Tales from the days of early internet? A hoax you believed before you realized everything on the internet is a lie? Those spam/chain emails about sending something to ten people before the ghost of some young girl will come out of your bathroom mirror and eat off your eyelids? AIM?
Pre-internet, but the razor-blades in Halloween caramel apples went around like wildfire. We were told to not accept unwrapped candy, homemade popcorn balls, or caramel apples. I remember one of our neighbors handed out caramel apples and I thought "if there's a razor in one of those apples, I know exactly who did it" - so I took the apple. A) Caramel apples are delicious, and B) Caramel apples are sticky messes that are the last thing you want to be eating when you're walking around when you're under 10 years old.
I doubt I even know where I heard this, but I thought that Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex died when hit by a bus in London but instead she joined a London-based Hare Krishna sect.
I remember having one of my college professors state with total certainty that Jamie Lee Curtis was born a hermaphrodite. I then believed it for years.
Turns out: not true. Or at least, there is no evidence for it.
My college roommate freshman year told me this at some point, but I didn't believe it. I was a fan of Jamie Lee Curtis at that point from True Lies and Trading Places.
"My mother just called me. She had ordered some flowers from a small local store, to be delivered and dropped on the porch. When they brought the flowers, they said, "Hang on, we have something for you." The driver went back to the truck and proceeded to bring out..."
Read that Bloomberg article on Wuhan re-opening... man, things are NEVER going to be the same again, unless there's a 100% effective vaccine, and even then, I wonder.
On the other hand, 500 miles away, in a city that was NOT hard hit by the virus, Shanghai is operating at 90% of normal. Things which are not normal - 98% of people wear masks and movie theaters and Disneyland are not open. But right now, only 20% of businesses or compounds are checking health codes or temperatures right now. Small venue concerts are supposedly starting back up this weekend. All restaurants and bars are either officially open or have closed permanently.
When I was doing research for my advanced degree the Internet was exploding with new search engines - gopher.net, lycos, alta vista, infoseek, excite, and yahoo (yet another officious oracle). Pick and choose which one to use. In '98 I co-founded a software company (sold in 2001) the same year google started operations. In 2000 in my 2nd start up our offices were on Brannan street across from infoseek. It later was shuttered and all of the search engines faded except for google. Yeah, the early internet was a fun ride.
My cousin was in the same comp sci grad lab as Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) at Stanford. He once brought a brochure about his new company to Thanksgiving - and my cousin and I made so much fun of the jargon in it. It was something like:
Consumers can access the WORLD WIDE WEB user HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL and navigate through HYPERLINKS - we laughed and laughed. Someone has a pool house in Hillsdale now, while the other two of us .. . do not.
Back around, maybe 98, a coworker and I were talking about new company ideas, just shooting the shit on what might work, not really being serious. We had an idea about a website that would allow companies to buy supplies by aggregating the best prices on products for the various office supply stores. This was before they all had separate online list of products, prices, and ordering.
That was the one thing that probably would have been successful had we actually done it.
I remember when Juno took the local internet market by storm because they had far more dial up numbers available than anyone else.
I also recall the issue of whether applications written and running on Netscape Navigator would work correctly on Internet Explorer. Then we had the issue where employers were difficult to convince that they should have Explorer in their shop when Navigator was already installed. "Why would we want to ever want to replace computers, or pay for more memory?"
I was a Netcom subscriber. I got it when it was still Windows for Workgroups 3.11. So you had to have a 3rd party TCP/IP stack and select a protocol. I think the early ones I used were SLIP and then when Microsoft included TCP/IP in Windows 95 it switched to PPP. It then became much easier to do "browsing".
I had MindSpring, than shifted to Earthlink, LOL. I was living in Atherton at the time - we didn't get cable Wi-Fi until 2003, a couple of years after Palo Alto got it.
I used to use our 300 and 600 baud modem in the late 80s to login onto a local BBS in the Claremont/La Verne area. They had a meet-up at the Round Table Pizza in Claremont when I was in the 8th grade - so I rode my bike over and saw the meet-up and thought "Wow, what a bunch of nerds!" and didn't go over.
The very first Cal sports internet community was the Go Bears Listserv - started up in 1994? There's a meet-up photo somewhere in a photo album I have at Northside LaVal's. Sean "Yoda" Rouse was a prominent member of that community.
