‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We've had numerous meat processing plants close down or run at reduced capacity due to workforce illness and people refusing to work due to the concentration of COVID-19 cases.
And I think about how in the restaurant business how a rumor of someone catching food poisoning can kill your business... what's going to happen when a review lands on your Yelp/Google page that a customer took grandma to eat at your restaurant and 2 weeks later she died from COVID-19? Your reputation will be absolutely trashed.
Just seems like everyone is getting set up to fail... except for those who are already able to work comfortably from home.
It does. We are seeing a dithering half-assed response to the pandemic in the USA.
If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable. The way things are going now, it's like we're letting up just enough to keep the damn thing circulating, killing more people needlessly and probably necessitating more lockdowns and prolonging economic consequences in the future.
This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.
From the second the federal government put the "opening up" in the hands of each State it seemed like a massive effort from the top down to distance themselves from any bad outcomes and take credit for any good outcomes.
Maybe it is better to have the Governors in charge, but once traveling/airports begin picking up again...State boarders and policies become pretty meaningless.
The federal government never put it there, it was always there because the closing down was always in the hands of each state, because that's where the lockdown orders originated. And that's arguably not the problem, anyway, as those policies are going to need to vary by state (and by smaller areas within states in many cases), anyway, the problem is more the federal withdrawal of support for testing, the failure of support for response needs (and the active redistribution of resources, including direct theft from states who acquired their own) driven by political affinity between the federal executive and state executive rather than public health needs, and the subtle and overt federal pressure (and direct federal mandates, in the case of meat packing) for premature, irresponsible reopening by the states (subtle including things like not providing robust financial supports so as to create bottom-up pressure for reopening.)
From an American Bar Association (ABA) article from April 2020:
>Through the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress exclusive authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the federal government has broad authority to quarantine and impose other health measures to prevent the spread of diseases from foreign countries, as well as between states although that has never been affirmed by the courts.
>In 1902, the Supreme Court directly addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographical area. In Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, the justices upheld a Louisiana Supreme Court decision that the state could enact and enforce quarantine laws unless Congress had decided to preempt them.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/yourab...
The Commerce Clause seems to specifically give the federal government control over people ENTERING the country and people CROSSING state lines, but doesn't seem to address the federal government declaring statewide lockdowns.
It does seem that the federal government can issue quarantine orders to individuals suspected of being infected, but again this is directed towards a specific person, and is an actual hard quarantine order.
The "Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health" says that the state can enact quarantine laws unless Congress decided preempts them. It seems to handle the opposite case: can the federal government prevent my quarantine? And the answer is only if Congress passes a federal law. This is a big hurdle, because the decision doesn't lie in the Presidents or his administrations hands.
The Executive does not, absent a specific law authorizing such a shutdown (i.e., a delegation of Congress' Commerce Clause powers, and no such law currently exists.
If the experts make a non-political recommendation, it has a chance of being accepted by everyone. If the president makes a recommendation, it immediately becomes political and Fox news will either hype the hell out of it (if the president is a Republican) or go to war against it (if the president is a Democrat).
I'm going to catch hell for this because "politics" but ... we're talking about Trump, here. A man who just recently had to walk back a suggestion that doctors look into injecting cleaning solvents as a possible treatment for COVID-19 as "just sarcasm."
The executive branch has broad quarantine authorities when it determines such measures are necessary to control communicable disease under the Public Health Service Act, and they have been applied with mandatory force outside of federally controlled facilities (mostly in regard to international travelers) in the COVID-19 emergency.
People are getting lost in the weeds about whether or who has authority to do what. I think that's less important.
What matters more is cooperation between Federal, State and local.
Instead of having those ENDLESS insane ad-libbed monologues at the "daily briefing", a true leader would have been too busy working non-stop with state, key city officials, disease experts, and those who can handle logistics. He could have left the daily briefing to competent spokespeople (I know that's laughable, but imagine any other administration).
Maybe you could debate when the federal government put it there, but they did. I think we would both agree that at all phases of a quarantine the Federal Government has supremacy over the States.
Further, Federal government deferring to the State on closures is unrelated to their deferment on opening (legally anyway, the political reasons are likely the same)...In other words just because the federal government deferred to States on closing, doesn't mean they couldn't jump in at any time. In fact with the openings they federal government implemented "Opening Up America Again" which is voluntary, but they could have just the same made it mandatory.
Otherwise, You are highlighting many other failures, which I tend to agree with...which are likely part of the desire for the federal government to distance themselves from any fallout of bad outcomes from reopenings. And rest assured when a State opening outcome is good Trump will pat himself on the back and claim they closely followed "Opening Up America Again" guidelines/phases, and States with bad outcomes failed to follow the same.
I don't think you are familiar with the commerce clause [1].
It gives the federal government control to regulate anything that would effect interstate commerce which would obviously include spread of a novel infectious virus.
Obviously State issued mandatory lock-downs effect interstate commerce and that where there federal government can begin regulating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
Edit:
In 1902, the Supreme Court directly addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographical area. In Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, the justices upheld a Louisiana Supreme Court decision that the state could enact and enforce quarantine laws unless Congress had decided to preempt them.
I have several friends who are directly impacted by this. Two of them work at small businesses that will shut down in a couple of months. I have one that has no income because he lost his waiter job and supply teaching job at the same time. I have some friends that are suffering from mental health issues. One person I know is living 5 people in a one bedroom apartment.
This is a very hard, almost impossible situation, so don't be so judgemental against people that want to end the lockdown. I fully understand why they want to, because realistically there's no end in sight and even 2 months is a very long time for people to do nothing and starve in their apartments for both food/money and interaction.
