“I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place” | Hacker News Reader

“I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place”

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When people ask me why I moved back to Canada from the USA, knowing I'd be paid less and have higher taxes, I often have a hard time articulating what the difference is between the two countries. Why I prefer to live here.

This thread sums it up nicely.

No matter how down-on-my-luck I get back in Canada, I will always have a safety net. I can always walk into a hospital and be treated. I can take time off when I'm sick. I get time off if I have a kid. It's the law here and not just best effort by employers. It's for everyone and not just the rich.

Is it is big thing in America now to claim we don't have things we do like time off when we are sick or hospitals to treat us? What on earth is this post about??

are you being obtuse intentionally? in the usa the hospital will send you a bill, thst is often ruinous

Umm, not everyone gets time off when they're sick. Did you read the linked thread? Many more people can't actually afford to go to a hospital without incurring irresponsible financial burden. Regardless of whether this is the "correct" decision by whatever calculation you do, there are plenty, plenty of people who arrive at the conclusion that they cannot afford to take work off and cannot afford to go to the hospital.

Unfortunately many of those same people occupy "high centrality" nodes in our society - they handle food, they deliver packages, they operate or take mass transit, they clean homes/workplaces/restaurants, etc.

Lots of people in America don't have sick leave. Lots of people in America can't afford treatment for illness until they have to go to the emergency room.

who is we exactly? just because you and your bubble do get healthcare and sick time doesn't "we" do.

https://www.uphelp.org/nearly-half-all-american-adults-are-u...

Looks like around 40% of the US work force has no paid sick leave:

https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...

Damn, that's hard. In Germany we have six weeks per illness. Meaning you get up to six weeks for your broken leg, another six for arm and so on. Insurance to cover up to a year isn't to expensive neither if you start early. Sounds like paradise.

It's pretty clear that he's stating Canada has a larger welfare net than in the US.

Take paid holiday. The US has no federal state minimum paid vacation. In Canada, it's 16-30 days.

Most folks don't have paid time off when they are sick. Even if they do, they'll still get in trouble for attendance when they are sick - and those days are often limited to 5 per year.

The big issue is that nothing is required, with the big exception of FMLA. FMLA doesn't cover small places nor part-time employees, though, and it doesn't mean you'll be paid.

Many people cannot afford to go to the doctor either.

There is absolutely no safety net for people.

> The big issue is that nothing is required

The most populous state in the country requires a minimum of 3 days paid sick leave for employees: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Paid_Sick_Leave.htm

Employers cant legally prevent employees from using this time. But, given that low-income people have little ability to fight violations of the law, I'd hardly be surprised to hear that people are forced (or feel forced) to work while sick.

"If an employee does not have any accrued or available paid sick leave, however, (e.g., if the employee has already used all of his or her accrued and available paid sick leave under the employer’s policy, including as consistent with Labor Code section 233), and if the employee has an unscheduled absence that would otherwise violate the employer’s attendance policy, the paid sick leave law does not prohibit the employer from giving the employee an “occurrence” for such absence, even if the employee was actually sick and/or could have used paid sick leave for the absence if he or she had any such leave accrued. The paid sick leave law does not “protect” all time off taken by an employee for illness or related purposes; it “protects” only an employee’s accrued and available paid sick leave as specified in the statute."

Sure, and three days is pretty slim - its easy to be pretty sick for three days with a single occurrence of illness. But the above quote is just a wordy way of saying "you aren't entitled to more sick leave than the 3 days provided for by this law".

Federal law [0] says you cant be fired for taking up to 12 weeks off per year to take care of, among other things, "major illness" (understood to mean that it does not cover things like colds or flu, unless they require hospitalization). But, it also only applies to businesses with over 50 employees, so non-chain restaurants are unlikely to follow this law.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

Ok. But honestly, the other 69% of Americans that don't live in California don't get this. Not only that, but it can somehow vary by employer.

Other places simply have it for everyone, and a union negotiation won't take away the safety net, as it is a right. It can only add benefits to the minimum.

