(sorry folks, I need to hit pause on talking about Atari 8-bit computers and focus on something far more serious, this is not a video game)Decade Of Disruption
Government inaction and human ignorance will allow covid-19 to infect millions of people this summer. Millions more will die or be displaced by climate change over the next few decades. Our global society clearly needs to reset and slow down - not just for 15 days or a month but for decades going forward. And we need to make these changes in the next decade to avoid population collapse and extinction in the rest of the 21st century.
In 1979 ABBA recoded the song "Happy New Year" for their Supertrouper album. One of the verses is "Who can say what we'll find, What lies waiting down the line, In the end of '89".
As 2019 came to a close it got me thinking about the changes in our world each of the past few tens of years spans. From any one given year to year not much appears to change. But look at the world every 10 years, every 20 years, and it's amazing how much change occurs for good or bad.
Imagine in 1899, the end of the 19th century and what by today's standards was the Stone Age. The world was just starting to use electricty and electric lights, elevators in tall building, gasoline powered automobiles. The Wright Brothers had not yet flown, Einstein had not yet have his miracle year which sparked both relativity and quantum mechanics, ideas that would have major impacts in technology and our lives for the next 100 years.
20 years later in 1919 his prediction about the curvature of space by gravity was proven by a solar eclipse paving the way to modern day GPS and other technologies. Skyscrapers and automobiles were all the rage. The world was recovering from a World War and a flu pandemic and the future looked bright, yet years later humanity had learned nothing and both would repeat themselves.
World peace did not break out in 1939 at the end of the Great Depression. Instead, history repeated itself leading to tens of millions more deaths, redrawing of the world map as former colonies splintered and gained independence over the coming decades, the Cold War broke out, and the bankruptcy of the British empire continues to affect world politics to this day with the final nail in that empire's coffin in the form of Brexit.
I wasn't around by the 1940's but everything from the current map of the world to the technology we use today was greatly influenced by WWII. And that's a point I want to emphasize - you can't just erase disruptive events from history and hope they go away, they change the future forever as will this covid-19 outbreak, as will the climate change crisis.
By 1959 we had space flight and satellites, early computers, colour television, and a whole lot of nukes keeping everyone paranoid. This was the age of TV dinners, drive-in movies, suburbs, cheap gasoline, and basically the start of the modern lifestyle as we know it today. To some people today this nostalgic past is the "Great" in "Make America Great Again" that unfortunately is also destroying the planet.
Over that next decade science and science fiction showed us a vision of the future - the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle, The Jetsons, Star Trek, 2001, and finally landing on the moon in real life. For 60 years now humanity has been enjoying an orgy of economic growth and consumer spending, and so has grown the world population (from about the 3 billion at the time of my birth to over 7 billion today).
As a child of "Generation X" I have lived through most of those 60 years, and have been incredibly fortunate and lucky to go from a broken family in communist Yugoslavia to growing up in government assisted housing in Canada, to now having lived and worked the past 30 years here in Seattle as an engineer a three of the world's greatest companies - Amazon, Intel, and Microsoft. This is the American dream that billions around the world hope for and through a little skill and a whole lot of luck I've gotten to live it.
1979. I was just a teenager then, spending my quarters in arcades playing Space Invaders, Galaxian, and other video games inspired by movies such as Star Wars and Alien. The Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers had just been launched for the 1979 holidays, ABBA was recoding its greatest album, and MTV and CNN were close to launching on cable, the first 1G cell phone network. I was about to write my first computer program in BASIC.
To answer ABBA's question of what lay ahead in the end of 1989: the PC, the Macintosh, the Atari ST, the Amiga, Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, CompuServe and America Online. Very large and heavy big screen televisions. It was the birth of the digital age and we were obsessed with gadgets, games, cable television, and music CDs.
The digital age of the 1980's is the world that "Millennials" and Gen-Z'er know. The Berlin Wall fell, communism appeared to crumble, blue skies ahead for humanity?
in 1999 the 20th century was nearing an end in 1999 with the Internet on everyone's minds. Google and Amazon just small startups and along with many other internet startups promising to deliver just about anything with a few mouse clicks. The CPU wars that I've written so much about were in full force, x86 vs. PowerPC, Intel vs. AMD, it was just clock speed and gigahertz all the way.
