something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ (and i guess it is even less than that outside of CA) just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market. Anyway, you should have seen packed restaurants' sidewalks this weekend. The life is ready to come roaring back. It is pretty clear by now that nor the inept governments, nor aliens are going to stop the virus.
Statistically the 2 cases at Tesla is an order of magnitude less than what you'd expect giving the factory size (10000) and the population size of the Alameda county (1.6M) and the infection rate there (4000).
Unless our descendants own those robots or there is a massive shift in who controls productive property, our lineages will die off once they're made permanently redundant and shut out from what those machines produce.
Almost certainly. Thing is, as countries develop, the birth rate drops off a cliff. Canada's already at 1.5 births per woman. The US is only slightly higher. As we make more robots, we'll make less humans. Society will be forced to become dramatically different.
We already have an abundance of resources, like food and land, yet we don't efficiently allocate them such that they don't go to waste, leave people hungry or leave people homeless. The only reason people without significant assets can access food or land is because they're able to trade their time for money. People who can't trade their time for money currently go hungry and become homeless.
This is why I say that unless there is a significant change in control of productive property, when that productive property deprecates human labor, those who rely on trading their time for money will be in dire situations.
> There's something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market.
This isn't a jab at workers needing to go back to work, this is a jab at the fact that we treat retail workers like garbage when in reality our society would crumble without them. The whole "just get a better job if you want to be paid more" argument levied at those who push for a higher minimum wage not only ignores the fact that, when in poverty, it's very hard to get a "better job", but also ignores the fact that these jobs are necessary. Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)?
> perhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work.
No, I'll invent a society where people whose job it is to move money around are paid substantially less than retail workers or janitors, and where those that do labor like this are respected more highly than someone like Warren Buffet or Crissy Teigen.
> Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)?
do you propose to pay sanitation workers hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece, in which case i can't imagine how city budgets will survive, or forcibly lower the salaries of financial workers to below that of the sanitation workers? in which case we'll have little to no financial services anymore.
ok, even if we suppose that it were absolutely brand new cases - Alameda county has added ~1300 cases since Tesla opened May 18. Still almost an order of magnitude difference.
I remember the local Bay Area station having the best coverage of the Mountain View fatal autopilot crash, e.g. they talked to the family and found the victim had reported several problems in the area before:
Probably. It's probably off-topic. Submitting whatever the evening news releases is usually off-topic. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes the news does accidentally cover things that are interesting.
Was there ever a time where you doubted that the demand for junk news was the problem? I don't complain about "the media" because they are just following the incentives their viewers leave for them. "The media" was never exclusive to high brow, balanced journalism. It has always included the tabloid rags, celebrity gossip, useless trivia about sports, outrage inducing politics, etc.
Fact: National Enquirer has been A/B testing since the grandparents of the founders of Facebook were in diapers.
> Musk went as far as to dare authorities to arrest him.
Is this referring to this tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891) that said "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me." ?
EDIT: It reads like defense of Musk. Like "he's not so bad, he asked to be the one held accountable" I hope none of his employees or their relations die from Covid, no amount of holding Musk "accountable" can reverse that.
Read it like this: the workers could not be held accountable anyway since re-opening was his own demand as the business owner. He is already responsible, not the workers, so that 'sacrifice' is void of meaning. I don't see any way that can be read as a defense of Musk.
But mostly I wanted to point out that your comment is in bad taste, and against HN guidelines. That kind of generalization never lands well.
Actually, that was a literal interpretation of his words.
You characterizing that literal interpretation as "mental gymnastics" is itself a form of mental gymnastics (more properly, excessive heuristic activity in the subconscious, and a lack of corresponding conscious awareness of these processes, or something along those lines).
I'm not sure. It would be good to prevent spread of disease. But also, Tesla's mission (https://www.tesla.com/about) is "to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." This is a generational timescale business - in Musk's mind an extra 1.5% of population dying is probably worth it - especially if the alternative is Tesla dies.
