90 something percent of this is the fault of the Federal Government. Some other percent is the fault of the States like Florida that haven't responded aggressively to the data.
BUT I heard a hospital leader mention a management issue within hospitals and health systems. He said that for a long time now the hospital procurement mantra has been just in time delivery. In retrospect they would be somewhat better positioned if they had greater stockpiles of supplies. I do wonder whether a management culture of operating as leanly as possible (in both government and the private sector) hasn't left us less prepared. A certain amount of redundancy is helpful.
Interesting thing I learned yesterday: half of the food that the UK produces and imports ends up in food shops. The other half goes to the trade - restaurants, caterers, institutions, work canteens, sandwich shops and so on. (I'd never have guessed it was so much.) Hence problems in the supply chain - suddenly people are eating all their meals, pretty much, at home, so supply chains are having to be rapidly readjusted away from "huge catering-size bag of stuff" to "lots of small retail bags of stuff". Not easy!
Trump playing games with PPE and ventilators has got me white hot with fury. It's criminal, it's premeditated negligent homicide. What can be done?
I just saw a tweet from James Comey with a beard saying he was going to try to tweet uplifting shit or something, and it made me blind with rage. He did this to us. That worthless son-of-a-bitch put Trump in power because he was afraid people would say mean things about him if he didn't break the rules to slander Hillary. And now Trump's killing people.
Obama made it look easy, but maybe it's not the healthiest kind of government that needs active, impeccable leadership from the highest level to corral agencies and marshall resources to respond adequately to predictable crises?
Just every fucking thing.
And I had not even yet seen the thing in 5.
But just to have this fucking thing happen with this president in an election year.
And this fucking populace. (Of which I am part.)
Not gruntled even one fucking bit.
I did laugh at the tweet that was something like, "Maybe we should have elected that overprepared lady with the emails, after all."
I don't really understand 6. That is, the federal government is unhealthy all the way down because Trump and his appointees have been breaking it deliberately for three full years now. Yes, it wasn't structured to stand up under that. But I can't imagine a system that would be "healthy" enough to.
9: I'm referring to how even under Obama, it seemed to be agreed such situations would require Obama and the White House's active steering, that standard interagency processes were bound to fail.
I suppose we can't really assess what federal capability would be absent a generation of GOP sabotage, though.
Y'all are looking for some anger? Trump's handling of the crisis has led to an upward spike in his approval ratings to levels that are unprecedented since the early days of his presidency.
Obama made it look easy, but maybe it's not the healthiest kind of government that needs active, impeccable leadership from the highest level to corral agencies and marshall resources to respond adequately to predictable crises?
I don't really understand 6. That is, the federal government is unhealthy all the way down because Trump and his appointees have been breaking it deliberately for three full years now. Yes, it wasn't structured to stand up under that. But I can't imagine a system that would be "healthy" enough to.
I think Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk is strikingly relevant to this -- on one level it's a book about how the Trump administration has dismantled the preparedness of the US government* and, on another level, a tribute to how valuable and underappreciated it is to have a functional government bureaucracy.
But I also think about The Clinton Tapes which really drove home for me that the reasons why the presidency demands so much, "active, impeccable leadership" are (1) problems will always arise**, but the specific nature of those problems is unpredictable and surprising, (2) however the president attempts to respond to problems there will always be people trying to point out the failings in their response, point out all the other things they're not responding to in that moment, and generally look bad. I think Trump is unusually incompetent and disinterested in having a functional Federal bureaucracy but I acknowledge that, even the best prepared person will still end up looking bad a fair amount of the time.
* I haven't seen it talked about much, but when I think about the ways in which Trump has undermined the Federal government the first thing that comes to mind is the hollowing out of the State Department. I wonder how much more the State Department would normally be doing when responding to a pandemic.
** I think of Wanda Sykes talking about how Obama was elected so that everybody could make the black man clean up the messes they didn't want to deal with. First the financial crisis then . . . pirates.
Y'all are looking for some anger? Trump's handling of the crisis has led to an upward spike in his approval ratings to levels that are unprecedented since the early days of his presidency.
Yes, I've seen various attempts to explain why that's not actually a bad sign, but that doesn't prevent me from feeling very, very concerned about that spike.
