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The 'Back to work movement' just seems like a way to push people off of unemployment.
by Loughla 7y ago
The 'Back to work movement' just seems like a way to push people off of unemployment.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIt seems really hard to imagine how that could be so. Why would random commentators or protesters care so passionately about unemployment budgets?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoHere on HN somebody posted an analysis of the websites pushing these narratives. I recall it was two guys selling T-Shirts. They discovered the power of the meme, and align it with their business interests.
- txcwpalpha 7y agoRandom commentators and protestors don’t. Certain politicians do, and those politicians have done an outstanding job of convincing those random commentators and protestors that this situation is political one, bringing all of the fervor and zealotry that politics brings. This situation went from being “we are staying inside to defeat the virus” to now “we refuse to stay inside (reopen) because that lets those evil democrats (Republicans) win, and I won’t ever allow that”.
- BEEdwards 7y agoI love how you politically both sides this, when the science is clearly on the stay at home side. Those damn democrats playing politics and listening to the doctors on health issues...
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoI'm not sure what you're referring to as "the science". People who disagree with stay at home orders largely acknowledge that staying at home makes it harder for infectious diseases to spread. If you're saying doctors and scientists have cooked up a master plan that will eliminate the coronavirus if we just stay home a bit longer and catastrophically fail if restrictions are loosened at all, I don't think that's true.
- clairity 7y agothe democrats and democratic media (npr, nytimes, etc., which tend to be my news sources) are absolutely playing up the fear and panic for their political ends (elections, legislation, fundraising, and everything else). if you don't see the politics of it, you're just not using your critical thinking skills. the science is not on the stay-at-home side. the science is on the don't-spit-in-other-people's-mouths side. how you effect that has been absolutely politicized.
- txcwpalpha 7y agoI fully agree with you, but I intentionally made it two-sided because AFAIK HN guidelines don't like it when a comment thread becomes clearly politically one-sided.
- BFatts 7y agoTo be clear, no one is asking to stay inside - everyone wants the economy reopened again. But, there's the sensible way and there's the stupid way. The latter method involves just going to back to the way things were and pretend the virus doesn't exist. That is untenable, and the smarter folk who think that a phased opening is a better approach are the ones being shouted down.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoOne of us is getting media bubbled here. I've seen a lot of people argue that they do not want the economy reopened and everyone should stay inside because it's not safe yet. Attempts to engage in a phased opening have produced headlines like "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice"[1], and major figures are still talking on Twitter about how "No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow."[2] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georgia-reopening-coronavirus-pandemic/610882/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg... [2] https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1258184774486642688 https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1258184774486642688
- pwinnski 7y agoI want to stay inside. Most people I know want to stay inside. The economy can limp along for the rest of this year just fine. The sensible way of re-opening involves not doing so now. Texas is still gaining new cases and deaths at a high rate. Our curve is not flattening. And yet with one eye on the unemployment coffers, Governor Abbott is overriding the same local decision-makers he deferred to just weeks ago, and forcing business to re-open. Hair salons open tomorrow, while four of the six days of May so far have set new records for new COVID-19 cases. Everyone I know who works retail jobs would rather be home. Some of them are being forced back, some have never been able to stop working. None of them are happy about it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoI agree. The beginning of this crisis really did hold promise of 'we are in this together'. And yet it quickly morphed into 'the other guys are out to get us'. I watching all this with genuine worry that things can easily spiral out of control.
- claudeganon 7y agoThey don’t. They’re stirred up by rich people through astroturf groups: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-protests-astroturf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-prote...
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoYour thesis here is that the movement is made up and nobody actually agrees with it? I guess I don't know how to rigorously disprove that, but it strikes me as unlikely as well. The easiest way to stir people up is to tell them things they already believe! It seems naive to look at even a moderate sized protest and say "oh, nobody actually believes in this cause, it's astroturfed".
- claudeganon 7y agoI believe that their is real discontent in the face of a deadly pandemic and massive unemployment, but also that rich people are harnessing that discontent to their own, cynical ends. These protests would not exist if we had UBI like Spain or a sane, well-managed response like Taiwan. I dunno how much history you’ve read, but the rich cynically exploiting the masses to direct their anger away from themselves and towards their enemies or other scapegoats is hardly a novel development.
- jerf 7y agoUBI can't solve this problem. UBI does absolutely nothing if there's nothing to buy because nobody is working. You can't UBI your way around meat plants closing, restaurants not being staffed, stores closing, and so on. If anything, UBI encouraging more people to not work can only make it worse. The whole premise of UBI is that there's such a surplus that the only sane thing to do with it is to distribute it. There is now no surplus, and indeed credible threats of shortages. Therefore, it is only logical that the rest of the argument is now invalid. Hopefully, only temporarily.
- claudeganon 7y ago
- DuskStar 7y agoBecause they pay for those unemployment budgets, perhaps? You may not agree with that perspective, but it is held by quite a few people.
- spamizbad 7y agoYep, and they are kinda doing it with a gun to people’s heads because unemployment will dry up soon.
- claudeganon 7y agoThat’s completely what it is, but also necessary to the process of normalizing masses of unnecessary deaths every day. It’s stunning that these propaganda narratives work in the face of countries like South Korea and Taiwan, where the response has been safely and thoroughly managed. But American exceptionalism is truly a force to behold.
- choward 7y agoNobody actually wants to go back to work. All they want is the financial security they feel from having a job. If any of these people hit the lottery for example would they be begging to go back to work?
