That's not how all industries work. Bonuses can be upwards of 100% of base pay for lots of people in financial services. I work in capital markets and the salary is competitive, but everyone is working towards building up the bonus pool which is then distributed among the team at the end of the year. It shouldn't even be called a bonus, which makes it sound like something extraordinary or unexpected. It's a redistribution of earnings which most people will factor into their budgets given that no one goes into the business of just covering their operating costs and not making a profit.

Anyone who works for a partnership, whether it be a law firm, consulting practice, hell even the big four accounting firms, is dramatically affected. Accounting is always touted as the most stable career you can get. These aren't people known for playing fast and loose and living above their means, yet Deloitte and others are laying off thousands.

Yeah, I don't know anyone white collar who isn't affected.

Most people's wealth is in the market and real estate, and both have been hammered.

And even if salary isn't immediately affected, it probably will be shortly. For example, my wife's salary was frozen, and there are already rumblings that next year's bonus season (a very significant portion of her income) will be skipped, which would be unprecedented.

My sister is a dentist and income near zero. My brother-in-law is in commercial RE and income near zero. They have three kids in private school and two fat mortgages.

There are a fair number of jobs where the bonus comprises half or the majority of your pay.

Its partisan because large media helped fan the flames. We were sold a doomsday narrative that did not pan out for 90 percent of the country and apparently the situation in New York was what was going to happen to the rest of us if we didnt lock everything down. No probably not. Really there were two options. Containment or mitigation. I'd posit most policy makers panicked initially and went with the containment strategy. Now well have to live with their choice and see if the economic fallout is worth it. Honestly I think in the end this is going to inadvertently benefit us. Itll shake out some dead weight, usher in new technologies and spread the employment wealth across the region's instead of concentrating it in cbds. We will see a suburban rise and a more egalitarian playing field.

In terms of job losses, it's stark...the vast majority are the service sector. The first link I found says 16 million out of 20 million total losses in March and April.

White collar jobs have big losses, but NOTHING like the same level. And we're much better off to begin with, on average. Anyone with a good income and some intelligence will have several months expenses easily available, outside a minority who ran into huge medical expenses or something. Most of us will do fine even if we're furloughed, which most of us aren't.

As is the case with my wife (slightly less than half her salary) but we would never budget on whatever she gets in bonuses because they fluctuate. Her base pay is is what we base our Household income on in addition to my own.

FYI- Drops in bonus and compensation freezes would be happening regardless of stay-at-home orders.

Maybe you’re not familiar with compensation structures in some industries. What if your annual bonus was 2-4x your base salary?

No one in prime Manhattan or London can afford their mortgage on the basis of their base salary.

Yes, me lol

I am enjoying a little freedom living a life right now in Arkansas that is 99% back to normal as far as I can see. And when I get back to Illinois next week, I will be doing all my shopping in Indiana until Illinois opens up everything.

Side note: I asked my girlfriend's mom and her sister if they have gone out to eat or shop yet. They both said no. Then her mom went on to say that it's because she is waiting until all the "rules" end and things are normal again. I am certain others are doing the same thing. She thought that since restaurants are at 33% capacity limits that they would be slammed, but they aren't. So hopefully when 100% of things go back to "normal" the economy will really pick up.

Won't someone think of the poor ol' millionaires? :(

I care about them, their spending helps keep economies going AND they are a HUGE part of those city's tax base, so it's important to everyone.

But in human aspects, I care about poorer people with NO job and little chance of getting another one for the time being.

They'll be waiting for a long time... The capacity limits probably will not be relaxed without a vaccine or treatment.

I'm going to miss the quarantine lack-of-traffic once this is all over. Its been such a bliss driving when the roads are somewhat empty or not filled with mini-vans with baby on board stickers doing 10 in a 45 zone.

Low traffic in the NY area also makes the area hospitable for driving. Now that folks are back on the roads, with the easing of things, traffic is back up, but still quaint. Normally the Belt Parkway and BQE are madness or LI Expressway. Quarantine made those roads enjoyable.

