[HN Gopher] Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
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Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more
Author : organicfigs
Score : 491 points
Date : 2020-04-29 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| subsubzero wrote:
| - The tech companies having issues during covid-19 are all
| heavily invested in travel/transportation(Uber/Lyft/Airbnb etc).
|
| - They also are in industries that entirely use gig workers with
| personal contact in 90% of their services(airbnb the least of
| these).
|
| - I don't see other tech companies getting hit this hard(the sky
| is not falling!).
|
| - I really, really hope these laid off engineers find other jobs
| quickly and land on their feet.
| peter_mcrae wrote:
| The tech companies you identified are getting hit 1st. I expect
| to eventually see fallout in Fintech, Realestate, Advertising,
| anyone selling B2B SaaS (particularly to marketing/HR/ sales
| departments, SMB), etc. It will take time to feel the 2nd and
| 3rd order impacts. Hopefully, we bounce back quickly, but it's
| hard to not be a little concerned.
| Groxx wrote:
| Advertising seems to be hit - there are quite a few articles
| around e.g. YouTube paying substantially less to creators.
| golergka wrote:
| Unless their investors believe in a V-shaped recovery
| afterwards, and are willing to spend money now to gain market
| space from competitors who would die in the meantime.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Realestate has already been hit hard. Opendoor had like a 40%
| layoff + furlough.
| fullshark wrote:
| I mostly agree at this point but wonder if covid's economic
| impact is just getting started and there's gonna be massive
| unforeseen 2nd and 3rd order effects.
| Hospitality/transportation and startups that were already in
| trouble (e.g. WeWork) might just be the tip of the iceberg.
|
| Conversely, it's helped some tech companies (Amazon and Zoom)
| so who knows how this all shakes out.
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| My thoughts are that amidst the fear, the thing is, this
| economy was slowed solely due to the lockdown. If there was a
| bubble, it hasn't popped yet. There really is no reason for
| the economy being in the position its in except for the
| virus. I doubt there will be 3rd order effects that are too
| devastating. The lockdown will end soon enough and the
| economy will thaw and start moving again, maybe even to the
| roaring pace it was at before all this happened ... and after
| all that is when we will likely see the actual once-a-decade
| market-correction/recession/depression.
| luckydata wrote:
| I am (for a few more weeks) a PM at a fairly popular applicant
| tracker company. I was just laid off. While recruiting is the
| first to get affected, you're underestimating how much of a
| bellwether HR tech truly is. If we're suffering this much, it's
| pretty clear what's about to happen. I've seen our internal
| data, things will be bad for a while.
| buboard wrote:
| They deal with real, physical stuff. The virtual world has no
| externalities (except maybe a solar storm).
| 0xDEEPFAC wrote:
| Maybe we should consider a higher level? For example, with our
| interconnected highly computerized trading systems and with
| every megacorp these days heavily invested in financials (think
| stock buy-backs) who knows? Definitely not the FED Reserve.
| adaisadais wrote:
| In the long term I think this will be a solid move for both Uber
| & Lyft. The apparent economics of both businesses are relatively
| dire but the long term value prop is still as important as ever:
| they are generating the consumer data that will ultimately be
| used for self driving vehicles.
|
| This will allow both companies to trim the fat and (hopefully)
| regain the move fast mentality that is necessary for a startup.
| This can be Uber and Lyfts time to shine.
| hnhg wrote:
| Do they fully instrument their drivers vehicles? I'd imagine a
| lot of sensor data is needed for self-driving cars.
| adaisadais wrote:
| No, but they have a good understanding on routes and areas
| with high traffic. That data is going to be worth a fortune
| for the first fully autonomous taxi service.
| luckydata wrote:
| I don't think so tbh. Time will tell.
| bagacrap wrote:
| All that routing data (and much more) is also funnelled to
| Google via Maps/Waze and, to a lesser extent, Apple or
| other companies with map apps. So I don't think Lyft or
| Uber have a competitive advantage here, even if the routing
| data is useful absent full instrumentation. Plus, full self
| driving seems a bit like a nuclear bomb, by which I mean
| second place in that race might be worth nothing.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| $36mil/1000 employees works out about 36k in severance. What
| happens to people who got stock grants that vest over 4 years?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Source that is linked in the article:
| https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1759509/0001...
| bdcravens wrote:
| As a company, is there reason to believe that Uber can better
| weather the storm? Does Lyft do anything other than rides?
| cultus wrote:
| Considering they somehow couldn't make a profit before this,
| I'd be surprised.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Uber eats is the biggest delta between the two companies, I
| suspect they still will need to cut staff though.
| cik2e wrote:
| Nah, that's not it. I drove for both in a major city in the
| months before the virus and outside of peak hours Lyft always
| has substantially longer pickup times. This is based on a few
| hundred rides for each company. This means that they have
| fewer passenger per driver, so the biggest delta is a smaller
| user base. Once the lockdown began Lyft rides basically
| evaporated overnight, while Uber was still going strong at
| certain times and certain places, catering to essential
| workers. But both are worthless as a way to make money right
| now.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I believe Lyft generally has a slightly wealthier
| clientele: more middle-class people choosing not to drive.
| Uber has more reach in the lower ends of the market. So
| when the stay-at-home orders flooded in, these middle-class
| people all stayed at home, while Uber was still serving
| essential workers.
| jonknee wrote:
| And international exposure, Lyft is just in the US and a
| little in Canada.
| vvladymyrov wrote:
| There is also Uber Freight business that was ground rapidly
| recently
| rvz wrote:
| Lyft is in a much more worse position than Uber. Since Uber is
| in more locations than Lyft and Uber has Uber Eats and other
| services, I don't know how Lyft can justify its value.
|
| One thing that's common is that they're both unprofitable and
| have both been racing to burn cash for years and unfortunately
| they are now making difficult cuts to save themselves. But the
| true picture will be revealed on May 6th in their Q1 earnings
| call.
|
| EDIT: Q1 Earnings call on May 6th, not Q2.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I would interpret the evidence 180 degrees in the opposite
| direction. Wouldn't the increased footprint mean that Uber
| has more costs in less profitable areas? (It seems logical
| that Lyft would have pretty equal coverage in the profitable
| areas). And Uber Eats + other services hemorrhage money -- I
| read that Eats has something like a $1b/year burn rate, even
| leveraging much of Uber's other infra.
|
| (Also, aren't Q2 earnings are usually in July?)
| nerdponx wrote:
| Uber used to have higher prices (in my area) and a lower-
| quality UI. That's changed in the last year or so, especially
| now that Uber has all of the "ride safety" features that Lyft
| lacks.
| asdff wrote:
| They had scooters for a while, no clue if they shut that down
| in recent months. Haven't been itching to scoot lately...
|
| I wonder if a giant will scoop up one of these companies after
| they are beaten to the point of death?
| rpvnwnkl wrote:
| Maybe Facebook?
|
| "Bringing People Closer Together"
|
| Seems to fit...
| bhupy wrote:
| UberEats is up -- higher than Rides even. They can raise prices
| to turn a profit if they really need (Instacart turned its
| first profit).
|
| Uber operates globally (and owns minority stake wherever it
| doesn't operate), so as the world begins to gradually re-open,
| Uber will capture that revenue even if the US is still fucked.
|
| Uber has $8B cash.
|
| Uber rides were "adjusted EBITDA" profitable for 2 straight
| quarters before this -- take "adjusted EBITDA" with a grain of
| salt, but it's also not "nothing".
| fpo wrote:
| Uber is in a much better position to capitalize on Eats as well
| as non US recovery (given that it seems the US is on one of the
| worst paths of most developed economies). Hell if anything I
| can see some Western European countries finally unbanning Uber
| just to stimulate some more economic activity.
| Italy/Spain/Germany can't afford to be as protectionist moving
| forward.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Does anyone else find the headline really weird? Having "17%"
| next to "hundreds more" makes the "hundreds more" look like the
| important figure, whereas in actuality the "17%" is really the
| important figure.
| sna1l wrote:
| Also: "Lyft's other cost-cutting measures include furloughing 288
| employees and base pay reductions of 30% for executive
| leadership, 20% for VPs, and 10% for all other exempt employees.
| Board directors will give up 30% of their cash compensation
| during Q2."
| user5994461 wrote:
| >>> base pay reductions of 30% for executive leadership
|
| Aren't executives mostly paid in stock and bonus?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And the value of those is probably going down by more than
| 30%, seeing as how they're shares, and often linked to stock
| performance as well.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Paying people in stock and performance bonuses is ideal
| during a downturn. It doesn't cost the company anything to
| pay people in stock, since it just siphons off value from all
| existing stock, and nobody's getting their performance bonus!
| MiroF wrote:
| > anything to pay people in stock, since it just siphons
| off value from all existing stock
|
| wait what?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It doesn't cost cash, I think they meant.
| MiroF wrote:
| Yeah, sorry it was unclear but I was more confused by the
| "siphoning" value part.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| "Dilutes" stock value (per share) would possibly be more
| accurate? Keep throwing shares at execs; if the company
| is successfully, it's a dilution. If it fails, then at
| least they didn't waste real money.
| zifnab06 wrote:
| Let's say I have 1000 outstanding shares all worth $10. I
| need to pay someone a $5000 bonus. I'll just issue 500
| shares of stock to them instead because, well, that's
| about $5000.
|
| Hypothetically the per share price goes down by 1/3 here
| and is now worth $6.67 (but the company's still worth
| $10,000 total it's just 1500 * $6.67 instead of $1000 *
| $10).
|
| Generally though bonuses like this come out of a pool
| that's already been allocated years ago and there's no
| change to stock price
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Even if the pool is allocated years ago, it's still
| effectively dilution (as before shareholders effectively
| owned a fraction of the unallocated sharepool).
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Creating new shares dilutes the existing share value.
| Paying employees in shares means you're diluting the
| stock value every time.
|
| Of course, for most publicly traded companies there are
| so many outstanding shares that this is negligible.
| MiroF wrote:
| I thought most executive compensation was paid out of
| pre-allocated shares.
| trimbo wrote:
| With GAAP reporting, stock comp goes on the income
| statement and affects the bottom line. So it has a visible
| effect for investors, but no one cares about P/E anymore
| so...
| vecter wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how stock comp costs the
| company money, if it does? AFAICT it just creates equity
| dilution, but I might be missing something.
| njoubert wrote:
| There are two ways to compensate with stock: purchasing
| stock on the open market with cash, or, hand out stock
| from a pool of withheld shares. The pool of shares might
| be periodically increased through creating new shares
| (and diluting) but this must be reported to the SEC and
| is only done infrequently.
|
| GAAP reporting requires that stock compensation is
| written off as an expense. It does not reduce the
| company's cash, but it does reduce the company's
| earnings. Hence it changes the price to earnings figure.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| Its from Accounting assets = liabilities + equity. So
| equity = a-l. If you pay cash your assets go down so your
| equity goes down. If you give away equity your equity
| goes down. In either case you equity goes down.
| formercoder wrote:
| There really is a cost to paying people in stock. That's
| why SBC is on the income statement. Additionally, analysts
| will often not add SBC back to cash flows.
| klodolph wrote:
| The amount of stock may be based on a much higher valuation
| at this point.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Aren't bonuses usually tied to base pay?
| [deleted]
| KeepTalking wrote:
| While the short to medium-term impact of this is terrible, I am
| optimistic that a few of these individuals (not the usual high
| profile stars) will kick start the next big idea.
|
| Do we have a list of affected individuals listed to work on
| interesting projects?
|
| Wish HN can curate a Database of individuals open to working on
| special projects that could lead to a YC submission
| reminddit wrote:
| is there existing analysis of effect of layoff on future stock
| price?
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Crap, I was scheduled to go on internship with them this summer,
| but I feel like that might quickly no longer be an option..
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| They likely have so much going on they have forgotten about the
| people they are bringing on board. Reach out with the
| expectation that you'll get a response along the lines of, 'let
| me check what's going on' followed by 'due to this
| unprecedented time we are unfortunately ...'
| samename wrote:
| I would reach out to them to verify, and simultaneously begin
| looking for a backup (which will be difficult in the current
| market, but there definitely are still companies hiring).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I quit a job in defense software in October, took a couple
| months off, and now this shit. Many companies took down their
| job boards entirely and some don't even render correctly with
| no items listed. Many in-progress interviews I had got put on
| hold, and now the job market is about to be flooded with out of
| work talent, raising competition and lowering the salary I'd
| probably get. Many places I've applied to have since announced
| massive layoffs (Toast, TripAdvisor, etc), some mere days after
| I've applied.
|
| I'm fortunate to have a lot of liquid saved but I'm feeling for
| engineers with families and not as much saved.
|
| Stay positive!
| rchaud wrote:
| I feel for you. Back in '08, I did my summer internship at a
| big energy company that had massive exposure to Lehman Bros'
| coal + gas trading arm. Job offer was rescinded the day AIG
| collapsed, and about 24 hours before Lehman went down.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Layoffs are mounting, alternative work is limited, and the
| unemployment systems in many states are either broken or running
| out of funding. Add the federal governments indicated desire to
| let blue states go bankrupt and we are looking at a good
| combination to enter a depression.
|
| Its a pretty sobering time.
| notyourwork wrote:
| As sad as it is, I hope all those who voted for this are
| willing to accept the fate bestowed upon us from our 2016
| election and the political stonewalling from both parties.
| cwhiz wrote:
| McConnell is a shrewd negotiator so I assume he is using the
| bankruptcy position to win concessions on rescuing the oil and
| energy industry. Otherwise there will be a handful of
| Republican states facing their own bankruptcies.
|
| Trump is just a spiteful moron but not even he would let New
| Mexico, Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
| Kansas all fail.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| No, but he'd let New Mexico fail (it's blue) and ram through
| a bailout for the rest out of political patronage, and the
| legislature would go along with it, since the Democrats seem
| to be allergic to actually opposing Trump policies.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Is Louisiana blue enough for him? No wonder JBE is
| hightailing it to the White House to kowtow.
| nimbius wrote:
| >Layoffs are mounting
|
| We just fired our cleaning crew this morning and cut hours for
| the entire shop floor. We are a mid-size, midwestern diesel
| repair shop similar to Western Truck Exchange. I used to just
| do valve work and major overhauls, now I carry garbage to the
| dumpster and fix the copiers in the front office too.
