8 ms·

In the short term, it's great. It really doesn't take much to tell banks to add numbers to people's bank accounts. What it's really doing is subsidizing every

In the short term, it's great. It really doesn't take much to tell banks to add numbers to people's bank accounts. What it's really doing is subsidizing everybody that works in or is tied to non-essential face-to-face service industry, by everyone else. It's really not even that interesting, other than seeing how easily frazzled people are by the slightest calamity - why is non-essential services taking a vacation for a few months at the expense of everyone else supposed to be a major event with long-lasting consequences? Imagine you have a family and you lose your job. If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really. Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? I'm guessing because not only have you lost your job, but you owe tens of millions in gambling debts and spent half your waking hours convincing various factions to give you some extra time to come up with the money. That's what the economy looks like to me and I find it difficult to be sympathetic - people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time. It is within my lifetime that I've gone from owning 2 t-shirts to 20 and I have no idea why. I can go back to wearing 2 and my life will be the same - I just hope others can see the silver lining in all this and not go back to living frivolously.

tempestn 6y ago
It's reasonable for individuals to aim for a few months of emergency funds. It's not reasonable to expect main street businesses to have cash on hand to cover many months of near zero revenue. Most small businesses just don't have the margins for that to be viable. If you expect every individual restaurant to be able to weather a period of months when no one goes to restaurants without any kind of assistance, the only restaurants you'll get will be large chains. Much like running government 'like a business', the analogy of running a business 'like a household' only takes you so far. They're fundamentally different things.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  GP also expects families to have 2 years plus of living expenses saved.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Some did invest their spare $ into liquéfiable assets, at a lower return, just in case they needed to access that cash. Then there are those that bought chalets to put on Airbnb and rubbed their high returns in everyone’s faces until March.
- alexashka 6y ago
  How did you arrive at your assessment of what is reasonable? Mine happens to be different from yours. Does that make me unreasonable? I mean, are there more shades to the world than reasonable/unreasonable, black and white? I think so and I hope we can discuss the various shades of grey. I think being responsible and saving for a rainy day applies across all spheres of life - be it government, business or a household. What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are?
  - EGreg 6y ago
    It assumes savings are possible in a business that has tons of expenses and can’t just stop paying rent.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the reasonableness of your demands. >What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are? For one, it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business. Such capital is likely not going to be available to new restaurants or other service oriented small businesses with no real collateral. Or it would come at such a high cost that it would be unprofitable to run the restaurant. All to optimize for a once in a century event. I think the world where the government backstops these businesses is just a better world than the one that would arise from what you envision. It has more of what I want and less of what I don't.
    - alexashka 6y ago
      > You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the reasonableness of your demands. Did I? There is a single sentence with the word 'need' in it in my entire post. My last sentence expresses my hope for others' behaviour. That's two 'normative' statements that really express the same point - we are living in a consumerist culture. I don't think that's at all a controversial position, it is almost a cliche at this point. I also haven't made a single demand upon anyone. I'm not sure what motivates you to misrepresent my position in such crude fashion and I wish you'd refrain from replying to me in this manner in the future. > it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business. Help me understand - you think the approach of being responsible and saving for a rainy day, dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business? How? How does saving profits relate to upstart requirements? As far as I can tell - the two are unrelated.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  I general, we WANT businesses without revenue for many months (excluding seasonally business that must explicitly manage this either with savings or loans) to fail, their capital be put to more productive use and moral hazard avoided. The outside risks like fire, hurricane, etc ... are best handled by insurance that allows for recuperated lost capital and restarting. What we are seeing now is basically an insurer of last resort type situation where we have the government taking on the role. Going forward, we should strive for pandemic insurance becoming more common, and maybe government back reinsurance or mandatory insurance pools handling the systematic risk inherent in a global or national emergency.
