How out of touch and uneducated are these people? Pandemics can't be stopped outside a vaccine. We are all going to catch it or be quarentined for 18 months.
Want to flatten the curve? I could go to Walmart and interface with 50 people to get ibuprofen, or I can interface with 1 worker?
We need to stop electing marketers and start electing people that understand math.
The whole structure of the debates and 24/7 news coverage is more about reality TV than any kind of substance. It's geared for soundbites and drama. So someone like Yang doesn't fit into that, but shines in long form formats like podcasts.
Andrew Yang is a nice guy but his "math" isn't actually all that good.
His plan to use a VAT to pay for UBI is a regressive tax. People with lower incomes spend a higher percentage of their income on consumable goods. Putting a higher VAT or sales tax on everything to UBI puts a lot of the burden on the lower class to pay for this program. Someone with a much higher income has a number of ways to avoid this tax - they can invest in companies instead, they can buy real estate, they can take a jet to a different country and buy expensive stuff there instead of buying it in the country with a high VAT, like how people in Massachusetts buy their computers in New Hampshire.
So, he "did the math," but that doesn't automatically make it good policy.
His plan was to exempt such goods from VAT, so it wouldn't be regressive.
That said, I wasn't entirely convinced by the Freedom Dividend and wish it hadn't been the centerpiece. What I was more interested in and really appreciated was his overall approach and focus on problems and solutions. An actual problem solver and uniter, not someone perpetuating the WWE reality TV show that is our politics.
Actually that's true, I wish I could take back my original comment at this point or modify it (too late).
"Assuming all goods are subject to a VAT and the entire VAT is passed on to consumers, an individual would have to buy $120,000 worth of items before the extra costs associated with a VAT “use up” their UBI."
That is...true, yes. Everyone's still getting the extra $1,000 a month.
Using all of that up by spending on a 10% VAT puts you at spending $120,000 a year.
So, while a VAT is not progressive, funneling it into UBI turns it into being progressive. That makes sense. You don't even need a goods exemption for that to work as intended.
I am also not convinced on the idea of UBI. There needs to be more studies including large scale studies if possible. I am not convinced that the largest rent-seekers with limited competition and supply alternatives wouldn't just suck those income gains away - jobs with labor supply surplus might pay closer to the minimum wage, landlords might simply all agree to raise rent, Comcast will raise bills across the country, colleges raise tuition, etc. UBI sometimes feels like an oversimplification, one of those "easy solutions" that doesn't take a long time to write down and fits in a campaign slogan.
a regressive tax used to fund a progressive policy can be either net regressive or net progressive. if rich people buy enough stuff that they pay more VAT than they receive in UBI, the whole system is still progressive.
And really, a VAT might be slightly regressive in practice because poor people tend to spend a larger fraction of their income but it's still pretty close to being a flat tax. If you were to try to fund a UBI with a head tax that would indeed be pointless. As long as rich people tend to spend large amount of money, in absolute terms, than poor people a VAT+UBI combo is going to be progressive.
For a good example of this, see Social Security (OASDI) in the US. The funding method is very regressive, taking a flat percentage of income only under a threshold (12.4% of income under $137,700 with half paid by employer and half paid by employee). People who make more than that pay less tax.
But then we use the tax to directly fund one of the most progressive programs in the US, which directly pays people who need it most.
I think most people would think of Social Security as a net progressive policy, even though it has a very regressive funding model.
> They are raising their wage to $17 per hour. That's around $3,000 per month in stead of their usual $2,500 per month.
According to Google, that beats Walmart pay[0]. Less clear for Target[1]. Of course, if reports are even remotely accurate, Amazon warehouse working conditions are considerably worse.
I don't know what other retailers pay, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're comparable.
The plague was stopped before vaccines existed... Same with many other pandemics. A pandemic is an epidemic that affects a larger area, not an unstoppable monster
I'll be glad if we get a vaccine. If we don't, we must fight it nonetheless. In 2003, we stopped the SRAS epidemic, another coronavirus. We stopped it. There's no vaccine yet. The 2015 MERS isn't completely extinct but it's under control.
Also I think Korea and a few other Asian countries will be virus free soon (those who thought the 2003/2015 epidemics)
Politicians right now are in, "it doesn't matter if we do the right thing, it matters that we look like we're taking authoritative action" mode. This happened after 9/11 too.
Right now, 0.1% of the US has had Covid-19. For heard immunity we need that number to be at least 500 times larger.
So, what's the plan here? Wait for a miracle that isn't coming? Stay in quarantine for a year and risk societal ruin?
And how will our lives look if we continue this quarantine for a decade -- which at our current level of infection (which has leveled off) is the minimum time it would take to gain heard immunity?
> And how will our lives look if we continue this quarantine for a decade
Probably look at Iraq and Afghanistan has dealt with post 9/11.
Speaking strictly in terms of the US, we'd be able to weather a 10-year lockdown.
America is rich in natural resources, and has a large agricultural base.
