(07-29-2020 02:14 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  Not a restaurant 'analogy' lad. Actual real life instances where the 'increased' unemployment has cut into the job pool. Literal positions that are not being filled.

Cant blame the fishing captains -- If I made 2% less than I do now and I could sit around and go fishing, that is absolutely what I would do.

Even more so if I made 10% more via unemployment.

Cold hard facts from one diner operator --- a kitchen position paying at the outset of Wuhan shutdown 1k a week. That person now makes a normal 380/week *plus* the Pelosi added benefit of another 600 a week. The kitchen position is not filled and he cannot fill it. And he cannot increase the pay at that position due to the drop in business due to the Texas shutdown provisions.

For another position, the combined unemployment and the Pelosi 600 special makes the work for pay fall short by about 100 bucks.

His solution -- he doesnt do dinner anymore (i.e. no service from 5pm on). He is contemplating simply doing breakfast and shutting down at 12:45.

This has zero to do with your long winded last sentence, I hope you might note.

Sorry, should have said anecdote. Brain may have been fried from my field work today.

That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.

If you (the Democrats) are going to tell people they don't need to pay their rent, then you should tell the landlords they don't need to fix the elevators or the AC. They don't need to pay the water bill or pay for grass mowing or replacement of broken windows.

In short, if you are stop our income, then stop our expenses.

Of course, that might hurt the guys who make their living repairing elevators or AC units, or mowing grass.

Democrats think everybody is able to do without income except their voters.

(07-29-2020 03:16 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  If you (the Democrats) are going to tell people they don't need to pay their rent, then you should tell the landlords they don't need to fix the elevators or the AC. They don't need to pay the water bill or pay for grass mowing or replacement of broken windows.

In short, if you are stop our income, then stop our expenses.

Of course, that might hurt the guys who make their living repairing elevators or AC units, or mowing grass.

Democrats think everybody is able to do without income except their voters.

Most importantly, if landlords are prohibited from earning income on the property, they should not need to pay the property taxes.

(07-29-2020 03:16 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  If you (the Democrats) are going to tell people they don't need to pay their rent, then you should tell the landlords they don't need to fix the elevators or the AC. They don't need to pay the water bill or pay for grass mowing or replacement of broken windows.

In short, if you are stop our income, then stop our expenses.

Of course, that might hurt the guys who make their living repairing elevators or AC units, or mowing grass.

Democrats think everybody is able to do without income except their voters.

Hence why I said "I don’t know if the abolishment of rent, without then support for landlords, is the answer."

The choice of the word abolish is the problem.

You don't 'abolish' lunch if you skip it today or for a month. Abolish implies 'permanent'.

We don't know enough about the speaker to know what they meant or to even draw any solid inferences. I understand why the left might say they didn't mean it that way because it is so outrageous, but I also understand why the right might find it consistent with some who have called for LITERALLY abolishing the police

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opini...olice.html

It's an opinion piece, representative only of the writer and I suppose, vicariously of the Times editor who thought it represented enough people (or pissed off enough people) to sell a few more papers.

It is the fact that we don't know this person at all that makes the comments open to such interpretations. THIS is what she said, and we don't have any other information to go on.

(07-29-2020 04:41 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  The choice of the word abolish is the problem.

You don't 'abolish' lunch if you skip it today or for a month. Abolish implies 'permanent'.

We don't know enough about the speaker to know what they meant or to even draw any solid inferences. I understand why the left might say they didn't mean it that way because it is so outrageous, but I also understand why the right might find it consistent with some who have called for LITERALLY abolishing the police

Remember, this is the generation that thinks "literally" doesn't meant literally.

(07-29-2020 03:01 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(07-29-2020 02:14 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  Not a restaurant 'analogy' lad. Actual real life instances where the 'increased' unemployment has cut into the job pool. Literal positions that are not being filled.

Cant blame the fishing captains -- If I made 2% less than I do now and I could sit around and go fishing, that is absolutely what I would do.

