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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

The reasons for not restarting production seem to be dogmatic and not evidence driven. Tesla is running the factory at a 30-40% capacity, and the Fremont factory has 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space. Tesla claims their plan will ensure 6 ft of distance for every employee, and PPE and masks are provided and mandatory. Even the HVAC is changed to optimise for fresh air turnover and filters are changed on a regular basis.

Tesla's full list is available here: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/T...

A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco, and many other businesses open in California today. We aren't talking about sporting events here: we're talking about some of the lowest risk and unavoidable interactions.

Carmakers are also defined as a COVID19 critical industry, and every other carmaker manufacturing in the United States is either open, or capable of open today. This puts Tesla at a serious disadvantage.

This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

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> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

"Support" is a bit of an overloaded word. I do agree with you that I do not support a government policy that isn't evidence-driven. But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.

As a simple analogy, perhaps the speed limits for highways in my state are capped at 60 mph, but there's evidence that the roads can safely accommodate drivers at 70 mph, they're well-maintained, they are built to appropriate safety standards, etc. I wouldn't support the government keeping the speed limit at 60 mph based on flimsy evidence. But I also wouldn't object to the government enforcing the speed limit as it is - because the end result of saying that every driver has the right to make their own private judgment of whether the speed limit laws are validly reasoned is that there is no speed limit anymore.

You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.

Prohibition is obviously a prime example of this, but if you consider various laws that once existed or are currently on the books but no longer enforced (think laws pertaining to racial segregation, sexuality, drug use, and such) you realize that being a law abiding citizen does not mean you are no longer allowed to think for yourself. Read up on "Jury Nullification" or "Jury Equity".

Civil disobedience typically involved still getting punished as a matter of protest to change public opinion. If Elon Musk is doing this as civil disobedience, he is using the resources of Tesla and the forced compliance of his workers in order to make a political statement. I don't really see that as better.

Instead, it seems that Musk is doing this just because he thinks he can get away with it, or because he is simply angry with the elected officials of his county. In such a situation, Tesla and Elon Musk should rightfully be punished for their actions.

Civil disobedience is typically, but not always, punished. We will have to see how this plays out.

There is also the question of which branch of government gets to have a say in the enforcement of a law. Consider California's approach to marijuana use vs the Federal government's. Or consider how there are numerous sanctuary cities that are in defiance of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These things are complicated.

It's not complicated because there is no conflicting guidance from the federal vs state governments. Once the federal government orders everyone to open up it will be unknown what the right answer is. States that want to continue with the lockdown will likely sue the federal government, or companies that want to open up would sue the state. The courts will weigh in and it will probably go "something something interstate commerce" and the federal government will win, forcing the states to open up.

After that it really depends upon how states respond and you could be stuck in a giant game of chicken. This is where it might get complicated and risky - mostly for people trying to abide by the law. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But in this case, the government wont' really arrest you for not opening your car factory. But the state might arrest you for doing it.

In the case of Marijuana, it's really quite simple: everyone in California using marijuana can be arrested by the federal government. They just choose not to, at least usually.

ICE is a bit more complicated. They are trying to compel cooporation from local law enforcement, who is not responsible for enforcing immigration law. They aren't asking them to enforce it directly themselves though.

To be fair, Musk's tweet especially says if anyone is to be arrested for this, it should be him.

> to make a political statement.

I see it as more a business decision, and only secondarily a political statement.

“Dear Officer, you cannot arrest me. Did you even check Twitter?”

He did say he no longer needed a house.

Or terrorism, depending on the perspective.

It’s not terrorism by definition of terrorism regardless of perspective.

Same as a person is not a nazi just because someone disagrees with them.

Same as speech is not violence.

Etc etc etc.

You started off strong, but overreached. If I say to my spouse or child "You fucking stupid cunt, I've told you a thousand times to put the dishes away! You good for nothing piece of shit, you can't even get that right!" That's violence.

EDIT> Speech is an act. That act can be violence.

No, that wouldn't be violence.

A more interesting example would be giving an order to fire rubber bullets into a peaceable crowd. In the same sense that someone has committed murder if they hire a hitman, we could say that the speech act of giving the order, is a violent act.

Your example of a stream of abusive language, is not the equivalent of that. If someone is punished for such an act, they are not being punished for committing a violent offence.

I do wish people would stop trying to shift the definition of 'violence'. I don't want to have to make a habit of saying 'physical violence' just to close the door on it.

The difference between your view and the view you are commenting on is (as so often) whether we look at the act or the outcome. And honestly, given the dictionary definition of violence both are valid perspectives.

Cambridge Dictionary says: violence – extremely forceful actions that are intended to hurt people or are likely to cause damage.

Nowhere does it say these actions have to be carried out with the body (and if we are pedantic here, yelling into a room can be very physical as well as you are literally moving air with your breath).

Violence is a matter of communication. If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.

This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.

> If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.

Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.

Boxing is a violent sport, but isn't criminal.

> This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.

I don't think the word 'communication' is helpful here. I think what you're getting at is intent.

> Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.

intent is in the dictionary definition of the term violence, which is my point. How do you know it is intent? It is beeing communicated (be it verbal, nonverbal or otherwise).

Defining acts like these as communication has a long tradition in system theory, which among other things is used in therapy of families and relationships, so this is not really a creative act on my side.

That people at times use actions (including violent ones) to communicate is nothing new, everybody who has a child knows this.

In conversations like this, it's unhelpful to defer to your favourite dictionary. For one, I can point to another dictionary whose definition of 'violence' makes no mention of intent. [0] (Originally I'd thought to use the Oxford dictionary for this example, but I'd missed that their definition, like Cambridge's, does mention intent specifically :-P )

More than that though, I'm able to have my own take on the meaning of a word.

Philosophers have no use for dictionaries when exploring the meaning of 'free will', for instance. For someone already fluent in English, the dictionary contributes nothing.

> How do you know it is intent?

Ah, I wasn't clear. I don't think violence is a matter of intent, but I think 'intent' may be a better word for what you were referring to as 'communication', unless I misunderstood your point.

I can see that it makes some sense to view violence as 'communication', in the same way evolution is steered by 'communication' between species, but I don't see that this perspective is bringing much to the table in this context.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/violence#Noun

It's not a matter of shifting the definition. It's a pragmatic recognition that these concepts are not hard-edged and are interrelated.

