
Ask HN: Economy after coronavirus – what can we do? - TeMPOraL
As all of us are acutely aware, the current pandemic is dismantling the economy worldwide. With luck, few months from now the world will either recover or adapt to the new reality, but we&#x27;ll still end up with seriously damaged national economies. Particularly hurt are all the people whose livelihood is tied to physical workspaces - gastronomy, services sector, manufacturing, etc.<p>My question is a call for ideas and analyses. What can we do to help our economies recover faster? That is, to help those badly hurt by present disruptions recover? What do you think the needs will be? What market opportunities?<p>Don&#x27;t be reluctant to share your best ideas - after all, execution is king, and in the post-pandemic world, there will be plenty of space for competing approaches.
======
geofft
One interesting idea I've heard recently is gift cards - essentially a way for
people with enough disposable income to sustain gig workers across a shutdown.
I know I'll be back at my local coffeeshop and taqueria as soon as I can. I
know I'll be taking Lyft again. I know I'll be wandering through bookstores
and going to theaters and so forth. And I'm not spending that money right now
because I'm staying at home.

If I can buy gift cards for these sorts of services and that money can be used
to fund workers, that's going to help them with cashflow. There's still going
to be this several-week gap of lattes and tortas that went unpurchased, but it
can be smoothed out a little bit.

There are logistical difficulties to sort out here to make sure money gets to
the right place, including that food service workers rely on tips and that gig
workers (like Lyft drivers) aren't the platform (like Lyft itself). So
probably this would have to be worked into the concept of a gift card to make
it solve the problem properly.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's an interesting idea. Do you know if any store or operation is trying
that?

I think it might need some additional promotion to work, in particular with
feedback to the customers - otherwise it turns into a prisonner's dilemma
situation. If I'm about to spend the next few months burning through my
savings, I'll not be willing to buy gift cards to support a local coffee store
unless I know others are doing the same; otherwise I take a meaningful hit on
my savings while not ultimately helping the business at all. I wonder if such
businesses could organize a Patreon/Indiegogo-style funding, declaring e.g.
"we need $50000/month to keep our venue and 5 employees", with a visible
progress bar?

Supporting gig workers with gift cards might be tough also because AFAIK
they're considered a disposable and easy-to-replace resource, often not
directly affiliated with the companies they serve most.

~~~
geofft
Right, I think this is specifically marketed with people with steady jobs
(either people with WFHable jobs like tech workers, or people who are going
into work anyway like doctors and retail workers) who are continuing to earn
their usual income during the lockdown. If you're not getting paid yourself,
it doesn't make as much sense for you to be a buyer.

At least where I am, enough of the customers of independent coffee shops /
food places / stores / etc. are people with steady, WFHable jobs that it seems
like simply managing cashflow and making sure it gets to the right people is
helpful in and of itself.

I don't have a good answer to the gig-worker problem (well, my preferred
option is government-run safety nets; the other option is regulations saying
gig employment should be disallowed, but those have their own problems), but I
want to throw it out there for brainstorming. One potential option is the
platforms offer zero-interest loans to their workers, e.g., "here's $1000 now,
but we'll want $100 back per month when this is all over, if you continue
driving for us we'll automatically take $100 of your earnings per month, if
you don't you'll just owe us." Of course many platforms can afford to do that
on their own, but they could also fund the program with gift cards from
customers. That is, there are two levels of gift cards here, one from customer
to platform, one from platform to worker.

------
bwb
Boost unemployment payouts in the USA, make it 60 or 90 days with ~80% of what
you made at your job. Then taper it down after that on a monthly period (and
you can improve that in times of crisis). You will need to pump up
contributions, but the gov can seed that with bailout money. Long term you
gather those payments with a progressive tax per business, not the silo model
we use now. Some countries in the EU do something like this, basically, your
unemployment is pegged to your salary.

This makes it somewhat "easy", if a restaurant in Seattle sees foot traffic at
an 80% decline they fire their team and hunker down for 2 months. Then start
back up once we get this thing beaten. And, this invests in labor/consumption
and doesn't have the negative side effect of keeping businesses afloat that
shouldn't be.

High rent is a killer, that is a harder one to solve. But, you could start a
rainy day fund (and seed it with a bailout). Basically offer a 0% loan to any
business that needs to pay rent during a time of officially declared national
crisis, but the deal is the loanee has to take ~50% off the rent payment for
the month in order to get it. And, make that work its way of the pyramid. The
idea being the person running the building takes a hit, the bank with the
mortgage takes a hit that month...

Note - In the USA unemployment maxes at 790 a week, and it scales depending on
some calculations. It doesn't include tips too so most people who work in
restaurants are really in trouble.