The movie "The Matrix" showed us a glimpse of a virtual world in what would eventually become known as "the cloud". Besides being just a great movie in general, I credit The Matrix with doing a brilliant job of introducing the concept of cyberspace to the masses.
For me the 1990's were a transformational decade, starting with my graduation from engineering school to the full-time engineering job at Microsoft, my side hobby emulators.com and my development of Atari and Macintosh emulation software. Thanks to Microsoft's flexible work hours even back then and the boundless energy of my 20's to pull all nighters, I was able to eventually take my emulators around the world to swap meets and trade shows in Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Houston, Hanover, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris. It was the decade I got to travel the world and start seeing some exotic places.For 20 some years now I've blogged about emulation, trying to educate people on how to make better use of their existing PCs to run existing software, about how to write more efficient code, about the various uses of emulation and how ubiquitous and hidden it is everyday products. This got me in touch me with a lot of Atari and Mac users around the world, and showed me we're all really not that different. I was having my first in Australia in 1996 and it was great, random customer of mine would invite me to visit and say hi. I'd be talking shop in people's living rooms in Adelaide or Melbourne or Sydney, it was a fun decade. I ended up quitting my job at Microsoft in 1997 to devote my full time to working on my emulators and spreading the word about emulation (which if you really in 1997 most people had never heard of an emulator, a virtual machine, and companies like VMware were just getting off the ground).
When I did eventually return to corporate life a few years later I did so with a new mission, to not just be another expendable engineer working on whatever random project management gave me, but rather to seek out projects that involved emulation, virtual machines, code optimization. From backward compatibility emulation for Xbox 360 to Time Travel Debugging in the Windows Debugger (WinDbg), to contributing to the Bochs emulator to model software behaviour at Intel, to the bringup of some of the first Windows virtual machines at Amazon Web Services, and most recently to what I think is the coolest thing I have worked on so far, power-efficient ARM64 based laptops using emulation to run decades worth of legacy Windows software.
And before I get all somber and apocalyptical on you, I have said this before and I'll say it again, I would encourage everyone leaving college and going into corporate life to take some time off first and explore the world and think about what you want your contribution to be. Don't just chase the biggest paycheck or take the first offer. The tech companies are masterful at manipulating college new hires with seemingly larger sums of money and stock which to a 20 or 22 year old seems like winning the lottery. In 30+ years I've seen a lot of people get chewed up and spit out by the tech industry.
1999 and the decade ended with the world extremely paranoid about the Y2K bug. People feared airplanes would drop from the skies, elevators would fall down their chutes, nuclear reactors would melt down. Technology was about to destroy us!As a coder I understood the problem. Y2K was in integer overflow problem, and that's not a good thing. Most computer viruses and malware exploit integer overflows of one form or another to take over your PC. This was potentially integer overflow on a global scale.
Having exhibited at Macworld 1998 and 1999 in San Francisco, which was always held the week after New Year's, I decided to skip the 2000 event. Instead I flew myself down to Australia in late December 1999 to watch the world potentially end in Sydney Harbour. All flights to Sydney were already sold out so I ended up flying from Seattle to LAX to Melbourne.
Then two days before Y2K I rented a motorcycle in Melbourne and rode the 600 miles to Sydney in time to catch the fireworks. When the world did not end at the stroke of midnight on Y2K Eve, I was in no hurry to fly to back to Seattle and pay my bills and take out the garbage like everyone else. I took a more leisurely motorcycle ride back to Melbourne by means of the coastal highway. About 700 miles or 1100 kilometers if I recall of nothing but scenic roads along the ocean.
And you can see where I'm heading with this now and why I had to write this blog. For it was three months ago on the eve of Y2K20 as I am watching the news from Australia, that I realized that these very same coastal roads and towns that I rode along 20 years earlier were now on fire.
The more I thought about it the more I realized the past 20 years, and more so the 2010-2020 decade, and particularly this past year 2019, has been incredibly disruptive to our everyday life around the world - both for the good and for the worse I might add.Scientific disruption by means of the verification of gravitational waves, the discovery of so many exoplanets, the evidence of photonic mass as an explanation for dark energy. Technological disruption by means of the cloud and second wave of Internet companies that has displaced oil & gas as well as large brick and mortar companies as the richest companies on the planet.