There's a fair number of state laws by now:

https://www.workplacefairness.org/paid-sick-leave

I haven't reviewed them all, but the ones I've looked at are pretty meager, ~40 hours a year (and often conditional on employer size), which won't do much other than take the edge off if you get more than a little sick.

When you're health insurance is tied to your work, if you lost the ability to work, you are screwed. You will stop earning money, your savings will evaporate, then your health insurance will evaporate, and then you get destroyed by medical bills. This happened in me in 2006 after a bad bicycle accident.

And all of this is assuming the health insurance company doesn't weasel out of paying for your bills while you have insurance because of a clerical error you made when applying for health insurance in the first place.

All of this also assumes that you have thousands of dollars to pay for deductibles before your health insurance kicks in at all.

To be fair to the thread however, the food industry is brutal on employees in Canada as well.

Most restaurant employees are paid below minimum wage and expected to make up the rest in tips.

Coming in to work while you are sick is socially accepted. Probably because everybody in the entire country gets some form of cold or flu at least once over the winter... it's almost inevitable.

I just came back from a upscale cafe where the person who served me my food literally coughed into their hand before touching my plate in front of 20 customers and nobody (but me) so much as even batted an eyelash.

The free healthcare in Canada is great... but you'd be lucky to have a job waiting for you in the food industry if you took 3 or 4 weeks off because you "just had a cold".

I was a busboy in a high end restaurant for a few years here up in Canada and I wouldn't wish that punishment on my worst enemy.

I remember my manager being furiously frustrated with me when I handed in my 2 weeks notice, because he knew it would be a hell of a task to find a hard working replacement as naive as younger-me used to be.

> Most restaurant employees are paid below minimum wage and expected to make up the rest in tips.

To note, only three provinces (the three most populous) have separate minimum wages for servers.

> Coming in to work while you are sick is socially accepted.

I hate this so much. I cause enough of a stink in my office about this that people in my department don't do it, but it boggles my mind that people with a lenient remote work policy and unlimited sick days would still choose to come into the office when sick if I didn't complain to HR about it.

It's just plain bad for business, which is the main aspect of it all that I don't understand.

If one employee comes into work sick, chances are everybody who works in close proximity to them all day will be sick by the end of the week.

"We are all sick because so-and-so was sick last week." is a phrase I hear constantly coming out of my significant other's mouth.

She works in the food industry as well.

Surely that must lower profits in some way, shape or form.

Whether it's customers being wary of buying your products in the future (I personally will not go back into that cafe with the hand-coughing server for example), or your entire work force just being sluggish and high on cold medication for a week straight.

I suppose it doesn't matter in the eyes of the manager because everybody is going to come into work as usual whether they are sick or not anyways.

I asked her what she thought about sealing viruses inside of dark airtight packaging that is kept cool until sale, (they sell packaged chocolate) and she just assumed it was nothing to worry about.

When living and working in Canada I was surprised that taxes were pretty much the same as what I’d pay in California.

OECD data seems to back that up. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffingtonpost.ca/amp/2018/05...

Yet the cost of living is just as high in certain areas (Toronto and Vancouver) and the pay is abysmal.

The offers I would get in Toronto and Vancouver would often be 25-30% of the ones I’d get in NYC and SF.

You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver and you’d still get health coverage

If you chose to live in either of those cities that would be on you

Income taxes yes, but there are taxes like the HST, gasoline taxes, alcohol taxes that bump up the tax rate significantly.

Taxes as a percentage of GDP Canada - 33% USA - 24%

[1]https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-canada.pdf

If that USA figure is just tax, and doesn't include what people have to pay for health insurance, it's not really comparable, is it?

Unfortunately many of the best jobs are in CA and other high tax states (additional income tax, sales tax, etc.) where it starts becoming much closer.

Also unclear if that link takes into account family transfers like the original link.

I have turned down multiple opportunities to work in the USA for these reasons.

A friend told me her story years ago and it made me never want to work there.

She was a single mother in her early 30s. Her husband/father of her child died in a traffic accident when the child was very young (around 2yo). When her son was around 6 he developed a chronic medical condition. Not curable but manageable without awful impact to his life. However it was expensive to manage. She had decent insurance where she worked so it wasn't a massive issue (I think she paid around $200/month for medication).