11: Obviously no reasoning should make anyone complacent, but I'm reassured by context around the approval ratings: (a) they're unprecedented but still not that large, the 538 bump right now is from -11 net to -3.6, (b) other presidents have received this rally-round-the-flag effect out of some apparent sense of duty on some people's part, it's usually much larger, (c) historically those large bumps disappear really quickly (Carter in 1980), and most importantly (d) it doesn't seem to convert to changes in general election matchup polling, e.g. even the small group of people who are changing their "approval" of Trump are still likely to vote him out in November.
I'm angry at my neighbors for hosting a party yesterday, and at all the parents who allowed their teens to go to it.
I had an online session with my therapist yesterday, in which I talked about how FURIOUS I am right now. She encouraged me to share that feeling with people who would be sympathetic to it, so this post is quite well timed.
13: Yes, part of my anger in 7 is this trend. I do buy a little bit of the explanations. For instance, Carter's approval spiked at the beginning of the hostage crisis. Another semi-interesting thing is that he has not gone up in the Rasmussen (daily tracker) which has always skewed Republican*; data I have seen shows it as going up with Dem/Indies who I hope will not go over to actually voting for the fucker.
*Watch now, it will soar tomorrow.
I was also mad about the local pizza place that had a crowd of people waiting for pickup in an enclosed area last Saturday night, but I narced on them and now they have received a call from the health department.
1 million US job losses/month projected through June. Still well short of November, but that's a lot of bad economy for a president to come back from.
Basically what Minivet said in 14.
And then we have the Good Dr. Brix:
"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit"
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1243556939369496576
(And goes to praise how steadfast he has been in advocating social distancing).
I know in part she (and Fauci most certainly) have to placate the manboy* to keep things form going even more of the rails, but my God. (And she's pretty much a careerist Republican semi-hack anyway).
*It's "It's A Good Life" all the way down.
I must not rage eat, I must not rage eat, I must not rage eat, I must not rage eat.
15: I'm less angry than you probably are,but nonetheless angry, at the people at the grocery store who come too close to me.
Always room for rage at the Iranian government, with additional rage held in reserve for other bad actors in this particular case.
Did they ever figure out who wrote that "resistance within the Trump administration" editorial ninety years ago? I didn't follow up. I wonder what self-serving lies that guy is telling himself today.
Re: "It's a Good Life." Most people know it via the Twilight Zone episode, but it is a really great short sotry. (And very short and available online it turns out.)
The ending:
Mom looked out of the front window, across the darkened road, across Henderson's darkened wheatfield to the vast, endless, gray nothingness in which the little village of Peaksville floated like a soul--the huge nothingness that was evident at night, when Anthony's brassy day had gone.It did no good to wonder where they were ... no good at all. Peaksville was just someplace. Someplace away from the world. It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates--God rest him--had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing. He had taken the village someplace. Or had destroyed the world and left only the village, nobody knew which.
It did no good to wonder about it. Nothing at all did any good except to live as they must live. Must always, always live, if Anthony would let them.
These thoughts were dangerous, she thought.
She began to mumble. The others started mumbling too. They had all been thinking, evidently.
The men on the couch whispered and whispered to Ethel Hollis, and when they took their hands away, she mumbled too.
While Anthony sat on top of the set and made television, they sat around and mumbled and watched the meaningless, flickering shapes far into the night.
Next day it snowed, and killed off half the crops--but it was a good day.
I'm mad at the entire goddamn Republican Party and also large parts of the Democratic Party for setting us up for failure like this.
I linked this thing a while ago, and felt there was insufficient outrage.
A number of symptomatic patients were abruptly released from quarantine early while a portion of testing was suspended, the doctor said.
[...]
from around the time of Xi's visit, even though his patients still exhibited signs of pneumonia, the patients were released from quarantine at the discretion of a "specialist" from the epidemic prevention and control authority.
[...]
"a mass release of infected patients began," he said.
[...]
blood tests to detect antibodies produced during infection were discontinued.
On the petty anger front because who cares about the statement, but Pompeo (which means Trump) refusing to agree to a G-7 statement unless they called it "Wuhan virus."
Boot us the fuck out already. I do think we come out of this more likely to use nukes sometime in the next 10 years, because that will really be the main thing left of our "exceptionalism."
26: I've been thinking about that since.
