For the first couple of years of my first bootstrapped company I tried to keep “cash in the bank” in excess of 3 months. Everybody knew. The one time (after the first six months of transient jitter) it dipped down close to two months everybody knew, and nobody quit (headcount at that point was about 60). So 9 months seems pretty good.
Though perhaps they are/were on the “don’t worry about the burn we can always get more” plan. In that case 9 months does sound perilous....though perhaps many people who couldn’t make car payments will become customers?
Well it's strong until it's not. Tons of businesses run on 1-month commercial paper and other stuff that they just plan to roll over and roll over until one day things change and they're completely fucked.
Market was already on the brink, COVID is going to be the excuse for many companies that are over the head with debt/investors money and still are running losses.
The economy hasn't made sense at all over the past 10 years. Companies have been hiring people just for show. Startups are all about putting up smoke and mirrors to appeal to a bunch of dumb investors.
Snap never made a profit in almost a decade yet its market cap is $17 billion. Uber hasn't made a profit in over a decade, market cap is $50 billion.
If you want to understand why things are like this, just look at how the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is constantly injecting new fiat money into the economy and you will have all the answers.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme: invest in a startup first so that you find other investors for a subsequent round so that you can IPO and sell it all off to the next suckers who are hoping to do the same. Just don’t be the one left holding the bag.
And the worst part is that all these people who were hired were misused for bureaucratic purposes and so their practical skillsets have atrophied.
Then when the big burst arrives and these people are collectively fired, they will be totally unprepared and incapable to adapt their skills to the economic reality that they were shielded from by their previous employers.
I wonder what they do all day. Sounds like it might be the ultimate retirement plan: get paid 150+k and not do much all day because there just isn’t that much work to go around.
Probably not, at least not if the generalized version of Parkinson’s law holds.
The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).
Wasn't this company already facing of running out of cash and other financial issues before COVID? I feel that, like many other companies, Bird is gonna use this pandemic as an excuse, when they had other big problems to deal with already
I wondered if the scooter only companies would be better off than ride sharing companies with small scooter revenue.
Anec-data: one of my relatives brokered a post lockdown lease in a large _redacted_ city for one of the two large ride sharing companies. It was for scooter storage.
But many American companies wouldn't have an issue borrowing money (at a reasonable interest rate) to continue operations since they're presumably profitable or at least approach break even.
Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?
Plenty of companies will have trouble borrowing money, it's a financial crisis. Money market rates and rates on corporate paper were through the roof triggering a liquidity crisis. Looks like the fed is really stepping in agressively, and hopefully they'll succeed, but we already saw credit markets almost lock up. Doesn't matter if you're profitable if nobody is willing to lend.
Lenders and credit investors are still very liquid at the moment; it's not a financial crisis and it's not at all the case that noone is willing to lend. But noone will lend to/invest in the credit of a non viable prospect and there will be more scrutiny about what's viable in current circumstances. The price of money has also gone up (despite central banks' best efforts) so there will be more discrimination between strong lending/investment propositions and weak ones, and the cost will be higher for everyone.
At the same time startups in Germany are heavily lobbying for additional provisions in the economic relief programs to cover startups as well.
Reading between the lines, "startups" (they are companies and thus eligible anyway based on standard conditions) refers to companies relying completely on external funding in the pursuit of positive cash flow and profitability further down the line. Looks a lot like a covered bailout for VCs and other investors. Because if a company was profitable before Corona, meaning banks would have provided credit already, the government is making it a lot easier and cheaper to get additional credit lines.
So if people are broke, landlords are broke, stores are broke, companies are broke -- just who exactly has the keys to the kingdom here? Who isn't broke? Just banks?
Well, right now, we have a serious problem with cash flow—that is, there isn't much cash flowing through the economy, because people are staying in their homes.
So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.
But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.
As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.
Not all of any of these are broke. Many companies have plenty of demand. Many companies have much greater than usual demand, or are shifting production to meet changed demand (for example, it looks like GM is going to be manufacturing ventilators). Those companies and their employees aren't broke--far from it.
