Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

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I get what you're saying here, and I respect the fact that you were able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, literally.

Depending upon where you get your numbers there are 18-31 million unemployed right now. Some of that will be solved by brains -- people who can find niches and what not. But with a 1/3 of the renters who won't be able to make the August check, that's just a bunch of people who can't afford to spend money at all.

So demand is purely in the trash right now.

So the question is, if you could get 18-31 million people in gig positions, what would happen?

Well for one thing the pay would be low, because the supply for labor (unemployed people) would be more then plentiful to meet current demand.

E.g. How many uber drivers do we really need right now? And if you doubled or tripled the amount of uber drivers what happens to the income for one uber driver? That would drop by basically by 1/3, as more uber drivers compete for the same amount of rides. And more and more uber drivers are willing to take less money for the same effort.

The result is you have an uber driver making less income and less willing to spend money. And that starts a vicious cycle. More and more people not willing to spend, more and more companies laying off individuals.

That continues until we hit a bottom, which we may or may not have seen yet, given the massive amounts of evictions coming as of today.

I don't doubt that it will happen regardless, but what is the point of evicting people if no-one is waiting to rent the property? If the bottom falls out of the economy and regular people can't rent then landlords are screwed aren't they? Rent-seeking is the section of the economy which has to change, I think.

Well, I would expect that the supply of rental units to flood the market. So those that can afford to pay rent will pit landlord against landlord seeking the best price. This will drop prices of rental units as landlords will have to accept a drop in rent to fill their units. That's good in the long run, but not good in the short term.

So for the people who can't afford to pay rent, well, a lot of them will end up on the street. No job, no home, no health insurance.

Keep in mind that in this economy the supply of money is not flowing anymore to the middle class, many of who were already living paycheck to paycheck. It's all being hoarded by those who have it seeking wealth preservation above all else first.

Look, I promote gig work in part because it's what I know. If you can come up with full time work that is germ free and make it available to people, cool.

I'm not a fan of Uber. I'm not interested in promoting that, honestly. I would like to see more walkable neighborhoods and better public transit and so forth. There are a lot of things I don't like about these trends towards paying a pittance to people who already drive to play the underpaid taxi driver role or the underpaid food delivery guy (Uber Eats, etc).

Me being for creating work that is safe is not the same as me being for having more Uber drivers and I find it aggravating that this is a routine thing people do, though I do understand why people make that inference. It's really not something I'm trying to promote and I don't know how to shed that interpretation elegantly. I feel like getting into my (negative) opinions of car culture and gig work layered on top of car culture is probably not going to go over well with most people.

I've lived without a car for a lot of years and people seem to feel okay with me being me in that regard if they can chalk it up to "She's just poverty-stricken and can't afford a car" or "She's just seriously medically handicapped and can no longer drive and is muddling through as best she can" and they get real, real uncomfortable if I start talking about not driving as a choice because I'm an environmental studies major and I wanted to be an urban planner and things like that.

I don't think America currently works all that well and I've spent a lot of years studying things like housing policy and I think I have some good ideas, but I'm a woman and poor and blah blah blah. There is always some excuse why I can't be taken seriously and those excuses were always there. I wasn't taken seriously in my youth either. It's not actually "because I was homeless for years."

We did this once before. We currently have unemployment levels similar to The Great Depression and that was resolved with going to war and they were surprised that they were able to come up with the resources to create both more "butter" and more "guns." In other words, more civilian production and more military production.

That was true because so many people were not working.

We have to get people working and being productive. That's the real issue here. And how we do that and make it safe is a question we need to address.

I don't think germ control is going to stop being an issue. I think the pandemic is rooted in the fact that we have nearly 8 billion people on the planet.

We didn't need this level of germ control historically because most people lived in little villages and the like. So we just didn't interact with that many people.

I think the pandemic is the universe trying to give the human race a hint that "You can't keep interacting with this many people cavalierly like germs don't matter. You can't run around shaking hands with a zillion people and expect that to not cause problems."

I think it is a huge mistake to act like Covid-19 is some anomaly and we need to just wait for it to pass.

I think we need to start making cultural changes and the front line of defense will be how we work.

Demand is down in part because people aren't working. It's a chicken and egg thing and we need to work on getting people working somehow.

And I keep imagining I will blog about it instead of leaving forum comments and stop aggravating people who don't want to hear it, but I'm failing to do that. Conversation provides a feedback loop that's hard to create when you blog, which is mostly me howling into the void and no own replies.

I don't know how to get taken seriously, but I'm clear on a few things. I'm just not clear how to communicate about those things in an effective manner that will get traction and it's making me crazy because the world clearly needs solutions and I don't quite understand why it is actively turning down solutions from someone who has spent nearly twenty years figuring out how to live with a high degree of germ control and many people know that.

They just used Uber as an example. Do you think demand for writing is higher now than a year ago?

Lots of restaurants started no contact delivery and low contact pickup. Do most people avoiding restaurants care if a pizza portal would be a little safer? Or are they trying to save money and lose the weight they've put on?

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