Edit - here's an interesting question - how many lives is accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy worth? Climate change is surely going to cost lives. Tesla also isn't really the best solution in my mind. I think we should all live in denser cities where you can walk, bike, and use transit.
If we're so concerned about the Tesla factory to the point of contemplating shutdowns, how do we feel about the scenes of bars and beaches filled with people all over the US?
How do you feel about them? Transmission of a respiratory virus at a windy beach is next to impossible, and photos of beaches look a lot more crowded than they really are due to the compressive distortion of telephoto lenses. Transmission of respiratory diseases at a bar, indoors, where people are elbow-by-elbow and intentionally suppressing their own immune responses with intoxicants, seems a lot more possible.
to the point that any business should be. as in, if they take reasonable precautions I am all for any business being opened. it is far easier to contain the issue in a factory floor than the supermarket many will be in on their way home.
that is the lunacy of the closings, they lack logic, as in rules being used and implied risk against other types of businesses opening have been glossed over for those already deemed essential.
> that is the lunacy of the closings, they lack logic, as in rules being used and implied risk against other types of businesses opening have been glossed over for those already deemed essential.
Musk was one of the few business owners to seriously push back against local authorities who made unjustifiable restrictions. More people would be grateful to him for doing that if he wasn't so ridiculous in other aspects of his public life.
Who decides what's reasonable? To me, "reasonable" might mean, "precautions that minimize unnecessary risk to human morbidity and mortality". Even if we were to agree on this, what do "minimize" and "unnecessary" mean? And how do we take into account second-order effects, like, maybe my workplace is primarily young people and there's relatively low risk of long-term harm, but my employees might spread the virus in the community...
> it is far easier to contain the issue in a factory floor than the supermarket
That's the thing about this novel virus. There is a lot of uncertainty.
These are all hard questions. I'm not pretending that health officials have uniformly made the right call, or even good calls. I am saying that if you think it's as simple as stating the policy "let anyone taking reasonable precautions open for business", I have a bridge to sell you.
Smart people don't waste resources defending themselves from libel suits because they couldn't stay off twitter. If he called him a pedophile privately, that's being an asshole. Inviting legal action through public statements is a waste of everyone's time and money. See also the "going private @$420" tweet.
I’m convinced Tesla is being singled out here because Musk took an outspoken approach to COVID from the beginning, and even though every other automaker has reopened their plants and the county has allowed them to open based on a comprehensive worker safety plan, Tesla continues to be targeted with hit pieces like this which are statistically no more meaningful than saying “humans work at Tesla factory”.
A Tesla factory has a fixed set of workers probably working consistent shifts, that is doing temperature checks at the entrances and supplying PPE is probably as safe as a non-work-from-home environment that we can find. They gained a lot of experience months earlier doing to same protocols on their China factory.
I also have a Cybertruck in order and I can’t wait to get my hands on one. I love that they are taking the risk to bring something so unique to the mass market.
> he must have determined just how many people can get sick and die without it being too much of a PR problem
I'd guess he also has some demographic data on his workers. If a substantial fraction are healthier and/or less susceptible than the population, it stands to reason that his plant should open before the broader economy.
Yes, I'm absolutely sure he went to his HR department and did a personal investigation into every one of his employees, all the people they live with, any family members they're caring for during lock down, the demographics of all the people they bump into during their commute, when shopping, everyone they bump into during their spare time and made careful decision to start tweeting Free America Now!.
For autopilot it’s around 5. That dangerous fraudulently advertised software should be pulled off the road.
Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free. Not to mention the laughable promises of full self driving being available anytime soon, which cause customers to overestimate the system’s capability.
> Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free.
They aren't just "warnings". After the 2nd or 3rd warning, it disables autopilot until the end of the ride completely. So you cannot just drive "hands-free" with autopilot and ignore the warning.
You could pick any large company that reopened and find instances of employees who have the virus. Singling out Tesla is good for clickbait, but why should the Tesla factory stay closed when bars and restaurants in California are allowed to open?
