Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

What we are discovering under the lockdown arrangements is precisely which jobs are actually required in the economy, and which are there just to cause some financial figure to increase.

Other than the stupefying boredom and colossal holes in the safety net due to the ideological blinkers of politicians and their cronies, exactly what isn't being done that needs to be done in the real world?

The farmers around here are still as busy as ever with their lambs. The wheat is growing in the fields. The rapespeed is below and as fragrant as normal. Supermarkets are stocked, and food is on the shelf. The power is on. The Internet is working. The drains function and refuse is being cleared.

Are some people scared that we might realise just how much activity is really fluff?

View on HN

> The farmers around here are still as busy as ever with their lambs. The wheat is growing in the fields. The rapespeed is below and as fragrant as normal. Supermarkets are stocked, and food is on the shelf.

Raw milk is being dumped because processing facilities to make it safe to drink are shut down. Meat processing centers are shut down or running at below capacity - beef is already disappearing from shelves. Vegetables likewise, farmers are losing ways to get to market.

The lockdowns have interrupted the path from source to store, and we're approaching a food shortage because of it. People will go hungry if we can't get the economy moving again.

I lack the explanation of the cause of the shut down. Are they being shut down because they cannot find employees or because they they cannot find consumers?

If they actually over produce (i.e. the consumption decreased), then I don't see how you can claim this will lead to shortage. On the other hand, if they shut down because there is undersupply of labour, then surely the people can be employed once they actually become hungry?

Either way, the market mechanism should rectify both situations.

My other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23134515

Short version: it's workers getting infected, which shuts down the plant to stop further spread. The "market mechanism" can't avoid that.

Two Walmart supermarkets near me are shutdown because employees tested positive for COVID-19 and at least one has died. Which explains why they cancelled my delivery order a few days ago. The app didn’t mention why my order was canceled…

Instacart is more expensive but about 20% of what I order is out of stock.

So basic groceries aren’t as available as they were a month ago.

I think this is what is gonna happen (in the U.S.). Because of lack of coordinated shutdown of non-essential economic activity, much more people will become infected, causing eventual shut downs of more essential activity.

So reopening the economy in order to save it is completely backwards. It's like drinking alcohol when you're suffering from cold, which will cause more heat loss. It might feel better, but in fact, it is making things worse, by not conserving heat on the parts of your body that are less essential for your survival.

> Meat processing centers are shut down or running at below capacity

Why are meat processing centers shut down?

Workers testing positive, leading to quarantining the whole staff to prevent further spread.

For the ones that are still active, the reduced capacity is a mixture of limiting the number of workers to maintain social distancing, and workers just not coming in for fear of getting infected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/meat-proc...

Something else I didn't realize, from that link, what is being processed is now unbalanced - the same throughput feeds less people because restaurants aren't open:

> Restaurants typically use the expensive stuff — strips, ribs, tenderloins and sirloin, Bormann said, while retail takes the chucks and rounds and trims. With restaurants mostly shuttered, “all of a sudden 23 percent of the animal isn’t being bought because food service is gone,” he said.

> Are some people scared that we might realise just how much activity is really fluff?

Yes, the people who own shares (or other stakes in the economy) are worried about it, because they might be the ones who ends up with the fluff.

I think the worries have been described in famous Kalecki's essay: http://gesd.free.fr/kalecki43.pdf

The lockdown is just a different way of getting the economy close to the state of full employment - by reducing consumption rather than by increasing production.

> Are some people scared that we might realise just how much activity is really fluff?

Absolutely. The people pushing this simply don't care about ordinary peoples lives. What they care about is this is a direct challenge to their carefully constructed status quo. The one that gaslights people into thinking is we change the power relations even a tiny bit the roof will cave in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com