However she was being sexual harassed and bullied by the company owner. She tried for years to change jobs but couldn't. Many times she was offered a job but the insurance package wasn't as good and so she could not afford the medication her son needed with the changes.

She was effectively held hostage with a boss who used to make her life miserable because of a healthcare plan. She was scared to go to work but she had no choice. No family support, etc.

It took her over four years to finally be free of that place when she moved country for a better life for her and her son (which is how we met and became friends).

She is a wonderful person who is doing amazing now. Last we spoke she was happily married. Not spoken in a while but think I will give her a call tonight to catch up. Thanks for the indirect reminder to do so.

I don’t understand for the life of me why any American (I am one) thinks that the status quo where your insurance is tied to your job isn’t insane.

Everyone understands it's insane, but the people with the power to change it have fantastic employer-provided health care, so why would they change things?

In all seriousness, if tax laws were changed to eliminate the employer advantage, things would change. But until then...

I just got my tax information for the year. My insurance is pretty good. I pay around $100 a month for family coverage, my company pays $21000 a year to subsidize it.

But, I still think it’s insane. We’ve made all sorts of decisions because of employee provided health insurance.

My now-wife met at work. We knew that our company was on its last legs, she took a job right before she was laid off making less money just to make sure that she had insurance for her and her sons (we weren’t married at the time).

I was laid off when the company was sold but I got a contract with one of our clients. I first looked for insurance on the open market. No one would sell me insurance because of a pre-existing condition. My “condition” wasn’t anything like cancer and I was part time fitness instructor, and ran half marathons within the last year.

Sure I could get CORBA, which I did, but less than four months later the acquiring company cancelled their insurance plan and outsourced all development to India.

I proposed to my wife and we were planning to get married in six months. She thought it was crazy I was helping to support her (she took a lower paying job) and paying insurance. She said let’s go to the courthouse and get married so I can get on her insurance.

She now works part time for the school system mostly so we can have insurance while I jump back and forth between salaried jobs and contract jobs.

I was in a similar situation. My wife didn't work, and I was doing the team lead thing. The moment my wife became pregnant, the employer immediately became abusive. I'm talking about working nights, weekends, mornings, late at night, and working on Christmas, on Thanksgiving. No amount of effort seemed to satisfy them.

One day, I was working on this feature that exercised the system in a way that had never been done before, and it was going predictably terrible. I had been working since 4:30 am, it was something like 8:00 pm, I couldn't even see straight I was so tired. I get up to go home and get some rest, and my manager says, "Oceanghost! I need to know when this feature is going to ready and tested!"

I just said, "Have a nice night."

I never wrote another line of code for that company. They fired me for "Sending a rude email" a few days later.

This is really what those opposed to universal health care want—a society where you have no dignity or power or ability to stand up for yourself.

Having universal health care is great in Canada. If you break your leg or get sick you don’t have to worry about going bankrupt. My chiropractor spent 1.5M on cancer therapy for her husband and he still died. There are stories of moms waiting outside the emergency room with a thermometer checking their children’s temperature because they couldn’t afford the copay. My pregnant babysitter had to go to emergency and paid $1000 for a copay.

But Canada only has 3200 ICU beds across the entire country. For a country of 35M. Canada has 2.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, 36th out of 40 in the OECD. The US is only 31st with 2.8 hospital beds per 1000, similar to Canada.

My friends in Canada have had to wait months for things like MRIs, seeing specialists, etc. I got an MRI next day, $100 copay. Just last week one of my friends’ boyfriend had a “dark spot” on his liver show up on a CT scan, but the doctor never followed up and my friend couldn’t reach the doctor via phone. Another of my friends had to wait 2 years for autism therapy and right now has engaged in multiple protests in Toronto because Doug Ford has completely fucked up autism therapy funding.

So there are good things and bad things about it. In Canada you don’t have to pay but you are trapped by its bureaucracy that keeps its employees paid and you have no options. In the US you have options but it could be very very expensive.