This is the new normal. We can't stay in lockdown forever. Jobs deemed "non-essential" by white collar professionals comfortably working from home are pretty essential to the workers who have been stuck at home without an income.
Until a vaccine is developed, people will get sick even if they are social distancing and wearing masks and their workplaces are doing the right things. We shouldn't be shocked or outraged or self-righteous when that happens. Society needs to accept that or we will never recover from the lockdowns.
Restaurants and bars in specific areas with specific precautions are allowed to re-open. Musk re-opened his factory against the advice of local officials.
And yet the local officials decided not to forcibly close the factory. They could have looked good on TV taking Musk away in handcuffs, and it certainly would have made a lot of people happy, but they didn't. There is a reason for that.
Ultimately, local authorities couldn't make a compelling case that opening the Tesla factory was risky enough to justify intervening. They had already allowed a number of other businesses to open that were more dangerous in terms of covid transmission than the Tesla factory and could also be called "non-essential". Tesla was taking the same precautions that local authorities recommended for other businesses they allowed to open.
It's different if a company re-opened against guidelines and is not considered "essential." Is making a few more cars really that essential?
Different companies have different roles to play. And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.
> And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.
For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?
There is a reason California is reopening. Lockdowns just can't last forever. We have to move on and do the best we can to live with the virus as a normal part of life, even though it means more people are going to get sick.
We should also all be uncomfortable with the government deciding which companies deserve to survive. We are supposed to have a market economy. We can put up with those kinds of government controls as short-term emergency measures, but they would cause economic collapse in the long term.
> For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever? [...] Lockdowns just can't last forever
Indeed. The purpose of the lockdown was to buy us time to build e.g. contract tracing infrastructure, massively expand testing, and develop other means to allow us to reopen safely.
Instead for the most part we've sat on our hands and done very little. Thus we're saying, well, sucks to be us, I guess we have to reopen and let people die.
It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.
> It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.
But it is this way, so what's your point?
We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.
My point was to respond to your "what if there's never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?"
There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more.
It's also not too late to do more.
But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's up.
I'm not advocating that we just forget about the virus. We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life. There are social distancing policies for businesses, people are wearing masks, etc. -- but businesses are reopening.
> We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life.
Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.
This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.
And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.
Even if a vaccine is developed, is there much reason to think it will stop covid-19? Or will it be like influenza vaccines, where maybe it has some impact but certainly isn't anywhere close to eradicating the disease or even assuring the vaccine recipient of anything? (Apparently flu shots were only 29% effective in 2018.)
I think you're probably right; this is the new normal. Lockdowns will be lifted as people come to accept covid deaths as normalcy, as they already accept influenza deaths, car accidents, etc.
There may never be a vaccine. We should operate under the assumption that there is a good chance one will be ready in a year or so, but that timeline makes it clear that we can't remain in lockdown.
Because articles are now written to confirm people's preconceived notions. Articles that confirm your biases are more likely to be shared than articles which don't.
I honestly wonder if this writing style is conscious and intentional though, or rather un(sub)conscious and accidental.
Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that which is inferred (imagined) "factual". If you look for it, you'll see that this behaviour is everywhere.
Oh, it's likely not conscious by the author. The most convincing of these one-sided views are the ones written by people who are "true believers" in their agendas.
Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic.
Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propaganda and produce the click bait needed to drive eyes.
That actually makes a lot of sense....the desirable qualities for a journalist in 2020:
a) good/popular writing style
b) an ideologue in subjects that have high ideological "weight" in the population
Honesty, accuracy, fact checking, nuance, all of the traditional desirable attributes for journalists are now not only not required, but extremely undesirable.
And depending on the particular organization (say, a relatively reputable organization like the NYT), the only thing you need are editors who can proofread the article before publishing, replacing explicit assertions with a variety of weasel words, a big chunk of which could likely even be automated to insert suggested edits that just need a manual review.
The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism, I struggle to find examples that do.
The journalist spoke with two workers within the production facility. "One of the workers said a supervisor confirmed two positive cases to a group at the Fremont-based seat assembly facility" This is an example of just one supervisor confirming two positive cases. It is likely that there are many more.