Our government can handle the basics:
Drinking water
Food
Shelter
The rest would be economic shifts, such as reduction in costs of living to account for a new economy that has shifted away from the ability to get together.
I would speculate we're better off with the entirety of the economy being in shambles, than we would be by having rather high mortality rates, and overwhelming our health services.
Let me post another question:
What if you did not need to work to have your any of needs met?
I'm not sure that society can in fact adapt to such strict restrictions. People in Afghanistan didn't take the decade off from socializing, even though there was a significant risk of getting killed.
By any reasonable estimate, it's over 1%. Highly infected areas like NYC likely exceed 10%
> So, what's the plan here?
It's not feasable to get herd immunity in a world as open as 3 months ago. The hospitalization rate (and duration) is too high -> it would take longer than the optimistic time for vaccine development.
Electronic contact tracing, heavy testing, traveler quarantines, mass gathering restrictions. It's not going to get contained, but you can have a world where isolated bursts effectively get squashed.
To the elected officials advocating for closure of Amazon warehouses: would it be better to have 300M people visit Walmart or their local grocery store where they will interface with perhaps 50 others? Or to have 100,000 people visit their local Amazon warehouse where there are masks, temperature checks, intensive cleaning, etc?
Even the most basic math on this indicates the Amazon option is far better for eradication of the pandemic than the Walmart option.
This is not true. They shut down inbound shipments of non-essentials for a few weeks, but they are in the process of re-opening up non-essential inbound shipments. We are now able to ship in all of our (non-essential) products. And we're hearing the same from most other sellers we know.
We need non-essential trade, since if you shutdown all non-essential trade suddenly all non-essential people are excluded from the economy, and people have to eat and pay bills. If we're still selling goods online, non-essential manufacturers/workers at least have some economic movement.
Unfortunately this is not applied evenly. Amazon is selling all its non-essential stuff, while other vendors can’t sell their non-essential wares even online. I can buy kid workbooks and mechanical keyboards on Amazon, but School Zone and WASD Keyboards are closed.
I've actually been buying food through Amazon (canned goods, protein bars, nuts, etc). Normally, I order online from a local grocery store, but the local grocery store, every time I go to the website, tells me that there are no available delivery slots in the next two weeks.
You gotta get on at midnight, order two weeks out, and get a weekly pipeline going. I used this method to get a bag of flour the other day, it was amazing.
There's also a debate to be had as to what's essential or not, which will depend on your perspective as well as the time scale.
Is Best Buy essential? No? What if my laptop breaks and I relied on it to work remotely?
Are electricians or climate control technicians essential? What if the air conditioning breaks in the middle of a texas summer? How can I self-isolate when it's even hotter inside than outside? What about elderly people who could easily have a heat stroke?
Are psychologists essential workers? They might be even more essential now that so many people are facing complete isolation and job loss.
I think longer this goes on, the more essential basic roles become needed. Dentists can close offices for a few weeks or a month, but after several months cavities go untreated, cavities are created because teeth aren't cleaned/maintained, preventable issues go unaddressed etc.
For a week or two sure essential is very narrow, but after several weeks that can expand.
I will say though, my state at least deemed most of the roles you mentioned essential. I can still get my computer repaired, get construction/maintenance done, and at least consult with my medical professionals over the phone/video chat for now in terms of basic consultation. I know betterhelp.com is a service (there are others) my spouse has used.
Well, at least by me you can order groceries from walmart to have them delivered/picked up. They have an excellent website for it, so it's very easy.
Everyone who can should be ordering groceries.. I have been ordering groceries from walmart for the last month and it's great that I don't have to go in there. One time I had to do a pickup at the store (alcohol purchase..), it was very simple as well. But while I was there, I was appalled to see a walmart sized parking lot almost full of people going into the store...
IME, grocery store pickup is essentially full (including Amazon fresh pickup). You only get to choose from pickup time slots several days in the future, and most the times I have checked, there was nothing available.
I wrote a bot to snatch an Amazon Fresh delivery slot for my groceries. (One bot publicly available just notifies you when a slot is available, but mine goes the whole way including placing the order and paying for it.)
What I've noticed is that delivery slots—at least for the San Diego area—are released once a day around 10pm-midnight, and sell out in about 10-20 minutes. So if you are obsessively checking manually every 10min around this time of the day, you are still relatively likely to find one.
> Well, at least by me you can order groceries from walmart to have them delivered/picked up.
Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now. They're all generally a week out, or you just can't get any delivery slot at all.
IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup. If they have any staff left over after that they can operate cash registers. Right now there's a perverse incentive for everyone to pack into grocery stores because there's no other option for actually getting food in a reasonable timeframe.
In the UK the supermarkets have massively failed to scale their delivery services.
Ocado at least are treating regular customers well - guaranteed weekly slots etc.
But rather than rejigging deliveries - perhaps drafting in more vans for delivery of non-frozen/coop stuff, and jiggling delivery routes to do neighbouring properties together (say increase delivery slots from hourly to daily to make drops more efficent), they’ve just carried on as normal.
