulus check is not taxable income. Since the Federal reserve is monatizing the debt, eventually the Chinese will have to accept being stuck with worthless electrons. And any other non-US country buying Treasuries.

It was a real stretch of logic to say restrictions on drinking shout down bars and liquor stores. The proper analogy would be Prohibition or dry counties decreed in the name of public safety.


The above pricks should know tt's called tithing and far more worthy use of 10% than your local LSD dealer.

I'm reading that it's a tax credit, not a tax refund in advance.

I can take a kick, just not in the chest.

I thought I'd read that the stimulus was merely an advance on your tax return for next year, but I can't tell you which day of the week it is right now, so take it for what it's worth.

Oh and because someone asked: no cough as of now. Part of the reason I got sent that contraption I had to put together was to do breathing exercises to help keep my lungs open so that I don't develop a cough or worse.

3:20pm. Nap time.

How do you know that the effect on alcohol sales is to only close 0.01% of small businesses? You are pulling that number out of thin air. If DUI enforcement was nonexistent there would be far more people willing to drive out to their local bars and consume more than a few drinks in a night. Single establishment bars are known to fail quite often in their first year. I grant you that the two acts would not harm the economy to the same degree, but I do not grant you that act B is 2500 times more harmful.

But to the question of the overall point, the point is that when a disease is this infectious and deadly then the reasons for implementing act B *DO* carry a whole heckuva lot more weight than reasons for implementing act A. Strict enforcement of DUI laws (i.e. using the 0.08 standard rather than the "I noticed you crashed your car into a tree" standard we used to have) has reduced the death toll from 25,000/year to 10,000/year according to the article below. In the case of COVID-19, the public health response options determine the difference between a few thousand deaths and a couple million deaths. So while act A saves 15,000 lives in a year, act B can save 1.9 million lives. I consider that a whole heckuva lot more weight.

https://www.guardianinterlock.com/bl...-driving-1970/

Furthermore, I am not saying that our only response is to kill our small businesses. I am not the one saying that we should give American Airlines and Boeing grants in the billions while the Small Business Loan program gets tapped out in its first week. The ideal scenario is to set up a way for life to pause as much as possible and defer things like commercial loans while we wait for the risk to pass. Hopefully this experience will help our society design those sort of plans in case we experience another pandemic during our lifetimes.

FWIW, I did exactly grab the 0.01% vs 25% out of thin air. They weren't meant to be an accurate portrayal, they were simply an illustration of how you can't compare things that likely have had very different effects (i.e I'm not saying that having DUI laws / etc. hasn't had an effect, I'm saying their effect is incredibly nominal compared to this case).

I'm also not saying to not do what we're doing either. If the difference between what we're doing and any other method is a couple million deaths, then you're right, that certainly is a good reason for, but at the same it also has to be balanced against the cost (just like anything else). So I'm just wondering if it's the best way. I don't really know.

Gcluelesspros/consnoobG

Lipstick on a pig.

People that think GG's poker strategy posts are bad really need to check out his posts ITT.

Full disclosure, part of my perspective comes from the fact that I find DUI and open container laws to be more intrusive in comparison to other laws we have for public safety. I've always been a bit annoyed that I can't drink a beer while I'm sitting in traffic because public safety but there was nothing legally stopping my senile grandfather from ramming his car into a convenience store because he mixed up pedals (he didn't actually do this, but that was only because my dad physically prevented him from leaving the house). I guess it has a lot to do with voter turnout for different demographics as well as lobbying activities for some freedoms and not others.

get free handjobs? Pretty sure he's working on it.

I'm betting that reading the news and 2p2 are probably the worst things you could do for your health right now, except maybe drinking a banana-coronavirus smoothie

They're reminiscent of when Candace Owens says she doesn't believe in climate change after she says she knows nothing about the topic. Like her statement, "The climate changes everyday why are we talking about it?" Is exactly the, "The flu has been around forever why are we worried about this thing?"

They're talking on completely different levels because the 2nd person doesn't even have a basic enough understanding of the topic they're so opinionated on that their opinion is utterly nonsensical.

Her talk here with Joe is pretty much the same thing. "I'm no expert and have no knowledge, but I refuse to change my uninformed opinion."

I was coming up empty on diplomatic ways of putting it, so thanks I guess?

I'd say there's very little evidence that draconian DUI laws have reduced the # of accidents. There is evidence that have a bare bones prohibition on DUI has affected driving. But again it's dubious that that actually shut down bars (and their business would logically be transferred to a liquor store for those who didn't become teetotalers once DUI became a thing). But I suspect it wouldn't matter because you aren't reading.


The confusion of correlation and causation among Corona Cassandras is quite analogous to climate hawks.

I believe it is an advance on a tax credit for 2020. There is also no clawback provision so what you get now you get to keep even if your income for 2020 is outside the $99k cap.

Says the guy who advocates giving money to predatory con men.

i will never tip garrick in MasonCoin when the new forum rolls out

maybe a dollar

Forget about ever leading scientist in the world, every doctor, any one with a brain understandings it’s the best/only way. Don’t take 5 minutes to read a bit on it. Fine

But, you have to know a bit about Trump. Do you have an iota of doubt he would shut things down if this wasn’t the only way? Even HE gets it.

What finally got to the President is someone showed him a picture of his local NYC hospital with a bunch of refrigerator trucks outside. He was told that was for the all the dead bodies they had and expected in the next week or so.

I am reading, and agree that it doesn't matter.

Glglglglgl

It is spurious to argue that "ever leading scientist in the world, every doctor, any one with a brain understandings it’s the best/only way." Even if we get rid of the obvious hyperbole, there is not an agreement among scientists and doctors that the current approach is the best response even right now (though most do), much less indefinitely. It's definitely not the only way. Many experts actually think we should be more restrictive than we currently are.

GG's point is 100% correct, imo. There is a level of risk that society is willing to accept, and it does vary based on what type of risk we are looking at. Where the scales balance depends on severity of risk, scariness of risk (not the same thing as measurable severity), perceived personal responsibility of those at risk (i.e., how much they "bring it on themselves"), cost of mitigation, etc.

Right now, it is the scariness and (even more so, imo) the uncertainty of what the risk factor really is that are driving the general consensus that these mitigation measures are worth it. As those factors change and as cost of mitigation builds, that consensus is likely to change.

Where that balance is, no one really knows. And anyone who claims that they do is full of it and really just arguing that it should be a certain way. Good luck with convincing everybody that "anyone with a brain agrees with me."