~~~
Beman30
I can speak about Italy right now: we should (they are still debating) froze
employment tax, consider that as an employer for each 1$ i give to my employee
I pay roughly 0.60/0.80 in tax, this means i am cutting my costs of 60/80%. We
have frozen any mortgage or installment for business and individuals.
Obviously this would not be a long term procedure but even if it holds for 5-6
months this gives a lot of possibility to invest.

About rent i can give you my experience: Most landlords here are boomers who
don't need rent money so they prefer to keep prices high rather than rent for
lower fares. I am confident those boomers will start panicking and lower rent.

~~~
bwb
Thanks for sharing, sending good thoughts to Italy and hopefully it starts
leveling off in 10 days or so. I live in Spain (but I am American). Everyone
here is on the first day of lockdown and in high spirits.

In the USA the payroll tax is around 20%, so that isn't going to do as much if
they pass that through to employees (esp as people employed are less a worry).
Better to help on unemployment as the service industry is all going to get
fired shortly if not already in the USA. The problem in the USA is
unemployment is the pay is not based on your salary but maxes at 790 a week /
2800 a month. And it scales all the way down to a minimum of $188. Even worse
tips don't count against insured wages.

------
michelleby
What industries will be unaffected? Most big tech, media, healthcare. What
industries will take a huge hit? Small business, retail and travel. Will this
leave permanent effects? My theory is that consumer discretionary industries
will struggle and that may last a long time. Biotech may be eclipsed for
awhile by the outbreak. It's been said that eventually we would transition to
a post-consumer economy and it seems like this outbreak could be a major
catalyst to making our goods, services and distribution almost exclusively
digital with the exception of food and necessary items. It seems like now is
the time to capitalize on escapism and "netflix and chill" culture, (i.e.
games, eBooks (or paper books) and VR). I've seen tons of user-generated home
cooking/and home projects happening. If your company is direct to consumer and
enables people to eat or make perishables like food/bev/cannabis (with some
DIY aspect) it seems like a good bet for the next few months.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _What industries will be unaffected? Most big tech, media, healthcare._

Healthcare will be completely shot everywhere in the Western world. Quite
possibly everywhere on the planet, period. Some media industries seem to be
affected already - video production is cancelled to protect actors and staff,
trade shows no longer happen. A lot of tech is just a component or service to
meatspace-based operations, so I expect our industry will feel the damage too.

That said, tech and media may indeed be some of the least affected sectors.

I agree that this may be the catalyst for a much stronger push for switching
some physical goods and services into digital. But can we start using this to
re-employ people laid off from exclusively meatspace businesses?

On a somewhat related note, seeing as most of Europe just went into lockdown
and is going to face _huge_ unemployment problem a month or two from now, I
wonder if this isn't the time to bite the bullet and introduce UBI.

~~~
peteradio
How is UBI supposed to work without major price controls?

~~~
DoreenMichele
I personally don't think UBI works. Period.

But some kind of financial relief may be in order to try to prevent worse
things. Having no money easily creates situations where "the battle was lost
because the nail was lost."

~~~
celticninja
any reason or evidence for why you think it doesn't work?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yeah, lots of reasons and lots of what I believe is evidence, but nothing most
people think makes sense.

The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share
alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of
the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to
move to "you don't work, you don't eat."

This was also basically what communism was supposed to be and that went
spectacularly badly.

We do have a few places where people get their share of a local natural
resource. Both Alaska and at least one Middle Eastern country give all
residents a check from their oil wealth.

But it's tied to something in specific: Oil. So we have a good idea of how to
make adjustments to the payout and under what conditions it would end. It
isn't a promise of "forever."