Violence, emotional violence, emotional abuse, abusive speech, etc.

EDIT> I don't find your example more interesting. The more clear-cut an example is the less interesting it is. blah blah entropy.

I'm not seeing your point.

No it is not. Problems with drawing the line between what is acceptable and what is "violent" speech are caused precisely by the fact that this axiom is completely false. You cannot have free speech, and by extension speech at all, without causing what you percieve as "violence". First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive. The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.

Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards. If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.

On the more serious side - what about "psychological violence"? What about when your wife treats you like a slave and verbally abuses you on a daily basis? If your wife mistreats you, then just leave. Her words cannot stop you. What stops you is more likely the threat of being beaten, that she will make it impossible for you to see your kids and she will take your house. The violence is physical, economical and sociological, not verbal.

Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life. Is this violence? Not at all, I will just shrug it off and continue to enjoy my day. I will get some downvotes and maybe be less frequent in visiting left-leaning websites. We lose the ability to talk to each other, but it's far from being violence. It's just stupidity on both sides.

Almost all situations of real interest and disagreement will be grey-area and call for a pragmatic vs. a dogmatic approach.

> First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive.

I am not, in general -- let's try to confine ourselves to my specific example.

> The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.

This is a dogmatic assertion that is not supported by the evidence. If I were feeling less charitable, I could counter that of course you could do something about physical violence -- you just had to train harder, have better weapons, or build a coalition. People are emotionally abused. Stating that in some cases, some people can transcend that abuse is ... not really relevant. It's interesting, and should be studied so that perhaps we can confer immunity to more people.

> Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards.

As soon as you admit context you admit that abusive speech could be an act of violence, as well as true speech. As you say, yourself, context matters. This is why dogmatic approaches to this issue are doomed to fail.

> If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, ...

Let's just stick to my example. To disprove "speech cannot be violence", I only have to find one example of speech that is violence. I don't have believe or prove that all (abusive) speech is violence.

> then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.

This is nonsense. It's smacks of litany rather than logic. A person can be a productive member of society in many ways, yet hold beliefs that disturb you.

> Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life.

I can't know, but your words suggest that you are looking to be disgusted. We all like to be self-righteous at times, but I doubt we are as far apart as you believe.

I have deep knowledge of computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, and emotional abuse. All of these areas teach that nature has no respect for our ontologies.

We may try to draw a hard line between violence and speech, but we mislead ourselves. Almost all of the cases worth debating occur at the fuzzy edges of these concepts.

Failure to realize this may result in the sense of having a crystalline framework, but ultimately it misleads.

EDIT> Also, why do you assume I'm left-leaning? I think you're pattern matching on some cluster of ideas you hate, and then running from there.

Violence is an act of communication and as such always bound to the context it happens in. If someone accidentally punches you during a sports match it may look violent, but you very likely won't feel violated, because you could assume the intent to hurt is not given. If someone delivers the same punch on purpose in front of your peers, you will feel extremely violated.

Two punches, equal in their physical qualities and physical pain, one much more violent than the other. What hurts more or does more lasting damage depends on the context. There are people who have been hit as a child and have no problem with it. There are people who have never been hit physically but verbally abused who will have to deal with this their whole life.

To think violence is only violence when it is physical certainly has not much to do with how people exert force onto each other in daily life. Of course this doesn't mean that every communicative act that challenges your world view, critisises your actions, highlights you mistakes etc. automatically constitutes a violent act, although you certainly might feel bad afterwards. This is why the dictionary definition of violence has "intent" in it. If someone tells you your whole life was a lie they might not intend to hurt you with their words, even if you are devastated. If someone tells you, your hair looks shitty, they do.

Note: whether you feel hurt or not plays no role in the definition of the word violence.

The 1st Googled definition of violence:

"behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."

Notice that word "physical". Liberals have tried to define the word to be associated with words or 'hate speech' in an attempt to shut down speech they don't want to hear. It doesn't mean they're correct.

If you want to clarify your thinking, you should consider these key questions:

1) Why is violence bad? What is it we're trying to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?

2) Are there instances of speech, which in specific contexts can, cause the same negative outcomes that we try to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?

3) Is it really true that physical violence is inescapable, while abusive speech only causes harm if the listener lets it?

Let go of left/right talking points, shallow pattern-matching, and groupism, and deeply consider these questions.

Well, I'm sure a nuanced argument about the boundaries between concepts can be settled by the first Google result.

I'll take your Google result and throw you this Oxford English Dictionary result, which admits a more nuanced interpretation: https://www.oed.com/oed2/00277885

That definition is the same as the one I gave. It talks specifically of "physical" violence, at least as the main definition.

When I was growing up, we always had this phrase: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." It was usually the response to a kid complaining of being verbally teased at school, in the sense that he needed to ignore it - don't bother the teacher / parents about it unless the bullies start using their fists to hurt you.

The left has tried to redefine violence over the years in order to create the idea of "hate speech" which they want punished the same as violence.

I disagree with this idea.

I didn't say that it was terrorism. I said there are perspectives from which it could be seen as such.

FYI: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/03/31/co...

I don't see how he could be arrested given that none of this lockdown was implemented in criminal statute law.

Fined, maybe, but even fines can be reversed by courts.

Here is Alameda County's public health order:

http://www.acphd.org/media/572718/health-officer-order-20-10...

To quote it: "Pursuant to Government Code sections 26602 and 41601 and Health and Safety Code section 101029, the Health Officer requests that the Sheriff and all chiefs of police in the County ensure compliance with and enforce this Order. The violation of any provision of this Order constitutes an imminent threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both."

This is municipal code, not criminal law. Very important distinction. Like with a traffic ticket, they can fine for not complying. They cannot arrest you, however.

Where they "get" you is if you blow off the court about resolving the fine which is contempt of court, which is a criminal offense.

It blows my mind how supposedly smart people know so little about the law. It's a lot like programming. The keywords are important and the logic used as well.

> This is municipal code, not criminal law.

These businesses are facing criminal charges in Los Angeles for violating the Los Angeles county public health order:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-03/coronavi...

