CoronaVirus ==> Empty Shelves

[FenceFurniture]

FenceFurniture, I'll gladly stay in your will if it involves a few tools or a stash of timber

Pfffft. That's all it involves. Well, currently there are three used, but excellent black cats (hmmm, not quite so excellent atm, one of them just barfed). And a very good vac pack machine.

[NeilS]

...and a pensioner now?

Wrong!

Having been a successful investor I'm self-funded.

Very unlikely to ever be eligible for the pension.

But, I don't like what you are IMPLYING.

I've been fortunate to be a net contributor to my country and now financially independent for whatever years I have left.

HOWEVER, not everyone is as fortunate. Through no fault of their own, others for whatever reason need our support to live above the poverty line and maintain their well being and self respect. I fully support that. As a society I believe we should be judged by how well our most in need are managing.

And, if I were a pensioner, I would be offended by your attempt to dismiss my views on that basis.

By all means challenge the ideas I express if you have issue with them.

But, please play the ball and not the person!

[artful bodger]

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[doug3030]

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So that's what BobL looks like with his mask off.

[DavidG]

One of the basic rules of a debate is to stick to the topic and do NOT attack the sender.

Someone has had their posts removed and if they continue baiting, will get a holiday....

DavidG Moderator...

[ian]

HOWEVER, not everyone is as fortunate. Through no fault of their own, others for whatever reason need our support to live above the poverty line and maintain their well being and self respect. I fully support that. As a society I believe we should be judged by how well our most in need are managing.

And, if I were a pensioner, I would be offended by your attempt to dismiss my views on that basis.

ah
the big statistical "elephant"

In most (all ?) western countries, poverty is defined in reference to a person's ability to purchase a basket of goods. If you have the income to purchase said basket of goods you are above the "poverty line", if not you are living below said line.
Over time the goods in the basket evolve.
I'm not entirely sure where the poverty line is currently defined in Australia, but with nearly everyone "working from home", we as a community can't be too far off that "basket of goods" including a mobile device for every household member and internet connectivity of a sufficient standard to allow for "working and schooling from home".

For a long time I've been critical that the NBN was more about delivering Netflix to every household than any other single factor. And I would question why the government was persisting down that path.
The current situation is leading me to reevaluate that opinion.
With nearly everyone now "working and schooling from home" the internet has become a basic service that needs to be both reliable and continually on, and part of the poverty line's "basket of goods".

The original NBN promise that 92% of households would get a 100 MB per second connection now appears totally inadequate. Let alone the adequacy of the 10-25 MB connections many now have. Back when I was still working, I estimated that the data I was then regularly using required a connection speed in the range of 1-2 GBit (each LAN had a "Steve's" drive connected to it servicing the building). The decay in connection speed, and the corresponding increased network congestion was particularly noticeable when "Steve's" drive went down in one building and you had to source the required data from another location via the WAN.


The Covid-19 virus is likely causing many to reclassify the internet into a basic good

[FenceFurniture]

The Covid-19 virus is likely causing many to reclassify the internet into a basic good

I'd call it an essential good (if that makes a difference).

Way back in the early days of this I was bemoaning the FizzaNet that we have been given. My platform has always been that we should have put in the absolute top whack available, even at cost of an additional $20B or more, because it needed to be able to cope with all the stuff we haven't thought of yet. An entire country working from home would be one of things. The need for Doctors to do whatever they might be able to do remotely would be another. A zoom meeting of 7 people must use up a lot of bandwidth in total.

Not hard to see that much more significant money than $20B may have to be spent on bringing the FizzaNet up to the speed of (say) New Zealand, in the not too distant future.

[Bushmiller]

HOWEVER, not everyone is as fortunate. Through no fault of their own, others for whatever reason need our support to live above the poverty line and maintain their well being and self respect. I fully support that. As a society I believe we should be judged by how well our most in need are managing.

Neil

Whilst not strictly on topic ( I do appreciate how we have arrived at this point) that is such a profound statement. It is not how many billionaires we have, but to reiterate:

" As a society I believe we should be judged by how well our most in need are managing. "

Regards
Paul

[BobL]

Well here it is folks (note the way CDC use the term cloth face covering - and not masks)
[CDC] Recommendation Regarding the Use of Cloth Face Coverings, Especially in Areas of Significant Community-Based Transmission

CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

Recommendation Regarding the Use of Cloth Face Coverings | CDC

But DT says he won't be wearing one !
Trump announces new face mask recommendations after heated internal debate - CNNPolitics

Also
CDC Now Recommends Americans Consider Wearing Cloth Face Coverings In Public : Coronavirus Live Updates : NPR

[BobL]

This might apply.
Donkey.jpg

[FenceFurniture]

This might apply.

"Might"?

[doug3030]

Not hard to see that much more significant money than $20B may have to be spent on bringing the FizzaNet up to the speed of (say) New Zealand, in the not too distant future.

Why?

