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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

1) I tried to read the article, but it's badly structured and edited.

2) The SF Bay Area has never had a ventilator shortage. In fact, we gave away 500 in March/April to other states because we have too many.

3) The article mixes up various timelines into an incoherent wall of text - General AI, corona pandemic and global warming effects all have different timelines.

4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

(I hope when Cory is able to focus he can improve the article. Maybe there is something worthwhile in there.)

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The ventilator shortage is irrelevant to the point the author is trying to make. It doesn't have to be true or false and should be taken as an hypothesis.

The point he was trying to make is that economy is not about money, it's about resources. Money has no value as such, it's a number in a system, or at best a piece of paper. Food is a resource, a ventilator is a resource. Economy is about choices, about how you allocate a resource, it's not about numbers.

> 4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

What's your evidence for that? Unemployment was really quite low in the last decade up until a few months ago, with presumably the same 'oligarchs' already in power?

Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse. If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that exact same decade.

It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply complex claim like that one.

> Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse.

How do we know that?

> If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that exact same decade.

That's great news, if true. It suggest a very actionable strategy to keep unemployment in check.

(Though, of course, looking around the globe, even the absence of a minimum wage law doesn't make all other unemployment problems magically vanish.)

> It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply complex claim like that one.

Indeed. This was just to point out that the claim would have to be backed by quite a bit of evidence, because the surface facts about unemployment need quite a bit of explaining away first.

There was no evidence at all provided in the comment I replied to. So this was an invitation to bring some evidence.

I have no opinion on 'oligarchs', only on hypothetical 'oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers'.

I mean... have you read the Wikipedia page of the current head of the Dept. of Education? See also: page of the head of the Dept. of Justice?

If you haven't... you really should

If doing that doesn't change any of your opinions on the matter... oh well, we're already doomed.

Jobs became “worse”? Wages were up the quarter or 2 before Covid.

What's really quite low? Ours hit 3,4% in May due to the virus, but June just came out at 3,2%...

Which place are you talking about?

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf says that US unemployment rate for June 2020 was 11.1%.

"Ours" being swiss. This unemployment level is still very high, 50+% over June 2019.

https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei....

(caveat: bei uns gibt's Kurzarbeit.)

Ok, that makes more sense.

It's useful to point out which countries / places you talk about. We only let the Americans get away without it.

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