I think this is a profoundly bad idea. It's just as dumb as the fed trying to prop things up. You're not going to solve this problem with money, but with a strong response to the root cause, the pandemic. That said ...
> My wife and I have a newborn, which currently isn't very expensive but we all still need to eat
I imagine you would get $3k since there are 3 of you.
People working many hourly jobs net less than $1,000 per month and cannot afford to take unpaid time off. So they go to work and spread the virus. Providing them and others with enough money to at least cover their most dire bills reduces that need to go to work sick. If money is not provided to these people, the odds that they are soon homeless if their work closes down is very real.
~40% of America cannot afford a $400 emergency, all of those people are at real risk of hunger and homelessness.
Giving everyone cash allows the country the freedom to implement programs that run a real chance of preventing the spread. It also goes a long way towards preventing societal chaos as people without savings and suddenly no income are now provided a way to continue living and feeding their families.
> People working many hourly jobs net less than $1,000 per month and cannot afford to take unpaid time off.
Absolutely and those people should receive assistance through the regular channels we have available. Unemployment, charities, welfare, churches, synagogues, etc. and frankly, good old fashioned neighborly assistance.
Not by throwing money at everybody, most of whom do not need it. That's just redistribution of wealth by another means. Don't shove your political agenda down people's throats in the middle of a pandemic.
"Absolutely and those people should receive assistance through the regular channels we have available. Unemployment, charities, welfare, churches, synagogues, etc. and frankly, good old fashioned neighborly assistance."
This probably works well in upper class neighborhoods, but a good portion of the US don't live in communities with much to spare. People unable to afford a $400 emergency or who rely on schools to ensure their children have at least one good meal a day generally dont have much to share with their neighbor. Most of the community organizations that serve those communities are in the same boat. Your suggestion also removes a good portion of people who don't attend religious services. Charities are limited in what they can provide.
Unemployment is difficult. For example to be eligible, Florida requires "You must be able to work, available to work, and actively seeking work. This includes being able to get to a job and have child care if necessary." Not many people hiring in the middle of a pandemic and further complicated by the closing of schools.
"Not by throwing money at everybody, most of whom do not need it."
~75% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and 40% of US citizens cant afford a $400 emergency meaning that most of them do indeed need it.
"Don't shove your political agenda down people's throats in the middle of a pandemic." - You seem upset which I can completely understand in this stressful time but please note; looking to ensure that people, especially children have food to eat and can afford their most basic of bill should not be seen as a political agenda, its simply trying to be a good human.
Your point is absolutely valid, but there is no reason why the same doesn't apply to this new scheme as well. You would need to distribute the money and the same distribution problems apply. People are people.
Give everybody $1k? Who's everybody? If you're in this country illegally, do you get $1k? What about people who got stranded here due to border closures? How are you going to identify people? How will you stop fraud, double dipping, etc?
Maybe instead of creating a new bureaucracy in the middle of a crisis, use the existing systems that are already in place and just pump more cash into them?
I think focusing on 1, 10 or 100 people double dipping or potentially getting funds they should not have is besides the point. We implement this to keep people from starving and going hungry. Plenty of time to track down people who abuse the system after the crisis. As far as distribution that's not an impediment. The IRS already has a list of people and addresses and we can mail them a check. Is it complete? who knows but its a start and probably covers 95% of people. Not doing anything because of bleeding edge cases is not a solution.
The existing systems you mentioned before are not setup for mass distribution. There is no way the local unemployment office can scale up to 100x. In addition we are not going to just give money to the other private entities to distribute as they are not equipped to do so.
This. The purpose of the money is to address the immediate demand shortfall. We have until December to figure out who might have gotten more than their fair share and claw it back. Hell, even if a fair chunk is wired to Central America it will mean those people won’t starve.
We need to be A-10 Warthogging cash now and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> charities ... churches, synagogues, etc., and frankly good old fashioned neighborly assistance
All of those things have displayed discrimination against groups they don't like in the past, or have an overt or covert missionary agenda. Charities have also come under fire for spending much of their funds raised on high executive salaries and not so much on actual aid to the needy. It is no surprise that much of the developed world no longer considers them a reasonable social safety net. (Indeed, in the Nordic countries the churches have largely given up their historical niche as a distributor of charity, since they feel the state can do a better job of taking care of the needy than they can.)
