generalpass

> How do you lose a contact by seeing if they’re interested in a new product/service?

From the perspective of the prospect, the salesperson is making a recommendation. If the startup fails to deliver, then it can cause a lot of problems in the relationship.

> It's not about cold-calling, it's about monetizing your network. If you have experience and contacts in an industry, and a startup offers you 30% commission on the revenue you bring in, it could be worth the time to see if you can make valuable connections for them. This is especially true if you're not tied to a full-time schedule with them — you could literally do this while still working another job.

So, the salesperson should risk losing a contact (and an account) for... nothing?

> I think this idea actually has a better chance of working, for a couple reasons:

> • There is less risk in starting the relationship. You're not divvying up shares in a company or even paying a fixed salary. The only thing you stand to lose is the time spent figuring out the comp structure

> • Founders don't have to open up quite as much about the business, and worry that their idea will be stolen/copied. This is partly because founders seeking salespeople will be further along (alpha version or later), and partly because there's less of a fear that a salesperson will start a copycat company than an engineer (because of skills, not intrinsic honesty).

For a salesperson you want to work with, they are making minimum $15k per month. Why are they even going to talk to you when you aren't offering equity or money? Do you think that cold-calling is fun-time?

Similarly:

Cofounders looking for salesperson to work for commission only.

I received a message from our overlords that staying at home is staying safe.

I don't feel safe.

Looks like the camera sticks out from the back a little, which is one of the features not present on 5S and previous SE, and I liked it that way.

My understanding is AdSense is based on click-throughs and sales, which will be more reader-dependent than product-dependent.

How do you feel your reader demographic stacks up against the LA Times?

AdSense tends to be only certain types of advertisers. I can't say that I've ever seen a concert ticket or movie advertisement in an AdSense window, but I've also been running ad blocking tools for quite some time now.

At larger revenue levels, a lot of advertising deals may be more direct. For example, perhaps a major band advertises their show dates directly with the Times. Bands are currently putting the kibosh on their tours, so all of that revenue goes to zero.

Could the LA Times run on your Adsense revenue?

> Good grief that's a dramatic article. The economic decline may be stark but that's what happens when you effectively freeze economic activity. I'm not really sure why exactly things are never supposed to be the same given that people still have their training, factories are still around and those can be reopened once sufficient safety is guaranteed.

> There's disruption in supply chains and business formation and whatnot, but I think it would be better to think about the economy in terms of actual resources and human capital rather than stock market figures, the former isn't vanishing into thin air.

> There's this tendency to dramatically overrate the impact of contemporary events. People said the same thing after 9/11 when it came to other aspects of life, and apart from increased airport security and a few costly wars there indeed was nothing new under the sun.

> The CDC estimated that the swine flu in 2009 may have killed up to half a million people globally. We'll see what the death toll of this is at the end but this isn't humanity's first pandemic and it isn't its worst, not by a significant margin.

The issue is not the available resources, but the government activities. The government initiated the crash, they are sustaining and making the crash deeper, the length of the crash will be based on their actions, and the recovery will be based on what they decide.

In previous recent events, people were free to operate their businesses largely the same as before the crash.

> I love how professors live on charity and lecture us on money.

More correct might be:

I love how professors live on taxes and predatory lending (which generates an indebted underclass) then lecture us on money.

> 'Capitalism learned to smooth out crises, because so many happened' is now least true than ever.

I didn't notice that statement in the article, but I did notice this one:

> Lockdowns imposed by governments have forced many companies to close and lay off staff.

Also consider: why did the city of Stockton, California have to declare bankruptcy? It collects taxes, yet it couldn't pay its bills. Again demonstrating the only causal factor is the ability to control the money supply and taxes are not a control on the money supply.

> Taxes take money out of the economy. Government expenditure puts money into the economy. Its a basic accounting truism. The rate of inflation/deflation is proportional to the difference between the two.

The same effect is seen with the mattresses. Your argument has no way to address this.

> The difference between you stuffing money under a mattress and the government doing so is that the government controls the money printers and you do not. There is no point to the government stuffing money under a mattress because it can conjure up as much money as it desires when it so desires. On the other hand, you have no much magical ability, so the situation is quite different.

> And yes we are talking about fiat currencies because most currencies in use today are fiat currencies.

> Government debt is not like household debt, and government saving is not like household saving.

Yes, the money printers are the exclusive exception and the only factor in inflation or deflation. Taxes are not a factor any more than mattresses. I don't know if you recognize it, but you are supporting my position.

> The government already has an infinite supply of money for itself, by virtue of being the issuer of the currency. Money supply means the money in circulation in the non-government sector. Then by definition, taxation takes money out the economy and government spending adds money to the economy.

> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances

> Discounting foreign trade, private sector surplus is exactly equal to government deficit.

> > Sectoral balances analysis states that as a matter of accounting, it follows that government budget deficits add net financial assets to the private sector. This is because a budget deficit means that a government has deposited more money into private bank accounts than it has removed in taxes. A budget surplus means the opposite: in total, the government has removed more money from private bank accounts via taxes than it has put back in via spending.

