smallgovt

What's a better alternative? Although loans are a bad solution for the type of restaurant you described, they are great solutions for small businesses that have predictable profits, of which there are many.

SBA loans are backed by personal gaurantees. In other words, the business owner is on the hook if the business goes bankrupt.

I think you're overestimating the magnitude of lost revenue. We're talking about 1 month of lost revenue.

A profitable restaurant's unit model might be: 10% net profit, 30% COGS, 30% fixed cost, 30% labor cost

During this one month shutdown, the restaurants won't incur labor cost or COGS. So, they're really only in the hole 30% of one month's revenue. With a little back of the envelope math, you'll see that the restaurant owner can pay back a loan for this amount by allocating 10% of their monthly profits (or 1% of monthly revenue) to loan payback.

Now, if the restaurant is NOT profitable, then we have a problem. But, they were probably going to go out of business soon anyways in that case.

If there's a silver lining, it's that takeout is higher margin for restaurants and I'm sure takeout revenue is spiking during city shutdowns.

Not to trivialize the numbers, but people still have to eat, so these dollars are largely being re-allocated elsewhere, primarily to takeout, food delivery, and grocery stores. Other sectors that are service-based represent real net loss in GDP.

I think you're conflating what the general public believes with what those in control believe.

It is in the public's best interest for the general public to only worry about what is within their control (so as to avoid panic). Therefore, the general public is being led to believe that all is going to be OK after a couple months of social distancing.

I guarantee you behind the scenes, those in control are scrambling to take immediate and drastic action to ramp up our medical treatment capacity.

Can independent contractors (e.g. gig workers) apply for unemployment benefits?

This seems to be for employees only. Are there benefits that are accessible to independent contractors like gig economy workers?

Service-based professionals who live paycheck by paycheck are screwed. What can the government do to get aid to these individuals ASAP?

The outage seemed to be limited only to SSL requests. Since all non-ssl requests to .heroku.com are forcefully redirected to ssl, all .heroku.com requests failed during the outage.

We were able to handle requests at our http://*.herokuapp.com endpoint, but all https endpoints were down during the outage.

Fundamentally? Maybe nothing. I was responding to the parent comment which claimed there's no real reason for China to under-report numbers.

Yes, but pretty much all asset classes are getting hammered except gold.

It makes China look better on the global stage if they do a better job containing the virus than democratic nations. I wouldn't call that a little point.

Actually, I think it's likely going to be seen as an overreaction in hindsight by the general public (even though it may not be).

If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.

Props to the Sequoia partner who led PR for this.

Just because Uber hasn't turned a profit doesn't mean they aren't worth $xxB.

If you actually believe Kalanick cashed out his shares at an overvalued price, go short Uber and make tons of money. That said, you're probably wrong.

Who really cares if it was empathy or not?

I think the world would be a better place if we judged people based on action rather than intention. Intention is complex and hard to determine.

> even though it's probably PR-driven, if we're being honest

Thank you for judging people/organizations based on their actions and not their intentions. Intentions are complex and hard to accurately determine.

Could you provide a source for the 15% statistic (that need oxygen assistance)?

Also, is it not possible to provide this oxygen assistance/therapy at home without hospital intervention?

If you really believe what you're saying, don't worry about timing the bottom. You're arguing that the current state of the markets is already a huge overreaction. Just buy into an index tracking one of the hard-hit sectors, and hold through the panic. If this is an overreaction, there's no way the panic's going to last many years, so you won't risk insolvency.

The travel sector has been hit the hardest, so you should buy into ETF's like XTN that track the consumer travel industry.

You can garnish future wages. That said, if he actually has <100M in assets, I also think that seems over-bearing.

Uh, no, Uber doesn't have to guarantee full-time work regardless of employee or contractor classification -- hence the term "part-time employment".

In all likelihood, moving drivers from contractor to employee status will result in lower pay for drivers. Uber won't foot the larger employment tax bill. They'll just lower driver wages and increase customer prices.

I'm sure the amount of attention he dedicated to his tweets was vanishingly small compared to his startup. Why did his tweets trigger you?

>> You can either pay one person (out of a - growing- pool of tens of millions of willing drivers) ~$15 an hour (depending on geography) in a $20k car or you can pay very little per hour in a 250k for the car + a gigantic engineering team + compute infrastructure. It can make sense on a large scale, but it'll be hard to do.

I believe this $250K figure will end up being off by a multiple of 2. As an example, the cost of LIDAR (the most expensive piece of many SDC's) has dropped by an order of magnitude over the past couple years. (A quick google search for a source on this claim yields: https://qz.com/924212/what-it-really-costs-to-turn-a-car-int...)

The biggest questions around SDC's seems to really be around safety & feasibility. If these criteria are met, I can't imagine the overall cost per mile driven will be higher than manual labor.

And, even if autonomous driving doesn't undercut on price, they will beat human drivers on both quality & convenience. Most people don't enjoy having a human driver who sometimes smells bad and tries to talk to you (not to mention the uptick in assault reports). And, since the cost of under-utilization will be much lower for SDC's, you can bet the average wait time for SDC's will be lower than Uber.

>> There's a general theme here: It's not enough to teach a computer to do something as good as a human, you have to undercut on price as well.

I think the more apt statement is: Consumers care about price, quality, safety, and convenience. A winning solution has to be significantly better in at least one of these categories (price being only one possibility).

>> Using the word “raise” when talking about financing via debt seems inappropriate and very start-upy.

Why would it be inappropriate? It's common to describe both debt and equity rounds as a 'raise'.

My guess is you're operating under the assumption that debt is inferior to equity because you're forced to pay it back. But, in reality, when you raise an equity round, you also have to pay back the principal + "interest"-- it just delays the repayment date til your liquidation event.

>> This is a low cost of capital line of credit, is it not (due to their infrastructure and broad customer base)?

Based on the wording "secured $100 million in new debt from a group of investors", my guess is it's a term loan of sorts vs a LOC (since banks typically issue LOC's, and they're generally not referred to as investors).

I think ultimately this cynicism is born out of envy/jealousy for the good will that such a donation engenders.

As you've pointed out, any logical analysis would conclude that, even in the most extreme cases, there's still a sizable positive benefit to society.

People have a problem with "undeserved" good will as if good will is some scarce resource that's limited in supply. I think the reality is they're envious.

You might want to check out 'The Book of Joy' by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize winner and archbishop). The book lays out what these two men believe are the fundamental pillars of enduring happiness. Instead of doing a poor job summarizing the contents, here's a link to Amazon if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CZCW34Q. Wish you the best.

I think it's worth noting that non-company stakeholders like myself are in no way owed an explanation of why this happened.

As you alluded to, shutting down a startup is a tremendously stressful experience for founders and management. Their top priority is doing right by their customers, employees, and investors. Doing a proper post mortem for the public, in my opinion, is far down on the priority list, and I'm fine with that.