It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
DURING THE SARS OUTBREAK THE TORONTO SUN NEWSPAPER HAD A COVER PHOTO OF A HOSPITAL WORKER IN A MASK, SMOKING A CIGARETTE DEFEATING THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE MASK
Tyson Foods Warns “Food Supply Chain is Breaking” in the United States
"Millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain."
(ZH) — News feeds in April have been inundated with food supply chain disruption stories due to coronavirus-related shutdowns. At least a third of US meatpacking facilities handling hogs have shifted offline this month, other plants that process cows and chickens have also shuttered operations, forcing farmers to cull herds and flocks. This is because each plant closure diminishes the ability for a farmer to sell animals at the market, leaves them with overcapacity issues similar to the turmoil facing the oil industry. Only unlike oil where pumped oil must be stored somewhere (as one can’t just dump it in the nearest river) even if that ends up costing producers money as we saw last Monday when oil prices turned negative for the first time ever, food producers have a simpler option: just killing their livestock.
We previously explained what this imbalance has created: crashing live cattle spot prices while finished meat prices are soaring, which doesn’t just affect farmers but also consumers simultaneously and could spark a shortage of meat at grocery stores as soon as the first week of May.
And in the starkest warning yet that high food prices could last for a long time, Tyson Foods warned in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday that the “food supply chain is breaking.”
“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” wrote Tyson Chairman John Tyson, patriarch of the company’s founding family, in a Tyson Foods website post that also ran as a full-page ad in several newspapers. “The food supply chain is breaking.”
Confirming the worst fears of American pork and bacon consumers, Tyson wrote that the company has been forced to close plants, and that federal, state and local government officials needed to coordinate to allow plants to operate safely, “without fear, panic or worry” among employees. He warned that supply shortages of its products will be seen at grocery stores, as at least a dozen major meatpacking plants close operations for virus-related issues.
Brett Stuart, president of Denver-based consulting firm Global AgriTrends, calls the situation “absolutely unprecedented.” “It’s a lose-lose situation where we have producers at the risk of losing everything and consumers at the risk of paying higher prices.”
Last week, Smithfield Foods, one of the top pork producers in the world, closed another operation in Illinois. That news came directly after Hormel Foods closed two of its Jennie-O turkey plants in Minnesota. Then it was reported over the weekend that major poultry plants across Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia had reduced hours because of worker shortages due to virus issues. And then on Sunday, JBS USA closed a large beef production facility in Wisconsin.
“During this pandemic, our entire industry is faced with an impossible choice: continue to operate to sustain our nation’s food supply or shutter in an attempt to entirely insulate our employees from risk,” Smithfield said in a statement Friday. “It’s an awful choice; it’s not one we wish on anyone.”
Bloomberg’s map shows the latest closures of meatpacking plants:
Even before the Tyson warnings, last week we cautioned that it was appropriate to label virus outbreaks at meatpacking plants as the “next disaster zones” of the pandemic. This wasn’t just because of workers and USDA inspectors were contracting the virus, and in some cases dying – but because food shortages could also add to social instabilities during a pandemic and economic crisis.
The distress in the agricultural space has not been limited to just livestock. Dairy and produce farmers have had to dump or throw out spoiled products due to a collapse in demand for bulk products, mostly because of shifting supply chains with the closure of restaurants, cruise ships, hotels, resorts, education systems, and anyone else who is not deemed essential in a lockdown.
What this means is that farmers who generally sell bulk products do not have the means at the moment to convert product lines into individual items for direct to consumer selling. This will take time for the conversion. So, in the meantime, with no customers, farmers have to dump.
“Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.”
Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.”
The immediate outcome of this food supply chain collapse will be even more rapid food inflation, hitting Americans at a time of unprecedented economic hardships with at least 26.5 million now unemployed since the pandemic struck the US.
And with a sharp economic recession, if not outright depression unfolding, more Americans are ditching grocery stores for food banks, putting incredible stress on these charities, which has forced the government to deploy National Guard troops at many locations to ensure food security to the neediest.
(TMU) — When it comes to cosmology, astronomy, and physics, there is no shortage of off-the-wall arguments and hypotheses. While new discoveries from the early moments of the Big Bang and quantum and particle physics continue to amaze us and fill in the gaps of our mysterious universe, there remains a stunning number of questions we still can’t answer.
