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265 pointsajay-d462 comments

It’s insane to me that we don’t just make masks 100% mandatory when you’re outside your own home. We don’t have exact numbers on how effective masks are, but when everyone is wearing them, evidence suggests “very effective.” Anecdotal examples - a man with a dry cough, that was later diagnosed to be COVID, wore a mask on the long flight from Wuhan to Toronto, had extended/close contact with 25 people, but he was wearing a mask, and none of them contracted it from him [1]. 2 hairdressers in Missouri had COVID, but they and their clients all wore masks, they had extended close contact with 140 people and none of them got COVID [2]. We know masks are most effective when the infected person wears them, and we know that asymptomatic spreaders are common, so really we just need everyone wearing masks for all close personal interactions.

We could keep the economy decently open AND keep COVID cases down dramatically with a simple law to mandate masks 100% of the time when outside your own home. In plenty of professions people are wearing masks all day long now, it’s uncomfortable at first, but you get used to it. Crazy that this isn’t being strongly considered.

[1] https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410 [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...

  just make masks 100% mandatory

That would require me to confess that other people might know more than me. Which some conflate to total loss of all personal liberty.

As a counter-argument thought experiment to try and understand how some people might feel that way, imagine this situation:

We've got an epidemic of terrorist shootings in the US. Some law enforcement experts suggest that not only should open carry be legalized everywhere in the US, but that carrying a gun should be mandatory while in public. It's the only way to stop the shootings.

I'm not going to suggest that this is in any way a 100% equivalent argument, far from it. But it might help you get a feel for why some folks are opposed to mandatory masks, even if they seem entirely sensible.

Masks cannot end someone's life either on purpose or accidentally.

A better example is seat belts or government issued ID, which are already currently mandatory.

Government issued ID's are not mandatory nor is seatbelt use on any private property.

Seat belt laws should not be on the books. Yes you should wear it, but the government should not be allowed to make rules that only protect you - so many other draconian rules would disappear if they could only outlaw things that show clear danger to third-parties.

And I wear my seatbelt always when driving, though not necessarily if I am backing into a spot.

Seat belts are mandatory, but not for example on public transportation. And in most jurisdictions you can’t pull someone over if the only reason is because you think they aren’t wearing a seatbelt. In MA, for example, it can only be added on top of another infraction.

So even a common sense policy which saves many lives from a public health perspective has some clear limits to when and how we enforce it as part of the overall social contract.

Particularly with regard potentially discriminatory police actions which can be non-uniformly enforced, think for example homeless people who might not have access to a clean mask being targeted.

Making up a new kind of law which can be used to fine/arrest literally anyone just for walking down the street “the wrong way” is a big deal.

I would respectfully disagree that things which are currently mandatory are better examples. We're talking about making new rules in response to a newly emerging phenomena. A change to the status quo, as it were.

Asserting that a change to the status quo is the same as the existing status quo that you already "bought in to" 5-50 years ago (for most of us) is in a lot of ways not the same at all.

Further it's possible to opt out of seat belts by not driving and you can kind of opt out of government IDs also by not driving or flying. It'd be difficult but if you really, really cared you could.

I'm not saying that these people's reaction is entirely rational. But if you want to try and understand them a bit better I think my very, very loose analogy might help you. If you don't want to understand them feel free to ignore entirely!

Unfortunately masks can end someone's life:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/driver-crash-passed-wearing-n95-ma...

I just point out that the government already mandates we wear clothing in public and a mask is basically just a shirt for your face.

Not wearing a mask during covid == indecent exposure in my book.

If that is your argument then I would counter that I do not believe the government should have any say on the clothing you wear. Though I would not be comfortable with going naked, we should not pay any consideration to religious feelings, be they Muslim or Christian - and that is all US clothing regulations are based on.

Being uncomfortable having to explain to a child what a dick is because they saw one hanging out while walking to the bus is not something I should be forced to give a shit about. Taking simple steps to prevent spreading an infections disease is.

I think if I spit on your face is illegal (probably assault) so we could apply the existing laws, if someone without a mask gets close to you while speaking existing laws could be apply because is basically spiting germs on you.

I am wondering if this would be accepted by a judge and no new laws will be required.

I think you're talking about a zombie apocalypse type situation, in which case yes if there are zombies roaming the streets trying to eat everyone's brains it might be wise for every sane person to carry a shotgun in public.

If they are actually experts, and this is an actual epidemic with an equivalent death potential, then sure! Give me the gun. What's the problem?

Is the equivalent to a cloth mask a BB gun?

Often, the problem for menis not that I don’t trust what others know, but that things like these get to be imposed without educating the public what it is necessary, the evidence etc.

What about my right to use tiktok? We give up rights all the time.

Okay I will let you in on the secret, but for the love of God keep your mouth closed.

The disease is as you suspected drastically overblown, although not entirely fake. Bill Gates is absolutely using it to spread his vaccines and the masks do very little.

The masks are there for us to counteract facial Bill Gates facial surveillance, not to stop the disease. That is highly hush-hush though so wear your mask but don't tell anyone.

Mum told me lying was wrong, but if it works?

If they create a law based on a real necessity, I don’t think you can call it a liberty violation. For example a law states you cannot carry grenades.

There’s a difference between admitting other people know more than you and giving up entirely on the use of your own rational faculties. Blindly trusting that masks work, in the face of (at best) low predictive power and (at worst) outright contradictory evidence, is an example of the latter.

My rational faculties tell me that masks sure as heck work equally well or better than no masks. Also that there is no downside whatever to me from wearing one (ego damage doesn’t count — this is real life, not a game). Put those together and it’s my personal responsibility to wear a mask until the evidence tells us it’s of zero value. (Maybe it’s not clear: masks are to protect other people from you, not vice versa.)

The logic the Netherlands used to counter the "only can help" argument is that wearing cloth masks can lull people into a false sense of security where they are less observant of social distancing because they are overconfident in the protective power of the mask.

I'm not aware of any study that confirms or debunks this but from a neutral point of view I would say it's at least plausible.

For the record, I wear a mask.

> there is no downside whatever to me from wearing one

The eternal refrain of economically innumerate people who can’t multiply.

> Blindly trusting that masks work, in the face of (at best) low predictive power and (at worst) outright contradictory evidence

Care to point out where you got your denialist news from? Because your personal beliefs fly in the face of any reason or evidence.

There is evidence that wearing masks spreads disease?

It is easy enough to imagine several ways it could do so: making it less likely for people to socially distance, making it more likely that people spread the disease (or for that matter other diseases) by increased touching etc.

Those two studies you cite aren't strong scientific evidence. There is no control group, so we don't know what would have happened if they had not been wearing masks. Also the sample size is quite small (n=2 across the two studies).

I've seen some studies that have good controls on influenza, in particular there is a college dorm study that compared no intervention vs. masks vs. hand washing: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2010/01/masks-pl... . This specific study doesn't give strong evidence that masks stop influenza spread.

Also, the individual rights argument is pretty strong. If mask wearing is already at 70% without any government mandate, I'd want really strong evidence and strong reasons to justify government intervention just to push that number a little higher.

The individual rights argument is not pretty strong. Here’s a partial list of things I did today for the sake of my neighbors/community that are also government mandated:

- Wore a shirt

- Turned on my headlights and used my turn signals

- Held on to my empty coffee cup until I got to a trash can when I could have just dropped it on the ground

- Kept my dog on a leash and picked up his poop

- Parked in a parking spot instead of conveniently stopping my car in the middle of traffic directly in front of the grocery store door

I’m sure there are plenty others. Being a member of society comes with a lot of privileges and a handful of obligations but it only works if we all do our part. No freeloaders, right?

Edit: An extra word

> - Wore on a shirt

Where do you live where this is government mandated?

I’m a woman so my nipples are criminalized in most of the United States.

If you’re a woman this might be considered indecent exposure in many parts of the US unless you’re at a beach or in a resort town.

In stores pretty much anywhere.

>- Wore a shirt

I still insist you wear chaps on top of pants or your short trousers. Pants are fashion, chaps protect.

These are objective concessions. Most of these concessions took tens (or thousands) of years to become objective.

In the case of masks, you have a big change in human tradition. There are very few societies that have ever required all people to wear masks all the time. I can't think of any examples. A small handful of modern societies require it for specific subgroups, but that's it.

Generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of masks, I want to see very strong evidence that masks are very necessary, and other approaches wouldn't have similar or better results with lower change to human tradition. So far, I haven't seen that at all. The scientific evidence that masks are effective or necessary is weak. Alternate approaches (eg. wearing a mask if you're symptomatic, staying at home if you're symptomatic) may be just as effective.

The examples you cite have roots in human tradition, and have been established for many years, mostly with strong evidence.

In the case of seatbelts, you have a big change in human tradition. There are very few societies that have ever required all people to wear seatbelts all the time. I can't think of any examples. A small handful of modern societies require it for specific subgroups, but that's it. Generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of seatbelts, I want to see very strong evidence that seatbelts are very necessary, and other approaches wouldn't have similar or better results with lower change to human tradition. So far, I haven't seen that at all. The scientific evidence that seatbelts are effective or necessary is weak. Alternate approaches (eg. improved driver training) may be just as effective. The examples you cite have roots in human tradition, and have been established for many years, mostly with strong evidence.

What harm will befall people who see my breasts and what strong scientific evidence can you provide to substantiate that theoretical harm?

United States, 1918.

Instead of projecting arrogant puffery, why don’t you think about the potential consequences of prioritizing your comfort and self aggrandizement to people whose lives are put in danger.

I have a neighbor who unknowingly was infected early on and likely infected several of her elderly clients, most of whom are now dead. She is devastated... think about how you will feel if you did the same thing, without the innocence of being ignorant.

> There is no control group, so we don't kno

It is unethical to have a study with a control group which involves a live virus.

There is enough evidence that masks are effective that they should be required until it's proven they are ineffective or the virus risk is reduced.

There are doctors, experts and even whole nations that disagree with you that there is evidence masks are effective.

This is the problem with arguments like this. It inevitably turns into a fight over who gets to pick the evidence and experts, as there is always reasoned disagreement.

Heck, China is an existence proof that mask wearing doesn't stop the virus in any meaningful way. Sample size, a billion. Checkmate. Are we done?