Yeah right lol it's Arkansas, they are raising the limits to 66% like next week.

Dude, yes! I have been going on "Sunday drives" since all of this started. Being new to Chicago, it has been nice to able to drive around with no traffic and being able to drive a little slower(without someone on my ass) to take in the hoods.

They're all up in the Catskills this week. The Orthodox community mass-evacuates on Memorial and Labor Day weekends, even in a pandemic. Kosher supermarkets and restaurants in Brooklyn run deliveries up to the woods.

Thought you meant they were in Illinois. Yeah, we'll see how that experiment in the South goes. I don't think it will end well, but fingers crossed.

If that's true, you can probably kiss 90% of restaurants goodbye. Restaurants cannot operate for years at half-capacity. Most probably can't even operate for months. Weekend crowds keep most dine-in restaurants alive, and you need to max capacity at prime hours.

Oh my bad, I wasn't exact in my language, yeah in Arkansas. Illinois will probably increase the limit by 1% a month for the next two years lol

Yeah, I just hope the more rural nature of the South and the hot-humid weather helps them keep things at bay. Georgia has been a pretty solid place to look at thus far, INDEED fingers crossed.

Exactly...

My wife is in HR so I am pretty familiar with on-boarding process and how compensation packages are set up. Plus my own experiences. I also just said she gets generous bonuses but again, that's gravy. We don't budget that into our finances because it's never a sure thing such as coronaviruses and negative oil prices. Last year was a pretty good year, cash flow was great. 2020 is going to be shit. Perhaps I've been exposed to the oil and gas industry too long to be apprehensive about taking risks.

The fact that some people depend on these bonuses to sustain a certain (unsustainable) lifestyle is frankly, their problem. No one needs to live in 'prime' London or Manhattan unless they choose to.

That’s probably a good point, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are getting screwed financially, and if you want people to stay at home and socially distance this is a lousy way to win them over.

It invites restlessness, anger, and resentment. And eventually people just refuse to follow these orders.

Thankfully there are States going about this a more sensible way. However, it does seem that many States have Governors who don’t want to budge from their rigid guidelines, because they perhaps a) don’t really understand the social and economic pain they are causing and b) haven’t bothered to realize the fact that in America Government is really not supposed to have this much unchecked power over people’s lives.

So what then, I should just move to some suburb so that grandma feels safe going to the shops? Don’t think so.

These lockdowns are a farce.

1,188 deaths today in Brazil. 20,047 overall.

The way things going with moving daily average up to +300/+400 every week, I guess by the end of the week, Brazil will overcome the US, which seemed to have stabilized at 1,500 daily. :(

I think the lockdowns have outlived their usefulness as they are but they weren't a farce early on. Unless you know more than the world's top epidemiologists. Otherwise get Fauci and Chris Whitty on the horn and set them straight.

As for 'suburbia', you missed my point. It's called mitigating risk.

I’m aware that the Supreme Court has sadly failed our Constitution in this regard.

That feeble body has dropped the ball over and over (upholding rent control? Seriously?)

I still view it as unconstitutional. I’m glad Americans left and right are defying these stupid and unreasonable orders. We are adults, we get that there is a pandemic and many of us will play it safe, but being locked out of our livelihoods is no longer an option. We don’t need this goddamn police state-esque scenario.

Would it be unconstitutional if it was a truly lethal disease that killed something like 20% of healthy individuals? Would people violating stay at home orders be treasonous in such a situation? If so, what's the threshold for a constitutionally-supported lockdown?

I've always found interpretations of the constitution and the parallels with religious study interesting.

Speak for yourself.

Common sense suggests people should live where they can truly afford to live, not where they can "afford" to live predicated on a dubious "bonus".

Coronavirus Update: NYC Could Begin Reopening By Mid-June

• Video Link

No, common sense would suggest that people would live based on their typical salary/wealth structure, which, in the case of many professions, is largely or almost entirely bonus or commission-based.