The most fundamental of these questions revolve around “why anything” and “why consciousness.” Why is there anything here at all? What primal state of existence could have possibly birthed all that matter, energy, and time, all that everything? And how did consciousness arise—is it some fundamental proto-state of the universe itself, or an emergent phenomenon that is purely neurochemical and material in nature?
A new physics hypothesis attempts to answer both questions at the same time with a new spin on panpsychism that weds aspects of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument with something called “timeless emergentism.” The hypothesis, outlined in a new paper by a team of researchers at the Quantum Gravity Research institute, is called the “panpsychic self-simulation model,” and while the authors certainly aren’t earning any points for intellectual modesty, their idea may just be capable of peacefully mapping some of the universe’s most wild conundrums.
The first pieces of this puzzle you may have already heard of: the Simulation Argument is a pop-culture staple now, most famously popularized when Elon Musk claimed it’s far more likely that we are living in a simulation created by an advanced intelligence. Then there is the age-old belief in panpsychism, which posits that the entire universe is a type of panconscious entity and that even ordinary matter is imbued with proto-consciousness.
The new argument gets rid of the middleman and suggests that panconsciousness itself is generating the simulations, not advanced aliens, and that the universe is one giant “mental self-simulation.”
The paper, titled “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” says the physical universe is a “strange loop” that can self-generate new sub-realities in an almost infinite hierarchy of tiers in-laid with simulated realities of conscious experience, kind of like a psychic Matryoshka doll.
You’re still left with the mystery of the physical origins of this self-generating consciousness, to which the researchers reply that the answer is actually non-material. The paper argues that universal consciousness “self-actualizes” using a natural algorithm called “the principle of efficient language.”
In other words, the universe is creating itself through thought, willing itself into existence on a perpetual loop that efficiently uses all mathematics and fundamental particles at its disposal.
The universe, they say, was always here (timeless emergentism) and is like one grand thought that creates mini thoughts, called “code-steps or actions”, again like a Matryoshka doll.
Quantum Gravity physicist David Chester broke down some recent findings they feel bolster the argument: “While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct. Recent advances in quantum gravity, such as seeing spacetime emergent via a hologram, also is a hint that spacetime is not fundamental. This is also compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy. In a sense, the mental construct of reality creates spacetime to efficiently understand itself by creating a network of subconscious entities that can interact and explore the totality of possibilities.”
The paper also suggests that the purpose of this single looping, self-generating consciousness is to explore and develop meaning through information. They also discuss future prospects, such as studying lucid dreams to better understand simulations and the idea of developing consciousness that does not require matter at all.
(MPN) — A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days. This is despite the fact that the economy isexpected to contract by 40 percent this quarter.
The report also noted that between 1980 and 2020 the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent. In the last 30 years, U.S. billionaire wealth soared by over 1100 percent while median household wealth increased by barely five percent. In 1990, the total wealth held by America’s billionaire class was $240 billion; today that number stands at $2.95 trillion.
Thus, America’s billionaires accrued more wealth in just the past three weeks than they made in total prior to 1980. As a result, just three people – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet – own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined. The Institute for Policy Studies’ report paints a picture of a modern day oligarchy, where the super-rich have captured legislative and executive power, controlling what laws are passed. The report discusses what it labels a new “wealth defense industry” – where “billionaires are paying millions to dodge billions in taxes,” with teams of accountants, lawyers, lobbyists and asset managers helping them conceal their vast fortunes in tax havens and so-called charitable trusts. The result has been crippled social programs and a decrease in living standards and even asustained drop in life expectancy – something rarely seen in history outside of major wars or famines.Few Americans believe their children will be better off than they were. Statistics suggest they are right.
