3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits | Hacker News Reader

3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

wsj.com

558 pointstreyfitty670 comments

A few things to note:

1. These figures are only new claims as of 3/21, so the numbers will get worse.

2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.

3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]

4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.

This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the '08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA

> This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the '08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.

I think we need to couple the two events a little more closely. The 2008 Financial Crisis accelerated inequality, political instability, asset inflation, and the rise of precarious work to such a degree that the damage of this hit is being greatly compounded.

To my mind, the hole that was the 2008 crisis was papered over and someone just came by and dropped a brick on it.

The former Minister of Finance in greece and current MP Yanis Varoufakis has made the same connection [0]. He argues that it's the same crisis, but that the crisis has transformed, so that the solution can't be the same as in 2008. E.g. the ability of China to offer massive renminbi-swaps is set into question because they are being hit hard by this crisis. The weren't hit during 2008.

He also questions whether the US will be willing to offer the same condition-less USD-swaps.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OLfHpvJKNg0 is an interview where he explains his position.

> the rise of precarious work

I'm not going to disagree that there was a rise in precarious work, but I think many people don't realize how valuable having this work as option is.

Brazil has been economically struggling for almost a decade now, which is the same decade when this type of work appeared. For many people in Brazil this has been a godsend. It's provided an employment option where previously there would have been none. The option wasn't between precarious work and non-precarious work. It was between precarious work and no work.

Precarious work at least lets workers get back on the work ladder and just being on the ladder makes it easier to grab the next rung on the ladder and pull themselves up. It's especially valuable that the precarious work also tends to be flexible. This lets people study for new skills and go to interviews, which is something much harder to do with scheduled work.

The economic situation in Brazil would have been far worse if another million or more people doing this precarious work had been unemployed for the last decade instead.

It's not that simple, because up to some point, precarious work outcompetes non-precarious work, reducing the later one.

You will see all kinds of arguments and researches, but actually nobody is really sure about what that point is, and if it is a net positive or negative for workers. To make it worse, Brazil is in a kind of unique situation because official work is extremely regulated, while precarious work is well accepted and widespread (and not as new as you think), so one can not even apply the lessons from most of the world.

The financial crisis didn’t prevent most people from spending money on entertainment or eating out. People scaled back spending or went to cheaper places.

People are fearful and a lot of folks are supposed to be sheltering in place. Business are being told to do takeout only which is a huge difference.

I was in the restaurant industry during the last crisis. Lots of places stopped hiring and slowed down but business didn’t suddenly stop.

>Business are being told to do takeout only which is a huge difference.

Yeah I've been doing a fair amount of takeout and places where you had dozens of people ... operating with two or three people now.

My brother is a restaurant owner and reports that despite volume being down, profit is up due to less overhead. Others in the restaurant industry are reporting the same. When we come out on the other side of this, I think a lot of businesses are going to rethink a lot of things they held on to as infallible truths.

Sorry as many mentioned, yes the key ingredient is takeout: This is a fast casual italian / pizza restaurant. I find fast casual restaurants doing just fine in my area. It's traditional sit downs that are struggling.

Is the change something that can be stabilized? Or when people have the option to eat out again, will delivery-only restaurants suffer too much from competition with eat-in restaurants? (Assuming there's some level of customer preference for eating in?)

Now I'm curious about pizza places. Most pizza places offer seating. But I feel like Domino's might in fact be delivery-only.

I think fast casual already did that and going say delivery only ... might be a dead end for most small businesses.

Especially as folks get out of their homes and WANT to be out and about ;)

My personal experience has been that quality of restaurant/food/dining experience has always been negatively correlated with number of tables, or even total sq. ft.

Almost every restaurant owner I know is about to fold or taking emergency loans. From people with several franchised sandwich shops to stand alone restaurants.

Who is reporting profits are up?

I'm guessing they're confusing profit and margin. It wouldn't surprise me if margins were higher now, but I have a hard time believing overall profits are up, anywhere.

Especially when you consider a lot of restaurants make a good chunk of their profit on alcohol sales. While many are offering alcohol to go, I think most of us are picking it up from the corner store instead.

Anecdotally, the owner of one of the nearby pizza places mentioned that both profits and margins are up for her. Of course pizza places historically have a large amount of delivery already. I imagine the current crisis has driven more customers to them at the expense of places that are traditionally dine-in only.

They might be making more money on sales vs staff right now but anyone who has a rent payment isn't going to cover it with takeout alone.

For most major fast food franchises, the drive through constitutes a majority of the food sales. Labor also constitutes the largest line item on a P&L, so if you can work it right, you might be able to make it work. Especially if you're getting assistance (in the form of suspended franchise/royalty fees).

Cheesecake Factory can't make rent this month - https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/26/business/cheesecake-factory-a...

Of course there's less overhead, they are employing fewer people (or drastically reducing paid hours for employees). That's kind of the point of the parent article.

Did his business already have a robust take-out business? If so, I wouldn't be surprised by this comment. I would expect revenues, for awhile, to be the same or even increase... though as individual customers circumstances turn less certain I would expect that to decline over time. Certainly there's less labor overhead, and slightly less expense for utilities, cleaning supplies, etc. But larger pieces, like rents, would remain the same absent some sort of accommodation for the crisis.

A business that didn't have a robust take-out business prior to the crisis I would expect to fare worse. You'd have to do things like get the word out that you are a take out business for one... and some couldn't likely make that transition. Would you order fine dining take out? Sure the food might be good, but half the reason to go to a good restaurant, rather than a cheaper one, is the service.

This. It makes you wonder how much long the confinement can really last.

I imagine those less at risk will eventually give up on confinement and continue on with their lives, forcing those at risk (risk factors, 60+, immunocompromised) to remain confined voluntarily or risk a greater chance of death by venturing out. Those not at risk (younger and healthier) will be prioritized for triage and ventilator access if they do get sick.

You can't expect people to shelter in place indefinitely, and they won't.

I think the next couple of weeks are going to be eye opening - we're going to get a lot of reports of deaths, even of the young and healthy, which we're already seeing. That should steel the collective resolve to last a while here. People are talking of lifting the restrictions and our collective endurance and things have barely gotten going. It's really complaining about the length of the red light when it's just turned yellow.

Naturally people aren't going hole up for a year, but we have to stop acting antsy when we've been in our houses a week or two.

Edit: I'm assuming the government does its job and takes care of its people so that they can do the right thing here.

> Naturally people aren't going hole up for a year, but we have to stop acting antsy when we've been in our houses a week or two.

It's natural to be antsy if you've lost your job, have no social safety net, and can't pay for food or your rent.

Either pay them to stay home, or don't be surprised when they leave to attempt to make a living to survive. They're already at risk of being homeless and destitute, so COVID matters much less to them. And I don't blame them.

I agree. Let's pay people so that everyone can do the right thing in this time of crises.

Everything suggests this is taking a dark turn in the coming days. I'm doing my best to stay safe.

> I'm assuming the government does its job

What has led you to make this assumption?

It could very well be a bad assumption, but efforts seem ot be being made now to get people support. Hopefully they get there or this is going to be really bad.

>Hopefully they get there or this is going to be really bad.

The right thing for governments to do is to help mitigate the damage they've caused by ordering massive shutdowns. They can't do one without the other otherwise, indeed, it will be really bad.

State and local governments are doing a good job in many locales. Assuming more Governors don't follow the jackwagon leading Mississippi and override local efforts, the situation should improve despite the lack of leadership and execution at the federal level.

What's going on in Mississippi?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/coronav...

Governor overriding local efforts to contain the virus. While the order improves things in some areas it weakens efforts in the cities that were trying to get ahead of the curve.

https://m.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2020/mar/24/gov-tate-ree...

The government is passing relief package of 18,000 dollars for every citizen of the USA. That's more than enough money to tide things over if it's distributed well, in a way that incentivizes the right things.

Unforunately, a very small portion of that money will go to individuals who have lost their jobs, and a very large portion will go to companies that were run on razor-thin balance sheets, ready to topple at the first sign of trouble. No incentives to run things properly the next time around, and limited help for regular people. While costing everyone a fortune in the form of inflation the next few years.

I’ve heard this point made a lot, that these “bailouts” are in any way equivalent to previous bailouts based on poor management and immoral business practices.

These aren’t the same. This shutdown (however justified) is because of the govt. If the government demands you shut down your business, or that you can’t go to work, you deserve to be compensated for that. If the government hadn’t mandated it, young people would still be out working and spending. Those businesses would be fine. If the govt wants to shut everything down, they have to pay people for it.

The other thing is that half of the cost is in the form of low interest loans and loan guarantees, and presumably most of those will not default if this doesn’t go on too long and thus won’t actually be real costs

The alternative seems to be to let millions get sick en masse, potentially leading to similar shutdowns for longer time periods (i.e. failing to "flatten the curve"). I don't think you can claim those businesses would be fine unless you define a timeline to go with your assertion; say, "those businesses would be fine for n weeks."

Remember that sick != dead, unless you have risk factors, 60+ or is immunocompromised in which case you should do everything you can to stay at home and practice distancing.

Businesses (including many of those demanding bailouts) have spent unprecedented amounts of money on stock buybacks in the last decade. If citizens are expected to have a reserve fund to handle unexpected crises, so should businesses.

If those companies go under they take a lot of jobs with them. It seems more efficient to prop them up instead of making direct payments to the employees who would have lots their jobs.

Especially since a lot of the companies are only asking for loans, not handouts.

Got any data to support your claim, otherwise I could argue that risk factors, 60+, immunocompromised are the MAJOR concerns as stated above. Looking to Italy and Spain seems to confirm this view.

Does it? Let's set aside the scorekeeping systems we use (money, profit, ownership, wealth) for a moment. I see no reason to think we can't get people properly fed indefinitely. We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth. And it's not like the shut down businesses will evaporate or anything. The buildings will be there. The equipment will be there. 97%+ of the staff will still be around.

Eventually we'll have a vaccine, and life can go back to normal (if we want). The main problem in the interim is keeping everybody from freaking out because the before-times social constructions weren't really set up for a global pandemic. But we can fix that if we want.

> We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth

Don’t forget about food. There’s a lot of complexity and people involved in getting food from a farm to your local restaurants and grocery stores.

If it gets really bad and even a fraction of people in these industries stop working, stay-at-home life might get a lot less comfortable.

As you can see from the sentence before the one you quoted, I didn't forget about it.

I agree there's a lot of complexity there. But it's still a relatively small slice of the population. A friend is a farmer; she's just carrying ahead farming. Compared with urban life, she's been "socially distancing" for years. For the more dense parts of the chain, we need to take other infection-prevention measures. But food production is already pretty good at keeping things clean, and the rest we can work on.

Food production is essential work, so nobody is stopping it.

We are about to have millions unemployed. Any job vacancy will be trivial to fill.

I wouldn't be concerned about the food supply.

It's worth remembering how efficient our modern food systems have become that less than 3 out of 100 people are enough to work them.

That said, it wouldn't hurt anything to start a "victory garden", it's the right time of year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden (but that's a good idea anyway, orthogonal to the virus.)

Things stop all the time.

You just need to find the right event for comparison. In this case probably the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami or the 2011 East Japan Earthquake (Tsunami, Fukushima Nuke plant etc)

I don't think that comparison works.

There, you had relatively short duration disasters where very soon afterwards, coordinated efforts were dedicated to putting the pieces back together.

Now, most of the press and leadership seems to be thinking only about how to manage the health related consequences of an ongoing crisis. I really don't hear anyone strategizing how to put the pieces back together or how to contain the crisis (note that I did not say contain the disease) so things don't fall apart so completely. There is a profound absence of thought amongst those in decision-making positions, at least insofar as I can see.

So they don't stop all the time. Those events you gave did not cause 3 billion people to be forced to stay at home. A tsunami or earthquake is isolated to a particular place. It may affect a few million. This is a different order of magnitude

Everyone can go right back to work after the event is over in a few minutes.

This more comparable to a nuclear bomb where the area is still radioactive and people cannot go back without PPE.

Edit: and like another reply said, this isn't local, so it's more like multiple nuclear bombs in multiple countries across the globe.

I definitely know more people laid off this week than last week. No one was really sure how much business they could sustain with this whole thing going on, and now that there's been a full week and a partial week employers are starting to pull the plug.

Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day. They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task.

My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning. She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully file, the rest are continuing to attempt to get the state web site to work today, while more people pile in.

These numbers are going to get much, much worse.

I confirmed that the state's unemployment website has slowed to a crawl (if it is working at all).

As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn't allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future when they could try again.

The matching UK system has a (huge) queue in it: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252480546/Huge-queues-fo...

Is there a human factor in processing these?

In related news on Queue-it: https://tech.eu/brief/queue-it-funding/

Solid company

Put the web form (plain static assets JS/CSS/HTML) on a globally accessible CDN. Then use SQS intake for each unemployment application form. Then firehouse it out, wherever it needs to go, at a rate which you can realistically deal with it.

Queuing access to the form itself and telling someone to wake up at 4:52 AM so they can then merely access the static assets is a less-than-desirable user experience.

It is more desirable than 504, and first thing I would do in 15 minutes with zero context. If I can get more context, of course something like your solution is more desirable, depending on the issue. It would take some time to figure whether it is necessary to bring in AWS or just database connection pooler, or whatever.

Even typeform/Google Forms would be better suited for the task.

>Even typeform/Google Forms would be better suited for the task.

And now you've given a private company access to market-moving unemployment data. And a million other issues, especially legal ones.

The technology part in and of itself isn't that difficult, it's all of the constraints (and, often, mountains of laws) that are the bigger issue.

Having worked on this type of application in the past they should find a new company to work with if they can't handle this traffic. We were handling hundreds of requests per second with ease 10 years ago. That was with MySQL and the app running on the same server.

It doesn't take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.

Usually it's not so much the form that causes things to fall down but some validation step that they are trying to do synchronously, that might have to access an IBM mainframe, and things time out. When you're getting a few an hour, it's not a big deal.

Completely agree with the sentiment. I think most often it is inadequate default configuration that bottle-necks somewhere, that never got tested with more than a handful of users at a time. Going to a hundred highlights some bugs. going to 1000 others. On the other hand, I have worked on a project for USDA and they had 10 year old servers running 15 year old software and did not allow any system administration, while the system admins were some unknown government employees completely inaccessible.

I have had to build python distribution completely in home/user-space in some cases, working on conservatively managed servers.

It doesn't take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.

I bet that's what the previous developers thought.

What happens if you need to validate the form data against an external service that's coming and going due to the traffic spike?

What if your database is rejecting transactions occasionally?

What happens when your backup process locks all the database tables?

How do you reject duplicate form submissions from people hammering the submit button? Do you query the database to find previous submissions?

What happens when a scriptkiddie decides it'd be fun to DDOS the site? How do you differentiate good traffic from bad traffic?

What do you do when the cloud provider runs out of space and you can't scale up any more (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691926)?

You need to think of all of these things and many, many more to run a robust online service that can handle spikes hundreds of times bigger than the usual level. It's really not straightforward or simple.

Or it's a much simpler problem that they didn't make it semi-fast because it didn't need to be semi-fast.

When "hundreds of times the usual level" is still only 50 page loads per second, and 10 milliseconds of CPU per page would be extreme overkill for anything written in a reasonable way, it actually is straightforward.

It's not just CPU though, but IO - I've worked with horrible enterprise systems before that had response times measured in seconds.

Even 5 seconds will work if the actions can overlap. If it can't do things in parallel then we have issues much more fundamental than "performance", and there's no defending it as a competent system.

(That is not to say it's necessarily the devs' fault.)

I don't mean to defend it too much, because realistically it should be possible with relative ease to handle much more traffic than that - but my point is that in the enterprise and government worlds, things are often not as simple as you think.

Aside from potentially having to interface with dozens of unreliable, painfully slow SOAP-based web services, everything is often hosted on creaking, over-subscribed VMWare hosts, in VMs that would be under-specced regardless.

There is also often a "governing body" that severely restricts your tech stack choices.

Want to use Postgres? Nope, our standard is SQL Server - 2008 edition, actually!

Want to use Python/Ruby/Elixir/Clojure/Kotlin? None of that hipster nonsense here, we use good ole Java/VB.NET here!

Message queue, you say? It's Windows Message Queue with distributed COM all the way down here!

"Containers"? What's a one of those? You'll get a crappy VM with 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM, and you'll thank me for it! etc...

As a dev, it's horrible and soul-destroying to work under such limitations, but if you have no choice...

All of those items are manageable. Some are simple setup or programming errors, some require a bit of added complexity but are normal in modern web apps.

A bunch of armchair developers seem to have been summoned to tell the Federal government how to handle form submissions for an extremely security and privacy intense application using their fancy modern techniques.

You are talking about comparing a basic web form with an application for unemployment benefits which must go into a federal tax database and be processed using a what I assume is a garbage mainframe system.

It not only needs to be validated, it needs to securely store records, be able to compare them, and hook up to the system that handles payments, etc.

They can't just circumvent it and dump it into some silly Amazon or MySQL database and call it a day. That would require the employees to basically copy and paste that data into the actual warehouse and considering they have 3+ million to go through as it is making it easy for them to process is just as important as allowing people to submit.

For the time being the correct response is a queue gate.

Stop being silly.

I also completely agree with this sentiment. A gov't form could be an unsightly complex beast that can't be re-architected, sometimes, ever.

They could, they just don't want to pay for it. The government has no interest in being known for easily handling a huge spike of traffic during a crisis. They can just take the lower road and get by with less and saying 'try again later'. There's no repercussions here because it's the government.

Hence mainframe maintainers should really move to charging $1 million/year in a decade or two.

So, legitimately, how to we make it so the government does have repercussions? I see a lot of people making jokes about guillotines and nooses, but is there no better way?

I suggest by campaigning to bring logic and critical thinking into early childhood education. Then philosophy, the classics. Science education.

Once you have more people who can understand that there are scientific and moral issues with manifest destiny, and religion isn't going to solve global warming, there will be some shifts in the public discourse and public policies.

Having the schools teach RightThink instead of WrongThink tends to be a hard sell to an ideologically diverse nation.

The whole point of logic and philosophy is that it teaches to think and analyze for yourself, Think, not SomeThink.

What's the scientific issue with manifest destiny?

It's the creation of pseudo-scientific explanations for coincidental advantages Europeans had, that created extreme intellectual complacency and bias that is holding back progress.

They aren't choosing to have crap infrastructure, their infrastructure is intentionally defunded as part of a political campaign to engender distrust in government functions and increase privatization. Government is incompetent because if it is, its easy to justify selling off the country to the incredibly wealthy so they can get wealthier.

It's a bit worse than that. The infrastructure isn't actually defunded, there are huge funds allocated to projects, but they're being consumed by managers at Deloitte, Lockheed, Booz Allen, Accenture, etc. The times when we see success is when enough funding trickled down to the few engineers who could make it work with what they get. Other times we see success is when there is enough public oversight by sufficiently independent stake holders. I see this in many local government agencies that are small, and projects accountable to city council, and so on.

It's "armchair" to say "you get what you deserve if your entire system depends on garbage"?

...okay, whatever you say.

I called it garbage, but really neither of us know.

Unemployment benefits are handled by the states, not by the federal government.

In Canada, it isn't. The parent's username suggests they talkin about the CAN.

https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei.html

In the US, though, it's by-state.

GP was talking about GGP's suggestion, which was about a US state (Michigan).

Yep, USDS and 18F folks would have to agree with you here. The arcane crap that we have to deal with in payment and government information systems is beyond frustrating and makes it extremely tough. I read an article about having to fix a multi-decade Cisco router bug to get CI/CD and automated deployments working after USDS / 18F started setting up faster deployments but still needed to figure out how to deal with legacy stateful DB connections.

The reality of government paperwork systems on the backend is much, much closer to this hell and is part of why so many like myself ran screaming from public sector because when you see so many peers doing so well at FAANGS, why would you subject yourself to something that resists change and wants to keep it the same way? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2014/03/2...

The point is that backend pain shouldn't stop you from accepting it on the front end and putting it into a queue. Making the problem of getting the application through backend systems the states' to deal with, not the applicants'.

So are you applying for the 44k/yr job to fix it? No, most of are not.

Yeah, even in the SF/SJ locality which has the highest Locality Pay Adjustment (at 41.44%)[1], the position would likely have to be GS-12/GS/13 to start being competitive.

There is the option of going to some area with a much lower cost of living and trying to hire there, but the problem might be getting enough people together to form a team. If you can easily get enough people with skill and experience, the area probably has jobs for them that pay better, and if those jobs don't exist, it might be hard to find the people.

1: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality/san-francisco

Eh, USDS and 18F jobs are kind of contract-based and do hit past six figures last I saw. However, they were defunded a lot since last I saw by POTUS45 so it's not clear what the state of comp is. DC area tech is a mish mash of rather enterprise-centric businesses and can be challenging if you're in the wrong domains of expertise.

Unemployment services are ran by the state. The entry level Software Engineer salary by the state of California is around $64k, with senior level salaries between about $75-$105k in Sacramento. I do not know if if this is normal, above average, or below average when compared with other states.