> > Therefore, budget deficits, by definition, are equivalent to adding net financial assets to the private sector; whereas budget surpluses remove financial assets from the private sector. This is represented by the identity: (G – T) = (S – I) – NX

> > which is

> > (Government sector balance) = (Private sector balance) – External sector balance

> > where G is government spending, T is taxes, S is savings, I is investment and NX is net exports.

> > The conclusion drawn from this is that private net saving is only possible when running a trade deficit if the government runs budget deficits; alternately, the private sector is forced to dis-save when the government runs a budget surplus and the trade deficit exists

> In the above equation, increasing T has exactly the same effect as decreasing G by the same amount.

Stating that the government has "an infinite supply" of money is not relevant because the money has to be created because the potential to create money is not the same as money that has been created. (I may also note that article must be implying a fiat currency, even though it is not stated.)

You statements and quote from Wikipedia do nothing to address Cantillon effects and I'm tempted to say, based on the quote provided, the editors of that article have never heard of such a thing. This is why Wikipedia is not a source.

I can make the same arguments about mattresses:

Money going underneath a mattress is removed from the equation of money in "circulation" until it has been placed into a pocketbook. If an entire population decides to remove 80% of the money in "circulation" by placing it under their mattresses, the prices for everything will fall though the floor as the population is only willing to spend the money remaining in "circulation".

Then, the population decides, all at once, to move the money from underneath their mattresses into their pocketbooks, and prices shoot through the roof because of the huge expansion of money in "circulation".

This is, conceptually, no different than the activities described in the quote and is best attributed to Cantillon effects (i.e., money flows through an economy).

> That is precisely what taxation is. Taxation takes money out of the economy, government spending puts money into the economy. For all intents and purposes, government spending creates money, and taxation destroys it.

> The government doesn't need your tax dollars in order to spend. As the issuer of currency, it can will as much money into existence as it wants. So collecting taxes is simply a way to regulate the money supply, control inflation and provide a base level of demand for the currency.

A tax does not remove money from the money supply, it simply transfers money to the government. Taxes could be increased and government spending increased yet further, and the net result is an increase in money supply, disproving your claim because the only causal factor is what government is doing with the money supply. Similarly, in a non-fiat system, such as a gold standard or even just specie, taxation does not reduce the money supply any more than storing the money under a mattress. This is a distortion or at least a misconception of what money is. The better analysis of these considerations would be as Cantillon effects.

> In this piece, we take a look at the helicopter money model, its role in the economy, and the related shortcomings that may emerge in the long-run.

> What’s Helicopter Money?

> The concept of helicopter money first appeared in 1969 in The Optimum Quantity of Money by a famous monetary theorist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. It implies transferring money to individuals or cutting taxes for households.

This section tells me everything I need to know: the person who wrote this article has no idea what they are writing about.

The "helicopter money" phrase was used satirically, and every economist at the time and through, apparently, until today, knew this because of how absurd the term is. I haven't read the piece sited, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state that Milton Friedman would not have stated that the term was even equivalent to "cutting taxes" and definitely stated the term as creating money and giving it to households (via a helicopter).

Please ignore this article. It is absolutely awful and is probably effective at tricking people who have never read about these things before.

> This is inaccurate. If the government pumps $x into the economy today, tomorrow it can take $x out by levying a tax.

It is true that the statement is inaccurate, but the way to reverse is by destroying money (e.g., burning it).

I found the source file:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/...

I can't find where this is linked to on the CDC site, but that is the source data for the tweet.

From the csv, here is "All Deaths" for first 12 weeks of each year:

  Year,2020,2019,2018,2017,2016,2015,2014
  Week
  1,58961,58289,66134,59763,55788,61737,53277
  2,58962,58351,67495,60980,55525,61141,55620
  3,57371,58193,64647,59293,55182,58628,54580
  4,56666,57834,62780,58047,55606,57269,54085
  5,55849,58122,60974,58432,54896,57284,53955
  6,55992,58489,61110,59038,55106,56420,53397
  7,54246,57915,59779,58479,55785,56348,53815
  8,53745,57856,57793,58288,54873,55668,52642
  9,53382,57915,56692,57256,55875,55732,51674
  10,51978,58488,57093,57477,56112,55272,52058
  11,47655,57869,56326,56656,54462,54262,51782
  12,40002,57086,55766,57045,54662,53238,51385

  Year,2020,2019,2018,2017,2016,2015,2014
  Week
  1,58961,58289,66134,59763,55788,61737,53277
  2,117923,116640,133629,120743,111313,122878,108897
  3,175294,174833,198276,180036,166495,181506,163477
  4,231960,232667,261056,238083,222101,238775,217562
  5,287809,290789,322030,296515,276997,296059,271517
  6,343801,349278,383140,355553,332103,352479,324914
  7,398047,407193,442919,414032,387888,408827,378729
  8,451792,465049,500712,472320,442761,464495,431371
  9,505174,522964,557404,529576,498636,520227,483045
  10,557152,581452,614497,587053,554748,575499,535103
  11,604807,639321,670823,643709,609210,629761,586885
  12,644809,696407,726589,700754,663872,682999,638270

Plugging it into a graph is more dramatic, especially looking at the numbers in 2018 (2017-2018 season).

