For many, their former workplaces are gone. So beating covid won't put them back to work immediately, and many will become the permanently (and eventually uncounted) unemployed.
Man, it's so frustrating seeing all these businesses shutting down (smaller ones are closing for good), meanwhile I'm sure Bezos and the Silicon crew are reporting record profits this year through food deliveries and amazon purchases.
I sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.
We're jumping right into another Great Depression, although as a millennial, I would argue we should call it something more fitting and modern - maybe... "The Big Sad"?
What else could you call it? You can't drop taxes on the wealthiest Americans who are seeing the lions share of wealth transferred to them and then have the government spend like a drunken sailor to try to keep the economy from tanking.
SOMEONE has to pay for those stimulus checks and it appears right now it's turning into a loan that our great grandchildren will bear the responsibility of so that Bezos and Co can see an extra 0 at the end of their net worth.
The word “need” presupposes a particular outcome. You don’t “need” to breathe, unless you want to live. The universe doesn’t “need” to keep existing.
So in language, when we say we need something, it’s a need for a particular and often presumptive / implied outcome.
In this case the purpose of the government is to provide for the general welfare of its
citizens. The value of the US dollar depends on the “full faith and credit” of the United States actually meaning something. Therefore the government does need to show a willingness and ability to pay its debts.
The perceived future rate of inflation is a major variable in determining the interest rate that the US has to pay on its debt.
Also, the US government needs to control the level of inflation in order to have a functioning economy.
Given the widely accepted theory that printing arbitrarily large sums of money over time drives inflation, there are competing forces that act in the short and long term that would dictate the right amount of money to print now, or into the future.
Since the ultimate goal is to stabilize and grow the economy, the government does in fact need to not borrow until the currency collapses, and needs to be able to keep its debt to some reasonable multiple of GDP.
Bezos literally got his phone hacked by foreign intelligence services for being supportive of the party that wants to fix this situation. He's benefiting because Amazon is well run and well positioned for this. He couldn't control how the response was managed and he doesn't control tax policy. Do a better job of blaming the people who are actually at fault, or you are abetting them.
Amazon has been using tax havens for years and years. Amazon has been actively preventing unionization of employees.
Jeff Bezos has personally donated to both political parties. Don't confuse his personal dislike of Trump with some sort of undying support of the Democratic party or their tax policies.
Of course he donates to both political parties, he's not a moron. Of course he uses the most advantageous legal tax strategy available. Almost every US company prevents union organization (nothing they've done comes close to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_uni..., and I wouldn't be surprised if companies astroturfed union initiatives in competitors) He is a private citizen and just because he's wealthy it's not his job to fix the US financial system.
I don't have time or inclination to rehash it all so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_of_Jeff_Bezos%27s_phone, but he owns WaPo and the hacking was probably retribution re Khashoggi. There was nothing done about it because "somebody" didn't like the WaPo editorial stance.
If Bezos's and the other mega billionaires wanted to truly change the tax code for a top .0001% tax rate or whatever they could almost certainly get it done.
How much does Bezos spend on lobbying (not Amazon specific interests)? Virtually a 25 cents to him - .000086
Adelson spent something like $500mm over a decade and he probably has 75% or more of the 'credit' for changing pro-Isreal policy.
Bezos and the rest of them could put a few billion into treasuries and still not lose any basis just use the dividends politically.
In addition if they stopped following shareholder primacy Bezos could direct Amazon to repatriate profits continually and pay the tax. Stop relying on legal 'loopholes' to lower tax % and just pay in 'best faith' and stop pitting local governments against each other in a race to the bottom.
Hell they could even send a check to Treasury but spending only a billion $ lobbying for new laws would be more effective and longer term.
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Personally I'd like to see something like a sovereign wealth fund that benefits social security/healthcare and directly supports the bottom 40%. Look to Alaska as an example.
Each 'bailout' the taxpayers should get a % of shares for their investment, basically free money from the Fed which is supposed to make its money back anyways. Fannie/Freddit/TARP is an odd example something more like UAE, Norway but passive and only US companies
Go further and make it part of taxes for the mega corps only. 14% profit + a small % of shares annually.
We don't have to turn into CCP with control over Corporate direction. Simply hold the shares passively.
Have to figure out something where corps have no dividends. Maybe a set yearly sale %.
I think about how beneficial it would be to give $1600 cash right now and match another $1600 to each individual in basically a retirement index fund that is only accessible in ___ years or ___ first time homebuyer etc circumstances like a new type of IRA. Hell the government could take a cut in ___ years and it would pay for itself.
I'm specifically responding to parent " He couldn't control how the response was managed and he doesn't control tax policy"
saying he could easily exert a LOT of power to change tax policy if he wanted to. And could step up and pay more in taxes even without changing the laws
It's his too, he is a citizen. with hugely outsized influence.
I am definitely organizing for and personally committed to taxing the mega mega wealthy/corps, and so are millions more. But even working in politics my influence is like 1/100,000th of his.
The network effect is strong. If I post a comment to stop using Chrome (since there are better alternatives and Chrome is a near monopoly) we already see how resistant to change we are.
If you order something, people don’t search for alternatives. If your tied into an eco system, you don’t move away from it.
Personally I actively try to support local businesses, use only non-monopolies out of principle.
People do tend to use alternatives that they experience as better (which may not be the same as being better). You have to have a better experience and you have to get people to be aware, consider, and try the alternative experience.
A lot of us switched to Chrome because it was a better experience at the time. A lot bought from Amazon for the same reason. I’ll happily buy from a non-Amazon who gives me an experience better than Amazon, consider a browser that’s better than Chrome, or a search engine which gives better results than Google. Those three still get the majority of my in-category traffic though, because the experience is generally very good, quite consistent, and often best-in-class.
I think the hurdle to building a competitor to Facebook or Twitter is higher than the hurdle of selling me an electronic device instead of Amazon selling it to me. (BestBuy, NewEgg, MicroCenter [semi-local], and randos on EBay do it regularly. No one is casually going to beat Twitter and FB for social.)