Without exception, everyone I've seen or heard of advocating for continuing the lockdowns/shelter in place have remote-friendly jobs with direct deposit. I'd wager most have months of cash reserves. While their 401k's have suffered, they're still paying their mortgage, feeding their families, and - at the worst levels - are exceptionally bored.
On the other side, I see people (friends and family) choosing to wait to pay their rent in favor of groceries.
* I'm in Austin, so almost 2 months in counting the SXSW cancelation on May 6th.. which was a good idea in that it probably prevented us from being a NYC or New Orleans in the short term.
It turns out the disaster doesn't need to wait anymore.
Also, the fewer survivors, the easier the revolution gets.
That's oddly appropriate explanation of communist thought in the 20th century.
Two weeks, no Lowes, no McDonalds, no grocery stores, no amazon delivery drivers, no postal service, no pharmacy. Only emergency room/icu, fire fighters, emts, cops, and powerplant operators.
Instead we put everyone on house arrest for an indefinite period of time.
In my deep red corner of the woods there's different cars in front of each house seemingly every other day and music, too. That's what you do in the face of the plague, you party!
Where I worked a transitioned to WFH for about 98% of the employees, but so many were still stopping by the office that the employees who couldn't work from home and felt they were at increased risk eventually contacted upper management and now every visit to the office is recorded and a manager has to provide a justification for why that employee had to be on site.
I think we have to look at little deeper into the America psyche to see what is driving this.
(As for where I live, the 2016 vote was almost a 50/50 split in the surrounding area.)
Instead, here we are. Almost at the two-month mark. And infection rates where I live (NOVA) are even higher than a month ago. FML.
It seems lockdowns cannot be implemented successfully no matter what you do. Perhaps a simple public mask requirement would have been better.
And even then, the odds of successful containment are pretty low.
We can decide to take the loss and let most people get infected, or we can be super aggressive about lockdown and contain it. Instead, we seem to have a compromise which is seems to take the loss, but slower with a porous lockdown which will have to last indefinitely. Now the other worlds are imagined in my head, so this may not be the case, but it is hard to look at e.g. New Zealand and not be frustrated by America's response.
p.s. I don't think Americans collectively decided anything about what options we would use to combat the virus. The federal executive branch effectively decided to do nothing, or nothing coherent and consistent, and states have individually scrambled to come up with their own responses, with varying levels of effectiveness.
> If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable.
Exactly. At the start of this it was made clear that lock-downs would be pointlessly destructive if they were eased back too quickly: we'd get all the economic pain for little gain against the virus. But it seems like that's roughly the course our leadership is taking...
So you think the solution was pointless because it prevented the problem from ever occurring?
If labor in the US begins to normalize or minimize the perception of risk of death associated with COVID as just another threat "out of their control" (now proven not to be the case), they'll continue working and producing as before--e.g. like risks associated with car fatalities, seasonal flu, heart disease/obesity/diabetes deaths largely influenced by sedentary lifestyles, etc.
Bob and Alice go to work, Bob contracts COVID, has serious illness, and dies two weeks later. Alice and friends are fine and give a moment of silence, "well, that's just the way things are, what could we do?", then continue on, just like we do every day. It's not until you're directly effected do you seem to care about other's lives, pretty terrible way to live IMHO.
A potential sideflip is that the gamble doesn't work and people start dying, perception doesn't shift, and a social, political, and cultural revolution take place resulting in demands for significant changes for labor rights in the US. I don't see that happening though.
I think the divide we're seeing about this lockdown is that people are really growing tired of their precarious situations (housing, food, essentially things tied to finances and necessary debts to survive) created by business trends and are starting to internalize just how little employers really care about them, regardless of the nearly insulting propaganda/advertisements about appreciation for front line workers.
They're being exploited, putting their lives at risk, and a few folks are profiting drastically off of it while propping these people up as heroes in marketing campaigns when many pretty much have to continue if they don't want to go into financial ruin (effecting critical life needs like housing, food, health insurance,, some ability to do things they want to do...happiness).
The worst part is that it's not just businesses. This culture of transactional relationships and financial focus we've allowed to permeate everything from friendships, family, community, etc. has brought out the absolute worst in people. Some of those mostly unaffected, working remote, continuing with gainful employment are showing they too want their transactional culture to continue. "I don't care about your life, I want my haircut." Some on the other hand don't have money and realize its necessary to survive so they blame the government lockdown for their precarious financial situation when its really the highly leveraged labor market the US created that's at fault.
It's pretty disgusting all around.
Oh? And what exactly is "manageable" in your (apparently well qualified) eyes?
Paul O'Neill died recently (not COVID-19 related). I don't have many business heroes. O'Neill was one of the them. (Andrew Grove is the other.)
Here's how O'Neill turned ALCOA around when he took it over in the 80s:
A few minutes before noon, O'Neill took the stage. He was fifty-one years old, trim, and dressed in gray pinstripes and a red power tie. His hair was white and his posture military straight. He bounced up the steps and smiled warmly. He looked dignified, solid, confident. Like a chief executive.
Then he opened his mouth.
"I want to talk to you about worker safety," he said. "Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and machines that can rip a man's arm off. But it's not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries."
The audience was confused. These meetings usually followed a predictable script: A new CEO would start with an introduction, make a faux self-deprecating joke--something about how he slept his way through Harvard Business School--then promise to boost profits and lower costs. Next would come an excoriation of taxes, business regulations, and sometimes, with a fervor that suggested firsthand experience in divorce court, lawyers. Finally, the speech would end with a blizzard of buzzwords--"synergy," "rightsizing," and "co-opetition"--at which point everyone could return to their offices, reassured that capitalism was safe for another day.
