Another week, another bunch of stress about the plague, right? But on the bright side March is very nearly over, after having seemingly lasted for ten years. So let's do a bunch of quick various things about the pandemic that is all of our lives now.

NO WAIT I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT A CURE, WHERE IS THE CURE

Perhaps you're wondering, now, when a vaccine will be available. The answer is a combination of "not as long as it could have taken" and "longer than we all would like." The reason it will take a long while is because most vaccines take a long time to develop. Getting a vaccine that works is hard, because you're trying to create a solution which will allow the human body to generate antibodies while also minimizing the risk of infecting somebody with the disease: most experimental vaccines are dangerous, or ineffective, or both if you're really unlucky. Indeed, vaccines can take up to a decade to get to the point where they're safe for public use.

It probably won't take that long, though, with a lot of immunologists predicting in between eighteen months and two years, for a couple of reasons. First off is the obvious one: lots and lots of people are working on this and many, many experimental vaccines are in the works, because when humanity decides to throw money at a problem you can often get faster results than usual. The second, less obvious reason is that when we had the SARS crisis back in 2003, at that time people started working on a vaccine for SARS. It was never completed, but Covid-19 shares a lot of genetic data with SARS (in between eighty and ninety percent identical) so the earlier work is helpful for people trying to create Covid-19 vaccines now.

All of this is probably not a lot of comfort to you. Next!

STUMBLING TOWARDS UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME SYSTEMS

Most governments right now are announcing large aid packages for their citizens who are stuck at home unable to work but who still need things like "food" and "shelter." For the most part, these have all started out tentatively and then expanded in scope and expense as governments and people just sort of get used to the idea that this is What Has To Happen, Okay? and it would be great if we could just skip that and go to straightforward universal income systems, at least on a temporary basis, but most governments have had to work through their issues with means testing or directed economic stimulus to industries or the like before we can get there. Canada is a great example of this: it would be massively simpler and less stressful if the government simply mailed everybody monthly cheques or did monthly direct deposits, but instead we have a patchwork of aid programs: expansion of employment insurance, subsidies to small businesses, a specific grant program for gig workers and self-employed people, and a couple of others which all mostly do the same thing and mostly come pretty close to giving out the same money to people who qualify for those programs.

Pretty much every country is doing this in the same way, inching ever closer to just-send-everybody-money with each passing week, and if you have any lefty in your comments complaining that Canada isn't doing as much as Insert Nation Here, you can tell them to go screw because really, it's mostly only a matter of degrees. I mean, I'd love it if the Canadian government offered an arts relief program like Germany's or a tourism sector aid package like France's, and probably something along those lines will show up eventually.

The major exception to all of this in the first world is, of course, the United States, which passed its aid package last week. A large chunk of it is tax credits, of course, because there's nothing the USA loves more than corporate tax breaks, but there's also industry-specific bailouts because... well, let me get to that in the next item, it probably deserves its own header. That said, a lot of people were left wondering why the USA decided that cruise ship companies needed a bailout, given that A) almost all cruise ship companies aren't American, B) most of their employees aren't American either, and C) this is because they specifically want to evade American labour laws, which is why they tend to be incorporated in places like Panama.

On the "for actual people" side of things, the most noteworthy measure is that the USA is giving every American (who earned less than $75K on their last tax return, and if you're asking "wait, what if I got laid off in between now and then?" the answer is "you're boned") a $1200 cheque, which will literally have Donald Trump's signature on it because of course he wanted to do that. There's also an expansion of unemployment insurance for four months and funds for small business loans, and while any economic stimulus to individuals is better than none - a single $1200 payment isn't going to be enough to help a lot of people, plain and simple.

ZOMBIE COMPANIES, OOOOOOOOOOO

So the reason for all the industry bailouts the USA is proposing (and to be fair, lots of other countries have the same issue to a lesser extent) is because of "zombie companies." A zombie company can be defined as a few things, but the one that everybody agrees on is "a company that earns enough money to handle the interest payments on its debt, but not enough to pay down its debt." Now, there's nothing wrong with companies having debt - indeed, stable credit is obviously important for businesses to have in order to ensure that creditors are paid out when cashflow can be irregular. But a company that is so debt-laden that it can't afford to reduce its debt principal is... a problem. And when a lot of companies are in that boat, it's everybody's problem.

I don't want to get too heavily into economic theory here, but one of the problems with the economic rebound following the 2008 collapse is that it has in large part been managed via extremely cheap debt. If you follow global interest rates at all, you know that most countries have slashed their prime interest rates to incredibly low levels, with most of the first world having interest rates of 1-2% over the past few years. This of course means that taking on debt is relatively cheap, so... everybody kind of did that, and everybody just sort of hoped that things would return to normal before something bad happened. And of course nothing bad happ - oh, right.

Goverments have slashed interest rates even further in response to the Covid-19 crisis, but most of them have nowhere left to go. (Canada cut prime interest rates to 0.25% this past week, which is basically about as low as you can meaningfully cut them before you hit zero.) Making debt cheaper isn't a solution when companies are already larded up with debt and have no real way to meaningfully generate income to make their payments, and the companies that are larded up in this way are huge employers - the automotive and telecom sectors are two of the biggest offenders worldwide, with resource extraction companies being nearly as bad and the health insurance sector in the USA being a particularly noteworthily bad bunch.

Hence: bailouts, because although these companies have been irresponsibly mismanaged to a shocking extent with no real long-term thought whatsoever, just losing them entirely would be dropping grenades into the economy which might take generations to fix.

It's a great system we've got going on here.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

City Slickers (1991, Ron Underwood, Crave) - 4/5

Twister (1996, Jan De Bont, Amazon Prime) - 2.5/5

French Kiss (1995, Lawrence Kasdan, Amazon Prime) - 3/5

The Milagro Beanfield War (1988, Robert Redford, Google Play) - 4/5

North By Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock, Blu-Ray) - 5/5

We also watched the entirety of Tiger King, which is entertaining in its batshit insane way - I certainly don't regret watching it - but as documentaries go it's not really very good at answering questions like "so who's right about these moral issues with respect to tiger zoos" (spoiler alert: it's the actual conservationists, who get smeared pretty badly by the documentary series in service of bringing them down to the level of the dogshit humans who are the rest of the show's cast).

See you in seven.