You could cut out the vast majority of giving people $1000 they don't need by only giving it to people that ask for it. If you wanted to go further you could check the persons last tax return. If they exceed some threshold then you could deny them.
You're right, I don't get it. Its much better to have these people who are suffering under an economic collapse outside of their control go to work sick, and spread the virus before finally losing their jobs and homes and go without food instead of getting money and then using that money to buy necessities and in turn stimulate the economy. In addition the people who's children relied on school lunches should be glad they are not getting money to feed them so as to keep it out of the hands of big industry. Thank you for illuminating my ignorance I was blind to it before.
A strong response to the pandemic will leave millions of people with no income. Many have zero in savings. These issues are tightly coupled: we can't expect people to make the right choices for everyone if doing so threatens their survival.
> And your plan for achieving that number is - what precisely?
Ease up on the zoning laws. Many zoning laws in that same metro area prohibit high density housing. The same high density housing that is most profitable and reduces the cost of housing.
It’s not just a hunch. There is a strong theoretical basis for why that will case prices to go down and supply to go up. And that theory is backed with actual evidence. Houston has more new home starts than the entire state of California, its housing prices are stable despite explosive population growth. Tokyo likewise has more housing starts than New York, LA, and Houston combined, and prices there are stable despite a growing population as people move into the city from the rest of Japan. The thing both places have in common is very streamlined zoning laws.
Zoning proponents are like anti-vaxxers and climate changer deniers.
In japan, housing purchase values ACTUALLY decrease! Which makes sense when you think that the building is a depreciating asset that is rotting, just like any other hard asset you buy.
Contrast that with nyc which has been a steady rise for now 50+ years when it became evident that the city would not be a rat den forever (and i live here)
I will never wrap my head around the concept that building more housing won't help housing prices because apparently 7 billion people want to live in San Francisco or something.
Zoning proponents are like anti-vaxxers and climate changer deniers.
Pure hyperbole. Unless you literally believe that there should be no proscriptions against me building, for example, a major trash incineration facility on a plot of land in the middle of your quiet residential neighborhood -- just because I "own" it -- then congratulations, you're a zoning advocate.
Everyone acknowledges the need for some form of zoning (or zoning-equivalent) legislation. It's just how cities work.
> for example, a major trash incineration facility on a plot of land in the middle of your quiet residential neighborhood
We can either chat about the 0.01% of scenarios ... or the other 99.99%. The other 99.99% look extremely similar ... it's towns not allowing two-family homes in one-family zones. Three-family homes in two-family or one-family zones. We're not even talking about apartment buildings. All of those are built using "variances", which just illustrate how absurd the system is.
Oh and speaking about your example? I live in a two-family home in a two-family zone ... next to a bus depot. How you ask? Well, they just got a variance I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The outright toxic projects that developers and city leaders routinely propose run at a least a couple of orders of magnitude above 0.01 percent.
Then there's a huge fat tail of other cases (big box retail, correctional facilities, treatment centers... not to mention freeway expansions and so forth) that, lo and behold -- not everyone who loves within a short radius of is a huge fan of, to say the least.
The point is - it's a grey scale, and you're painting it as a binary. It's not.
> The outright toxic projects that developers and city leaders routinely propose run at a least a couple of orders of magnitude above 0.01 percent.
This is true, but does not contradict my point. How many tiny projects are never run through anything or even considered because regular people don't have a mountain of cash/lawyers/etc. and simply comply with the law, while all those toxic projects hire lawyers to get variances?
How many two-family homes are never built or even considered because the zone is one-family? How many housing units have we lost this way?
We can certainly ask all kinds of questions about whether some forms of zoning are a good idea or not. Certainly many are outdated, illogical and/or counterproductive.
But the point is that everyone (whether they say so or not) acknowledged that at least some baseline of codified land use regulation -- a.k.a. "zoning" -- is necessary.
It's just a question of what kind -- and who should benefit.