|
| >alternative work is limited
|
| non-existant out here really, but the real thing no one seems
| to be covering is crime seems up. We had two break-ins this
| month, one stole all our nitrile gloves, another took our air
| conditioner and a tool box.
|
| >the unemployment systems in many states are either broken or
| running out of funding.
|
| LOL this is a massive understatement. I applied a month ago for
| limited unemployment and got a voice message telling me the
| system was overloaded after I had completed the 40 minute call.
| the next day the line didnt even _answer_ and the website was
| still down two weeks later. I finally stood in line for an hour
| at the unemployment office to be told I had to call the number
| "when it comes back up." Oh, those Trump Bucks? the $1200? Not
| me or a single person ive talked to has gotten that money.
|
| >the federal governments indicated desire to let blue states go
| bankrupt
|
| Just the blue ones? I'm in a red one and so far its starting to
| feel like we're _all_ up shits creek. The local Sheriff wanted
| us to do oil changes on their patrol cars because we 're part
| of a city contract for fire truck maintenance and they dont
| have the budget for regular service anymore. the motor pool for
| the county just cancelled their snow plow rebuilds, the county
| schools cancelled their bus maintenance and wanted to know if
| we would buy about 15 of them. The local water company asked if
| we could do their pump house generator maintenance on a net 120
| or a payment plan.
|
| >a depression.
|
| I remember living out of my truck during the 2008 financial
| "downturn" and freezing all through November. I think the
| government may be vastly over-estimating the social credit they
| have with the people of this great nation if they think another
| round of "austerity" is going to sit right with us while all
| the banks get bailouts and the rich get richer.
| m00x wrote:
| > Oh, those Trump Bucks? the $1200? Not me or a single person
| ive talked to has gotten that money.
|
| That's awful. In Canada, most people got their CERB money
| within a week. It took 2 days if you already had direct
| deposit info on there. Some people are refusing to go back to
| work after the relaxed lockdown because the CERB is more than
| they make working a few shifts a week.
|
| It's a bit frustrating that part-time workers are getting
| more than if they would work, but I'm happy that everyone is
| taken care of.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Pushing people off of unemployment insurance, which it's
| generally assumed that some states are doing, all while there
| is no work to go to isn't a recipe for a depression, it's a
| recipe political catastrophe. In a weaker democracy this stuff
| would trigger a revolution, and I'm starting to get worried
| about ours.
| chasd00 wrote:
| this is why a lot of people have raised their eyebrows over
| the cost of shelter in place vs the risk of Covid19
| infection. I'm glad it's becoming more visible, a few weeks
| ago you'd be shouted down for even suggesting the economic
| and political consequences of shelter in place could be
| catastrophic.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| There is a 0% chance of me returning back to regular life
| until I feel _safe_ , no matter what politicians say.
|
| I think the advocates for reopening the economy vastly
| overestimate the ability for political leaders to do that
| via dictat.
| 0xDEEPFAC wrote:
| Perhaps its time to go back to basics. A focus on health,
| store-able foods, alternative investments which might survive
| bond/stock market issues, and family would be imperative in
| such a "new normal."
|
| Vaccination certificates and debt forgiveness incoming? Who
| knows anymore - what harm is there in being ready?
| Loughla wrote:
| Real questions. I'm not a history buff.
|
| Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal
| government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing
| to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were
| the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close?
|
| Current question - what is the endgame for those who what blue
| states to go bankrupt? What do they get if that happens,
| outside of talking points? I assume they profit off of it
| (because that's the reason anyone does anything that I can
| tell), but how?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| End game for people like McConnell is that it puts downwards
| pressure on unions. A bankruptcy if a law is passed actually
| allowing states to go bankrupt would be a process overseen by
| federal courts, many of which are chaired by Trump appointed
| judges now. The judge gets to decide which debts are paid,
| meaning that pensions are very likely going to be chopped,
| hurting union members. There are other reasons.
|
| Bottom line is that they want rich people (their primary
| donors) to get richer and don't care about poor or middle
| class. They are very open about it now and still somehow
| supported.
|
| This is a good read on it:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-
| mitch-...
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Could the union strike (after the bankruptcy proceedings
| are complete) and force the state to take on new debt?
|
| Can states (or municipalities) not declare bankruptcy, and
| instead default on only the obligations they don't want to
| pay? That would be similar to how I as an individual can
| just stop paying one credit card but not the other. Or are
| those left holding the bag able to sue and force bankruptcy
| proceedings?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The judge gets to decide which debts are paid, meaning
| that pensions are very likely going to be chopped, hurting
| union members.
|
| I don't understand this. What is the connection between
| pensions and union members?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Historically, pension benefits were one of the main
| benefits unions fought for (and won) so that their
| members could have an income in their old age and retire.
|
| Today, very few workers still have pensions, but the few
| that do tend to be those represented by a union. In many
| states, this includes government employees: teachers,
| firefighters, police, etc.
| klipt wrote:
| And everyone else has 401ks which also suffer in a
| crisis, but the federal government can't bail out red
| state 401ks without also helping blue state 401ks, so in
| that sense 401ks are safer than pensions.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Today, very few workers still have pensions
|
| I've never seen a professional job that didn't include a
| pension - certainly not in the tech industry.
| wikibob wrote:
| Are you in the USA?
|
| Pensions are defined benefit. That is, it is specified
| exactly how much money you will receive in retirement.
|
| A 401K retirement plan is not a pension. You save your
| own money and possibly an employer contribution, and you
| make your own investment decisions. The value goes up and
| down in accordance with what you invested in.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > A 401K retirement plan is not a pension.
|
| Are we both talking about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/401(k)?
|
| "In the United States, a 401(k) plan is the tax-
| qualified, defined-contribution pension"
| Loughla wrote:
| Defined contribution (401k) is not the same as defined
| benefit (pension).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| beefalo wrote:
| Here have you seen a pension in the tech industry? 401ks
| are ubiquitous but no modern companies offer pensions
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Why are you going all up and down this thread trying to
| pedantically show that people are using the term
| "pension" slightly differently to Wikipedia's definition?
| It's not contributing anything to the discussion.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well I just don't get it. People say 'nobody gets a
| pension anymore' but a 401(k) is just a different type of
| pension. My defines benefit savings plans literally say
| 'pension' in the product names.
| ivalm wrote:
| State worker pensions are generally product of union
| negotiation.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Those with pensions tend to be union members; the pension
| being a benefit insisted upon in negotiations between
| unions and their (government) employers. If a state
| declares bankruptcy, lists pensions as a debt, and the
| federal discharges the pension debt, the GOP can thumb
| their noses at unions in a very big way.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Those with pensions tend to be union members
|
| I still don't understand. Surely almost every
| professional has a pension, but few people are in unions.
| notyourday wrote:
| Pension is broadly understood to be a defined benefit.
| Workers contribute to the pool a certain amount every
| months, government/company contributes a certain amount
| every months for every worker and when a worker retires
| the worker draws a specific amount until he or she dies
| or in some cases until his or her heirs die. The
| government (via PBGC) is on the hook for the amount until
| the time of death. The issue with defined benefit plans
| is that they are as they are being "negotiated" not self-
| sustainable with the unrealistic return expectations and
| having costs not adjusted for the reality of increased
| life expactancy.
|
| Currently most of non-union ( and mostly non-government
| union ) employees have a defined contribution plan. A
| worker contributes a specific amount every year, a
| company matches some amount of workers' contribution. At
| the retirement worker's draw down is limited to the
| amount in that account. If the account did well. the
| maximum amount is that can be drawn is large and if it
| has not done well, it is not large.
| Loughla wrote:
| Very few people in the United States have pensions.
|
| Mainly pensions are available for state employees, or
| union members. And for that matter, state employees tend
| to be part of a union.
|
| Unions are responsible for pensions, and the only people
| who have held onto them as the 401k has taken over.
|
| Edit: Because I apparently can't reply to chriseaton
| below - 401k is defined contribution, you contribute $x
| which is a set amount and non-taxable. Pension is defined
| benefit; you receive $x, guaranteed, after x,y,z
| parameters are met (age, years experience, etc). They are
| not even slightly the same thing. Not even close.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think a 401(k) is a pension? Almost all companies offer
| a 401(k) for full-time employees.
| danso wrote:
| A 401(K) is not a pension. The latter is funded entirely
| by the employer.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why does Wikipedia say it's a pension then?
| akiselev wrote:
| Because language is imprecise and depends on context -
| you and the GP are talking past each other. They are
| using the word in a conversational context and you are
| using it in an academic/technical sense.
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension:
|
| _" A pension is a fund into which a sum of money is
| added during an employee's employment years and from
| which payments are drawn to support the person's
| retirement from work in the form of periodic payments. A
| pension may be a "defined benefit plan", where a fixed
| sum is paid regularly to a person, or a "defined
| contribution plan", under which a fixed sum is invested
| that then becomes available at retirement age.
|
| The common use of the term pension is to describe the
| payments a person receives upon retirement, usually under
| pre-determined legal or contractual terms. A recipient of
| a retirement pension is known as a pensioner or
| retiree."_
|
| A 401k is a savings account, not a contractual
| obligation, so that's why it's not a pension in common
| usage.
| james-mcelwain wrote:
| You're being willfully obtuse here. No one in the US
| would call their 401k a pension.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Obviously someone who wrote this Wikipedia article would!
| james-mcelwain wrote:
| Pension is being used as a term of art here not how
| anyone uses it in standard parlance.
| notyourday wrote:
| That's not the case. Pensions are not always funded
| entirely by employer. In quite a few cases the salary of
| a worker is reduced by a certain amount that is added to
| what is contributed towards a pension by an employer.
|
| The difference between a pension and 401(k) type plan is
| that pension is a defined benefit plan and 401(k) type
| plan is a defined contribution plan.
| [deleted]
| mbrameld wrote:
| Not within the context of this discussion. Using your
| context clues > childish pedantry.
| kennymeyers wrote:
| Very few professionals in the United States have
| pensions.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| There are very few companies that offer pensions. A 401k
| is not a pension. A pension is recurring money that is
| given to you upon retirement in perpetuity. A 401k is
| just a means of investing your salary into the stock
| market pre-tax. Your employer does not even have to
| contribute to it although many if they offer a 401k plan
| offer some form of match up to x%. My last employer
| offered to match my contributions up to 6% my current
| employer offers no match. 401k and pension are very
| different.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > A 401k is just a means of investing your salary into
| the stock market pre-tax.
|
| If you plan to spend it when you're retired then it's a
| pension!
| wonderwonder wrote:
| ok...
|
| Then I guess my savings account is a pension too as well
| as the jar of small change I keep on the kitchen counter.
| mbrameld wrote:
| @chrisseaton
|
| I'll just go ahead and spoon feed it to you: pension in
| the context of this discussion means a defined-benefit
| plan contributed to solely by your employer. I'm
| surprised a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify is
| struggling so hard to grasp the concept of context.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well I went to look it up on Wikipedia and that's what I
| read. Not sure why there's such a big disconnect between
| what people expect you to think it means and what
| references tell you it means!
| mbrameld wrote:
| The reference does include the meaning as applied in this
| thread, you just have to read past the first couple
| sentences. You do understand that the same word can have
| different meanings depending on the context, right?
|
| Edit: because I think you just won't be able to get there
| on your own, look under the heading "Defined benefit
| plans" on the Wikipedia page for Pension. If you need
| help defining the words in that section let me know, my
| spoon is ready to feed Chris Seaton, the Shopify Senior
| Staff Engineer that doesn't understand context.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Not really sure why you're so worked up about this? I
| thought a 401(k) was a pension, since it pays you money
| when you retire, which is what a pension is to me. I went
| looking it up on Wikipedia which said it was as well. Can
| you see how I'd think it was a pension?
|
| > If you need help defining the words in that section let
| me know
|
| Well I must not understand the word 'pension' then,
| because it says multiple times that it's a 'pension'!
|
| If you don't to explain it to me you're not obligated to.
| mbrameld wrote:
| I'm happy to explain. Let's start with the fundamentals:
| Do you understand that the meaning of a word is dependent
| on its context?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think you're deliberately trolling me so I'm not going
| to keep responding.
| mbrameld wrote:
| Your initial confusion was understandable.
|
| You said you didn't see how pensions and unions were
| related. Someone explained to you that most people with
| pensions in the US are union members.
|
| You then said most professionals have a pension but not
| many are in a union. At that point you revealed the
| source of your confusion: you don't understand the
| meaning of the word pension in this context. So somebody
| else helpfully told you, "When talking about pensions in
| the USA, people are usually referring to retirement plans
| where the employer says something roughly like "when you
| retire, we will pay 80% of your salary". or "when you
| retire, we will pay you X/month". The responsibility is
| on the employer to ensure that money is around when you
| retire."
|
| That should have been it. That should have cleared up
| your confusion by clarifying exactly which definition of
| pension was being used. You then insisted that a 401k was
| a pension after being told explicitly that wasn't the
| type of pension being discussed. What was your point
| there?
|
| Edit: I thought you weren't going to respond? Don't go
| away mad...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Chris Seaton, Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify...
|
| Not sure why you keep repeating my name and job like
| you're trying to dox me for asking a question about
| pensions... and it's in my HN Profile and my name is my
| username, you're not a genius for finding it out.
| mbrameld wrote:
| How am I doxing you if it's in your profile? People use
| names and titles in conversations the same way a 401k is
| a pension. I'm not sure you're qualified to judge genius.
| None of this is because you asked a question about
| pensions, is that honestly what you believe? Just in case
| it is: this is because you continue to insist that a 401k
| is a pension when it is not in this context.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > How am I doxing you if it's in your profile?
|
| That's what I just said...
|
| I really don't know what your problem is.
|
| But people can see you editing your comments so they know
| what you're writing even if you remove it later.
|
| People can also see you trawling through my comments to
| reply to unrelated things.
|
| For this reason I've flagged you - looks like other
| people are as well as your comments are showing up
| flagged now.
| mbrameld wrote:
| I guess that's easier than admitting you're wrong. It's
| telling that you refuse to answer the questions that
| would illuminate your error. You asked me to explain it
| to you, why won't you let me?
| sct202 wrote:
| It is not. In America, if someone refers to a pension
| they are usually referring to defined benefit retirement
| plans, where you work X years and get $Y as a result of
| some formula and $Y is not related to market performance
| or how much money is in the pot.
