Seenso

> Read 18 U.S.C. § 6002 it does not grant blanket immunity. If I testify truthfully and reveal perjury in the past I can be tried for that perjury now.

I think you're reading it wrong. It doesn't grant immunity for perjury committed while testifying under immunity, which is a completely reasonable exception. Without it, a guilty criminal would have no incentive not to give false testimony portraying his guilty friends as innocent.

You might want read this: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?re...

> Again, this violates the 5th amendment.

That's your opinion, but the Supreme Court's opinion differs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastigar_v._United_States

> When is your workplace ever certified disease free?

Never, but taking these actions in this situation is definitely negligence at best. It's like running a hospital forcing people to work without providing soap or hand sanitizer.

> Facebook is not telling them they have to come into the office. Rather, it’s the contracting companies that these people actually work for.

Though that's one of the benefits of outsourcing: you get all the benefits of squeezing your workers to the maximum (which helps the bottom line), while still having deniability for PR purposes.

Facebook is responsible unless they loudly and publicly order their vendors to treat their employees better.

> Scumbag judges should be thrown off for this.

> Completely bullshit. They held her in prison for a year with no charges and now they want her to pay a quarter million in fines? Fuck off.

It's not bullshit. Manning was basically obstructing justice by disobeying a court order. If sanctions like this didn't exist, people wouldn't have any incentive follow court orders at all, and the court system would become ineffective and break down.

Also, I'm not sure if the concept of "charges" is even relevant here. Aren't those leveled by a prosecutor? In contempt cases the judge is directly punishing noncompliance with court proceedings.

> The country is pretty much shut down.

No, it isn't yet. I'm in the office right now, with thousands of my colleagues.

> And you aren't going to be able to test ~60 _million_ people who will ultimately be infected with this

Maybe not, but you don't want to discourage people from getting tested now. Getting a positive test is an important cue to take extra stringent isolation measures.

Aggressive testing helps reduce the need for stringent, general measures like lockdowns:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-respon...

> There's no cure. Bodies will pile up regardless.

There's not cure, but there is treatment. Many deaths will be avoidable if we can slow down the spread, to spread out the load to avoid overwhelming the medical system too much.

> more debt to pile up...

So, lets pile up bodies instead?

> Was it the people saying to remove all the extras, or the people who put the extras in?

What extras?

> There is a lot of FUD currently going on. This podcast by Joe Rogan is great. Listen to an expert and then make your decisions.

Joe Rogan podcasts are approximately forty hours long, on average. You need to summarize it, with text.

> Politicians should not take advantage of emergencies by tacking wish list items on to bills that address the emergency.

What exactly are the unrelated wish list items here? Everything I'm seeing here looks on point and directly relevant to this crisis.

Workers need rights to sick time right now, or the virus will spread even more quickly and this will be worse. People are going to be losing jobs or hours because of this, and if they don't have extra cash they're going to need food assistance. Medicaid is about to get hit hard, just like every health insurance program. The elderly and disabled people are vulnerable groups, and are going to need greater levels of assistance during the coming disruptions.

> "Hey, it's an emergency, pull out your wish list for the past four decades."

All the proposals listed in the article makes total sense in the context of this crisis. Sick time for people to quarantine, food assistance for the people whose incomes will drop due to the fast approaching recession and isolation measures, all totally on-topic.

The US has long-understood systematic problems that will contribute to making this crisis worse. If you want to mitigate the crisis, you'll want to fix those issues that you can.

> Because if we do react strongly, and it does largely contain the virus, that will also be "proof" (quote-unquote) that it wasn't anything we needed to be so proactive about in the first place.

Even if every other country has Y2K levels of success containing the Coronavirus, we can still point skeptics at the example of places like Italy to prove it was a real threat.

> A pardon is not possible because she has not been convicted of any crime.

Is that true? Wasn't Nixon pardoned for his crimes without actually being convicted of anything? He didn't even manage to get impeached, since he resigned before that could happen.

> And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on (though perhaps not to the extent in this article).

Yeah, I was surprised the article made such a big deal about that. My ears are also a little asymmetrical, and Stephen Colbert's [1] are very obviously so.

[1] A famous American comedian with a nightly talk show.

> COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too.

Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested. One of the most important things we need to do right now is detect the people who got the virus through community transmission.

> Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.

I'd say that testing those people should be lower priority, since an assumption they're infected is more likely to be accurate, so they can take preventative measures without needing a test.

> Amazon has not done anything to combat counterfeit items on their website before now, I don't expect much from them now.

I think they have, but their efforts are usually spastic and reactive, so they don't do much good.

I remember during the eclipse a few years ago, they told everyone who bought eclipse glasses from them not to use them and refunded their money. There were lots of articles showing most of the ones being sold on Amazon were inadequate or had fake certification markings. Unfortunately, Amazon only took action a few days before the eclipse, after millions were sold and it was almost impossible to find alternatives.

> Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, and churn them out by the billion.

Where would they do that? China is still pretty locked down, and I think they're still struggling to supply domestic needs of those items.

> Sounds incredibly inefficient

Just like having redundant servers for your applications and backups for your data.

> The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.

And they've delivered that by building a fragile system with too little safety margin or redundancy.

It's like building an application that can serve the absolute greatest number of requests for the absolute lowest price by having absolutely no redundancy. It looks great, until a disk fails.