  - clairity 6y ago
    > "we WANT businesses without revenue for many months... to fail, their capital be put to more productive use and moral hazard avoided" tell that to every startup that spends many months, sometimes years, without revenue, and certainly with negative income. more directly, it's difficult to boil down misallocation to simply being out of revenue for some months, although econ 101 might indicate so (actually it's price x quantity at the margins, but we'll go with the simplistic interpretation here). but more interestingly, inefficiencies are actually a key part of markets and capitalism. it takes many, distributed participants doing very similar things to get pricing right. many companies start and fade away. those are in fact inefficiencies in the ruthless game of survival of the fittest. in a perfectly efficient world, you'd only need 1 try to get it right. the better analysis is to determine which factors in addition to to revenue to use to determine misallocation. if i had to hazard a guess, we probably want, as a policy matter, businesses to be able to weather up to a year of economic shock, not just a few months, without introducing any concerning moral hazard economy-wide, while providing the necessary resilience and stability. regarding insurance, you're basically saying the businesses should pay for systemic risks, rather than all of us, but that risk is not idiosyncratic to just those businesses. it's systemic, so the system should bear them, i.e., the government (as representative of society as a whole).
zrobotics 6y ago
OK, expecting multiple years of savings is just flat-out unrealistic. Even the more hardcore financial advisers only recommend 9 months. Plus, who owns 2 t-shirts? Are you doing laundry daily? Hate to break it to you, but that isn't exactly great for the environment either. My father grew up poor as hell on a farm, and even he had 6 shirts. To this day he will comment that they were darned to the point of being patchwork, but owning 20 shirts doesn't seem like a huge extravagance. Even with homemade clothing, that isn't a ridiculous wardrobe. There is definitely a consumerist culture and people buy stuff they don't need, but in the context of this article & the pandemic the people receiving this aid need it. I don't mean to be negative, but there are 0eople making the decision between paying rent and eating; calling out consumerism for this is in poor taste.
- artsyca 6y ago
  I'm glad I have the shirts on my back bro and your comment has inspired me to mend my fraying dress pants. By the way I think he's being rhetorical, not literal. It's an order of magnitude thing. i.e. I had o(n) where n < 1000 and now I have o(10n)
gizmo686 6y ago
The problem isn't over consumption [0]. We have the capacity to produce; and unless you are suggesting that society should be hoarding warehouses of miscellaneous goods, production must equal consumption. When some external stress hit, our capacity to produce (and, in this case, consume) goes down for non economic reasons. Fortunately, we have such an overcapacity of productive capabilities that outside of a few goods that saw a sudden demand spike, this loss of productive capacity is nothing more than an inconvenience. If our productive capacity was only that which was essential, not only would we be sacrificing goods and services during the good years; but we would also not have so much slack that we could weather such a drop in capacity without without serious supply shortages. Indeed, there are still parts of the world that do not have are level of "unnecessary" production that are now facing famine. The problem we in the wealthy world are facing is one of distribution. When we made the policy decision of shutting down non critical production, we also broke a critical component of our resource distribution system (namely, giving people tokens that can be exchanged for resources). Since we don't have a centrally planned economy, no one is really in the position to make this kind of policy decision, so we are left with the option of mainting something like the previous system just giving people those tokens by central fiat. [0] Unless you want to blame the pandemic on environmental changes and travel consumption. This isn't completely unreasonable, but even in the "natural" state, pandemics happen.
jussij 6y ago
> why is non-essential services taking a vacation for a few months at the expense of everyone else supposed to be a major event with long-lasting consequences? That government response is there to help slow the spread of COVID-19 which then results in the saving of many tens of thousand of lives. If the government didn't step in to help, people are then forced to go to out to work which then helps to spread the virus.
Ghjklov 6y ago
>people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time Who sold them that stuff? Who convinced people that they need to upgrade their phones every single year? Nothing will change until we destroy the marketing/advertising industries that profit off manipulating the most vulnerable people...
lm28469 6y ago
