L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’ • Hacker News Board

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#101

Post by StavrosK » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #61

torpfactory wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you act early, it will always appear you overreacted. If you act too late, well... https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/corona...

This goes both ways, though. If you act early-- and way over-react-- and it works, you get to claim to be the savior of the country, even though the reaction was disproportionate. There's no way to disprove it.

You can't "disprove" overreacting, but you can disprove saving the country. Case in point, Italy was not saved. What would overreaction look like? Shutting an entire country down back in December? If your definition of "overreacting" is "shutting down a country before there's a single case", you can definitely prove or disprove that.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#102

Post by paulgb » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #37

tempsy wrote: post #26

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

Restaurant bookings and travel were falling sharply in CA even before the official stay-at-home policies[0], so your alternative is a world where huge chunks of the economy are still fucked. Unless you want to force people to eat at restaurants, travel to conferences, host events, etc... [0] there's this from March 13, for instance https://blog.opentable.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus-restaur... , googling conference…

NYC too, to the point that the mayor tweeted encouraging "New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus", which did not age well even by 2020 standards.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#103

Post by eropple » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

nightstaywalki wrote: post #81

eropple wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In no realistic permutation. Thanks for asking!

Hmm I'm not as sure, and I'm not sure why other people are so sure. People seem to generally respond 'of course not' and get offended that I've suggested it. I'm not really sure why.

On the off chance that you're saying this in good faith? Generally speaking it's because Just Asking Questions comes with motives that suck. Maybe you're the one whose don't and you are tragically caught up amidst the sewage flow of "screw 'em" types, but playing the percentages on bad-faith argumentation is pretty safe. Trolls and other turds make a point of wasting people's reserves of good faith as a tactic to dominate discourse--there's no reason to let them do so. Flat dismissal is the milder form of "block and move on".

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#104

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

imron wrote: post #31

kccqzy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that, through your choice of software, your observation is not at all meaningful in this discussion?

That's the joke!

It's not funny, it's just tired and repetitious, and HN discourages joking around anyway because it leads to low quality conversations and contests over who can be funnier instead of who can contribute the most meaningfully to a conversation.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#105

Post by namro » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #56

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…

Sweden has far fewer cases and death rate without a massive lockdown. If this disease is really so deadly, why isn’t their country being massively depopulated? Same for states in the US that haven’t implemented any lockdown measures.

Look at their fatality rate compared to other European countries. Also read the recent news about change of approach of Sweden and The Netherlands. Read about the current situation of the UK and go back in time an look at their initial response vs e.g. Germany. Compare the two. Lockdowns are saving lifes.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#106

Post by goalieca » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #34

tempsy wrote: post #26

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

The "disease" would be a lot, lot worse without the "cure" though. There'd still be really bad economic effects; there's no scenario in which everyone would just be going about doing business as usual pretending nothing is wrong while the news is reporting on catastrophically overwhelmed hospitals and how if you get to the point where you have serious trouble breathing, you're on your own and might easily die without…

Well, the statistics are starting to show that if you're young and healthy, this is not much worse than the flu in terms of outcome. The hospitalization rate is also much lower than was reported earlier. Even just counting positive and confirmed test cases, this data is painting a pretty clear picture.

Here's the data out of new york city. You can see the chart showing hospitalizations and deaths per age. The trend is pretty biased towards old people. This makes me wonder if a more targeted response by the government would be better. The 2 trillion dollars might have been better spent. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#107

Post by nathanlied » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #56

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…

Sweden has far fewer cases and death rate without a massive lockdown. If this disease is really so deadly, why isn’t their country being massively depopulated? Same for states in the US that haven’t implemented any lockdown measures.

Sweden also has a fairly low population density outside its larger cities, as well as a relatively small (10M) population. And its measures aren't without criticism - consider they have 100 deaths per 1M people, which places them 10th on countries with over 1K cases.

There's states in the US with similar densities; I'd imagine those would be spared most of the deaths, even if stricter measures weren't implemented, but what about the coasts?

Honestly, the US, large and heterogenous as it is, should implement different measures per state. It's obvious to me that what works for some places may not work for others so well.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#108

Post by salawat » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #13

ColonelSanders wrote: post #9

Idea: Whenever there are furloughs or layoff, any payouts or profits for the C-Suite and managers that are higher the average employee, is put into an annuity for the laid off employees. So if a CEO makes 30,000,000, and the average worker is paid 125,000. A 29,875,000 fund will be made to deposit a monthly check into the bank of the fired employees. This includes any profits made from selling stocks. To avoid loopho…

Even if the scale of the difference divided by the number of employees were enough to be useful (it's not), all this would do is incentivize executives to run inefficient businesses into the ground.

How ya figure? Unless you're thinking something like intentionally driving the company into bankruptcy which will be a self-regulating problem.

No one will hire a CEO who swan dives a company on a regular basis.

A "business" is a value generating construct. Either in raw profit potential, or in that it keeps work being done. Not seeing the counter-incentive.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#109

Post by dehrmann » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #26

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

My fear is that 2-3 months of lockdown isn't a cure, it turns into on-and-off lockdown, herd immunity is never established because immunity wears off in 2 years, and a vaccine is 2-5 years out.

Ignoring the economics, preserving life takes on new meaning if you count a every locked down day as taking away an hour of life from someone. Take the Bay Area. At 7.7M people, every day, there are 11.7 lifespans wasted by lockdown. There have been 3.2 covid-19 deaths per day.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#110

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

fullshark wrote: post #60

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been very hard for me to understand this line of thinking. As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. Do you think California would not have many more cases if the measures were relaxed? Or do you think that the cases would not be all that bad? Or do you think that they would only affect people that you aren't personally concerned about? I'm asking honestly fo…

I personally think something should have been done, but it's an open question if we went too far or not far enough and am willing to listen to the argument that we went too far. It's unlikely what was done was the absolute perfect policy prescription given all the trade offs involved. Personally I'm looking to Sweden's data, a country that instituted some social distancing measures (no crowds above 50) but not all (R…

Give it time. They're still in full exponential growth, whereas every place that enacted social distancing rules a couple weeks ago or more is now plateauing.