Historically, we had nuclear families with one primary breadwinner and
benefits for others through that person. That's largely dying out for various
reasons. We need a new system that allows for some people to work (for pay)
and some to not and more or less everyone to get access to housing, health
care, etc.

We mostly aren't talking about that. UBI sounds like a rich persons fantasy of
hush money. "We'll just cut a check and the problem will go away."

Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those
things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties
between money and the creation of actual value.

I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea.

Maybe some kind of expanded earned income credit would make sense. In the US,
we would benefit tremendously from fixing our health care system.

But I think just passing out money/resources to "everyone" has a long history
of failing every time it has been tried in some fashion. It actively
undermines a lot of social contracts that are the very basis for civilized
life and replaces it with "You and all your friends just won the lottery and
the rules don't apply to you anymore."

From what I gather, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt in five years.
This is another piece of evidence that you can't fix life, the universe and
everything by just throwing money at it.

~~~
geofft
> _The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and
> share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking
> advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a
> country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat."_

UBI/welfare works very differently in a scarcity economy like the Pilgrims'
and in a close-to-post-scarcity economy like ours. In fact, I wonder to what
extent we're _already_ post-scarcity, we just don't have the logistics worked
out to make it realistic. I think that's a much more interesting question than
whether UBI is a good idea in the abstract. It seems to me it's an obviously
bad idea when the risk of people not working is an existential threat to your
society, and an obviously good idea when it's not.

For instance, if wizards showed up tomorrow with the ability to create
unbounded amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medicine, it would make
little sense to deny those resources to everyone who needed them.

> _Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those
> things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the
> ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is
> enormously dangerous and a bad idea._

I agree with that, but I also think that this _already_ applies to the rich.
Once you own a certain amount of money, our existing systems already
discourage human labor and encourage you to spend your time re-investing your
money, paying other people for labor, etc. Once you own a bit more, our
systems discourage even that and encourage you to spend your time moving your
money to offshore banks, lobbying the government, etc. Once you own a bit
more, our systems encourage you to spend money trying to just _be_ the
government.

So we need to figure out how to cope with a society of people who are
disconnected from money in that way, independent of whether UBI is a good idea
or not.

Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state
of being dependent on their labor - no engineers with windfalls from their
employer's IPOs, no business magnates, no trust funds or inheritances enough
to pay for more than your college education, etc. Everyone needs to keep
working until retirement, and nothing you do will let you retire early. I
suspect that option is too politically distasteful to everyone (probably even
to myself) to make it viable. (That said, most obvious way to do it is
extremely heavy taxation, at which point you can afford a generous welfare
state.)

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state
of being dependent on their labor_

Just for the record: This is not something I'm suggesting and I absolutely
don't agree with it.

This is part of my mental framework:

Americans are slaves to the grind in part because cheap housing options simply
don't exist anymore and our health care system has very serious problems with
regards to the financial end of things. Addressing those two issues would give
Americans real relief. Instituting UBI in the US without first addressing
those things would actively discourage the US from trying to address those
issues. If you don't address them, no amount of "free money" fixes our
problems.

This is not argument. I just don't want other people to come through here,
read what you have said and go "well, that must be what she means and I'm not
for a system that denies people leisure time and retirement."

If people want to know what I think, they can ask me what I think (or read my
writing elsewhere in some cases). Please don't rely on other people's mental
models to decide what I supposedly think.

~~~
geofft
Sorry, yes - I don't mean to imply that's what you think.

And I do actually think that's a coherent system, and I personally think that
it is in some ways more humane than our current one, so I don't even mean that
such a system is negative. I also don't think such a system needs to deny
people leisure time and retirement: I did specifically suggest that such a
system would involve retirement, just no _early_ retirement. Since the vast
majority of people in our current society have that option closed off to them
in practice, this doesn't strike me as unjust.

As a straw man, let's say minimum wage is N, and taxes cause your net earnings
to approach 1.2N asymptotically as you make more and more income. You can
apply for government support if you make less than N for good reason, or if
you hit retirement age. That puts strong pressure on housing and healthcare to
be reasonably priced, because people _can 't_ pay more than a certain amount -
nobody has it. But it also ensures that everyone, rich and poor alike, must
work to eat. (That is, in this system there's no UBI; there should still be
some sort of social safety net for people who _can 't_ work, but no support is
provided for people who can work but _won 't_, until retirement age.) At most,
you can take a sabbatical every 6 years, in theory; in practice it'd be less
than that. Such a system will strongly incentivize the richest among us to
support generous labor conditions (vacations, leave for childcare, etc.)
because problems will apply to them just about as much as to anyone else.

