Any other president in USA history would have handled this better.

I agree. Trump clearly cannot act in this situation, but it's not like you don't have people who can. Why the republicans don't just fire the guy and put Pence in when doing so is literally a matter of saving thousands of lives is beyond me. Not that I think Pence is much smarter, but at least he seems like a guy that might listen to experts at a time like this. And if he's not the guy either, then someone else needs to step in.

I mean partisan politics is useless at this point. Trump says he's a 'wartime president', and here's the correct answer: 'Okay mr. deal, you're right. this is a war, and you're losing it, so to quote you 'you're fired!', GTFO and let the adults take over'.

I mean, watching the entire US government being run by this guy is like watching Star Trek if Picard was replaced by a senile old narcissist; the borg are invading people are dying, and captain Big Brains High IQ man spends his time on the bridge talking to the media about how he's in fact really handling it all very well and how great the ratings are. Or like watching that now meme-famous propaganda-head of Saddam tell the media about how there's nothing to worry about while bombs were dropping on Baghdad and american tanks were rolling in. It's that level of dumb.

When? In the 2 and a half months China was covering up the problem with the aid of the WHO?

No, before all of this even happened. The medical field has been aware of pandemics for centuries. Here in Finland we've been stockpiling medical equipment in in cae there is a major crisis like a pandemic, war, or othewr event that causs a disruption in distribution or a spike in eed for decades. This has all been handled by a national agency known as the National Amergency Suply Agency.

This cirisis marks the first time since its establishment that the agency has activated ist distrivution chain, and is now wporking together with us (I work for the national health care system's logistics side), Finnish manufacturer's and the army to make sure hospitals have enoug protective gear, ciritical medications, and other supplies.

We have a saying in Finnish which roughly translated goes: 'It's too late to squeeze when you've already shar your pants' and the US medical system right now is the embodiment of this saying. A private system will not run a surpluss of equipoment and ventilators, because the focus of an entgirely private system is on profit, and doing such things as stockpiling on equipment or having excess capacity eats margins, so it's not done for reasons of cost. Meanwhile there's very little effective cordination on the federal level and each state is basically left to fend for themsevels, as the Great Orange Leader watches on doing fuck all-

Or perhaps beforehand when Federal and State level regulations required justifications for oversupply of medical equipment?

Individual hospitals can never be adequately prepared for somehting on this scale, but the government can.

What baffles me is that the US military gets this. When america goes to war you never hear news about how the army is lacking ammunition, manpower, or medical gear to take care of its taskl, because the army operates under a doctrine where readiness is all and if you're not prepared for any number of worst case scenarios you're fucked. But when it comes to actually saving the lives of american civilians in a case of global pandemic, your level of readiness is thoroughly insufficient, even though this is a known risk to prfessionals in the field, and something you should have been taking seriously at a federal level for decades,

When this is all over, we'll get some nice bechmarking data for all western medical systems and how well they've faired in tackling this epidemic, and by the way it's shaping up, the american systems which is the most expensive model of health care on the planet per capita, will not even be in the top 10 in terms of infection rates and mortality rate.

You've still got time to change that: put in place a national stay at home order, start using the defense production act to seriusly pump up medical gear production, and take in federal agencies or hell, the army/national guard, to help with distribution and delivery. You have the money, the manpower, technology and the skills to handle this. What you do not have is competent top-level leadership and crisis management.

Replying to myself to correct myself to correct a typo: meant to say 'Should have used him or Trump', I did not mention them in the original comment, but they're the prime example of this right now.

You mean, how Bloomberg - the oligarch is buying his way into presidency right now?

Well yeah, that's why I used him and Trump as examples. The point is that using a direct democracy approach will combat this better, because someone like Trump or Bloomberg is not likely to gain the support of the majority of all americans, whereas Trump showcased that by targetting swing states with deep pockets it's possible to buy one's way to the presidency via a minority vote.

Especially the Pro-Democracy crowd and their efforts to turn Presidential Elections into a joke popularity contest.

Wtf? You think having an actual democracy is 'a joke popularity contest' and it's better to keep in place an archaic system which allows any deep-pocketed oligarch wannabe to money-ball the election by focussing on the key states instead of the entirety of the populace even though they rule equally over everyone? One question: why?

What good does this do to anyone? It's always easier to lie to and manipulate a minority than a majority, and I was lead to believe that at the core of american political ideals is the notion that 'every man is created equal'. Yet right now you have a system in place which essentuially means the value of your vote is different based on where you happen to be living, which means that you're not in fact all equal, because some votes weigh more than others.