O'Neill hadn't said anything about profits. He didn't mention taxes. There was no talk of "using alignment to achieve a win-win synergistic market advantage." For all anyone in the audience knew, given his talk of worker safety, O'Neill might be pro-regulation. Or, worse, a Democrat. It was a terrifying prospect.
...
Within a year of O'Neill's speech, Alcoa's profits would hit a record high.
Here's an extended excerpt from Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: http://txti.es/duhigg-keystone-habits
Imagine a president who came out in February, even early March, with a message like that. Imagine our response had been organized around that message:
"I intend to keep all Americans safe, rich and poor, old and young. I intend to go for zero deaths."
Considering the virus was spreading in the US in late January any action at that time would have been much too late.
They've been FAR BETTER at controlling this thing than the USA.
The key difference? Leadership: they don't have a mental-case at the helm of their government. Trust: their populace heeded warnings and acted accordingly.
I expect that when this is all over, we'll see that even some countries that have been referred to disparagingly as "banana republics" will outperform the USA in handling of the crisis.
I thought the purpose of the lockdown was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed? Maybe that is what you meant by manageable?
My two cents:
Why shouldn't we remove the lockdown if we can manage to do so without overwhelming hospitals?
We have been locked down and covid still circulates through the population, and appears that it will do so until we reach herd immunity and/or have a vaccine, with the likely/hopeful outcome, based on how these types of coronaviruses often behave, being a decrease in the danger posed by this specific virus over time.
Playing devils advocate: How much of a difference do mandated lockdowns even make? Sweden doesn't have a lockdown and they are doing better than a number of other western countries, worse than some others, but pretty much well within the same bell curve given the fuzzy data we have at the moment.
When does it become selfish to tell tens of millions of people they can't provide for themselves because you are scared of the coronavirus. They might not be. The risk profile can be very different for different people.
As long as the hospitals are not overwhelmed why not self-isolate, and let other people do what they want? That was the justification when we started these lockdowns, to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, right?
That's a big if. The last stats I saw showed Sweden experiencing 4x deaths per capita compared to its neighbors, which is a clue that eschewing lockdown does make a difference. Every country is different. How do you know that Sweden's approach used in a different country wouldn't overwhelm hospitals? Once you let the pandemic get more widespread in a population, it gets hard to stop. Think very carefully about irreversible decisions.
The reason why some countries have significantly higher death rates from coronavirus: it permeating nursing homes.
The countries that put in strict controls overall and maximally protected people in nursing homes have the lowest death rates.
Of course, the death rates worldwide are under-reported, and overall, worldwide, on average, the death rate is expected to be double of what is reported. To get an idea of what the true death rate from coronavirus, you would also need to compare previous death rates in previous years--at the same time of year. There is more work to do on that, because you would ideally have projections for if an epidemic never happened this year.
I don't think data is the reason why people feel strongly one way or the other about this. Maybe risk assessment is the difference.
We both look at the same data and come up with different conclusions. We might even both agree that this is most likely to peter-out from this point, but that it could get worse. We disagree on how to hedge/address both possible outcomes.
Could you? My impression is you have too much integrity to do that. Ignoring the obvious difference between a largely rural Nordic country and one of the world's most densely populated trade centers might be hard for you.
>We both look at the same data and come up with different conclusions
I have yet to draw a conclusion. If you read my comment carefully, it's cautioning you against coming to a conclusion too soon.
ISTM that with equal justification, you could argue that the lockdown countries have (possibly) more economic damage because they paid up front. But one side is paying in treasure, the other in blood.
And it's not even clear that Sweden is reaping economic benefits. Some parts of their economy suffered just as much damage as other countries. And now, many of the lockdown countries are experimenting with loosened restrictions, while Sweden's infection and death rates remain stubbornly high.
The total number of infections will be the same up until a vaccine is developed, but the death rate can be lowered by delaying widespread infection until treatments are developed, tested, and deployed, and by keeping the infection rate at a level the medical system can handle.
Person #1) I'm at risk and there are no good treatments, so I will self-isolate, waiting for vaccines, better treatment, and/or this to go away.
Person #2) I'm young, my risk is negligable, hospitals are not overwhelmed, and I have to support my family, my kids need to go to school, etc.
Why does person #1 get to tell person #2 what to do?
It seems some people view COVID as guaranteed death and any questioning of lock downs ending means that you are or are about to be a mass murderer.
New Zealand has been able to pretty much eradicate the virus through lockdowns and contact tracing, but they only had 1000 cases.
There is no precedent for doing that in a country with millions of cases, like the U.S. It may be too late for that.
So is the purpose of continued lockdowns in the U.S. to eradicate the virus? That is what I am skeptical about, I don't see the evidence that such a thing is possible.
It is an elementary fact that life rides on the derivative. Stop work and no wealth gets created. No meat, no veggies, no crops, no gas, no electricity, no metal, no lumber, no stone, no plastic, no industrials, no dentists, no medical services, no schools, no nothing. Modern people cannot live subsistence lives off the chickens in their backyard and a plot of land within walking distance. Our stockpiles will last for a while, but not forever.
At a second degree, the social connections that enable the amazing collaboration underpinning modern society break down. The longer we are locked down, the harder will be to come back and figure out our place in the grand social puzzle.
It is a terrible situation. Most people are going to get infected, and a non-negligible fraction of them [1%] are going to die. Everywhere where the virus got endemic. Perhaps a handful of East Asian countries will manage 100% border shutdowns and 100% contact tracing for years on end. More power to them, the rest of the world lacks the social cohesion to pull off something like that.
