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America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#31

Post by 0des »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30
nostromo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click on the comment’s date. Then you’ll get the option to vouch for it. (Assuming you meet some unknown karma threshold.)

You have to have 31 karma to vouch for a comment. If you vouch for too many comments that break site guidelines, you’ll have the vouch feature taken away. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356579

Thanks! Are you aware of a shadowban mechanism that may be preventing this person from being heard, or does this appear to you to be someone who has gained the ire of someone who is sufficiently motivated to suppress their speech indefinitely?

I ask because I find 2 or 3 of these accounts each week and have been wondering why they aren't allowed to participate, and by what mechanic.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#32

Post by 01100011 »

nostromo wrote: post #17

Childcare will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future. The cost will keep parents, mostly women, out of the workforce. Childcare used to be cheap, but overregulation at the state and local level have made it extremely expensive. For example, extreme caregiver to child ratio regulations really drive up costs. On top of that you need a lawyer and a pile of permits just to open up a daycare center in severa…

How many of the unemployed have kids? Seems like something we should have data for.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#33

Post by thephyber »

pessimizer wrote: post #7
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #3

I have another thesis. Take a sample of all the last few major economic crisis. For example the 2008 credit crisis. Check if available jobs persisted open, 18+ months subsequent to crisis. If they didnt, then something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis. Take a look at confounding factors. What do you see? -Huge subsidy of unemployment via federal checks and unemployment expansions. Pay matters, b…

This is a bizarre take. The recovery from 2008 was the slowest recovery in US history (marketed as the longest period of growth in US history), and it probably permanently damaged the size of the workforce. Prime age employment was down IIRC 10% for years.

I never understood the expectation that the upswing from every debt cycle can be equally fast compared to the last wave. Doesn’t this assume that all economic conditions pre/post 2008 are the same?

Financial products and regulation changed. Cloud, gig apps, smartphone apps, social media all changed the work landscape right around 2008.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#34

Post by imtringued »

indymike wrote: post #18
0des wrote: post #12

An otherwise insightful (but somewhat crass) comment seems to have been immediately [dead] upon being posted, but I think they might be on to something. Readers: I hope you don't mind me momentarily intervening in the voting process, but I will post the comment below for others who may not have show-dead turned on to see. EDIT: Even more curious, the majority of this accounts otherwise normal posts seem to be [dead]…

> A 50% drop in housing costs will serve them better than a 15% raise. The number of Americans who would benefit from a substantial deflation rises every day. Except servicing existing debt would become nearly impossible as wages went down, but that pesky car payment stayed at $500/mo.

In reality, the market isn't really naturally free in the "freedom" sense. There is coercion everywhere. It's just that ownership of land allows for the most powerful form of coercion.

Advertising companies, sales people, car dealers or realtors are all trying to convince you to spend more so they get their commission or more revenue but ultimately you can always refuse. You can always decide to live well within your means. The truth is that pretty much everything on the market that is free of coercion is getting cheaper.

Housing doesn't work like that because location is a natural monopoly. It's a basic human need that cannot be produced and jobs unnecessarily cluster in cities forcing people to move there bidding up prices endlessly. The rule of thumb has become "If you can afford the house, you can afford everything that fits inside it." Wanna build a machine shop with $100k worth of tools? Cheap compared to the $600k to $2 million house. That's the thing. Strangely enough, literally everything is getting cheap except real estate. The story that inflation has been ruining the working class for the last 10 years just doesn't add up. There is no reason why housing shouldn't obey the same trend other than artificial scarcity of either housing near jobs or jobs near vacant housing.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#35

Post by s5300 »

0des wrote: post #29
nostromo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click on the comment’s date. Then you’ll get the option to vouch for it. (Assuming you meet some unknown karma threshold.)

Nostromo, thank you very much, I'll do that. Have a great weekend and thanks for showing me 'the way' :) Also, do you happen to know why this person's seemingly normal comments appear to be [dead] within 0 minutes of their post?

Likely because they've at some point reached and sustained a negative amount of Karma like I have :P

Sometimes it's for a good reason, others it because there's some very alt right folks on HN that will brigade you if you've said something that makes them a bit butthurt.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#36

Post by rsj_hn »

0des wrote: post #12

An otherwise insightful (but somewhat crass) comment seems to have been immediately [dead] upon being posted, but I think they might be on to something. Readers: I hope you don't mind me momentarily intervening in the voting process, but I will post the comment below for others who may not have show-dead turned on to see. EDIT: Even more curious, the majority of this accounts otherwise normal posts seem to be [dead]…

It's a valid take. Not one I necessarily agree with, but one that deserves exploration.