The EC makes no sense from the point of view of democracy besides facilitate oligarchy and manipulation by political funders, and it's one of the least useful political contraptions I have ever seen.

As opposed to Joe Biden who bragged about doing the same thing with Obama

Nope.

The situations are not comparable in the slightest, because Biden nor Obama for that matter did not gain any political benefit form themselves by pressuring to fire a corrupt prosecutor for whose firing there was widespread support in the west.

Trump's own people are saying that he witheld military aid he'd previously given to Ukraine because he wanted Ukraine to help him politically. When this whole shitstorm started their argument was 'there was no quid pro quo', which is obvious BS because he froze the aid, and only released it after it came to light in order to try and hide his guilt.

If this was tried in an actual court this would be the most clear cut case ever. But it's not tried on an actual court, it's being tried in a political body, where republicans (remember, the same people who tried to impeach a president over a blowjob) have no entirely abandoned the 'there was no quid pro quo' argument and moved on to full-on batshit insane partisan mode of 'so there was quid pro quo but so what'. I mean look at this so called argument by his lawyer:

If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

So they're now admitting there was indeed quid pro quo, but saying that it's not impeachable.

It's basically arguing that the president can do anything to get him elected as long as he believes it's in the public interest. You know which systems of government used to work that way? Monarchies. The argument boils down to a Nixonian 'when the president does it, it's not illegal'.

Watching this unfold from abroad has been amazing: the republicans used to make a lot of noise about limited government and checks and balances and whatnot, but that's all gone now. They're now actively working as a team to basically set a historical precedent which states that so long as you control the Senate and the presidency, the president is basically above any and all laws and can do whatever the he wants, and if he gets impeached the senate can just block all witnesses, ignore all the evidence, and acquit him, who gives a fuck about the constitution or the rule of law. I mean if the sides were flipped and it was the democrats pulling this sort of bullshit the republicans would have their heads exploding. But since it's their guy, they happily fall to their knees and declare: 'All bow to Donald the First, protector of the Realm!'

This is how republics fall. It's happened numerous times before and it'll happen again, and there's nothing special about the US that makes you guys immune to it. The framework that's there to protect you from tyranny is the constitution, and the american constitution is a fine document, but it's just that. A document. It's not a magical talisman that does anything on it's own, it requires the politicians to actually adhere to the ideas and principles contained within it for it to work. As Schiff put it: "No Constitution can protect us if right doesn't matter any more." When men abandon any and all principles and the rule of law to further their own political goals at any cost, the slide to totalitarianism has begun. I mean, my history lessons taught me that you guys specifically had a revolution and a war to get rid of this kind of bullshit, but I guess nothing really matters anymore, so long as your side is on the throne. The idiocy of this mentality is beyond mind boggling, but I mean, it makes sense, you have to be a literal idiot at this point to think that Trump's serving anybody but himself.

Have fun with your newfound love for monarchy man, and remember to bow low to your ruler, for his is the absolute power!

Still... if there is a chance to keep it contained (or at least substantially contained) it makes sense to do so.

Yup. The problem with asia is that the population density is so damn high that if an outbreak gets out of hand, you're soon easily talking about hundreds of millions of infected and millions dead.

Thing is, the last time we had a truly pandemic flu was a hundred or so years ago, when the Spanish flu killed an estimated 30-100 million people globally in 18 months, and did so in a time when travelling across the globe was rarer, slower and more expensive. With air travel being so cheap and fast these days and cities growing more and more, the spread of these things can be superfast if people are not careful and easily result in high death tolls. Sure, most of the dead in such a scenario will be people with a weakened immune system, but that includes small children for example, so these are things that need to be taken seriously. Luckily there's a vaccine in the works currently and that should be out in a couple weeks. Here's to hoping the Chinese can keep it from spreading across Asia until that point.

Here in Finland we currently have 2 Chinese tourists from Wuhan who may have the virus (still waiting for test-results) and they're currently in an isolated ward. Both should do fine, but luckily they were smart enough to seek medical attention immediately instead of wandering around at their Lapland tourist-village, because if it is Corona that's a fast way to spread the virus elsewhere into Europe by infecting other tourists.

That said, if Netflix is potentially forgoing revenue by not instituting ads, the customer goodwill more than makes up for it.