Virginia, DC, Maryland have similar cost of living but VA, MD, and DC have drastically different governments, tax rates, rights, and laws despite people working in roughly the same 40 square miles. Even a federal employee graduating and writing software should make more than that. Senior salaries are between $110k and $140k with not a lot of outliers on either end (the distribution matters more to me than a median when talking salary these days for white collar jobs).

California is a huge state and the Bay Area is going to have drastically different stats for even the same industry comparing San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Luis Obispo (yep, there's software jobs there too).

I recall that looking like a fortune last time I was laid off. I would've applied for that in a heartbeat.

Now, not so much, but if my circumstances change, then who knows?

> The point is that backend pain shouldn't stop you from accepting it on the front end and putting it into a queue.

What if the backend rejects the form? The user's already moved on before their form made it through the queue. So then you're stuck re-implementing all the validations the backend needs in order to give the user feedback (which you may not even be able to do) or trying to get the user to come back later to try again.

> Making the problem of getting the application through backend systems the states' to deal with, not the applicants'.

Reducing permanent staff involved in processing applications is probably one of the main reasons the automated system was built in the first place. If they still have to do that, then you might as well just replace the frontend with a printable PDF.

You can pick a balance between some validations and 100%, and I don't think it's that hard unless you're invested in saying this is just UNPOSSIBLE.

There is already processes (a workforce and/or outbound written letters) to reach out to applicants in the case of eg a dispute (terminated for cause vs laid off).

> You can pick a balance between some validations and 100%, and I don't think it's that hard unless you're invested in saying this is just UNPOSSIBLE.

The point is that it's easy to say things should be easy when you don't know anything except the very surface details of the problem, and it's not your job to actually solve it.

Maybe the team that built the system in question were a bunch of dumb-dumbs who just needed a rockstar developer to show them how easy it is to scale, or maybe the problem is actually more complicated than it seems due some hidden complexities or constraints none of us actually know anything about (either technical or business).

Put it in a workflow where a form is filled out until it reaches a point where the back-end needs to do some heavy lifting, queue the form for processing, and then notify the user to continue to the next form in the workflow.

None of those comments really help explain why the bottle necks.

If the form has to go into a mainframe well just set up an asynconous Queue

Validation is the problem. If someone thinks they’ve successfully applied, rejecting them asynchronously is often worse than not letting them apply in the first place.

The government generally has no problem with rejecting filed claims after review.

I’m sure, but there’s still, I’d wager, an order of magnitude difference between the paperwork rejected now and that if users were unable to receive immediate feedback in order to correct their input.

At this point introducing a new company could cause more problems than it solves, and I think it's understandable to not be prepared for a volume of jobless claims that is almost an order of magnitude more than at any point in US history.

> If I was contracted to fix this ASAP

You’re assuming that the people who built it in the first place (or the people that may or may not be contracted to fix it later) know or care. Remember, this is government contracting we’re talking about - lowest bidder wins. How do you win the lowest bid? By doing it as cheap and quick as you can. That means hiring inexperienced/cheap developers who can build something that looks like it will work for far less money than you can build something that actually will.

Ocado (the IaaS for online supermarkets company, and, in the UK, online-only supermarket itself) has done this in response to the increased demand, and makes you wait in a 'virtual queue' (virtual relative to what in America you call a 'line-up', but we call a 'queue', at a physical supermarket) before you can place or edit your order.

I mean, you can tell the numbers are extremely inaccurate via just a simple, cursory glance at the report.

Pennsylvania reported 378k claims.

California reported... 186k claims.

Yesterday, California's governor said they've received more than 1 million claims since March 13th (so, over a 12 day period from the 13th to the 25th). This DOL report covers March 14th through the 21st.

Are we to believe that the remaining 800k+ people all filed on March 13th, or March 22nd through the 25th?

But there's more. Utah reported an increase of only 9 claims compared to the week before. They went from 1,305 to 1,314.

Then, New York, where more than half of Covid-19 cases in the US are, reported only 80k?

As of 3/21. Lockdown in California began in the evening of 3/19. Still not enough time for the numbers to react.

"Are we to believe that the remaining 800k+ people all filed on March 13th, or March 22nd through the 25th?"

I could believe it over the 22-25 stretch.

Especially since "filed" may here mean when the paperwork was finally able to snake its way into some particular system.

Somewhere there is an architect saying "I told you so!" I can almost guarantee the requirement was to handle several hundred requests per day, an architect pointed out if we get deluged then we won't be able to handle it, so maybe they were able to get them to allow for one or two thousand requests per day.

Now of course we don't know what the architecture of this system is and what the deltas in cost would have been to allow this to scale-out more - but I do know that all too often the more robust solution giving you much greater protection and lower cost down the road is often discarded if it costs even just 5%-10% more. Then the day comes when the people making these decisions get caught flat-footed and they try to blame everyone but themselves. It doesn't always happen like this - but it happens a lot.

I think that is small-think. The technical solution is only part of the problem and scaling up all systems to meet the .1% case seldom makes sense. They were smart to save 5-10%.

Eh.... On the flip side, processing and storing some simple text forms should be able to handle 1000s of simultaneous users on one box.

So, probably like most software of this nature, the reason it's not scaling is simply because the people who made it probably weren't the greatest engineers on the block.

These are the same kinds of assumptions that lead engineers to think they can build a [any product] clone in a weekend. It's unlikely that the problem or constraints are nearly as simple as one may think.

Consider: single auth across all the state's services, external APIs, identity verification, address verification, employer ID verification, federal/military ID verification, income/tax verification, phone verification, bank account information, translation into multiple languages, accessibility features, etc. Also, there's probably a lot of legacy infrastructure and process.

Also, if "ability to burst to 10x normal filings per week that might happen once every 40 years" wasn't in the spec, I think they were right not to engineer for it.

Admittedly it's a value call. My thought is generally if it's a small incremental cost that greatly increases the robustness then you should go for it. But - sometimes the money or time just isn't there. I'm bothered more by the people not even wanting to have the discussion than by those who do a summary analysis and decide it's not worth it.

That's a fair point. My comment comes from being in too many meetings where people want Twitter scale for conference-room-sized user bases.

It sometimes borders on sealioning.

The 0.1% case happens. And if it’s going to seriously wreck lives when it happens then you should solve for it. Does Instagram need to handle the 0.1% case? No. But the unemployment website should.

Unemployment forms being delayed by a day or two to deal with poor queuing will not "wreck lives".

This reminds me of an old story about an engineer who took initiative and automated the accounts receivable process at his company, now they get paid 25% faster! He shows his boss and gets a promotion.

He decides to do it again, this time with accounts payable, and is promptly fired.

Yes but for every architect there's an antiarchitect saying YAGNI!!1

You spelled pragmatist wrong.

They also tend to have some... interesting features dictated by the state UI office. When I'd applied in Wisconsin about 6 years back the site stopped accepting form submissions outside business hours.

I assume some less computer-literate higher up thought that someone needed to be around to actually accept the form, same as in-person submissions.

Secondhand story:

I briefly interned with a state judiciary's IT department around 2015 and got to get lunch with the CIO. He described to me how most court filings in the state had been manual prior to 2008 when the mortgage crisis hit and judges in the tax courts got _slammed_ with cases surrounding foreclosures. This , in turn, drove a need to develop a platform to automate the process of filing a case. It started with the tax court and gradually expanded to automate filings for other court divisions as well (e.g. Family, Civil).

I wouldn't be shocked if the revelation of "holy shit no one can file for unemployment" drove such an investment. I honestly think the next generation of politicians should take a page from product owners by isolate some shitty process that they'd have jurisdiction over, and finding some way to automate it. Bonus points if it's right before a watershed moment- imagine if someone had considered the problem you described prior to the coronavirus epidemic.

Wow, just found what my state (CO) is doing to help manage the influx. Talk about a low-tech workaround.

>IMPORTANT NOTICE: Because of the high volume of claims, we are asking that you help us help you and our greater community.

>If you need to file an unemployment claim and your last name begins with the letter A - M, file a claim on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, or after 12 noon on Saturday.

>If you need to file an unemployment claim and your last name begins with the letter N - Z, file a claim on Monday, Wednesday, Friday or before 12 noon on Saturday.

Ooooh, like gas rationing in the 70s.

> Wow, just found what my state (CO) is doing to help manage the influx. Talk about a low-tech workaround.

> Ooooh, like gas rationing in the 70s.

I wasn't born back then, but I heard about that being based on License plates at a few car meetups by the older guys in the group and I had the same thought when I heard that on CPR.

Odd, but it could work if you have total compliance; lets see how that pans out.

Distributed load balancing!

well as long as it works...

Not from the US, so not quite in phase with how things work. What can this tell us about actual unemployment and actual people that won't have a job now (short, medium or forever)?

Hard to say. Some of them might still be employed but with zero pay, others might have been laid off, and for others their employers just folded the business.

Most businesses do not have capacity to pay workers and rather than hold out, some are terminating immediately so their employees can claim unemployment benefits. I know for example of Dental offices (which in Texas are mandated closed until April 21st I believe) are doing this, but have every intention of re-hiring the same staff the moment they are allowed to re-open. I'm not sure this is the typical case, but its certainly a subset.

I have to say, agressiveness of USA capitalism is shocking to watch.

moral bonus: ability to 'explain' it that is just because you can claim unemployment benefit.

Just my personal opinion here, but one should be careful to view the pandemic through the socialism vs. capitalism lens. I think it's better to focus on the particulars of events rather classifying them as in on of the two camps.

2008 took months to unravel because of the nature of the crisis. Foreclosure is a process and in some areas can take up to 6 months or more from the time you stop paying your mortgage.

Here we had state governments practically shutting down their economies overnight. Overnight, every restaurant in my state was no longer allowed to have dine in. Only maybe half in my local area stayed open for carryout, and at least 80% of those have closed in the few weeks since.

The speed at which this happened is astronomical, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be multiple times worse than 2008. Just that the onset was very quick.

The biggest risk stated in 2008 was contagion to "main street" economy, which did eventually occur to some degree.

This virus and fallout went directly to the main street economy (of the entire world at same time) and stopped it cold.

I think its entirely unknown what the ultimate ramifications are of this cold stop to the world economy. But I see no reason to think its not bigger than 2008.

This is huge. It may be a months of jobless claims compacted into a week.

Also the knockon effect on landlords ... many bossiness want some sort of rental relief or those with limited cash flow are saying they are not going to pay.

Small business owners almost always have to personally guarantee commercial rents. "My business doesn't have revenue so I'm not paying" is simply not a valid response unless the owner is willing to take it the whole way to bankruptcy, which I'm sure we'll see a surge of in the coming months from the more aggressive landlords. It varies by state but my state is very forgiving to residential tenants and very unforgiving for commercial tenants (I say this as a former commercial tenant who owed past due rent at one point).

The SBOs with resources will just have to continue paying rent out of pocket, or face liens against their personal assets.

Right. Quite a lot of SBOs never thought this day would come, that they had no choice but to sign such agreements. Tenant ignored the reality of these unfair and untenable agreements. And here we are.

My response to a landlord insisting on 100% rent for property, that just become non-revenue generating by order of the government, or else they will take my personal property? Force majeure, I owe you $0, this contract is null and void. Shall we re-negotiate?

Liens are going to require court judgements. That system is about to get plugged up with cases. Most SBOs and landlords are going to have to re-negotiate. Landlords will talk deferred rents and suggest SBOs get one of these SBA 3.75% loans, in order to make the landlord 100% whole, eventually. SBOs should seek better advice than that which comes from their landlord. SBOs could do much worse than mimicking the likes of Subway, Mattress Firm, etc. by insisting haircuts are coming, fast. And by much worse, I mean, paying the landlord 100% and making them whole.

Good. Screw the landlords. Let them liquidate and bring the market back down to earth a bit.

Do landlords drive up prices? I know for residential properties, homeowners are willing to pay way higher prices than what makes sense for landlords.

I don't understand the vitriol towards landlords. Do people get angry at the bank for lending money so they can buy a house?

Most landlords raised rents just because they could.

They were profitable where they were, but since the next guy raised his rents, then they jacked up their own rents.

This is what makes people angry at landlords. And often times, your rent increased, but your pay didn’t, so you get squeezed both ways.

This is literally basic Econ 101.

Commercial leases have rent increases built into them that are agreed to by all parties. Nobody is getting a surprise by their rent going up, and they're typically negotiated and signed close to a year before becoming effective. If the rent is too much, you can move your business or find ways to grow your revenue. If there's nothing cheaper, then that's what the market has decide a square foot of commercial real estate in your area is worth. If your business doesn't support that, the market doesn't want your business.

We tell contract developers all the time "you need to charge more!" and "charge what you're worth!" but the minute someone does it to us we scream about how unfair it is and how the system is broken. I'm sure the guy selling widgets who has his WordPress guy charging him $125/hr thinks that's unfair, too. And I say that as someone who has been both the widget salesman and the $125/hr WordPress dev.

> I don't understand the vitriol towards landlords.

It's because real estate is - the vast majority of time - a tried and true way to accrue wealth, and it takes a least some measure of wealth (or a lot of personal risk) to get into it. People get angry when they see folks they think of as "less deserving" with money, and literally the only thing you need to get into real estate is money. So there are a lot of "dumb" people doing it, making a lot of money, seemingly for no reason other than they own the right building.

I've dealt with commercial landlords before and they can be ruthless. As a commercial tenant, you're most likely paying everything. Your rent (with yearly increases well beyond inflation), pro rata insurance, pro rata real estate and school taxes, common area maintenance (CAM) fees that can be thousands a month between all tenants for snow to get plowed ten times a year and the grass to get mowed.

If you're a low margin business it's easy to look at half your revenue leaving the door to your landlord who (in your eyes) has zero risk and provides no value and get angry. But I owned a brick and mortar business for 4 years and had 3 landlords in that time because they kept going bankrupt. So there's definitely some risk associated with it.

>4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.

You (and others) are probably aware, but worth pointing out that these people still can not currently file for unemployment benefits until the house passes the bill, the senate approves any house amendments to the bill, and the president signs the bill.

The house isn't voting on this until tomorrow at the earliest, so there's still a ways to go.

There's probably others as well that have had their pay reduced, that are waiting to see what's going to be passed before filing for benefits. Anecdotally I know of some software engineers in this boat.

I'm kind of confused by what it means for a gig worker to become unemployed; specifically the criteria. Is it along the lines of "I normally drive Uber. There are no riders anymore. Therefore, I can't collect income?" I mean, it'd be hard to verify such a statement is fact. A gig worker could just stop logging into Uber, then file an unemployment application. I hope there's an angle to this I'm missing.

You likely will need to prove that your unemployment or lack of ability to work was caused by COVID-19. So doctors note, test result, order to stop work by governor, etc.

Also doesn't take into account those who have had reduced hours or salary at their jobs, like my wife's entire company (at least the employees that didn't get furloughed at her company). She got reduced to 3 days a week, for a 40% salary reduction.

And yet DJIA is up almost 1000 points. Is this the stimulus $$$ in work, or what is going on here?

Unlikely. I suspect it's more likely month-end re-balancing.

Markets are complicated. Especially in the short term, you have large forces that aren't concerned only with future expected value.

For instance, if you manage a fund that sold substantially on the way down, you now have a great deal of cash you need to do something with. Considering a 'local bottom' has been found, you may be very interested in trying to re-enter the market now. The risk of waiting for a lower entry begins to compete heavily with the risk of missing a buying opportunity.

Unfortunately, it's called "a good time to get the heck out if you haven't already."

Panic selling is generally a poor strategy. Feel free though I'd be happy to pick up some more cheap VGRO.

You don’t think it’s a good time to “panic sell” when the market goes up 20% in just 3 days?

Edit: especially while the US corona curve is not showing any signs of slowing down.

This has got to be a dead cat bounce.

Normally, when a company lays off workers, the market cheers, and the stock price goes up. Investors get to keep more of their money, and no longer have to pay out in expensive labor.

But this situation is quite different, in that the economy just came to a stop, for practically everyone. At some point, this has got to trickle up, and affect the larger corporations. People won’t fly, so airlines go bankrupt. Hotels go bankrupt. Travel Agencies go bankrupt. And on and on.

But of course, maybe Wall Street is expecting a bailout of the airlines, and other big businesses, so maybe that explains the optimism.

Job losses are expected and are priced in (which is why it crashed a couple weeks ago). The job losses were less than some expected so the market went up.

> 3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]

This should be normalized to be per-capita, comparing absolute figures is distorted by population growth. The US was only 230M people in 1982, 100M less than today.

After normalizing it's more like 3.9x.

3.9m ~ 5m are pretty similar compared to 670k...

This goes to show how negatively-impacting ignoring health officials is.

Semi tangent, about dealing with mass unemployment.

I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. There's a lot of recrimination, and even self loathing about being poor or out of work in the US. It doesn't seem based in reality and certainly isn't helpful.

Perhaps it is time we realize that much like a pandemic things in this world change fast and we need to be able to help folks who are out of work pick up skills quickly / retrain (and maybe retrain employers that people with a 'different' resume might actually be able to do other jobs) so that they can get back on their feet.

Maybe it won't be a pandemic but things are changing fast whole industries of people find themselves offshored, jobs change, etc. I think we need to plan for / get comfortable with the idea that on a smaller scale we should be ready to deal with such things dynamically over the course of people's lives with retraining, support for it, and etc. And maybe a workforce with a variety of experiences will be better for it.

In Australia, they closed all the 'non-essential' industries. Which turns out to be about 30% of the workforce. I keep thinking that big shift will be when people come out of this they won't allow themselves to be 'non-essential' ever again. They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net.

I wonder how many people feel they have the option to not take back a job?

I have such options, exercised them a few years ago when I was 'done' with a particular industry and I wanted to change (networking to web dev, I'm so much happier with my work now), but my ability to do so was largely because the job I had done was a pretty good job pay wise (so I could save) / I received a severance, etc. The jobs that are getting shutdown are different / the people I suspect have fewer options.... at least in the US.

When I think about the people who won't take back their jobs, I think about the business owners mostly.

Australians love cafe culture and 6 months ago, if you opened a cafe in the Sydney CBD and if you could make good fast coffee, you'd have a great trade with good revenue to match. But now, those small business owners are going to lose business and homes.

And a lot of workers may come back, but they won't stay.

It's really really bad because we don't have a lot of industries that have openings that can just absorb new hires. Industry doesn't train up people any more, maybe that trend will revert but I really worry for a bubble of people in my community that may loose out and never get a strong footing back.

> I wonder how many people feel they have the option to not take back a job?

This is exactly why social safety nets are limited in the US. A social safety net drives up wages. Workers no longer rely upon a job to the degree they did before.

So it raises wages and raises taxes, which raise cost for everyone else. It forces managers to actually pay a living wage and take care of employees, which hurts them because they can't treat people like shit to get good numbers to show their managers.

> They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net.

This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies after experiencing suffering without them wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Sometimes things must get worse for them to get better.

>This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies

Most of the legislation is temporary heading into an election. I suspect the GOP would be happy to cut that net ASAP and sadly their own voters would support it.

I have some models as to how this changes the US electorate, based on the burn rate. Curious to see how right I am.

It feels like we're on the edge of a sea change... but it has seemed that way for decades.

History happens gradually, and then suddenly.

I totally understand that. And you'll probably come out the other side of this with a socialized healthcare system of some sort.

Fingers crossed.

> wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Well, unless we libertarians were right all along and these progressive policies are unmaintainable over a longer period of time. At this point, I think we're about to find out one way or another.

What policies are unmaintainable?

That's a really vague statement.

I think we're going to find that libertarian leaning countries fared far worse in this pandemic than authoritarian ones.

Those policies have been maintained for decades in many European nations.

Honest question, as a libertarian, if you were president what would have been your response to this virus?

Time will tell. In a year, we'll actually have much better evidence about how different systems fared. Right now, both the market-based US system and the public systems in Europe are being put to the test.

I suspect that they will both have failures and successes that will largely be localized and that we'll find out that those features that made a healthcare system robust don't correlate that much with being a public system or a market system. It will probably correlate more strongly with culture.

All systems have capacity limits. This is even a compsci problem: queues. Whether your system is public, private, or a combination of both, under extreme demand that exceeds your workload capacity, you'll either be overwhelmed (and drop work) or apply back pressure (both which will appear as rationing of healthcare; you have no choice but to ration when supply is limited). There are only so many doctors, nurses, ICU beds, and ventilators.

Note that in Italy and Spain, reverse triage is being done based on your at risk status, age, and other complications. If you're young and healthy, you take priority. I imagine the same will be done in the US, and those who are more likely to survive will be provided with ventilators and other medical equipment to survive, not those who can pay or with insurance; medical practitioners are making the call, not the chargemaster and CFO.

Public healthcare systems won't need a bailout, they're already government supported. We'll move money around on the nation state balance sheet and move on. Private systems though may not survive. That's culture though, so perhaps you're right.

I'm more cynical - it's very easy to justify losing your job now as driven by external factors while losing your job before as being due to an internal failing. If people get their jobs back within the next few months, I think it could breed a sense of superiority of "I got my job back with the Coronavirus, and you couldn't even get a job in one of the biggest boom markets ever.' there's no basis in reality for looking down on the poor like you said, and I don't know if this shock will force people to really understand reality as you hope, or simply by the basis of a new false understanding as I fear.

