What do you think will change in the short/medium/long-term 'after' COVID

[Cloo]

Just got a press release at work saying cash withdrawals have fallen by 46% since lockdown

 

[wtfftw]

Yeah, I know a good handful or so of people that have really suffered with ME/CFS, including someone who was basically bed or wheelchair bound for 20 years until they got better, and some whose late teenage years and early twenties were ruined by it. It's a terrible condition for sure.

It'd be a very bad and reportable GP that didn't think a patient was ill with ME/CFS, I think the issue usually arise when the patient thinks the cause is different to the one the NHS says it is. Anyway, off topic, it is a very complex condition.

Most of the issues arise from the NICE guidelines and the yuppie flu era + peoples inability to understand fluctuating conditions and that begin tired isn't a competition.
Anyway.
Times might be changing.

 

[Cloo]

Yes, I saw that today - good news!

 

[Doodler]

Just got a press release at work saying cash withdrawals have fallen by 46% since lockdown

Large retailers really hate cash and there will be a long war of attrition against it. One of the social changes the pandemic will likely speed up. Tradesmen as customers at builders merchants, Screwfix etc will hold out longer than most.

 

[Mation]

If I were working on virtual reality tech I'd be be trying to develop fully immersive, multi-sensory stuff - full body suits and haptic interfaces, at least - so that they'd be cheap enough to be an option for big gatherings.

 

[wemakeyousoundb]

My main worry with the cashless future is: who is going to supply the homeless/beggar population with card readers?

On the home design front I might just start a bidet company to future-proof people's home for the next pandemic loo-roll panic buying.

 

[elbows]

lol at this in the Telegraph

We have one last chance to stop Britain's descent into a post-Covid socialist nightmare

Even a vaccine won’t halt the Left-wards drift of a society permanently scarred by lockdown

www.telegraph.co.uk

Yes, the vaccines may allow Britain to return to a society with most of the trappings of normality, hopefully by the spring. But that is where the Panglossian vision ends. It is never possible for a traumatised country entirely to turn back the clock, vaccine or no vaccine, and any politician presuming otherwise is in for a terrible shock. We will emerge from lockdown a permanently scarred country. The old Britain is gone, replaced by a jaded, poorer, more indebted, more risk-averse and, above all, more collectivist economy.

The story of the past nine months all over the Western world is one of state failure on a colossal scale, ended only by the extraordinary capitalist miracle that is Big Pharma: the script could almost have been written by Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. Yet this risks not making any difference to the Left-wards, socialist shift triggered by the virus and our response to it.

It’s not just the spectre of post-Covid tax hikes that threatens to finally destroy what is left of the Thatcherite-Blairite-Cameroon consensus. The scale and duration of furlough – a necessary policy given lockdown – means that millions are now addicted to free money. There is widespread lockdown Stockholm syndrome: a JL Partners poll finds that 48 per cent of the public don’t want restrictions to be lifted even when a vaccine is rolled out.

The culture has changed: Britain now loves and expects a bailout. Welfarism has gone mainstream, as has the idea that the Government doesn’t have a budget constraint, and that the Bank of England can simply print money. Lockdown has made self-employment and small business creation less attractive, and working for the state a lot more so.

Oh and heaven forbid I leave out the grand finale of that shit piece.

We need a plan to reboot all of Britain, to reignite our animal spirits, to attract foreign investment, to create millions of new firms, to increase our trend rate of GDP growth and, above all, to cut the state down to size. The Government may not wish to call this austerity, but it is Britain’s last chance to fight off the spectre of post-Covid socialism.

 

[May Kasahara]

"millions are now addicted to free money", what, like George Osborne and his £650k salary for one day a week of hedge fund advice? Or Carphone Warehouse rich cunt David Ross, who got £85k of arts bailout money for his pet opera company despite being worth £700m? Or any other of the countless amoral ratfuckers who seem to infest the upper echelons of our society, feeding on its structures and then pissing on its bones?

Fuck every single last one of these capitalist wankstains, and every single one of the craven cunts who cheers for them. It's a sickness greater than coronavirus.

 

[Cloo]

Yes, because people are loving sitting at home, unable to work or go out much for months on end

 

[May Kasahara]

Shout out to all my creative industry friends sitting back on their piles of free money I am so infuriated by this cheese-faced shitehawk and his rancid opinions.

 

[yield]

They'll see the unfolding pandemic, economic & political crisis as an opportunity.

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” ― Milton Friedman

Foucault's boomerang.

Rather than merely highlighting the history through which European powers had colonised the world, however, Foucault’s approach was more novel. Instead, he explored how the formation of the colonies had involved a series of political, social, legal and geographical experiments which were then actually often bought back to the West in what Foucault – drawing possibly on Hannah Arendt’s famous work on totalitarianism – called ‘boomerang effects’. ‘It should never be forgotten,’ Foucault said:

“that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”.

