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Comment by woofyman | Hacker News Reader

I love how billionaires with their private jets and 40,000 square foot homes want every body else to go back to work

and I love how many privileged middle class people are smugly calling to press pause on civilization from the comfort of their homes which they can only do because a faceless army of poor people keeps them fed and cared for

You understand that they're at home too? Just look at the unemployment stats.

Most of American production is automated. Its middle-level folk keeping America running. Cherry-picked examples notwithstanding.

uh, no they're not. do you think the chicken fairy is depositing frozen birds in your supermarket? your existence is secured by a chain of people who haven't achieved the level yet for "is it safe for me to go to work?" to even register as a question

And by non-essential workers staying home it frees more hospital beds for those more at-risk and exposed.

That’s literally the point of shelter in place.

With hospitals shutting down, and doctors and nurses being furloughed for lack of patients...

...because we've done enough to slow the spread. Any responsible look at the stats show that clearly. Here's a link in case the entire internet wasn't enough:

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

...or because the dangers were exaggerated in the first place.

I think it takes a trivial number of actual human beings to do that. Everything has been automated.

The minimum-wage folks are in service industries, and have been for decades. There are only 13M Americans left in factory jobs total.

The factories may have been automated, but the supply chain has not.

The most common job in the United States is retail salesperson, followed by cashier, office clerk, and food prep. Of those, only office clerk can reasonably be done from home. Maybe. In some cases.

Yes, those are considered "service" jobs. That doesn't change the fact that the chicken is only in the supermarket meat case because a person physically put it there. There's no big automated conveyor belt running from the chicken farm, through the slaughterhouse, and winding up in the meat case.

And a tremendous amount has been done to mitigate risk for sales. Curbside pickup; delivery; masks and shields; repeated sanitization.

I got to believe we're not arguing in good faith here any more. Goodbye.

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