Yeah I do worry that the uncertainty and fear... just leads to more poor views of the poor, etc.

> I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US.

Sure, just like the Depression did.

And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated until the next similar event.

Generally speaking a lot of depression era policies and concepts / the new deal stuck around / are still with us compared to what was there before.

Sure, I think it's possible that some policies will stick around longer than the attitudes that motivated them; I was addressing hope about perspective, not policy.

After the depression the US emerged as the global hegemon because of major shifts in power that happened as a part of WWII. The US was uniquely adapted to grow to be the global super power at the same time that European nations were taking a huge hit from the war.

I suspect this will ultimately lead to China as the new hegemon. We're seeing key advantages to the Chinese state that the US cannot adapt to. Decades of pushing the US government to work more and more exclusively in the interest of capital has lead to a completely impotent state that cannot take care of its people. Likewise we have a complacent populace who, as many here have argued, won't be able to endure extended isolation.

The pandemic is not just a rogue wave that has done some damage and we'll bounce right back. This event has shown deep systemic vulnerability to certain very real risks that the US is incapable of adapting too. And all these same risks are what leave us extremely vulnerable to other similar events like climate change.

The US will recover in a sense, but this is very likely the start of a long process of a major shift in global power, and the end result will look very, very different than the world of a few weeks ago.

Germany lost 2 World Wars and today it has greater GDP than UK by $1 trillion. It doesn't matter who is hit harder it matters whose economy is more efficient and has more innovations.

Not much comparable. Just a random difference - Germany was quickly rebuilt because allies want it to be rebuilt, and not let impoverished and destroyed like after WWI. We know how that ended...

When talking about efficiency, I think China might have the upper hand now - they are much more effective in discipline, they don't mind suffering things that are unacceptable for us, and look where they are with COVID - ahead of every-fucking-body else. West looks pathetically weak and ineffective compared to them. Maybe in 2 months things will look differently, but I don't see much data for that now.

> they don't mind suffering things that are unacceptable for us

When the ruling class exploits the working class and suppresses their access to information and free speech, that doesn't mean they "don't mind suffering," it means one sector of the Chinese population has cannibalized another sector in order to build wealth for themselves. Much like what is happening in the US with the ultra-wealthy. It's not all rainbows and roses in China, in fact if you forgot, there is an active genocide in progress in that country.

Genocide or not (nobody knows what is happening in those camps, so I would not use that word unless we have some solid hard evidence), we talk about consequences of covid on societies. And Chinese one seems to be faring much much better than most others.

I just saw how a video of Chinese doctors dressing up for a visit to a covid patient. My doctor wife just stared with open mouth - nothing like that is done here in Switzerland. They use super basic equipment, which is simply not enough to protect long term doctors exposed to patients. We simply don't have the mindset to handle this situation seriously. We will learn eventually, but it will be a painful lesson for our society.

As somebody on HN mentioned a few weeks ago, China defined its bottom with closure and quarantine, and now they are bouncing back. While west is still in free fall.

China understands what matters most and that is controlling the narrative. An authoritarian government excels at manipulating the raw data and thus the narrative.

Controlling the narrative is also what the US Federal government is currently doing.

They hold nightly pressers, dragged their feet on getting tests out, recently asked states not to publish their unemployment reports, etc.

I'm not arguing against the point that China is handling this better than other countries. I'm arguing against the point that it's because they "don't mind suffering." They do mind suffering, but they have no agency, and their government has decided that they must suffer so that the economy can survive this crisis as healthy as possible.

China is an authoritarian country, and they've resorted to literally locking people into their homes until a quarantine period passes, arresting them, and beating them. Can you imagine if American police started locking apartment complex doors from the outside? I don't want to live in a country like that, even if it means we're worse equipped to deal with pandemics.

And let's not forget this whole thing started in China because their food safety regulations aren't adequate.

edit: ah yes, downvotes -- mash that disagree button

I didn't downvote you, and agree with you 100%. Your food safety remark is also right, but makes your whole comment seem less objective.

Solzhenitsyn predicted this like 30 years ago.

Not having tolerance for suffering. Lack of courage, destruction of masculinity.

P.S. people can downvote me as much as they want. But that is not going to change the facts.

Well, apparently 40% of the staff in intensive care unit exposed to covid victims has been infected, so I'm not sure how useful those fancy suits are.

We do know what is happening in the camps. There have been numerous leaks, and accounts of former residents.

There’s no ambiguity. The only way “we don’t know” is if we chose to be ignorant.

My point was if a country wants to be successful and dominate over others it needs to have an economy which is efficient and which innovates that's why USA is currently world's richest and most powerful country. On the other hand China with its massive workforce and efficiency combined with upcoming innovations is about to become world's new number 1 superpower.

Interesting - the Chinese economy isn’t known for efficiency or discipline. It’s known for its massive scale.

China has been trying to increase its economic efficiency and discipline, but generally failing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/19/chi...

I saw someone make an interesting comparison on this.

In the West, when they think of efficiency, they think of using robots and automation to remove human labor. Labor costs go down, quality goes up, profits go up. Get rid of pesky factory workers and their need for benefits.

The goal in the West, is to maximize profit, above all else.

Whereas with China, when they think of efficiency, they think of production output ratio in mass production. Meaning, how many people can they employ, along with automation and mechanization, in order to massively increase production output.

Humans are more adaptable than robots, and can be repurposed to operate another machine. Quality is not as high, but it may be acceptable. The gain is in mass market share, at a lower cost. And at some point, their higher end manufacturers will automate and compete on par with their western peers.

The goal in China, is to maximize output. Massive profits can come later.

>>West looks pathetically weak and ineffective

That’s what happens when your people have almost no rights and you can literally weld their building doors shut. Their strength comes at a cost, and it’s the freedom of their people.

Edit: Also, China only matters because we allow them to matter. As soon as we wise up and let other countries start making our toys and phones, China will be screwed.

A key determiner is who invents an effective treatment and vaccine first. Many bright young minds globally are paying great attention to Covid-19. If it happens in a country, possibly US, East Asia, or Europe, then the institutions of higher learning in the country would gain immediate prestige. (Pretty sure some teams in China have set its sight on this.)

If it happens in East Asia, that would also be a recognition of their recent rapid improvement in STEM research that's not yet common knowledge, and not recognized by many general rankings.

An academic ranking with some objectivity has 5 Chinese, 1 Korean, and 1 Singaporean universities among global top 10 in biomedical engineering, for example:

http://www.shanghairanking.com/Shanghairanking-Subject-Ranki...

A shift in perception among talents may start a positive feedback loop that propels innovation in East Asia (incl. Singapore) further. Today, many graduate students in top programs in the US are from Asia.

Over the long term, quality and rate of innovations are what determine global leaders (as a sibling comment suggests).

I agree with the last part of your statement, but not the first. By the time an effective vaccine is developed and run through human trials, most of the population will already have gotten Covid, so it's not likely to be a savior moment. Additionally, given how many vaccine candidates are already in the pipeline, it's pretty likely there will be multiple options approved within a few months of each other.

On a related note, if China wants to improve its STEM research prestige level, it needs to do something about the rampant fraud in research results that cause a lot of people to be highly skeptical of anything they publish.

Many countries, esp in East Asia, have slowed COVID spread down a great deal. Vaccines will likely be invented before it penetrates the populations there. They are among the largest groups of graduate students, ie key research workforce, in the US.

If a vaccine developed in East Asia is either cheaper, more scalable, or more effective, increased self-confidence would mean many top students will choose to pursue graduate studies at home instead of the US. This is in addition to fear of being discriminated against because of the pandemic.

Given the number of top people in East Asia with strong quantitative skills, it would significantly shift research momentum to the east.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png

I’m not sure about this. China is, rightfully, being blamed for the initial outbreak of the virus and their failure to contain it. I think when the dust settles, we’re going to see a rapid decoupling from China as countries look inward to strengthen their domestic supply chains.

I have a hard time seeing China emerging as a winner from this crisis.

This.

China cares for its people by imprisoning them with brute technology and camps?

Given how poorly the rest of the world reacted after getting two months of advance warning, I can't think of more than three countries that could have contained this outbreak.

Fingerpointing at China when they reacted far more decisively then the West did seems... A tad off the mark.

If this originated in Milan, Kansas, or Bangalore, we'd all be in the exact same boat today.

Hell, if the outbreak started in Kansas, we would probably have a hundred thousand dead by now, with our supreme leader still insisting that the virus will magically go away in three weeks.

Not sure it is fair to say that the world really had advanced warning from China. They were saying everything was okay and people-people transmission is low. All trust was lost, so time was reset when Italy was hit, that is the real time zero, because no one trusts China.

> They were saying everything was okay and people-people transmission is low.

For the first two weeks of January.

When they got to the point of locking down an entire city, it became pretty clear to everyone that it was a serious situation.

We looked at that, and did... Nothing.

The first lockdown in Italy was Feb 21. Trump had alread convened a task force to investigate and handle the spread of the virus on Jan 29, and was later called racist for the travel restrictions placed on people coming from China on Jan 31.

It's apparently been memory-holed, but during this period it was the US media calling it "no worse than the flu", not the other way around.

And what did that task force accomplish?

* Shipping a laughably insufficient number of test kits that didn't work, while banning private labs from developing their own tests. We still have a crippling test kit shortage.

* Asking people traveling from China to self-quarantine, and not following up.

* No stockpiles of necessary medical supplies.

Getting called names has never stopped him from rolling out bad policy in the past. I don't see why it can be credited for stopping him from rolling out good policy this time.

If China becomes less dependent on exports to the US, they could dump US treasuries, which could potentially destroy the US economy & the dollar.

They have the US by the balls.

Interesting theory. I suspect China will continue to do what they’ve been doing, and build out their own country.

The United States was built on the foundation of transportation (roads and highways), automobiles, mortgages, and travel. These industries built up the middle class, by providing jobs for home, and profits from exports to abroad. Then came tech and the massive windfall from that.

They essentially have the population of 4 United States, that they can essentially just compete internally among themselves, while still producing products for export to abroad.

They can just follow the same playbook here.

* Infrastructure, check, they have highways, airports, and also, high speed trains.

* Automobiles, check, they have the largest car market in the world. And they are continually working with, and learning from, their European partners. Eventually, they’ll get good enough to not need external partnerships.

* Mortgages, check, lots of high rises, since that’s the only way to house so many people.

* Travel, in progress, they’re working really hard to make a commercial airliner. This will take another 20 years, but Boeing messed up with their 737 Max fiasco, which may give them an opening sooner. But most of the parts to this airplane comes from American companies, so if Trump wants, then he can really crush their airplane independence dreams, at least for 10 years.

* Technology, in progress, they have mostly web companies, and application companies, but not yet core technology companies. They still don’t quite have CPU and memory chip companies yet, and they outsourced manufacturing to Taiwan. This is where Trump can really crush them, but again, at a heavy price, and only for 10 years.

In the end, anything is possible, but I highly doubt they are interested in squeezing the US by the balls anyways. They are finding it more profitable to maintain friendly terms with the US, and sell them cheaper trinkets, than taking a confrontational approach, and getting into a hot war, where nobody wins, except Lockheed.

OP assumed the rest of the world will become less dependent on foreign goods, which would therefore hurt China. I pointed out China is hedged to come out on top in that scenario, not that China would necessarily push for that scenario.

Inner cynic: For now long? 5 years? Then we will again be cutting costs, looking at the bottom line, and find that Chinese manufacturing gives a better bottom line.

I think it is arguable the other way around.

China's own population may be additionally disenchanted with a government unable to handle the situation without iron/hamfisted attempts to clamp down after ignoring the problem / sources for a long time.

1. The supposedly superior Chinese system is largely responsible for the outbreak being as bad as it is. Never mind the initial coverup and lies about the nature of the disease, their allowance of those horrifically unsanitary wildlife markets is crime enough.

2. I'm wondering what makes you think the US is incapable of adapting. Will we ever be able to do a China-style lockdown? Probably not, but that's a feature not a bug. There are other ways of dealing with a pandemic, and I sincerely doubt anyone from the west, or most of the east for that matter is going to be moving to China for their pandemic-response measures.

If anything I see this as a negative for China. The experience has revealed just how vulnerable China-dependent supply chains are, particularly for medications and medical devices. I expect both political and social moves to diversify away from dependence on China, which would hardly make them more of a Hegemon.

1. China’s early failures were quickly remedied. They enacted a massively costly economic shutdown early, and bought the west weeks or months. What did we do with that bought time? We wasted it by denying the threat, failing to stockpile, and ultimately doing the exact same thing China did (trying to suppress news of it from the top). At least in the US a select few Republicans were able to profit off this, so I guess they can thank China for their generosity. 2) China built two hospitals in a week, and nearly instantaneously shifted a significant portion of their industry to making medical supplies. Thousands of Americans will die because the US President won’t invoke the defense production act. US does adapt, but it does so too slowly to solve the problem.

China has proven themselves massively resilient. Right now, they’re worried about reimporting cases from Europe and have covid largely under control. It would have been better to not get out of hand in the first place, but they’re the only country that’s demonstrated an ability to work themselves back out of the crisis once it’s unfolded.

Already, colleagues in China are returning to work, and I’ll be out of the office likely until May. China gave us weeks if not months of warning that we ignored, so it’s a little frustrating to see Americans and Europeans finger point when ultimately we’re responsible for our own shit.

If you look at China’s trajectory over the past ~15 years, it is obvious that the 21st century is theirs for the taking, as the 20th was for the US.

I sincerely doubt "buying time for the west" was even remotely in the minds of any Communist Party officials in charge of the lockdown. They committed to the lockdown so their own medical systems wouldn't get overwhelmed and cause even more economic damage, just like everyone else.

US adaptation will take the form of putting systems in place to prevent a re-occurrence. Of course we move too slow in the initial crisis, we always have. Any democracy moves slower than an authoritarian dictatorship in the moment, that's one of the trade-offs. It's frustrating, but a natural feature of the system, and pays dividends in the long-term.

China's trajectory over the past 15 years has been providing cheap labor to be the world's workshop. But that labor is no longer as cheap, automation continues to advance, and companies were already relocating their supply chains due to political/economic/IP theft concerns, Samsung being the most notable example. Now this? There will be a surge.

That and the Chinese's government's bottomless-loans-as-political-favor policy can't last forever. And thanks to the one child policy they're facing a major age and gender demographic crisis. China is also dependent on imports for food and energy.

They exist in their modern form at at the pleasure of the rest of the world. The foundation for their economic miracle was the west opening them up to world trade to distance them from the Soviets, and later cheap labor. It was never anything intrinsic to China or Chinese power. The moment they try to force their will on the world they'll find their ability to do so is short-lived.

Nice username for such a comment. I approve!

A few weeks? Really? A major geopolitical shift the likes of which the world has never seen is going to occur in a few weeks?

These things take place over years, even decades. I do agree that the US hegemony may come to an end if things continue as is. But I don't think that means another becomes hegemon.

> And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated

Actually Depression changed consumer habits for entire generation. People saved more, spent less, kept money under the mattress etc. Not a generation that you can kick-start an economy with.

Weird memory but my depression era great Grandma (matrilineal side all had kids at like 18) was teaching me a "depression soup" recipe. The first thing she had me do was peel the potatoes. All I could think was "this is the best part of the potato... We are literally throwing food away right now."

I think lots of experiences like this with her led to me quite unfairly latching onto the "ok boomer" ageist wave. Time and Time again she would do things that would make me wonder "wtf did your generation learn from all the lessons you went through..."

More than likely, older potatos were used instead of thrown out. Have you considered that the potatos may have been green and near toxic, and peeling the old potatos was necessary to be able to eat them without vomiting? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-o...

Isn't depression era pre-boomer? (Baby boomers were born between 1944 and 1964). I think you've misclassified your great-grandma

It also gave rise to whatever social safety net the US has today.

Frankly we have a formal education system that is actively hostile to training people to do jobs, and instead teaches "fundamentals" and "how to learn". There's tremendous support for those concepts, though I personally consider them bogus. If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change. Otherwise the funding and time that could be used for jobs training will always be soaked up by it. My humble opinion.

I know its not a popular opinion, but when I see my Nanny wanting to get ahead by taking night classes, and those classes have her studying and writing 19th century poetry... I can't help but feel deeply frustrated by the disconnect. How could she possibly stay motivated to finish school, when its only giving her hoops to jump through and no practical skills to get into a better job? How could I convince her to e.g. take programming lessons from me, when society and her parents are telling her a college degree (that, at this rate, she'll unlikely obtain) is what will help her most? /rant

>and "how to learn"

Honestly I see that as something that isn't taught enough / we have a very structured system that is "here is how you're going to learn it... good luck" that doesn't provide a lot of options.

I do agree with the idea that your traditional 4 year college education system is poorly equipped to help redirect existing workers.

> If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change.

Absolutely and it goes beyond the profiteering that people typically rant about. The barriers to obtaining a degree for the sake of obtaining a degree are high in itself. Then we add bureaucracy and a bottom-up approach to teaching that I think excludes a good amount of potentially qualified people that would otherwise do great.

Software development is a great example of highly successful people that either dropped out of high school or college because they discovered a top-down approach can lead to the same outcome as a bottom-up academic one. Top-down example being: you want to build an app, you learn only what you need to build it (e.g. html, css, and javascript) then with continued years of applying that experience in related areas you naturally acquire more of the fundamentals of computer science.

I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. I've seen this topic appear before and with it comes condescending responses towards those that don't hold a degree. This was especially evident on the HN platform when people learned Edward Snowden was a drop-out.

The current attitude towards this is well rooted in society and still a hard one to break. Thankfully tech companies are starting to come around to the idea.

> I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses.

Ding ding ding. I've gotten my share of flak on a couple occasions for working in IT without a degree.

These people looking down on me are probably right that they're smarter than me and more knowledgeable than me and could probably code circles around me. I know I ain't getting a FAANG job any time soon. I know full well that there are gaps in my knowledge that someday I'd be interested in filling once I've got enough saved up to try college again. Doesn't mean I can't be productive, too, nor does it mean I can't teach myself what I need to know to get the job done. Maybe duct-taping systems together with MSSQL sprocs and proprietary programming languages/runtimes and shell scripts and CSVs ain't the most glamorous work compared to playing around with blockchains and neural nets and Jupyter notebooks, but it's work that needs done regardless, and I ain't too proud to do it, even if it's putting grey hairs on my head decades before they've got any business being there.

"Top-down" v. "bottom-up" is definitely a good way of putting it. The code I write ain't pretty, but it's gonna do exactly what I need it to do to solve the user's problem, and chances are it's solving problems for which there are no elegant solutions. It ain't gonna run like a Lamborghini, but that's okay; I just need it to run like a Tacoma.

Reading your post made Andrew Yang's voice pop into my head:

"And do you know what would really help those people while they retrain for new jobs? A thousand bucks a month!"

Except Yang wanted to make people choose. A thousand bucks a month [with no structural controls on costs], OR food stamps and housing vouchers.

Let's be real about what he put on the table.

Further he went an endorsed a candidate nowhere aligned with his supposed policies. :(

As did Tulsi and as will Bernie :(

I can't help but draw a parallel to how machine learning and A.I. automation is supposed to disrupt a majority of blue collar jobs and if this is a taste of what is to come when we crack the code and people's skills are rendered obsolete to specialized sophisticated machinery that outperforms us in every metric and runs autonomously 24/7.

I also think about universal basic income and what life would feel like if I suddenly was left to my own devices and had the luxury to learn any subject I wanted, pursue new hobbies and crafts without dragging myself into work with stop and go traffic both ways, zapping my creative energy and making me a more jaded person day by day and the week progresses.

And this is just the start.

While I think the US response to Corona was slower than the response in my country I feel the US is the only country that's seriously discussing economic repercussions and debating the medical experts.

In EU (at least in my country) it's doctors running things and we are in "stop the pandemic at all cost". Everyone is in panic due to Italy situation. But doctors are only trained to see the medical side of the picture - and there is a point at which this approach to fighting the virus is going to have worse consequences than a full blown pandemic itself - I don't see anyone publicly discussing this point around here.

Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you missed those?

Not sure if this was your intent, but "sacrificing millions for the sake of the Market" sounds like you're trying to shift away from the point that right now about 3.28 million more folks (probably more) are wondering how to pay their rent/mortgages and feed their children. If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic.

But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact!

This is where it's very important to distinguish between financial conditions and material conditions. Feeding children and supplying respirators and masks are material conditions, dependent on the production and distribution systems.

Paying rent and mortgage, on the other hand, isn't material. If you don't pay it nothing material changes - it's not an iron law of the world in the way that hunger is, evictions are a choice. Admittedly it transfers the problem to someone else, but if the solution to maintaining everyone fed includes them then they're not going to go hungry.

Financial conditions also have a time tradeoff. Reducing retirement funds affects material conditions in the future. Or the date at which people are able to retire.

If you had a button you could press which let you retire immediately, but (with probability P) took the life of some random person in the world, would you press it? With what value of P?

I imagine some communities will simply sink lower and never recover trajectory, and some sociologist will write a sad book sometime in the future about them. How does Black 2030 look like in America? Optimistic?

We should believe that some economic curses last multiple lifetimes.

Mortgages and by extension rent provide liquid funds to banks so that account holders, including essential business's like hospitals, farmers, and factories can pay their employees and bills.

