" But it's hard to ignore the fact that in this country, when poor people make mistakes [or, in this case are the victims of circumstance], they typically eat those mistakes. Medical bankruptcies, unable to cover a $500 emergency, etc"
This may be the case. But would you rather have thousands of people without jobs in the airline industry and the many other jobs that will be lost as a result of the bankrupt airlines?
Bailing out these industries out is in essence allowing many people to keep their job.
one option is to bail them out but with strings attached. Demand concessions that are good for labor and for the consumer public in exchange for the bailout. Don't just let them put all savings into pockets of executives and shareholders (while promoting "ration and save/pull yourself by bootstraps" ideology to the poor, of course) then run crying to the taxpayers because they're too big to fail.
You're basically arguing that these jobs are government jobs, as without government bailouts, these jobs would not exist.
Let them fail. Others will come in because people will need air travel. Competition will come back, and more jobs will be created.
Times will be tough. People will struggle. But these things will happen either way. We can't keep sugar-coating society. If we keep bailing companies out, eventually the US government and its people will be unable to pay.
I've been working from home for a decade. I've worked at many companies and been part of the hiring process for remote developers.
Most people just don't have the discipline to work remotely. I think productivity will be reduced overall and it might prevent remote working in the future.
I really believe that working remotely or from home is a skill that needs to be developed over time in most cases. There may be some people who are just naturally better at it, but the first time I had a remote job we went from five days in the office to five days at home abruptly and I was horrible at it and inefficient at my job.
With my current job we started doing 1-2 days of working from home a week over the last year or so. Doing it part time has given me a chance to develop the skills and space needed to be successful and now that we are being pushed into it full time I feel a lot more prepared for it.
I do agree, though, that for most people who aren’t used to it or haven’t had a chance to develop the skills needed it’s going to be a rough transition and productivity is likely to decline, at least temporarily. Some of that may be due to working remotely, but I’m sure at least a part of it is just due to the general circumstances and anxiety surrounding it.
But like didn’t you go to high school or college? Did you never have to study at home? How does one get into the modern office workforce without ever learning how to be productive when left to their own devices? I don’t get it
For me working from an office or working from home is literally the same thing. I’m on computer with headphones on and talking through slack.
> But like didn’t you go to high school or college? Did you never have to study at home?
My (admittedly limited) experience with education is that no, you don't have to study that much. Pay attention during classes/lectures, do your exercises during the breaks and that covers most of the stuff. Maybe do an hour here or there at home.
Then there's the one off course that has you do more work than you can pull within these limits; dread the deadline and slack on. Pull an all-nighter before the deadline. That's how it goes.
I'm watching a close relative attend university and I feel like they're studying even less than I did.. they attend lectures maybe 1-3 times a week, sometimes watch a video lecture... mostly just stay at home, play games and slack on. Jeez! Seems to translate to something like 10-15 hours of work a week? And not particularly demanding work. In for a shock when they need to be at work 8 hours a day and actually try get some stuff done every day (every hour even).
> But like didn’t you go to high school or college?
I was home schooled for K-12 but I did go to college and I was actually pretty effective at working on my own. But I think the nature of the work you’re assigned in college is different from that of the workplace, at least in most situations. For example, college won’t necessarily teach you how to communicate effectively with a remote team, how to stick to a schedule even at home, how to set up a space so you can take calls, etc.
I also think I sort of unlearned the skills needed after being forced to come into the office between X and Y time of the day for several years after college, so when I was suddenly left to my own devices again it was a difficult shift. Had I jumped straight from college to a fully remote job I may have done a bit better.
Now that I’ve relearned those skills I much prefer a mix of working from home and being in the office, that way I get a good balance of focused time at home and social time at the office.
Unless things have changed a lot since I was in college, a student who can't easily study at home could always go to the library or the computer lab.
Personally I had no problem working at home on things I was finding interesting - but if I was studying something I was less passionate about I was liable to get distracted unless I distanced myself from distractions like browsing the internet.
I'm one of those people who lacks the discipline. I live with someone who works remote full time, and they have that discipline, and are in fact way more productive working from home. But me? I have no problem doing well in the office, but all the full work from home jobs I've had? I've been a miserable failure. I'm worried 'cause my performance is going to drop a lot right as we head into the third recession of my career.
It really varies by personality. Some people do a lot better by themselves. But if you hire me? It's worth paying for the office space.
I agree being remote is not for everyone. And not everyone wants to be remote.
I also agree that productivity will likely drop, but the remote aspect will only be one of the many reasons considering what's going on right now.
I assume any productivity drop during this time will be brought up when discussing remote, ignoring the circumstances and that it was basically enforced without any preparation.
I find I lack the discipline not to -over-work. When you don’t have clear boundaries between the home and workplace life, and you love what you do, it’s far easier to let work consume you, which isn’t generally a good thing.
The two most important things for me so far have been:
- Keep a morning routine and a regular schedule
- Regularly check in with my colleagues, and post progress updates.
For my own personal anxiety, I'll not allow myself to feel guilty if I'm being slow or unproductive, (even in the office, sometimes the energy's just not there today) but I will allow myself to feel guilty if I'm failing to keep regular contact with my teammates. Without doing this, it's far too easy to slip into a rabbit hole researching something interesting, but ultimately not work related. Or, y'know, refresh the HN homepage for an hour and get nothing done.