Southside (or maybe both?) were partially owned by Tom Fogerty - of Creedance Clearwater Revival. His daughter went to Cal at the same time I did - my friend dated her for a second.
Watched Cal/Duke at Southside. Was insane! the next day my coworkers said they saw me on the KTVU Channel 2 news a couple of times in the background in the game news story.
when i was in HS and early days as undergrad ('88) the internet was still not the dominant net. i remember working in a research lab (Space Science Lab) and having internet, bitnet, arpanet accounts and how it is hard to send messages between the different nets w/o some strange naming scheme.
on a separate note, when i was about to get married ('98), the idea of a wedding website and an online gift registry did not really exist in a structured way. so built my own wedding website and online gift registry that spanned across multiple online stores, vendors and even places that had no internet buying.
I remember dialing into BBSes with a 1200 baud modem. I had a list of dial-up sites. A friend had an Apple IIe with the AppleCat modem and was able to do all the boxes. That was back when phone company techs had handsets
I got a cable modem in January 2005 which I remember specifically because I had been trying to deal with a bunch of insurance problems after my younger daughter was born and the dial up connection was choking on the size of the forms. The missus was strongly opposed for various reasons (not least that she thought it was subsidizing my employer) but I had to draw the line.
I posted this yesterday - but a lot of the re-open America money is coming from big business and a lot of the policy will revolve around workers who do not want to return to work being able to be filed under "voluntarily quit" and will not be able to receive unemployment - allowing both the business and the state to clean it's payroll.
This country and government hate poor people.
Terence7 hr
You know it's not about "re-opening for business" - it's about getting people off unemployment.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said in her state, it will be considered a “voluntary quit” if an employee refuses to return to work once businesses reopen, thereby losing access to unemployment benefits.
Perhaps it's the Republican in me (yes, there are Republican Cal fans) - I don't buy this for all the businesses that want to reopen. In order to keep the lights on and to eat, businesses need to work if it is safely possible to do so.
I do want people off unemployment, but I want them off unemployment because they are employed. If they are off unemployment because of safety/risk of going back to work for a job that is risking their safety, then they probably shouldn't be working for that company/job. If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income.
I rarely speak up on these boards on my views on things because I know that most of you probably disagree with my political/moral viewpoints, but that's ok! I respect the heck out of y'all and love to see the viewpoints you have.
" If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income."
IT'S THEIR OWN TAXES THEY PAID INTO UNEMPLOYMENT.
(when i went onto unemployment it was very clear i got back what I paid into it. It's also not stealing when the fund is there to keep people paying rent and buying food in times of need)
Curious about this point: "If they are off unemployment because of safety/risk of going back to work for a job that is risking their safety, then they probably shouldn't be working for that company/job."
Are you saying that it's up to them whether they want to go to their newly unsafe job, or quit and find a new one? Do you think the employer has an obligation to provide a safe work environment?
Talked to a friend in Texas - this is what she wrote:
"I have several students who don't feel safe returning to their jobs as service, movie theater, or retail workers. As everyone here knows, the TX governor is insane and wants to start opening things this weekend. Movie theaters will open with limited seating. It's seen as resignation and as such, they're ineligible for unemployment. All of the colleagues I've spoken to are reporting similar stories."
"stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income"
This is an interesting concept. Why is it an unemployed individual stealing from everyone else? All the large businesses that don't pay tax but use public services--why is that not stealing?
"If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income."
I would argue that if unemployment -- which is meant as supplemental income in combination with any savings to navigate between jobs -- pays better than the actual job does, maybe the company is actually stealing from the government by leaving their employees in a welfare state in order to increase profitability.
I may be pretty liberal socially, but I am all for smaller federal government and more emphasis on local government and fiscal responsibility. But that means that we can't constantly be in danger of a massive recession/depression because our consumer-based economy is walking a tightrope with such a large percentage of America a few months from going homeless.
I want to also add one more note re: stealing from hard earned taxable income. We pay taxes that go into a social safety net specifically so that we can draw from it when we need to. This is not stealing -- this is the entire point of the process. I want to re-emphasize my earlier point, it is 100% companies stealing from our hard earned taxes by taking advantage of said safety nets and paying unsustainable wages knowing that there *is*one for them to fall on.
