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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

This is anecdotal and it might come across as bitter and tonedeaf as someone who is not in a STEM job and cant see the bigger picture very well. Im a diesel engine tech who repairs those big trucks carrying food and shit tickets to grocery stores. the fact that ANY market is completely detached from whats actually happening to Americans is frustrating.

My job just cut benefits and hours but we're "essential." Remember those $1200 checks? Im still waiting on mine. Lenders and banks were supposed to start going easy on loans but ive had two emails and a phone call about the loan for my Silverado this month and wouldnt you know, the caller was excited to mention my stimulus check.

A guy who used to be my bartender now couch surfs a few days a week at my place while he looks for work. His mother is getting evicted from an assisted living center in a few days and his girlfriend is sick. She 'works at the Amazon' so she cant take any time off, but hes hoping if he gets a job at the Flying J at the edge of town he can switch places with her and she can take a few days off.

Shops are closing and nobody seems to care. Ive counted 2 furniture stores, a consignment shop, a few barber shops, and half the god damn bars in this town including one that was burned to the ground "mysteriously" over the last two weeks. Someone spray painted a swastika on the late night pizza joint.

So yeah this is a recession but it is so much worse than a lot of people think. No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here. Half the country is out of work and the best Bloomberg can come up with is "its the start of a recession dont you know!"

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> This is anecdotal and it might come across as bitter and tonedeaf as someone who is not in a STEM job and cant see the bigger picture very well. Im a diesel engine tech who repairs those big trucks carrying food and shit tickets to grocery stores. the fact that ANY market is completely detached from whats actually happening to Americans is frustrating.

Thanks for posting this comment. I know it sounds trite, but I’m sending well wishes your way, hoping you and your loved ones make it through this crisis as minimally impacted as possible.

I think you likely see the big picture better than others. The economy is absolutely crushed. That the markets go up must be especially frustrating to those not able to partake in any gains. My take on the market is that it will go up on good or bad news for the moment. Going up on good news is self explanatory, going up on bad news could be related to speculation that the Fed and Congress will pump even more money into the economy —- the wealthy expect to be propped up by the government as they were in the great financial crisis.

My cynical take on this is that the rich expect to get richer, no matter the outcome, and are investing accordingly. My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to.

> My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to.

Individuals must answer this question, not just ask it.

> My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to.

My question is how many people have absolutely no ties to the stock market? I'm pretty far from any definition of rich, but I still have a 401k, so you're not likely to see me rioting because the S&P 500 is in the green.

About half of households own no stock at all. It's a safe bet a good portion of the other half have little enough that "the market's up!" isn't very meaningful for them.

Only 52% of americans own any stock whatsoever [0], and the richest 10% of americans own 84% of all stock.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/190883/half-americans-own-stock...

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085

All taxpayers (since they will have to make up for shortfalls) and recipients of defined benefit pensions (since they will have to accept reductions in benefits) are also indirectly exposed to changes equity prices.

> All taxpayers (since they will have to make up for shortfalls) and recipients of defined benefit pensions (since they will have to accept reductions in benefits) are also indirectly exposed to changes equity prices.

But that needs to be put in its proper context. Even if you have a small amount of stock or indirectly benefit from stock prices in some way, it'd be stupid if you let that mentally tie yourself to the stock market.

For instance, shortfalls in taxes do not necessarily need to be made up by "all taxpayers." With progressive taxation, they can be made up by some taxpayers (which will likely consist of most HN commentators, since software engineers are relatively wealthy).

Not if the shortfall is made up via asset price inflation and dollar devaluation. Then the non asset owning class takes the brunt of the pain.

Which is what I believe has been happening for decades. Progressive taxation can help, but I doubt the political will exists to tax capital gains.

> I doubt the political will exists to tax capital gains

A friendly reminder that capital gains is taxed (when it is realized).* I assume that you are actually complaining about closing loopholes that exist for avoiding paying the full rate.

* Obviously this comes with the caveat that the tax code is large with lots of "loopholes" (in quotes because they were mostly intentionally created). Capital gains losses are somehow socialized as tax deductions and the "carried interest loophole" allows certain fund managers to treat capital gains as a different class of income.

The number of people in the US with defined benefit pensions is quite low and consistently falling.

> and the richest 10% of americans own 84% of all stock.

The top 20% of earners also handle close to 90% of the tax burden, while close to 50% of the population pay nothing in taxes.

In a society where the bottom 50% have virtually no wealth and are in debt, how much do you think they should pay in taxes and how do you expect them to pay for it?

Man, that 50% of the population that's able to buy things without paying sales tax is really fortunate. How do I sign up for that benefit?

You could move to Oregon...

...In all seriousness, the parent comment was probably referring to the Federal Income Tax.

Yes, I'm aware that's what he was referring to, but it's not the entirety of the tax burden in the US, and even people who pay nothing in income tax still pay taxes.

This is precisely why a flat tax disproportionally impacts lower income people.

Unless it’s a flat tax on capital assets.

I think it would be interesting to try out a model where _only_ capital assets are taxed. No sales tax, no income tax, no capital gains tax.

It should dampen the effect of the rich getting richer only from rent collecting, while still making sure the market allocates capital to where it provides the most economic value (I.e can be turned into enough revenue to pay the tax in question)

I agree with a wealth tax in principle, but it's not without many difficult implementation challenges. For example, someone's entire net worth could be held in art. How do you accurately gauge its value if it hasn't been sold in two decades?

Auction it out. Highest bidder on rent gets to keep it.

This doesn't make sense. You're now saying that the government is going to be in charge of inspecting every citizen's property and auctioning it for them?

I'm as liberal as they come, and that just seems ridiculous.

Yes. Perhaps not the government though, what I have in mind is an institution representing the commons and all individuals right to it. So the income from said auctions could not be used for arbitrary government spending but only for the interest of the commons: The ones agreeing to respect the ownership deal by being non-owners of the asset in question. I imagine most of the revenue would just be payed back as a dividend.

Edit: (I do not think of wealth in the form of art though. Imagine most wealth is tied up in capital assets$

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

There’s a good moral argument about dividing capital into land and other assets.

But I suspect that from an economical efficiency perspective that division is less interesting than between revenue and assets.

It's really more about dividing capital into the kind that is "natural" and limited - land, mineral rights, EM spectrum; some would also say copyright and patents - and the kind that is produced by human labor. It's a bit fuzzy in practice.

Sure, but without the bottom 50% the top 20% would not be able to make nearly as much money as they do.

Progressive taxation is aware of the exploitive nature of capitalism. Just because people are being exploited doesn't mean they don't contribute, much to the contrary.

> 50% of the population pay nothing in taxes.

Sales tax is almost 11% here. And I'm in a red-leaning purple state, not "Taxachusetts" or anything. Property tax on vehicles. FICA ("it's not a tax!" yeah OK, but it is really)

That's because the top has looted the economy, leaving little or nothing for the rest of us. Its not a reflection on the bottom 50% at all.

> That's because the top has looted the economy

Can you explain how this happens? How does one "loot" one of the largest economies in the world?

Monetary policy and globalism. We've got an economy built on debt. We went from a production based economy 40 years ago to a consumption based one. We exported skills. We believed that a service-based economy was sustainable in the long run. We went off the gold standard and embraced an inflationary monetary policy that punished savers. Then we built a retirement system (including state pensions) dependent on yields, which causes retirement funds to chase ever riskier asset classes. We made debt so available for so many things, like education, healthcare, real estate, etc, and we made it so artificially "cheap" that it drove up prices. We never really recovered from the 2008 real estate bubble. The Fed's answer was to buy mortgage-backed securities by the trillions, and bailed out the people responsible without punishing anyone. So we kicked the can down the road and now, this downturn is so massive that we will not be able to escape the deep financial consequences and it is going to take years to overcome this. We have nothing left to borrow against and we're in tens of trillions in debt.

Thank God for this comment

The U.S. Dollar is backed by an ass whopping!

You pay people less than their cost of living, demand that the state make up the difference in food stamps and health-care subsidies, and then pocket the difference.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/time-for-postcapitalism

It's simple:

Think about it, a CEO of a big company is more likely to be in social circle of the politicians, judges and regulators.

They are more likely to be sympathetic to their immediate acquaintance who they see every week rather than those poor social economic class people who they have nothing in common with.

Add some dilllusion and descrimination in the mix, like "they are poor because they are lazy" and it becomes easy to make policies which benefit your immediate social circle.

And lot of poor people don't even have time or motivation to analyze those policies and even if someone manages to do that, they don't have enough influence to do anything about it.

Even simpler. The folks in a company that can write checks, write them to each other.

I don't think it's because top are lotting, more like people at top have bigger leverage. But in all, all people are equally likely to loot if the places were changed.

In that case, I would love to be handling 90% of the tax burden right now.

They pay sales tax, social security tax, and they never make anywhere near as much in wages as the value of what they produce, which is the biggest tax of all but since it’s a hidden, implicit tax, you can’t see it.

If someone making 1m/yr pays 1% in taxes and someone making 10k/yr pays 90%, the millionaire is still covering over 50% of the tax burden despite being impacted far less by the taxes on his wealth.

> The top 20% of earners also handle close to 90% of the tax burden,

Only if you only count the income taxes, and ignore other (mostly regressive) payroll, excise/sales, and other taxes at the federal and state levels.

Including all those taxes, the top 20% still pay 66% of all taxes.

https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/04/ch...

The top 20% also owns 86% of the wealth, so it seems like they are still coming out ahead.

Well, they do have all the money. Besides, the 19.9% shouldn't complain to the 80%. Rather, they should complain to the 0.1% whose lobbyists write the tax code in the first place. We can be sure they had their reasons to set up this level of progressive taxation rather than some other level.

What does what you have in your 401k matter if your house and car are being repossessed? I suppose you could pull it all out at penalties and with a bunch of taxes, but that's going to be work, and assumes you have enough in there to make it worthwhile.

Penalties are waived for certain exigent circumstances, which I believe this would qualify as.

The larger penalty would still probably be the taxes, which I assume aren't waved, and again assume there's enough in there to make it worthwhile. I know for myself, even though I've been diligently saving for my relatively short career, I don't think there is.

You are going to pay those taxes anyway when you retire. 401k is only beneficial if you expect to pay lower tax rate when you finally retire. Unless you expect the federal tax rates to go significantly down across the board, withdrawing from 401k when you have no other income is actually a great idea, or it would be without the 10% penalty.

However, you typically can borrow money from your 401k, and pay no penalty, which makes it a good option if you need temporary liquidity.

And considering how early this pandemic hit in the year, if you were laid off in March you didn't even make 25% of your salary yet. That means your taxes are likely to be quite low for the year, so this is actually a good time to withdraw money from a 401k and take the tax hit.

If I ever have a full year gap between jobs (like some kind of a long sabbatical), I'm going to be doing a lot of Traditional to Roth converting, for exactly this reason.

There is in fact a special exemption this year to the 10% tax penalty for taking money out of retirement accounts for COVID-19 related purposes. But make sure your specific account offers that exemption before withdrawing anything.

The idea of the 401k is such an amazing hustle for the wealthy.

* Middle-class Americans consistently pump money into the stock market generically (not information trading), raising the value of all your stocks over time.

* Now you have a gun to their head to support policies that pump up the value of your stocks even more.

* Also, when shit hits the fan, they can't easily cash out, but you can. Both on a mega-scale (recession), and individual stocks (when companies tank, you sell first, and 401k index or diversified funds take a hit).

I'm not an expert in this stuff but it smells from miles away.

> The idea of the 401k is such an amazing hustle for the wealthy.

You make a very interesting point!

I wonder what a "reverse 401k" program would look like (e.g. box the wealthy into aligning their actions with the interests poor/middle class while only marginally benefiting themselves).

> aligning their actions with the interests poor/middle class

Any attempt to recognize classes exits will lead to class war. Everyone is upper class, or waiting to join upper class, anytime now.

Class war is good.

Taxes?

I wonder what a "reverse 401k" program would look like (e.g. box the wealthy into aligning their actions with the interests poor/middle class while only marginally benefiting themselves).

Pensions? Those also don't seem to work all that well.

Just a pedantic note - I have most of my 401K money in Certificates of Deposit, so you do not have to pump the market.

However (thanks, Federal Reserve!), you get punished with interest rates below inflation, so people, increasingly desperate to protect their savings from inflation, put their money in risky investments (not just the stock market, also overpriced real-estate, etc).

If you research the history, you discover that the 401k was designed for the C-suite, not ordinary workers. Some calculating Wall Streeter(s) somewhere decided that it's a reasonable retirement vehicle for ordinary shlubs. It is not. See this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/teresa-ghilarducc...

> My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to.

There is deep rot at the heart of the American system, and something is going to have to give. The economy has been broken for the lower 50% for a long time now. This course is unsustainable.

I try not to get explicitly political on here, but Bernie Sanders was, as far as I can see, our last shot at reversing the trend from within the current system. He is the only person on Capitol Hill with the motivation to make the real changes that desperately need making. Joe Biden will just pretend the problem doesn't exist for another four years. Trump, as a leader, is just an agent of chaos with no ideals and no plan. I can't totally blame people for taking a chance on that over the continued, slow march of rot.

I think we're going to start seeing escalating social unrest until something breaks. All we can hope for is that something breaks sooner rather than later, and that we get whatever new deal needs making before things get too bad.

It wasn't too long ago that Los Angeles was burning on national TV, and people had to post on roofs with rifles due to the police refusing to get involved with the situation beyond protecting the wealthiest zip codes. It only stopped when the national guard deployed armored vehicles.

People think the U.S. is removed from this sort of thing. It's not. If you push the working class to a breaking point, they will break into stores to steal diapers if they have to.

Does anyone else remember Occupy Wall Street here in the US? Millions camping out in parks demanding change and support. But they were unable to rally, organize, create any lasting impact on the elites and wealthier strata of society. The middle and top looked down on the bottom as an annoyance. They were literally removed by riot police, and the movement died. Unsurprisingly, the number of homeless people increased drastically in that same period (financial crisis) and how have many municipalities responded? Laws against sleeping on benches. There was literally a tent city under Las Vegas, but the decision makers in this society are so far removed it just doesn’t matter. Until the bread runs out, we are not in a real “end of the world” crisis as you describe it. Americans are apathetic, just wealthy enough not to starve, have deeply ingrained individualism that makes them resistant to anything resembling support or handouts, and don’t understand what’s happening - that is to say, the rich are getting so rich their families will never be poor again, and the doors to that class are closing. There’s more support now for ideas like a basic income, universal healthcare, etc. but the fundamentals of the system are so ponderously difficult to change...a very interesting situation.

Of course!

My conspiracy theory is that because the stole 700billion with the bank bailouts and that resulted in OWS, which was quashed pretty quickly - and resulted in no consequences for those that stole that.

They have ossued the “stay inside orders” whole the now steal four trillion dollars so there wont be another OWS at scale.

"Bernie Sanders was, as far as I can see, our last shot at reversing the trend from within the current system"

If anything, Bernie Sanders was our first, worst shot at structural economic change. In fact, every candidate on stage during those Democratic debates was running far, far to the economic left of Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore or either Clinton. With some historical perspective, you might see that the tides have turned in favor of the types of changes you are calling for, not against as so many people seem to pretend.

In practice, none of them would actually have implemented it, except the only one with a history of going against party and lobby. Barack Obama ran far to the left of Barack Obama, but ended up compromising with Republicans for some absurd reason as he held both the house and senate, to the degree where he passed Mitt Romney's proposal while dragging his feet.

None of them except for Bernie Sanders was willing to recognize the system as fundamentally broken. Biden and Clinton and indubitably their Democrat sosies would openly profess to the elite that nothing would change.

"none of them would actually have implemented it, except the only one with a history of going against party and lobby"

Why would the person with few allies and hostile relations with various power players be the one who could "actually" implement anything? Barack Obama had a senate majority that Bernie would have killed for in his hypothetical first term, but Obama still couldn't get his own party to even consider a public option. Things have changed compared to them, but not so much that any 51-seat senate majority could pass anything close to what Bernie calls for. It's beyond unrealistic to pretend otherwise.

You're saying that even with a Senate majority, Obama couldn't get his own party to consider public option, while also arguing that through candidates that are "far to the left" of Obama (except Bernie Sanders apparently), we can achieve the kind of structural economic change that people who support Bernie Sanders want. Seems a bit contradictory to me.

Because the presidency is vastly more powerful than what you think. Obama could have pulled an FDR, or a Trump, and shifted the party very hard, but didn't. It's quite simple: you go to your opponent, you tell him that if he doesn't follow the whip you will use your vast reach to get him primaried, threaten to modify the rules of the DNC, hell, drum up support for a general strike. Threaten to slash the military budget, threaten to cancel a defence program, or to stop shale oil subsidies, play politics. But for some reason, from FDR onwards, no one plays politics except to concede towards the right. Literally no one in power. The platform of the Democratic Party has become "Let's be Republican-lite in order to win those elusive moderate independent" that for some reason seem to shift more and more towards the right for every single election cycle for the last 40 years, almost as if they were illusory or weren't as ideologically unmovable as asserted.

And it's total bullshit that the Democratic Party wouldn't consider a public option. The Republican Party was considering a public option.

> but ended up compromising with Republicans for some absurd reason as he held both the house and senate

My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but didn't he also have to compromise with the (relatively) right-leaning wing of the Democratic party?

Did Trump have to compromise with the left wing of the Republican Party? Did Biden have to compromise with the left wing of the Democratic Party? No, because of the implicit threat of being primaried, or for the party to be shifted. Which Obama did not even threaten, but all others presidents did (towards the right).

He also openly compomised in the name of "bipartisanship" multiple times despite it being uneeded.

The only thing that comes close to a left wing part of the Republican Party is Sue Collins, who is always very sorry and disappointed but eventually toes the party line.

Compared to Trump, roughly half of the Republican party is to his left by varying magnitudes. Obamacare, for example, was originally a Republican proposal.

But yes, the entire Republican party line eventually toes the party line. Same for the Democratic party, as long as the party line strengthens the class interests of the elite.

I didn't believe even Sanders would do that. That's why I supported Gabbard. She wasn't as strong on the economics, but I actually believed she would try to rein in the military-industrial complex, which is an indisputable blight upon humanity and which Sanders never discusses.

