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I dunno how useful those graphs actually are. The Germany graph shows a massive dip in excess mortality up to -10000 in mid-march. That sounds questionable.
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On November 27 2020 18:53 Simberto wrote:I dunno how useful those graphs actually are. The Germany graph shows a massive dip in excess mortality up to -10000 in mid-march. That sounds questionable. Could be the effect of working from home/lockdown before the initial spike in covid cases starts resulting in deaths since those naturally lag behind.
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On November 27 2020 19:09 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2020 18:53 Simberto wrote:I dunno how useful those graphs actually are. The Germany graph shows a massive dip in excess mortality up to -10000 in mid-march. That sounds questionable. Could be the effect of working from home/lockdown before the initial spike in covid cases starts resulting in deaths since those naturally lag behind.
Unlikely since most of the negative excess deaths are from January/February which is probably before there were much restrictions anywhere outside of Wuhan. I think most likely is just a very mild flu season so if 10k fewer people died that winter from the flu than a typical winter there would be negative 10k excess deaths
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On November 27 2020 19:09 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2020 18:53 Simberto wrote:I dunno how useful those graphs actually are. The Germany graph shows a massive dip in excess mortality up to -10000 in mid-march. That sounds questionable. Could be the effect of working from home/lockdown before the initial spike in covid cases starts resulting in deaths since those naturally lag behind.
Working from home means less exposure to all kinds of dangerous situations beside the kitchen. Less traffic accidents for example.
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I hope the possibility to work from home will continue well past covid times and become a norm. So many benefits that come from not commuting. I really hope there will not appear idiots to lobby for work from office because they need jobs in public transportation, selling cars or renting offices.
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Well the side effect of remote work is (and this is alrady discussed in my company for example) that You dont actually need to hire people from major cities. If You dont come to office anyway there is no reason to hire people living in London/Berlin/Frankfurt etc. and pay them wages according to local standards. You can instead hire people from across the country (or even from diffrent countries) and pay them a lot less.
If there is a massive switch to remote work incoming this will also bring major soci-economic changes to many countries.
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Comprehensive data on excess deaths outside the US: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
The z-scores by country are very insightful. Some countries have very high excess deaths, some don't, some even have lower than expected deaths (all compared to previous years). Germany, Norway and Greece would be examples of exceptionally well performing countries, whereas Spain and the UK performed exceptionally poorly. It's quite clear that countries that already had high excess rates in previous years had even higher excess rates in 2020, whereas most countries that didn't use to have excess rates before also don't tend to have excess rates this year. This seems like potentially useful information for future predictions.
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It's interesting to consider that over the next several years COVID will be responsible for negative excess deaths. By the sheer fact that so many people, especially those with advanced age, have died this year there will be fewer of them dying over the next several years.
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On November 27 2020 20:06 arbiter_md wrote: I hope the possibility to work from home will continue well past covid times and become a norm. So many benefits that come from not commuting. I really hope there will not appear idiots to lobby for work from office because they need jobs in public transportation, selling cars or renting offices. Don't worry, Deutsche Bank has already called for a 5% tax on home workers to punish them for their selfishness in not commuting to the commercial real estate that Deutsche owns and buying lunch from the CBD businesses that Deutsche has loaned money to.
There will be a lot of that nonsense going around in a year or two. We need to be ready to fight it.
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On November 28 2020 10:07 JimmiC wrote: Don't worry all those that had delayed tests, surgeries and so on will make up the difference. Yeah I suspect they might. If there is a drop in deaths in years to come it will likely be because of working from home becoming more common and generally accepted resulting in less accidents, not because of a portion of the elderly having died.
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On November 28 2020 12:43 Belisarius wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2020 20:06 arbiter_md wrote: I hope the possibility to work from home will continue well past covid times and become a norm. So many benefits that come from not commuting. I really hope there will not appear idiots to lobby for work from office because they need jobs in public transportation, selling cars or renting offices. Don't worry, Deutchse Bank has already called for a 5% tax on home workers to punish them for their selfishness in not commuting to the commercial real estate that Deutchse owns and buying lunch from the CBD businesses that Duetchse has loaned money to. There will be a lot of that nonsense going around in a year or two. We need to be ready to fight it.
That is just so absurdly stupid. "We should tax those people because they don't spend their money the way we think they should!"
Working from home is such a huge net benefit to society because it reduces waste. If someone is just as effective at home as they are in an office building, why does society need that office building? Why do we need to waste resources on transporting people to places where they don't need to be at?
Their "contribution" to society is the work they do. How they spend their money is not their contribution. Also, i don't see Deutsche Bank lobbying for a tax on automation. You could use all the same arguments there. Robots don't need to commute, robots don't buy lunch anywhere.
Oh, and trickle-down. Shouldn't the money the people don't have to spend on transportation eventually trickle down into the economy anyways? After all, if rich people get shitloads of money, it is supposed to do that.
Finally: Deutsche Bank. Not Duetchse or Deutchse. It was even written correctly in the link you used, just copy the spelling of a foreign word from a place that uses it correctly instead of just making up your own spelling on the fly.
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It's similar to the shrieking about EVs freeloading on road maintenance because they don't pay fuel tax. It's a very juvenile view of how taxes work. Nobody taxes X to pay for Y transactionally, we just tax the things we want to discourage and give breaks for the things we want people to do.
The fact that this has come from a bank makes the ulterior motive pretty obvious. It's not like DB can pretend it doesn't understand tax. They just want governments to help them seek their rent. The virus has exposed this kind of corporate straw-clutching in a lot of different places.
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For all its flaws and incompleteness, one of the benefits of MMT (and other heterodox approaches to economics) is that people are starting to rethink the assumptions underlying the financial mechanisms that make government and society work. What taxes do and don't do, and their relation to government spending, are some of the highlights.
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COVID-19 just killed my Hawaii vacation just like it killed my Japan vacation earlier this year. Hawaii was accepting tourists as long as you took a COVID test within 72 hours of your flight and it came back negative. If the test wasn't resulted by the time you arrived in Hawaii you had to stay in your hotel until the test came back negative. A few days ago the governor decided that he wanted the test to come back before your flight even departed and if it didn't result before your flight you have to quarantine for 14 days even if the test comes back negative. Of course there is no logical reason for why you'd have to keep quarantining if your test comes back negative so it's obviously done just to disincentivize people from flying before their test is resulted.
Anyway, I didn't find out about the rule change until late last night after I had taken my COVID test in the afternoon. My flight is tomorrow afternoon and I doubt my test will be back in time considering it was done over the holiday weekend. I still have a shot by rescheduling my flight to Tuesday morning but I don't know if I will make that window either. The backup plan is just canceling the whole trip and going to Cabo or Cancun.
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So travelling and going on vacations at the peak of a pandemic comes with risks and uncertainties. Noted.
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On November 28 2020 09:29 BlackJack wrote: It's interesting to consider that over the next several years COVID will be responsible for negative excess deaths. By the sheer fact that so many people, especially those with advanced age, have died this year there will be fewer of them dying over the next several years.
Indeed, but some countries actually has fewer excess deaths this year because of covid-19 measures.
Death is such a taboo in today's society. People of all ages die horrible deaths because of a multitued of illnesses all the time all over the world, but we don't care unless we know them, identity with them or they were infected with covid-19.
One thing which really scares me during this is how easy it has been to swing the public opinion for politicians. They blatantly contradict themselves, but people and media follow suit far too much, especially for controversial topics like closing schools, lockdowns, limiting the freedom of movement and shutting down travel and entire industries.
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