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Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

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Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#541

Post by dnautics »

mikepurvis wrote: post #520
dnautics wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever met a DOE program manager? Have you ever personally dealt with an EOC lawsuit? I've done both, and let me tell you neither of those organizations comes anywhere near what you seem to imply they do. I'm not convinced society wouldn't be better without them.

A major thing the DOE does is keep track of where the world's plutonium is— it's energy-related, but also a national security matter. Michael Lewis's excellent book The Fifth Risk examines some of these agency functions in the context of what was lost when there Trump administration stepped into power with essentially no transition plan or concept of how to run them.

You're making my point.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#542

Post by dbsmith83 »

coleifer wrote: post #499
seattle_spring wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure healthcare costs and, you know, being dead might affect them more than losing their job.

Save your sarcasm for your followers. Imagine being memed into believing forcing people to stay home is better than letting people choose.

Like choose to kill old people?

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#543

Post by dbsmith83 »

bsder wrote: post #365
sojournerc wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wow. Hope your dictators benevolent. Just as our legal system is adversarial, where two "teams" enter a court to at least attempt justice, it seems crucial to a successful political system that there be a dialectic between opposing views, hoping compromise benefits the whole. Comments such as this, dismissing a huge portion of fellow citizens out of hand, without so much as recognizing that "they" might be tryin…

> Comments such as this, dismissing a huge portion of fellow citizens out of hand, without so much as recognizing that "they" might be trying to do what's best in their eyes is so far from a democratic ideal... Explain to me what I'm supposed to do with people who wear "Better Russian than Democrat" t-shirts or my father-in-law who literally said "Her views are everything I want, but I can't vote for her because she'…

Just because you have a crazy father-in-law doesn't mean that all, or even most Republicans think that way. If you believe it, then you live in a bubble. Also, if you are so right, and your point of view is so correct, I'm curious why you haven't been able to convince your father-in-law and show him the error of his ways. Actually, I'm not curious--it's probably because you think everyone else in the other party is wrong and has nothing constructive to add, which causes other people to not listen to you. This otherism is tiring.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#544

Post by danielrpa »

eskaytwo wrote: post #505
danielrpa wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are richer. This is the very same principle employed by both states for their internal taxation - the idea that the more you make, the less you get from your taxes relatively speaking ("the rich" pay higher tax rates in both states). It's just progressive taxes applied to the entire country, where NY and CA are "the rich" among the states.

But if the Republican approach is a regressive tax (eg the big tax cut favouring the big end of town) then shouldn’t CA/NY also receive similar treatment? That’s essentially the discrepancy going on here.

I'm just saying that if CA/NY believe in "from each according to its ability, to each according to their needs", as they appear to given their tax laws and public policies, people should be fine with them being donor states.

After all, a staunchly republican poor individual in CA/NY still gets the same benefits as a poor democrat, because need (not opinions) dictates how much you get. Of course, Texas isn't exactly poor, my point is more relevant to states like South Carolina, Louisiana etc.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#545

Post by hiram112 »

hjonb wrote: post #464
alkibiades wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so why should people in texas pay for the stupid budget decisions of san francisco when they didn’t waste their money? it’s moral hazard

They aren't paying for pensions. They are paying for a massive lack of tax revenue due to COVID. Funny I never hear the argument from red states "We don't want your federal money for all the poor, sick, disabled, in our state!" considering CA and NY pay WAY WAY more out than they get back in federal money

These red state takers idea has propagated throughout social media, and become a talking point used anytime some fiscal argument breaks out between left and right.

And it's mostly absurd, because it just looks at net transfers between the states and Feds without realizing who is actually benefitting from that money.

How many small family farms do you think are left in much of the Midwest, who are living high on the hog with government subsidies, as the left likes to imagine?

Is it a transfer to Iowa or Nebraska when the federal government pays out a few billion in farm subsidies, which then goes straight into the pocket of fund managers in Manhattan, sovereign wealth funds, or megacorps who actually own the farms

How bout when Wall Street got bailed out in 2009 to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars? Do we count that as a subsidy to New York, Jersey, and Connecticut?

Even if the money was paid back, there's no way to calculate the trillions of dollars citizens of other states lost due to perpetually low interest rates or propping up houses in coastal areas at the expense of people living in low COL areas.