Oh there's still ads on Netflix even currently, but they're just subtle about it. Product placement is everywhere. Cars, consoles, drink-brands, etc. Hell, Stranger Things boosted the sales of Eggo by 14 % in a year. and the latest season had a scene that was basically an all-out ad for Coca-Cola that coke is taking full advantage of.

The old truth about marketing is that it tends to work better the less people pay attention to it, and that's why product placement is so effective: people are seeing a brand and a logo but since they're watching a show or a movie they really don't think they're being advertised to. But then some point later on they're at a store walking past some Eggos or New Coke or whatever and they suddenly go 'hmm, I somehow suddenly really want waffles', and voilá, successful sales increase

Keep an eye out for these, they're usually really easy to spot once you learn to do it. Oftentimes you'll have a short second or 2 long shot with the brand logo (or simply the product itself) clearly visible and centrally framed. They're just short enough that they'll go past rapidly, but long enough for the eye/brain to register it. That's why you'll so often get a shot of say a car from the front as people are getting into it with the front-logo visible, or alternatively a shot from the driver's POV with the logo on the steering wheel visible clearly.

For this reason it makes no sense for Netflix to start doing direct ads, because the current model is a way for them to both please the customers by having 'no ads', whilist simultaneously raking in money with brand deals. It's a win-win.

On your last point there..it is almost fascinating that just last month, there was only a brief report on TV about a gunman that came into a church, I think in TX and was about to start shooting the place, but was stopped by multiple folks in the congregation with carry concealed firearms that put the fucker down before he did much damage.

I think one good guy was hurt....but these other good guys with guns prevented more deaths.

It was the same day as the guy with a machete in a Jewish home hurt a lot of people, you heard about that for days, but the story of good guys with guns stopping a bad guy......*crickets"

Disclaimer: I'm not making a gun-law argument, I'm not American, so whatever Americans want to do with gun legislation is all the same to me, it's your country, do with your laws what you will. This is just my 2 eurocents on violence and guns in the US.

Coming from a society where guns are common in hunting circles only and we don't do carry licences, the notion of people carrying guns everywhere is alien to me. While I definitely understand the 'good guy' argument, it's also an answer to a mainly American problem. And don't get me wrong, if I ever moved to the US, it's possible that I too would seek to carry a gun for self-defense, because the likelihood of something like a gunman opening fire in a public space is much higher in the States than anywhere else in the west. So carrying guns for protection in the US is not something I'm inherently against at all.

What I'm saying is that the problem the guns are helping to 'solve' is one that is pretty unique to the US. If a high amount of guns (note: guns carried with individuals at all times, we have a lot of guns as well, as does for example Switzerland, but in both countries it's illegal to just walk around with a weapon, and there's much tighter controls on who gets to buy one, background checks, mental health checks, etc) by their mere presence lead to increased overall safety, you'd expect a country like the US to be at the bottom of the violent crime statistics, but it's not. Now it's not at the top either, but looking at the list of countries by homicide rate, the US is higher than any other western country at 5,30 homicides per 10 000 inhabitants, a level comparable to many African and third world countries.

Now obviously there's a lot of variance by state. But even looking at the state-by-state breakdown of the homicide rate, even the states with the lowest rates sit at around 1,5 homicides per 10 000, which is obviously a lot better, but even that is higher than in most western and northern European countries. Interestingly enough, the top 9 States on that list (Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, New Mexico, Maryland, Alaska, Missouri and Louisiana) all sit above 7,1, which if compared internationally puts them higher on the homicide rate list than Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to the cartels and the senseless war on drugs though, the top of the list is almost entirely occupied by southern american states, with Mexico at 24,8, and El Salvador at the top with an insane 61,8.

BUT, violence is obviously not caused by just guns alone. A lot of other metrics go into violent crime: poverty, level of education, income inequality, etc, etc. That is to say, I'm by no means claiming (and neither should anyone else) that the amount of guns in the US is the only thing affecting the crime rate. The US has, compared to its western counterparts, a significant issue with inherited poverty, and a notable lack of social mobility due to lack of universal health care and education options, which means that people born into poverty are far more likely to stay in poverty, and this obviously raises crime as crime is globally one of the ways for uneducated poorer people to try and gain an improvement in one's living standard.