Opposite experience here. We placed an order on a Sunday, next available delivery date was the following Thursday. We received hourly updates on Thursday, that the order was "being shopped, delivery delayed +1hr" -- Thursday came & went, on Friday we received no updates, and the order just sat there for a week or so.
Canned response (understandably) from support which just asked us to "re-schedule it to another day" (which was at that point a week out min), and then after 2 weeks I got a cancelation email and they finally issued the $500 refund. We pay the "premium" yearly price to InstaCart, too. =|
We now have no faith in them, because if we schedule a delivery for a week away and then the food doesn't arrive we're kind of stuck; PostMates has been decent, depending on the driver you get, and has continued to be same-day.
Instacart is dead for me. "We'll be with you shortly. We're taking a lot of orders right now, we'll be back soon!" -> Click 'Try again' -> loops back to that message.
Instacart has no item limits but they also don't either provide order-time notice of or have any exemption from the item limits imposed by the actual retailers.
Delivery and curbside pickup require more employees than the traditional method of customers picking their groceries from the shelves. The grocery stores simply don't have enough employees to serve all their customers if they only do delivery and curbside pickup.
I understand, which is why I'm advocating closing down the cash registers to shunt staff into serving delivery and pickup orders.
We shouldn't be incentivizing the population to pack into a single building because we're fetishizing the ritual of going to the checkout line. The checkout line should be lowest priority for staffing.
Shutting down registers and making the handful of regular checkers do delivery/pickup orders isn't tenable - the throughput isn't even close to similar. Putting together pickup/deliveries is very time consuming for traditional grocers. And then what happens when someone who doesn't have the ability to shop via app needs groceries? Do they call in, and take up another employee's bandwidth while they take down the list?
> And then what happens when someone who doesn't have the ability to shop via app needs groceries? Do they call in, and take up another employee's bandwidth while they take down the list?
Absolutely. An employee taking orders on the phone instead of working the cash register is an employee who's not getting exposed to coronavirus.
I can't believe we're talking about unemployment going to the moon and at the same time saying we can't spare precious labor resources. Talking grocery orders over the phone is something anyone with a grade school education can do.
It seems like you are assuming supermarkets can support the same number of customers if the reallocated their staff to pickup/delivery.
As a shopper who knows what I want and where to get it, I might spend 15 minutes shopping at a minute at the register, and that doesn't count my drive to and from the store.
With respect to unemployment, nobody is interestested in working at a super-market, especially when unemployment is pays 50% more [1]. Workers would quit if it did not disqualify them from unemployment
[1] the average cashier salary is 30k/year (575/week) and the current unemployment benefit for the same salary is 875/ week when you include the additional $600
> Also,I believe it's possible to build a covid-19 safe ,pickup process.
It's not at any reasonable cost for any stressing concept of “safe”, but any reasonable pickup process is probably going to be less of a public health risk than in-store shopping even with reasonable effort at maintaining social distancing and personal protection.
Yeah, it's a mystery to me why this is so hard. Put a barcode on all receipts "order this again". Go online, scan in your barcode to place the order, bam problem solved. For 90% of people this would satisfy all the normal grocery shopping since we tend to just buy the same staples over and over. As for the rest, well, yes there would need to be a small army of staff to deal with corner cases. But why this is unobtainium is beyond me.
Sounds like you are trying to make ordering easier. Current problem seems to be that the stores are swamped and can't handle the order volume. At least here in the UK where I live, the grocery stores are asking people who can to buy in person, instead of online ordering.
> Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now. They're all generally a week out, or you just can't get any delivery slot at all.
That's inconvenient, but I've known for over a week that it now needs to be scheduled a week in advance, and I had all the information to determine approximately what I'd need in one week's time (how much we have now and how much we eat), so, if you can get a spot one week out, it's only a minor failure.
If you try to order grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food, yes, it's a big problem, but the information that you have to plan at least a week ahead is widespread enough that it's an inconvenience, not a disaster.
No, it's not just about ordering grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food. The big problem is that there is no queue!
For weeks now, I've seen, "We're sorry! All times are currently booked. Please continue checking back - new time slots open up throughout the day."
Despite planning ahead, subscribing to the delivery service, and attempting to schedule a delivery or pickup, I get this unhelpful message and have been forced to shop in the store two times.
Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon? I'm fine waiting a week to three weeks as long as I don't have to keep polling their delivery slots every hour, on the hour, just to figure out that they don't have any available.
By the way, I'm not complaining. I understand the system is overwhelmed and operating outside the expected capacity. I'm just frustrated with people looking upon those shopping in-store as if it has anything to do with lack of foresight.
> Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon?
Because grocery delivery in normal times is more time-of-day sensitive and more subject to “if not at the desired time, I will not want it or get it by a different means” than general merchandise, and so grocery delivery systems are optimized around those conditions.
