Bankruptcy cannot create more revenue Tell that to Hertz
The SEC certainly did.
Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share the distress. Covid has accelerated the inequality that was already at record levels. For many in tech and other white colar work Covid is either a non-event or a net benefit, while for many others its life ruining. We better start preparing for a future where many, maybe most, people have no economic value.
Inequality is an increasing function of population size, so it probably went down some due to COVID. the reason is that for many things there is only value in being the best or within the top finite number in the population. Being top x percent isn’t good enough, even 0.1% with sufficiently large populations. For example: spectator sports, politics, movie stars, the first to discover relativity, semiconductors... and…
The number of things you can be ranked on increases as the population size increases.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#73Guess who bought up real estate post-2009 crisis, when prices were at rock bottom? Wealthy individuals and corporations that had enough assets to withstand the storm and capitalize on a down market. Guess who will grab more market share post-COVID? Better yet, guess who wasn't affected by forced lockdowns and benefited during the worst of COVID? I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from sma…
>> I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more. It's not discussed because people don't care. They are optimizing for one thing and one thing only currently: COVID case counts. Anything to get the number under what they think is a good number, all externalities be damned. In six months when they can't get their fair trade coffee from th…
The number of COVID cases is still growing incredibly fast and we are not far away from a million deaths.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how this demonstrates your point. The rich get richer. US households have changed dramatically since 1967. There's participation of women in the workforce (up about 20% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf ), housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ ) - home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class, and the wages of the middle class have incr…
>The rich get richer. People claim this a lot, but for a half dozen datasets I've looked at over the years, the opposite is true. To prove this claim, make some definition of rich (income, wealth, top N, whatever), and see how many people in that class stay there. You'll find that most rich do not stay in the level of wealth you picked very long. A simple place to check is Forbes 400. The top 400 churns a lot. The ne…
This all seems irrelevant when the poorest 80% of Americans own about 7% of the nation's wealth. The top 1% owns 40% of the wealth. This statistic by itself would not be an existential problem if the poor weren't struggling to survive. But they are. And so it is. 12% of all Americans are below the poverty line, which for a single person is less than 12k USD a year.
See pg10 for 40% net worth figure: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085.pdf
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually it seems that a few large scale trials are starting, and Dr. Fauci was optimistic for November
The fastest vaccine our species has successfully made took 5 years of trials. November is beyond the traditional definition of "optimistic" by an order of magnitude. I want to believe in a November miracle, but pessimism says to curb our enthusiasm (greatly). (Also, it is probably mostly a "coincidence" Dr. Fauci's job currently requires him to say everything will be better by November because of pressure from a cert…
Indeed, that would be fast, but maybe the virus is in a category we have already seen and created vaccines for before.
There seems to be already about 6 large scale tests in progress in the world (ie. after lab/animal/small group), that's a good sign.
Anyway, I don't see much reason for Dr. Fauci to make such kind of statement if it was still really years away.
The tests will tell where we are, we'll see in a month or two.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more. It's not discussed because people don't care. They are optimizing for one thing and one thing only currently: COVID case counts. Anything to get the number under what they think is a good number, all externalities be damned. In six months when they can't get their fair trade coffee from th…
Your take is dripping with bias. Everyone who had any sense wanted a lockdown with business stimulus, there is no reason these externalities needed to be bad in any capacity. Sacrificing lives because the Republican party is okay with it isn't on the common person.
That's revisionism. A whole lot of people did NOT want a lockdown, or accepted it only because it was billed as only for two weeks. Once it became clear that the goalposts were rapidly moving and "two weeks", "flatten the curve" etc had been a lie, a huge number of people became disgusted with it.
And please, if you'll accuse others of dripping with bias, attempting to paint this as a strictly left/right issue doesn't work. It's normally the left who claim to care about workers and small businesses, isn't it? Those are the people suffering the most.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the work Bill Gates is doing, I'm pro vaccine, and there's no way in hell I'm getting the COVID vaccine before sometime late 2021. I want to see long-term results before I take my chances with a fast-tracked vaccine. I suspect that there are lots of other folks with the same mindset.