There are a bunch of practical flaws with this straw man proposal, but I would
argue that if we genuinely value the link between how much money you have and
your labor, we should be thinking about systems that more closely resemble it
than the ones we have now. I'm just genuinely undecided on the value of that
link, because I don't have enough information - we don't have a good idea of
what a society looks like when you can set up that link _and_ you have copious
amounts of "free money" to go around.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I don't frame this problem space at all like you do.

I think there is value in doing work, but I don't think we need a system that
ties your income to your labor per se. It's fine if the system ties your
income to your ability to add value to the system in some way.

Education, know how and stewardship are all important ways to add value to the
system. They are all ways to add value while reducing our own direct
dependence on labor per se.

I'm fine with rich people owning shares in a company.

I'm fine with founders getting rich.

I'm fine with college grants and a system that actively encourages and
financially rewards the pursuit of education.

I'm not okay with a system that cuts ties between human choices and financial
outcomes because I think when you do that, you will eventually kill the goose
that's laying your golden eggs.

People need to know "The goose is sacred. Don't kill the goose. This how the
gold gets made."

And UBI sends the signal that it comes from nowhere for doing nothing and I
think that's a fast track to cutting our own throats.

Insisting humans need to still figure out how to effectively interact with the
system so the system produces things of value is intended to protect the
ability of the world to keep producing things of value. I think UBI destroys
that.

I think it is a superficial, inelegant answer. We need deep and elegant
answers.

We aren't going to find them if we don't even bother to look because we went
with UBI.

~~~
geofft
Thanks, that's helpful.

My personal vision of UBI is that it should provide what you need to live but
not what you need to have a good life - i.e., if you so much as want a Switch
with _Animal Crossing_ , you have to contribute to the system and earn it (via
labor or otherwise - in this system you _could_ still get arbitrarily rich,
and you can reinvest your earnings), but if you want (non-fancy) meals and
(personal) housing and medical care, nothing is required from you, we treat
that as an inalienable right. I think such a system still maintains the link
you want to protect, right?

Maybe this is not really what people mean by UBI? (Perhaps I should call this
"welfare without means-testing" or something?)

~~~
DoreenMichele
There are various policies that generally shrink the individual burden in a
way that also shrinks the public burden.

One of those is a good health care system. It benefits the public to make sure
everyone can see a doctor if they need to, even if they are broke.

Letting poor people just get sicker and sicker tends to negatively impact
other people and force costs up. When done well, universal health care doesn't
inherently have adverse incentives. It doesn't actively encourage people to
get sick so they can consume more medical care.

Another area that can simultaneously shrink individual burden and public
burden is good housing policies that make it possible for people of limited
means to find adequate housing that supports a reasonable quality of life.

In America, "affordable housing" has more or less become synonymous with _slum
housing._ Slum housing tends to help trap people in poverty by limiting access
to education, jobs, shopping, etc.

We have a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. I mean actual affordable
housing, not slum housing.

Off the top of my head, health care is something crazy high, like 20 percent
of GDP. For most households, housing is the single biggest household expense
in the budget.

Transportation is typically the second largest expense because America makes
it nigh impossible to live without a car. That fact is largely rooted in and
tied up with housing policy.

If you provide universal health care and shrink the overall cost of health
care while making it a lighter burden for individuals with health issues who
are likely to have trouble earning an adequate income because of their health,
you will remove a big chunk of the financial burden for America generally and
especially for the most burdened Americans.

So just spitballing here, if you theoretically make health care free, you
theoretically remove up to 20 percent of the financial burden from people --
possibly more for many people.

Some people are paying more than half their income in rent, and another like
25 or 30 percent on transportation. If they can have a life without having a
car and can find a home for far less money, you begin to get to the point
where a part-time minimum wage job can keep body and soul together.

If you have a small retirement check or something like that, intermittent gig
work can be enough to make your life work adequately well.