Worse, the impact is going to be unequal. Some social strata will have more options to stay isolated for longer. It will appear, for a while, that they are somehow performing better than everybody else. Rest assured, there will be very few that can avoid the disease for long enough (~18 months) to be on the upside of a hypothetical vaccine. All we can hope is that, eventually, this disease goes the way of the common cold.
Toughen up. This is not Man's making. Nature send a Russian Roulette our way, we have no choice but to play.
In the meantime, try to avoid media that does it's best to paint this disease as the second coming of the Black Death. One of the technique is to cherry pick. Say 'one of my co-workers died', implying that they are next. Instead of '1 out of 73,348 of my colleagues' died. It is unavoidable tragedy that there may be anywhere between 73 and 733 of their colleagues that are going to die before we see the end of this.
Covid will be with us forever now, and in just a few months we already understand a lot more about it than we did at the start.
The longer we can delay mass infection, the more effective our treatment of the disease will be, and the more likely we will have vaccines.
Lets delay for a while, figure out the best treatment methods, and then let it through.
You can stay in your house until the treatments get better, which is also a smart thing for vulnerable people to do.
Why not let other people off lockdown if they wish as long as the hospitals are not overflowed? A lot of people face a negligable risk from this.
What difference would it be to you? And look at the cost to them, tens of millions of people's livelihoods thrown up in the air.
Having said the above, I do see the value of lockdowns that prevented hospitals from being overwhelmed. That is different. But it looks to me like we can look at moving past that threat. What do we do next?
The benefit comes when the community as a whole does it, there is literally no point to anyone doing it alone, unless they are vulnerable.
"What do we do next?"
Figure out the best way to treat covid, and talk about the best time to end the lockdown.
Im in NZ btw, NZ locked down hard and early. Its been six weeks and so far we have 20 deaths from covid.
"What next?" is exactly the question, and I dont think anyone knows the best answer yet.
We are likely to be mostly ending our lockdown on this wednesday. We are entering "level 2" which I believe is all businesses open and running, just some rules around congregation.
I simply do not understand the chorus of calls to end lockdown (or simply never start it) in countries where absolutely nothing is under control.
It will cause incredibly loss of life, and people are doing in a rush.
Im really struggling, on a personal level, to understand the rush in some countries to sacrifice people and not economies.
Surely the economy is there to serve us?
I've struggled with the same questions. I noticed that no matter which date I picked, 'let's delay longer' was always the preferred choice. We've got to wean ourselves from the lockdown.
OTOH we have been incredibly lucky with both our leadership and our island status.
the US is a huge state, with porous borders so the right choice might be different, but the more controlled the spread is, the fewer lives will be lost and the more likely time will help us understand the best treatment.
The premise of the question is false. The states making aggressive reopening moves are largely on upward trends of cases and show no sign of being able to avoid overwhelming their health systems if they reopen (some are on track to so so with their, often already too lenient, “lockdowns”), and even the states doing more measured reopenings that seem to have the caseload situation more in hand (like California) don't have the surveillance in place to detect a new surge in time to effectively respond. The latter approach is risky but arguably responsible given the context of the grossly negligent federal economic response, but the former is just flatly indefensible.
You mentioned being concerned with the caseload in states that are doing graduated openings. I was thinking of this mostly in terms of hospitals being overwhelmed.
Are you thinking we can eradicate this in the U.S. with a long term lockdown? I don't think that's possible anymore.
Are there other useful ways to use a lockdown at this point, when there are already millions of infected?
There's no precendent/evidence that anything else can be done at this point, there's too many cases.
Are you thinking that we should change the goal of the lockdown, to be eradication? Is that possible?
This thing is still spreading, even during the current lockdowns.
Because until we have an effective vaccine or treatment, that'd mean something about 2% mortality rate across the infected population, which, without any containment, would be close to 100% as this thing is crazy contagious. That's 6 million dead people.
And keep in mind that 2% is a very optimistic number. Germany has twice as many. In the US about 6% of the confirmed cases are already dead, with only about half recovered. From that 6%, it'd be 22 million dead people.
Also a profound lack of reading the future.
That was the objective by our president, from the get-go. Remember who is in office: a malignant narcissist with sociopathic tendencies.
When an authoritarian ruler (even a soft one) says something, even if it sounds like an exaggeration, like "lock her up" or "I Could Stand In the Middle Of Fifth Avenue And Shoot Somebody And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters", you should absolutely believe them at face value. They are not people to be messed with.
Also, in the US, a death from something adverse is nothing more than a statistic. The 60,000+ deaths (likely to be double based on the deaths reported compared to previous years) are nothing more than a statistic. Remember that. It is sick but true.
You should take a look at the countries that are part of the European Union, that are east of the Iron Curtain. They have dealt with crises before, and relatively recently, and they seem to have done pretty well in the circumstances.
The IMHE group at the University of Washington, which is a world-renowned team, posts projections on COVID-19 statistics both in the US and from EU countries [1].
If I were reading this kind of stuff in a history book and the next paragraph said “and the revolution started in...” I wouldn’t be surprised. Punishing people for being afraid of a pandemic is not a smart move.
I genuinely believe it will take a failure of an absolute overwhelming magnitude (internet goes completely down and society collapses) for an actual, classic-style revolution.
Once unemployment goes too far past 20% and stays there long enough, we'll see social safety nets fail and serious numbers of folks penniless and dependent on aid for basic survival. That's enough, I think, to precipitate revolution or at least angry people not cooperating, breaking things, making demands, and overwhelming anything the government/police can do to stop it.
If the internet went down, people might not like the silence and their own thoughts.
I initially thought ISPs removed data caps and all those for WFH, but now I think it is part of the effort to keep the society intact.