You think a RE broker has an annual family budget of $0 because they're working on commission? You think someone in financial services is gonna budget based on a once-a-century pandemic?

If those people are earning a lot, they presumably have at least several months of cushion before they need to get into their longer-term investments.

Their home purchase would of course assume a "low case" in the income range, to at least be easy in a moderate downturn. If they earn 2/3 of average for a while, a six-month cushion would make things easy for 18 months.

We are barely 10 years out of a massive recession. Yes, they should actually and the market was already overvalued prior to Covid-19. If a bonus structure was 2-3 times my base salary adjusted for COL, I would rent a while, save and then put down a huge chuck of change as a my down payment on a home so when something does happen (and it will), I won't be left holding the bag when bonuses dry up and can't afford my mortgage payments.

fulton houses


http://i1340.photobucket.com/albums/...psvnuafkku.jpg

Again, you fail to understand pay structures. The “bonus” is entirely expected. Mortgage lenders here will usually look at a trailing 3-year average. As a rule of thumb, they will lend 5x base salary and 2.5x the amount of “bonus” (or whatever discretionary, non-contractual income) to account for the variability. For people who are commission or fee-based, or business owners, you obviously have to look at a historical average income because there is no contractual salary.

Nobody in businesses like banking or law gets up and goes to work every day for their base salary, nor do they live on it.

This is purely my own honest opinion as an American, so YMMV:

For The Constitution to mean something (anything), it needs to mean something in any and all circumstances. On a human level if this was an airborne version of Ebola or HIV we would probably all walk around in spacesuits, but from a constitutional law prospective it doesn't matter if a virus is 0.009% lethal or 99% lethal, *I* or *you* (if you were American) have inalienable rights that cannot be abridged.

Once a right is "alienable", you can't go back. The government can (and someday will) create or false flag some "emergency" that justifies crossing that rubicon and everything written on that piece of paper back in 1787 becomes as meaningful as the graffiti in the alley in back of my house.

Don't take offense to this next statement, but this sense of legal and cultural absolutism is something many Brits, Canadians, Aussies simply don't "get" due to the progressive evolution of British democratic norms. The UK and it's offspring pretty much have made it up as they have gone along rather than embracing them in one full swoon ala American Revolution. The UK doesn't even *have* a constitution. Ironically, the Europeans who "get" the American mindset the most is....The French, which makes sense if you think about it...

Your rights to movement etc. don't trump other people's rights to life (or liberty or pursuit of happiness).

In fact, the requirement to not kill people tends to take precedence.

Where do you draw the line? The flu kills tens of thousands per year in the US as well. Would a mandatory lockdown every flu season be constitutional in your eyes? This is ultimately for the courts to decide, but to me, a virus with a mortality rate lower than 1% (and significantly lower for people under 60) doesn't justify throwing the constitution out the window. Coronavirus is not an existential threat to the United States.

You can rationalize it all you'd like. Our history is littered with the rationalization of unconstitutional federal and state laws. I just hope this doesn't set a dangerous precedent for expanded government control over individual freedom. We've had enough of that already.

After this is all over, when we reflect back on whats going on, we will truely know if it was worth it. I mean in the acute sense, yeah... its sucks. Its not good... not fun... it bloody sucks.

But...but... long-term, we will get a better idea.

Some may see this virus as a bad thing, but what if... what if it was actually a good thing? What if this is the giant walkeup call for the world, in a manner that will usher in change... change that will over the long run save many more lives, order of magnitudes higher, over the long run, than have been taken from us via this virus and its residual non-virus side effects (economic damage, people offing themselves due to "X" reason that can be tied to this virus event).

Possibly, just possibly, the folks that perished are in fact martyrs for the collective well being of folks decades to come, as a result of the global changes that will occur due to this wake up call. I mean, the idea of martyrs, sounds scary, but sometimes, folks in history have had to die to give others life. To give nations another route in the collective well being of its future and present kin.