And clear to me that deaths are being undercounted in many places, US and abroad.
Hoping that was Dylan activating the Manchurian Candidate.
That Iran thing is fucked up.
There's been barely any comment (in media) about the US not playing any kind of global leadership role in the crisis, I assume because it wasn't even expected anymore. New normal!
13, 14: I've seen various attempts to explain why that's not actually a bad sign
I think there's a pretty plausible case to be made. Would a normal president have gotten a bigger bump? Given the inevitable bad times ahead, would even a normal, reasonably competent president be able to avoid a subsequent downdraft?
But sweet Jesus, how can people follow that sonofabitch's behavior and think his handling of this is okay? I have to occasionally be reminded of how little information low-information voters really have.
George Carlin put it in perspective:
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
But of course, you can't say that shit in public. Calling idiots "dumb" is as bad as calling awful people "deplorable."
He said that for a long time now the hospital procurement mantra has been just in time delivery. In retrospect they would be somewhat better positioned if they had greater stockpiles of supplies. I do wonder whether a management culture of operating as leanly as possible (in both government and the private sector) hasn't left us less prepared.
There's no question that this is the case. It's the usual story of neglect and greed: Longtime and criminal underfunding of public hospitals, the massive rise in for-profit hospitals (up more than 50% since 2001 vs. declines in public and non-profits), non-profit hospitals acting a lot like the for-profits, hospitals chasing rich private pay patients with luxury suites and buying expensive equiment and overtesting so they can bill insurance companies, huge waves of hospital consolidation, and pissing away millions on C-suite pay. I'm sure Minivet could fill in much more breadth and depth.
I can't speak much more than that to hospital supply chain trends, but underfunding and focusing on just the services that pay, definitely. I also think a lot of systems nonprofit and private suffer from managerial salary and position bloat - not just executive.
35 it's not only neglect and greed - but a pursuit of efficiency that can have other motivation. What people always seem to miss in the "good times" is that especially efficient systems are not resilient systems.
Managerial bloat is just another word for stockpiles of management supplies.
I also think a lot of systems nonprofit and private suffer from managerial salary and position bloat - not just executive.
Very true. The ratio of administrators to medical staff has skyrocketed.
37: Agreed, and definitions of efficiency are often, though certainly not always, ideological.
41 that's true, and even the fairly empirical ones can run into ideological screwups.
38. The US has a strategic middle management reserve, who knew?
They're just hoarding all the Post-its.
Shouldn't Carlin have said "Think of how stupid the median person is"?
Hopefully intelligence doesn't have the same long tail wealth does.
"Think of how stupid mean the median person is"?
I don't know about mean meanness versus median meanness, but the median and mean stupid person are supposed to be the same person.
More anger: the red state governors who are actively countermanding mayors trying to flatten the curve.
So there is a medical fetish group in the UK claiming the NHS hit them up for any supplies they had...
my wife's cousin just passed after a year or so of fighting breast cancer. They weren't close or anything, but hearing from Mrs. yoyo's parents about how that side of the family is trying to get around the lockdown (they live mostly in SW CT) to do funeral stuff is enraging. Quite a few people in the family have health issues that are exactly what makes one vulnerable to Covid and they are going to get someone killed. AND, another couple in that side of the family is about to give birth, and they are planning on handing off their ~10yr old to their other grandparents this week, and THEY LIVE IN MANHATTAN. At least we convinced mrs. yoyo's parents that they can't drive out for the funeral.
also, re: "I do think we come out of this more likely to use nukes sometime in the next 10 years, because that will really be the main thing left of our "exceptionalism."" : https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1243597001754894337
@45: Yeah, but the average person doesn't know what median means. Or should I say the modal person doesn't know what median means?
43: I meant fewer medical professionals to cover the same number of patients, but also certain types of support staff as well as outsourcing.
37 is what I was trying t9 get at initially and in 54.
A friend contextualized Trump's polling numbers:
" I see people getting worried about Trump's approval ratings going up during the pandemic and I wanted to put it into context with a little, basic political science information.
First, his approval isn't really changing much. Be careful not to read too much into any given poll, and according to 538.com's measure that aggregates all the major polls, his approval was a little over 43% at the end of January and is now a little under 46%. It has fluctuated between upper 30s and the mid 40s for most of his term, so it may be nothing real.