Billionaires very theatrically donate a fraction of what they used to give back in taxes, making sure to generate maximum publicity for their actions. And they secure positive coverage of themselves by stepping in to keep influential news organizations afloat. A Decemberinvestigation by MintPress found that Gates had donated over $9 million to The Guardian, over $3 million to NBC Universal, over $4.5 million to NPR, $1 million to Al-Jazeera, and a staggering $49 million to the BBC’s Media Action program. Some, like Bezos, prefer to simply outright purchase news organizations themselves, changing the editorial stance to unquestioningloyalty to their new owners. The spike in billionaire wealth comes amid an unprecedented economic crash;26.5 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the last five weeks, and that number is expected to continue to rise dramatically. While the super-rich are holed up in their mansions and yachts, the49-62 million Americans designated as “essential workers” must continue to risk their lives to keep society functioning, even as many of them do not even earn as much as the$600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits the CARES act stipulates. Many low paid workers, such as grocery store employees, have already fallen sick and died. The mother of one 27-year-old Maryland worker who contracted COVID-19 and diedreceived her daughter’s last paycheck. It amounted to $20.64.
Amazon staff, directly employed by Bezos, also risk their lives for measly pay.One third of all Amazon workers in Arizona, for example, are enrolled in the food stamps program, their wages so low that they cannot afford to pay for food. The vast contrast in the effect that COVID-19 has had on the super wealthy versus the rest of us has many concluding that billionaires’ wealth and the poverty of the rest of the world are two sides of the same coin: that the reason people working full-time still cannot afford a house or even to eat is the same reason people like Bezos control more wealth than many countries. Bezos’ solution to his employees’ hunger has been to set up a charity and ask for public donations to help his desperate workers. The majority of millennials, most of them shut out from attaining the American dream,already prefer socialism to capitalism, taking a dim view of the latter. The latest news that the billionaire class is laughing all the way to the bank during a period of intense economic suffering is unlikely to improve their disposition.
Spanish Beach Sprayed With Bleach, Causing “Brutal Damage” to Local Animals
Spanish authorities were forced to apologize for spraying a beach with bleach.
(TMU) — Authorities in a Spanish coastal town have been forced to apologize after they sprayed a local beach with bleach in a clumsy attempt to protect residents from the coronavirus. The apology from officials in the fishing village of Zahara de los Atunes, near Cadiz, comes after they used tractors to spray the beach with a bleach solution in anticipation of a planned four-phased lifting of quarantine measures and the release of children from lockdown for the first time in six weeks.
However, the move became the subject of regional outcry as environmentalists claimed it caused “brutal damage” to the local ecosystem just as it was in the midst of a respite due to the lockdown, reports El Pais.
Officials sprayed roughly one thousand liters of water with a two-percent bleach solution over the Zahara de los Atunes beaches on Saturday in hopes to provide a cheap way of “disinfecting” the beach.
But according to local environmental activist María Dolores Iglesias, the bleach did unconscionable harm to the local ecology, which consisted of beaches and dunes that offered breeding and nesting space for protected migratory birds such as the black-backed plover.
Iglesias claims she witnessed at least one nest filled with eggs get completely destroyed by a tractor, while the bleach “killed everything on the ground, nothing is seen—not even insects.”
Continuing, she explained:
“Bleach is used as a very powerful disinfectant, it is logical that it be used to disinfect streets and asphalt, but here the damage has been brutal.
“They have devastated the dune spaces and gone against all the rules. It has been an aberration what they have done, also taking into account that the virus lives in people not on the beach. It is crazy.”
Like many locations across the globe, the beaches at Zahara de los Atunes experienced thriving conditions for wildlife due to the lockdown. Yet the local authorities ham-fisted attempt to clean the beach indicated a basic disrespect of the local ecosystem. Iglesias explained:
“The beach has its own way of cleaning itself, it was not necessary.
“They do not think that this is a living ecosystem, but a lot of land.”
La naturaleza se recupera en muchas zonas, gracias a la ausencia de humanos. Pues nada, fumigamos las playas con lejía para joder a aves y demás microorganismos, en playas por las que no ha pasado nadie en 40 días. Zahara de los Atunes, Cadiz. 👏👏👏👏 Óscar a la inteligencia.
As the Andalusian regional government mulls imposing penalties on the local authority for the move, local official Agustín Conejo offered a sorrowful public apology, admitting that it was a “wrong move.”
“I admit that it was a mistake, it was done with the best intentions,” Conejo explained.
The town of 1,300 residents has been trying to shield itself from the spreading pandemic by spraying streets with disinfectant solution and even erected a “fumigation arch” for cars entering the village.
