Well, yes. It has always been easier for white people to register and vote. They don't put obstacles to voting up in rich suburban neighborhoods and rural jurisdictions. Also, voting demographics have always skewed older, so more registered voters are old. So the pool of unregistered voters, whether through malice or apathy, always tends toward Democratic demographics. They'll register Republicans in these campaigns because they'll still register more Democrats overall - it would put some people off if it was nakedly tilted against registering Republicans. But much like people don't consider White or Male to be a race or a sex, because they've historically been the default POV/main actors in most of this country's histories - at least the ones they teach - and media going back hundreds of years, the "average voter" (in terms of actual registration) is white and usually male. They're mostly registered already; it's the people at the margins who can't take the day off work to go vote (you're technically allowed to, but sometimes you just can't for money or family reasons) because there's one polling place for their district halfway across down because their gerrymandered district is shaped like a bowl of spaghetti fell on the floor and the secretary of state assigned the same voting budget to every geographic region, never minding that the suburb of 10000 and inner city of 80,000 have different needs, who haven't registered and don't intend to vote.

Think DST is tough? There's a rare condition out there called Non-24 sleep/wake disorder. It's where a body's circadian rhythm is not, in fact, 24 hours like the rest of the human race, generally closer to 25 hours or similar. That's essentially DST every single day. I actually use DST to explain it to people - you'd hate it if every day your body was one hour off. In two weeks, your natural "wake up time" would be 6 pm instead of 6 am, then a week later it would be 1 am. And it's not just a sleep-related issue - the circadian rhythm affects EVERYTHING, like your immune system, your cardiovascular system, your digestion, everything. You can't fight your circadian rhythm forever; there is no way to stay on the same daytime/nighttime schedule as everyone else - and unlike graveyard shift workers, you never get to acclimate, and there's not enough caffeine in the world. I know someone who has it - the only thing that really helped was either one-time doses of Ritalin for a few hours of mental boost, or a drug developed by the military to keep soldiers awake called Provigil, which is also not a everyday solution.

Most of the people that have it are blind, with damaged eyes - the theory is it is caused when melanopsin receptors in your eyes. Just like rods and cones, you have special cells in your eyes that are sensitive to daylight and send signals to your brain to regulate your melatonin (sleep hormone). There's a drug, Hetlioz, that is like an antidepressant for melatonin that is used to treat it in blind people. But there are some truly unfortunate people out there with sight who have it too, for unknown reasons, and it doesn't work for them.

Circadian rhythms are not something to fuck around with.

You can outsource tech workers too, I'm sure they're exactly as good everywhere around the world because the tools to learn are all out there for anyone, all you need is a free language and a "pay what you want" humble bundle and you too can write your own app with enough practice.

A massive marketing effort goes into even middlingly successful artists. If you have to fire up the machinery every month, you're going to burn people out - they just won't care. For established artists, albums are an event - a catalyst around which 6 months of interviews, touring, promo videos, and other marketing are planned. There are people who can drop a new single every couple months, but it really depends on the genre and audience - if your audience is adults, they won't have time for your shit if you try to grab their attention 8 times a year. But if you just release a stream of singles, nobody is going to remember to check them out by the third one.

When there's SO MUCH competition out there, you can't afford to hamstring all your promotional efforts, burn yourself out on a constant treadmill, and alienate your fans.

One of my favorite bands - one that I've paid probably $600 in the past 6 years to see in concert 6 times - released their newest album in 4 chunks. l was excited for the first one, interested in the second, didn't really care when the third came around, and didn't even know when the 4th was released until they had one consolidated album to promote. They were releasing as they went along, and halfway through I just decided to wait until the entire thing was done.

Maybe getting a day job kills their creative spirit. Maybe they already have jobs, unconventional jobs - maybe performing music IS their job (wedding bands, stock music/advertising, house band for a bar, studio musician). Trying to hustle your music to the point that they can "make money off of touring and merchandise" can also be a full time job. Touring is a full-time job that requires 100% dedication and would cost you most jobs.

"Music" is a hobby. Real musicianship, real songwriting, real skill, is an art. Money only kills quality in music when that's the only goal of music - we all hate record execs, promoters, Clear Channel music directors, MTV when it still played music videos, and other grifts, payola schemes, and crass commercialists - why shouldn't we hate Spotify execs for trying to inject their profit motive back into our musical tastes?

Good songwriting, good musicianship - that shit is TRANSCENDENT and people have and will pay good money for those experiences. Turning musicians into another content mill - maybe it works for some musicians, but it sure won't for others. Songs take time, iteration, and collaboration to develop, albums take a LONG time to record/mix/master, planning a tour takes longer than the actual tour lasts. Masterworks, or even just a catchy song, can take hundreds of hours to get to the recording that you hear.