Second, in there is a phenomenon called the "rally around the flag" effect where during any time of international crisis or war, presidential approval goes up as Americans optimistically hope that the country will get through it. Remember how approval of government in general shot up after 9-11?
However, 3 points would be the weakest rally effect in the history of the rally effect, if it is even anything--and that's pretty crazy given that this could turn out to be the biggest global crisis since WWII.
For perspective, Kennedy's approval shot up from 61% to 74% after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Carter's approval went from 32% to 58% during the Iranian hostage crisis. George H. W. Bush saw his approval shoot from 60% to 89% after Operation Desert Storm, and George W. Bush went from 51% all the way up to 90% after 9-11.
And these high numbers tend to decline fast. Note that two of the examples above lost their next elections. If it's even anything, a 3% climb to 46% isn't much at all.
I'll also point out that we are in the early part of this crisis, social distancing, sheltering in place and quarantining. The full brunt of it is nowhere near hitting, as bad as things are in New York and Washington.
I hope the predictions about infections and deaths are wrong, but as more people get infected, hospitalized or die, Trump saying he had it under control weeks ago is going to look really bad.
My point here is that there is reason to worry over the pandemic, but there is not reason to think that this is helping Trump's chances of re-election."
The ratio of administrators to medical staff has skyrocketed.
Why?
57: same as what happened in academia, I imagine.
57: billing complexity, profit maximization.
57: billing complexity, profit maximization.
I'm spent most of my adult life developing my political callouses so I don't go insane,and over the years I've been fairly successful. For the first time since 2006 they've failed me; I'm fucking furious. I resent the shit out of the fact that the President is making it materially less likely that I'll get to piss on his grave.
56 What is amazing is that he had a shot for a real rally, and has fucked it up. Even if everything turns out as a realistic best case, there'll still be enough death, preventable enough, that he won't be able to say he was right not to overreact early on. He knew that his 15 cases and under control remarks were lies when uttered. The sheer amount of floundering will kill any victory narrative.
Sweet Jesus fucking Christ.
https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/03/joe-biden-comes-to-michigan-gov-gretchen-whitmers-defense-after-trump-slams-states-coronavirus-response.html
During a Friday radio interview with WWJ Newsradio, [Whitmer] said Michigan has had a difficult time obtaining important medical gear.
"What I've gotten back is that vendors with whom we've procured contracts -- They're being told not to send stuff to Michigan," Whitmer said. "It's really concerning, I reached out to the White House last night and asked for a phone call with the president, ironically at the time this stuff was going on."
My fucking god, is it because she's a woman? A Dem? MI went red last round, so that's not it. Because it's not bad in DeVos territory yet?
I'm thinking right now that maybe we're going to win Michigan.
I say Mike, don't call the governor of Washington; you're wasting your time with him. Don't call the woman in Michigan. ... If they don't treat you right, I don't call.
I'm thinking right now that maybe we're going to win Michigan.
More apocalyptically, this is a man who has no intention of holding an election.
Somewhere in there he rendered l'état, c'est moi into non-pithy Trumpspeak:
"I want them to be appreciative. We've done a great job...When they are not appreciative to me they are not appreciative to the Army Corps, they are not appreciative to FEMA. It's not right."
Presidents don't hold elections. States do.
And they have to: who've going to serve in the legislature, who will be governor, who will be county commissioner? Those dogs aren't going to catch themselves.
He might think that he can suspend the election -- because he doesn't know anything about our form of government -- but (a) it won't work and (b) it'd tank the Dow.
Yeah, generally it's been only taking care of white voters in red or swing states*, but I guess if you have a female Democratic governor it doesn't matter.
*Another "feature" of our wonderful Electoral college system; whole states can be trashed with almost no electoral consequences.
63: I'm not sure a what that means exactly. A lot of vendors have been breaking their contracts. Charlie Baker's task force has confirmed orders and the PPE hasn't been delivered. He no longer considers it real until it arrives in the Commonwealth.
70: She's implying the Feds are overriding her orders. Another article was more explicit, but I wasn't familiar with it, so linked the mainstream version. I know a lot of contracts aren't being honored (or are being honored at historical levels, no more), but this doesn't seem to be that.