There's a dozen other ways we can measure these types of back door transfers, and I guarantee you, it ends up that those blue coastal states are getting a lot of extra subsidies that the silly stats that you guys use ignore.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#546

Post by hiram112 »

eldavido wrote: post #335
Shivetya wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His unwillingness to not solve the state's pension problems should be applauded. the amount of unfunded liabilities is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and approaching a trillion if it has not passed that already. This all happened because the number of public servants who are pulling in over 100k has skyrocketed... 100k+ in retirement.. with millions past 50k! Think about that 50k in pay plus medical. These pe…

People need to understand, the value of a 100% of final-salary pension for people earning 100K retiring at 55-60 is likely millions . It's even worse with the games people play with PTO and other benefits (where they bump pay 20-30% in their last year to get that pension benefit for the rest of their lives). Look at the average retiree's 401(k) balance for comparison and it gets pretty clear how unfair this is. There…

Yep. If they paid out the value of those pensions upon retirement at the cost of a similar annuity and an estimate for the health care costs, people would probably be more angry than they are now, as they don't realize just how generous these are.

To buy an annuity at age 55 worth $100k / year with guaranteed health, dental, long term care, etc. for an employee who's estimated to live another 30 years would cost a few million dollars. A quick Google search shows that the media 401k balance at 55 - 65 in the US is under $75k. The amount of non-guaranteed dividends, cap gains, and withdrawals made to ensure it lasts 30 years would probably not even cover the cost of Obamacare from 55 to 65 when they're eligible for Medicare.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#547

Post by hiram112 »

hemantv wrote: post #423
Shivetya wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His unwillingness to not solve the state's pension problems should be applauded. the amount of unfunded liabilities is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and approaching a trillion if it has not passed that already. This all happened because the number of public servants who are pulling in over 100k has skyrocketed... 100k+ in retirement.. with millions past 50k! Think about that 50k in pay plus medical. These pe…

This is just crazy to me, this public servants takes unprecedented risks and take lower pays so they can take stable retirement. Now it comes time for due, we don't want to fund these anymore. The entitlement in HN is just too much.

The days where gov workers traded high private sector income for stability and retirement was finaihed sometime in the late 80s, when offshoring, immigration, and massive amounts of productivity started being squeezed from labor to capital.

I live in DC, and at my age many professionals who don't really have any lucrative skills or degrees are now hitting the 6 figure club in late 30s as GS13s. They'd be making less working at some private company without any pension, longer hours, less vacation, and worse benefits, and no guaranteed promotions.

In this town, a lot of people would be more than happy to get a nice office job working for the Federal Government, but it's not that easy anymore unless you're a certain special minority or other who gets pushed to the head of the line.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#548

Post by Gibbon1 »

dbsmith83 wrote: post #542
coleifer wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save your sarcasm for your followers. Imagine being memed into believing forcing people to stay home is better than letting people choose.

Like choose to kill old people?

It's perfectly okay to advocate for killing old people on HN as long as you do it politely. But sarcasm is verboten.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#549

Post by Pmop »

koheripbal wrote: post #439
diogenescynic wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just finished my MBA and am getting laid off in the same month. It's really depressing.

Great time to start a company

Meanwhile I'm trying to get my "first" job as SE or backend/fullstack web developer. It's been so hard to meet the requirements (3-5+ years of previous professional experience) that now I'm thinking it might be just as hard to start a company (copying proven business model employed elsewhere, with necessary modifications), only you get a chance to at least try.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#550

Post by manigandham »

cleandreams wrote: post #291
bilbo0s wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, right now there seems to be a disturbing pattern of the world falling apart at the end of every GOP administration. This is problematic, because we still need the GOP so that we can vote out democrats when they mismanage the nation's affairs. We can't have one party, that's not safe for us as the citizenry for obvious reasons. At the same time, we can't have this, "the world ends", at the end of every G…

Single party rule in California has been an improvement. We have a functioning government. Kinda helps in a pandemic. When we got rid of our last Republican governor we paid down our debt and California entered this dire period with a big reserve. The notion that some sort of optimal condition is reached by trashing government is just a clueless and stupid idea.

Has it? Can you name 10 things that have gotten better in California over the last decade?
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