Environmentalist group Greenpeace in Spain compared the autonomous local government’s move to the recent suggestion by U.S. President Donald Trump that doctors “look into” injecting patients with disinfectant to rid them of coronavirus.
“Fumigating beaches in the middle of the breeding season for birds or the development of the invertebrate network that will support coastal fishing… is not one of Trump’s ideas. It is happening in Zahara de los Atunes.”
Fumigar con lejía playas en plena época de cría de aves o de desarrollo de la red de invertebrados que sustentarán la pesca costera y destrozar el valor turístico del litoral, no es una de las ideas de Trump. Está ocurriendo en Zahara de los Atunes 👇https://t.co/afCFLg1sVG — Greenpeace España (@greenpeace_esp) April 27, 2020
The total death toll in Spain now stands at 24,275, making it one of the countries hit worst by the novel coronavirus. On Tuesday, the country announced that there were 1,308 new infections—the lowest number yet since the country announced a state of emergency on March 14. However, by Wednesday the number quickly shot up to 2,144 new infections, reports El Pais.
The country’s center-left government under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has come under harsh criticism from opposition parties for an announced plan to begin relaxing quarantine measures and return to a “new normality” by the end of June. The announced de-escalation will follow a four-stage plan with no set dates, contingent on the severity of the outbreak in each province.
The Largest Ozone Hole Ever Recorded Over North Pole Has Finally ‘Healed Itself’ and Closed "COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns probably had nothing to do with this."
(TMU) — The massive ozone hole that formed over the North Pole has finally closed, scientists have announced.
Researchers from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) who were tracking the record-breaking ozone hole over the Arctic tweeted last Thursday:“The unprecedented 2020 Northern Hemisphere ozone hole has come to an end.”
The hole, which was the single largest such ozone hole ever detected in the arctic, first opened in late March as unusual wind conditions trapped frigid air over the North Pole for several consecutive weeks.
However, scientists took pains to point out that the closing of the hole has nothing to do with drop in emissions recorded across the world as a result of lockdown measures meant to curb the coronavirus.
“COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns probably had nothing to do with this.
“It’s been driven by an unusually strong and long-lived polar vortex, and isn’t related to air quality changes.”
Live Science reports that a polar vortex is comprised of powerful winds that create a circular cage of cold air that leads to the formation of high-altitude clouds in the region. The clouds mixed with harmful human-made chemicals such as chlorine and bromine, which migrated into the stratosphere and accumulated inside the vortex.
The unprecedented 2020 northern hemisphere #OzoneHole has come to an end. The #PolarVortex split, allowing #ozone-rich air into the Arctic, closely matching last week's forecast from the #CopernicusAtmosphere Monitoring Service.
The chemicals then ate away at surrounding gases, thinning the ozone layer and forming a huge hole approximately three times the size of Greenland in the atmosphere, according to a European Space Agency (ESA) statement.
The ozone layer is the layer in the Earth’s stratosphere that is responsible for absorbing the ultraviolet (UV) rays of the Sun, effectively filtering out radiation that causes skin cancer among humans, destroys crops, and disrupts marine ecosystems among other devastating effects on the planet.
The ozone layer has faced decades of degradation thanks to the use of harmful chemical compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons, halons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, and other organic and synthetic (human-made) ozone-depleting compounds that are commonly used in refrigerators, aerosols, and a range of industrial processes.
The startling decline of the ozone layer became such a dire matter of concern that in 1987, governments agreed to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty meant to phase out the production and use of ozone-depleting chemicals.
However, ozone holes have continued to form annually in the Antarctic due to a failure to sufficiently check the amount of human-made chemicals that continue to make their way into the stratosphere. Scientists believe that this will remain a seasonal phenomenon in the future.
In October, the ozone hole shrank to its smallest size ever recorded, mainly due to the unusually hot climate conditions above Antarctica caused by global warming.
In the Arctic, polar vortexes tend to be far weaker, which means that the conditions which eat away at ozone gases aren’t typically found—hence the “unprecedented” nature of this ozone hole. According to a 2018 study by the World Meteorological Organization, the southern ozone hole has been shrinking at a rate of 1 percent to 3 percent per decade since 2000, meaning that it won’t heal entirely until about 2050. Credit is also due to the Montreal Protocol for the apparent healing of the ozone layer.