> My friends in Canada have had to wait months for things like MRIs

It seems to be dependent on urgency. I've got what's likely a minor labral tear that isn't significantly affecting my quality of life where the MRI is expected to take months. On the other hand, when I had a potential TIA I had an MRI done within a day.

Private clinics are also pretty readily available for imaging, for those with the means/will to pay.

In the US you have options if you have disposable assets somewhere on the order of cash payment for required services (or have an exceptional insurance plan, but chances are very good those two are correlated).

Otherwise your ceiling looks more or less like Canadian care (your floor, of course, can be considerably worse).

Despite being "trapped in a bureaucracy" Canadians experience healthcare outcomes that are, on average, better than those experienced by Americans. Care is prioritized by need and urgency - not by money, but this results in a fairer and more equitable system.

On the other hand, done estimates are that there are an excess of ICU beds in the US and an overuse of them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351597/

evidence suggests that in the presence of available ICU beds physicians tend to admit lower-risk patients to the ICU and use the ICU more for care at the end of life (4–6). These findings suggest that overuse of ICU beds may be mediated, at least in part, by excess supply. Yet the number of ICU beds in the United States continues to increase, from 69,300 in 1985 to 93,955 in 2005 (2, 7).

Sure we have to wait for non urgent matters, but my step-mom died of cancer nearly 2 years ago, so I can attest of the efficiency of the system in her case. Each time she felt bad enough to go to the hospital, she was taken care of in matters of minutes in the emergency. Any necessary scans were done quite quickly.

Getting a diagnostic was a bit tough though, she had to get multiple appointment before they found the cancer, but I think that's mostly because cancer can be hard to diagnose. Once they found it, it was too late and what was initially potentially treatable lung cancer, became 4th stage and reached her bone.

The day she was asked between fighting or not a lost cause is the day I understood how our system is so much superior to the US one. The government bought us 4 or 5 more months with her. There 4-5 months that would have cost so much, 4-5 months that she wouldn't have agreed to if they had to pay.

Once I forgot to renew my insurance card. I was still insured, but I just couldn't benefit from it directly, which made me postpone it later and later, until it was needed after hitting my knee quite bad. That day I also was thankful for our system, because I hesitated to go... it was the first time I experienced what so many people have constantly experience in the US. If I still had that card, I would have never ever thought of any of that, I would just go. That was for a situation where I would have been able to get it refunded too, imagine that. Finally it was only about 80$ to get a scan of my knee, the people at the reception didn't even know how to charge me, that was funny. The funniest is that you would probably save money by getting that scan here in Canada, I have no doubt that it would be much more than 80$ in the US and you would still have to pay your full 100$ copay.

In the US it seems like the government goes in favor to the employers, while in Canada, it's in favor to the employee. There's no such thing as "at-will" employment here in Canada. You can't be fired for no reason.

This is the big reason I think we need to figure out as a society how to make it possible for everyone to keep a roof over their head and food on their plates even if they don't work at all.

The question of whether lazy people will take advantage of the system is not a life-or-death question. The life-or-death question is whether highly motivated and desperate people will take risks they shouldn't because we make them take those risks.

I am a highly motivated person, yet if I could keep my home and health without working I would stop working day 1. I would target my motivation at things I personally care about that don't help the economy in the least. My art, woodworking, finishing my stack of books. I am certainly not alone.

This is why I think there needs to be some level of threat of destitution to keep society functional. Without it, this all falls apart.

What sort of things would you target your motivation towards? Would they be valuable for humanity? Is "the economy" really the right barometer? (edit: I see you added this - I think those are valuable for humanity! I wish you could spend your time on art and woodworking!)

Personally, I spend a lot of my time keeping a hedge fund's computers working, because they pay me well for it (and I want to not only avoid destitution now, I want savings to avoid destitution in the future). I spend about zero time on any of my open-source projects, which would be more valuable for humanity as a whole, but I can't figure out how to get paid the same amount (or really anything) working on them. And I know my projects are valuable to the economy too - I arrived at this job to find that another team was doing a big migration onto a project I maintain (and haven't had much time for). I didn't know this in advance, and they didn't know I was joining their company.