|
| This is significant because the risk is on the employer
| to make up any short falls if the pension fund is not
| able to pay $Y because of market performance or
| underfunding. A 401K shifts the risk to the employee. If
| it's not enough to provide $Y per year, that's the former
| employee's problem to deal with.
| [deleted]
| mbrameld wrote:
| Do you agree that context matters? If you use context
| clues you can figure out that we're talking about one
| particular definition of pension, and that is the
| employer-funded definition. What's the point of your
| pedantry?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| When talking about pensions in the USA, people are
| usually referring to retirement plans where the employer
| says something roughly like "when you retire, we will pay
| 80% of your salary". or "when you retire, we will pay you
| X/month". The responsibility is on the employer to ensure
| that money is around when you retire.
|
| Companies used to have things like this - when my dad
| retired he had several pensions from multiple companies
| that worked like this. Nowadays government usually uses
| them to put off paying the full cost of employees.
| cpursley wrote:
| > overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments
|
| It might be straight-up politics. But there is a real
| situation where state governments have been financially
| mismanaged. Should the "working class" person in Alabama
| without any retirement prospects be forced to bail out (via
| the Federal Gov't) the state of California's very generous
| pensions that were not fiscally sustainable in the first
| place?
| cpursley wrote:
| Edit: Apparently a lot of users on hn in Cali. I'm just
| throwing random states names out there.
| [deleted]
| nightsd01 wrote:
| The state of California is actually in a pretty decent
| financial position. In fact, the blue states are net
| contributors to the federal budget while red states are net
| negative (they take more resources than they provide back
| in federal taxes)
|
| If there weren't any blue states around to sign the red
| state welfare checks, they'd be in a pretty poor position.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| According to Mercatus Center fiscal rankings, 4 out of 5
| of the bottom 5 fiscal performers are run by democrats:
| illinois, new jersey, conneticut and massachusets.
| Kansas, a red state, is the outlier.
|
| https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-
| economics/state-...
| Loughla wrote:
| Mercatus is not exactly the most unbiased source that
| exists.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Its easier to be in better financial shape if you are
| taking in more federal funding than you are contributing
| via federal taxes. 8 of the top 10 states that take more
| funds than they contribute are red. Exceptions are Hawaii
| and New Mexico.
|
| Good read on the matter:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/whic
| h-s...
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| This spending constitutes things like social security
| checks and the upkeep of military bases and other
| facilities. It is not relevant to state budgets. And even
| if all the money went to a state general fund, the worst
| performers would not be significantly different.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| In 2014 the federal government provided 40.9% of
| Mississippi's state budget. How is that not relevant to
| the state budget? As a percentage of state budget being
| provided by the federal government, 13 of the top 15
| recipients are red states.
|
| https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_aid_to_state_budgets
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Very simple answer: blue states have bigger budgets so
| the % of aid they receive from the government seems
| smaller.
|
| The Federalist has done an analysis of federal aid _per
| resident_ :
|
| >Against a national average of $1,935 in
| intergovernmental spending per American, red states
| receive just $1,879. Blue states get considerably more,
| at $2,124 per resident. Purple states see the least of
| their money returned to them per capita, at just $1,770.
| Measured in this way, the blue states are getting quite a
| bit more than the red or purple.
|
| https://thefederalist.com/2017/11/17/red-states-tax-
| takers-b...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Your source has Massachusetts in the bottom 5, which lets
| you know right there it's laughable.
|
| Never lived there myself, but I know for a fact they're
| consistently in the top 5 of contributors to the federal
| kitty of all states both nominally, and per-capita. They
| get almost nothing back compared to what they put in.
| They are, arguably, the largest contributor to the nation
| if we're considering individual burdens. And a top 5
| contributor by outright total aggregate tax contribution.
|
| Illinois and New Jersey, by total outright tax
| contribution, are also consistently in the top 5 of
| states that contribute to the federal government. (And
| I'm from Wisconsin. I hate Illinois. But facts are facts
| man.)
|
| Hate to tell you, but your source is bogus as far as
| analyzing the biggest contributors to the national kitty.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| You seem to think that Illinois, New Jersey and the lot
| must be in a great fiscal situation because they are "net
| contributors". As I explained in another comment, the
| money these states "receive" is mostly payments to
| individuals and has little meaning to their state
| budgets.
|
| Paying out a lot more to the federal government than they
| receive back does not mean these states are doing well
| and others poorly. It really just a natural consequence
| of having a lot of high earners in a progressive tax
| system. The states in question have been racking up huge
| amounts of debt and/or have underfunded pensions funds,
| which is why they are consistently ranked lowly in terms
| of fiscal health. I am a little surprised you had you not
| heard of the financial problems coming out of Illinois,
| New Jersey and the like? There's even a dedicated
| Wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_pension_crisis
| bilbo0s wrote:
| > _Paying out a lot more to the federal government than
| they receive back does not mean these states are doing
| well and others poorly._
|
| Sigh.
|
| Even if we look at a list of states by GDP, Illinois, New
| Jersey, and Massachusetts would still be perennial top 10
| states. Even a list of states by GDP per capita, they all
| still are perennial top 10s. Per capita, I would bet that
| Massachusetts is number 1? (Maybe NY might edge them out?
| But I'd definitely bet they're number 1 or 2.)
|
| Listen man, I don't even like Illinois. I hate Chicago.
| But facts are facts. They make a $#!t ton of money. And
| not the easy way doing financial engineering like New
| York. They do it the hard way with a huge diversified
| economy. Few states are like that. It's just a fact man.
|
| Are you going to say that GDP is not a good indication of
| what a state produces?
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Their high GDP per capita is not going to fix their
| insolvent pensions or runaway spending. Illinois has a
| BBB credit rating (just above junk!). Are you really just
| going to ignore that because of high GDP? https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_credit_...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There's plenty of financial engineering in Chicago last I
| checked.
| james-mcelwain wrote:
| Mercatus is a Koch funded think tank -- hardly unbiased
| and a poor source here.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| It would be better if you countered the statistical
| method used in the analysis. Otherwise your point is no
| better than someone saying "Soros donated to this think
| tank, therefore invalid".
| thehazard wrote:
| You know that California bails out the majority of the rust
| belt indirectly via State taxes, right? Curious how you
| consider that in the equation.
| claydavisss wrote:
| The net outflow from California at this point is a
| rounding error and the equivalent sum is basically being
| printed by the Fed every ninety minutes each working day.
| No one is solvent.
| viscanti wrote:
| >Should the "working class" person in Alabama without any
| retirement prospects be forced to bail out (via the Federal
| Gov't) the state of California's very generous pensions
| that were not fiscally sustainable in the first place?
|
| Multiple citations needed. Alabama takes back a lot more
| than they pay into the federal government (CA not so much).
| It's easy to appeal to the "working class" people, but
| those people have been getting much more federal support
| relative to what they pay in, while states like NY pay in
| substantially more than they get back.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| As a mathematician I can tell you that game theoretically,
| Alabama is not able to bail out anyone. They use more money
| than they contribute to the country. I think a better
| example would be should Texas or Massachusetts be obliged
| to bail out California.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| This kind of thinking leads down a sad, unproductive, and
| dangerous "me first" path. Let's avoid falling back into
| tribal thinking. This applies to states as much as
| countries (as seen in Europe right now).
|
| If pensions or any other specific things are mismanaged -
| which IMHO is in fact the case in California - let's fix
| them _together_.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Alabama gets ~$3.50 form the federal government for every
| $1 it contributes in federal taxes. California gets ~$0.97
| for every dollar it gives. So the real question is should
| Californians be bailing out Alabama all the time. Should
| states like South Carolina, Alabama and North Dakota just
| be left to die? I mean they are takers in even the best
| economic situation.
|
| The answer is of course not, they are states populated by
| real people who live under the laws and economic system of
| the United States Federal government. The government should
| ensure that all people are entitled to enough funding to
| provide opportunity, health and justice. We don't just
| leave people to suffer regardless of who they vote for. At
| least we didn't used too.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I always find those numbers interesting. IIRC, they come
| from the Taxpayer foundation and generally stop at "zip
| code where the Feds send the check".
|
| Hypothetical example: The DoE wants to build a
| supercomputer from XBox 360s (ASCI RRoD). They select UNM
| as the lead contractor and write a check for $101M. UNM
| buys $50M in XBoxes from MSFT in Seattle, and another
| $50M for compilers and professional services from IBM in
| Armonk, NY. Did NM get $101M for their taxes, or $1M?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Note that often the ZIP code that is chosen is a result
| of senators pulling strings to get it awarded to their
| constituents, even for R&D-that's often new jobs.
| notyourday wrote:
| Mostly congressmen, not senators. And that's what
| earmarks are.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| That might be meaningful if you could show that most of
| the federal money going to New Mexico was used for R&D as
| opposed to, say, social support programs. And then you
| could try to show that the money going to all of the
| other "taker" states was similarly being used on
| developmental projects as opposed to social support.
|
| I'd bet on it not being used on R&D. In fact, I'm betting
| most of that money never even leaves the state of New
| Mexico. Those contractors building roads aren't being
| paid with monopoly money.
|
| I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
|
| That's one of the reasons I'm such a big proponent of
| lower taxes. The tax resource allocation scheme is
| fundamentally unfair as currently structured. There are
| other reasons I support lower taxes, but you don't want
| to get me started.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| End game is:
|
| GOP knows they're gonna lose the election. They want to hand
| the dems the worst economy possible.
|
| Then, 4 years down the road, they can start campaigning
| against "do-nothing-dems" and point to the horrible economy
| they had to start fixing.
| whylie wrote:
| Dems are going to lose the election and are actively
| attempting to sabotage the current presidency as much as
| possible. I don't believe you actually think what you're
| typing. Who's paying you lol?
| maxlamb wrote:
| How are the dems attempting to sabotage the current
| presidency? Holding someone accountable =/= sabotage.
| Seems like Trump is sabotaging his own presidency more
| than any one else.
| megamittens wrote:
| Go drink some bleach and then we can talk about who is
| sabotaging this administration.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The thing is, right now there seems to be a disturbing
| pattern of the world falling apart at the end of every GOP
| administration. This is problematic, because we still need
| the GOP so that we can vote out democrats when they
| mismanage the nation's affairs. We can't have one party,
| that's not safe for us as the citizenry for obvious
| reasons.
|
| At the same time, we can't have this, "the world ends", at
| the end of every GOP administration either. So we really do
| need to fix this.
|
| The alternative is we get some different parties, and I've
| seen little to no indication of that happening. The other
| parties have neither shown an ability to evoke a response
| large enough to get elected. Nor have they shown an ability
| to govern even in the extremely unlikely event that they
| were elected.
|
| For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the dem-rep
| dichotomy. Which can work. We just need for the reps to
| stop running the nation into the ground when it's their
| turn. Other nations have shown us that reasonable and
| effective responses to the pandemic were possible. Why are
| we here? What is the set of missteps or issues that got us
| here? We have to identify those issues, and fix them.
| cleandreams wrote:
| Single party rule in California has been an improvement.
| We have a functioning government. Kinda helps in a
| pandemic. When we got rid of our last Republican governor
| we paid down our debt and California entered this dire
| period with a big reserve. The notion that some sort of
| optimal condition is reached by trashing government is
| just a clueless and stupid idea.
| kortilla wrote:
| California has gotten significantly worse over the last
| 10 years or so for residents though, even if some debt
| has been paid off.
|
| Rent control, nimbyism, etc all backed by the current
| government have made the housing market a hellscape.
| Nothing has been done to address the education system and
| huge pension liabilities either.
|
| The issue with Democrats in charge without any meaningful
| opposition is that none of the Democratic radioactive
| stuff gets touched (excessive regulation, entitlements,
| etc).
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > Rent control, nimbyism, etc all backed by the current
| government have made the housing market a hellscape.
|
| The question is if California is soooo bad. Why are
| smart, intelligent people coming here? Why does capital
| still invest here?
|
| Part of the answer is other places in the US are slowly
| failing. So many of the problems have to due with
| California serving as a refuge from failed economic and
| social policy in other states and countries.
| newfriend wrote:
| If California is so great, why are so many people moving
| away? [1]
|
| California is being propped up by the tech industry
| because historically the biggest tech companies are
| headquartered here, which caused all the talent to be
| clustered here, and then new tech companies were forced
| to be here to attract that talent. Obviously, smart,
| intelligent people move here because jobs are here, and
| capital invests here because talent is here -- but things
| are changing quickly and other cities are becoming tech
| hubs.
|
| If these other states have such "failed economic and
| social policies", why are so many people moving there?
|
| The worst will be when Californians move to other states
| and then vote for policies that ruined the place they
| just fled.
|
| [1] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/10/31/190122-more-
| people-lef...
| majormajor wrote:
| > California has gotten significantly worse over the last
| 10 years or so for residents though, even if some debt
| has been paid off.
|
| > Rent control, nimbyism, etc all backed by the current
| government have made the housing market a hellscape.
| Nothing has been done to address the education system and
| huge pension liabilities either.
|
| Rent control and Nimbyism is not new in the last 10 years
| in CA. In fact, rent control in the state is less strong
| than it was in the past.
|
| So you can't directly blame those for changes in the last
| 10 years.
|
| What's changed in the last 10 years? A lot of incoming
| migration into high-paying jobs. And it largely sucks for
| everyone but those new residents who are making more than
| the existing residents. People who make less are
| increasingly starting to leave, but not enough to make a
| dent compared to the influx of newcomers with money. If
| you have money, you're still more likely to move to CA
| than away from it.
|
| You think if all those people were wealthy _Republicans_
| instead of Democrats they 'd be less-NIMBY? Right-wing
| suburbs in the rest of the country are NIMBY-central.
| rauchp wrote:
| "Single party rule in California has been an
| improvement."
|
| I just moved to California so I don't have too much of a
| personal opinion yet but that sounds like a bold claim.
| From what I've seen, people over the age of 30 seem split
| on whether or not it's an improvement. You look at
| mismanaged cities like SF where there's insane homeless
| budgets but very little action and results and wonder if
| the monopoly on political power has made politicians here
| complacent.