China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all have lower infection rates than we do, and one of their biggest ways of controlling it has been masks. Taiwan in particular has never had more than a few cases and they are near neighbors to the epicenter of this whole thing. They controlled it by cutting off travel and using masks and they've never had to do a shut down.

Where is this evidence? Is this evidence for n95 masks, or the cotton nonsense most people wear?

>I'd want really strong evidence and strong reasons to justify government intervention just to push that number a little higher.

Why?

Look I know we've all heard the Friedman quip about temporary government programs, but that refers to normal situations. It's one thing when a program might drop off the political radar and outlast its mandate by decades, but in the case of COVID-19, there is absolutely no way on Earth, at all, that people could just forget that it happened. If the COVID-19 pandemic were a war, it would already rank among the 50 deadliest ever.

Our rights are not devalued in the long term by rapid action in a pandemic which, by the best available estimates, could kill over a million Americans if left to run unchecked. They are not devalued in the long term because it is always going to be easy for people to know whether we are experiencing this kind of emergency. The loudest deniers on Facebook are not representative of the population: most Americans do recognize the threat, despite one of the largest disinformation campaigns in human history.

So what if there's a small chance we might be too strict about masks? It's not a large injustice, and it's not a slippery slope.

> So what if there's a small chance we might be too strict about masks? It's not a large injustice, and it's not a slippery slope.

It very strongly depends on exactly how the mask requirement legislation works. If it's "all persons in a public in the state of California must wear a face covering until December 31, 2020. Failure to do so will result in a fine of no more than $150", that's probably fine. People will still complain, somewhat justifiably, that this legislation is safety theater rather than an actually useful law, but in the grand scheme of things it just wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, if it's "any person who knowingly performs an action which endangers the health or well-being of others is subject to a fine of up to $10,000 or 5 years in prison", we now have yet another law that most people are arguably in violation of at least some of the time, which allows bad actors in government to impose enormous pressure to comply with unreasonable or illegal demands under threat of large fines or jail time.

I personally worry quite a bit that something more like the second will be passed, and will be very selectively enforced.

The state of New Mexico currently mandates the use of masks while in public with the penalty of a small fine (I forget the exact amount, but it’s only a couple hundred dollars). So in practice, the former is what is already being done. And yes, people do still complain, but as far as I can tell almost everyone complies.

> There is no control group

There's no ethical way to do a control in a study of infectious diseases. You'd have to mandate that some study participants not wear masks, when your hypothesis is clearly they the masks will keep some of them from getting sick or dying.

You're asking for far too much here. Masks are known to stop disease spread from (literally) centuries of use. We don't have to throw all that intuition out with covid, even though the numbers may change.

And again: why should we have to prove this technique via completely impractical research constraints when it is very likely that it helps, in a situation of dire urgency.

This is such an asinine comment. What’s the need for any law, since ~70% will comply anyways? And this of all cases? Where a few rogue “super spreaders” can give it to thousands of people?

>What’s the need for any law, since ~70% will comply anyways?

Codifying morals is done for the purpose of having cheaper and fairer enforcement.

Wearing pants would be higher than 70% without government mandate -- does that mean that a law that you must have your junk covered an impingement on individual rights?

Of course. So is having to wear a mask.

A mask is justified in the short term, the fact that you don't want to see my junk rates no higher than me not wanting to see your sportsball t-shirt. Unfortunately one of them is illegal and it isn't the sportsball t-shirt.

Sorry, but this doesn't sound like "no strong evidence":

Without adjustments for other variables, the two intervention groups had about a 10% reduction in overall ILI incidence over the 6 weeks compared with the control group, but this was not statistically significant.

However, when the researchers analyzed the ILI rates for each week of the study and adjusted for other variables (age, sex, ethnicity, baseline hand washing practices, sleep quality, alcohol use, flu vaccination), they found that the FMHH group had significantly lower rates than the controls in weeks 4, 5, and 6 (35%, 44%, and 51%, respectively).

The adjusted rates for the mask-only group also were lower than those of the control group in weeks 4, 5, and 6, with reductions ranging from 28% to 42%, but this did not meet the authors' significance criterion of P<.025.

The authors say several factors may explain why a significant reduction in ILI was found only during the second half of the intervention period. One is that recruitment of students continued through the first 2 weeks of the intervention, increasing the sample size by 11%. Also, the proportion of FMHH participants who wore their masks more than the average 3.5 hours a day increased in the later weeks of the study, and confirmed flu cases on campus peaked in weeks 4 and 5.

Well, it depends on what you think is "strong" evidence. A 10% reduction doesn't seem very compelling, and when you introduce the more advanced statistical analysis, that hurts the case in my eyes. There are probably less disruptive ways to get a 10% reduction.

I found that study from this meta study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/ which reviews a lot of these studies for influenza. Note, however, that most of the studies only look at if the masks protect the individual, not whether masks stop the spread of influenza, but the evidence seems pretty inconclusive.

If we’re having this much trouble sorting out individual egos and absolutist ideologies with masks, where the choice is so simple and risk-free, we are REALLY going to be in the soup when vaccines start to come out.

The individual rights argument is based on community norms so if it's 70% already it becomes weaker, not stronger.

> It’s insane to me that we don’t just make masks 100% mandatory when you’re outside your own home.

It sounds reasonable in closed spaces (like in the examples you gave). But I'm reluctant to wear a mask outside in low-density area (I would if there were strong evidence it made any difference).

> man with a dry cough, that was later diagnosed to be COVID, wore a mask on the long flight from Wuhan to Toronto, had extended/close contact with 25 people, but he was wearing a mask, and none of them contracted it from him [1]

I'm nitpicking here, but by itself it doesn't sound as a strong argument in favour of masks. If I understand correctly, without any containment measures, the propagation rate (R0) of the virus is around 3. Which means that a sick person is going to contaminate on average 3 other people. I suppose the average person can have quite a lot of interactions (starting with their family, colleagues) during the time they are contagious. So even without mask, it's not obvious the guy in the plane would have infected anyone else.

That being said, I agree with you that masks should be mandatory (in closed spaces).

> It sounds reasonable in closed spaces (like in the examples you gave). But I'm reluctant to wear a mask outside in low-density area (I would if there were strong evidence it made any difference).

I agree with this. 100% mandatory outside of your home would mean I would have to wear a mask while running, which seems unnecessary when I see a grand total of 1 or 2 people on my entire run (and cross the street to keep plenty of distances between us).

This is one danger of applying a solution for 100% of everyone, everywhere without taking into account any nuances.

That said, mandating masks indoors + outdoors when you can't maintain 6 feet of distance seems like a no brainer. Perhaps in higher density areas it could be worth requiring them 100% of the time, even outdoors, but I'd like to see the data first.

One of the problems with "masks should be required" is that it lacks nuance. Around where I live--exurbs of a major NE US city--they're required and pretty much universally used in stores as far as I can see. However, outside, it's very mixed and personally it seems pretty reasonable. But I'm sure to some people it seems as if people aren't being reasonable.

Certainly I'm not wearing by myself in the woods. But perhaps that's seen poor practice by some. No idea what things look like in the city. Perhaps I'd find it uncomfortable.

Most of the mask orders I've seen take that into account though, requiring masks indoors and in outdoor spaces where social distancing is not possible or enforced.

The lack of nuance is a feature and not a bug. It takes the decision out of the individual's hands since people can have any number of reasons ranging from valid to incomprehensible for why their specific activity doesn't require a mask. We have already tried leaving it up to individuals for the last 4+ months and that clearly hasn't worked. The choices going forward appear to either be to put stronger precautions in place until there is a vaccine or continue to let tens or hundreds of thousands of more people die unnecessarily so we can be slightly more comfortable while outside our homes.

I generally agree, and I personally don't wear a mask outside when I walk in my neighborhood for this exact reason (very low density, plenty of space).

With that said, it appears that if there is any gray area in the rules then the general population is almost sure to abuse them. In this case, I think it's better to err on the side of caution and make it 100% mandatory so there is absolutely no gray area.

I mentioned this in another comment already, but this is what’s being done in New Mexico.

The mask order was extended to, basically, “wear a mask if you’re outside your house”. This includes exercising outside. Personally, I find that part a bit excessive; however, my understanding is that it’s meant to counter exactly what you pointed out: as long as there are any exceptions, some people will reason their way out of compliance. A 100% mandate is just easier and simpler to follow.

I now wear a mask when walking in my neighborhood after I noticed other people wearing masks too. Chalk it up to peer pressure I guess, but to me it’s a very small price to pay if it helps enforce mask-wearing in other contexts.

Outside in low density areas appears to be fairly safe, but it's a behavioral problem, and if masks are mandated and normalized, this thing'll be over in a jiffy and we can meet down at the pub for a pint.

R0 is an ensemble average, not a useful metric for any given person. It's likely that transmission is wildly variable, and that superspreading events are major contributors to transmission. Basically, households slowly pass the disease between each other, and occasionally one person manages to get a shitload of people outside their household sick. Masks appear to be extremely effective at stopping the superspreading events, which has a huge effect on R0.

At this point, I don't care about the effectiveness. It is a sign of respect for those of us who have lost family and friends as a result of this global pandemic with what will amount to millions dead over the next 1-2 years. It is a very visible sign that shows that you care about yourself and the people around you.

I'm very, very pro-mask; I'm optimistic that getting people to wear them could drop R0 << 1 and bring an end to this. That said, it seems unethical to me to mandate (read: enforce with fine/imprisonment) it for the purpose of ... what sounds like virtue signaling?

The scales fall from tetrometal's eyes .... yes, a huge amount of the discussion around masks is pure virtue signalling.

That's why there's this huge focus on masks stopping the spread by pre-symptomatic people, which is a highly dubious and never-before tried idea, for which basically no reliable evidence exists (masks pre-COVID being intended to stop you getting sick, not other people), and which is an absolutely pure form of virtue signalling. It's literally a highly visible sign that someone is suffering discomfort for someone else's health, except, that only works if you believe it's actually true.

Look at the Nordics. In Sweden there's no mask requirement because the epidemic is disappearing. In Norway they pointed out that given the tiny number of infected people, even if you assume masks work perfectly, 200,000 people would need to wear a mask constantly to stop one new infection. And this is a virus with an IFR of about 0.1% so you end up needing millions of people to wear masks constantly to stop just a single death, almost certainly of a person very close to the end of their life anyway.

