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Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

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Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#311

Post by aogaili »

thu2111 wrote: post #271
aogaili wrote: post #208

Things in the US seems absurd from an outsider perspective due to ideological beliefs. On the same month, you can read two articles coming from the US: 1) Jeff Bezos Becomes The First Person Ever Worth $200 Billion 2) Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent It doesn't take much thinking to conclude that there is something messed up with resource/capital allocation in this economy. But t…

It doesn't take much thinking to conclude that there is something messed up with resource/capital allocation in this economy Well, yes. The government forbids people from using local businesses and forces them on pain of terrible retaliation to buy from online services, and Jeff Bezos is very good at running those. That is a messed up allocation of resources but it's not Bezos' fault the government made so many of hi…

Yeah, well I did not say whose fault is it, or how it should be structured, I just point merely that is not working well.

I'm not economist, this is above my knowledge, but there has to be a better way of doing this.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#312

Post by aogaili »

RhysU wrote: post #263
aogaili wrote: post #208

Things in the US seems absurd from an outsider perspective due to ideological beliefs. On the same month, you can read two articles coming from the US: 1) Jeff Bezos Becomes The First Person Ever Worth $200 Billion 2) Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent It doesn't take much thinking to conclude that there is something messed up with resource/capital allocation in this economy. But t…

Hypothetically, Bezos could own all of the bars in NYC, decide they are now a bad bet, and not pay their rents. He could invest elsewhere while those businesses go bankrupt. It would be wise of him, in this hypothetical, to deploy capital to a place where it would obtain better returns than propping up a broad cross-section of marginal businesses. To your last paragraph, all superpowers eventually fade. Look on my wo…

Thank you I'll take a look.

Again I'm not pointing at Bezos, he contributed a lot of great innovation to society and I'm a big user of Amazon services, I merely pointing out that things are really out of balance. And this inequality trend was bad before Corona and it just got way worst. So something seems fundamentally broken.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#313

Post by aogaili »

aogaili wrote: post #208

Things in the US seems absurd from an outsider perspective due to ideological beliefs. On the same month, you can read two articles coming from the US: 1) Jeff Bezos Becomes The First Person Ever Worth $200 Billion 2) Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent It doesn't take much thinking to conclude that there is something messed up with resource/capital allocation in this economy. But t…

I'd appreciate for those who downvote to put their reason, I might learn something.

But please don't downvote because you don't like what you read.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#314

Post by RhysU »

aogaili wrote: post #312
RhysU wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, Bezos could own all of the bars in NYC, decide they are now a bad bet, and not pay their rents. He could invest elsewhere while those businesses go bankrupt. It would be wise of him, in this hypothetical, to deploy capital to a place where it would obtain better returns than propping up a broad cross-section of marginal businesses. To your last paragraph, all superpowers eventually fade. Look on my wo…

Thank you I'll take a look. Again I'm not pointing at Bezos, he contributed a lot of great innovation to society and I'm a big user of Amazon services, I merely pointing out that things are really out of balance. And this inequality trend was bad before Corona and it just got way worst. So something seems fundamentally broken.

Throughout most of human history wealth/power has been wildly skewed into a small number of hands. The historical anomaly is that equality today has become pervasive to the point that we find inequality to be noteworthy. Current trends may be reversion to the historical mean without anything being fundamentally broken.

It's been a hell of a good few centuries for much of humanity. We should keep it up, of course, but a reversion is normal in a dynamic system with feedback even when an upward trend is "sticking".

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#315

Post by aogaili »

RhysU wrote: post #314
aogaili wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you I'll take a look. Again I'm not pointing at Bezos, he contributed a lot of great innovation to society and I'm a big user of Amazon services, I merely pointing out that things are really out of balance. And this inequality trend was bad before Corona and it just got way worst. So something seems fundamentally broken.

Throughout most of human history wealth/power has been wildly skewed into a small number of hands. The historical anomaly is that equality today has become pervasive to the point that we find inequality to be noteworthy. Current trends may be reversion to the historical mean without anything being fundamentally broken. It's been a hell of a good few centuries for much of humanity. We should keep it up, of course, but…

That is an interesting perspective.

But my understanding that that human society were mostly hunter gatherers, with little resources to speak of and there is no concept of capital ownership and accumulation since there is nothing material to accumulate, it is only after the agricultural revolution (ownership of land and slaves) and industrial revolution (ownership of machines and oil) and information revolution (ownership of data) that capitalist started accumulating and owning more and more resources. Therefore, I really don't think capital accumulation is the natural order of things, just as fat accumulation in today's carbs rich society is not what the human body is designed for.