Besides - it's okay if many people lose their motivation to work, as long as enough people still work from intrinsic motivation. And you'd still have the motivation of needing to earn money for luxuries. Once you finish your stack of books, the survival stipend wouldn't cover buying any more books.

You are payed well to do X. You can’t get anyone to pay you to do Y. Yet you believe that Y is more valuable to society than X. Why?

Isn’t society’s willingness to pay you for something a decent signal that society values it?

No, because as I just demonstrated, they use my open-source work - society just has no mechanism to monetize it.

It is possible that I could charge support contracts for the software now - but it's just about done, and it's pretty well documented, and if anything I'd have less incentive to write public docs. And I have no mechanism to get people to fund the next thing I want to work on and think is a good idea. (Well, I could continue working at a high-paying job for a few years and then quit, of course... but the logical conclusion of that loophole is that nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to quit, else they'd be able to ignore the market, right?)

Current basic income studies show about ~10% work disincentive. Sure, you might start painting, and never turn back. But most people would like to do something, to have some extra money, etc. Basic will always be just that, very basic. But it would help tremendously to lift people out of the vicious cycle. (That they must take the shittiest jobs because they need money right now, so wages are low, because there are a lot of people who will take those jobs even at those low wages.)

That's better than I expected! 90% of people still working but actually taking sick leave / taking time off to care for family members / taking time off to learn new skills, plus 10% of people not working (and some fraction of them working on art or other good-for-humanity things that are traditionally unprofitable, some fraction of them working on moonshot ideas, etc.) should be even better for the economy!

Yes, I was surprised too.

Probably there's a serious but unknown-sized effect about what would happen if it wouldn't be a trial. (There was a link and a discussion on HN a few days ago.) The folks in the trial went to school and so on. (And that's included in the 10%, so who knows, maybe those would cancel out.)

We could differentiate between providing basic life support (housing + food + medicine) and paying for your hobbies. I am doubtful that the stick is the only option (destitution) and not the carrot ( having an iPhone Pro Max Super Wazoo 300, eating at restaurants).

In your example, books I'll concede you could do on the cheap, but woodworking not so much. As a hobbyist woodworker myself, I know how much all the basic tools cost, and then the wood on top of that (+ a large margin for how frequently I botch a good plank).

And it's not like we need to provide a 3,000 sqft penthouse to those who are not contributing to society; something that keeps people safe from the elements but is otherwise pretty bland would be okay. I think it could be sufficiently bland that folks would be motivated to work to upgrade.

Your interests/hobbies don't help the current economy, which does not value them as much as other types of labor. I think we'll find that the economy quickly changes once the incentives go from "wage slave at some company to pay for roof and food" to doing whatever you want without fear of becoming homeless and dying, which can range from doing nothing, to dedicating your life to art or woodworking. There absolutely will still be people willing to do the work that needs to be done, this time, at a more proper price, not the price that is set because there's an oversupply of workers who are forced to work or face death.

This argument gets used a lot but for some reason people who argue this always forget to finish the thought, specifically why Americans need the threat of torturous death to participate in society while people in countries with strong social safety nets do not.

I think there are fair questions about the long term sustainability of such safety nets and what place countries without such nets have in propping these places up.

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Debt...

What are those question? I don't see them stated on the page you linked, just some data about external public and private debt.

The social democracies can't afford to pay for their own defence, for one thing. Peace makes prosperity possible.

Before you brush that off, I'll add that my forebears migrated to the US after having survived WWII and it's aftermath. The current generation takes global peace for granted but anyone who has studied history knows that is not the natural order of things.

So take the lesson that Europe got after WW2: investing in defence is a pointless exercise as it keeps pushing the inevitable until its breaking point, tighter integration, trade and shared experiences are the only way for longer lasting peace.

Instead you are telling the world to go back to the pre-WW2 state of affairs and invest in defence, because "that is not the natural order of things". Great, we are humans, we have built a lot of things out of the natural order, I believe we can do better and I'm glad it's become the norm to consider peace as the status quo and not as an outlier, as a mindset it's much healthier for humanity.

Again, not sure how that fits with the chart you posted - the way America funded its participation in World War II is by taking on tons of debt.