There's truth here, but - and this is getting into subjective territory - it's my belief that none of the other candidates came by those platforms through conviction. I think they measured what voters wanted to hear, measured what kind of brand they could sell for themselves, found the intersection, and constructed a campaign around it.

Now, that doesn't completely invalidate the point! There's a genuine "economy" of votes around "I take a stance for X, you give me votes, I continue to take that stance, you continue to give me votes", which can function even in the midst of cynicism. But it's much less reliable or efficient when that's the case; when the politician, as a person, doesn't base their platform in their genuine beliefs. In fact I think the prevalence of this mentality is one of the major causes of our current situation.

There's almost nobody left among our politicians who has any real conviction. I think John McCain did. And call me naive, but I believe Bernie Sanders is authentic when he's talking about these topics. He's been doing so since the seventies. Career-politicians who do nothing but appease voters might do an okay job at running the show, but they will never truly change the system that got them elected.

I mostly agree with what you're saying, but disagree about Bernie. Many of his biggest policies are still just trying to cover the rot with a coat of paint. Healthcare too expensive? Just have the government cover the bill. College too expensive? Same thing. Workers not paid enough? Raise the minimum wage. All very blunt, simplistic reactions, that ignore the complexities of the real world. Getting rid of the rot requires looking at the roots of the problems. If something is 10x more expensive today than it was a few decades ago, just agreeing to pay the 10x price is not a good solution. You need to figure out and address the underlying causes.

I am still hopeful for our future, maybe foolishly, but I am. If there is a silver lining of Covid-19, maybe it will highlight some of the insane bureaucracy and regulatory capture that are strangling our institutions in the US and lead to improvements. Don't get me wrong, we also need some progressive policies targeted at helping those who are struggling most, but those policies will only be effective if we also recognize and address the underlying cost disease issues. Just look at progressive havens like San Francisco to see how much money can be burned on well-intentioned ideas without achieving any results, if you refuse to acknowledge the underlying causes.

> If something is 10x more expensive today than it was a few decades ago, just agreeing to pay the 10x price is not a good solution.

That's not what those proposals were. Single payer healthcare and state-provided education is how you fix those problems.

IMO, 4 year university degrees in the USA in their current state are basically a scam

We're promising kids that if they study hard in school they'll be elevated to the middle/upper class by their degree, but in reality most of those degrees are almost completely worthless for building a career.

People are graduating with 4 year degrees in business, math, assorted liberal arts, and then they're saddled with 6 figures of debt and not any more appealing to companies than someone with a year of experience in a desk job

Another problem: So many people are getting pushed into getting 4 year degrees now that they're now a requirement for many jobs that don't even need them. Sure, a CS degree will help if you're building some Google-scale backend code, but you really don't need one to tinker with a small web storefront's layout bugs

Are you familiar with Bernie's plans of

a) giving 20% of ownership of large corporations and 40% of board seats to workers?

b) breaking up the big banks and helping community banks.

These are insanely good ideas and aren't simplistic. Unfortunately, many, including you, only scratched the surface of what Bernie was about.

I would agree with you if there weren't so many case studies of other countries solving those problems with those exact, "blunt"-seeming solutions.

Bernie isn't trying to solve a problem, more correct it. Why fault the people for trying to correct a problem that's more to their advantage when hospitals, to this day, still haven't tried to correct the problem of expenses. One shouldn't have to forego their home to pay for small surgical procedures. When people try to correct these things we get replies like yours saying you shouldn't correct them but leave them to the system to correct them. We have to realize the "system" won't inherently do these things, we the people as part of the system have to take measures to look out for ourselves also because the system won't do it for us.

Most people will not want social unrest. Social unrest leads to chaos and unpredictability.

A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc. it doesn’t always have to be like that as those are extreme; never the less unrest is a medicine that is in most instances worse than the disease.

Unrest starts when people had and lost. The people who were able to afford a BMW last year find themselves homeless this year.

True Believer has lots of insight into the circumstances than lead to unrest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

I think it starts when people have nothing left to lose. There’s no hope to lose, there’s no illusion left.

On the other hand, some societies can descend quite a bit and be okay with going into more or less survival mode: witness Russia.

Not "nothing less", but just less to lose than to gain. People are willing to gamble on a roll of the dice when the upside is larger than the downside.

But the risks for that upside can be pretty large. You cannot predict how things turn out: Mensheviks vs bolsheviks.

Russia had a lot of political unrest back in the 90s, when it was at the bottom of its descent. It elected extremist parties to parliament - commies had the majority for how long? - and street politics was also... messy at times. I remember growing up in that period, and back then it would have been entirely unsurprising to wake up one day to see ballet on TV where news are supposed to be.

So I wouldn't call it a good example of being okay. It made it through that political unrest without blowing up as a whole (but with plenty of local crises, like Chechnya)... but it was not smooth sailing at all.

> A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

That's the first thing that will be tried, but to be truly successful the "buy in" needs to happen equally as much from the people that are on the verge of picking up pitchforks. It also needs to be an authentic political action. Unfortunately our politics in the USA has gone into profound dysfunction. Something ugly is going to happen, I think. I don't know when, but it's been on the way for quite some time. That guy in the oval office is just a symptom of a really deep problem.

> Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc

Not necessarily!

There are a number of really bad things that precede unrest, usually a collapse of systems that people rely on. The folks in Venezuela didn't want unrest either, but when your currency becomes worthless within a span of a couple years... bad things are going to happen.

Yes, this exactly. These problems are absolutely possible to solve through political action. But our leaders have had ample opportunities, spread out over more than a decade, to do so. And they've sent a clear signal that they simply won't.

Actually I believe they sent a clear message that they want problems to get even worse. It is not even keeping the status quo at same level, at the face of this pandemic almost all world governments decisively pursued enriching the 1%.

I only hope more people woke up to this fact and form a critical mass but I doubt it.

You can read if that way. What I see is them propping up business so that there are actual jobs to go back to once things stabilize.

It does little good to send people thousands of dollars if when that dries up, and it would, there are no above board jobs to go back to.

How nice of the governments to help businesses afford to eat instead of people.

There is no reason assistance to people has to go through business. The reason governments do that is because leaders own equity in the current hierarchy and definitely don’t want to disturb that by giving the lower classes leverage to demand better terms.

If businesses employed robots you’d have a point. But most today provide people gainful employment. No businesses left means no one to hire you.

The businesses don't disappear because the doors close for a few months. People will still have their colleagues’ contact information to be able to re hire and start again.

Some businesses can be easily put on hold and restarted later. I’d wager it’s not that easy for most.

I’d wager those businesses are already classified as essential and kept operating. And if not, that can be a separate issue the government can tackle, but there’s no need for it to be conflated with the issue of keeping people fed and housed.

just like keeping people fed shouldn’t be conflated with keeping businesses operating and solvent. your logic cuts both ways and businesses shouldn’t have been brought up by the grandparent in the first place

Except "gainful employment" has been quietly eroded year after year with things like institutionalizing contract work/gig economy/worship of hustle/eroding worker's rights to organize and bargain with employers...

Do you not understand that if there are not jobs to go back to there will be no eating tomorrow either? If businesses start to go under, and this cascades as it usually does, we could be seeing serious recession, or even economic failure? What do we do about food then? Also what happened to the economic stimulus checks and unemployment system? The systems are definitely taxed but that only shows you how big we’re getting hit atm.

By buying up junk bonds the government props up irresponsible, mismanaged companies, which possibly spent money on stock buybacks and bonuses for executives, instead of product/service development.

The way to go is to protect workers during transition from one job to another by providing them with decent unemployment benefits, training, etc., not bail out lousy executives over and over.

When people die, they're dead. When businesses die, their assets are sold to better businesses and their former employees are hired by better businesses.

I swear I have yet to meet a capitalist who actually believes in "capitalism"...

I see that motion as the status quo. The velocity, maybe even the acceleration, towards enriching the 1% is the status quo. This is how things will continue to go if people leave the system alone, pandemic or not.

Not even 3 decades ago all it took was a jury verdict for anarchy and looting to sweep across LA, requiring the national guard to put down the unrest. People were breaking into stores to steal diapers. What will be the breaking point this time around?

We’ve had those flare ups before. Watts riots, early 1900s labor riots and repression.

They’ve had them in France, they’ve had them elsewhere. That’s a kind of unrest but not the kind I think we’re talking about.

I think what we’re talking about is the kind that results in overturning of the power structure. I don’t think we’re near that. I think 99.9% of the people do not want that outside of people on the extreme left and extreme right, interestingly for quite different reasons.

This intentionally ignores 100 years of oppression and institutional racism that was the actual powder keg. The verdict was just the striking of the tinder.

The exploding inequality and continuous safety net collapse in the united states could very well be a similar powder keg waiting for a match.

Exactly. That powder keg never went away after Rodney King. It's always been here, institutional racism exists to this day. Systemic inequality can only be tolerated so long, and patience runs thin when money runs out.

> Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc

Usually unrest is not decided so naively like that.

For example, you can organize and take political action just fine, but your larger encumbered opponent might want to start unrest for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair#May_Day_parad...

Unrest is what happens in Venezuela or Yemen, etc.

As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. "Unrest" in Latin America is caused by USA's off-the-leash unsupervised services. Venezuela's government is taking better care of its citizens than our government is taking of us, in this current health emergency. This despite the crippling sanctions and attempted coups d'état we've perpetrated against them. Don't believe the war media; I recommend The Grayzone. [0]

Although, of course, for the last year or so not even the war media attempts to defend what we're doing in Yemen.

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/

>Venezuela's government is taking better care of its citizens than our government is taking of us, in this current health emergency.

I've seen nothing to corroborate this.

>Don't believe the war media; I recommend The Grayzone.

Here's a video from last year of Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal cheerfully receiving honors from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled that country by violence and decree since 2015:

https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1156588153945427970

I do trust The Grayzone to have an anti-U.S. editorial position. I do not trust them to be objective.

Venezuela is the watched pot: it should have boiled by now! Venezuelans haven't violently overthrown Maduro because they mostly consent to the results of two somewhat-democratic elections. He lets his supposed "rival" Juan Guaido prance about the country unmolested so all Venezuelans can laugh at the impotence of CIA. With continued sanctions and the price of oil at long-time lows, "natural" pressure on Maduro should be running hot. Instead, that same low price obliterates CIA's theoretical incentive to install a subservient petrostate. They've redeployed their ratfuckers to Nicaragua.

If a USA president had been subject to massive bias from nearly every news media corporation, he might be tempted to honor an independent news outlet that attempted to report with objectivity. Oh, wait... that actually happened this year, at the "State of the Union" speech.

When we fall into the trap of running to wikipedia every time we're confused by world events, we can't be surprised that the war media continues to lead us around by the nose. If we step back and see the pattern, we begin to discount every story that leads us closer to yet another stupid war. Every day this month, it has been obvious to non-Americans how deficient our system is. Every other nation on earth has responded more reasonably and more effectively to this virus. Venezuela is among those nations.

>Venezuela is the watched pot: it should have boiled by now!

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

>A better alternative is the less sexy but more productive political action obviously with buy in from the power brokers.

This has been tried for many years with little result. People in my social circles have grown fed-up and tired with the U.S. political system, especially those who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 only to watch entrenched power-brokers deny him the candidacy. Some allege similar interference in 2020 (see podcast with former Bernie staffers):

https://soundcloud.com/seeking-derangements/sd7-the-bernie-p...

>unrest is a medicine that is in most instances worse than the disease.

Millions of increasingly desperate and frustrated Americans may not be able to agree with you. People are never purely rational actors, and beat-down emotional people are among the least rational. The LA Riot's immediate outcome was arguably worse than its proximate cause, but nevertheless people rioted.

>My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to.

The only social unrest that has happened so far have been the protests about wanting to lift or ease restrictions on states, and they were widely panned as a bunch of nutjobs. I doubt there will be any "unrest" beyond the protests.

The only social unrest that has happened so far have been the protests about wanting to lift or ease restrictions on states, and they were widely panned as a bunch of nutjobs.

It's easy to look down on people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. They're still human beings. They've been given this raw deal: For the greater good, you will now give up your job for an indefinite period of time, with no prospect of finding like employment elsewhere. You have no choice, and if you refuse, you are a horrible person and in some cases you may face civil and criminal consequences.

Injustice isn't any less unjust, because the recipients are somehow in a group one perceives as deplorable. Principles of justice and human rights are universal. This was MLK's ideological point in the Civil Rights movement.

Adherence to this principle is how I distinguish pseudo-activists who just want power and attention from those who really have justice at heart: Are the principles applied to everyone, or just to whomever it's convenient?

The folks participating in the protest are not at all lower on the socioeconomic latter, but predominately middle class. Black Americans, who tend to be poorer and less secure, support the lockdown at a higher rate than whites or other racial groups [0] (at least in Florida). Whites have the least support for a lockdown, but most still oppose reopening.

Lastly, at least some of the protests were funded by the DeVos family [1].

[0] https://poll.qu.edu/florida/release-detail?ReleaseID=3659

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/26/devos-family...

Building up socio-economic status is a straw man point here given how widespread the effects of this downturn are. It could be that parts of the middle class that are protesting may have lost their jobs or businesses and the stimulus checks don’t offset that as much as it would for lower income folks.

And our middle-class is typically just a few, if not just one, paycheck away from abject poverty.

Fact that US still have to break down so much into racial cohorts in polls is weird. And offer nothing of value other than the generalizations like "who tend to be poorer" that doesn't help the discussion nor analysis. What do you do with this information in this context?

How about breaking down by religion or something else that at least points to what kind of media/message the group is more exposed to? or something that hints at extraneous interests, like homeowners or not. There are so much better ways to break down this data.

> How about breaking down by religion or something else that at least points to what kind of media/message the group is more exposed to?

I'm an American that fits into neither of these groups but nearly everyone I know does, so from my third party perspective I think you might be underestimating how different the sources, messaging, and conversations are between white and black Americans on average. That being said, I think it is still vastly overused in polls, and is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy to some degree.

Due to the history of the US, race is highly determinate to culture and socioeconomic status. It's a very good proxy for to cut across all sorts of differences. For example, you mentioned home owners. Guess which race has very few of those?

I would have preferred to see a poll based on income, but race is still a decent proxy for that.

"decent proxy" is a gross generalization that depends on your deeply set pre-conceptions.

It's a statistical fact. It's not racist to acknowledge that racial minorities in the US are disadvantaged.

> one perceives as deplorable

There is no reason to bring that reference in an otherwise non-political discussion.

There is no reason to bring that reference in an otherwise non-political discussion.

It's hard to separate socioeconomic differentials from politics. And I specifically use deplorable to call out the political excesses of my own accustomed "tribe."

>And I specifically use deplorable to call out the political excesses of my own accustomed "tribe."

And, either purposely or naively, you're misconstruing the context and scope of a single quote as if you were a part of the other "tribe."

The "basket of deplorables" comment is widely and incorrectly assumed to be an expression of elitist disdain by "the left" for all rural white males, all Trump supporters, or everyone of lower socioeconomic class, when it rather explicitly referred to the - and I'm paraphrasing almost directly from the quote here - "racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes" who took over Trump's base and steered it in an extremist direction. In other words, people who should be considered deplorable.

It may not have been a precisely worded criticism but it was an accurate one.

And, either purposely or naively, you're misconstruing the context and scope of a single quote as if you were a part of the other "tribe."

It may not have been a precisely worded criticism but it was an accurate one.

Thanks. I have absolutely no reason to reply to any of that.

I know the following from personal experience as a person of color, as a not completely hetero-normative person, and as someone who lived in the on-campus house of an organization that had non-gender specific bathrooms in the 1980's. As I mentioned elsewhere, tone-deafness and lack of self-awareness are often symptoms of someone having lost the ability to view others -- all others -- as fully equal in basic human being status.

Left as an exercise to the reader: Who exactly am I calling out here?

I completely agree with you, but... How about don't vote in leaders that only care about helping out their rich buddies then?

The Scandinavian countries have moved to pay all payrolls to keep people paid during all this madness, instead of just bailing out large debt holders.

It's tough when your country isn't much of a democracy. A major difference between Scandinavia and the US/Canada/many others is that proportional representation plays a much greater role in the electoral system here.

It's a good thing, when a republic is constructed so that a minority still has a voice. One might perceive them as the "wrong" minority today, in the current context. In the future, they might well be the "correct" minority.

(That said, I think Sweden of all places in the west, have had the best, most sane reaction to the pandemic.)

What minority are you even talking about?

What minority are you even talking about

Any of them.

Some of them, I'm in. Some of them, I'll never be in. The principle is universal: A just society protects the minority. Any of them.

Any of them? Including groups that want to oppress others?

"Protects" is not equivalent to "grants the political wishes of". For example, people who want to abolish free speech still have the right to argue for the abolition of free speech.

Including groups that want to oppress others?

Of course. Rights have to be universal, even for people with such desires. Otherwise, whomever has the power to adjudge what others are "actually" thinking have the power to remove people's human rights.

The dynamics where accusation is enough, guilt is assumed, and no proof is needed are often abused to have power over others. If there was ever a time when this should be obvious, it is 2020, present day.

In fact, all of the above is the whole point of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta.

It’s one thing to protect the minority from the majority; it’s another to allow the minority to constantly overrule the majority. At some point the US will come apart because of our current political dynamics.

it’s another to allow the minority to constantly overrule the majority

That's the whole point of protecting the minority. Otherwise, if the majority always wins, and the minority has to be satisfied with the crumbs left by the majority, the minority has effectively zero power. It's like writing an API. You know you're doing it right, when things mostly work, but there's someone, somewhere sorely dissatisfied with not getting their way.

In the words of one fictional British gentleman, "You don't have it. I don't have it. That's detente, comrade!"

And do you think that in Sweden of all places, minorities don't have a voice?

They have more of a voice, because they don't have a two party system. If you are American, please check out some European political systems. You'll find that politics in Europe are a lot more nuanced and minorities in general are much, much better represented.

And do you think that in Sweden of all places, minorities don't have a voice?

I don't know if you intended it that way, but the above feels like you're trying to put words in my mouth to that effect. No, I don't think I said that minorities are voiceless in Sweden.