I ought to read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein again.

 

[mx wcfc]

Just got a press release at work saying cash withdrawals have fallen by 46% since lockdown

I used to draw cash once a weekish before Covid. I've taken cash out three times since mid-March.

 

[Sue]

Post-Covid Socialist nightmare you say...?

Bring it on I say.

 

[Cloo]

I can see a lot of places like beaches etc instituting charges initially to make up for lost income and to control numbers, but it's not going to change back afterwards

Redirect Notice

www.google.com

 

[elbows]

I am still inclined to anticipate very large changes ahead. I wouldnt have that view if I based it only on the pandemic and the current state of UK politics. But I am inclined to combine the big factors of the sotry of this century together into a mix that has huge hanges written all over it. So a combination of technology, limits to globalisation, climate and energy (some of which relates to a version of peak oil but with longer timescales than some people who were interested in peak oil earlier this century imagined). And very much the massively unfinished business from the financial crisis and subsequent austerity era. Specifically, a huge ideological void was left in the wake of that stuff, where even the established order had to acknowledge that 'trickle down' was bullshit, and where some obvious next moves were avoided. I tend to think of that inaction as being a delaying tactic that was never going to last forever, eventually something else has to fill the void. And what that something is will be shaped by climate and energy reality as we move through this century. Interaction between this stuff and pandemic actors and opportunities is still rather unclear, but I will be surprised if it doesnt contribute in some ways to the transition ahead.

And so I take note of the improved climate change targets with shorter timecales that we hear more of these days. And although we are used to talk of green new deals and building back better resembling little more than empty talk and lip service, whenever such concepts appear on the radar I will continue to take them seriously and consider the possibility that it might actually happen this time.

I repeat these thoughts now because of this:

Biden 100 days: What we all got wrong about him

People expected a low-key president, trying to unify. Instead he's been transformational, says the BBC's Jon Sopel.

www.bbc.co.uk

This is a blog column and not a book, but arguably the dominant idea in American politics for the past 40 years has been the low-taxing, economy-deregulating, budget-balancing, competition-encouraging, union-limiting small government of Ronald Reagan.

The same is true of the influence of Thatcherism in the UK - yes, there have been 13 years of Labour government since Maggie's demise, just as here there have been the Clinton and Obama terms since Reagan. But arguably they operated within, and were defined by, the orthodoxy of the monetarist economists who've held such intellectual sway on both sides of the Atlantic: Milton Friedman, the Chicago school, Laffer curves, Sir Alan Walters.

If Obama's rescue package didn't go far enough (as Biden believes), surely that was because he was looking at the disruptive and growing power of the conservative Tea Party movement. Both Clinton and Blair saw their paths to victory through the elusive "third way": free-market economic liberalism with a big dollop of concern for the least well off.

After the morale-sapping defeats of the 1980s- both for Labour in the UK and Democrats in the US - the head-scratching was intense on what they needed to do to win. Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair came to believe firmly that tax-raising and big government pledges would not reverse that trend.

But Biden - for better or worse - looks like he is using the pandemic and the woeful state of America's infrastructure to unapologetically say to the American people "yep, big government is back". It is territory that Republican opponents - still trying to sort out their post-Trumpian identity - will be keen to fight on.

There are probably some other threads scattered around u75 which could be a better fit for these thoughts, but I failed to find them today before my patience and available time ran out.

 

[ska invita]

Coming soon, 1st July, when eviction ban and rates holiday ends, as does the period for EU citizens to sort out any leave to remain status. Could be grim

 

[platinumsage]

It’s obviously hard to research because pandemics haven't happened much in modern times but the IMF had a go:

COVID’s Long Shadow: Social Repercussions of Pandemics

blogs.imf.org

 

[ska invita]

It’s obviously hard to research because pandemics haven't happened much in modern times but the IMF had a go:

Also too many variables between different states and their responses

 

[Cloo]

It’s obviously hard to research because pandemics haven't happened much in modern times but the IMF had a go:

COVID’s Long Shadow: Social Repercussions of Pandemics

blogs.imf.org

Interesting stuff... I don't know whether anything can push the British people towards massed political action though, seeing as currently no one even wants to vote the government out, let alone actually take to the streets.

 

[mojo pixy]

It's the cost of housing that depopulates rural areas above all. A bunch of business types from London all upping sticks to the countryside will only exacerbate that. A further rise in housing costs at a time when jobs will be vanishing all over the place will be a catastrophe for rural communities.

House prices near me (south Devon) are going insane. Based on anecdata from two people currently looking to buy homes, plus my own vague interest (I rent and can't ever see a time when I'll be able to buy) prices have risen here anywhere between 10% and 20% since last summer. One place I know of that a friend was looking at for £225k last year has now reappeared for £285k. And I hear it's not just asking prices, but offers are going through the roof.