Furthermore, "But because Tesla restarted production a week earlier, there could have been cases that were never reported to the county because Tesla was “not required to directly report known cases” before the agreement, county officials said."
If they were confirmed not-positive before the reopening how come this information was not publicly made available beforehand? If they weren't tested and then went back to work during the reopening, doesn't this indicate a lack of diligence in screening returning employees?
In any case the main issue is that Musk reopened the plant against local authorities' wishes and thus the consequences of such action should be held under scrutiny.
The employees were and are free to do as they wish.
The main issue for you, perhaps, is violating authorities “wishes”. Wishes, because in fact it wasn’t illegal.. freedom of assembly gives us that, we aren’t in wartime, and until tested in court those local orders are just recommendations that need be judged in court... where they’d be struck down.
Not that they weren’t good common sense at the time, but the coronavirus very clearly now is not only a smaller risk than we thought, but also only specifically a risk to very certain vulnerable groups who are easy to identify.
If you are so worried about authorities’ wishes, I wonder what you think of the protests? Do you think the authorities’ wishes were generally right in the case of George Floyd? Should the protestors have been rounded up for violating wishes and causing massive risk? Seems you care a ton about people not dying from the virus, so I’d assume so.
In a free and democratic society it is the authorities who need to be held under scrutiny.
I get that the government needed to react quickly and impose emergency measures. But now that things have calmed down, we should apply the same standards to business closures that we do to everything else: governments must justify why a business cannot reopen, must apply the rules consistently and fairly to every business, and can be challenged when they don't live up to those obligations.
It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant. To give an example which way it goes: in Poland, the virus appeared a few weeks ago between coal mines workers. Yesterday there was a decision to temporarily shut 12 coal mines down.
> the company had reported several cases of the coronavirus, and the employees affected were told to stay home.
I'm self-employed and my little software company took a sharp hit with the pandemic. Not being one to wait until all the money runs out, I took an "essential job" stocking groceries at the nearby Walmart. Every day, before employees can enter the store, they are screened. In the time I have been there, several employees failed the screening and were sent home. Two of those turned out to have the virus.
Tesla and other employers have similar screenings, so unless the employees lied about being symptomatic, they should not have been among the workforce. Add to that, the CDC just announced findings that non-symptomatic spread of the virus was very rare.
You mean Bezos Post? The newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, towards whom Elon Musk very publicly shows no love whatsoever? It's like believing everything Bloomberg writes about Bloomberg. :-)
> The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism, I struggle to find examples that do.
That's a fallacious appeal to authority if I've ever seen one. The Washington Post and most other newspapers publish plenty of crap in addition to serious journalism, and they aren't above publishing clickbait to drive ad revenue.
My point still stands. The author of this article:
- conducts interviews with primary sources and provides direction quotation in the article.
- reports on number previously unknown to the public
- provides historical chronology of events so readers can understand
I ask again, what would be required for this piece to "count as journalism"?
>The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism
It doesn't matter where it came from. Some publications just have different ratios of biased crap and the biases are different depending on the institution.
If I worked at Tesla and came to find out about positive tests in this manner, in an environment with what appears to be a more rapid return to work inclination, I might breathlessly express my concern to as many as would listen.
While I agree the article doesn't properly contextualize the number, that's not really the right comparison.
Alameda county has had 2564 cases in total since March (up to May 20th) -- so you'd have expected 15 employees to have tested positive for COVID since March. This is a very different statement than 2 of its employees have tested positive shortly after it re-opened.
Loosely one might compare it to those that tested positive in the week of May 20th, which, according to your link, is about 400-500 new cases (about 5x fewer than the cumulative total). So you might reasonably expect something like ~3 cases if you assume the Tesla workers had the same positive test rate as the general population of the county.
Here's an example of how workers were pressured to come into work:
The state approved Tesla to work. It's the county that is concerned. But if you decline to come to work, just know you will not receive benefits and you will be unable to apply for unemployment since we have work available. We can't force you to come in if you don't feel comfortable.