NBN should NEVER have been rolled out in metropolitan areas the way it was. It was a waste of money. All the major players knew that wireless internet on Mobile Networks would be superior to NBN in metropolitan areas before the NBN rollout was complete. Cable areas should have never been touched as it has degraded the service. ADSL services within 4km "wire distance" of an exchange should not have been touched either. Fibre to the premises is an extravagant expense when you are only aiming to supply a speed of 100 anyway. Fibre to the node would have sufficed until it may have become necessary to upgrade to 1000 or whatever.

Telstra played the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government for fools by selling them their copper network and pits to install the NBN network in. That infrastructure was effectively worthless and left to decay before the government compensated them far more than what it was worth. They paid billions for worthless infrastructure and spent billions on "upgrading" it to something that is pretty much already out of date.

All that should have been done under NBN was to upgrade the metropolitan areas with sub-standard or no ADSL and then concentrate on the country areas. Replacing Cable and ADSL2 areas with NBN was a total waste.

The money that will be spent on improving Internet will be on wireless, and areas where 5G and its successors does not operate.

[Beardy]

Certainly not an area of my expertise but it has never made sense to be hardwiring with the ever improving wireless technology available

[Tccp123]

This article from today's Australian sums up my position perfectly:

I thought of my father, terminally ill with pulmonary fibrosis, when I heard of another victim of coronavirus this week.
He’s confined to his house, alone since my mother died four years ago. He relies on family and friends to shop for him; they wave through the window and leave him food on the doorstep.
I spoke to him as news came in of a 90-odd-year-old woman dying in a nursing home. He’s sick of the isolation and doesn’t want the time left to him to be spent in solitary confinement. His first great-grandchild was born six months ago and he fears he will never see the boy again.
“Look, son, I’m 88 in August,” he said, cheerfully. “I’ve had a good run. Whatever happens to me from now on, it’s not a f..king national tragedy.”
My father’s attitude is, he believes, not uncommon among his contemporaries, who understand the tough reality of old age. As he put it, with his winning sarcasm, “These people in nursing homes aren’t exactly snatched away in the prime of their lives, are they? Half of them don’t know they’re there, don’t even recognise their children when they visit.”
It’s brutal, but I’m sure he’s right. If you’re in an aged-care facility you’re not waiting to be discharged and sent home in a few weeks. You’re on your way out, and the exit’s probably not that far away. Coronavirus is speeding up the process, and it must feel overwhelming to the medical staff on the frontline. Which is precisely why they shouldn’t be making the decisions.
The health of a nation is not the sum of the health of its citizens. We require doctors and nurses to focus on their patients, but politicians need to take a broader view of the myriad components of a functioning, worthwhile society.
Sarcasm aside, when did life move from being precious to priceless? We lost 20 people to the disease in March. In the same month we lost another 13,000 or so to other ailments and accidents, but let’s not worry about them.
As more facts emerge about the virus, it looks as though it does most harm to the chronically sick or the elderly, as do most respiratory diseases. And when old age is combined with a pre-existing serious illness, you’re in real danger. So the high-risk group would be wise to take all precautions, withdraw from society if they wish, and resurface when there’s a vaccine. We could devote enormous resources to looking after them.
Instead, we are asking the healthy, most of whom will be no more than inconvenienced by this latest strain of flu, to sacrifice or cripple themselves, their livelihoods, their children’s future, to preserve people whose own future is already precarious and limited. Has anyone checked with the elderly, who tend to have a more sanguine outlook, to see if this economic suicide is what they want?
As individuals it’s excruciating to assign a value to human life, and happily few of us are obliged to do so; but as a society we make those calculations all the time. Our highway speed limit is 110km/h; we could reduce that to 20km/h and watch the fatalities tumble, but the inconvenience would be intolerable. We let people swim and surf (at least we used to) from wild, unpatrolled beaches, and sadly accept some of them will drown, measuring the pleasure of millions against the misfortune of a few.
We are always managing risk, but suddenly in this panic no risk, to anyone, is acceptable.
Even news organisations have adopted this position, their HR departments issuing earnest communiques that declare “the health and wellbeing of our employees is our paramount priority”. Sorry, since when? As part of my job I have been sent, and sent others, to war zones — yes, with bombs and bullets — to bring our readers the news. That’s what I thought our priority was as journalists. Now half my colleagues in the media have emerged as trembling amateur epidemiologists, scouring the online world to find the youngest and healthiest victim to ramp up the terror and prove this disease attacks anyone, not just the old and sick, when that’s manifestly not the case.
As Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, said last week, “people with no comorbidities can relax; you may feel funny but the mortality is incredibly low. The wider question is how we best manage people with comorbidities and keep them safe and out of hospital.” So far our leaders’ answer is to paralyse the country and the prospects of everyone in it.
In Sweden, never thought of as a nation of daredevils (they’re so safe they gave us ABBA and Volvos), the vulnerable are sequestered and cared for. They might have to sit things out until a vaccine is developed, while the rest of the people are visiting restaurants and bars, more or less as usual. So far it seems to be working.
No such luck here, though. Our reckless, hysterical governments tumble over each other to impose ever more ridiculous constraints on our liberty, supported by police forces that interpret their authority in a fashion sinister and absurd at the same time. And they have the audacity to quote “the Anzac spirit” as they order fit young men to cower in their trenches.
Some of us are not surprised that our elected leaders and their unelected enforcers have been found wanting, but what really shakes your faith in society is how meekly their ludicrous commands have been obeyed. Did anyone really think more than 500 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach represent a threat? And if so, why the same 500 limit around the corner at Tamarama’s beach, a fraction of the size? And why a zero limit now? Why can’t a solo sunbaker lie on the grass in a park without a police car moving him on? Why can’t a boat owner take a run up the coast? Why can I only buy “essential” goods? Will PC Plod soon be inspecting my shopping bags for truffles and Toblerone?
Save your comments; I know there will be plenty of people rushing to justify any extreme measure that “saves someone’s life”. The curtain-twitchers are busy in Britain, dobbing in neighbours who leave their houses twice a day or have their girlfriend over. They’ve adapted to their police state very comfortably. Fortunate, perhaps, that Churchill’s World War II promise that “we will fight them on the beaches” was never tested.
The driver of this madness is that the data we are working with, as has been pointed out by many epidemiologists, is fundamentally flawed. If we don’t know how many people have been infected, we don’t know the mortality rate. One of our panic-stricken pollies was on the radio on Monday warning people that even if they felt fine, they could be walking around spreading the disease. A disease with no symptoms that doesn’t make you ill? Terrifying.
But those symptom-free people will never be counted, just as all the people who have avoided burdening the hospital system with their minor coughs and sore throats will never be counted, so the mortality rate is inflated. So too in Italy and Spain, where everyone who dies with the disease is recorded as dying from it, no matter whether they have been wiping their feet on death’s doormat for months.
You don’t need to be good at maths or medically trained to realise all these numbers are wickedly inaccurate. If the infection can manifest itself with mild symptoms or none, how on earth can we declare how many are infected? How many run-of-the-mill flu infections go uncounted each year? I’ve never been sufficiently troubled by a cold or flu to go to the doctor, so I’ve never featured in any statistics. Perhaps I’m freakishly lucky, but I doubt it.
Instead we have a simple division sum, but one where the denominator may be out by a factor of a hundred, or a thousand. If one in every 12 people infected dies, that’s a nightmare. One in every 1200, with 99 per cent of them already gravely ill and of advanced age, it’s not so frightening. And are the millions thrown out of work a price worth paying?
John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University in the US, believes if we hadn’t given this new COVID-19 its own special scary sci-fi name and counted and tested it separately from ordinary colds and flu, “we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average”.
Instead, for many of our fellow citizens, this will be the year everything they’ve worked so hard for — their businesses, their savings, their jobs and dignity, their marriages, their sanity, their hopes and dreams and joy — evaporated.
One day we’ll emerge blinking into the economic wasteland we have wilfully created, but next year winter will come around again, and with it more flu, no doubt with another horror mutation.
So what will we do then? You can only kill yourself once.

