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

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

#551

Post by standardUser » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

gwright wrote: post #546

standardUser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most wealthy nations already have a robust social safety net in place. They don't need to rush to cobble together a temporary one in the same was the US does.

This really isn't helpful to the discussion. The US has unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and many other programs. And it seems to be pretty premature to declare which country is or isn't going to come out of this with the least amount of damage. It is a bit of a mystery to me why Congress isn't just providing better funding/financing for all the existing programs. I'm not sure why there should be new typ…

The comment pointed out that the US seems to be tackling the economic impact more aggressively than other nations. That is only partially true to begin with since many other nations are discussing or have already passed large-scale stimulus measures for their national economies.

But the urgency and focus on economic measures in the US does have justification. Here in the US, we need things like free testing (already the case in most nations) and to handle the surge in unemployment (we have a system, is is just less robust than most wealthy nations, hence the very urgent need to dramatically expand it).

I made no mention of "which country is or isn't going to come out of this with the least amount of damage", only reiterated the well-known fact that the US has one of the meekest welfare states of any wealthy nation. That had not yet been mentioned in the thread and seemed extremely relevant.

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

#552

Post by ardy42 » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #535

ardy42 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that backend pain shouldn't stop you from accepting it on the front end and putting it into a queue. What if the backend rejects the form? The user's already moved on before their form made it through the queue. So then you're stuck re-implementing all the validations the backend needs in order to give the user feedback (which you may not even be able to do) or trying to get the user to come back later…

You can pick a balance between some validations and 100%, and I don't think it's that hard unless you're invested in saying this is just UNPOSSIBLE. There is already processes (a workforce and/or outbound written letters) to reach out to applicants in the case of eg a dispute (terminated for cause vs laid off).

> You can pick a balance between some validations and 100%, and I don't think it's that hard unless you're invested in saying this is just UNPOSSIBLE.

The point is that it's easy to say things should be easy when you don't know anything except the very surface details of the problem, and it's not your job to actually solve it.

Maybe the team that built the system in question were a bunch of dumb-dumbs who just needed a rockstar developer to show them how easy it is to scale, or maybe the problem is actually more complicated than it seems due some hidden complexities or constraints none of us actually know anything about (either technical or business).

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

#553

Post by csense » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #531

luckylion wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of size. If you have 1% "falling through the cracks", it's individually tragic but not something that will negatively impact the economy that much. If you have 30% falling, you're going to be in for a rough time.

A lot more are falling through the cracks in a good economy than 1%. About what, 10% are poor in the US?

One friend I had in school qualified for free school lunch, so presumably below the poverty line.

His parents had a house, with a yard. There was air conditioning, cable TV, and each child had his own room. I distinctly remember a nearly-server-class PC much better specced than anything my family owned (a dual-processor desktop in the 1990's!)

Poverty stats don't tell the whole story, especially if they're only based on income levels. A wage that would have you living out of your car in SF might allow a squarely lower-middle-class lifestyle in the rural Rust Belt.

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

#554

Post by luckylion » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

milkytron wrote: post #517

luckylion wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's great practice, but practice that comes with heavy costs. And who knows when/where/if the next pandemic hits. If it's not within the next 10 years, the lessons may have been forgotten and the practice was expensive and useless.

My hope is that after this pandemic (assuming it slows down or we gain control over it), governments around the world will enact policies that prepare us for future pandemics. Like a postmortem type of thing where they document what went wrong, what could be done better, and what they can do to mitigate the impacts of future pandemics, in a rational and blameless manner. Similar to what happened after the financial c…

> Similar to what happened after the financial crisis with additional financial regulation.

But that's only temporary.

It's like developers starting over and promising themselves that they won't accrue technical debt this time. And then life happens and you need to push that feature quickly and a few years down the line, you're sitting there saying "we need to start over, this is too much trash held together by hopes and dreams".

Companies will cut corners, because that's their main focus. Politicians will reduce regulations, because that's how they stimulate locale economy, and we're back at square one in no time.

The only lasting shift, aside from potentially more work from home, is people making sure they'll always have an extra package of toilet paper. They won't flee the cities (where viruses can spread much better), even though the rent is killing them, and they won't go into voluntary lock down the next time a thousand people die in China of some lung disease.