It was completely predictable, one of the biggest TSLAQ voices on twitter called this a few days ago in a high profile way. Whenever a news outlet reaches out to Musk for comment on a negative story he goes on the attack.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadStatistically the 2 cases at Tesla is an order of magnitude less than what you'd expect giving the factory size (10000) and the population size of the Alameda county (1.6M) and the infection rate there (4000).
This is why I say that unless there is a significant change in control of productive property, when that productive property deprecates human labor, those who rely on trading their time for money will be in dire situations.
(Descendants; ancestors are those in the past.)
a good start would be to pay well for that work.
> There's something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market.
This isn't a jab at workers needing to go back to work, this is a jab at the fact that we treat retail workers like garbage when in reality our society would crumble without them. The whole "just get a better job if you want to be paid more" argument levied at those who push for a higher minimum wage not only ignores the fact that, when in poverty, it's very hard to get a "better job", but also ignores the fact that these jobs are necessary. Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)?
> perhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work.
No, I'll invent a society where people whose job it is to move money around are paid substantially less than retail workers or janitors, and where those that do labor like this are respected more highly than someone like Warren Buffet or Crissy Teigen.
do you propose to pay sanitation workers hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece, in which case i can't imagine how city budgets will survive, or forcibly lower the salaries of financial workers to below that of the sanitation workers? in which case we'll have little to no financial services anymore.
This is literally a local TV evening news story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-06-06
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/wind-baffles-on...
I remember the local Bay Area station having the best coverage of the Mountain View fatal autopilot crash, e.g. they talked to the family and found the victim had reported several problems in the area before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719736
Maybe we are the problem.
Fact: National Enquirer has been A/B testing since the grandparents of the founders of Facebook were in diapers.
Is this referring to this tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891) that said "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me." ?
I'm pretty sure that was dry sarcasm, and your comment is the one doing mental gymnastics...
EDIT: It reads like defense of Musk. Like "he's not so bad, he asked to be the one held accountable" I hope none of his employees or their relations die from Covid, no amount of holding Musk "accountable" can reverse that.
But mostly I wanted to point out that your comment is in bad taste, and against HN guidelines. That kind of generalization never lands well.
You characterizing that literal interpretation as "mental gymnastics" is itself a form of mental gymnastics (more properly, excessive heuristic activity in the subconscious, and a lack of corresponding conscious awareness of these processes, or something along those lines).
Tyranny is where you restrict the movement of healthy people.
Edit - here's an interesting question - how many lives is accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy worth? Climate change is surely going to cost lives. Tesla also isn't really the best solution in my mind. I think we should all live in denser cities where you can walk, bike, and use transit.
that is the lunacy of the closings, they lack logic, as in rules being used and implied risk against other types of businesses opening have been glossed over for those already deemed essential.
Musk was one of the few business owners to seriously push back against local authorities who made unjustifiable restrictions. More people would be grateful to him for doing that if he wasn't so ridiculous in other aspects of his public life.
Who decides what's reasonable? To me, "reasonable" might mean, "precautions that minimize unnecessary risk to human morbidity and mortality". Even if we were to agree on this, what do "minimize" and "unnecessary" mean? And how do we take into account second-order effects, like, maybe my workplace is primarily young people and there's relatively low risk of long-term harm, but my employees might spread the virus in the community...
> it is far easier to contain the issue in a factory floor than the supermarket
Although this claim has some logic to it, I'm not sure it is actually true. See the outbreaks at meatpacking plants, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/08/cache-valley-providin..., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/08/us/meat-proce...
That's the thing about this novel virus. There is a lot of uncertainty.
These are all hard questions. I'm not pretending that health officials have uniformly made the right call, or even good calls. I am saying that if you think it's as simple as stating the policy "let anyone taking reasonable precautions open for business", I have a bridge to sell you.
