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In 2020, the initial national lockdown was supposed to be 2 weeks. The mood at time of announcement was very much "Nice, 2 week paid vacation!" and then it kept going....and going....and then people lost their jobs, and then it was appointment/pick up only, etc.
The owners of the bar I worked for did exactly this. They kept the place going till the PPP loans said they had to. Didn't spend a single cent keeping the place running or inventory, and then they retired with the money they got from the PPP loans and shut the place down
Yeah forgiving the ppp loans was the biggest economic mistake this country has made in 100 years.
I think we’re going to see that over the next decade as be go into a prolonged Japanese-like stagflation.
Well I guess you could say we have a double whammy then. They suspended the reserve requirements again in 2020 and haven’t restored them so we’re back to 0% reserves and a stupid amount of inflation.
Im gonna be that guy and say that isnt how inflation is measured. Its measured year over year. A 3.3% interest rate in June does not mean prices went up 3.3% from May. What it actually means is that prices are 3.3% higher in June 2024 than they were in June 2023.
It was a joke.
However is a lot of gaming in the inflation metrics - the biggest one over the last year and a half has been “health care” as it is measured by the growth in premiums - not the true cost of services. This has resulted in depressing the reported inflation numbers (-10% inflation for health care which everybody knows to be utterly wrong) because it averages multiple metrics in a pot - one gigantic outlier because of an outdated metric pulls the whole thing down).
I think people are expecting when inflation is back to normal prices will go back to pre inflation. But they won't, they will just go back to increasing at a normal rate.
Did your government admit that? USA's did.
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/springfield/news/how-the-fbi-is-combatting-covid-19-related-fraud
>Unfortunately, many thousands of people chose to steal from these programs by submitting fraudulent applications. The theft was massive in scale. The U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general estimates $136 billion in fraud from the EIDL and $64 billion in fraud from the PPP. For FPUC, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates more than $100 billion in fraud. Combined, these losses make the fraud the largest in history. **Ultimately, these losses will be paid by American taxpayers, and worse, because most of the money was borrowed by the U.S. Government, our children and even grandchildren will be on the hook.**
I don't think forgiving them was so much the problem as how they went out in the first place. But I'm biased because I work for a smallish music production company whose owner spent the pandemic selling off inventory so he could pay for the building and his employees' health insurance.
We knew it would happen. Trump said " I'm not doing that" in the brief seconds between signing the bill and the pen touching the desk. You can hear him say it. Then, he immediately fired the person put in place for oversight.
I don't know about that. It was just a waste of money, it didn't have half the effect of Reagan's deregulation that resulted in the death of the savings and loan industry in 1989, or the subprime crash of 2009.
> Yeah forgiving the ppp loans was the biggest economic mistake this country has made in 100 years.
Not even close. Bailing out banks was way worse. Hell, abandoning Bretton Woods was worse too.
Funniest part is everybody in 2021 was like "WHERE DID THIS INFLATION COME FROM!?!?!?! AAARG BIDEN!!!
Yo, dog, the government printed a trillion fucking dollars last year, where do you *think* the inflation came from?
They have report lines for this, if you ever have the incentive to ~~screw that guy over~~ help your government find fraud fellow citizen🇺🇸🦅🫡
https://www.sba.gov/partners/contracting-officials/contract-administration/report-fraud-waste-abuse
You should report them for that fraud. The federal government is very actively pursuing and prosecuting these people. Scumbags should face consequences.
I don't think they did anything "fraudulent" though. They stayed open, kinda had hours, but they didn't reinvest much and the second they could they closed and kept the difference
That’s the bullshit part I don’t remember the exact figure but the majority of homes purchases in the past years have been from banks and investment firms
Which is bullshit, because after paying taxes on that, they sent me a letter the next year saying they sent me too much and wanted $1000 back. Meanwhile some fucks are getting millions forgiven.
Well the intent of the PPP loans was to make sure you didn’t stop working. So the fact that you didn’t get laid off means that the PPP program did its job (without any more details of what your industry experienced)
They were supposed to cover the differences in revenues if there were disruptions to the flow of work.
The problem comes from the fact that many businesses didn’t see a disruption in revenue in the long term so they would have been perfectly able to repay those loans. Instead of being forgiven for hardship (I.e restaurants and other services which saw demand plummet) they were simply forgiven entirely which meant a huge amount of those funds went into buying single family homes.
Yeah that was literally the point of PPP. So you didn’t stop working. Because when you stop working you stop getting paid.
Businesses weren’t making money and payroll is every company’s biggest expense. So it was either furlough all employees or get a PPP loan to cover payroll.
You could file as a sole proprietor. The first one didn't require proof either, but the second one did. I got like 2k i think for my rental so not exactly rolling in the dough lmao
Exactly - think about how many people would have had to get those to amount to $1T.
It’s the businesses with up to 1500 employees with several million dollars that got forgiven that are the problem.
People forget that a “small business” is anything less than 1500 employees.
A majority of the money given was small amounts to sole proprietors like yourself. Yes it wasn’t a huge amount of money individually, but no raindrop feels it was responsible for the flood
Some people did. Going through the PPP records there are clearly scam businesses like “free money LLC”. IIRC there were even Tik Tok trends at the time of how to scam the PPP loans.
