Dubois Vs Joyce / Whyte Vs Povetkin unlikely to go ahead

Just a tip, I’ve just been in Tesco etc and the shelves are empty. No pasta or rice for example. I’ve just nipped in a local polish shop and they’ve got plenty. I’m guessing people’s xenophobia is causing them to overlook them as options.

 

Right.
And I'm saying that vast numbers of people won't cope if the economy shuts down. If unemployment spirals out of control and panic buying continues and the markets continue to plummet, millions of people will suffer badly in the UK, and millions worldwide will probably die. I'm not sure how this can even be denied.
If the world economy wasn't important like I'm saying it is, we'd all be living in the Garden of Eden. But it is important, and we're not.

Yeah, I get it, you disagree.

Theoretically, if politicians worldwide are reckless and the global economy crashes, YES, many, hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, rather than millions, could die of poverty.
No, maybe you and I may be in the priveleged minority who wouldn't, but it's incredible complacent to assume so, and to assume that the British economy and society is immune from such eventualities.

I'm talking about if the businesses were closed.
Imagine huge swathes of the working and lower middle classes being thrown into unemployment because of shut downs. It's not like the war where the people were re-employed and re-deployed into the army and armaments industries. I'm talking about small businesses dropping like flies, large businesses shrinking rapidly overnight. This is possible.
If twenty weeks of shutting down is okay, then why the **** do we go to work about 47 weeks of the year ?

Yes, pick up a history book.
Study this subject.
Have a look into the real effects of world economy crashes.
We're talking about massive and long-lasting damage.
The effects of the 1930s crash were the worst horrors the world has ever seen in the first half of the 1940s.
It was no joke.
And before this Covid19 thing, we already live in a world of rising tensions, stand-offs and increasingly extreme nationalisms and the rise of populist demagogues.
This is something people should be aware of.

If the economy is literally shut down, yes, society will be destroyed. That's a trusim.
Of course, at the moment, the proposals aren't to shut down the economy in that manner, but people need to be careful in how flippantly and recklessly they approach this.
A few measures can lead to unexpected effects, which can lead to more measures, and unforseen effects, all the while compounded by the measures being taken by leaders in other countries, tinkering and muddling their way through with perhaps not the well-being of the ordinary people as their only motives.
It's naive to assume the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can't **** this up royally. Worse yet, they may be replaced by even worse versions when the people get angry and realize they ****ed it up.

No, not these measures directly.
We're at early days of what's coming though.
I will say that shops being shut, bars being shut, restaurants being shut, will be catastrophic to Britain's economy. It's not just the people who work in those places, it's a whole range of businesses that supply and service those businesses, and there are knock on effects beyond that.

There are no guarantees in this world.
We COULD all die from poverty, if the economy literally broke down. We'd surely live miserable existences.
No country can survive a literal economic shutdown in any real way - I mean, unless maybe if you use Somalia or Zimbabwe as a model for 'survived'. A functioning society needs a functioning economy.

There are ALREADY millions of deaths through starvation and disease, as I keep saying. This isn't fiction. This is the real world.
I guess some people in 'the first world' can't comprehend that, but it is plainly true, and a global economic collapse would result in hundreds of millions more, yes.

I'm not scaremongering, I'm just voicing a warning about the movement to shut things down.
The results could be catastrophic.

This is my last reply to you. I feel I've explained myself several times over now. Take it or leave it.

 

I've seen this too.
The large supermarkets, (and their smaller outlets) are devoid of lots of things, for a couple of weeks now, and it's getting worse.
It started with the toilet roll, pasta and the tuna.
Now there's no meat in many of them, the pasta sauces and similar items have been cleared (all those people buying pasta), no beans, and the rest of the tinned foods are being bought up rapidly. Bread is getting scarce.
Some of these shops have no fruit now either.
And these are just the aisles where I was looking for these particular things. All gone.
Whole aisles empty.

Many of the smaller shops still have stuff, in London, but at this rate, how long can they hold out ?
At what point will they start reserving for favoured customers ? What point do they start hiking prices of in-demand stuffs ?

And this is just the beginning. And all the people who missed out on hoarding stuff are suffering and are determined to hoard now too.
A black market will emerge if this carries on, and the poorest people will get shafted.

This is the kind of **** the government needs to address.

This isn't what I'm hearing on the media and the internet. This is what I'm seeing with my own eyes, and feeling, on the street.

 

I'm not sure how much of that actually relates to the situation we are in at the moment though. You seem to be saying that millions are already suffering (true of course), but what does that have to do with the coronavirus which appears likely to peak in around twelve weeks?

You keep saying we should look to history. But a two to four month shutdown of non-essentials does not seem remotely comparable to, say, a six year world war.