> Imagine you have a family and you lose your job. If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really. I lost my job in Germany and got one year of unemployment benefits, no savings needed. Min wage workers have no way to build 6 months of emergency fund and keep the "dignity" you're referencing in later post. If on top of that they also have to build their own medical insurance and retirement fund it's game over from day 1. > Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? It's the same thing as unemployment benefits, insurances, &c. in the end, money going where it's needed* to avoid people losing everything to events out of their control. (*which hopefully is small/medium sized businesse, not mega corps avoiding paying tax whenever they can but that's another issue) > people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time. That's for sure, sadly it doesn't look like we're going in that direction. I'm personally appalled at how some people spend their money but it's part of the game
- chosenbreed37 6y ago
  > I lost my job in Germany and got one year of unemployment benefits, no savings needed. I'm glad you were able to get those benefits. I think in general it is a good system. You say no savings needed. By that you mean you personally did not need to save that money. But somebody did. Unless the German government is printing money they would have to get that money from somewhere. If they don't have it now they would have gone to the bond markets. In which someone will have to save for it in the future. Again this is not a bad thing. I think it is important to point that someone will have to foot the bill. In some cases it will be a future generation (depending on how much the government is having to borrow). This is usually in the form of taxes. Which presumably many would pay. Including those who did not receive any direct benefit during the crisis. You could argue that it is for the greater good. And many would agree. I personally do think there is something to learn from the position taken by GP. After all in the eurozone we regularly see contrasts between the frugal north (Germany, Netherlands, etc) and the spendthrift south (Italy, Greece, etc). Whether as individuals, companies, nations perhaps we could think about how to best to manage our resources to be able to weather the storms that may come our way.
bildung 6y ago
> What it's really doing is subsidizing everybody that works in or is tied to non-essential face-to-face service industry, by everyone else. Not, not really. Canadas bond rates are 0.5% it seems. The country just has to lend a few billions, wait a few decades, and the debt is essentially gone due to inflation alone.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really. > Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? Because, as a share of population, approximately no one in the workingn class that makes up the bull of the population has “savings for a couple of years”, and that's not just a transitory situation but a fact that capitalism structurally guarantees.
artsyca 6y ago
Sounds like something I would write, kudos. Bro it's not about getting more t-shirts. One day you may wear collared shirts.
alkonaut 6y ago
Any analogy between personal finance and macroeconomics is doomed from the start. If I printed money in my basement and I could spend myself out off a slump, then it might be comparable. But I can't.
NikolaNovak 6y ago
>> I find it difficult to be sympathetic - people need a reality check I think these are the two key points. And sorry if it gets personal, but the first point one is obvious, and the second one is true - yes, yes you do. There are people in the world who lack empathy. They don't understand those who are unlucky or in hardship. I mean, intellectually they say they do, but believe there's always a personal failure that's to fault, rather than any impact of environment or circumstances. They also believe their own situation is only due to their good work and thinking, and not due to any external circumstance, and they'd have been that successful in any set of circumstances. That single mom working 12 hour shifts at Amazon warehouse - well it's her fault that she got pregnant / that father left / that she doesn't have savings. That Ontario auto worker with five kids who lost their job last year due to car industry moving on, and has been using their savings to retrain while looking for another job, it's their fault for running out of runway or not seeing the industry direction earlier. Etc Etc Etc It's just sociopathic inability to see outside of one's own context and history and internal narrative. To imagine a series of unfortunate events. Sure you own 20 t-shirts. Doesn't mean all people do and/or have "tens of millions of gambling debt". I mean, honestly, the wording in that post is beyond cruelly clueless, it just feels like a troll. Nobody could ACTUALLY be that blind to their own personal privilege. As I said, this could get a little personal. CERB is not MEANT for people who gambled or have too many t-shirts. It's for people who work hard and now cannot, and are dis-proportionally impacted. I have a high salary and can obtain it from home - great. It's my luck and blessing and life choices and privilege. The 21 year old at beginning of their career and no savings and who can NOT work now... is ORDERED to not work... the family running out of food... that's who it's for. Canadians have overall made a decision (repeatedly) we'd rather help the innocents, at the risk we get a little abused. It's our stereotype. And the reason I live here. The notion that we'll pay for it, that we're making up numbers, that it's unsustainable - those are all valid points. But the notion that these are all some over-privileged clueless people who are getting free money for no good reason... Jeebus. Somebody is wrong on the internets!