Essentially whole state went blue in 2018. Maybe he's still mad, but I can't believe he still remembers 2018. I'd think he'd be sending stuff to bring up approval ratings for November.
Detroit's caseload is exploding. Major international airport, plus a tradition I just learned about - adults (lots of auto workers) go on early spring breaks to Florida. That probably didn't help.
Oh, and hundreds dead in Iran from a moonshine "cure" for coronavirus. That's awful.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/hundreds-die-iran-drinking-bootleg-alcohol-methanol-coronavirus-cure-social-media.html
15: ?!? As the parent of a teenager, I find this absolutely mind-boggling.
The LA City Council couldn't manage its Zoom settings and got dick pics during the official proceedings.
Whenever I see stupidity at that level I'm thinking MAGA is at play.
76 to 74, though plausibly to 75 as well.
75 sounds like LA got hit by the same assholes described here. We didn't get any dick pics, just buttsex porn.
The dicks were completely hidden by the butts from the first?
Well, the dicks were moving pretty fast. I don't think you could really call that a "pic."
Maybe if recorded on actual film instead of direct digital.
The 38-year-old mother of four, who cleans homes for a living, lost jobs with two of her three employers. Like many relatively well-off Indians, they've begun social distancing to fight the highly infectious virus. For Devi, who is now taking home about $0.67 a day, her diminished earnings are as much of a concern as her living conditions. As India races to break the chain of transmission of the illness known as Covid-19, her family -- who live in a cramped single room and share a bathroom and toilet with two other households -- is among those most at risk.
Robert Reich's twitter feed fills me with rage. He's highlighting all the ways that the Republicans fought to bail out corporations and give crumbs to workers.
The cruise ship companies who registered in Liberia should not get bailouts. They're so worried that low income workers might accidentally get more than they otherwise would have been entitled to, it's disgusting.
Yeah, Lindsey Graham going on about nurses making more on unemployment/bailout benefits when nurses are on the frontlines and dying ffs has me furious.
The restaurant/food service industry does strike me as a problem, but I don't worry about them making rent. If you own the building for a Cheesecake Factory and the Cheesecake Factory doesn't pay rent for three months (for example), what are you going to do about it? You're going to sue them and let them reopen when they can because otherwise you'll turn the loss of three months rent - minus whatever you might get from a lawsuit against a functioning business - into the loss of rent for an indefinite period until you can find another restaurant that needs enough space for an aircraft hanger minus the expected value of a lawsuit against a broke company ($0).
It's possible the real estate holding company goes broke, but fuck them. The banks will either take a hit for the reasons noted above or the bank will take over the vital task of collecting checks and life will go on except that one group of rich people will be less rich because they had a business model that did not price risk reasonably.
I do worry about my local restaurants.
(Which makes the point, among others, that this is a desperate situation for small restaurants that give a city culinary variety and character, but that chains will be find.)
Downtown restaurants were already having a pretty tough go, I think, and this'll whack them hard. Their landlords have been getting pretty hefty property tax increases the last few years -- I suppose the legislature can maybe do something about that when they meet next year. Or not: I'm sure that the federal assistance will have long been spent, and we'll have all sorts of losses that aren't covered.
I sure as well am going to want some sort of rebate on my office rent if the owner of the building gets a property tax rebate.
The UK government is giving subsidies to employees (80% of earnings up to £2500/month) and sole traders (80% of profits up to £2500/month), but people like me who are sole directors of small companies and take most of their income as dividends rather than earnings are only eligible for about £500/month, and that only if they furlough themselves from their companies and do no productive work over the next three months. I'll be all right, I think, but people whose incomes have just evaporated, like my choir director, are going to be completely fucked.
Through the Church of England, they also subsidize soul traders.
On the other hand, the reason most people decide to set themselves up as a limited company rather than being self employed is because you them pay corporation tax, at a lower rate, rather than income tax , and the reason to take your money out as dividends rather than salary is that you don't have to pay National Insurance on dividends.
On the other hand, the reason most people decide to set themselves up as a limited company rather than being self employed is because you them pay corporation tax, at a lower rate, rather than income tax , and the reason to take your money out as dividends rather than salary is that you don't have to pay National Insurance on dividends.
Small companies like mine do that because our accountants tell us that it's the best thing to do. I pay approximately £2,000 less in tax a year as a result. So we're now expected to starve?