 

I'm sure Boris Johnson and his cronies have never been in Tesco or Sainsburys in his life though.
He probably gets his toilet roll hand-made in a boutique in Harrods and delivered by a gold-adorned carriage and a coachman dressed in livery.

 

Wrong.
During WW2 we became a total war economy and re-directed the economy to combat the Germans.
Men were conscripted into the forces and into the mines and essential war industries.
Women were employed into the factories.
Everyone was paid. There was full employment.
And goods were rationed.

This isn't comparable.
If everyone was being conscripted into working on a vaccine for Covid19 and conscripted into the NHS to deal with the sick, then we'd have a comparable situation.

You've completely misunderstood me if you think I'm making a defeatist argument. Far from it.

 

I visited three local supermarkets yesterday and yes, whilst items like pasta, eggs, rice etc were out of stock, there was plenty of food for a full and healthy diet for anyone to get by. Plenty for everyone to stock up on. Loads of fruit, meat, tinned vegetables and beans, nuts, bread, milk, fish etc.

I've had to modify my diet because I used to eat a lot of eggs for example but there's a lot to get by.

That said, I am an above average salary earner and the nature of my work means I can continue to work at home and get paid so I can still afford food and rent comfortably. My Mrs is still working too and getting paid so we are comfortable. I feel really concerned about those who are now on unpaid leave or who are tight on money and therefore cannot stock up like others are doing.

I saw Sainsbury's has started to ration items which is a good step. The next step ought to be to offer significant discounts on food and essential items to pensioners and vulnerable people although I appreciate it's hard to categorise people and would be a difficult system to operate in practice. Maybe some stores could be available to pensioners and low-earners only. Just a thought.

 

You also seem to be missing several important points. Working from home will have a significant impact on our ability to carry on. The government have just set aside a multi-billion package for industries and companies facing downtime. And the biggest issue of all for the doomsday scenario is that this will largely be over fairly soon. As has been pointed out many times, experts continue to suggest the peak of this is somewhere in the region of twelve weeks.

You keep saying that's enough to ruin society and so on. Is it? You keep saying 'look to history.' When are you referring to?

 

Retailers are rationing the numbers of individual items a shopper can buy and many of them are reserving special times for only OAPs to shop.Asda and Lidl yesterday had very limited goods to buy,no eggs,toilet rolls,sanitizers,disinfectant,meat joints,chicken, or milk,but measures are now being put in place to alleviate this.
I feel you are looking a very long way further down the road and ,at the moment, we have no idea whether we will be travelling that far.No disrespect intended.

 

This is already happening to be fair. As per the paper this morning, 'Asda is closing its cafes and pizza counters and restricting shoppers to three items on all food, toiletries and cleaning products, Sainsbury’s closed its cafes as well as meat, fish and pizza service counters to free up its staff and delivery network for essentials. Aldi has introduced a four-items-per-shopper limit on all products and Tesco cut its limit from five to two items over the weekend on products including toilet roll, long-life milk, pasta and tissues.'

I was in a supermarket yesterday. Some stuff was pretty low in terms of stock but I was quite surprised given the horror stories kicking around about how much food was available. I was able to buy a normal amount of shopping including plenty of fresh fruit and veg. The only thing that did seem odd was a policewoman in the shop, but she seemed to be fairly jovial about the whole thing and was just chatting with the security guard. I suppose it's a slight step up just in case some idiot decides they need a million toilet rolls but by and large it seemed calm.

I wonder if this is reflective of how people view things. I'm genuinely calm and think we'll be fine if we're sensible. Unforgiven is predicting a bloodbath and is seeing the devastation with his own eyes. Perhaps reality is somewhere in between.

 

It's good news that the supermarkets are taking measures.
I saw that last week in some of the smaller outlets but the large supermarkets seem to be getting worse by the day.

I don't know how far I'm looking down the road with this. In the case of food shortages at shops, for some people that's the most immediate and urgent issue and it's already happening. For the people on low income who normally live off the cheap beans and pasta and rice etc., and the hoarders have ruined their budget, it's already happened. And it's just begun.

 

On the contrary, apparently the prospect of people dying from this thing is far scarier to many people here than it is to me.
In fact, it's the only stick to beat me with, the fact that people will die of covid19 on trolleys in the local chuch hall or whatever. That's it. That's the fear, the fear of the horrible event, that is motivating all this argument against my observations and opinions.

 

So, mass unemployment is sustainable now. The economy doesn't need people to go to work. Okay.
Thanks to the Covid19 for bringing that to our attention. We can all jack our jobs in and tell the bosses to stick it. Great. They can get a robot to do my job and someone will send me a pay cheque. That's dandy, I must say.
Thanks you for enlightening me.