|
| Then there's the whole NIMBY thing. There's a whole lot
| of Democrats (arguably DINO's) that are very anti-
| building. They run under the Democrat banner so they'll
| probably keep getting re-elected. Obviously a solution
| here is people getting involved in local party politics
| to primary these candidates out, but that sounds like a
| miracle that'll happen as soon as we get nuclear fusion
| power plants.
|
| The whole thing makes me wish 3rd party candidates were
| more viable in the US. This flip-flopping really sucks
| and creates a lot of chaos but political monopolies, from
| what I've seen, are able to hide mismanagement and bad
| policies really well. (Texas is probably a similar
| example from the other spectrum.)
| bsder wrote:
| You are choosing _really_ bad examples, because
| Republicans are _even more extreme_ than the Democrats on
| them.
|
| Homelessness is an infinite money sink coupled with very
| problematic civil rights issues. It takes a unified
| effort at the federal level when states are willing to
| just ship their problems to other states. It also
| requires a unified effort at healthcare--both physical
| and mental. Nobody has come up with a good solution to
| homelessness yet-- _anywhere_. If you have one, put it
| out there as lots of governments are desperate for a fix.
|
| While NIMBY is bad irrespective of party, the YIMBY
| movement only started gaining traction once the
| Republicans were purged as the NIMBY movement could
| _COUNT_ on them as a unified bloc of obstruction. And, as
| for NIMBY, renters outnumber property owners, yet don 't
| show up to vote. Well, then what results do you think
| you're going to get?
|
| As for Texas, it isn't as uniformly Republican as you
| think. The major cities are gaining significant
| Democratic representation (the Republicans just banned
| straight ticket voting because it _destroyed_ them in
| Houston last cycle). You can also see this in the
| Covid-19 response--the mayors for big Texas cities almost
| uniformly shut down--Austin declared very early in order
| to avoid the disaster that would have been SXSW.
|
| Yes, the gerrymandering in Texas is horrific, and the
| areas outside the cities are as stupid red as it gets.
| However, Texas isn't as unified as you think--in spite of
| the human-shaped Senator known as Ted Cruz.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| The homeless coming in from out of state turns out not to
| actually be that prevalent in practice. In LA, for
| instance, only 18% of currently homeless residents became
| homeless while living out of state [0]. So if you could
| magically get everyone from out of state off the streets,
| you'd still be left with 82% of the homeless population,
| i.e. there'd still be a big homeless problem.
|
| To a first order approximation, the majority of homeless
| are simply residents who lose a job or can't earn enough
| money, can't afford their rent, and end up on the street.
| Making a lot more housing available so it's not so
| impossible to afford is clearly an important part of the
| solution, which we seemingly can't do as long as
| progressive democrats are in charge.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-
| population.ht...
| bsder wrote:
| Homelessness is, unfortunately, not a uniform block.
|
| Some chunk are from out of state. Some chunk are mentally
| ill. Some chunk are addicted to drugs. Some chunk have
| physical ailments. Some chunk are fleeing abuse.
|
| This is what makes homelessness so intractable. Even if
| you fix a chunk, that's probably less that 20% of the
| problem. Now, you've spent a lot of money, made no
| visible progress on the problem, and have a bunch of
| people clamoring about how you wasted money.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Would that be the last Republican governor who actually
| tried to prepare for the pandemic with ventilator
| stockpiles and mobile hospitals?
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| I left California long ago because it's so polarized
| towards blue. I share different ideals and tend to get
| ostracized for them - not a community I want to be part
| of.
| JoBrad wrote:
| We don't need the GOP for that. Both the RNC and DNC have
| dramatically changed their positions over the past 30-40
| years. That could happen again (and probably will) if
| either party suffers a life-threatening loss in
| elections.
|
| Or another party will rise to power, and one of the
| current powerhouses will fade away.
| danans wrote:
| > We just need for the reps to stop running the nation
| into the ground when it's their turn
|
| If you think that is what the Republicans are doing each
| time it's their turn, not sure there is much hope in
| changing that pattern.
|
| After all, they clearly _think they are not_ running the
| nation into the ground when it 's their turn.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| They'd probably agree that they were, actually, as long
| as you constrained the definition of 'nation' to 'federal
| government.'
| bsder wrote:
| > We can't have one party, that's not safe for us as the
| citizenry for obvious reasons.
|
| Why not? If one party doesn't actually want to govern,
| kill it.
|
| In addition, the Democrats are hardly a unified bloc.
| And, if the Democrats, themselves, split into 2 parties
| because they have buried the Republicans, that would
| solve your problem, no?
|
| California is your counterexample. Excising the
| Republican party like a tumor made things a _LOT_ better.
|
| I see burying the Republican party as a patriotic duty at
| this point. It is so rife with corruption from Russian
| and Chinese infiltration that it should be regarded as a
| foreign enemy.
| sojournerc wrote:
| Just wow. Hope your dictators benevolent.
|
| Just as our legal system is adversarial, where two
| "teams" enter a court to at least attempt justice, it
| seems crucial to a successful political system that there
| be a dialectic between opposing views, hoping compromise
| benefits the whole.
|
| Comments such as this, dismissing a huge portion of
| fellow citizens out of hand, without so much as
| recognizing that "they" might be trying to do what's best
| in their eyes is so far from a democratic ideal...
| bsder wrote:
| > Comments such as this, dismissing a huge portion of
| fellow citizens out of hand, without so much as
| recognizing that "they" might be trying to do what's best
| in their eyes is so far from a democratic ideal...
|
| Explain to me what I'm supposed to do with people who
| wear "Better Russian than Democrat" t-shirts or my
| father-in-law who literally said "Her views are
| everything I want, but I can't vote for her because she's
| with the Democrats."
|
| That kind of stuff is not anti-Democratic party--it is
| anti- _Democracy_.
|
| > Just wow. Hope your dictators benevolent.
|
| Sorry, I'm pretty comfortable burying a party that is
| anti-Democracy.
|
| However, it turns out that the California jungle primary
| gives the opposing party more power because it often gets
| to be the king-maker between the two Democratic
| candidates rather than simply getting ignored because one
| candidate won the primary and now can roll over the
| general election.
|
| So, that _actually_ approximates your dialectic as
| opposed to mouthing it and never compromising. Unlike the
| Republicans, Democrats don 't seek to silence the
| opposing party. But, yeah, the jungle primary is going to
| do a good job of removing the wing nuts from both parties
| from the conversation.
|
| I consider that a feature and not a bug.
|
| I suggest some further research.
| chasd00 wrote:
| you know, there are plenty of batshit insane Democrats
| out there too. I don't see how you can put all
| republicans in the same basket (nor can you Democrats).
| Turn off the TV and avoid the toxicity of the Internet,
| you'll be much happier and realize that 99% of all humans
| are plain old every day decent individuals.
| lacker wrote:
| Well yes - there was a civil war! And more recently, the
| national guard was used to enforce school integration. Things
| have been _much_ more antagonistic between the federal
| government and the states at times in the past.
| gkop wrote:
| For others curious, while the National Guard is a joint
| state-federal organization, the feds took control to
| enforce integration against the orders of the Arkansas
| governor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National
| _Guard_and_...
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| >Well yes - there was a civil war!
|
| Hah, this really puts it into perspective. Despite how bad
| things are now, it's not 1865.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Don't know why this is downvoted, a Civil War would
| objectively be worse than this.
| empath75 wrote:
| Yeah, the civil war.
| eropple wrote:
| The federal government _was attacked_ to touch off the
| Civil War. Like, by men with guns. That 's a rather
| critical distinction.
| coredog64 wrote:
| There was a distinct period before the armed attack of
| hostilities between the federal government and the
| southern states, e.g. Nullification crisis and the
| "tariff of abominations".
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Sure, but look at the recent protests. Armed men
| protesting state level governments openly egged on by the
| whitehouse and organized by rich political dark money.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Armed men with guns were militarily consequential during
| the Civil War. Today, they are a danger only to
| civilians.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Small arms and asymmetrical tactics have quite
| substantive results in places like Afghanistan, Yemen,
| and Iraq. Let's not write off potential danger because of
| lopsided resourcing.
| empath75 wrote:
| I'm not sure it particularly matters which side started
| it, you still had basically open violent conflict between
| democrats and republicans for decades, before and after
| the war.
| tenpies wrote:
| > Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal
| government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly
| willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so,
| what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close?
|
| To be honest the most interesting thing to me is the US
| media. I don't think it has _ever_ been so openly hostile
| towards one party and so hungry to cause a civil war. They
| 're not even hiding it any more. They're operating as if the
| country were at war against the Republican Party and any
| person who is not a card-carrying Democrat must be
| eliminated, de-platformed, or represented in the most
| farcical way possible. It's incredible. It's the stuff that
| totalitarian states struggle to achieve, yet it seems to have
| happened "organically" in the US.
|
| If I were a hostile actor I wouldn't even need to mount
| propaganda or spend money on my own content - I would just
| need to amplify the US media's message.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Depends on the channel you listen to.
|
| This comment is just more of the hate-mongering. "I saw an
| article I didn't agree with: I'm being attacked!" In the
| same threads, we hear of the bubbles people build by
| reading only agreeable news. How can all that be true at
| the same time? It cannot.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Voting predilections in the US are strongly correlated with
| the highest attained educational level of the voter. "The
| Media" as a monolithic structure has a higher average
| attained educational level than the country at large.
|
| The "why" is obvious; I find a better question would be,
| are they wrong?
| adamsea wrote:
| If you were a member of the media and the President of the
| United States - of any party - suggested people try
| injecting bleach as a cure (for anything), what would you
| do?
|
| What would you say about other politicians who implicitly
| supported such irresponsible behavior.
|
| This isn't even a political question - I mean it's basic
| science. Bleach.
| rajup wrote:
| Nobody suggested injecting bleach, please stop spreading
| exaggerated misinformation.
| augustt wrote:
| Really? Calling it bleach instead of disinfectant is the
| important source of misinformation here? The lengths
| people will go...
| _1100 wrote:
| In the interest of complete clarity and understanding I
| went and found the exact transcript and this was exactly
| what was stated:
|
| "I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,
| one minute, and is there a way we can do something like
| that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. "
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| Ok then you tell me what he said. Why would he claim it
| was a joke a day later? Why would that even be a joke?
| Whats funny about that?
|
| I'm definitely no liberal but I seriously cannot believe
| how obsessed you guys are with defending this dumbass
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't think that's the case at all. If there's any
| problem with the media, it has been overly deferential to
| power.
|
| That's always been the case. But whatever one thinks of
| Trump, it's pretty obvious that his campaign and post-
| election behavior is fundamentally different than
| presidents in living memory. He has rewritten the rules.
| The media just hasn't been able to adapt successfully to
| that, and still often writes about him and his
| administration as if they're covering things in a different
| era.
|
| Among many others, journalism professor Jay Rosen has long
| been making this point, and made it again recently on his
| blog: https://pressthink.org/2020/04/a-current-list-of-my-
| top-prob...
| matchbok wrote:
| The media's job is not to fawn over the president,
| actually. They are to report the news and tell the people
| when the president lies.
|
| Therefore, they are doing a great job.
|
| By the way, the most watched cable news is Fox News. I
| assume you aren't talking about them?
| newfriend wrote:
| > The media's job is not to fawn over the president
|
| I wonder if you felt the same way from 2008 to 2016 when
| they were fawning over the previous president. It's
| interesting that they do a great job only when a certain
| political party happens to be in power.
|
| It's easy to be the most watched cable news when every
| other mainstream channel is carrying water for the
| opposition party.
| bhupy wrote:
| I can try to give you the most "good faith" argument in favor
| of allowing Blue States to go bankrupt.
|
| There's a caveat here that the Federal laws will need to
| change a bit to allow States to go into packaged
| restructuring. And to ensure that we are bailing out specific
| individuals to ensure that they are not too negatively
| affected.
|
| One of the strongest arguments against "bailouts" of large
| corporations is that it negatively impacts price discovery.
| More specifically, it removes a company's ability to thrive
| in certain extreme conditions from the pricing equation
| entirely. An example: Amazon is at all-time-highs right now,
| and it's because it's proven itself to be a hugely important
| institution, both during wartime and peacetime. Its market
| price should reflect this value. Airlines, OTOH, are an
| institution that can be prone to failure when some things go
| wrong (exogenous or otherwise), and the price should reflect
| that. A theoretical airline doing $1B in revenue should be
| worth less than a theoretical Amazon doing $1B in revenue,
| even if both have identical profits, growth, balance sheets,
| etc. The net effect of this is inefficient and poor capital
| allocation, where more capital would be allocated towards
| airlines than warranted, and that capital could be allocated
| elsewhere in more productive / less risky endeavors.
|
| This may come across as overly fundamentalist about the
| market, but where this really manifests is in the Fed's
| bailout of junk bonds, which is absolutely nuts. The whole
| point of junk bonds (I.e. the type of a loan that WeWork
| would have to take) is that it's default risk is high, but
| the yield is also high. If junk bonds are bailed out, then
| that means that we all ought to go and buy junk bonds. High
| yields for everyone! The Fed is going to bail you out no
| matter what. This, then, overly inflates the demand (and
| price) for junk bonds, and you now have a total capital mis-
| allocation, with a lot of capital going into AirBNBs and
| WeWorks of the world, rather than the Amazons of the world.
|
| How does this relate to States? Taxation is the price we pay
| to live in a society, and States are a really underrated way
| we can accurately come up with the correct "price" for the
| correct basket of services society might offer. This is the
| Charles Tiebout school of thought. Bailing out states with
| shitty fiscal policies is 1) a moral hazard and 2) messes
| with the long run calculation of the optimal level of
| taxation.
|
| Okay great, so then what happens if we just let States
| "fail", like we might let Corporations fail? If we allowed
| States to declare bankruptcy, the bond-holders won't get
| paid, and the State credit ratings will shift to reflect
| their true creditworthiness. In this regard, bailing out bad
| States is no different from bailing out junk bonds -- the
| only difference is that today State bond-holders don't know
| that they're holding onto junk bonds -- most States have a
| generally high credit rating (except Illinois, because, well
| lol)[1]. The only mechanism we know of for the system to
| correct the ratings of these bonds is to 1) let States
| relieve themselves of their debt obligations, and 2)
| organically allow the bonds for those States to become more
| high-yield.