Looks like CDC will soon be recommending everyone wear a mask when outside.
So, we have a Nixon mask and five paper masks that say N-95 and that were bought in about 2012.
94: Acquired from where? (I mean, OK, if that's what the order is, fine, but it seems a bit Public Health Theater. I gather in Asian countries where it's common, it's to destigmatize having actually sick people wear them, but given that we don't have enough for people who need them and typical use practices would be total garbage, what's the point?)
I donated the two N95s I had. Do I have to take up sewing?
So, we have a Nixon mask and five paper masks that say N-95 and that were bought in about 2012.
In a pinch, you can take a regular mask and then just write N-95 on them with a sharpie.
|| Angry, but not particularly coronavirus related: looking forward to hearing what Charlie has to say about the Wampanoag ruling. Sounds to my non-specialist ears like it could be quite bad for Native sovereignty generally, and especially for the more recently recognized groups. |>
How many cotton briefs would I have to wear on my head to convince people I was safe to be around?
"Small companies like mine do that because our accountants tell us that it's the best thing to do. I pay approximately £2,000 less in tax a year as a result. "
Sounds very clever. Good job everyone isn't able to do the same thing, though, isn't it?
Acquired from where?
Seriously, where? If you don't have one are you going to be discouraged, formally or informally, from taking a walk or going to the grocery store?
Trump is insisting his name goes on the check people get. In gold leaf.
Well, as I said at the other place, I can't do much right now due to my broken fibula, but the shit that's going down against Asian-American folx and communities has got me pretty enraged. And if it's this bad here, I hate to think about what it is like elsewhere. And the elected officials seem to be doing fuck all about it as far as I can see.
A radical poet-activist friend of mine who has already found himself alienated from one country (Vietnam), wrote a post last week thanking various people he'd interacted with during the day for treating him humanely. I got where he was coming from, but it still made me angry that he should have to be grateful for that. Fucking racist shits who are attacking their neighbors are so despicable I can't stand it.
||
How many German federal functions remain in Bonn?
|>
100 I think it needs a legislative fix. The issue is essentially semantic, as the First Circuit explained last month: http://media.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/16-2484P-01A.pdf The relevant statute appears to indicate that the feds can only take land into trust for Indigenous nations that were recognized in 1934, and not for nations that were federally recognized thereafter. (You'll recall that one of the Montana tribes was recognized, finally, earlier this year.) I'm not going to say that this can be fixed with a comma -- although maybe it can be -- but it could definitely be fixed by added four words to the US Code.
Which can be accomplished, I would think, once Trump is gone.
The feds first walked away from their pro-Native position on this in 2017, when they dropped their appeal of the district court ruling saying they'd read the statute wrong, and now, by vacating the underlying administrative action,* they've mooted the case for purposes of Supreme Court review.
* I haven't looked at the actual administrative action, but from the news stories, this very much appears to be what has just happened.
(And a bill passed the House last year that would have fixed it.)
Look, all I know is what I read in the twitters.
Maybe home-sewn masks, bandannas, etc.? If the guidance people decide even just covering your nose and mouth imperfectly is helpful enough to advise the general public to start.
Or it could be guidance that helps kick-start faster manufacturing and distribution on the Taiwanese model.
Okay, that doubling rate is alarming. (Sorry all, no headspace to respond to entire thread)
This is a link to the tweet with the comparison of "Amount of medical supplies the feds have shipped to various states, relative to amount requested" to which the only words I can add are: guess they're not going to impeach him again.
This is real, right? I don't want to waste anger on it if it's somehow misleading.
That is making me shit my pants. He is letting people die out of his petty revenge fantasies.
Eh, nothing new in US presidents killing people through revenge fantasies. That's pretty much the Iraq War.
I'm still not entirely convinced that Trump is a worse president that W. Bush. Depends on your metric, I guess.
Not only do we have to bid against the Federal government, not only do they send our ventilators and masks to more politically connected states, when we do buy equipment the Trump administration seizes it.
114. I've been thinking about this myself. GWB killed a lot more people so far. He also did real damage to American interests with his strategic blunder. It was also very expensive.
Trump is more embarrassing, but Bush would still have the edge if you value the lives of foreign people as equal to Americans. Americans aren't likely to see it that way though.