They have more of a voice, because they don't have a two party system.

Right. Again, as Matt Easton says, "Context!" If the US were to go fully democratic, with our two parties, no electoral college, and everything done proportionally, things in the US would suck for constituencies smaller than 50%. Particularly with discourse being what it is in 2020.

However, if you know of a way to do away with the US two party system, I'm all ears.

Also, when I read your comment above, I tend to read it in my head as sounding angry and patronizing. Hopefully, you didn't mean it the way of, "What, you ignorant fool, do you not know...etc...?"

The system as it is sucks for more than 50% of the population, though. With a two-party system, you're either going to have tyranny of the majority, or tyranny of the minority. Neither is good, but the former is preferable.

Neither is good, but the former is preferable.

This is why being gay before 1950 was so great: because the majority of society got its way. That's why there was segregation in many places in the US back then: because the majority of society got its way. It took the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's to get the in-built principles and mechanisms which are there in the US system to protect the minority to really apply. And yes, it was in part the action of the national majority which got that to happen.

The usual reason why people say the majority should get its absolute way, is generally because they are in the group who would come out on top. That's a shortsighted view. Even the majority is human and gets it dead wrong sometimes. This is why certain human rights need to be inviolate. This is why every government needs some sort of mechanism which gives the minority out-sized power. The US just does it in this particular way.

The examples you give are of a kind that give minorities rights that cannot be overridden by voting.

EC and Senate are a very different arrangement - they don't protect any rights as such, they simply give some people more votes than others. Which means that not only those people can then veto majority decisions (even when they don't actually infringe on their rights) - but they can impose legislation that curtails rights of the majority.

As for it being a short-sighted view that majority should generally have its way, well, here's Federalist #22, for one:

"Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the National deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican Government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the People of America; and two thirds of the People of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on Union, ought readily to renounce a pretension, which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

Was Hamilton short-sighted when he wrote this criticism? You can argue that it was originally aimed at the Articles of Confederation, not EC and Senate. But it's clear that this is a rather generic criticism, and it's applicable whenever "larger States ... receiving the law from the smaller" becomes commonplace - which depends on how many states there are, and their relative sizes, which have changed a lot since the original 13 colonies. Looking at the outcomes of the presidential and parliamentary elections in the past 20 years, I'd say that this condition is already fully in force, and so is the warning.

I completely agree with you, but... How about don't vote in leaders that only care about helping out their rich buddies then?

Tone deafness in the media and the social and governmental leadership of any country is a key reason why demagogues and sociopaths get into power. This has been the case across time and cultures.

The Scandinavian countries have moved to pay all payrolls to keep people paid during all this madness, instead of just bailing out large debt holders.

Watch Louis Rossman's YouTube coverage of the US programs as a potential recipient/applicant. As a small business owner, he has a front seat to the incompetence of US lawmakers. It's the same kind of thing which smells like grandstanding incompetence, which also afflicted the "banking reforms" post 2008. The laws aren't written by and for people who actually know how things work.

Oh they're definitely written by and for people who actually know how things work. They're written by Congressional aides and advisors who do exactly what they're told by the donors to the politicians. The politicians don't care what's in the bills, they care how the voters will react.

In the UK there is a lot of payroll being paid by central government, plus there are interest free loans for small businesses.

This is very good on the surface, however, there is a large chunk of wealth going to the rentier class. The rentseekers were encouraged under successive Tory and New Labour governments with schemes such as 'buy to let'. Now they are the only truly protected sector of society. The rich get richer.

> The rentseekers were encouraged under successive Tory and New Labour governments with schemes such as 'buy to let'. Now they are the only truly protected sector of society. The rich get richer.

There's some truth to this, but I wouldn't say rentseekers are the only truly protected sector of society. My parents put their life savings into buying a block of flats in the 90s. They borrowed from every single person they knew and took out a mortgage against their own home and put most of their subsequent savings into paying off the mortgage sooner.

The last mortage payment is due end of this year and they were looking forward to leaving their full time jobs whilst maintaining their little property 'empire'.

So far this month they've had 3 tenants call asking for rent reductions, 1 totally unable to pay rent and another insisting on a 20% discount because their friend's landlords are offering the same.

Maintaining that block of 10 flats is no picnic. It means you're on call to unblock toilets on bank holidays or clean, paint, draft tenancy agreements and file paperwork on your evenings and weekends.

Of course - owning an appreciating asset means you're better off than someone who doesn't but you're not quite sitting pretty.

That is unfortunate. All business has risk; becoming a property owner is no different. I anecdotally know a few people who bought second homes to rent out, and they're facing a crunch too. I don't see why, though, small-time landlords should be treated different from other small business owners when it comes to society-wide crises like these.

Buy to let has been heavily discourages by changes to the tax system and stamp duties in the last few years, so this is an unreasonable characterisation. The previous long-running Labour government did far less to discourage buy to let and other rent seeking activities than recent Conservative governments in the UK.

Yes rent seeking activities are a serious problem and I think there's a consensus forming on this, at least in the UK.

Trump was elected on a populist, "drain the swamp" agenda. The public is notoriously bad at predicting which candidate will help the people, and which will "help out their rich buddies."

The public is notoriously bad at predicting which candidate will help the people, and which will "help out their rich buddies."

For the latter, you can get pretty close with this algorithm:

    WillHelpRichBuddies() {
        return true
    }

Great! So just pick people with benevolent rich buddies.

> It's easy to look down on people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. They're still human beings. They've been given this raw deal: For the greater good, you will now give up your job for an indefinite period of time, with no prospect of finding like employment elsewhere. You have no choice, and if you refuse, you are a horrible person and in some cases you may face civil and criminal consequences.

The man in front of the protest to ease restrictions in my mid-sized city was a wealthy local real estate magnate.

The man in front of the protest to ease restrictions in my mid-sized city was a wealthy local real estate magnate.

That still doesn't change the equation for those who aren't real estate magnates and were living paycheck to paycheck before the crisis.

You either listen to all people and meet them where they're at, or you give fuel to demagogues. (Who might be rich magnates.)

It definitely doesn't, but it does change the tenor and content of those protests.

it does change the tenor and content of those protests.

If people who shouldn't have political power gain it by listening to the neglected, the proper course of action isn't to denigrate the people. Take back that power by listening.

> If people who shouldn't have political power gain it by listening to the neglected, the proper course of action isn't to denigrate the people.

He didn't get it by listening to the neglected. He got it by spending money. The protests in my city, like in most places, were primarily people saying "I want people to work for me!" and not "I want to work!". Also had some confederate flags thrown in, because why not.

> Take back that power by listening.

If I were to listen, I would hear that people don't want to be forced to choose between survival and health.

If I were to listen,

If you were to listen.

I would hear that people don't want to be forced to choose between survival and health.

Losing your home, losing the ability to pay for healthcare, perhaps losing custody of your children or losing your already strained marriage -- these are all serious issues which may greatly impact the survival and health of many people.

One thing which tone-deafness is often a symptom of, is that one has lost a bit of the capacity to think of certain others as full, equal in worth, human beings. I know this from first hand experience.

> Losing your home, losing the ability to pay for healthcare, perhaps losing custody of your children or losing your already strained marriage -- these are all serious issues which may greatly impact the survival and health of many people.

Absolutely. And nobody wants to be forced to pick between that, and the very real possibility of getting sick. But if the states just open up, that's the position that they will be in—work and maybe get sick, or not work, and lose your home, the ability to pay for healthcare, perhaps losing custody of your children or losing your already strained marriage.

Keeping the states closed is a popular position.

> One thing which tone-deafness is often a symptom of, is that one has lost a bit of the capacity to think of certain others as full, equal in worth, human beings. I know this from first hand experience.

It's an honest shame that people with your attitude weren't the ones running the protests, instead of people flying the confederate flag and wanting to get their hair done.

Absolutely. And nobody wants to be forced to pick between that, and the very real possibility of getting sick

For a lot of people, this is a choice they make every day, even predating the pandemic.

It's an honest shame that people with your attitude weren't the ones running the protests, instead of people flying the confederate flag and wanting to get their hair done.

It's an honest shame, that politics in 2020 is often about group stereotypes, not fundamental economic reality.

> For a lot of people, this is a choice they make every day, even predating the pandemic.

It is, but I'm not sure where you're going with this—are you implying that the pandemic hasn't drastically affected that decision? Otherwise: what are you saying?

Otherwise: what are you saying?

We're all human beings, regardless of "tribe."

Lots of these people (and a lot of the trumpy, NRA class at large) are bourgeoise, fwiw

Lots of these people (and a lot of the trumpy, NRA class at large) are bourgeoise, fwiw

Well, for one thing, in that subset there are still people getting a raw deal.

For another thing, it's a generally bad thing when people start formulating their political equations or thoughts of who's worthy to be listened to based on group stereotypes. "People like that," is just another form of, "those people," or "them."

I've been on the receiving end of stuff like that all my life, as being one of a few classes of minorities, some of it from people who might be characterized as "the trumpy, NRA class at large."

Ultimately, we're all individuals, and we're all human beings. Beware of people who rail against a group, then have you identify them by outward signs. Be especially wary, when those people start claiming to know the presence of bad thoughts in others, such that they "don't deserve" this or that. Be especially wary when the "don't deserve" starts extending to basic human rights.

In 2020, be triply wary if you are, in effect, being asked to think badly of and ignore the human rights of one particular group -- in the name of justice and human rights.

> It's easy to look down on people lower on the socioeconomic ladder.

That's not who's protesting with assault rifles demanding that their hairdresser show up to work.

People who are "lower on the socioeconomic ladder" are the ones going on strike for PPE, hazard pay and sick leave that the media are dutifully ignoring.

That's not who's protesting with assault rifles demanding that their hairdresser show up to work

Again, it's easy to paint a group as a "type" to justify disregarding their viewpoint. There are opportunists at any large protest. Ultimately, the protest is a collection of individuals, each with their own story.

People who are "lower on the socioeconomic ladder" are the ones going on strike for PPE, hazard pay and sick leave that the media are dutifully ignoring.

Noted!

Lots is being done to lessen the effect on the lower socioeconomic ladder. My state has a $600/week stipend for all those unemployed. In many cases this is more than they earned while employed. Sort of a temporary "basic income".

So its unevenly applied (not in every state). That's an issue to bring up with your state representative.

Those protester people were to a large extent rich employers who wanted to start earning on the backs of others again, or benefiting from that work with normal service availability. There isn't a lot of rawness in that deal, only privilege, and their request was one that hurts others to maintain that privilege.

It would be much harder to "look down" on the protestors if their protests were backed by sanity. For every sign saying "I need to work to feed my family," you see 20 saying:

* Coronavirus is a hoax!

* Fake nurses!

* 5G cellphones cause coronavirus!

* Impeach Bill Gates!

* Vaccines are poison!

* Social Distancing is Communism!

* Freedom!!

There are reasonable arguments against the temporary shutdown, but the protesters are not part of that reasonable conversation.

For every sign saying "I need to work to feed my family," you see 20 saying...

Ask yourself this: Why is the media playing up those fringer crazies, and not covering the very poignant, socially relevant, and human angle of "I need to work to feed my family"? Then go and look up Manufacturing Consent. Here's how propaganda often happens in the West: Emotional manipulation is better than outright ham-handed Pravda-esque censorship.

BTW, you seem to have watched the same "All Gas No Brakes" YouTube video of the Sacramento protests I did. You name the very same nutcase signs as appeared in the video. There's part of your answer right there: If it bleeds it leads. Nutcase signs are easy to get viral sharing out of. They tick the humor and outrage buttons all at the same time.

Freedom!!

This is a good thing. If someone tries to associate freedom with bad people, it's because they want all the power for their own tribe.

Note this quote from a cousin comment: "People who are 'lower on the socioeconomic ladder' are the ones going on strike for PPE, hazard pay and sick leave that the media are dutifully ignoring." Please, ask yourself why the media are dutifully ignoring certain things.

Complaints of media manipulation and conspiracy are also a longstanding, standard element of the fringe's message. When your message is strong and supportable, you want a camera and microphone pointed at you. When your message doesn't make any sense, then media attention is always painted as mean and biased.

"Freedom"

Every protest in the USA, no matter where it sits on the moral or political spectrums, tries to hitch its wagon to "Freedom" in some way. It's become a word you just paint on a sign when you can't think of something to actually be complaining about.

Well, depending on one's viewpoint and level of shortsightedness, there's always, "F- Your Free Speech!"

You realize everything what you say holds true on the opposite side of things, yes?

All of the media coverage I've seen and read played up those protesters as valiant, the suffering workers of the world uniting to stop the government from destroying their career.

Your argument that this is the result of a unified media doesn't exactly work, unless you're referring specifically to media you disagree with.

Your argument that this is the result of a unified media doesn't exactly work

Well, of course not. That's the classic trope of putting the predicate calculus version of "All" into another's mouth. However, depending on where you look, such an approach is quite predominant in the "mainstream." I don't have time to review all media myself, personally.

> I doubt there will be any "unrest" beyond the protests.

> No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

What was that quote about society being three meals away from anarchy?

Speaking of meals: US food banks have been reported as having 6 mile long lines and were required by Dept of Agriculture to maintain a 5-6 minute questionnaire (per meal recipient) up until a week ago.

Unemployment rate is underreported because states can't bring applicants onto their rolls fast enough for demand (if the state even accepts the applicant).

Rent payments, Mortgages, credit cards defaults are all growing. Once people exhaust their stopgap measures, the pressure for civil unrest grows quicker.

it reminds me of how i read somewhere the average citzen in china approves of their government while in the west this is hard to comprehend. think of the furor when google tried to do business there: dont they want the truth, dont they want freedom?? it turns out that actully more importance is placed on values like stability and order. its interesting to see in america the head nodding, that yes, health and safety is #1 above all else, no matter what cost (i dont mean economic cost!) -- i mean not freedom, not choice. anecdotally, it also reminds me of how doctors treated my terminally ill friend. submit yourself to drugs and surguries and live like hell but you will live a few months longer. instead the doctors should have been saying go away, live as best you can while you can! but that sentiment is technically against their duty. technically they were 'treating' her, 'helping' her. anyway this is just to say, a change is happening, a change possibly for the worse, but a change we ourselves are asking for (secure us, keep us safe, keep order... to hell with the truth and freedom, those values are for confederate flag waving 'rednecks')

Do you count it as "unrest" when people just quietly ignore the restrictions without actively protesting? Because I see a lot of that, and more every day. In some rural counties the local Sheriffs have unilaterally decided not to enforce statewide "shelter in place" orders. I'm not justifying that behavior but it will inevitably increase week by week.

How broad is your definition of unrest? If it’s as broad as ignoring laws while being quiet about it, then speeding could technically be seen as “unrest”. As for quietly disobeying the “shelter in place” orders, I don’t see that as unrest, but as I said earlier, depending on how broad your definition is, it could be.

There’s been plenty of strikes at Amazon, instacart, and others. Hell, there’s a growing movement for a rent strike in May as well.

Just go figure the only widely covered protests are the right wing astroturfed ones...

Social unrest?

How about some activism, social representation..? We don't really do that in the US these days.

...widely panned...

...in the corporate news media. They have never had the full story, and they have less and less of it recently. This knob has been turned too far; it's broken now. TPTB will remember they have other knobs (every other OECD nation is directly supporting citizens' incomes, for example) or the whole machine will catch fire.

> The only social unrest that has happened so far

Keyword being "so far". In Italy, where people have been out of work for months, things are starting to get dicey. Here are some links:

- [Sky News: Coronavirus: Italy becoming impatient with lockdown - and social unrest is brewing](https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-italy-becoming-impati...) - [The Guardian: Singing stops in Italy as fear and social unrest mount ](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/singing-stops-...)

There's more but I won't flood you. The point I'm trying to make is that things _so far_ are okay, but will get increasingly dicey if people don't have access to food and the necessities for living.

I am sorry to disappoint you but no, things are not starting to get dicey in Italy, at least not yet. I am italian and value that Guardian report as I value one written in "Novella 2000". Those reported are single episodes and UK journalism is trying to build a case out of nothing as happened other times in the past.

P.S: I live in Rome and here people are still singing. P.P.S: "Novella 2000" is the unquestionable italian king of trash gossip magazines.

for investors there is no gain so far, definitely worse than those who did not or could not invest. I think most if not all of "us" are still under deep water, my 401K became 201K a few weeks ago, now it's about 301K, so as a matter of fact, this is a loss year for people who saved to invest, worse than those who did not invest.

Very few rich people will actually get any richer. Most of them are heavily invested in stocks, which have plummeted, or owned or work for businesses which are being crushed. There are very, very few places to hide from what's going on.

One possible exception, and it's quite a small group really, may have had a lot of money in cash and bonds. They may be able to do quite well by buying or investing in businesses at relatively low prices and earn gains during the recovery. This is _not_ a bad thing. The economy desperately needs fresh investment to re-grow businesses, re-hire employees, pay salaries, rebuild supply chains. That takes a lot of capital investment.

I suppose another way would be to confiscate all their wealth and give it to the government to invest, but who do you trust to do that most efficiently and to the best economic effect. Government bureaucrats, or businesspeople with track records of investing in and growing businesses?

So on the business side now is not at all the time to bet on Socialism. We can't afford it at the best of times, let alone the worst. On the other hand, this crisis has starkly exposed the weaknesses of naked market capitalism. It's pretty obvious already that the European model of social democracy with single payer health systems and a robust social safety net has proved far better able to cope with this crisis. It's a system specifically designed to help people suffering hardships, and now it's doing exactly that on a massive scale. I think this comes out of the European experience in the two world wars. Existential crises in which all of society pulled together because we flat out had no other choice. We were all in it together. Now we're all in this together.

I suspect this will lead to similar realisations in the US. If big companies hit by disaster deserve bailing out for the common good to save jobs and economic resources, why are individuals hit by adverse circumstances any less deserving at a personal scale? If it's reasonable to help a business hit by a health crisis, why is it unreasonable to help a family? I'm no socialist, check another post on this discussion where I defend Conservatism here in the UK, but recognising that as a society we have obligations to each other isn't socialism, for me it's just pragmatism.

