3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits • Hacker News Board

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#191

Post by wyclif » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #142

PaulRobinson wrote: post #23

A staggering number, and unprecedented in the modern era. I'm not in the US or an America, but my (retired), Father is and for the sake of the people around him and his family I hope this is the point where the American political system - and Republicans in particular - realise that their ideologies are dead. In the UK we saw an Old-Etonian Tory Prime Minister in the space of a couple of weeks: - Effectively national…

> Politics here has changed forever Unlikely. I think we'll be back to business as usual (at least on the political side) within a year of the end of the pandemic. I'm also afraid that this is going to be a major setback not just for Europe but globalization in general, which will leave us all worse off in the long run.

On the contrary, setbacks for globalization may very well leave us better off...after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now, and have vast swathes of our supply chain for essential pharmaceuticals and medical equipment farmed out to evil, duplicitous regimes like the Chinese state.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#192

Post by crazy1van » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #162

phasnox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It makes you wonder how much long the confinement can really last.

Does it? Let's set aside the scorekeeping systems we use (money, profit, ownership, wealth) for a moment. I see no reason to think we can't get people properly fed indefinitely. We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth. And it's not like the shut down businesses will evaporate or anything. The buildings will be there. The equipment will be there. 97%+ of the staff will still be around. Eventually we'll have a…

> We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth

Don’t forget about food. There’s a lot of complexity and people involved in getting food from a farm to your local restaurants and grocery stores.

If it gets really bad and even a fraction of people in these industries stop working, stay-at-home life might get a lot less comfortable.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#193

Post by williamdclt » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

big_chungus wrote: post #167

csomar wrote: post #146

> A week ago, he said he had “a good middle-class job” which paid him $35.50 an hour plus health care and retirement benefits. Now he is struggling to figure out how he’ll pay a $300 electric bill and $1,000 in rent for his townhouse. He also lost his health insurance. You make $35.5/hour in (I suppose?) a stable job but if the work stops for a week, you struggle with a $300 bill? I know some people are living payche…

This is exactly right. The economy has grown to unsustainable levels based on the economic habits of the average American who can't be bothered to save, hence the crash we're seeing now. At sixty hours a week, that guy should be making six figures, pre-tax. There is zero excuse for not saving. Everyone should save at least six months of salary for emergencies; though a few people legitimately can't, most Americans si…

Americans work sixty hours a week? Ten hour a day, rest on Sunday?

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#194

Post by treyfitty » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

throwaway_USD wrote: post #155

Everyone should expect the stock market to thrive off this data today...

Why’s that? I see that the SP500 is rising... but why is this “good news” for businesses?

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#195

Post by bbxxcc » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

cjslep wrote: post #32

I grew up with the puritanical mindset of: "Your intrinsic worth as a human is the money you earn; because the money you earn is from how hard you work; and how hard you work is a reflection of your intrinsic Virtue." Thus I grew up in a family that loathes the unemployed. I really hope -- though I have grave doubts -- that this event gets through to them, so that they can have some personal growth, too.

I think loathing the unemployed (especially if it isn't caused by health conditions and isn't temporary, like in this case) is commonplace in any society. There are many studies which show unemployed people are more likely to commit crimes. e.g. [1]

Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers. [2] Unless society as a whole actually produces wealth, there is nothing to tax, and the government doesn't have any money to spend. And how does wealth get created without people in employment? Unless you are the country with the reserve currency, which effectively gives you the ability to keep printing money until the world catches up to the con. Which doesn't still change the underlying economics, it is just that at any given point in time there is always some country which will be using the reserve currency status to make it appear like you can create wealth by printing more money.

Aiming for more employment is a net positive to any society, and I think that is what conditions people to loathe the permanently unemployed.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40057352?seq=1

[2] I remember reading an essay by PG about how getting employment is when you go from being a "net consumer" to become a "net producer", cannot find the link.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#196

Post by jkaljundi » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

Demiurge wrote: post #177

luma wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day. They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task. My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning. She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully f…

As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn't allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future…

In related news on Queue-it: https://tech.eu/brief/queue-it-funding/

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#197

Post by kingkawn » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

At least in New York the state dept of labor unemployment page is broken under the server stress and untold numbers of people haven’t been able to login and file claims.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#198

Post by jahaja » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

big_chungus wrote: post #126

Slartie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect to "motivate" people to just go to work, spend money in restaurants, fly around, take cruises...as if there was nothing going on, while at the same time millions of people are dying? Everyone is going to have someone in their family who dies because of this virus. And they're not going to die silently - you'll have crazy imagery of emergency rooms spilling over with patients circulating among the pu…

The worst-case projection is 1.7 million: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est... . If the media hadn't spent weeks fearmongering and spinning this as some killer exotic plague (rather than something that hits at-risk populations much harder but is survivable for most others). Only a few percent of younger people have needed intensive care. It won't make too much of a difference anyway; we'll…

This might be the most unethical thread I've ever read on HN, and that takes a lot. Shame on you.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#199

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #81

sundaeofshock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you missed those?

Not sure if this was your intent, but "sacrificing millions for the sake of the Market" sounds like you're trying to shift away from the point that right now about 3.28 million more folks (probably more) are wondering how to pay their rent/mortgages and feed their children. If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. But nah, the "mark…

Are you aware of a quantitative model relating economic losses to loss of life / quality-of-life? I see this claim repeated over and over, but after hours of searching I can't find any quantitative models. If such a class of models did exist, we could weigh it against various SIR models and make an actual assessment. Without that economic model, the decision calculus you're suggesting we make isn't really possible.

Also: even that conversation seems like a huge false choice. Why not just give up on market capitalism for a few quarters and make sure everyone is fed/clothed/sheltered? It's not like houses disappear overnight if rent/mortgages aren't paid. And it's not like we've never suspended capitalism in the past -- the federal government put in price controls, effectively nationalized industries/supply chains, etc. during WWWII. And then we returned to capitalism afterward.

> But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact!

TBF, those are the folks getting most of the economic relief so far. And not just from recent Congressional action. Somehow when it comes to ensuring liquidity in certain financial markets, the federal government can move mountains in minutes. But when it comes to people having a safe place to sleep and food to eat we're the mercy of the invisible hand.

Why can't e.g. HUD, unilaterally and without congressional action, create "liquidity in the housing market" by making enormous zero-interest loans to everyday folk whenever they feel like that's necessary?

People who trade in equities and bonds have enormously powerful economic backstops, which people who merely pay rents and mortgages and buy food do not have.

Re: 3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

#200

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

Demiurge wrote: post #177

luma wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, unemployment benefits are managed by the states, and those states are running web services which typically see a few hundred hits a day. They are now trying to process tens of thousands of new records each day, and at least in MI the service is absolutely not up to the task. My wife managed to get her filing completed a little after 1am this morning. She was the only one of her 20 coworkers to successfully f…

As a developer I immediately though of the power of queues. Twenty people trying to submit same form does not work for everyone, but a queue processing one person at a time might allow the twenty people to submit within a short time. It is flattening the curve! If I was contracted to fix this ASAP, I would set up an nginx front-end proxy config that doesn't allow more than X sessions and suggest a time in the future…

Put the web form (plain static assets JS/CSS/HTML) on a globally accessible CDN. Then use SQS intake for each unemployment application form. Then firehouse it out, wherever it needs to go, at a rate which you can realistically deal with it.

Queuing access to the form itself and telling someone to wake up at 4:52 AM so they can then merely access the static assets is a less-than-desirable user experience.