Now, obviously, with a mass shelter-in-place order, “as soon as possible, and I'll be here and ready to accept and store it whatever time of day that turns out to be” is a lot more common for groceries than it normally would be, but no one built their systems around a maybe once a century public health event.
So what? Then get your week out slot. Then when you get your order next week, reserve a slot for a week out. I have to wait 2-3 days here, so I've adjusted and planning on that.
If there are no slots at all, sure that's a problem. But claiming it's a failure across the board because you have to wait a few days to a week is kind of insane...
> Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now.
While we've had to do a couple in person runs to try to hit the limited stock items tp, paper towels, and—when the problems actually included hoarding early on rather than just the supply-chain issues later—milk, we've had pretty good luck with instacart except during the first week of the CA shelter-in-place order.
OTOH, I know people less than 100 miles away that are having very different experiences.
I suspect this is all highly variable from place to place and week to week.
> IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup.
Where it's even entirely within the same company, staff aren't entirely fungible between delivery and other functions. And where it's not, that's even more true.
My wife and I have placed three InstaCart orders in the last month. Super fast, and excellent, service. We have been giving the shoppers a little over 20% of the total order cost as a cash tip, on top of what InstaCart pays them. The shoppers seemed to be happy to have the work.
That's not it, actually. This particular pressure is coming from the left, via unions representing Amazon workers. A few NY State representatives have signed on to the effort, as I understand it.
And the "call for closure" bit is a bit spun; it's mostly gamesmanship. The unions don't actually want their workplace closed, they're trying to point out the risk the workers are taking being there and advocating, ultimately, for things like hazard pay and PPE.
Amazon already has enormous market power and with the current pandemic, it is probably one of the few companies that will survive this largely unscathed; it may even be able to benefit. I am not completely sure as to why that is the case. My recent order says it will be delivered at the beginning of May. But then, they will pick up a lot of business from all the places that will have gone under.
Still, how do you buy anything on Amazon, when it has a month wait time for things you want/need?
Delivery times clearly vary a lot. I have admittedly not tried to order any "quarantine goods" like webcams but I think everything I've ordered has arrived in two days.
I will admit that I am not sure I do understand your argument. For the record, I am never happy about too much power residing in too few hands. It rarely ends well.
But neither Walmart, Kmart, nor Sears had as big of a grip on US economy as Amazon does simply, because Amazon is not just a giant online store. It is not apples to apples comparison.
It is possible I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say. Care to elaborate?
> But neither Walmart, Kmart, nor Sears had as big of a grip on US economy as Amazon does simply, because Amazon is not just a giant online store
Citation needed — all three have enjoyed periods in history as dominant nationwide market leaders in retail. Sears' mail order catalog was essentially the pre-Internet Amazon, and commanded a comparable scale.
I've ordered a selection of things from Amazon (and other vendors) over the last month and none have taken a month to deliver. I used to be able to get many things from Amazon same-day or overnight - that is rarely available now. But, 2-3 days is still common.
And the things that are listed as 3+ weeks often aren't available any faster from other sources.
Some of my orders have come on a normal timeline. Others have been sitting in "waiting to ship" for weeks. Another was entirely canceled by Amazon without explanation.
I suspect it's largely based on what is in Amazon warehouses. The items listed as a month+ are probably Amazon Marketplace (3rd party sellers) who don't have items at Amazon warehouses at this time - unless it's changed, Amazon was not accepting new inbound Marketplace shipments that weren't "important" items.
It's odd that you are portraying Amazon's ability to survive the coronavirus situation as a negative thing. It's a good thing, and we should want more companies to be as resilient and adaptable.
We are better off right now because Amazon exists and is able to deliver to people who are sheltering in place.
I am not. It is laudable that they are able to thrive in adverse environment. My complaint is specifically about the amount of marketshare and corresponding market power, which is already pretty big. At certain point, too much power has to be controlled. There is a reason we have antitrust laws.
You are absolutely correct. That said, 'bigness' invites monopolistic behaviors. I am actually saying: do not let it grow big enough to cause problems in the future. It works in gardening.
We should punish violations of the law if and when they happen, rather than pre-emptively asking businesses if they could please be a bit less successful.
Bigness is not a problem in itself, and we should be more appreciative of it as a form of resiliency after this pandemic. Big business has performed better than most other American institutions. Our ability to cope with the shutdowns has been heavily reliant on big business, especially big tech.
Should is likely the key word in that statement. You will note how many and public violations of the law get a slap on the wrist that in practice amounts to a little more than the cost of doing business ( Equifax, Wells Fargo, Uber come to mind ). Regular people watch this and each time it happens trust in the basic institutions tasked with making the playing field equal gets drained a little further.
As for the point about big business performing better than other American institutions, I would like to point out that it is big business does happen to have rather good representation in our government; definitely better than most citizens do. Of course they do better. It would be weird if they did not.
