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Comment by shartshooter | Hacker News Reader

we’ve now lost 10% of workforce in three weeks

I’m a little surprised it’s not higher.

I assumed with bars, gyms, retail, house cleaners (and not to mention wait staff at restaurants) all out of a job indefinitely that those folks made up >10% of the workforce.

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It is definitely much higher. Many states' unemployment systems are woefully inadequate.

Florida (but probably other states too) intentionally made the unemployment claims system painful/impossible to navigate:

>“It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/03/its...

Maybe Floridians should vote in their best interest then..

Floridians are trying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_Amendment_4

The legislature and Governor took a look at the 65% vote and went "nah", though, and put a bunch of new obstacles in place to override the voters.

Not like Florida Republicans are the only offenders there. 59% voted in favor of California's "let's check if people are illegal immigrants" amendment back in 1994 [0], but then the incoming Democratic governor refused to defend it in court. (Sure, it may have actually been unconstitutional, but considering it's basically the opposite of 'sanctuary cities'...)

Denying the public the benefit of politically inconvenient propositions is a long tradition in the US.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...

> California's "let's check if people are illegal immigrants" amendment

That's a really disingenuous description of an amendment intended to "prohibit undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services".

> Sure, it may have actually been unconstitutional...

It's funny that this is waved away as a minor issue, as if it weren't a giant difference between the two situations you're trying to draw a comparison between.

I mean, that's a better description than calling it "Save Our State"... but yes, the goal of the amendment was to reduce the services provided to illegal immigrants. Perhaps I should have said "let's check if people are illegal immigrants before providing non-emergency services", but too late to edit now. Whether this is a good idea is very much in question, but that's also the case for letting felons vote.

The "might have been unconstitutional" was a "no, this genuinely might have passed muster in the courts if it was actually defended". What actually happened was that an injunction was placed against implementation of the proposition, and the state never appealed. Probably worth noting that the logic used in the injunction - that it was unconstitutional on the basis that it infringed on the federal government's exclusive jurisdiction over matters relating to immigration - would also (IMO) prevent sanctuary cities from existing, except that inaction is generally (and correctly) privileged above action.

You should look at how these clinics are funded.

Clinics?

From what I'm seeing on Reddit, the system in Chicago is also simply overloaded - they can't process claims fast enough to handle the spike, so people have to keep trying.

~6.6m might just be as fast as we can process per week.

I have more than a few friends trying (and failing) to register for unemployment claims because the websites are jammed up.

It's possible that what we've found is that we can only intake around 7 million jobless claims per week. The number could be much higher, we just don't have the bandwidth to receive all the claims, so they continue to pile up.

I think it will continue to raise is seems like we can only handle processing about 6.6 millions unemployment claims a week. There was a similar number last week. I know we saw it increase quickly, but that does not mean we will see it decrease quickly.

Bingo. During Chernobyl nuclear disaster initial official radiation reports were based on the highest number of the fielded portable measurement equipment.

It is not higher because the UI filings systems are still not capable of processing the volume of new claims.

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