But also ecological disruption that is accelerating faster than anticipated. Between overpopulation, global warming / climate change (and really let's call it what it is, climate collapse), extinction and declining populations of species, increasing suicide rates and drug addiction and diabetes and obesity, the disaster that Arab Spring turned into and the corresponding rise of hate and nationalism around the world, something's got to give.
It's 2020 and we are not living The Jetsons world of flying cars or the Star Trek vision of world peace. Humanity is not well. Human lifespan is decreasing by means of disease and pollution and suicide.
The impending doom of climate change and rising sea levels was something that experts in the year 2010 told us would not matter until the year 2100 and be a problem for our grand children to solve. Not our generation's problem to solve even though we contributed.
But within the span of a decade that 80 years of runway to solve the problem has dropped to 10 years. Most experts now tell us cities will be flooding, well, are flooding, just look at Miami and Venice, and millions of climate refugees will need relocation by 2030.
And this was the conclusion I reached three months ago before covid-19 was really on the radar of anyone outside of China. Covid-19 is just the straw that is going to break the camel's back.
I can't be more clear about this - human society is about to change and and it has to change fast if we are to survive. We have to change how we travel, how we eat, how we work, how we entertain, how we interact.The 2020-2030 decade can go one of two ways:
- it can be the Decade of Extinction with the end of modern civilization as we know it with a return to a post-apocalyptic Mad Max stone age, or,
- it can be the Decade Of Transformation where humanity chooses to adapt how me live and take these issues seriously.
We can't just wish and pray that covid-19 will go away by Easter, clicking our heels three times won't help, and we can't just wait for technology to solve rising sea levels and rising temperatures while we go about our lives the same as before.I will present the pessimistic view first and the arguments for why humanity will fail. Perhaps this is why despite all the thousands of exoplanets, all the evidence that screams there has to be life out there, civilizations are doomed to fail.
We can look at science fiction for examples of how this will end. For while it is fiction, science fiction has allowed our imaginations to explore all sorts of "what-if" scenarios, and most would agree science fiction's imagination shapes our future.
But here is the reality check: Billionaires building rockets to launch us to space hotels or colonies on Mars is not the answer. Not in this century. This is not show "The 100", or the animated movie "Wall-E", or the movie "Elyisium" in that we don't just get to fly away and leave the planet in shambles. This is not "Blade Runner" or "Westworld" where androids work for us. We are in the first few days of "28 Days", we're living the start of "12 Monkeys" and what is happening in the cities around the world is quickly going to turn into "The Purge" as supplies start to run out and people get more desperate. That is the reality of the rest of 2020.
Why covid-19 keeps spreading: ignorance and denial
Let me argue the case why 2020 will be a miserable year and then why things cannot go back to normal.
Let's not forget how ABBA's song "Happy New Year" ends. the final line is "We might as well lay down and die, You and I". As a child I thought of ABBA as just yet another happy go lucky pop band. It's not until I was older and started truly understanding the meaning of the lyrics that I realized that their music about dread and despair, heartache and loss, and a paranoid and pessimistic outlook about the future (such as the songs "The Visitors" and "On and On and On").
Their lyrics are not unlike most of the dire messages in the lyrics of the metal bands I listen to today. It's not surprising when you consider ABBA came from cold war Sweden with the threat of the U.S.S.R. next door. Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, these bands are products of a bankrupt post-WWII Britain. They sing about the misery they've lived. One can only imagine what bands in 2030 or 2040 will sing about with respect to the year 2020.
But despite the musical reminders human society seems to have a short-term memory. For most people in Europe and North America alive today things have been too good for too long. Milleniuals and Gen-X'ers and Baby Boomers have not know World War, we've not known pandemic at this scale.
After the big sigh of relief after Y2K it seemed technology would solve everything, world peace was just around the corner, and the stock market (particularly tech companies) were booming. How silly and naive we were. The stock market crashed a few months into 2000, crashed again after the events of 9/11 a year later, and technology it seemed had overpromised.
Over these past 20 years we've had wave after wave of viruses spread around the world. SARS, H1N1, Zika, Ebola, etc. every time we contain it we forget about it. Those were contained, either because either the virus such as Ebola is too deadly and kills the host before it can be spread far, or it is not as airborne and as transmitable.
