Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[iam416]

DeSantis is taking marching orders from PDJT and Vince McMahon. LOL.

And, still, LMMFAO @ Andrew Gillum as the next big thing. I mean -- seriously. In restrospect it looks even sillier than the Media's efforts to pump up Robert Francis.

[froot loops]

DeSantis is a Trump toady, that is not breaking news or anything . He only put in the shelter in place order because Mark Meadows urged him to. VKM calling Trump to let him keep on filming at the performance center is the simplest, correct scenario. VKM is on the council to open up the economy, he called Trump and Trump exerted his total authority as president. DeSantis isn't standing in the way of that plus Vince might not know who he is unless HHH told him.

I want to see the zoom call with VKM and the rest of the council to open up America. Watching the reactions of the other principals would be interesting. I'm sure the guy giving the rocket push to King Corbin is going to have a lot of great insight.

[Hannibal]

Florida has a case rate far below the national average and a death rate also far below the national average, despite having gone on lockdown later than the rest of the country and despite having been Grand Central Station for huge crowds practicing all kinds of social non-distancing behaviors last month. And also, despite having a huge elderly population. Maybe DeSantis is wise enough to not want to create 30% unemployment in his state for no discernable benefit.

Between Sweden and Florida we now have two very conspicuous cases where leaders were supposedly going to have blood on their hands and millions of dead grannies because they did not lock people in their homes soon enough. Go back and look at the headlines during Spring Break and how appalled everyone was that Florida was still open for business a month ago. And it's not as if we are still traveling the world in covered wagons and sailboats. A virus in one place gets spread everywhere within days, thanks to crowded airports and huge amounts of travel. Millions of people were flowing in and out of China long before Wuhan or anywhere else was shut down.

[froot loops]

Sweden has 1200 deaths, Finland has 64. I'm not sure you want to hang your hat on Sweden just yet.

[iam416]

The Florida point is fair. 100%. Sweden remains TBD. It doesn't compare particularly well to Norway (or Finland), but the snapshot is still pretty early.

Florida was definitely exposed and open and has not seen anything close to, say, M numbers. But, because Whitmer is doing everything the "right" people want, the media loves her and she's a potential VP pick. Meanwhile, DeSantis is a WWE Puppet (still, lmmfao). But the results certainly give a big fuck you to that narrative.

[froot loops]

Whitmer didn't do everything right, she was behind Governor Mike DeWine in making the correct decisions. Florida's cases are supposed to peak in late April, early May.

[Hannibal]

How is Sweden "TBD"? The results are in. This isn't cancer, where it takes years to build and detect. It takes two weeks. Maybe three. And with open borders we were all exposed within a few days of one another. We have more than enough time now and the data is building up enough to where we have a pretty good set.

[iam416]

she was behind Governor Mike DeWine in making the correct decisions.

By a day. And how far has DeSantis been behind Whitmer in his efforts to appease his squared-circle masters?

Again, it's 100% a fair point, whether you like it or not.

[iam416]

How is Sweden "TBD"? The results are in.

Because virus spread is big-number dependent. It never looks like anything until it does. 11,000 cases in Sweden now. Let's see where they are in 2 weeks.

And, look, man -- you can burn all the strawmen you want, but no one was proclaiming millions of deaths in Sweden, a country with a population of 10M. Assuming every motherfucking Swede caught the damn thing, at current predicted fatality rates, that's 200,000.

The most intriguing numbers to me are in India. There's no way that country should only be at 11,000 cases, but they are.

[iam416]

And as it relates to the United States, we're seeing roughly 2000 deaths per day with most higher population areas on some sort of lockdown. There's no earthly reason to expect that number to drop if we "open up" -- whatever that will eventually look like. That's what we're looking at. I don't see how anyone can just "meh" that argument away (just as I really don't see how folks can "meh" away the economic devastation we're trucking toward).

[Jeff Buchanan]

I thought we've been through this FL/Desantis/WWE thing pretty thoroughly with both sides making their points.

