Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides] • Hacker News Board

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#291

Post by asdff » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #274

asdff wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone? Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a lo…

Huh? An idle business can only distribute cash for so long before it runs out.

But again, follow the money. Where is that exact dollar that would have gone to that business had there not been any coronavirus?

The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their short position.

Perhaps that dollar is held up in some whale's cash account after they closed their positions. You would tax that whale for that cash, and redistribute it to the working class to afford food and shelter.

In any recession, the big stall is capital being too skiddish to pay for labor, resulting in lowered consumer spending, justifying less demand for labor, and creating a worsened financial crisis due to even lower consumer spending levels. If you are able to keep the working class afloat, you can conceivably keep consumer spending afloat, and therefore keep the economy afloat, even if capital is fearful.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#292

Post by iamleppert » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

miketery wrote: post #196

mywittyname wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful. People often romanticize the "mom & pop" places, but there's a reason that most consumer-facing companies are very large, and those reasons were enumerated by the OP. Also, there's a good deal of selection bias going on. If you had a successful business, why wouldn't you look to expand it to multiple locations? Running a single store makes your business vulnerable and usually requires a lot of time.

While there are advantages to having large / homogeneous / monolithic / centralized entities. There are also weaknesses in the face of some threat because there is no diversity to survive it.

I’m not sure I agree with the diversity argument. That argument is based on the biological principle of natural selection. However, an economy isn’t a biological system: its a man-made system that is designed and run by an intelligence, actually many intelligent agents working together.

Biology is not designed or run by any intelligent agent that we know of. When people apply the diversity argument to non-biological systems, it makes me think they are actually and really arguing for intelligent design of biology.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#293

Post by ericd » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #189

ericd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t have a vaccine for the common cold, not for lack of trying. AFAIK we’ve never made a vaccine for a coronavirus. This isn’t the time to be relying on silver bullets.

Common cold is caused by hundreds of different viruses so a single vaccine is not useful

Similarly, this one is mutating pretty quickly: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85500...

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#294

Post by asdff » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:29 AM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #290

asdff wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just old people though. Infants. Immunocompromised individuals. People with asthma. People undergoing chemotherapy. The narrative that this disease only affects the economically unproductive is dangerous at best, and inhumane at worst.

Honestly, what do you think is going to happen to these people if the economy totally shuts down? it's going to be easy to have a chronic & serious health condition? The same? My feeling is that I'd rather be chronically sick in a good economy than in a depression. What happens when medicine becomes unavailable due to supply chains being cut off?

The ultimate purpose of the shutdown is to not overwhelm healthcare providers, so people who need treatment actually receive it rather than die waiting in an overcrowded ER. So yes, they would fare better in a shutdown with lessened spread of the virus and fewer people putting strain on healthcare.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#295

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #291

gnicholas wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? An idle business can only distribute cash for so long before it runs out.

But again, follow the money. Where is that exact dollar that would have gone to that business had there not been any coronavirus? The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their s…

If the business is providing no services or products, then it cannot afford to pay its employees. This is because the economy is built around mutually beneficial exchange, which only happens when people can work.

Example: I go to a clothing store and give them an amount of money that I value less than the clothes they give me in exchange. We are both better off because we have made that mutually-beneficial exchange. If the exchange doesn't happen because the store is closed, then there is no revenue (let alone profit) to divvy up.

The only way to simulate that transaction in a way that gives money to employees is to literally take it from customers who receive nothing in return.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#296

Post by giantDinosaur » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

zouhair wrote: post #86

testfoobar wrote: post #38

The virus is terrible. But our solution could turn into an economic catastrophe. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out. 1. Make hundreds and millions of the rapid tests available. 2. Deploy them to every business, every institution. 3. T…

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Why not? This is a matter of survival. If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most.

The 'economic system' is based on fundamentally one thing: people doing stuff. If people can't do stuff, literally, like go out of their houses, then no new economic model can work. It's like, the one requirement for everything.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#297

Post by giantDinosaur » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #294

giantDinosaur wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, what do you think is going to happen to these people if the economy totally shuts down? it's going to be easy to have a chronic & serious health condition? The same? My feeling is that I'd rather be chronically sick in a good economy than in a depression. What happens when medicine becomes unavailable due to supply chains being cut off?

The ultimate purpose of the shutdown is to not overwhelm healthcare providers, so people who need treatment actually receive it rather than die waiting in an overcrowded ER. So yes, they would fare better in a shutdown with lessened spread of the virus and fewer people putting strain on healthcare.

Why didn't you respond to the actual point? What do you think is going to happen to people with chronic health conditions in a depression, or when supply chains stop functioning? What happens when (random example) e.g. anti-HIV medicine shipments can't be made and we start to get new mutations in those diseases?

Do you just assume we'll treat chronic health issues as a priority in a depression? I'd like to think we do as well, but the point is that things may well just stop working.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#298

Post by dillondoyle » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:42 AM UTC

whb07 wrote: post #153

alistproducer2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1-3% is an average among all age groups. You clearly have not looked at the data. For example, in Italy the CFR is somewhere around 14% for elderly. Everyone else is lower such that the nominal death rate, being an average among all groups,.has been consistently running around 8%. Obviously when this matures that rate will go lower because the denominator will grow but the denominator that people care about is th…

Holy cow. Notice how everyone literally says “there’s not enough testing” but yet you’re able to rationalize the CFR as valid. What you see going to the hospital and getting tested CLEARLY is the most critical number of cases. It’s possible that for every person tested, there are 100 or more that are asymptomatic. Run some numbers on this “highly contagious” disease. Another point why we are in a fear bubble is that…

WHO assistant director general & epidemiologist Bruce Aylward's investigation in China found that there wasn't a significant 'iceberg.' There's other supporting data elsewhere. I find these three paragraphs easy to digest:

-- " In Guangdong province, for example, there were 320,000 tests done in people coming to fever clinics, outpatient clinics. And at the peak of the outbreak, 0.47 percent of those tests were positive. People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.

If you didn’t find the “iceberg” of mild cases in China, what does it say about how deadly the virus is — the case fatality rate?

It says you’re probably not way off. The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher. If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying. "

https://www.vox.com/2020/3/2/21161067/coronavirus-covid19-ch...

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#299

Post by anovikov » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

Soviet approach to solving the problem would be: don't tell anyone.

There was a major flu epidemic that killed 100K+ in the Soviet Union in 1977-78 (long after gulags and all the scary Soviet stuff, when living standards were among the world's top, comparable to poorer Western European countries like Italy and Spain). None of my older relatives ever heard of it. just some old people died, that's it. Absolute zero of economic or social consequences. I think kids didn't go to school for some weeks and maybe streets were cleaned bit better than usual, nothing worse.

Re: Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]

#300

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

Womply wrote: post #221

glass_of_water wrote: post #13

This appears to be an appeal by Womply to direct a ton of stimulus money toward them, so that they can make loans to small businesses (instead of the Small Business Administration), and then they can take a cut of that.

No, that's not the goal. We aren't trying to monetize this. We are trying to be good corporate citizens and to help our customers, the country, and our market. We have unique data, expertise, and resources so we feel obligated to help out.

Is there a PDF of this deck?