That's currently out of reach for the vast majority of Americans. It shouldn't
be.

It should be readily possible to find a small, cheap residential space, live
without a car and get medical care even when you are flat broke. Then, you
only need some really minimal income to get by and you can dream of better
things and work towards them.

At that point, most people can find some way to muddle through.

I would be for expanding our military medical benefits such that any term of
military service gives you access to the military medical system for life.

I would be for expanding and enhancing our Earned Income Credit on federal
taxes.

I would be for being freer about providing food stamps with a lot less means
testing, etc.

But a universal basic income makes no sense. Elon Musk doesn't need a check
from the government for $10k annually.

Anyway, I'm running a fever, not feeling well and no longer sure where to go
with this ramble. You have a good day.

------
hanoz
It seems clear to me that the economically productive section of society is
going to be in hiatus for a significant period of time, which in itself is
going have a massive and widely shared impact on the consumers of their
production, but the elephant in the room is to what extent the rentier class
is going to take its fair share of the pain.

If families and businesses are going to be hitting pause, through necessity
and for the public good, then we can't have landlords expecting to be paid in
full all the while.

Of course some of them will take a hit anyway when their tenants go to the
wall, but it would be better for all concerned if the economically productive
can do what they can, without the threat of the rug being pulled out from
underneath them.

------
ohiovr
Start thinking in terms of years from now, this isn't going to be papered over
like last time in 2008. Don't execute any business plan without revenue in
sight immediately. Shun all forms of debt. Raise capital. Protect what is
close to you. Be safe out there.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
so... long SPY? 12-18 month recovery has to be right around the corner. at the
worst, 60 months

~~~
celticninja
not wsb, please don't bring that.sort of comment here, I may also be guilty of
it myself but let's not redditify HN, or at least let's slow it down.

------
forkexec
Amazon, shipping, streaming games/media, ebooks, healthcare, internet-based
medical services will be fine.

Many people are about to have enormous amounts of idle time to dedicate
towards home-based hobbies, creative projects or entertainment, especially
elderly told to self-isolate for several months.

Domestic healthcare product manufacturing will be high-incentivized for a
decade or so.

Disposable income industries, especially travel and tourism, will be in free
fall for months to a year. Luxury goods tend to also mostly dry up.

New ventures should focus on much improved (and defensible) essentials and
better delivery of essentials that aren't as painless as ordering from Amazon.

------
cl42
I've been thinking about this a lot and will be writing a blog post soon in
terms of thinking about risk post-COVID-19. Thanks for asking the question
because it's an important one -- it's easy to lose sight of the longer-term
implications, given that we DO need to focus on saving lives in the short run.

There are a few things I'd say...

(1) COVID-19 is destroying international trust. The EU nations are closing
their borders to each other, there is hoarding of supplies between countries,
and stories are coming out now that countries might want to have exclusivity
to vaccines. This is NOT supposed to happen with allies, and I think countries
will have major trust issues and collaboration issues post-COVID-19.

(2) A lot of the economic stimuli will lead to significant increases in debt,
but also NEW monetary and financial strategies. Countries are discussing
encouraging central banks to buy stocks, mortgage-backed security, nationalize
factories, and more. This means government debt will increase significantly,
and corporate debt will be an issue as well. As earnings announcements are
made for Q1, Q2, etc... we'll see just how bad this has gotten.

(3) Small businesses will be shutting down. Even if there are debt forgiveness
programs driven by government debt (i.e., #2 above), the stress and short-term
cashflow issues of many small businesses will likely cause many to shut down.

I can go on and on... I can also provide citations for any part you'd like to
see.

Having said all of that, I think a few things are important:

(1) Promote social cohesion. People are scared, nervous, unsure what to do --
organize online events, reach out to people, etc.

(2) When it's safe, SPEND MONEY with SMALL BUSINESSES. I think this will be
critical.

(3) Encourage your governments to work with other governments, and speak out
against the politicians/governors/MPs/whatever that specifically were
irresponsible during this period. Don't let them get re-elected.

... I can go on and on... Just let me know. :-)

~~~
muzani
Why do should we spend on small businesses? I know this sounds a little harsh,
but do we really need to keep them from shutting down? A lot of big businesses
today had their start during an economic downturn. If a small business shuts
down, the owner often ends up working in another more robust business and gets
a good ride up.

~~~
cl42
I don't think it's harsh -- I think it's a good attitude to question this
stuff.

I put myself in the shoes of the gym, coffee shop, or restaurant owner... The
businesses that contribute to our communities but likely won't be consolidated
into bigger companies. They add value to our communities without necessarily
being hugely profitable. I think it's good to support those businesses.

I wish I had a stronger economic argument but I don't, right now.