Covid-19 seems to be the perfect storm - an airborne virus with long incubation time. Meaning that it's going to get a lot worse. This is the 21st version of smallpox. The critical mistake everyone is making is in thinking this will be over soon (by Easter! NOT!) and we'll go back to normal. That's we'll go back to working and consuming and polluting the planet some more just as we have been doing for 60+ years.That "aspirational" optimism is gong to be fatal. People are just not as scared as they should be, they're not taking this as seriously as they should be. As I am writing this on the evening of March 30th I see that the U.S. government has changed its "aspirational" outlook about Easter to one now where we'll be holed up in our homes for a few more months and it will be "victory" is only 100,000 Americans die.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-moves-the-coronavirus-goal-posts-pre-spinning-100-000-deaths-as-a-very-good-job/ar-BB11UGik?ocid=bingcovid
Just today over 500 Americans died of covid-19 bringing the total up to about 3000. That is about the same number of deaths as occurred on 9/11 and even more than Pearl Harbor. Those events woke people up, they galvanized people and the government to, in the case of 9/11, shut down airspace immediately, and in the case of Pearl Harbor to stop dragging America's feed and finally start fighting in WWII.
Yet because these people didn't die all at once, the spread of covid-19 across the U.S. has been taking about two months, people are still going to beaches, going to churches, having parties, hanging out in parks, and disobeying Stay At Home orders. In fact only about half the 50 states even have such orders, people are still free to travel and do as they wish in the other half of the country.
Now as everyone probably knows the trick with stopping computer viruses is you have to have your firewalls up everywhere and apply patches as soon as possible. Even shut off the devices until they are patches. It doesn't protect anything to patch half the computers in a company or home but leave the other half unprotected.
So why does it makes sense to lock down half the country and not the other half? Italy tried this initially with disastrous results. The rest of Europe didn't follow fast enough and now we see covid019 spreading like wildfire throughout Europe. What did they think would happen?
It is not surprising that some of the most affected countries now are the affluent countries such as the United States, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France. In 2017 my wife and I were on vacation in Europe, and in the course of about 8 hours drove 350 miles from Croatia through Slovenia through Trieste Italy up into Austria and finally stopped in Munich Germany. 5 countries, 350 miles, 8 hours. Even without air travel this thing can spread through 5 countries in a day.
Governments are dragging their feet, partly I think because of the denial that this is spreading, partly the ignorance of mathematics to understand exponential growth, and partly I think greed to not lose out on tax revenue.
I give credit to major corporations for waking up the soonest and taking actions such as sending people home. Here in Seattle this occurred 4 weeks ago as Amazon and Microsoft and other tech companies in the city told people to grab their computers and monitor and work from home for the next few weeks. My wife and I have been effectively "working from home" since March 2nd.
Apple closed their retail stores and other retailers followed suit. Tech companies, perhaps because they're better with numbers, knew not to keep having their employees exposed. So why aren't governments waking up?
I unfortunately have to confess to some ignorance and denial myself. Seattle didn't just shut down overnight because tech companies were sending people home. In fact my wife and I had months earlier booked a spring break trip down to Cancun to meet up with family from Canada. The night before the flight, March 4th we debated whether to cancel our trip or go on the trip, and against everything my rational brain was saying, we got on the flight. Cancun was another world. Everyone I talked with, family and stranger, was oblivious to what was happening in Seattle, that companies had sent people home. As one would expect at a beach resort it was packed, bartenders were shaking hands with customers, beach volleyball and pool parties were taking place as they do during any spring break.
But my rational brain was still saying get the hell out of there! I felt like Jon Snow needing to scream out "Run! Winter is coming!".
To add to my paranoia, the Alaska flight back to Seattle was suddenly cancelled during the taxi ride to the airport. I went online and saw that Alaska was also cancelling other flights into Seattle and along the west coast. Fearing a shutdown I booked the first flight out of Cancun, which happened to be a United Airlines flight to Houston.
I spent the evening of March 8th and next morning the 9th in Houston, chatting with people at the hotel bar and at the airport, and similarly it was pure bliss and ignorance. Bartenders shook hands, people high fived and hugged, the airport was still packed, I even overhead people mentioning the cable news scare stories about a virus. (Remember this is still the week the U.S. government was in denial).
Yet that same afternoon of March 9th as I was landing in Seattle what should have been afternoon rush hour was a ghost town. Traffic looked like a Sunday morning, not a Monday evening. Seattle was shutting down, grocery stores were running out of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and pasta from what I could tell. No shortage of fresh vegetables then or even now.In hindsight it was incredibly stupid and reckless to have travelled from Seattle to anywhere. Since March 9th I have been truly working from home.