The point I'm trying to make here is that having followed the american gun-discussion here and elsewhere for more than a decade now it would appear to me like both sides are in fact talking past each other: the left will bring up stats of mass shootings and such in an appeal to empathy and emotion for the victims, and the right will pull up the 'good guys with a gun' -argument and the whole discussion is soon side-tracked into a meaningless chaotic ramble about bump-stocks, extended magazines and whatnot, as if those things actually made a huge difference in the larger scheme of things, and eventually no meaningful change occurs, and these things keep happening.

This is just a suggestion, but how about trying to talk about the societal conditions that make it so that people picking up guns and randomly shooting other people is now a standard affair in the States to the point that more school kids now die from gunshots than on-duty american police officers or military personal? Because by that stat alone it's blatantly clear to me (and I hope it's clear to most sane Americans) that there is a problem, but even as a European leftist I'm not naive enough to believe that the solution to this problem lies on the 'ban all guns or arm every schoolkid with a magnum' -range that so seems to dominate the hyperpolarized US gun debate? You don't need to give up guns or your the 2nd amendment to take action against gun crimes but if you want to keep the guns and improve safety, you need to start taking better care of your fellow citizens.

If the supermarket accepts it, it has use.

Bitcoin sure has its uses, but its properties make in highly impractical for most consumer transactions: BC is so volatile to both directions that accepting payments in it is super risky. Essentially any store accepting it has to exchange their BC to dollars/euros almost immediately, because holding significant sums of bitcoin in the books puts you in deep currency risk, and increases costs because you get added transaction fees. It's the reason why Steam stopped accepting BC as payment a few years back.

It's the exact same reason why most stores will not accept a foreign currency. That too has uses and value, but hassling around with the exchange rates is not worth it for most supermarket -level operators.

High volatility may in some instances be a lucrative thing for investors, but it's never something you want for a currency.

Oh, it's you again making the same fallacious point about the war that I explained to you was wrong not too long ago, and your attempt of a comeback consisted of entirely mixing up 2 different wars and the timeline of events.

At this point you're just a moron or a Russian troll, or both.

The Allies came within an ace of declaring war on the Soviet Union to save your sorry asses.

Eh... what? That radio broadcast is from february 1940 during which time we were fighting the soviets by ourselves in the winter war. We managed to stay independent even without the Brits or the Germans at that point and the interim peace started with a peace treaty with the Soviets.

The events I described all happened after that and largely because of the winter war. Since we were now at peace, British priorities shifted away from Finland and towards other priorities, especially with the nazis invading Norway. They appointed an ambassador from Moscow that had openely supported the Finnish illegitimate Terijoki-government of communists that were in exile in the USSR, and they actively sided with the Soviets in opposing Finnihs-Swedish defence co-operation in the face of continued pressure from the Soviets.

Compared to the early spring, during the summer of 1940, Finland wasn't high in importance in British foreign policy. To gain support from the Soviet Union, Britain had appointed Sir Stafford Cripps, from the left wing of the Labour Party, ambassador to Moscow. He had openly supported the Terijoki Government during the Winter War and he wondered to Ambassador Paasikivi 'didn't the Finns really want to follow Baltic Republics and join the Soviet Union?'. He also dismissively called President Kallio "Kulak" and Nordic social democracy "reactionary". The British Foreign Office had to apologize for his language to Ambassador Gripenberg.

Britain opposed Finnish-Swedish cooperation and provided support for the Soviet Union to scuttle the initiative, until it became apparent in late March 1941 that it had driven Finland in the direction of the Germans, but by then it was already too late. Finnish foreign trade was another critical issue as it was dependent on British navycerts and the Ministry of Economic Warfare was extremely strict when issuing those so that even Finnish trade (and relations) with the Soviet Union suffered from it.

So during the summer of 1940 (which is when we would have needed military aid and support to rebuild the army because the Soviets took over the Baltics and the pressure was mounting on us too, Britain nor the west was not an option, and they themselves helped to destroy any potential alliance with Sweden, leaving Germany as the only viable option.

and here was a nice country blazing the way and creating a precedent

Again, since we're not in NATO what the hell do you think we could have done? If we allied ourselves with the west too heavily the soviets or acted too much against their interests they could basically invade and we would not get support from NATO, because them doing so would trigger the 3rd and potentially a nuclear war.

You see to think we were in position to defy the political pressure coming from the USSR during the cold war as an non-allied country, which we most certainly were not, because we were alone.

You're free today because better people than you defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Thanks for nothing, assholes.

We're free today because we did what we had to to keep ourselves as free as we could in a time when nobody else cared, and that cost us heavily, both in terms of land anmd lives lost to the wars with the soviets and the nazis.