Now if no positive change occurs, all this would be a waste, and IMO, a failure. If we don't learn from this virus and repeat the same systemic errors in society, than those lives were lost in vain.

Possibly history will judge this virus as a necessary one, to wake up folks to how vulnerable we are, and by remediation of such vulnerabilities, it could be seen as a blessing.

I mean we still have global warming and all... that looming, horrific giant Elephant, but assuming we do very little to curtail it, everyone typing and browsing SSP at this moment will be dead or very old by the time 2080 comes by, so we won't have to worry about it, but folks born today that may live past 2080 or be 50/60 by the time 2080 rolls by, not gonna be fun.

If you want good bed time reading material, look up places that will be to hot to live in the future.

The restrictions are generally pointless at this point. People are gathering in parks, streets are busy, etc. There is an outdoor bar in Hyde Park that was opened, and a police car that rolled past on patrol took like 3 minutes to get past because it was blocked by people. :haha:

You can make businesses close but you can’t keep people from interacting. They’ve been going to visit friends and family this whole time. My neighbors upstairs had a small party earlier this week.

I’ll give you things like concerts or bar service, for a while. But allowing restaurants and gyms, at least, to open with better hygiene standards (but without social distancing that renders them economically unviable), and certainly cultural venues like museums and galleries, to reopen is a no brainier and wouldn’t make an appreciable difference at this point by the looks of things.

If somebody passed a law requiring castration of all HIV infected individuals, then I guess that is also Constitutional using your logic. After all, my right to privacy and to engage in consensual sexual intercourse is superseded by everybody else’s right to be safe from disease.

I agree. In my neighborhood people have been getting together the whole time.

I think we should drop all of these laws at once and simply recommend strongly that everybody wear a face mask in public until the pandemic is over, as well as use hand sanitizer frequently.

It will achieve all of the same outcomes as these draconian laws that are utterly destroying our society and making life a living hell for millions.

Flu kills tens of thousands, but not 1,000,000+, as Covid could if we didn't deal with it. The line would be somewhere between the two.

Talk about a false parallel. HIV infected people are required to abstain...sort of like a quarantine rule.

You're missing the point of the rules, and how things spread.

For one, rule-breaking is part of why numbers haven't dropped even faster. In the UK, the numbers haven't dropped that much...it's generally #3 in deaths per day despite being a smallish country. Even more than the US it's an example of how NOT to do things.

The good news is that even with rule-breaking, people are getting a small fraction of the exposures they'd get if the world were back to normal. Mixing with smaller, localized groups is nothing like spreading across the city and being in larger groups. Or being in restaurants and eating/socializing in an enclosed space for an hour+ with no mask.

It won't BE over until there's a vaccine and it'll be largely due to some fairly wealthy, if not billionaire, CEOs of biotech companies to do that. And some of it--not just the research but the production and global distribution of vaccine, may well be done by the Gates Foundation thanks to a certain billionaire. Incidentally, the wealthy execs of remdesivir maker Giead are donating at least the first 150,000 doses of that drug and pershpas more while the vaccine makers are all promising lots of free/at cost doses too.

Where are they "required" to do anything? Not in CA. They can probably be sued in civil court if they don't tell partners about their positivity but it's not illegal. Furthermore, it's recognized that since the beginning a lot of people don't know about their status--just as with COVID--so some sort of legal ban probably wouldn't accomplish much.

^ lol there you go falling over yourself to protect the exploiters.

Really? Point me to the US law mandating that HIV infected persons are barred from sexual intercourse.

Meanwhile, people everywhere who own shops engaging in legal trade have been barred from doing business by executive order for the past few months.

Doesn’t sound like a “false parallel” to me whatsoever. After all, quoting your exact words, isn’t this how our lawmakers and judicial system should operate:

Based on your logic, then, HIV infected people should be legally banned from any sexual intercourse.