Good reliable rail is good. High speed rail is the only replacement for air travel though. If you have two large cities 3h by car apart, you can just barely beat that by flying (depending on how big the airport is and whether it's reasonable secureity e.g. come to airport 30min before departure or TSA style 2 hours before). A train is often longe than the highway.
You don't even necessarily need special high speed rail, just more rail makes it more high speed because you can mix slow and fast traffic (e.g. no-stop direct trains can run side by side with freight and services that makes 10 stops).
Speed doesn't have to come up so much to at least beat road traffic.
China relies on rail, and a lot of high speed rail, to move their massive and increasingly mobile population. We no longer need to speculate on whether high speed passenger rail can substitute for a lot of air travel.
"...let the market figure it out" would work in a market that isn't already so strongly shaped by subsidies, regulations, and nationalist protectionism.
Autonomous vehicles will have a very large and currently underestimated impact on all kinds of other modes of transportation, but there is a wide range of expert views on when that will happen.
Even slow trains are a good means of transport. I much prefer a train to buses and cars.
I think high speed rail could be potentially a game changer for the job market. In the UK if you could easily commute in from Birmingham or Newcastle then London salaries would be more accessible outside London.
Korea will have to remain on alert, forever, as their population has no established immunity. A vaciine may never come - there is no influenza vaccine (it mutates every season).
Plus, there are grim, yet economic, benefits if the sickest and most elderly die from Coronavirus, in the form of long-term savings on pensions and healthcare. This should be taken into account in strategic national planning.
The UK approach seems the most sensible - keep the economy and society functioning, and recommend that the most vulnerable practice self-isolation. Better to isolate those who are not participating in the productive economy (ie. the sick and elderly) than the entirety of the population.
If you consider a simplistic economic model then there should be no public pensions or healthcare at all. The moment that somebody's direct economic output falls below a defined threshold, be it due to retirement, illness, lack of retraining in a changing job market, then they represent a liability to be efficiently removed.
Fortunately more sophisticated approaches are generally followed, since in practice humans aren't simply worker ants or feedstock for Solyent Green.
Cannot disagree more strongly with your point! No, the economic benefit of “having the sickest and most elderly die” should most definitely not be taken into account in strategic national planning.
Every life is precious. This line of thought is exactly what lead the Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands they considered an economic burden.
And if the worst case occurs, with millions of elderly and immunocompromised dying, there are billions in potential savings in pensions and old-age healthcare, as well as improvements in housing affordability and overall reductions in national CO2 emissions.
Agreed, we need to just push onwards and all will be back to normal in 12 months.
The facts remain that children, young adults, adults and even elderly without comorbidities will survive. Deaths are still restricted to those with existing health problems, particularly the elderly.
From an economic perspective, this is the perfect pandemic. We should maintain all schooling and social activities to spread the virus as far and rapidly as possible, to gain herd immunity as quickly as possible. The vulnerable can self-isolate.
The savings in pensions and long-term healthcare for the elderly, as well as a reduction in housing prices owing to the deceased estates, will promote an economic boom that may even - in the long term - offset the short terms costs we are facing right now.
You can imagine a situation where the USA has survived the virus and gained mass immunity, with 5% of its elderly population perishing along the way, giving the USA a long-term advantage due to lower payroll taxes, versus Europe who shut down early, have continual flareups due to lack of herd immunity, and continue with a heavy taxation burden due to elderly losses of only 0.5%.
WTF? Maybe we could just shoot all the old people now and get even a quicker competitive advantage? (yes, it's sarcasm but this line of thinking is evil).
The big advantage could be finally moving the PSU out of the case, and having it as just an external power brick. This will make systems significantly lighter and smaller (and thus more portable), take heat out of the case, and improve airflow.
You can already buy 330w laptop chargers - just beef them up and you could easily run a mid-grade gaming PC.
How many younger people in Italy are in intensive care? More than somebody, THAT I can tell you.
What happens when there're not enough places in intensive care units - something that is ALREADY HAPPENING in Lombardy?