I guess we'll find out what the judges the locals voted for and the juries summoned are made of. Even then, their decisions can be overturned by a higher court or appealed so that basically means nothing. They can say "criminal municipal code violation" and a good judge should say, no, that's not how this works. I guess it is LA, though...

In CA, municipal code encompasses both criminal and civil statutes.

That link is paywalled, but the article title only refers to shutting off utilities.

> the article title only refers to shutting off utilities.

It does not.

> This is municipal code, not criminal law

No, the code cited in the order is State (not municipal or county) code giving certain authority to county public health officers, neither municipal codes nor municipal officers are involved. Also, municipal codes in California can have criminal components, so the contrast drawn is false as well as not germane to the relevant facts.

> Like with a traffic ticket, they can fine for not complying. They cannot arrest you, however.

Being stopped and issued a traffic ticket is a non-custodial arrest and the “fine” people pay if they don't dispute tickets is legally forfeiture of bail. But, in any case, unlike minor traffic offenses, violating a county public health order issued to control communicable disease is a criminal offense punishable by fines, jail, or both; the Alameda County order cites the relevant state criminal law.

> It blows my mind how supposedly smart people know so little about the law.

Indeed.

Now, go read what those specific codes actually say. None are criminal statutes or encompass criminal statutes.

26602. "The sheriff shall prevent and suppress any affrays, breaches of the peace, riots, and insurrections that come to his or her knowledge, and investigate public offenses which have been committed. The sheriff may execute all orders of the local health officer issued for the purpose of preventing the spread of any contagious or communicable disease."

41601. "For the suppression of riot, public tumult, disturbance of the peace, or resistance against the laws or public authorities in the lawful exercise of their functions, and for the execution of all orders of the local health officer issued for the purpose of preventing the spread of any contagious, infectious, or communicable disease, the chief of police has the powers conferred upon sheriffs by general law and in all respects is entitled to the same protection."

> None are criminal statutes or encompass criminal statutes.

These 60 businesses in LA county are facing criminal charges:

https://www.lacityattorney.org/post/feuer-continues-filing-c...

> Now, go read what those specific codes actually say. None are criminal statutes or encompass criminal statutes.

The criminal statutes are cited earlier in the order, at the very beginning:

“Please read this Order carefully. Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. (California Health and Safety Code § 120295, et seq.; Cal. Penal Code §§ 69, 148(a)(1))”

HSC 120295 is the key one (the others deal with resisting arrest and interference with executive officers): “Any person who violates Section 120130 or any section in Chapter 3 (commencing with Section 120175, but excluding Section 120195), is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not less than fifty dollars ($50) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment for a term of not more than 90 days, or by both. He or she is guilty of a separate offense for each day that the violation continued.”

The most key part of Chapter 3 for this purpose is HSC 120220: “When quarantine or isolation, either strict or modified, is established by a health officer, all persons shall obey his or her rules, orders, and regulations.”

> I don't see how he could be arrested given that none of this lockdown was implemented in criminal statute law.

Yes, all of it was. Or, more precisely, it was implemented under statutory authority of county and state public health officials whose orders are enforceable under preexisting criminal statutes and do not require additional criminal legislation for each new order.

Which Code and Section?

Both the county and state orders thoroughly cite the relevant authority.

Actually, they don't.

In fact, Newsome's Executive Orders refer only to GOV § 8567, which only refers to procurement powers of state agencies. It specifically does not create any criminal statute, which in CA happens to be a very involved process including traversing multiple legislative committees.

In other words, he could trigger a process to confiscate your steel if he can establish urgent necessity for all of it, but he can't make it a crime to build a car. You're flat wrong on this.

> In fact, Newsome's Executive Orders refer only to GOV § 8567

This is both false and irrelevant; it's false because Newsom’s 39 (to date) executive orders relating to COVID-19 (they are almost daily) reference more than just that section—i.e, the first, EO N-25-20 (3/12/2020), references government code sections 8567, 8571, and 8572 [0]; but more to the point it's irrelevant because while the EOs have some importance in state COVID-19 response, they aren't the shelter-in-place order, which is a Public Health Order issued by the State Public Health Officer / Director of Public Health on March 19, 2020 [1], citing Health and Safety Code Sections 120125, 120140, 131080, 120130(c), 120135, 120145, 120175 and 120150, which pertain to the power of the Department of Public Health to issue such orders and the obligation of local officials to enforce them.

[0] https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/3.12.20-EO...

[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/CDPH%20Document%20...

> To be fair, Musk's tweet especially says if anyone is to be arrested for this, it should be him

To be fair, you can't both commit a crime and pay other people to commit crimes and get them out of the legal consequences by tweeting that you are the only one who should be arrested.

Not sure about the rules in the US out that country. But it's it really a crime to go to work? Especially some national law and state law seem to allow it. Just the county's burocrats seem to prohibit it.

> But it's it really a crime to go to work?

Yes.

> Especially some national law and state law seem to allow it

State law makes it a crime to violate orders of county public health officers for the control of communicable disease.

the crime here is county officials engaging in literal economic repression. It's not a matter of when the government orders whatever is says this week.

The fact of the matter is that if a business feels it's time to reopen, it should do so, cautiously of course.

Neither the employees or customers are forced to go. They have a right to refuse. They don't have a right to dictate what others decide to do with their business

If you're a drug lord, manufacturing meth, just because you provide jobs to the runners, doesn't mean they can't be held accountable, am I right?

> the forced compliance of his workers

Can you provide a source for this?

I have no idea what (if any) compensation Tesla workers receive while not working during the pandemic, nor do I know if those workers will be penalized for not working - particularly for not working while the factory is open in violation of state restrictions.

Firing someone if they don't do something is not forcing them. It shouldn't raise to duress in my opinion.

Firing someone because they didnt obey your order to break the law is not duress?

You’re begging the question that there is a law to break.

It’s not at all obvious that going to work in a factory that’s operating against a county order is breaking the law.

It's not at all obvious that it's not, either. At the very least, it's against the spirit of the order.

The county order prohibits both businesses operating and individuals engaging in out-of-home activity except as explicitly permitted by the order, and violating a county public health order is a crime (misdemeanor) punishable by up jail.

Automobile manufacturing is not one of the listed exceptions, so it is illegal both to operate (for the owner) and to go to work at (for the employees) such a business.