As for the resiliency, I can't get help, but to chuckle, in 2008 tons of big businesses were begging for a bailout. This time around BA and few other big players are not above asking for the same. How resilient are they really?
I can give you your point about tech sector ( though an argument could be made the main reason they seem somewhat is immune is shifting the employment cost to the employee -- ie. gig economy ).
Big business is not the problem in itself, but pretending it does not have inordinate amount of impact is silly. Its growth, especially if it is causing undesirable changes, should and must be curtailed. Otherwise the best thing you can compare it to is cancer.
> As for the resiliency, I can't get help, but to chuckle, in 2008 tons of big businesses were begging for a bailout. This time around BA and few other big players are not above asking for the same. How resilient are they really?
So to me that sounds like even more reason to like Amazon, if they survive this without any government bailout money. Because, like you pointed out, other business do not so let's all praise Amazon for being able to do so, right?
I think you misunderstand my argument. I have zero issues giving Amazon credit, where credit is due. It is as big as it is, because it got a whole lot of things right from customer perspective. Compared to even to say BestBuy today, it is still probably best experience I had online.
That, however, does not mean that they cannot get so big that I would not want their power limited.
This is true for all non-essential stuff right now but it's very likely it will get delivered in half the estimated time. The estimated time is a conservative estimate.
A lot more expenses for Amazon on their very low margin grocery (retail) business. People are panic-buying AMZN stock expecting this to reflect in a higher profits, which is very questionable. If Prime subscribers can't get their same/next day deliveries, Amazon might not get enough new subs, but could rather start losing them.
> People are panic-buying AMZN stock expecting this to reflect in a higher profits, which is very questionable.
Are we sure of that? I'd expect the rationale to look something more like "Amazon will grab a higher market share as a result of people switching to delivery during this crisis, which will result in higher profits down the road".
Exactly. People are learning to use Amazon for things they may have not used it before. And it's not just Amazon. HN users are by and large very technical and early adopters of tech services. The pandemic has forced the general person to learn how to use/try out these services.
Not sure I agree with this thesis. I think after this, people will see Amazon in a new light. More like a railroad (of days past) or electric/cable company. A utility. People have very few places to turn to during this crisis, and Amazon happens to be there.
The other way is that Amazon is growing their mindshare even more, pulling in more long term customers of Amazon Prime, Prime Video, and Fresh. Not to mention Twitch and Audible, which should be growing as well.
Plus, they own AWS which is the majority of their profits. The huge surge of usage this Q might even be enough to offset any additional expenses.
If there's a dip because Amazon misses earnings, long-term investors will surely buy it because of Amazon is simply growing market share, and one of the few companies that will come out of this stronger.
Amazon is a retailer, and retailers get hurt in recessions.
Yes, there's a wave of panic buying currently, but that will recede.
AWS may also surge with remote work, but enterprise budgets will be slashed in a recession. And a non-trivial amount of AWS's customers may fold completely.
It's true that retailers get hurt in a recession. That's a headwind. The tailwind is that even more people will be shopping online via Amazon going forward. I'm betting it'll be the brick and mortars hurting more. Some of their market share will be cut due to a recession, but some of it will be going to Amazon.
AWS spend will go down in a recession too, but there are numerous other companies I'll bet against before AWS (ie martech, advertising, HR tech, etc). Infrastructure is one of the most critical parts of a company.
Even if many of AWS’s customers fold, the big ones are likely to file for bankruptcy and thus their backend systems will still likely be operational for sometime.
Example: If an airline company were to file for bankruptcy, then their booking management system (the part not likely handled by Amadeus) would still be operational. Their transactional systems (databases and associated infrastructure) would likely still be kept running, however their analytical workloads may see some trimming.
I'm curious what others experience has been with Amazon during the lockdown/shelter-in-place orders.
For me, Amazon had turned into nearly a just in time service to acquire items. With the issues with quality, I started to move away from Amazon, and with the delivery time increase, I've all but stopped ordering from Amazon.
Now, I shop at a local Kroger subsidiary (Fred Meyer), and anything I can't locally, I just go without, except in rare circumstances (like a z270 mobo).
If it isn’t clear, these 75,000 jobs are in addition to the 100,000 jobs which Amazon announced they would hire about a month ago. The article states that they’ve already(!) hired the previously announced 100,000 jobs.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadHow out of touch and uneducated are these people? Pandemics can't be stopped outside a vaccine. We are all going to catch it or be quarentined for 18 months.
Want to flatten the curve? I could go to Walmart and interface with 50 people to get ibuprofen, or I can interface with 1 worker?
We need to stop electing marketers and start electing people that understand math.
Only thing I could think of is credentialing.
https://www.axios.com/andrew-yang-2020-media-attention-acc26...
https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-me...
The whole structure of the debates and 24/7 news coverage is more about reality TV than any kind of substance. It's geared for soundbites and drama. So someone like Yang doesn't fit into that, but shines in long form formats like podcasts.