Very few rich people will actually get any richer, but that doesn't mean that yellow journalists and political activists won't be able to convince the general public that they did by carefully starting their measurements at around the time the stock market was it its lowest, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/24/billio...

Rich people will get poorer in the part of their wealth that is largely virtual anyway - stocks and other investments, the value of which is so far removed from the real world by now, it's all just make-believe. The actual physical assets that provide them with improved quality of life will be just fine, for long enough that all those virtual losses become gains.

But the poor and the middle class will be hit - are being hit already - at those physical assets. So their quality of life plummets directly and immediately.

Tech people will be hit much harder by this than they think. The STEM world is largely in denial because ultimately SV grew because of the last major recession. That won't be happening this time.

Startups are having massive layoffs right now, and each week bring companies further and further down the chain lay people off. I strongly suspect we'll see more major layoffs next week.

Most big tech companies are driven by either consumer spending and advertising. Before 2008 at lot of these companies still had not capture their full market share, so even in a recession there was room for growth. Now profits in these companies are based on market dominance. Even the big names will likely take a hit as the severity of this recession starts to take hold.

Finally in the Bay Area there's the looming problem that huge amounts of everything is paid for in RSUs (restricted stock units). The more ridiculous those total compensation packages may seem to outsiders the more they are built up from RSUs. In theory you should just live off base salary and RSU are the (very thick) icing on the cake, but this is unrealistic in SV. This stock part of the compensation goes a long way to paying for the insane housing in that region. Stocks drop and instantly Bay area income does to.

Tech will be effected, but a combination of naiveté and denial make conversations here seem like tech is safe.

Maybe Tech will in short term, but investors still will need to chaise yield in a zero interest rate environment.

As soon as things pass, money should start to flow back into startups.

Funding doesn’t matter much if your customer base either doesn’t exist anymore (eg b2b sass companies trying to build a foothold via other startups) or has drastically shrunk (b2c companies targeting consumers with reduced buying power).

> As soon as things pass

This may not be soon.

> Startups

The problem with a lot of startups is that they aren't making a profit when everything is going fine, let alone during a world wide pandemic, sometimes for years.

I see it as a wake up call for tech. It will suck for many people but in the long run it might be positive for the industry.

100% agree. The housing market in the bay area will go down even more. The last year changes in tax rules such as lower deduction for mortgage interest and municipal taxes had already weakened the market. With RSUs going down, even less people will be able to buy housing, driving the price down. I think my house lost 8% in the last year, pre-COVID19. Sucks for me as a home owner, but I really believed the housing market was over-inflated. If we have layoffs, in FAANGs, I suspect a lot of folks will not be able to pay there mortgage.

> With RSUs going down, even less people will be able to buy housing, driving the price down.

If we use the SP500 as a benchmark for RSU valuation, in 2020 those regressed, at their lows for the year, to mid 2017. They are currently at September of last year. In the past year, SP500 is up a quarter percent. I don't think tech workers were doomed in 2019, and nobody was buying a house on the assumption that RSUs would appreciate at 50 percent per annum.

> If we have layoffs, in FAANGs, I suspect a lot of folks will not be able to pay their mortgage.

Indeed million dollar mortgages are high stakes. If foreclosures actually become an issue I imagine the politicians will step in to bail someone out. Maybe the lenders, but probably homeowners directly since they vote. It's entirely possible we see a democratic congress throw out the SALT limits from the tax reforms.

I wouldn't count on it. The mortgage market is divided between conventional and jumbo loans[1]. Any bail outs will likely focus on conventional mortgages. The current administration seems to relish in screwing over blue states, and the house of representatives has a long list of negotiating priorities. They might be able to negotiate the SALT limits, but I don't see jumbo loan bail outs making the cut.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/we...

wow, those poor bay area house owners.

Yes - there seems to be an assumption that they have jobs until the money runs out.

I also feel pretty strongly that many companies have been hoarding engineers/etc. because they've been so flush with cash from places like SoftBank and because there has been no expectation of making a profit for the last 10 years. Then they make them work on a VPs pet-projects with not much business value and those will be reviewed fairly soon.

>Finally in the Bay Area there's the looming problem that huge amounts of everything is paid for in RSUs (restricted stock units).

The FED and Treasury have "united" in some sense, and we have unlimited (trillions) QE flowing into equities. So unless the FED stops the money printing party, I'm not so confident this will happen.

>"The STEM world is largely in denial because ultimately SV grew because of the last major recession. That won't be happening this time."

Says who? Are you really claiming knowledge of what the future portends?

If you are certain of the future-- you would make a bit bet. Have you bet money on it? I doubt it. If you truly thought this was the case, you'd have purchased some options ;)

> Lenders and banks were supposed to start going easy on loans but ive had two emails and a phone call about the loan for my Silverado this month and wouldnt you know, the caller was excited to mention my stimulus check.

Don't settle for this. My niece had her car repossessed 3 weeks ago. They said for $18k cash she could have it. We told them to pound sand. She's borrowing cars and getting rides, but next week she'll have a decent car, and I'm going to record a lien on it with the county so nobody can take it if things get worse and she has to declare bankruptcy.

Make them an offer: for $1000 cash, you'll park it in the driveway, unlocked, with the keys in the visor on any day they want to schedule. You're going to buy it back at the auction for 1/3 of what you owe. Or they can work with you, politely. If they take your car, they're just as screwed as you - possibly more so. The used car market is a bloodbath and they all know it's going to be far, far worse in 6 months.

The rich get richer because they know how to take advantage of situations like this. As a diesel tech, you almost certainly have the knowledge to nurse an old beater along and take advantage of your lenders weakness. Please do it.

> and I'm going to record a lien on it with the county so nobody can take it if things get worse and she has to declare bankruptcy

This is brilliant. I have never considered using such a tool in my travels, but have added it to my tool belt. Thank you.

> The rich get richer because they know how to take advantage of situations like this.

Preach!

Can someone explain how this works?

OP's niece takes on the liability as the owner (ie she hits someone and causes harm her insurance doesn't cover), but OP retains legal claim against the property, preventing someone else from obtaining it through a legal judgement or similar proceedings.

Right, if it gets taken away it gets given to me as the senior lien holder. For best legal protection, I should loan her money with some nominal interest rate.

A distant family member did this on the house of one of their kids, and it saved them from losing it in a foreclosure. The other lender was so angry with them for refusing to release their lien; but they couldn't legally force them to do it.

So you're paying cash for the car? If there's no loan, who exactly is going to take it away?

Any creditor you can’t pay who goes through the trouble of getting a judgement against you. This could be a credit card company, a healthcare provider, anyone you owe money to but can’t afford to pay.

How does this work with an asset the size of a house? Does having as little as say $5,000 in the house when the the other lender has $200,000 in give you this power to stop foreclosure?

Maybe not stop it, but make it a really big pain. They'll need you to sign off on court filings, etc. If you're obstinate, you can certainly encourage them to "deal with this house later".

Don't house loans require an upfront disclosure of leins against the property?

This would only work in an "easy money" period, during which loan originators are eager to ignore lending standards on second mortgages. Such periods will come around again, though.

Yes. There might be a state where someone holding a lien on a house can prevent a first mortgage holder from foreclosing, but I'd certainly recommend someone talking to an attorney before trying this.

You can't do it (unless it's a mechanic's lein) if there's already a lein on the title.

It doesn't. Bankruptcy courts and courts in general are pretty wise to the idea of "debts" and dubious last minute transfers to family members, close relatives, and so on. This guy is definitely not the first person to think of the idea.

Correct. You can't magically draft a senior lien. Unless it's a house in an HOA in a super lien state. Or you're the government and taxes are owed. So there are some instances where a senior lien can be recorded later, but an outstanding auto-loan - not that I'm aware of.

Skirting what's owed, playing games with manufactured leverage, getting repossessed - these are all the factors that cause people with lower credit scores to pay a lot more for their loans.

The used car market has been inflated for years. 100k+ mile vehicles selling for over half their new price makes no sense to me.

It's because of the long term 72-84 month loans. People are trading in used cars for close to the loan payoff amounts - which is still pretty high.

GM had 0% interest for 84 month loans on their trucks for awhile there.

something is very wrong with the lending market when it makes sense to give people free money.

The dealerships are making their money with various add-on packages now, to try to bump up the sale price. It isn't even in your favour to offer cash in most cases.

You're not giving them free money, you're getting them to pay you a lot more in total over many years by selling them a much more expensive vehicle up front. Instead of, say, $20k over 3 years, they can get $40k+ over 7 years for selling a product that doesn't remotely cost them twice as much to build. It's more profit for them.

These 0% 7 year loans are not coming from banks. They're coming from the car companies. They're a sales tool.

If you take the 0% financing, you miss out on the $4,500 "customer cash" discount. They're just moving numbers around.

Talk to the federal reserve.

That should only change the asking price, not the actual sales price. Its not like the dealers are going to eat the loss. They just roll what they might lose into the new loan.

I dont have access to the actual sale prices at auction to know what the true worth of these cars is though. I would guess half of the retail asking price?

people can't afford cars, simple as that. otherwise loan terms wouldn't be 84 months.

Car manufactures favor margins over moving metal. They've learned that long loan terms don't reduce sales, as most people define affordable to be, they can afford the monthly payment.

And since manufactures own the lending arm, and the sales arm, they enjoy higher margins, plus more in interest payments. Not everyone is going to qualify for that 0% interest. Plus, it keeps dealers happy because they can squeeze in bullshit fees to pad the sale price.

It makes sense if the car tends to last 350k+ miles and has only been gently used. There are at least a few models that have pretty consistently been getting up to that or higher before major repair is needed since 2010 or so. I will say I think quality hybrids (again, gently used) are worth more than a lot of their counterparts on this point.

Depends where you live and how much you drive. While the situation is much much better than it used to be, cars in places like the Northeast still tend to start getting serious rust damage after 10 years or so.

That is definitely true. The salt-rust issue should play a huge role in resale value. I grew up in an area with this situation, and I knew a lot of people who would only buy used cars sourced from southern states because of it.

Gently used at 100k seems like a strong ask. I commute two hours a day and get around ~20k miles a year. The car would be five years old at the point of 100k. Quicker than that and the person that owned it drove the crap out of it. Plastic and trim is squeaking, stains, scratches, etc. I dont personally care about any of that but I expect it to be reflected heavily in the price.

Then you look at the asking prices for larger SUVs with 200k+ miles and its even crazier.

My first car was 10 years old when I got it, model year 1986. I did maintenance myself with the help of my father - oil, brakes, rotors, that kind of thing. It was 5 more years before it needed real work (bad alternator, bad fuel pump) and another 3ish years before major failure. A couple grand kept it on the road. After I sold it I still saw it around town for a number of years.

My point is, cars last far, far longer than we generally assume if you take reasonable care of them!

It's possible if you're like my friend whose job was to drive all around Europe hauling specialised parts for construction equipment, sometimes doing 2k km in a single day.

I think he did 60k km (37.5k miles) during the first year, but you couldn't tell that from the shape the car was in, since he cared for both the exterior and interior.

The only thing that showed any visible signs of aging were the windshield wipers - he had so much on his plate that he couldn't squeeze out a few minutes to refresh them.

tbf 37.5k miles really isn’t a lot. in my area in the US it’s common for people to push 25k - 30k a year just on their commute

And that's my point - you can do 100k miles in less than four years.

Is the car "heavily used" after that? I would say that aside from the driver's seat there's probably no clear indication of that.

Those SUVs were expensive new as well. If you head over to the new car lot, it's not hard to spend $60k on an SUV, even a domestic one with a Chevy|Ford|Jeep badge.

These are the kinds of vehicles that everyone wants to drive (along with trucks) and 72/84 month loans have been common for a while now (even for lightly used cars). So that sets price floor for trade-ins, since people can only roll over so much negative equity. Then you have to factor in that car sales in 2009-2012 were 50-60% of what they were in 2019.

So, demand is high, and supply is low. It makes sense that used SUVs are expensive. Once you start looking at less desirable models, like coupes and sedans, then prices drop considerably.

Don’t forget leases! Many of the luxury SUVs are leased and traded every 2-3 years, putting further pressure on prices.

I recently entered the used car market in the US and I was really shocked at how expensive cars are here compared with Europe.

Americans have bought the idea that everything in the US is so cheap, hook line and sinker, and don't question it. As an American living abroad I hear it all the time. Then I actually put up prices and pretty much everything is cheaper but labor where I am. Everything you need - cars, transport, healthcare, education, good quality fresh food - are usually pretty expensive these days in the US. More niche stuff like hobby equipment yes can be cheaper in the US due to market size.

I'm guessing this had largely to do with the recession?

People weren't buying new cars and so the supply for used cars dropped (I remember dealers calling me begging me to sell my Ford Edge) but the demand increased exponentially because it made more sense to buy a used car, then to get a new one.

This is turn increased the price to many models and in some cases, a lot. Hybrids and electrics shot through the roof because people were trying to save money on gas. More reliable models from Honda, Toyota and Subaru also went way up in value.

Don't forget that the government paid $3B to destroy 665k perfectly good cars in order to drum up demand for new cars.

Low end car flipper here, it really depends on what slice of the used car market you're talking about. Think about what kind of people buy what vehicles, the kind of money they have and where the supply of those vehicles comes from and it all makes sense IMO.

Used cars are an immensely diverse range of "products". You've got $500 Aveos that Jimbo or Manuel will have no regrets hauling an I-beam on the roof of, you've got $25k 25yo 4Runners that 25yo software engineers with six figures of salary and minimal expensive responsibilities will talk themselves into paying asking price for because it's what they grew up getting dragged around in.

The market for anything new enough to get a loan on is always inflated, obviously, that's what easy financing does.

For the last 4yr or so the bottom the the market, non-japanese compacts and subcompacts with 15k+, 90s junk that needs work, Altimas in perfect condition but with a time bomb CVT and 80k on them, etc, unfashionable midsize SUVs from the '00s was just fine. You could pick up running, driving, has one or two known mechanical issues that need to be addressed 10-25yo vehicles for $1500 all day long, non-running for even less.

The market for low mile, low flair, A to B commuting and family hauling vehicles in good cosmetic condition that people who think "good schools" means "no poors" and worry about what their neighbors think of their lawn buy for their kids to go to college in or slightly less well off kids have to buy for themselves after college were what was inflated, like 5k+ for a Japanese crossover from '01 with 250k on it inflated. These vehicles have become less and less common because the white collar upper middle class crowd that keeps things nice but changes cars decently regularly has been leasing more and more.

If you were wiling to clean the ever living crap out of a kid-stained interior or get some cosmetic body damage fixed (or just ignore it and live with the ugliness), or (get your pearls ready folks), <gasp>, drive a domestic that isn't a pickup, you could get cars of the same, age miles and mechanical condition for $1500-$3000 instead of $4k on up. These vehicles are plentiful because the middle class has been buying them CPO off lease and using the piss out of them hauling around their families, commuting a ton of miles, etc, etc and then ditching them for another one when they feel they are too old/beat. This is the niche I specialize in and I think these vehicles are a great value.

Basically the stuff that white collar professionals feel is the bare minimum of what they or their kids can drive without looking below their class has been ludicrously overpriced because (surprise, surprise) those people have a decent chunk of change to throw around and supply has been dwindling.

This might be a dumb question, but wouldn't whoever sold the car/provided financing have the lien on the title? Wouldn't sale/financing be contingent on no other liens on the car/property?

Yes, this is why OP would provide the financing himself or pay cash.

This is such horrid advice. She will have to declare bankruptcy to discharge the auto loan and 18k debt may not be sufficient to guarantee she can. Worse, that 18k will now have fees added to it for the repossession and late payments. The chance of getting the car back through auction are near nil for many reasons, from that auctions do not necessarily take place in the same locale to it can be months before the car gets to that point as the paper work has to work through the system, a system sufficiently hampered by the CV19

Now we don't know the full extent of the original poster's loan issues but the best bet is to try to arrange payment changes with the lien holder. Never ever advise anyone to walk away, that is the worst thing you can ever do.

The worst advice hardly, you’re exaggerating. Your credit will take a hit for 7 years, which is definitely a long time but the worst of it is you will pay more up front in deposits and pay high interest rates from loans. I’ve walked away from more than $18k during the last crisis and here I am today with a great credit score and am looking at buying a house potentially soon (or at least was pre COVID). The worst thing you can do is to continue paying on something you know you’ll lose anyway, causing even more financial problems for yourself.

> No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

I think this is possibly the single biggest long term problem we're going to face as a result of all this. Economic recessions will come and go. But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids. They will be left permanently behind without a serious concerted effort by every school district to make up for lost time. The bar (which is already dismally low) will have to be lowered further for them to graduate, and how/when will it ever be raised back again?

There was some discussion of aspects of this yesterday and there have been a few articles. The general consensus is that kids who have good home environments and have at least some interest in learning will mostly do fine. Some may even do better than normal.

But kids in poor home situations who were already barely scraping by--if that--will basically lose the year and everything that implies. In some areas, double-digit percentages of students have basically gone incommunicado from their schools.

To make matters even worse, the jobs those kids would get to offset a lack of schooling won't be available now.

I don't know if they'll be roaming the streets (the police in America are pretty unforgiving), but I can certainly say they will have it worse than ~2001 and ~2008 graduates.

What does it imply?

If any school district cares, all the kids will essentially end up repeating a grade. This is not the end of the world. If anything, it might improve student achievement. (Students who are born right after the cutoff for a particular elementary school class, in aggregate, outperform the ones born just before, the youngest in the class.)

Outside of college-bound seniors — a special case — the main price is their time, same as anyone else, and their caregivers' time.

You don't understand how urban school districts work if you think you can just get a grade to "repeat itself." Kids will drop out once they're 18 like flies.

> If any school district cares, all the kids will essentially end up repeating a grade.

It sounds more like you haven't thought this through.

I shouldn't assume school districts care

voted +1 touché

1) there's no way parents will be OK with this, and

2) the count of districts ready to have a 7.7% student headcount increase in one year (you're doing this for 13 grades at once, plus have another coming in) on top of whatever growth they already expected approaches zero. I mean, hell, think of what that would do to the teacher labor market alone if even 10% of districts all did that, putting aside things like building space and bussing.