The thing is, even when the experience gets worse, you might still be resistant to change. You already have your account setup, that feature X you liked they took isn’t that bad, the extra advertising doesn’t bother you too much, etc.
Maybe feature X in Firefox is actually better than Chrome (just an imaginary example) but because it doesn’t exactly work like you are used too, it doesn’t appeal.
Or your peers are all in the same in-group and Software X is what a Real Programmer should be using.
That all together could mean an experience gets progressively worse yet you don’t switch.
In my small town all the locally-owned and operated coffee shops were forced to close due to government mandates, and most are now closed permanently, because they couldn't afford to pay rent without any customers.
McDonald's and Starbucks? Still churning out coffee to people standing in long lines.
We've normalized political violence on the left and right this year. One side trashes a bunch of cities, the other the capitol. That genie won't go back in the bottle for sure.
Eventually the poors will get angry and united. So far our industry is helping keep them divided, but I'm not sure how long that will last.
> One side trashes a bunch of cities, the other the capitol
First, both sides are mostly made up of non-violent people dedicated to their cause. Both sides can rightfully claim that a minority of "bad eggs" amongst them caused the violence.
But that's where the equivalency ends. We have to look at the cause itself.
It's quite a stretch to say that a group protesting police brutality (in the face of actual police brutality) is at all equivalent to a group seeking to overthrow a legitimate government (with zero evidence to back their claims).
It's not the same ballpark. It ain't even the same fucking sport.
Bullshit. A great number of those protesting on the left/progressive side during the fairly recent BLM marches were peaceful people legitimately angry about police violence, but more than enough others used the same starting point as a launch pad for mass riots, burnings, lootings and the promotion of extremist (but leftist extremist) political postures that were little different in their love of overthrowing legitimate institutions from anything recently done by the idiots at the Capitol. In terms of sheer scale and distribution, the former protests had much more violence to them than more recent right-oriented protests. Emotional attachment to a certain ideology is no excuse for claiming two obviously related things "ain't even the same fucking sport". They very much are, but from different teams.
The locally owned and run stores were forced to close by a government mandate, while the "big boys" where deemed essential and were allowed to stay open.
The joys of being rich, you get to influence the government!
I don’t think this ever applied to a Starbucks or McDonalds compared to a local coffee or burger place.
100% for supermarkets and Walmarts, but I can’t see how (in any jurisdiction) McDonalds or Starbucks would be allowed to do take out but local restaurants would not.
This entire pandemic response is 100% the modern equivalent of the liquidation of the Kulaks. There's no way around it. If you thought wealth inequality was bad before...
> I sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.
Wait, what? You casually suggest that the pandemic was planned as a conspiracy against the middle class, but you don't think it matters whether it was a conspiracy or not? Please clarify if I misunderstood.
Not the parent, but I read that as, whether or not it was a conspiracy, the effect seems to be the same and the damage is done, so whether it is or not doesn't really matter.
As in, focusing on the cause of the problem and whether it was intentional or not isn't going to solve the problem.
Also not the parent, but I assume "calculated beforehand" does not refer to the pandemic per se, but rather either preparedness for when the economy goes south or exploitation of that reality after the fact.
I suspect they meant the economic/financial response to the pandemic, and the larger mom/pop => gig monolith and physical retail => ecommerce trends, rather than the pandemic itself.
I was trying to say that it doesn't matter what you believe is causing all this chaos, it's independent from what's actually going on in the world right this second.
Whether it's the conspiracy theorists who believe it was pre-planned by the CCP to accelerate them to be the next global super power fueled by vaccines with 5G death-rays and microchips, or if it's these behemoth companies putting in contingency plans and/or having the massive amounts of reserve capital (rivalling even medium-sized governments) to quickly cater to the new economic landscape brought on by lax regulations and tax havens - it doesn't matter, people are suffering in numbers that haven't been seen probably for a hundred years.
It's one of those times I (very begrudgingly) think that China has done well in terms of recovery. They have the hard, enforceable power to lock people in their homes for extended periods of time under who knows what penalty - or they're lying about their recovery to the world... Who knows?
This pandemic was avoidable. I say that because when you work with international colleagues you see it firsthand. Other countries aren't suffering like the US is. The US mismanagement of the pandemic just on it's really diminishes it's global standing. It's not Bezos or Instacart or whomever, it's the basic lack of top down coordination in a response to the virus and dissemination of the vaccine.
These small business would probably not be closed if we had a competent national response. The probably would be closed but not bankrupt if we didn't have an inept fiscal response, also.
You're going to have to explain that one. Right now I just have to assume you mean "one party controls all three branches of government", in which case, it's not the fault of Democrats that the GOP turned into assclowns and got voted out.
I took it to mean that it doesn't matter if it's left or right, "Democrat" or "Republican".
The transfer of wealth has (in my personal theory) lead to the lobbying of everybody, no matter which political affiliation - to the point where both "sides" are agreeing on policies that are harming people and favoring corporations.
That's absolutely shocking to me. I knew it was a lot but on the order of billions/trillions?
I _REALLY_ do not want to get political, but the timing is just too coincidental to not be mentioned... Now that a certain person is going to be kicked out of office, several politicians of mentioned governors and mayors are finally considering re-opening their cities when only weeks ago they were handing out fines - even when there's been a lackluster start to the US vaccination campaign.
Anecdotal, but I laughed when I saw that SL Green, one of the biggest commercial landlords in New York City, and one of the competitors of my former PE firm, was seeking federal relief funds for the pandemic as a small business.
Not looking to give them an "out" - but I wonder if it's because these companies take on so much debt by buying properties and making the bet that people will always be living and working in them, paying rent. Now that people are leaving NYC in droves for other, cheaper locations - the NY real estate market is absolutely tanking because nobody is paying rent.
These property management companies made their bed, imo.