But what is mind boggling again is just how slowly governments are reacting. It took an additional week until about March 18 for Canada and the U.S. to decide to close their borders to foreigners, and then a few more days to close the borders to each other's citizens. Does a virus care about nationality of citizenship?
Washington State itself, the origin of U.S. cases, did not order bars and restaurants to close until March 15th and only enacted a statewide stay-at-home order on March 25th.
It is a true sign of the times when convention centers and stadiums are being converted to hospitals. We're seeing that here in Seattle with the hospital being built inside of the Seattle Seahawks stadium. It is happening in Chicago as the McCormick Place (site of several COMDEX shows I've been to) and in New York at the Javitz Center (home of so many past Macworld shows).
Only now as world leaders and officials such as Prince Charles and Boris Johnson and others are being diagnosed with the virus and quarantining themselves. They're unfortunately leading by example months too late.
Just like an unpatched PC or computer network, you have to shut everything down to contain a virus.
Most people are also poor at math. There is the fundamental lack of understanding of how exponential growth works. While drunk driving, suicide, murder, heart disease are relatively constant factors year to year that kill hundreds of thousands of American every yet, they are constants. There are preventable deaths but apparently we as a society choose to tolerate a certain rate of fatalities in order to keep enjoying our cars and burgers and cigarettes.Which is probably why many people are not alarmed by covid-19 yet. One case here and there doesn't seem worrisome. But because it spreads exponentially, 1 case becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, doesn't sound like much. But if you do the math it takes only 20 doublings to pass 1 million cases, 30 doublings to reach a billion. Which means at the current rate of doubling about every 3 days, it will take perhaps another 5 weeks to infect a billion people worldwide if we do nothing.
As every sane person on TV has been urging us to do, STAY HOME if you can, AVOID TRAVELJust like with a new computer virus we need to shut things down. It might be a year before there is a covid-19 vaccine, which means we might have to work from home, stay at home, avoid sports, avoid beaches, avoid theaters, avoid air travel, for a good year.
And everyone needs to do this at once. We're not getting back to work by Easter. We're not going to the movie theaters this summer to watch the big Hollywood blockbuster openings.
Yes it sucks. The James Bond movie won't be opening next month. Baseball, basketball, hockey, football are all on pause. Comicon is postponed. The Vintage Computer Festival that was to have taken place here in Seattle this past week was cancelled. Life as we know it has to hit Pause.It is appalling to me how Tokyo is hell bent on holding the Olympics as soon as possible. It is inappropriate to be talking about restarting sporting events or rescheduling the Olympics until infections stop and there is a vaccine.
WE HAVE TO ACCEPT THIS NEW REALITY.
Stopping this virus from spreading would only have worked if all counties, states, and countries shut down travel simultaneously and ordered people to stay are home simultaneously. But it's too late, Pandora's Box is open. The equivalent of a full 747 of people is dying every day of covid-19 in the United States alone.
As I write this we are just three doublings - 9 days - from it being a 9/11 worth of deaths per day. And just 5 doublings - 15 days - away from a U.S. death toll of 100,000. Italy and Spain might even reach that sooner.
We saw what happened in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina kill over 1000 people. Within 48 hours of the flooding and power outages, society collapsed. The city was in chaos.
And now New Orleans as a result of Mardi Gras celebrations and partying five weeks ago, is not surprisingly getting hit with a wave of covid-19 cases that could eclipse the death toll of Katrina.That's my pessimistic view of life in 2029. Millions will die this year and if we keep acting irresponsibly the modern civilization we know and love will cease to exist. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but the math doesn't lie.
Trickle up economics vs. ad-hoc bailouts
That's the bad news. The good news is: it is possible to adapt and change one's behaviour. Just as we learned after the brief airspace shutdown after 9/11 https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set-the-stage-for-an-unlikely-climate-change-experiment/ the skies are clearing up these days, the air is getting cleaner. https://www.suchtv.pk/world/item/95329-covid-19-lockdowns-give-europe-s-cities-cleaner-air.html This shutdown is exactly the kind of action we need to combat global warming. I heard a joke that climate change needs the same PR guy that covid-19 has. Because if we cared nearly as much about the planet as we do about our own selfish desire to not catch covid-19 we could halt global warming.