- ianleeclark 7y agoSo we can do a blood sacrifice at the altar of The Cheesecake Factory because people don't want to work a shitty job?
- mc32 7y agoIt’s not a yes or no thing. Some people don’t like being cooped up and would rather be able to socialize in person at work, etc. Some people are fearful and would rather stay at home. There are many in between.
- choward 7y agoThat's true but you're only cooped up because of stay at home orders. Were people who worked full time from home complaining about being cooped up? Maybe a little but not enough to want to go into an office 40 hours a week. Sure it's nice to get out and escape from your family a little bit and socialize with different people but why does this have to equate to going to work?
- em-bee 7y agothe difficulty here is of having to develop a new way to deal with this situation. it's the same problem some people face at retirement. they just have a hard time adjusting to the new situation. those of us who work from home don't have that problem. neither those that are already practicing a range of activities that don't require going outside. like reading, practicing a music instrument, painting, knitting, contributing to FOSS, etc. we just spend more time on those. everyone else needs to pick up a new hobby. if your daily routine consists of going to work, and hang out with friends in your free time, then you'll have to completely relearn how to get through the day, pick up new hobbies and find other new meaningful activities.
- JAlexoid 7y agoUnfortunately money isn't limitless.
- syshum 7y agoUnfortunately there are many people that believe it is... That the government can just indefinitely issue people money with no negative consequences, or worse they believe that simply "taxing the wealthy" is a path to that infinite money
- daxorid 7y agoThese people aren't wrong, though. Powell has printed $6T, and the DXY has gone nowhere but up, along with the SPY and the QQQ and the DJIA. Every single Thursday, we report more job losses than expected, and the market screams higher. As much as we'd like to think there will be consequences to printing money, the evidence is in that there won't be, either in currency value or market confidence. MMT has proven itself correct.
- mindslight 7y agoYou don't seem to be taking into account that stocks shooting up is itself the inflation. The stock market is completely disconnected from the economic forecast, because money remains easy for wall street despite everything happening on main street.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoHas it? The argument could be made that US financial health is worse now than in 2008 and not better. Wall Street gorging on free money is not really a good argument right now if the country is literally on the verge of falling apart.
- syshum 7y agoShort term you are right, as most of the printing has not actually found its way back into the economy in any real way Long term however you are very very wrong Further the Stock market is not a good indicator of economic health, never has been. Stock market is largely irrational
- roenxi 7y agoThere are two basic frames: (1) Most jobs were make-work. Parking everyone up doesn't really matter. (2) Most jobs add a little bit to society. Shutting everything down substantially reduces the buffer between people and a 1,500AD standard of living. Which frame a person accepts as more reasonable probably determines how they feel about the shutdowns.
- throwaway894345 7y agoThis comment seems like it could be insightful, but I'm a native English speaker and I can't make heads or tails of "Most jobs were make-work. Parking everyone up doesn't really matter.".
- ashtonkem 7y agoOhio’s setting up a snitch website for employers to report on employees too scared to return to work, so that benefits can be stripped. If I were reading this kind of stuff in a history book and the next paragraph said “and the revolution started in...” I wouldn’t be surprised. Punishing people for being afraid of a pandemic is not a smart move.
- Loughla 7y agoI honestly, genuinely believe that people are a) too divided, and b) too content to complain online v organize actual change for any sort of revolution to happen. I genuinely believe it will take a failure of an absolute overwhelming magnitude (internet goes completely down and society collapses) for an actual, classic-style revolution.
- ashtonkem 7y agoPredicting if, or when, a revolution will arrive is a tricky thing. There are plenty of cases where revolutionary participants themselves dismissed the chances of a revolution hours or days before they kick off. They only look inevitable in hindsight. Regardless; even long short of kicking off a revolution, punishing the populace for being scared is bad politics.
- qqn 7y agoYes, from Dan Carlin's podcasts I learned of the book The Great Illusion (1909), the illusion being that nations gained through war. In it, the author wrote that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous," concluding that a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long. This was a popular view, yet WWI still kicked off just a few years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
- ashtonkem 7y ago“This time is different” is quite the siren song in several areas of human endeavors.
- phkahler 7y agoPeople could live at home on a lot less money if not for debt and rent. But there isnt a pause button on the financial system. In fact, a lot of people may just go deeper in debt due to this.
- tehjoker 7y agoThere is a pause button, but we have to demand it. If the state stands down on enforcing those debts, they can't be collected. Simple.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThat is a very dangerous door to open. First, at the other end of those debts are things like peoples' pension plans. People aren't going to like their pension plan's income being put on pause. Second, making (aspects of) contracts unenforceable can be very destructive if it goes too far. A huge amount of society relies on contracts in order to be able to operate; if you destroy that, you can damage society in fairly fundamental ways.
- phkahler 7y agoI think a key to a strong and secure economy is to reduce and discourage debt of all kinds. Instead lowering interest rates is used to encourage spending. Debt has its place, but it always comes due.
- TearsInTheRain 7y agoOr maybe people that are unemployed want to get their jobs back?
- zrail 7y agoThis is my understanding as well. The Federal government isn't actually funding the $600/week/worker extra to the states yet and so states are running out of cash. Obviously the only solution is to drop the states of emergency and order people back to work. It's the only possible way out of this quagmire. /s
- kgin 7y ago100% agree. Shows the power of wrapping anything in “freedom words” can get people to support it, even if it means putting themselves in harm’s way.