CoronaPanic in the Age of Internet

Source:  https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/oil-price-crashes-record-low I thought I had "eaten the onion" today as I saw that oil prices have gone negative. But no! This is a real thing! Oil prices are now so low that buyers are being paid to ship and store the product! I don't think this has ever happened in the history of oil. At times like this I kind of understand the need for OPEC. If all oil production shuts down because there's too much of it, then we'll be suffering the consequences later on. I don't have much else to say other than this. Just wow! Oil prices are negative! Oh, and if you don't understand the reference "eat the onion" then look it up. The "onion" is a satire rag that pokes fun at current events by posting outrageous articles that just barely seem true. At times like this I really do wish I had eaten the onion.

I'm sure, with so many people dying recently, that we've been thinking about what happens after death. I know this topic has been done over a million times since the dawn of language and man itself, but there are a couple things that I have never seen talked about. It can be phrased as a single question: what happens to the soul when dementia or brain damage removes and alters personality and perception? I worked with a couple of older folks with dementia during my short stint as a live-in caretaker, and I saw that, though their core personalities were intact, they were not experiencing our world as concretely as us neurotypicals are. They had lost something important that us non-sick people take for granted, and as an extension, assign to our "soul." But these people were clearly still alive. They were experiencing things, just not in the way that we typically assign to experience. Let me talk about a man named Phineas Gage. If you've ever taken an intro to...

One of the most famous games of all time, SimCity (and its sequels and spinoffs) has a mechanic where people get sick and have to go to the hospital. There are conditions that change how effective your response to sickness is, but in general, the idea is that you build more hospitals to house more people and have more ambulances. The ambulances then go through the streets and, barring traffic, reach their destination. There are even some versions of this game that have the "zombie apocalypse" disaster as one of the player-generated city destroyers. After all, one of the most fun things to do with a city in a video game is to destroy it Godzilla style. But no version of the game, as far as I've played, has a pandemic disaster. Zombie apocalypses aside, I think there is an underrepresentation of pandemics in video games. There are plenty of pandemic movies, and there are video games dedicated to pandemics, but there are very few games where the point is not the pandemic ...

We have two things going for us in this time of crisis: the fact that the virus has a death percentage of under five percent, and that our governments are working tirelessly to help us get through this. While four to five percent is super deadly by flu standards, it's nothing compared to some of the superbugs that get cooked up in the game Plague, Inc. You may have heard the comparisons, the jokes about this game that simulates a pandemic under the control of the player. There are some nasty things that a virus can do to you. With the whole world closing down, we can only hope that the measures put into place by the government are proactive enough to save lives. At the same time, we have to remember that the Swine Flu back in 2012 killed a lot of people too. We're lucky to live in a time where vaccines are even possible. Back in the day, cholera, smallpox, and polio were menaces that haunted us continuously. We didn't even know how they worked or how to combat them. W...

I think the government, in giving every Tom, Dick, and Sally twelve hundred dollars as a stimulus, is implicitly recognizing that the money that they take from us in taxation would actually do better for the greater good than in our hands than in government hands.  This kind of "stimulus package for the masses" is the government's attempt at a fair deal for everyone. While I am afraid of how much money this will inject into the economy (causing inflation), I am hopeful as long as the amount of money given to each citizen is not larger than the amount they paid last year in taxes. Because, in theory, that money was already theirs and they handed it over to the government, who haven't used it yet. Thus, in my estimation (as a non-economist), I think inflation will be kept under control. Plus, there's the fact that inflation causes a spurt of economic growth anyways before prices start rising. Perhaps that's exactly what we need in this situation.  I don...