The numbers just don't work, at all, once the epidemic has faded away. And as Sweden and other places shows it can fade away without any mask requirements.

That is magical thinking. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population. Wearing masks in public for a few months won't change that reality.

Wouldn't have to mandate it, if people would just do it...

Better idea, use positive reinforcement. Walmart, et al raise prices 15%. Mask wearers get 15% off. Everyone else pays full-price.

They have to mandate N95 masks indoors if it is indeed aerosol-based superspreader events.

Yeah, well I don't actually care about theater versus what's effective.

I'm not sure I'd characterize it as theater. This isn't a play or performance, it is a global pandemic and people, including myself, are losing loved ones.

> It sounds reasonable in closed spaces (like in the examples you gave). But I'm reluctant to wear a mask outside in low-density area (I would if there were strong evidence it made any difference).

It gets weird because there are many non-closed spaces which are very crowded. Imagine a concert, or the boardwalk.

why are you reluctant?

That's because the evidence all points to indoor transmission via airborne particles. There was an article here earlier today wherein it was pointed out that being outside there is a very small chance of getting infected. It's being indoors with poor air circulation that where the infections happen.

The way I see it, every law we pass is, roughly, choosing a tradeoff between liberty, safety, and economic productivity. We don't allow people to drive as fast as they like. On the interstate, we limit that to say 75 mph. That leads to more deaths than if it were 25 mph. Collectively, we have decided that 75 mph lies near some optimum. Certainly, some view it as too fast, some view it as too slow. Not everybody has the same risk tolerance.

It's no different with masks.

My main question is: For how long?

First, presume COVID will never be completely eliminated. (Certainly it will never cease to be detected by widespread RT-PCR testing with a 1-2% FP rate).

If you won’t grant me that, presume that equally deadly (to certain demographics) diseases will always exist.

Do we never get to go around outside without a mask on again?

Some cultures think that’s the right choice. Some do not. There are valid arguments on both sides, so I think it’s not appropriate to belittle either perspective.

Being required by law to wear a mask whenever you are out in public (and not eating?) is a major cultural shift. It’s reasonable that people will have different readiness to enact, e.g. a Federal law with major financial or criminal penalties involved.

My ancillary point would be that COVID is not the same level of risk in all places and at all times. So, e.g. a Federal mask policy with a $1,000 fine that applies in FL and MA all the same, where MA cases are basically at the noise floor of the test right now, is not justifiable. Or, likewise, a single policy which applies to nursery schools and nursing homes.

Particularly for large heterogenous countries, there is a huge benefit to local and regional government being able to set appropriately strict policies for their own jurisdictions.

There is also absolutely the need to be dynamic in your level of response. Look at Melbourne for example. You can’t lock down as hard as they will be doing indefinitely. Perhaps you can do it for a short time in response to an acute event. That’s just an extreme example in the overall scale of phased response protocols. Legally mandated masking is just somewhere further down that spectrum.

These have been some of my main concerns in the beginning. What is the exit strategy? Nobody can tell you. Back in March, I get a phone alert ordering me to start inside.

For how long? What criteria must be met for this order to no longer be in effect?

There was no mention of that. It was neither time limited, nor data limited (e.g., automatically goes out of effect when infection rates drop below x per million).

Furthermore, this was an executive order by our governor, not passed by the legislator, which make it all the more unpalatable.

Yes, covid is deadly. More deadly than the flu. But the flu is also deadly. We take none of these precautions for the flu. How much more deadly than the flu must a virus be for all of this to be justified.

Worth noting there have been multiple flu strains throughout modern history which have been more deadly than COVID has been so far.

Aside from 1918 Spanish Flu there was also the 1958 Asian flu which killed ~2 million.

COVID is also less deadly than even an average flu for about half of people who get it, but many times more deadly than the average flu in about a quarter of cases.

The bottom line is unless you have a set of sustainable measures which can keep R below 1, then you’re back to just bending the curve to keep hospital capacity available.

Realistically I think that locations that have a very low herd immunity percentage cannot be successful in keeping R below 1 without intensive shutdown and lockdown measures, which of course must be sustained indefinitely.

However once a certain level of herd immunity is reached in a community, a more sustainable set of measures can be enough, in concert with the innate benefits of herd immunity, to keep R below 1. I believe this explains the current dichotomy we see in places like NY and MA versus FL and CA.

It’s not a question of “MA does better wearing masks than CA” it’s a matter of masks plus MA’s herd immunity keeps MA below 1 while masks with the lower herd immunity in CA keeps them above 1.

You don’t have to be much above or below that R=1, after 30 days the results compound either way.

I like the idea of not supporting laws you're not willing to enforce by gun.

I think people should be encouraged to wear masks, but not strictly mandated.

> I like the idea of not supporting laws you're not willing to enforce by gun.

That's a really low bar.

For example, I think shoplifting should be illegal. 99.9% of the time no guns will need to be involved. But if someone is sufficiently willing to escalate, it becomes a matter of letting them steal whatever they want from stores, whenever they want, or enforcing it with a gun. You could fine them, but someone with that attitude would just ignore the fine. So yes, I'm willing to enforce shoplifting with a gun, as a last resort.

But if shoplifting is my point of comparison... I think right now that not wearing a mask is worse than shoplifting. So yes, let's enforce it. Try extremely hard to keep guns out of it, but don't just give up on making it a rule at all.

- On the other hand, -

all of the above is assuming that someone would go to ridiculously escalated and brandishing measures to fight the law. If we assume they won't do that, the situation is completely different. No guns would be necessary to enforce either of those laws, so just enforce them with safe measures. There's no need for your rule of thumb in that case.

>I like the idea of not supporting laws you're not willing to enforce by gun.

Speaking of which, this whole covid thing with the masks, the travel bans, etc. is really a great illustration of the differences between legal, enforceable and politically palatable. Of course nobody is learning these lessons because we're all busy arguing about masks.

Because I shouldn't have to wear a mask when I am riding my bike alone in the woods, or when I am walking my dog. It is uncomfortable, and outside transmission is rare so it is not that beneficial. We have to find a balance between saving lives, and taking away comfort and freedoms, just like we do with things like cars.

No cop is going to be hiding behind a tree while you are alone in the woods. When you are walking your dog, you are passing by numerous people on a sidewalk? If so, wear a mask. If not, no copper is going to be hiding in the bushes running a mask check. We can have the same balance we have with cars. Most people vaguely obey something close to the speed limit and sometimes people who are way over or just unlucky get nabbed and it happens often enough that (again), most people obey closely enough. Mask usage doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than florida, texas, and southern california (LA county and surrounding) are doing it. That's not a high hurdle.

Most people haven't got the message yet that governments are acting irrationally. If governments mandate a mask law, then everyone becomes a cop. The other dog walker you see on the path, who is terrified of what they think is a disease that has killed 7% of the population[1], will report you and because it's the law you'll be punished even though it makes no sense.

Look, we're in an environment where rationality has disappeared. Now is not the time to be radically changing human interaction, possibly forever, on the basis of atrociously poor statistics and data handling.

[1] https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-...

" The other dog walker you see on the path, who is terrified of what they think is a disease that has killed 7% of the population[1], will report you and because it's the law you'll be punished even though it makes no sense."

Sorry but this is utter nonsense. The authorities don't have time to track down every citizen-reported non-mask wearer. You are imagining a deep-state dystopia that simply does not exist.

It's insane to me that people want to make such large-scale changes to people's behaviour based on some anecdotes.

Are you American by chance? This is also anecdotal, but on the internet I'm seeing wearing a masks considered "such large-scale changes to people behaviour" mostly from American commenters. In Asia they just do it, in Europe we just do it (and I live in maybe the most government-hostile country in Europe).

> in Europe we just do it

Maybe in some European countries. The Dutch public health authorities are very skeptical about the usefulness of masks and continue to resist a mask requirement except in places where distancing is impossible (like public transport).

Mandating face coverings for everyone who leaves their house is a large-scale change. No, I am not American. I'm also now not really European, so that should tell you where I am ;)

Edit: I decided to clarify why I think it is a large-scale change. I cannot think of any other action we are actively obliged to do by law, except for possibly covering gentials, when leaving our own house/property. Introducing any such obligitory action is, in my opinion, a large-scale change in mandated behaviour.

> No, I am not American. I'm also now not really European, so that should tell you where I am ;)

i am probably missing something obvious but no, there are plenty of places that are not america or Europe.

Where in Europe we do it? Most of the countries agree the evidence is rather weak, I wouldn't do such broad generalizations about Europe. No masks in Finland where in at, neither in Estonia or Latvia that I visited.

Japan has pretty much 100% mask coverage, but the number of cases is still rising rapidly.

To be fair, not nearly as fast as the US, but masks are not a panacea.

They don't need to be perfect, you just need to find an acceptable combination of measures that push the replication rate low enough.

No one is saying masks are perfect. But Worldometers shows Covid-19 deaths at 480 per 1 million in the US and 8 per 1 million in Japan. New cases in Japan are but a tiny fraction of the United States.

Masks have been mandatory where I'm at since March, along with full lockdown for months, and the virus is still making it's rounds. The president here is a laughing stock because he recently stated that everyone is going to get it no matter what, so be prepared -- so everyone is asking what was the point of having the shutdown then. We know lots of people that have COVID now or have had it and they are all fine (except for one elderly lady that passed). Getting sick is pretty normal here. Mass hysteria is not.

I agree they should, but a lot of these small businesses are restaurants and bars where you have to remove your mask to put food and drinks into your mouth.

> It’s insane to me that we don’t just make masks 100% mandatory when you’re outside your own home.

How do you intend to enforce this mandatory order?

> a man with a dry cough

Anecdotally, this could have been the reason the other 25 didn't contract the disease, and not really the mask.

I don't think so. A dry cough does not mean like bone dry. It means no mucus coming up from the deep lungs. Plenty of droplets are produced by dry cough.

Asymptomatic-like. I understand.

>It’s insane to me that we don’t just make masks 100% mandatory when you’re outside your own home.

We can just reopen reopen right now. Yes covid spread easily but we already know that majority of covid cases its either asymptomatic or only mild symptom.

At this point lockdown create more problem than it solves.

For an example of what people are doing in this space: Melbourne, Australia (where I live) just did this.