|
| You might argue that this makes it difficult for States to
| fund infrastructure projects and safety nets. Yes, it makes
| it difficult to finance projects in the short run, because
| the bond failures are reflective of the quality of the
| current governance. Who comprises the government, who is
| running things can change democratically -- if citizens want
| more infrastructure projects / better development, they will
| have to vote for better policies and better representatives.
| It's the democratic equivalent of swapping out the entire
| executive team at WeWork with the executive team at Amazon.
| The alternative is that you never see these governance
| changes at the State and local levels, and you have the same
| problems in perpetuity because the same people are always in
| power, and we never learn from mistakes -- institutional rot.
| Better governance might be to restructure bad pension
| systems, or raise their own State taxes (IMO State taxes are
| far too low).
|
| TL;DR -- the best argument for letting States go bankrupt is
| that it's an effective way to weed out institutional rot in
| the long run, and come up with the optimal level of taxation
| for the optimal basket of State provided services. Such a
| scheme can only work if individuals continue to be bailed out
| so that they are not caught in the onslaught.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_cred
| it_...
| orky56 wrote:
| The artificial safety net provided to states as opposed to
| corporations is for the fact that it is important for all
| states, even the most underperforming to have a standard
| level of infrastructure and overall competitiveness. The
| whole concept of republic like the US is partly based on
| bringing up the rear. This is why poorer states have less
| leverage and must offer more incentives to businesses to
| induce economic activity. Richer states already have
| advantages of being the incumbent including various
| resources to draw and keep businesses. These same states
| (often blue) have higher taxes to fund their barriers to
| entry with surpluses that give them the capital to weather
| aberrant situations like these. In addition, it is
| difficult to argue that constituents will vote for their
| economic best interests if social issues are more top of
| mind in redder states. This will only exacerbate the
| problems without a federal solution in place.
| bhupy wrote:
| > The artificial safety net provided to states as opposed
| to corporations is for the fact that it is important for
| all states, even the most underperforming to have a
| standard level of infrastructure and overall
| competitiveness. The whole concept of republic like the
| US is partly based on bringing up the rear. This is why
| poorer states have less leverage and must offer more
| incentives to businesses to induce economic activity.
| Richer states already have advantages of being the
| incumbent including various resources to draw and keep
| businesses.
|
| This is a great ideal, in theory, but the flip-side of it
| is that in reality if we don't have _any_ sort of
| negative consequence for unsustainable policy-making, you
| have a moral hazard, and institutional corruption and
| rot. Heaven knows there is a lot of that at the State and
| local level. You ultimately need some creative
| destruction in the long-run to ensure that we have the
| best possible governments. I heavily caveated that we
| _must_ make sure that, in the short run, the poorest are
| taken care of. Insofar as one would be in support of
| allowing States to fail in a "good faith" way, it would
| be if the Federal policy ensured that the poorest among
| us are bailed out and taken care of in the short run.
|
| > These same states (often blue) have higher taxes to
| fund their barriers to entry with surpluses that give
| them the capital to weather aberrant situations like
| these.
|
| Sure, and a lot of Blue states will be fine and not have
| to go into packaged restructuring / bankruptcy. For a lot
| of States (both Red and Blue), the most worrisome line
| item is the defined-benefit pensions -- they promise a
| certain return that has never happened and will never
| happen. These pensions will _never_ be solvent. Most
| people in Illinois under the age of 50 know that they
| will probably never see a dime of these pensions, and
| that's terrible. You would want to push States to more
| sustainable pension systems, maybe a Sovereign Wealth
| Fund like Singapore / Scandinavian countries, or just raw
| publicly funded 401(k)s. If those same pension plans
| instead put the annual contributions into the S&P500,
| they would have been more solvent than they are today.
|
| > In addition, it is difficult to argue that constituents
| will vote for their economic best interests if social
| issues are more top of mind in redder states.
|
| I mean, you have to let constituents look out for
| themselves in a democracy. If they don't vote in their
| economic best interests, then that means those societies
| favor different outcomes. All of these states have
| republican forms of government with checks and balances
| to ensure that democracy doesn't turn into mob rule.
| Letting Blue states go into bankruptcy might even be
| better off for Blue states and worse off for Red states,
| but the underlying idea is that we need to let States
| test out different approaches to welfare and
| infrastructure and prevent long-term institutional rot.
|
| > This will only exacerbate the problems without a
| federal solution in place.
|
| Yes, hence my caveat to bailing out individuals.
| novok wrote:
| Ehh, I think the fact that one industry is doing well vs
| another is dependent on the crisis itself. If this was a
| localized natural disaster type of issue or something like
| the berlin airlift, the travel industry would become
| ascendant and the retail sector (online or otherwise) would
| be hurt.
| bhupy wrote:
| Sure, airlines was just an example to drive home the more
| fundamental point.
|
| There are a bajillion different variables that go into
| how we price corporations / assets in a decentralized
| way. This includes basic stuff like revenue, margins,
| balance sheets, growth, but can also include macro risk,
| which political party is in power, the current weather,
| etc. Apple isn't worth $1T because some schmuck decided
| it was worth that much, it's worth that much because we
| all play some part in the price discovery. When you
| remove some of the variables from this equation, the
| price becomes less reliable (mis-priced assets).
|
| You might argue that it doesn't matter for most assets
| like airlines, and you'd probably be right about that,
| but there are certain types of assets like junk bonds
| where this has more negative consequences in the long
| run. We've been mis-pricing junk bonds to the degree
| that, at a macro level, there is way more capital being
| allocated to bad companies with poor fundamentals than
| there should be. We want more Amazons, Stripes, and
| Shopify's, and fewer WeWorks and SoftBanks.
|
| States are similar, you have some States that are
| incredibly well run (Massachusetts, Washington) and some
| that are very poorly run (eg Illinois). We need some
| mechanism to nudge poorly run states in the right
| direction, and encourage well run States to keep doing
| what they're doing, and more.
| beachwood23 wrote:
| I don't have anything to add, just thank you for the detail
| on the other side of this coin.
| [deleted]
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Why only let blue states go bankrupt?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| I just finished my MBA and am getting laid off in the same
| month. It's really depressing.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| There was an interesting piece in this week's Atlantic on the
| motivation for having states declare bankruptcy:
|
| "Under the Constitution, bankruptcy is a power entirely
| reserved to the federal government. An American bankruptcy is
| overseen in federal court, by a federal judge, according to
| federal law. That's why federal law can allow U.S. cities to go
| bankrupt, as many have done over the years. That's why the
| financial restructuring of Puerto Rico can be overseen by a
| federal control board. Cities and territories are not
| sovereigns. Under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. states are.
|
| Understand that, and you begin to understand the appeal of
| state bankruptcy to Republican legislators in the post-2010
| era."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/why-mitch-...
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| In their defense, PR is spectacularly mismanaged. I love the
| place. I love the food. I love the culture, but there is
| something really annoying about an island, where everyone is
| on island time and blackouts are just a part of daily
| routine.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I don't understand how someone can love their political party
| as much as Mitch McConnell does. It's party before all else.
| I don't get it. At all.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's a strategy/ideology he's been rewarded for following?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| But this isn't a game. It has real consequences.
| state_less wrote:
| For whom? Mitch McConnell?
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is a pretty grim path to follow. If States are to go
| bankrupt and subject to federal imposition of what debts must
| be paid, then it may push States to seek further
| sovereignity. An example being pressure to mint their
| currency. This is currently banned in the constitution, but
| if things get dire... they could simply ignore?
| eranima wrote:
| The constitution only has power if people are willing or
| motivated to enforce it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| In the apocryphal words of president Andrew Jackson:
| "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce
| it!"
| seibelj wrote:
| I would prefer that states have more power and we further
| decentralize authority away from the federal government.
| This will limit the see-saw that occurs whenever the
| president switches parties.
| [deleted]
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Part of that tension is what's led to the the current
| situation with COVID-- the federal government is where
| the CDC is, so there's an expectation that they're the
| ones providing centralized coordination and guidance for
| a measured, unified, national response.
|
| If each state has its own version of the CDC (and other
| similar agencies), then that's fine, but they also need
| to have a lot more sovereignty over things like (in this
| case) being able to close their borders to neighbouring
| states whose agencies may have come to differing
| conclusions about what measures are needed.
| bhupy wrote:
| Each state does have its own version of the CDC.
| notyourday wrote:
| > but they also need to have a lot more sovereignty over
| things like (in this case) being able to close their
| borders to neighbouring states
|
| Commerce Clause of the US Constitution stands in a way.
| It (the Commerce Clause) has been a bedrock of the
| federal government pushing through progressive policies
| onto the states.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I wouldn't.
|
| There is a comfort that comes from the instability of
| party switches. The parties don't cooperate, which means
| less can get done. Anything that puts anyone in an area
| where one of the gangs of politicians can actually do
| something, is to be avoided. We've learned that the hard
| way in Wisconsin.
|
| As a general rule, it's always best to split up your
| government as much as you can.
| afterburner wrote:
| Less gets done means the country gets worse and people
| get more radicalized trying to improve things. The
| polarization in the US is likely a direct result of the
| massive deadlock.
|
| Your strategy is one guaranteed to ruin your country.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| There are democratic nations with many more parties than
| we have, and the quality of governance in many of these
| nations has proven to be as serviceable as the quality of
| governance in the US. (Some might even argue that many of
| these nations have displayed superior governance to the
| US despite the power being split up among so many parties
| that they need coalitions to accomplish the little they
| can get done.) I've never really found myself persuaded
| by the skepticism against split governments.
|
| Now there may be a point of diminishing returns. As in 5
| parties are as good as 10, are as good as 15. But that's
| an academic question, and we're not even at 5 parties
| yet.
|
| On the other end, maybe 500 parties is self defeating, as
| you say. But we're nowhere near that either.
| jshevek wrote:
| > _Less gets done means the country gets worse and people
| get more radicalized trying to improve things._
|
| This opinion requires a great deal of justification.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what we're seeing now? The government
| has basically been in gridlock since 2010, and voters
| have increasingly rewarded extreme policians who seek to
| shift the overton window over compromise politicians who
| work across party lines to find a middle ground.
|
| The book American Carnage is a fantastic deep dive on
| this (and extremely fair and even-handed, despite the
| bombastic title).
| jshevek wrote:
| > _Isn 't that exactly what we're seeing now?_
|
| If "that" is the cause-effect relationship claimed above,
| no we are not "seeing" this right now. There is a huge
| difference between events and the narratives, accurate or
| otherwise, which some people use to explain those events.
| The system under consideration is insanely complex, with
| an immense list of causal factors at play. To me, in my
| opinion, it's obvious that the causal relationship
| described above is at best a tiny contributor that is,
| itself, dependent on other factors also being present. At
| worst, it's completely wrong and a distraction from
| understanding the real causes.
| bjustin wrote:
| The problem with less getting done is that it applies to
| all levels of government. Want to change your yard
| landscaping? Nope! Not when your neighbors, town, county,
| and state all have to separately approve it.
| cmurf wrote:
| Already tried that, the first constitution, the Articles
| of Confederation. The founders quickly discovered the
| federal government was too weak.
|
| But alas, one of those founders, Jefferson, argued we
| should rewrite the constitution every 19 years.
|
| And another founder, Hamilton, argued that ambition must
| be made to counteract ambition. And that government is a
| reflection on human nature, most directly its citizens.
| https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Jefferson's opinions on political processes changed
| _drastically_ after the French Revolution, by the by.
| matthewbauer wrote:
| If we kept a common market, and common currency, you
| would see lots of failed states like we've seen with
| Greece in the EU.
| bhupy wrote:
| Yes but you would also see lots of extremely advanced
| states like we've seen with Germany, France, Denmark,
| Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and
| Estonia in the EU
| notyourday wrote:
| > I would prefer that states have more power and we
| further decentralize authority away from the federal
| government.
|
| No EPA. No DOE. No equality under the law. No EOC. No
| NLRB. No Amtrak. No federal enforcement of consent
| decrees. No voting right act. No gay marriage, etc?
|
| Edit: Thanks for downvotes. Every single one of these is
| enforced by federal and not state courts. It is federal
| court that gave us Roe v. Wade, for example. It is a
| federal court that prevents Alabama from running its own
| little fiefdom. It is a federal courts that gave us Brown
| v. Board of Education.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't know that I'd put Amtrak on a list of things that
| I'm thankful we have a federal government to provide...
| jshevek wrote:
| The parent suggested a degree of change along a spectrum,
| you list possible consequences that might occur only if
| one takes the most extreme form.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Surely before being bankrupt, a state would be forced to
| raise sales/income taxes?
|
| At some point, those taxes would be so high, people would
| start leaving the state, and at the point of bankruptcy,
| the state would be a ghosttown.
| lonelappde wrote:
| States already have sovereignty. They can simply decline to
| pay back bondholders.
| lonelappde wrote:
| The Atlantic author seems deeply confused. Not unexpected for
| David Frum. Puerto Rico is a territory, not in any state. A
| city is under state sovereignty.A state or a city can
| default. A city can declare bankruptcy under Federal law.
| There is no law allowing a state to go bankrupt and be
| managed by the Feds. Bankruptcy is an _option_ , not a
| Federal power. McConnell isn 't playing 7 dimensional chess,
| he just doesn't want to return tax money to Blue states and
| was just using language loosely when he said "bankrupt".
