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I think a better way to look at it is that workers should be able to protest working on a machine they find morally wrong. The world might be a better place if people directing resources were required to stop and think "Are the workers going to willingly do this?" before making decisions.

My only experience with social causes is doing labor organizing in Seattle, but that experience has been almost exclusively organized and run by uneducated working poor.

My point being that from what it looks like, there probably isn't a list of people organizing the CHAZ because it's mostly a spontaneous reaction to the current circumstances. They're explicitly non-hierarchical, and if they look anything like the circles of activism I've worked with in Seattle they're probably made up of more working class activists than this idea of liberal business owners.

But that is just my assumption based on my own anecdotal experience, I don't live in Seattle anymore and haven't been to the CHAZ myself.

> It's interesting how this is organized by largely college educated people, many of whom are not PoC

Do you have a source for this? I haven't been able to find a list of people involved in organizing this.

While not super related, I've always been fascinated by shoplifter analysis of loss prevention you can find on the internet: https://raddle.me/wiki/shopliftingml

They have that hand scanner tool, so you can scan larger objects without picking them up, and I often will forget I have smaller objects under the larger one I scanned.

Also, scanning 1 item while holding two of it in your hand.

As someone who has inadvertently stolen from Walmart on more than one occasion, I cant attest that their anti-shoplifting AI does not work.

Well, also the fact that a police station is filled with armed police might also be a reason.

You can use querySelectors in React, it's just normal JavaScript. You can also use refs if you don't want to use querySelector.

I think the whataboutisms come up whenever China is mentioned because it feels a bit goofy to spend energy worrying about authoritarianism across the world while ignoring authoritarianism in your own country.

I'm not saying people shouldn't worry about both, but if you're wondering why people are saying "but America" I'd guess that is the main reason.

I think it's important to distinguish Marx's theories (dialectical materialism) from Marx's application of them. Marxists apply his method of systemic analysis to contemporary events to navigate global and local economic issues, but don't deify the man himself. Marx isn't a Nostradamus-like figure, and many people have added to dialectical materialism and the labor theory of value.

To put it simply, Marx looked at this machine we're using to produce things and said "Woah, I don't think this machine will run more than another 150 years", and we've managed to duct tape and super-glue it to running much longer, the fundamental analysis of capitalism's contradictions are still true, we've just adapted better to them than he anticipated.

Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history? I've always understood it as a sort of evolutionary biology for social science. This article mentions Marx, but only as a guy who had an idea of a communist society?

Right after mentioning Marx the author states: > The idea that such progress was inevitable was sharply derailed by the genocides and totalitarianism of the mid-20th century...

Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events, as well as things like imperialism, colonialism, and recessions / depressions cycles.

I, personally, think it can easily become reductive to push everything into dialectical materialism, and many people have added onto Marx's analysis. But if you're going to try and nail down some laws around history I think it might be a good idea to read about thinkers in the past who have already tried to answer the question.

Silas Marner by George Elliot. Changed the way I parent my children.

You can find them for ~$30 on Amazon.

Yea, unfortunately that seems to be the case. While local level officials in Wuhan punished some early whistleblowers for posting publicly about the virus the Chinese Supreme Peoples Court said they should not have been punished.

I think China has shown a lot of transparency and has put a ton of resources towards containment.

ERs in the US primarily act as triage and stabilization centers for emergencies. Treatment for chronic illness or preventative care can't reliably be found in an ER.

An anecdote, the last time I had to go to an ER in the US was when I cut the flexor tendon in my pinky, I knew it was severed but since it wasn't life threatening they stopped the bleeding, put some liquid stitches in the cut, wrapped and braced it and sent me on my way.

I had to wait until the weekend was over to see my primary care doctor which I have access to because I have insurance / money.

I used to work at a gig economy startup (uber for dog walking...) and we spent considerable resources lobbying local and national governments to expand the kinds of restrictions we put onto our independent contractors while still not labeling them as employees.

We also had an entire team dedicated to preventing our contractors from going "off platform".

Probably one of the more exploitative jobs I've had.