Kinda sorta. They want any face covering. Stick a handkerchief or bandanna over it. Or a faceshield - my pet hate as they stop immediate droplets but do nothing for aerosols.

For details: https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/face-coverings-covid-19

That ship has sailed.

When COVID was politicized, that chance died.

> a simple law to mandate masks 100% of the time when outside your own home.

Far too many people see that as one stop before Nazi Germany for that to happen.

Edit: I am not one of them, lol.

Where would you rank 'employees must wash their hands before returning to work' signs in restaurant bathrooms on your road to Naziism?

I do not view it that way. I wash my hands and wear a mask.

I do know people who object to those handwashing mandates though. Knew a guy who occasionally wiped his hand on the sign in protest of it.

Those are the sort of selfish people who are dragging America down.

You need to take into account culture and mentality. Making people wear masks 100% of the time might work in a country like Japan where people are disciplined and conforming but will not work in many other places where the attitude is a bit more lax.

The best way for those place is to give people mask off time in non critical places so they will be more likely to wear them in the critical places. For example, there is no point pressuring people to wear a mask while walking in quiet street where they can easily keep distance or hardly pass by other people, but you should force them to wear it when in a shop or a crowded main street.

They have a strong social conformity rate in Japan and their numbers are rising too. Masks are just kind of effective.

Japan, a country of 126 million people, had fewer cases yesterday than Georgia, a population of 10 M people. Masks work. Nothing is 100% effective.

Would you characterize Australia as a disciplined, conformist society? I'm in Melbourne, where masks are currently mandatory, and most are complying. In practice, you see people sipping from coffees while walking down the street, then putting the mask on as they pass people.

Compared to US, absolutely. I'm in Washington State, and we do have a mask mandate here - but if you go into more conservative areas, it appears to be routinely ignored. I've seen a gas station diner where 90% weren't wearing masks.

For another point of reference - in Australia, do you have police officers who openly refuse to enforce such laws? Because it's pretty common in small towns hereabouts.

> We could keep the economy decently open AND keep COVID cases down dramatically with a simple law to mandate masks 100% of the time

We could already keep the economy open with little ill effect. At this point, if you’re still concerned about the health effects of covid, you should either support wearing masks 100% of the time anyway (e.g. for influenza prevention) or you’re a statistically illiterate hysteric.

Tell that to people who have died or are permanently disabled because of covid. What an idiotic, false, and asshole thing to say.

It seems strikingly brazen for the landlords to start asking for full rent in this market. Even before covid, vacant storefronts were sitting on the market for months or years due to retail and banking moving online[1]. Good luck finding someone who wants to start a new restaurant in the next 9 months or so. Even if they think they can force the current tenant into bankruptcy and collect, there won't be much to collect after taking away the tenant's only income stream.

It all just feels very short-sighted.

[1] see, e.g., from 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-...

>Even if they think they can force the current tenant into bankruptcy and collect, there won't be much to collect after taking away the tenant's only income stream.

A lot of landlords have no choice. They themselves are businesses, often leveraged to the hilt, with not a whole lot of room to offer grace.

And yes, I realize there are massive REITs behind some of these properties, that have large earnings and reap huge windfalls for shareholders. That doesn't mean they're equipped to receive no income for months during a pandemic. It's sort of the way our economy works: right on the edge at all times.

I agree with all that, but surely if they don't have any wiggle room to offer grace they don't have wiggle room to let the property be vacant for 6+ months, by which time there will inevitably be a glut of supply on the market.

It should shake out that way, but sometimes there are places where the gears don't quite mesh. For example they might have loans secured on the property as x * monthly rent, and so if they rent it out cheaper then they have to post additional collateral which would be more than a few month's rent.

I'm almost sickened pointing this out, but legally speaking, a large part of the 6+ months would be the responsibility of the tenant they sued. It could get ugly for the small business owner.

True generally regarding tenant responsibility if new tenant can't be found, but good luck recovering anything at all from a tenant who was evicted because they couldn't pay rent.

It seems to me that any landlord who understood the economic situation would work with tenants to keep them on paying something, even if they couldn't afford full rent. I expect landlords will end up better economically in the end that way.

Keeping a tenant at 80% rent is still better than having no tenant at 100% rent. If business are having a few quarters of negative profitability, why can't the same happen to commercial real estate?

Rent control. It makes more sense to keep the place vacant than to reduce the base rent, which could take decades to make up.

Rent control. It makes more sense to keep the place vacant than to reduce the base rent, which could take decades to make up.

Huh?

Does NYC have rent control for businesses? I doubt it. That's for apartments.

I'm not familiar with how rent control works. If they lowered prices due to the pandemic would they really have to keep them that low indefinitely?

I mean, many of these guys can't handle 4 months of no cash flow. 100% rent or 80% rent, they're going under anyway. You might as well get what you can out of them.

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you run my proposed scenario on a hypothetical rent of $10k a month then it becomes "which is greater 80% of 10 or 100% of 0" do you want $8,000 or $0".

"You might as well get what you can out of them." might mean lowering rents.

I'm excited for your world. The world where we get what we can out of people already struggling. Sounds like a nice world.

I can't speak for NYC, but in Sydney commercial properties are typically valued at a fixed multiple of the rent.

This matters because if they change the rent, any loan they've taken out now gets revalued, which could put them underwater. So in that case 80% is much worse than empty but at 100%.

This is why you'll see landlords giving a month's free rent, making rebates etc, while technically still charging 'full price'.

I suspect sometimes people just have trouble acknowledging the real value of a building. It certainly happens with a lot of home owners.

In good times you sometimes see landlords dramatically raise the rent on tenants, have the space empty, and then continue to stay empty for months.

Allow me to shed a single tear for the landlords who took an over leverage position and are expecting the taxpayer to bail them out on the threat of a mass eviction crisis.

If only someone could have told those poor poor landlords the dangers of over leveraged investments. The TSLA short guys should get on this grift; bail outs for idiots or the public gets it.

Commercial landlords require huge down payments and want small business owners to sign using their own name. Any experienced commercial landlord has been burned plenty of times trying sue a "Grapes vape shop LLC". Gets! Worse! The largest asset these small business owners own is: their house -- and NOW they have no LLC protection.

Yes this exactly. The commercial real estate people I know aren't worried much (at least at the moment). Most of these small business leases are personally guaranteed.

It’s all absurdly shortsighted and instead of throwing helicopter cash around the Fed should have sat all major banks and asset managers around and said “we’ll support your principal but you agree to a moratorium on coupon payments on MBS” and then force these to be passed on to landlords and then on to tenants. Everyone gets (mostly) what they want.

What you’re missing is that this chain represents a social hierarchy that has to be preserved above and beyond any material arrangement. Bankers > borrowers > tenants.

You can bailout the upper echelons of the first two, but anything further calls into question the whole validity of the arrangement. That is forbidden.

Would it shock you that the main reason that space is vacant in New York or California is due to tax policy, state and federal?

If it doesn't make sense it makes dollars.

It's not tax policy. It's finance. Real estate is about cash flow, not tax.

A property owner can finance a real property based on the actual or putative rental market value, using the leasable property as collateral. An empty space can theoretically rent for top dollar if a national chain rents the space, but a leased space must be valued at the actual lease value. Consequently, many developers choose to keep spaces vacant unless they are actually able to lease them at or close to the lease value assumed in their financing arrangements.

The margins on the financial instruments that affect real estate are generally slim enough that a couple percent here or there as a result of tax is the deciding factor.

Yes, it would shock me. Care to explain?

There are lots of ways to come up with an answer.

Any tax deduction that can be realized by a non-person entity can be securitized.

"If you are a real estate professional, you can deduct any amount of rental losses, regardless of your income."

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) pass taxes onto owners.

Occasionally you pay no capital gains on selling property.

Occasionally you pay no tax on income used to pay off debt financed property.

If you are a huge investor you can buy and sell properties. Normally you would pay tax like anyone else at that scale, or you can sell shares in your REIT where a lot of the value is tied up in the fact that the small-time share buyers can realize tax benefits you can't. So you securitized tax benefits.

In some places, like California, the tax bill on your real estate is frozen some 30-40 fucking years ago as long as ownership doesn't change outside of family dynasties. So whereas you'd have to rent it in any other part of the civilized world, here you can just wait until grandma dies and inherit the house. It sits vacant.

Some people create family dynasties by marriage. Although it's a stretch to call that, strictly speaking, a tax dodge.

We don't tax vacant properties, which could encourage their use productively.

Anyway let me put this another way. Would it shock you that I know a lot of people here in San Francisco with 2 or 3 houses owner-occupied by a total of 5 people because (1) they have just lived here forever, (2) their kids have moved out, and (3) the taxes are frozen in the early 90s? And you wonder why there's vacancy. 3 houses for 5 people!

Thanks for this, I hadn't thought about securitizing tax benefits.

But in the SF case if you have 5 people living in 3 houses, say, as 2 / 2 / 1, and this are single-family houses, I don't think you have vacancies. "Occupants per square foot" isn't a measure of vacancy except when it's zero.

See another answer to the parent. Also, there are ways that large owners can claim vacancies as losses from a tax perspective.

This isn't really tax policy, though- yes, there are tax rules around this, but it's not like the IRS woke up one day and was like-

You know what's unfair? Large property owners feeling the pain from potential lessees not fully appreciating the value they're getting for the price. Merely setting a price is a legitimate business risk, and large owners deserve to be recognized for that risk and for their losses.

That isn't what happened.

In case there's some motive for picking NY or CA, what about all of the empty space in Houston? Why would the rents go up, along with vacancy?

I haven't gone counting, but I've been unnerved by how many storefronts, warehouses, lots, and human houses remained empty after what the narrative would like us to believe is a protracted economic expansion.

(Serious question. It's obvious enough that the owners perceive them to be of more value empty than full.)

It's not easy to break a commercial lease. Better to drain down the tenant while you can instead of reducing rent and then they die when other contractual obligations drain them down. You likely won't be keeping the tenant alive by letting them stay on reduced rent.

>>Between early March and early May, roughly 110,000 small businesses nationwide shut down, according to researchers at Harvard.