> Instead, it seems that Musk is doing this just because he thinks he can get away with it, or because he is simply angry with the elected officials of his county. In such a situation, Tesla and Elon Musk should rightfully be punished for their actions.

Here is the thing about the Tesla culture, which is like a more subdued one then the one at SpaceX: some people are 'all in' about the cause and are putting their Lives at risk working 10+ hours everyday.

One of the reasons I decided to go work for Kimbal instead of Tesla was the mandatory Swing shift for Supply Chain (at the time) ahead of the Model 3 ramp. People were putting in 60+ hours in 4 day schedules. Burn out is not possible, its near exepected. They also offer really amazing Health Packages, like the best any other Multi-national corp ever offered me because they understood it as critical component to success in such an ambitious goal. At Kimbal's place I could do 60+ hours over 6 days, which if you've done either is taxing, but the former wipes you out and messes up your circadian rhythm, which as you get older is harder to re-adjust on the fly.

If you honestly think there aren't people waiting to just go back to work at the HQ factory to do what they joined up for int first place then you haven't met many Tesla people, let alone any SpaceX guys.

Is this fair? I think if Elon/HR has stipulated there are no consequences for those who can't or won't return, then, yes. The Factory has only just been able to recently turn things around after an amazing Manufacturing feat from the Fremont Team, only to have this stifled by the Local government, who oddly benefit a great deal from the revenue generated from Fremont.

If any of you have been to Fremont, you'll know there isn't much Economic activity there, even for the East Bay. Lots of local businesses, little restaurants and some fast food places rely heavily on Tesla employees. This is a lose-lose situation which may be due to political reasons, but if a fine is all the stands in the way of making the deliveries back-log get smaller, then its worth it. (Elon is saying he is willing to get arrested for it?)

People have paid in full for a Model Y, which has been refined due to Model 3's hard-earned lessons, the losses and missed opportunity costs are immense. If they have to move production of Y to Shanghai and re-import them to the US then not only is that a supply chain nightmare, but it completely undoes the cost-savings that made Shanghai imperative in the first place.

I don't blame him, this has also boosted the stock price above 800 again, too. So the Market agrees with his decision.

>some people are 'all in' about the cause and are putting their Lives at risk

Jesus, the frickin Nazi Youth did the same thing!

Why don't people ever see the leader worship and authoritarianism (fascism) in corporations?

> Jesus, the frickin Nazi Youth did the same thing!

Personally speaking, I met a person that was Hitler Youth when I lived in Southern Germany; and for a majority it was less about a dark haired, dark eyed Austrian talking about the 'aryan master race' then you'd think, and more about not wanting to die of hunger as all the farms were Nationalized.

> Why don't people ever see the leader worship and authoritarianism (fascism) in corporations?

I've said before and I'll say it again: I'm not in the cult of Elon, I care what he enables not what he is/isn't. You cannot deny that EV has succeed in large part because of Tesla, I worked for all the major Car manufactures with a real EV program (BMW/VW/Nissan) and those are now completely shifting in large because Tesla succeeding in it's Mission statement.

SpaceX delivered on its promise of making Rockets re-usable and more affordable etc...

Those are his companies, which he founded and risked eveything to get to where they are, but its the People who work in them that I support and champion. I just find Elon funny in a meme troll-like way, especially towards those who seem to take offense to every action/indiscretion he makes.

I did not mean to imply you were in the cult of Elon.

As a teacher of American History I have read countless diaries of these kids, they were brainwashed while they were in the scouts. I do not blame them either.

>Those are his companies, which he founded and risked eveything to get to where they are, but its the People who work in them that I support and champion. I just find Elon funny in a meme troll-like way, especially towards those who seem to take offense to every action/indiscretion he makes.

You could have championed the people in Hitler's armies as well.

> I did not mean to imply you were in the cult of Elon.

That's the issue with hyperbole, it tends to lends itself to extremes.

> You could have championed the people in Hitler's armies as well.

Back to the Nazi narrative, no I personally wouldn't have, want know why? During the (illegal) Iraq and Afghan Invasion I was in staunch opposition, and I went to a Pro-war University and come from a Military family. Both of my cousins were vets of both Iraq and Afghanistan, one with 3 tours in total. I was supposed to be the third, but realized in the 6th grade killing for the State is still Murder and that War is not a career--I wanted to help preserve Life, not destroy it.

I'm glad I got accustomed to having to do with less, as my family practically shunned me for this position and were aghast at my Anarchist leanings and didn't support me in anyway because of my refusal to accept the BS narrative that was sold to them.

So, having lived amongst and worked with said former Hitler Youth, something I'm sure even you as Historian probably cannot say, it was ultimately an experience that led to compassionate acceptance.

He didn't want to fight in Hitler's BS war of Genocide. He was hungry and did what he was told as a child from a rural farming family who had their land stolen from them and was subject to go days/weeks without eating.

He was the 'Opa' of the family I worked for on the farm, I would bring him coffee in the morning while he sorted through the potatoes we planted, harvested out of respect, and despite what you may want to think I never saw a blood-thirsty genocidal maniac.

Instead I saw a broken man who was forcefully inducted to march and sing to feed his Family, who later became a farmer himself after the war and inevitably lost his farm due to Chernobyl's fallout, and a Man who still suffered the affects of unfathomable levels of scarcity as he would regularly take whatever looked edible from our compost bin, despite having access to the store and the farms fresh produce.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you're an Educator you really should have better arguments to base your views/convictions on. Nazism was a horrible system, but there are more cogent ways to convey your position than resorting to 'well, Nazis...'

> Those are his companies, which he founded

Elon provided the majority of Tesla’s series A, but he wasn’t a founder in the conventional sense of the word.

> Elon provided the majority of Tesla’s series A, but he wasn’t a founder in the conventional sense of the word.

Granted, and you're right, his role as CEO would come after all of that.

>simply angry with the elected officials of his county

Erica Pan received zero votes for her because she has never appeared on the ballot. She's an appointed not an elected official. This is her choice and the public has no possibility of direct electoral response to her decision to forbid Tesla opening.

When it comes to a choice between Musk's judgement versus elected officials, I'd suggest the former has a superior track record to the latter. Not to mention, any punishment will blow straight back at them when Musk then moves the Tesla factory. It's quite amusing really.