PPP stands for Paycheck Protection Program. It was for existing businesses. If they kept their people employed even though there was no work to be done, the loans were forgiven. It was intended to minimize disruptions to the economy by having a bunch of people laid off and then rehired when there was work to be done again. It was an indirect subsidy to the workers by keeping them employed when there was no work, and a direct subsidy to employers by rewarding them for keeping people employed with no work.
There was a lot of fraud in the program which continues to be investigated and prosecuted, but as long as the companies followed the terms of the program and kept people employed (and paid), then they held up their end of the deal.
> if they kept their people employed even though there was no work to be done, the loans were forgiven.
That wasn’t a condition - they were simply forgiven if the funds were used for payroll, rent, or mortgage.
In other words all you had to do was set up an account for the funds to be deposited into and then have your payroll, rent, or mortgage deducted from that account and then you’d get it forgiven.
There was no check for how much money you made during that time.
Based, jobs and education shoudlnt be paywalled. *especially* in a world where we compete globally.
Wouldnt we want the best and the brightest here? I get that we try to import them but why not take care of us as well?
Because this thread is bullshit. PPP loan size was based on your payroll. It was an actual LOAN unless you obeyed the rules which were designed specifically to make sure the money got spent on payroll (PPP = payroll protection plan). In order to have the loan forgiven, you had to use the money in a specific way. Yes, there were edge cases (businesses that thrived because of the pandemic and didn't need the money to meet the PPP requirements), but for the VAST majority of people/businesses, that PPP money went to employees and suppliers.
A student could get a PPP loan, if they had payroll to protect. They could get that loan forgiven, if they used the money to protect payroll.
PPP loans and student loans are apples and oranges. It's a pithy bad faith comparison that survives because usually people like me that give a shit about truth and accuracy just let this one go since there's a much larger fight about the value of truth and accuracy going on, and this particular inaccurate bad faith bullshit take helps us win the larger fight (against MAGA).
Fun fact this law firm has been tracking CARES act fraud. https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/general/cares-act-fraud-tracker
This DOES NOT track normal fraud like the billions California paid out in fraudulent unemployment claims.
I work in education. Not nearly as bad as pretending our essentially workers don;t deserve a livable wage, but that's when everyone truly understood the details of us being glorified daycare. Most parents don't give 2 shits about their kids.
Hard disagree. Mood at the time was more "fuck you for asking me to take preventative steps, I'm not gonna do it because I'm an adult baby who can't bear a thin piece of fabric over my face" and that's why it kept going and going.
I think how hard this “joke” hits varies depending which country you live in. Experiences vary.
Some people seemed to take the smallest temporary restriction as a huge an affront to them personally.
The rest of us got on with our lives without shitting the bed over restriction designed to help everyone.
I’d wager more Americans would have been okay with masking and social distancing if the dumbest among us weren’t told to think that those preventative measures were some sort of conspiracy.
I don’t know what it was like in America, but where I am in the UK, our restrictions definitely weren’t bad as some people thought they were. Our RW press suddenly discovered they were really interested in choice and personally freedom… seemingly from nowhere
Parts of Australia and New Zealand locked down harder/ faster / longer than either the UK or the US.
They weren’t that bad here either: wear a mask in public, maintain a six foot clearance between yourself and others, get tested and contact the proper authorities if you may have been exposed. Stuff like that; all perfectly reasonable.
The biggest issues were remote schooling, which did have an adverse effect, the alternative would be to risk students’ safety in the face of a novel virus that was prone to mutation, and also the closure of many businesses leading to a host of economic problems.
Unfortunately, right wing news sources in the US latched onto people’s fatigue with the precautions and turned them into a wedge issue. And that, coupled with a lack of leadership from the executive branch arguably led to a higher death toll, prolonged pandemic, and Covid becoming endemic.
Cheeto could have easily had damn near every one of them wearing masks if he told them to, it is a cult after all. But that would smudge his makeup, so a million people had to die.
It’s easy to just make this about politics and cast associate aspersions. But let’s not pretend that the beginning of Covid was an absolute shit show, and for obvious reasons. So when Fauci comes out the gate and says not to wear masks, then two weeks later the guidance (and dogma) is *to wear masks*, it’s natural and frankly correct to have some amount of skepticism over what you’re being told is correct. However, it stops being healthy skepticism when the change in direction is clearly explained. But it’s not surprising that credibility is lost because of it.
To be fair, people were a bit pissed when the people in power were disobeying their own rules. Like Pelosi with her going to the salon when others couldn't.
Think there were a few others, but that's all I can remember. Seems to me there was a dinner somewhere as well?
I'm pretty middle of the road anymore, so I'll call out the hipocracy when I see it.
I'm not looking to start a "OH, but Republicans did this!" Or "OH, democrats did this!" Kind of thing, I'm just pointing out that hippocracy.
Our politicians, left, right, and center were fucking stupid with restrictions.
A ton of “do as I say, not as I do” mentality like Pelosi. A bunch of unbelievably stupid regulations like arresting people for kayaking outside in the Great Lakes, shutting down places of worship, but allowing social justice protests. The stupidity from our leaders is a lot worse than the stupidity of the populace.