Good, then don't pretend that it's wrong to push back when health officials inconsistently apply their rules and cannot justify them when challenged.
Smart people can be assholes, too.
I say this as a huge EV proponent and someone who has a Cybertruck on order.
A Tesla factory has a fixed set of workers probably working consistent shifts, that is doing temperature checks at the entrances and supplying PPE is probably as safe as a non-work-from-home environment that we can find. They gained a lot of experience months earlier doing to same protocols on their China factory.
I also have a Cybertruck in order and I can’t wait to get my hands on one. I love that they are taking the risk to bring something so unique to the mass market.
I'd guess he also has some demographic data on his workers. If a substantial fraction are healthier and/or less susceptible than the population, it stands to reason that his plant should open before the broader economy.
By this reasoning, only New Zealand should reopen at all: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/world/australia/new-zeala...
Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free. Not to mention the laughable promises of full self driving being available anytime soon, which cause customers to overestimate the system’s capability.
They aren't just "warnings". After the 2nd or 3rd warning, it disables autopilot until the end of the ride completely. So you cannot just drive "hands-free" with autopilot and ignore the warning.
This is the new normal. We can't stay in lockdown forever. Jobs deemed "non-essential" by white collar professionals comfortably working from home are pretty essential to the workers who have been stuck at home without an income.
Until a vaccine is developed, people will get sick even if they are social distancing and wearing masks and their workplaces are doing the right things. We shouldn't be shocked or outraged or self-righteous when that happens. Society needs to accept that or we will never recover from the lockdowns.
Ultimately, local authorities couldn't make a compelling case that opening the Tesla factory was risky enough to justify intervening. They had already allowed a number of other businesses to open that were more dangerous in terms of covid transmission than the Tesla factory and could also be called "non-essential". Tesla was taking the same precautions that local authorities recommended for other businesses they allowed to open.
Different companies have different roles to play. And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.
For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?
There is a reason California is reopening. Lockdowns just can't last forever. We have to move on and do the best we can to live with the virus as a normal part of life, even though it means more people are going to get sick.
We should also all be uncomfortable with the government deciding which companies deserve to survive. We are supposed to have a market economy. We can put up with those kinds of government controls as short-term emergency measures, but they would cause economic collapse in the long term.
Indeed. The purpose of the lockdown was to buy us time to build e.g. contract tracing infrastructure, massively expand testing, and develop other means to allow us to reopen safely.
Instead for the most part we've sat on our hands and done very little. Thus we're saying, well, sucks to be us, I guess we have to reopen and let people die.
It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.
But it is this way, so what's your point?
We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.
There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more.
It's also not too late to do more.
But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's up.
Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.
This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.
And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.
>it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards
Certainly not for the people who are forced to shutdown.
I think you're probably right; this is the new normal. Lockdowns will be lifted as people come to accept covid deaths as normalcy, as they already accept influenza deaths, car accidents, etc.
According to the county dashboard, Alameda County had 2,564 cases on May 20, 2 days after Tesla reopened: https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html...
With a population of 1,671,000, that means about 0.15% of Alameda County residents had been diagnosed with covid-19 at that point.
So we could reasonably expect 15 cases out of the 10,000 employees at Tesla's factory.
Why the breathless article about 2 cases?
Because articles are now written to confirm people's preconceived notions. Articles that confirm your biases are more likely to be shared than articles which don't.
Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that which is inferred (imagined) "factual". If you look for it, you'll see that this behaviour is everywhere.
Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic.
Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propaganda and produce the click bait needed to drive eyes.
a) good/popular writing style
b) an ideologue in subjects that have high ideological "weight" in the population
Honesty, accuracy, fact checking, nuance, all of the traditional desirable attributes for journalists are now not only not required, but extremely undesirable.
And depending on the particular organization (say, a relatively reputable organization like the NYT), the only thing you need are editors who can proofread the article before publishing, replacing explicit assertions with a variety of weasel words, a big chunk of which could likely even be automated to insert suggested edits that just need a manual review.
