611–620 of 711 posts
Just to illustrate how absurd this number is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUCTISVXQAcIKEb?format=png&name=...
This is messing up charts so much that maybe in a couple years we will be removing 2020 from the data just to have a chart that doesn't have a crazy x-axis.
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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…
Wow, just found what my state (CO) is doing to help manage the influx. Talk about a low-tech workaround. >IMPORTANT NOTICE: Because of the high volume of claims, we are asking that you help us help you and our greater community. >If you need to file an unemployment claim and your last name begins with the letter A - M, file a claim on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, or after 12 noon on Saturday. >If you need to file an un…
Just to illustrate how absurd this number is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUCTISVXQAcIKEb?format=png&name=...
The pandemic quarantine will accumulate pent up demand, or at least a desire to consume once it is "over".
A good economic recovery would provide enough money to fund this demand and immediately reward rehiring of people to previous levels.
But this will be a series of discredited supply-side measures until (perhaps) a Keynesian friendly democrat is in office.
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Not Democrats as a whole. Nancy Pelosi and one or two other congress people in particular. As I understand it from various sources spanning the political spectrum, both the Republicans and Democrats that were in Washington DC had productive bipartisan talks over the weekend and had largely hashed out a bill that both sides agreed on. Then Nancy Pelosi flew back from California and injected several additional things i…
I think it's weird to point at Nancy Pelosi given the current state of politics. McConnell and the republicans denounce any Democratic bill that is passed as partisan, so why would this be any different? And you feel that Steve Mnuchin and his $500B corporate bailout slush fund meet the criteria laid out for crisis spending? Give me a break. The Democrats are trying to include things like vote-by-mail, since this cri…
If I worked at a company whose SRE leadership responds to crisis and failure the same way that our Congress does, I'd quit and find a company that is far more rational and disciplined.
> the Democrats would be fools to waste an opportunity
This is the problem with politics and something no one should endorse. Both parties are operating as if a crisis is an opportunity instead of a problem to be solved. Abusing a crisis to ramrod long-term policies changes is corruption in my book. Again, this is exactly how we ended up with the Patriot Act.
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My brother is a restaurant owner and reports that despite volume being down, profit is up due to less overhead. Others in the restaurant industry are reporting the same. When we come out on the other side of this, I think a lot of businesses are going to rethink a lot of things they held on to as infallible truths. Sorry as many mentioned, yes the key ingredient is takeout: This is a fast casual italian / pizza resta…
They might be making more money on sales vs staff right now but anyone who has a rent payment isn't going to cover it with takeout alone.
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> they don't mind suffering things that are unacceptable for us When the ruling class exploits the working class and suppresses their access to information and free speech, that doesn't mean they "don't mind suffering," it means one sector of the Chinese population has cannibalized another sector in order to build wealth for themselves. Much like what is happening in the US with the ultra-wealthy. It's not all rainbo…
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…
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>somehow because this is seen as an external threat and not an internal blunder. Similar to 9/11. Countrymen tend to band together and support the leader when faced with a crisis, regardless of the leader.
What is particularly infuriating is this specific leader made it much worse by doing things like closing the pandemic response team a couple years ago and calling it a big Democratic hoax until recently. TBH, it's very difficult to look at that 538 chart and not come to the conclusion that a large portion of Americans are idiots. And I'm not even talking about whether or not they support Trump, I'm talking about how…
Don't need a chart for that.
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medicare part d doesn't allow the government to negotiate prices The gov't can't negotiate prices, but the private insurers who manage Part D plans absolutely can.
and what effect has that had on drug prices in the us compared to other countries?
So I'd say it worked pretty well.
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Unfortunately yes. Even if one wants to keep the quarantine at all costs, it should be a political decision, not only medical, after weighing everything. In Italy, where I'm in my third week being shut in, experts and doctors are being quoted tiredlessly by the news: the problem is that they're doing their job (which is good!) however they do not realize the impact of their suggested measures. Not their fault by any…
Isn't Italy in a pretty bad shape to restart the virus spread right now? As soon as the government can detect a 16-times increase in the number of cases, act, and still be soon enough for the next 200-times increase not to be a tragedy, it is a good time to leave the quarantine. Right now Italy can't stand the first increase. The good news is that each time the disease spreads, those numbers become smaller, the bad n…
It won't be able to hold a long-standing quarantine. Probably a couple of months tops. That's not even mentioning the economy. As I said, endured isolation will have very bad side effects.