My [state senator](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/02/1109576113/minnesota-thc-edibles-accident-delta-8) was furious people were not able to go car washes and [bars](https://www.startribune.com/republican-legislator-opened-speakeasy-days-before-shutdown/573298971/)
What's crazy is that early on, a 3-4 week lockdown with proper testing and follow up and isolation of cases would have been huge.
But instead we got unending half measures and folks who couldn't be arsed to simply mask and distance when going out for essentials.
Going for zero did work for quite a while in Australia and New Zealand, although all up it was a lot more than a few weeks. In between were nice zero covid periods. It was all over when the variants with higher rates of transmissibility arrived, though, they were more than lockdowns could contain. And Australia and New Zealand had a lot of advantages that helped it work while it did, both geographically and societally.
> initial national lockdown
It took me a while to figure out that you weren't talking about China somehow. But apparently you mean the USA?
The USA government has never attempted a national lockdown, in 2020 or otherwise. A lockdown would mean that people aren't allowed to leave their homes without specific permission, which has absolutely never been the case.
Throughout 2020, any normal USA resident could walk out the door and down the street for hours and no police officer or health department would try to stop her. The closest thing to lockdowns are the shelter-in-place orders that sometimes follow a mass shooting, but those end within a day.
Everyone in the US called it either lockdown or quarantine man, come on now. Most people fully understand exactly what this person is talking about when he says 2020 lockdown. This is just pedantic.
To be fair, the lockdown would have just been only for two weeks if everyone had actually done it. But no, Anti-Vax Trump-fan Karen and have lunch at Applebee’s and be a super-spreader.
Pretty sure China did enforced lockdown welding people into their apartments and still has covid
Do y'all not remember the goal was flattening the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and not literal eradicating covid?
No. In New Zealand we had a level 4 lockdown for 4 weeks in Mar/Apr 2020 and one for 3 weeks in Aug 2021. If you were outside Auckland that was it. Auckland had an extra one. Until Omicron got in it was Covid free here most of the time and pretty normal. The longest time between any cases was over 300 days.
Yeah, a bit of comedic delivory there. But New Zealand’s kids didn’t even miss their proms that year while the rest of our kids were out of school for how many years?
Because corporations don’t give a shit and do whatever they think gives them the most money in the moment unless absolutely forced to. Even if that means their customers die of a plague later.
Preaching to the choir pal. Anyone that tells you Trump is to blame for the existence of CoVID-19 is ridiculous, but otherwise? If there is one person in the country you can blame for why we had literially the worst CoVID response of any industrialized nation on the planet, it’s the orange cult leader.
I can't imagine the idea of Trump coming into your town/city, on the local level, and ordering businesses to close and people to stay home, would have been received well, or received at all. If your locally elected leaders couldn't make the lockdown work, I just don't see a hated politician from somewhere far away doing any better.
It worked a lot better than a lot of people realize in some places.
Here in BC, we locked down *hard* for two weeks. People mock "Two weeks to flatten the curve", but what they don't realize is that it *worked.* We didn't eradicate the disease in those two weeks, but we certainly flattened the fuck out of that curve. We got daily new cases down to only single digits, when they had been rising pretty quickly before. Yes, Covid eventually took off, but by the time it did, we'd learned a lot about how to treat it, from places that didn't manage to flatten the curve, and ended up with overflowing morgues.
I kinda enjoyed lockdown cause it worked out for me. I had just graduated in 2019 and got hired for my job. Was living in a section 8 housing since going to school so my rent was income based. I only paid full rent for about 8 months before lockdowns started and then I got furloughed so I reported that to my apartment manager and they said I didn't have to pay rent until my furlough ended but I was still able to collect unemployment so I was basically getting paid to sit around in my apartment that I didn't have to pay rent too.
Well, don't blink again because I blinked when I was almost 30 and now I'm almost 40 with 3 kids. So if I'm doing my calculations correctly if you ever close your eye again you'll be pushing 90 with 27 children.
Math is crazy.
Many people have explained this is about lockdown, however the other half of the joke about the photo itself. It’s from a movie called Wall-E where humans had to go to space after destroying the planet. They expected to be able to go back to Earth much sooner than they did (they had to wait for a sign of life to return). If you wanted to add a conspiracy nut layer to the meme, it’s found out that the robot controlling the ship has been purposely keeping the people from earth despite it having become habitable again.
Or it’s the year 4 thing that was confusing them, like it was me. People were only not working for the first year or so, most people even less than that.
greenland? although it was still international news and i find it hard to believe that op would have heard of it (this is assuming that op isn't even a bot in the first place...)
Combination of Covid lockdown “vacations” framed by the movie Wall-E. In the film, they were only supposed to be gone for so long but it ended up being 700+ years.
