smallgovt

> There are numerous accounts of businesses receiving calls from Yelp salespeople essentially telling them to buy an ad package or the negative reviews get prioritized.

Sure, there are numerous accounts (read:hearsay) but there's zero physical or hard evidence.

After all this press, don't you think there'd be at least one recorded phone conversation or email that showed up in the numerous lawsuits' discovery processes?

There is literally zero physical evidence corroborating Yelp account execs' extortive practices.

To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

Not sure why you're downvoted. The general public (including OP) still believes that Yelp manages reviews differently for businesses that purchase advertising.

There is zero physical evidence that Yelp does or ever did this. The only thing that Yelp ever did was move one positive review to the top of the page for advertisers, and I'm pretty sure they abandoned that practice a long time ago.

It's pretty obvious to me that unsophisticated business owners are simply drawing false inferences when they receive a sales call and then receive a negative review. Confirmation bias at work.

Here's an old Hacker News comment that seems to me to probably be close to reality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149078

Best of luck. I've been through something similar and know how stressful it can be. When closing my last startup, we purchased a D&O tail policy to cover cases like this. It's a good way to buy a little peace of mind.

> The entire viability of these businesses exists within the margin created by stripping away any vestige of traditional employment stability

That's a stretch. Even if Uber/Lyft were forced to employ their drivers, they would most likely just raise prices and cut marketing costs. Sure, they'd be much smaller businesses, but they'd very likely still live on.

Uber pays their drivers ~$7b a year. Employing them would cost an extra ~$2.1B/yr. Self driving cars are probably coming in 10 years, so even if they didn't increase prices or make any other changes in their operating model, they'd need to raise $21B to hold them over. That's not a small amount of money, but Uber's market cap is $54B.

Investor must be claiming fraud or gross negligence.

For those who are willing to go through this thought exercise, if we're purely trying to maximize humankind's total well-being, how much wealth would we have to create to counteract one coronavirus victim's loss of life?

Here's a set of 3 questions that I think leads to a possible answer.

- How much would someone have to pay you to be put to sleep for 8 years, during which period you have no sensory input or output?

- Would you rather be put to sleep for 8 years now or at the end of your life?

- Do you have a preference over being put to sleep for the last 8 years of your life vs just dying straight up?

I think most people would be willing to go to sleep for 8 years for $2 million. And, most would prefer dying 8 years sooner over going to sleep now.

In other words, $2m > sleep for 8 years now > dying 8 years earlier == coronavirus victim

The moral dilemma is that we're asking one person to die 8 years sooner to create an outbalanced improvement in quality of life increase for someone else. That is, you're taking away well-being from one person to give to another. I think government officials implement policies that redistribute human well-being all the time, but it raises alarm bells when we start dealing with life and death.

That's good to hear (that 100% testing will take place). Where can we follow up on the testing results and subsequent fatality statistics?

>> Fatality rate goes up drastically if the medical system fails

Based on my research, it actually seems like fatality rate will NOT skyrocket if our medical system is overwhelmed like in Italy.

Here is an actual study that looks at fatality rates in Italy vs China after stratifying by age group: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763667

The most eye-opening graphic is the first chart. To summarize the article:

1) Italy's fatality rate for patients younger than 60 is actually better than China

2) Italy's fatality rate for patients older than 60 is less than double that of China

3) Italy may have a higher rate of pre-existing conditions which makes fatality rate look worse than it is

4) Italy is only testing symptomatic patients which makes fatality rate look worse than it is

All of these results were surprising to me. The information being spread by the mainstream media suggests that if hospital systems get overwhelmed like they have in Italy, fatality rate will skyrocket.

In reality, it seems like we're dealing with a classic case of Simpson's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox). If you stratify data by age group, you find that even if hospital systems are overwhelmed (to the same degree as Italy), fatality rates will, at most, double.

I only speak for myself and would feel uncomfortable enforcing my values on others. That's why my comment posed this more as an open question and discussion.

If you're asking for my personal evaluation, yes, I believe that at a certain point, it's clearly worth trading quality of life for quantity of life. This applies to my own life. For example, I would rather take a 50% chance at survival versus living the rest of my life in abject poverty and emotional turmoil.

