Coronavirus

[Trappin]

Today I toured the north side of the town where I live. This is northern Calif. so we're all supposed to be hiding in our homes like scared children - except for so-called essential service workers.

I saw the construction company crews busily working on a large city project to repair sewers - which means trenching work on normally Super busy surface streets. Also saw commercial painters painting exterior walls at a shopping mall. Some taco trucks are out doing business. Any restaurant that can provide take-out food are open. The outdoor farmer's market was open. Smoke shops are open. The local ammunition store was open (they dont sell firearms.)

For some reason the local big landscape companies are not sending crews out to mow yards and blow leaves around. Its not like they work in confined spaces. So those guys are royally screwed because most of them are green card workers living on the edge of poverty.

Of course city and state workers have done nothing about street people and hobos. Did you know there was outbreaks of flea borne typhus in LA county? So, yeah. We can totally trust our state government to manage an epidemic.

Four people in a county of maybe 300,000 residents have tested positive.

[Stoneface]

Let's play spot the sociopath!...

[shubla]

As of today Canada is offering emergency unemployment funding which is about $2k/month for the next 4 months if you lost your job due to the virus

In my country they offer this by default no matter if there is coronavirus or not.
It's not 2k though, maybe living in canada is more expensive.

[jordancoles]

As of today Canada is offering emergency unemployment funding which is about $2k/month for the next 4 months if you lost your job due to the virus

In my country they offer this by default no matter if there is coronavirus or not.
It's not 2k though, maybe living in canada is more expensive.

$1200CAD/month in rent alone where I'm at for a 2 bedroom basement, and that's mid-level rental fee for BC. In Vacouver I had a friend paying $1700/month for his half of a shared 2 bedroom

BC has a housing crisis though and a lot of people want to live here

In more rural areas you can pay $600-800

[shubla]

As of today Canada is offering emergency unemployment funding which is about $2k/month for the next 4 months if you lost your job due to the virus

In my country they offer this by default no matter if there is coronavirus or not.
It's not 2k though, maybe living in canada is more expensive.

$1200CAD/month in rent alone where I'm at for a 2 bedroom basement, and that's mid-level rental fee for BC. In Vacouver I had a friend paying $1700/month for his half of a shared 2 bedroom

BC has a housing crisis though and a lot of people want to live here

In more rural areas you can pay $600-800

Ohh CAD? I didn't know your currency was that devalued, I revert my claim.
In Finland, 1 room apartment (old, cheap and shitty ones far from everything) costs 1000CAD a month in rent (well near the capital at least, but why would you want to live in forest or something!).
There are many forms of welfare in FInland, how much you get depends on which welfare you are on.

If you have low income, you get 80% of your rent paid by the state (with maximum cap of around 400€ in capital city, a bit less elsewhere)

If you are a student, you get 250€ a month and 650€ of state backed loan for each month that you study (9 months a year usually), but sadly, there is a strict limit on how long you can study and get aid, few decades ago you could extend your studies for a really long time and still get the aid, but these days you cannot extend your studies at all without losing all of the studying benefits.

If you are not eligible for any other supports, you get the worst and smallest basic aid.

If you are unemployed, you get an unemployment aid(s).

If you are "disabled enough" you may get disablement aid. (Disablement is measured in percentages, which I find funny)

If you are old enough, and poor, and dont have any other income you may get state-pension, which is ridiculously small amount of money.

But getting these aids is not easy, making any business with KELA, (social insurance institution) is notoriously difficult and complicated bureaucracy hell. Their processing times are long (weeks/months, long time to wait for money to pay your rent or buy food...). When you get your decision it is sometimes difficult to comprehend what it says, because it's all written in very bureaucratic-like gobbledygook.
They make mistakes all the time. For example, I once earnt one-time income of like 300 euros. They deducted the income from my aid THREE TIMES. It took months to sort out the things so they would only deduct it once.

Which brings us to some problems with the current social welfare system...

For example, if you get financial support for your studies, you can earn a decent amount of money on the side, without the aid getting any smaller. But the financial aid doesn't scale with your rent, and you have to study, by definition of one ECTS credit, around 10 hours every day to get it. Luckily the definition of ECTS-credit rarely accurately describes the amount of work that your studies will really take.

Unemployment benefits are complicated, there are multiple types of them. I am not that familiar with them all, but basically some of them require that you have done work in the last x days before getting unemployed. Some of them you can get without former work history by marking yourself as a job seeker in some center and attending in some (often very useless) meetings and infos on how to seek for jobs etc.

Basic aid is kind of the worst aid. If you have any other income on the side, you will lose your benefit in 1:1 ratio, so basically if you earn 100€ a week by doing some small amount of work, you lose 100€ of your aid!
But the basic aid can be larger amount than for example the study aid. Because, the aid is your rent + base amount, which depends on your family size. So if you have high rent, you can get a lot more money than by studying for example, because rent doesn't affect your studying aid at all. Some people blame the system for increasing rents, because when state pays high rents for poor people, prices rise.

Some of these aids overlap, like you can get multiple different aids in different amounts and they all affect each other...
Wish there was just one basic income!

[tyrtix]

Hi from Italy, i'm still alive! So, if there's a god somewhere, he really have a good sense of humor.
Be nice with the people around you, probably your country still have to see what will happen in the future.

[azrid]

big numbers are coming bois
stay safe

[jordancoles]

big numbers are coming bois
stay safe

Where is this from?

This is total confirmed cases globally?

[shubla]

big numbers are coming bois
stay safe

Where is this from?

This is total confirmed cases globally?

You shouldn't trust the numbers because different countries have different ways for diagnosing. Like in Finland they just stopped diagnosing people more than a week ago. Now only those who have serious symptoms are diagnosed so numbers from Finland do not compare to numbers of other countries. And who knows if other countries have done the same?

here is one that I find nice to use. Only bad thing is that it divides china and us to regions instead of showing them as 1 country which makes tracking them more difficult.

[Ysh]

There are many forms of welfare in FInland, how much you get depends on which welfare you are on.

Which you are on?