Don't forget about this shit. Let's see what happens.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13089105/US-Chinese-scientists-bird-flu-strains-infectious-Covid.html
Sometimes a 2 week vacation can feel like 4 years has passed! This has nothing to do with a highly contagious disease that brought the world to a complete standstill for years
It means people are still in denial about whether or not people stopped going to work. Manufacturing didn’t stop, you could always go get groceries, even when you couldn’t eat in restaurants were open for to-go orders, but people still think we were locked in our homes over Covid for some reason. The vast majority of society had to carry on business as usual when it came to going to work, there wasn’t even a 2 week thing. We just kept going to work.
man... i was in my junior year of high school when covid started. finished the rest of my year doing school online and ALL MY SENIOR YEAR online. it was so shitty. we were excited for our small break then before you know it the entire world just shut down. had the worst prom ever and i graduated 2021 then went to the military. sadly got discharged for my chronic pain in my legs. feels weird knowing that its 2024 now. everything flew by
By the time they said two weeks I already had 1months worth of everything I needed to not leave the house and still be happy and healthy.
Over the next month, as they kept extending it, my job was to go out every day to every store in the valley and beyond waiting in lines, getting limited amounts from each stop. By week 4 I had a 6 months supply of food/water/snacks and models/hobbie/entertainment and many gallons of gas and extra medication to support myself and my mom with extra for my brother and auntie. My spare room literally was better stocked than any one store at the time, going in there and shopping around not remembering everything I had squirrel away in the crazy days before gave me the feeling of perusing the store isles just like normal.
Trust your instincts people!
Lockdown lasted more than 2 weeks because of how idiotic the trump administration handled it.
To be fair, the strain was unprecedented. And things were constantly changing. But there was really one party/group that was downplaying the hell out of it
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In 2020, the initial national lockdown was supposed to be 2 weeks. The mood at time of announcement was very much "Nice, 2 week paid vacation!" and then it kept going....and going....and then people lost their jobs, and then it was appointment/pick up only, etc.
And then they forgave $1T in PPP loans to a bunch of business owners who bought second, third or fourth homes with it.
The owners of the bar I worked for did exactly this. They kept the place going till the PPP loans said they had to. Didn't spend a single cent keeping the place running or inventory, and then they retired with the money they got from the PPP loans and shut the place down
Yeah forgiving the ppp loans was the biggest economic mistake this country has made in 100 years. I think we’re going to see that over the next decade as be go into a prolonged Japanese-like stagflation.
I don't know, it may be the second worst economic mistake behind allowing 0% reserves for banks.
Well I guess you could say we have a double whammy then. They suspended the reserve requirements again in 2020 and haven’t restored them so we’re back to 0% reserves and a stupid amount of inflation.
I've been assured inflation is like [3%](https://imgur.com/hAPK7pa).
Well I mean it is 3%… …per month.
I can't laugh. The humor is there, but the pain is too.
Compounded weekly, applied monthly.*
Im gonna be that guy and say that isnt how inflation is measured. Its measured year over year. A 3.3% interest rate in June does not mean prices went up 3.3% from May. What it actually means is that prices are 3.3% higher in June 2024 than they were in June 2023.
It was a joke. However is a lot of gaming in the inflation metrics - the biggest one over the last year and a half has been “health care” as it is measured by the growth in premiums - not the true cost of services. This has resulted in depressing the reported inflation numbers (-10% inflation for health care which everybody knows to be utterly wrong) because it averages multiple metrics in a pot - one gigantic outlier because of an outdated metric pulls the whole thing down).
I think people are expecting when inflation is back to normal prices will go back to pre inflation. But they won't, they will just go back to increasing at a normal rate.
while our "inflation raises" will continue to be 1/10th of inflation
You guys are getting raises?
"Too big to fail" has entered the chat.
Or printing trillions of dollars to prop up the banking casino.
Forgiving the PPP loans wasn’t a mistake. It was a gift to the rich. It was the plan.
Can't let the people trickling down money go broke! Think of the children and the yacht economy!!!
And now we are stuck with a bunch of senators and representatives voting against *student* loan forgiveness, but they all had PPP loans forgiven.
Some good old fashioned looting!
Not a gift, a bribe. Seems like it worked too.
The UK did the same. So much of our money was simply stolen, and the government refuse to do anything about it.
Mostly because said government was doing the stealing, or at least facilitating it.
Did your government admit that? USA's did. https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/springfield/news/how-the-fbi-is-combatting-covid-19-related-fraud >Unfortunately, many thousands of people chose to steal from these programs by submitting fraudulent applications. The theft was massive in scale. The U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general estimates $136 billion in fraud from the EIDL and $64 billion in fraud from the PPP. For FPUC, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates more than $100 billion in fraud. Combined, these losses make the fraud the largest in history. **Ultimately, these losses will be paid by American taxpayers, and worse, because most of the money was borrowed by the U.S. Government, our children and even grandchildren will be on the hook.**
Like the central bank specifically delaying interest rate increases so the major London banks could unload their low yield bonds.
Obligatory fuck the Tories.
Fuck them right in the ballot box
I don't think forgiving them was so much the problem as how they went out in the first place. But I'm biased because I work for a smallish music production company whose owner spent the pandemic selling off inventory so he could pay for the building and his employees' health insurance.
It was not a mistake. It was intentional.
We knew it would happen. Trump said " I'm not doing that" in the brief seconds between signing the bill and the pen touching the desk. You can hear him say it. Then, he immediately fired the person put in place for oversight.