I had been thinking Trump was looking like he wouldn't kill as many as Bush, but now I think he's likely to kill a lot more.
This is real, right? I don't want to waste anger on it if it's somehow misleading.
IIRC it's slightly misleading, in that they're sending stuff based on a preexisting allocation formula driven primarily by population that doesn't take into account the severity of the crisis. So Florida is getting so much relative to what it's requested because it's a big state that isn't taking this very seriously, whereas New York despite also being big is asking for way more and not getting it.
Sounds very clever. Good job everyone isn't able to do the same thing, though, isn't it?
Fuck you, ajay. I have savings to survive this. Friends don't.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, you may be thinking of the people who earn huge sums by setting up as "personal service companies" while still working in-house in city firms. I'm talking about very small businesses - individuals or couples working at home or renting an office as translators, editors, personal trainers, art/singing teachers, that sort of thing. Setting up as a small limited company is absolutely the standard thing to do under those circumstances. Remember that small businesses are supposed to be the engine of the economy? And now we're all thrown in the shit, while people make glib remarks about not paying tax on dividends. Fuck that.
Ume, if I could "like" your comment here, I would do so. I hear you.
And we shouldn't be turning against one another like this. The virus does not care, does not make these finely-grained distinctions. Our only hope of defeating COVID-19 is to practice social distancing, as an act of social solidarity.
JFC but the procedure to take an external monitor at home is so needlessly complicated and looks like I need to go to the building twice, the first time to record the serial/asset numbers of the device, then send it along and get the permission of the various heads of HR, FM, Security, IT, etc.,
Just take one off someone else's desk.
119: of course, but the accountants probably should have said, "you'll save money now but you should know that you will be without access to certain benefits." It's the same in the US with 1099 contractors who are not employees who don't pay into unemployment or the self-employed. They are modifying rules because of the magnitude of the crisis to include to include those people. And we should all be in this together, but the accountants probably should tell people about the risks and benefits of both options.
but the accountants probably should have said, "you'll save money now but you should know that you will be without access to certain benefits."
For fucks sake. Ineligibility for government support for loss of income due to covid-19 was not a risk anyone could have predicted until, um, a week ago.
No, but any recommendation to people that they structure their income to avoid paying into National Insurance schemes is suspect as far as I'm concerned. That said, this is a crisis and we need to help everyone out, preferably by soaking the rich.
Everyone fuck off and leave Ume alone.
Fuck you. I fucked off and left Ume alone of my own fucking free will.
Ineligibility for government support for loss of income due to covid-19 was not a risk anyone could have predicted until, um, a week ago.
Sure it was, but it was a tail risk, and everybody ignores tail risk.
Fucking off now...
You're a fucking knight in shining armor, Kraab.
A fucking hero wears no underpants at all over his leotard.
A fucking knight needs to manage their armor very carefully.
Email I just received from a rare book dealer with the subject "Flatten the curve! Bid online!"
Apropos of a thread a little while ago, Kamala Harris as cop cars
https://twitter.com/fOrGiVeNcHy/status/1243920903207092224
There are more reasons to form a small limited liability company than saving taxes. From my standpoint in the US there is the hope that it helps shield your life savings from a frivolous lawsuit. It may make it easier to obtain health insurance. It makes it possible to have a better retirement program. You are supposed to pay yourself the customary wage for the job you do which then has all of the standard payroll taxes paid (This is the one that unscrupulous people try to take advantage of).
I think many accountants are not that good and are focused only on the current fiscal period and do not look at the big picture. You have to select your accountant with care.
Those reports from Rikers are dire -- current behavior leaves zero assurances that the administrators won't leave corpses to pile up once people start dying. I have not heard about jails and prisons in Louisiana, but they can't be heading in a good direction either. Although (2018):
Hurricane Katrina, in ways obvious and subtle, changed how New Orleans and the state of Louisiana grapple with criminal justice challenges. By changing its laws so that fewer people end up in jail, New Orleans has done something arguably better than evacuating. And, because of this, its prison population has dropped by more than 67 percent since 2005. Hurricane Katrina, in other words, forced policymakers to fix not only some of the worst circumstances of incarceration, but also to prevent people from being held in dangerous conditions altogether.
rarely have i been happier to have consistently gotten up people's noses on here for being vapid, frivolous and tone-deafly foodie-esque rather than for persistent snotty mansplaining.
solidarity ume!