I think he wants to ensure he can take responsibility for the market rebound. If and when it happens, people will more likely attribute the rebound to him if he takes decisive action. And, if the market doesn't fully rebound, he wants to have an excuse. In this case, he'll be able to say "I told you we should have restarted the economy sooner".

That's not my intention at all. I'm simply pointing out that both quality of life and quantity of life are valuable to most people.

“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life” - Cuomo

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Is life worth living if you're destitute and living in poverty or emotional turmoil? Won't a strong economy increase the pace at which we develop and produce life saving technologies?

At a certain point of economic ruin, I think many people will choose a strong economy over saving lives. The question is more so what the tipping point is. It seems hard to quantify and compare the total impact a strong economy has versus lives saved, but I think it's definitely worth having the conversation. Ultimately, this is a value judgment so there's no objective answer.

This isn't just about listening to the experts. Ultimately, we need to make a value judgment between saving lives now vs saving the economy. There's no clear answer when a stronger economy saves future lives.

I think it's simply a result of outrage culture.

Latest details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-AOqaYSBRA

$3000 for family of 4; no mention of income brackets restricting payments.

The article is basically saying "we're going to be fine if we continue implementing extreme social distancing measures".

In other words, if we stop panicking, and big hotspots don't implement extreme social distancing measures, we won't be fine.

A certain level of panic is required to enforce efficacy of these social distance programs, so it seems dangerous to spread this message less people begin to act out of self interest.

The last article I read was this FT article published two days ago: https://www.ft.com/content/1f8e5a3a-6a58-11ea-800d-da70cff6e...

The article says the Republicans are proposing $1,200 per individual who earns below a certain income and $500 per child, while the Democrats are proposing $2000 per month to all individuals and $1000 per month to all children.

They're apparently stuck on how the corporate bailouts will work.

The US is currently passing its own stimulus plan that will ship at least $500B to the bottom half of earners. It seems like the ETA for passing the bill is mid-week.

Question for OP: does this data change your mind? If not, what would?

1) Pretty sure you're misinformed on this point. The hedge fund sector that has gotten attention and partial blame for this meltdown is the risk-parity segment of hedge funds. These funds target a specific range of volatility, so when the market becomes wildly volatile they are forced to reduce their overall holdings. The entire risk-parity segment of the market is at most $400bn and they are levered 2-3x on average. In the grand scheme of things, this is pennies when compared to broader money flow.

2) Stock buybacks are simply a more tax-efficient way of distributing profits to shareholders. Redistribution of profit to shareholders is a fundamental trait of capitalism, so you can't really blame the CEO for doing this. You seem to be blaming CEO's for not preparing for a black swan event. If CEO's are forced to prepare for every possible black swan event, their companies would go nowhere.

This is good news for independent contractors who are struggling to make ends meet.

Yes, I'm saying at some point we should make the choice between a lot of people dying now and even more people dying later.

> I just think that health comes before economy.

I don't think we can make such a blanket assertion. The US markets have lost 10T in value over the past month. If the virus infects 70% of the US population with a 2% mortality rate, 4.2M ppl will die. It's obviously not so simple, but we're sacrificing $2.4M in market cap per life saved. At some point, the tradeoff makes no sense in light of the fact that we could invest in life saving technologies/solutions that save more lives down the road.

You don't think the markets would skyrocket if a real cure that is easily manufactured was discovered today? Sure, there's still a lot of pain to follow but the markets have priced in a lot of really bad scenarios where the virus kills large numbers and shutdowns last a long time.

From the paper, "At day6 post-inclusion, 70% of hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were virologicaly cured comparing with 12.5% in the control group"

Sample size is only 36. 20 treated patients. 16 control.

Given that markets didn't react to this news 11 hours ago, I think it's safe to say that this doesn't have significant prospects of being a real cure.

To be clear, this bill doesn't set aside more money to loan to small businesses.

It only did two things:

- made the existing SBA Disaster Loan program available to businesses affected by CV19

- added $20M to help w/ administration of said loan program

There were talks about actually increasing the budget of the SBA loan program by $xxB. This bill did not do that.

SBA disaster loans all require personal guarantees. So, you can't get run away from the debt by declaring business bankruptcy. You'd also have to declare personal bankruptcy.