4/1: US-Italy Charts and other updates:

Italy continues to show a lot of progress.  New cases were up a little over the past 2 days but still down from the peak over a week ago.  Even more welcomed news is the deaths dropped back to levels seen about a week ago too.

The US has shown the opposite as new cases and deaths continue to climb.  The US saw over 1,000 die in one day.  That's the single highest any country has had to deal with, even Italy. 8 states had more than 1,000 new cases.

A sigh of relieve for France as the massive new case spike seen yesterday was temporary.  New cases dropped back to the same level as the day prior to the spike. Deaths, however, were up slightly.

Spain has maintained the same level of new cases per day for a week now.  Seems to be very test limited as deaths have still increased slightly day by day.

Turkey has seen a massive increase in deaths per day over the past 4 days.  Brazil has had back to back spikes in new cases and an sizable increase in deaths over the past 2 days.

India is now of major concern.  Nearly a 5x increase in new cases and frightening 7x increase in deaths.  They are still early in this fight and thy did shut down the whole country over a week ago.  Hopefully they can keep those figures from running away.

This is the one I was thinking of from the University of Washington.  Saw it a over the weekend.  It's the same one that the White House used in its briefing yesterday (though I think their updated one had the estimate slightly lower).  The line crosses right over the intersection of April 1 and 1,000 deaths per day.

Here's a link to the latest version among other graphs.

If Germany is doing so great, then why are thousands of US military personnel over there protecting your German asses?

It's not so bad. Instead of getting fully absorbed by the corona hysteria, people should be thinking of all the other things that are connected in the big picture; after all, right now there's more time for that than usual, with so many people either losing their jobs or working only short periods of time each week. Why do Americans get so fat on average? Because corn syrup is omnipresent in processed food. Why is corn syrup everywhere? Because it's sweet and very cheap, so it tastes good and allows manufacturers to pad food instead of having to use healthier and more expensive ingredients to reach the expected size for a meal. It's just one big example of a government putting economic interests of big corporations above the health of the population; tied into that is the pharma industry because it's in their best interest that people aren't healthy.

And yes, it's the government's job to make laws that protect its people, because people don't have the time to research everything all the time. What also ties into food is meat production. Lax laws mean more cheap meat, but it comes at the cost of the environment because of the tremendous amount of animals, both in the masses of food they need to be fed and the questions regarding where there poo should go and the perpetual burping of cows which accounts for quite a significant amount of CO² emissions on this plant. A lot of things are intertwined, so merely tackling the question of how to have less fat people would help with a bunch of other seemingly unrelated problems as well.

A few European countries have passed a tax on sugar and the response of the mighty Coca Cola company was that they notably reduced the amount of sugar in their soda pops. Capitalism is good because it rewards effort and therefore pushes people to work hard, but governments have to act as a responsible check to contain capitalism, because in its purest form capitalism is extremely dangerous. The biggest flaw in the current setup of industrialized nations is that people tend to be corrupt, so money can buy laws or the lack thereof; that allows corporations to get richer and repeat this cycle, and that's how the world got so much pollution and fat people.

So yes, we should have no more very fat people. But the responsibility for that lies in large part with the governments who have to make laws that discourage companies from producing very unhealthy food. If the population cannot buy such questionable food, then there aren't obese people in the first place. You see, fat shaming can have its benefits because it can get people to think about the big picture more critically; if it wasn't allowed to talk about fat due to "protecting the feelings of fat people" or some other form of political correctness, then the obesity problem will inevitably persist.

It's not so bad. Instead of getting fully absorbed by the corona hysteria, people should be thinking of all the other things that are connected in the big picture; after all, right now there's more time for that than usual, with so many people either losing their jobs or working only short periods of time each week. Why do Americans get so fat on average? Because corn syrup is omnipresent in processed food. Why is corn syrup everywhere? Because it's sweet and very cheap, so it tastes good and allows manufacturers to pad food instead of having to use healthier and more expensive ingredients to reach the expected size for a meal. It's just one big example of a government putting economic interests of big corporations above the health of the population; tied into that is the pharma industry because it's in their best interest that people aren't healthy.

And yes, it's the government's job to make laws that protect its people, because people don't have the time to research everything all the time. What also ties into food is meat production. Lax laws mean more cheap meat, but it comes at the cost of the environment because of the tremendous amount of animals, both in the masses of food they need to be fed and the questions regarding where there poo should go and the perpetual burping of cows which accounts for quite a significant amount of CO² emissions on this plant. A lot of things are intertwined, so merely tackling the question of how to have less fat people would help with a bunch of other seemingly unrelated problems as well.

A few European countries have passed a tax on sugar and the response of the mighty Coca Cola company was that they notably reduced the amount of sugar in their soda pops. Capitalism is good because it rewards effort and therefore pushes people to work hard, but governments have to act as a responsible check to contain capitalism, because in its purest form capitalism is extremely dangerous. The biggest flaw in the current setup of industrialized nations is that people tend to be corrupt, so money can buy laws or the lack thereof; that allows corporations to get richer and repeat this cycle, and that's how the world got so much pollution and fat people.

So yes, we should have no more very fat people. But the responsibility for that lies in large part with the governments who have to make laws that discourage companies from producing very unhealthy food. If the population cannot buy such questionable food, then there aren't obese people in the first place. You see, fat shaming can have its benefits because it can get people to think about the big picture more critically; if it wasn't allowed to talk about fat due to "protecting the feelings of fat people" or some other form of political correctness, then the obesity problem will inevitably persist.

Corn Syrup is worse than normal sugars for sweeting things.