You know why sophomore slumps have traditionally existed? Because a first album takes years to make - a second album is often rushed in a matter of months after the well has run dry. For every song on an album, there are either two dozen more that never made it out of the rehearsal room, or each song had weeks of effort dedicated to it.

Time is as much a resource for musicians as anything else - and taking that away from them will ruin a lot of them.

Exactly. And the death rate doesn't just start climbing at 70.

50-59 is 1.3% - that's still a huge number of people, a lot of long-established, highly-skilled senior-level workers and executives. We're not just talking about killing off Walmart greeters. There's a lot of institutional knowledge at this level of worker, and a lot of productivity. In industries that rely on "connections" and networks, these are your TOP guys, you lose them and you lose 20 years of memory - you don't even know what you won't know when you lose them.

60-69 - more than half of which is still working age for most Americans - is 3.6% death rate. How many CEOs or business owners fit that category? Everything that applies to the 50s applies here as well.

And if we send all these people back to work and the numbers jump up again, those percentages double or triple. We'd be killing off a lot of our most valuable, experienced, knowledgeable, and productive workers. How long can we keep all our managers, senior staff, owners, and best public-facing salesmen at home? With community spread, they'll still get sick anyway even if they're rich and isolated, and there's no "good health care" even for the well-off if hospitals get jammed during a pandemic.

Like COVID-19? Drop the 19, I assure you people will know what you're talking about. Covid's just as easy to type as wuflu, is the ACTUAL NAME of the virus, and isn't used as a dogwhistle to further a political agenda.

What has $600-700 billion a year in military spending got the U.S. in the past two decades? None of the major threats have been military in nature. Terrorism a la 9/11 is a law enforcement, intelligence, and security problem - trying to solve it militarily just wasted trillions, created ISIS, and eventually led the Taliban back to power - because of 3000 deaths. The 2008 financial crisis, the last great threat to the country that caused widespread death and destruction, was because of bad regulation and greed, also spurned on by the same people that caused the fiascos after 9/11.

This problem is medicinal and sociological and even political in nature - the military's done nothing to help, and anything the military does (surplus supplies that we paid military contractor rates for, fucking hospital ships?!) would have been cheaper if we just did it through a well-funded NIH, CDC, and national healthcare system. The military budget is 100x the CDC budget - how much better could we have handled this situation if you gave 1/20th of $800 billion to public health?

Of course, you'd have to actually LISTEN to them in the first place, which, of course, the same party in power for 9/11 that didn't listen to intelligence reports warning of Al-Qaeda and then chose to embark on two wars of choice - one of which was unprovoked - and encouraged reckless deregulation that led to the financial crisis is in power now, so, maybe there's something else we need to look at too.

People are also much less willing to accept mass death these days than they were before. Mortality rates have plummeted, life expectancy has shot through the roof, and medical advances have gotten everyone used to being healthy and living an (expensive) extra 10-15 years. We used to lose hundreds of thousands to wars, automobile accident death rates were an order of magnitude higher, companies used to routinely poison people with faulty products and not face consequences. In today's litigation environment, you can't even kill a baby without losing millions.

Everyone talking tough about getting back to work now will be horrified once there's a million dead people. No politician encouraging going back to work,only to spawn a wave of hundreds of thousands of deaths, will ever hold office again. Trump's already set a lower bound at 100,000 - by his own words, that's "a good job" - and a higher limit at 200,000. Anything reasonably higher than that is going to be held against him and the Republican party - and anything that's more than 3x that will guarantee electoral loss.

It's not about stopping the flow of cash completely, it's about giving everyone a break from their largest payment each month. If rent isn't paid, that gives other services a chance to get paid. Housing and commercial space is, by and large, paid off on some level - e.g. it doesn't *cost* anything for your 40 year-old house or 30 year-old strip mall to exist outside of basic upkeep and property taxes, as opposed to electricity, water, internet, and food. Rent is 95% wealth transfer to a landlord, mortgages are wealth transfers to banks. If we literally just said everyone who has a shelter-in-place is allowed to shelter rent-free for the time being, what does that cost? Obviously people are going to be losing money, but fuck, everyone's losing money, why should housing be the only investment vehicle immune to a crashing economy? If we just tack on a few months to the end of mortgages and leases and forego collecting rent for now, how much damage does that do - versus evicting literally millions of people and businesses who can't pay anyway? If you evict someone, who the hell else is going to move in right now? Will we be able to run a functioning society when everyone takes a 300 point hit to their credit score from bankruptcy and has evictions on record? You can't pretend like this is the same world as a month ago anymore - a lot of debt is going to either be forgiven or never paid after this as people are forced to walk away.

Now, I still haven't seen an answer to my question - what am I not seeing? How is giving everyone a nationwide pause on rent a worse alternative than evicting millions of people and businesses in 3 months when the eviction moratorium is lifted and 4 months rent is due? (As if 3 months will be the end of the crisis!)