Also, I hear that China is able to fund its own defense and also provide some sort of social safety net. So did the USSR.

Anyway - I'm not advocating "America should be like country X," whether Denmark or China. I very intentionally said we need to figure out how to do this. That's probably going to involve something new, not copying another country, because I do agree things are different when you're a superpower. I also didn't say "we" in the sense of "America" - pandemics don't respect national borders. The failings of China's social safety net are my problem too.

Don’t sell yourself short. “Art” and “woodworking” are both potentially “work.” If the worst case scenario is having too many literate artists and craftspeople, I’m not sure what the problem is. :)

I'll say the same thing as I always do; what if you're depressed?

A kid drops out of high school, plays video games instead. Two years have passed, now he has a two year career gap. "Eh, I'll just stay home and figure something out." Now he has a four year career gap...

Well, one, what's your alternative? Force depressed people who can't hold down a job to starve on the streets? We're trying that approach now, does it seem to be working out well?

If you have a survival stipend, it's probably a lot more common for qualified, competent people to have career gaps. I probably would, personally. That makes it easier for the depressed kid to compete whenever he decides to rejoin the job market. (Also, for some reason, parents who set up trust funds tend not to worry about this....)

Also chances are if the depressed kid stays home for a few years, he will find some calling he actually likes - programming, music, writing, some specific type of research, whatever - and come out of it with a particular qualification to do something. What's the benefit to the depressed kid of having him flip burgers and stack shelves and have no time to figure out what he actually enjoys?

What if that kid or his parents can't afford treatment of his depression?

Treatment for mental health problems is expensive. The underlying issues can have causes that require a lot of time to solve. Therapist trips are expensive. Some of it isn't covered by your insurance. You lose a lot on productivity as a parent of the kid. You will need to dedicate time to him unlike in other situations where you can be fine delegating the responsibilities.

A kid drops out of high school, gets depressed instead. Two years have passed, he can't afford the treatment and needs to get out but his issues aren't resolved. He is forced to work, burning himself out. He can't be productive or do critical creative work that pays well. Now he has gone 4 years without being treated, having time to recover and is in a worse position.

This is the big reason I think we need to figure out as a society how to make it possible for everyone to keep a roof over their head and food on their plates even if they don't work at all.

Start with comprehensive zoning reform to reduce the cost of housing. https://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf

Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009. (JEL E23, J24, J31, R23, R31)

Imagine multiplying everyone's effective salary by 36%. We'd have a lot less real poverty. California meanwhile, despite its ostensible liberality, has the highest poverty rate in the country due to building restrictions: https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20....

I vouched for this post, as it's something that people need to be more aware of. While many people here can remote into their tech job, there are many people who simply do not have such privilege, and those are often the people who make your food and drinks. I too have mostly worked food service jobs, out of a job and looking for one now, and as soon as coronavirus hit the news, I knew that I would be eating out a lot less now because what the Twitter posts describe are completely accurate from my experience. I lived it.

thanks for vouching :)

not sure what happened here. I stepped away and this blew up, so I was also unable to change the title into something better. no idea though why this gets flagged (several times).

There are a lot of regional differences within the US. In Massachusetts, it's a lot better than this:

* MA has 40 hours of mandatory paid sick leave a year

* Assuming that your employer doesn't offer health insurance, if you're a single person making minimum wage in MA, working 40 hours a week, you qualify for ConnectorCare, with $15 co-pays for primary care visits and no deductible. There's a $82/month premium, but you'd also qualify for a $276/month tax credit.

There are still plenty of situations where a person making minimum wage wouldn't be able to afford a doctor's visit. For instance, if you miss paying your premiums your health insurance can be canceled. Or you could be working for an employer that offers health insurance, but with a high deductible. However, the situation here is a lot less bleak than the thread - for many people here working in the fast food industry a doctor's visit and a week's time off are affordable.

Sick leave should be unlimited. Have the employee skype a nurse for 10 minutes if you think they are faking it.

This title could be better. Maybe "I spent 9 years as a manager at a pizza place... Nobody in the restaurant industry goes to the doctor when they're sick"?