tempestn 6y ago

It's reasonable for individuals to aim for a few months of emergency funds. It's not reasonable to expect main street businesses to have cash on hand to cover many months of near zero revenue. Most small businesses just don't have the margins for that to be viable. If you expect every individual restaurant to be able to weather a period of months when no one goes to restaurants without any kind of assistance, the only restaurants you'll get will be large chains. Much like running government 'like a business', the analogy of running a business 'like a household' only takes you so far. They're fundamentally different things.

FireBeyond 6y ago
GP also expects families to have 2 years plus of living expenses saved.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Some did invest their spare $ into liquéfiable assets, at a lower return, just in case they needed to access that cash. Then there are those that bought chalets to put on Airbnb and rubbed their high returns in everyone’s faces until March.
alexashka 6y ago
How did you arrive at your assessment of what is reasonable? Mine happens to be different from yours. Does that make me unreasonable? I mean, are there more shades to the world than reasonable/unreasonable, black and white? I think so and I hope we can discuss the various shades of grey. I think being responsible and saving for a rainy day applies across all spheres of life - be it government, business or a household. What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are?
- EGreg 6y ago
  It assumes savings are possible in a business that has tons of expenses and can’t just stop paying rent.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the reasonableness of your demands. >What do you think is fundamentally wrong with such a view, other than that it isn't the way things currently are? For one, it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business. Such capital is likely not going to be available to new restaurants or other service oriented small businesses with no real collateral. Or it would come at such a high cost that it would be unprofitable to run the restaurant. All to optimize for a once in a century event. I think the world where the government backstops these businesses is just a better world than the one that would arise from what you envision. It has more of what I want and less of what I don't.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    > You made a bunch of normative statements about what people "need" to do, so I don't think it's out of bounds to make a normative comment about the reasonableness of your demands. Did I? There is a single sentence with the word 'need' in it in my entire post. My last sentence expresses my hope for others' behaviour. That's two 'normative' statements that really express the same point - we are living in a consumerist culture. I don't think that's at all a controversial position, it is almost a cliche at this point. I also haven't made a single demand upon anyone. I'm not sure what motivates you to misrepresent my position in such crude fashion and I wish you'd refrain from replying to me in this manner in the future. > it dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business. Help me understand - you think the approach of being responsible and saving for a rainy day, dramatically increases the capital requirements for starting a new business? How? How does saving profits relate to upstart requirements? As far as I can tell - the two are unrelated.
jacobr1 6y ago
I general, we WANT businesses without revenue for many months (excluding seasonally business that must explicitly manage this either with savings or loans) to fail, their capital be put to more productive use and moral hazard avoided. The outside risks like fire, hurricane, etc ... are best handled by insurance that allows for recuperated lost capital and restarting. What we are seeing now is basically an insurer of last resort type situation where we have the government taking on the role. Going forward, we should strive for pandemic insurance becoming more common, and maybe government back reinsurance or mandatory insurance pools handling the systematic risk inherent in a global or national emergency.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "we WANT businesses without revenue for many months... to fail, their capital be put to more productive use and moral hazard avoided" tell that to every startup that spends many months, sometimes years, without revenue, and certainly with negative income. more directly, it's difficult to boil down misallocation to simply being out of revenue for some months, although econ 101 might indicate so (actually it's price x quantity at the margins, but we'll go with the simplistic interpretation here). but more interestingly, inefficiencies are actually a key part of markets and capitalism. it takes many, distributed participants doing very similar things to get pricing right. many companies start and fade away. those are in fact inefficiencies in the ruthless game of survival of the fittest. in a perfectly efficient world, you'd only need 1 try to get it right. the better analysis is to determine which factors in addition to to revenue to use to determine misallocation. if i had to hazard a guess, we probably want, as a policy matter, businesses to be able to weather up to a year of economic shock, not just a few months, without introducing any concerning moral hazard economy-wide, while providing the necessary resilience and stability. regarding insurance, you're basically saying the businesses should pay for systemic risks, rather than all of us, but that risk is not idiosyncratic to just those businesses. it's systemic, so the system should bear them, i.e., the government (as representative of society as a whole).