This absolutely is a transfer of wealth up to the billionaire class. Money that would have been put into the hands of waiters, dishwashers, barbers, and bartenders is now being spent on Grubhub and Amazon.
The remedy for this is a transfer in the opposite direction - direct stimulus payments. There's a reason McConnell fought so hard against those.
I have a photography studio in a small (population 1,000 or so) town in Minnesota that has surprisingly become a bit of a shopping destination.
Or had, anyways. Half of the shops on Main Street are now closed. Some were, I think, destined to fail. A candy shop is a pretty ridiculous prospect nowadays. Others have been staples to the town for years and helped make it worth it for other businesses to move in.
I’m really not sure if it’ll ever bounce back. There are still a couple of clothing shops, a restaurant, a brewery, and a wedding dress shop. If one or two of those go down I might think about pulling the plug myself.
As I have watched these headlines, I have constantly been frustrated by the lack of analysis of what's really going on beyond the data point.
Which industries lost jobs? Are the losses temporary due to lockdowns or a sign of an accelerating recession? Which regions lost the most jobs? Which income levels are most affected? What percent of jobless people are being covered by unemployment? And so on.
A single data point is useless click bait. Who is building the Tableau dashboard and having an economist write weekly economic analysis for the general public? Without good information, our democracy is rudderless.
Are you expecting that analysis to be in the headline itself? Several of the questions you pose are answered in the article.
"The losses last month were concentrated among restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues. Educational services, mostly colleges and universities, also cut workers in December. So did film and music studios."
" Economists say it could take several years for the labour market to recover from the pandemic."
"contacts in the leisure and hospitality sectors reported renewed employment cuts due to stricter containment measures."
Where are the graphs? Where is the data to back up those claims? Does "concentrated" mean 20% or 90%? Which economists said that and why did they say it? How many job cuts did the leasure and hospitality sector see? Without any summarized data to back up the claims, they amount to little more than unsourced opinions. I am asking for the opposite of a headline. I want a well source, data backed economic analysis for people who are interested in the deals but who are not economists, updated weekly or monthly in a consistent format.
There's not lock downs in the US. There are some rules about how businesses can operate, but people aren't locked down.
Here there is no in person dining. I think it would be pretty interesting to compare their revenues from 2019 to the periods during the pandemic where they have been open. My impression is that the 2020 numbers would be pretty weak, but I don't know.
I am aware of there being recent regional stay at home orders in California. I believe that is usually what people mean when they use the term "lockdown," at least outside of the Chinese context where they had much more forcefully kept people in their homes. In addition, since we have a global economy, COVID restrictions in other countries could affect US jobs.
Yes, it's silly to call an order to stay home (unless you need food or to go to work or feel like exercising) a lockdown. And then the other side of it is the (very lax) enforcement. People leaving home for other reasons aren't getting fined or otherwise punished.
> Are the losses temporary due to lockdowns or a sign of an accelerating recession?
It's a little hard to know in the moment if a restaurant/store/etc can make it through because of the 'fixed' costs like rent (never mind that those could also be addressed but the GOP is suddenly really concerned about the deficit because there's a Democrat about to be in charge so it's time to be deficit hawks again). Also many huge unknowns hang over any attempt to guess about that and those are how long till vaccines are in enough arms to allow for thing to go more normal, how much support they get from the government, and what their expenses and savings are to begin with.
This is the picture that played out across Spain and Greece in the early part of this decade ((We're a 1/5th part through "this decade, wow)
Sudden, elevated incidents of economic catastrophe leading to a massive decline in economic output and the underlying opportunities available to a few generations of intelligent people. This led to a significant decline in wealth creation relative to the rest of the emerging world in these nations.
Unlike the United States, they did not have the massive power of the worlds biggest military underwriting their currency and had to rely on the graces of the EU and IMF, who, frankly, displayed why bureaucratic lethargy is widely despised.
Make no mistake, this is going to remake the economy in ways very few of us can even begin to appreciate. How we, as a nation handle this sets the balance of power in the world for the next half of the century.
Hardly surprising, the US strategy has been lockdowns (good!) but without consistent aid to people and small businesses (bad!). The stay home and don't spread idea is a good one but needs to be backed up by actual assistance or aid. Pitiful amount of assistance from the federal government. We had one round of adequate funding right as this started and then basically nothing else. Money ran out, Congress was deadlocked and only aid we got was piggybacked onto a normal spending bill.
Right, and banks gave away the money to businesses that were good at paperwork (including some owned by politicians who got preferential treatment). The money, for the most part, didn't go where it was needed.
I know it would be next to impossible here in the U.S., but one of the things China did for the lockdown was to declare a rent abatement for anyone not allowed to do business. This wasn't a suspension where you got hammered later. You just did not pay rent while you had no income. End of story.
It was a temporary suspension of the economy in order to get back to a more normal level of operation. Australia is another example of this.
We got theater, fraud, and politicization instead.
I don't understand how professional short sellers made it through the past few years. Everything from economy, social structure, and climate, all going to hell, but the stock market seems blind to all of it.
In my understanding professional short sellers rarely short the whole market. They'll tend to have a particular firm that they think is overvalued and short that.
The economy as measured by GDP and unemployment was doing really well up until 2020 and Covid. And stock prices represent the present value of future earnings - if you believe that we'll see a reversion to the mean after Covid (and we will), why would you expect SPX to tank?
At least as of a couple of months ago, the lion's share of growth in the S&P 500 was from a few tech stocks, everyone else seemed mostly stagnant. You might respond that stagnant seems to be an overvalue, and I'd agree except that the fed has been pumping money into the markets in huge amounts.
> government response to worsening Covid-19 pandemic hurts businesses
Fixed the title. Unfortunately we don't have to be where we're at. We knows who's most vulnerable, we know how it spreads (low airflow crowded spaces), we know who's been vaccinated and/or who's had it. The fact that any organized response, even at the city or state level, across both blue and red states, shows the ineptitude of these appointed officials. In many ways the "hey we're at least doing x,y" is worse than doing nothing at all.
