>Fund people, not companies

it depended. large corporation like Apple don't need the money but mom and pop shop that is forced to close during the peak should receive money. the sad thing is corporation that clearly can make it thur covid is receiving the largest amount like https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

>mom and pop shop that is forced to close during the peak should receive money.

No, they shouldn't. Don't give any money to any corporations, give all the money exclusively to people.

If Mom and Pop run a business, they can get cash as humans to float their business, just like any human could. They could temporarily lay off all their staff (which is OK, because their staff are humans, and are also getting cash)

There was never any valid reason to give a single cent to any company.

Right so then after cash runs out no one has a job and no businesses exist?

Companies are more that just a collection of people.

If you give cash to people, they'll use to buy stuff from corporations, Mom&Pop, and uber food. That should create jobs?

The situation was that businesses were not allowed to be open.

I want to convince you this isn’t a good idea. If all the businesses shut down in my town or city, what happens after? Where do I find work? Especially if I don’t have sufficient capital to start a new business (never mind the skills or training), what will I do then? How does society go back to normal?

Do we stop all output and just have the government mail checks to every individual forever? That’s not going to work. Who is going to produce the things we need to function as a society?

Please re-read the comment.

> They could temporarily lay off all their staff

So you pay people's salaries while they're furloughed. Together with moratoria (don't know if this is the word) on loans this means companies get “paused” while lockdowns are ongoing and don't shut down.

Temporarily in the context of covid has meant more than 12 months for a variety of local shops and businesses in my area. They can't come swinging back signing leases and buying inventory after going bankrupt.

I saw 2 kinds of "small" businesses in Canada. One kind was hit so hard the bailout money they got wasn't even close to enough to keep their business running. The other kind wasn't impacted or even benefited from increased revenue.

I know of at least one company in the latter category where the owner pocketed around $500k and I don't think it had much impact on how they ran their business. All they had to do was not layoff people they wouldn't have anyway and the government picked up the tab on their labor costs for a year. Free money!

just keep giving everyone more money Duh!

/s

Well. Actually that’s not as terrible of an idea as you probably think.

Look into “modern monetary theory”

Did mom and dad directly fund political campaign of those in power?

You force them to close if you want them to come back you have to keep them alive.

Keeping the humans alive should be sufficient.

You realize humans need jobs to come back to and humans need places to buy things and services.

No, only the Capitalist Heroes know how to tell people to work. Regular humans are totally insufficient to the task.

Or, instead of funding either corporation, just give mom and pop money. Instead of business bailouts, we should've done regular, recurring stimulus checks that would help business owners cover bills while they're businesses were closed, and help employees cover bills while they're unable to work.

That is exactly what was done here in the Netherlands. Booking.com just decided to exploit and, in my opinion, abuse that system.

Edit: These emergency financial support measures I was referring to are:

- "Temporary emergency scheme for job retention" (NOW)

- "Temporary self-employment income support and loan scheme" (TOZO)

- "Reimbursement Fixed Costs" (TVL)

More info (in English) on gov websites:

- https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/inform...

- https://english.rvo.nl/subsidies-programmes/reimbursement-fi...

Edit 2: Oh wait there is more:

- "Subsidy scheme for events cancelled due to corona measures"

- "TVL Stock Support Closed Retail"

- "R&D subsidy scheme for the mobility sector" (RDM)

- "Temporary Support for Necessary Costs" (TONK)

- "Arrangement for businesses damaged by curfew riots" (RBC)

More info: https://business.gov.nl/corona/overview/the-coronavirus-and-...

NOW appears to pay businesses up-front for, in turn, continuing to pay employees: https://business.gov.nl/subsidy/corona-crisis-temporary-emer...

Arguably, it would've been a much better system if the Netherlands just... paid people directly regardless of who they worked for at the time, so employers didn't need to worry about paying employees while they couldn't do normal business.

I think it was similar in Canada. Everyone here that got laid off was eligible for government money though, so I think it would have been better to forgo the wage subsidies for businesses. A lot of them pocketed that money.

Instead they should have let businesses lay off staff without feeling guilty because there was a safety net for those people and once a business laid off X% of their staff they could have been eligible for extra government help.

That way the government wouldn't have ended up paying the wages of people that were needed to meet demand (and make profit for) the businesses that weren't really impacted.

For example, local restaurants got crushed and could easily justify laying off 50%+ of their staff. Give them more money IMO. However, the delivery business down the street with +50% demand shouldn't be getting a nickel.

That's exactly what it is. Reasoning being two-fold, first is that it's easy to implement as the government knows the exact payroll of every company anyways (they file taxes quarterly), second is to keep people on the payroll in case restrictions can be loosened. They're still working, so can go back to productivity immediately.

Yeah the systems are far from perfect. They're inefficient, in some cases unfair, and with regards to abuse perhaps rely a little too much on good faith.