Even more so if I made 10% more via unemployment.

Cold hard facts from one diner operator --- a kitchen position paying at the outset of Wuhan shutdown 1k a week. That person now makes a normal 380/week *plus* the Pelosi added benefit of another 600 a week. The kitchen position is not filled and he cannot fill it. And he cannot increase the pay at that position due to the drop in business due to the Texas shutdown provisions.

For another position, the combined unemployment and the Pelosi 600 special makes the work for pay fall short by about 100 bucks.

His solution -- he doesnt do dinner anymore (i.e. no service from 5pm on). He is contemplating simply doing breakfast and shutting down at 12:45.

This has zero to do with your long winded last sentence, I hope you might note.

Sorry, should have said anecdote. Brain may have been fried from my field work today.

That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.

This article gets to what I'm talking about. While we are certainly seeing some employers struggling to rehire because the wages they propose to pay people are less than the increased unemployment, the sheer magnitude of job loss out paces these situations.

Quote:In April, more than 20 million American jobs vanished as businesses closed and most of the country was under stay-at-home orders...

While the labor market has been rebounding since states began to reopen, bringing millions back to work, the country is still down nearly 15 million jobs since February. Next week's July jobs report is expected to show another 2.3 million jobs added. That would bring the unemployment rate down to 10.3% — still higher than during the worst period of the financial crisis.

Consumer spending, the biggest driver of the US economy, declined at an annual rate of 34.6% — by far the sharpest decline on record.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/economy/u...index.html

Until we actually get the coronavirus under control and manageable in all 50 states, I don't think we'll see anything close to the rebound we need to get back within striking distance of pre-coronavirus activity. Either we won't see employers hire because of economic uncertainty, or we won't see a significant number of people be willing to risk their health for minimum wage jobs. I think we could tackle the latter by raising the minimum wage via government subsidy (basically use some of the unemployment funding to supplement increased wages so that employers who are strapped for cash are not dealing with increased expenses).

(07-29-2020 03:01 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.

In the situation Tanq describes, it's pretty obviously a combination of the two. The worker won't come back to his/her old job because of the Nancy-bucks, and the employer can't afford to pay more because of economic turndown. I think most situations fall into that category.

This is the kind of distinction without a difference that academics love to make, but has no real relevance. Exactly WTF difference does it make whether jobs were lost directly to CV or to the $600/week Nancy-cash? This is the kind of thing that academics will be writing papers about to keep their "publish or perish" going, without dealing with anything that actually matters.

At the end of the day, I have felt for some time that the negative impacts of the economic shutdown will hurt more than the virus itself. Not making light of 150,000 deaths, that's a lot, but it's a lot because we are a country of 330 million people. It's one per 2,000. Putting that back in the perspective of my old home town of 8,000, that would be 4 deaths. I don't think we would have ever considered 4 deaths from anything to have been a pandemic.

I think Trump screwed up the response to CV-19. I think the main reason he screwed up is that the "experts" he listened to didn't have a clue either. In their defense, this was new and unknown, so nobody can be an expert about something that is unknown. But more significantly, those experts were all bureaucrats, not emergency responders, and their approach showed that very badly--from opposing the China travel ban, to the fiasco over testing, to the wildly overstated projections, to shutting everything down. A bureaucrat lets perfect be the enemy of good enough, and strives constantly to get more data and build more models rather than to solve the problem.

Here's how I have said for some time that I would have handled it. Shut everything down for a week or two at the start--no international flights to/from anywhere (except we are probably legally obligated to give US citizens the opportunity to return), shut down the exchanges for a week, try to stop it in its tracks. During that time, get all of the players together (by Zoom to set a proper example) to formulate a game plan. Who does the testing, where, with what tests? How do we get CDC and FDA off their asses to get tests approved and out there, using state, local, and private facilities to help? What seems to be working/not working in other countries? What critical supplies and infrastructure do we need and how to get it STAT? Get every member of the at-risk population insulated from any possible contact with the disease, to the maximum extent possible. Probably call for a one-month moratorium on rents, debt service, and other periodic contractual payments. At the end of the two weeks, allow reopening with masks and distancing. If you want to reopen, require masks. If you don't want masks, you can't reopen. Very simple.