> The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with.

I wouldn't call those choices informed, it'd call them myopic. A smart, informed choice with a time horizon of 6 months can be an exceptionally stupid one with a time horizon of 30 years.

You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.

> This argument has been applied to many rights in the Constitution, and the courts have consistently held that any right that can be cast aside just because the government asserts an "emergency", regardless of type, is effectively a right that does not exist.

That's not my argument, though. I'm arguing against a kind fundamentalist absolutism that doesn't even allow for narrow, reasonable, and necessary exceptions in any circumstances. Applied to the First Amendment, that logic says you should be able to yell fire in a crowded room or libel someone, yet those things are prohibited and we haven't found ourselves in a dystopia on account of that. The Constitution itself even has such exceptions written into it, and the founders recognized their necessity even when not enumerated.

I get where you're coming from, but I no longer believe that kind of absolutism is a protection from tyranny. Letting an undetected Typhoid Mary freely travel the country in the most convenient ways possible isn't actually going to do anything to prevent Trump from suspending elections or declaring Joe Biden a terrorist, if he likes, it's just going get a lot of people sick.

> No, this is not correct. There are only allowances for non-discriminatory "reasonable restrictions" such as closing roads during unsafe road conditions. There is no general "public safety" loophole that enables the Federal government to abrogate well-established rights, there must be due process for each individual so-deprived.

Do you have a citation for that?

If you're correct, this interpretation is to be verging on Constitution-as-a-suicide-pact territory, and the Constitution should be amended or the opinion changed to correct the flaw, and allow suspension of those rights during serious epidemics.

But there's a nuance there that I think needs clarification: is the right to not be discriminatorily singled out or a right to be provided access to infrastructure in all circumstances?

I think the right has to be the former, and general, nondiscriminatory restrictions would be OK. I posted in another comment that state governments regularly shut down roads and other infrastructure due to public safety concerns. I think closing roads in a lockdown could be done under similar authority.

The latter, to be provided access to infrastructure in all circumstances, is kinda nonsensical when you think about it. For instance, it would mean everyone had a constitutional right to drive through roads that have been closed for construction, which would be ridiculous.

> Also covered by the Commerce Clause, since 1937.

So you're saying the commerce clause requires states to keep intra-state transportation infrastructure open, regardless of the public safety risk? That's unbelievable, since that infrastructure is regularly closed for public safety reasons (e.g. closing roads during blizzards):

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/12/01/blizzard-closes-hig...:

> To the west, the Minnesota Department of Transportation closed a stretch of Interstate 35 between Duluth and Cloquet. The Cloquet Police Department posted a photo of vehicles stranded along Highway 33 in that city late Saturday.

https://apnews.com/25d827c21bff49bba79339c51a6f3407:

> The Nebraska State Patrol has closed Interstate 80 from the Wyoming border east to North Platte as well as all state highways in the Nebraska Panhandle as a late-winter blizzard swept into the state.

> The authority to restrict travel into a state (from an adjacent state) unambiguously lies with the federal government, under even the narrowest possible interpretation of the Commerce Clause.

Honestly, the scenario I had in mind was intrastate travel restrictions, especially around cities.

> Or just reroute off an interstate onto a different road between states, which is a lot more likely.

If you're implementing a lockdown, you'd close more than just the interstates for that exact reason. At a minimum, you'd probably want manned checkpoints on the interstates, state highways, major county roads, and obvious choke points like bridges; and unmanned barriers on the minor roads.

> Then somebody takes the whole thing to the courts, and the courts tell the Feds to knock it off and let people through because they are violating the law of the land.

I'm skeptical that the courts would act as you assume when "the public Safety may require it."

Also, who says "the feds" have to implement it? It's my understanding that state authorities have broad powers to combat epidemics, too. They're also the ones with the manpower to implement lockdowns.

>> Ultimately, Seattle’s experience shows the futility of travel bans

> Is there a word or phrase for the act of poorly implementing an idea, then using the failed result as a way to discredit the idea? It's like a straw man argument but done in practice rather than in argument.

I don't know, so I'm going to coin a term for it: dishonest experiment.

> If they closed airports and put up some checkpoints on the interstate to only allow select traffic through, I imagine that would cut travel pretty dramatically.

> Courts tend to believe that the Privileges and Immunities Clause gives a constitutional right to travel between states.

Interstate closures happen all the time for all kinds of reasons.

If someone wants to unconditionally exercise their "constitutional right to travel between states" when epidemic control measures are in place, they can walk or swim.

>> Better than who for example? Better than Iran? I'd certainly hope so. Other than Iran, I'd say it's too early to tell.

> China? At no point we're we arresting people for spreading the word about it?

I'm no fan of the Chinese government, but

1) their authoritarianism both kick-started this epidemic and bungled the initial response

2) AND seems to have contained the epidemic once its severity was understood.

The US and many other developed countries seem to be on track to bungling their initial response, as well. That's pretty inexcusable since they've had the benefit of months to prepare.

The US government should have paid to build up a test kit stockpile in February, but I guess now we get to see how badly free market principles handle an epidemic.

> have to go to work sick because they don't have sick days

Personally, I think sick people who don't have paid sick leave should be paid to cough on people who oppose requirements for paid sick leave.