Yeah, that's what really sucks about this pandemic compared to more physical natural disasters. Since the pandemic hurts people directly and not material things, it effectively increases inequality. Those living at the margins are hit hardest while those will lots of money and capital see most of that stay preserved.

I think we're gonna have to talk about repeating the school year come fall.

Schools are not going to repeat for everyone, if only because it would be monumentally unfair (and counterproductive) to force students who learned the required curriculum to repeat a grade. But if you just give everyone a pass and throw students into the next grade who basically skipped a semester, that's not going to play out well either.

ADDED: What I suspect happens is that most schools bend over backwards to pass everyone they feel they possibly can and adjust lesson plans when schools come back to recognize that many students didn't really learn much the previous semester.

> Missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids.

Which subject can they study at school that they cannot study at home?

There is very little that students can't study at home given at least some parental support. However, it's pretty clear that a significant number of students have basically given up on the school year.

Not being in bone-crushing poverty with parents that are unable to help them.

I have several kids at home, all at different elementary grade levels and it’s not at all easy to keep them on track, motivated, and actually learning something while trying to get work done myself. The kids have been cooped up and its hard to keep the kids from bickering. Schools are not helping. They are giving assignments but telling kids things won’t be graded or are optional, etc... so kids don’t want to do some things. We have to undo that and push them to do it.

Given how competitive our society has become I am terrified that we will get behind.

I wonder why we have collectively decided to make society so competitive. We have more technology and resources at our disposal than ever before. We could make things easier on ourselves not harder. What’s the point? (I don’t believe all the competition and thrashing about is improving performance. Did stack ranking improve performance at Microsoft?)

TL/DR - Students in poverty lose more ground when not in school than other students. Having an extra three months at home will exacerbate this.

In the US we have a school system where the children are off from school for about ten weeks in the summer. Educators have tested the children at the beginning of the school year and at the end of the school year to study the effect of this.

Students with decent to above average socioeconomic factors tested at about the same level from the end of the year to the beginning of the next.

Students with poor socioeconomic factors tested measurably worse at the beginning of the next school year compared to the end of the previous year.

They also looked at the delta from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year. There was no significant difference in outcomes when socioeconomic status was taken into account.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240707200...

Some of them have essential workers as parents and are left unsupervised during the day.

Some have parents ill equipped to assist them with school work those parents never completed themselves. (Hell, I went to college, and my kids' math work is a challenge.)

Some have no access to internet.

I saw an article the other day (I'm unfortunately having trouble Googling it up) that said some school districts have 15-20% students they still haven't managed to connect to teachers yet.

My son's school started remote classes this week. More than a third are missing in action. Naturally it is the third that benefited the most from the structure and support of school.

Lets be honest. Many people just aren't cut out to teach many subjects, and a lot of people just didn't pass many high school subjects, let alone have a good enough understanding to teach them

English & Language Arts, including writing. Even for competent parents, unless you fully understand the curriculum and know how to teach it, providing direct instruction or enabling self-teaching in these areas is FAR harder than for math & science ... until you get into lab sciences where access to materials becomes problematic.

I missed pretty much the same amount of school during SARS in Hong Kong in 2003. This was before any sort of remote learning was possible, I didn’t do school work for pretty much a whole semester. I didn’t feel that this held me back at all, however there were a few key differences in my end:

- I was in 4th grade where school was less rigorous

- I went to a private international school

- While my parents were busy working, I still had a stable home environment to count on

I expect it's a bigger problem for high schoolers in general--especially seniors if it ends up meaning some students don't graduate and just drop out.

If I think back to my grade school experience, I was admittedly a pretty good student but I can't really imagine any single semester being all that critical. (And, in fact, I ended up skipping 8th grade.)

If you went to a private intl school, I imagine the tuition wasn't cheap. That right there is the difference. When you're paying big bucks, your parents will want to do everything to make sure you don't fall behind. I assume with that kind of education you also went on to complete a university degree of some kind.

Contrast that to the public high school system in the US, where resources are lacking, and students may not even have the tools at home to follow through with remote learning, let alone hope to go to college, which is still 5 figures a year minimum.

> still 5 figures a year minimum

Speaking from personal experience, if you did decently well academically in high school, you can get upwards of 16K a year in grants alone (Pell Grant ~6K, State Grant ~5K, University Grant ~5K) if your situation is documented poor based on your parent's and your tax returns.

My state school (UT Austin) charges tuition of about $5.5k/semester if you take >= 12 hours of classes a semester.

Of course, I realize this advice only applies to those who are demonstrably poor and perform decently academically. But college is (better than) free if you fall in this category.

The problem comes with families who aren't "poor" but aren't rich enough to afford spending an extra $20k/year ($11.k for UT Austin plus $10k for living expenses) for four years, for each kid. If you have three kids it's like buying an extra house, which isn't that affordable for most families.

Often times when parents are taking international positions for their firm, the employer will pay for private international school.

>The bar (which is already dismally low) will have to be lowered further for them to graduate, and how/when will it ever be raised back again?

You don't have to lower the bar. There are other options. There is no fundamental law of physics that says a generation has to graduate at age X, so we -- the society -- should be perfectly able to delay that process for a year, instead of lowering the bar.

That said, there's something deeply wrong either with the society as a whole or with the HN audience if you read "poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food" and you say that the biggest long term problem is the lowering of the bar because kids skipped school.

The longer you delay graduation past the age of legal majority, the more students will drop out and [attempt to] enter the workforce.

Not every kid is willing and able to live with their current parent or guardian after they are legally able to either move out on their own or be evicted.

It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.

> It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.

Yes, that's why there are "poor kids roaming the street like packs of feral dogs" in the first place, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That's the big problem.

So let's not pretend that lowering the bar is what's going to make those kids catch a whiff of good fortune. The US system grinds people like that into dirt and that won't change with a single decision, be that decision to add a school year or to lower the bar.

I am not advocating lowering any bars. I'm just saying that those kids are as screwed now as they have ever been, and that this particular misfortune will not play in their favor in the future, as employers, government, and nongovernment institutions will be just as unsympathetic then as they are now.

A sufficient proportion of the US is willing to let those kids fall by the wayside, rather than do whatever can be done to boost them over this hurdle. It won't be adding another school year, and it won't be lowering the bar. It might be by providing housing, food, and petty spending allowance for over-18 kids still attempting to finish their high-school diploma.

>I am not advocating lowering any bars.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your reply. My comment was a reply to a comment about lowering the bar and I thought you were arguing that same point.

>I'm just saying that those kids are as screwed now as they have ever been, and that this particular misfortune will not play in their favor in the future, as employers, government, and nongovernment institutions will be just as unsympathetic then as they are now.

I completely agree with that assessment.

Students attend school for 13 years. Let's say they miss out on 5/8 of a year because of this (I think the number is closer to 1/3, but it's not a big difference). So, instead of getting 100% of a "dismally low" education, they're only getting 95.2%. That hardly seems like a devastating loss to me, either from a knowledge or economic perspective.

I don't know if the US is the same as other countries.. but in the UK your birthdate defines how much schooling you get.

I'm a summer child so my first year of school consisted of a two week introduction and then the summer holiday.

My best friend at school and all of the higher performing kids (except me) were born in the first half of the year so had an extra 6 months of schooling.

I thought everyone in the UK started school together, in September?

Not in the early 1980s at least. You're put in a school year based on birthday, the school year starting in September. You then started at school on your 5th birthday.

It may be different nowadays; it would make way more sense to have everyone start in September. I live in The Netherlands and here kids start as soon as they turn 4. They then spend two-three years in the young kids class depending on maturity.

> They will be left permanently behind without a serious concerted effort by every school district to make up for lost time.

Left behind who, exactly? Everyone is out of school.

You should rethink that. It's the poverty that these kids and everybody else will be subjected to that will have a much larger impact. If every one of these kids were sitting at home in a financially secure household, I guarantee you they'd all be fine.

>But missing 5/8ths of a school year

Yes I'm sure many did not plan on having a snap year. Though it does seem to be the case. Looked cool in the movies, real life - not so much.

Let alone the whole financial impact upon university students whose lifelong debts they build up in education fees, will also entail the everyday costs of living as well. Most of which work summer to pay for that and now, had a real kick upon that. Now that whole aspect hasn't even been touched up and does seem to be one that needs addressing. Heck, i'm sure some parents will be impacted equally. After all if a child is effectively held back a year, then equally government support should for that child equally be extended a year beyond the normal age cut-off's.

Though I'm 50+ and no children, I'm mindful that the impact has much minutia.

May I ask you a question though - when you do get back to school after this `snap`, will your drive for learning and making the most of the class's be more, or the same as it was without this pause? I ask as I suspect many student will be more focused and keener to learn after this break as for many if you deny somebody something or remove it - they tend to appreciate what they are missing more - something we all do in many respects.

When I was in third grade, we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales. This is material I forgot pretty much as soon as it was over. When I graduated high school, my mom and I went through all my old elementary school material to see what we'd like to keep for sentimental value and what we're okay with throwing out to make room in the garage, and we were just overwhelmed by the sheer massive volume of paper that came out of that whale unit.

There is so much redundancy in elementary school education that you can take out a large chunk of it and still teach the same amount of information. School could be way, way denser than it is. Hell, even in high school, a full year would cover the same amount of material as a single semester of one of my college classes, and my college classes only met 3 times a week (for the same exact class length as my high school classes; or fewer than 3 times a week for longer class length).

I took a bunch of communication college classes while I was in high school. High school and K-12 are essentially glorifies day care and much less about the education. I was learning a lot faster with the condensed college classes than the high school classes which dragged on for the whole year.

Elementary school is not just about learning academic stuff but about personality development as well. Unless a child is very gifted, it will also get bored extremely fast.

Middle and high school is for everybody and college/University is for the smart 50% (or whatever).

It's natural that you cover more in less time in college/university because students that go there are already smarter than most.

If you try to apply the same standards to high school, you will push the dropout rate into 60 or more.

Conversely, when I was in 6th grade, I begged and pleaded with my parents to try a new distance learning pilot program our state was doing. They allowed me to do it for 7th grade, and the lack of oversight and discipline led to me being a complete year behind in mathematics when I went back to regular school for the 8th grade. I never recovered, and ended up dropping out 2 years later.

Sure there is redundancy in elementary education. But middle and high school kids missing out on a year of math can be fatal. Smart determined kids can make it up. But the vast majority will be completely lost.

Missing any math in any year is a disaster. There is a real continuity in math teaching starting from addition through high school. I've seen so many people who gave up early on, and they have _no hope_ of making it up later on.

And it continues beyond. I tutored in a graduate business program. And math was absolutely the stumbling block for the students I was tutoring. It was all pretty simple stuff. Graphs for economics, solving equations, very simple differentials to find maxima or minima (didn't really need to understand calculus because these were such simple cases), etc. They were pretty much all totally lost.

It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.

And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.

The thing is, you can 100% learn the gap if some is missed. The problem comes when the gap isn't filled at all and then the prerequisites for future material aren't there. I don't think that will be the case with the current situation.

High school: 45-50ish hours per week of class time and homework, waking up at 7:00 every friggin' morning to rush out the door, stuck in a building with little exposure to sunlight for hours on end. Work often assigned one day and due the very next.

College: 25-30 hours per week of class time and homework, walks outdoors between classes, long, leisurely breaks throughout the day. Usually at most 3 early wake-up days a week, and often zero. Work almost never due the very next day. It was like a goddamn vacation, after high school.

(granted I attended a low-ranked university and I gather it's not that easy everywhere, but we were still covering material much faster and with far higher expectations for work than in high school, yet it was way the hell easier just because the conditions were more humane and there was far less wasted time—on the flip side, my high school wasn't in any way prestigious or notable either, yet still demanded all that time)

I attended a low performing inner city high school and went to an ivy. I still feel that way.

> we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales.

The point of most of that is not to teach you about whales (though whales are cool). It's to teach you:

* How to read and process written material.

* How to organize your thoughts and write grammatically correct sentences.

* The moral value that science is useful and nature is important to preserve.

It's the same reason they still teach cursive. Cursive matters fuck-all, but training fine motor skills in general is very useful and cursive is just a semi-arbitrary means to that end.

It’ll also discriminate on educational and monetary lines. Highly educated households are better prepared to self educate, both in terms of experience and available resources. While they probably won’t do as well as teachers did, they’ll do better than less educated households, conferring a competitive advantage.

> But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids.

It's not. The amount of learning that happens in a typical school year is not very high. The world can skip an entire year of school, and the educational cost it will pay will not be very high.

The cost of missing a year of childcare, that school provides, on the other hand, is pretty massive.

This sounds like 1970s' movies depicting groups of teenage and younger kids roaming the streets throughout the night after all the community centers, arcades, and malls [i.e. any communal source of entertainment] closed. Midnight skateboarding in abandoned lots, drunk 11-year-olds, graffiti, sneaking out the window as a matter of course ... parents having no idea where their children go at night [remember "Do you know where your children are?"? Forgive a "wrong decade" but the point stands] ...

Of course this is all "crazed cinema depicting crazed societal horror", but are we truly expecting a return to such times and activities?

> But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids

If only there was a way we could give them access to the entirety of the world's knowledge, a million lifetimes of recorded video, and the world's best teachers for near zero incremental cost, right in their homes. If only.

We're gonna flub this one because "Netflix and chill" is the best this tech generation can muster in the face of the worst crisis in recent history.

Squandered.

I weep almost every day because our entire communications infrastructure and online experience has been tailored for our own. goddamn. greed.

For primary school, it's a lot more about the child care than it is about the education. At that age the most important thing is safety and enrichment, something provided equally well (well, probably better) by unschooling. Something all my neighbors seem to be doing right now.

We could come out of this with a generation of kids that have learned better how to play and how to let boredom cultivate creativity. Depends a lot on the home situation though.

What you're saying matches up with the reports I've been seeing.

I think a lot of HN readers are simply unable to believe such a thing can occur; the recessions of the past thirty years were mild compared to what's happening right now. Personally, I'm absolutely terrified.

Agree, 2008 was the financial system having a heart attack and the economy being hurt as a result. 2020 is the economy having a heart attack.

What bothers me more than anything else is the unpredictability of it all. We don't know how this thing will pan out. There is way too much conflicting data about it. Will it burn out and mutate into less lethal strains? Will we get it in the waves? Will it be a seasonal thing we have to live with? Will there be a cure or better, a vaccine? Or will it be like the common cold with no vaccine?.

We don't know. And without that knowledge, you can't plan for the future. I wouldn't want to invest money into any business right now. Who knows what shape we will be in in 12 months time?

COVID thankfully is less likely to mutate than other types of viruses, so once COVID-19 is gone, it will most likely stay gone. However, gone here meaning world wide.

How much the world can safely open up businesses is directly correlated to testing. Eg, it's easy for schools to open up when they require testing every day for every student when they come in. On the other extreme, it's hard for schools to open up when there is no testing being done.

A second and even third wave is highly likely without proper testing. It will take longer for a vaccine to be created than we can shelter in place, unless we get very lucky.

The alternative is a country does not shelter in place, and it builds up herd immunity. A lot of people will die. It's not the ideal option.

At the end of the day it comes down to tests. The more we have the more the economy can open up.

This is something I see from coverage of "lock-down protesters." There's a concentration of imagery, so bad associations can be made, pandering to those with left-leaning viewpoints. The underlying message is, "see, we don't have to pay any attention to the ravings of these crazy deplorables."

Such patterns were also at play in the media coverage of minorities in the 1900's and early 20th century. They're just being used by a different set of people with different directional vectors.

What you have to remember, is that a lot of people have been given this "deal:"

How about you have a period of unplanned, involuntary unemployment with little prospect of finding alternative employment in your areas of expertise? Okay, thanks, bye!

It's even worse because the lockdowns hurt young people economically for the sake of the health of the elderly. The lockdowns are financed by debt which will be paid by the young. The young are also probably much poorer and browner than the elderly.

Right! Also, the lockdowns benefit well-heeled professionals who can work from home while not straining their safety nets. On the other hand, lots of working class and lower middle class people are very strained!

If the country feels rudderless and without leadership, it is.

The top is, well, obviously, useless.

State leadership is all doing different things, which is, in some ways, a good thing, but I don't hear much in a concrete way about what the plan is to address this all over the next 12-18 months. We hear a lot about when we'll "open things back up" or phased re-openings, but nothing whatsoever about a strategy -- THESE are the tests we'll use, THIS antibody test to let people work THOSE jobs, THIS kind of contact tracing.

I'm not quite sure if the states are hoping the federal government will come out with some unifying strategy/process/materials/procedures at some point, or what, but it sure ain't happening.

Record low unemployment in almost every category before the media panic-machine induced over-reaction[1]. My bet is we will rebound just fine.

[1] https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

The back-to-work strategy will most likely be led by large businesses. They have resources, they will decide what strategies they want to follow, and they're all working on that now.

And really, no one can argue with them on that. A governor or president can order businesses closed, they can lift that order, but they can't force businesses to go back to work before the business leaders and customers are ready to.

What governments need to do is clarify the new rules of the road for businesses. For example companies that used to be heavily restricted on how they can use health information are now going to need to test all their employees, make decisions based on those test results, provide protective medical equipment, etc.

> I'm not quite sure if the states are hoping the federal government will come out with some unifying strategy/process/materials/procedures at some point, or what, but it sure ain't happening.

They're not - most of the megaregions are forming interstate compacts to coordinate medium to long term strategy. Colorado and Nevada just joined the Western States Pact which CA/OR/WA started a few weeks ago around the same time the East Coast created their own. I think the Great Lakes states have one as well.

> nobody seems to care.

A lot of people care. Many of those who care believe that the situation we're in right now is caused (or at least greatly exacerbated) by incompetent leadership at the national level, but unfortunately that view is not shared by a substantial fraction of the American people, and against that kind of headwind there is only so much we can do.

On top of that, an even greater fraction of people who believe that the administration is incompetent, believe the correct solution to that predicament is to vote the opposite party come election time. It’s as if change in the election system isn’t even an option.