I wish I could find a page on the CDC website that links to these reports, but you can easily get the latest report by just increasing the week number by 1.

> When you're in a situation where the severity of the outcome doubles every 4 days and you do not have clear information about where the curve will break, underreacting will result in extremely bad outcomes much much much more often than overreacting

> For a simplified example just compare the cost of taking actions that make you break the curve 4 days too early with the situation where you break the curve 4 days too late

But does it seem that implausible that cooler heads might find a solution that doesn't cost at least $20 trillion?

How about a link to source data?

Another carefully considered analysis that doesn't seem to even want to attempt to discuss how long people can go without income.

I hope I am wrong.

The reason social unrest would be caused by lockdowns is because the population is too poor to go that long without starving to death.

I suspect deaths from COVID-19 will pale in comparison to deaths already occurring from various diseases and conditions that arise from not having clean water and functional septic systems.

> A business that doesn't have cash flow for bad times is not a business. There was a time when business weren't leveraged to the max and the profit taking during good times was not squeezed to every cent. This could easily be fixed with regulation to promote this behavior but currently the priority is to take the profits to the owners.

This may be what we read about publicly traded firms, but small businesses are in a completely different category. For example, many of them, if they do not take loans to improve their offering, will lose customers to the competition.

More like a bandaid on a severed artery.

> I understand your frustration, but, remember how news talk about computers and how much simplification is needed to get the overall public to understand the concepts.

> Do not judge experts from the two liners that you read in the news. Stimulus packages, social distancing, new ways of producing needed equipment... everything is part of solving the problem.

The article I'm commenting on, which I also read prior to commenting, is not what you are describing.

From the article:

> Those resources do not current exist, said Konyndyk, who also noted that hospital capacity across the country needs to be expanded and protective equipment for health workers restocked. There are currently global shortages.

> “If we want to be able to — as I think we need to — turn our economy back on in a safe way, we need to be able to do that sort of thing at scale,” Konyndyk said. “And we do not have anywhere close to the public health infrastructure that’s needed to pull that off.”

His statement suggests that he thinks the economy operates as a switch that is simply turned off and on at a whim, while also saying there do not exist enough resources to perform the needed tasks. Where does he presume these resources to come from? Printed money?

Also from the article:

> “We let things get out of hand,” said Mina, who is also associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “So now the place that we’re left in is we have to absolutely beat this down with a hammer and get to near zero cases.

If they truly have nothing but the best intentions for keeping society healthy, they would understand that economics are more complex and more powerful than anyone can command or comprehend. If they keep the economy shut down all the way until there are "zero cases", there will be a lack of basic health care as resources rapidly dwindle.

I also think they are terrible at grasping stats. I have yet to see published average random sampling of the population. Undergrad stats for nearly every major teaches you don't have to sample very many people to estimate a population. And there doesn't seem to be any attempt to analyze overall mortality rates, which should at least on a monthly basis be up over past years.

Whenever I read these health experts, I get the impression they feel the economy is just some superfluous activity to keep the masses engaged.

> I think there's a shard of truth in the assertion that: if you ask an epidemiologist how long people should remain locked in their homes, they'd tell you "forever". If you ask a capitalist how long, they'd say "lets re-open today". Neither of these answers are realistic solutions to this problem.

> Dr Fauci says "the virus sets the timeline; not us". This is, unfortunately, false. Western governments do not have the teeth necessary to enable this to be true, and it is not "naturally" true. Humans, at the end of the day, will do whatever they want. Americans are a weird, maybe beautiful, breed; there's a surprising number of us who would rather just get sick and possibly die than sacrifice the freedoms and amenities of normal life.

> At some point, maybe a month or three from now, people will get restless. They'll re-open businesses, remove WFH policies, try to get back to normal. There will be another surge in cases. At that point, what does the government do? Remind people "hey, we never lifted the stay at home 'suggestion', please stop"? Do they put more teeth behind it? Or, maybe then we'll have better therapeutics + small herd immunity, and we should just let the disease run its course without as many economically disruptive mitigations?

> Point being, this isn't a situation where predictions about the future are useful. Its constantly evolving.

The philosophical capitalists would state that actors should be free to choose their desired level of risk.

You statement suggests a stereotyped version of a capitalist who might order everyone to go out and work.

> Sure, but what if you sold your 3 year deal to an airline that is now effectively stuck in bankruptcy for the next 10 years. Or any of the 100 other industries/sub-industries that are completely shut down right now. If I can't afford to pay rent on my office I sure as heck am not paying Microsoft either.

I'm not clear such contracts make it through bankruptcy court.