I don't know how this will impact rents because I suspect a lot of the rise is down to city people relocating (so not buying to let but buying to live) but sooner or later it must.

 

[SpookyFrank]

House prices near me (south Devon) are going insane. Based on anecdata from two people currently looking to buy homes, plus my own vague interest (I rent and can't ever see a time when I'll be able to buy) prices have risen here anywhere between 10% and 20% since last summer. One place I know of that a friend was looking at for £225k last year has now reappeared for £285k. And I hear it's not just asking prices, but offers are going through the roof.

I don't know how this will impact rents because I suspect a lot of the rise is down to city people relocating (so not buying to let but buying to live) but sooner or later it must.

People I know in Devon who are considering moving/buying are mostly holding off in the expectation that the current surge in prices is a temporary blip. I'm less sure of that personally. But there are still plenty of unfashionable bits of Devon where normal people with real jobs are still permitted to live, for now at least.

Rental prices near me (Exeter) have definitely gone up in the last six months. This despite much upheaval in the student rent sector.

 

[Poot]

People I know in Devon who are considering moving/buying are mostly holding off in the expectation that the current surge in prices is a temporary blip. I'm less sure of that personally. But there are still plenty of unfashionable bits of Devon where normal people with real jobs are still permitted to live, for now at least.

Rental prices near me (Exeter) have definitely gone up in the last six months. This despite much upheaval in the student rent sector.

Yeah my parents have been looking for a house down here in Devon for years (don't judge too hard, they are very old and I am all they have, they're not doing it for a laugh.) I've watched houses disappearing within minutes of going on sale, people being gazumped left, right and centre and absolutely zero near any coasts or holiday hotspots. House prices have skyrocketed in a matter of weeks. Luckily they've found somewhere now in an unfashionable but very suitable place but it's been tense. Really bloody tense.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Yeah my parents have been looking for a house down here in Devon for years (don't judge too hard, they are very old and I am all they have, they're not doing it for a laugh.) I've watched houses disappearing within minutes of going on sale, people being gazumped left, right and centre and absolutely zero near any coasts or holiday hotspots. House prices have skyrocketed in a matter of weeks. Luckily they've found somewhere now in an unfashionable but very suitable place but it's been tense. Really bloody tense.

Look at Cornwall for an idea of the endgame here. Already in places like Torbay you can walk from an area of sickening, ostentatious affluence to one of grinding poverty in matter of minutes.

 

[Poot]

Look at Cornwall for an idea of the endgame here. Already in places like Torbay you can walk from an area of sickening, ostentatious affluence to one of grinding poverty in matter of minutes.

Torbay has some serious problems, as you say most are caused by the massive discrepancy. Tbh the problem was finding somewhere with a community, which now isn't possible because of second homes in so many places. My dad wants a model engine club and my mum wants to do fundraising. Apparently everyone else just wants an Air bnb they can visit twice a year.

 

[mojo pixy]

Changes I expect..

- increased conflict generally over masks and vaccines. Incuding possibly between countries, as some are more vaccinated than others. The so-called Mental Health Crisis is being deepened by all this, and there's no sign that conspiranoia in general is going to do anything but spread and deepen.

- a lurch towards compulsory ID cards, with 'track n trace' used as the pretext. To put it mildly, this will not improve the Mental Health Crisis.

- Tory incompetence and callous disregard and bullying and lying during 2020-21 will be broadly forgiven and forgotten. At most, Boris Penis err Johnson will take it all on the chin personally, resign, and the party itself and its remaining leadership will make sheepish noises and probably get re-elected in 2024. Unsure who the next leader will be. Rishi Sunak the Furlough Messiah perhaps.

- Labour may try to capitalize on the shit that's about to hit the fan wrt unemployment, debt, and evictions, but I'm not expecting them to manage anything beyond hand waving and hard stares.

- a cold winter 2021-2022 with an unvaccinated-for new covid variant or two. Which could turn everything upside down.

- who the fuck knows. Is this new flurry of Coronavirus part of Earth trying to solve its Humanity problem? Caught up in ourselves, it's easy to forget we aren't the be-all-and-end-all of life on this planet.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Massive interest in holidaying abroad again, possibly to the extent that prices go up and hotels and flights to popular destinations are difficult to book.

We have booked for next year, there was about a £50 increase on a two and a half grand holiday.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Coming soon, 1st July, when eviction ban and rates holiday ends, as does the period for EU citizens to sort out any leave to remain status. Could be grim

What's that, a week after 'freedom day' when everything is, implausibly, normal again.

 

[josef1878 2.0]

We have booked for next year, there was about a £50 increase on a two and a half grand holiday.

A weekend in St. Ives?