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

#555

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

pengaru wrote: post #515

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…

> 3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1] This should be normalized to be per-capita, comparing absolute figures is distorted by population growth. The US was only 230M people in 1982, 100M less than today. After normalizing it's more like 3.9x.

3.9m ~ 5m are pretty similar compared to 670k...

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

#556

Post by travisporter » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

viklove wrote: post #478

saiya-jin wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genocide or not (nobody knows what is happening in those camps, so I would not use that word unless we have some solid hard evidence), we talk about consequences of covid on societies. And Chinese one seems to be faring much much better than most others. I just saw how a video of Chinese doctors dressing up for a visit to a covid patient. My doctor wife just stared with open mouth - nothing like that is done here in…

I'm not arguing against the point that China is handling this better than other countries. I'm arguing against the point that it's because they "don't mind suffering." They do mind suffering, but they have no agency, and their government has decided that they must suffer so that the economy can survive this crisis as healthy as possible. China is an authoritarian country, and they've resorted to literally locking peo…

I didn't downvote you, and agree with you 100%. Your food safety remark is also right, but makes your whole comment seem less objective.

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

#557

Post by mdarens » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #423

mdarens wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the welfare state expanded dramatically after the new deal, but that reversed with the turn toward austerity in the late 70s. "the government" is an overly broad way of speaking about this, as it places budgeting for defense contracts & bailing out finance capital, or monetary policy geared toward preventing the labor market from getting tight (as opposed to full employment) under the same umbrella as tanf & snap.

The only time the welfare state in the US has actually gotten smaller was Clinton's welfare reform in the 1990's. That was easily offset by things like Medicare Part D in the 2000's. People keep talking about "stripping away the safety net", but when I look at entitlement spending, it just keeps getting bigger.

clinton's slashing of the welfare state is a matter of degree, not the only instance of purported beneficiaries losing benefits. medicare part d doesn't allow the government to negotiate prices and thus functions more as a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry than people for whom it is ostensibly intended to prescription access. lots of games can be played with budgets (such as block grants, one notorious example being the 1981 repeal of the mental health systems act) so the raw dollars of entitlement spending can grow without representing a true shift in resources. when cost of living (eg rents, healthcare) outpaces spending, all while units of public housing are destroyed without being replaced, and the terms of occupation have grown ever more stringent (for example, requiring maintenance come out of tenants' rent while lowering the maximum eligible income for tenants), the mere dollar amount of spending becomes a less definitive measure, i think.

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

#558

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #401

toomuchtodo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're saying the same thing. No need to be pedantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights

No, it's different. Delegated to the states implies that someone else had the power and gave it to the states. That is not true. The states always had the power, and have had it since they formed, and it was not removed upon admission to the United States. It's like saying France was delegated the power to enforce a national quarantine. That is simply not the case.

[deleted]

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

#559

Post by luckylion » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #527

luckylion wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's great practice, but practice that comes with heavy costs. And who knows when/where/if the next pandemic hits. If it's not within the next 10 years, the lessons may have been forgotten and the practice was expensive and useless.

A lot of things come with heavy costs - the US military is funded billions upon billions year after year for a threat that may never come. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan probably at this point are more costly than the bailout we are giving to the economy. In fact, most of the hard problems the world faces will require investments that take longer than 10 years to return on. The economy is important - but maybe our…

The US military isn't funded to respond to potential threats, it's funded to be a threat. It's like Google giving Android away, they'll make that money back multiple times on other deals.

> The economy is important - but maybe our economy needs to be a little less growth oriented and a little more resilient.

I absolutely agree, but I also believe that's not going to happen. And it's not because there's some cabal that won't let it, it's just that everybody wants more and I don't see that changing. Our economic setup with the constant demand for growth is just the result of that. I don't believe you can put the genie back in the bottle, few people are at a point in life where they'd be happy to stay at that level for the rest of their days.

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

#560

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #333

toomuchtodo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net. This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies after experiencing suffering without them wouldn’t be a bad thing. Sometimes things must get worse for them to get better.

> wouldn’t be a bad thing. Well, unless we libertarians were right all along and these progressive policies are unmaintainable over a longer period of time. At this point, I think we're about to find out one way or another.

Honest question, as a libertarian, if you were president what would have been your response to this virus?