Pennsylvania factory team clocks out after 28 days of live-in work for masks
pennlive.com
pennlive.com
Georgia, “Hold my beer”.... “let’s open er back up”...
[0] https://6abc.com/braskem-america-marcus-hook-pa-pennsylvania...
If you are making a respirator mask, another factory will take these pellets, heat it to melting, and basically spray the hot plastic to form a sheet with very fine plastic fibers. Because the fibers need very specific properties, they probably use a custom plastic resin, not a regular commodity resin.
If you are making protective clothing, a different factory will take the pellets, heat it to melting, and slowly extrude it through a nozzle. Once you get a sheet, you cut it to size, and maybe glue some different pieces together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6V0w-ajtN8
You're getting downvoted, but that sadly does reflect the mindset of some clueless entitled participation-trophy-winning employees I know.
This is a perfect time for companies to take advantage of the situation by cutting pay, perks, promotions, etc. Employees should absolutely push back.
Why is this the perfect time? Is something going on that is affecting the entire world economically?
I'm sure a few cases of beer would be nice as well, but let's remember that it's the workers who made all those masks and by taking care of those workers we've helped our society as a whole.
0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840906009/author-tours-the-en...
We're far too likely to see things as character flaws when looking outward and as circumstance when looking inward.
I’d be willing to bet that a pretty significant percentage of the tech elite have taken serious steps like this, this clearly isn’t a small set of obscure players.
0: https://www.inquisitr.com/3950643/billionaires-are-building-...
Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
Some basic risk analysis shows the trip increases risks and is therefore a dumb move even if the idea of a bunker could be useful in other situations.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/e2-80-98we-needed-to-go...
> Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
Generally, I don’t think so. Insurance exists to protect one’s finances, and it’s one of the oldest financial instruments out there. But you can’t eat an insurance policy, it can’t sustain life.
Not saying that everyone with a bunker falls into this category. But it's certainly true that when the best resourced and connected among us have the means to withdraw comfortably, their aggregate effort to remedy whatever is causing the disruption will diminish.
Most people here have home fire insurance coverage but don't have extinguishers (or haven't checked them in years), sprinklers, or a fire safe. So is fire insurance coverage bad?
Fire risks the loss of things that insurance cannot replace, such as your face, dog, or offspring.
I think the fear is of billionaires using money to save the bits they want by running away rather than the bits you want by fixing the society.
Once this is all over, they'll want to stroll back in like nothing happened. Ideally, we won't let them back in.
He has a major foundation whose stated goal is to improve wellbeing around the world and a massive social media company that constantly markets itself as making the world a better place.
If his foundation and company are truly fulfilling their missions, why is he buying up land in Hawaii and elsewhere to go hide out if everything goes bust?
Whether we like it not, people like Zuckerberg are some of the biggest leaders on the planet. We worship the kind of money and power people like him have.
To see people like that so unsure of the world in which they have an immense amount of influence over deeply undercuts their image of being these brilliant and visionary leaders.
This is a beautiful sentence. It is often touted, "If you don't like the culture you live in, change it". The response of most people is that they don't have the influence to change it, and it's better to just bare it until they can move on. The examples of Zuck, Thiel, and others who do have this influence, but choose to invest in fallback plans rather than throwing everything into making the needed changes says a lot about the mentality that breeds success in the US.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90494347/american-billionaires-h...
People at the top are profiting while people at the bottom are either sacrificing or outright dying.
It's informative to look at the examples of how that isn't true.
- donate money where it does more good per dollar spent - if you're able to
- spend working time on important issues - if you're able to
Just because some millionaires aren't doing anything to make the world a better place, doesn't mean those with fewer means can't. We in the tech field with our salaries especially.
That line of reasoning leads to the need for political change, and not necessarily revolution.
As for donations -- that's the low-hanging fruit. Any individual, without having to change anything about their life (other than spending a bit less on themselves) can give to cost effective charities to do a tremendous amount of good.
Americans in particular depend on charities for services because domestic spending has been recklessly and cruelly slashed for at least the last 40 years. Depending on unaccountable and nebulous organizations and random billionaires for critical services is the opposite of personal freedom.
It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance. Giving a small 'leg up' can help communities get better faster.
Yes, obviously. I'm claiming that the people donating to (among others) Give Directly would be more effective at achieving their stated goals via political corruption than personal charity.
To be clear, I'm violently opposed to the sort of blind act-utilitarianesque consequentialism that would claim it's morally wrong to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action (and people who donate to Give Directly et al probably are helping, just less effectively than they could be), but as far as recommendations go, see above.
But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.
But then, what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life to focus on fixing corruption; or to even use their free time to do that; what is the problem with sharing a message that encourages people to do research (focusing on cost-effectiveness of charities) before giving money to charity?