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > he [totally meant some other thing] and was just using
| language loosely when he said "bankrupt".
|
| If that's so then he's had plenty of opportunity to make
| that known. Based on the media frenzy around this, it's
| quite clear that he meant and continues to mean a literal,
| actual, non-sarcastic bankruptcy.
| Shivetya wrote:
| His unwillingness to not solve the state's pension problems
| should be applauded. the amount of unfunded liabilities is in
| the hundreds of billions of dollars and approaching a
| trillion if it has not passed that already. This all happened
| because the number of public servants who are pulling in over
| 100k has skyrocketed... 100k+ in retirement.. with millions
| past 50k! Think about that 50k in pay plus medical.
|
| These pensions and their medical side are the reason why the
| ACA did not touch golden medical plans because the vast
| majority are in this area along with certain other larger
| private pension systems. By the way, the House silently
| dropped that provision entirely from the ACA in 2019 so they
| any taxation of them is gone.
|
| My favorite story to fall back on is provided below... and
| there are other states worse off. This type of largess should
| never have been allowed nor should the tax payer bail them
| out. People bemoan the pay of executives at private
| companies, well guess who is right up there in many cases.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/ill.
| ..
| cactus2093 wrote:
| To be fair, in SF for example the median income is $96,000.
| And I think that's take-home salary, so the median cost to
| the employer with benefits is well over $100k. It doesn't
| seem at all unreasonable that important city workers should
| make at least the area median wage. Having all of the local
| government employees be the lowest paid people in the city
| doesn't seem like a good thing.
|
| It is also kind of shocking to see how many employees
| actually work for city and state governments. And of course
| government workers have a strong reputation for not being
| incentivized to work very hard or do more than the bare
| minimum. I would think the bigger opportunity would be to
| reduce the size of local government payroll rather than
| lower everyone's salaries.
|
| Related thought - I wonder, why aren't city and state
| governments more at the forefront of automating menial work
| away, given the perpetual costs of each worker on the
| pension system? It seems they'd have a lot to gain from it.
| notauser554 wrote:
| "And of course government workers have a strong
| reputation for not being incentivized to work very hard
| or do more than the bare minimum."
|
| This reminds me of my friend who got an engineering job
| for the government after university. He was motivated at
| the start, going above and beyond to make sure his
| projects were completed on time and in good order. One
| day his boss called him in and asked him to change his
| schedule. The boss said he was making his co-workers feel
| bad. So the new schedule was to be take a 2 hour lunch
| and do something else for 2 hours, like play video games,
| to align his work output with the rest of the department.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Seriously? We're going to blame old people for not wanting
| to live in poverty while the heights of the economy
| sequester trillions of dollars in a power law curve?
| ac29 wrote:
| Many pensions are not the "have $27k/yr starting at age
| 67" kind, but the "have $100k/yr + benefits starting at
| age 55" kind. Its the latter that people find upsetting -
| nothing close to poverty level.
| lonelappde wrote:
| Should the Federal government return tax money it took from
| the people of New York to give to the people of Kentucky?
| Why or why or why not?
|
| The Federal government can easily tax /discredit those
| wealthy pensioners to fund unemployment insurance, if they
| do choose.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| It's amazing that the US Federal government seems to be
| able to provide trillions of dollars in liquidity on a
| moment's notice to anyone and everyone - except the
| states.
|
| Airlines? Of course. Junk bond investors? Sure, why not?
| States? "We're not going to bail out Democratic-run
| states."
| mrnobody_67 wrote:
| Don't forget Carnival Cruise Lines... which doesn't even
| pay any taxes in the US as a corporation since it flies a
| flag of convenience and doesn't employ many Americans.
| artificial wrote:
| It would be immensely helpful to see uniforms with all of
| the campaign contributions each has like a race car
| driver so you know who butters their bread.
| dillonmckay wrote:
| I would vote for that constitutional amendment.
| mrnobody_67 wrote:
| I ran across that Forbes article yesterday as well...
| amazing data:
|
| "71,000 public employees at every level of Illinois
| government received six-figure paychecks. Additionally,
| 23,000 retirees pulled down more than $100,000 in annual
| pensions."
| altoidaltoid wrote:
| Consider also that alot of retirees don't stay in
| Illinois as well. So other states are benefiting from the
| discretionary spending funded by Illinois taxpayers
| eldavido wrote:
| People need to understand, the value of a 100% of final-
| salary pension for people earning 100K retiring at 55-60 is
| likely _millions_. It 's even worse with the games people
| play with PTO and other benefits (where they bump pay
| 20-30% in their last year to get that pension benefit for
| the rest of their lives).
|
| Look at the average retiree's 401(k) balance for comparison
| and it gets pretty clear how unfair this is. There's a huge
| political opportunity for someone to tell this story
| properly and get a restructuring done.
| skybrian wrote:
| Is it legal for a state to declare bankruptcy or would
| Congress have to pass a law? It doesn't seem like the House
| would be interested.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Interesting that the author is not a Democrat: David Frum was
| a speechwriter for George W. Bush.
| bfrog wrote:
| If they are really letting go of their hard found engineering
| talent its a serious signal that they don't believe this to be a
| short term issue. Assuming the highly paid engineers around the
| bay took a good deal of effort, and significant cost to hire.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Do note that laid off engineers are typically from teams that
| have overhired and where we don't have plans to grow, as well
| as engineers who did not get a good rating and are less
| promising. It is sad nevertheless.
| afterburner wrote:
| Maybe they're scared and taking rash actions.
| bagacrap wrote:
| No doubt they're preferentially laying off the under
| performers.
| fyp wrote:
| Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as
| facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring,
| are the engineers laid off all going to be absorbed by facebook?
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the case, as they never made it into the
| FANG acronym. Even Twitter doesn't quite fit up there.
| whymauri wrote:
| AFAIK, the FANG acronym was meant to represent the FAANG
| stocks, not the perceived quality of engineering within the
| industry.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| I didn't know that. I thought it was because of their
| engineering chops.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was stock based. For one, Netflix is
| like, completely different than the rest. They only hire
| senior engineers and basically substitute a talent
| pipeline with giant wages.
|
| FAANG internships always sounded weird, considering,
| y'know, Netflix doesn't do internships.
| redisman wrote:
| I always thought Big 4 was because they were basically
| the top 4 biggest market cap companies in the US
| beefalo wrote:
| The term was coined by Jim Cramer as the group of well
| performing tech stocks
| microtherion wrote:
| Maybe calling them FAANGULA would have triggered some
| unfortunate associations...
| jswizzy wrote:
| Microsoft is hiring for Jedi like crazy.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| This will play our more like the dotcom burst than the 2008
| crisis.
|
| For most younger people here this may come as a shock but tech
| jobs can disappear, for years.
|
| The job market in 2019 felt a lot like the job market in 1999,
| people rushing to get upskilled so that they could get into
| software and make ridiculous money. After the dotcom burst huge
| number of people left tech, or at least left the world of
| software development. Salaries also went way down for nearly a
| decade.
|
| A common comment here on HN with layoffs is "well they're just
| getting rid of superfluous employees, so this is no big deal".
| This assumption is both ridiculously callous about real people
| losing job, it also underestimates how much work is superfluous
| in SV.
|
| It is very possible that tech will take a serious hit this
| time, and that the total number of software engineers, data
| scientists, dev ops people etc will go do... for years. And
| likewise salaries will also drop (TC automatically does this
| thanks to the magic of RSUs).
|
| Certainly people will need software and software engineers,
| just likely not nearly as much as they do now. Once FAANG
| realizes there's no longer a need to keep talent off the
| market, expect salaries to take a dive.
| justinzollars wrote:
| I totally agree with this perspective: salaries will go down,
| the number of jobs will decrease.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Which is gonna suck for a lot of people in major metros, as
| those salaries were necessary to keep up with asset inflation
| post-2008.
|
| Wariness about the future, spiced with a tinge of
| schadenfreude.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| I should point out, as I have no attachment to my karma,
| that the schadenfreude comes from the fact that those
| inflated asset prices were used to justify and fund
| gentrification and displacement. If a crash ruins a few of
| the entities profiting off that, well, _chef 's kiss_.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Well guess what those assets won't be able to sustain
| themselves without those salaries.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| People have been calling software engineering wages a bubble
| for 20 years, and trying to call "the end of tech". I just
| don't see it, highly proficient software engineers are more
| valuable than ever. The wages are higher than ever. Going
| forwards, tech is really the only engine of growth in the
| American economy. Trying to say tech will be under for years
| is like saying the USA will be in a massive recession for
| years. I just don't believe it.
| code4tee wrote:
| What's happening now is very analogous to the 2000 dot.com
| crash. The economy overall will recover, albeit slowly.
| However companies are questioning why they need 100
| engineers instead of 50. That doesn't just reverse itself
| overnight. As the OP said those that weren't around the
| last time might find it hard to believe that tech jobs
| really just disappear for years.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| No it's not. The fed printed so much money and dropped
| rates so low, there's a massive excess of capital looking
| for business opportunities. Monetary policy is what is
| driving the economy, and it's making this bubble bigger
| than ever. You can't ignore economics and cheap money. We
| will have ten more we work like companies.
| herdodoodo wrote:
| >The fed printed so much money and dropped rates so low,
| there's a massive excess of capital looking for business
| opportunities
|
| Learn about monetary policy is and how the Federal
| Reserve controls the money supply before you make
| opinions on the matter.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| Educate me then, why am I wrong?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| You aren't wrong. Most of the central banks loans went
| into inflating the price of stocks, bonds, and real
| estate. Inflation in those assets has been running over
| 10% a year. While goods, services, and wages has been
| running 2% per year. That's all due to central bank
| operations.
| orky56 wrote:
| Rates are low now but it will take time for this to get
| reflected in VC/PE/corporate dollars to invest. The
| addressable market of consumers/enterprises that are
| willing to spend money on non-essential products/services
| is down and will drop further since budgets are being
| tightened and fat is being cut. The 2008 unicorns that
| were born out of the last recession had to provide
| oversized returns to investors based on them addressing
| needs well beyond what cash-strapped
| consumers/enterprises were willing to spend on. We're in
| for a ride.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| Not really. You are underestimating the magnitude of
| money injected into assets.
| empath75 wrote:
| When you've got 100s of thousands of unemployed talented
| engineers on the market, you're not going ot be able to
| sustain $200k salaries for people who know how to write a
| yaml file for long.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| Not when the FED is printing so much money. That money
| has to go somewhere, and a lot of it ends up funding new
| startups and new corporate debt.
| pthomas551 wrote:
| You're making a sweeping assertion with zero evidence to back
| it up.
|
| One obvious counterpoint to this argument is that this
| recession was not caused by markets realizing that many
| publicly listed tech companies actually had no market and no
| path to profitability.
|
| Also, non-tech companies took on a large number of engineers
| in the late 90s to address Y2K - many of whom got laid off
| afterwards. Not an issue here.
| jccooper wrote:
| Facebook is surely in a similar ad dollars crunch as Google. I
| can't imagine they're full speed.
| pthomas551 wrote:
| Based on what we've heard from Google yesterday, and FB's Q1
| results just now, it looks like the much heralded ad crunch
| is turning into not much more than a speed bump.
| wuunderbar wrote:
| But we need to wait for Q2 results to know the full impact,
| right?
| twblalock wrote:
| They are also seeing record traffic so they might be doing
| alright. We'll find out when they report earnings later
| today.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I mean record traffic means record server usage with record
| low ad spend from their customers.
|
| However, that's just a short-term hit. FB and Google may
| very well increase their own spending so they can capture
| the huge amount of people who are now using their
| platforms.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as
| facebook/google before corona
|
| So was wework by many. Facebook/google cannot be more different
| from uber/airbnb/lyft.
|
| FB/G are in high margin business, operating largely in virtual
| space, where scaling to new markets has low marginal costs.
|
| Uber/airbnb/lyft are in historically low margin, capital
| intensive space, where scaling to new markets has very high
| marginal costs. Same as wework is an office rental with an app,
| so is uber, a taxi with an app. App part is cool, and gives
| them meaningful advantage, but it's still a taxi business, and
| they were not able to change that.
| yks wrote:
| GP referred to the prestige as a workplace for SWEs and not
| to the viability of a business.
| graphememes wrote:
| Should have done lyft eats
| minimaxir wrote:
| > Lyft is laying off 17 percent of its workforce and furloughing
| 5 percent. This is after an employment lawyer at the company
| accidentally invited much of the workforce to a weekend meeting
| called "Jetty" in what workers took to be a reference to
| jettisoning jobs.
|
| https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1255526352813535232
| draw_down wrote:
| There's always some related piece of news about the way the
| company went about the layoffs. This one seems especially
| reaching. Really, a meeting invite?!
| Uehreka wrote:
| If I found out that a bunch of my coworkers had been laid off
| in a video meeting, I'd be bummed because they got laid off,
| but I'd understand that companies have to make hard decisions
| sometimes.
|
| If I learned that the accidentally visible filename of the
| PowerPoint in that meeting was "EjectorSeat.pptx", I'd be
| some combination of angry and alarmed about management's
| attitude. That would be a definite "update my resume and call
| up some former colleagues for lunch" kind of moment at the
| very least.
|
| I think people reasonably expect that when a company makes a
| serious decision that affects hundreds of people's
| livelihoods, that they effect a pretty somber tone.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I think people reasonably expect that when a company makes
| a serious decision that affects hundreds of people's
| livelihoods, that they effect a pretty somber tone.
|
| This case sounds like an unfortunate mistake, I'm sure they
| intended to present the material in a somber manner. That
| said, it begs the question on if what should be expected
| behind closed doors.
| dx87 wrote:
| I think that falls under the saying: "Integrity is how
| you behave when you think nobody is looking".
| twodave wrote:
| Sort of OT but "integrity" is one of my favorite words.
| Imagine everyone you interact with has a small, slightly
| different picture of who you are. If those pieces could
| all be combined, they should form a consistent, accurate
| and (mostly) complete picture of the real you.
|
| And even then, the only person who fully knows the real
| you... is yourself.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _This case sounds like an unfortunate mistake, I'm sure
| they intended to present the material in a somber
| manner._
|
| The tone of the presentation is far less important than
| the tone in the minds of the people doing the presenting.
| You can present as somberly as you want, but if a laugh
| track is secretly playing inside their heads, they can
| fuck all the way off. Workers deserve actual compassion,
| not the facade of it.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >>This case sounds like an unfortunate mistake, I'm sure
| they intended to present the material in a somber manner.
| That said, it begs the question on if what should be
| expected behind closed doors.
|
| Which OP sort of implied the sentence right after.
|
| I'm pretty sure if most people heard the discussions that
| go on in management meetings, especially at high levels,
| they'd be pretty irate. I've been in a few at different
| organizations and I don't have the moral flexibility to
| treat people like disposable garbage our sociopathic
| business 'leaders' have. Most people suspect this is the
| case but are satisfied to hear PR lies--as long as the
| message isn't offensive (which I don't understand why, I
| prefer direct messaging so we can cut the BS).
|
| We need a serious social revolution in labor rights and
| expectations in this country. Not sure if its a really
| bad or good time for it but I think its one of the two.
| skybrian wrote:
| Is this based on actual experience or are you just
| imagining villains here?
|
| I don't have that experience, but my suspicion is that
| the cartoon bosses in peoples' heads might not be an
| accurate picture of actual bosses? Laying people off
| doesn't seem to be easy for most managers, or at least
| those who talk about it.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Runs contrary to meetings I've been in. YMMV.