Or in other words, it would be outright idiotic once a vaccine is developed and administered to try to restart the world economy and rev it up to the levels of before. Our immediate goal should not be fire up every power plant, fill up every stadium every day, set new earnings records every quarter. We don' t have to set records every month for the sake of setting new records.
I'm liberal but I've never considered myself a tree hugger or an environmentalist. I lived on steak, fried chicken, hot dogs, and burgers for the first 50 years of my life. I drove a gas guzzling Chevy Blazer SUV for 20 years and a V6 Ford Mustang for another 10. But over the past 10 years I have adapted, switching to LED bulbs, trading in my cars for electric vehicles, walking more, giving up meat for a plant-based diet, and sticking to purchasing devices with efficient microprocessors. My switch to electric cars in 2015 wasn't even so much based on environmental reasons as curiosity, and the fact is that electric cars accelerate really well and require virtually no maintenance. I have driven electric now for over 4 years and saved thousands of dollar in maintenance costs and thousands more in fuel costs, not to mention avoiding countless trips to the gas station and oil change place and muffler place and radiator place. Electrifying cars is a no-brainer, and yes, exactly the kind of disruptive technology of the 2010 Decade Of Disruption that can do the world some good in the 2020's. If will explain more of the positive disruptions and my hope for the Decade Of Transformation in Part B of this posting in a few days.
Spoiler alert: Yes drive electric but also STOP EATING MEAT! I will have a lot to say about this in Part B, and don't just take my word for it, here are some homework assignments for you until then:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/one-root-cause-of-pandemics-few-people-think-about/
https://gamechangersmovie.com/
One more thing I want to say and that is to address the issue of the millions of lost jobs and the spike in unemployment that is happening now as a result of businesses hitting pause. Special snowflakes in tech such as myself can survive this pause for months or years. Remember, I've left Microsoft 11 times and Amazon twice over the past 30 years, I am used to sitting on the couch for months at a time between interesting day jobs living off savings. But most Americans, Canadian, Europeans, Chileans, Argentineans, Croatians, they work paycheck to paycheck. Their jobs are now deemed non-essential and they are being laid off. They don't have the luxury to sit this out while landlords are knocking on their doors.
Instead of thinking about restarting the economy and putting these people back to work prematurely at their peril, the government needs to practice "trickle up economics" also known as a "universal basic income". Because the 1980's "trickle down economics" was a bust. It only made the rich richer, the poor poorer. 35 years later the result of tax cuts and education cuts and funneling money to the top 1% is painfully evident across America in the form of poverty and homelessness. The top 1% doesn't trickle the money back down into the economy, what they do instead is stash it away in banks and hard assets, and worse, funnel the money offshore which effectively takes the money out of the U.S. economy. What we're thought of as a growing economy benefiting all is really just profits being sucked away to a handful of rich assholes.
Trickle up economics / UBI is an idea being floated by various Presidential candidates such as former candidate Andrew Yang who is now behind https://movehumanityforward.com/. The idea is you give every American $1000 per month, no questions asked. $330 billion country-wide per month, $4 trillion per year. Sounds like a lot, but it gives many people a safety net. It is not a welfare system that encourages people not to work. Rather it gives people the security to pay rent and buy food. In a crisis like this it would not require the government to make emergency multi-trillion dollar bailouts. This is one of the major changes in society we will need to adopt to move forward.
Scientific American had a great article on this a few months ago titled Is Inequality Inevitable? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ which modeled income distribution as a physics problem. What it shows is that a true free market economy is rigged to make most of the participants poor and a handful of random winners rich. (i.e. who wins who loses is mostly random chance). Only when you inject factors such as taxes and and a universal basic income do you create a more reasonable income distribution that mirrors many real world countries.
Having a UBI in place by now would have required far less intervention than the $2.2 trillion, likely $6 trillion or larger bailout taking place now. This massive printing of money and sudden injection of new cash into the economy will create inflation, will cause prices to go up. The wheels are about to fall off the U.S. economy yet again. GDP will drop. Inflation will go up. I suspect more stimulus packages costing trillions more before the year is over, which will amount to costing the federal government multiple years worth of UBI.
Agree with me? Think I'm totally wrong? Still think the covid-19 virus and climate change are a liberal hoax? Or want to convince me that photons have no mass? Let me know at emulators@emulators.com and regardless - STAY HOME!