The journalist spoke with two workers within the production facility. "One of the workers said a supervisor confirmed two positive cases to a group at the Fremont-based seat assembly facility" This is an example of just one supervisor confirming two positive cases. It is likely that there are many more.
Furthermore, "But because Tesla restarted production a week earlier, there could have been cases that were never reported to the county because Tesla was “not required to directly report known cases” before the agreement, county officials said."
Otherwise, this literally means nothing.
If they were confirmed not-positive before the reopening how come this information was not publicly made available beforehand? If they weren't tested and then went back to work during the reopening, doesn't this indicate a lack of diligence in screening returning employees?
In any case the main issue is that Musk reopened the plant against local authorities' wishes and thus the consequences of such action should be held under scrutiny.
The main issue for you, perhaps, is violating authorities “wishes”. Wishes, because in fact it wasn’t illegal.. freedom of assembly gives us that, we aren’t in wartime, and until tested in court those local orders are just recommendations that need be judged in court... where they’d be struck down.
Not that they weren’t good common sense at the time, but the coronavirus very clearly now is not only a smaller risk than we thought, but also only specifically a risk to very certain vulnerable groups who are easy to identify.
If you are so worried about authorities’ wishes, I wonder what you think of the protests? Do you think the authorities’ wishes were generally right in the case of George Floyd? Should the protestors have been rounded up for violating wishes and causing massive risk? Seems you care a ton about people not dying from the virus, so I’d assume so.
I get that the government needed to react quickly and impose emergency measures. But now that things have calmed down, we should apply the same standards to business closures that we do to everything else: governments must justify why a business cannot reopen, must apply the rules consistently and fairly to every business, and can be challenged when they don't live up to those obligations.
Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.
> the company had reported several cases of the coronavirus, and the employees affected were told to stay home.
I'm self-employed and my little software company took a sharp hit with the pandemic. Not being one to wait until all the money runs out, I took an "essential job" stocking groceries at the nearby Walmart. Every day, before employees can enter the store, they are screened. In the time I have been there, several employees failed the screening and were sent home. Two of those turned out to have the virus.
Tesla and other employers have similar screenings, so unless the employees lied about being symptomatic, they should not have been among the workforce. Add to that, the CDC just announced findings that non-symptomatic spread of the virus was very rare.
I also struggle to find examples that do count, nowadays. Most of what I see is "narrative pushing."
That's a fallacious appeal to authority if I've ever seen one. The Washington Post and most other newspapers publish plenty of crap in addition to serious journalism, and they aren't above publishing clickbait to drive ad revenue.
I ask again, what would be required for this piece to "count as journalism"?
It doesn't matter where it came from. Some publications just have different ratios of biased crap and the biases are different depending on the institution.
Here is a more precise but still infuriating headline.
If I worked at Tesla and came to find out about positive tests in this manner, in an environment with what appears to be a more rapid return to work inclination, I might breathlessly express my concern to as many as would listen.
I don't find that offensive.
Alameda county has had 2564 cases in total since March (up to May 20th) -- so you'd have expected 15 employees to have tested positive for COVID since March. This is a very different statement than 2 of its employees have tested positive shortly after it re-opened.
Loosely one might compare it to those that tested positive in the week of May 20th, which, according to your link, is about 400-500 new cases (about 5x fewer than the cumulative total). So you might reasonably expect something like ~3 cases if you assume the Tesla workers had the same positive test rate as the general population of the county.
The state approved Tesla to work. It's the county that is concerned. But if you decline to come to work, just know you will not receive benefits and you will be unable to apply for unemployment since we have work available. We can't force you to come in if you don't feel comfortable.
https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1270110558071566337
Interesting account there ...
Furthermore it is a extremely strong coincidence that this article comes out five days after Musk seemingly randomly attacks Amazon: https://nationalpost.com/technology/elon-musk-amazon-feud-je...
It certainly matches Musk's regular habit of lashing out at his critiques...
The Washington Post: Tesla defied county orders so it could restart production. Days later, workers tested positive for the coronavirus.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-f...