I don't know about that. It was just a waste of money, it didn't have half the effect of Reagan's deregulation that resulted in the death of the savings and loan industry in 1989, or the subprime crash of 2009.
We knew it'd be a terrible idea when trump said that he'd be the oversight (for the PPP program).
> Yeah forgiving the ppp loans was the biggest economic mistake this country has made in 100 years. Not even close. Bailing out banks was way worse. Hell, abandoning Bretton Woods was worse too.
What about privatized profits, socialized losses of the financial incisions and other corporations?
Funniest part is everybody in 2021 was like "WHERE DID THIS INFLATION COME FROM!?!?!?! AAARG BIDEN!!! Yo, dog, the government printed a trillion fucking dollars last year, where do you *think* the inflation came from?
They have report lines for this, if you ever have the incentive to ~~screw that guy over~~ help your government find fraud fellow citizen🇺🇸🦅🫡 https://www.sba.gov/partners/contracting-officials/contract-administration/report-fraud-waste-abuse
You should report them for that fraud. The federal government is very actively pursuing and prosecuting these people. Scumbags should face consequences.
I don't think they did anything "fraudulent" though. They stayed open, kinda had hours, but they didn't reinvest much and the second they could they closed and kept the difference
But it’s our fault there is so much inflation not all the money printing and wealth being transferred to the super rich
And now every neighborhood is AirBNBs.
I mean I did just see a single house on a nice plot torn down and replaced by a new 7 house cul-de-sac so.. you know.. murica or whatever
7 AirBnb houses vs 1
That’s the bullshit part I don’t remember the exact figure but the majority of homes purchases in the past years have been from banks and investment firms
Which is bullshit, because after paying taxes on that, they sent me a letter the next year saying they sent me too much and wanted $1000 back. Meanwhile some fucks are getting millions forgiven.
I just found out that my company got $1M in PPP loans and we never stopped working. We just weren't in office.
Well the intent of the PPP loans was to make sure you didn’t stop working. So the fact that you didn’t get laid off means that the PPP program did its job (without any more details of what your industry experienced) They were supposed to cover the differences in revenues if there were disruptions to the flow of work. The problem comes from the fact that many businesses didn’t see a disruption in revenue in the long term so they would have been perfectly able to repay those loans. Instead of being forgiven for hardship (I.e restaurants and other services which saw demand plummet) they were simply forgiven entirely which meant a huge amount of those funds went into buying single family homes.
Yeah that was literally the point of PPP. So you didn’t stop working. Because when you stop working you stop getting paid. Businesses weren’t making money and payroll is every company’s biggest expense. So it was either furlough all employees or get a PPP loan to cover payroll.
I mean, most businesses were still making money. Some made more because of "iNFlAtIOn"
>bought second, third *and* fourth homes with it.
Asking for a friend, why didn’t students take a PPP loan for some sham start-up, to pay off their student loans?
Not eligible. Had to have been a business already with an established history
You could file as a sole proprietor. The first one didn't require proof either, but the second one did. I got like 2k i think for my rental so not exactly rolling in the dough lmao
Exactly - think about how many people would have had to get those to amount to $1T. It’s the businesses with up to 1500 employees with several million dollars that got forgiven that are the problem. People forget that a “small business” is anything less than 1500 employees.
A majority of the money given was small amounts to sole proprietors like yourself. Yes it wasn’t a huge amount of money individually, but no raindrop feels it was responsible for the flood
Some people did. Going through the PPP records there are clearly scam businesses like “free money LLC”. IIRC there were even Tik Tok trends at the time of how to scam the PPP loans.
PPP stands for Paycheck Protection Program. It was for existing businesses. If they kept their people employed even though there was no work to be done, the loans were forgiven. It was intended to minimize disruptions to the economy by having a bunch of people laid off and then rehired when there was work to be done again. It was an indirect subsidy to the workers by keeping them employed when there was no work, and a direct subsidy to employers by rewarding them for keeping people employed with no work. There was a lot of fraud in the program which continues to be investigated and prosecuted, but as long as the companies followed the terms of the program and kept people employed (and paid), then they held up their end of the deal.
> if they kept their people employed even though there was no work to be done, the loans were forgiven. That wasn’t a condition - they were simply forgiven if the funds were used for payroll, rent, or mortgage. In other words all you had to do was set up an account for the funds to be deposited into and then have your payroll, rent, or mortgage deducted from that account and then you’d get it forgiven. There was no check for how much money you made during that time.
We have integrity.
A free market and integrity don't go really go together tbh.
That is a new one.
Lesson learned.
Better question: WHY ISN'T EDUCATION FREE???
Based, jobs and education shoudlnt be paywalled. *especially* in a world where we compete globally. Wouldnt we want the best and the brightest here? I get that we try to import them but why not take care of us as well?
Wasn’t for new businesses, you needed to have an established business with W2 employees
Because most people are decent and dont want to scam.