Silence is Golden for Whales as Global Lockdown Reduces Ocean Noise Scientists say whales are less stressed out and enjoying conversations without all of the racket caused by ships.
(TMU) — If we’ve learned one thing from the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that the dramatic global lockdown and economic downturn has given nature room to breathe.
It seems that the silver lining in the global health crisis has extended to more than a reduction of air pollution over urban zones and wildlife taking back its habitats in the absence of tourists. The drop in underwater noise pollution has also been quite beneficial for whales and other aquatic mammals.
And scientists just can’t resist the temptation of eavesdropping on their oceanic conversations.
Scientists who are tracking live underwater sound signals from ocean observatories near the port of Vancouver have found a major drop in low-frequency sound that comes from ships at sea, reports The Guardian.
David Barclay, assistant professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University, compared the sound power—a way of measuring loudness—within the 100 Hz range from an inland seabed observatory and one lying farther off the shore. Both observatories recorded major drops in noise.
Barclay explained:
“Generally, we know underwater noise at this frequency has effects on marine mammals.
“There has been a consistent drop in noise since 1 January, which has amounted to a change of four or five decibels in the period up to 1 April.”
The lowered volume correlates with an overall drop in maritime traffic during the same period, he added, noting that exports and imports fell by roughly 20 percent at that time.
The reduction of marine traffic in the world’s waterways—including tankers, cargo and container ships, cruise liners, yachts and fishing vesels—comes amid an unprecedented rapid collapse in economic activity across the globe.
However, scientists are hoping to take advantage of the massive pause in the movement of ships to find out about what effect this has on marine life. Barclay calls the moment a “giant human experiment,” and his colleagues agree.
Michelle Fournet, an acoustic ecologist at Cornell University who studies animal communication and especially whale communication around Alaska, said:
“We are facing a moment of truth.
“We have an opportunity to listen – and that opportunity to listen will not appear again in our lifetime.”
Traffic at land and sea also fell in the days following the events of September 11, 2001. During that time, researchers in the U.S. were also able to study how the quieter ocean impacted baleen whales, and they produced a landmark study showing that anthropogenic or man-made underwater ocean noise associated with ships led to chronic stress in whales.
Fournet added:
“We have a generation of humpbacks that have never known a quiet ocean.”
An expected halt in cruise ship activity in south-east Alaska during this time of year due to the coronavirus will also give researchers a window through which they can gain more insights on how whales interact with each other.
Fournet said:
“What we know about whales in south-east Alaska is that when it gets noisy they call less, and when boats go by they call less.
“I expect what we might see is an opportunity for whales to have more conversation and to have more complex conversation.”
Fournet’s enthusiasm is shared by oceanologists across the globe, who just hope to listen while their practical work has been interrupted by the pandemic.
Bioacoustics expert Nathan Merchant of the U.K. government’s Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) said:
“We are on tenterhooks waiting to see what our records are saying.”
In fact, Merchant’s crew had been planning on figuring out how they could make the ocean quieter for the purpose of an experiment in order to gauge what benefits, if any, it may have on marine life.
As the world economy continues to stand still amid a crisis of global proportions, whales and their mammalian relatives are experiencing a drop in noise pollution and moment of aural peace they’ve likely never enjoyed before in their lives. And for researchers, the moment is priceless.
Merchant said:
“We have this natural experiment going on. Of course it is a terrible crisis, but we may as well get on and look at the data, to find out what effect it is having.”
(TMU) — Artist Tom Bragada Blanco, aka Tom B.B and better known as Bragalast1, is in the street art scene.
This 33 year old talent from Marseille, France transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary with his 3D art. You’ll likely stop and stare in awe, should you come across one of his artworks, and his most recent work of a giant Sphynx cat crouching in the middle of a field will blow you away!
The hairless Sphynx cat, in spite of its name, is not from Egypt but was developed in Canada from a hairless male kitten born in 1966 through selective breeding. Blanco’s Sphynx cat however, was created through a very different process.