You are delusional to think it is possible to suspend payments without printing massive amounts of money that will certainly lead to more death.

shrug we provided liquidity last time and can do so again. Money printing doesn't kill people, viruses do. The banks are intermediaries. The essential businesses are not affected provided we do not let the banks fail randomly, and there is no need to do that.

Last time we had nowhere near the need for liquidity. There were bad mortgages, but they were the minority.

Currency inflation kills. Look at venezuela. You cannot shrug this off. At least consider the effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

> By March 2009, it held $1.75 trillion of bank debt, mortgage-backed securities, and Treasury notes; this amount reached a peak of $2.1 trillion in June 2010.

That feels like a lot of liquidity to me.

Liquidity expansion through loans and purchase of credit and equity instruments simply isn't very inflationary. It can only cause real price inflation if the money starts chasing a shortage of real goods and services - which are currently being dramatically underproduced. If it does start causing inflation, the Fed can and will simply raise interest rates from their current near-zero level. Or fiscal policy can be used.

Venezuela is under sanctions which are intended to exacerbate the situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...

Yes, quantitative easing is okay. But that is a lot different than the direct money being given to individuals and businesses by Congress. Especially the direct payments to individuals means printing money.

What the fed is doing is printing money now that will be destroyed later, or held in reserve. Either way, it is backed by actual financial instruments (whatever equity or bonds or notes they're buying).

People do not need liquidity to survive. They need air, water, food, medicine, shelter, in decreasing order of importance. No one has ever died for lack of liquidity.

We've done a middling job at making sure people have air and water, less good with food and even worse with shelter and medicine. But liquidity? That should be last on the list of things to worry about. It should always be last.

> If you had a button you could press which let you retire immediately, but (with probability P) took the life of some random person in the world, would you press it? With what value of P?

Death is not a problem, everyone dies, nobody knows when they will. Could be someone pressing a button, could be a bus, could be old age. You can die tomorrow. But suffering, that really matters. I wouldn't make someone suffer, but if it's quick painless death... way harder question.

I just really dislike the focus on living rather than focusing on the value of life. I mean this in a pre-pandemic sense. Hearing people talk about fear of death, and yet accept a lifetime of meaninglessness.. just irks me.

Economic conditions have real and immediate health consequences too.

For example, in 2010 US unemployment briefly grew about 6% to a total of 10% in the US and there were 40,000 additional deaths from cancer alone[1]. When you consider heart disease, other indications, drug abuse, and suicide, the numbers are much greater. The often cited number of 40k for each percent unemployment may not be far off if these factors are taken together.

This trend also holds true in the OECD where social programs are more common because there are still budgetary constraints on centralized healthcare.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Edit: Here is a Meta-analysis showing that the risk of death was 63% higher among those who experienced unemployment in the US AND Europe

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/

Are you aware of a quantitative model relating economic losses to loss of life / quality-of-life? I see this claim repeated over and over, but after hours of searching I can't find any quantitative models. If such a class of models did exist, we could weigh it against various SIR models and make an actual assessment. Without that economic model, the decision calculus you're suggesting we make isn't really possible.

Also: even that conversation seems like a huge false choice. Why not just give up on market capitalism for a few quarters and make sure everyone is fed/clothed/sheltered? It's not like houses disappear overnight if rent/mortgages aren't paid. And it's not like we've never suspended capitalism in the past -- the federal government put in price controls, effectively nationalized industries/supply chains, etc. during WWWII. And then we returned to capitalism afterward.

> But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact!

TBF, those are the folks getting most of the economic relief so far. And not just from recent Congressional action. Somehow when it comes to ensuring liquidity in certain financial markets, the federal government can move mountains in minutes. But when it comes to people having a safe place to sleep and food to eat we're the mercy of the invisible hand.

Why can't e.g. HUD, unilaterally and without congressional action, create "liquidity in the housing market" by making enormous zero-interest loans to everyday folk whenever they feel like that's necessary?

People who trade in equities and bonds have enormously powerful economic backstops, which people who merely pay rents and mortgages and buy food do not have.

> If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic.

Please show us your calculations.

> If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic.

Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that? Are you under the impression people will just willingly starve to death, or that fighting over food will get so bad that millions of people will die?

First of all the "millions of deaths" comes from one model. There are many others and we haven't tested enough to know the true spread or lethality of the virus in a general population. It's quite possible that many people have already had covid-19 and were completely asymptomatic, which would make the death rate look much less scary. Anyone who tells you with certainty that "millions will die" is going off incomplete data like everyone else at the moment.

And if we locked down the global economy for a year or two until a vaccine is developed, yes it's not out of the realm of possibility that millions worldwide would die a result of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th order consequences of that decision. Look how many stress fractures are occurring after just a few weeks. You think they'll get better with time and continued stress?

Honestly I think the UK had the best original strategy of locking down the people most at risk, make sure they're taken care of as much as possible, and letting everyone else get herd immunity as quick as possible. But people weren't/aren't willing to accept that, and likely still won't for at least the next few weeks.

The millions of deaths comes from most models, which is why governments the world over are willing to endure economic devastation. Also, we are talking about the US specifically, so bringing in the worldwide death toll from 5th order effects (why not 20th?) seems disingenuous.

Finally, the UK changed their strategy away from sequestering the 70+ population because Imperial College told them that would only halve their death toll, and it would still remain solidly in the millions (for a country of 66 million).

Clearly we've been looking at different sets of models with different assumptions. I haven't done an objective survey, but I'd dispute "most" predict millions of causalities.

But if we're just talking about the US: The range from the CDC models last I checked is anywhere from 163,000 - 1.7 million for a country of ~330 million.

By comparison the opioid epidemic alone has already killed somewhere between 100,000 - 200,000+ over the last 5 years. And that was largely the result of a kinder, gentler, less dramatic economic shock known as the 2008 recession and decades of preceding industrial decline.

We've already compressed shocks that took months in 2008 to weeks, not the least of which is the record unemployment filings in the posted article. Hence the largest stimulus package in world history being passed in days.

"The economy" is not some vague abstract number on the evening news, and economic shocks do kill people, it's just less tangible than a virus. If this continues for more than a month or two I expect people returning to work out of desperation and then receiving death threats for doing so, and things will get uglier from there if the lockdowns continue.

>UK had the best original strategy of locking down the people most at risk, make sure they're taken care of as much as possible, and letting everyone else get herd immunity as quick as possible.

The problem in the UK is that they seemed to have no substance to the plan. Yes, hard lock down the people at risk, but where is the government response to make that possible?

If they had a well developed plan to carry out those words it might be worth doing, but they didn't and then caved when it was clear it was just rhetoric.

They have half a million volunteers. When you sign up you get an idea of what for, delivering food and stuff to the vulnerable is part of it. So the boomer generation can have the millennials delivering them their toilet paper with some goodies to eat.

> Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that?

The lockdown is wasting months to years of billions of people's lives. That has to be equivalent to some number of deaths, hard to quantify how many, but it's greater than zero.

Also, a bad economy literally kills people by starvation albeit in foreign, poor countries that don't have food surpluses or the ability to print USD.

It is seemingly easy to (roughly) quantify the number of deaths which have occurred as a result of COVID-19, and it is certainly greater than zero. It would seemingly be difficult or impossible to quantify the number of deaths which have occurred as a result of social distancing policies (aka "lockdown"). For that reason alone the certainty of a COVID-19 threat seems greater than the certainty of death by economy.

Yeah I don't see that the tradeoff is "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. Jeff Bezos losing 2% of his income" so much as "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. letting millions of people die of starvation". We're not there yet, but lets see where we are in a month.

Is there going to be some shortage of food that I'm not aware of?

Or just a shortage in distribution mechanisms for it, because we are unwilling to consider emergency measures during an emergency?

The problem with that black and white reasoning is that on some level "the market" represents people's livelihoods and eventually there comes a point where it's reasonable to say "X people should die to prevent Y amount of hardship for Z people".

I agree. It's easy to fall in the trap of "human life above all else", but there comes a time where tradeoffs become reasonable.

Society already does this with the automobile. 36,000 people die every year for the convenience of driving, which I feel is a completely reasonable tradeoff, and this is not a controversy, at least in the united states.

That seems to only include the accident mortality rate. It would likely be even higher if you included deaths from automobile air pollution.

Unrelated but curious, why do you feel it's a completely reasonable tradeoff? In my mind, automobiles have led to a class (and historically race) divide which further segregates and polarizes sects of society.

I seriously doubt cars cause a "racial divide" in any reasonable way.

As for whether I think it's a "reasonable tradeoff". I don't know, but maybe because it's not brought up as controversial by society. This is not a good reason, I suppose, but I haven't really thought about it. I guess I'm mindlessly mimicing the ethics of people around me.

Those are not happening in the local media here.

"sacrificing millions for the sake of the market"

This is an unfair way to characterize this difficult issue.

No it is exactly how the issue should be characterized. Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way.

> Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way.

In what way is the fact that there will be two different levels of economic costs in two scenarios a 'false dichotomy'?

Edit: I think this is worth clarifying. I may misunderstand you, but it looks like there are two errors in your post. The first is treating differing scenarios with differing outcomes as if they were the same, simply because they have some facet in common.

The second is a mis-use of the term 'false dichotomy'. If you believe that a choice between two options will have the same outcome, that is not a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy, a special case of the fallacy of exhaustive hypothesis. Here, one wrongly assumes that there are only two possible choices and uses this assumption to arrive at some seemingly logically derived conclusion.

My apologies if I've misunderstood your intended meaning from your short post.

Hospitals will be overwhelmed much more, and there will be far more deaths if we don't "flatten the curve." In addition, workers will stay home anyway (which many are already doing), collapsing the economy regardless.

It is indeed a false dichotomy. If anything, just irresponsibly letting nature run its course will be worse. Besides, recessions have been consistently associated with decreases of death rates. There is no evidence, and plenty of counter-evidence, that recessions cause increased death. Of course, we are getting a recession either way.

> It is indeed a false dichotomy

What do you think 'false dichotomy' means? How does it apply, here?

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Especially not on the topic of this most stressful and difficult moment.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site when posting here, we'd be grateful. Examples:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

If world runs out of food supply or other important products, then the "young people who don't have any underlying disease" will also die.

Not going to happen because of the virus. Could happen if the politicians don't remember to keep the economy functioning.

Unfortunately yes. Even if one wants to keep the quarantine at all costs, it should be a political decision, not only medical, after weighing everything.

In Italy, where I'm in my third week being shut in, experts and doctors are being quoted tiredlessly by the news: the problem is that they're doing their job (which is good!) however they do not realize the impact of their suggested measures. Not their fault by any means, but:

a. They're effectively scaring the population (an WHO advisor here suggested 6-9 months lockdown, which is likely impractical and will have devastating consequences on the social fabric, even without thinking about the economy)

b. The politicians are so scared of the virus that they're completely abdicating their functions (in Italy the Parliament was closed for two weeks, and the judicial system has been completely shut down as well) and doing whatever they're being told.

The fact is this is a good pandemic to practice on. We are very very lucky, to even be debating the economy right now.

If this virus was far deadlier and affected young people, I think the tone on this very site would change in a heartbeat.

Sure, it's great practice, but practice that comes with heavy costs. And who knows when/where/if the next pandemic hits. If it's not within the next 10 years, the lessons may have been forgotten and the practice was expensive and useless.

My hope is that after this pandemic (assuming it slows down or we gain control over it), governments around the world will enact policies that prepare us for future pandemics. Like a postmortem type of thing where they document what went wrong, what could be done better, and what they can do to mitigate the impacts of future pandemics, in a rational and blameless manner.

Similar to what happened after the financial crisis with additional financial regulation.

I have no doubt another pandemic will happen, and we'll likely have forgotten what it's like, so having policies in place becomes even more important.

> Similar to what happened after the financial crisis with additional financial regulation.

But that's only temporary.

It's like developers starting over and promising themselves that they won't accrue technical debt this time. And then life happens and you need to push that feature quickly and a few years down the line, you're sitting there saying "we need to start over, this is too much trash held together by hopes and dreams".

Companies will cut corners, because that's their main focus. Politicians will reduce regulations, because that's how they stimulate locale economy, and we're back at square one in no time.

The only lasting shift, aside from potentially more work from home, is people making sure they'll always have an extra package of toilet paper. They won't flee the cities (where viruses can spread much better), even though the rent is killing them, and they won't go into voluntary lock down the next time a thousand people die in China of some lung disease.

A lot of things come with heavy costs - the US military is funded billions upon billions year after year for a threat that may never come. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan probably at this point are more costly than the bailout we are giving to the economy.

In fact, most of the hard problems the world faces will require investments that take longer than 10 years to return on.

The economy is important - but maybe our economy needs to be a little less growth oriented and a little more resilient.

The US military isn't funded to respond to potential threats, it's funded to be a threat. It's like Google giving Android away, they'll make that money back multiple times on other deals.

> The economy is important - but maybe our economy needs to be a little less growth oriented and a little more resilient.

I absolutely agree, but I also believe that's not going to happen. And it's not because there's some cabal that won't let it, it's just that everybody wants more and I don't see that changing. Our economic setup with the constant demand for growth is just the result of that. I don't believe you can put the genie back in the bottle, few people are at a point in life where they'd be happy to stay at that level for the rest of their days.

> The US military isn't funded to respond to potential threats, it's funded to be a threat.

This is pointless, circular logic. It is funded to be a threat to defend its interests, from threats, that may never materialize.

It will change in the right circumstances. We may be closer to them than most think.

The point of being the guy with the largest stick is primarily that everybody has to do what you say. A secondary function that emerges after you do that is to ensure that those with the smaller sticks don't gang up on you and pay you back. My point is that "defend its interest" isn't it, it's "advance its interest". The US wouldn't be where they are today if there was no military on earth, their huge success is based on the military being there to bully other countries to comply with political demands, or to simply regime change if they don't.

That sure might change, and it won't be pretty for US citizens, but it will be great for plenty of countries. Until they get under China's rule, of course.

Agreed. It's the same reason why I think we'll learn essentially nothing from it and be back to business-as-usual (with poor safety net and tiny stockpile of medical essentials) in just a couple years.

Isn't Italy in a pretty bad shape to restart the virus spread right now?

As soon as the government can detect a 16-times increase in the number of cases, act, and still be soon enough for the next 200-times increase not to be a tragedy, it is a good time to leave the quarantine. Right now Italy can't stand the first increase.

The good news is that each time the disease spreads, those numbers become smaller, the bad news is that we don't know by how much.

> Isn't Italy in a pretty bad shape to restart the virus spread right now?

It won't be able to hold a long-standing quarantine. Probably a couple of months tops. That's not even mentioning the economy. As I said, endured isolation will have very bad side effects.

You know, after a short search and calculation, it looks like today there are about 4 times more people dying in your country than usual. That's pretty big. In a couple of weeks, there will probably be nearly no new cases, so you can detect growth without it immediately being a disaster.

Yes, there are economic consequences, but the alternative is quite a lot of avoidable deaths.

I think it's a fair discussion to take, but how are you going to run an economy with the health service in permanent overload?

That is what would happen if you just let the thing pass. Those charts of "squashing the sombrero" have the number of beds at a very low place compared to the expected hump of cases. On some of them you can barely even see the gap between the red line and the zero line, due to the scale of the hump.

Death rates would shoot up way above what is normal for the disease, people would die of all sorts of other preventable things too.

Already everyone I know who was going to get a preventative health diagnostic test (myself included) in the next two months has had the test rescheduled. Otherwise healthy people are likely to have some percentage of un-diagnosed issues go on an extra month or two because of this, so it's definitely not just those who are directly infected with Coronavirus.

Some places' ERs are already at capacity, and there's no way I would go to one right now unless I was almost at death's doorstep. That's not necessarily a good thing if something happens that should normally require an ER visit.

Also, some procedures being performed that a patient would normally stay overnight and be monitored are being changed to outpatient. It can now be more risky to stay in a hospital than it is to go home for recovery, even though you can't be monitored for potential post-procedure complications.

> in permanent overload

It won't be permanent. It will be like a forest fire and kill a lot of people and be horrible, but will eventually die down due to heard immunity.

Ok not permanent as in years and years. But long enough that it's towards the end of the year before there's capacity.

You don't want people dying needlessly for half a year.

And while the overload is on, the economy will be affected, whatever the response is.

Doctors have passed from the illness, too. Even young, healthy ones. Stress and lack of sleep hurt the immune system.

I wonder how much the viral load affects this? People working in these conditions are at a high risk of inhaling a large amount of virus at different times.

I believe this was linked somewhere else on HN. It sounds like this is one of the possible causes of doctors being more affected by the virus, but they don't know for sure.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/health/doctors-coronavirus-he...

It seems to me that the health care system in general is one institution that has shown severe signs of strain in this crisis, and perhaps will need to be rethought along with others.

Interestingly enough, questioning the health of that particular institution is much more taboo than most in this crisis. Given the practical importance of patient faith in the healthcare provider that may be reasonable, but for my money I'd like to be able to try and imagine a better healthcare system in a public forum without getting downvoted for criticizing its current incarnation.

> thow are you going to run an economy with the health service in permanent overload?

You start rapidly building additional capacity to handle the load.

I saw this idea floated around on Reddit a few days ago. Basically the crux is that unemployment has a death toll, too.

So if you close all non-essential businesses, unemployment rises, which increases the likelihood of people losing health insurance, losing homes, not paying electrical bills, communication (internet / phone) bills, etc. If some people lose all those things and don't have access to them again for 2+ months, and have no other safety net, they might die. Doubly so considering the hospitals may be at capacity with COVID-19 cases.

So, what would be better - keep people at home and unemployed, where people die by lack of resources, or keep people going out where people die by spreading COVID-19?

The third options is to keep people at their residences but either pay them or reduce their bills / mortgages etc to 0 while COVID-19 blows over. But that could take 2-18 months. It was hard enough getting $1200 once for every American household - I doubt it will continue for another 18 months until a vaccine is developed.

> losing health insurance, losing homes, not paying electrical bills, communication (internet / phone) bills, etc.

None of this is true because non-essential bills have also been shut down.

None of my expenses have changed. And as far as I know, it would be a problem if I lost my income as I would still need to pay rent/mortgage, taxes, groceries, utilities, health insurance.

Boy that's news to me.

I think what you are saying is that discretionary expenses have been greatly reduced. That is true, but I think you then make a very big leap to assuming the savings can easily offset the fixed expenses that you mention (insurance, rent/mortgage, utilities).

> I doubt it will continue for another 18 months until a vaccine is developed.

If any of the 40+ trials going on for drugs is successful and makes COVID-19 clinically manageable, it would improve the situation earlier than just waiting out a vaccine (which, like the drugs, may not work at all).

You've rightly identified the question as a false dichotomy. People in the US don't _have_ to die for lack of resources.

The state helping the people to survive this crisis or not is a political choice.

I'm not really worried about lack of raw resources and immediate needs. We'll figure that out via a mix of savings, private charity, and local/state/federal assistance. I'm assuming that we'll mitigate the virus via treatments, vaccines, or the brutal reality of acquired immunity.

The more difficult political problem is how the financial pain is going to be distributed and how we reboot the economy. How assistance is distributed, taxes are adjusted, or fiscal measures are taken is going to be very complicated with opportunities to create winners and losers based on the policies. So far I'm not particularly impressed by Congress in this area.

Each country has economic and market mitigations. Some are beginning to copy US model of Gov paying bills outright for a period. If everyone can do this with low cost, there's no reason for high risk and damage to economy later. This incident will make us learn fast.

The medical experts do consider economic and market impacts, and there are alignments in governments how to balance everything. However, since this is an unprecedented health crisis with unknown ramifications, that is first priority. Many measures are to create wiggling room to handle what unknown unknowns may come down the road as well.

This shows us systemic vulnerabilities, and societies will be forever changed, probably for the better.

I'm not saying countries are not implementing economic mitigations - I'm saying the only voices in decision making are coming from medical experts - there is no public evaluation or discussion of economic impact as a counterpoint to any action suggested by epidemiologists and doctors. The economy minister here is just putting out fires - he has zero say in the measures taken.

And the politicians in charge are too afraid to debate the experts and frankly lack any leadership at all in this situation - (with a few exceptions in other countries). Blindly listening to experts of one domain because you are afraid is not leadership, they are supposed to do balancing decisions - and from what I see in the media they basically delegated the government responsibilities - if they are discussing this they are certainly not making their discussions or reasoning public.

In my country the different parts of leadership has displayed a unified front in the media and been very clear what they know and that there are unknowns that need to be learned now. If some politicians are "delegating blame" and not taking part, that's indeed a problem. Though it could be a perception problem. I've strong doubts weighted discussions across branches are not happening most sane places. Normal responsibilities during such incidents will be shifted and cease as well.

What about hyperinflation? And why isn't anyone bringing this up?

And mental health too. How many new Alcoholics will this create? How many suicides?

It's interesting that NOW people are concerned with this impact from the economy, yet when people became alcoholics from getting fired when the economy was good, no one seems to care.

It's a matter of size. If you have 1% "falling through the cracks", it's individually tragic but not something that will negatively impact the economy that much. If you have 30% falling, you're going to be in for a rough time.