We can't even rely on citizens to wear masks. What makes you think that if government were competent enough to develop complex rules based on the factors you mention that we would be any better off.
Exactly, this is a great example of a failed policy.
Lets apply the simple rule: the less moving pieces a system has, the less it's likely to fail.
So, instead of getting 100 people to wear a mask in one business, get 1 business to increase the airflow in the business by 10x. Much simpler solution and something that can be directly measured. And really, they're non-competing; we can do both. Furthermore it eliminates the perceived need for draconian measure that are fueling other social problems.
I'm sorry, you think that increasing airflow by 10x in businesses in many various buildings and conditions is a simpler matter than people putting a piece of cloth over their face? xD
The key government failure in the US, at least since a total failure by the white house to seize the moment early on, is republicans seizing mask-wearing as a wedge issue. Following the most simple measures such as masks would effectively solve the issue enough for vaccines to catch up. Cynical exploitation of ignorance in the people by republicans has been the true societal failure in this pandemic.
By your argument, doesn't that mean that states/cities with completely blue government would have the lowest numbers? Or are those pesky Republicans all over california interfering with that?
We're a company of about 12 FTEs. Nobody here filed for unemployment, yet we've seen 5 fraudulent unemployment claims (for people that still work here) come across our HR department that creepily accurate information. What gives? And are those claims included in these stats?
And the whole "lets use this couple digit number that cannot be changed as authorization/authentication/proof of identity". Why can someone use the SSN to supplant identities?
It's the one ID everyone had (eventually) and should only have 1 of for their whole life which means it's perfect as a lazy way to keep just one record for every customer that'll never change.
If anything between outsourcing and automation employment isn't coming back. (And the employment that does come back will be at sub-minimum wage 12-hour days precarized "gigs" or 3 "half-time" jobs)
You’re probably looking for one of the unemployment rates. It’s quite useful to know what fraction of the population is working, even if there are perfectly good reasons for some to not be working.
Retirees still eat and someone has to grow the food.
I think it's disingenuous how all of these news articles phrase it as if the pandemic itself was responsible for hurting these businesses. In reality, the effect of covid alone on business would be very small for most industries. The thing that's actually destroying these businesses (and the middle-class wealth behind them) is the government reaction to the pandemic, not the pandemic itself.
More accurately the government non-reaction to the pandemic. Patchwork of confusing lockdown rules, poorly observed, and next to no assistance for those truly in need. We got the worst of both worlds: death and economic destruction.
> More accurately the government non-reaction to the pandemic.
This is precisely the opposite of true. Countries with strict and widely observed lockdowns don't seem to be generally better off health-wise than those with no lockdowns whatsoever, but their economies are certainly worse off.
> next to no assistance for those truly in need
If you think "assistance" such as it could have been rendered would have been good for the economy, your economic model is badly broken. The only viable approach is to not impoverish those people in the first place, which was an option.
> Countries with strict and widely observed lockdowns don't seem to be generally better off health-wise
No? So we're not counting China or Australia?
I also didn't say anything about lockdowns specifically. Those are the last resort after travel restrictions, mandatory testing and quarantine for travelers, contact tracing, universal mask-wearing have failed to slow the spread. We didn't even try any of that, did some weakly-observed lockdowns and then said "See? Nothing works! Not our fault!"
> good for the economy
I said it would have prevented the widespread misery. The economy exists to provide for human wants and needs. It's not an end in itself. If we were going to print money (yes I know that's a simplistic view of what happened) give it to people to buy food and pay rent.
> The only viable approach is to not impoverish those people in the first place, which was an option.
Definitely. By doing everything I said above - testing, quarantine, contact-tracing, not denying the existence of the disease in February etc. Instead we did none of the preventive measures, then half-heartedly locked down in a haphazard fashion.
If we'd done nothing, the virus would have run amok and impoverished those people anyway by destroying their industries and we'd have way more deaths.
Prove it. Even if they're lying, they'd have to under report deaths by a factor of 40 to approach the US per-capita death toll. How easy do you think it is to hide 40x the bodies that were reported?
> Austrialia isn't substantively better off than e.g. Sweden
In what way? They have 50x (1k/1M vs 50k/1M) fewer cases per capita than Sweden. They have the same unemployment rate (~7%). I'd call that "substantively better".
In your worldview everyone who does better than the US at containing Covid is either lying or doesn't exist. Think about that.
> That seems facially insane to me
Preventing misery sounds "insane" to you? Or do you think the idea that giving assistance would prevent misery is "insane"? They're both pretty normal ideas - maybe you're the one with the distorted view of the world.
> Clearly none of those things actually help
South Korea (1k cases/1M) and Taiwan (36 cases/1M) would like to have a word with you.
> You have a completely distorted view of how dangerous this virus is.
In October 2020, Covid was already the 3rd leading cause of death for 45+[1]. In the past week, it was the single-largest cause of death. The next 2 (usually heart disease and cancer) take decades to kill you and aren't transmissible.
Maybe you should consider the possibility that you're the one who's been deeply misinformed. You're saying completely untrue stuff with 100% confidence. I think you're in denial.
Basically everything you’re saying is low-grade bullshit, but I’ll just focus on
> In October 2020, Covid was already the 3rd leading cause of death for 45+
If you don’t understand how the US’s covid mortality reporting policies grossly inflate this number, you’re deriving premises from fundamentally broken data.
In fact, this is the fundamental source of confusion when doing comparisons across countries. If you normalize for reporting standards, things look very different from the picture you’ve painted.
Edit: this dogshit website won’t let me respond further, but I’ll just paste it here:
Arguing the numbers is a losing tactic - at least, it’s a waste of time - when you’re speaking with someone who doesn’t understand that it’s absurd to compare countries where anyone who dies with covid is reported to have died of covid (like most metrics in the US) against countries that have a more sane reporting standard, like Taiwan.
