This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are still deciding what to do.
Edit: Be aware, I have enough emergency savings for around 3 years worth of fuck it. I'm not you and you should not be me.
This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.
I guess that's what I get for assuming.
After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work.
I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe.
My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.
Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.
As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.
[^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.
> Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
I agree with this assessment to the extent that we keep electing poor officials, but I don't think it's a "one party is amazing and the other is terrible". In particular, the CDC's issues were around a long time before the prior administration (again, SARS was in 2003 and we scarcely made preparations in the intervening years). To the extent that the problem is the officials we elect, I think that's partially true--I think the government is an emergent property of the health of our body politic, but our body politic is highly partisan (as evidenced by your comment). This is partly due to a divisive media but also probably to our two party system. We will keep electing worse officials because those officials can make a plausible argument that they are at least marginally better than the officials in the other party. The bar keeps getting lower; it's a race to the bottom.
> We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
The pandemic response team wasn't part of the CDC, but yes, disposing of that team was a bad idea in hindsight. It doesn't absolve the CDC; however, and it misses the point in the same way that the "but the government didn't properly fund the CDC!" argument misses the point.
It's proof that powerful interests are successful in starving the beast so they can get away without oversight.
I'm sure we'll all talk about how this is all the Republicans' fault, and that may well be true; however, it doesn't excuse us from perpetuating the cycle of divisiveness at every opportunity; however, cathartic that may be. We need to work to understand and build bridges if we're to be more than Pyrrhic victors. Of course partisanship and tribalism will always be more popular until we've reached whatever low we're willing to accept.
It is hard to meet in they middle when both sides are extremely far apart, and each side has factions that are even further apart than ever before.
Really we need more than two parties dictating the agenda. It is getting harder for the far left to even want deal with Democrats, much less Republicans. The same is happening with the far/alt right.
So what's the point? One could argue that Republicans were responding in kind. You would disagree (as would I, but that doesn't matter). This kind of endless litigation only polarizes us--we each permit our own extremists because we believe they are slightly less bad than the other side's extremists. I think a multi-party system would be helpful, but I think the problems run deeper (especially since we're seeing the same trends toward polarization in countries with multi-party systems).
I think at its core the problem is that our epistemological institutions are corrupted by extremists. We aren't having an actual debate because the "hosts" or "moderators" of the debate are only presenting one perspective and only the facts that support it. The other side isn't going to have their opinions changed because their questions aren't being addressed, only shouted down and maligned. I think this lack of real national discussion drives each side to be more entrenched and more extreme, and I think this is somewhat by design--the media in particular seems to be optimizing for it deliberately.
I think we need to build a collective awareness of the manipulation we're subject to. We need to understand that the folks on the other side of the party line aren't evil, but that we're being presented with a distorted perspective (although certainly many on each side really are bad). We need to start moderating ourselves as individuals and developing empathy for people on the other side of the party line while demanding better of our institutions. We won't start agreeing with each other on everything or indeed many things (and certainly not overnight), but we should be able to have productive debate and work gradually through issues. We need to start humanizing each other and finding common ground.
It is very hard to empathize with conservative capitalists, libertarians or the alt right, when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy.
It's also kind of sad that rioting, protests and raw anger over recent social issues has been more effective at moving the needle than decades of political handwringing. I don't think this is going to help with any "see it from both sides and meet in the middle" arguments.
This is a misunderstanding. The difference is not in the presence or absence of empathy, but rather in how that empathy is expressed: private interaction or government programs. The libertarians are not lacking in empathy; they just don't see it as a suitable justification for political action.
Of course, if you only discuss the problem from a political angle, and consider only political solutions, then it would indeed seem like they aren't interested in solving it at all, when in fact they are very interested in finding a solution—just one that doesn't involve force.
Right. He had the right idea. Of course things wouldn’t change over night. One man making positive gestures is important but insufficient to turn the ship on a dime. A lot of mistrust had been built up by that time and others were continuing to build that mistrust. I think he did a lot to stem the tide of divisiveness, especially given how quickly things fell apart in that regard after he left office.
However even with Democrats, there are a lot of people who think Bernie was unfairly treated, and that Biden is in bed with corporations, while establishment democrats think you should vote "blue no matter who", and that Bernie supporters were loons. Again, hard to come to a middle ground even within each party.
MLK Jr was not a moderate, and had problems with their ineffectiveness.
https://www.bustle.com/p/this-martin-luther-king-jr-quote-on...
The article is 2 years old, what was done in those two years to help prevent the outcome we're seeing now? More black men got shot by police with little to no action done about it.
Treat people as equals doesn't exactly need a list of demands, but the discrimination has become so ingrained that some need it spelled out for them.
Why would they try to appease people who weren't going to vote for it?
The article below goes into more detail.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/01/set-health...
IIRC we did have a massive stockpile of masks, but it was only discovered at the start of the pandemic that they weren't being rotated out and most/all of them had degraded too far to be safe.
Which direction are you picturing this going?
I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net.
So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.
Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.
People do this regardless.
The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.
In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services.
Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.
It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.
Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan).
In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't.
This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.