IMO we are facing costs and painful trade offs:

* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action was shutting the economy down during Covid to minimize deaths. Well, OK, there is a price for that in terms of destroying businesses and livelihoods, of loneliness and isolation. A lot of people are now stressed out, out of work - and those jobs are gone. Yes, new jobs will take their place, but not necessarily the same jobs in the same place.

* Many insisted that the "moral" course of action is to suspend evictions when people lose their jobs during covid. It was unfair to lose your apartment if you lost your job. Well, OK, but that means that rental prices are now out of whack from what people are earning and the new job situation. That inventory is held back from the market and from (downward) price pressure.

* Many also insisted that the "moral" course of action is to not have professional versus trade tracking in schools, that every high school should be "college prep", and everyone should go to to college. Well, OK, there is a cost for that in terms of not having a trade school infrastructure and a lot of people with no marketable skills even if they attended college or a college prep high school.

The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. By pretending we'll all just be professionals, we have a huge mass of people who have no careers and no opportunity to engage in truly skilled work, together with acute shortages of things like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, general contractors, etc.

So yeah, life for a lot of people is very bleak. The take away is not to "warn" employers that they should manufacture lots of non-existent jobs for workers, but to fix our educational system so that it produces the kinds of people our economy needs, rather than the kinds of workers we think we want to be. Then rely on church attendance and government income insurance to take care of our moral concerns.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#37

Post by toomuchtodo »

0des wrote: post #31
toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to have 31 karma to vouch for a comment. If you vouch for too many comments that break site guidelines, you’ll have the vouch feature taken away. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356579

Thanks! Are you aware of a shadowban mechanism that may be preventing this person from being heard, or does this appear to you to be someone who has gained the ire of someone who is sufficiently motivated to suppress their speech indefinitely? I ask because I find 2 or 3 of these accounts each week and have been wondering why they aren't allowed to participate, and by what mechanic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441707

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#38

Post by 0des »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #37
0des wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Are you aware of a shadowban mechanism that may be preventing this person from being heard, or does this appear to you to be someone who has gained the ire of someone who is sufficiently motivated to suppress their speech indefinitely? I ask because I find 2 or 3 of these accounts each week and have been wondering why they aren't allowed to participate, and by what mechanic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441707

Are there instances where these warnings are private or later deleted? I find it a little unsettling that on some of these I cannot find any such warnings or replies.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#39

Post by imtringued »

steanne wrote: post #8
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #3

I have another thesis. Take a sample of all the last few major economic crisis. For example the 2008 credit crisis. Check if available jobs persisted open, 18+ months subsequent to crisis. If they didnt, then something is different in this crisis vis a vis all prior crisis. Take a look at confounding factors. What do you see? -Huge subsidy of unemployment via federal checks and unemployment expansions. Pay matters, b…

then the states that cut off the extra unemployment early would have seen greater job growth then the states that kept it up. they didn't. https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-that-cut-unemployment-be...

People love talking about how government spending causes an artificial boom. In my opinion it just increases flexibility in the debt market by giving unemployed people access to government debt via unemployment benefits. Of course, it's still a band aid and we should figure out other ways like sharing work by making the hours per week one can work flexible according to what happens in the economy.

The fact that entire people end up unemployed and then need to be bailed out by the state is just grossly inefficient compared to e.g. firing 50% of their work hours. I say this because every human contributes a baseline of demand for things like housing and groceries. Firing workers also fires the consumer that demands housing and groceries which leads to a downward spiral that is much worse than just the inefficient production of goods and services that nobody wants.

Re: America’s unemployed are sending a message: Safety and compensation matter

#40

Post by dharmaturtle »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #10
fallingknife wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't COVID unemployment all over now, though?

It depends on state. Red States happen to have recovered better. https://wallethub.com/edu/states-covid-recovery/90947

To be clear: this site defines "recovery" by combining COVID and economic factors - equally weighted.

If we look solely at COVID transmission rate, that's a somewhat different picture: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...

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