You have to pick your battles. Changing the election system is really hard. There are legitimate policy disagreements one can have with the Democrats, but one thing you cannot say about them is that they are brazenly corrupt and hostile to facts. Donald Trump is both. He is proud of these things. He thinks they're features, not bugs, and about 40% of American voters seem to agree. As long as that remains the case, nothing else matters. Policy is moot when the country is run by a personality cult.

This is true, but it's important to note that it applies to Republicans generally. Trump isn't special. He is the results of decades of Republican policy and is supported by Republicans even to this day.

Yes but that still ultimately goes back to support from a very large number (tens of millions) of voters.

Certainly Democrats are just as corrupt and hostile to facts as Republicans (the set of denied facts will be different of course). Only a partisan would claim otherwise.

Can you give some examples?

Of course. Many large cities have been run exclusively by Democrats for decades and are notoriously corrupt, for example Chicago and Illinois more generally.

The facts that are denied will be those that run counter to the prevailing sacred cows of whatever movement it is. One that especially irks me on the Democratic side of the fence is denying that the minimum wage has a cost in jobs, despite near universal belief from economists that this is the case.

That’s not an example that is a vague hand-wavy allegation. Which cities? What specific acts of corruption?

Actually, it is an example. These reports by the University of Illinois at Chicago have more details. The start of the most recent report:

"Chicago continues to be the most corrupt city in the country and Illinois remains the third most corrupt state."

https://pols.uic.edu/chicago-politics/anti-corruption-report...

Yes, you're right. Sorry, I was reading your comment while waiting in line at the grocery store and I was not focused.

But that is one example. You said many large cities have been run exclusively by Democrats for decades and are notoriously corrupt. One is not many. AFAICT Chicago and Illinois are the exception rather than the rule among Democratically controlled cities and states.

Also, Democrats don't exhibit pride in their corruption the way Trump does. When Democratic corruption is exposed, Democrats seem to be, for the most part, ashamed of it. It's not just Trump's corruption that is problematic, it's the way he wears is proudly as if it were a badge of honor. When Rod Blagojevich tried to sell Obama's Senate seat, he was put in prison. And then he was pardoned by (of course) Donald Trump!

Also, your (one) example deals only with corruption. I cited two problems, the second being denial of facts. Do you dispute that?

Not to step into your discussion with the other guy but examples are so numerous that I know of three more off the top of my head. The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth , Mohammed Nuru's Penthouse, Leland Yee and Shrimp Boy.

> The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth

First hit on Google is:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

First occurrence of the string "corrupt" in that article:

“Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt..."

> Mohammed Nuru's Penthouse, Leland Yee and Shrimp Boy

OK, I'll concede those two. But both of those examples are from one city (San Francisco), so now at best we're up to two cities. That's not a "large number" in my book. Also, the Nuru example seems pretty petty (yeah, he built himself a nicer office than he should have. That hardly seems comparable to me to the President of the United States proposing to hold the G7 summit at a property that he personally owns.) And both Nuru and Yee were ultimately disgraced. Yee is still in prison.

At the level of Nuru and Yee, there are literally tens of thousands of Democratic officials of similar rank througout the country. Two examples of corruption, one of them petty, and both of them ultimately disgraced, hardly seems like a pattern to me.

By way of very stark contrast, the entire Republican party is covering up for Donald Trump.

And none of this speaks to the other problem I cited: denial of facts.

What would you require in order to move from your position?

Evidence, preferably all collected in one place and properly analyzed. Something like this:

https://rantt.com/gop-admins-had-38-times-more-criminal-conv...

Ah, that would be a pretty hard task for me to compile. Thank you for being explicit about your standard of evidence!

You don't have to do it yourself. You can find someone else who has done it and give me reference.

But I suspect you will be unable to find someone who has done it because it's simply not true.

Keystone XL, lack of real consequences for BP over the oil spill, just to name a couple.

Someone on Twitter described the stock market as a graph of rich people feelings and, facetious as that is, I wonder if there's truth to it. A market driven partly by emotion could mean a stock hysteresis where the market's long-term reaction lags behind the economic reality like you describe. The recent headline "16 million people just got laid off but U.S. stocks had their best week in 45 years" is the most mind-shatteringly insane headline I've ever seen.

The other thing to remember is that nobody actually loses anything when stock prices go down. Everyone still owns the same stocks, in the aggregate, and no actual material property is lost. Just the valuation changes. To insist that valuations cannot be allowed to go down as a matter of government policy is totally bonkers.

> Everyone still owns the same stocks, in the aggregate, and no actual material property is lost. Just the valuation changes.

But the valuation is the number that actually matters, not the number of stocks you own. You can't buy food with stocks, you have to exchange them for money first. If the price of stocks goes down then you own less real value.

Right but just as the total number of outstanding stocks remains the same, so does the total number of outstanding dollars. Both the total stocks and the total dollars remain unchanged, they just changed hands. For every loser of money, there is also a winner. Just because you paid too much does not mean that the federal government should come running to bail you out. In the aggregate, nothing is created or destroyed except for illusions.

It might help to remember that a recession is economic decline over a period of time, so a steep decline over a very short period is not considered a recession. As we move into a longer period of time (in the past, the rule was two quarters, but that doesn't seem to be a "rule" of the definition anymore), it starts to officially be considered a recession.

So it's not that it was being dismissed as not significant before this but, rather, it hadn't been going on long enough yet to officially be called a recession.

I'm sure the technical definition of a recession makes him feel much better.

> It might help

How would that help...?

He seemed to be expressing frustration with the fact that the news are just starting to say "we're entering a recession" when it's been hitting a lot of the country hard for quite some time; that the news outlets were dismissing the huge impact it's already having. I was saying that the news outlets weren't dismissing it. Rather, given the time periods are extending, it is now moving from "major economic downturn" to "recession", where the later is the former over a period of time.

The specific point being made was "don't get frustrated that they are downplaying the economic impacts based on the terms they are using; because that's how the terms are defined. It's not a judgement call".

> Ive counted 2 furniture stores, a consignment shop, a few barber shops, and half the god damn bars

Retail like that is very underrepresented in the stock market, so those losses wouldn't be reflected.

stock market will make new all time high any day now lol

But many people invest in commercial real estate directly or indirectly, and all those travel/retail industry companies were advertising customers for google/fb, and their unemployed workers are customers for Apple and Amazon who now have no money.

That the stock market doesn't reflect main street yet after the biggest stimulus in history is perhaps unsurprising but also a little worrying.

REITs are in the gutter. Look at ETFs like ARR, TWO, AGNC over the past year.

Indices like DIA, SPY, QQQ don't have much of this, though.

You also have to consider that the stock market will probably represent a larger portion of the economy after all this, so while there may be less overall pie, if the companies on the index increase their percent of the pie, it may balance out.

Not immediately, but eventually the lack of spending and debt defaults will show up.

Also they are competing for market share with companies on the stock exchange. The sad truth is a shutdown like this is terrible for small businesses that are going to die, but great for large corporations that can weather the short term pain.

Why I am bullish on restaurants. That space is going to have the greatest spread of that.

plus in some areas the unemployment payments have been a disincentive for some to return to work. there have been stories in the news that for many it is more than would earn normally; however most seem to skip over that taxes are not deducted from all benefits and some are taxable so we might get a lot of heart ache come beginning of next year

Every furniture store around here has been "going out of business" for the last 20 years. At least that's what I've gathered from their "everything must go", "50% off" fluorescent signs.

There is a good free e-book that can shed a bit of light on the mechanics of why markets can rally when the real economy seems to be in deep recession.

https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/

Basically when money printer goes brrr then prices of financial assets tend to go up. The unfair bit about this is that these kind of assets are mostly owned by the rich, which makes the wealth gap even bigger.

> when money printer goes brrr then prices of financial assets tend to go up

It takes a while to kick in, though while the numbers go up, the values don't.

Please don't apologize for thinking this was tonedeaf. It's possibly the most real thing anybody has ever posted on HN. Thanks for sharing.

It's always a good conversation when nimbius turns up.

someone who is not in a STEM job and cant see the bigger picture very well

The bigger picture is not any more visible from a STEM job. I haven't left the house aside for a jog in at least a month, and I work from my kitchen. I am living in a smaller bubble than ever, the only thing I'm missing is a hamster wheel. Wait, no, there's already a treadmill in the basement.

I hope online shopping is helping the shipping industries limp along, if only a little.

I'm sorry, your situation sounds terrible, and this is hard on a lot of people. I truly feel for you and everyone impacted. Speaking from personal experience, not even STEM people are immune from the economic impacts of the pandemic.

1) Have you tried the IRS website to check the status of your payment? My status finally flipped from "GO F YOURSELF" to "Please give us your bank information"

https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/get-my-payment

2) As your hours are cut, you may qualify for Unemployment from your state under modified rules from the CARES act, have you applied?

between 2011 and 2016 I went on a bunch of motorcycle trips around the western states. It was really depressing and heartbreaking to see so many closed businesses and obviously economically depressed towns when we were supposedly having a economic recovery. You could see that the situation outside the coastal bubbles was pretty bad.

Over time the more tourist-serving towns seemed to recover.

I am pessimistic that we're heading for the same situation again. The companies that the stock market cares about will recover, we will all go on pretending that things are back to normal. Meanwhile there will again be large swaths of the population in dire straits.

The economic frustration got trump elected.

It still surprises me that America has such a culture of leasing cars they can't afford for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month.

Here in the UK if you said you were going to buy a car, most people would instantly assume you mean second hand. There's not much of a culture of buying or leasing new cars here, and even less of leasing cars that you really can't afford (outside of petrolheads anyway)

As an American it surprises me. I'm in the top 13% in terms of income/household and I've never bought or leased a new car in my life. It's well known (at least to people I know) that if you want to save money you buy used, ideally with cash, although you can sometimes save a little money with financing if you get lucky.

The issue seems to be in previous generations cars were more of a status symbol for many (as well as being generally more affordable), so lots of people were raised with that expectation. So they buy/lease flashy overpriced German maintenance money-pits and scoff at used Toyotas because they're boring.

That or they're just trying to put on a veneer of financial success as part of their "hustle".

I'll say for a long time I was the same way, until I bought a Prius.

A little while after I bought it, prices actually went up over what I purchased it for, and I was getting letters from Toyota dealerships offering to buy it back from me above my cost.

It's declined in value since then, but still runs well (knock on wood).

This isn't saying used cars aren't worth it -- they definitely are -- but for certain scenarios I think the choice is maybe more complicated than I thought for a long time.

Well, in 2009 my Dad's also had the same experience with the dealer who wanted to give him $5k more than he paid for his year old Silverado - I think it was due to the overall market undergoing massive inflation (not reported as "core inflation") due to QE and other stimulus efforts.

I doubt the same would happen now with an economy halted.

Or people just enjoy having a car that they like? If you can afford it and you spend a lot of your time in your car, why not get one that you enjoy driving?

It's the "if you can afford it" part that's at issue here. Sure if you have the money do whatever you want, but lots of people are leasing/financing cars because they can technically "afford" to spend 1/4 of their take-home salary on a monthly payment when they could never dream of buying the car outright even with years of savings.

They're living at their means instead of within their means, let alone beneath their means. So the moment any financial difficulty comes their way they're screwed. It's especially irrational if it's just for extra enjoyment beyond necessary comfort. Someone who takes out a personal loan to buy all the blu-rays he wants would be called financially irresponsible, yet it seems perfectly reasonable to some to pay hundreds of dollars a month extra for that BMW or Range Rover.

The other aspect is a lot of older luxury cars were also very well built, and older economy cars were some real bare-bones shitboxes.

My father enjoyed driving his Mercedes, so I figured I ought to enjoy a German luxury car as well. I expected to pay a certain premium on parts, and obviously for premium fuel and synthetic oil, but that I'd get a much more solid feeling car in return.

The problem is, the Mercedes he drove were from the 80s and 90s, so parts markup aside, they were basically Toyota reliable.

The German car I bought was from the mid-2000s, and nowhere near as well built or reliable as a 90s Mercedes, even in present day.

I'd even owned a 1986 Mercedes that was still reliable in 2010, I'd also owned a 1992 Mercedes that was also reliable, and continued to be so after I sold it to a friend who drove it for all of university (2010-2015).

But it was the 7 year old one that basically fell apart despite me buying one with full dealership service history, then sinking endless money in making sure all the repairs were done properly with OEM parts, on top of my religious maintenance as I'd believed German cars were only problematic due to neglectful owners.

So, it went about as poorly as you'd expect.

Similar here and I leased a car once. Never again. Always used. There was a poster higher up the thread who flips cars that knows what they are talking about. You don't have to be at that level but just some common sense and research gets you a solid, clean used vehicle that you can depend on for years if you don't care about any ego shit and you take care of it. This and houses are our biggest impediments to real wealth as North Americans. We dump so much of our earned wealth that could be used to save and invest in our futures instead padding the pockets of car salesmen and banks.

I suspect this has to do more with social circles than country. Obviously there are more people buying new cars, or else there wouldn't be any used cars for anyone to buy. I think the same is largely true in the US -- lots of people would never buy a brand new car, but there's also many people who would only buy a car brand new. The break down is probably 30/70 or 40/60.

This is very eye opening, thanks. Yes, in the US, the implication is the opposite: "I bought a car" is taken to mean brand new.

I guess part of it is that it's a very car oriented culture, but the other part is that people value owning a new shiny thing over financial cautiousness.

“82% of new cars in Britain are bought using relatively new "PCP" loans, which let drivers pay less than the full value of the car.” - https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-car-finance-pcp-mortgage-...

So while I agree if someone says they are buying a “new car” it just could mean “new to them” I do think a lot of people do lease. I see a lot of young people with new BMWs etc, probably paying with money that they will regret not having put into their pension in years to come. Or maybe I should have lived a little bit more at their age.

I don't get how that isn't basically just a lease? Except that the buyer gets something that looks like a call option that sounds like it's nearly guaranteed to be below expected (normal, maybe not in rough times) value?

Mainly because I've never seen a lease where the dealer doesn't ask you if you want to buy it.

I think there's two confounding factors there, in the US parking is usually plentiful and right out front (or visible), so you're always seen in the vehicle you pull up in. It can be a part of your identity, both for yourself, and socially.

Americans also spend a lot of time in their cars, I went from a short commute to a long commute (1 hour each way), and found I got almost exponentially more critical of my car the longer the commute.

Suddenly the practical vehicle I didn't mind driving 15 minutes, was an eyesore to look at after an hour, and the NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) wears on you exponentially with time.

I started browsing cars to buy that would have been borderline financial suicide for how much I made, just because of how important the comfort and aesthetics became to me.

Couple this with their tendency towards financing things, and how cheap automotive related expenses are in the US, and it's the perfect storm.

I ended up changing jobs to one 10 minutes from my house, and it's downtown so parking is just done at various pay lots a few blocks from my office so nobody ever sees what I drive, and suddenly what I drive is irrelevant again, I was back to being content with my 15 year old Camry.

Heh, when I learned to drive in the USA I got a Honda Fit (I'm 6'4"). The plan was to drive it for a year and switch to a car more appropriate for a high-flying' techie, like a BMW X5.

I found out after test driving BMWs and Audis I don't see much difference between those cars and the Fit other than some bogus identity around it. It's just driving. I've taken many 6-12 hour long non-stop trips in the Fit (e.g. SF to Seattle where I only left the car once to pump gas, the 2nd time I had to get gas was in Oregon; many trips to Eastern Sierras from SF, etc.) and I think it's fine.

That's an interesting thought, but what part of that requires you to buy a new car? Car technology moves notoriously slowly, and the comfort and features of a new car compared to a 3 year old car at 2/3rd the price is negligible. (outside of the move to electric cars anyway)

Plenty of people must be buying new cars in the UK - the average age of cars is only 8 years, and if you buy a used car it will be a UK model.

That’s quite different to somewhere like New Zealand, where the average age is twice that and almost nobody buys a brand new car - instead most cars are imported second hand from overseas.

Where do all the used cars come from to support such a used-car market?

> Here in the UK if you said you were going to buy a car, most people would instantly assume you mean second hand.

This is true in America as well. I think wealthy Americans forget that regular Americans often live their whole lives while never owning a "new" car.

(This is even true of car loans in the US -- the majority of those are for used vehicles).

Who buys them, then? Obviously someone is buying them new.

Frankly, as an American, the UK's car market seems nuts to me. The kinds of cars that folks get as "company cars" is laughable.

I couldn't say for certain, but I feel like people in the UK run cars much longer than Americans as they don't do as many miles. It's not uncommon to see cars in the UK around 15-20 years old (often not older as there was a trade-in scheme years back)

The rule of thumb in the UK is a car gets about 10k miles per year and "modern" cars tend to last about 150-200k miles before they're not worth the repair costs.

For example, my car is a 2005 Focus which I recognise is older than most cars on the road, but costs me a couple hundred quid in maintenance each year and I have no intention in upgrading until it becomes uneconomical

So, how is it that people employed in essential businesses have not become rich in this pandemic? After all they are in high, crucial demand and could/should command better wages than programmers at this time. Sure, some of those raises would increase the price of goods, but that would be offset by hefty UBI checks to everyone. How is it that people who endanger their lives working in supermarkets don't get raises, but developers (whose contribution to the pandemic was "lets make another surveillance toy") get to work from home and still get their full paychecks? I'm sure someone will find a great excuse why it's wrong to think that and some other economicky argument. But something feels wrong about it.

Hope better days for you man, but those other jobs in leisure sector will not recover for a long time unfortunately. Do you think that they can somehow use the itnernet to keep businesses alive?

Because they have no money.

Having money is a feedback loop. You can't negotiate if you're skint.

Lack of strong unions is one contributing factor. Companies have all the power, and this situation is giving them even more power. No one dares risking losing their job in these conditions when so many others are already out of work and would take any paying job without complaint.

Because they can be easily replaced by the 26 million newly unemployed and have no union.

Because essential doesn't mean hard to replace or highly skilled. It sucks and I wouldn't want to do their job but enough people are willing to at that wage.

That would only really happen where workers are actually getting compensation commensurate with the value of their work. That hasn't been true for years (if ever) in the US.

Also essential doesn't really mean their more in demand now than before in all industries. Mechanics for example are essential and still at work but cars if anything will be needing less maintenance now than before because so many people are out of work and not driving anywhere for vacations.