~~~
cl42
After responding to a few other posts, I came across an important number --
about 50M Americans work for businesses that are 99 people or less in size.
That's a lot. Even if a small percentage of these businesses go under during
this entire crisis, that'll lead to a big shock to the financial/economic
system.

------
Beman30
Ok, I'll be that guy... I think this recession will hit bigger companies
rather than smaller one, small means resiliency. Online consumer companies
like Amazon wins because of their ability to cut prices, what if: Sending
goods will be more expensive than having a retail shop? If manufacturing goods
will be cheaper in your home country? I think we will see local industries
flourish at expense of multinational who will be not able to change that fast.
Any tech business that is able to support local business with their daily
troubles and help them cutting costs will build the future.

~~~
buboard
a small business, e.g. a hair salon will shut down if having to pay people
without any customers for a month. Amazon can wait

------
smarri
My 2 cents. Interest rates are so low that central banks will no longer be
able to use that lever to stimulate economies. One idea is salary tax holidays
i.e. do not tax wages for a period of time such as one or two months. More
money will be in the hands of people to spend in the local economies.

------
lubujackson
A key issue for parents is kids stuck at home. Parents can't work, even
remotely (very well), with kids cooped up for months. There is a huge lack of
childcare now and it will be worse on the way back to normal until schools are
open.

My idea is to facilitate linking teens to nearby families with younger kids
for babysitting. This already happens normally, of course, but in cities like
SF it is less common. With dual working parents solving the childcare issue is
a requirement.

------
_bxg1
There are lots of service workers who are about to be in trouble. In places
where white-collar workers are staying home, baristas and waiters and Uber
drivers are still at it. If they aren't sick enough to be hospitalized,
they're probably still at work, because they can't afford not to be.

What opportunities might there be for "Uber for X" that people can do from
home? Amazon's Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I can't think of any others.
And usually when the only present solution is a catch-all, there's space for
more niche solutions that can thrive by specializing around specific sub-
markets.

------
yulaow
I think that, in the long run, we will see a de-urbanization movement pushed
by all the works that, being potentially done from remote, will be done from
remote.

This will bring _a_lot_ of consequences like a drastic drop on rent and prices
of apartments, a fast reduction of small shop/pub/restaurants inside the big
cities, a change in the way universities make courses, etc...

It is going to impact every aspect of life considering we pushed urbanization
to its limit in the last 6-8 decades.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
I wish a _fraction_ of the employers right now asking people to work from home
realized "shit, people could work from home all of the time, not just during a
global pandemic"

~~~
peteradio
Old world managers would freak.

------
buboard
move more of it online. Thanks to decades of e commerce the economy can
already function without brick and mortar. More of this, in a health-conscious
way (e.g. special uniforms for deliverypeople, drop-off stations for products,
contactless payments). It needs to be deployed fast, too

------
_1tan
[http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html)

~~~
muzani
While I agree with the essay, keep in mind this is peak survivorship bias.

~~~
_1tan
Agree.

------
grandridge
Be more self sufficient,localize production

------
DoreenMichele
This will be rambling, and I apologize.

I run r/GigWorks on reddit and I run some websites aimed at helping people
trying to do GigWork.

I've been batting ideas back and forth with someone about a website called The
Butterfly Economy, inspired by a comment I made on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732)

That website is currently a landing page.

While homeless, I developed an online income. It's never been enough, but it
was better than not having it. I've been trying to lay the groundwork, both
online and in meatspace locally, to help homeless individuals and others to
connect with earned income via the internet.

I'm not getting a lot of traction and I'm not sure there's any point in
continuing to push for something that no one else seems to want. I end up
feeling like the world would literally rather let a bunch of people die than
listen to me and I don't have a solution for that.