Even if Musk is right and the county officials are wrong, he still has to follow the law. If he thinks he can get away with breaking the law because he can threaten to move his business, I would support jail time for him. The attitude that having money puts one above the law is not something that should be tolerated.

Do you support throwing non-violent drug offenders in prison too? Or are you in only in favor of jailing rich people who might actually have enough leverage to prove in court that the law is unjust (or better yet, completely unconstitutional)?

I support jailing executives who willfully violate the law, especially if they think that they can get away with it by threatening to move their business elsewhere. We can't live in a society in which money buys you the right to violate the law.

You can believe that the county's rules are unwise, but they're in place in order to protect public health. Right or wrong, Musk is violating those rules and thinks he'll get away with it because he runs an important company. There has to be a clear message that he won't get away with it. Fining him won't make a difference. Prison time might.

A public official tweeting 'F*ck Elon Musk' is hardly responsible behaviour either.

Just to be clear, the public official who tweeted that has nothing to do with Alameda County. She's an assemblywoman from San Diego. And I'll note that her angry tweet doesn't endanger anyone's life.

So far, Alameda County officials have been very subdued in their response - too subdued, in my opinion. They're afraid of Musk moving his factory out of town. It's a terrible message to send that large businesses can ignore public health regulations, and avoid consequences by threatening to leave.

civil disobedience may typically involve punishment but it shouldn't be a requirement.

There's definitely a great evil to laws which are either selectively or rarely enforced. Eventually they turn cancerous and are abused.

For example, look at the Logan Act and its justification for spying on politicians.

The Logan Act has literally never resulted in a prosecution. Got one indictment though, in the 19th century.

The Logan Act was used to pressure Michael Flynn into pleading guilty. That wasn't a first. It can be an effective threat without actually prosecuting anyone for it. That's more than a sufficient reason to repeal this blatantly unconstitutional law.

So if it’s never used, why is it on the books? There’s plenty of evidence that laws are abused so the government can get what they want.

I only support civil disobedience for "human rights issues". That is the only thing really merits the term.

Things appearing as civil disobedience for money issue are virtually always terrible - as soon as "radicalism" or "iconoclastism" becomes a business, it's worst business.

Prohibition was a terrible policy but the people that fueled the defiance of prohibition were mobsters, scum that had a terrible and arguably on-going terrible effect on the country.

Even 1960s drug proponents became awful at the point they became drug dealers.

The ability to earn a living is a human right that no government can deprive you of without a good, specific reason and due process.

It is not a human right to earn a living.

And it is absolutely the right of a government to prevent you from working.

Many jobs requiring government approval for example a doctor, lawyer, builder.

Governments do not have rights, period. They exist solely at the consent and continued pleasure of the governed (or should at least). That is to say, every human has rights, because they are an individual human. The rights of people are self-evident and stem solely from the fact that people are human.

Governments have no rights. There is nothing that is owed to them due to their existence as governments. Were a particular set of people not to form a government, no other government could rightfully enter to assert their 'right' to govern.

I'd love to hear black or brown people adopt this as their motto.

Same

Gandhi was brown, and his policy of civil disobedience was essentially based on the premise that a government only derives its legitimacy from the will of the people to be governed by it. Leading to the act of mass civil disobedience.

"It is not a human right to earn a living."

The UNCHR has begged to differ since 1948. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

"Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...

> to just and favourable conditions

One could argue that putting yourself or others at risk of infection is not a “just and favorable condition”

>It is not a human right to earn a living.

What gives you the right to decide that?

It shouldn't, unless your only purpose is damaging that individual, which sounds to me like a not very humane purpose.

Work is one of the main purposes and goals an individual may have, together with family. Denying that to anyone is simple and plain tyranny.

Governments have no rights.

Human beings have rights.

Oddly enough, in this case the local and state government does have a reason and did follow due process. A company that disagrees can sue -- more due process.

It all hinges on the reason and due process of course.

I read an amusing analogy, we have what we call the "Schrodinger's disease".

The government tries to protect me from the disease and suspects me of spreading the disease - all at the same time.

Even though I don't want that protection and I am not sick. Doesnt' matter, I have to oblige.

Yes, you do. It's honestly not that complicated.

Have you been tested? Every day? You can't confidently say you're not infectious when a large proportion of cases are asymptomatic, or very mild. By all means be gung-ho about your own life, but your rights stop at the point they risk other people.

You will never be able to confidently say you are not infectious of some disease.

Exactly. Which is why, when there is an epidemic of a dangerous disease, measures need to be implemented that assume that everybody is infectious unless proven otherwise.

No, that's not the point. If the small risk of someone dying from covid19 is enough to take away everyone's rights, what keeps your state from taking away your rights for a similarly flimsy reason, such as the risk that you will commit a crime?

Laws, constitutions, the legal system, and the ballot box.

Mature democracies should have the ability to carefully and responsibly limit some rights in times of great crisis, such as wars and pandemics.

this is like saying have you regularly proven that you are not guilty of crimes?

It is really not how it should work at all.

Assuming everyone is infected at all times is both absurd and most importantly unworkable and counterproductive. The net effect is the opposite of what it wants to achieve.

This is essentially the same principle that says restaurants have to follow health regulations to prevent spreading disease.

Depriving people of the right to earn a living regardless of their health status and regardless of their health practices (PPE, distancing in the workplace, sanitizing surfaces, air filtration) is absolutely not due process. It is the sort of arbitrary and absurd regulation which is quintessentially Californian. California has a history of depriving people of human rights without rhyme or reason; this is just furthering the trend.

> California has a history of depriving people of human rights without rhyme or reason; this is just furthering the trend.

[citation needed]

Why point the finger at California? The federal government has done so too.

Here are some examples:

* making it illegal for homeless people to exist in cities (loitering laws etc. when the homeless cannot help but break the law)

* taking away the right to bear arms as soon as black people started carrying firearms for self defense

* a long history of police brutality in the LAPD against minorities

* Los Angeles refusing to protect Asian Americans during race riots

* The California Dept of Labor refusing to enforce minimum wage laws regardless of the citizenship status of workers (only the federal government has to enforce border and immigration laws)

We're talking about California in this thread. If you want to talk about the federal government you're free to do so.

Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines the right to work.

I'm not interested in casting Elon Musk as some sort of heroic figure, and if it turns out he has coerced his workers or endangered them in practice, not just theoretically, he should pay for that.

But the freedom to work is absolutely a human rights issue.

So, this quoting of Article 23 seems to considerably distort the intention of the article:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

What is described is something like the right to be considered for work if one is qualified. Maybe to the provision of work. But saying that this article guarantees a factory owner the right to restart that factory when they feel they'll be providing work along with making a profit, does not ring true.

In practice, meaning, let's let him kill a few of them before we jump to conclusions?

Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1]. So one could argue that this is, in fact, a Human Rights issue. Just because this guy is a billionaire does not mean that these rights do not apply to him.

[1]https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/human-rights/

Just as Freedom of Speech doesn't give one free license to spout hate speech or shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, one persons right to work isn't more important than another's right to life (or safety from a deadly pandemic).

I'm always amused to see people use the "fire in a crowded theater" analogy. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. coined the phrase in Schenck v. United States.[1] In that case, he sent a man to prison for the crime of leafleting against the draft in World War I.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#The_C...

Minor nitpick: he didn’t send Schenck to prison. He was already in prison. The Supreme Court just kept him there.

The court case that gave us the "fire in a crowded theater" example was partially overturned by brandenburg vs ohio. It's not entirely clear which direction the court would come down right now.

Your first example is also impacted by this. General advocacy of violence was upheld as constitutionally protected speech, it's very unlikely that hate speech could ever meet the brandenburg test.

That's not to say that your point about one person's right to work vs another person's right to live is wrong. In fact, I think the court would likely agree with you on that matter. I just think your first couple of examples are flawed.

The full phrase is "the right to work in just and favourable conditions". Which concerns his workers too.

Though suggesting that Musk's "human rights" are being violated through closure of his car factory in the middle of a pandemic is making a complete joke out of both his argument and out of the concept of human rights.

Yes I read the link before I posted it, I just didn't think the full phrase added anything to my response to the OP. :)

Anyway, I would think that being unable to open your own factory while your competitors are allowed to be open when you have done nothing wrong, would be quite "unjust and unfavorable". I mean it isn't like he can conduct this type of business from home instead.

Edit:

Here is the full sentence according to Article 23 from the Universal Declaration of Human rights:

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. [1]

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/en...

if your factory is closed while your competitors are allowed to be open that would definitely be unfair if all other relevant conditions about the factories were the same, in this case if they were in proximity to each other.

And just in case you're going to ask what proximity has to do with the matter of justice, it is because as his competitor's factories are located elsewhere than Alameda they fall under different jurisdiction, do his competitors ever have any regulation based on where they are located that they can then refuse to obey because Tesla's Alameda factory doesn't have to do it that way?

If there is unfairness here it is of the same sort of unfairness engendered by the world being a large globe with different climates, countries, governments, currencies, and cultures and where you choose to place your factory means your natural greatness of being must be hampered by the base restrictions of existence.

You are being completely disingenuous.

"Right to work" has a completely different meaning than "Right to work in just and favourable conditions".

The latter refers to the fact that IF you are working then it should be in a safe environment not that you have the right to work at all.

I am not being disingenuous in the least. I believe you are mis-interpreting the phrase.

Here it is in full form under Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. [1]

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/en...

Paraphrasing here, but I very much read that as "Every human has the right to work in just and favourable conditions", not "Every corporation has a right to operate under equal economic treatment."

The irony of bringing up the right to work in a discussion about a US corporation wanting to reopen their plant. So is Tesla going to offer everyone who wants to work a job, because it's a human right? Exactly, that's not what the right to work is, neither does it mean that corporations can just be restart plants without care about regulations.

Howard Roarke might disagree.

> Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1]. So one could argue that this is, in fact, a Human Rights issue. Just because this guy is a billionaire does not mean that these rights do not apply to him

This nicely illustrates the folly of trying to reason about a situation from a pithy statement of some cherry-picked "right." Are we violating the "right to work"[1] of young children when we forbid them from quitting school getting a a factory job? Maybe, but it's pretty obvious that overriding factors are more important in that case. It's the same when we consider an employer who wants to "to work" employing his employees in conditions that some may consider unsafe.

No, because children don't have a right to work.

> No, because children don't have a right to work.

I'm not sure what point that's meant to make, but it supports what I was saying. You'd never be able to derive that exception from:

>>> Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1].

There's loads of different competing rights, exceptions to those rights, and other social practices that need to be weighed to make a judgement a situation like this. Focusing too closely on reasoning about this one "right to work" ignores all that, and thus leads to less than enlightening conclusions.

The ability to make money and to produce things is a basic human right though.

You can continue to make money and produce things in the food service industry. You cannot continue to do so in a nonessential industry in a manner that puts others at risk in a way that is costly to the state. Don't produce meth, and don't run a car factory before a pandemic has been contained.

That’s very much a false equivalency.

Oh yes, billionaires and corporations figured highly in Thoreau’s _Civil Disobedience_. From Walden Pond to Elon, it’s a straight line of coherent thought.

I really think that the word "billionaire" needs to stop being used as a bad word.

Billionaires are citizens too. They are bound (imperfectly) by laws. Therefore they too encounter situations where practicing civil disobedience makes sense.

I recall the quote from Thoreau, saying we must also stand up to those "who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity."

The point of the essay is to exhibit disobedience to government when that government is perpetrating injustice. Somehow halting the production of luxury cars for a few more weeks, with the explicit intent of trying to save lives, doesn't seem like an injustice to me.

> Somehow halting the production of luxury cars for a few more weeks, with the explicit intent of trying to save lives, doesn't seem like an injustice to me.

Forgive the cliche, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"Trying to save lives" is the new "think of the children". It's the same mentality that gives us legislation like the EARN IT act.

The question we should ask is, (1) has the government provided a reasonable justification for placing such limits on commerce, freedom of movement, etc. And (2), is the strategy we're pursuing, from a public health perspective, the right one?

My answer to both (1) and (2) is "hell no". The rules our government has ruled out are arbitrary and capricious and are largely based on superstition. Case in point: closures of public parks and beaches.