Not to minimize the impact on companies and people who are seeing drastically reduced demand, but it's a serious overstatement to say that all companies and people are.
All the essentials who don't get locked and people are stocking on: health, supermarkets and their providers. Also those who are online or can be easily adapted: streaming, communication, online markets, education, soft development.
Any company that sells to people inside their homes is doing great. Games and content providers, video conferencing software, restaurants that do food delivery, Amazon.
Anecdote: just talked to my neighbor who owns a delivery takeout quick service restaurant and they estimate business is down 70%... maybe the bigger chains are ok but small business likely not
Restaurants still have the hurdle of fear - is everybody in the kitchen wearing gloves, are they all non-COVID, etc.. There are enough touchpoints in the process to get take out delivered I'm avoidng it.
And that is certainly your prerogative to do. My family is getting takeout a few times a week to support our favorite local restaurants. Just providing a counter point that there is still money going into some restaurants (although I'm sure it is less than typical).
Companies with large capital reserves, e.g. Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway. With startup valuations low, those three could go on a discounted M&A spree.
Especially because a lot of those major American companies have spent the past decade loading up on debt and buying back their shares at historically high prices.
Isn't a stock buyback exactly the same as paying a dividend, but taxed at a lower rate? I don't see why these companies are being demonized, the government should just let them go bankrupt and let the public buy their assets for pennies on the dollar.
That's not the way it works. For instance, over the last 10 years, Boeing spent 45 B$ in buyback out of its 60 B$ profit. Now that the situation looks grim, Boeing does not have enough cash to live through the crisis. But it won't go bankrupt, it will get 60 B$ of cash from today's federal government bill, and probably more later on.
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.
Boeing’s crisis started long before CV19. The 737 Max debacle was already weighing heavily on their balance sheet.
The point is, it’s hard to predict the future. Who knows if the future will bring a fatal bug in your software, a pandemic, or both. But regardless, we all know tough times will always happen, and to therefore be prepared.
And my point is you can’t be prepared for months of no revenue. No consumer is going to pay the high prices needed for a business to insure itself for an extinction level event, because an alternative business won’t and will offer lower prices.
For example, a hotel owner can choose to squirrel away cash to protect the hotel and its employees for months of no income. A competing hotel will instead choose to renovate the hotel. Which hotel will customers choose to stay at?
What would you have done? Saved $45B in cash in case a virus like this causes the world economy to stop?
The job of management is to find a profitable way to deploy capital. If management are returning capital to shareholders, outside of expected dividends of course, it’s because they are bereft of ideas. What would I have done? Invested a large portion of that money in long term R&D and careful strategic acquisitions. It’s the same over at IBM. The current generation of managers have inherited cash flows set up by their predecessors but have no idea what to do with them.
Squandered means there was a better, evident option at the time. I have not yet been able to find a satisfactory answer to the question of what the companies should have done rather than buybacks, especially to mitigate the effects of a literal shutdown of basically entire lines of business resulting in no income.
The businesses in years past made money, invested some of it, spent some on R&D, and distributed some to shareholders (via buybacks). What other option was there?
They are being demonized because the government isn't letting them go bankrupt or letting the public buy up their assets. Instead the government is rewarding their greed and poor business practices by bailing them out and letting them keep all of the money they made.
Because some people may not realize/forget the source of these billions, these billions are either taxpayer money, OR these are new/fresh money (which means diluting the value of the currency for everyone).
The issue is not the stock buyback but the debt binge these companies have gone on to to buy back that stock. This has left them unprepared and exposed for any kind of a downturn. This exposure is being remedied compliments of the tax payer. "Privatize the profits but socialize the risk" seems to be their mantra. The buck only ever seems to stop at the CEO when the going is good. This is why they are being demonized.
Yes to all that. No tears, no bailout. Nationalize out of bankruptcy instead.
Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.
But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.