Blanco chose an old gas tank as the canvas to create his giant 3D optical illusion of the Sphynx, crouching in the foliage, ready to pounce on some unseen prey in the field. The green gas tank completely disappeared, blending in with the surroundings.
A self-taught artist, Blanco has been drawing since childhood with an obvious passionate for street art. He started his career under the name “Q.ter”, customizing T-shirts, sneakers and caps which eventually led to many commissions for frescoes in children’s rooms, trompe-l’oeil in public places and the opportunity to create art for several theaters, restaurants and businesses. Blanco is also regularly invited to perform at street art events has exhibited at the Aumône-Vieille street festival in Aix-en-Provence.
Braga uses a technique called aerography, which he learned in 2011 for his street art. Aerography is described as a surrealist method in which a three-dimensional object replaces the traditional stencil used in spray-painting. Although this method is most frequently used for the decoration of tiles from the Victorian era and in the art of Man Ray, Braga has adapted the technique to create his own very unique artworks.
(ZH) — When Thursday’s initial claims report is published at 8:30am on Thursday, the Dept of Labor will confirm that the current depression unlike any seen before, with approximately 30 million Americans losing their jobs in the past 6 weeks alone. That number, however, may be underestimating the full number of of Americans who have lost their jobs by as much as 50%.
According to an online poll by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute, millions of Americans who have been thrown out of work during the coronavirus pandemic have been unable to register for unemployment benefits. The poll found that for every 10 people who have successfully filed unemployment claims, three or four people have been unable to register and another two people have not tried to apply at a time of acute economic crisis.
Official statistics show that 26.5 million people have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March, wiping out all of the jobs gained during the longest employment boom in U.S. history, and another 3.5 million initial claims are expected to be filed this week.
However, EPI’s survey indicates that an additional 8.9 million to 13.9 million people have been shut out of the system, said Ben Zipperer, the study’s lead author, which means that as of this week, just shy of 50 million American have lost their job since the start of March. “This study validates the anecdotes and news reports we’re seeing about people having trouble filing for benefits they need and deserve,” Zipperer said.
Among the reasons why idled workers have been unable to get in the “pipeline”, they claim they have encountered downed websites and clogged phone lines, as the state governments that administer the program have been overwhelmed by applicants.
“It’s a shame how you work for so many years and then when you need it, you can’t get it,” said Jim Hewes, 48, who said he was unable to file a claim online for more than two weeks after he was furloughed from his job at an Orlando, Florida, second-hand store in March. Hewes said he mailed off a paper application on April 9 but had not heard back from the state.
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“It’s almost set up to fail. It was made complicated so people would get discouraged and give up.”
EPI surveyed 24,607 adult internet users using Google Surveys between April 13 and April 24. The poll has a confidence interval, an indicator of accuracy, of plus or minus 1%. 9.4% of poll respondents said they had successfully applied for unemployment benefits, while 3.4% said they tried but could not get through. A further 1.9% said they did not apply because the process was too difficult.
* * *
Among the reasons for the continuing technical challenges listed by Reuters, is that states like New Jersey and Georgia have struggled to find staffers who know how to update computer systems that run on decades-old technology. Others that have moved to newer technology have also encountered technical woes. States have also had to incorporate enhanced federal benefits that provide an extra $600 per week and extend coverage to Uber drivers and other independent contractors.
On top of that, many states entered the crisis with fewer workers to handle unemployment claims as an improving economy had allowed them to cut staff.
States had the equivalent of 26,360 full-time workers in their unemployment offices in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Labor Department, down 30% from staffing levels during the peak of the Great Recession in 2009 and 2010. Many Americans who managed to file claims have yet to receive payments weeks after they lost their jobs.
Labor Department statistics show that 71% who apply are getting payments, although that figure varies significantly by state. Florida, for example, said on Saturday it had sent payments to roughly one in five of those who had successfully submitted claims. Among those waiting are Rachel Alvarez, 44, who says she now hides snacks in her bedroom so her three children cannot eat them too quickly. The former restaurant server in Naples, Florida, says she has run through her savings since she was laid off on March 25.
“I have nothing,” she said. “As much as I don’t want my kids to see me stress out, each one has seen me cry.”
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