I am specifically not claiming that; I'm claiming that, in the case of public goods and services[0], donating money to fund those them directly is less effective (that is, strategicly wrong, a mistake presumably made in good faith) than spending that money to push government-funded public goods through the corrupt faux-democratic process.
> see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption
> what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
I don't think I've made any claims about whether people should work and/or donate to end political corruption.
> Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life
Yes, obviously if they make enough money to pay for >1.00 person-years per year of whatever they're trying to accomplish, it's more effective to spend money rather than labor, and that 1.00 drops quickly if a full-time specialist would be more productive. I'm not making a distiction between donating money versus donating labor.
0: including no-strings-attached grants like Give Directly appears to do; I think basic income would be a better way to structure that, but that's not what I'm objecting to.
EDIT: actually, way back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960983
> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?
I'm recommending people not support (with money or otherwise) charities that provide public goods and services, because those (being public) should be paid for by the entire tax base, especially corporations, in favor of supporting efforts (whether recognized as charities or not) to force the government to do its job of providing public goods and services to its subjects.
Eg, if the government were to stop maintaining the roads, I would not recommend that people donate to a road repair charity; I would recommend that they put whatever pressure necessary on the government to do its damn job.
I think the disagreement started with the your response to my question to someone else:
> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?
And your response
> If they're not, I will.
It looks like your position is a lot more nuanced than "stop giving money to charity" :)
And I wasn't expressing any moral position, just: given the goals that such charities seem to be pursuing (eg healthcare), their actions don't seem effective at actually accomplishing those goals. Basically, agreeing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960723 saying:
> There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed
We're not fighting to make the claim "doing X" is the ultimate and nothing is better -- with the world of nearly-infinite complexity and unbridgeable uncertainty, the best we can do is point out what seems, based on good evidence, as things to do that seem better than others.
They evaluate charities; their top-recommended charity Against Malaria Foundation can, for $5, provide an insecticide-treated mosquito net that can protect individuals from malaria for 3-4 years. It's been proven to effectively decrease incidence of malaria in regions where such nets were distributed. This is very cost-effective.
Charity can be very efficient in helping people. You just have to find cost-effective charities and give your money there.
To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”
This is the same reason why it's prefectly resonable for a corporation to engage in Google/Facebook style adware and spyware deployment (or any other unilateral only-not-crimes-because-the-law-hasn't-caught-up) provided that they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using. (This is not hypocricy, this is appropriate response to a molochian incentive structure.)
0: internal to the aristocracy[1], not aristocracy vs lower classes
1: substitute a different term for "uppermost upper class" if you prefer
For it to be ethical it must be highly targeted and explicit. When it's not, in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)
Just for an example-- Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
Yes, fair. I'm not talking about the signalling/optics side of it at all. If they're not trying to criminalize it then they're not trying to criminalize it, regardless of whether they succeed in convincing people otherwise.
> Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
A relevant example would be someone who is lobbying for mandatory disclosure of source code, but not providing source of their own software until legally required to.
> Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
Yes, and my point is that it's not hypocritical to use dark money for that, since to abstain would weaken his position even if he's actually sincere. On the hand, from a PR/signalling perspective, abstaining from dark money is not a effective signal, because there's nothing actually stopping a campaign that intends to reneg on it's promises from sending the same signal, if it sees that that would benefit it. So insisting on ideological purity just disadvanges Lawrence-Lessig-like campaigns relative to openly malicious ones, without actually filtering out secretly malicious ones.
Too late to edit, but I wanted to clairify that I'm talking about strategicly wrong (less effective than something else they could be doing) rather than morally wrong (of negative effectiveness).
Even the most self-sufficient retreats I've read about I estimate can only last about a generation on their own before their tech base rapidly dissolves, and the residents face a harsh decline. As our civilizational complexity and population density increases, the challenges facing our species keep creeping up the effects' time horizon. It's already a Red Queen's race for all but the biggest retreats to outlast these types of large-scale disruptions.
If you really want to prep, then you build for redundancy, you build for the long-term (decades, centuries, millennia, not days, weeks, years), you build for positive sum, win-win outcomes, you build for continuous striving towards post-scarcity, inclusively across as many people as there are resources for. That level of preparedness is nearly impossible to kill, is self-regenerating across generations, with no retreat-building necessary because the "retreats" are all over the place.
There are no billionaires in mad max world.
This article by the same author goes deeper into some of the billionaires' mindset:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
> Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by. (Other prominent boosters include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the US to form its own corporate city-state.)
> ...
> The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:
> 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.
> 2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.
> 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.
> 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.
> The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. Davidson and Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. “The new Sovereign Individual,” they write, “will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.” It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.
> Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a “domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age”.