I'm aware of the basics of inflation. They haven't shut down rent though. Specifically - if we stopped debt payments for mortgage and suspended rent, all the way up the chain from my apartment to corporate rent, such that nobody has any income from rent but nobody has to pay rent, but continued propping up banks with Fed money - what happens? It certainly will shut down some large housing lenders (although aren't the majority of mortgages backed by the government already?) but it would prevent a lot of economic havoc and fear amongst the millions of jobless - and really, by pumping money into unemployment insurance, we're already making payments to rental and housing companies, but what good is that doing?

Forgive rent/mortgages, let people have enough money, provide the loans to companies directly - enough to keep the doors open but they have to go to 0% profit for now. Investors take a hit but it helps hundreds of millions of people. What am I missing? I don't know what I don't know about why this would bring down the economic system.

How many employees are solely funded by rentals vs everyone in the country not having to worry about rent? We have unemployment insurance for those employees. Don't like anyone losing jobs but there's already gonna be 5 million unemployed, they would be a drop in the bucket. At least they wouldn't have to pay rent.

How much of the economic hit is debt service? What if we employed a nationwide shutdown of all rent/mortgage payments - all of them - and backed the banks with 0% interest loans from the Fed like we're already doing? Nobody is "losing" money this way - renters don't pay the landlords, landlords don't pay mortgages or commercial leases, banks get the shortfall in funds made up for by having a few 0s added to their electronic records. Investors don't get dividends and banks don't profit off of interest, but people can use their limited incomes to continue buying food and essential goods and don't get kicked out of their homes, which would be the primary catalyst for civil unrest. We'd have to find ways to fudge the numbers for the grannies living in a condo while renting out a house for their sole source of income, but most landlords should survive if they don't have to service massive debt of their own.

It's far too late at night for me to think the consequences through further than that. Can someone list the obvious downsides I don't see?

There's an economic answer for this. Right now, doing nothing, the projections (don't care if you don't believe them, that's what the policies are being based on) call for millions of Americans to die. That's not gonna be good for the economy - or the chances of the elected leaders (at every level) remaining in their positions.

However, at some point it stops costing less to save a life, and starts costing more to keep people alive. America can't afford to lose 2-3 million to an unchecked spread of COVID. But at some point they can't afford to shut down the economy to save X amount. X is yet to be determined, but 2-3 months from now people might just be fed up enough that they're willing to roll the dice on their family and friends, and sacrifice 1/100th of their contacts list to get back to a normal life. America is already one big death panel that has collectively voted EVERY TIME to sentence tens (hundreds?) of thousands to death per year through an inadequate health care system and defunding our safety nets - not to mention all the firearms deaths we actively vote for through politicians that strengthen the 2nd amendment.

We will save millions through shutting everything down. We will kill hundreds of thousands when we start everything back up before a vaccine or effective treatment is found.

Once we start realizing that we can't treat anything BUT COVID-19 - and lose hundreds of thousands of to cancer, heart attacks, many fewer transplants and other life-saving surgeries, other diseases and syndromes - we're going to be willing to trade saving COVID patients for saving other patients as we just become DONE with treating "them" at the expense of "the rest of us." Although COVID will take many of those others anyway, as their compromised immune systems won't be able to stand up to it, so maybe we just accept the death of anyone above a certain age or with certain conditions if they can't survive COVID or haven't already gotten it.

A lot of THAT could have been saved if we had shut down economies earlier. But we didn't, so here we are.

You're conflating logic, as a method of building an argument, and Logic, as a systematized discourse of knowledge (those are just the words that are used in academia, I'm not going to PoMo 101 for you) that has a history of meanings developed by thousands of years of Western culture and values with a definite ideological force behind it.

It's borrowing the cred behind the concept of Logic and using it as a tool to shut down thought, by throwing that little shortcut to Everything That has Ever Been Rational into the mix when trying to argue a point about gender issues or whatever academic bugbear you have. It's the logical fallacy of appeal to authority, just like an appeal to God, Country, or Morality can be used to shut down a logical premise you don't subscribe to.

When you criticize logic, in that academic Gender Studies way, it isn't to throw out the entire concept. You don't shut down arguments that way, you open them up, by taking a step back and looking at the history behind the term's use, the political ways we've been raised to look at Men Who Used Logic and some of the previous ways that messed-up things have been done under the rubric of "It's the Most Logical Thing To Do" and otherwise equating a contingent/biased/flawed/political case of "logic" with capital-T truth and perhaps building a new argument off of that unstable edifice.

You almost by definition can't have an argument without logic, so no, making the argument that the term Logic has been misused for political gain in the past doesn't mean politicians are illogical. Though I don't like minorities being shut down, that's true.