A lot more are falling through the cracks in a good economy than 1%. About what, 10% are poor in the US?

One friend I had in school qualified for free school lunch, so presumably below the poverty line.

His parents had a house, with a yard. There was air conditioning, cable TV, and each child had his own room. I distinctly remember a nearly-server-class PC much better specced than anything my family owned (a dual-processor desktop in the 1990's!)

Poverty stats don't tell the whole story, especially if they're only based on income levels. A wage that would have you living out of your car in SF might allow a squarely lower-middle-class lifestyle in the rural Rust Belt.

You just proved that though - owning a house, with a yard, is not a sign of wealth in most of the US. There are plenty of cheap houses, with yards, to go around. Just not in places most people want to live, leading to less wages and less opportunity because of the lack of jobs.

It is about the volumes I guess , millions are filing unemployment claims now , the impact is going to much higher on these issues , lot more people will suffer due to this, so more people have been talking about it .

A healthy and growing economy with low unemployment is a boon to the poor, sick, and alcoholic. The entire purpose of pursuing a healthy economy is that improves the quality of life for the citizens. Continuing to hold this position now is not hypocritical.

There is always a tradeoff.

The virus will kill X and reduce the quality of life for Y people. The economic disruption will kill Z people and reduce the quality of life for Z2.

Quality of life is not a defined term.

There is a difference between trading my life, or trading a new laptop now instead of saving for it. That is what we are looking at here.

So even if my quality of life goes down, food/health/shelter contributes the majority to that, probably 85%. The rest is all worthless junk.

If the economy is failing to the extent that food is in short supply - that is different. There is no indication that will happen.

Ignoring quality of life, there is still a death tradeoff to be considered.

Economic conditions have real and immediate health consequences too. For example, in 2010 US unemployment briefly grew about 6% to a total of 10% in the US and there were 40,000 additional deaths from cancer alone[1]. When you consider heart disease, other indications, drug abuse, and suicide, the numbers are much greater. The often cited number of 40k for each percent unemployment may not be far off if these factors are taken together.

This trend also holds true in the OECD where social programs are more common because there are still budgetary constraints on centralized healthcare.

[1]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Most wealthy nations already have a robust social safety net in place. They don't need to rush to cobble together a temporary one in the same was the US does.

This really isn't helpful to the discussion. The US has unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and many other programs. And it seems to be pretty premature to declare which country is or isn't going to come out of this with the least amount of damage.

It is a bit of a mystery to me why Congress isn't just providing better funding/financing for all the existing programs. I'm not sure why there should be new types of programs to help individuals. I'm deeply suspicious of efforts to prop up businesses, I'd rather have the focus be on individuals and let businesses figure out the best way forward. For some businesses bankruptcy might be the best solution because the business model has completely changed.

The comment pointed out that the US seems to be tackling the economic impact more aggressively than other nations. That is only partially true to begin with since many other nations are discussing or have already passed large-scale stimulus measures for their national economies.

But the urgency and focus on economic measures in the US does have justification. Here in the US, we need things like free testing (already the case in most nations) and to handle the surge in unemployment (we have a system, is is just less robust than most wealthy nations, hence the very urgent need to dramatically expand it).

I made no mention of "which country is or isn't going to come out of this with the least amount of damage", only reiterated the well-known fact that the US has one of the meekest welfare states of any wealthy nation. That had not yet been mentioned in the thread and seemed extremely relevant.

This boils down to the reality that governments can take measures to mitigate the economic damage caused by an idled labor force (direct payments to workers), but can do very little to mitigate the economic damage caused by a sick or dying labor force.

For those who are willing to go through this thought exercise, if we're purely trying to maximize humankind's total well-being, how much wealth would we have to create to counteract one coronavirus victim's loss of life?

Here's a set of 3 questions that I think leads to a possible answer.

- How much would someone have to pay you to be put to sleep for 8 years, during which period you have no sensory input or output?

- Would you rather be put to sleep for 8 years now or at the end of your life?

- Do you have a preference over being put to sleep for the last 8 years of your life vs just dying straight up?

I think most people would be willing to go to sleep for 8 years for $2 million. And, most would prefer dying 8 years sooner over going to sleep now.

In other words, $2m > sleep for 8 years now > dying 8 years earlier == coronavirus victim

The moral dilemma is that we're asking one person to die 8 years sooner to create an outbalanced improvement in quality of life increase for someone else. That is, you're taking away well-being from one person to give to another. I think government officials implement policies that redistribute human well-being all the time, but it raises alarm bells when we start dealing with life and death.

I think you're framing the question - the tradeoff at this point is not how much value will be created but how much value will be destroyed.

The impacts of corona measures will lead to the economic slowdown and general reduction of wealth - for you this might mean that you lose your job, can't afford to buy a new apartment, car, furniture, electronics, clothes, etc. but for people that live close to poverty level that just got out of that place because of globalisation and increased economic growth this will result in less access to basic infrastructure, medications, food, development opportunities.

And that's not even touching the reduction in R&D and economic activity that would improve the lives of people. For example - consider risky tech companies like Tesla being wiped out by market conditions - who is going to do R&D in things like battery tech in an economy where people are pulling out of capital investment ? Even the established companies with cash reserves will scale back R&D. And this will happen across the board - which will in turn make future crisis more difficult to deal with.

Well the dot com bubble comes to mind concerning people not willing to invest in risky tech companies but that didn't stop new tech from coming to the market

Shouldn't there be a difference between 2m$ I can spend myself 8 years from now and 2m$ that some rich person earns if I die.

When is an X% increase in GDP per capita worth a Y% chance of death? Illegal migrants perform this calculus every day. Their decisions may be instructive.

You don't see people crowding onto fishing boats or hiking treacherous desert to escape Europe ($38k). We can probably afford to fall to that level. It'll be a major lifestyle adjustment, but a doable one.

Looking down the scale to Latin America: Chile, Panama, and Argentina are pretty okay (~$15k). Less so for your typical American middle-class suburbanite, but people have good lives there. Even Brazil is decent (~$10k). But once we start pushing into Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, etc ($6-7k) the natives start accepting pretty significant risks to get out.

US GDP per capita is about $60k. Although it will be a terrifying shock, we can probably fall to about 10% of that before things are truly desperate. But once we're talking about killing more than 90% of the economy: yes, people might in fact prefer death.

The issue on the framing of this topic also boils down to who asks it.

I often hear it framed as: "How much is a person's life worth?" or some general reference to stock values.

But when people say "economy" this is what it really means:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52002734

Cash flow, supply chains, jobs, bankruptcy, debt, poverty, famine and more than likely families breaking up (financial stress is the #1 cause of divorce) plus a spike in suicides.

That's the economic impact. And when the question of virtually guaranteeing that outcome around the world to a significant portion of the global population vs a risk of a negative outcome for for the percentage of people who are susceptible to serious issues from COVID-19...it gets a heck of a lot murkier.

There's not a heartless bad guy in this situation. Both outcomes are terrible and if you purely look at the number of people negatively impacted, the economic fallout of this approach with its cascading effects look significantly worse.

We should not pretend like we understand the "economic fallout", and that operating under the current "rules" is the only mode of existence. Economics and capitalism are social constructs after all. _Nobody_ understands economics well enough to make statements with any certainty. At least epidemiology is better understood.

Not to mention what happens when you take into account the positive effects a recession and drop in production has to: air quality, worker health, general mortality, and climate change?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00210-0

That's fair. It's a lot of moving parts to the system.

I think this is a false choice.

As Bill gates said, we can't say- "Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts"

The truth is that it seems our choice is relatively simple:

1) Allow the virus to spread rapidly, overload the health system, kill many people, until herd immunity is reached.

2)Do partial shut down measures, some partial efforts at testing and contact tracing, let the virus continue for a long time, and more slowly reach option 1.

3)Do strong shut down measures until the virus is able to be controlled by a strong testing+contact tracing regime.

Iran (seems to have?) chosen option 1.

Italy started with option 2, and will hopefully move into option 3.

Option 3 is the only acceptable option that doesn't destroy the economy and health systems.

Unchecked, 10 cases of this virus will turn into 100s of thousands. That is the same with 10 cases in March, or 10 cases in May or 10 cases in any month.

People just dont get exponentials. They don't understand that if you get a total of a million cases in a week's time, most of those cases appear on day 6. They can't see how 1/7th of those cases turns into a million. Every country should be hoping that whoever calls the shots understands math.

People just don’t get sigmoids. They don’t understand that herd immunity quickly starts to slow the local spread of a virus in a region, and that you can’t model the entire population of a country like bouncy balls in a box. Every country should be hoping that whomever calls the shots understands math better than the average HN commenter.

This might be a logistic curve in the long term. But if this runs wild it will look like an exponential for a while longer. If your doubling time is 3 and a bit days. You can't just sit back saying "the inflexion point is coming any day now!". You need to do something yesterday.

> ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner.

“That pile of bodies” is mainly the elderly and terminally ill, demographics that society already seems to have little problem ignoring. Even now the worry among most of the population seems to be that those demographics will overwhelm the health system, preventing everyone else from getting medical attention. But this could be solved by triaging, which is rumoured to already be the de facto standard in Italy (i.e. if you are over 60 and show coronavirus symptoms, other patients take priority over you).

The longer the lockdowns in various countries go on, the stronger I think societal pressure for solution 1) – with triaging to avoid overloading the health system – is going to get.

Still enough normal 30-49 olds are dying as well

There's no guarantee that option 3 can be accomplished in the US. We might aim for it and realize that we're only accomplishing #2 and now inflicted maximum economic damage on top of it.

I generally agree with this assessment, but it's not certain the U.S. is choosing option 3.

How do we assess contingency levels, other than after-the-fact measure of fatalities? Contingency is highly variable across the country. Rural areas have a lot of personal distancing built in. Urban areas certainly aren't in China-style lockdown, or South Korea-style technology+culture distancing based on prior experience. Nationally, I think the U.S. is at best taking a "moderate contingency" approach.

Each state's governor has control over the contingency, short of the president declaring martial law. e.g. in Mississippi the governor has declared most businesses are "essential" and thus open for business, expressly contradicting local ordinances more strictly defining what is essential. We very likely will see localized variations in infection and fatality rates as a result of these variations. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-mississippi-gove...

Therefore I don't know whether the progression of the disease is even predictable.

You can also collect data on the risk groups during the current shutdown period, provide the infrastructure for isolating the risk groups (ie. setup delivery services, organise isolated accommodation, etc.), triage appropriately in the case of spikes and then transition in to plan 2.

Considering the numbers of infected people confirmed alone and the percentage of asymptomatic cases contact tracing and testing sounds about as realistic as waiting on a cure.

Being a sole proprietor / contractor right now feels hopeless. Nobody is spending money with me right now, projects on hold, no possible way of filing for unemployment. It's worrisome.

Thankfully my wife is still working - but she's an administrator at a Nursing Home and people there are starting to get tested - and she's panicking. They are days from having no nurses. She's worried about cleaning crews being sick. She's worried about bringing it home. Luckily they have a stockpile of supplies, BUT THIS WHOLE THING IS ABOUT TO BLOW UP!

The problem is that the tests of their employees are taking UP TO 10 DAYS to come back. They are sending home nurses for this long just to wait and see if they are all going to be exposed, their residents too.

Anyone in their facility who may be sick is being sent home for 14 days. There will be nobody left to take care of the elderly, who may also get sick.

People are worried about dying themselves, or the people they care for dying.

I'm confident we are 10 days from hearing about Nursing Homes and Nurses in Nursing Homes everywhere getting sick and dying in massive numbers.

I don't think you'll be hearing much about nursing homes: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/feds-decline-to-...

Check out the details of the small business forgivable loan package just passed by the Senate. I think they took some actions to help sole proprietors and self-employed people also.

> Being a sole proprietor / contractor right now feels hopeless. Nobody is spending money with me right now, projects on hold, no possible way of filing for unemployment. It's worrisome.

Please don't take this as me being captain hindsight here, but I think that this pandemic has reallllly shown the need for an emergency fund. IMO if you're sole prop or contractor, you owe it to yourself to have a bigger emergency fund for this exact scenario.

It is not that people don’t know this and spend all they make. Not all contractors make enough to save for an emergency fund easily. Independent of all of this, every experienced contractor knows that sometimes there will be dull patches and you save for that . However it is not always possible to do so, and you may have saved for 2weeks or 2 months and it may not be enough the economy might limp for 6months or a year .

perhaps having better social safety nets like 90% of the developed world would be better, no?

In an country with healthy safety nets and an economy that fairly pays everyone, sure, I'd say maybe they should have saved more.

We're not that economy, and we're not that country, and it's totally unreasonable to expect that everyone can put aside months of emergency funds.

And as an econ/business reporter points out, this should be seen as the lower bound on the true number of lost job, because there are a lot of reasons people didn't file, including confusion, overwhelmed systems, and many lost jobs not qualifying: https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/1243147516784324608

This is also only the beginning, as lockdowns across the nation aren’t in full swing yet.

Do we know the weekly throughput of processing unemployment requests?

The rate is hard to determine since it’s per state. There have been many reports of online systems going down and phone queues being insanely long:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/coronavirus-unem...

There is usa how the implemented lockdowns work? They forced to shut down all non-essential industries and shops? Or they just suggested it?

I am finding confusing information online. Like... Did they really give to the each employer the power to decide if they are essential or not?

The authority has been delegated to states, each state is making their own decisions.

Yes. Every state has treated it slightly different. Many high-population states are under restrictive rules right now.

No. The authority was never given to the federal government. Key difference. The federal government cannot grant that which it does not have

We're saying the same thing. No need to be pedantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights

No, you are getting it backwards. The states predated the general government. The states delegated powers to the general government.

No, it's different. Delegated to the states implies that someone else had the power and gave it to the states. That is not true. The states always had the power, and have had it since they formed, and it was not removed upon admission to the United States.

It's like saying France was delegated the power to enforce a national quarantine. That is simply not the case.

Each state does it in its own way, if at all. Then local cities and provinces do their own thing anyway (sometimes loosening the state-wide rules rather than tightening them).

Yes, government is mostly nudging people towards doing the right thing.

Some governors issued edicts listing the non-essential businesses that were to be shuttered until April 23.

The policing policy is if you are spotted as still open by code or law enforcement, you can lose your operating license.

At least some places the mandates are at the local level and businesses decide for themselves. Example: In-law's business does print advertising. One of their big clients is a fast food chain. So their company lawyers decided they can stay open because they are part of the food business and therefore essential.

It varies a lot by state. I know that here in SF, they had some clear rules (obviously high-contagion things must close; obviously vital things should stay open) with a lot of gray area. But they've been removing the gray area over time. Which I think has been a good approach, as economies are complex.

It is going to be much worse.

This is the first week when the managers/companies started to pay attention to what is happening.

Small companies are going to lay people off this week/next week. Mass layoffs take time as a lot of states have something like a WARN act.

One should also remember that most of tipped restaurant industry gets tips on credit cards which are included in the next weekly/bi-weekly paychecks, which means people had money coming the week of lock down/last week. It is this weeek/next week's paychecks will have nothing in them.

Here's how you know we are starting to accept reality: Uber and Lyft miss the revenue numbers; at least one of the on demand delivery services abruptly closes. Ordering food at the markups of DoorDash/Postmates/UberEats/Grubhub is denial.

In an ironic twist of fate, Uber Eats might become the stronger part of the business when ridership is down but food delivery is up. My friend who is an Uber driver tells me that's what's happening in his area, in California.

That's because people still think this will be a couple of week long speed bump. Cooking at home means 10%-25% of the restaurant cost.

https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/18/21185260/unemployment-insuran...

> A week ago, he said he had “a good middle-class job” which paid him $35.50 an hour plus health care and retirement benefits. Now he is struggling to figure out how he’ll pay a $300 electric bill and $1,000 in rent for his townhouse. He also lost his health insurance.

You make $35.5/hour in (I suppose?) a stable job but if the work stops for a week, you struggle with a $300 bill? I know some people are living paycheck to paycheck but starting from a certain income you should build a safety net. What about your IRA? What about your credit score? What about small investments?

Looks like some people are living $ to $ without leaving any money aside. This might be what is going to make this even harder for the economy.

This is exactly right. The economy has grown to unsustainable levels based on the economic habits of the average American who can't be bothered to save, hence the crash we're seeing now. At sixty hours a week, that guy should be making six figures, pre-tax. There is zero excuse for not saving. Everyone should save at least six months of salary for emergencies; though a few people legitimately can't, most Americans simply don't bother because they'd rather spend that money on the new i phone.

Edit: Williamdclt, I'll answer your question here due to rate-limiting.

Yes, lots of us do; I've been working that way since internships in high school. Same with many others I know. Usually, though, it's close to 12 hours a day and none on Saturday, or maybe 11 a day and a little on the weekend. Not an issue so long as you plan about an hour a day for something fun and mindless, and leave weekends free to do chores/relax.

Edit: Consz, responding here due to rate-limiting.

Not all of us live in the same world. I'm glad to hear you and your friends are doing well, but that's not representative of everyone. I do because I'm currently hourly, and that's true of many of the people I mentioned. When every additional hour worked has more money associated with it, most people will work more; that's not silly. The downside is, of course, there's a distinct opportunity cost to taking time off, so I don't do so much of that.

Wages have stagnated since the 1970s: https://i.stack.imgur.com/m7EXP.jpg

Americans work sixty hours a week? Ten hour a day, rest on Sunday?

Welcome to the job of doctor for example. But its true that those are outliers, I would expect average to be closer to 45

I'm British, but used to work with a lot of Americans, all white-collar workers in the oil and gas industry, across a few different companies.

It seemed to me that the US has a toxic overtime culture, where your perceived value to the company was based in large part by how much time you were at your desk. And of course, you didn't get paid for that overtime. I don't think I met a single person who worked less than 50+ hours a week, every week.

I did ask about this, and was always told it was "normal".

Also, and I might be remembering this wrongly, I think employees only got ten days annual leave.

This was all in a single industry, in a single state, so I don't know how well the observation extrapolates, but it was my perception at the time.

Not all, no, but a good few do (I'm sure this varies by industry, region, etc.) Ambitious people tend to do so more than others; there are only so many promotions/pay raises/etc. to go around and I'd rather I get it than one of my co-workers, so it becomes a bit of a positional arms race.

This is silly. My professional cohort doesn't have anyone working sixty hour weeks, and these are people making mid-6 to mid-7 figures. Lot more to life than working, buddy.

60% of Millennials (basically people in their 30's) don't have enough saved for a $1000 emergency: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/60-percent-of-millennials-ca...

I'm pretty sure those millennials aren't making $35 an hour

I went to my local 7-11 a couple of weeks ago to get some cash at the ATM. Next to it was a garbage bin for throwing away your receipt.

Out of curiosity, I went through about a dozen and not a single one had a balance above $1,000. Most were below $500.

There is little financial literacy in this country. Basic lessons about opening a bank account, the difference between checkings and savings, etc. is not something that is taught in K-12 nor in College. Let alone more "advanced" topics like 401Ks and IRAs and investing in the stock market.

> Most were below $500.

> There is little financial literacy in this country.

Well, technically if you're drawing cash, you should be drawing it from your checking account and if you're saving it should be in a savings account, so your checking account balance should be relatively low.

That's a pretty biased sample. Most people with financial literacy aren't withdrawing cash at a 7/11. They're doing it at their own bank branch to avoid paying any fees.

The reasoning here is circular. At the ATM in 7/11 that would only be used by people who aren't financially literate enough to absorb excessive fees, we find evidence of poor finances and poor financial literacy.

Uhm, what?

Or maybe they're just doing it out of convenience? Have you never payed a fee for convenience?

Have you tipped in a restaurant? Have you taken the highway instead of the back roads and payed a toll? Have you ever had food delivered to you?

Congrats you're doing the same thing people who pull money out of an ATM are doing you financially illiterate rube.

FYI, I liked the points you made. However, personal insults ruin discussion and lower the quality of the forum, so I downvoted this comment.

I can certainly relate to getting fired up at foolish comments on the internet! It's tough sometimes... heh. Cheers, I hope you have a good day.

Charles Schwab is one of many banks that pays for all ATM fees.

Additionally, a financially literate person may value the time it would take find another ATM more than a $2 ATM fee.

This comment is a tad ironic. My monthly expenses are $N, and I keep at most $N + 1,000 in my checking account. Often much less e.g during the first half of the month. I keep my checking account balance as low as possible precisely because I know "the difference between checkings and [high-yield] savings". Keeping more than a small buffer extra in your checking account seems pretty financially illiterate to me.

Also, keeping anything more than absolutely necessary in a checking account is ridiculously dangerous if you're using ATMs outside gas stations....

There's plenty of people with multiple bank accounts, one of which just has a few hundred bucks in checking, and then near the end of a month they pull from an online savings (that has higher APY) into their main account as required. That's just one example of many tricks employed.

How is this evidence of low financial literacy? It appears like this is evidence of the existence of poverty...

Well here's the thing about that, people were actively incentivized not to save cash with low interest rates and a booming stock market. I know for myself personally I'm heavily invested in the markets just because that's what worked best for almost a decade. Nobody saw this coming.

Now you have to debate selling your stock at such low prices and realizes huge loses or paying your bills - I think most people are going to try to hold out for unemployment/use credit before they do that.

