Ask HN: Economy after coronavirus – what can we do?
This will be rambling, and I apologize.<p>I run r&#x2F;GigWorks on reddit and I run some websites aimed at helping people trying to do GigWork.<p>I&#x27;ve been batting ideas back and forth with someone about a website called The Butterfly Economy, inspired by a comment I made on HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22028732" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22028732</a><p>That website is currently a landing page.<p>While homeless, I developed an online income. It&#x27;s never been enough, but it was better than not having it. I&#x27;ve been trying to lay the groundwork, both online and in meatspace locally, to help homeless individuals and others to connect with earned income via the internet.<p>I&#x27;m not getting a lot of traction and I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s any point in continuing to push for something that no one else seems to want. I end up feeling like the world would literally rather let a bunch of people die than listen to me and I don&#x27;t have a solution for that.<p>And talking about it that way is probably the worst way to talk about it, but a decade of getting kicked in the teeth and not taken seriously has taken its toll. I don&#x27;t know how to escape that mental space while still stuck in that reality where I don&#x27;t get taken seriously and so forth.<p>The old guard never seems to voluntarily step down. Perhaps this crisis is an opportunity.<p>From what I gather, people online are saying things like &quot;Yeah, my boss, who always told me my job can&#x27;t be done from home, is letting me do it from home now because of coronavirus. The asshole.&quot;<p>So I feel like we&#x27;ve long had the pieces in place to move to a different way of working and of living, we just dug our heels in and refused to jump on the bandwagon. But people are beginning to embrace it more now that the other option is death, basically.<p>I think -- and have thought for a long time -- that with 7 billion people on the planet, we need to change how we do things or there will be a massive die back of the human race. We do a lot of things that worked when population levels were lower and I think a major sticking point is germ control.<p>I&#x27;m aware of that because of my medical situation, but I get literally told I&#x27;m insane and making things up. So it&#x27;s been impossible to tell people &quot;I think you should do things differently.&quot; That&#x27;s point and laugh at me, at best.<p>I&#x27;m tired and short of sleep and feeling pretty hopeless about a lot of things. I hope to be more productive on various projects in coming weeks.<p>And it&#x27;s probably a mistake to answer this in public, but you and I aren&#x27;t good friends and I don&#x27;t want to bug you privately and blah blah blah. So there&#x27;s some of my thoughts, fwiw.