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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

#441

Post by murph-almighty »

luma wrote: post #88
stupandaus wrote: post #24

A few things to note: 1. These figures are only new claims as of 3/21, so the numbers will get worse. 2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce. 3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1] 4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment s…

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…

Secondhand story:

I briefly interned with a state judiciary's IT department around 2015 and got to get lunch with the CIO. He described to me how most court filings in the state had been manual prior to 2008 when the mortgage crisis hit and judges in the tax courts got _slammed_ with cases surrounding foreclosures. This , in turn, drove a need to develop a platform to automate the process of filing a case. It started with the tax court and gradually expanded to automate filings for other court divisions as well (e.g. Family, Civil).

I wouldn't be shocked if the revelation of "holy shit no one can file for unemployment" drove such an investment. I honestly think the next generation of politicians should take a page from product owners by isolate some shitty process that they'd have jurisdiction over, and finding some way to automate it. Bonus points if it's right before a watershed moment- imagine if someone had considered the problem you described prior to the coronavirus epidemic.

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

#442

Post by dr_orpheus »

geerlingguy wrote: post #144
lordnacho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair discussion to take, but how are you going to run an economy with the health service in permanent overload? That is what would happen if you just let the thing pass. Those charts of "squashing the sombrero" have the number of beds at a very low place compared to the expected hump of cases. On some of them you can barely even see the gap between the red line and the zero line, due to the scale of th…

Already everyone I know who was going to get a preventative health diagnostic test (myself included) in the next two months has had the test rescheduled. Otherwise healthy people are likely to have some percentage of un-diagnosed issues go on an extra month or two because of this, so it's definitely not just those who are directly infected with Coronavirus. Some places' ERs are already at capacity, and there's no way…

Also, some procedures being performed that a patient would normally stay overnight and be monitored are being changed to outpatient. It can now be more risky to stay in a hospital than it is to go home for recovery, even though you can't be monitored for potential post-procedure complications.

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

#443

Post by mindslight »

shripadk wrote: post #45
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…

> And maybe - just maybe - it's time everybody took another look at the UBI debate, again. Doesn't UBI directly result in inflation and cause currency devaluation? If the money that you hold loses its value (because everyone has at the very least the same amount of money as a basic, consistent income) then it is worth nothing in the end. It is as good as having no money in my humble opinion. Money has to be valuable…

Yes, but nowhere near the amount of inflation caused by allowing Wall Street and consumer banks to create trillions of new dollars with artificially low interest rates. Plus if we had more price inflation on consumer goods it might actually reign in the Fed, and make them stop ignoring the ongoing rampant price inflation for assets.

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

#444

Post by murph-almighty »

brewdad wrote: post #399
evan_ wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm assuming the government does its job What has led you to make this assumption?

State and local governments are doing a good job in many locales. Assuming more Governors don't follow the jackwagon leading Mississippi and override local efforts, the situation should improve despite the lack of leadership and execution at the federal level.

What's going on in Mississippi?

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

#445

Post by dr_orpheus »

nemo44x wrote: post #326
bpicolo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors have passed from the illness, too. Even young, healthy ones. Stress and lack of sleep hurt the immune system.

I wonder how much the viral load affects this? People working in these conditions are at a high risk of inhaling a large amount of virus at different times.

I believe this was linked somewhere else on HN. It sounds like this is one of the possible causes of doctors being more affected by the virus, but they don't know for sure.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/health/doctors-coronavirus-he...

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

#446

Post by nsporillo »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #245
wyclif wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Lifted millions out of poverty at the expense of millions of middle class American jobs. I believe globalization largely did not end up in the best interest of most Americans because the transfer of technology and manufacturing did not result in a new American ally, but rather a strategic competitor. For over a decade now we've seen a rift in the interests of the common people and the elites in the United States, which is why we've seen the resurgence of populism.

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

#447

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #99
dragonwriter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. Sure, just like the Depression did. And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated until the next similar event.

After the depression the US emerged as the global hegemon because of major shifts in power that happened as a part of WWII. The US was uniquely adapted to grow to be the global super power at the same time that European nations were taking a huge hit from the war. I suspect this will ultimately lead to China as the new hegemon. We're seeing key advantages to the Chinese state that the US cannot adapt to. Decades of p…

A few weeks? Really? A major geopolitical shift the likes of which the world has never seen is going to occur in a few weeks?

These things take place over years, even decades. I do agree that the US hegemony may come to an end if things continue as is. But I don't think that means another becomes hegemon.

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

#448

Post by oh_sigh »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #379
string wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you keep the comments like this on Reddit and away from HN, please? For the non-UK users reading this: almost all of the bullet pointed statements are either incorrect or exaggerated.

[citation needed]

"Citations for thee, but not for me"

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

#449

Post by lm28469 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #164

A year from now, will we look back and say it was worth the suffering for something 5x as bad as the flu? (based on Germany’s numbers, which are more fully accounting for those with mild symptoms) Shows how important testing randomly is, if the denominator is low because you are only testing those in the hospital, it looks like the second coming of the Spanish flu.

> based on Germany’s numbers, which are more fully accounting for those with mild symptoms

It's only "5x" the flu (you say so, I didn't look it up) BECAUSE everything is locked down. If we continued to live and work as usual hospitals would be overcrowded (they already are in italy, spain and some parts of france), which means a bicycle accident, a car crash, a bad fall = you'd die because no one could take care of you. In Italy they had to call the army to get more body bags and more people to carry the dead out, NY is already running out of space to store dead people.

You can't just look at low numbers due to aggressive lock downs, project them in your imaginary world and draw conclusions while ignoring all the side effects.

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

#450

Post by C1sc0cat »

dubcanada wrote: post #287
driverdan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bunch of armchair developers seem to have been summoned to tell the Federal government how to handle form submissions for an extremely security and privacy intense application using their fancy modern techniques. You are talking about comparing a basic web form with an application for unemployment benefits which must go into a federal tax database and be processed using a what I assume is a garbage mainframe system…

None of those comments really help explain why the bottle necks.

If the form has to go into a mainframe well just set up an asynconous Queue

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