>Fund people, not companies

it depended. large corporation like Apple don't need the money but mom and pop shop that is forced to close during the peak should receive money. the sad thing is corporation that clearly can make it thur covid is receiving the largest amount like https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

I have to agree, if I want to start a competing reservation platform I would take this "opportunity" to launch it, but because big corps (almost a monopoly for booking.com) are helped in difficult times this makes it almost impossible to have competition or new small players that would have been advantaged by not having the weight of the big players.

Imho, the main error is that they gave away the money unconditionally. The fact that the particular government didn't foresee this outcome is quite astonishing.

Computationally, company is an order higher than humans in that it contains "structures" designed to generate revenue, and these "structures" consists of physical things (ranging from items in a physical store to an office space to entire factory, etc) as well as none-physical things (e.g. productivity optimisation across a 'team' of people who had worked together for a long peroid of time, trust in the supply chain, etc). When a company dissolves, many of these "structures" will be gone. In general there are many costs to reconstruct these "structures" after they are gone.

It will be amazing if

- it's cheaper to construct these structures designed to generate revenue (and we already see this in tech-driven stuff, which was how the notion of start-up emerged from the 70s)

- people are motiviated and are willing to overcome the hardship (as well as, in many cases, unconfortable feelings) to learn to construct these structures or to learn things that will help (e.g. programming, etc)

Unfortunately, most of these structures are currently still expensive (thanks to this, start-ups and techs are in general over-hyped [1]). And most people prefer consuming stuff mindlessly than learning things. Mindfulness is the key.

Therefore I'm extremely grateful that we as a civilisation are finlly entering the first phrase of the psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelic would always have a net positive impact to society at large as they force people to come to terms with reality as well as their very own phsyical existence, and be more mindful about the qualia of this world.

[1]: not necessarily a bad thing as they can eventually flatten all these cost structures

Lock down the economy, kill small businesses, hand out printed money like candy to big corporations. Nothing suspicious going on...

Not sure about "let them break" for a government-imposed lockdown, but I agree that giving support directly to employees to stay home from work would have been a better strategy since you cut out the middleman. (Use whatever method works. Via the unemployment infrastructure for example)

Money was specifically earmarked to retain employees

> Let them break

There are all sorts of random shortages right now--truckers, lumber, cars, rental cars, computer chips. They're mostly annoying, but it would be a lot worse if companies didn't get help.

Government has been sold on the "Hobbes" vision of society and believes an assertion of authority is necessary in order to prevent civil chaos. They will never give money directly to people until this changes. https://issuepedia.org/Hobbes_vs._Rousseau

>Fund people, not companies

People work at companies. Letting productive assets fail due to ignorance and jealously does not help people.

Best yet is to fund measures to minimize disruptions and to help manage the economic meltdown caused by pandemics. And plan accordingly. The world was utterly unprepared to deal with a pandemic. Once we were somewhat better equiped with knowledge (ie. aerosols in closed spaces), procedures (widespread testing, ventilation, etc) and equipment (masks, ICU beds) the economy could function much closer to (a new) normal. But even today, if it weren't for vaccines, we would not be remotely close to where we are now, at least in some countries. A lot of the measures implemented were useless, including tech (ie phones), which failed to be of real service tracking contacts and infections.

Once enacted, countries or regions that don't abide to my wishful set of international rules on pandemic measures will be isolated or excluded by the community. Money otherwise would flow to implement measures everywhere and keep the world economy going at a good pace.

Here's a review on what I consider a great investment for these financial aids, making air filtering/ventilation and CO2 control ubiquitous:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/05/26/...

Also the economy would had suffered a lot less if there was a predictable schedule on how restrictions and, even stricter, lockdowns were applied according to some economists.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/experts-think-the-econo...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-may-14-2...

It's actually quite shocking how, when the primary idea is "dump money into the economy," giving the money to people instead of banks or firms is so controversial. It's more socialist and more capitalist, if you believe in that sort of thing.