Regardless; even long short of kicking off a revolution, punishing the populace for being scared is bad politics.
What we do want, basically always, is for the "average" person to work. And we want that because if most people aren't working we stop producing enough food and other goods/services and we all suffer for it. That's as true now as ever.
The government handing out money doesn't create food, or tractors, or houses, or nails, or clothing, and so on and so forth. It helps continue the distribution of the goods we do have in the short term, due to how we choose who to give goods to (i.e. selling them to people with money), but without people directly creating goods or indirectly creating value to sell to other people for goods (the other people being in other countries that are still producing goods) we will run out in short order.
Sure.
A king in 1100 would have a different definition from his peasants. There are people living in mud huts today, and others in slums: both would give different answers. 180 years ago you were medically better off not going to the doctor, today I'd count ability to see a doctor as part of reasonable comfort. I know people who think they can't live if their car is more than 3 years old, and people who was excited to afford a 15 year old used car.
The first sentence is not true in the universal generality stated. I know that it's not your main point, and I know that most people don't have the luxury that I do, but I am a teacher and a researcher, and I would absolutely keep doing both no matter how much money I had. (I hope I'll be able to keep teaching; my university's not so big.)
(The only effect of having more money would be that I would replace grant-writing with periodically sending off handsomely calligraphed letters to funding agencies saying "Can't be arsed. Sorry!")
The only people who actually have personal security are the independently wealthy - everyone else lives and dies at the mercy of some greater system, a state or an employer.
I think it's something to applaud, but I'm not sure...
What people want is financial and health security (which in the US are strongly linked), social interactions and some other liberties like working out and traveling. The actual work aspect mostly benefits the owners of the businesses. And I can see that as a small business owner you'd be exposed to the same pressure for financial security, many times over.
But don't confuse "not wanting to stay at home with nothing to do and no clear idea of whether you'll even have a home in a month" with "wanting to work", it's not helpful in analyzing what's actually happening.
Not everyone has the luxury of a work at home job that allows them to put half of their salary in the bank each month.
those of us who work from home don't have that problem. neither those that are already practicing a range of activities that don't require going outside. like reading, practicing a music instrument, painting, knitting, contributing to FOSS, etc.
we just spend more time on those. everyone else needs to pick up a new hobby.
if your daily routine consists of going to work, and hang out with friends in your free time, then you'll have to completely relearn how to get through the day, pick up new hobbies and find other new meaningful activities.
Well, I, for one, would be a janitor and be perfectly happy for the rest of my life - low stress, low pressure. Seems nice.
Fast food workers and retail would be more difficult, just because people would have to treat them like humans, if they didn't need the money from the job to survive. But that's never talked about.
Sometimes those shitty jobs are only shitty because the people you have to interact with make them that way.
In a prior career, I worked full-time retail management. I actually really liked that job, except for all of the shitty people who asserted their authority over me because I needed the job, and they didn't need to see me as a human due to my job.
(1) Most jobs were make-work. Parking everyone up doesn't really matter.
(2) Most jobs add a little bit to society. Shutting everything down substantially reduces the buffer between people and a 1,500AD standard of living.
Which frame a person accepts as more reasonable probably determines how they feel about the shutdowns.
Obviously the only solution is to drop the states of emergency and order people back to work. It's the only possible way out of this quagmire. /s
Second, making (aspects of) contracts unenforceable can be very destructive if it goes too far. A huge amount of society relies on contracts in order to be able to operate; if you destroy that, you can damage society in fairly fundamental ways.
This situation went from being “we are staying inside to defeat the virus” to now “we refuse to stay inside (reopen) because that lets those evil democrats (Republicans) win, and I won’t ever allow that”.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
Texas is still gaining new cases and deaths at a high rate. Our curve is not flattening. And yet with one eye on the unemployment coffers, Governor Abbott is overriding the same local decision-makers he deferred to just weeks ago, and forcing business to re-open. Hair salons open tomorrow, while four of the six days of May so far have set new records for new COVID-19 cases.
Everyone I know who works retail jobs would rather be home. Some of them are being forced back, some have never been able to stop working. None of them are happy about it.
You may not agree with that perspective, but it is held by quite a few people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-prote...
I dunno how much history you’ve read, but the rich cynically exploiting the masses to direct their anger away from themselves and towards their enemies or other scapegoats is hardly a novel development.
Funds Available for Bond Repurchases: $1,000,000,000,000
And just like that a trillion dollars!
For the record, I agree with the gist of your message. It seems a little too easy to conjure up magical money out of thin air.
Assuming you go over the logistics of what's the best way to actually hand in money to people: through tax rebates? through an envelope sent by the Post Office? through citizens' bank accounts? (then how do you handle the non-banked population?) etc etc the powers that be still have to decide what criteria should they use to send said money: according to one's needs? what are those needs? according to one's contribution to society? but then who decides about another person's real contribution to society?
All these questions were first asked at least 200 years ago (I'd say starting with the French Revolution, maybe even with with the Levellers in the ~1640s), questions for which we haven't found any reasonable and definitive answer so far and we'll probably never will.
that causal chain limits how much money can be printed without adverse effects (and at the extreme, economic and political collapse). if we generate ~$1T/mo of value, printing a couple billion extra here or there gets drowned out in the estimation error of the size of our value creation. we print an extra $1T/mo and we have start to have serious problems.
so money is not limitless. it's bounded by our collective product.
Every other country on the planet wants to hold it.
For the USD where you have excess capital imports which aren't offset by corresponding goods, materials or services exports (e.g. the USA buys products from China then China gives the money earned back to the USA in exchange for treasury bills) then what does it mean for China to cash out?