There is a reason some "small businesses" had trouble finding a bank to work with; no one in their right mind would deal with them because they were on such thin financial ice that they couldn't sustain a down payroll cycle. Granted, this mess will take a lot longer, and a lot more, to work through, but an operation that lurches into insolvency in 2 days was badly over-extended and recklessly under-capitalized to begin with.
I think that's a bit unfair, albeit I understand it's somewhat the point that I made. There are industries that find it harder to go through periods of no business outside of their control, like restaurants. That said, I also think there are two parts to it. Businesses have convinced people that low wages are necessary, when a vast majority of the chains are just trying to inflate profit margins like I was saying above. Only categorized as "small to medium" businesses because each location has a small number of employees, even though they employee thousands nation-wide. Second, as Americans we've gotten too complacent and used to everything being cheap at the cost of underpaying employees everywhere. At some point we'll have to reconcile that keeping people out of poverty is worth paying a higher price per pound for our steaks and cheeseburgers.
Maybe not "all businesses" but clearly the Republican politicians that are pushing this are not doing so with an eye on the safety of the employees if they are mandating it across the board, irrespective of the circumstances.
An upside of re-opening is that elective surgeries can be scheduled. My sister lives in Iowa and has been struggling with a bladder issue and her surgery was cancelled. Hopefully she can get it fixed now.
Apparently my mother is now scheduled for some kind of procedure that will allow her to have “DIY” dialysis - not sure that this will go well but I’m pretty sure she needs it so 🤷🏼♂️
I've been thinking a lot about how many surgeries are "elective" but not really optional -- they are medically necessary but just not lethal. I am glad those folks can move forward getting their problems fixed. Hope your sister is taken care of and on the mend soon!
That's part of the larger problem with what is medically "reasonable", and in too many cases, what is not "too expensive", that hijacks the process. Its not completely divorced from using medical science to determine treatment, and not profits, but there is a cost that, as you note, has to be paid sometime by someone.
Too often a cheaper in the short term management strategy gets forced upon the patient even though that's more expensive in the long run than actually fixing the problem, because the next financial statement will look better, and someone else can worry about the long term consequences, fiscal and physical. The health industry profits much more from long term management than short term resolution.
That doesn't change with a single payer system vs one that suddenly leaves millions without insurance coverage when a state's unemployment goes from ~3% to ~15% in 2 days; that will require actual oversight, which will be both a lot of work and inconvenient. But I think DC's point is at least people won't effectively be dumped every time management decides layoffs are their response to being over-extended and recklessly under-capitalized.
I’m reconciled to the fact that as a society we will likely have to reopen in advance of a vaccine or other mitigating technology. I am also completely certain that the GOP cannot be trusted to handle this in a way that doesn’t end up fucking most of us over.
It's not just a GOP issue. The local and state governments have demonstrated an inability to be agile in responding to changing developments, a lack of comprehensive understanding of issues (understandable, no one can be an expert in everything, but also underscores the fact that small to medium organizations can't have staff and don't have access to expert counsel in all sides of issues), and a predictable but still frustrating tendency to pander to either local voter popularity or local contributor interests, without accounting for the consequences beyond the shortest term.
A proliferation of hired gun spokesman/experts who may or may not actually be qualified or inclined to be an expert has only further clouded the issues.
You know the old saw “never mistake incompetence for malice”? For me the difference with elected officials is one party is incompetent and one is malicious. There’s nothing wrong with not being sure how to figure out how to deal with an event so profoundly atypical that’s going to need new solutions and a degree of experimentation. I think the difference between the parties at the national level is that one keeps repeating “trust the experts” and setting preconditions we’re nowhere close to meeting, and one is indemnifying corporations and making it clear they want to starve people back into unsafe work environments. And that, to me, is the division between incompetence and malice.
The lady friend is having an issue with her employees not wanting to come back to work bc A) they're getting more money from unemployment than they would if they returned, and B) they don't want to chance La Rona. She emailed them yesterday to tell them while she was happy to have paid their health insurance 100% for March and April, but she cannot continue to do so going forward, and they have three choices 1) remain furloughed and pay 100% out of pocket, 2) come back to work and pay their normal out of pocket share, or 3) be removed from the insurance plan altogether.
