GarrisonPrime

My business bank (Wells Fargo) didn't even begin taking applications until the day before the money ran out.

My personal bank (Bank of America) flat-out refused to talk to me, since I'd never had a business credit or loan through them.

Quickbooks is apparently planning something, but of course have nothing ready yet.

PayPal never mentioned to me they were an option. I've logged into my business account with them daily since this all began. Not a peep. Not an email. Not a notification anywhere on the page. Nada.

I scoured the SBA page daily - hell, three times a day - checking up on my EIDL application and also looking for any update on them offering PPP. Never saw anything, despite many people asserting like you are that it was there all along and early.

It's like you're from a completely different reality.

Wow, so expensive either way. European card processing is around 1.7% from what I’ve seen. American banks are atrocious. Is the Federal Reserve rate responsible for this.

American banks also take forever to transfer payments, which drives me mad. There is this massive amount of money just in limbo, a sort of shush cash pile, which the banks make interest off of while the owners of the money fume waiting for permission to use their own money. Grr. /rant

I suspect they don’t talk about it or consider appeals at all, because they feel they have no need to bother with any sort of customer service. They are king of the hill, and always have millions of more users eager to sign up. There seems to be little reason for them to bother resolving any issues. Much easier for them to just ban the user and ignore them.

>...we should be re-purposing those dollars for societal benefit. _There_ is the moral failing.

To see such a dangerous, totalitarian ideology expressed so casually is terrifying.

Argentina and Germany are hardly in rosy positions at the moment.

“I like free money” is hardly a good argument to support statements like “it just makes sense”.

A pandemic is virtually guaranteed to happen every so often.

And if a nuclear war broke out, that'd hardly be unexpected or random.

"Black Swan" does not mearly mean "unique and significant". The unpredictability of a black swan event is the main cause of concern, as it doesn't allow for much preparation.

I wonder if they're giving an artificially long date in an attempt to discourage certain orders so as to relieve the current crush.

Until the global economy unnecessarily collapses.

I'll assume you know better than I, but while browsing the past few weeks of that account's comments I didn't see any "nationalistic flamewar" talk. Just a few mentions of Chinese authoritarianism and the stiffing of dissent and open discourse.

...oh.

>How about a GRANT instead of a loan?

You mean free money, just because? How could you even begin to figure out who deserves it? That'd be a lot of offices and bureaucracy to set up to solve the question. Unless you just want to give wads of cash to any restaurant claiming to need help, in which case I'm glad you're not leading the economy.

Actually, yes, once this is over it's reasonable to assume restaurant patronage will see a huge surge beyond prior levels, at least for a time.

>take the people with excess wealth - providing no utility right now

Most "excess wealth" is tied up in business and other investments. It's not like wealthy people just horde cash like Scrooge McDuck. That wealth is currently working to support the economy. It is hardly passive.

Forcing the wealthy to pay increased tax on this value will cause them to close business functions, sell stocks, etc.

Is that really wise at this point in time? To redistribute value from existing, proven formats into unspecific, theoretically useful ones?

Theft is not immoral simply because it is unfair or mean. It's because it causes systemic dysfunction.

Don't take this the wrong way please, as I'm sorry this has happened to you...but Yelp being in trouble pleases me greatly.

If your area has been declared to be in a state of emergency, you might qualify for a small business loan set up just for the purpose of helping businesses such as yours survive this:

https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela/

Being devil's advocate a bit here, but efficiency helps prevent boom and bust cycles, or at least reduces their magnitude.

Supporting "worthy virtues" is all well and good, except that it's subjective and not always well thought out, leading to unfortunate consequences.

I'm sure plenty of people thought it great to help Sally Struthers feed the 3 million starving African children in the 80's...until the result was 10 million starving African children.

> I suspected Amazon would do well...

Until people camping at home start getting sick, with their common factor being Amazon Fresh delivery.

Or at least, some people would like to believe that. I suspect an astonishing large number of them will discover differently, should those ideals be put to the test. Just a hunch.

I suggest a good way to “give advice” is Socratic. Listen. Have them describe their views. Ask clarifying questions.

Even if you have the best advice in the world, it’ll be useless if it’s not what the listener needs to hear at that moment.

Might be better to just help them better understand their current perspectives and options. Then they’ll be more open to finding solutions themselves.

“Is it” was the core of the question, which can be yes/no. ;-)

The variety of disciplines and sleep deprivation is only about 2 years early in the training. After that the training is highly focused, and again only 2 years or so are sleep deprived. And today, the majority of doctors in practice are less than 20 years from their training. You make it sound like doctors are an outdated mass of idiots, and I can only assume your personal experiences have biased you.

The real training is objectivity, which is very difficult for even doctors to maintain, despite knowing just how misleading research results can be and so how they must be wary, how to rationally follow the literature, etc.

I seriously doubt more than single-digit percentages of people googling things, even intelligently, are going to be following citations and weighing competing models. Likely less than a fraction of one percent. And, unless they have personally done similar research and so can understand the data and potential pitfalls more clearly, even that enlightened fraction is highly likely to make some biased misinterpretation.

How can they not, when it is their own health they are investigating? Even a genius layperson examining the literature flawlessly would benefit from an interpretation provided by a neutral third party.

That’s not soon enough of a resolution to avoid affecting the games, I’m afraid.

I’m just guessing it was a combination of (1) an app could be distributed / authorized to only specific email addresses, so far less chance of interruption than you’d get if the website got leaked to the public, and (2) wanting to simplify the reporting logistics by just having people use their private phones, rather than having to set up laptops and internet, and possibly (3) an attempt to stick a toe into the realm of widespread voting by app.

Of course there’s always the possibility it’s a simple matter of (4) someone lobbying politicians into giving money to his brother to slap together an app, because government money.

Pass them through an intermediary, such as Google Drive?

For every 1 such study that ultimately proves useful, I wouldn’t be surprised if 100 (or even 1,000) were an utter waste of time.

Your argument seems to imply a shopaholic hoarder isn’t wasting their lives, just so long as at least sometimes they actually use a random rubber band or a ‘70’s themed valentine card.

And yet the company is paying for all those pointless clicks. Hopefully they’ll consider “misleading ads” as a possible reason for a low conversion rate.

It depends on the industry. In retail, for instance, a customer acquisition cost of more than 10% their expected lifetime value is unsustainably expensive. Is suspect retail having only 5-8% profit margin is part of that though.

What’s disgusting are your conflated examples.

How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free?

This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.

Are you assuming that everybody who is able-bodied and has a scale degree should be able to find employment?

Did over 12 million people in this country really get worthless degrees or become incapacitated?

Getting a "good" degree might not matter so much, if so many other people also got those degrees. One could say that degree is therefore no longer so good, but there is not an endless train of "even better" degrees for people to move on towards.

Nice story. I’m not sure web scraping is a “niche” subject anymore though.