I'm telling you, Desantis is the cross hairs of his political opponents that includes the idiot crowd that is trying to resurrect disgraced Desantis's D gubernatorial opponent Andrew Gillum of the Miami Hotel Fiasco 2 months ago and FL's tone deaf liberal media that includes the Miami Herald. Outside of Miami-Dade Co., FL is a very conservative state.

A month ago, I reported here that the packed beaches narrative was a national media red-herring, a hit piece if you will that just wasn't accurate. The WWE thing is so unimportant in the scheme of things it is, as talent notes, laughable.

The last two press conferences I paid attention to that Desantis has held were packed with reporters asking antagonistic questions about the WWE thing but more antagonisitically about the SBA loan program, the PPP and UIB payments in FL.

Banks and the State's Unemployment Offices are struggling with this because both are simply overwhelmed. Way before the delays in filing and receiving benefits got to be a problem, Desantis had already moved to secure additional servers to handle the on-line app site crashing and brought in some 200 state employees employed in other jobs to be trained and to work in the UIB office. Reasonable people know that it takes several days to weeks to get all this up and running but noooooo. He didn't act fast enough. Fuck them.

As to Desantis being a Trump "toady," he is an R, he is a conservative, he's pro-business and has generally taken anti-welfare, anti-administrative state positions. Fine with me which is why I support him here. But he's not, personally, anything like Trump..... another reason I support him. You want to talk about a personality like Trump's? Take up the trump toady narrative over GA's governor, Brian Kemp.

[iam416]

I'm telling you, Desantis is the cross hairs of his political opponents that includes the idiot crowd that is trying to resurrect disgraced Desantis's D gubernatorial opponent Andrew Gillum of the Miami Hotel Fiasco 2 months ago and FL's tone deaf liberal media that includes the Miami Herald. Outside of Miami-Dade Co., FL is a very conservative state.

Re-quoted simply for an EFZ.

[Hannibal]

And, look, man -- you can burn all the strawmen you want, but no one was proclaiming millions of deaths in Sweden, a country with a population of 10M..

Not in Sweden, specifically, but if you scale down the hyperbole and the doomsday predictions to the appropriate level, then you still end up with more than 1,000 dead there and an infection rate that is actually far below the US average.

I'm not sure why you are expecting a time bomb to go off there. Kids are going to school. Restaurants are open. A month now after they were shut down here. The virus has had months to travel to and throughout Sweden. Ditto for Florida. In both cases, the case rates have been steady for about two weeks. Sweden FWIW did shut down lots of stuff, but not as much as us. IMHO they did it the right way and we should use that as a model for a partial reopen.

[froot loops]

By a day. And how far has DeSantis been behind Whitmer in his efforts to appease his squared-circle masters?

Again, it's 100% a fair point, whether you like it or not.

You got it wrong, DeSantis is not a puppet of VKM he is a puppet of Trump. He is a Trump toady, I'm positive VKM called Trump and then Trump ordered DeSantis to let them tape. If Trump told DeSantis to wear suspenders, he would comply. WWE was searching for places to tape incognito before it was deemed essential. It would be silly to think Trump and Vince didn't talk about it.

[iam416]

IMHO they did it the right way and we should use that as a model for a partial reopen.

So, I think almost everyone here is on roughly the same page -- the economic shutdown isn't sustainable and we need to figure out a way to re-open in a very sensible way. I'll note two problems (aside from whatever logistics/technical measures need to be in place):

First, politically speaking, politicians will own that and the Media is all about the "lockdown" right now. People will die and regardless of whether that's at all tied to the decision it still be "BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!" The way around that is a rough consensus. The EU is taking steps to re-open. States, I'm sure, are looking at it. If we all sort of take the same basic approach then the politics is significantly muted.

Second, and more importantly, people have to be willing to go back to "normal" life. I think that's going to be a really big hurdle to overcome. For example, you can reopen restaraunts, but are they actually going to reopen? Are people going to come? Are they going to come in numbers that matter?