We don't know yet what is happening. We don't know mortality. Several EU countries have no data or release no data about intensive care units.
But, for once, Italy is reacting quickly, even though it's got some issues (e.g. the leak to the press before the law passes). Don't play this down. WHO and others are calling for preparedness. We're taking the necessary steps. Is the world doing the same?
> This is an extreme overreaction for a disease which is only fatal to the elderly
I find this an incredibly offensive thing to say. This is unempathetic to an insane degree. I hope when you're elderly people treat you with more respect than you treat others with.
Beyond that, it's incorrect. There are fatalities in younger age groups, just at a much lower rate. Once ICU and ventilators are exhausted, the fatalities in all age brackets (except children) does go up.
The issue is the high percentage of patients that require intensive care, with up to 5% needing respiratory support. This can very easily overwhelm local health systems, and cause a knock-on effect to health support to the rest of the community. The best defence governments have right now is to try and slowdown the progression of the disease, and quarantining entire regions has already been shown in China to be an effective way of doing that.
Only fatal for the elderly seems a bit over-simplistic. The link you provided doesn’t indicate how many cases the younger population has. Also, why is it an overreaction? Elderly people should be protected too.
The solution is simpler than that which is to remove high-denomination notes from circulation and provide all citizens with free bank accounts. Eventually, just move to cashless transactions entirely.
The bigger problem in countries like Greece though is that the tax burden is immense, for example the sales tax rate is 24%. This creates a huge incentive to avoid the tax. This windfall is then either wasted on corruption or spent on healthcare and pensions for the elderly - ie. not services that the taxpayer can immediately or personally access.
Sales tax, company tax, and flat income tax rates around 10%, with no payroll taxes, seem like a better and more sustainable way to go. Flat taxes in Eastern Europe have actually seen tax payments and compliance go up, even with lower and non-progressive rates.
My biggest concern about CO2 is the cognitive impact it has on humans - at levels 800ppm and higher, mental performance is impacted. It will take a while for the atmosphere to reach this level (hopefully it never does), but it is common inside houses and offices. As atmospheric CO2 rises, it becomes more difficult to ventilate buildings, and human mental performance degrades.
In terms of geoengineering, it seems like these two are our best bets:
In any case it seems absolutely bonkers that we are still selling fossil-fueled-vehicles and building coal power plants when we clearly have the technology and capability to replace both of them.
The amazing thing about stratospheric aerosol injection is that fully negating the effect of global warming would cost less than $5 billion per year.[1] That's less than 0.01% of world GDP. That's cheap enough for a single major country to unilaterally take on itself.
In contrast going fully carbon neutral would cost the economy at least 100 times that amount. And even then it would still result in some amount of warming between 1.5-3 C. Plus require multilateral commitment from nearly every country.
To me the calculus seems to strongly favor forgetting about carbon mitigation completely. Instead just focusing on immediately starting aerosol injections. The tech already exists and is ready to be deployed. Starting sooner will give us time to get better at using it, and discover any potential pitfalls.
Then in 100 or 200 years, we can switch over to more advanced geoengineering that fully and permanently scrubs carbon out of the atmosphere. Aerosol injection would act as a stopgap measure until the carbon-scrubbing is cost-effective.
The 2% figure is misleading, mortality is overwhelmingly restricted to the elderly and particularly those with existing health problems:
PRE-EXISTING CONDITION DEATH RATE*
Cardiovascular disease 10.5%
Diabetes 7.3%
Chronic respiratory disease 6.3%
Hypertension 6.0%
Cancer 5.6%
no pre-existing conditions 0.9%
AGE DEATH RATE*
80+ years old 14.8%
70-79 years old 8.0%
60-69 years old 3.6%
50-59 years old 1.3%
40-49 years old 0.4%
30-39 years old 0.2%
20-29 years old 0.2%
10-19 years old 0.2%
0-9 years old no fatalities
Shutting down the economy and quarantining whole areas will do more harm than the virus. Tens of thousands of Americans already die of the flu and Coronavirus us just a very virulent form of that.