> Basically everything you’re saying is low-grade bullshit
I.e. "I can't argue with actual numbers so I'm just going to scoff at you instead."
Denial's a powerful drug my friend.
> anyone who dies with covid is reported to have died of covid (like most metrics in the US)
First off, Taiwan and South Korea have low cases, not just low deaths. So saying "It's impossible to stop the spread" is clear nonsense. And you haven't presented any evidence that other countries don't report Covid deaths in this way.
Moreover, how many of those US deaths were completely asymptomatic Covid patients that died of something else entirely? And how do you explain ICUs being packed out and LA running out of mortuary space if all those people would have died anyway under normal circumstances? The fully asymptomatic deaths are the only ones you should discount. Everyone else rightly counts in the Covid mortality stats. Doesn't matter if their obesity or cancer or old age or some other underlying issue made them more vulnerable; it was the Covid that killed them then rather than later.
I do agree that arguing numbers is a losing tactic - with someone who's in deep denial because they decided early on this whole pandemic business was BS and no evidence was going to change their mind. Stay safe buddy.
Forced shutdowns without immediate compensation is an illegal government taking under the Constitution. You know it as expropriation.
There's got to be more incentive for governments to lift these restrictions, and a real cost of they don't, even if they're playing with someone else's money.
Unpopular opinion, but I don't understand why people still tolerate these drastic and destructive measures when we can see all over the world that they have minimal effect on seasonal virus infections. Have we abandoned all common sense in sheer panic?
Romania has had much more liberal policies than Austria for months, yet it is doing better (by a small constant factor it seems). The seasonal effect is clearly visible.
We will be suffering the consequences of these wrong policies for years as countries, and in particular also Europe as a whole, losing ground internationally.
Every day I read a different article about how many jobs there are, and then I read one about how bad unemployment is, then I read one about how the economy is booming, and then I read one about how the economy is declining.
This is clown world, and I don't know how we've sustained it this far. Everything seems to be in conflict. Somehow investors have a seemingly irrational confidence in the market. What is going on? Collective insanity?
The US economy appears to have bifurcated, which in my opinion is the root cause of a lot of our social unrest issues. The white collar/upper class is doing just fine, hasn't been laid off, and has been minimally affected by COVID. This group is also responsible for most of our economic output - which is turn driving a disconnected wallstreet.
The lower/working class has been completely obliterated. Though these people represent a larger chuck of the population their economic output is less impactful. In other words, Wallstreet is unaffected by bunch of unemployed service people. It's no wonder these people are angry and rallying behind a psudo-fascist like Trump. We need to do something about these inequality issues, otherwise we're on a slippery slope.
> It's no wonder these people are angry and rallying behind a psudo-fascist like Trump.
Say what you want about Trump, and there's a lot bad to say about him, but at least he pretends to listen to the blue collar class. People need to understand this because most of his voters are not the radical MAGA people. If those voters don't believe they have a voice now, and arguably they don't have that voice, that increases the chances of more fractionation, more violence, and so on.
They should be pissed, by the way. They've either lost their jobs or had to continue delivering food or whatever during a pandemic for the white collar workers whose jobs are primarily nonsense. Society rewards people who invent problems, the digital duct tapers who fix those problems, the countless managers and supervisors to wrangle those duct tapers, and governance structures like Human Resources, but pays shit for actual work. Even if you are white collar, depending on what you're doing you may get paid only modestly if you're solving a real problem.
Something in us is telling us that we can't allow actual problems to be solved because, if we solved them, we'd all be out of things to do. And that's one problem we don't know how to fix.
Robert Reich's book, The System did a GREAT job explaining this. He talks about how Trump was the only one even pretending to listen. Now, hilariously, instead of taking his lead the liberals have decided to call 1/2 the county raciest and sexist.
I hate Trump and always have, but I see what he did and why it worked. I also see why insisting that 1/2 the country only liked him because they are raciest is just making things worse. LOL, this country deserves to fail.
> but at least he pretends to listen to the blue collar class
And while he pretends to listen, you've got politicians like AOC and Sanders fighting their backsides off for the blue collar classes, trying to get them healthcare and education.
The media will bring inevitable tales of woe. Yet other businesses have been booming. I know there is no furlough in the US but think of those in this pandemic who are healthier, better rested and fitter than they have ever been. Every disaster also comes with opportunity.
In e-commerce life is good even if retail is a disaster. Who is hiring and doing well out of this?
You can't shut down small businesses but allow major retailers to stay open, and expect things to be ok. Eventually businesses run out of cash, run out of loans, and they go bust leaving employees in the cold. Good thing they have that $600...
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 76.0 ms ] threadI sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.
We're jumping right into another Great Depression, although as a millennial, I would argue we should call it something more fitting and modern - maybe... "The Big Sad"?
SOMEONE has to pay for those stimulus checks and it appears right now it's turning into a loan that our great grandchildren will bear the responsibility of so that Bezos and Co can see an extra 0 at the end of their net worth.
So in language, when we say we need something, it’s a need for a particular and often presumptive / implied outcome.
In this case the purpose of the government is to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. The value of the US dollar depends on the “full faith and credit” of the United States actually meaning something. Therefore the government does need to show a willingness and ability to pay its debts.
The perceived future rate of inflation is a major variable in determining the interest rate that the US has to pay on its debt.
Also, the US government needs to control the level of inflation in order to have a functioning economy.
Given the widely accepted theory that printing arbitrarily large sums of money over time drives inflation, there are competing forces that act in the short and long term that would dictate the right amount of money to print now, or into the future.
Since the ultimate goal is to stabilize and grow the economy, the government does in fact need to not borrow until the currency collapses, and needs to be able to keep its debt to some reasonable multiple of GDP.
Really, I'm gonna post 'borrowing is fine' in reply to lots of messages that act like the US government is running a household budget.
If not, when will it end?
Jeff Bezos has personally donated to both political parties. Don't confuse his personal dislike of Trump with some sort of undying support of the Democratic party or their tax policies.