Although all you need to be a scientist is to use the scientific method properly, most people believe that you also need to have a PhD or a job that requires a lab coat
This sort of what-about-ism doesn't address the core point. That top-down command and control systems are vulnerable to precisely this type of outcome. Providing a single western example of a much milder localized circumstance doesn't address anything except deflect attention from the main point.
Flint was a local event. This is consuming all of China.
Corporations aren't a thing. They're a legal construct. They're owned by shareholders, who are mostly institutional investors ... pension funds, 401k, etc ... everyday people. So you will be taxing everyone. The same people who already pay income taxes on their earnings. And that's assuming they don't just pass the additional cost down via increased prices on whatever it is they produce.
If you want to tax the wealthy, this is not the way to do it.
To add to this, only those who are actively seeking work and are not employed, are considered unemployed. A retired person (or a person who has given up looking for work) is not counted as unemployed, but will be counted once employed.
You should be flexible enough to bill in whatever manner that works best for the work at hand, the client, and most importantly, yourself. If the job requires hourly billing, don't pass it up because "I don't bill hourly". With some clients, you simply won't get them past that and it's up to you to make it work anyway, for both of you.
I agree, you should push clients away from hourly billing, but sometimes it's not possible and it's not worth losing an opportunity over.
You can propose to "sell" a fixed number of hours every two weeks or month, then allocate those hours when you estimate, without forcing you to keep a timer open while you work.
Yes, it's a compromise, you're not selling value, but you're not exactly selling time either and you have sufficient incentive to be productive.
Please let's not pretend that there is an infinite amount of opportunities out there and it's just a matter of your grabbing the right one. You need to keep money rolling in every month and you take what's in front of you, making the best of it.
There are two levels of organization. Time level (which projects when, meetings, sprints, time allocation) and project level (user stories).
For the time level stuff, I use Google Calendar. This allows me to plan development work for the various projects around any meetings that end up on my calendar.
For the project level stuff, I use JIRA in kanban format with Blocked, Backlog, In Progress, For Review, Done.
I've been doing it this way for more than a decade ...
> Works ok but I feel I can do better, like adding a progress % or something to get a better overview of my tasks.
JIRA will give you a burn-down chart automatically, but honestly, that stuff is worthless.
One piece of advice. Do not kick back user stories unless there was a defect in the work. If you want to add something or do something differently, make a new story and mark that one as done. It kills morale to see the same stuff over and over again, makes it look like you're not making progress.
Unless you assume each solar system is a threat, so you proactively send automated machines to each solar system that can adapt to the threat as needed. They might also not care if there is or isn't life there and just want to build Dyson spheres everywhere.
The argument for Dyson spheres is extremely weak. If you are powerful enough to build one, you are also powerful enough to dismantle a nearby gas giant and fuse that.
The energy required to dismantle and fuse a gas giant would be tremendous - there's definitely an opportunity-cost involved.
Compared to a Dyson sphere - which only requires a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the energy absorbed to build and launch the orbiting platforms that make-up the sphere.
You can "ignite" a gas-giant by maneuvering a black-hole into position inside the gas-giant, but (as far as we know) there are far more gas-giants than there are black-holes, and the distances involved are tremendous (nearest black hole: 3,000ly, nearest gas-giant: 6 to 9e-5 light-years). It just doesn't strike me as feasible or even worthwhile even if it was feasible.
Maybe as the heat-death of the universe approaches, the last band of remaining humans (don't ask) try to ignite the gas-giants to keep the lights on?
There is no need to "ignite" the gas giant. You just skim off hydrogen and fuse it in magnetic confinement chambers anywhere you need power. Gravitational confinement is for amateurs.
We don't build bonfires in our cars, as used to be done in steam locomotives; we oxidize carbon differently, and generate a pressure differential by entirely different means. Why should advanced aliens do things the clumsy way?
Anyway there isn't enough material in a solar system to build one. If you can get elsewhere to gather the stuff, why bother to bring it back?
> My wife and I have a newborn, which currently isn't very expensive but we all still need to eat
I imagine you would get $3k since there are 3 of you.