His plan to use a VAT to pay for UBI is a regressive tax. People with lower incomes spend a higher percentage of their income on consumable goods. Putting a higher VAT or sales tax on everything to UBI puts a lot of the burden on the lower class to pay for this program. Someone with a much higher income has a number of ways to avoid this tax - they can invest in companies instead, they can buy real estate, they can take a jet to a different country and buy expensive stuff there instead of buying it in the country with a high VAT, like how people in Massachusetts buy their computers in New Hampshire.
So, he "did the math," but that doesn't automatically make it good policy.
The concept of UBI is a good idea to explore in the future. However, we shouldn't just assume that it's definitely going to work as intended, either: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/nordic-welfare-news/heikki-h...
That said, I wasn't entirely convinced by the Freedom Dividend and wish it hadn't been the centerpiece. What I was more interested in and really appreciated was his overall approach and focus on problems and solutions. An actual problem solver and uniter, not someone perpetuating the WWE reality TV show that is our politics.
"Assuming all goods are subject to a VAT and the entire VAT is passed on to consumers, an individual would have to buy $120,000 worth of items before the extra costs associated with a VAT “use up” their UBI."
That is...true, yes. Everyone's still getting the extra $1,000 a month.
Using all of that up by spending on a 10% VAT puts you at spending $120,000 a year.
So, while a VAT is not progressive, funneling it into UBI turns it into being progressive. That makes sense. You don't even need a goods exemption for that to work as intended.
I am also not convinced on the idea of UBI. There needs to be more studies including large scale studies if possible. I am not convinced that the largest rent-seekers with limited competition and supply alternatives wouldn't just suck those income gains away - jobs with labor supply surplus might pay closer to the minimum wage, landlords might simply all agree to raise rent, Comcast will raise bills across the country, colleges raise tuition, etc. UBI sometimes feels like an oversimplification, one of those "easy solutions" that doesn't take a long time to write down and fits in a campaign slogan.
But then we use the tax to directly fund one of the most progressive programs in the US, which directly pays people who need it most.
I think most people would think of Social Security as a net progressive policy, even though it has a very regressive funding model.
They are raising their wage to $17 per hour. That's around $3,000 per month in stead of their usual $2,500 per month.
Little vacation, few sick days.
According to Google, that beats Walmart pay[0]. Less clear for Target[1]. Of course, if reports are even remotely accurate, Amazon warehouse working conditions are considerably worse.
I don't know what other retailers pay, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're comparable.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=Walmart+associate+pay
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Target+worker+pay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://www.cdc.gov/plague/resources/235098_plaguefactsheet_...
Right now, 0.1% of the US has had Covid-19. For heard immunity we need that number to be at least 500 times larger.
So, what's the plan here? Wait for a miracle that isn't coming? Stay in quarantine for a year and risk societal ruin?
Would deaths scale linearly with a 500x increase?
How about the impact on our medical system, would that scale linearly with a 500x increase?
Probably look at Iraq and Afghanistan has dealt with post 9/11.
Speaking strictly in terms of the US, we'd be able to weather a 10-year lockdown. America is rich in natural resources, and has a large agricultural base.
Our government can handle the basics:
Drinking water
Food
Shelter
The rest would be economic shifts, such as reduction in costs of living to account for a new economy that has shifted away from the ability to get together.
I would speculate we're better off with the entirety of the economy being in shambles, than we would be by having rather high mortality rates, and overwhelming our health services.
Let me post another question:
What if you did not need to work to have your any of needs met?
Processes and procedures would need to be put in place to ensure safety.
Society would need to adapt to meet those needs.
Those building blocks will be needed if we want a plan that isn't too painful.
By any reasonable estimate, it's over 1%. Highly infected areas like NYC likely exceed 10%
> So, what's the plan here?
It's not feasable to get herd immunity in a world as open as 3 months ago. The hospitalization rate (and duration) is too high -> it would take longer than the optimistic time for vaccine development.
Electronic contact tracing, heavy testing, traveler quarantines, mass gathering restrictions. It's not going to get contained, but you can have a world where isolated bursts effectively get squashed.
Even the most basic math on this indicates the Amazon option is far better for eradication of the pandemic than the Walmart option.
Is Best Buy essential? No? What if my laptop breaks and I relied on it to work remotely?
Are electricians or climate control technicians essential? What if the air conditioning breaks in the middle of a texas summer? How can I self-isolate when it's even hotter inside than outside? What about elderly people who could easily have a heat stroke?
Are psychologists essential workers? They might be even more essential now that so many people are facing complete isolation and job loss.
For a week or two sure essential is very narrow, but after several weeks that can expand.
I will say though, my state at least deemed most of the roles you mentioned essential. I can still get my computer repaired, get construction/maintenance done, and at least consult with my medical professionals over the phone/video chat for now in terms of basic consultation. I know betterhelp.com is a service (there are others) my spouse has used.