I don't have time or inclination to rehash it all so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_of_Jeff_Bezos%27s_phone, but he owns WaPo and the hacking was probably retribution re Khashoggi. There was nothing done about it because "somebody" didn't like the WaPo editorial stance.
>just because he's wealthy it's not his job to fix the US financial system.
In other words, he should be lumped in with all the other billionaires that avoid taxes and aren't doing anything to uphold the social contract.
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If Bezos's and the other mega billionaires wanted to truly change the tax code for a top .0001% tax rate or whatever they could almost certainly get it done.
How much does Bezos spend on lobbying (not Amazon specific interests)? Virtually a 25 cents to him - .000086
Adelson spent something like $500mm over a decade and he probably has 75% or more of the 'credit' for changing pro-Isreal policy.
Bezos and the rest of them could put a few billion into treasuries and still not lose any basis just use the dividends politically.
In addition if they stopped following shareholder primacy Bezos could direct Amazon to repatriate profits continually and pay the tax. Stop relying on legal 'loopholes' to lower tax % and just pay in 'best faith' and stop pitting local governments against each other in a race to the bottom.
Hell they could even send a check to Treasury but spending only a billion $ lobbying for new laws would be more effective and longer term.
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Personally I'd like to see something like a sovereign wealth fund that benefits social security/healthcare and directly supports the bottom 40%. Look to Alaska as an example.
Each 'bailout' the taxpayers should get a % of shares for their investment, basically free money from the Fed which is supposed to make its money back anyways. Fannie/Freddit/TARP is an odd example something more like UAE, Norway but passive and only US companies
Go further and make it part of taxes for the mega corps only. 14% profit + a small % of shares annually.
We don't have to turn into CCP with control over Corporate direction. Simply hold the shares passively.
Have to figure out something where corps have no dividends. Maybe a set yearly sale %.
I think about how beneficial it would be to give $1600 cash right now and match another $1600 to each individual in basically a retirement index fund that is only accessible in ___ years or ___ first time homebuyer etc circumstances like a new type of IRA. Hell the government could take a cut in ___ years and it would pay for itself.
saying he could easily exert a LOT of power to change tax policy if he wanted to. And could step up and pay more in taxes even without changing the laws
That's not his fuckin job!
It's ours - and our government's.
I am definitely organizing for and personally committed to taxing the mega mega wealthy/corps, and so are millions more. But even working in politics my influence is like 1/100,000th of his.
If you order something, people don’t search for alternatives. If your tied into an eco system, you don’t move away from it.
Personally I actively try to support local businesses, use only non-monopolies out of principle.
A lot of us switched to Chrome because it was a better experience at the time. A lot bought from Amazon for the same reason. I’ll happily buy from a non-Amazon who gives me an experience better than Amazon, consider a browser that’s better than Chrome, or a search engine which gives better results than Google. Those three still get the majority of my in-category traffic though, because the experience is generally very good, quite consistent, and often best-in-class.
I think the hurdle to building a competitor to Facebook or Twitter is higher than the hurdle of selling me an electronic device instead of Amazon selling it to me. (BestBuy, NewEgg, MicroCenter [semi-local], and randos on EBay do it regularly. No one is casually going to beat Twitter and FB for social.)
Maybe feature X in Firefox is actually better than Chrome (just an imaginary example) but because it doesn’t exactly work like you are used too, it doesn’t appeal.
Or your peers are all in the same in-group and Software X is what a Real Programmer should be using.
That all together could mean an experience gets progressively worse yet you don’t switch.
McDonald's and Starbucks? Still churning out coffee to people standing in long lines.
It's infuriating, but what can you do?
Eventually the poors will get angry and united. So far our industry is helping keep them divided, but I'm not sure how long that will last.
First, both sides are mostly made up of non-violent people dedicated to their cause. Both sides can rightfully claim that a minority of "bad eggs" amongst them caused the violence.
But that's where the equivalency ends. We have to look at the cause itself.
It's quite a stretch to say that a group protesting police brutality (in the face of actual police brutality) is at all equivalent to a group seeking to overthrow a legitimate government (with zero evidence to back their claims).
It's not the same ballpark. It ain't even the same fucking sport.
The joys of being rich, you get to influence the government!
100% for supermarkets and Walmarts, but I can’t see how (in any jurisdiction) McDonalds or Starbucks would be allowed to do take out but local restaurants would not.
Wait, what? You casually suggest that the pandemic was planned as a conspiracy against the middle class, but you don't think it matters whether it was a conspiracy or not? Please clarify if I misunderstood.
As in, focusing on the cause of the problem and whether it was intentional or not isn't going to solve the problem.
I was trying to say that it doesn't matter what you believe is causing all this chaos, it's independent from what's actually going on in the world right this second.
Whether it's the conspiracy theorists who believe it was pre-planned by the CCP to accelerate them to be the next global super power fueled by vaccines with 5G death-rays and microchips, or if it's these behemoth companies putting in contingency plans and/or having the massive amounts of reserve capital (rivalling even medium-sized governments) to quickly cater to the new economic landscape brought on by lax regulations and tax havens - it doesn't matter, people are suffering in numbers that haven't been seen probably for a hundred years.
It's one of those times I (very begrudgingly) think that China has done well in terms of recovery. They have the hard, enforceable power to lock people in their homes for extended periods of time under who knows what penalty - or they're lying about their recovery to the world... Who knows?
These small business would probably not be closed if we had a competent national response. The probably would be closed but not bankrupt if we didn't have an inept fiscal response, also.
- Suppression of ability to speak freely
- One party system
- The executive organizations of the party agenda are the largest monopolies (instead of Krupp and Messerschmitt we have Google and Amazon for now).
I know I will get a lot of downvotes, but i hope it helps at least a couple of people here to know they aren't alone in thinking this now.