>> We would be the richest country in the world by far
Confusingly, as a nation you wouldn't be richer or poorer and a persons buying power wouldn't change much. This is a long way to say that printing money isn't the right lever to pull to make everyone richer.
>> poverty would be solved
Poverty is only partly a money supply issue, you'd need to fix the other problems that cause poverty too otherwise you'd have limited effect.
Powell has printed $6T, and the DXY has gone nowhere but up, along with the SPY and the QQQ and the DJIA.
Every single Thursday, we report more job losses than expected, and the market screams higher.
As much as we'd like to think there will be consequences to printing money, the evidence is in that there won't be, either in currency value or market confidence. MMT has proven itself correct.
Long term however you are very very wrong
Further the Stock market is not a good indicator of economic health, never has been. Stock market is largely irrational
It’s stunning that these propaganda narratives work in the face of countries like South Korea and Taiwan, where the response has been safely and thoroughly managed. But American exceptionalism is truly a force to behold.
tbh, I don't think this would be as devastating as you say. "went to restaurant, died two weeks later" is not as clear a connection as "ordered shellfish, puked guts out next day". the thing that's so bad about food poisoning is that, not only does it suck, but it strongly implies a dirty kitchen. in my experience, people are disturbed more by the abstract thought of an "unclean" kitchen than concrete fears of getting sick.
I guess the real priority is to make sure the brunt of the costs of these decisions are borne by those towards the bottom...
Legal liability will incentivize business to take steps to contain the virus and reduce transmission. Take that away and in many businesses will just go "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not my problem."
"Essential to our way of life" is actually a pretty expansive category, which encompasses a great deal of stuff that not actually essential by any reasonable definition.
On the balance of probabilities, I'd bet that many people will just eschew dine-in experiences. At least for a year or two. Can you survive the year or two with decreased dine-in traffic? That's the question owners should be trying to answer. If your footprint is small enough, I'd suspect the answer is yes. If you've got a larger footprint than is prudent in the new reality, you'll likely need to make some changes.
I've seen projections of 1.4m additional deaths from tuberculosis over the next 5 years, half a million cancer deaths, and pretty much uncountable additional deaths from other reasons (suicide, substance, hunger, lack of exercise among elderly).
The list goes too long - for example, people stopped coming to ER for strokes and heart attacks (a 40% decrease of ER visits) and die at home. There are 200m additional people now on the edge of starvation.
I also note a correlation between a country's wealth and level of healthcare. If a country has less money, it typically has less healthcare and more deaths from ridiculous, easily preventable causes. Having a good economy appears to save lives and improve life outcomes across the board.
What works in England doesn't necessarily work in the US, and presuming that Republicans are just being greedy is naive and counterproductive.
At some point, digging into the details, you find the single largest obstacle to a UBI is entrenched ideas and naysayers. Call them Republican or whatever you like, but they're the ones being naive and counterproductive.
Next, let's talk about any plans that involve "testing" as part of the plan to reopen. How much testing would you need? And what kind of testing would you need? Remember, you're not in a hospital, you're just a person who is trying to go back to work or into a grocery store. First, there's a kind of test that takes 3 days to turn around. That's useless, because in that 3 days you've gone around and infected tons of other people. Second there's the tests that take 5 minutes to turn around. Okay, that's great. So you take that test, and you're negative. Perfect. You're allowed to buy groceries today. What about tomorrow? Or the next day? How many tests would we need to make this really work? And how many of that type of test are reasonably available within the next 6 months? It's not going to happen. So any plans about "testing our way out of this" are out the door.
What does this mean? Basically there's some limit of economic destruction that is going to be worse than the virus. Nobody can predict exactly what that is. Is it closing everything for 6 weeks? 3 months? No one knows. The hard truth is we're just going to have to eat it, and by eat it I mean take a lot of deaths. Hopefully in a way that doesn't overload our hospitals. What will really get your goat is realizing that public leadership has known that testing and vaccine wasn't going to work since very early on. And we've just been keeping hope alive based on lies and magic thoughts.
Covid-19, on the other hand, is a much simpler target, just because it's one target. (Yeah, they're talking about different strains emerging. I don't know if they have drifted too far to be covered by one vaccine, though. Even if they have, three to five strains is still much simpler than the cold.) So there is more hope for a vaccine than you are saying. (That doesn't mean that I think we're going to see one next week. Maybe not even this year.)
As for testing: We either need to test everyone, then quarantine everyone who's sick and trace their contacts, or else we need to test everybody, frequently. I don't see either of those happening very soon.
The absolute best case scenario by Fauci for a vaccine was 1 year. Let's assume even that miracle occurs. Do you really believe shutting down the economy for a year is feasible without a collapse of civilization as we know it? Then you have the same logistical problem of making and delivering this vaccine to literally billions of people. It's technically doable, but not in any kind of short time frame. I'm sorry, but it's just not real, and it never was.
I said that this is what it would take in order for testing to work. I didn't say that I thought it was doable; in fact, I think it is not.
As for a vaccine, I think that one is possible, but not certain, and not immediate. And I said so, rather plainly.
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
...
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-wal...
Even centuries after his death, I find his poetry to be some pretty wild stuff.
Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.
Fun Fact: Whitman, a staunch anti-authoritarian and overall structure hater, is one of the few English Poets taught in Chinese schools, as he is considered 'a man of the people'.
[0] Super crazy debate on who was 'first' here, if that can even be a thing that can be measured.
Listen! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes
in the old days, the kings of tribes—how noble princes
showed great courage!
Who was captain and mate of a fishing smack;
When a yacht crossed his bows,
He said: “My word!
It’s an awfully good thing it wasn’t a liner.”