Basically, she qualified for the SBA/PPP loans, but needs to have 29 FTEs on her payroll in order for the loans to be forgiven,
Without wanting to sound like a Bernie dead-ender, this whole escapade has been a strong argument for an alternative to employer provided health insurance.
Can we talk healthcare for a bit? I go nuts at the Medicare For All crowd who declares that we should have medicare of all because everyone deserves free healthcare. They have absolutely no idea how Medicare work. It's far from free at the point of service.
Due to a slight family crisis (everyone's OK) I have spent many hours in the last two weeks going through all of my Mom's medical bills. She has Medicare, plus a Medicare Plan D supplement to give her prescription drug coverage, which Medicare normally doesn't cover. Her out of pocket costs have never been less than $8K/year since at least 2014, which is as far back as I went, and that doesn't even include the $160 or so monthly premiums she has to pay. The M4A folks are going to be pretty fucking shocked if they ever get their wish.
It’s not a great payment mechanism and it’s certainly not comprehensive. It’s been very useful for my folks but not without issues on gaps in drug coverage. At least your mother lets you see the paperwork, my folks apparently would rather die of the ‘rona than cede the “independence” of grocery shopping far less have us help with the paperwork.
While related, fixing a seriously flawed payment and delivery system and fixing the access to coverage issue are 2 different problems, both exacerbated by current events.
Assuming safe working conditions and adequate ppe are a part of returning to work. This has been the problem with some of these situations, where the inability to operate safely manufactured a hot-spot, and people understandably don't want to sacrifice their safety, and have to heavily leverage that health coverage in short order.
I don't envy a lot of business owners and managers who never considered the possibility of a situation arising that would be allowed to get as out of control as this has.
Seems reasonable, but having hair salons and barbershops in the "Stage 3" group would seem to indicate that people will need some other way to get their hair cut. Could haircutters start making house calls?
A friend on my other internet community posted: I was on a call about potential research into COVID-19 in autopsy subjects consented for donation. This included a couple of the area medical examiners. King County (includes Seattle) Medical Examiners office is testing every single case for COVID, and have found it in a significant number of totally asymptomatic people who died of something else entirely. Murder victim, positive. Overdose victim, positive. I’ll be very interested to see the actual numbers after they’ve been at this for a while
The ESPN article left out this quote "I have had a few offers for teams in the Atlantic League, but am more in favor of experiencing Taiwan and their delicious food.”
Early Hoax
Pre-internet, but the razor-blades in Halloween caramel apples went around like wildfire. We were told to not accept unwrapped candy, homemade popcorn balls, or caramel apples. I remember one of our neighbors handed out caramel apples and I thought "if there's a razor in one of those apples, I know exactly who did it" - so I took the apple. A) Caramel apples are delicious, and B) Caramel apples are sticky messes that are the last thing you want to be eating when you're walking around when you're under 10 years old.
What about rat hair in Butterfingers?
that's what makes them delicious
When people say they don’t understand how a disease can spread so fast, I give chain letters/emails or pyramid schemes as an example.
I doubt I even know where I heard this, but I thought that Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex died when hit by a bus in London but instead she joined a London-based Hare Krishna sect.
She did die later of breast cancer at 53.
So I realize that you might not identify with a protagonist who is a twelve-year-old girl, but I recently read The First Rule of Punk and really enjoyed it, and perhaps you might, too: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553179/the-first-rule-of-punk-by-celia-c-perez/
I bring this up because, prior to this book, I hadn't heard of Poly Styrene.
Interesting
I remember having one of my college professors state with total certainty that Jamie Lee Curtis was born a hermaphrodite. I then believed it for years.
Turns out: not true. Or at least, there is no evidence for it.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jamie-lee-curtis/
My college roommate freshman year told me this at some point, but I didn't believe it. I was a fan of Jamie Lee Curtis at that point from True Lies and Trading Places.
i heard this in elementary school before I knew what a hermaphrodite, or who Jamie Lee Curtis was. This was pre-internet.
Yeah I remember this one. Maybe we need a snopes checker...