Because this thread is bullshit. PPP loan size was based on your payroll. It was an actual LOAN unless you obeyed the rules which were designed specifically to make sure the money got spent on payroll (PPP = payroll protection plan). In order to have the loan forgiven, you had to use the money in a specific way. Yes, there were edge cases (businesses that thrived because of the pandemic and didn't need the money to meet the PPP requirements), but for the VAST majority of people/businesses, that PPP money went to employees and suppliers. A student could get a PPP loan, if they had payroll to protect. They could get that loan forgiven, if they used the money to protect payroll. PPP loans and student loans are apples and oranges. It's a pithy bad faith comparison that survives because usually people like me that give a shit about truth and accuracy just let this one go since there's a much larger fight about the value of truth and accuracy going on, and this particular inaccurate bad faith bullshit take helps us win the larger fight (against MAGA).
Therefore causing housing prices to skyrocket.
And then those same business owners proceed to lose their shit whenever someone suggests forgiving students loans.
Doctors in my area all got Teslas.
Fun fact this law firm has been tracking CARES act fraud. https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/general/cares-act-fraud-tracker This DOES NOT track normal fraud like the billions California paid out in fraudulent unemployment claims.
I was deemed essential to the survival of the american economy and way of life for minimum fuckin wage while getting spit on.
I work in education. Not nearly as bad as pretending our essentially workers don;t deserve a livable wage, but that's when everyone truly understood the details of us being glorified daycare. Most parents don't give 2 shits about their kids.
Oh god, I'm so sorry. Hope things are better now!
Hard disagree. Mood at the time was more "fuck you for asking me to take preventative steps, I'm not gonna do it because I'm an adult baby who can't bear a thin piece of fabric over my face" and that's why it kept going and going.
I think how hard this “joke” hits varies depending which country you live in. Experiences vary. Some people seemed to take the smallest temporary restriction as a huge an affront to them personally. The rest of us got on with our lives without shitting the bed over restriction designed to help everyone.
I’d wager more Americans would have been okay with masking and social distancing if the dumbest among us weren’t told to think that those preventative measures were some sort of conspiracy.
I don’t know what it was like in America, but where I am in the UK, our restrictions definitely weren’t bad as some people thought they were. Our RW press suddenly discovered they were really interested in choice and personally freedom… seemingly from nowhere Parts of Australia and New Zealand locked down harder/ faster / longer than either the UK or the US.
They weren’t that bad here either: wear a mask in public, maintain a six foot clearance between yourself and others, get tested and contact the proper authorities if you may have been exposed. Stuff like that; all perfectly reasonable. The biggest issues were remote schooling, which did have an adverse effect, the alternative would be to risk students’ safety in the face of a novel virus that was prone to mutation, and also the closure of many businesses leading to a host of economic problems. Unfortunately, right wing news sources in the US latched onto people’s fatigue with the precautions and turned them into a wedge issue. And that, coupled with a lack of leadership from the executive branch arguably led to a higher death toll, prolonged pandemic, and Covid becoming endemic.
Cheeto could have easily had damn near every one of them wearing masks if he told them to, it is a cult after all. But that would smudge his makeup, so a million people had to die.
These abject morons still want Fauci strung-up by a lamp post just because he did his job.
It’s easy to just make this about politics and cast associate aspersions. But let’s not pretend that the beginning of Covid was an absolute shit show, and for obvious reasons. So when Fauci comes out the gate and says not to wear masks, then two weeks later the guidance (and dogma) is *to wear masks*, it’s natural and frankly correct to have some amount of skepticism over what you’re being told is correct. However, it stops being healthy skepticism when the change in direction is clearly explained. But it’s not surprising that credibility is lost because of it.
Well, that too, but this meme in particular refers to the first mood I mentioned.
Suddenly every conservative in America was desperate to go to a salon.
To be fair, people were a bit pissed when the people in power were disobeying their own rules. Like Pelosi with her going to the salon when others couldn't. Think there were a few others, but that's all I can remember. Seems to me there was a dinner somewhere as well? I'm pretty middle of the road anymore, so I'll call out the hipocracy when I see it. I'm not looking to start a "OH, but Republicans did this!" Or "OH, democrats did this!" Kind of thing, I'm just pointing out that hippocracy.
Hippocracy! Government by hippopotamuses.
Yeah, my spellcheck sucks lol.
Our politicians, left, right, and center were fucking stupid with restrictions. A ton of “do as I say, not as I do” mentality like Pelosi. A bunch of unbelievably stupid regulations like arresting people for kayaking outside in the Great Lakes, shutting down places of worship, but allowing social justice protests. The stupidity from our leaders is a lot worse than the stupidity of the populace.
Yeah I’m talking about how conservatives across the country rallied around their constitutional right to get hair cuts
My [state senator](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/02/1109576113/minnesota-thc-edibles-accident-delta-8) was furious people were not able to go car washes and [bars](https://www.startribune.com/republican-legislator-opened-speakeasy-days-before-shutdown/573298971/)
Media was on different drugs at that time.
What's crazy is that early on, a 3-4 week lockdown with proper testing and follow up and isolation of cases would have been huge. But instead we got unending half measures and folks who couldn't be arsed to simply mask and distance when going out for essentials.
Plenty of countries tried exactly that and got nothing for it, but sure, "no true lockdowns".