A very good essay on Howl and Moloch here : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
"I raised Moloch to Heaven and all I got was a Disneyland with no children"
And here it is read by Jeremiah: http://traffic.libsyn.com/sscpodcast/Meditations_on_Moloch.m...
A hero!
I can point you to multiple giving themselves paycuts.
Denver Health Medical Center: https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-denver-he...
Salesforce: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-top-executives-ca...
Oxy: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=9&ved=2ahUKEwj...
Liberty mutual: https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2020/03/02/liberty-m...
That’s what I got in 3 minutes. I still would bet there are a ton more.
The articles written about CEO pay cuts are PR puff pieces intended to placate us into not taking back what the oligarchs have stolen from us.
I won't bother getting into a discussion about "what the oligarchs have stolen from us."
You could make an argument that either:
A) The company should issue more equity to pay for furloughed/laid off workers
B) The company should reallocate equity from executives to the furloughed workers. This may not be possible for a host of legal reasons, tbh, so I'm not sure it's actually possible.
Don't ask economists how to manage a pandemic. Listen to the epidemiologists. Consult the economists to determine how much money is needed to keep people fed and sheltered until the epidemiologists say that the threat will be passed.
*I'm stereotyping economists here, but they've participated in too many conversations I've witnessed where they wade well out of their bubble of relevance. I read this somewhere on HN once, and it stuck with me: know what you're being asked to be an expert on. Economists aren't experts on infectious diseases. Fuck off, you're killing people.
My humble apologies to the majority of economists that aren't megalomaniacs like the ones they seem to find for TV interviews and Government advisor roles.
Can you cite any proof of this "provable" fact? ...and also a source that defines Economists "core task"?
My problem is primarily with politics as opposed to pure economics. Politicians use arguments provided for them by pet economists that allow them to hide behind the economy as a reason to avoid making hard decisions. Lo and behold, the status quo is best path forward ad infinitum.
Political economic decisions are often historically provably wrong and have the opposite effect to that which was the stated intent (whether or not it was the actual intent). Australia and the US recent re-implementations of trickle-down economics, by 30 years of experience, is not effective at doing what the politicians say it will. More subjectively: climate economics.
It's a complex argument but you're right to call me out on hyperbole. It's politics staining whatever it touches.
Semi-related interesting article about economics relationship with politics: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/july/1435672800/ric...
Economic shut down kills people too. Especially poor people. Especially especially poor people in poor countries with food insecurity. So fuck off yourself. It's not that simple. Crime, authoritarianism, famine, (more) disease. You're just claiming the moral highground because you have a point source of death that is more likely to affect people in your local community.
Unfortunately, each state will make it's own decision on how to resolve this situation, and your state's decision may not line up with your preference. I can understand the frustration for those in a reopening state who are terrified of a big outbreak & getting sick, or those in a shut down state that are terrified of not having the money they need to survive from being out of work.
insert politics
Is everyone else on HN a subscriber to all these publications or am I missing something?
I believe there is also a social rule here on HN that it is fine to ask for a bypass link, but it is not fine to complain about websites trying to stay solvent
EDIT: here is a bypass for the article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to the NYT
www.nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com.
As for what you're missing? If you weren't already a subscriber to the NYT, you probably aren't that interested in it. I find the NYT, especially editorials, to be extremely long-winded. This could have been summarized as "My opinion: MTA is a horrible employer that conditions my employment on coming to work when we don't have the sanitation and protective supplies or procedures that MTA tells us to recommend to our customers".
RMT Union was absolutely up in arms against automation of their jobs, which would have made them much less vulnerable today. I wonder what MTA employees thought about the automation and if automation was even considered by NYC Subway or rail operations.
Maybe we'll finally get proper automation after this is over.
I can't really believe that the country that managed to send man to the Moon is not able to put a camera somewhere in the train or on the platform, so conductor does not need to do something like this...
If camera is too much, maybe a properly installed large mirror would do the trick.
Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect.
So I think a pretty good engineering compromise has been made here. Going to the moon happened because there was an unlimited budget and we only had to do it a few times. Seeing if your train is platformed correctly and that it's not dragging any customers to their death has less funding and has to happen thousands of times a day. Hence, we have a person in the train to do that, instead of a machine learning sensor network.
The London Underground has figured this out, and figured it out decades ago. No tube driver gets out of their cab, or puts their head out of a window (they don’t have one that opens).
Stations are equipped with cameras and screens that allow drivers to check doors. The doors are designed to detect obstructions, including items of clothing trapped in them.
For Crossrail TfL has invested huge amounts of money into their new trains to further improve the door sensors, due to the extreme length of the trains. The doors have been tested for their ability to not just detect trapped items, but also the difference between bad (someone inside with a scarf trapped) from emergency (someone outside with a scarf trapped). [1]
All of this is done to not just improve safety, but also capacity. In London at least, the biggest restriction to capacity is the amount of time trains need to spend at platforms for people to get and off. They’ve already optimised the hell out of transit period between stations.
And all of this has been done on the oldest underground network in the world, and trust me it’s age shows. No Victorian ever imagined the tube would be so busy (or they wouldn’t have stuck us with tiny 6” high passenger compartments).
[1] https://www.londonreconnections.com/2018/crossrail-cutting-f...
Elevators manage to not drag you, but multimillion dollar train cars can't?
Your thought process is one of over-engineering. Don't overengineer.
(In Japan, platform doors are common. Every installation I've seen has multiple e-stop buttons to press if you get caught in them. Clearly they don't trust the sensors, if there are even sensors. And those doors are static and don't move with the train.)
The Victoria line has been operating semi-automatically with driver only operation, and not getting out of the trains (because the windows don’t open) since 1968.
