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

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

#141

Post by salawat »

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.

I know next to no one who ever uses "Stocks" to pay for everyday costs of raising a family or just getting by. I am aware that, yes, retirees stand to lose a lot; which is tragic, and also why I downright disagree with the idea of privatized retirement accounts based on held and sold equity based on the assumption that growth will always occur. In fact, the architecture of such a system is the driving force in the propagation of cross-generational fiscal inequality, and will inevitably result in a slow inexorable trickle up without an active mechanism in place to ensure that wages grow by the same factor that technology obviate the need to have someone do a job. In a crisis, someone is inevitably left with the empty bag as things spiral.

That said; the economy taking a dive is preferential to the population doing the same. There will always be work to be done as long as we wake up every day; and the trick is figuring out how to adapt to new circumstances to get that done.

For instance, now would be a fantastic time to train additional medical personnel or build additional infrastructure for them. Research efforts into mitigating the pandemic are also highly desirable. Logistics solutions to enable financial compensation and product dispatch from community kitchens restauraunts, etc without necessitating physical congregation are sure bets, and just about anything that isn't dependent on getting a bunch of people all in the same place at the same time is also good.

The economy is perfectly fine if you don't assume there is an implicit guarantee that the same endeavors that were profitable yesterday must remain so always. What we're experiencing is an economic record scratch and pivot.

Perhaps for a while most actual economic transactions will be centered on "because it needed to be done, and the government is subsidizing everything until we can find a way to get private enterprise running freely again." Who cares? Life'll have to keep going. If a Jubilee has to happen to reset things... Oh well. It'll suck; but no one asked for this.

The type of work to have people thrown at it is what has changed, and the acceptable methods of execution have been altered. I doubt we'll see a wholesale collapse of civilization by a long shot. What'll be far more interesting to see is if we'll weather the transition to less globalised work smoothly or not. The predictability of life just took a hit; that's all. Time to show how to change. No?

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

#142

Post by adventured »

clouddrover wrote: post #122
christophilus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken This is probably true, but other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread. Our options aren't binary. It's not as if the only choice is "Nuke everything" or "Surrender". The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. We probably could d…

> The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. The US has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any nation. The US is seeing about 2,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths a day at the moment: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html Contrast the US results with Australia's or South Korea's results. Australia and South Korea are doing m…

> The US has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any nation.

Your statement isn't very useful. It's the per capita death rate that matters the most of any metric. It's non-sense to compare the US to countries with 5% or 20% of the population using absolute numbers.

In terms of density, it's the NYC region that overwhelmingly accounts for the problem in the US. NY + NJ = majority of US deaths. The NYC region is the most dense on population in the US, which dramatically magnified its outbreak.

Approximately 44 of 50 states have lower per capita death rates than Sweden. Most US states are doing extraordinarily well in fact.

Half of US states are seeing no serious outbreak at all.

Arizona has 7.3 million people and only 131 deaths.

Belgium has 11.4 million people and 4,000 deaths. Sweden is considered a relatively good outcome in Europe so far, they have 10 million people and 1,000 deaths. Texas has three times the population of Sweden with 1/3 the deaths.

Some more examples:

Utah 19. Oregon 55. Arkansas 30. Washington DC 67. Delaware 41. Hawaii 9. Idaho 33. Iowa 49. Kansas 69. Maine 20. Minnesota 79. Nebraska 18. New Hampshire 23. New Mexico 31. North Dakota 9. South Dakota 6. Montana 7. Vermont 29. West Virginia 9. Wyoming 1. Puerto Rico 45.

Lower population density helps a lot in most cases. However San Francisco is also one of the most dense cities in the US and only has ~15 deaths or so. That's thanks largely to climate, which impedes transmission heavily. The same reason the entire San Diego County only has 53 deaths.

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

#143

Post by wholien »

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.

We'll see how Sweden fares since they aren doing very minimal shutdowns (public events over 500 people are canceled).

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

#144

Post by DuskStar »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #128
joegahona wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Dense city? Quarantine. - Moderately dense? High risk individuals quarantine, everyone else social distances, but works. - etc. Across the board, if your business is the sort that can WFH (such as software companies), then you do work from home. If not, then you're open, but with precautions. Restaurants are open, but pickup only, etc. How is this _that_ much different from what's being done now?

Well for example there's lots of non-essential business that can operate while enforcing social distancing. Closing bars and restaurants makes sense. But closing stores were you walk in and walk out does not make sense. Banning fishing doesn't make sense. Very broad strokes have been used to lock stuff down.