| monetaryvirus wrote:
| According to SlateStarCodex, Triplebyte (YC '15) ignored
| the stay-at-home warnings about the virus and had employees
| come in to the office to get their notice of layoffs:
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
| skosch wrote:
| He (mostly) retracted this a week later:
|
| "Last links post I included tech company Triplebyte in
| the shame list for refusing to let employees switch to
| work-from-home, then firing them. A representative of
| Triplebyte contacted me and asked me to explain their
| perspective, which is that they took the pandemic
| seriously and went all-remote around the same time as
| everyone else. The reluctance to let employees switch to
| work-from-home applied only to a few employees in early
| March, before the scale of the crisis was widely
| appreciated, and they say that they would have tried to
| make accommodations if they had understood the
| seriousness of the requests. They had been planning the
| downsizing for a while, it was really unlucky that it
| ended up in the middle of a pandemic, and they tried to
| make it as painless as possible by offering good
| severance pay, etc. I'm relaying their statement because
| I'm realizing it was probably unfair of me to single them
| out in particular - my hearing a lot about this was
| downstream of my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for
| Triplebyte, and my having a lot of friends who work(ed)
| for Triplebyte was downstream of them being a great
| company doing important work which all my friends wanted
| to work for. I continue to generally respect them and
| their vision (see here for more), and you don't need to
| give them any more grief over it than they're already
| getting."
| monetaryvirus wrote:
| I was referring to this part:
|
| >The rumor is that it had planned the downsizing for a
| while, wanted the employees to be in the office to hear
| about it in person, and didn't care how much risk it had
| to expose the soon-to-be-ex-employees to in order to make
| it happen.
|
| i.e. making them come in to the office _for the layoff
| notice_ , after it was known the public needs to social-
| distance and minimize gatherings.
|
| That part is still bad, and it's not retracted, nor does
| Triplebyte dispute making them come in to the office to
| be informed of the layoffs.
|
| In any case, it would be nice if he updated the original
| post with a link to the retraction, otherwise people
| won't see any unringing of the bell when they go back to
| that link.
| tomp wrote:
| What else do you propose during a "lockdown" "shelter-in-
| place" situation? IMO it's only the _name_ of the meeting
| that is (potentially) the problem.
| elliekelly wrote:
| A phone call? Ending the employment relationship isn't all
| too different from ending a romantic relationship. How
| would you feel if your significant other called and dumped
| you? Not good. How would you feel if your SO notified you
| of your new relationship status via text? Probably worse.
| Now how would you feel if your SO sent a mass text message
| dumping you and several other people at once? Probably a
| lot worse.
|
| Sometimes difficult decisions have to be made but a one-on-
| one conversation with the person is always preferable to a
| (mass) notification, in my opinion.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not when it's 22% of the company. After about 30 minutes
| in EVERYONE is aware people are getting calls about
| losing their job and spend their day hearing a trickle of
| rumors on who just got the call and wondering if their
| phone is going to be the one to ring next. I've yet to
| see something like this go down better than making it
| clear up front (e.g. mass meeting) and come out all at
| once then having the managers follow up after.
| SilasX wrote:
| If my SO had elected to break up with me while she had a
| super-contagious disease with high mortality rate that
| could be transferred to me by being in her presence, I
| would _definitely prefer_ that she do it by phone or
| vidchat, yes!
|
| As the parent (tomp) noted, the risk profile is basically
| that with the SIP situation, so this is an exception to
| the general rule.
| qqssccfftt wrote:
| Just FYI, you're shadowbanned.
| xapata wrote:
| There's usually a pretty good reason for that. Notifying
| the person starts the process over.
| qqssccfftt wrote:
| I like to undermine the regime.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I was once shadow banned because I had submitted a link
| incorrectly (switched the link & the title which
| apparently many bots do). I emailed dang and he sorted it
| out in a matter of minutes.
|
| In my experience the mods are super responsive and more
| than willing to look into things & hear you out. If this
| person cares enough to reach out about it they should
| have the opportunity. And if they've been shadow banned
| for a good reason I imagine they would be told as much.
| hckr_news wrote:
| What does this mean?
| saagarjha wrote:
| It means their comments show up as [dead] until they're
| vouched by others.
| mrfredward wrote:
| It's really comforting to hear this explained. In the
| past, when I saw a username with several reasonable
| comments showing as dead, I was worried it was the work
| of bots or some conspiracy flagging things unfairly. I'm
| glad that's not the case.
| SilasX wrote:
| Thanks. I keep [dead] comments turned on and I thought
| that one was pretty reasonable so I was going to vouch
| for it but wasn't sure if there was some context I was
| missing. Your comment provides it.
| qqssccfftt wrote:
| [dead] by itself is a shadowban. [flagged] [dead] is not.
| verall wrote:
| Comments can be downvoted to death without being flagged.
| [dead] by itself does not imply its a shadowban. It's
| super easy to tell though, because if someone is banned,
| you can look at their history and see all their posts
| besides a few that get vouched are dead.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Note that [dead] itself is not necessarily a shadowban:
| an unpopular comment will show up like that too. To
| figure out if the user is shadownbanned you want to go to
| their profile and check if the account is new or has
| multiple [dead] but reasonable-looking comments.
| thorwasdfasdf wrote:
| I'm sure the current economic situation plays a role in the
| decision to layoff.
|
| But, i wonder, in general, if all these layoffs are to some
| degree something overdue that companies wanted to do anyways
| and are now just taking the opportunity to do it whilst still
| saving face.
| Frost1x wrote:
| This entire situation is going to allow for a lot of,
| arguably, necessary house cleaning.
|
| I think you're also going to see management at surviving
| businesses exploit the downturn to their advantage. Lots of
| rationalization as to why you won't see raises, why you'll
| need to work more to pick up the slack, lots of "be greatful"
| (there's _some_ validity here), lots of pay /hour cuts, etc.
| that will likely perpetuate long after the crisis has
| rebounded and balance sheets are in the green again. Its
| funny how quickly businesses react to cut costs but are slow
| to react to shore up their current employees.
|
| You're also going to see employers who lay-off yet justify
| continual hiring in this marketplace. Businesses will try to
| capture high quality labor talent at reduced costs (due to
| competition) and lock in those rates for awhile (hoping some
| will stay and be happy with modest raises on their
| significantly reduced labor rates).
|
| One place I work with, management claims everything is fine
| and they've locked down all non-essential hiring, but I keep
| active monitoring on popular labor marketplaces for them and
| see continual updated advertising, even after they've claimed
| to stop hiring. Some of it's automated but I know for a fact
| a few places manually renewed listings intentionally. They're
| not locking hiring, they're looking for discounts right now
| because they know they're financially solid and will weather
| this storm just fine.
|
| I love many aspects of technology but am really growing to
| hate industry practices to the point of looking at career
| changes.
| jasondclinton wrote:
| > I love many aspects of technology but am really growing
| to hate industry practices to the point of looking at
| career changes.
|
| Agree with your post (and upvoted) but wanted to point out
| that these labor practices common to capitalism and so
| you're likely to find it just as bad outside of tech. In
| some industries, worse than others, for sure. But this is
| the Faustian bargain that we signed up.
|
| (Personally, having worked some really terrible jobs
| outside of tech, I wouldn't leave it.)
| bluGill wrote:
| There are also hiring ads run just to convince potential
| customers that you are not dieing. I know a few people who
| saw a job ad seeming to target them, with no response to
| their resume despite having a very unique skill set. Only
| by talking to insiders did the truth come out : they have
| enough people with the unique skill set but they need to
| appear to be growing even when it obviously is a dieing
| area. (mainframes in this case, they still exist and sell
| well but everybody has known they are on the way out)
| eastbayjake wrote:
| Isn't a "jetty" a defensive barrier to protect a harbor against
| storm tides? Dumb move to accidentally invite everyone to a
| meeting with a codename, but not a dumb codename as you protect
| a company from a storm.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I think it meant Jettison (throw or drop (something) from an
| aircraft or ship).
| paulcole wrote:
| I'm not sure where you got that idea from but I assumed it
| was a typo. The lawyer was trying to type "layoff plan" and
| autocorrect worked its magic.
| SilasX wrote:
| Not to get too far on this tangent, but, for me, "jetty"
| doesn't evoke "jettison" but either:
|
| 1) Those little docks like in Venice (cf. "Let me off at this
| jetty" in _The Last Crusade_ ).
|
| 2) The jetty server library that Jenkins uses which shows up
| in error messages.
| hinkley wrote:
| 3) the short film that 12 Monkeys was based on
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| La Jetee
| supernova87a wrote:
| 3) A plank that pirates walk people off of into the water
| to be eaten by sharks.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Source? Never heard that, and not seeing it in cursory
| internet searches. IME it's just called "the plank."
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > but not a dumb codename
|
| The _whole_ point - the _only purpose_ of a codename is that
| it doesn 't give the game away.
| yaktubi wrote:
| They are referring to the George Jetson maneuverability
| earthtourist wrote:
| IIRC this is why the U.S. military (in certain cases?) uses a
| pre-generated list of code names. If you let humans do the
| code names, they'll choose names that leak info.
| phillco wrote:
| Q: "Why does my company use the blandest possible codenames for
| everything?"
|
| A:
| OedipusRex wrote:
| That's incredibly insulting.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I miss the early days of the internet when people had thicker
| skins and weren't so easily offended/insulted.
| herdodoodo wrote:
| so... back when the internet was just rich white guys that
| could afford computers as their hobbies and could get away
| with making extremely inappropriate jokes without
| consequence? Yeah, I "miss" it too
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You know, my 'white privilege' have me SOOOO much more
| opportunities than my black afro-russian compatriots ever
| had in Russia. :-/
|
| Jokes aside, I believe my parents income in 1993 was less
| than 10% of the poorest non-white guy in the US. So your
| 'white guy' accusation kinda lands flat.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Well, they did use to call it Upper Volta with rockets
| apacheCamel wrote:
| Ahh yes, making a joke in a meeting title to make fun of
| the employees that are about to be fired. A comedy classic.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Lyft is up 5% today, but the market (S&P 500) is generally up
| 2.94%.
| ivankirigin wrote:
| Lyft is down ~34% since February
| break_the_bank wrote:
| Anyone long on Uber? I bought Uber at $23, only cause it was
| cheap. I can't justify owning it and now I'm thinking of
| selling it off. I do wonder though, is anyone long on Uber?
|
| I don't see them winning the self driving car battle. Tesla /
| Google have better brands and better salaries, that probably
| would keep the best talent away from Uber.
| jonknee wrote:
| It's not a secret to any investor that Lyft's business has gone
| _way_ down. These sorts of layoffs tend to only spark panic
| selling when they are not expected.
| asdff wrote:
| Both uber and lyft are flying today. Most people see cutting
| jobs as a bad thing, market probably sees it as a cost savings
| and great business decision.
| peder wrote:
| Lyft and Uber are disproportionately impacted by coronavirus
| news, and the remdesivir drug trial seems to have been a
| success, so Lyft and Uber are up more than the rest of the
| market.
| empath75 wrote:
| > and the remdesivir drug trial seems to have been a
| success,
|
| it's what now? I haven't seen any data, including the
| report today, that it made a significant impact.
| asdff wrote:
| So many companies are disproportionately affected to
| varying degrees. Not all up. If you are referring to this
| news (1), take it with a grain of salt. Look at the %
| recovery, look at those N's, look at those p values. Gilead
| is pumping today, but imo this isn't a smoking gun study.
| The drug needs to be administered to more patients to get
| more statistical power and draw meaningful conclusions on
| efficacy.
|
| Then again, wall street doesn't know their N's and p's.
| Gilead could have put out anything today and the stock
| would be flying on speculation due to none of the hungover
| 24 year olds moving millions at goldman sachs actually
| reading the study, much less interpreting it. Of course,
| this is just my take. Maybe you are right and this does
| explain the pump, I guess we will read about it this
| evening.
|
| 1. https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-
| relea...
| empath75 wrote:
| stocks almost always bounce after layoffs.
| startupinmotion wrote:
| welp
| ar_lan wrote:
| I recall Lyft being the highest paying company with respect to
| rank, according to levels.fyi.
|
| I guess I'm glad I don't work there right now.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Lyft SWE here. Can confirm. My Lyft offer was significantly
| greater than Google, Uber etc. That said, with 20/20 hindsight,
| Google would have been a safer choice.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Are you aware how many engineers have been affected by the
| layoffs?
| silentsea90 wrote:
| I am not I am afraid.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is Lyft a sensible work week in exchange for their positively
| mental salaries?
| silentsea90 wrote:
| I like working at Lyft, and if not for the stock more than
| halving since the IPO and now the Covid storm, I wouldn't
| question my decision. There are a ton of interesting
| problems to solve and lots of smart people (ex-fb, google
| etc if that is a measure). The leadership is ethical and
| supportive. We're generally not coasting and it is easier
| to advance your career faster than Google, while not having
| the threat of a PIP all the time like Facebook and Amazon
| (apparently). We don't work on fluff or building tech in
| house just for the heck of it because we've historically
| been conservative in entering businesses and focused on
| rideshare, and we've not been as awash with $ and people to
| spend on experimental projects. Prioritization is key here.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| At what level? Oracle OCI was paying the most in average to new
| devs a few short months ago according to levels.fyi so maybe
| you mean at the senior level or higher?