Additionally the places where there is simply an increased demand and need are a lot of 2 types of job 1) warehouse workers or 2) manufacturing. Warehouse workers don't have that strong of a bargaining position because places like Amazon are already used to constant turnover, surge by up to 200k a year already, and only really need warm relatively able bodied people of which there are loads right now that'd love a job. Manufacturing people are in a slightly better position as it's harder to just throw bodies at it but factories have limited ability to ramp up. Grocery store workers are kind of (1) employees where it's very easy to replace workers so it's tough for ununioned employees to demand hazard pay or raises because it's very easy to find replacements, especially so now when there's so many other service industry jobs that are out of work right now.

Not to mention that even if demand rises the ability to pay doesn't necessarily rise as well. Value and price are not the same.

Essential doesn't imply "Not replaceable".

With 22 million out of work, it's easily to replace an "essential" meat packer. It's far harder to replace an engineer or doctor even if they aren't essential

That's why white collar workers make so much money in the first place...

You probably know this, but worth saying just in case: you should look into unemployment assistance. I believe that the CARES Act applies in case of reduced employment, and the $600/wk benefit is always given in full.

Assuming the state’s computer systems and unemployment department personnel can handle it. Which they obviously can’t since millions and millions of people have requested unemployment assistance but are met with error messages and busy signals on the phone, and don’t have the money they need.

Thank you for this.

I don’t want anyone to have to put themselves at risk of catching covid in order to survive. And, the survival of working class people has to be placed above the convenience of upper middle class people who want a haircut or to go to fuddruckers.

At the same time, working class people are the ones who will suffer first and most from an economic downturn. So if they want businesses reopened, you can hardly blame them.

I think we need ubi, right now. Can’t think of any other solution.

>> No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

In a lot of areas, schools are still open to serve breakfast and lunch to kids, school buses are dropping off food, and in states like mine, half the families are getting extra cash for food right now. Families will receive $193.80 total for March and April for each eligible K-12 student, and another $182.40 total for May and June.

I strongly suspect that we’re already in a depression. And much like the last one, it’ll be a serious hammer blow to rural areas.

Thank you for sharing your experience. That's tough.. I can only wish you the best of luck, surviving and thriving.

Having tasted some of the bitter existence out there, it felt needlessly cruel. In a land of abundance, there's really no reasonable explanation for anybody going hungry, being without shelter, live in dilapidated conditions, fear one's neighbors, fall into irrecoverable debt for healthcare, or any of the million ways that poverty ruins people.

I've been down and out in the U.S., where whole neighborhoods were struggling. It's enough to drive one crazy. Much respect to those able to rise above (or just hang on) and still manage to keep their spirits up.

Mass media and journalism often feel way out of touch with the day-to-day realities on the streets. Much of the time they're in the business of shaping the public narrative, rather than giving people a voice or reporting the truth.

Normally economic indicators are signals of what is to come. However with the sudden current crisis it's the other way around. Everybody already knows millions of people are without a job and the situation is very bad. This is not an economic crisis, this is a health crisis with economic consequences.

Unfortunately, business failure is part of a laissez faire economic philosophy (i.e. let things take their own, natural course without interference). It's also part of life-- the cycle of creative destruction.

Some businesses will fail (for whatever reason). New ones will step in to fill the void-- perhaps very similar ones, or ones somewhat similar to those they replace.

I think of it as economic evolution.

The world outside of those businesses has evolved-- if those businesses and their management are not simultaneously evolving, then they risk being left behind.

I think the covid-19 situation has exposed weaknesses in the economy, which will be shored up-- but not without painful economic corrections.

"No one seems to care" Eh, the reality is that the owners, families, and adjacent/partner/affiliate companies may care. Other people care-- about other things which are higher priorities from them (things which you may not be aware of).

Ultimately, those businesses may have failed in part because their owners/management didn't care enough to evolve their skills and offerings to what is in demand in the economy (outside of the impact from covid, of course).

To be honest, if you really want to understand economics, you might not be trained to the degree necessary-- i.e. diesel mechanic does not equal knowledgeable economist. So, you are allowed to have an opinion, but others like myself might remind you that it is not a qualified economic opinion, but rather the opinion of a mechanic.

For example-- Do you take investment or other economics advice from your local mechanic? Do you think others would? I certainly wouldn't. As such, if I were a mechanic, I would not have confidence in my assessments of economic situations-- instead I would read the thoughts of those who I am confident are knowledgeable on the topic.

Assertions are easy to make. Valid assertions depend on knowledge, experience, data, perspective, etc.

And this post is why I get so infuriated when I see all the blue-checkmarks on Twitter, calling people who want to go back to work "Selfish, stupid, idiot, etc".

People don't want lockdown to stop because they need to go to their hairdresser, or because they need to go hangout at the pub, or whatever idiotic reason these privilege a-holes put in their tweets. People want to get back to work, because they need money, to have a roof above their head. To feed their kids.

Edit: Just to clarify because I see a lot of misunderstanding in the replies: I am not advocating to end the lockdown. I am criticizing the tone deaf, patronizing, rude, caricatural comments attacking people who want to end it to get their paycheck back.

The biggest contributor to this economic downturn is the pandemic. Demand and market valuations plummeted in February, long before any stay-at-home orders.

I understand their thinking because not working is causing a massive amount of collateral damage, but the virus doesn't care about any of that. If everyone goes back to normal too early, this all just starts over, and folks are forced to be inside even longer, there's just no way around it.

80-90% of people who catch this disease would survive without treatment. If America won't support people who might die of starvation when stuck at home, then the individually smartest response becomes to take their chance with the virus.

I don't need to explain what a 10-20% death rate would do to society, however.

> I don't need to explain what a 10-20% death rate would do to society, however.

Not much if 80% of them are very old and sick.

You're getting downvotes but it's true. There are other considerations that are completely being ignored by the ivory tower types. It's shocking to some, but jobs are how people afford to live their lives (buy food, pay rent, pay tax which funds government, etc).

I'm more concerned about social and political unrest that often results from mass unemployment, people losing their homes, not enough to eat, etc than losing people to the virus (which still stucks). 22 million unemployed and growing is enough to swing elections in dark directions...

If 20% die but 8 out of 10 are very old and sick, then globally 4% die who are healthy or not very old.

4% of an (healthy not very old) population dying still means overall the economy would contract by 4% (because product/service demand is down 4%), which would still be the greatest recession in the last 8 decades.

Your comment ("not much") is thus completely false.

Sure, but the idea that this virus kills 20% of all people is stupid. You just made that number up. We don't have much we can do to treat this disease. Nobody believes it would ever go that high. If somehow it does, even more than 80% will be old and sick.

4% of a population dying also does not mean the economy contracts by 4%. You just... made that up too.

Lastly, you've assumed that a 4% annualized economy contraction from one month in a quarter means that we'll see 4% by just keeping this going. That's... wrong. The negative impact of lockdowns will compound. I don't give a shit if the economy shrinks by 4%. It's absolutely fine if we have a bit of a shitty economic time. Prolonged wide scale poverty for millions of people is an entirely different beast.

«kills 20% of all people is stupid. You just made that number up»

I did not claim that. I just took this percentage from the hypothetical situation you used to build an argument (you yourself said if 10-20% die then it wouldn't mean much to the economy.)

«4% of a population dying also does not mean the economy contracts by 4%.»

Yes it does. Basic economics. With everything being equal, the size of an economy is linearly proportional to the number of persons. A population half the size of another one will buy half the number of cars, half the food, will spend half on entertainment, etc. So if 4% of average individuals die worldwide, consumption (thus the economy worldwide) is down 4%. Like I said, it's basic economics.

«Lastly, you've assumed that a 4% annualized economy contraction from one month in a quarter means that we'll see 4% by just keeping this going»

No I don't assume that. Read again what I wrote. I am only talking about the impact of a certain percentage dying, not about the impact of the lockdown.

You sound like Dennis from Always Sunny talking about how girls need to sleep with him if they're alone on a boat because of the implication of what would happen if they refuse, but denying that he actually said anything threatening.

> "I don't need to explain what a 10-20% death rate would do to society, however."

Yes, you didn't claim anything. But the implication is clear. When I responded I assumed you meant 20% CFR.

> Yes it does. Basic economics. With everything being equal, the size of an economy is linearly proportional to the number of persons.

I don't know what else I can say other than this is a dumb statement that you just made up.

* It's not a basic tenant of economics

* All things aren't equal, ever

* It's not a linear relationship, nor even always positively correlated over time depending on context

And lastly if you actually believe your math, then its clear that for any realistic death rate the economic impact is negligible.

Note that you are confusing me with another user (Filligree) who started the thread and initially threw these "10-20%" figures. Personally I do not believe 10-20% of the world population will die.

«I don't know what else I can say other than this is a dumb statement»

Not dumb. It's a good approximation, especially because post-pandemic times (after people have regained their jobs, which might take months/years) will be identical to pre-pandemic times with the ONLY difference being that a certain percentage of Americans will have died prematurely. That percentage will directly translate to an economic loss.

Look, the fact your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019875) was severely downvoted indicates most HN users disagree with you. I tried to take the time to explain to you why. You don't get it. I don't have any more energy to spend on this discussion.

You're right, that was another user, rendering most of this moot. I got 3 downvotes, and I don't particularly care if three people disagree with me. Similar opinions expressed elsewhere have gotten more upvotes. Shitty appeal to the people fallacy.

> Not dumb. It's a good approximation, especially because post-pandemic times (after people have regained their jobs, which might take months/years) will be identical to pre-pandemic times with the ONLY difference being that a certain percentage of Americans will have died prematurely. That percentage will directly translate to an economic loss.

This is simply not true. The world does not click back to the state it was with fewer people. Millions of people are now unemployed. Thousands of companies will no longer exist. The lockdown is killing small businesses disproportionately fast and that gap is going to be filled by larger businesses. Larger businesses have fewer local employees. The wealth gap is going to be greatly exacerbated, and this will affect everyone. Supply chains will change, inflation will change, consumer spending habits will change. The economy is going to feel different, and in a large part driven by how long everything takes to restart. x% of people dead meaning x% worse economy is just an irrelevant, naive comment.

I don't really care to debate this further either because... it's not interesting

Keep in mind death is not the only negative outcome of this. My wife's uncle is relatively young (50s), completely healthy, gainfully employed, and has contracted Covid. He's been in the hospital for over a month, has been on a ventilator for weeks, is currently off but has been in and out of the ICU, his lung has collapsed, he can't feed himself, he can't walk, and he's currently re-learning how to swallow. If he makes it out of the hospital (that's a question mark right now), he's not going to be able to support himself. He won't be able to walk without getting winded so he will need a wheel chair, which will prevent him from doing the job he had before he went in. His experience, which has a decidedly negative economic impact and which is not uncommon for those who have needed to be hospitalized by covid, is completely missing from the "covid only impacts old people who were unproductive and probably would have died anyway" narrative.

This is absolutely true and this would get a lot worse if people decide to end the lockdown early. If one needs money to feed their family now, the chance of them either passing or being incapacitated are not to be taken lightly.

I had hoped the government would freeze all the mortgages, bills and offered real assistance to people in need. The stimulus check for the hoi polloi is a joke. I personally don't need it, why did I get it? I know I could donate it to the poor but that's not the point I'm trying to make. That stimulus seems to be a way of saying "but we already helped you".

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not arguing that covid only impacts old people, I'm saying 4 things (in general, maybe not the one particular quote above):

a ) covid won't destroy society in any case

b ) we cannot endure a lockdown until the disease is eradicated or a vaccine is produced

c ) a lockdown ended before the disease is eradicated or a vaccine is produced will just lead to a second wave of the disease

d ) the economic burden of the lockdown will increase exponentially as more businesses run dry

I don't want your uncle to be sick. But I'd rather your uncle get sick than have you, your wife, and your uncle lose your jobs; and then have your uncle get sick anyway.

There's also some very concerning long-term effects for those who have recovered. There's a trend of seeing lung-scarring or other things that I'm sure will come up again int 10 or 15 years. Imagine that happening to a large portion of society.

Even recovered people who feel fine can have chronic issues due to the virus. Young, healthy people may come away with serious lung issues without realizing it[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1253437512401301505

I'm sure it would have more than a 4.8% impact.

This is wrong. We are not forced to be inside because of the virus. It would have been totally possible to have this pandemic going on with zero lockdowns, which would have probably led to worse health effects, and less-bad economic effects.

It's a pet peeve of mine when people claim that we must lock down or that the virus is forcing us to do this or that, as opposed to it being a political choice based on tradeoffs.

In fact, I predict that after things open up, they will not shut back down, no matter how bad the second wave of the outbreak gets. People simply won't accept it.

Sure, we can let a million folks in the USA die because we love our capitalism, but 80%+ of the USA disagrees with that false dichotomy.

I don't think that's true. The mindset I've consistently seen is that people do agree with the dichotomy, and are just willing to sacrifice the economy because they don't think it's very important. How many times has the line been trotted out that we can't sacrifice human lives for the sake of the economy?

First of all, that number is clearly exaggerated. No current evidence supports the claim that a million people in the USA dying of covid is remotely plausible.

Now to the substance of your argument: this has little to do with capitalism. If most people are not working for a long period of time, in any society, even a non-capitalist one, then that society will rapidly become dramatically materially poorer.

We make choices to improve material conditions at possibly increased health risks all the time. Longevity is not the only metric for overall quality of life.

I would happily accept some increased risk of my own death for the lockdown to be over. Correctly navigating the tradeoff requires figuring out how much increased risk of death is acceptable, not asserting that it’s zero.

It's not just Covid. If the hospitals are overwhelmed, that car accident you get into means you might not be able to get medical care, causing a small issue to become deadly. You may not be able to get treated for a heart attack.

Further, we are seeing people still testing positive and having health problems over a month after first symptoms. If your entire supply chain is taken out, essential or not, you can end up with larger problems than when you started. If you think it's a problem that the meat packing plant has to close after a single case, wait until 75% of the plant is symptomatic.

Finally, the solution is to have enough tests and contact tracing so that people can confidently open up, knowing that we can stop the rate of transmission. This shutdown should be used to prepare for a way we can safely reopen, a la South Korea.

Without a lockdown, most of the country will eventually be infected. NYC currently has 21000 excess deaths, so extrapolating that to the rest of the country would mean 21000*328M / 10M = 690,000 excess deaths. That's assuming that nobody else in NYC is going to die of Covid 19, even after lifting the lockdown, so this is an extremely conservative projection, and it's already close to 1M deaths.

What's implausible about this? Is Covid 19 less lethal outside NYC? Can R remain below 1 anywhere in the country, without a lockdown?

Sorry, you're right. I did the arithmetic wrong, thinking that 1M deaths would represent 3% of the population, instead of 0.3%. My mistake!

The rest of my point still stands.

I mean I agree it's plausible, but it also seems likely that it's more lethal in NYC because of population density.

More infectious, sure? But more lethal? Why?

Lots of current evidence supports the claim. COVID is clearly more contagious than the flu, and herd immunity (without a vaccine) will require between 60-70% of the population to become infected. That's 229M people. COVID is also more fatal than the flu. Its IFR is roughly 1%. So 1% of 229M is 2.3M fatalities, and roughly 20M additional hospitalizations.

If you believe the IFR is lower, say .5% (still over 5x the flu), then you still have the same number of hospitalizations, but just 1.15M fatalities.

If you believe the IFR is the same as the flu (0.1%), then you'll still have 20M hospitalizations and 230K fatalities.

Say we're really lucky, and the IFR is the same as the flu, and we find a therapeutic drug to help treat it, dropping the IFR to half of the flu (0.05%), you have 114800 fatalities, but still the 20M hospitalizations.

The math is just brutal. What will the impact be of 20M hospitalizations, to say nothing of the deaths?

It’s a false choice between the economy and people’s lives. The problem is that while labor economy was shut down, the financial system was not, so that rents and debts had to flow out of people that could not generate income, and the government has been ignoring the issue with nominal support.

Not freezing debts/rents across the entire economy is how this whole thing spins into a depression

Every expense is someone else's income. Freezing debts/rents doesn't solve anything. It just shifts the burden.

Ultimately we are losing the wealth that we otherwise would have generated. We are poorer and there's no way around that.

Yes, it shifts the burden from people who work for a living, to people who's living is worked for by other people.

The former are far more important, and numerous than the latter. I eat butter, I don't eat dividends.

If you're a renter you live in a home that a landlord built or paid someone else to build. And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.

And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze. Those units will be gobbled up on the cheap by rich people that can borrow money at cheap rates.

> And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.

So what? They've already stopped paying people to build. Construction workers have lost their jobs already. While having to keep paying their rent, or mortgage.

This is a temporary disruption, and needs temporary, stop-gap measures to stop the bleeding. Nobody's advocating to stop all rents forever.

> And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze.

1. No, they aren't. Most units are owned by real estate companies.

2. Couple it with a mortgage freeze, and none of them will be wiped out. You can, in fact, kick this can up the hill until it hits the capital markets...

The “lockdown” is a Fabian strategy; one of the goals is to preserve our ability to stage an economic comeback after the health crisis has been resolved. In the near term, the economy is toast no matter what we do (short of a well oiled contact tracing and isolating machine).

This paper seems to suggest there isn’t really a tension between protecting people’s health and saving the economy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560

You are correct that the lockdown measures are a choice and not a natural consequence of the virus though.

Even if widespread shelter-in-place orders were not in effect, if the virus spread through a lot of the people in a town, you can bet that people wouldn't be going out as usual. Nobody* will be eating at restaurants if they hear dozens of people in town got sick while eating out and died because local hospitals are over capacity.

*there's always somebody

Not a single sane person is arguing going from isolation to business as usual overnight.

> If everyone goes back to normal too early, this all just starts over, and folks are forced to be inside even longer, there's just no way around it.

This whole thing just starts over if we EVER go back to normal unless a vaccine is invented. Herd immunity is impossible to achieve during an effective lockdown. It's not like we're any closer to being able to safely resume activities than one month ago. A highly infectious disease with asymptomatic carriers cannot be eradicated.

I hate people saying generic statements like "we have to stay inside until its safe" with no reason to believe its getting safer.