And at least in Michigan, they're not taking the time to open up low risk businesses now - instead they're filling in even more of the gaps that allowed life to continue. No golf courses, even without any staff contact. No landscaping. No landscaping supplies. No motorboats or jet skis. No travel between two residences you own.

But at least you can still buy lottery tickets!

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

#145

Post by clouddrover »

adventured wrote: post #142
clouddrover wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. The US has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any nation. The US is seeing about 2,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths a day at the moment: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html Contrast the US results with Australia's or South Korea's results. Australia and South Korea are doing m…

> The US has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any nation. Your statement isn't very useful. It's the per capita death rate that matters the most of any metric. It's non-sense to compare the US to countries with 5% or 20% of the population using absolute numbers. In terms of density, it's the NYC region that overwhelmingly accounts for the problem in the US. NY + NJ = majority of US deaths. The NYC…

> It's the per capita death rate that matters the most of any metric.

The US has the 15th highest per capita death rate. It's on track to go up in that ranking:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

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

#146

Post by CydeWeys »

kmtrowbr wrote: post #134
CydeWeys wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no basis for your fear that immunity would wear off in two years. Unlike the cold and the flu, these coronavirus strains do not mutate quickly enough to cause quick loss of immunity. It seems more akin to chickenpox, which you can only catch once (and shingles doesn't count). So, take heart in this at least?

common cold = caused by coronaviruses, COVID-19 = an uncommonly deadly coronavirus RNA viruses have a faster mutation rate than DNA viruses. Chickenpox = DNA virus, Coronavirus = RNA virus. That Chickenpox is a DNA virus is why, like HIV, it can survive in the body for the long term and re-emerge decades later as shingles. DNA has a double helix which has error-correction and is more stable. However that makes it als…

Nope. The common cold is a catch-all term for over 200 different mild upper respiratory viruses, the clear majority of which are not coronaviruses. The most common strain of virus causing the common cold is a rhinovirus, which does have the property of mutating well and thus being hard to develop a resistance to. It is true that some of the common cold strains are coronavirus, but not most of them, and regardless, they aren't COVID-19 (which is of recent zoonotic origin). Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 indicates that catching it once is likely to confer life-long immunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

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

#147

Post by williamstein »

CydeWeys wrote: post #110
fullshark wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sweden's number of confirmed cases is not in full exponential growth right now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

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

#148

Post by thaumaturgy »

tempsy wrote: post #55
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…

Not all cities issued a shelter in place in California at the same time. Bay Area was early, and then the state issued one a week later. You think you’d see a hot spot somewhere in the state but doesn’t appear to be the case. Unclear to me that SIP is the main reason why we have few cases vs if we just required face masks and social distancing while keeping more businesses open.

Yeah, fwiw I would not argue with someone that claimed that nobody has a complete picture of all of the factors in the virus's infection rate. There has been a lot of conflicting and incomplete information and it's been difficult to stay up-to-date. It might be that there's some sort of difference between California and New York or northern Italy that would make California far less susceptible. Maybe environmental, or demographic, who knows.

The problem though is that we don't know that California would somehow turn out differently, and because of this thing's damnable asymptomatic incubation period and rates of spread, by the time you realize you haven't taken it seriously enough, it's going to be very bad.

So imagine you're sitting at the table with the governor and CalOES. They're asking you to make a decision today: tank the economy, or not. In two weeks you get to see how it turned out: either you saved the economy and only several hundred people died, or several thousand people have died and your healthcare system is on the verge of collapse and the economy tanked anyway because sick and dead people don't do a lot of shopping.

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

#149

Post by jdminhbg »

ColonelSanders wrote: post #15
jdminhbg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> all this would do is incentivize executives to run inefficient businesses into the ground. What incentive would an executive have to run a business into the ground? It's a business - the motive to gain profit and ambition won't leave because profit is shared. Regardless - my point is - what's wrong with being generous to workers? Why not share a bit of that with people who work so the motivation and incentives are…

> What incentive would an executive have to run a business into the ground

The one given above: laying off workers to make the business competitive results in having your salary clawed back for three years. Staying inefficient and getting out-competed does not.

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

#150

Post by CydeWeys »

clouddrover wrote: post #145
adventured wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any nation. Your statement isn't very useful. It's the per capita death rate that matters the most of any metric. It's non-sense to compare the US to countries with 5% or 20% of the population using absolute numbers. In terms of density, it's the NYC region that overwhelmingly accounts for the problem in the US. NY + NJ = majority of US deaths. The NYC…

> It's the per capita death rate that matters the most of any metric. The US has the 15th highest per capita death rate. It's on track to go up in that ranking: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

And Sweden is higher in the per capita death rate and on track to go up much higher in that ranking.
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