Apart from irresponsible behavior of not reducing debt or not keeping enough money reserves, few other points to note:
- CEO and the executive board gets pay rise based on stock price increase which is a silly math because the total market cap does not increase..
- Share buyback gives a quick boost to share prices, and often, the executives have found to be selling shares immediately after share buyback. It's almost like they pre-plan the buyback and following stock sale. There are many studies showing this to be a more common practice.
This is a difficult call to make. Of course, the government shouldn't be the automatic fall-back solution for incompetent/greedy management. On the other side, large companies failing do have a network effect, that is why the government does bailouts in the first place. There are arguments that the 2008 crisis could have been avoided, if the government had bailed out Lehman. Lehman failing caused the crisis and in the end many more companies needed and got a bail out and still a huge economic damage was done.
The only solution in my eyes for this dilemma is, that the government should do bail outs, but at the price of shares. For any money paid, which isn't just credits, the government should get company shares, which are sold off, as soon as the market stabilizes.
Agreed. Or an additional option is to let businesses fail. The value of a viable business doesn't instantly go away just because they are insolvent. Let another better managed company buy up the failed company.
no. the government merely needs to look like it will be a tough debate next time that might not go through, by having a tough debate this time that spooks businesses
To be fair, for many businesses it's government mandates that has forced them to shut down. Yes business was down, but there was some business. With shelter in place there is no business. If the government mandates something that causes total loss of business, it's fair for them to be on the hook to help out with the problems caused by their mandate.
by your logic everyone should have been living pay check to paycheck when interest rates get low.
but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.
Somewhere out there must be a few firms with massive cash positions. Every time a company buys back stock, they're giving cash to the investor who sold the stock. Assuming the government doesn't inflate the currency to nothing, those firms are going to absolutely clean up now, with so much cash to deploy while everyone else is getting force-liquidated.
Sure but the fun part about these insanely well funded moonshot startups that lose money on every transaction is that all these shutdowns improve their gross margins and cashflow positions.
Parked being the operative word. You don't see abandoned cars littering the pavement/sidewalks, left lying around in parks etc. (at least not in most neighbourhoods).
I'm no fan of cars but the idea that a company can just dump junk like this all over public spaces as an intrinsic part of its business model is bizarre to me.
Could it be that nobody in their right mind would take a leadership position at this trainwreck of a company (when they can probably find a much better one), so the only ones left are the cowards?
Maybe. But there are way too many companies and leaders like this. They expect two week notice when an employee leaves, but have no problem firing people at 5 pm on Friday via email/text whatever.
There's no good way to lay anybody off. But there are worse and better ways. A one-on-one video call is much more respectful and humane than playing a recording.
Not necessarily. A humane call with, "Please don't discuss this until 4 pm, as I want to tell people personally" would go a long way. And if people do talk about it, you can still have the rest of the discussion, which is not just about revealing facts.
True, but they can try to make both the recently laid off and soon-to-be-laid-off employees be too busy to communicate, or they can round up the ones who will be staying so at least they don't pass around the news to those who aren't going to be laid off before they know they're not on the chopping block.
No, in an in-person layoff situation. I was addressing the comment I replied to where it said "This is equally true for in-person layoffs".
I've been in an office during an in-person layoff situation (surprisingly only once during my 15+ year career), and they were definitely taking advantage of it being done in person.
That's noble, but seven doesn't really scale to "hundreds" especially if you are wanting the news to break more or less uniformly across the group you are laying off.
Every manager called every single worker personally to relay the news, for a general well-being check in, and to answer any questions about UI benefit filing. Each manager has also personally checked in once a week to see how things are going, and to provide updates, and said they will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks they plan to be closed.
... and that's a non-union, publicly traded company.
If a company only has one manager for "hundreds" of employees, this has to be very low on the scale of the ways the company is doing badly for its workers.
The only way is face to face. If you can't do that then you are shit. Video? Really?