And talking about it that way is probably the worst way to talk about it, but
a decade of getting kicked in the teeth and not taken seriously has taken its
toll. I don't know how to escape that mental space while still stuck in that
reality where I don't get taken seriously and so forth.

The old guard never seems to voluntarily step down. Perhaps this crisis is an
opportunity.

From what I gather, people online are saying things like "Yeah, my boss, who
always told me my job can't be done from home, is letting me do it from home
now because of coronavirus. The asshole."

So I feel like we've long had the pieces in place to move to a different way
of working and of living, we just dug our heels in and refused to jump on the
bandwagon. But people are beginning to embrace it more now that the other
option is death, basically.

I think -- and have thought for a long time -- that with 7 billion people on
the planet, we need to change how we do things or there will be a massive die
back of the human race. We do a lot of things that worked when population
levels were lower and I think a major sticking point is germ control.

I'm aware of that because of my medical situation, but I get literally told
I'm insane and making things up. So it's been impossible to tell people "I
think you should do things differently." That's point and laugh at me, at
best.

I'm tired and short of sleep and feeling pretty hopeless about a lot of
things. I hope to be more productive on various projects in coming weeks.

And it's probably a mistake to answer this in public, but you and I aren't
good friends and I don't want to bug you privately and blah blah blah. So
there's some of my thoughts, fwiw.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Don't apologize, I enjoy reading your ramblings. And feel free to bug me about
this privately. I'm very grateful for the advice you sent me last time; we've
implemented some of it.

With all your experience with homelessness, what's your opinion on how the
homeless population will handle the pandemic, and what can be done to help
them? Somewhat surprisingly to me, I've seen exactly _zero_ comments about
this in the press, and I've been a COVID-19 news junkie for the past two
weeks. It's like these people don't exist.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I actually posted a thing about how this is impacting the homeless in the US
less than 24 hours ago. It got no real traction.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580519)

I don't have solutions. I live in a hundred year old building and nothing is
square anymore and there was a really terrible storm one night some weeks back
with both rain and high winds. The curtains and window sill inside my unit got
soaked and the curtains molded.

I planned to remedy that quickly, but new policies delayed my tax refund by
like an entire month. So that was dealt with about 10 days ago and I'm still
running a fever and coughing up phlegm.

This is likely a large part of why I personally feel hopeless. I'm not getting
much of anything done at the moment. I expect that to change in a few days.

But I really, really wish the US would stop it's nutty housing policies and
begin building SROs and Missing Middle Housing and stop objecting to how "But
those are tenements and that's a bad thing!" when that de facto means people
are homeless because of it.

And I've studied the history of housing in the US for a long time. It's why I
had a class in Homelessness and Public Policy. I wanted to be an urban planner
and I was pursuing an environmental studies degree with a concentration in
Housing as preparation.

So I know just a whole lot about housing and I never know how to succinctly
and compellingly make my points. It's a source of personal frustration.

I'm quite confident that an updated version of the SRO with some modern
amenities would go a long ways towards remedying a lot of problems in the US.
And I have absolutely no idea how to get there from here.

I hope you and your family are well. They are closing the Walmart at night now
here. It was open 24 hours and we were shopping there in the middle of the
night to avoid the crowds and I'm starting to feel like the pandemic is doing
more than being a minor inconvenience for me at this point.

But I very seriously doubt me or my sons will get sick from it. We are too
careful about germ control as a matter of course because two of us have CF and
the other is a carrier.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for your thoughts. Sad that this post got no real traction. It's an
important issue, both from ethical and epidemiological POV.

My family and I are well; we went into full social distancing mode, only going
out occasionally to a store. We've cancelled everything that didn't already
cancel itself (this week, Poland implemented shutdown of shutdown of bars,
restaurants, cinemas and all other kinds of non-essential, gathering-inducing
businesses).

Do get to that Walmart and stock up a bit if you can (as a low-pass filter).
The virus will definitely affect you, if not directly then by the panic it
induces in people. Get well, and stay safe.

------
buboard
put extraordinary effort on developing suitable antiviral and a vaccine in a
fraction of the ordinary time period.

------
ilaksh
UBI