These aren’t insurmountable problems, and they’ve been solved for a very long time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_1967_Stoc...
Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? In part, it's a delivery on the promise of self-driving cars we were imagined would be our eventual retrofuturist societal inheritance.
Point taken, but I don’t think the name “The Boring Company” is going to inspire many people even if it was a making weed-burgers for baseball fans.
For the rest of the stations, optimizing for the case where it's unsafe for the conductor to stick their head out seems odd; why is there a crowd on the platform then?
This person is a conductor though. They sit in a cab in the middle of the train and operate the doors.
Sounds like a catch 22
Progress should be made. Having machines do jobs we don't need humans to do will always be better for everyone in the long run, and it is better if we do it sooner rather than later.
Luddism never helped anyone.
However I would point out that the original Luddites, who were middle class, mostly died in abject poverty.
We should not prevent automation, but at the same we should not just brush aside the plight of the displaced workers. New jobs will be created, but probably not for them.
Anecdote: I work a lot with low income people and the vast majority want to be considered essential with the ability to earn. This is because they, like most people, are smart and are able to understand the risk and make decisions for themselves and their families.
So while I think pushing for safety is good and important, and extreme cases should be addressed, I find it odd that the dominant narrative around essential workers right now is not how workers are clamoring to be considered essential. It is the story not being told.
Absolute bullshit.
We don't know the true prevalence. We don't know the true incidence rate. Without that, we don't know the true mortality.
Epidemiologists and infectious disease docs can't give you a reasonable "understand(ing of) the risk ... for themselves and their families" right now, only the general bounds of best- and worst-case scenarios.
Anyone else claiming to have that knowledge or understanding is deluding themselves and/or others. To point to people desperate to not end up homeless/jobless and say they're making a rational decision with understanding of risks involved is absolutely ludicrous.
A child can make a first order estimation of personal risk. For example, I live in California and there are 2000 cases a day for 4 million people. I think I am safer than the average person, so my risk is less than that.
It isn't perfect or numerically accurate, but gives a ballpark result which can be used.
If growth increases, you know it is becoming more dangerous. If growth decreases, you know it is becoming less dangerous.
Also what we want is a 14 day decline in new cases. Then we should consider re-opening.
People refused to social distance and ruined it for everyone.
What does a 14 day decline mean for a state that never had a significant outbreak.
I have seen zero evidence that there is a meaningful spoiler effect. If you have any data, I would be very interested.
Come on, nobody has done these calculations. Not even the experts. I bet less than 1% of the population could give you even a reasoned estimate of the risks to themselves or their families.
An example might be:
PRos- I am young, healthy, and my work involves no human contact. If I don’t work I will lose my house
Cons - I know there is a non-zero risk and I need to find a new caregiver for my elderly parents.
100%: I will lose my home if I don't pay for it
x%: I or my family may get seriously ill or die.
We don't know x exactly, but we do know some bounds. We know it is better than a coin flip. I've heard estimates of worst case being around 20% if hospitals get overwhelmed. However, we know that this affects young, healthy people far less than others. But let's say it is 20%. When you are poor, your risk tolerances change. I know people who would willingly take a 1 in 5 chance for death to get back to work. And likely, their chances are more like 1 in 1000. I know vastly more people who would take that chance.
That said, it is fairly easy to get a ballpark for risk. If nobody in your city or county has contracted the virus, your short term risk is very low. If you don't contact anyone in your daily activities and practice basic hygiene, your risk is very low.
But getting that "option" may not lead to much of a real choice, since gaining it may mean losing better options. IIRC, nonessential workers who've become unemployed due to shutdowns qualify for unemployment, but workers whose employers have opened do not.
Giving them the "option" to work just presents them with a choice between going back to a potentially unsafe workplace and having no income, while not provides it means they can stay safe with some income.
Their "options" are to work (with potentially tremendous risk to themselves) or quit without unemployment - losing their health insurance and income simultaneously.
That's hardly an option.
Sure, we _can_ reopen, but we can't force people to sit next to one another, and risk getting Covid-19 to continue to keep small businesses alive.
The only solution is to ensure the workers are paid, rent freeze for both business and personal leases.
In a recent press conference, New York Governor Cuomo failed to provide any reasonable response to a reporter when asked about someone in a very similar situation (the person qualified for benefits, but checks have not arrived).
What is to happen to these people? Is the lockdown to protect them from something truly worse than not being able to buy food?
Anyone care to address this single point without going off-topic?
It's not hard, we just have a weird culture in America that couples all these basic human essentials to your work.
> It's not hard, we just have a weird culture in America that couples all these basic human essentials to your work.
The requests for these things have already been made and are not reasonably being acted on.
Ray Zalinsky: Goin' a little heavy on the pine tree perfume there kid?
Tommy: No, it's an auto air freshener.
Ray Zalinsky: Good, you've pinpointed it, now the next step is washin' it out.
Ayn Rand
I am not a follower of hers but on this particular topic I am reminded of her quotes a lot
> I am not a follower of hers but...
How are you both not a follower of hers and also driven to conjure quotes? That looks a lot like when someone says "I'm not racist but <overtly racist thing>". (I'm not calling you racist. I'm drawing a similarity between "I'm not X, but").
To put it another way, it would be easy to imagine this variant of the quote being real (to be completely clear, it isn't):
>> Capitalism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to the capitalists, that the only justification of his existence is his service to the capitalists, and that the capitalists may dispose of him in any way they please for the sake of their own profit.
> -Karl Marx
...and that claim, unlike Rand's, would have been both accurate and relevant.
But, those minor flaws aside, it is, indeed, a quote.