So indeed, thanks for nothing, your side was of no help.

I highly advise you to stop lecturing people on history when you clearly do not understand it or even know the basic facts that are being talked about, it makes you look really, really dumb.

Was that like in 1941 when you invaded the "yellow country" marching shoulder to shoulder with the Nazis?

We did invade yes, after said nation had just previously invaded us and left us with a massively weakened army while the general war was still going. Now I'm sure the Finnish leadership at the time would have much preferred to get help from the West, but see the problem with that is that the Soviets were part of the allies, so that's really a no-go. Basically it was either an alliance with the Germans, or run the risk of being annexed by the Soviets if they choose to attack again, the post winter war army was in no shape to repel another attack by themselves. Like most of Finnish military history, the geopolitics of this place left us between a rock and a hard place.Germans: made the military alliance and aid contingent on us joining them on the invasion, and while there were some officers definitely in the army who were Nazi sympathisers, the man in charge of the whole army, Mannerheim, was not. We never signed the tripartite pact signed by the axis powers, the Jewish population of Finland - including the men serving in the Finnish army - were not taken to camps, and so on.

It was a long shot, because it became quite clear to the Finns even prior to Stalingrad that Germany was going to lose, but it worked: We started to negotiate for peace against Germany's orders , and eventually reached one that caused us to also fight the remaining Nazis in the country to drive them out, making us the only country to fight both the Societs and the Nazis in the 2nd world war. If that doesn't show you that the true goal of the entire wartime plan was to maintain our independence (which we did successfully), I don't know what will. I mean we used the Germans and the promise of getting them out as pawn to secure peace before the Soviets had the time or the opportunity to invade the entire country again.

In the alternative timeline where the alliance with Germany had not been made, there's basically very little preventing the Soviets from attacking Finland after the Germans were broken, and we would have likely become like Poland, just another state of the USSR. So what would you have done? Sit here and hope the Soviets play nice? C'mon man.

Your country literally invented the word "finlandization" which means to bow down to the "yellow country" doing things that they never requested, out of toadying compliance. Most of the Finland's media and political elites shifted their attitudes to match the values that the Soviets were thought to favor and approve.

Well, since we were never allowed to join any military alliance with the West (as per the peace terms forced by the Soviets) and thus were not in Nato, the threat of Russian military invasion was everpresent even after the war. The soviet union had us sign a treaty on 'friendship and co-operation', which stipulated that they're allowed to moce troops into Finland if they deem the security of the Soviet state to be at risk, and this was basically used as a threat to force compliance on important political issues throughout the cold war.

So absolutely, there was self-censorship by the media and politicians, and there was a lot of backchanneling back and forth, because prior to the collapse of the soviet union, one could not become president of this country without being approved by the Soviets. They had massive influence, both politically and economically being a huge trading partner, but seeing the way things went down for the countries actually invaded by the Soviet union that belonged to the Warsaw pact, the conditions and life in Finland (both economic and political) were still a lot better than those of the full-on soviet satellite nation, and considering the soviets also outright banned us from receiving any of the aid from the Marshall plan, the post-war economy managed to do surprisingly well.

So in fact the term 'Finlandization' is a state of being in between full independence and being fully under the control of another state. While it would have obviously been best to be fully independent, there's basically no scenario in which that would have been possible with the way the war happened and the way the Soviets played their cards.

Finland was issuing stamps with Lenin on them, for fuck's sake.

It was Lenin who granted us independence from the Russian empire during 1918, because he foresaw the then upcoming civil war (and in fact earlier in 1917 Lenin himself had been in hiding in Finland, in Tampere) which he through the local reds would win and we'd willingly join back. They didn't, and we didn't, and he did not choose to invade us. Horrible as the man was for the soviets in the end, it's still undeniable that he was a key player in the Finnish process of independence, which is why there still is a single park named after him in Helsinki.

History is not black and white. Moral grandstanding is easy, especially after the fact, but since the balance of power between small nations and huge nations is always one-sided, compromises have to be made.

The origin of the attack is not yet known.

Here in Finland the army trains against an invasion of a foreign power, Since it's in general not smart during peace time to practice warfare against a named enemy, the opposing forces are usually referred to with the codename 'Yellow nation', that for some reason or another tends to always approach from the east, but just as with this story the 'origin of the attack is not known'.

Damn sneaky Yellow nation at it again! One day we shall find out who you are!