Cal
If you follow a Faith, please say a little prayer for Coach Aristotle Thompson's son.
https://twitter.com/Helmets4Helmets/status/1254953149237886976
https://helmets4helmets.com/our-story
Go Bears!
This is so sweet: https://twitter.com/maureenjohnson/status/1255567323848736771?s=20
"My mother just called me. She had ordered some flowers from a small local store, to be delivered and dropped on the porch. When they brought the flowers, they said, "Hang on, we have something for you." The driver went back to the truck and proceeded to bring out..."
Read that Bloomberg article on Wuhan re-opening... man, things are NEVER going to be the same again, unless there's a 100% effective vaccine, and even then, I wonder.
On the other hand, 500 miles away, in a city that was NOT hard hit by the virus, Shanghai is operating at 90% of normal. Things which are not normal - 98% of people wear masks and movie theaters and Disneyland are not open. But right now, only 20% of businesses or compounds are checking health codes or temperatures right now. Small venue concerts are supposedly starting back up this weekend. All restaurants and bars are either officially open or have closed permanently.
When I was doing research for my advanced degree the Internet was exploding with new search engines - gopher.net, lycos, alta vista, infoseek, excite, and yahoo (yet another officious oracle). Pick and choose which one to use. In '98 I co-founded a software company (sold in 2001) the same year google started operations. In 2000 in my 2nd start up our offices were on Brannan street across from infoseek. It later was shuttered and all of the search engines faded except for google. Yeah, the early internet was a fun ride.
My cousin was in the same comp sci grad lab as Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) at Stanford. He once brought a brochure about his new company to Thanksgiving - and my cousin and I made so much fun of the jargon in it. It was something like:
Consumers can access the WORLD WIDE WEB user HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL and navigate through HYPERLINKS - we laughed and laughed. Someone has a pool house in Hillsdale now, while the other two of us .. . do not.
I used to see Jerry Yang walking around downtown Menlo Park. He was a regular at the Peets on Santa Cruz avenue.
Early Internet
M... MOM! HANG UP! I'M USING THE INTERNET!
<<picture of Ryan from The Office pointing up.gif>>
Back around, maybe 98, a coworker and I were talking about new company ideas, just shooting the shit on what might work, not really being serious. We had an idea about a website that would allow companies to buy supplies by aggregating the best prices on products for the various office supply stores. This was before they all had separate online list of products, prices, and ordering.
That was the one thing that probably would have been successful had we actually done it.
Sounds like Ariba - once a high-flyer that went public, then poof.
I had completely forgotten about them!
I remember when Juno took the local internet market by storm because they had far more dial up numbers available than anyone else.
I also recall the issue of whether applications written and running on Netscape Navigator would work correctly on Internet Explorer. Then we had the issue where employers were difficult to convince that they should have Explorer in their shop when Navigator was already installed. "Why would we want to ever want to replace computers, or pay for more memory?"
I was a Netcom subscriber. I got it when it was still Windows for Workgroups 3.11. So you had to have a 3rd party TCP/IP stack and select a protocol. I think the early ones I used were SLIP and then when Microsoft included TCP/IP in Windows 95 it switched to PPP. It then became much easier to do "browsing".
I had MindSpring, than shifted to Earthlink, LOL. I was living in Atherton at the time - we didn't get cable Wi-Fi until 2003, a couple of years after Palo Alto got it.
as long as I cash out. Go public or get bought by one of the office supply companies I guess.
I used to use our 300 and 600 baud modem in the late 80s to login onto a local BBS in the Claremont/La Verne area. They had a meet-up at the Round Table Pizza in Claremont when I was in the 8th grade - so I rode my bike over and saw the meet-up and thought "Wow, what a bunch of nerds!" and didn't go over.
The very first Cal sports internet community was the Go Bears Listserv - started up in 1994? There's a meet-up photo somewhere in a photo album I have at Northside LaVal's. Sean "Yoda" Rouse was a prominent member of that community.
i miss LaVal's pizza
Southside (or maybe both?) were partially owned by Tom Fogerty - of Creedance Clearwater Revival. His daughter went to Cal at the same time I did - my friend dated her for a second.
Was LaVals and La Burrita owned by the same group? I thought I had heard that.
