This is part of why I am not confident about any economic upside of us opening up.
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.
> Just seems like everyone is getting set up to fail.
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.
>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.
It's easy to say we should just stay in lockdown until things are manageable when you have a job that allows you to work from home.
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.
If we're going to do a lockdown, we might as well as do a full lock down. Like give everyone a two week warning and then nobody leaves their house for two weeks.
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.
> 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.
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...
I think part of the strategy here is to minimize the perception of risk associated with the disease and fact that it's preventable/manageable but at a cost to the current economic structure we have.
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 impossible for most people in America to lockdown for more than 2 or 3 months and not make income. People are living a pipe-dream if they think America will just stay inside for a couple of years while a vaccine is developed, if there is ever one developed. Even other countries with extensive social networks have to eventually fail because they don't have unlimited resources in an economy that produces nothing.
> This is the cost of a profound lack of leadership.
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.
>If we're going to lock-down, we might as well do it until the crisis is manageable.
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?
> 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
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].
Ohio’s setting up a snitch website for employers to report on employees too scared to return to work, so that benefits can be stripped.
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.
Nobody actually wants to go back to work. All they want is the financial security they feel from having a job. If any of these people hit the lottery for example would they be begging to go back to work?
This is my understanding as well. The Federal government isn't actually funding the $600/week/worker extra to the states yet and so states are running out of cash.
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
People could live at home on a lot less money if not for debt and rent. But there isnt a pause button on the financial system. In fact, a lot of people may just go deeper in debt due to this.
That’s completely what it is, but also necessary to the process of normalizing masses of unnecessary deaths every day.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's a very poor review. Given how long the incubation period is, plus the presence of asymptomatic carriers, it is impossible for the average person to accurately attribute the infection to a specific business.
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."
Liability shields would help. Not sure they would solve the public reputation problem? (I've seen the public reputation problem take down restaurants even when the restaurant did not poison the claimant.) But they would give restaurant owners confidence that there would be, at least, no legal liability.
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.
What's your take on the estimated death toll from the lockdowns?
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.
That depends on context. There are cities and counties without a single Covid case to date. If I lived in one, I would feel more comfortable going back to Work. Also, those with low Rick businesses or mortgages are probably eager to go back
Trump and Republicans are pushing to open up as an excuse not to pay people to stay home. They are pushing this back on the American people and it is not right. If we get a UBI or 80% wage guarantee (like the UK did) then we could wait this out. Instead the Federal government is refusing to do its job and putting the blame on the states and individuals. We are being played.
Got some major red pilling for you on corona virus. As you are probably aware, there's several corona type viruses that infect humans, one is covid-19. You know what else is a corona virus? About 20% of the common cold. After centuries of fighting the common cold, what are the odds we'll figure out a vaccine for this novel corona virus within the next year? Probably close to zero. Maybe with all of this extra attention, something might get done, but it would honestly be a miracle. So any plans about reopening that involve a vaccine are out the door.
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.
20% of the cold is not one corona virus; it's several. A vaccine for the cold would have to handle most of them, along with the other 80% that are noroviruses. Vaccinating against one strain of the cold doesn't do you much good when there are maybe 100 of them.
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.
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
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!
This is why I'm so sick of all the "we're in this together" stuff coming from celebrities/rich people/brands. We are very clearly NOT in this together, socioeconomic factors are huge in your potential survival of this and executive teams are giving themselves bonuses while laying off workers or asking for permanent pay cuts. This faux positivity helps nobody.
My favorite American joke: what do you call someone who you think doesn't deserve healthcare, doesn't deserve happiness, and should die so that you can maintain your standard of living?
Don't worry, Time Magazine will declare "The Essential Worker" as Person of the Year 2020, and that will make up for all the minimum wage and unsafe working conditions.
If the US had a decent social healthcare in place, it would be. You pool together resources so everyone has a chance. Instead you are either lucky or rich.
Not really. In the event of an untreatable disease, no amount of free healthcare would make me feel better about being obligated to work in a factory if I'm vulnerable to the disease; even if factory work were the best damn job in the world.
Why do we even consult economists when it comes to a pandemic response? Economics is already provably not great at doing its core task.
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.
Most epidemiologists say the threat won't pass. The idea that there's some policy response to eliminate the threat, rather than finding ways to mitigate and live with it, originates with politicians.
Economics has become the tool of political ideology. It's modus operandi is language that's impenetrable to the non-economist.
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.
I think most economists are pretty crap. That belief, however, doesn't mean that economic effects aren't real. It doesn't mean that epidemiologists are particularly good, or even trying, to counter balance health risks with health risks due to economic harm, because that's not really their job and its more or less an unprecedented situation.
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.
Is this another thread where everyone argues for their preferred side of the lose/lose situation we're encountering (lose income vs risk to health)?
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.
What am I missing? I can't view any of the NYT articles posted here; all I get is a overlay with subscription options. Same goes for most WaPo, Bloomberg and economist articles.
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
I think a lot of HN members are subscribers to these publications, just as a matter of culture.
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.
"As a conductor, when I stick my head out of the car to perform the required platform observation"
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.
There are two checks that the conductor does. One is to ensure that all the doors are "platformed", i.e. won't open into the tunnel. This is done by pointing at a striped bar hanging from the ceiling. They lean out the window and point because it's one of those "hacks" that makes compliance with the procedure more likely. (Kind of like how checklists dramatically increased aviation safety.) The second thing they do is check that the train isn't dragging anything when it's leaving the station. People do get caught in the doors (usually their clothes or bags), and you don't read about them dying because the conductor is paying close attention and stops the train.
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.
> 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.
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).
Sending a man to the moon was done in the context of this military industrial state's show of might and veneration of the individual. Utilitarian arguments aside (especially given that investments into rail very directly translate into value for the populace it serves), rail transportation infrastructure investment wouldn't have quite the impact as far as propaganda manufacturing is concerned.
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.
On stations with curved platforms there are in fact monitors installed at the conductor's stopping position.
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?
Honestly the fact that we have cars driving around neighborhoods and highways by themselves but we haven't totally automated train driving is pretty ridiculous.
It's political more than technical. Automating the trains means eliminating the driver's job, and the Transit Worker's Union is opposed to the elimination of those positions.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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."
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?
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].
[1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
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.
(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
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."
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.
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What works in England doesn't necessarily work in the US, and presuming that Republicans are just being greedy is 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.
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!
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.
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.
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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
http://archive.is/jA5jJ
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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...
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Elevators manage to not drag you, but multimillion dollar train cars can't?
Your thought process is one of over-engineering. Don't overengineer.
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.
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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?