Anyone who has done even a little bit of labor organizing knows that getting contact information for your co-workers is the first step in forming any kind of worker organization. It's not illegal, but companies go to great lengths to prevent workers from accessing that data on a large scale if they can. This might seem like Google isn't doing anything explicitly anti-worker here, but in reality this is union-busting 101 cloaked in corporate speak.

Here is one of my favorite threads by Marcin: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752

If y'all don't follow Marcin Wichary on Twitter you're missing out on a lot of great content. He's consistently highlighting interesting intersections of history, technology, and how humans live within it all.

Twitter can often times be an unpleasant place and he's always a bright spot in the noise: https://twitter.com/mwichary

Not only will it be more fickle, there is 0 accountability from the public, and the corporation has unilateral control over the programs existence.

Contrast that with entrenched public goods like schools, libraries, police and fire departments. Most politicians don't have the ability to suspend those programs if the quarterly numbers are low.

So yes, private welfare infrastructure is inherently less stable than public.

> If we can construct some system where the profit motive does motivate ongoing maintenance of welfare infrastructure, thats a win.

There are some things that just aren't profitable, and never will be, like rural mail delivery.

Not to be dramatic or anything, but I think if the last 30 years have taught us anything, it is that the more we try to solve problems with profit driven organizations the more anemic our society will become.

> Will this effort make it harder to build public infrastructure in the future?

Yes, most likely.

> But at the same time, homeless people don't care about your theoretical utopia. They need help right now, and there's a very real cost to saying, "nobody should help this person suffering until we can do it right."

I don't know who you are arguing against here. I never said any of these things. I'm not advocating we prevent corporations from doing things that help people, I am only pointing out that they are fickle friends, and we shouldn't count on them to be reliable providers of aid.

It isn't about good or evil, it's about the fact that relying on large corporations' profit interests to solve public ills is a fools errand. So, sure, the public might get some good from a corporation's program, but as soon as the profit dries up, the corporation will move on. This isn't a moral thing, it's just a thing profit-driven organizations do.

People don't want welfare infrastructure to be contingent on a corporations ability to profit, because in the end it will be a fickle thing.

It's a really convoluted system which requires the kids to essentially be penned up and allowed to walk to their parents cars in a controlled way. They have a policy against walking since there are no sidewalks for most of the area around the school.

It's probably safer given the fact there are no sidewalks, but it still sucks.

I don't live in a sun belt city, but rather a smallish town (60,000 pop) in the US. I live less than half a mile from the nearest grocer store, but it's too dangerous to walk. No sidewalks, no shoulders. I have to drive.

I live 0.1 mile away from my kids' school, but cannot walk over there to pick them up, I have to get in a queue of cars that leads almost to my house. It's ridiculous.

You can usually find a therapist for a similar rate ($80-$100)/hr, or if you're lucky enough to have insurance that covers therapy, you can get it for less. I currently only pay a co-pay of $25/hr.

As a society, should we really tolerate businesses who can only exist via exploitation?

Unions are no more or less corrupt than any organization of humans (the businesses they work inside of especially).

> It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it.

This is the crux of liberal (classical, libertarian, and contemporary) ideology as a whole. The idea that if only people were enlightened we could have nice things. All in all, it is kind of useless, or utopian. You can't enlighten people, and merely giving them education doesn't do the trick on its own.

Liberalism (classical, libertarian, and contemporary) ignores material conditions as a base for which all things are formed, leaving it ill-equipped to handle any real issues. We can hem and haw all day about how "if only the plebs were enlightened" but nothing will change until we make real efforts to change people's material existence. It's easy to turn to fascism and extremism if you have literally nothing going for you in life.

I'm not excusing individuals actions, but don't try to solve a systemic problem with individualism if you want anything to actually change.

I think the fact that business school exists at all should be our first clue that Economics is mostly pseudo-science. It has little material value aside from propagandizing the ideas of the wealthy.

I mean, how many of us work at Microsoft or Amazon? Companies currently in a bidding war to build the "War Cloud".