Or just the latter half? Much more informative than the first half.

Ditto. [1] HN seems to have a bizarre tolerance for cryptic headlines. (And the low character limit doesn't help.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519541

Don't miss the re-tweet down farther in the thread:

"I'm an epidemiologist. For 5 years I was specifically a flu/respiratory virus epidemiologist. I was asked on multiple occasions what I thought was the most effective thing we could do to improve the severity of flu season.

That's an easy answer. Universal paid sick leave."

https://twitter.com/Just_Eleanora/status/1233030130345246720

The incentives really are not in place. He's just scratching the surface of the rabbit hole. If quarantines become compulsory, the situation will be even worse. Imagine people actively covering up their symptoms and lying to doctors. It would be complete pandemonium.

The title is not great. I would suggest "I spent 9 years at a pizza place, and I'm terrified of COVID-19."

It’s in the best interest of restaurant owners to keep their customers safe and to monitor employees of sickness. Unfortunately I doubt they have the foresight to do this, because they’re probably living on the edge as well.

But one incidence of coronavirus at their restaurant and their traffic will go to 0 immediately. The owner will go bankrupt almost overnight. Word travels extremely fast these days, especially over social media.

For example I just heard that Stanford hospital has a dozen confirmed coronavirus patients there. If a restaurant has a worker diagnosed no one will go there immediately.

A lot of restaurants are going to go bankrupt over the next 2-3 months unfortunately.

No, it's in the best interest of restaurant owners that there are no documented incidences of coronavirus at their restaurant.

To spell it out: if a manager knows someone has the virus, they will fire them. Therefore, the infected will try to cover it up. This will be the case even if healthcare is free.

Agreed, but that's IF they manage to identify the source to the restaurant

Which is not such an easy task as it seems

Think about Las Vegas.. Wonder why not many reported cases there?

One of the things that will shake up the US elections and put the entire country at risk is the fact that healthcare is so expensive. If you cannot get treated for coronavirus, you can expect the number of cases to spread and skyrocket.

I don't want to downplay the financial concerns but in the US we expect every hospital bed to be full by mid May. Many of those beds lack proper isolation for infectious disease, and we'll have run out of proper PPE supplies for healthcare workers, meaning many of those workers will cycle out of commission. Unfortunately every country is in a similar situation. People are going to go without appropriate care regardless of copays. Helping people cover out of pocket expenses is the easy problem to solve.

https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909?s=2...

This is beyond simply getting a hospital bed, really. If people can't even stay at home because they're forced to make money, or they cant afford proper medication, well you get the idea.

That's an engineer extrapolating from an assumed doubling time.

It's not an absurd scenario, the doubling time is from studies of other countries, but there's also no accounting for public health measures and individual behavior. Things like reducing time spent in groups (school, church, events) have a considerable impact on infection rates. The small number of cases in Hong Kong provides good evidence that such measure work.

> Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n

Isn't the best approach then to do nothing? To be blunt here: if what she's saying is true, most of the vulnerable groups are going to die anyway. So why not just ignore it completely, and spend the healthcare resources on other stuff?

I mean, if the choices are:

1. 2% of the population dies and the healthcare system and economy collapses completely

2. 2 + ε% of the population dies

Then the second option is arguably preferable.

I believe the unspoken plan is to let it happen but try to let it slow roll through the population at a rate I would describe as a controlled disaster. That's why planes are still flying except to the worst spots.

USA taught me how little people can have as basic rights and because they think of "equality" without factoring in financial status; since they think everyone earns what they get in life. Majority of US is religious. So, I can see why people aren't demanding basic necessities for a decent quality of life and when that would make them feel they haven't earned success.

Knowing the forgoing makes me believe something like loss of life from the coronavirus could possibly be what's needed to get people rallying for change. Otherwise the mentality will continue of I will get mine some day and before then I don't want things to change because I'll get rich eventually.

I feel that events like this are the "time to pay the piper" moments with what's wrong with American society. But don't expect to see the price paid. I expect to see a bail out in one form or another to kick the can down the road.