I tracked down the paper[1] they referenced and Table 5 was an eye opener. While "only" 110K small businesses were estimated to have shut down out of 30M[2] small businesses nationwide (0.37%), the really grim survey results are summarized in Table 5 of the paper titled "Reported Likelihood of Remaining Open by Industry and Hypothetical Crisis Duration". The restaurant/bar/catering category surveyed back in late March believed their chance of survival would only be 0.15 if the shutdowns lasted through to December.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26989.pdf

[2] https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2314...

Is there any proven mechanism to put a segment of society "on-pause" for while? Each business entity submits a hibernation plan to central authority, funds provided and liabilities put on hold by decree. What do governments do historically during sieges and plagues?

Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?

Most businesses while closed could have very minimal costs.

Let's take a restaurant. Few people dining, so minimal labor costs, reduced deliveries, so minimal cost of goods/foods. But they still have enormous rent costs.

My guess is that 90% of businesses could have gone on outside, easily weathered this storm, and picked right back up where they left off if we had simply paused rent payments. This would have meant property owners wouldve been short money to pay mortgages, so we simply hold off on mortgage payments. Banks can weather that without issue, or receive govt loans to tide them over and structure of the economy is ready to pick up where it left off.

A similar solution in residential housing could've also worked well.

So you need to understand how the commercial real estate world works to know you can’t just “hold off on mortgage payments” for very long. Most loans backed by CRE are securitized. So they are packaged into bonds. These bonds are not just banks, they are funds. Funds that hold and generate monthly payments for millions of American’s pensions/retirement/etc. This isn’t just rich old landlords won’t get their money, it is a large number of Americans, the money will stop. Bonds will simply default from lack of loan payments. Yes, the Gov can keep it afloat for a short period, but we’re talking trillions of dollars. This is the giant elephant in the room right now that the “Main Street’ is unaware of. It could potentially be very nasty. What happens if 50 million+ Americans stopped receiving/had cut significantly their pension/retirement payments? CRE is a top asset class, one of the biggest.

Sounds like what you're saying is that those bonds and investments carried unrealised or unrepoeted risk.

That's the lenders' (and regulators') responsibility.

Fixed-income investors are still granted emergency income. Their previous lifestyles may no longer be sustainable, but they'll be able to afford food, clothing, shelter, and other true necessities.

I would look at this as being more of a black swan event. No investor can factor those in because they are unknown by definition.

This isn't about lifestyle. If CRE crashes, this is 2008 all over again and probably an order of magnitude worse. Commercial real estate has been a very active asset class over the past decade and it's huge.

s/unrepoeted/unreported/

No disrespect to poets.

It sounds like the main issue you're addressing is that mortgages need to keep getting paid. New York City suspended mortgage payments however, so how were they able to do that without causing all the problems you're describing?

So the way these Deals are structured, you have "people in charge" of each deal, in simple terms. They also monitor all of these properties (Asset Managers) all the time. Right now they are basically marking them as "COVID" Forbearance. But that has been going on for some time now, and we are at risk of the bonds starting to default. I expect the Gov. to step in soon on this even more, but that will only buy a small amount of time. What needs to happen is to get tenants paying. It is a very complicated system that was never designed to handle something like this.

And how convenient it is, that a system that's designed to benefit the wealthiest, is also rigged to sink everybody else with it, if it's brought down. And so, for a while now, whenever anybody tries to enact some reforms that'd make it more equitable, they're defeated by appeals to retirement security. That's one nasty hack of democracy.

Commercial bonds carry risks (even very unusual but not unprecedented risks such as a global pandemic). Maybe the bondholders should have thought about this?

They have. Demand for US Treasury Bonds and other safe haven assets increased as capital holders seek to de-risk.

I wouldn’t worry too much about that, our whole political system is run by old people and they’ll throw everybody else into a giant blender before they let return on investment drop for the elderly and wealthy.

Cut pensions then. Right now the working are paying full price to the retired. Everyone should get a haircut.

Ok I'll bite on the terms of someone bought into the way things are: pensions are just deferred compensation; by cutting them you would effectively be unilaterally tearing up a contract that both sides agreed to. In addition: pensions are paid for when the work is done, not after the fact.

> My guess is that 90% of businesses could have gone on outside, easily weathered this storm, and picked right back up where they left off if we had simply paused rent payment

You can't go home again, though. Meaning that the world pre-Covid is gone and it's not something we can return to. We will always need dentists and daycares and so on, but much of the retail was already on its way out. And then if Covid marks a shift to WFH then lots of restaurants that depended on office workers are no longer viable. The world is changing and creative destruction, while painful, is needed.

If millions are evicted and there are no jobs for them to find, and there's no safety net from the government (the one group that can print money), the destruction won't probably creative, unfortunately.

This is where things can get dangerous for the US, there is no safety net that guarantees people $1000 a month so that they don't starve or have to sleep on the street.

> Banks can weather that without issue

citation definitely needed on that. I don't think the banking system is set up to see Billions of dollars in monthly revenue disappear every night. This could take ALL of the slack out of the system and would almost certainly prompt a run on the banks

Messing with the banking system to this extent is one of few conceivable ways you could see the USA have a total economic collapse

Yes. See my comment in this same reply thread. It isn't the banks. It is the funds who invested in these AAA bonds backed by a very diverse CRE portfolio. Who owns these funds? Avg. Americans. Pensions/retirement/etc. They are already close to the breaking point with the forbearance. The fed/Fannie/Freddie will need to step up next, but that won't last long either.

So what is a layperson to do ? Should I take out the money now while it is still there?

Germany is doing it. You can get money to pay for the restaurant.

What you cant do :pay your own rent!

More people than you think are unable to... Because, well, most people spent there money instead of saving..

But if you look at like this : resturant barely passing bye (or freelancers or whatever) go out of business.

The rest can weather the storm with the help of the government.

What happens if/when the lender of last resort (i.e. central banks) goes down?

Actually you need to provide citation for the idea that messing with the banking system would cause a total economic collapse.

Also, a bank run is probably the earliest, and most completely solved problem of financial problems. In the US with FDIC insurance, and the fact that the Fed has stepped in to bail banks out time and again, there is absolutely no reason to believe there would be a bank run.

Also, banks saw trillions of dollars of revenue disappear in the 2008 financial crisis. The disappearance of revenue wasn’t the issue. The suddenness with which it happened and the unexpected impact of non banking financial institutions was what caused damage.

Suddenness wouldn’t be an issue because it would have been something mandated by the government. And the non banking institutions are smaller, better understood and would have been far less of a problem this time.

Hey friend, you need to do your own research before demanding citations. You've made quite a few wrong or misinformed claims yourself. Much of what you're saying requires citation are just the basic assumptions that the current market economy runs on.

>But they still have enormous rent costs

This here is one of the most important things anyone who wants to open a restaurant needs to consider. With Restaurants location is incredibly important and being in a great location carries significant costs.

Unless you own your space, you will have a difficult time making it a in the Restaurant business. you have to sell a lot of food to pay 5k-15k of rent every month leaving little in profit and savings.

The Restaurant business is brutal, even if your semi successful.

Its difficult. The times had an interesting article at the beginning of Covid about a restaurant closing.

A closure ripples through the economy. Salaries/ suppliers and rent. Crazy high rents are going to be a casualty of this virus I suspect.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-re...

I though paying everyone unemployed $600 dollars in unemployment while not a perfect system, was pretty good as that money was going right back into the economy, keeping it from collapsing completely.

We can't expect property owners to pause rent payments without the government pausing property tax payments.

All those mortgages are wrapped into bonds. No mortgage payment, bonds can't pay. It's a default. Or haircut.

Those bonds in turn are people's retirement income. It doesn't just end at a bank.

Then the Federal Reserve buys MBS (mortgage backed securities). Or we bail out banks again. So eventually we all end up paying the corner store's rent through taxes and inflation?

> Most businesses while closed could have very minimal costs.

For me, my mortgage on the property is my biggest expense and my bank offered my no forebearance. So, no, most couldn't have minimal costs unless you can address lease/mortgage payments.

Edit: If you disagree that mortgage/lease is the biggest expense for many businesses and doesn't need to be addressed, I'm really interested in your point of view. I may be using anecdotal evidence for me that doesn't translate to other businesses.

Banks can’t weather it that easily. They’re levered up at least 10 to 1, in many cases more. If they’re levered 10 to 1 and expecting 5% mortgage payment, in one year half their equity is wiped out, and in two years they’re insolvent. It gets worse... if the value of the mortgages goes down by 10% because people become worse credits, they become insolvent. This is why the govt is propping them up. (Same is she and solution in 2008)

TBTF.

Risk is ultimately assumed by states / CBs.

Its not all mortgages though.

What do you tell the property owner who paid off mortgage, and uses the rent as primary income? Should the govt pay these people? I suppose they could get the banks to loan the money interest free...

What's the alternative? Evict the tenant, no rent money, it's not like you're getting another tenant until the economy recovers...

There are still plenty of employed people, and a landlord would rather offer a big discount to someone who can pay rent than continue to deal with a tenant who is unable to do so.

"get a job, landlord" or "apply for unemployment"

but really there should be some minimum UBI so that nobody starves or lives on the streets.

They're not gonna be getting rent if businesses close anyway so telling to them to get stuffed because rentier capitalists are lower in the hierarchy of business to preserve doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.

maybe people shouldn't be able to make a living out awating rent? this is pure 'rent-seeking', I understand the appeal tho...

wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to do anything at all for a living but wait for my tenants to pay up?

“Rent-seeking” does not mean “collects rent”. It’s a specific term that describes someone who inserts themselves into economic transactions without providing value.

The classic example is someone who puts a chain across a path and then charges to move the chain out of the way.

WRT landlords, you can still describe some of their behavior as “rent-seeking” if they are perpetuating a social or political environment where they get greater returns for doing nothing (e.g. NIMBY/BANANA)

No, collecting rent is not “rent seeking”.

Rent seeking is collecting “rents” (which is different than rent for a home) from either a public good (like land) or through lobbying for legal changes that prevent competition and increase earnings.

A house built on a piece of land is an improvement and doesn’t fall under “rent seeking”.

You could make the argument that the land the house is on is rent seeking, sure, but that would mean only a part of the income would be considered rent seeking.

"maybe people shouldn't be able to make a living out awating rent?"