Watched Cal/Duke at Southside. Was insane! the next day my coworkers said they saw me on the KTVU Channel 2 news a couple of times in the background in the game news story.
we watched a lot of ugly Cal losses there too no? NCCA hoops vs UConn seems to ring a bell.
yeah there were a few of those so I choose to remember Cal/Duke.
I was at Southside LaVals for Cal/Duke too. LaVal's was CRAZY full.
I missed the entire Aaron Rodgers era because there was no such thing as streaming games back then and I was in London.
when i was in HS and early days as undergrad ('88) the internet was still not the dominant net. i remember working in a research lab (Space Science Lab) and having internet, bitnet, arpanet accounts and how it is hard to send messages between the different nets w/o some strange naming scheme.
on a separate note, when i was about to get married ('98), the idea of a wedding website and an online gift registry did not really exist in a structured way. so built my own wedding website and online gift registry that spanned across multiple online stores, vendors and even places that had no internet buying.
wrote the website using super basic HTML and Perl for the cgi-bin action when you clicked on a button
I remember dialing into BBSes with a 1200 baud modem. I had a list of dial-up sites. A friend had an Apple IIe with the AppleCat modem and was able to do all the boxes. That was back when phone company techs had handsets
that would send tones to do certain diagnostic things. I had 56K dialup up until maybe 2003 when I got a cable modem in Oakland.
I got a cable modem in January 2005 which I remember specifically because I had been trying to deal with a bunch of insurance problems after my younger daughter was born and the dial up connection was choking on the size of the forms. The missus was strongly opposed for various reasons (not least that she thought it was subsidizing my employer) but I had to draw the line.
Today in Covid-19
I posted this yesterday - but a lot of the re-open America money is coming from big business and a lot of the policy will revolve around workers who do not want to return to work being able to be filed under "voluntarily quit" and will not be able to receive unemployment - allowing both the business and the state to clean it's payroll.
This country and government hate poor people.
Terence7 hr
You know it's not about "re-opening for business" - it's about getting people off unemployment.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said in her state, it will be considered a “voluntary quit” if an employee refuses to return to work once businesses reopen, thereby losing access to unemployment benefits.
A similar situation will soon play out in Texas.
https://twitter.com/ScottImmordino/status/1255231572233551872?s=20
Perhaps it's the Republican in me (yes, there are Republican Cal fans) - I don't buy this for all the businesses that want to reopen. In order to keep the lights on and to eat, businesses need to work if it is safely possible to do so.
I do want people off unemployment, but I want them off unemployment because they are employed. If they are off unemployment because of safety/risk of going back to work for a job that is risking their safety, then they probably shouldn't be working for that company/job. If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income.
I rarely speak up on these boards on my views on things because I know that most of you probably disagree with my political/moral viewpoints, but that's ok! I respect the heck out of y'all and love to see the viewpoints you have.
" If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income."
IT'S THEIR OWN TAXES THEY PAID INTO UNEMPLOYMENT.
(when i went onto unemployment it was very clear i got back what I paid into it. It's also not stealing when the fund is there to keep people paying rent and buying food in times of need)
Curious about this point: "If they are off unemployment because of safety/risk of going back to work for a job that is risking their safety, then they probably shouldn't be working for that company/job."
Are you saying that it's up to them whether they want to go to their newly unsafe job, or quit and find a new one? Do you think the employer has an obligation to provide a safe work environment?
Talked to a friend in Texas - this is what she wrote:
"I have several students who don't feel safe returning to their jobs as service, movie theater, or retail workers. As everyone here knows, the TX governor is insane and wants to start opening things this weekend. Movie theaters will open with limited seating. It's seen as resignation and as such, they're ineligible for unemployment. All of the colleagues I've spoken to are reporting similar stories."
Their Lt. Governor is even more insane than the Governor.
"stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income"
This is an interesting concept. Why is it an unemployed individual stealing from everyone else? All the large businesses that don't pay tax but use public services--why is that not stealing?
100% agreed
"If they want to keep unemployment and not return to work because the benefits are better than returning to work, that's stealing from everyone else's hard earned taxable income."
I would argue that if unemployment -- which is meant as supplemental income in combination with any savings to navigate between jobs -- pays better than the actual job does, maybe the company is actually stealing from the government by leaving their employees in a welfare state in order to increase profitability.