I've been an employer for 20 years. They come and go and quite right too. I encourage my troops that if they are looking elsewhere then we'll give them time off for interviews and assistance in how to interview effectively. I really am not joking. If you think you own someone completely then your name is Satan! I just want a decent day of work out of you, when you want to work for me. If you no longer want to work for me then I want to get rid of you as efficiently and as fairly as possible ...
Reminder: The world has a bad case of pandemic. The reason for layoffs is the extreme measures society has been taking to avoid unnecessary face-to-face interactions. One thing that would piss me off more than being fired is catching a disease from the person firing me.
That's an important point. As much as I'd like my manager to look me in the eye as they tell me I'm laid off, I'd be super pissed if they flew me to San Francisco just to lay me off then left me stewing the whole flight home.
Slow and gradual onboarding with care and nurture to take them on.
Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
It's hard to do and doesn't positively impact bottom line initially but it avoids resentment in the vertical(market) which is super important for long term growth.
> Careful individually planned offboarding to help them transition.
This doesn't work when you need to make large changes to an org.
I've seen first hand how different styles of this work.
When it's done 'carefully and individually', and keeps happening over days (because that's what it takes) - everyone else in the company starts wondering if they're impacted, and it becomes this slow-moving horror show. Another person gets tapped on the shoulder, called into a room and let go. Meanwhile the business expects things to continue as normal, but it doesn't and even normal meetings become a source of anxiety.
While it's never pleasant to be told you're being let go - at least if you can do it in larger groups and get it over and done with as soon as possible you reduce the level of anxiety and uncertainty.
Not to say that a pre-recorded video, voice mail or text message is the way to go, but still.
I was really appreciative of the way the first company I worked for handled my departure. Things were changing at the company so I was looking to leave anyway but then they decided to change their structure and I was given a few options in person (lived ~2000 miles from main office) all of which were mutually beneficial from my point of view.
A) stay on and help integrate an external team for up to 16 weeks (reduced hours, freedom to interview and apply elsewhere) B) stay on and wrap up the current sprint and tidy up some documentation for up to 8 weeks C) finish out the week and receive 6 weeks separation pay. All options also allowed me to keep insurance until I found a new position as well as keep my company provided tech. It really made me appreciate the people at the company overall, minus the person who was making the changes (which has since been canned and some of the engineering efforts at the company have stalled which is sad)
How so? I worked at an all remote company. We were remote from the day of founding.
Everyone I hired I hired remotely, without ever meeting in person. In the two instances I had to let people go I did it remotely. The same way I hired them, the same way I’ve had people quit.
But they pulled all the birds off the street. Why wouldn't you at least put them back everyone around riding lyft bikes. Does this have anything to do with the virus.
Perhaps, but it will also clear out potentially strong companies that still require substantial investment to get to market simply because they're early in their lifecycle.
You can tell a well made building vs a poorly made building by what's still standing after an earthquake. But no building is built to withstand an atomic blast.
The same could be said of poor software practices. With so many developers out of work why would any company hire a developer that needs a 3mb JavaScript framework and 1000 NPM packages to write 3 lines of code? The argument against reinventing wheels just because talent is rare just evaporated.
This trope is so tired, and the reason for using the NPM/Node ecosystem has never been about talent being rare. Choosing JS at all is because you value developer time over time chasing down suitable third party dependencies, handling build incompatibilities, and generally dealing with the mess that is multi-platform development.
I think Javascript/NPM was just an example and that he was complaining about overengineering. There are examples of this in every specialisation (not just front-end) like the companies using Kubernetes when their entire workload could fit on a single machine.
As somebody who has been writing in these technologies for 20 years I disagree. The entire purpose of jQuery, for example, was exactly because talent was rare. Keep in mind jQuery was around for years before it was popular. It was its Sizzle engine masking the standard DOM methods that made it popular.
When talent is rare you can artificially widen the availability of talent by lowering the barrier of entry. Lower qualified job candidates are dependent on the crutches that allowed them entry, though, which comes at a cost of lost innovation potential and productivity overhead. The cliche don't reinvent the wheel is completely about developers distancing themselves from innovation. When talent is suddenly and explosively available to the job market there isn't a valid business reason to do that especially as companies have smaller budgets for hiring fewer developers and more developers are competing for fewer available positions.