It's not exactly free money -- landlords do have to deal with the maintenance of the property, fixing/replacing broken appliances, and so forth. Before a landlord goes bankrupt they will cut back on maintenance that is not absolutely essential (something I lived through in my younger years, seeing benches fall apart, trash not being removed, and weeds taking over the front and back yards of the building), and eventually would not be able to pay for maintenance that actually is essential (good luck getting your plumbing fixed when your landlord cannot pay the plumber). There is also the matter of cascading bankruptcies when large numbers of landlords are not being paid, resulting in their loans no longer paying (likely dinging retirement accounts and pension funds).

The fact is that a major shake-up in how we organize housing e.g. getting rid of rent-seeking landlords would be difficult in normal times. Doing such a thing during a deepening economic crisis would make everything worse for everyone, including people not directly involved.

The result would be an even greater lack of housing supply and vastly worse quality (including disaster safety and hygene), as without renting only immediate capital is available for assets which currently take decades to generate funding to build. Going with trailers as middle class residencies would also be more wasteful as they are built to last and outright depricate in value to "have to pay to get rid of even with salvage rights" levels.

The whole point of money is that it is fungible so it would just go elsewhere. Not a very good outcome. Imperative "shoulds" don't mean a thing in emergent systems and problem solving. Parents should love and nurture their children but we still have child abuse unfortunately.

Obviously, someone has to hold the bag, but who? You cannot just expect everybody to receive their guaranteed returns on investment as if nothing happened.

But who and how much -- that is a very tough decision.

They can live off unemployment like everyone else. And guess what, mortgage payments were already suspended in NY. Yup, they fucked over renters just like that.

Pausing does awful things to employment for people who can't survive on some minimal part-time hours that are possibly unpredictable as well, making it hard to work additional jobs to keep income stable.

> so minimal labor costs

That seems to apply only in places with minimal protection. In most of the EU they're simply employees so all the standard rules about firing would apply.

No, no proven mechanism.

There are an infinity of answers why, mine:

There is no "pause" when it comes to financial relationships.

One org's liability is another one's asset. Your rent payment goes to your building owner's mortgage, the payments from which are received by an SPV, which is an asset in the fixed income portion of your investment portfolio, which is itself an asset in which you have shares, the value of which determines the value to you.

So like the proverbial butterfly, you not paying your rent hits you on the other side.

These are all contractual relationships, usually private, and bespoke. There are legal consequences to you not paying your rent. Consequences to your owner not paying his mortgage. Consequences to the absence of delivery to the SPV. Consequences so the SPV not returning its contractual interest rate. Consequences to loss in value of your shares. All of these consequences are encoded into myriad unique contracts- your lease agreement, the mortgage agreement, etc.

There fundamentally is no standardization across these agreements. There is no central registry of all of these relationships and dependencies.

There can't be, operationally, as they change in real time, and there can't be theoretically, as maintaining one would violate so many principles of privacy and autonomy and freedom and so forth.

Finally, we also live in a world where flows are dependent on work, of various kinds- underpaid and -valued work often performed by women and POC, overpaid and overvalued often performed by high status white men. All, nevertheless, work.

When work stops, but flows must continue, what do we do?

>When work stops, but flows must continue, what do we do?

Pay people to keep these flows going, like all other countries did?

Yeah. Other countries have had success with putting the cash in at the leaves of the dependency graph (ie the businesses) with the requirement to continue payroll. Then the rest of the relationships already exist, so the cash flows through.

Or we can destroy our economy. I suspect there will be a short delay between widespread rent payment failures and contamination of the banks. By then, we're all gonna be on the ride for the duration.

Not feeling so optimistic today.

There's no free lunch. The government money has to come from somewhere too. Otherwise, inflation.

Continuing to pay people in a way completely disconnected from the (lack of) work they’re performing is also a very reliable way to “destroy the economy”.

If you don’t want to destroy the economy, the trick is to not throw a giant wrench into it by prohibiting people from working.

Exactly. Covering wages would have been a great investment -- preserving countless businesses that would be irreplaceable, or infeasible to start again. As life resumed, the businesses would be right there, immediately ready to go, serve their markets, pay their workers, pay their taxes, pay their landlords, preserve the equity of their owners, and resume community roles. Instead they're gone forever -- because such an approach is seen by a substantial cohort of Americans as an undeserved handout and moral hazard.

I agree, 1000%.

> What do governments do historically during sieges and plagues?

Collapse? Militarise?

Trying to think of examples in what one would recognise as the modern era, outside of the obvious wholesale destruction of WW2. It looks like the war itself was bad for small business in the US: https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...

> The total number of business enterprises in operation in the United States has declined from a peak of nearly 3.4 million in 1941 to the present [1945] low point of perhaps 2.8 million. Certain persons have seen in this decline an alarming tendency toward concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations, accompanied by a continuous freezing out of small enterprises.

"Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?"

Yes, for a few reasons:

1. The probability of a catastrophic event is low but non-trivial, so every so often society has to deal with some form of destruction on a scale that is larger than what the economy can absorb. In the ancient world the threshold was lower because economies were smaller, but even the largest economies today still have limits that will be exceeded periodically.

2. Debt is a necessary part of the economy, but we are generally bad at determining how much debt we should carry, and so we periodically overshoot. The result of overshooting is a financial crisis, in which many bad debts and unsustainable businesses will be destroyed (resulting in undershooting the optimal debt level, and thus allowing the cycle to start again). Ray Dalio wrote a free book about the debt cycle that is worth reading.

The problem is that people can’t hibernate. All of the employees, all along the chain, need to eat.

There is no shortage of food at the moment. Just pay people to stay home.

Right, so the government needs to cover the costs. That's what the Paycheck Protection Program was trying to do, but it wasn't expansive enough and now it has run out.

Some companies collected those loans and still didn't pay employees. I've seen this unfold personally too and it has really shaken my respect for American businessmen...

You can do that, but then the system's not really in hibernation; you've just replaced it with a temporary UBI. There's no reason to expect the transition back to a normal market economy to be particularly smooth.

A rocky transition from a temporary UBI to normalcy is better than thousands upon thousands of small businesses permanently closing across the country.

> Just pay people to stay home.

With what money?

There's always money if they want to spend it. For what they pumped into the markets earlier this year, they could have given $7.5k to every American adult (or $4.5k to every single person inc children)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/03/12/fed-inje...

The Fed Money Printer (TM) has been running on overdrive for awhile now.

Bottom-left quadrant of this. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1789676-money-printer-go-brr...

until what?

> What do governments do historically during sieges and plagues?

Completely disrupt the working of society to gather resources for either combat the problem or run away and have a comfortable life elsewhere.

History is not a good guide here. If you insist on using it as a standard, we are doing really, really well on this crisis. We are much better discussing what can improve than what we did wrong.

  Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?

Yes, I'd say it's a rather integral part of existing in the universe. All systems experience these cycles on some time scale.

Historically people starved and tried to make ends meet as best they could. But if you were to ask the Kulaks (basically besieged by their gov), you’ll notice that starvation was a big part.

Are we doomed to cycles during (our lifetimes)? No, it could be all downhill for centuries. (Which I think has been the case when empires collapse, be they Roman, Dynastic Chinese, from the steppes, Mayan, etc.

Debt jubilees were used in circumstances like this.

I think that was most typical when the party declaring the debt jubilee was the lender itself (e.g. the government), or when the lenders were despised by society (e.g. Jews in mediæval Europe).

A debt jubilee would not fly so well now when all of our pensions, retirements and endowments are tied up as … someone else's debt.

Given how many households are deep in debt in US, do you think that cancelling others' indirect debt to them would leave them in the red?

My bank (Wells Fargo) actually voluntarily suspended payments for 3 months. In times like WWII, the private sector pitched in to help with the coordination of the government on the various levels.

In my country (Malaysia), the loan moratorium was ~6 months by government decree, as was electricity & broadband bills. I reckon this was only possible since government-controled funds are the largest shareholders of the companies involved.

It's still not enough. I'm thinking service providers all need a new "bare essentials" tier, whereby delinquent customers can keep the service relationship on minimalist when they are desperate.

This is preferable to cutting the service and restarting later with bad credit.

It's not that easy... it will have to be supported somehow. It still costs $ just to exist. Economies are like living organisms. You can't just stop breathing. This is why covid could trigger a worldwide depression/recession.

Infectivity rate will INCREASE up until 50% and will only slow at 70% when herd immunity kicks in... things will be getting WORSE not better.

I am pretty sure that is a plot element in ‘Atlas Shrugged’.

We’re going to see a lot of those plot elements in the near future.

Yes. Cancel rent and ensure everyone regardless of employment gets some mini-UBI for essentials.

Any effort to preserve employment is stupid. People don't need to work, they need to eat and live under a roof.

Small business don't need to exist, either. We might want them too, in which case we should cancel commercial rent too. Or, we might give up on small business (https://www.thebellows.org/the-double-horseshoe-theory/), and instead increase the public spaces in the city so the fabric of society and adapt.

>Small business don't need to exist, either.

Nah, you know what doesn't need to exist? Giant multinational corporations beholden to nobody that do whatever they want with impunity around the world, polluting, crushing local economies, lobbying governments, tracking the population like cattle and selling their data for pennies to the highest bidder.

Man the world sure would be better if they didn't exist.

Small businesses though, they're the backbone of just about every small to midsize community around the world.

>Nah, you know what doesn't need to exist? Giant multinational corporations beholden to nobody that do whatever they want with impunity around the world, polluting, crushing local economies, lobbying governments, tracking the population like cattle and selling their data for pennies to the highest bidder.

Giant corporations generally pay better and invest more into their workforce than small business, that's why developed economies, with high levels of organisation, rely on larger firms.

The romanticism of small-business is extremely misplaced. Small business is unproductive, precarious, and as can be seen in this pandemic fragile to external shocks, offering virtually no security to their workforce.

Large firms, ideally with high levels of unionisation (see France or Denmark), can absorb these shocks because unlike small business they're not scraping by from one month to the next. And they very much are accountable to society at large, that's why they need to hire lobbyists in the first place, because they're usually subject to regulation. It's small business that is effectively unmanagable.

>Giant corporations generally pay better and invest more into their workforce than small business, that's why developed economies, with high levels of organisation, rely on larger firms.

In my experience, this is entirely not true. The only places i've ever gotten fair wages, been treated like a valuable employee, received regular raises were businesses with between 10-20 employees.