Arguing (2) is out of the scope of this comment but suffice to say that my belief is the negative externalities introduced by our COVID-19 response are far, far worse than COVID-19 itself.

FWIW, I am not a fan of Musk in general. I am inherently suspicious of people that are trying to save humanity. As we have seen with Musk - for example, how Tesla factory workers are treated in the pre-COVID-19 era - because he is working tirelessly to save humanity, he is willing to sacrifice actual humans to achieve his goals. Because after all, in the scheme of things, if you're talking about fighting existential threats like climate change or being stuck on one planet, what's the cost of even 100,000 human-lives' worth of wellbeing in comparison? It's not even close.

But when it comes to COVID-19, I absolutely think Musk is right. Yes he has made some absolute asinine comments/predictions but his general points about suspension of civil liberties, and statements that COVID-19 is not nearly as lethal as we were told...all of that is totally true in my book.

People who oppose EARN-IT act did provide their reasons. I get it that you don’t believe their intentions. Do you have any plausible theories on this supposedly secret motives of Alameda county officials? You say it isn’t saving lives, so what do you think it is? What do they benefit from keeping a factory closed unnecessarily?

> supposedly secret motives of Alameda county officials?

This is an arbitrary goal post. There need not be any secret motive of the county officials to make their reasoning incorrect or the law not right. Their motives could be completely public and still scrutinized and found to be incorrect.

It is simple cover-your-ass behaviour from low level bureaucrats.

> You say it isn’t saving lives, so what do you think it is?

I think that they intend to save lives but that their understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the best way to address it is so overly simplistic that the myopic policies they are instituting are going to lead to larger mortality over the long-term. Which is the pattern we see at the broader scale as well when we examine the US' response to the pandemic.

So, like I implied above, their intentions are good, but intentions are largely worthless.

> "Trying to save lives" is the new "think of the children". It's the same mentality that gives us legislation like the EARN IT act.

Is not "but what about my freedom" the same thing? This is a nonsense argument.

> But when it comes to COVID-19, I absolutely think Musk is right. Yes he has made some absolute asinine comments/predictions but his general points about suspension of civil liberties, and statements that COVID-19 is not nearly as lethal as we were told...all of that is totally true in my book.

Forget the nonsense and call it for what it is. It has nothing to do with civil liberty. It has to do with money, power, and influence.

People actually suffering and not knowing where their next check comes from, well, we don't really care about them. But when finally the rich software engineers get a little less comfortable, the screeches for freedom would make even the largest eagle blush.

> "People actually suffering and not knowing where their next check comes from, well, we don't really care about them."

This is quite literally about them. Knowledge workers and others sitting comfortably at home are the biggest opposition to opening up business.

If it was about them then the federal government would provide aide so that a proper response can be undertaken.

I disagree. The rich people who can avoid the poor are the biggest proponents of opening up business. In fact, I see this sentiment on hacker news more than anywhere else- because software engineers are rich and benefit from the working poor everywhere, they want the economy to reopen so their portfolio grows again.

The federal government is providing aid and today discussed a 25 trillion dollar deal. That is more than all the mortgage, auto, and student loan debt combined.

The problem is that govt is slow and payments by themselves are not effective because of the cascading effects of economic shutdown (you cant spend money when services aren't running in the first place). It's the lower and middle class workers that are suffering the most without a paycheck.

Also, in case you missed it, the stock market has been on a rapid rise for a month now and the NASDAQ is currently positive for the year. Portfolios are doing just fine.

Phhft, some aid. The people get just crumbs under the table. In Europe, many countries pay 80% or more of furloughed salaries. This is how it’s done. (There is shenanigans there too, but less.) The cares act is joke.

In the US, the megacorps got theirs. Now the populace has to work. No tests, just work comrade. For Mother US!

The federal government discusses a lot of things - the large majority of which never get passed. This is not an argument.

If the stock market is doing fine then perhaps we don't need to rush to reopen. Or maybe it's completely propped up based on nothing, countless measures of pumping money into industry, and monetary policy.

> (you cant spend money when services aren't running in the first place). It's the lower and middle class workers that are suffering the most without a paycheck.

Aide shouldn't be for spending money on Tesla's and other junk. It should be for rent, food, etc, utilities, etc. So this argument is pointless.

The poor and middle class have already been suffering for years - expensive healthcare, lower wages, less pensions, regressive taxes. Yet now people suddenly care? It's basically all a lie. Just admit it - you don't want to lose money for yourself, and you don't care if other people you don't know die or get sick or work in poor conditions.

The stock market is not the economy. Also you can't selectively choose to only open certain businesses because they're all connected. Tesla alone has thousands of vendors and suppliers affecting hundreds of thousands of jobs.

I'm a startup founder who has lost major revenue. I personally know dozens who have lost their businesses and jobs and a few who have gotten sick. More aid is not going to make any difference and the economic disaster is going to cause much more suffering and death. Supporting family isn't free. These are known effects and must be balanced against the new data we have about covid19.

But now you're resorting to baseless accusations and personal attacks so let's end it here.

I'm responding to how this all aligns with Thoreau's concept of civil disobedience. Billionaires more interested in the expansion of their own business at the cost of the lives of their workers is the exact opposite of what Thoreau considers justice.

I recommend learning more about these ideas before building them into your narrative. You may realize, for example, that the people who have been working on COVID response full time for months have put a lot more thought into it than you.

It's not about good or bad. It's about power. Billionaires have a shitton of power, and we need rules to rein them in. To protect us from them.

That's in the abstract. Let's take this concrete example. Say there is some worker in this factory. They don't want to go to work. They don't feel safe. Now they are torn between two authorities. What happens if they do show up? What happens if they don't show up? Will they be seen as "not a teamplayer"? Will their career stall out compared to their yes-men colleges? Maybe even get fired without any cause given. Half a year later so as not to make it obvious?

> Let's take this concrete example. Say there is some worker in this factory. They don't want to go to work. They don't feel safe. Now they are torn between two authorities. What happens if they do show up? What happens if they don't show up? Will they be seen as "not a teamplayer"? Will their career stall out compared to their yes-men colleges? Maybe even get fired without any cause given. Half a year later so as not to make it obvious?