Everyone who can should be ordering groceries.. I have been ordering groceries from walmart for the last month and it's great that I don't have to go in there. One time I had to do a pickup at the store (alcohol purchase..), it was very simple as well. But while I was there, I was appalled to see a walmart sized parking lot almost full of people going into the store...
What I've noticed is that delivery slots—at least for the San Diego area—are released once a day around 10pm-midnight, and sell out in about 10-20 minutes. So if you are obsessively checking manually every 10min around this time of the day, you are still relatively likely to find one.
Pickup/delivery options are a total failure across the board at all grocery stores right now. They're all generally a week out, or you just can't get any delivery slot at all.
IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup. If they have any staff left over after that they can operate cash registers. Right now there's a perverse incentive for everyone to pack into grocery stores because there's no other option for actually getting food in a reasonable timeframe.
Ocado at least are treating regular customers well - guaranteed weekly slots etc.
But rather than rejigging deliveries - perhaps drafting in more vans for delivery of non-frozen/coop stuff, and jiggling delivery routes to do neighbouring properties together (say increase delivery slots from hourly to daily to make drops more efficent), they’ve just carried on as normal.
Instacart? INSTANT order assignment and food within 2 hours. I was stunned. Also no item limit like in Prime Now. I got 8 cheeseless pizzas. '<'
Canned response (understandably) from support which just asked us to "re-schedule it to another day" (which was at that point a week out min), and then after 2 weeks I got a cancelation email and they finally issued the $500 refund. We pay the "premium" yearly price to InstaCart, too. =|
We now have no faith in them, because if we schedule a delivery for a week away and then the food doesn't arrive we're kind of stuck; PostMates has been decent, depending on the driver you get, and has continued to be same-day.
We shouldn't be incentivizing the population to pack into a single building because we're fetishizing the ritual of going to the checkout line. The checkout line should be lowest priority for staffing.
Absolutely. An employee taking orders on the phone instead of working the cash register is an employee who's not getting exposed to coronavirus.
I can't believe we're talking about unemployment going to the moon and at the same time saying we can't spare precious labor resources. Talking grocery orders over the phone is something anyone with a grade school education can do.
As a shopper who knows what I want and where to get it, I might spend 15 minutes shopping at a minute at the register, and that doesn't count my drive to and from the store.
With respect to unemployment, nobody is interestested in working at a super-market, especially when unemployment is pays 50% more [1]. Workers would quit if it did not disqualify them from unemployment
[1] the average cashier salary is 30k/year (575/week) and the current unemployment benefit for the same salary is 875/ week when you include the additional $600
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/cashier-gro...
https://www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment/ui-calculator.htm
So here when you order online, you don't get to choose items: you can only buy one standard list of products.
Also,I believe it's possible to build a covid-19 safe ,pickup process.
So scaling just the basics shouldnt be a problem.
And as for the rest of the products, well waiting a week isn't the end of the world.
It's not at any reasonable cost for any stressing concept of “safe”, but any reasonable pickup process is probably going to be less of a public health risk than in-store shopping even with reasonable effort at maintaining social distancing and personal protection.
At this point, everyone should have accumulated a two week buffer of food and water. A week of foresight isn't a terribly onerous ask.
That's inconvenient, but I've known for over a week that it now needs to be scheduled a week in advance, and I had all the information to determine approximately what I'd need in one week's time (how much we have now and how much we eat), so, if you can get a spot one week out, it's only a minor failure.
If you try to order grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food, yes, it's a big problem, but the information that you have to plan at least a week ahead is widespread enough that it's an inconvenience, not a disaster.
For weeks now, I've seen, "We're sorry! All times are currently booked. Please continue checking back - new time slots open up throughout the day."
Despite planning ahead, subscribing to the delivery service, and attempting to schedule a delivery or pickup, I get this unhelpful message and have been forced to shop in the store two times.
Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon? I'm fine waiting a week to three weeks as long as I don't have to keep polling their delivery slots every hour, on the hour, just to figure out that they don't have any available.
By the way, I'm not complaining. I understand the system is overwhelmed and operating outside the expected capacity. I'm just frustrated with people looking upon those shopping in-store as if it has anything to do with lack of foresight.
Because grocery delivery in normal times is more time-of-day sensitive and more subject to “if not at the desired time, I will not want it or get it by a different means” than general merchandise, and so grocery delivery systems are optimized around those conditions.
Now, obviously, with a mass shelter-in-place order, “as soon as possible, and I'll be here and ready to accept and store it whatever time of day that turns out to be” is a lot more common for groceries than it normally would be, but no one built their systems around a maybe once a century public health event.
So what? Then get your week out slot. Then when you get your order next week, reserve a slot for a week out. I have to wait 2-3 days here, so I've adjusted and planning on that.
If there are no slots at all, sure that's a problem. But claiming it's a failure across the board because you have to wait a few days to a week is kind of insane...
That's just it, this last 4 weeks when I've tried to order online, about 75% of the time I've seen no slots at all, from 3 or 4 different providers.