This is true. People need to realize this is a 2 year minimum thing we're just in the beginning of dealing with. Anything else is fantasy.

> This whole thing just starts over if we EVER go back to normal unless a vaccine is invented.

We can get to normal faster if effective pharmacological treatments come out from the ongoing trials. If we can treat it, or at least prevent it from being severe, it is not a problem of public health anymore.

Technically true, just as hopeless for any practical time scale. The economic problems of being on lockdown will compound over time. We cannot wait until we have treatments or a vaccine.

Most people who don't have money don't want to go back to work. They feel like the have to go back to work even though it's a terrible idea, because the rest of the country is refusing to support them while they can't.

Yeah, those meatpackers really want to go back to their essential jobs right now.

blaming "Blue Checkmarks" for the fact that people are being victimized by capitalism during a pandemic makes me sick to my stomach. What a hopeless year this has been.

People victimized by capitalism (and I totally agree that this is the current situation btw) don't need to be called names or selfish, or idiots, by people who are not victimized.

I'm blaming privileged people for lecturing and gaslighting people who are not as privileged.

I totally agree with you.

It seems like no one is understanding your point... yes, it's an absolutely terrible idea for people to go back to work right now, but if it's literally between that and going hungry (because you know your government won't do shit to help you), then it's no surprise that some people will want to go back to work out of sheer necessity. In fact I'd be shocked if most of these Silicon Valley tools would come to any different conclusion if they were actually in the same boat.

> "victimized by capitalism during a pandemic "

Care to explain? Last time I checked, it was governments (monopoly of force) who issued stay at home and quarantine orders.

The US economy in not capitalist despite the popular belief; it's mixed. The current pain would not be as bad right now if it were not for the artificial asset bubbles that were created by Keynesians via cheap money in response to the last recession...

> monopoly of force

We The People

The last response is the cause of our current predicament, but the dynamic has already been continued creating the next big crunch - the first thing the government did in response to this crisis was to lower interest rates, and the second thing was to subsidize six trillion dollars of corporate debt at the fake rates rather than letting the market correct itself.

Sure, the problem isn't actually capitalism per se, but rather the rent treadmill fostered by extreme concentrations of capital. Our economy is strongly centrally planned via artificially low interest rates, with the overt goal of making everyone work full time - essentially by eroding labor's bargaining power versus capital.

If someone's latent paradigm causes them to see this dynamic as endemic to late stage capitalism, nitpicking with no true Scotsman isn't terribly useful unless you have a plan to keep the people who control large capital accumulations from continuing to influence monetary policy to their benefit. Putting aside terminology, your gripes would likely have more in common than not.

I totally agree with you. In the richest country in human histroy, people shouldn't be forced to live paycheck to paycheck.

The essential motivation for people to want to feed their families/pay bills is completely logical, but it's important to keep in perspective that the virus doesn't care about any of these things. We don't need to look too far back in history to see that ending isolation in a pandemic too early can have huge consequences (much bigger than an economic slowdown/unemployment).

This is not the fault of the citizens. This is the fault of government who did not provide enough economic assistance, creating the desperation you're witnessing. This was unnecessary; other governments provided the support their citizens needed (the UK, for example).

Either pay people a decent wage to stay home to flatten the curve, or accept the death rate resulting from people who need to eat and have shelter having to go to their jobs.

This so much. The narrative seems to pitch an either/or situation, why not both or some of both

I am against ending the lockdown early as well and disagree in no uncertain terms with those who are trying to minimize the pandemic. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to start wondering whether the economic and political damage may ultimately outweigh the lives saved. If anyone thinks populism spawning extremists and getting them into public office was bad now, imagine the tsunami of public anger and populism that will occur caused by immense (even, dare I say it, pandemic) unemployment and poverty, which is where we're headed full steam. When things get tough, people shift into a "me first" mentality that is incompatible with the philosophies of many HNers.

The economic damage at least was always going to happen. It's a direct consequence of the pandemic itself (and people's natural fear-based reactions to isolate themselves to reduce their risk).

It's not like you can relax social distancing and have the economy do well, especially not when the death toll really starts ramping up and people fear for their lives every time they leave home. There isn't any choice available in which there isn't a bad recession.

It's not clear how bad things would actually be without the lockdown. There is a continuum, and I'm sure there is a much happier medium than what we currently have.

My question then is what half-measures would be preferred here that would've still flattened the curve? When you're in the middle of a pandemic, I think it makes sense to err on the side of doing too much to stem the tide versus burning time and energy trying to feather the dial to get that needle perfectly balanced between physical and economic health. Perhaps more bluntly put, I'd rather people be alive and on unemployment than gainfully employed and dead. (And yes, there's a whole other discussion to be had about the efficiency or lack therof of getting money out to people. We could and should do a lot better.)

Economic downturn can kill people, too. It is not as simple as dead people on one side and no dead people on the other.

Right, but one kills directly and in much larger numbers. I think it's clear which is the bigger mortal threat.

I disagree the situation is clear.

To take the logical extreme, if we were to avoid all possible immediate threat to life, no one should leave the house, let alone drive to work. Obviously, our society would immediately collapse, and many millions would die. So we have to balance possible immediate threats against likely longer term consequences. Something we do not seem to be doing very well in the case of covid-19.

> I disagree the situation is clear

I'm confused, do you actually think the mortality rate of a down economy will be anywhere near that of a pandemic? Let me know if I'm misinterpreting you here but it sure seems like this is what you're arguing.

If said "down economy" led to a long-term depression or a year or two of lost crops due to any number of possible disruptions, we could easily see more death (both directly and due to social unrest, suicide, etc).

Yes, I do think we could have a more reasonable approach that will result in less aggregate deaths than our current approach.

> lostapathy: If said "down economy" led to a long-term depression or a year or two of lost crops due to any number of possible disruptions, we could easily see more death (both directly and due to social unrest, suicide, etc).

History doesn't bear this out. The Great Depression resulted in an uptick in suicide, yes, but a decline in practically every other cause of mortality.

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290.full

> yters: Yes, I do think we could have a more reasonable approach that will result in less aggregate deaths than our current approach.

You could look at any societal attempt to deal with a large scale threat and say "well that could've been done better", but as I said in my other comment, perfection takes time, and, with time of the essence, I think we were smart to move forward with an imperfect but obviously impactful solution rather than burn time and lives trying to find some mythical perfect balance.

One piece of anecdotal evidence:

I live in NYC but currently reside in rural upstate NY. We have very few cases up here and it's impossible to NOT socially distance because that the way of life up here.

As of last week, Cuomo is applying the same rules in NYC to all of NY state, which is ridiculous. My family friend has a furniture factory up here that employs 220 people with a backlog of $2M+ pieces worth of furniture. All of his employees were socially distancing before and everyone had an N95 because of what they were building. Cuomo shut down the state and this guys business is about to go under (competition is legally opening up in Ohio and other states) because he's weekly payroll is 125 and at some point he doesn't want to risk $500-1MM of his own money out of pocket to weather the storm. That is 220 jobs that do not need to disappear.

The same rules that apply to NYC should apply to other areas. Some of these problems were are seeing are policy problems.

I don't have an opinion one way or the other on your friend's situation. It definitely sucks, and you may well be right that it's unduly harmful to their situation. But don't underestimate this disease. Even upstate New York isn't immune, take a look at this interactive map[1]. Almost all counties in upstate New York are north of 50 confirmed cases per 100,000 people, and all of those are neighboring counties with hundreds of confirmed cases. Given our rate of testing is abysmal, it's very likely there are several times that many actual cases in each county. Drastic action is absolutely needed, even in your county.

This is an awkward and difficult situation. If we underreact, we will have hundreds of thousands or millions more deaths (not joblessness, actual dead people) than we could have if we reacted appropriately. I think that's worse than the alternative of a massive recession, but I definitely sympathize with people who are most affected, like your friend and his employees. It's tough; there's no clear right answer; mistakes will be made. We just need to do the best with the information we have, and trust the experts to do the same. I'm sorry :(

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

My impression from living up here for a month or so is that most people are taking it seriously, though some are not. I do not think people are going to stay inside as soon as the spring weather arrives.

I do agree mistakes will be made, but i also think there there are leaders on both sides of the political aisle that should resign at this point for errors they have made.

*The same rules that apply to NYC SHOULDN'T apply to other areas.

On the flip-side, putting all businesses in this situation means most of us are in the same situation; and every market/industry needs to work together to get out of this crisis.

If no one can pay their mortgage, loan holders HAVE to make exceptions.

That shared spirit of sacrifice isn't a reason to institute lock down orders, but my opinion is that it will allow us to lesson the economic damage long term.

Why do they have to make exceptions? Absent a government mandate there is no requirement and, unfortunately, the mortgage is secured by the underlying property.

I fully expect, and you should too, foreclosures to skyrocket and people to be on the street. The banking sector is not in the business of shares sacrifice and the US government isn’t in the business of letting the banks collapse.

This lockdown will kill people. Let’s not be blind to that fact out of some sense of moral righteousness or some hope of humanity being found by faceless corporations.

> I fully expect, and you should too, foreclosures to skyrocket and people to be on the street.

Why, in the worlds wealthiest nation is that something I should expect?

Because those who write the rules are going to use the massive number of foreclosures to buy up property dirt cheap like they did in '08 and beyond.

It's a feature, not a bug. We're seeing one of the largest transfers of wealth from the poor to the wealthy ever and it's only getting worse. The cruelty is the point.

Oh also don't forget the number of people who are, or will shortly be, underwater with their car payments too. That's another ticking time bomb.

Ahh, I didn't read that parent comment with a sense of sarcasm.

As long as I have breath in my lungs, I will do whatever I can for the least of my brothers.

If you paid attention during the last recession while foreclosures did skyrocket, those people did not end up out on the street. Many found other places to live or just stayed in that house until someone forced them to leave. Some people stayed in a house without paying a mortgage for years.

If it goes that direction again I see even more people just staying without paying anything. The banks don't have the resources to force everyone out and no one wants to buy that many properties in a lot of areas.

We can print more money right. Money isn't real. Death and this virus are.

How about we just take care of those who need taking care of during this disaster. How about we put all national efforts to keep the lights on, providing safe housing and keeping the food supply chains intact.

Instead we are worried about corporate quarterly profits and when the Ruby Tuesday can reopen, because somehow serving burgers for $3/hr plus tips is going to secure that person's financial situation.

We can print more money, but we cannot print the things the money will buy. When the factories shut their doors and busineses small and large collapse and the food supply chain implodes, you can't eat money or shelter from the rain under money - and all that turning the printing presses up will do is to make it clear to everyone just how unreal money actually is. We know from other countries that's really hard to undo.

And if those people are dying in droves? What then, who makes these things?

This isn't the Black Death. People aren't dying in numbers that would affect the overall workforce size. It's more like an unusually bad flu epidemic - the main differences being that the deaths are more biased away from people who aren't working anyway, and that we don't shut down the planet over the flu. There might be good reasons to lock down heavily, but that's not one of them.

In many parts of the world, what the original comment describes is simply a normal day; the only reason Americans typically do better than that is our strong economy. We know what economies without strong quarterly profits and Ruby Tuesday look like, and they don't support the modern American standard of living.

Now try to imagine an economy that values human capital over never end growth. We can do better, but it requires a different kind thinking.

We value neverending growth because it represents an increase in the amount and quality of goods and services people want. Most people I've seen talk about valuing human capital over neverending growth tend to believe everyone should live as well as the American middle class - I agree with that, but we won't be able to make it happen without more economic growth.

> Instead we are worried about corporate quarterly profits and when the Ruby Tuesday can reopen, because somehow serving burgers for $3/hr plus tips is going to secure that person's financial situation.

Man, fuck off. This is so god damn entitled. Writing off someone's income as negligible because it's already in the realm of poverty anyway is so callous. Taking care of people's needs is hard. You can't just hand wave it with band-aid money. No matter how much money you allocate, people, especially the poor, are going to suffer if their livelihoods are destroyed. And it's even worse for people in poor countries that depend on exporting to the US for money for things like food. I don't give a shit about Ruby Tuesday's bottom line. I care that Ruby Tuesday's being closed means long term economic harm. The real world is complicated. The existing system is horribly far from perfect. But keeping it turned off is going to make things so much worse. Asserting that people who recognize this are thinking only of the corporate profits is incredibly disingenuous. We have printed astonishing amounts of money to ease this situation. It's not a viable solution.

My local restaurants are down to: McDonalds, Burger King, and Panera Bread. Everything else is shuttered. It will take years to recover from this, and in many locations, just won't, as wealth concentrates further into fewer areas.

Think for a second the absolute nightmare the economy would be going through if we _hadn't_ locked down.

We will never know the answer to that.

I guess I don't understand why more people aren't asking for a solution that allows them to sustain themselves and their families and also doesn't elevate the risk of spreading COVID-19. I don't get how "end the lockdown and let a bunch of people get sick" or "possibly starve homeless in the streets" became the only two possible options, and I don't get how anyone becomes a staunch advocate for either.

Where do you live? That sounds apocalyptic.

Look at Detroit if you want a good idea.

Try driving through the midwest and Appalachia sometime.

this is like, basically all of non major urban area America

Iowa has received a lot of flak for refusing to go into full shelter in place. When I read threads like this, I am thankful for the governor having the backbone to keep a large part of the economy up and functional.

My brother, though his situation is not so dire, has given me similar anecdotes, many of those from his friends group. He lives in a small college town in rural southeastern Ohio. Many of his friends, though, who are being hit very hard right now are all over Ohio... Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton.

> His mother is getting evicted from an assisted living center in a few days and his girlfriend is sick.

That's awful. I know some localities have "paused" evictions and payment "holidays," but there's been a lot of unevenness. Frankly, I think there should have been a national to that effect, so there'd have been uniformity and no gaps.

I am sorry to hear about all this and I am in agreement with you. It is also nice to have this perspective reflected on HN, so thanks

STEM jobs are starting to feel the pain too. They also make their money by selling to other companies and people who are hurting. The Behemoths are doing alright but there are so many business areas of software that are about to crash into the rocks fairly soon because their customer base has disappeared.

Life is honestly hard. We can be OK. I have written why, in detail (I hope skimmable/browseable, a tech-simple site: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581716.html .

Feedback welcome.

I'm in STEM and we're being killed here as well. Layoffs and furloughs are ubiquitous now.

I know some lenders, specifically Ally, offer up to 4 months of deferment on auto loans right now

Yep, I've seen places close in even the richest (read: highest rent) areas of town

> No school means poor kids roam the streets like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

You don’t think that describing poor kids who cannot go to school and likely cannot afford to eat on their own as packs of feral dogs is problematic at all?

I found that part odd. Describing children of poor people as packs of feral dogs is similar to me as to describing children of black people as pack of feral dogs. The only conclusion I can make out is that either people did not interpret it as a negative description of poor people, or that looking down at poor people is more acceptable than in my own culture.

I would be very interested to hear from someone who find the current phrase acceptable but not if the comment had written "black" rather than the word "poor".

And all that because of a virus that has a fatality rate about between .2 and .5% which mainly targets people who are already on the verge of death to begin with.

We need to begin opening our country back up and implementing more targeted lockdowns and isolations for the most vulnerable.

Not only will this bring us to herd immunity faster, we will have a huge pool of recovered people available to donate plasma antibodies to those suffering from the virus.

Taking the recent deluge of antibody test data that's been released in the last few weeks from around the world indicating infection rates are far higher than official numbers indicate and the growing threat of economic misery for tens of millions, this is the best way forward.

Or, instead of taking the lives of those who cling to it, we could enact sensible policies to re-engage the capital squandered by the richest in our society. "But that would be tantamount to thievery!" you say. Perhaps, but that seems better than murder.

The difficulty here is that the lockdowns are almost entirely self-inflicted, not the result of directives from the government. So even if the government proclaims "back to normal everyone!" very little will change in reality.

Though, if "go back to work!" also means the unemployment assistance and stimulus payments stop, it could get more exciting.

Current estimate is that you need around 70% of the population infected to get herd immunity. 0.5% fatality rate * 70% of the population is >1 million deaths in the US alone.

> Half the country is out of work

It is clearly not, otherwise that 4.8% would be a much bigger number. Hyperbole doesn't help here.

No one claims things are good. A global pandemic is a disaster any way you cut it. We're all affected, some much more than others, and we all have to help. But there's no magic wand we can wave where we all go back to work, either.

Even "essential" industries are affected. Very few people want to go to a crowded restaurant or theater right now, lockdown rules or no. Almost no one wants to travel on an airplane. That's just not coming back until we get the disease under control, and releasing lockdowns pushes that date farther into the future.

Remember the disease is disruptive all by itself. We have something like 25% of the nation's pork butchering capacity off line right now, not due to lockdowns (obviously they were "essential") but due to actual outbreaks. And that's what we should expect everywhere we permit commerce: random, uncontained, very disruptive outbreaks.

There's no magic. This sucks. But we have to work together to fix it, and harping about only one side of the problem hurts and doesn't help.

> It is clearly not, otherwise that 4.8% would be a much bigger number. Hyperbole doesn't help here.

Uh buddy, you know the first quarter is January, Feb, March right? The country was in shutdown mode for maybe half of March at most. Extrapolate that out to the full quarter (ie multiply 5% by 6) and you get a 30% drop. And on top of that, in March many businesses were still trying to partially pay or at least remain in business on paper. That's all done, plus now we start getting secondary effects.

The Administration's mismanaging of this situation is one of the single most costly screw ups in our country's history.

> But we have to work together to fix it

What, concretely, does this mean, especially if creditors are pressuring people to return to work to keep up with their payments, and returning to work is a public and personal health hazard?

The Market does not scale directly off unemployment numbers. Depending on how the GDP is being calculated here, it could be over-valuing certain fields and that would bias the shrinkage in one direction or another - for example, the tech industry is more likely to be able to work from home, so those businesses are still mostly operating, and tech is also a high-profit-low-cost industry that isn't as dependent on having supply chain stuff (like factories and warehouses) as other industries are.

High unemployment in tech or finance would potentially drop GDP much more than high unemployment in low-income fields would, even though low-income workers are often VERY important - nurses on the front lines right now don't bring in big money, neither do people staffing grocery stores or fulfillment warehouses.

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