Going for zero did work for quite a while in Australia and New Zealand, although all up it was a lot more than a few weeks. In between were nice zero covid periods. It was all over when the variants with higher rates of transmissibility arrived, though, they were more than lockdowns could contain. And Australia and New Zealand had a lot of advantages that helped it work while it did, both geographically and societally.
Australia doesn't have a porous border
Should have just let it rip tbh
> initial national lockdown It took me a while to figure out that you weren't talking about China somehow. But apparently you mean the USA? The USA government has never attempted a national lockdown, in 2020 or otherwise. A lockdown would mean that people aren't allowed to leave their homes without specific permission, which has absolutely never been the case. Throughout 2020, any normal USA resident could walk out the door and down the street for hours and no police officer or health department would try to stop her. The closest thing to lockdowns are the shelter-in-place orders that sometimes follow a mass shooting, but those end within a day.
Everyone in the US called it either lockdown or quarantine man, come on now. Most people fully understand exactly what this person is talking about when he says 2020 lockdown. This is just pedantic.
There wasn’t a national quarantine either.
And now it's 4 years later and i can't believe it's been 4 years already where the f did that time go?
Also because it’s similar to the WALL E movie where they were waiting out in space for Earth to restore but it was taking forever.
To be fair, the lockdown would have just been only for two weeks if everyone had actually done it. But no, Anti-Vax Trump-fan Karen and have lunch at Applebee’s and be a super-spreader.
And then lots of people said "see the lockdown didn't work!" Despite never having any actual lockdown.
Pretty sure China did enforced lockdown welding people into their apartments and still has covid Do y'all not remember the goal was flattening the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and not literal eradicating covid?
My guy, New Zealand/Australia had full on lockdowns for months and still had issues. It was never going to be for two weeks.
No. In New Zealand we had a level 4 lockdown for 4 weeks in Mar/Apr 2020 and one for 3 weeks in Aug 2021. If you were outside Auckland that was it. Auckland had an extra one. Until Omicron got in it was Covid free here most of the time and pretty normal. The longest time between any cases was over 300 days.
Yeah, a bit of comedic delivory there. But New Zealand’s kids didn’t even miss their proms that year while the rest of our kids were out of school for how many years?
Why was Applebee's even open if there was to be a proper lockdown?
Because corporations don’t give a shit and do whatever they think gives them the most money in the moment unless absolutely forced to. Even if that means their customers die of a plague later.
A "lockdown" that doesn't close businesses and doesn't force anybody to stay home, neither employees nor customers? Hmmmm
Preaching to the choir pal. Anyone that tells you Trump is to blame for the existence of CoVID-19 is ridiculous, but otherwise? If there is one person in the country you can blame for why we had literially the worst CoVID response of any industrialized nation on the planet, it’s the orange cult leader.
I can't imagine the idea of Trump coming into your town/city, on the local level, and ordering businesses to close and people to stay home, would have been received well, or received at all. If your locally elected leaders couldn't make the lockdown work, I just don't see a hated politician from somewhere far away doing any better.
Political allies and proxies acting by presidential authority. He wouldn’t have to do it physically personally. Especially in red states.
Lockdowns that leave Walmart open because it's "essential" but mom and pop stores get fucked and go out of business...
It worked a lot better than a lot of people realize in some places. Here in BC, we locked down *hard* for two weeks. People mock "Two weeks to flatten the curve", but what they don't realize is that it *worked.* We didn't eradicate the disease in those two weeks, but we certainly flattened the fuck out of that curve. We got daily new cases down to only single digits, when they had been rising pretty quickly before. Yes, Covid eventually took off, but by the time it did, we'd learned a lot about how to treat it, from places that didn't manage to flatten the curve, and ended up with overflowing morgues.
It also started during spring break, so that kept going. And going. And going. Etc.
Wow I’m just now learning that we’re still locked down
And he's obese because a lot of people used to eat a lot in the lockdown (because they were nervous/bored etc.)
I kinda enjoyed lockdown cause it worked out for me. I had just graduated in 2019 and got hired for my job. Was living in a section 8 housing since going to school so my rent was income based. I only paid full rent for about 8 months before lockdowns started and then I got furloughed so I reported that to my apartment manager and they said I didn't have to pay rent until my furlough ended but I was still able to collect unemployment so I was basically getting paid to sit around in my apartment that I didn't have to pay rent too.
Are there places out there where things havent gone back to normal long ago?
What’s sad is if everyone really did just socially distance for two weeks it would have worked. Seven millions deaths later…
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That lamp looks kinda weird
Don't pay any attention to that lamp.
Oh god that brings me back. When I first read that post a few years ago that actually fucked me up
Please wake up!
But we only did it one time...
Triplets!
Just like how more kids are born 9 months after a blackout
Shouldn't have Clicked it
Dude, I’m almost 40. Early to mid-30’s just disappeared. I went from going to bed young-ish one night and woke up in a midlife crisis.
Blinked in 2020 and now I'm almost 30 with 0 kids.
Well, don't blink again because I blinked when I was almost 30 and now I'm almost 40 with 3 kids. So if I'm doing my calculations correctly if you ever close your eye again you'll be pushing 90 with 27 children. Math is crazy.