Now if I had my way regarding policies, everybody would have already been getting a monthly prebate/prefund check, so the one-time checks would have been superfluous. And with kurzarbeit employers would have been able to get significant subsidies to keep far more workers employed. And we would have had a trained, equipped, and ready National Guard to serve as what we really needed--an emergency response force.

A bureucratic paper-shuffling force was totally inadequate to our needs. And the so called, "Pandemic Response Roadmap," which was basically an instruction manual in how to shuffle papers, was pretty much useless to answer questions like, "Who does the testing? Where? With what tests?"

(07-30-2020 11:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-29-2020 03:01 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.

In the situation Tanq describes, it's pretty obviously a combination of the two. The worker won't come back to his/her old job because of the Nancy-bucks, and the employer can't afford to pay more because of economic turndown. I think most situations fall into that category.

This is the kind of distinction without a difference that academics love to make, but has no real relevance. Exactly WTF difference does it make whether jobs were lost directly to CV or to the $600/week Nancy-cash? This is the kind of thing that academics will be writing papers about to keep their "publish or perish" going, without dealing with anything that actually matters.

What difference does it make? Seriously?

What percent of the 15 million jobs lost are from people who don't have a job to go back to as opposed to people who do have a job to go back to, but make more on umemployment.

That is CRUCIAL to the entire argument.

If each of the 15 million lost jobs are rehiring and no one is taking them because unemployment is too generous, that's a problem. But if 14.5 million are still not rehiring, but we're advocating getting rid of the only lifeline people may have because the 500,000 jobs that can't fill an opening are competing with an increase in unemployment, do we actually need to address this unemployment benefits issue?

It matters because people are arguing to get rid of financial aid to US citizens specifically because some jobs are having a hard time filling their low-wage positions. Should we cut off our nose to spite our face?

(07-30-2020 11:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  At the end of the day, I have felt for some time that the negative impacts of the economic shutdown will hurt more than the virus itself. Not making light of 150,000 deaths, that's a lot, but it's a lot because we are a country of 330 million people. It's one per 2,000. Putting that back in the perspective of my old home town of 8,000, that would be 4 deaths. I don't think we would have ever considered 4 deaths from anything to have been a pandemic.

You were also thoroughly convinced that the virus would be seasonal that that it wouldn't be that bad in the first place. So forgive some of us if we take your opinions on the topic with a few gallons of salt.

(07-30-2020 11:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I think Trump screwed up the response to CV-19.

So not a B+ any more?

(07-30-2020 11:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Here's how I have said for some time that I would have handled it. Shut everything down for a week or two at the start--no international flights to/from anywhere (except we are probably legally obligated to give US citizens the opportunity to return), shut down the exchanges for a week, try to stop it in its tracks. During that time, get all of the players together (by Zoom to set a proper example) to formulate a game plan. Who does the testing, where, with what tests? How do we get CDC and FDA off their asses to get tests approved and out there, using state, local, and private facilities to help? What seems to be working/not working in other countries? What critical supplies and infrastructure do we need and how to get it STAT? Get every member of the at-risk population insulated from any possible contact with the disease, to the maximum extent possible. Probably call for a one-month moratorium on rents, debt service, and other periodic contractual payments. At the end of the two weeks, allow reopening with masks and distancing. If you want to reopen, require masks. If you don't want masks, you can't reopen. Very simple.

Trump did almost none of this and has actively worked against significant parts of what you would do. So again, still a B+?

Done with my daily vent, carry on as you were.

