The Less Blob

I don't understand how these places don't have some online capacity. It's like the 60 year old guy at my office who has to schlep in on the subway and hour each way because he cannot work from home because he doesn't have Wi-Fi ( and isn't able to get it any time soon). Jeez, why not have an eBay account and list the 50 free items? I know why.... None of these guys want to deal with shipping stuff.

I'm guessing he is around social security age, so maybe a no brainer for him.

People start these posts thinking the jaded members here will offer them boxes of loot sight unseen for their treasure. I have news for you, they're too busy stocking up on ammo and TP right now.

Worse, the CDC actually told a northwest doctor running a flu study who suspected it NOT to test for it. She ignored them and helped identify the Washington cluster.

I read the east coast cases may have started with someone coming back from Iran. People coming back from Italy as well.

fer sure. F the cruise lines. And F the airlines. Don't want them to all go under, of course, but...

Some of the assignments are drawings and writing.... 3rd grade math is tricky...but yes, my wife showed me, while screaming

Mine does not. Yes, I will eat the yearly fee they charged in Sept. But I can dump Blink when I want.

My youngest has a bazillion on line assignments. The teacher is just sending a zillion of them. Many are very hard to do on a laptop and really need you to print out many pages. I don't have much printer ink, so this is all very awkward and hovering over my kid badgering him to do 4 hours of homework a day while I am working full time may drive me insane. We are being sent PDFs to do writing assignments on. I have to convert them to word to be able to edit, which messes everything up. For handwritten stuff we need to take pics of it and upload it. I can't stand this!!

Let's not forget 6.4% whatever social security and other doo dads on your first $130somethingthousand of individual income. (I won't even get into the 13.4% or whatever in local income taxes I pay, that isn't Warren Buffet's problem) If all your income is capital gains and qualified dividends your rate is 15-18.8% (15% + a 3.8% medicare sur-tax) in that upper middle class income range. And you don't pay SS taxes on it either. I think it goes to 23.8% (20% + the sur-tax) in the $500K+ range. So, yeah, that 3.8% sur-tax on higher incomes may make it a bit more than half the % I pay, so billionaires may be paying a bit more now. yay! Of course, that is before deductions billionaires have that I probably don't as a stupid wage slave. Granted, I am a disgusting lawyer, so I deserve this, but the infectious disease specialist going to war right now who pays nearly 2X the tax rate as the hedge fund manager...

I don't disagree. But the very rich (who tend to have income via capital gains and other income taxed at a lower rate than labor) pay about half the overall tax rate I do. Part of that is compounded by me paying SS on nearly all of my income and they may not pay it on any of their's. I am upper middle class simply by virtue of the fact that I live in a two white collar professional home and my wife, literally, has 4 jobs and never stops working. Yes, obviously, unless they are in some "no tax" situation due to various loopholes and loss carry overs or whatever, they pay more than I do in total $. But we have a tax system that rewards investment and passive income (and also building a company, hard work for sure), does not reward "labor" the same way. Until I have some huge capital gain that gets favorable tax treatment I am not thrilled with this. I am not all in on confiscatory tax rates and all that, but, at a minimum, I don't think these folks should pay lower than I do.

I would make that three administrations. Bush II had a great opportunity to run a surplus even with the 2000/2001 crash (there were surpluses in both years), but decided to get involved in a 2 front war. The deficit was $442 billion in 2015 and $585 billion in 2016. So while it was huge during the recession in 2009 and a couple of years thereafter, they got down when things were good economically. Yes, those are higher than I'd like, but not crazy. His successor, however, needlessly exploded the deficit during boom times, I agree. But 10-15% unemployment and that kind of instability for years will bring social upheaval. We probably will get a genuine socialist elected president then.

This is what some folks said in 2008/9 and while there were certainly issues with that bailout, we did technically get out of the recession by the second half of 2009 and the S&P 500 had bounced back by the end of the year. I am not in favor of a 2-3 year recession and 15-20% unemployment in the name of fiscal discipline.

I think this sort of "kicking" in a national emergency is probably preferable to tax cuts to billionaires who already pay half my tax rate and amazon during economic boom times, but I don't want to sound political....

I'm not an economist (my degree in economics certainly does not qualify me as one), but we probably avoided some inflation in 2008/9 because most asset values collapsed 40-50%. So the money pumping basically just slowly offset some of that. I dunno about other assets, but we've certainly seen that for stocks. We'll see how real estate plays out. Oil is down, but I don't see the Saudis flooding the market long term.

They said that in 2008/9 too. It did not happen. It should have, but did not.

I am not going to buy iTunes of Sabbath, Metallica, and whatever else I like to torture my family with! I have those damn CDs!

This is something hitting all "face to face" businesses right now. Do you think all the gyms will close too because people got used to online workouts? (Which have been around forever). Heck, maybe, I dunno. My wife likes hitting the gym and doing her classes, but if she gets the same workout for free or $9.99 in our living room rather than $199.99 a month, maybe she does that. I'm an old fart, reading comics on line doesn't work for me, but you're right, my teenager has no problem doing so and he hates floppies too, prefers TPBs.

Yeah, and, as a result, a CD player, which was pretty standard on economy cars is now a high priced luxury item on a $40K+ SUV. The 2005 model car I drive has a CD player, my wife's new Traverse does not....have to use iTunes and the radio...a CD player would have been like $1200 more or something nonsensical for a lease. I am not on with the interwebs musics yet. I like my CDs...

The SS is priced around what it cost to enslabulate and get his sig. The book is "free"... Honestly, I am just trying to figure out how to evaluate the SS books and it seems there is no formula

It has not yet popped in many states. We shall see. I hope you're right. I fully expect to be working remotely until April 20 at the earliest (I am authorized until 3/31, but they can re-up that), when the schools here are supposed to re-open, but we shall see if that happens as some school systems already shut down for the year in states with few cases. I know here in NYC where this is exploding the teachers unions will fight and the way the mayor and chancellor messed up (not reporting cases to the CDC!!!) they have pretty good grounds.

you have this in Oregon, so its not all bad:

Totally different. The 90s were caused by a glut. We don't really have a glut here. I am not so sure so many LCS close up unless they were on the brink anyway. If they were paying their rent in the past, why would their landlords not work with them? It's not like there is a ton of retail looking to move in. If they were constantly behind, probably not. there is a lot of retail space out there, I think the landlords on average are going to be smarter. And I don't think comic shops are the kinds of places people will be scared to go back to. crowded bars, clubs, maybe movie theatres, flights....

I am pretty happy I am no longer on the okBoomer facebook group. I suspect there are a lot of youngsters on there both reveling in potential boomer deaths, but also losing their mess because their retail/food jobs have been shut down.

Folks doing this for $7.25 are not getting combat pay for sure. I suppose it is better than being out of work though. At least by me it is $15, so I feel less bad for them. Still not worth getting sick for, but if you're paying the bills..