It also reminds me that "Canada is like America put through a low pass filter." We have pretty much the same situation, but with milder extremes. When I worked in a kitchen I did see injuries and sickness get handled more properly because a doctors visit is free and employment insurance is a thing, so they still got paid for being off work. But I also saw the same issues with "you don't get paid if you don't show up" so people worked through short term illnesses. I saw someone step in a pot of scalding chicken broth/fat because they were so fatigued and the idiot who placed it on the floor was sick and fatigued and was skipping steps.

To each their own opinion but as I get older (and indeed pay a crap ton more taxes) I'm becoming increasingly convinced that we need more socialism. This twitter thread is a great example of how we can all suffer when the most vulnerable of us suffers. I say socialism because I believe we need a baseline safety net where, "if you're not conributing, at the very least you're not doing harm." I've met a lot of people where I think "honestly I would rather you just stay out of the way." I think that's the hardest part. We have a culture of absolutely despising the idea of free lunches and free loaders.

The US has unemployment insurance, but it only covers job loss (the employer typically provides the paid sick leave or workers pay a company like Aflac a small premium in their paychecks to gain it.) Are you saying a Canadian worker would file to claim the EI benefit of one day at the doctor? It appears to be more of an extended illness employment insurance benefit (up to 15 weeks.)

I think America is anything but a society, more a bunch of folks that happen to be sharing the same tract of land, compared to other cultures.

Hyper-individualism has its shortcomings and as you framed it, the piper has come to collect the money and there's been a lot interest owed.

Hope we are wrong but wouldn't hold my breath.

Disclaimer, haven't set foot in the US yet so I'm only extrapolating from what I have been able to observe from far away.

Pretty spot on, actually.

How did submitter conclude that "I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place” is a relevant excerpt that could be used as the title?

The thread is about concerns about health care policy and food service labor practices encourage the spread of viruses, if you want a heads-up.

After reading this I think I’m going to skip restaurants & fast food for a while

I used to love the US and I came out of the 2010s hating it instead. Sigh.

It is an insane asylum, but we're not all crazy here. That said, it is crazy-making watching it crumble from the inside.

You are all complaining about the system in the US but don't realize it is INTENTIONAL. A pure capitalist society doesn't want Sick Poor People who cant work. You are a drain on the wealth generation engine. Old Sick Poor people are even worse. Check out the Stanford Study https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income-play-r...

This will boil down to the cost of a human life at the end of the day, not unlike the speed limit debate where we know cars kill a bunch of people every year, and yet people want to get places 5 minutes faster.

Historically, the cost of a human life has mostly been low but was offset by a sense of community. We've gotten rid of community by allowing people to migrate in large numbers. Migrate from state to state, from country to country, from job to job, from marriage to marriage, from casual sex partner to casual sex partner.

All this migration makes it difficult to create lifelong bonds and without those, you really are screwed in the ways the twitter thread describes.

It's uncomfortable and our current political and mass media setup makes it impossible to have long form conversations on these topics - so I just don't know how things can possibly get better for the average citizen. Sad.

On the other hand, allowing people to migrate from marriage to marriage lets them create lifelong bonds that actually help them when their first partner turns out to be callous and uncaring. And there's nothing forcing people to migrate if they're happy with their current community.

It's true that the old system was better for some people - e.g., callous and uncaring partners got to have someone obligated to keep taking care of them. I suppose it's a tradeoff.

I think you're confusing "allowing people to do what they want" with "institutionalizing socioeconomic factors that push people apart and keep them there".

When you have to drive 2 hours each way to and from the city every day to work your minimum-wage janitorial job in a tech office, how much time do you have left over to help build a community?

When you're stressed to the breaking point, staring down the barrels of a hundred different problems without the money and/or time to solve all of them, depressed and anxious and not sleeping, how much time and energy do you have left over to build a community?

These problems stem from the same root as those described in OP's link: a government that doesn't care about its citizenry, and corporations taking advantage of that fact to squeeze workers for all they're worth in order to enrich a very few at the top.

But sure, let's prevent people from seeking better opportunities outside of their current abusive relationships with individuals and corporations. Great—that'll really level the playing field. I think you really hit the nail on the head!

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