You're implicitly equating making development easier with lowering the barrier to entry. If you make that assumption, then you could say that Boost does the same thing. To avoid this, you would have to never make anything easier to use, which is the whole point of tool development to begin with.
> there isn't a valid business reason to do that
This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer, not the junior developer. Carrying it out to extremes (leftpad) being another beast, usually junior developers will be the ones wanting to build something that already exists, generally for the purpose of testing their ability.
But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the road to knowledge siloing.
The term easier is highly subjective so I did not use that word on purpose for that reason, but otherwise the connection I drew between lowering the entry barrier and a superficial abstraction layer was pretty explicit.
I am not a C++ developer and I have no experience writing in that language. I know that Boost is a template system for C++. I know this because for a long time I maintained a multi-language parsing utility and was considering extending support to C++. I never extended that support to C++ in my utility but C++ developers who introduced me to Boost were absolutely confident that parsing Boost logic from a C++ code sample would be next to impossible. Its trivial. If you have experience with embedded languages that sort of multi-dimensional parsing is not as hard as it sounds. A more elegant example is JSX which is a pseudo-XML construct embedded in JavaScript that can recursively contain JavaScript in various ways which then can contain more pseudo-XML islands and so forth. There was also a jQuery template scheme that introduced psuedo-HTML into script tags of actual HTML.
Typically the goal is to make systems that are more simple opposed to more easy. Easy is a disorganized pile of spaghetti code because it took less effort to write with no prior planning. Cleaner and more organized code takes greater effort with fewer interesting parts. Easier is generally preferrable to entry level employees who don't yet have the experience to differentiate easy from simple.
> This assumption is quite strange, because "don't reinvent the wheel" is usually a tenet of the more seasoned developer
I absolutely disagree. This is what I call an experienced beginner. That is somebody who has been doing the job for a couple of years and has gained confidence with certain techniques and conventions, but has never grown to a level of sophistication or problem solving that most businesses would consider valuable enough for senior level responsibilities. This is the kind of thing that most people would refer to as Dunning-Kruger, because the expertise is limited to something designed for engaging beginners and that expertise is confused with excellence.
> But in general the more senior people I've worked with are the ones who have the philosophies that boring is better, reuse existing solutions if possible, and don't do anything too new or in a novel way, because that is typically the road to knowledge siloing.
There are all kinds of justifications for avoiding writing original logic and most of them are pretty weak. If it cannot be expressed in terms of project risk or financial harm the justification is generally a form of bike shedding. That means the developer is framing the conversation in a way their limits their uncertainty exposure without consideration for the product.
I have not much more to add, but FWIW the people espousing the "boring is better" and "don't reinvent the wheel" mantras were experienced SV devs, 15 and 30 years experience. They said there is a business justification and it's one of risk, namely that the more home-grown or nonstandard solutions you have, the less likely other people on the team will know what's going on when one of them breaks. There's also the maturity value of an existing codebase in that it has been proven to do the thing it sets out to, whereas a new endeavor may encounter roadblocks that require a rewrite partway through, and also lack documentation and good error messages, don't have the same years of bugfixes, etc.
It is kind of (really) weird to be happy that the whole sector will be overflooded with unemployed devs, causing a drop in salaries, simply because you dislike NPM/node. I'm all for good software practices but I still prefer good working conditions and compensation.
Not sure if it will really cleanse us of companies like this. We've been through terrible depressions before, and sociopath companies seem to always make a comeback.
Based on other countries, it looks like the real way to cleanse us of these companies would involve moving our country towards more progressive policies.
Investors have traditionally not taken this sort of thing into account, focusing only on the profits. Although, I have read articles saying new generations refuse to invest in certain sectors, such as the military industrial complex (companies like Lockheed Martin). So perhaps it'll change over time. See https://www.upworthy.com/millennials-are-making-money-by-inv... for an example of one of the articles.