Nevertheless the systems do exist. Financial aid was and even still is there for you or your business if you need it.

Have you counted on how much this would have costed?

The amount the US government has spent on pandemic relief is 20-30k per American, depending on how you choose to count.

(Edit: I’m aware TFA is about about European pandemic relief.)

I have to agree, if I want to start a competing reservation platform I would take this "opportunity" to launch it, but because big corps (almost a monopoly for booking.com) are helped in difficult times this makes it almost impossible to have competition or new small players that would have been advantaged by not having the weight of the big players.

Tell that to plentyoffish who took on the dating market and consistently ranked higher than big companies like match.

If bookings.com suddenly disappeared you would have hundreds of players ready to jump in with their own angle. What would you offer? Is bookings.com really holding you back?

Plentyoffish sold to Match a few years back, as I recall.

I do take your general point though.

if you gather a group of people with financial independence, and try to bootstrap and never sell a new reservation platform, you can make it happen in about a decade. The trick is to never bloat budgets and staff, and to stay away from KPI - your goal is to take over regions by dumping prices and providing near-zero commissions on bookings from your platform for as many hotels as you can handle. You can handle this strategy among a team of financially independent members who are interested in the field rather than quick buck. It's hardly possible if you're seeking VC money.

That's interesting because I feel like a lot of tech is in the kind of spot. If enthusiastic people come in and start building really good core products while charging fair value there are going to be a lot of bloated, wasteful tech companies that could end up in a world of hurt. At least that's my opinion.

Imho, the main error is that they gave away the money unconditionally. The fact that the particular government didn't foresee this outcome is quite astonishing.

The reasonable short notice caused the government to decide the lesser of evils: allow some abuse to help most, (un)fortunately this exposes the excesses. Booking.com "decided" to not take part in the second round three months later mainly due to the legal work being well enough established and in place to force the company to forgo any firing of people and any bonuses to executives.

Yes an error, but as always there is some nuance.

True, but there were way to to help very quickly while mitigating some risks, and some of this is probably philosophical, really.

If I give your company a 10mm check, or 10mm in payroll tax relief, it's the same to your bottom line. The latter goes a long way to making sure it's applied to keeping people employed if that's your actual goal (which may or may not be your stated goal).

Given the huge bonuses bailed-out bankers got in 2008, it would be criminally naive to assume that politicians didn't plan on this happening.

> The fact that the particular government didn't foresee this outcome is quite astonishing.

They 100% saw this coming which is why they killed oversight. Best way to get Congress to pass a free giveaway is to get them in on the fun.

There is a reason the Republican politicians in Congress voted to strip the measures of even normal oversight.

They did see it coming and in fact they were trying to increase inflation.

> The fact that the particular government didn't foresee this outcome is quite astonishing.

Charitable of you to think that this isn't by design.

Computationally, company is an order higher than humans in that it contains "structures" designed to generate revenue, and these "structures" consists of physical things (ranging from items in a physical store to an office space to entire factory, etc) as well as none-physical things (e.g. productivity optimisation across a 'team' of people who had worked together for a long peroid of time, trust in the supply chain, etc). When a company dissolves, many of these "structures" will be gone. In general there are many costs to reconstruct these "structures" after they are gone.

It will be amazing if

- it's cheaper to construct these structures designed to generate revenue (and we already see this in tech-driven stuff, which was how the notion of start-up emerged from the 70s)

- people are motiviated and are willing to overcome the hardship (as well as, in many cases, unconfortable feelings) to learn to construct these structures or to learn things that will help (e.g. programming, etc)

Unfortunately, most of these structures are currently still expensive (thanks to this, start-ups and techs are in general over-hyped [1]). And most people prefer consuming stuff mindlessly than learning things. Mindfulness is the key.

Therefore I'm extremely grateful that we as a civilisation are finlly entering the first phrase of the psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelic would always have a net positive impact to society at large as they force people to come to terms with reality as well as their very own phsyical existence, and be more mindful about the qualia of this world.

[1]: not necessarily a bad thing as they can eventually flatten all these cost structures

And intriguingly, one can also say that the phenomena of start-up is perhaps a branching-out of 60s' hippie movement (partially inspired by books such as The Whole Earth Catalog which is not only spiritual-ish but leans more towards pragmatism) where instead of going all anti-capitalism and trying to be self-sustainable from the ground-up and detach itself from the economy (which eventually always ran into problems cuz then it became a micro-economy itself, which was the very thing it tried to transcend), start-ups aims to be self-sustainable in the existing econcomy while detaching itself from the cooperate cultures.

Lock down the economy, kill small businesses, hand out printed money like candy to big corporations. Nothing suspicious going on...