While we've had to do a couple in person runs to try to hit the limited stock items tp, paper towels, and—when the problems actually included hoarding early on rather than just the supply-chain issues later—milk, we've had pretty good luck with instacart except during the first week of the CA shelter-in-place order.
OTOH, I know people less than 100 miles away that are having very different experiences.
I suspect this is all highly variable from place to place and week to week.
> IMHO the grocery stores should be prioritizing staff to filling delivery orders, then pickup.
Where it's even entirely within the same company, staff aren't entirely fungible between delivery and other functions. And where it's not, that's even more true.
And the "call for closure" bit is a bit spun; it's mostly gamesmanship. The unions don't actually want their workplace closed, they're trying to point out the risk the workers are taking being there and advocating, ultimately, for things like hazard pay and PPE.
My area is limiting store hours. Umm that puts more people in the store at once, sillies.
Amazon already has enormous market power and with the current pandemic, it is probably one of the few companies that will survive this largely unscathed; it may even be able to benefit. I am not completely sure as to why that is the case. My recent order says it will be delivered at the beginning of May. But then, they will pick up a lot of business from all the places that will have gone under.
Still, how do you buy anything on Amazon, when it has a month wait time for things you want/need?
Hows about when Kmart had it?
Hows about Sears?
....
you get the point.
But neither Walmart, Kmart, nor Sears had as big of a grip on US economy as Amazon does simply, because Amazon is not just a giant online store. It is not apples to apples comparison.
It is possible I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say. Care to elaborate?
Citation needed — all three have enjoyed periods in history as dominant nationwide market leaders in retail. Sears' mail order catalog was essentially the pre-Internet Amazon, and commanded a comparable scale.
And the things that are listed as 3+ weeks often aren't available any faster from other sources.
Some of my orders have come on a normal timeline. Others have been sitting in "waiting to ship" for weeks. Another was entirely canceled by Amazon without explanation.
We are better off right now because Amazon exists and is able to deliver to people who are sheltering in place.
Bigness is not a problem in itself, and we should be more appreciative of it as a form of resiliency after this pandemic. Big business has performed better than most other American institutions. Our ability to cope with the shutdowns has been heavily reliant on big business, especially big tech.
As for the point about big business performing better than other American institutions, I would like to point out that it is big business does happen to have rather good representation in our government; definitely better than most citizens do. Of course they do better. It would be weird if they did not.
As for the resiliency, I can't get help, but to chuckle, in 2008 tons of big businesses were begging for a bailout. This time around BA and few other big players are not above asking for the same. How resilient are they really?
I can give you your point about tech sector ( though an argument could be made the main reason they seem somewhat is immune is shifting the employment cost to the employee -- ie. gig economy ).
Big business is not the problem in itself, but pretending it does not have inordinate amount of impact is silly. Its growth, especially if it is causing undesirable changes, should and must be curtailed. Otherwise the best thing you can compare it to is cancer.
So to me that sounds like even more reason to like Amazon, if they survive this without any government bailout money. Because, like you pointed out, other business do not so let's all praise Amazon for being able to do so, right?
That, however, does not mean that they cannot get so big that I would not want their power limited.
So to answer your question: sure.
Are we sure of that? I'd expect the rationale to look something more like "Amazon will grab a higher market share as a result of people switching to delivery during this crisis, which will result in higher profits down the road".
If people take this literally then there will be strong push to nationalize it or break it up. I'm not sure Amazon wants that feeling...
The other way is that Amazon is growing their mindshare even more, pulling in more long term customers of Amazon Prime, Prime Video, and Fresh. Not to mention Twitch and Audible, which should be growing as well.
Plus, they own AWS which is the majority of their profits. The huge surge of usage this Q might even be enough to offset any additional expenses.
If there's a dip because Amazon misses earnings, long-term investors will surely buy it because of Amazon is simply growing market share, and one of the few companies that will come out of this stronger.
Yes, there's a wave of panic buying currently, but that will recede.
AWS may also surge with remote work, but enterprise budgets will be slashed in a recession. And a non-trivial amount of AWS's customers may fold completely.
AWS spend will go down in a recession too, but there are numerous other companies I'll bet against before AWS (ie martech, advertising, HR tech, etc). Infrastructure is one of the most critical parts of a company.
Example: If an airline company were to file for bankruptcy, then their booking management system (the part not likely handled by Amadeus) would still be operational. Their transactional systems (databases and associated infrastructure) would likely still be kept running, however their analytical workloads may see some trimming.
With restaurants closed and questionable for the foreseeable future, I dont see this changing soon.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to...
I'm curious what others experience has been with Amazon during the lockdown/shelter-in-place orders.
For me, Amazon had turned into nearly a just in time service to acquire items. With the issues with quality, I started to move away from Amazon, and with the delivery time increase, I've all but stopped ordering from Amazon.
Now, I shop at a local Kroger subsidiary (Fred Meyer), and anything I can't locally, I just go without, except in rare circumstances (like a z270 mobo).