I realise that its grim to talk about, but there may actually be economic benefits from the very sickest dying from the virus and thus relieving the burden of large pension and healthcare expenses.
The annual death rate in the USA is 2.8m. The virus will spread throughout the biosphere and become a standard part of the human virus paradigm, like the common cold or flu.
The best than can be done is to manage and stage its extent as much as possible, to avoid overwhelming healthcare services all at once. The Japanese seem to have the same idea.
Cases should be triaged and medical resources dedicated to those aged 50 and lower, who are still working and in generally good health.
The US pension system across many states, companies, and the federal Government itself is unsustainable, so this virus may be the key to bring those programs back into proper operation. Cities like Chicago will face a huge relief as Coronavirus spreads and lessens their pension burden.
Additionally, the housing freed up could be used by younger people and families, dramatically improving the quality of life for much of society. Inheritances could be used by younger generations to invest in businesses or upgrade personal living situations.
Lower pension and healthcare expenditure will allow lower taxes, perhaps allowing the elimination of payroll taxes.
The deaths will be tragic but from a purely economic perspective Coronavirus looks like a major opportunity for Western societies to de-age. We are very lucky that unlike other Pandemics, this virus is restricted to the sick and elderly, and barely impacts the young and healthy, unlike say the Spanish Flu.
On the premise that this virus does become standard, I've been wondering whether post infection you have a better immunity towards other related SARS-like viruses in the future? In which case, would there potentially be a net positive if SARS-like viruses no longer have the same effect?
Is it possible that this could be like getting chickenpox young and protecting you from worse things (measles as adults) in the future?
(note: I know nothing when it comes to health related issues like this so I'm assuming it's completely naive thought since I haven't seen anyone else mention anything similar)
The coronavirus family includes SARS, MERS, COVID-19, and 4 viruses that cause the common cold. Coronavirus causes about 15% of common colds per year. If you don't get SARS immunity from the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, it's unlikely that you'd get it from COVID-19.
Curious, do you know how it is that a vaccine could potentially be developed for Wuhan coronavirus, whereas the common saying goes, “there’s no cure for the common cold”?
The reason there's no cure for the common cold is that the common cold is caused by ~200 different viruses. You can vaccinate against the individual viruses, which prevents infection from that particular strain only.
There are additional complications in that many cold viruses generate only partial or temporary immunity, and the immunity wears off in a couple years. Also that coronaviruses mutate fairly quickly (though not as quickly as influenza, another illness that's caused by a family of viruses rather than a single one and generates only temporary immunity). I've heard that coronaviruses are also fairly hard to develop vaccines for because of technical reasons that I don't really understand.
But if your goal is partial, temporary immunity to protect against a circulating pandemic - similar to a flu shot - it's theoretically possible. That partial, temporary immunity is why adults get fewer colds than children do - they already have immunity to many of the cold viruses circulating within the local population.
The common cold is just a phrase said when you have a mild unknown respiratory infection. If you could narrow down the cause you could devise a vaccine, but you would have to find all the possible forms and then get vaccines against those also if your goal is to not get some version of the common cold.
It's a very virulent form of SARS not influenza. It's not related to the flu at all. [0]
>I realise that its grim to talk about, but there may actually be economic benefits from the very sickest dying from the virus and thus relieving the burden of large pension and healthcare expenses.
What an optimistic perspective... I would think that this is more likely to over burden our already fragile health care systems in the short to medium term though.
Ex: You're 35, but you have asthma and high blood pressure.
Does that mean your mortality rate is 12.7%?
Also, your list says:
> no pre-existing conditions 0.9%
and
> 10-19 years old 0.2%
Does that mean a teenager with no pre-existing conditions has 1.1% mortality rate, or is it just 0.9%, or just 0.2%?
I'm honestly asking cause I know nothing about disease or mortality rates.
Rail is best used for freight.
Autonomous busses and cars (electric) are the best long-term solution for travel.
The best approach is simply to enact a Carbon Tax and let the market figure it out.
We would be better off promoting mass-contraception to the developing world and halting land clearance in terms of massive targeted CO2 reductions.