I may be pretty liberal socially, but I am all for smaller federal government and more emphasis on local government and fiscal responsibility. But that means that we can't constantly be in danger of a massive recession/depression because our consumer-based economy is walking a tightrope with such a large percentage of America a few months from going homeless.
I want to also add one more note re: stealing from hard earned taxable income. We pay taxes that go into a social safety net specifically so that we can draw from it when we need to. This is not stealing -- this is the entire point of the process. I want to re-emphasize my earlier point, it is 100% companies stealing from our hard earned taxes by taking advantage of said safety nets and paying unsustainable wages knowing that there *is*one for them to fall on.
There is a reason some "small businesses" had trouble finding a bank to work with; no one in their right mind would deal with them because they were on such thin financial ice that they couldn't sustain a down payroll cycle. Granted, this mess will take a lot longer, and a lot more, to work through, but an operation that lurches into insolvency in 2 days was badly over-extended and recklessly under-capitalized to begin with.
I think that's a bit unfair, albeit I understand it's somewhat the point that I made. There are industries that find it harder to go through periods of no business outside of their control, like restaurants. That said, I also think there are two parts to it. Businesses have convinced people that low wages are necessary, when a vast majority of the chains are just trying to inflate profit margins like I was saying above. Only categorized as "small to medium" businesses because each location has a small number of employees, even though they employee thousands nation-wide. Second, as Americans we've gotten too complacent and used to everything being cheap at the cost of underpaying employees everywhere. At some point we'll have to reconcile that keeping people out of poverty is worth paying a higher price per pound for our steaks and cheeseburgers.
Do you think it would be easy for some of these people to find another non-risky job in this environment?
Maybe not "all businesses" but clearly the Republican politicians that are pushing this are not doing so with an eye on the safety of the employees if they are mandating it across the board, irrespective of the circumstances.
An upside of re-opening is that elective surgeries can be scheduled. My sister lives in Iowa and has been struggling with a bladder issue and her surgery was cancelled. Hopefully she can get it fixed now.
Apparently my mother is now scheduled for some kind of procedure that will allow her to have “DIY” dialysis - not sure that this will go well but I’m pretty sure she needs it so 🤷🏼♂️
Best wishes for her and you.
I've been thinking a lot about how many surgeries are "elective" but not really optional -- they are medically necessary but just not lethal. I am glad those folks can move forward getting their problems fixed. Hope your sister is taken care of and on the mend soon!
That's part of the larger problem with what is medically "reasonable", and in too many cases, what is not "too expensive", that hijacks the process. Its not completely divorced from using medical science to determine treatment, and not profits, but there is a cost that, as you note, has to be paid sometime by someone.
Too often a cheaper in the short term management strategy gets forced upon the patient even though that's more expensive in the long run than actually fixing the problem, because the next financial statement will look better, and someone else can worry about the long term consequences, fiscal and physical. The health industry profits much more from long term management than short term resolution.
That doesn't change with a single payer system vs one that suddenly leaves millions without insurance coverage when a state's unemployment goes from ~3% to ~15% in 2 days; that will require actual oversight, which will be both a lot of work and inconvenient. But I think DC's point is at least people won't effectively be dumped every time management decides layoffs are their response to being over-extended and recklessly under-capitalized.
Thanks. I hope so to.
This is a good article about GA by Amanda Mull, who sidesteps the “know nothing Yankee” trap by being from Georgia: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georgia-reopening-coronavirus-pandemic/610882/
I’m reconciled to the fact that as a society we will likely have to reopen in advance of a vaccine or other mitigating technology. I am also completely certain that the GOP cannot be trusted to handle this in a way that doesn’t end up fucking most of us over.
It's not just a GOP issue. The local and state governments have demonstrated an inability to be agile in responding to changing developments, a lack of comprehensive understanding of issues (understandable, no one can be an expert in everything, but also underscores the fact that small to medium organizations can't have staff and don't have access to expert counsel in all sides of issues), and a predictable but still frustrating tendency to pander to either local voter popularity or local contributor interests, without accounting for the consequences beyond the shortest term.
A proliferation of hired gun spokesman/experts who may or may not actually be qualified or inclined to be an expert has only further clouded the issues.