>The romanticism of small-business is extremely misplaced. Small business is unproductive, precarious, and as can be seen in this pandemic fragile to external shocks, offering virtually no security to their workforce

The last place I worked before my current job had a workforce of 13-15 people at any given time. We were extremely organized and productive. We brought in anywhere from $30000-$50000/day for that company. The company's assets were well into the millions from the bank statements I seen.

Our customers included people and businesses even hundreds of km away because of the quality of our work. Our work wasn't cheap either, even compared to our competitors, yet we regularly had so much business, we needed to turn down contracts and still constantly made money.

All of my coworkers had been there for over a decade before I left. They all supported families and lived good lives off that job. We all genuinely cared about the success of that business and wanted everything we did there to reflect well on it.

I have never felt that when working for any corporation other than when I'm forced to at mandatory 'pep meetings' or 'team building' bullshit they force you to participate in.

Large firms also have the money and the indirect influence ("we create jobs!!!") to throw around when more regulations are on the table. And if they're large enough, you start getting negative effects from market dominance abuse.

And small businesses don't have to be run in a way that makes them fragile to external shops. There's no reason why they can't form federations specifically for that purpose - operating independently, but sharing the downturn risks across the entire pool.

And many large businesses started out as small businesses. They literally owe their existence to the small business they started out as.

Hey, I'm with you that small business is much preferable to chaebol hell. But, I am also worried how much small business is still possible given modern technology and economies of scale.

(But I am also aware that the fact that large business gets so much more government assistance, directly, or via financial markets and fractional reserve banking, means it is hard to tell what is really going on.)

What I'm getting at is it may be that under capitalism consolidation is inevitable to a degree that small businesses would have to be completely propped up, in which we may consider other interventions such as workers on board or co-op requirements, UBI, etc.

Basically, if no outcome one likes is "natural" (please excuse the capitalist realism), then one should look at the full spectrum of "unnatural" solutions, as opposed to just the status-quo-adjacent "let's just attract and subsidize immigrants to work 3x hard as the rest of us so we can instagram in their restaurants and bodegas".

>> But, I am also worried how much small business is still possible given modern technology and economies of scale.

This is the opposite - the more modern technology, the more likely it is that small businesses can succeed. Barriers to entry are massively reduced on many fronts.

Large businesses are the engines that drive the economy. Small businesses are the future big businesses.

Countries have tried preventing big businesses before, and favoring small ones. It never worked out very well.

"...engines that drive the economy."

What metric are you using?

Young small to medium sized businesses account for most of the job growth.

Mature large businesses are better at rent seeking, tax avoidance, and wallowing in governmental largess.

This is why S&P stocks are rising. Consumers will still need to buy, but the pandemic will drive massive consolidation to large firms that can weather the financial strain.

Apparently, if you separate the 5 biggest tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon) the rest of S&P 495 is down about 11 percent Year-to-Date [1].

[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4363542-big-5-twilight-zone

Thank you, that's an excellent fact that rarely gets mentioned in the news or in comments.

Yeah no kidding. Was completely oblivious to this. Although I knew Amazon and Apple's stock had shot into the stratosphere somehow (Amazon I totally get, Apple not so much)

Apple might be skyrocketing b/c

1. it's post-covid revenues weren't significantly impacted 2. it's a blue chip stock in an era where safe securities like bonds yield nothing (there's no where else to put money) 3. fund managers don't want to miss out on the up-swing momentum, however irrational it may be

Presumably all those investors whining about large cash balances are singing a slightly different tune now.

The Russell 3000 has recovered to above its January 2 level.

S&P is rising because the fed won’t let the market fail. We will let everything else in this country turn to shit, but the fed will prop up the market no matter what.

The US stock market has become essentially a Ponzi scheme at best, and an outright scam at worst.

There’s many reasons the S&P is rising, you can’t say it’s from this without evidence.

Large companies have easier access to debt. And in a low rate environment, solid returns from debt are pretty much guaranteed.

more people buying than selling?

more machines buying that selling. but will sell at a millisecond notice.

What percent of small businesses fail every year?

To understand the damage, you have to know how what the baseline closure rate is. I am not sure what the rate is in the restaurant industry, but it seems extremely high even in regular times.

This is the businesses that made it. The vast majority fail. The fact that one-third of a very small percentage are newly failing is significant.

> The fact that one-third of a very small percentage are newly failing is significant.

Completely reasonable. But how significant?

Is 1/3 50% more than usual?

Is it 3x as many as usual?

Is it an order of magnitude more?

Many small businesses have signed personal guarantees on their commercial leases, meaning that landlords will come after them even after they've closed.

Restaurants for example will often have 5-10 year lease terms.

>> Many small businesses have signed personal guarantees on their commercial leases, meaning that landlords will come after them even after they've closed.

Yep. Just signed a 7 year lease and personally guaranteed it. More things few people are talking about when advocating for lockdowns.

Personal bankruptcy is only on your credit report for 7 years, versus being on the hook for sums you could never afford to repay. You'll be eligible for credit right away after the discharge (because you can't go BK again for 8 years), and eligible for a low down payment FHA mortgage (3-5% down) after two years (from discharge date).

I don't understand why this is being downvoted. Bankruptcy is a tool to encourage efficient risk-taking and solving otherwise tricky collective action problems for creditors.

There's an unfortunate stigma about bankruptcy in the U.S. which leads to _far_ fewer people/businesses filing bankruptcy than should be.

No one is better off limping along under unsustainable debt, not businesses and not individuals. We need to get rid of this stigma and let people use the tools we put in place to solve these problems.

Sure, but the business owner probably also lost his/her house in the process.

Just because it's not permanent, doesn't mean bankruptcy is an easy option.

During bankruptcy, all of your property will be placed in a bankruptcy estate. If you want to keep your home, you can usually exempt it from the estate and will continue to be liable for the mortgage as long as you make payments. If you don’t have enough equity in the property to secure junior liens on the property, such as a home equity loan, those will be stripped away and you’ll only be liable moving forward for the senior lien (primary mortgage).

There’s a lot of nuance, and it’s hard to generalize, but the system is designed to provide some relief in a reasonable manner.

furthermore, it seems that it should be easier to obtain credit if you have no debt than if you have more debt than collateral, and obviously no ability to pay it.

Not if the reason you have no debt is that you had the courts erase it all.

Force majure?

In Russia the government set up a process to have people freed from contracts during the pandemic, using this legal concept.

This is where having a hippy friend who doesn't believe in money is really useful.

The trick is to get them sober, washed and suited up for the meeting where you sign.

And be very, very nice to them the next few years when they ask you for a favor.

> “It’s the most frustrating situation because it’s not about passion anymore or the work you put in or the hours you put in,” he said. “It’s all about the mitigating circumstances that are out of your control.”

this is generally true about business. if the regulatory environment, the marketing is good, or the loan office is good (etc), you get lucky. if a celebrity likes your yoghurt. etc.

hard work is the other side of this, but the role of luck is huge.

anyway, looks like we're headed into the first real bust in a long long time.

This might actually be a good thing in the long run. Real estate prices in NYC were insane before the pandemic, landlords would purposefully keep property off the market and toss out long established businesses on hopes of scoring a payday from a new renter. Now we are in a situation where it is just impossible to pack enough people into a space to earn a profit at $3700 per square foot. No doubt it will cause some people a lot of pain up front but eventually it might be possible for small businesses and families to be in Manhattan again.

Another source of some sobering figures was the NYC Hospitality Alliance which just published their July Rent Report. 83% of respondents did not pay their full rent in July and 37% of respondents reported they paid no rent.[1]

[1] https://thenycalliance.org/assets/documents/informationitems...

It's so disheartening to see both Cuomo and DeBlasio's absolutely pathetic response to the pandemic - really on every level, but in the case of this article, the economic response.

Nearly every other city has taken major steps to make it easier for people to spend time outdoors, for restaurants and bars to serve patrons outdoors, assistance programs for local small businesses, and so forth. By contrast, DeBlasio has been chipping away at Open Streets, cancelled Summer Streets, and both he and Cuomo have been actively impeding restaurants and bars from adapting to serve food and alcohol outdoors.

They've insisted that bars cannot serve alcohol without serving "real food" (nachos doesn't count), which is a huge blow to bars which don't have a full kitchen. Even for restaurants and bars which do, though, they've been incredibly aggressive with issuing citations. Many have complained that, if a server clears the empty dinner plates before patrons are finished with their drinks, state inspectors will cite them because "there's no food", even though the bill shows that they were charged for dinner. Others have complained that the city has cited them for "violations", but unlike the health inspectors, doesn't actually provide a list of the offenses that need to be corrected.

In addition, they've provided ~zero financial assistance for small businesses - particularly bars and restaurants, which are hit the hardest. That's in stark contrast to other cities in the US and elsewhere, which have given direct cash assistance to help them weather the crisis.

It's a disaster all around, and neither the governor nor the mayor have shown any interest in taking meaningful steps to support the state's largest economy. (Cuomo has done a better job at framing his actions to the press, but when you actually look at what he's done, he's done a really awful job).

It's impossible to make rent in the city while at 50 percent capacity. The reckless and inconsiderate patrons are back already, the rest will not be going back to bars and restaurants any time soon, meaning probably two years. How many of these businesses would make it two years under normal conditions? 80% of nyc restaurants fail within 5 years. [1]

Nonetheless, I have seen two new restaurants open up in my area - both focusing on take-away with some outdoor seating. When businesses are being forced to adapt to a public health risk, I consider that a positive.

However I 100% agree with the need for better use of public outdoor space, the crippling of open/summer streets programs makes no sense.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-restaurants-fail-ra...

I don't think it's "reckless and inconsiderate" for people to frequent outdoor restaurants/bars now. NYC has had outdoor dining open for 6 weeks, with low and stable COVID infection rates throughout. A scientific consensus that COVID spreads the most indoors is emerging. Aside from allowing people to enjoy their leisure (with social and mental benefits), we support local businesses and their workers. Is it great that people are even working with the virus around? No, of course not. But with government aid not coming at all, the next best thing to do is to make sure the restaurants have enough money to pay staff and other expenses.

The real "reckless and inconsiderate" people are the politicians who are trying to impose austerity, cut benefit checks, and let businesses fail without a care. The elites are presiding over a 30% annualized decline in GDP without a care - mindboggling.