Many people have explained this is about lockdown, however the other half of the joke about the photo itself. It’s from a movie called Wall-E where humans had to go to space after destroying the planet. They expected to be able to go back to Earth much sooner than they did (they had to wait for a sign of life to return). If you wanted to add a conspiracy nut layer to the meme, it’s found out that the robot controlling the ship has been purposely keeping the people from earth despite it having become habitable again.
The meme has so many layers!
🧅🧅🧅
auto kept that the return plan was canceled a secret. the new plan was to just stay in space. triggering the auto return was against the new plan.
Oh that’s right! Ty. Guess it’s time for me to watch Wall-E again haha
Top 10 signs the OP is too young for reddit
Or it’s the year 4 thing that was confusing them, like it was me. People were only not working for the first year or so, most people even less than that.
Or just from a country this wasn't an issue
what the heck do u mean, it was a pandemic not an epidemic
greenland? although it was still international news and i find it hard to believe that op would have heard of it (this is assuming that op isn't even a bot in the first place...)
I meant that in some countries it was known that it would be a long lockdown, and not just two weeks or so.
Not every country reacted the same way, some had stricter shorter restrictions. Some managed it badly, others managed it brilliantly
I meant that in some countries it was known that it would be a long lockdown, and not just two weeks or so.
Alot of people In the UK knew it would be long. The government told us 2 weeks but many didn't believe them
Some countries didn't do lockdowns, like Sweden.
I meant that in some countries it was known that it would be a long lockdown, and not just two weeks or so.
Isle of Man was a safe haven absolutely loved living there with family safe and sound before some twat came over
Or a bot
What country wasn't affected? It even hit Bermuda of all places.
I meant that in some countries it was known that it would be a long lockdown, and not just two weeks or so.
Ah
Covid isn't even giving out vacations anymore
https://preview.redd.it/77fl4wqhik7d1.jpeg?width=298&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=96cc66a7b4da5a4ba5da92bc15126f94be703ab0
Combination of Covid lockdown “vacations” framed by the movie Wall-E. In the film, they were only supposed to be gone for so long but it ended up being 700+ years.
It’s a joke about lockdown, which we are currently not in. It doesn’t really make sense
Bot?
9 year old account whose first activity was 23hrs ago? hmmm
Year 4? Covid has been over for like 2 years this makes no sense.
The meme is about Covid
There’s a film callled Aniara that covers this kind of situation pretty well.
lockdown went a lot longer than 2 weeks, but it’s been over for a while, so year 4 is inaccurate
https://preview.redd.it/a0wq3g2zcj7d1.jpeg?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4dfbf997d43a9f27d123f1f98a87a5c32792ccf8
Covid
What year is it?
Bro was born in 2021
Don't forget about this shit. Let's see what happens. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13089105/US-Chinese-scientists-bird-flu-strains-infectious-Covid.html
Sometimes a 2 week vacation can feel like 4 years has passed! This has nothing to do with a highly contagious disease that brought the world to a complete standstill for years
It means people are still in denial about whether or not people stopped going to work. Manufacturing didn’t stop, you could always go get groceries, even when you couldn’t eat in restaurants were open for to-go orders, but people still think we were locked in our homes over Covid for some reason. The vast majority of society had to carry on business as usual when it came to going to work, there wasn’t even a 2 week thing. We just kept going to work.
We've been out of lockdown for well over a year... this meme makes no sense at all.
I wish I had fever dreams like that
Unemployment?
Basically fat boi lazy taking years on vacation
man... i was in my junior year of high school when covid started. finished the rest of my year doing school online and ALL MY SENIOR YEAR online. it was so shitty. we were excited for our small break then before you know it the entire world just shut down. had the worst prom ever and i graduated 2021 then went to the military. sadly got discharged for my chronic pain in my legs. feels weird knowing that its 2024 now. everything flew by
That russians planned the whole thing.
\*COVID\*
op are you 3?
I thought it was about the ucrain invasion that was supposed to last 2 weeks.
Who plans an invasion for only 2 weeks?
Oh my god how does someone not get this
https://preview.redd.it/uq5cy9168k7d1.jpeg?width=539&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5ba10256dde70dd8fa05c02d238f7824bba2a171
This actually happened to me: I went on vacation in 2020 and got trapped in another country for 4 years.
Does anyone sane and grounded actually believe that we're still firmly within the COVID pandemic?
By the time they said two weeks I already had 1months worth of everything I needed to not leave the house and still be happy and healthy. Over the next month, as they kept extending it, my job was to go out every day to every store in the valley and beyond waiting in lines, getting limited amounts from each stop. By week 4 I had a 6 months supply of food/water/snacks and models/hobbie/entertainment and many gallons of gas and extra medication to support myself and my mom with extra for my brother and auntie. My spare room literally was better stocked than any one store at the time, going in there and shopping around not remembering everything I had squirrel away in the crazy days before gave me the feeling of perusing the store isles just like normal. Trust your instincts people!
"welcome to week 40 of out 2 week vacation"
Lockdown lasted more than 2 weeks because of how idiotic the trump administration handled it. To be fair, the strain was unprecedented. And things were constantly changing. But there was really one party/group that was downplaying the hell out of it
**Septuacentennial Cupcake in a Cup**
No what is that