Personally, I don’t believe it’s possible to rack up that amount of debt without precipitating horrific consequences. They’re either going to have to inflate it away - which will result in a dramatic drop in living standards, with the associated reduction in life expectancy - or they’ll keep pretending that everything is wonderful and it’ll all blow up in our faces.
The “we’re all going to end up on UBI” theory is a plausible endpoint for a bankrupt planet.
Same story everywhere.
It’s all essential 
You could be right. Plenty of support and ongoing trials.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/138316
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-04/guaranteed-income-gains-popularity-after-covid-19
No, we have dodged them because we never got to the point of widespread community transmission as has happened in other countries, despite several introductions/outbreaks. You will recall that.
I recall that and also the summer from hell and still not being able to travel in reality. At this stage it’s getting to be we are dodging the blank bullets.
It is, I suppose, no less ridiculous than printing money into existence as debt with interest attached, with nothing to underpin its value other than government say-so.
Economists have never been much interested in math, but apparently 1+1=2 can now be jettisoned as a minor irrelevance.
I actually support the idea of ensuring that nobody needs to fear being homeless or starving, but I think there are ways of doing that that don’t involve mathematical absurdities.
Yeah, so? You do understand my point right?
Yes but I also feel like we are not living well here over the last year so not really dodged it totally. Too many restrictions bringing quality of life down .
That has nothing to do with my point. I was talking about natural immunity. There was an article above I was responding to, maybe you didn’t see it. I was wondering what you thought about it actually. It’s a bit old
The idea that TW has largely dodged the COVID bullet due to either natural or some other method of immunity has long been interesting to me. I was introduced to the TW natural immunity idea by a Taiwanese, but I soon wrote it off after realizing how many expats there are in Taiwan, expats either living in the same society as taiwanese or living in a parallel society bubble, and how the virus has not noticably circulated among them here either.
Not to mention COVID is def a problem in China, obviously a place where many people have the same or very similar genetic background as many Taiwanese. So yeah, so much for that theory it seems.
I then - as I am sure others here have - thought, hmm, what if there was something in Taiwanese diets or daily routines that is serving as some sort of COVID prophylactic, something that pretty much everyone here gets exposed to (or less likely, eats, such as stinky tofu 
) day in, day out. Again, no evidence of a spike in cutural/geographical bubbles that would be likely to miss this exposure here though. I guess the exposure would have to be completely pervasive/penetrating (?) for this to have any credibility
I guess one of these theories could be true, and enough of the population is immune here so as to defacto protect the vulnerable - either genetically or via lifestyle/lack of covid prophylactic exposure - from harm. Virus can’t metastisize in a population if not enough targets to latch onto right? I am all for public policy like mask-wearing in high-traffic areas such as the MRT, but let’s be real here, anti-Covid proliferation is a game of whackamole that even the best countries with similar strict regulations have tried and failed at. People are not only coming to Taiwan legally and via airports, where obviously there are highly effective regulations in place… Still to this day I have no idea how this place continues to be on top of this virus enough to evade long-term community transmission…
Why do the politicians have to exaggerate the numbers?
Not only that, but we had an actual outbreak that resulted in the deaths of 5% of confirmed cases.
Because the whole charade would fall to pieces if they didn’t?
“COVID deaths” are the figures that really annoy me. A whole bunch of health authorities have quietly released figures showing the true rate of death due to COVID, which is somewhere between 1% and 10% of the declared numbers, depending on precisely how much weight you give to comorbidities. And yet the politicians and the media continue to holler about the “death within 28 days of a positive test” figures; and worse, the statisticians continue to use that inherently-dishonest metric.
Right! Wow I did forget that. Much higher than global average. Amazing to me the genie was put back into bottle here. TW dodging and continuing to dodge this really could be simply chalked up to excellent policy. Definitely less conspiratorial of an angle, but also still blows my mind - Covid is fantastic at finding and whittling away at a country’s weakest link.
But don’t tell that. It’s a secret. The narrative being pushed is that COVID is not a big deal and that 98% 99% 99.9% 99.99% or wherever the goalpost is.
Oh those other 4.99% of people that died? They don’t matter. They were too old or too fat or something something should change health overnight or get younger magically or die anyways something something.
You might want to have a look at the actual statistics for yourself, instead of just making stuff up. They’ve been out there for two years.
Like I said, these statistics are only as a result of the interventions. Hardly any country let Corona let run wild and free without vaccinations.
We’ve seen what effective measures look like in Taiwan. We’ve seen what outbreaks can look like.
There are no places that have tested 0 interventions. So you can’t say that with certainty. We can’t change the past and retest. So you can’t tell me with certainty that COVID kills less than 0.01% of people, because there are no statistics available that shows COVID through a population where the action was to simply do nothing. Because no populations exist.
I am honestly curious @finley, why do you think it is Taiwan has been safe from Covid for so long with only a few minimal/containable outbreaks?
Specifically Taiwan please - as it being such an outlier should be of great interest to you.
I’ve mentioned this several times here, and of course been ridiculed for it. The evidence globally is that most people are naturally immune to a wide variety of coronaviruses, at least to a level sufficient to ensure they aren’t killed by a “novel” variant. The variance between national statistics is probably due to a whole bunch of things, but one of them must surely be differences in the way data is collected.
Yes. I find it very interesting. I find it even more interesting that absolutely nobody considers it worthy of a research project. You would think somebody, somewhere, would want to know exactly what is going on in Taiwan, and why.
My hunch is that it’s a combination of several different factors:
Old people in Taiwan frequently die of respiratory disease. It’s considered “normal”. Given a government policy of “Taiwan doesn’t have COVID”, it’d be a brave doctor who decided to put “COVID” on a death certificate.
Taiwanese people are reasonably healthy. Metabolic syndrome - which is one of the top three risk factors for complications arising from any respiratory disease - is quite rare here. A fair number of people enjoy (moderate) exercise in the outdoors, including old people, and that must have had a positive impact.
Despite Marco’s protestations to the contrary, death-by-COVID (and nothing but COVID) is incredibly unusual in the global experience. If deaths were counted in Taiwan in the historically-normal manner, then someone dying of pneumonia as a consequence of general ill-health would have had his death recorded as due to the underlying disease. The West is racking up thousands of “COVID deaths” because they’re counting positive tests at death; as even the authorities point out, this is not even close to being the same thing as ‘died of COVID’.
Taiwan never did proper lockdowns, opting instead for a mishmash of other measures that stopped short of locking people in their houses. Since the most aggressive transmission occurs between people locked indoors with family members, lockdowns elsewhere almost certainly precipitated waves of infection that would not ordinarily have happened.
In short, I don’t think Taiwan is or was any more “safe from COVID” than anywhere else, but it looks like a spectacular success in the context of the gross failure of policy and pathological distortion of the facts in other countries. Objectively, our experience has probably been similar to Japan or Korea (given certain similarities in the terrain). In other words, I suspect COVID is here but has never “taken hold” in waves because the conditions were not right for such waves to occur. For one reason or another (unrelated to anything the CECC has done), R has hovered somewhere around 1.
It goes without saying that I’m just handwaving here. I’m disappointed that nobody has attempted to get to the bottom of this. The idea that it was down to clever quarantining, masks, etc etc just doesn’t seem plausible. Plenty of other competent authorities did the same things, and more - and it didn’t work.