zrobotics 6y ago

OK, expecting multiple years of savings is just flat-out unrealistic. Even the more hardcore financial advisers only recommend 9 months. Plus, who owns 2 t-shirts? Are you doing laundry daily? Hate to break it to you, but that isn't exactly great for the environment either. My father grew up poor as hell on a farm, and even he had 6 shirts. To this day he will comment that they were darned to the point of being patchwork, but owning 20 shirts doesn't seem like a huge extravagance. Even with homemade clothing, that isn't a ridiculous wardrobe. There is definitely a consumerist culture and people buy stuff they don't need, but in the context of this article & the pandemic the people receiving this aid need it. I don't mean to be negative, but there are 0eople making the decision between paying rent and eating; calling out consumerism for this is in poor taste.

artsyca 6y ago
I'm glad I have the shirts on my back bro and your comment has inspired me to mend my fraying dress pants. By the way I think he's being rhetorical, not literal. It's an order of magnitude thing. i.e. I had o(n) where n < 1000 and now I have o(10n)

gizmo686 6y ago

The problem isn't over consumption [0]. We have the capacity to produce; and unless you are suggesting that society should be hoarding warehouses of miscellaneous goods, production must equal consumption. When some external stress hit, our capacity to produce (and, in this case, consume) goes down for non economic reasons. Fortunately, we have such an overcapacity of productive capabilities that outside of a few goods that saw a sudden demand spike, this loss of productive capacity is nothing more than an inconvenience. If our productive capacity was only that which was essential, not only would we be sacrificing goods and services during the good years; but we would also not have so much slack that we could weather such a drop in capacity without without serious supply shortages. Indeed, there are still parts of the world that do not have are level of "unnecessary" production that are now facing famine. The problem we in the wealthy world are facing is one of distribution. When we made the policy decision of shutting down non critical production, we also broke a critical component of our resource distribution system (namely, giving people tokens that can be exchanged for resources). Since we don't have a centrally planned economy, no one is really in the position to make this kind of policy decision, so we are left with the option of mainting something like the previous system just giving people those tokens by central fiat. [0] Unless you want to blame the pandemic on environmental changes and travel consumption. This isn't completely unreasonable, but even in the "natural" state, pandemics happen.

jussij 6y ago

> why is non-essential services taking a vacation for a few months at the expense of everyone else supposed to be a major event with long-lasting consequences? That government response is there to help slow the spread of COVID-19 which then results in the saving of many tens of thousand of lives. If the government didn't step in to help, people are then forced to go to out to work which then helps to spread the virus.

Ghjklov 6y ago

>people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time Who sold them that stuff? Who convinced people that they need to upgrade their phones every single year? Nothing will change until we destroy the marketing/advertising industries that profit off manipulating the most vulnerable people...

lm28469 6y ago

> Imagine you have a family and you lose your job. If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really. I lost my job in Germany and got one year of unemployment benefits, no savings needed. Min wage workers have no way to build 6 months of emergency fund and keep the "dignity" you're referencing in later post. If on top of that they also have to build their own medical insurance and retirement fund it's game over from day 1. > Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? It's the same thing as unemployment benefits, insurances, &c. in the end, money going where it's needed* to avoid people losing everything to events out of their control. (*which hopefully is small/medium sized businesse, not mega corps avoiding paying tax whenever they can but that's another issue) > people need a reality check and get back to living a simpler life with less shit being bought and sold all the time. That's for sure, sadly it doesn't look like we're going in that direction. I'm personally appalled at how some people spend their money but it's part of the game