Your emergency fund isn't supposed to accrue interest, it is supposed to be a safety net against these kind of situations.

yeah, not great, but the same thing has happened to many businesses. When they stop making money they can't meet their obligations (e.g. wages) and need a bailout a week later.

A staggering number, and unprecedented in the modern era.

I'm not in the US or an America, but my (retired), Father is and for the sake of the people around him and his family I hope this is the point where the American political system - and Republicans in particular - realise that their ideologies are dead.

In the UK we saw an Old-Etonian Tory Prime Minister in the space of a couple of weeks:

- Effectively nationalise a huge chunk of private industry by offering to subsidise 80% of all salaries up to £30k/year

- Delay tax payments for businesses, and offer up to 15% of GDP in loans and grants to help keep them alive

- Renationalise the train industry (privatising it and others was a hallmark of Thatcher's period in power)

- Accept that their planned immigration policy post-Brexit is now probably dead in the water because who knew that "low skilled workers" like cleaners and agricultural workers would be useful?

- Severely curtail free movement and enterprise by shutting every pub, restaurant, cinema, theatre and cafe across the UK as well as almost every shop that isn't a pharmacy or food shop

- Become champion supporters of an NHS they were - until recently - trying to sell bit off of

Politics here has changed forever, and likely for the better (assuming the sanctions on free movement and enterprise are temporary and not a back door for more draconian measures). For the sake of the most vulnerable in America, I hope it's the same there too.

And maybe - just maybe - it's time everybody took another look at the UBI debate, again.

> And maybe - just maybe - it's time everybody took another look at the UBI debate, again.

Doesn't UBI directly result in inflation and cause currency devaluation? If the money that you hold loses its value (because everyone has at the very least the same amount of money as a basic, consistent income) then it is worth nothing in the end. It is as good as having no money in my humble opinion. Money has to be valuable for it to be useful in trade. Giving away money to everyone devalues the currency.

You would have to implement it in a way that redistributed wealth, i.e. increase marginal tax rates.

The goal is to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and educated. One option is to just give them housing, food, and education. Another is to give people money and let them choose. Yet another is to loan the money and to put them in debt forever.

It's a noble goal. What about exercising the option of personal responsibility and agency of choice? (D) none of the above.

What about it? From what I can tell, people would rather choose to live in countries where there is some social contract regarding a minimum quality of life rather than Somalia.

Here is a pretty good article that assumes that you have zero knowledge and talks about how UBI could be implemented without any more inflation than we already have.

https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...

You should read Utopia for Realists: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316471917

It addresses a lot of concerns about UBI in a very accessible way. UBI isn't a new concept and it has been well studied. (It was almost implemented in the USA as a more streamlined alternative to the byzantine welfare state, but the Democrats sunk it.

UBI redistributes money. The total amount in circulation doesn't change. So the deflation argument really comes down to: if everyone has money, no one has money. I don't think that's the case. Even in the unrealistic case where we all have the same amount of money, we wouldn't spend it on the same things and that fact alone is a moderating force on inflation. Prices reflect people's ability and willingness to pay. In cases where we are forced to buy the same things, like housing, healthcare, and education, prices are out of control anyway.

Yes, but nowhere near the amount of inflation caused by allowing Wall Street and consumer banks to create trillions of new dollars with artificially low interest rates. Plus if we had more price inflation on consumer goods it might actually reign in the Fed, and make them stop ignoring the ongoing rampant price inflation for assets.

I would like to be optimistic and think we all learn valuable lessons from this but realistically most people will just double-down in their convictions and blame some other externality as to why their own political/economic ideologies didn't pan out.

We haven't yet seen the full effects of the current political shift or of the measures being taken. It may be premature to believe we know all of the lessons that are to be learned from this, or even that the ones we believe we are learning are grounded in data. Hindsight will make all of this much more clear.

But politics is nothing if not consistent - who was blamed and who was punished for the 2008 financial crisis?

Don't be rational when you answer that question. Remember back to what Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnel were saying, and remember that people believed them.

Looking like you are right about this. Approval ratings are up somehow: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

>somehow

because this is seen as an external threat and not an internal blunder. Similar to 9/11. Countrymen tend to band together and support the leader when faced with a crisis, regardless of the leader.

What is particularly infuriating is this specific leader made it much worse by doing things like closing the pandemic response team a couple years ago and calling it a big Democratic hoax until recently.

TBH, it's very difficult to look at that 538 chart and not come to the conclusion that a large portion of Americans are idiots. And I'm not even talking about whether or not they support Trump, I'm talking about how it is quite clear they are not able to make logical inferences of true cause and effect (e.g. what Trump is possibly responsible for and what he's not), instead they are just like reeds in the wind blowing whichever way their TV sets or friends tell them.

Your hoax remark is purely false. From the quite-liberal Snopes: "Despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax."

He said Democrats were politicizing it, which is fair. It's obvious he was just playing politics as well, and also trying to keep people from panic-buying. Meanwhile, the border was already shut down with China, before February, far earlier than many other countries.

You're running around calling Americans idiots just like Hillary called them deplorables. Meanwhile you obviously are buying false narratives and pulling at selectively chosen data that affirms your narrative... all I'll say is, the problem may not be "Americans".

OK, here is the full text of what Trump actually said:

> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.

> One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.

So I'll just let his words stand for themselves. What is exactly is it that he is referring to as a "hoax" then? That the virus needs to be taken very seriously and is definitely not in the same vein as seasonal flu, as he's done multiple times, or directly contradicted actual experts like Dr. Fauci right on the same podium? Saying "your hoax remark is purely false" is total bullshit. Again, I'll just let Trump's words above stand for themselves.

Yea it’s pretty clear he’s saying the Democrats/media, not the virus, is the hoax, here. He already sees them propagandizing it, so he’s saying, “watch out here we go again, another thing they’ll try and twist”.

Which is funny - because you’re literally trying to twist it right here.

The “hoax” is just him saying they’re smearing him either for things he didn’t do or did wrong, even refers to it in the next sentence when he defends his early action containing the virus. He never suggests the virus itself is a hoax. That’s just plainly obvious. If you aren’t catching that, I think you’re seeing things through a very narrow liberal lense.

The border was closed to China in January. That’s a pretty early response, a lot faster than many other countries.

Sure, hes made mistakes. But your quote doesn’t make him look bad like you think it does.

One of the key issues in American politics is epistemic. Many voters on the right will not receive any information about just how badly the initial response was bungled. There is a relatively closed media ecosystem of TV, web, and social media which completely blots out truth with conspiracy theories, half truths, lies of omission, or whataboutism.

Many of these people really truly believe they are well informed and also believe themselves to be true patriots. How this dynamic can be changed is beyond me and it is deeply problematic.

> come to the conclusion that a large portion of Americans are idiots

Don't need a chart for that.

That’s democracy for you, where the ruler is whoever controls the discussion, which is usually the media. It doesn’t help that leadership is a revolving door and nobody is accountable. At least with monarchies you could lose your head.

Time will tell whether it's a crisis bump or a sustained trend.

I wouldn't give it much weight for now.

People are probably going to take the bailouts and not think at all that their "free-market" and unbridled capitalism approach is wrong. We know this because it happened in 2008. In reality it isn't unbridled capitalism because if it was it would result in massive bankruptcy and people hurting bad as they did in the depression. But since neither 2008 and today has been show to deliver the hurt that 1929 did yet, I don't think we will see the appetite for massive social programs that FDR enjoyed. Those people saw what it was like to be penniless and nearly starving.

Minor point - Rail industry was privatised by John Major. Thatcher was against or at least indifferent to privatising it.

> and Republicans in particular - realise that their ideologies are dead

Good luck. Their base doesn't care. I was speaking with my father a couple days ago, who is a US Board-Certified surgeon and ran his own practice for 40 years. He's a smart guy, but firmly lives in the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh bubble. He was saying how he was hoping this crisis would put the final nail in the coffin ... for the corrupt democrats. It's insanity.

They're both right. Neither the Republicans or Democrats will be able to conduct business as usual going forward.

what is the reasoning (genuinely curious). Are democrats somehow failing America re: COVID-19?

I believe many are upset over them temporarily blocking the stimulus bill.

Not Democrats as a whole. Nancy Pelosi and one or two other congress people in particular. As I understand it from various sources spanning the political spectrum, both the Republicans and Democrats that were in Washington DC had productive bipartisan talks over the weekend and had largely hashed out a bill that both sides agreed on. Then Nancy Pelosi flew back from California and injected several additional things into the bill that were highly partisan and permanent fixtures aligned with policy Democrats had been pushing pre-crisis. This act by Pelosi derailed partisan efforts. Liberal media lauded these additions. Conservative media condemned them. Anything that is added that gets opposite reception by partisan media is pretty much the definition of partisan.

Any bill that is a response to a crisis should short and specific to the crisis at hand with no permanent changes to how business is conducted long term. Politicians taking advantage of a crisis is how we get disastrous policy like the Patriot Act, no-fly lists and FISA courts.

Any long term policy changes should be debated and decided upon months and years after the crisis has been averted.

I think it's weird to point at Nancy Pelosi given the current state of politics. McConnell and the republicans denounce any Democratic bill that is passed as partisan, so why would this be any different? And you feel that Steve Mnuchin and his $500B corporate bailout slush fund meet the criteria laid out for crisis spending? Give me a break.

The Democrats are trying to include things like vote-by-mail, since this crisis is already affecting elections and will likely have an impact on the ability to conduct a fair election in November. They want better unemployment and healthcare to make us resilient against this exact situation. These are all good things, and the Democrats would be fools to waste an opportunity to do the right thing for the country.

>I think it's weird to point at Nancy Pelosi given the current state of politics. McConnell and the republicans denounce any Democratic bill that is passed as partisan, so why would this be any different?

This is not about the current state of politics. People are dying. Immediate measures to fix this need to be taken to save their lives. This is not the time for politicians to push their agenda, even they believe it makes the world a better place.

It makes sense to talk about all the things that you mentioned you liked after this emergency is over, so that we can be better prepared for next time. But right now, the bills should be hyper-focused on what to do now, to deal with the emergency that is happening now, so that we can resolve it now, so people don't die tomorrow.

(FWIW I agree with most of what was included. It's just not the time to discuss it)

I agree philosophically, but that's not how the world works. First, we have enough smart people to do both things at once. Secondly, if you have leverage, you use it. Making sure people can vote for a party that will properly manage disasters like this one seems like a top-tier priority right now.

> we have enough smart people to do both things at once

not if they keep getting steamrolled by the opposite party when they insert their partisan clauses into an emergency bill

> if you have leverage, you use it

Again, people are dying. This is not the time to use leverage.

> not if they keep getting steamrolled by the opposite party when they insert their partisan clauses into an emergency bill

How have they gotten steamrolled? The Senate Dems won a ton of concessions, and the House Dems will win a bunch more. Getting steamrolled would be giving the Republicans everything they want just to get table scraps, which is what has happened in the past.

> Again, people are dying. This is not the time to use leverage.

People die every day. These "partisan clauses" will save more lives in the long run. Its silly to pass a bad bill to bail out the Cruise lines just to say we did something when we have the opportunity to help people. It's definitely not on the Democrats to reduce their demands on behalf of working people. The onus is on the Republicans to do right by the people of this country, fund the emergency measures we need in the short term, and pass the "partisan clauses" that will make sure people can survive and operate quasi-normally in the long term in case this isn't a quick fix.

There are 7 months before the election. Address only the immediate economic concerns now, pass that bill. In a month when we have more information, pass another bill. In another month after that, pass another bill. The only things that need to be in the bill right now are only the things that need to be set in motion right now. Everything else can be done later when we have more information and a better understanding.

If I worked at a company whose SRE leadership responds to crisis and failure the same way that our Congress does, I'd quit and find a company that is far more rational and disciplined.

> the Democrats would be fools to waste an opportunity

This is the problem with politics and something no one should endorse. Both parties are operating as if a crisis is an opportunity instead of a problem to be solved. Abusing a crisis to ramrod long-term policies changes is corruption in my book. Again, this is exactly how we ended up with the Patriot Act.

What were the provisions?

Stuff like:

- 35MM for the JFK center in DC

- 300MM for migration and refugee assistance

- no voter id

- early voting

- emissions stuff regarding airline industry.

All great ideas, especially since the GOP tries every day to make voting more difficult. At least all this will help people, unlike most of the provisions the GOP wanted to slip in (abortion nonsense, pro-corporate loans, etc)

Whether or not they are great ideas, they are irrelevant to solving the immediate health and economic issues this bill should be addressing right now. None of those are issues that should be cause for holding up that aid.

Well I hope he is right.

I've found most right wing folks immune to updating their worldview in the face of contradictory evidence and have come to the conclusion they are to be beaten, not reasoned with.

Sadly I think the effect might be the opposite. The massive financial hardship seems poised for a backlash where a group promoting 'economy above all else' will gain the support of millions who feel their financial future has been unfairly taken.

I see little threads fraying already.

I have heard even normally fairly left-leaning people saying variations of 'this will kill more people from poverty'.

What if that ends up being true?

It might be. But I think the takeaway from "we either let people die from the virus or die from slipping in our economy" should be "let's have an economy that's more robust to disasters."

That's a straw-man argument that no reasonable would disagree with.

How do you have an economy that's more robust against disasters? The economy is built on work. If people aren't working then there's no economy. The only way around it is production by robots.

I think that's also a worrying possibility. It might be true.

Whether or not you think 'left-leaning' is the correct ideology, I would expect more left-leaning people to reject the 'either-or'. But to think that the government should be enacting policies to avoid casualties from both disease and poverty, not choosing one or the other. I.e. distributing the financial damage across everyone in proportion to their existing affluence.

>> - Become champion supporters of an NHS they were - until recently - trying to sell bit off of

No evidence for this whatsoever, but is just the usual Labour dog-whistle claim against every Tory govenment.

> Politics here has changed forever

Unlikely. I think we'll be back to business as usual (at least on the political side) within a year of the end of the pandemic.

I'm also afraid that this is going to be a major setback not just for Europe but globalization in general, which will leave us all worse off in the long run.

On the contrary, setbacks for globalization may very well leave us better off...after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now, and have vast swathes of our supply chain for essential pharmaceuticals and medical equipment farmed out to evil, duplicitous regimes like the Chinese state.

Us = the world/humanity, not the USA. China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, and it would not have happened without globalization.

>China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty

Starting from the point of the great leap forward, yes there has been an improvement.

Lifted millions out of poverty at the expense of millions of middle class American jobs. I believe globalization largely did not end up in the best interest of most Americans because the transfer of technology and manufacturing did not result in a new American ally, but rather a strategic competitor. For over a decade now we've seen a rift in the interests of the common people and the elites in the United States, which is why we've seen the resurgence of populism.

> after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now

Not so. Pandemics travelled around the world before globalization. The black death, smallpox in the americas, syphllis.

This just increases the speed.

Speed is, however, an important factor in the severity of the impact.

In a given area, yes. But with globalization we also got forewarning, and information from those in earlier areas.

Under a less intertwined system, this likely would have spread heavily within each area, and that area would have little info form outside on what to do. Every place a potential Wuhan.

syphilis was also caused by globalization!

i hope many travel restrictions become permanent. ban cruises, make tourism difficult and expensive, cut off travel totally between the hemispheres. nature is being completely destroyed by human activity, this is an opportunity to reverse it.

If you're worried about the environment you can just add a carbon recapture tax to gas.

Banning travel between large areas is ridiculous and wouldn't happen. Especially when a policy of quarantine during outbreaks would be equally effective with a vastly smaller cost.

Quarantine completely failed to prevent what was a highly localized disease globally in 2 months. We need to accept it’s simply ineffective across international borders unless draconian measures are applied before they seem required. We might get through this with 100,000 people dying globally or 100,000,000 it’s completely unknown at this point. But, should the second happen expect some significant changes to happen for years if not decades.

PS: China’s case fatality rate broke 4%, though they likely undercounted cases by ~50% if not more.

What country even quarantined everyone coming in on a plane?

I might have been unclear, but I was suggesting quarantine for everyone coming in, as an alternative to banning travel forever.

Quarantine set up once you already have an outbreak is uh, a different matter.

Internal travel was suspended between several countries, though far to late to make a significant difference. A partial list: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirus-travel-bans/i...

Saying they waited to long is true, but simply means it fails due to politics.

Edit: NM, misunderstood what you where referring to.

Yeah, far too late. I mean the equivalent of locking things down in January, not March.

A total travel ban would also fail due to politics, so that's not a really helpful criteria.

I think the list of things that people believe are 'ridiculous and would never happen' has greatly reduced in size in the last few weeks.

Also, there's a lot more to environmental destruction than excess carbon.

Outside of fuel and labor, the resources spent to enable travel are quite minor. I don't think trying to stop carbon-neutral travel helps the environment in a meaningful way.

I'm not sure modern travel and globalization are the same thing. It only took a few travelers to spread to every state in the union. That doesn't have anything to do with global supply chians.

Very one-sided take on globalization. Unless every country would completely close their borders the virus would have eventually spread everywhere anyway. While medical equipment is temporarily out of stock in some countries, globalization also guarantees that eventually each country will have access to the necessary equipment. Imagine living without global trade and expecting Afghanistan to create an industry for ventilators in a couple of months.

You're taking the other extreme and doing what you accuse the other person of doing: a one sided take.

Backpedaling on globalization doesn't necessarily have to mean going back to no globalization. It just means now being away for the drawbacks and accounting for them. No every country doesn't need to produce their own medical equipment, but enough will that consider it important to do so and have the internal demand to support it and that will create supply-chain optionality for those that don't produce their own supplies.

Every country that doesn't manufacturer their own equipment and supplies will be far better off when they have several countries they can source from.

> - Renationalise the train industry

That's not quite what's happening. https://www.railwaygazette.com/uk/uk-train-operators-offered...

>- Become champion supporters of an NHS they were - until recently - trying to sell bit off of

Private Eye on "24 Hours to Save the NHS https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641

Can you keep the comments like this on Reddit and away from HN, please?

For the non-UK users reading this: almost all of the bullet pointed statements are either incorrect or exaggerated.

Hi Paul, epic post - and so true.

I was watching CNN last night with my Canadian wife (I'm English) and I couldn't believe the BS being thrown around when all we really want to see from the USA is concrete action like what many other nations including the UK has achieved.

Saw your tweet about boycotting companies btw, you'll like this: http://www.whencovidisover.co.uk/

How is our social system so fragile?

I mean seriously - thousands of years and wireless comms and rockets to the moon and not only do we forget to prepare for a virus (something that had happened routinely throughout our history) but when it hits and people have to stay at home for a few weeks the economy falls down and leaves millions of people who want to work unable to do so.

Rare catastrophes are hard to prepare for, because the cost of preparation is expensive.

"Routinely happening" once a century or two isn't an easy target.

Don't even start to think about climate change, a phenomenon we're completely aware is happening, but still do nothing about, despite consequences that will be worse than this virus.

There a lot of well paid individuals who have the job of convincing regular people that climate change is a hoax and lots of regular people believe them.

Are these regular people citizens of a democracy? Then the chain of responsibility stops there. No greater entity will swoop in to help if the citizens of a democracy can’t be trusted to make the kinds of decisions confronting them.

It’s only a democracy if you can keep it.

It's much more complicated than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

> Bernays' thesis is that "invisible" people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. "Engineering consent" of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy.

> Bernays explains:

> "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."

Global warming being a serious issue has widespread support. Unfortunately a democracy which is asked "Trump or Biden?" isn't really asking the population an important question

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

How is shrinking the government to blame? It's expanded colossal ever since the new deal. Grover Norquist, the guy you're quoting, is not an elected official. He was just saying what he believes. That's pretty weak evidence for "the problem". The only nation that ended up containing it was China, because being able to tightly control what your population does is one of the perks of authoritarianism. That said, it doesn't make it a good trade-off.

How is shrinking the government to blame for an inadequate government response? It seems self-evident to me, perhaps I'm missing something.

Also, South Korea did a great job containing the virus, so authoritarianism isn't a prerequisite to addressing this crisis.

the welfare state expanded dramatically after the new deal, but that reversed with the turn toward austerity in the late 70s. "the government" is an overly broad way of speaking about this, as it places budgeting for defense contracts & bailing out finance capital, or monetary policy geared toward preventing the labor market from getting tight (as opposed to full employment) under the same umbrella as tanf & snap.

The only time the welfare state in the US has actually gotten smaller was Clinton's welfare reform in the 1990's. That was easily offset by things like Medicare Part D in the 2000's.

People keep talking about "stripping away the safety net", but when I look at entitlement spending, it just keeps getting bigger.

clinton's slashing of the welfare state is a matter of degree, not the only instance of purported beneficiaries losing benefits. medicare part d doesn't allow the government to negotiate prices and thus functions more as a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry than people for whom it is ostensibly intended to prescription access. lots of games can be played with budgets (such as block grants, one notorious example being the 1981 repeal of the mental health systems act) so the raw dollars of entitlement spending can grow without representing a true shift in resources. when cost of living (eg rents, healthcare) outpaces spending, all while units of public housing are destroyed without being replaced, and the terms of occupation have grown ever more stringent (for example, requiring maintenance come out of tenants' rent while lowering the maximum eligible income for tenants), the mere dollar amount of spending becomes a less definitive measure, i think.

medicare part d doesn't allow the government to negotiate prices

The gov't can't negotiate prices, but the private insurers who manage Part D plans absolutely can.

and what effect has that had on drug prices in the us compared to other countries?