You know the old saw “never mistake incompetence for malice”? For me the difference with elected officials is one party is incompetent and one is malicious. There’s nothing wrong with not being sure how to figure out how to deal with an event so profoundly atypical that’s going to need new solutions and a degree of experimentation. I think the difference between the parties at the national level is that one keeps repeating “trust the experts” and setting preconditions we’re nowhere close to meeting, and one is indemnifying corporations and making it clear they want to starve people back into unsafe work environments. And that, to me, is the division between incompetence and malice.
Well said
The lady friend is having an issue with her employees not wanting to come back to work bc A) they're getting more money from unemployment than they would if they returned, and B) they don't want to chance La Rona. She emailed them yesterday to tell them while she was happy to have paid their health insurance 100% for March and April, but she cannot continue to do so going forward, and they have three choices 1) remain furloughed and pay 100% out of pocket, 2) come back to work and pay their normal out of pocket share, or 3) be removed from the insurance plan altogether.
Basically, she qualified for the SBA/PPP loans, but needs to have 29 FTEs on her payroll in order for the loans to be forgiven,
Without wanting to sound like a Bernie dead-ender, this whole escapade has been a strong argument for an alternative to employer provided health insurance.
Can we talk healthcare for a bit? I go nuts at the Medicare For All crowd who declares that we should have medicare of all because everyone deserves free healthcare. They have absolutely no idea how Medicare work. It's far from free at the point of service.
Due to a slight family crisis (everyone's OK) I have spent many hours in the last two weeks going through all of my Mom's medical bills. She has Medicare, plus a Medicare Plan D supplement to give her prescription drug coverage, which Medicare normally doesn't cover. Her out of pocket costs have never been less than $8K/year since at least 2014, which is as far back as I went, and that doesn't even include the $160 or so monthly premiums she has to pay. The M4A folks are going to be pretty fucking shocked if they ever get their wish.
It’s not a great payment mechanism and it’s certainly not comprehensive. It’s been very useful for my folks but not without issues on gaps in drug coverage. At least your mother lets you see the paperwork, my folks apparently would rather die of the ‘rona than cede the “independence” of grocery shopping far less have us help with the paperwork.
Glad everything is okay with your mother
While related, fixing a seriously flawed payment and delivery system and fixing the access to coverage issue are 2 different problems, both exacerbated by current events.
Please forgive me for the extremely broken English in the first paragraph. I'm not quite sure what happened there!
Those seem like reasonable choices to me.
Assuming safe working conditions and adequate ppe are a part of returning to work. This has been the problem with some of these situations, where the inability to operate safely manufactured a hot-spot, and people understandably don't want to sacrifice their safety, and have to heavily leverage that health coverage in short order.
I don't envy a lot of business owners and managers who never considered the possibility of a situation arising that would be allowed to get as out of control as this has.
It's good that she's giving them reasonable choices.
Governor's plan for reopening:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/28/here-is-gov-newsoms-4-part-plan-to-reopen-california-from-coronavirus-shutdown/
Seems reasonable, but having hair salons and barbershops in the "Stage 3" group would seem to indicate that people will need some other way to get their hair cut. Could haircutters start making house calls?
A friend on my other internet community posted: I was on a call about potential research into COVID-19 in autopsy subjects consented for donation. This included a couple of the area medical examiners. King County (includes Seattle) Medical Examiners office is testing every single case for COVID, and have found it in a significant number of totally asymptomatic people who died of something else entirely. Murder victim, positive. Overdose victim, positive. I’ll be very interested to see the actual numbers after they’ve been at this for a while
Incidentally, someone responded: It makes me wonder if Covid does more to the body than originally thought.
Yup, COVID-19 caused that person to be murdered 🙄
You never know! “If you cough one more time I swear I’m going to shoot you!”
In our ever crumbling democracy
Pro
Manny Ramirez considering joining Taiwan pro league.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29112258/former-boston-red-sox-star-manny-ramirez-hoping-return-baseball-chinese-league
The ESPN article left out this quote "I have had a few offers for teams in the Atlantic League, but am more in favor of experiencing Taiwan and their delicious food.”
YESSSSSSSS
KBO is going to start up soon (minus fans), ESPN will broadcast live.