Getting a lot of downvotes by people on my above comment, but oddly enough no one wants to engage and say why they disagree. I feel like this platform would work better if people could only upvote. It would force them to comment / explain their own position if they really disagree with folks. Flagging should of course still exist though.
Please don't post flamebait to HN or take threads further into ideological flamewar. That's not only not what the site is for, it destroys what it is for. We've had to ask you this more than once before. Ignoring those requests and continuing to flout the guidelines will eventually get you banned, so please don't.
I wasn't attempting to bait people, I was trying to explain to them why they're facing what they're facing. I am unemployed myself, it's not like I'm some troll trying to incite people. It's meant to create a dialogue, a discussion about the future of our country. I'm sorry if people took offense to my opinion in any way.
I believe you! But if posting about a divisive topic, it's necessary to flesh out your comment enough so it's substantive. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638. Otherwise people (like me in this case, or this response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708180) will interpret it as flamebait, even though you didn't mean it that way.
3.3 million people successfully signed up for unemployment insurance in one week, but that's almost certainly a significant undercount.
Some can't, because they're self-employed. Some lost their jobs but have another. Some weren't able to sign up because their states' systems couldn't take the load. Some just didn't sign up.
I'd bet the actual job loss count is at least 2-3 times that, but I have no real data to back that up.
I didn’t say that at all. I said that due to recent policy decisions, the government has incentivized workers not to work.
In a normal free market economy, when people get laid off, their labor is reallocated to a different sector in the economy. Now there’s no reason to look for another job, if your rent is guaranteed and the government checks come in every month for four months on top of unemployment.
What exactly leads you to believe that we’re currently in a situation for the free market to prevail while millions of Americans can’t leave their houses and the infection rate of COVID continues to double every three days?
The last time we saw labor contraction like this was during the Great Depression, when millions starved and the economy took years to recover. What are people supposed to do when there are no jobs for them and they can’t leave the house? If there’s no work to be done for the next three months and no income coming in, what do these millions of workers do, starve?
> The last time we saw labor contraction like this was during the Great Depression, when millions starved and the economy took years to recover. What are people supposed to do when there are no jobs for them and they can’t leave the house?
What do you think they did in the Great Depression? WW2? They didn’t sit there and wait for the government to bail them out. They saved for a rainy day. The US govt borrowed money from the citizens to fight WW2. But thanks to QE infinity, the government has disincentivized and fucked over savers as well. Big surprise, anytime the government gets involved they fuck it up.
Complaints about saving are the most absurd thing ever.
Rich people were getting free money by doing nothing and taking no risk. Now they're getting less free money by doing nothing and taking no risk.
It's crazy that you want to enact policies which would very literally kill thousands of people just because you want rich people (who don't need more money) to get more free unearned money.
In a truly free market wealthy people would have to pay vault, security, and insurance fees to maintain a riskless balance.
> They didn’t sit there and wait for the government to bail them out.
The government in the 30s took on trillions (in modern dollars) in debt to do just that; the only difference being they put people to work by pouring money into infrastructure projects because people could actually work without isolation.
The difference here is that the money isn't going into infrastructure, it's going into basic necessities and healthcare; people are still being put to work as you can tell from the ramp-up in hiring for delivery, cargo, logistics, etc. The velocity of money hasn't stopped - if anything, it's actually increased in certain areas of spending. The problem here is unique for almost everyone alive today: entire quadrants of the economy have ground to a halt because of an external stressor.
TL;DR: your understanding of the new deal needs work.
> I said that due to recent policy decisions, the government has incentivized workers not to work.
On some level, isn't that almost the goal? If the coronavirus hits us at full speed, the estimates I've seen suggest that the loss of life would remove tens of trillions of dollars of future economic capacity. (And also, you know, kill people.)
Until we figure out how to keep this under control (like Singapore) or slow it enough to provide adequate medical care for the infected, the goal is to get people to stay home.