Actually, the Part D plans have been able to get better prices than commercial payers.

So I'd say it worked pretty well.

ok, i think you're being intentionally obtuse here. thanks for your time.

I live in the US, I would prefer being anywhere else in the world right now. Even Italy is currently in a good position since they peaked and will likely recover in April. In the US, sky is the limit. There are almost 0 precautions to limit the spread. Even states that pretend to do something, actually does nothing. I live in MA, which has a shelter-in-place order, but all the businesses that I know of are classified as "essential" so all my friends are working business as usual. We're talking about people who work in random mailrooms, in random thrift shops etc. Businesses can do however they please because there is no regulation. And I think it's pretty clear US will likely experience millions of deaths by the end of April.

My point is, there is a huge spectrum between "China level authoritarianism" and "making government fit your bathtub". It's really frustrating to explain this again and again. We should not allow government to invade our private lives, but we also should have government regulating businesses, especially in time like this.

It's just the consequence of market economy. Everyone is under pressure to "cut out fat", make themselves "lean". That applies everywhere across the supply chain. First thing that goes is every redundancy, buffer and spare capacity - things that would mitigate a crisis like this. It's because the companies that "cut out fat" can grow faster, sell cheaper and profit more, compared to their competitors that have risk horizons longer than few months.

What needs to be done is legally mandated buffers and redundancies (so that no one can gain a competitive advantage by omitting or removing them). Many countries had that after II World War. Unfortunately, out of the wood works came people screaming "efficiency!" and cut it all out.

Have you considered what the cost of adding these “mandated buffers and redundancies” to the overall economy? Have you attempted to integrate these costs over time when there isn’t a pandemic going on, and made any attempt to determine the net effect?

Have you considered that you can’t start a small business with buffers and redundancies? And that small business accounts for 50% of overall employment?

Yes. His point is that game theory and economic principles favour the leaner, therefore every company moves to max. efficiency with JIT supply chains and max leverage.

The only way around this is regulation if we want to be able to withstand crises _without_ bailouts.

That's currently not the situation, which is why bailouts happen.

Agree with you completely, but how can we regulate domestically and expect companies to survive when the external competition doesn't have to abide by the same kinds of regulations.

Edit: the obvious answer is tariffs, etc... but we haven't seen any real action like this until recently

It’s not just game theory, it’s actual real world efficiency. Which translates into jobs and salaries. Reducing baseline capital efficiency drives up all baseline costs. These costs are passed on to consumers and act as a drag on the economy.

It would make no sense to do that in response to a black swan event.

Let’s say small business has to keep 6 months of expenses in reserve instead of the typical 3 months rule of thumb. For the same amount of cash on hand that means you can afford half the monthly expenses.

It’s not just a matter of “hoard more cash”. That cash had to come from prior quarter’s net income. Revenue you don’t invest drags down growth (a.k.a hiring). Revenue you don’t spend is also taxed, adding further drag on the business.

Basically what this proposal is suggesting is to drastically reduce the “money multiplier”. This shrinks GDP.

If the government forces your company to shut down for weeks, I expect them to pay for it. It doesn’t make any sense for small businesses to self-insure against government mandated shutdowns. That would simply be a recipe for destroying small business.

Nope, the efficiency is captured as profit only until other efficient competitors appear and lower the price.

The price does _not_ "trickle down" to consumers or employees until it has to. Again, theory: why would a company give away free money?

> Have you attempted to integrate these costs over time when there isn’t a pandemic going on, and made any attempt to determine the net effect?

No, I didn't. I'd actually like to - because it isn't obvious to me that the result would come in favor of minimizing the buffers. Consider that buffers in the supply chain only cost as much as the storage costs. Which may run well into billions over time, sure. But this pandemic has already erased trillions of dollars in the last three weeks, and it isn't showing any sign of stopping any time soon.

The government does have stockpiles for emergencies, mandated buffers will guarantee overproduction and affect market equilibrium

> The government does have stockpiles for emergencies

As you can see now, it doesn't. Neither does any other government.

Well, they do. But they were just way to small.

They used to be bigger. Now they're Lean, and exist for the sake of ticking a checkbox.

Privatization and "efficiency" on all things of national interest do that. It is why deficit hawks are misleading their constituents with every sentence.

Your hatred of lean is confusing, Companies exist to make money why would they hold extra inventory ?

Companies are merely one part of society. Why does society exist?

Huh? What does that even mean? I'm replying specifically to the notion that lean manufacturing is a bad thing

You're saying companies exist to make money but an isolated factoid like that doesn't make for a productive discussion. Lean manufacturing may be good for individual corporations but it's clearly bad for society and society needs to continue existing for corporations to exist.

Tying up $ in assets that are sitting in warehouses instead of using that $ elsewhere is a not benefit to society. One premise of lean is to match variation in demand to supply as quickly as possible, you should be calling for capacity to scale production and lower lead time, not hold inventory. You might not even hold the right inventory.

>capacity to scale production and lower lead time

How has that been working out? What happens when factory employees fall ill?

What happens when your inventory runs out ?

Potentially the same problem, except you shift it forward in time. So perhaps the factory staff can recover and get back to work before the buffer runs out. Or competitors can ramp up production in time to compensate. Point is, a buffer is adding inertia into the system, an integrating block, which is often a good thing, as it eats oscillations. It's essentially the same reason you put capacitors next to the power supply in electronics - they eat voltage spikes, preventing your device from shutting off just because it briefly drew more power.

> Tying up $ in assets that are sitting in warehouses instead of using that $ elsewhere is a not benefit to society

As we can clearly see now.

> One premise of lean is to match variation in demand to supply as quickly as possible

This is done at a cost of making the whole system less resilient against demand spikes and in-chain disruptions. A perfectly lean system would be following predicted demand precisely, maximizing efficiency at each stage, and as a result break down as soon as anything in the chain changes by even most tiny amount.

I'm a layman in supply chain space, but my observation is that the risk horizons on the market are too small - anything that happens less frequently than once every few quarters may as well not exist. So throw in a big enough wrench, and everything is in shambles for way longer than the existence of initial cause (see the so-called "bullwhip effect", or as it's known in control theory, a positive feedback loop making the system oscillating and unstable). It could've been helped if there was enough buffer in the system to allow time for expanding manufacturing capacity.

As for what to do with different kinds of inventory, two observation. One, the earlier you are in the manufacturing process, the more potential buyers for your product you'll have - so it's that less risky to keep inventory. It's probably not worth it to stock too much of front left doors to 2020 BMWs, but a sheet metal wholesaler doesn't have to run lean and choke everyone downstream when the foundries or miners get disrupted by an epidemic. Two, for some stuff it's really the role of the government to keep buffers. PPE and food would be this. Imagine if any of the Western countries actually had a proper (Cold War style) stock of PPE for a pandemic, and food for everyone for a year. There wouldn't be any worry about staple shortages or hemorrhaging medical staff. There wouldn't be a problem with PPE manufacturers expanding capacity either, as the government could just buy enough goods to fill in the entire buffer capacity they plan on depleting - which would give the manufacturers a chance to recoup their investment in meeting a temporary demand surge.

Bottomline: not saying that fat is good, but I think there's such a thing as being too lean, and that is the problem we're having.

This is hubris talking. Nature can humble us at any time and we can do little-to-nothing nothing about it. Not to say we shouldn't try. But humanity vs the worst things that the environment can dish out–super volcanoes, asteroids, super bugs–isn't really a contest at all. CoVID-19 isn't even an extinction level event.

Because people previously (falsely) believed it could not happen in the US, with the last true pandemic being so far in the past. The Bill Gates TED talk from 2016 shows that some people understood what we should have done, but it involves not only changing minds but also putting money into it. Whatever the total fallout from this pandemic, I expect the creation of a medical reserve (as suggested in the talk) is one that will certainly happen.

> thousands of years and wireless comms and rockets to the moon

Every society is three meals away from chaos.

Anecdotal but my company is hiring 2x support and 2x QA, yesterday alone we went from receiving 5-10 applicants a day to 53. I just got into work and there is already 21 from last night.

Just curious, did your company get an essential business exemption from any stay at home orders?

We have not, but we can work remote and have had to move our hiring process to be entirely remote.

To make it sure that I understand it correctly: this is not the total number of unemployed people, but the number of people who became unemployed recently and now file the forms? Then that number is gigantic, wow.

This is the number of people that filed for unemployment in the last week. A staggering number. Just seven days of data.

Seven days, that's horrible. Let's hope these people quickly find work again.

A lot of these filers are in the restaurant/bar industry, and are being "laid off", and told to file, and then will be rehired when the quarantine ceases.

The USA is home to ~340 million people (many people here illegally aren't counted). Only about 63.4% (~215M) of them work.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...

Labor force participation rate does not include children, so the 215M number is actually much lower

As you look at this story, please keep some basic numbers in mind:

1. US Population: 329,433,166 (as of 3/25/2020)

2. Employed: 158,130,000 (approx. 48% of population)

3. Unemployed: 8,787,000 (approx. 5.6% of employed)

Note:

Take these numbers with a grain of salt as US Population is only as good as the Census Reporting itself. The Employed # is an estimate based on 155.76 million factually employed in 2018 and does not include self-employed, contractors, gig workers etc.

Sources:

1. https://www.census.gov/popclock/

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

3. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/us/

Just to illustrate how absurd this number is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUCTISVXQAcIKEb?format=png&name=...

This is messing up charts so much that maybe in a couple years we will be removing 2020 from the data just to have a chart that doesn't have a crazy x-axis.

2020: the Shetland Islands of unemployment charts. (For context: https://bit.ly/2UEV5H5)

Holy shit... That is absolutely nuts. And to think it will likely get worse.

The thing about the current situation is that there is still no end in sight and it feels like we are just at the beginning stages of a tough struggle.

Thankfully tech seems to be holding up in terms of employment for the moment, but we have stopped hiring as well so who knows what may come next. Not every tech can withstand or even benefit from the current crisis.

I grew up with the puritanical mindset of: "Your intrinsic worth as a human is the money you earn; because the money you earn is from how hard you work; and how hard you work is a reflection of your intrinsic Virtue."

Thus I grew up in a family that loathes the unemployed. I really hope -- though I have grave doubts -- that this event gets through to them, so that they can have some personal growth, too.

That is the saddest thing I've ever read on this site. I know there's people who believe that but it's still shocking to me.

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think." -Ayn Rand

I was also raised in a family like this.

This is the view among most Americans, reinforced by the word 'un'employed which suggests that the default condition is for someone to be employed.

Perhaps not the default but it is the norm. Regardless of semantics we should be pushing UBI for exactly these instances.

Sadly everyone seems to be doubling down on their existing strong opinions.

(Any ideas to improve that?)

People learn through hardship. We haven't experienced hardship yet.

At my day job and can't talk in detail now, but yes.

Can’t wait to hear it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662807

I think this is wrongly attributed as puritanical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic it's well known enough to be a common phrase, with it's own wiki entry.

One of my big hopes is at the end of this mess, the Protestant Work Ethic and Prosperity Gospel go down in flames.

This event should show anyone with even a bit of sense that your 'virtue' is only a small part of your economic power.

I think loathing the unemployed (especially if it isn't caused by health conditions and isn't temporary, like in this case) is commonplace in any society. There are many studies which show unemployed people are more likely to commit crimes. e.g. [1]

Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers. [2] Unless society as a whole actually produces wealth, there is nothing to tax, and the government doesn't have any money to spend. And how does wealth get created without people in employment? Unless you are the country with the reserve currency, which effectively gives you the ability to keep printing money until the world catches up to the con. Which doesn't still change the underlying economics, it is just that at any given point in time there is always some country which will be using the reserve currency status to make it appear like you can create wealth by printing more money.

Aiming for more employment is a net positive to any society, and I think that is what conditions people to loathe the permanently unemployed.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40057352?seq=1

[2] I remember reading an essay by PG about how getting employment is when you go from being a "net consumer" to become a "net producer", cannot find the link.

Landlords are bigger parasites than any NEET.

I've encountered exactly two people in my life who were perfectly healthy, both mentally and physically, but just sat around all day doing nothing for years on end.

Both were landlords.

> I think loathing the unemployed (especially if it isn't caused by health conditions and isn't temporary, like in this case) is commonplace in any society. There are many studies which show unemployed people are more likely to commit crimes. e.g. [1]

Similarly, there are studies showing that rich people are less ethical. https://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086

> Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers.

How do you define a "net consumer"? The only resource to consume on this planet is its ecosystem. Are unemployed people consuming more of our ecosystem than employed ones? I don't think so.

A lot of free software has been created by people not in employment. So the idea that unemployed people cannot be contributing value to society is false.

Canada is at 1 million or about 5% of our population. And it's only going to go up from here.

I have no idea how they are doing to handle any of this, having that percentage of your population on EI is going to hurt.

Have heard similar estimates, found an article corroborating this.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-unemploymen...

Most, if not all (?) will lose their healthcare. Horrible situation to be in during a pandemic.

Won't know for sure until Apr 03 (The Day BLS releases the official unemployment rate for March) but this may very well trip the Sahm recession indicator, which has correctly predicted/detected every US recession back to 1950 (If it's been further backfitted I can't find the data).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SAHMCURRENT

I don't think you need a black magic/AI/fancy algorithm to tell whether there is a recession or not

No, but it's nice to have some confirmation :)

3.28 million? Really?

With the lockdowns of retail, hospitality, etc. in Australia, a country of 25 million total, we've seen nearly something north of 800,000 unemployed (temporarily or permanently). This can't be an accurate figure, surely!

This is just the people who have filed last week. There is bound to be many more soon. And I am not sure everyone who have lost their jobs are eligible.

My wife and many of her coworkers quite their jobs in the last two weeks as working from home wasn't an option. My understanding is they won't be eligible for unemployment?

Depends on the jurisdiction but in most no, voluntary leaving is not covered.

Your number actually makes the number sound more reasonable. 800k of 25 million is about 3%. 3 million of US population of 300million is 1%.

> in Australia, a country of 25 million total

The US has 13x-15x the population of Australia, so the numbers will be larger. In any case, these are the claims filed in the past week only, and not a cumulative count of the total number who are currently unemployed.

For those playing at home, that's 3.28 million people who probably don't have access to health care now. Many probably didn't before due to the nature of their jobs, but it's going to be interesting to watch the cry for bailout of hospitals from the same politicians who are completely fine otherwise with people going without healthcare.

The economical impact of COVID-19 on people's lives will be far more severe than the biological one.

Hopefully this won't discourage governments from taking appropriate action once a more lethal pandemic comes.

So lets say that there are a couple hundred thousand dead and you are pretty sure that 50% of the people out there have it. Are you going to go out for dinner or a movie? Not me..

But ignore me if you aren't saying that the restrictions should be reversed so the economy goes back to normal. A guy on CNBC just said that even if it means 400K would die. The economy just will not go back to normal anytime soon.

Things that Coronavirus is teaching us:

-the people who are actually vital to make the economy are grocery clerks, doctors, nurses, teachers and other carers, but not corporate CEOs, who are ultimately just dead weight.

-money is imaginary and they can print as much as they want.

-the people in power right now would rather have the stock market crash and watch you and a million other Americans die than give healthcare to everyone, even in the middle of a pandemic. How much would it help to have a centralized, organized response where everyone gets tested early right now? But it’s impossible, because it would mean giving health care to poor people.

-capitalism is a beast that dies if it cannot grow. People work mostly to pay rent and debts. They pay rent so the landlord can pay the mortgage. The bank has already lent out the money they expect to get from people paying the mortgage- so if property owners don’t pay their monthly bill, the whole financial system has a heart attack. Same thing with corporate debt. The corporation is assuming that you’re going to buy crap you don’t need. If you don’t, then they can’t pay their massive debts and again the whole system seizes up. So the primary reason we spend all our useful hours at work is so that we can make numbers bigger at the bank. And all of these debts, ultimately, are paid off on the backs of the working class. But the whole system can’t be reduced, or paused, or even slowed down- it must grow exponentially more and more, consuming more and more resources forever, or else it craters in a devastating crash and cannibalizes itself on the way down.

There are 2 policy options I see moving forward:

Public: Healthcare and Unemployment (possibly sick leave)

Private: Forced GAAP accounting for 2-4 weeks of sick leave for all employees (including gig contractors)

These would be paramount to national security; so could potentially receive backing loans or even the defense budget.

I'm not sure if the lessons will be interpreted in this way, or even remembered once things go back to some form of normalcy, at least for the monied classes that hold the largest microphones in our society.

The lessons learned from the conflict in Vietnam was not that "war is a racket" or "the US shouldn't militarily intervene unless it's a last resort". It was simply that "the US should use proxies where possible and only intervene where the opposition has a limited capacity to fight back".

And even then, they've greatly overestimated their strength in these conflicts. Because the people with the largest microphones said it would be enough to win.

Welcome to the Great Depression of the 21st century.

Things are bad enough without exaggerating the situation. The big problem with the great depression was not the size of the crash but the duration of the recovery. Our view of the money supply seems a bit more effective these days and it seems unlikely that the recession that comes out of this situation will last as long.

Like you say, things are bad enough without exaggerating the situation.

If you think this is all over in anything less than 4-5 years in terms of economic impact, I don't think you've understood what has really just happened and is about to happen.

I do not think anyone knows how long the recovery will take, not even the experts.

There are indicators from past problems, though. One example I've seen is that it took 17 years for airlines to recover after 9/11[0].

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/airline-stocks-recover-septe...

I'm guessing that index does not capture total return. For example, DAL has offered ~2-3% annual dividends at least since 2013, which adds up to a pretty substantial difference to between total return and asset price if reinvested. It's not clear if that's when they resumed dividends or if Yahoo Finance just doesn't have data going back further.

Why don't you do the calculation then, instead of dismissing an article/calculation based on something you're not even sure is true?

You want me to . . . hand-calculate market-weighted total return of an index? Without access to the underlying financials? That's a big ask for an internet comment.

I didn't dismiss the article. I provided additional context that might be helpful in evaluating its claims. You are free to do with that what you will.

https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/indices/nyse_arca_globa...

"The Index tracks the price performance ..." suggests that my surmise is correct, at least for the global version of this index.

> You want me to . . . hand-calculate market-weighted total return of an index? Without access to the underlying financials? That's a big ask for an internet comment.

Here’s a handy tool to do just that! Unfortunately only goes back to 2007, so not useful in present case of airline stocks. But a very useful tool.

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/

>That's a big ask for an internet comment.

So your solution is to "guess" that it didn't happen?

>I didn't dismiss the article. I provided additional context that might be helpful in evaluating its claims.

You didn't add anything. You insinuated that it wasn't correct, with zero evidence or knowledge.

Why didn't you add other things, like maybe the journalist made the entire thing up? Or perhaps the whole measure of the index is simply a lie and doesn't exist?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people here consider random aspersions "adding context".

I'm puzzled that you think factual and relevant context is an aspersion. The article is technically correct that asset prices took a long time to recover to the previous levels. But it is limited in its application. In order to judge the return of an investment, you have to look at not just its asset price but what it produces. A chicken only decreases in value from the time it begins laying eggs, but that doesn't make it a bad investment. Same with the airlines.

> So your solution is to "guess" that it didn't happen?

It's not a guess. It's an informed inference from my knowledge of airline dividend habits, which I subsequently backed up with a citation. However, I will not do hours of modeling work to satisfy your curiosity. If you want that information, do it yourself.

Economic "experts" usually don't know anything about the future.

I think my understanding of the current situation is about as good as any layperson. I have been following closely, I called all the policy changes in my state to within a day or two, etc. I don't think that the evidence on what will happen next is so clear that all right-thinking people will come to the same conclusions, as you imply.

It's not an exaggeration. You should take the macroeconomic effect seriously. This is the first major recession in over 100 years caused by an external market factor. Factor in 18 months for vaccine clinical trials and distribution, 1-2 years for industries to get back on their feet, and slews of international policy regressions...you're looking at a 4-5 year impact. Not to mention, social distancing is really taking a mental toll on the world population, regrettably giving more weight to the word "Depression."

The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses estimated yesterday that 30% of small business might not survive the quarantine.

I'm with you; people are underestimating the last impact of this pandemic.

we have better communication and technology today as well. The trouble is, we have no idea when recovery will even begin. The human spirit can move past this; but many people can't even begin right now.

From what I read from various economists, it looks like it will likely be worse than 2008. So it may not be as bad as 1929 but it will still hurt.

The US federal and state governments have implemented policies that have forced a large number of businesses to close temporarily. A business that is closed can't pay it's employees, so naturally it would have to lay them off.

If tomorrow we found a cure and got the all clear to return to life as normal, how many of the 3.28M would be re-hired immediately? What we need is a distinction between being laid off temporarily and being laid off permanently. That would give us a clearer picture of the real economic impact.

We need a new metric. The senate stimulus bill should have included a new classification and support for workers temporarily put on unpaid leave.

And the stock market loves it? I’m so confused.