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| Tech companies pay a lot in stock when their business is at
| risk.
| beefalo wrote:
| Lyft was paying higher in base salary than everyone else at
| the time as well
| stephencoyner wrote:
| This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft.
|
| Amazon could bundle rides with package deliveries and get the
| pre-existing driver and passenger network from Lyft. Lyft was
| actually telling drivers to work with Amazon when the pandemic
| started (1).
|
| Waymo could take Lyft's aggregated rider demand. They already
| have a partnership to transfer autonomous rides from Waymo to
| Lyft during bad weather situations and refer Lyft riders to Waymo
| vehicles (2).
|
| Edit - links below.
|
| (1) Amazon - https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197699/lyft-
| amazon-coro...
|
| (2) Waymo - https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/05/08/waymo-lyft-
| partner...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft_
|
| Or maybe Apple.
|
| Apple has been pouring millions into improving its street views
| in Apple Maps. It should buy Lyft. Pay the drivers an extra
| $x/mile to clamp the Apple Maps image gathering device to the
| roofs of their cars.
|
| The drivers win because they get a bump in income in an
| industry that's already hurting.
|
| Apple wins because it gets up-to-date information about the
| places where people go most.
|
| Even better: Apple could pay them $x/mile to drive to specific
| areas where the data is stale or missing.
|
| As a former Uber/Lyft driver, I'd be all over this like Oprah
| on a baked ham.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Downvoted this for two reasons.
|
| 1) You don't explain how in monetary terms Apple having that
| better data would offset its additional costs since Lyft does
| not derive a profit.
|
| 2) This comment was mean-spirited and completely unnecessary:
|
| > As a former Uber/Lyft driver, I'd be all over this like
| Oprah on a baked ham.
| usaphp wrote:
| > Pay the drivers an extra $x/mile to clamp the Apple Maps
| image gathering device to the roofs of their cars.
|
| Scenario 1 (buy Lyft): So if Lyft has around 1 million
| drivers in USA [1], and Apple will pay them an average of
| $50/month to use the device + the cost of the
| device/installation (around $100) that would cost around
| $150,000,000 on top of the acquisition price. And you cant
| really be sure that they covered all roads.
|
| Scenario 2 (hire drivers): US total road length is about 4
| million miles, average driver can cover about 160 miles a day
| (8 hours * 20Mph). If you want to drive through all of the US
| in 30 days you would need around 800 drivers. If you pay them
| $5000/month to do that, that would cost you "just" $4
| million.
|
| [1] https://investor.lyft.com/news-releases/news-release-
| details...
| reaperducer wrote:
| Remember that Apple currently maintains its own fleet of
| such mapping vehicles, so there would be some savings, as
| well.
| viscanti wrote:
| Presumably there's more valuable data than just maps. I
| would imagine that Lyft could give valuable real-time data
| like areas of the city where there's traffic congestion and
| slower drive times. It's unclear how you'd value that, but
| it seems like an acquiring company would get more than just
| raw map data for all available streets.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Pay the drivers an extra $x/mile to clamp the Apple Maps
| image gathering device to the roofs of their cars.
|
| Why bother paying them? If they own the company, just make it
| a condition of the contractor agreement.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Because it's Apple, not Google.
|
| And because the drivers own their cars, and will want to be
| compensated for any alteration to the car. Just like they
| get compensated for hanging ads of their headrests.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Apple seem to have already done the job without Lyft's help.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Initial data acquisition and keeping the data updated are
| vastly different tasks.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| This gives you high frequency data of common roads at an
| incredible cost. Street views only need very low frequency
| data of all roads, so you'd be paying a premium for data that
| isn't needed while still having a gap.
| hinkley wrote:
| In boom towns there is a lot of construction. Having up to
| date data would be exceedingly valuable there. Downtown
| Springfield, maybe not so much.
| luckydata wrote:
| you can cover easily with one car per town. there's no
| value in acquiring Lyft to get a few drivers.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Apple wins because it gets up-to-date information about the
| places where people go most.
|
| Apple is already doing this - my iOS Maps has real time
| traffic in areas where I know that they're only getting this
| information from other iOS users, not from reporting devices.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Apple would only buy Lyft if they could control the brand
| experience to a level that just isn't possible at scale with
| humans as the primary service delivery ( _cough_ ) vehicle.
|
| Consider the Apple retail experience. Retail is relatively
| easy to train for, there's a big labor pool to pick from, and
| with Apple's revenue/sq.ft. they can afford to compete for
| good staff.
|
| Now consider the sum of your Uber/Lyft experiences and the
| scale of the problem. Is it reasonable to expect an Apple
| retail level experience in the ride app space? Even with a
| tolerable up-charge?
|
| Retail experiences have always varied with some brands able
| to offer consistently stellar experiences. Tiffany comes to
| mind. In all my adult years hailing a car has always been a
| total shit show except at the most extreme price points. I
| won't speculate as to why, I'm just saying, the quality
| problem of mass small auto ride hailing has yet to be fixed
| by anyone.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Is it reasonable to expect an Apple retail level
| experience in the ride app space? Even with a tolerable up-
| charge?
|
| They're called limos. And Uber already does them. Most
| people won't pay the premium though and that means, in
| part, that I imagine they have a fairly limited network
| outside of some dense metros.
|
| Of course black cars are available for many companies if
| you pre-book. It's what I use for my home airport--or at
| least did when I was flying.
| luckydata wrote:
| > This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy
| Lyft.
|
| and buy what exactly? Uber and Lyft aren't very valuable
| businesses, especially as their mythical ability to corner the
| supply (drivers) hasn't materialized at all.
|
| IMHO both of those companies are destined to shut down or
| survive in a much more limited fashion, as unicorns they make
| no sense.
| [deleted]
| animalgonzales wrote:
| love that this is the top comment on HN and not the fact that
| 1k people just lost their ability to pay their rent/mortgages,
| take care of their families, deal with medical costs.
| stefan_ wrote:
| In fact the top comment is now some partisan bickering! All
| these smart people and not 10% of them enough foresight to
| think beyond "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
|
| Not in the US, but I'm not sure someone unemployed and out of
| medical insurance can tell much of a difference between "red"
| and "blue" right now.
| varjag wrote:
| Business value (or lack thereof) of Lyft now is an unknown,
| worthy of discussion. The things you mentioned are basic
| facts everyone is acutely aware about, hard to see what does
| it help restating them.
| panzagl wrote:
| That way they'd know "We're in this Together" (cue dramatic
| piano)
| cwhiz wrote:
| Also known as virtue signaling. I am sure it is helpful
| to all those laid off people to know there are readers on
| Hacker News talking about them.
| luckydata wrote:
| I was just laid off so I can appreciate both sides. On
| one side I like to discuss tech-business topics, on the
| other I really feel like the crowd here is a little more
| callous than it should be. I don't have solutions, just
| offering an observation.
| jlei523 wrote:
| I really don't think Waymo needs Lyft or Uber to dominate the
| ride hailing market in the future.
|
| If they can make a better self-driving car than anyone else,
| they will win the ride-hailing market. People have no loyalty
| to Lyft or Uber. They will use whatever is the cheapest/most
| convenient.
| caogecym wrote:
| Agreed, though the stock went up after this news, Google and
| Amazon could have acted faster.
| vmception wrote:
| That's because there is at least 17% less share dilution than
| there was a day before, let alone the runway being marginally
| extended.
|
| So speculators don't get dumped on by employees with RSUs all
| day every day, and the business prospects are not adversely
| impacted any more than they already were. Thats _when_ you
| pay more for shares.
|
| Layoffs are proactive for investors, not an omen for
| investors, don't get that confused.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| If this is really a factor in the stock price, then that
| company is toast.
|
| When an employee is hired, the assumption is that that
| employee's all-in hiring cost is less than the increase in
| value for all shareholders. That means if you pay an
| employee $250K a year, including stock, the shareholders
| better be getting more than $250K back in value.
|
| By your reasoning, the shareholders are losing more by
| dilution than they gain back by enterprise value. If that's
| the case they should fire everyone and close their doors,
| since there's no RSU dilution at all with zero employees.
|
| On the other hand, if employees were hired with the
| assumption that they were worth the price, then any layoffs
| should rationally reduce the stock value - because even
| though you get the RSUs back, the employees must have been
| worth more than those RSUs or it was a mistake to hire them
| in the first place.
| vmception wrote:
| Nice logic, the only reality is that wall street
| tolerated being dumped on by employees in the
| theoretically high growth tech sector.
|
| no voting rights, no dividends, create shares, dump on
| investors
|
| the limits of this tolerance was pushed and pushed in the
| macro environment of there being nothing else to invest
| in
|
| if share price goes up, profitability "just a few
| quarters away", the employee value proposition or
| executive handcuffs are not factored in
|
| for a long time the "share price" trend of tech companies
| has not been important because a steady share price means
| that it is _amazing_ that wall street tolerates being
| dumped on and keeps placing large enough bids to absorb
| the constant sell pressure from an open spigot of
| unlimited authorized shares to create. even a moderate
| down trend is okay since the employees are dumping shares
| monthly instead of stuck a long for the ride for at least
| a year. rising share prices just being icing on the cake.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| That still means the company is toast. You're basically
| arguing that companies were way overpaying for their
| employees, and their stock price was inflated to begin
| with. The stock should still go down in that case.
| vmception wrote:
| I'm not arguing that at all. I am recognizing the
| psychology in the macroeconomic environment and helping
| you understand why you are on the wrong side of the
| market today.
| pavlov wrote:
| The distribution of RSUs at all major tech companies is
| very uneven. Most job titles don't get any, or just a token
| amount. Only executives and software engineers can
| negotiate for the large grants.
|
| I'd guess less than 10% of employees probably hold more
| than 90% of RSUs everywhere (not that different from the
| stock market as a whole, where 10% of Americans own over
| 80% of the market).
|
| So a 17% layoff might not touch the RSU-rich employees very
| much at all.
| cracker_jacks wrote:
| Won't this create more share dilution in the short term?
| Don't layoffs trigger options/RSUs to be executed some time
| window after the layoff?
| malandrew wrote:
| The other thing I would add is that new employees usually
| get some cash value for their level divided by the
| current stock price. Many laid off employees were hired
| when the stock price was higher. If they have to replace
| these employees with new ones in a timeframe before the
| stock price has recovered then they suffer more dilution.
| vmception wrote:
| LYFT and many recently IPO'd tech companies have been
| doing monthly vesting, with no cliff. So basically with
| all their massive hiring, employees have already been
| dumping shares.
|
| The conditions on the unvested portions typically are
| destroyed. With options are available to purchase for
| exercise. That's pretty exclusive to startup life, but
| the same concept in RSUs at big tech where only the
| vested portion is sellable and the rest is destroyed.
|
| That being said, a contract can say anything.
| Lammy wrote:
| The last thing I want to see come out of this pandemic is more
| consolidation that just makes the strong stronger.
| rajnathani wrote:
| Acquisitions by large tech companies could [0] be put on hold
| for now. Even if it's not, there could be a stronger push by
| antitrust.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/warren-ocasio-cortez-
| pande...
| chris11 wrote:
| I've also heard that large investors are much more cautious
| about doing large deals right now. I think with all the
| uncertainty with Covid-19 would mean a major acquisition
| would be unpredictable.
| [deleted]
| justapassenger wrote:
| > This seems like a great time for Amazon or Google to buy
| Lyft.
|
| Why? It's a low-margin, money losing business. On top of that
| it's operating in a space with a lot of legal risks,
| regulations and competition.
| netcan wrote:
| _a great time for Amazon or Google to buy Lyft_
|
| ...What would they do with it? The business model (also uber)
| as-is makes a loss.
|
| Uber/Lyft's initial proposition was that once ride sharing
| incumbents were established, they'd have a software-ish
| monopoly and margins. This did not work out. Now the
| proposition is "When driverless cars get invented..."
|
| If google had a car that can drive itself, they can figure out
| an app. They can get to a customer base. The driverless car is
| the important part.
|
| Amazon otoh... deliveries maybe? If they could figure out a way
| to do deliveries in a lyft/uber model... that's valuable to
| amazon.
| cco wrote:
| I could see value for self-driving/ride-sharing data
| collection for Google. Google wants to make a ride-sharing
| program, well has one now I guess, having all that data seems
| like a boon if Lyft is a cheap buy. They could also collect a
| lot of data for use with their self-driving research as well.
| roosterdawn wrote:
| Yes, it probably would be a valuable to Amazon. So valuable,
| in fact, that it already[1] exists.
|
| [1]https://flex.amazon.com/
| stephencoyner wrote:
| Yes, this exists today, but what Amazon would be buying is
| faster time to expansion. If they need drivers now (which
| is an assumption, I don't know this to be a fact) Lyft
| gives them an established network incredibly fast.
|
| So obviously the price would have to be right and of course
| Amazon wouldn't be paying a large premium.
| clintonb wrote:
| An advertising campaign to attract drivers is probably a
| lot cheaper than buying Lyft.
| t_serpico wrote:
| yea it's trivial for Amazon to create their own 'driver
| network'
| draw_down wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but "Amazon already has one" strikes me
| as the opposite of a reason for Amazon to buy Lyft.
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. Lyft doesn't have anything they can't create for a
| lot less money. And if they buy it, they get a lot of
| headaches: legacy code, legacy staff, legacy relationships to
| partner and drivers.
| chris11 wrote:
| Sure, I'll switch between ride sharing apps based on cost
| alone. But I'll still want available drivers near me. I'm not
| willing to try multiple apps just to see if it's usable.
|
| I think Uber/Lyft's customer bases are definitely valuable.
| There's a real business there post Covid-19. I'm not sure
| what the margins would look like though. I think an
| acquisition might be a good idea if it was cheap enough and
| it looked like competitors wouldn't be able to use vc money
| to offer rides below cost.
| amiga_500 wrote:
| Why does a tech company want to get into taxis?
|
| They might as well buy a cheese company that is in financial
| trouble.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Google had (still has, I believe) a fair investment in Lyft.
| Perhaps they could expand that.
| [deleted]
| saagarjha wrote:
| There was a person in the Uber thread yesterday who predicted
| this. I wonder if they'll go back to hiring if this is over or
| they're using as an opportunity to get rid of people they
| shouldn't have hired in the first place.
| sjtindell wrote:
| My guess is both, they're doing some cleanup and will go back
| to hiring.
| vmception wrote:
| Some companies should be billion dollar companies with 30
| employees, like when Instagram was bought out in 2012.
| Headcount is mutually exclusive from how much the enterprise
| makes and can return to shareholders.
|
| If headcount is not directly helping that then it should not be
| an indefinite relationship.
|
| Also, I'm available for hire as a CFO or board member if you
| think your company has challenges with adopting this market-
| relevant predilection and needs to make "the hard decisions".
| redisman wrote:
| You should look in to private equity firms if you're so eager
| to lay people off.
| ivankirigin wrote:
| Lyft alum here, and other alumni are working to try to help out
| here.
|
| See here:
| https://twitter.com/haddartha/status/1255559084012699650
|
| Also, there are alumni facebook groups and slack channels. If
| those are for you, email me: ivan.kirigin@gmail.com
| otfc123 wrote:
| Hope all you liberals are happy now.
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