[woodhutt]

Neil

Whilst not strictly on topic ( I do appreciate how we have arrived at this point) that is such a profound statement. It is not how many billionaires we have, but to reiterate:

" As a society I believe we should be judged by how well our most in need are managing. "

Regards
Paul

Well said, Paul. It's reminiscent of another quote that defines a true Democracy - not as a system that grants power to the majority, but how well that majority listens to minorities.

Another thing that should be borne in mind is that not everyone has internet access or a mobile phone. It has become prevalent here in NZ that you are now unable to contact any Government Agency (and a lot of NGO's too) other than by one of these means. Since retirement, I do not operate a mobile and recently tried to contact the IRD to sort out a tax code issue. I first tried their website which required me to open an "account". Reluctantly I did and began to follow the instructions to be able to lodge an enquiry. Then we got to the security check. "Please enter your mobile phone number." I have none and that's where the attempt stopped dead with the suggestion I ring the helpline. This I duly did and got a recorded voice asking me to key in my IRD number - done. "Next, we need a security check to verify you are who you say you are. Please state your mobile phone number." I don't have one. "Sorry we do not understand that response. Please state your mobile phone number..." End of call amid much swearing. The only phone number listed in the White Pges actually resulted in me talking to a very nice lady receptionist who said she was unable to put me through to anyone that could help and that I should call the very number I had just spent 15 frustrating minutes working through to a dead-end. So, back to basics, a snail mail letter (there is no email listed). I dug out the letter from IRD which advised me about the need to change my tax code and - lo and behold - no mailing address! Not a PO Box or Private Bag to be seen. So s...f 'em until this lockdown is over. Pete