You're going to have to explain that one. Right now I just have to assume you mean "one party controls all three branches of government", in which case, it's not the fault of Democrats that the GOP turned into assclowns and got voted out.
The transfer of wealth has (in my personal theory) lead to the lobbying of everybody, no matter which political affiliation - to the point where both "sides" are agreeing on policies that are harming people and favoring corporations.
In general, US billionaires have gained over 1 trillion while small-businesses have perished https://www.statista.com/chart/22068/change-in-wealth-of-bil...
You can put considerable blame on those democratic governors and mayors who give shutdown orders to small businesses but allow major retailers to remain open https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/tale-two-pandemics... https://azbigmedia.com/business/covid-small-business-impact-...
I _REALLY_ do not want to get political, but the timing is just too coincidental to not be mentioned... Now that a certain person is going to be kicked out of office, several politicians of mentioned governors and mayors are finally considering re-opening their cities when only weeks ago they were handing out fines - even when there's been a lackluster start to the US vaccination campaign.
LOL, this world is going to shit, I blame excessive privilege and social media.
These property management companies made their bed, imo.
My old firm sort of moved away from the LBO model, but it's still going strong.
The remedy for this is a transfer in the opposite direction - direct stimulus payments. There's a reason McConnell fought so hard against those.
Or had, anyways. Half of the shops on Main Street are now closed. Some were, I think, destined to fail. A candy shop is a pretty ridiculous prospect nowadays. Others have been staples to the town for years and helped make it worth it for other businesses to move in.
I’m really not sure if it’ll ever bounce back. There are still a couple of clothing shops, a restaurant, a brewery, and a wedding dress shop. If one or two of those go down I might think about pulling the plug myself.
Which industries lost jobs? Are the losses temporary due to lockdowns or a sign of an accelerating recession? Which regions lost the most jobs? Which income levels are most affected? What percent of jobless people are being covered by unemployment? And so on.
A single data point is useless click bait. Who is building the Tableau dashboard and having an economist write weekly economic analysis for the general public? Without good information, our democracy is rudderless.
"The losses last month were concentrated among restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues. Educational services, mostly colleges and universities, also cut workers in December. So did film and music studios."
" Economists say it could take several years for the labour market to recover from the pandemic."
"contacts in the leisure and hospitality sectors reported renewed employment cuts due to stricter containment measures."
Here there is no in person dining. I think it would be pretty interesting to compare their revenues from 2019 to the periods during the pandemic where they have been open. My impression is that the 2020 numbers would be pretty weak, but I don't know.
It's a little hard to know in the moment if a restaurant/store/etc can make it through because of the 'fixed' costs like rent (never mind that those could also be addressed but the GOP is suddenly really concerned about the deficit because there's a Democrat about to be in charge so it's time to be deficit hawks again). Also many huge unknowns hang over any attempt to guess about that and those are how long till vaccines are in enough arms to allow for thing to go more normal, how much support they get from the government, and what their expenses and savings are to begin with.
Sudden, elevated incidents of economic catastrophe leading to a massive decline in economic output and the underlying opportunities available to a few generations of intelligent people. This led to a significant decline in wealth creation relative to the rest of the emerging world in these nations.
Unlike the United States, they did not have the massive power of the worlds biggest military underwriting their currency and had to rely on the graces of the EU and IMF, who, frankly, displayed why bureaucratic lethargy is widely despised.
Make no mistake, this is going to remake the economy in ways very few of us can even begin to appreciate. How we, as a nation handle this sets the balance of power in the world for the next half of the century.
I know it would be next to impossible here in the U.S., but one of the things China did for the lockdown was to declare a rent abatement for anyone not allowed to do business. This wasn't a suspension where you got hammered later. You just did not pay rent while you had no income. End of story.
It was a temporary suspension of the economy in order to get back to a more normal level of operation. Australia is another example of this.
We got theater, fraud, and politicization instead.
[0]https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3848d55f-749c...
I don't understand how professional short sellers made it through the past few years. Everything from economy, social structure, and climate, all going to hell, but the stock market seems blind to all of it.
Fixed the title. Unfortunately we don't have to be where we're at. We knows who's most vulnerable, we know how it spreads (low airflow crowded spaces), we know who's been vaccinated and/or who's had it. The fact that any organized response, even at the city or state level, across both blue and red states, shows the ineptitude of these appointed officials. In many ways the "hey we're at least doing x,y" is worse than doing nothing at all.
Lets apply the simple rule: the less moving pieces a system has, the less it's likely to fail.
So, instead of getting 100 people to wear a mask in one business, get 1 business to increase the airflow in the business by 10x. Much simpler solution and something that can be directly measured. And really, they're non-competing; we can do both. Furthermore it eliminates the perceived need for draconian measure that are fueling other social problems.
The key government failure in the US, at least since a total failure by the white house to seize the moment early on, is republicans seizing mask-wearing as a wedge issue. Following the most simple measures such as masks would effectively solve the issue enough for vaccines to catch up. Cynical exploitation of ignorance in the people by republicans has been the true societal failure in this pandemic.
If anything between outsourcing and automation employment isn't coming back. (And the employment that does come back will be at sub-minimum wage 12-hour days precarized "gigs" or 3 "half-time" jobs)
Retirees still eat and someone has to grow the food.
This is precisely the opposite of true. Countries with strict and widely observed lockdowns don't seem to be generally better off health-wise than those with no lockdowns whatsoever, but their economies are certainly worse off.
> next to no assistance for those truly in need
If you think "assistance" such as it could have been rendered would have been good for the economy, your economic model is badly broken. The only viable approach is to not impoverish those people in the first place, which was an option.
No? So we're not counting China or Australia?
I also didn't say anything about lockdowns specifically. Those are the last resort after travel restrictions, mandatory testing and quarantine for travelers, contact tracing, universal mask-wearing have failed to slow the spread. We didn't even try any of that, did some weakly-observed lockdowns and then said "See? Nothing works! Not our fault!"
