There are tons of helpful videos to get you started. I recommend Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen on YouTube
And in terms of amortizing time spent learning, it's hard to beat getting better at something you do every day. Sometimes multiple times!
senior positions that require many years of experience for entrancy due to the nature of the job may suddenly go vacant with noone to fill them.
when older people, {people who understand how to retool and operate a VLSI plant for example, people who are ATCs or surgeons} die and there is only a pool of young inexperience to draw from we will have to make do without some of these things, change laws to allow reduced qualifications, and or accept things like nuclear accidents as a learning curve until we have experienced people ,[after the replacements make time in]
Wouldn't be the worst side effect. Nice to occasionally snap things back, then more restrictions can be put in place again if warranted.
gourmet cooking it is not, but cheap and easy and often tasty
There were a number of structural factors that led to the great depression: gold standard currency and restrictive monetary policy at the Fed, overly restrictive tariff laws, simultaneous drought that destroyed a lot of farmland, rampant financial fraud, lack of deposit insurance at banks causing numerous bank runs and failures.
Basically all of the above is different now. The modern Fed is organized around preventing the monetary mistakes made during the depression. We are on purely fiat currency now, not the volatile gold standard. Food security is hugely increased, and restrictive tariffs have not impacted the ag industry of Canada and Mexico, which are key supports of the US's food supply chain. We have the FDIC for deposit insurance and increased post-Great Recession capital controls on systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).
We have also learned from the Roosevelt interventions of the 1930's that it requires both a strong monetary and fiscal policy to address a systemic shock to the economy. So it might take some time for stimulus to arrive, but it should be incoming.
Finally, we have the internet. Not to oversell it, but it's a significant asset that can ensure a degree of continuity of supplies, services and employment in an event such as this. Yes - it's not perfect and many necessary jobs can not be done over the internet. But it's better than the alternative.
So, my feeling is that we are heading into the most significant non-wartime economic event since the great depression, but if cards are played properly we should be able to mitigate the terrible effects to a much better degree than was possible in the 1930's.
3+ months of earning is non-trivial, and they'll never get them back.
Hopefully any stimulus will be aimed at recently un- or under-employed folks.
If I, as a working software developer, end up getting a check... the system is seriously unfair.
They are being told by their landlords they have to keep renting their chairs, perhaps at a discount, because it's a lease. They are being encouraged to get SBA loans by the government, and their landlord. This is vile and immoral. The mere suggestion is unethical feudal nonsense.
Make some people go into debt in order to help secure the income of their lord? It's uncivil to say it out loud. Turning it into official policy is an abomination. It indicts the whole culture of a society to do this.
I think as a class, they should declare bankruptcy. Force the next higher class to find redress, by mortgagees taking haircuts on loans, all the way up to pensioners and 401ks. The entire point of the free market is that it's supposed to account for these risks, and absorb them equitably. If the market or government demands some low rung people experience worse misery than others, it is a recipe for widespread loss of trust in a system, that quite frankly right now does not deserve trust.
What if you end up losing your employment a month or so down the road? The 'everyone getting a stimulus check' isn't great, but the effort to means test and make those somewhat arbitrary decisions is non-trivial, and there will always be someone who really did need it, but didn't seem to need it based on some algorithm.
I am struggling to see why you think that, since I don't watch CNBC and was not thinking of hedge funds or the stock market at all when I wrote the above post.
I didn't get into what I think should happen, which is this:
- immediate expansion of unemployment insurance to 75-100% of income for at least 12 months, with no shenanigans allowed at the state level
- for tip and gig workers and self-employed, 1040 income should be used to qualify for unemployment benefits up to a capped amount ($100k or whatever)
- immediate expansion of Medicare to anyone who qualifies for the ACA
- immediate open enrollment so people can switch to Medicare via the exchanges
- immediate expansion of SNAP and WIC
- 6 month moratorium on evictions nationwide
- any bailouts should be patterned on the Obama administration's auto bailout, which is to say the capital structure should be rewritten so that workers are given a piece of the company, and the public should benefit once the economy improves
I also expect to see a change in perception in the US to thinking that any civilized society that wishes to keep running needs to have a comprehensive health care system, a social safety net for basic income and housing, and a trusted set of expert institutions.
So my suggestion short term is: learn to cook if you don't know how to. Not fancy, haute cuisine, but how to take whatever's in the pantry and make something tasty out of it. Learn how to grow some produce in small spaces, even if it's just herbs.
Learn how to not spend money. How to reduce your energy and water usage. How to do basic repairs and projects yourself. What you have to buy in a time of logistical disruption is time. If you can increase the time you can be without income from a month to four months or from six months to two years, that is a remarkable difference in your resilience.