Have you considered making horrible puns?
There's not enough people doing that anymore.
139, 140:. Yes I have noticed that the shortage has become critical lately.
Maybe one of you tech savvy people can program a bot to perform this essential function.
For what it's worth, I'm in a somewhat similar situation to you, Ume, in that I'm also a small limited company director. But I decided to pay myself a salary to reduce any issues with IR35, as my work appears employee-like, so I'm in the PAYE system. (We've said some magic words on the contract with my main client that will supposedly insulate both parties from risk, and their being non-British should be further protection, but paying my own PAYE/NI still seems like the best way to reduce the potential for costly litigation, should protect my client from permanent establishment risk, and just feels like the right thing to do for the country I'm a guest in.) I feel for you; while I've been hard on the dividends-to-reduce-tax strategy before, you're absolutely right that there's no way that this sort of issue would be predictable. If one were to assume that this a predictable risk of this strategy, and that's a feature of the system, it's pretty fucked up that the government gives a "get hung out to dry for £N,000 a year in tax savings" option.
So, yeah, solidarity. I hope they figure out a way to genuinely help you and the other small business owners you mentioned.
Right now the government scheme is only scheduled to last three months; if that holds, there's a good chance dividend-earnings people will come out ahead relative to if they had been operating as sole traders or paying themselves a salary. (Yes, I know, it doesn't feel like coming out ahead for people who didn't save that money. I'm just running the numbers, out of curiosity.)
(I'll probably be alright, but if anyone needs a bit of programming done, hit me up?)
I don't know what a "director" is, except that Vernon Dursley is one.
Are you shut down because London is shut down or because Pittsburgh is?
That sounded worse than I meant to. I'm not shut down or using that government scheme, and I'm still making income. I'm not currently in any danger of having my contract terminated, but if it gets to a situation where they have to consider layoffs they'd probably part ways with me.
That's good to hear. I know downtown is pretty much empty. A few weeks ago, when it was legal, I had a very hipster brunch in what I think is your old building.
It's the gothic revival one. Both the bar and the fresh food fast casual place there feel hipstery, and priced as such. People seem to like the new restaurant that just moved in, too.
I think that's what it was. I had avocado toast and it cost $9.
Thanks, nice people. I should say that I personally should be all right; work hasn't started to dry up yet, though I expect it to slow down substantially later, and I have a comfortable cushion of savings for as and when it does. I'm more angry for the people I know whose incomes have dropped off a cliff and who have no way of getting through this without going deeply into debt.
I will talk to my accountant about the dividend/salary ratio when we're out the other side of all this. I'd left it entirely to him, and it's something that I should have thought about properly myself. But that's for later. The urgent problem is to make sure people don't go under right now, in such a way that no-one gets arbitrarily left behind.
The US rather than the Isles, but I'm now reading that the $350b in corporate relief can be applied for by businesses below a threshold no matter how small, including sole proprietors, independent contractors, and the self-employed, and while they're loans, under some conditions that appear intended to be fairly feasible to meet, the loans can be forgiven.
Chait usefully extends our prior discussion of Trump polling. I find it particularly heartening that other world leaders -- even the ones doing a very bad job -- are getting a bigger polling bump than Trump.
Apropos of anger, I wrote a thing. bit.ly/whenSIP
154: Oh my. I'd been worrying about South Africa's ability to get people to stay home with a raging plague, but I guess I was worrying about the wrong thing. Good, new and different anxieties!
153, 155: Thanks. (And now you've cracked my deep undercover pseud.)
154 is just awful.
152 is wonderful. Thank you. Would it be dreadful to mention it on twitter?
152 is excellent. The thing it's responding to, on the other hand, is ludicrous.
That's a really great piece, Sir K.
It's is good. It took me a while to figure out that people weren't complimenting a very nice url.
152 is magnificent. Really. A ray of sanity.
Thanks, everyone. I'll admit I'm pretty proud of it. It's the sort of letter to the editor-type thing that I often start writing in my head but then don't do anything with. The tone of the original column was just so unbearable that I couldn't not write a response.
164: don't get me wrong, the URL is pretty good.