I understand your perspective, but I think, and with all respect, it is defeatist mindset. There is sure a better modern economical systems specially with the improvements in human capability to make decisions using AI and modern technology.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#316

Post by Weebs »

twblalock wrote: post #285
Weebs wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because landlords are trying to profit off of the conditions created by the broader local community. They make a bet on which space created by the community will allow them to extract more rent than the cost to maintain the building and pay the loan, and later sell the property for more than they paid. Tenants are either members of the community who want a home, or are trying to provide a service to the community. On…

It's not extraction, it's a service. If there were no landlords, it would be impossible to start a business in NYC without buying a building. Most businesses would never be able to afford that. Thank goodness there are landlords who are willing to rent out their buildings!

It's not either or, you don't have to have individual ownership for properties. A landlord can be replaced by a neighborhood cooperative that redirects the value produced from the building back into the community (schools, public service funding, etc.)

Private ownership and rent contracts is only one way of many to solve the problem of granting access to space without outright purchase.

Also, providing a service and extracting value from others work aren't mutually exclusive. Consider this: a foreign organization extracts natural resources, refines them, sells the new product back to the localsy (and other outside communities) for large profits that are mostly redirected outside of the native community.

I would clearly call that extraction, the fact that they also provide a service to the community doesn't negate that.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#317

Post by loco5niner »

just-juan-post wrote: post #183
dwaltrip wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves. It’s about preventing the spread of infectious disease. You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. That being said, I’m not sure what the best policy is. It doesn’t seem feasible to have a complete lockdown that extends for many months. So we have to be clever, keep learning, and find good solution…

> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on. > You might be fine, but if you are asymptomatic, you can directly harm or kill others and not even know it. See also: Drinking, condom-less sex, smoking, and junk food. All of these things directly or indirectly harm others and if this is about public safety then it's time yo…

>> This isn’t about people making decisions for themselves

> Making decisions for ones self is exactly the principal that the USA was founded on.

You mis-understood that statement. It's saying its about making decisions for others, since you could be infecting them without knowing it.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#318

Post by loco5niner »

just-juan-post wrote: post #160
MiroF wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Study Finds Most Restaurants Fail Within First Year Of It Becoming Illegal To Go To Them Even without these laws, personal decisions would have decimated the business regardless. Even in places didn't shut down, patronage plummeted.

If people are scared and won't go to restaurants and bars then why continue to keep them closed? You are saying that patronage is already down so why even restrict them? Give people and businesses a choice in the matter. This is about letting individuals and businesses make their own decisions without the government forcing them to close.

> If people are scared and...

You're framing this the wrong way. It's not about being scared, its about being careful.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#319

Post by RhysU »

aogaili wrote: post #315
RhysU wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout most of human history wealth/power has been wildly skewed into a small number of hands. The historical anomaly is that equality today has become pervasive to the point that we find inequality to be noteworthy. Current trends may be reversion to the historical mean without anything being fundamentally broken. It's been a hell of a good few centuries for much of humanity. We should keep it up, of course, but…

That is an interesting perspective. But my understanding that that human society were mostly hunter gatherers, with little resources to speak of and there is no concept of capital ownership and accumulation since there is nothing material to accumulate, it is only after the agricultural revolution (ownership of land and slaves) and industrial revolution (ownership of machines and oil) and information revolution (owne…

Kings and pharaohs accumulated capital even if they didn't use the word. We're something like 10,000 years into amassing resources at scale in the hands of the few.

This growth coincides with states, incidentally, and is the subject of the very cool book https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States.... That book combined with https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/022647822X (as a state, like a dog, must compete in an ecological niche) and an archeology professor that liked to point out that "progress" is a recent Western invention (vs recorded history) inform my perspective here.

I am not saying that we shouldn't strive for better, just that I don't see a fairly short reversal, on the timescale of a lifetime, as a compelling reason to scrap the approaches that collectively have brought us this far.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#320

Post by Terretta »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #259
TomSwirly wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "you may be hurting people indirectly" argument never worked and it's getting more brittle with time. The United States has 25% of the world's COVID deaths and 5% of the population. In fact, wilful ignorance DOES hurt people.

To be fair, the US is in kindof a weird position with respect to Covid 19. It's a perfect storm of 1) good testing (at least better than the developing world) and 2) inconsistent and ineffective responses to Covid. I don't dispute that the US has performed poorly here, but the 25%/5% stat needs to be contextualised by the fact that other countries who have done really poorly (e.g. Brazil), have much less testing than…

Deaths have nothing to do with testing.

"We can observe trends from the number of deaths reported each year, on a weekly basis. When we see large deviations in the numbers for a time period, we call that excess deaths. Looking at 2020 since March, the raw number of excess deaths is 200,000 more people than a normal year. When we try to understand that, COVID-19 is the most rational and likely explanation. If you don't believe it's COVID-19, try to pinpoint why this year has been so different than any other. Why would a new disease that kills people not be the cause?"

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus...

Graphs:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

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