chosenbreed37 6y ago
> I lost my job in Germany and got one year of unemployment benefits, no savings needed. I'm glad you were able to get those benefits. I think in general it is a good system. You say no savings needed. By that you mean you personally did not need to save that money. But somebody did. Unless the German government is printing money they would have to get that money from somewhere. If they don't have it now they would have gone to the bond markets. In which someone will have to save for it in the future. Again this is not a bad thing. I think it is important to point that someone will have to foot the bill. In some cases it will be a future generation (depending on how much the government is having to borrow). This is usually in the form of taxes. Which presumably many would pay. Including those who did not receive any direct benefit during the crisis. You could argue that it is for the greater good. And many would agree. I personally do think there is something to learn from the position taken by GP. After all in the eurozone we regularly see contrasts between the frugal north (Germany, Netherlands, etc) and the spendthrift south (Italy, Greece, etc). Whether as individuals, companies, nations perhaps we could think about how to best to manage our resources to be able to weather the storms that may come our way.

bildung 6y ago

> What it's really doing is subsidizing everybody that works in or is tied to non-essential face-to-face service industry, by everyone else. Not, not really. Canadas bond rates are 0.5% it seems. The country just has to lend a few billions, wait a few decades, and the debt is essentially gone due to inflation alone.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> If you have savings for a couple of years, you can take it easy for a while and then go look for a job and find one 6 months later. Was anything other than your ego bruised by the loss of the job? No, not really. > Why doesn't this analogy translate to what's happening with covid? Because, as a share of population, approximately no one in the workingn class that makes up the bull of the population has “savings for a couple of years”, and that's not just a transitory situation but a fact that capitalism structurally guarantees.

artsyca 6y ago

Sounds like something I would write, kudos. Bro it's not about getting more t-shirts. One day you may wear collared shirts.

alkonaut 6y ago

Any analogy between personal finance and macroeconomics is doomed from the start. If I printed money in my basement and I could spend myself out off a slump, then it might be comparable. But I can't.

NikolaNovak 6y ago

>> I find it difficult to be sympathetic - people need a reality check I think these are the two key points. And sorry if it gets personal, but the first point one is obvious, and the second one is true - yes, yes you do. There are people in the world who lack empathy. They don't understand those who are unlucky or in hardship. I mean, intellectually they say they do, but believe there's always a personal failure that's to fault, rather than any impact of environment or circumstances. They also believe their own situation is only due to their good work and thinking, and not due to any external circumstance, and they'd have been that successful in any set of circumstances. That single mom working 12 hour shifts at Amazon warehouse - well it's her fault that she got pregnant / that father left / that she doesn't have savings. That Ontario auto worker with five kids who lost their job last year due to car industry moving on, and has been using their savings to retrain while looking for another job, it's their fault for running out of runway or not seeing the industry direction earlier. Etc Etc Etc It's just sociopathic inability to see outside of one's own context and history and internal narrative. To imagine a series of unfortunate events. Sure you own 20 t-shirts. Doesn't mean all people do and/or have "tens of millions of gambling debt". I mean, honestly, the wording in that post is beyond cruelly clueless, it just feels like a troll. Nobody could ACTUALLY be that blind to their own personal privilege. As I said, this could get a little personal. CERB is not MEANT for people who gambled or have too many t-shirts. It's for people who work hard and now cannot, and are dis-proportionally impacted. I have a high salary and can obtain it from home - great. It's my luck and blessing and life choices and privilege. The 21 year old at beginning of their career and no savings and who can NOT work now... is ORDERED to not work... the family running out of food... that's who it's for. Canadians have overall made a decision (repeatedly) we'd rather help the innocents, at the risk we get a little abused. It's our stereotype. And the reason I live here. The notion that we'll pay for it, that we're making up numbers, that it's unsustainable - those are all valid points. But the notion that these are all some over-privileged clueless people who are getting free money for no good reason... Jeebus. Somebody is wrong on the internets!