Not sure about "let them break" for a government-imposed lockdown, but I agree that giving support directly to employees to stay home from work would have been a better strategy since you cut out the middleman. (Use whatever method works. Via the unemployment infrastructure for example)

Money was specifically earmarked to retain employees

> Let them break

There are all sorts of random shortages right now--truckers, lumber, cars, rental cars, computer chips. They're mostly annoying, but it would be a lot worse if companies didn't get help.

Government has been sold on the "Hobbes" vision of society and believes an assertion of authority is necessary in order to prevent civil chaos. They will never give money directly to people until this changes. https://issuepedia.org/Hobbes_vs._Rousseau

>Fund people, not companies

People work at companies. Letting productive assets fail due to ignorance and jealously does not help people.

Best yet is to fund measures to minimize disruptions and to help manage the economic meltdown caused by pandemics. And plan accordingly. The world was utterly unprepared to deal with a pandemic. Once we were somewhat better equiped with knowledge (ie. aerosols in closed spaces), procedures (widespread testing, ventilation, etc) and equipment (masks, ICU beds) the economy could function much closer to (a new) normal. But even today, if it weren't for vaccines, we would not be remotely close to where we are now, at least in some countries. A lot of the measures implemented were useless, including tech (ie phones), which failed to be of real service tracking contacts and infections.

Once enacted, countries or regions that don't abide to my wishful set of international rules on pandemic measures will be isolated or excluded by the community. Money otherwise would flow to implement measures everywhere and keep the world economy going at a good pace.

Here's a review on what I consider a great investment for these financial aids, making air filtering/ventilation and CO2 control ubiquitous:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/05/26/...

Also the economy would had suffered a lot less if there was a predictable schedule on how restrictions and, even stricter, lockdowns were applied according to some economists.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/experts-think-the-econo...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-may-14-2...

It's actually quite shocking how, when the primary idea is "dump money into the economy," giving the money to people instead of banks or firms is so controversial. It's more socialist and more capitalist, if you believe in that sort of thing.

I'm not saying you're wrong when I say consider the following: if every individual had a bunch of free money and decided to not work, then the next day they drive to the store and there is no one working... what do they do? Didn't you just cause a ton of inflation?

At the end of the day, money doesn't solve problems. Work being done solves problems.

How that should affect policy... I have no idea but I can see both sides of the problem.

It would have to be A LOT of money for people to stop going to their jobs.

In a more realistic scenario: Maybe some people would quit their jobs because they gained some independence. Is that bad?

The problem isn't really people quitting actually because like you said, that could be good. It's more like the business can't pay to stay open because there aren't enough customers to cover the variable costs. So now the business is closed and you have no where to spend your money... This realistically only affects small businesses like your local grocery store or whatever. Once the pandemic lifts, all that cheap property gets bought up by the Walmarts of the world and the concentration of power to the top 1% continues.

Right? I could totally be wrong here.

It's weird how the 'infallible invisible hand of the market' folks don't believe in it in practice. All the 'isms' seem like convenient excuses to justify selfish behavior in whatever way suits the argument and not these well thought out concrete theorems like we were lead to believe.

The context of this discussions is the government giving free money to people.... I don't understand how you equate that to people not believing in market forces.

If you give everyone free money, why do you think people will stop working?

We justify giving money to rich people because it will make them work harder, but we fear that giving money to poor people will make them lazier.

I don't believe giving money to poor people will make them lazier, nor do I believe we should give free money to rich people.

Ultimately, they want to give money to people that need it and will put it to good use (for whose definition of good, I don't know... also, we HOPE that is the case but obviously people are biased, politicians included). Sometimes it's individuals who need money, sometimes it's businesses (which is why they did both).

I will tell you that I personally did not need any of the individual stimulus money, but I got the full amount because I don't make a ton; however, there are others who need the money because they have expenses much higher than mine, e.g. they have debt of some kind.

Not trying to muddy the waters. I am trying to say it's not always clear who needs money and who doesn't.

>if every individual had a bunch of free money and decided to not work

It would be predicated on the amount wouldn't it?

Presumably 65M distributed equally among the people of the state wouldn't be enough for everyone to stop working.

One thing we can say without going into counterfactuals, the execs probably didn't work 28M harder, or produce 28M in value.

Oh I totally agree in this particular instance nothing good came from this "bailout". I'm merely trying to say I understand why small businesses need bailouts in addition to their employees.

Or businesses can increase their unlivable wages.

I am certainly willing to pay 30 cents more for my Big Mac so that the employee gets $15/h instead of 8

Isn't this mainly a game theory problem? If you don't force a minimum wage, then competitors will undercut each other.

As much as we like to believe WE would go to the "more ethical place", unless the average person did then ultimately the undercutter will win. Now real life is not that black and white obviously. Costco pays a pretty decent wage allegedly but they make up for it in creative ways (like having the warehouse also be the storefront).

Labor cost at restaurants is rarely the determining factor for food prices. It is the real estate cost. But we don’t talk about it.