So it almost makes sense to incentivise people not to work. The last thing we want right now is everybody out and mingling.
But we have to use this time well. We need to increase medical capacity, research treatments, build ventilators, run serological tests for antibodies, build contact tracing infrastructure, care for patients, make masks and PPE, and a hundred other things.
Have you actually looked at how much you make on unemployment? I'm in Florida and you get $275/week. The federal govt is giving an extra $600/week for 4 months. So you'd be making $3500/month for 4 months before it drops to $1100/month. Also consider that you have additional expenses like health insurance if you're not employed. It's basically buying people a little bit of time to find another job before they go back to regular unemployment wages which I consider below poverty line.
^ this is a strong argument for a 100% estate tax, as well as for exceptionally high capital gains taxes.
After all, people with inherited wealth or unearned income will have no incentive to work otherwise. A such, we MUST strip them of their assets so that they may become productive parts of society.
Free market economies are an analytical fiction, not a normal thing at all.
> Now there’s no reason to look for another job, if your rent is guaranteed and the government checks come in every month for four months on top of unemployment.
Both the base and supplemental unemployment still require you to be actively seeking work and to not reject offered work to continue to receive the checks, so there is, in fact, a very good reason to look for work.
Given that affordable health insurance is often tied to employment, I don’t really see how you can assume people have “no reason to look for another job”. Nevermind the long term damage that employment gaps can do to your career prospects.
Sure, you're not wrong about this, however, given the situation with COVID-19, we don't really want people to be out there working. We want them working from home if they can or not working at all. If that's the case, the government has to kick in to support those people. We're making a public health decision that adversely affects the economy but not making this decision is likely worse than the where we're at and where we're headed.
Perhaps this will be a lesson to us as a people, a nation, and all companies who operate to not take such a narrow view.
Other sectors aren’t available for labor reallocation. People are losing jobs in all the sectors that will take them and those sectors are forced to be closed or limited for the foreseeable future.
Let's suppose you're right, and that 100% (or even 50%) of those getting unemployment for the next 4 months will sit around since getting a job might end up meaning less money.
Genuinely curious what you would want to do instead? Are you thinking UBI, so that even if they get a job they still receive the other benefits. I could get behind that. Is that what you're thinking though?
This is a dumb take. All these people were working and wanted to keep working until coronavirus lockdowns took their jobs. I’m sure most of them want to find new jobs but good luck because almost no one is hiring in this environment.
You really believe money is the only reason people work?
(If you need a hint here, look at all the medical workers working crazy shifts now. You think they're getting overtime and danger pay commensurate with the risk?)
> I said that due to recent policy decisions, the government has incentivized workers not to work.
That's one way to look at it.
An arguably more accurate interpretation is that few workers laid off due to Covid-19 are likely to find remote work. And that means testing wouldn't be worth the expense.
There is increased demand for delivery drivers and truckers, I admit. So I agree that these policies may increase wage rates for such categories. But that's not so horrible.
> Now there’s no reason to look for another job, if your rent is guaranteed and the government checks come in every month for four months on top of unemployment.
That is actually an ideal outcome, because that would slow down the disease transmission significantly.
Responding to a bad comment with an even worse comment is exactly the wrong way to go, and the site guidelines ask you explicitly not to do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are, so please don't do that.
Wow this is bad at a totally different level - it is a new league og messed up.
These companies - and more importantly the human garbage at the upper / top level of management of these companies - need to be remembered and when the global situation will return to normal they will need to be given the treatment that they deserve.
BEING FIRED VIA A PRE-RECORDED MERSSAGE DURING THE WORST GLOBAL CRISIS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR! - talk about being kicked when you are down, huh?
The comments seem to break several of the guidelines [1]:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
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We know that terribly unfair and cruel things are happening to people, but enraged comments with implied threats of retribution don't do anything to right the wrong.
Let's try to be the change we want to see in the world.
Edit: more: https://twitter.com/coryweinberg/status/1243685675137781762?...