> good for the economy
I said it would have prevented the widespread misery. The economy exists to provide for human wants and needs. It's not an end in itself. If we were going to print money (yes I know that's a simplistic view of what happened) give it to people to buy food and pay rent.
> The only viable approach is to not impoverish those people in the first place, which was an option.
Definitely. By doing everything I said above - testing, quarantine, contact-tracing, not denying the existence of the disease in February etc. Instead we did none of the preventive measures, then half-heartedly locked down in a haphazard fashion.
If we'd done nothing, the virus would have run amok and impoverished those people anyway by destroying their industries and we'd have way more deaths.
> I said it would have prevented the widespread misery.
Why? That seems facially insane to me.
> testing, quarantine, contact-tracing,
Clearly none of those things actually help. You can't eliminate a disease with this level of transmissibility - maybe slow it down a bit.
> the virus would have run amok and impoverished those people anyway by destroying their industries
You have a completely distorted view of how dangerous this virus is.
Prove it. Even if they're lying, they'd have to under report deaths by a factor of 40 to approach the US per-capita death toll. How easy do you think it is to hide 40x the bodies that were reported?
> Austrialia isn't substantively better off than e.g. Sweden
In what way? They have 50x (1k/1M vs 50k/1M) fewer cases per capita than Sweden. They have the same unemployment rate (~7%). I'd call that "substantively better".
In your worldview everyone who does better than the US at containing Covid is either lying or doesn't exist. Think about that.
> That seems facially insane to me
Preventing misery sounds "insane" to you? Or do you think the idea that giving assistance would prevent misery is "insane"? They're both pretty normal ideas - maybe you're the one with the distorted view of the world.
> Clearly none of those things actually help
South Korea (1k cases/1M) and Taiwan (36 cases/1M) would like to have a word with you.
> You have a completely distorted view of how dangerous this virus is.
In October 2020, Covid was already the 3rd leading cause of death for 45+[1]. In the past week, it was the single-largest cause of death. The next 2 (usually heart disease and cancer) take decades to kill you and aren't transmissible.
Maybe you should consider the possibility that you're the one who's been deeply misinformed. You're saying completely untrue stuff with 100% confidence. I think you're in denial.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2774465
> In October 2020, Covid was already the 3rd leading cause of death for 45+
If you don’t understand how the US’s covid mortality reporting policies grossly inflate this number, you’re deriving premises from fundamentally broken data.
In fact, this is the fundamental source of confusion when doing comparisons across countries. If you normalize for reporting standards, things look very different from the picture you’ve painted.
Edit: this dogshit website won’t let me respond further, but I’ll just paste it here:
Arguing the numbers is a losing tactic - at least, it’s a waste of time - when you’re speaking with someone who doesn’t understand that it’s absurd to compare countries where anyone who dies with covid is reported to have died of covid (like most metrics in the US) against countries that have a more sane reporting standard, like Taiwan.
I.e. "I can't argue with actual numbers so I'm just going to scoff at you instead."
Denial's a powerful drug my friend.
> anyone who dies with covid is reported to have died of covid (like most metrics in the US)
First off, Taiwan and South Korea have low cases, not just low deaths. So saying "It's impossible to stop the spread" is clear nonsense. And you haven't presented any evidence that other countries don't report Covid deaths in this way.
Moreover, how many of those US deaths were completely asymptomatic Covid patients that died of something else entirely? And how do you explain ICUs being packed out and LA running out of mortuary space if all those people would have died anyway under normal circumstances? The fully asymptomatic deaths are the only ones you should discount. Everyone else rightly counts in the Covid mortality stats. Doesn't matter if their obesity or cancer or old age or some other underlying issue made them more vulnerable; it was the Covid that killed them then rather than later.
I do agree that arguing numbers is a losing tactic - with someone who's in deep denial because they decided early on this whole pandemic business was BS and no evidence was going to change their mind. Stay safe buddy.
There's got to be more incentive for governments to lift these restrictions, and a real cost of they don't, even if they're playing with someone else's money.
Just an example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Romania has had much more liberal policies than Austria for months, yet it is doing better (by a small constant factor it seems). The seasonal effect is clearly visible.
We will be suffering the consequences of these wrong policies for years as countries, and in particular also Europe as a whole, losing ground internationally.
This is clown world, and I don't know how we've sustained it this far. Everything seems to be in conflict. Somehow investors have a seemingly irrational confidence in the market. What is going on? Collective insanity?
The lower/working class has been completely obliterated. Though these people represent a larger chuck of the population their economic output is less impactful. In other words, Wallstreet is unaffected by bunch of unemployed service people. It's no wonder these people are angry and rallying behind a psudo-fascist like Trump. We need to do something about these inequality issues, otherwise we're on a slippery slope.
Say what you want about Trump, and there's a lot bad to say about him, but at least he pretends to listen to the blue collar class. People need to understand this because most of his voters are not the radical MAGA people. If those voters don't believe they have a voice now, and arguably they don't have that voice, that increases the chances of more fractionation, more violence, and so on.
They should be pissed, by the way. They've either lost their jobs or had to continue delivering food or whatever during a pandemic for the white collar workers whose jobs are primarily nonsense. Society rewards people who invent problems, the digital duct tapers who fix those problems, the countless managers and supervisors to wrangle those duct tapers, and governance structures like Human Resources, but pays shit for actual work. Even if you are white collar, depending on what you're doing you may get paid only modestly if you're solving a real problem.
Something in us is telling us that we can't allow actual problems to be solved because, if we solved them, we'd all be out of things to do. And that's one problem we don't know how to fix.
I hate Trump and always have, but I see what he did and why it worked. I also see why insisting that 1/2 the country only liked him because they are raciest is just making things worse. LOL, this country deserves to fail.
And while he pretends to listen, you've got politicians like AOC and Sanders fighting their backsides off for the blue collar classes, trying to get them healthcare and education.
In e-commerce life is good even if retail is a disaster. Who is hiring and doing well out of this?