> The elites are presiding over a 30% annualized decline in GDP without a care - mindboggling.

It's only mindboggling if you expect them to care about the entire GDP and not just their personal slices of the pie.

Perhaps the government should broker some temporary rent-per-customer or rent-per-$ sales as a way to help both landlords and small businesses.

Sure DeBlasio and Cuomo 100% bungled the response in March especially, but you have a lot wrong here.

The city has been massively transformed to allow outdoor dining. Easily 1000's of restaurants and bars now have outdoor dining in what would usually be street parking spaces. Manhattan and Brooklyn especially. I've seen less of this in the Bronx, but most restaurants stayed open doing takeout anyway.

NYC gave direct cash grants to businesses with <10 employees. I know business owners got the money. Those grants were approved and funded before Care Act / PPP was passed. Once PPP opened there was no point in NYC trying to compete, the city can't print money.

Other states were able to give more direct financial assistance to businesses because they didn't have to spend so much on actual COVID response. Remember NY received a tiny amount of federal funding relative to population and actual pandemic impact, because of who was in control of the funding formula.

> Sure DeBlasio and Cuomo 100% bungled the response in March especially

Okay, so we agree on that.

> The city has been massively transformed to allow outdoor dining. Easily 1000's of restaurants and bars now have outdoor dining in what would usually be street parking spaces.

As journalists have documented extensively, New York's expansion of street space is incredibly paltry compared to what other cities in the US have done. No, it's not zero, but it's clearly not enough (per the article), and it's not even keeping pace with what other cities are doing.

> NYC gave direct cash grants to businesses with <10 employees. I know business owners got the money. Those grants were approved and funded before Care Act / PPP was passed. Once PPP opened there was no point in NYC trying to compete, the city can't print money.

Yes, there is a a point to the city (and the state) providing direct aid to local businesses on top of the federal assistance. And there absolutely is a point to the city and state targeting funds to essential industries that are hit particularly hard - which is what plenty of other jurisdictions have already done.

> Other states were able to give more direct financial assistance to businesses because they didn't have to spend so much on actual COVID response. Remember NY received a tiny amount of federal funding relative to population and actual pandemic impact, because of who was in control of the funding formula.

First of all, New York wouldn't have needed to spend as much on COVID response if Cuomo and DeBlasio had actually done their jobs in January or February. But more importantly: the limiting factor here isn't money. As I outlined in my post, the state is actually spending money in ways which are directly harmful to small businesses, with no justifiable public health gain.

DeBlasio and Cuomo could literally just base their policies on what other cities and countries have done with success, and that would already be miles ahead of what they've decided to do instead. The problem isn't that they can't. The problem is that they've genuinely expressed zero desire to.

Outdoor dining is a bandaid fix that does not work for all restaurants. Several of the restaurants in my neighborhood that actually have decent sidewalk space are probably serving 50% of what indoor dining would have been. Even with saving money by not employing as many people for solely dining, you have increased costs through constructing bespoke outdoor dining spaces and additional cleaning.

>"The city has been massively transformed to allow outdoor dining."

Massively? The city has simply allowed restaurants to put tables out in the street and share the street with passing cars. You have people eating out in the road while surrounded by gridlock traffic, exhaust fumes and all the accompanying horn honking. It's a total shit show.

Additionally the Open Streets initiative been implemented in such a haphazard patchwork manner it could hardly be viewed as anything remotely transformative. This is a pretty spot on overview:

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/07/07/op-ed-open-streets-is...

On top of their horrible response, the media seems to be giving Cuomo a pass, which i dont understand.

New York was the epicenter of the outbreak in the US. The situation has improved, but we aren't out of the woods yet, so I think it's correct to be cautious.

My impression from walking around outside is that everyone has optimized for malicious compliance with the rules that do exist, and we don't really appear to be taking the threat seriously anymore. Everyone has gotten masks with exhaust vents, so they can comply with the mask regulations without actually protecting anyone from their disease. Restaurants, stores, and parks are packed. People are basically done caring, and since they won't take steps to slow the spread of the disease themselves, some regulation is required to prevent super-spreading incidents. (Regarding the food rule, I think the idea is simply to reduce the number of people that can dine at a certain place per day. If someone that works there is sick, that limits the number of people they infect.)

> New York was the epicenter of the outbreak in the US. The situation has improved, but we aren't out of the woods yet, so I think it's correct to be cautious.

New York was the epicenter specifically because both DeBlasio and Cuomo ignored public health officials at nearly every turn, refused to start preparing for the pandemic until the first case had already hit, and even then spent more of their time bickering with each other in a weird power struggle instead of trying to contain the pandemic quickly.

Multiple independent studies have shown that Cuomo's refusal to shut down the city when DeBlasio requested it was responsible for over half of NY deaths to date - and even that's not considering the fact that DeBlasio made the request rather late (the city's public health department was advocating it far earlier).

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/0...

https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-distancing...

I'd rather not contract COVID-19 and die as a result of an outing to a restaurant or a bar. I'm fine with what Cuomo and DeBlasio are doing.

Me too which is why I don't go out to a bar or restaurant. In my opinion people at bars and restaurants are okay with the possibility that they will be infected. For me personally it's not worth the risk, I can cook and have drinks at home.

Good news! The chance of death is less than 1%, which is neglible.

Then don't go to a restaurant or bar. Down here in Texas we opened in May and left it up to the individual to make the health choice. I'm active and going to the gym daily and bars during the weekend, but I have friends who won't go outside and haven't dined in a restaurant since March.

> “ Nearly every other city has taken major steps to make it easier for people to spend time outdoors, for restaurants and bars to serve patrons outdoors, assistance programs for local small businesses, and so forth.”

Horrible. Just horrible. Making it easy to gather is a bad thing, that will prolong the pandemic and lead to far more deaths and worse total economic outcomes.

I think De Blasio and Cuomo have done really a great job in NY, and wish they’d go even further to mandate masks and reduce outdoor dining basically through the rest of 2020.

> It's so disheartening to see both Cuomo and DeBlasio's absolutely pathetic response to the pandemic

Grinding this axe kills your credibility.

New York sits at the bottom of the per-capita Covid charts in the US.

Were mistakes made at the beginning? Perhaps. Hindsight is always 20/20. However, data was scarce. And we had terrible shortages of PPE and no viable tests. And shutting down a school district like New York's takes a lot of time. And we had "liberal hoax" coming from the White House instead of a unified national response.

If you want to grind axes about bad pandemic response, pick on those states that refused to learn the lessons of New York and then passed New York in per capita cases 3 months later. After we had PPE. After we had tests. etc.

And, New York actually might be able to open schools without a disaster occurring. Other states? Not so much.

> New York sits at the bottom of the per-capita Covid charts in the US.

If New York were counted as its own country, it would have the highest per-capita COVID-19 death toll in the entire world. And yes, that's because Cuomo and DeBlasio refused to listen to their own public health departments and refused to learn the lessons of other countries that had been hit earlier[0].

> Were mistakes made at the beginning? Perhaps. Hindsight is always 20/20. However, data was scarce.

There was copious data - both from other countries and from other US cities - that indicated that New York needed to issue a shelter-in-place order at least a week before Cuomo agreed to. Even San Francisco had already shut down before Cuomo agreed to shut down NYC[1], despite San Francisco having fewer per-capita cases at the time. And even then, Cuomo waffled on whether to shut down the public schools.

There's plenty of evidence that Cuomo and DeBlasio ignored the scientific evidence that they had at the time, so you can't chalk up the high death toll to a lack of data.

> And shutting down a school district like New York's takes a lot of time.

It doesn't. Once Cuomo finally agreed to do it, it happened immediately. Where do you get the idea that it "takes time"?

[0] https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/0...

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-...

> "She asked her landlord for a break on her $6,000 a month rent, but he refused. Ms. Dillon said she decided in early April to close down."

Commercial evictions have been stopped in New York since March. It seems like a lot of people underestimate their bargaining power in a pandemic. Who else is the landlord going to rent to anyway?

"may" is an antagonym: may means the same as may not.

Although I understand the rationale, lumping vague probability words like "may", "could", "might" as antagonyms (auto-antonyms) doesn't seem valid.

Whether you use "may" or "may not" would indicate the leanings of your null hypothesis / default assumption.

We may only be halfway, one third or less into this pandemic.

I really hope that

1) the early vaccines will work

2) other mitigation strategies (masks, social distancing, quick tests at scale etc) will succeed in keeping R under 1 and small businesses above breakeven in case we're in for another 1-2 years of covid flare ups

If the above don't work, we could be looking at mass unemployment, unbearable private and government debt, and more civil unrest

>If the above don't work, we could be looking at mass unemployment, unbearable private and government debt, and more civil unrest

Given the fact that there's never been a successful coronavirus vaccine, and that there's a huge portion of the American population that regards mask-wearing and hand-washing to be tyrannical affronts to civil liberties, I think we all know how things are going to play out.

What do you all think is going to happen when climate change hits? This little crisis is all just a rehearsal for the real thing, you know.

This is what Lenin said about financial capitalism and monopoly. Every boom-bust cycle, endemic to capitalism, results in further consolidation. The free market / small producer capitalism that everyone says they like died around the 1880s-1890s when large firms began to dominate. Everything said in favor of that form since then has been essentially nostalgia for a lost time that wasn't even that good to begin with.

If the trust busters don't come back, we will see essentially a kind of feudalist economy develop around a few extraordinarily powerful companies as every ladder is pulled up behind them and smaller institutions are "creatively destroyed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage...

This shouldn't be down-voted. Just because you don't like something Lenin did doesn't mean all his observations are wrong.

I recently found https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-100-issue-5/all-i-rea... which was a great read. Eugene V Debs had a similar conclusion about consolidation being inevitable, but thought that that was a good thing.

And to be clear, whether competition is possible / what's the right trade-off between efficiency and robustness, is really important to grapple with. If we don't know how to e.g. break up Google, proposals like having workers on boards become dramatically more essential.

> This shouldn't be down-voted. Just because you don't like something Lenin did doesn't mean all his observations are wrong.

He is probably being downvoted for saying that consolidation will lead to feudalism. That is a ridiculous idea that deserves a downvote!

He said a "feudalist economy" which seems an apt description for an economy run by a handful of companies.

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