(07-30-2020 12:14 PM)mrbig Wrote:  You were also thoroughly convinced that the virus would be seasonal that that it wouldn't be that bad in the first place. So forgive some of us if we take your opinions on the topic with a few gallons of salt.

I was optimistic that it might be, but I was never, "thoroughly convinced," and I don't think I ever made any statements to that effect. If I did, I'm sure you will go back and find them, and we can discuss at that time.

I don't know how to be thoroughly convinced about something that we know so little about. But I can be optimistic. And for that matter, while we have seen a spike in "cases," we have not seen a similar spike in deaths, so there does appear to be some summer mitigating impact.

Quote:So not a B+ any more?

Yes, because I think the mistakes he made were based on the advice of the "experts" who screwed the pooch badly on this. I sincerely and truly believe that democrats would have stuck with the experts a lot longer and screwed the pooch even more badly. So I guess I'm grading on a curve.

Quote:Trump did almost none of this and has actively worked against significant parts of what you would do. So again, still a B+?

Umm, I have outlined that approach, with few changes, going back to when Trump was handling it the way he was handling it, and the B+ was contemporaneous with those statements, so yes.

I am not at all certain that Trump did almost none of those things. Not exactly the same, but a lot of them generally yes. And if he had taken it away from CDC and FDA earlier, I can only imagine the cries of, "Hitler! Dictator!" that we would have heard. For that matter, same if he had done what many on the left have claimed and imposed a national policy on the states.

I don't know whether my way would have worked or not, but I'm pretty sure that if the democrat way was to rely on the "Pandemic Response Roadmap," we would have seen a huge bureaucratic clusterflock with many more sick and dead.

(07-30-2020 11:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-29-2020 03:01 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.

In the situation Tanq describes, it's pretty obviously a combination of the two. The worker won't come back to his/her old job because of the Nancy-bucks, and the employer can't afford to pay more because of economic turndown. I think most situations fall into that category.

This is the kind of distinction without a difference that academics love to make, but has no real relevance. Exactly WTF difference does it make whether jobs were lost directly to CV or to the $600/week Nancy-cash? This is the kind of thing that academics will be writing papers about to keep their "publish or perish" going, without dealing with anything that actually matters.

At the end of the day, I have felt for some time that the negative impacts of the economic shutdown will hurt more than the virus itself. Not making light of 150,000 deaths, that's a lot, but it's a lot because we are a country of 330 million people. It's one per 2,000. Putting that back in the perspective of my old home town of 8,000, that would be 4 deaths. I don't think we would have ever considered 4 deaths from anything to have been a pandemic.

I think Trump screwed up the response to CV-19. I think the main reason he screwed up is that the "experts" he listened to didn't have a clue either. In their defense, this was new and unknown, so nobody can be an expert about something that is unknown. But more significantly, those experts were all bureaucrats, not emergency responders, and their approach showed that very badly--from opposing the China travel ban, to the fiasco over testing, to the wildly overstated projections, to shutting everything down. A bureaucrat lets perfect be the enemy of good enough, and strives constantly to get more data and build more models rather than to solve the problem.

Here's how I have said for some time that I would have handled it. Shut everything down for a week or two at the start--no international flights to/from anywhere (except we are probably legally obligated to give US citizens the opportunity to return), shut down the exchanges for a week, try to stop it in its tracks. During that time, get all of the players together (by Zoom to set a proper example) to formulate a game plan. Who does the testing, where, with what tests? How do we get CDC and FDA off their asses to get tests approved and out there, using state, local, and private facilities to help? What seems to be working/not working in other countries? What critical supplies and infrastructure do we need and how to get it STAT? Get every member of the at-risk population insulated from any possible contact with the disease, to the maximum extent possible. Probably call for a one-month moratorium on rents, debt service, and other periodic contractual payments. At the end of the two weeks, allow reopening with masks and distancing. If you want to reopen, require masks. If you don't want masks, you can't reopen. Very simple.

