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3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

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

#271

Post by throwaway_USD »

generalpass wrote: post #258
throwaway_USD wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why the (millions?) of individuals whose actions are reflected in market prices from noise. Its not individuals buying, individuals sold to secure cash during this unknown period...it is the corporations themselves buying in bulk now, because they are flush with cash, cut all costs, and have $5.75T in cash coming their way in the form of loans that will not need to be repaid ($1.75T worth) and negative interest loan…

> Its not individuals buying, individuals sold to secure cash during this unknown period...it is the corporations themselves buying in bulk now, because they are flush with cash, cut all costs, and have $5.75T in cash coming their way in the form of loans that will not need to be repaid ($1.75T worth) and negative interest loans ($4T worth). Point is companies will be buying today while they can. Or maybe they are bu…

>Or maybe they are buying because their factories have been shuddered and they have capital sitting with no other place to put it.

That is one of my points:

>because they are flush with cash, cut all costs

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

#272

Post by rabuse »

est31 wrote: post #206
johnpowell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the number of people that filed for unemployment in the last week. A staggering number. Just seven days of data.

Seven days, that's horrible. Let's hope these people quickly find work again.

A lot of these filers are in the restaurant/bar industry, and are being "laid off", and told to file, and then will be rehired when the quarantine ceases.

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

#273

Post by bjourne »

bbxxcc wrote: post #195
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…

> 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]

Similarly, there are studies showing that rich people are less ethical. https://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086

> Unemployed people, by definition, are net consumers.

How do you define a "net consumer"? The only resource to consume on this planet is its ecosystem. Are unemployed people consuming more of our ecosystem than employed ones? I don't think so.

A lot of free software has been created by people not in employment. So the idea that unemployed people cannot be contributing value to society is false.

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

#274

Post by jartelt »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #257
nck4222 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night. You (and others) are probably aware, but worth pointing out that these people still can not currently file for unemployment benefits until the house passes the bill, the senate approves any house amendments…

I'm kind of confused by what it means for a gig worker to become unemployed; specifically the criteria. Is it along the lines of "I normally drive Uber. There are no riders anymore. Therefore, I can't collect income?" I mean, it'd be hard to verify such a statement is fact. A gig worker could just stop logging into Uber, then file an unemployment application. I hope there's an angle to this I'm missing.

You likely will need to prove that your unemployment or lack of ability to work was caused by COVID-19. So doctors note, test result, order to stop work by governor, etc.

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

#275

Post by danans »

wyclif wrote: post #263
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us = the world/humanity, not the USA. China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, and it would not have happened without globalization.

Eh, I was speaking of the world. China lied about the coronavirus right from the beginning, when having two weeks of lead time worldwide could have saved thousands of lives. They arrested, silenced, and probably killed the doctors who blew the whistle on the cover-up. These are facts, not conjecture.

> our supply chain for essential pharmaceuticals and medical equipment farmed out to evil, duplicitous regimes like the Chinese state.

There's a legitimate discussion to be had about medical equipment supply chains, but describing China this way does a huge disservice to that discussion.

> They ... probably killed the doctors who blew the whistle on the cover-up. These are facts, not conjecture.

That's literally an example of conjecture.

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

#276

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> If I was contracted to fix this ASAP

You’re assuming that the people who built it in the first place (or the people that may or may not be contracted to fix it later) know or care. Remember, this is government contracting we’re talking about - lowest bidder wins. How do you win the lowest bid? By doing it as cheap and quick as you can. That means hiring inexperienced/cheap developers who can build something that looks like it will work for far less money than you can build something that actually will.

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

#277

Post by onion2k »

driverdan wrote: post #214
Demiurge wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having worked on this type of application in the past they should find a new company to work with if they can't handle this traffic. We were handling hundreds of requests per second with ease 10 years ago. That was with MySQL and the app running on the same server. It doesn't take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.

It doesn't take many resources to show the user a form, validate it, and save to a DB.

I bet that's what the previous developers thought.

What happens if you need to validate the form data against an external service that's coming and going due to the traffic spike?

What if your database is rejecting transactions occasionally?

What happens when your backup process locks all the database tables?

How do you reject duplicate form submissions from people hammering the submit button? Do you query the database to find previous submissions?

What happens when a scriptkiddie decides it'd be fun to DDOS the site? How do you differentiate good traffic from bad traffic?

What do you do when the cloud provider runs out of space and you can't scale up any more (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691926)?

You need to think of all of these things and many, many more to run a robust online service that can handle spikes hundreds of times bigger than the usual level. It's really not straightforward or simple.

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

#278

Post by helen___keller »

bin0 wrote: post #269
helen___keller wrote: post #215

My biggest concern is that we aren't working on the infrastructure and cultural shift that is going to be needed to have a return to normal. The endgame of covid-19 is herd immunity, which requires either 30-60% of the population infected and recovered, or it requires a vaccine. Realistically both are probably 9+ months out: vaccines are slow to develop, and almost every governor has proven they'd rather shut down ev…

Cultural changes? How would you build those? The government doesn't control the culture. How would you make it unacceptable? Bureaucrats don't have direct control over that. Also, a bunch of "we need"s about the ideal situation don't do much. The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state. While that provides certain advantages in this situation, it comes with certain drawbacks: not being…

> Cultural changes? How would you build those? The government doesn't control the culture. How would you make it unacceptable? Bureaucrats don't have direct control over that. Also, a bunch of "we need"s about the ideal situation don't do much.

We have a federal government. A federal government can spend money, including on marketing. Remember WWII propaganda, some of which people can still recite to this day, like "loose lips sink ships"?

A federal government can pass laws that require workplaces to take certain actions (temperature checks for employees, WFH for jobs that are capable of doing so). A federal government can pass regulations requiring public gatherings to take certain security actions such as taking visitors' temperatures with a contactless thermometer. A federal government can spend money to have factories produce a very large number of face masks and contactless thermometers, and can coordinate with states to distribute them to population centers.

> The reason the China contained it is because she is an authoritarian state

Yes, thanks for stating the obvious. If you notice I didn't suggest we restrict travel between states and cities, or that we lock people inside their homes, or that we should register every location that a person goes to so that we can quickly identify who they've been in contact with should they test positive for covid-19. These are the more authoritarian actions that China has taken.

In fact, lacking the authoritarian actions, we need to try even harder at the non-authoritarian stuff. Which we aren't doing.

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

#279

Post by rsweeney21 »

The US federal and state governments have implemented policies that have forced a large number of businesses to close temporarily. A business that is closed can't pay it's employees, so naturally it would have to lay them off.

If tomorrow we found a cure and got the all clear to return to life as normal, how many of the 3.28M would be re-hired immediately? What we need is a distinction between being laid off temporarily and being laid off permanently. That would give us a clearer picture of the real economic impact.

We need a new metric. The senate stimulus bill should have included a new classification and support for workers temporarily put on unpaid leave.

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

#280

Post by graeme »

wyclif wrote: post #191
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> after all, globalization is one of the main factors why we're experiencing this deadly pandemic now

Not so. Pandemics travelled around the world before globalization. The black death, smallpox in the americas, syphllis.

This just increases the speed.

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