I understand this sentiment, but the more people think this way, the longer it takes to safely get to herd immunity, so there is a massive tradeoff happening here.
No, herd immunity is already happening anyway via natural vaccination, i.e. people getting it. There's no actual need for a vaccine. Case numbers are falling in many areas again, even after a round of opening ups.
By now the vaccine has clearly shifted in purpose from a medical one to a primarily psychological one. For people who are wedded to lockdowns and can't admit how disastrous they are, a vaccine is a face-saving exit criteria. It comes with the bonus of more top-down control of the population too!
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#78Isn't this tracked to some degree in unemployment stats? Is being laid off from a small business that different from being laid off from a large business?
Not necessarily.
In the UK unemployment stats haven't moved, despite huge numbers of job losses, because for someone to be classified as unemployed they must be looking for work. But there's no work to find so people aren't looking. That's why technical unemployment often acts in odd ways: a booming economy may not see unemployment fall for a while because people who became economically inactive restart a job search, so get added to the ranks of the unemployed.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how this demonstrates your point. The rich get richer. US households have changed dramatically since 1967. There's participation of women in the workforce (up about 20% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf ), housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ ) - home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class, and the wages of the middle class have incr…
>The rich get richer. People claim this a lot, but for a half dozen datasets I've looked at over the years, the opposite is true. To prove this claim, make some definition of rich (income, wealth, top N, whatever), and see how many people in that class stay there. You'll find that most rich do not stay in the level of wealth you picked very long. A simple place to check is Forbes 400. The top 400 churns a lot. The ne…
I'm sure you have seen the graph showing productivity increases aligned with incomes suddenly diverging in the 70's and incomes flat lining while productivity continued to increase linearly. Given the stark change, I don't think it was necessarily due to increased global competition. Where did the money that would have gone to improve salaries end up going? Having incomes flat line for the middle class for the last 40 years is not a good sign. Perhaps the money has gone to the billionaire class, but I am not sure. What is your take on that.
Re: Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fastest vaccine our species has successfully made took 5 years of trials. November is beyond the traditional definition of "optimistic" by an order of magnitude. I want to believe in a November miracle, but pessimism says to curb our enthusiasm (greatly). (Also, it is probably mostly a "coincidence" Dr. Fauci's job currently requires him to say everything will be better by November because of pressure from a cert…
Indeed, that would be fast, but maybe the virus is in a category we have already seen and created vaccines for before. There seems to be already about 6 large scale tests in progress in the world (ie. after lab/animal/small group), that's a good sign. Anyway, I don't see much reason for Dr. Fauci to make such kind of statement if it was still really years away. The tests will tell where we are, we'll see in a month o…
> Indeed, that would be fast, but maybe the virus is in a category we have already seen and created vaccines for before.
I pointed this out two comments up, but the coronavirus family is common enough that something like 1/3 of the causes of the Common Cold is a coronavirus (the rest IIRC are a different family known as rhinoviruses). We've never managed a Common Cold vaccine or vaccines despite something like a century of work (at least as long as we've been fighting annual flu season with flu vaccines). In the immediate past couple of decades we've seen an increasing number of deadly coronaviruses: the first SARS virus (this being the second), the MERS virus, basically several of the things in the last few years people have been referring to by possibly misnomers like "avian flu" and "swine flu" have been in this family and so forth. So far we've not been successful in creating a vaccine for any of those. No coronavirus in human history has a vaccine, and there is a lot of history with the family (contrary to whatever racist and/or "animal jumping" theories people have that this is something very radically new; it's a "very uncommon cold").
On the hopeful side, Science often builds strongly on failure, and so it could be that we are perfectly set up for a breakthrough from all of this history of vaccine failure. (And again, I pointed out two comments above the hopeful optimism that a coronavirus vaccine puts us on a wonderful path to possible a common cold vaccine. That could be amazing for future humanity.)
Just that history so far with this entire family/category of viruses doesn't give us a lot of room for hope right now.