Now if I had my way regarding policies, everybody would have already been getting a monthly prebate/prefund check, so the one-time checks would have been superfluous. And with kurzarbeit employers would have been able to get significant subsidies to keep far more workers employed. And we would have had a trained, equipped, and ready National Guard to serve as what we really needed--an emergency response force.

A bureucratic paper-shuffling force was totally inadequate to our needs. And the so called, "Pandemic Response Roadmap," which was basically an instruction manual in how to shuffle papers, was pretty much useless to answer questions like, "Who does the testing? Where? With what tests?"

The tragedy is that we could implement your plan tomorrow and have a reasonable shot at reopening by September 15th.

(07-30-2020 12:36 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-30-2020 12:14 PM)mrbig Wrote:  You were also thoroughly convinced that the virus would be seasonal that that it wouldn't be that bad in the first place. So forgive some of us if we take your opinions on the topic with a few gallons of salt.

I was optimistic that it might be, but I was never, "thoroughly convinced," and I don't think I ever made any statements to that effect. If I did, I'm sure you will go back and find them, and we can discuss at that time.

I don't know how to be thoroughly convinced about something that we know so little about. But I can be optimistic. And for that matter, while we have seen a spike in "cases," we have not seen a similar spike in deaths, so there does appear to be some summer mitigating impact.

Quote:So not a B+ any more?

Yes, because I think the mistakes he made were based on the advice of the "experts" who screwed the pooch badly on this. I sincerely and truly believe that democrats would have stuck with the experts a lot longer and screwed the pooch even more badly. So I guess I'm grading on a curve.

Quote:Trump did almost none of this and has actively worked against significant parts of what you would do. So again, still a B+?

Umm, I have outlined that approach, with few changes, going back to when Trump was handling it the way he was handling it, and the B+ was contemporaneous with those statements, so yes.

I am not at all certain that Trump did almost none of those things. Not exactly the same, but a lot of them generally yes. And if he had taken it away from CDC and FDA earlier, I can only imagine the cries of, "Hitler! Dictator!" that we would have heard. For that matter, same if he had done what many on the left have claimed and imposed a national policy on the states.

I don't know whether my way would have worked or not, but I'm pretty sure that if the democrat way was to rely on the "Pandemic Response Roadmap," we would have seen a huge bureaucratic clusterflock with many more sick and dead.

Almost certainly false.

What we actually experience was a bureaucratic cluster**** because the head of the executive abdicated his leadership role and didn't understand the need to coordinate and direct the various agencies.

You're seriously trying to argue that having a team in place in the NSC that had one purpose - coordinating the response of multiple, massive bureaucracies would have led to a worse outcome?

(07-30-2020 12:14 PM)mrbig Wrote:  You were also thoroughly convinced that the virus would be seasonal that that it wouldn't be that bad in the first place. So forgive some of us if we take your opinions on the topic with a few gallons of salt.

Given that the death tolls in NY and NJ (who peaked at the end of flu season) were around 8-10% and the tolls in Fl and Texas and Ca (who peaked or are peaking much later) are below 2%, there is at least some evidence that the strains we are seeing now are not nearly as deadly as the ones we initially saw. Of course there are other factors, but that's not a minor difference easily explained. For comparison (though it's clearly not the same thing... just a stat I find interesting given the focus on it and the money spent on it) the flu vaccine generally moves the odds of getting the annual flu from about 2% to 1%. 80 in 4000 to 40 in 4000.

People get the flu outside of flu-season, and even more probably get it but don't have significant symptoms from it such that they seek treatment. It's entirely possible that the initial virus has been significantly weakened due to seasonality.

(07-30-2020 12:58 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  You're seriously trying to argue that having a team in place in the NSC that had one purpose - coordinating the response of multiple, massive bureaucracies would have led to a worse outcome?

Yes, because that team had no concept of actual response. What would they have made better? And what reason do you have for believing that they would have made it better?

The problem we had is that all our so-called "experts" were public health bureaucrats, not actual responders.