> Most people just don't have the discipline to work remotely.
I'd phrase it differently: most people don't start with the discipline. However, it's something you can learn. I don't know if everyone learns. I don't know if everyone learns in the same circumstances. I don't think nearly as many people will learn under exceptional circumstances (virus pandemic) as they would if they were starting to do full time remote permanently. And yes I'm concerned that a lot of people/companies will draw the conclusion that remote can't work because that one time we had to do it, there were problems...
The virus will associate working from home with a disease pandemic. It already is killing the work from home culture. It's okay if the majority go to an office, the problems arise when the indifferent demonize working from home.
Working remotely benefits greatly from creating the right environment to reduce distractions. That can be the difference between enough discipline and failure.
Amphetamines. Seriously. Prescription, of course. Coffee is a distant second. Thiobromine can be better for some people - you can get supplements it you can buy brewing cacao if you want to experiment with a potentially tasty drink.
Yeah, sure, there are behavioral interventions but for a guy like me, if I can just do it with a reasonably pill I'm willing to take the risk. Your risk tolerance may vary. Meditation is a good alternative but it takes time and, ironically, discipline.
Incidentally it may be the reverse, that people who are good at meditating are those predisposed to having good discipline!
This might work. But how many people will die in the process? There are many cases of young people, with seemingly no prior health issues, dying after getting severe issues as a result of the virus.
On top of that, you can't guarantee that young people will only get it. With no travel restrictions, it can easily spread to the elderly.
It kills maybe 1% to 2% of people under 50 with no comorbitities.
If we assume everyone in the UK is under 50 and there are 60m people and we want to infect 60% of them that's 36m people infected, and 1% of that is 360,000 dead.
That's ignoring all the people who do have comorbitieis (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc), and all the people over 50.
It's also ignoring all the people who eg get into road traffic accidents and need an ICU bed, which won't be available if we cram hospitals full of covid-19 patients.
The reported numbers in published papers are more like 0.4% under the age of 50 and 0.2% under 40 and probably lower as there could be a large portion of mild unreported cases.
>> Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%)
That's not a great way of measuring the death rate during an on-going epidemic. They should be measuring the number of people who died today / number of cases a week ago.
Why a week ago? If it takes longer than a week for victims to die, in a situation with rapidly increasing infections that will give a very distorted number.
The best source I found on the subject -- a disease modeler with CDC who was giving an interview -- said that their current estimates used 5-day doubling, 15-day median time to death, and 1% CFR to do their estimates.
For the modeler, the purpose was estimating the true number of cases (which they estimate as current_deaths * 800 for a first-order approximation) -- but similarly, you could use that to estimate CFR by taking (num_cases / 8) as the denominator. Except, of course, that you can't realistically estimate num_cases. With the exception of Diamond Princess and possibly South Korea, everybody's numbers tell you more about the number of tests they run than the number of infected that exist.
One doctor from John Hopkins, for example, estimated that there are between 50k and 500k cases in the US as of 3 days ago -- and my own admittedly-amateur estimations using CDC numbers for deaths from influenza and all-cause pneumonia could only set an upper bound of ~400k cases as of March 1st
Sure, maybe just one week is too short and it needs to be longer. But that just makes my point stronger, doesn't it?
Using the total number of people infected today means they're including a bunch of people who may go on to die, but they're not including those deaths yet. So they're making the death rate look smaller than it is.
"We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time"
yes, yes they are. They are building it for the Valley with the plan to expand nation wide.
Please stop with the politics. Trump can get something right.
Nobody was this pedantic with Obama. The difference is that Obama just wouldn't tell us what he was doing..and the press would ignore all of the terrible things going on behind the scenes.
Did he imply or are you implying now because you don't like Trump?
Kind of like when he made a speech about illegal immigrants and the press implied that he was talking about all immigrants?
"Also, people were pedantic with Obama all the time. Tan suit, anyone?"
Obama was adored by the mainstream press and anyone that said a single negative thing about him was attacked and deemed a racist. Fast and Furious anyone? How about when he used the IRS to illegally target conservative groups?
60 million people were infected with H1N1 during his presidency and 13,000 people died in the US. Most people don't even remember this.
If you can't admit when Trump does something right, I sure as hell won't believe you when you tell me Trump is doing something wrong.
That's great! It is surprising to find pockets where this isn't the norm in 2020, but I'm seeing it. I can remember working through this same issue in 2016 at a local Seattle startup.
The lack of land borders is probably helpful, too. The article wants the reader to believe it's the near universal healthcare, though.
> Last but not the least, Kolas said that she believes the country’s health insurance system, which covers 99 percent of the population, has been crucial to fighting the spread of the outbreak.
“Taiwan’s health insurance lets everyone not be afraid to go to the hospital. If you suspect you have coronavirus, you won’t have to worry that you can’t afford the hospital visit to get tested,” she said.
“You can get a free test, and if you’re forced to be isolated, during the 14 days, we pay for your food, lodging and medical care,” Kolas said. “So no one would avoid seeing the doctor because they can’t pay for health care.”
This may be the case. But would you rather have thousands of people without jobs in the airline industry and the many other jobs that will be lost as a result of the bankrupt airlines?
Bailing out these industries out is in essence allowing many people to keep their job.