It may be a temporary bump. I'm still debating pulling some money out of the market for a while. I'd still be buying via my 401(k), so I'm not totally out, but I just feel like the fundamentals will pull the market down for a while. Then again, we will probably, finally, start to see (stag|in)flation soon so having cash may be a bad move.

That’s about 1% of the US population to put it in perspective

And a far higher percentage of the workforce.

About 1.6-1.8% by most estimates, so not really _far_ higher

That's 60 to 80 percent higher. Large differences in small numbers still look small haha

3.2810^6 people is 1.59% of the 20610^6 US working age population. [0]

For comparison, in my native Belgium, 18.38% of the working age population receive temporary jobless allowances due to corona [1].

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

[1]https://www.tijd.be/politiek-economie/belgie/federaal/overhe... (Sorry, Dutch language source only)

Someone can correct me on this if I am wrong.

Most of the unemployment is people on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of financials. Most of them are in the service sector. The middle of the pack group did not suffer because of this (yet). Whenever this clears the service sector, travel, restaurants, hospitality etc will bounce back very quickly. So all the people that lost their jobs could just get them back and the recovery will be sharp.

However, the kick in the nuts will be if the virus drags on for months. Then it becomes uncertain.

What is the process for freelancers to get unemployment? I think that was mentioned in the new stimulus?

Some info: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/can-i-collect-unemployment...

Yes, you can thank Bernie Sanders for that.

And yet - S&P 500 reacts with a sharp climb and most investors already think we hit the bottom two days ago.

https://archive.md/6BC8F

For context, the previous record was ~680K in the early 1980s.

Also worth noting the population then was 231 million, of which 110 million was in the labor force.

So today: 3 mil / 160 mil - 1.9%

1982: 670k / 110 mil - 0.6%

My initial response to this is... duh. How many governments have ordered people not to work. Is it surprising that all those people would then file for not working benefits?

Of course not. Its an artificial unemployment spike (provoked by very real, fundamental forces in the world i.e. covid-19).

It will be VERY interesting to watch how state governments react to this spike. The federal government has monopoly money but state governments are VERY MUCH concerned with debt levels.

We'll see how long these isolation orders last. States will have to chose between unemployment, pensions, welfare programs, transit operations, etc. I wonder who gets the axe first. You could very easily see states go bankrupt and whole classes of the social safety net depleted for a generation.

More than anything right now people are going to have a very strong appetite for financial security. It's about time we reconsider 'working for 50 weeks to pay for 52' as a viable means to have that security.

The stock rises after the announcement...

Yes, a higher unemployment number was expected. Did you think unemployment going way up wasn’t already partially priced in?

If the US was smart (big if...)

The pandemic quarantine will accumulate pent up demand, or at least a desire to consume once it is "over".

A good economic recovery would provide enough money to fund this demand and immediately reward rehiring of people to previous levels.

But this will be a series of discredited supply-side measures until (perhaps) a Keynesian friendly democrat is in office.

Pent up demand for what? I’m being half facetious here, but something of this magnitude and rare will likely cause a shift in our world-views. This whole talk of “pent up demand” in Econ 101 really leads me to believe this system is guided by shibboleths and buzz phrases.

Let’s be real for a second: this pandemic will fundamentally change consumption as we recalibrate just how much we “need” that new shiny thing.

Isn't it meaningful that the cause of this particular unemployment is very unique, in that it wasn't caused by a weak economy, but by the government artificially closing the businesses temporarily?

Theoretically, once everything starts to open back up, won't there be a similarly sized surge in "new jobs" so to speak?

At least in New York the state dept of labor unemployment page is broken under the server stress and untold numbers of people haven’t been able to login and file claims.

Canada wins 500,000 jobs lost at 10% of the population. Oil and gas prices is a double whammy.

Reminder: we spend 700 Billion on our military. No reason that can't be reduced to provide aid if needed.

A year from now, will we look back and say it was worth the suffering for something 5x as bad as the flu? (based on Germany’s numbers, which are more fully accounting for those with mild symptoms)

Shows how important testing randomly is, if the denominator is low because you are only testing those in the hospital, it looks like the second coming of the Spanish flu.

Even if we raise the denominator to make the percentages look better, there is no denying that hospitals are being overwhelmed. The flu often already pushed hospitals to the edge, so even only (heh) 5x worse will cause most hospital systems collapse.

Should 1000 people go unemployed to save one person?

Phrased differently, are you willing to die to give employment to 1000 people?

Phrased differently, I would be willing to die to give employment to 1000 people who can work to save 10 (?) people. If people aren’t working to care for the system, then doctors can’t find helpers with their kids, etc.

The system collapses in this scenario as well.

I don’t have a real answer, but this event is helping discuss interesting and difficult questions.

If I was over 70 y.o., I would think that I would be willing to die to prevent my grandchildren from experiencing the great depression.

Obviously right? Clearly temporary unemployment of any number of people seems less important than death of thousands, if not millions of people.

Yes, yes, extremely yes.

Luckily the calculation is far less shitty than that. Contrary to what folks claim, the reducing in fatalities from automobile accidents and from dramatically lowered pollution outweighs suicides and other economic reasons for people to die. This lockdown is a dramatic net positive for human lives and significantly reduces the risk of death from many sources.

Germany hasn’t reached health system overwhelm. When systems overwhelm, the death rate spikes. Both from corona and also from other causes that now can’t be treated.

Who cares if it's 5x the flu? I understand that you don't want to be proactive, but can you at least be reactive? Hospitals are already overwhelmed by COVID, and we're barely starting. It simply doesn't matter if it's 5x the flu, or 0.5x the flu. If it infects millions of people in a matter of weeks, since no one has immunity to this disease (unlike flu), it's gonna collapse the health system. Once the health system collapses, deaths will follow.

> based on Germany’s numbers, which are more fully accounting for those with mild symptoms

It's only "5x" the flu (you say so, I didn't look it up) BECAUSE everything is locked down. If we continued to live and work as usual hospitals would be overcrowded (they already are in italy, spain and some parts of france), which means a bicycle accident, a car crash, a bad fall = you'd die because no one could take care of you. In Italy they had to call the army to get more body bags and more people to carry the dead out, NY is already running out of space to store dead people.

You can't just look at low numbers due to aggressive lock downs, project them in your imaginary world and draw conclusions while ignoring all the side effects.

Everyone should expect the stock market to thrive off this data today...

Why’s that? I see that the SP500 is rising... but why is this “good news” for businesses?

The danger was businesses losing customers (revenue/income), which these initial numbers confirm...but on the other hand these jobless folks (and the whole country)just took out a $6T loan, of which $5.75T is going to these businesses ($1.75 will not have to be paid back and $4T will be interest free loans, and likely in may cases these companies will actually have negative interest rates, in other words they will make money on borrowing these tax payer loans). These are the very same companies that will also avoid paying US taxes.

Public companies cut all their costs/expenses and are going to be given $5.75T...mainstreet can't buy on these lows (because they have no jobs/income, fear and lack of liquidity are a bad combination) and the companies are flush with cash to buy back stocks now before they get the real windfall from tax payers. In short, public companies will be spending today to buy their own stock.

But it's been confirmed that stock buybacks will not be allowed for companies receiving a bailout. Am I missing something more here?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coronavirus-stimulus-packa...

>Am I missing something more here?

Apparently...they are doing the buy backs now (like right now) while they are flush with cash/no expenses, main street can't invest, and before they get their bailout cash. Never mind the buy back prohibitions are being majorly overstated.

I expect you are being facetious. The reason the market is up is a short squeeze.

> Everyone should expect the stock market to thrive off this data today...

There are too many huge announcements for anyone to claim they know why the (millions?) of individuals whose actions are reflected in market prices from noise.

>why the (millions?) of individuals whose actions are reflected in market prices from noise.

Its not individuals buying, individuals sold to secure cash during this unknown period...it is the corporations themselves buying in bulk now, because they are flush with cash, cut all costs, and have $5.75T in cash coming their way in the form of loans that will not need to be repaid ($1.75T worth) and negative interest loans ($4T worth). Point is companies will be buying today while they can.

> Its not individuals buying, individuals sold to secure cash during this unknown period...it is the corporations themselves buying in bulk now, because they are flush with cash, cut all costs, and have $5.75T in cash coming their way in the form of loans that will not need to be repaid ($1.75T worth) and negative interest loans ($4T worth). Point is companies will be buying today while they can.

Or maybe they are buying because their factories have been shuddered and they have capital sitting with no other place to put it. Or maybe they are buying because they are worried about inflation and are moving out into a better asset class for the condition. Or...

I realize there is some redundancy there from yours, but even "only" large investors acting (which, itself, seems an assumption) there are still far too many to claim to know their individual justifications.

>Or maybe they are buying because their factories have been shuddered and they have capital sitting with no other place to put it.

That is one of my points:

>because they are flush with cash, cut all costs

Stock market up, Trump says churches will be full of people in two weeks. I'm watching a movie it seems

I wonder would a vaccine be able to reverse this instantly? Can you imagine. It's going to be a bumpy few months.

My biggest concern is that we aren't working on the infrastructure and cultural shift that is going to be needed to have a return to normal.

The endgame of covid-19 is herd immunity, which requires either 30-60% of the population infected and recovered, or it requires a vaccine. Realistically both are probably 9+ months out: vaccines are slow to develop, and almost every governor has proven they'd rather shut down everything than see hospitals be overloaded.

In other words, for the next 6-12 months we have two choices:

(a) Public life sees a boom-bust pattern of sickness, where we open things back up, then a new outbreak of infection happens, and everything shuts down again for 2-6 weeks.

(b) We aggressively fight off our initial outbreak, then build infrastructure to quickly identify and contain all infections. We gently reopen life back to a kind-of-normal states of permanent semi-quarantine until a vaccine arrives.

In my opinion, (b) is clearly the optimal approach. And yet we haven't even begun working on the infrastructural and cultural changes needed to support pre-herd-immunity public life.

We need mass production of face masks and a culture where it is unacceptable to not wear a face mask in public, particularly crowded locations and public transit.

We need every building, every bus and train, every tourist attraction, testing every visitor with a contactless thermometer. If you have a fever you get a covid-19 test.

To support allowing non-remote-capable work to resume, any jobs that are remote capable should remain remote until we have herd immunity. More people leaving their homes means higher risk of an outbreak, and when an outbreak happens non-remote-capable employees are the ones screwed over.

As much as I distrust the CCP and China's official numbers, it just takes one glance on the measures being taken in China to prove that China is a thousand times more serious about containing this virus than we are, and that's going to play in their favor in getting things back to normal. Here's an eye-opening video on some of the steps Nanjing has taken to prevent an outbreak:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&feature=youtu.be

The simple fact is we're lacking the national leadership to make an effective response to this disease.

Cultural changes? How would you build those? The government doesn't control the culture. How would you make it unacceptable? Bureaucrats don't have direct control over that. Also, a bunch of "we need"s about the ideal situation don't do much.

The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state. While that provides certain advantages in this situation, it comes with certain drawbacks: not being able to access many websites, inability to express your political opinion, inability to own a firearm, being tossed in a concentration camp if the government doesn't like you. This isn't a question of leadership, you're asking the government to do things it literally has no power to do, things entirely outside of the constitution.

> Cultural changes? How would you build those? The government doesn't control the culture. How would you make it unacceptable? Bureaucrats don't have direct control over that. Also, a bunch of "we need"s about the ideal situation don't do much.

We have a federal government. A federal government can spend money, including on marketing. Remember WWII propaganda, some of which people can still recite to this day, like "loose lips sink ships"?

A federal government can pass laws that require workplaces to take certain actions (temperature checks for employees, WFH for jobs that are capable of doing so). A federal government can pass regulations requiring public gatherings to take certain security actions such as taking visitors' temperatures with a contactless thermometer. A federal government can spend money to have factories produce a very large number of face masks and contactless thermometers, and can coordinate with states to distribute them to population centers.

> The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state

Yes, thanks for stating the obvious. If you notice I didn't suggest we restrict travel between states and cities, or that we lock people inside their homes, or that we should register every location that a person goes to so that we can quickly identify who they've been in contact with should they test positive for covid-19. These are the more authoritarian actions that China has taken.

In fact, lacking the authoritarian actions, we need to try even harder at the non-authoritarian stuff. Which we aren't doing.

Recession will take place in every country next year so expect that the number of jobless people will strike up during and after the pandemic.

And this is only the beginning... if you look for projections (or run your own [1]), we will need a hard nationwide shutdown for at least 2-3 months (not 2 weeks) for this to not kill a million plus Americans.

I suspect even if a shutdown is lifted, when people start seeing body counts it’s not like they’ll return to traveling or eating out.

We’d probably need to see an anti-body test first and/or vaccine. This is going to take years to recover from.

[1] https://austingwalters.com/covid-19-vs-the-economy/

other countries are also facing this crisis in different stages. So traveling won’t be back to normal for a long time.

Well, the antibody tests are coming in a matter of weeks - multiple approaches have already been developed and they are currently being validated, that is, checked if they trigger reliably on the Coronavirus antibodies and ONLY on those and not similar ones (source: Charité Berlin - the virology lab there is on the forefront of developing Coronavirus tests and assists in validating new antibody tests).

They will allow us to make large randomized studies in the population and finally determine the "real" percentage of people who can be considered immune, which is the key element currently missing in all projection models. Having that data, more realistic projections can be made as to how fast the virus will resume to spread if we lift specific restrictions. At the moment, we can only hope for this number to be far larger than expected.

But doing such studies takes time, and without their results, lifting any of the restrictions is going to be a dangerous gamble with public health. So I would also suspect for most restrictions to stay in place for about 2 months, and then maybe a slow and gradual opening. First schools, then essential day-to-day businesses, and travel/leisure stuff last.

However, antibody tests are not a substitute for a vaccine. Only a broadly available vaccine will give people enough confidence of not contracting the disease for them to start living a normal life again. We can't expect any kind of normality in the economy until this happens, regardless of whether "America (or any other country) is opened for business" again or not - because an open business is worth nothing if the customers stay away.

You know how to fix the problem with those record layoffs though right? First cut all funding to social safety net programs and use that money to give tax cuts to the rich, who then don't even pretend that trickle down economics works and instead set up a fund for the public to donate to help those who need relief because fuck you I got mine.

"The great American job machine"

The whole previous decade needs to come with an asterisk when talking about job growth. Looking at job participation rates and those that have stopped looking completely from BLS paints a completely different story. The pandemic obviously isn't making things better, but it's just always been an afterthought when talking about job growth.

For this not to bankrupt the nation and retard our growth for the next twenty-five years, we need to all go back to work, today. Even if coronavirus kills a million people, the rest will probably be fine in the long term. If we shut down the economy, three hundred million will be affected. This "flattening the curve" business is clearly not worth it.

You cannot shut the economy. There is only so much we can borrow. The fed is buying debt right and left, and the government surely doesn't want to borrow money and remove that liquidity. So, the fed will buy t-bills instead and probably have to inflate the currency to pay for it all. We could end up spending orders of magnitude than 2 trillion on more hand-outs, so we could end up with another period of stagflation. Unless we want to retard our growth and prosperity for the next 25 years, we all have to go back, consequences aside. Vulnerable people need to stay home for months until this blows over; it's not the responsibility of the rest of us to lose our jobs for the sake of a few others. Doctors say we have to stay home, but as doctors, they naturally want to prioritize health. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Like many other problems, there are diminishing returns as we approach either extreme of opening the economy or shutting it down. This extreme clearly isn't working. The at-risk million stay home; everyone else goes to work.

One thing I don't understand about this line of thinking is how do you expect sick people from working? Sure, not everyone will die but a significant portion of the population will get infected and need at the very least to stay home for a week or two. How is that situation better than where we're at now?

3.28 million people are already out of work, likely a good deal more than that. One million are most at risk. There won't be zero impact, but that's less than a third, right out of the gate. Long-term we'll see significant increases in unemployment on the "shut-it-down" path.

To clarify based on your reply to this comment, my point was that we've already seen more people out of work than the estimated worst-case 1.2 million death toll. This is the first data point, and we'll see more huge increases as we gather more. You mentioned that sick people won't work, but we're already seeing what is possibly more unemployment than we'd have with people sick. 1.2 million < 3.28 million.

While some people may not work in the short term, this "flattening the curve" business prolongs that time greatly. We'd all be back much sooner if we just ripped off the band-aid and got it over with.

EDIT: Replying to circumvent123 here, as HN is rate-limiting.

Yes, death is worse than unemployment, but for how many? Death for one vs unemployment for everyone, which would you pick? If so, is this simply a question of the ratio of the two? Regardless, that's not the choice of bureaucrats to make. At-risk populations are responsible for staying home and keeping themselves safe.

I don't understand what this has to do with the question I asked. Feels like a non sequitur

Death is worse than unemployment. That's a sick comparison you are making.

2 weeks is less than 3 months, obviously.

How do you expect to "motivate" people to just go to work, spend money in restaurants, fly around, take cruises...as if there was nothing going on, while at the same time millions of people are dying? Everyone is going to have someone in their family who dies because of this virus. And they're not going to die silently - you'll have crazy imagery of emergency rooms spilling over with patients circulating among the public. And I'm not speaking about "media hype" - since this will hit all hospitals, people will just have to look left and right in their hometown to see the catastrophe evolving.

Are you going to plan to force people to take vacations, eat out, do their "normal" stuff, while this is unfolding? Because without excessive force, nobody will do that. You'll have open businesses, but they won't have any customers for months while the above-described pans out. And probably for quite a while to come, because this event will rip a gaping wound into the conscience of the American people, probably larger than 9/11 did.

The worst-case projection is 1.7 million: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est....

If the media hadn't spent weeks fearmongering and spinning this as some killer exotic plague (rather than something that hits at-risk populations much harder but is survivable for most others). Only a few percent of younger people have needed intensive care. It won't make too much of a difference anyway; we'll still hit a peak and have a colossal shortage of everything. The doctors will have to make a choice: do we save the young person with more years and more productivity ahead of him, or do we save the eighty-year-old? Guess which will be chosen?

There is no pretty solution to this problem. A lot of people will get hurt. I wish everyone would stop staring like a hungry child at the government, begging it to "do something". The government cannot solve this problem. Stealing more money from those who remain in work won't solve anything. This is precisely the time to reduce taxes massively, completely gut every entitlement program, and strangle the bureaucracy that caused this mess until the nation has a chance to prosper.

EDIT: Replying to Slartie comment here, as HN is rate-limiting.

What is "navigating through"? The government can't arrest those who violate its un-constitutional orders, lest it risk spreading disease further. Why can the precious bureaucracy solve this? How? It'll do something, that's for sure, but that's because everyone keeps screaming to "do something".

You're looking at this absolutely the wrong way. This is the time to massively cut taxes, promote supply-side growth, and remove almost all entitlements. It is the job of each American to be responsible for his own welfare, not for Big Daddy Government to swoop in and save him. The Nanny State strikes again. Twelve-hundred-dollar hand-outs to everyone? Disgraceful. We're turning into a nation of lazy mooching welfare queens.

> Now tell me again that the "government cannot solve this problem".

> Even the anti-government Republicans currently seem to look to the government as the only instance potentially capable of solving this problem.

Who said I was a Republican, or agreed with the party, or approved of its actions? I don't. It's a disgrace.

EDIT: Replying to ss2003 here, as HN is rate-limiting.

Yes, but entitlements too. They make up most of our expenses, not military.

EDIT: Replying to jahaja here, as HN is rate-limiting.

Why do you say that? You'd really saddle the next generation with debt to pay for a shutdown that saves mostly older people? That's no more fair than a million people being killed by a virus. If you could choose that everyone looses his job or one person dies, what would you choose? Why? What about a hundred people dying? Thousand? Where's you're bright line?

> The government cannot solve this problem.

The government is precisely the only instance that is able to solve this problem, with "solution" not being "make it go away instantly", but "navigating through the time until a vaccine is available in the best way possible".

> reduce taxes massively

This ideology partially got you into the problem. 1.5 trillions in taxes have just been reduced while everything was fine, just "because the people in power could" - and because it benefitted their purses. It's an ironic twist of fate that Congress just passed a deal of almost-identical "historic" proportions with the goal of pushing a similar sum of money into the hands of the people that are NOT in power, because if the people in power don't do this, the entire country is going to blow up around them, reducing the previously-inflated contents of their purses (stocks, real estate) to shreds.

Now tell me again that the "government cannot solve this problem". Even the anti-government Republicans currently seem to look to the government as the only instance potentially capable of solving this problem.

We should be cutting the bloated military budget not entitlements.

So far, if the 3rd bill makes it into law, we will be at well over 2 trillion dollars trying to keep the economy from imploding. Many say that it won't be enough and we will be looking at more bills and A LOT more spending. Yearly military expenditures are at 700 billion a year.

> The fed is buying debt right and left, and the government surely doesn't want to borrow money and remove that liquidity.

That's why the tax cut was a bad idea. It should have been a tax increase. We should be saving more in good times so that we have enough for the downturn.

If we had a safety net - like UBI, we wouldn't be spending 2 trillion.

Its time for UBI & some wealth distribution for proper prosperity and growth.

I paid $14 in federal taxes for every $100 I made in 2019. I am in top 1% earners in my state and nationwide. That is just ridiculous.

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