Yes, I think pretty much exactly that would happen. (I'm not super up-to-date on the CARES act or other legal measures that they might be able to take, or if unemployment pays out to people who "quit" their jobs currently, so there's a small chance that those are options)

However my conclusion is that's an example of why forcibly shutting down businesses was a terrible idea in the first place and never should have been done.

But yes I totally agree, our governmental systems are not set up to handle these questions.

I must confess that when the "flatten the curve" meme started spreading around and the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers were being given, that I actually believed in flattening the curve and thus initially supported the lockdown. I should have known at the time that the goalposts were going to be moved. In retrospect it's incredibly obvious.

I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to the threats of “new normal” and how damaging the response has been and continues to be.

The math didn’t check out on “Flatten the Curve” from the very start. It is very, very hard not to get caught up in the panic response, and in that moment the sheer number of people who would accuse you of endangering lives for even doubting the response was necessary, correct, proportional, scientific, or even legal, was enormous.

In MA ~60% of COVID deaths have been in nursing homes. That’s 3,000 deaths in an extremely narrow population (< 50,000 people) and the state was busy shutting down life as we know it and totally failed the people actually at risk. In NY they sent known COVID cases into their nursing homes. In RI 70% of their total fatalities have been in nursing homes.

We need the end of lockdown, we need to halt the drift into totalitarian and draconian tracking measures, and we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population.

As far as TFA, it’s the typical Elon lightning rod effect but the fact is all the other auto manufacturers have reopened, and Alameda County is no hotspot. It should be entirely uncontroversial that Tesla is reopening and in the meantime challenging any continuing shutdown order in court. I doubt a preliminary injunction would be granted based on the required legal standard, although judges have surprised me in the past!

You realize that even if the lockdown ended tomorrow, that doesn't change the fact that the economic effects are still going to exist from other countries suffering from Coronavirus related issues, yes?

The rallying cry around ending the lockdown is complete and utter bullshit considering other countries that have tried reopening (including South Korea and parts of Japan) were slammed by a second wave of infections.

Opening up won't stop the at-risk population from being afraid to work, nor will it stop people from getting sick and being unable to work.

Economic effects are still going to exist. This is a tautology. What matters is the change or trade-offs in effect from taking one course of action or another.

We have over 20 million unemployed (probably a significant undercount) through a self-inflicted lockdown in just a couple months. Leading economic experts such as the US Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve have warned strongly of “permanent economic damage” if we continue the lockdown. I would speculate this lockdown is firmly ushering in the next era of “essential” mega corporations and the utter destruction of small business.

And in New York, the majority of new cases in the last few weeks have been from people “strictly observing social distancing.”

Like focusing a laser increases the energy that can be brought to bear on a single point and magnifies the overall effect, so too can highly targeted common sense measures save more lives than this “utter bullshit” general lockdown.

I’ll give the specific example again. While we’re doing ~30k tests a day nationwide, we still haven’t tested every nursing home patient and worker. In fact, NY Times reports many nursing homes have not gotten access to barely any testing at all, even for their recently deceased. So a sub-population of 1.3 million residents is bearing 35% of total fatalities (in 14 states it’s more than 50% of all fatalities) and this lockdown diverts massive resources and energy away from saving those lives.

Do I have that right? 0.4% of the population has seen 35% of the total deaths? Over-represented by 87x. By the way that’s an undercount because only 33 states actually break out data for nursing home deaths. But instead the political response is fear mongering, preaching a new normal, and shaming people who go to the beach.

>we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population

Exactly. And if we had been prepared with enough testing capability and protective equipment, that would have been the way to go. But we were not prepared. So we had to go with plan B. The US is not good at health care. There are consequences for that.

> the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers

Those are the current stats I believe. The IFR is of course lower, but probably not wildly lower. As of yesterday the UK's chief medical officer was estimating it at 1% or a bit less.

Billionaires are indeed citizens and no one is taking away their rights, per se. However, it is my opinion that as a class of people they should not exist (astute readers know how to flag clear opinions so they need not always be noted as such for the sake of brevity). In 2018 the median household income in the US was $63,179 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N; numbers from other sources vary a bit but all around that point), and of course most people don’t have much for savings. $1B : $63,179 :: $15,828 : $1. My household income is quite a bit above the median and puts me in the top few percentiles, depending on how one adjusts for location. I pay a fair bit in taxes. I feel plenty incentivized to work hard; I would like to earn more and have a bit more money. At the same time, I have been incredibly fortunate in a variety of ways. It is difficult for me to see any credible policy rationale for why anyone should have 10,000 times more money than the median American household (and that’s for a modest billionaire). The extralegal advantages that come with such wealth are considerable, and worthy of pejorative usage.

People shouldn't be allowed to be too tall either. No one deserves to be 6'3 when the average height is 5'7. The extralegal advantages that come with such height are considerable and worth correcting.

Aside from the fact that Elon was born into a wealthy family (which is vaguely like having tall genes, I guess?), he can discard his massive wealth at any moment with considerable ease compared to the task of somehow reducing your height from 6'3" to 5'7". He actively chose to accumulate wealth and hold onto it, there are plenty of successful businessmen who aren't billionaires or aspiring billionaires.

Are you really going to pick height as a comparison point for being a billionaire? Did tall people take their height from short people? Is height taxed?

I think this is a fantastic analogy, except instead of 5'7 and 6'3 it's 5'7 and 50,000' tall. You bet society would start to have some pretty interesting laws if there were a bunch of people running around that were ten thousand times the size of the median person. It would be agreed that people of this size, while capable of incredible things, present a significant problem for the general population and they consume A LOT of resources. Certainly the population would prefer if they were only 1000 feet tall, after all, it's impossible to maintain perspective if your head is in the clouds, far from the median person.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ is a great visualization of just how wealthy one particular billionaire is.

We're all closer to being millionaires than Jeff Bezos.

> We're all closer to being millionaires than Jeff Bezos.

This is true in terms of orders of magnitude, but gets hilariously true when looking at the absolute numbers.

The difference in wealth of a homeless person and a (barely) millionaire is about a million ($1,000,000).

The difference in wealth of that millionaire and Jeff Bezos is about a Jeff Bezos ($138,999,000,000).

That website rubs me the wrong way in so many ways - the premise of "what could we do with X% of $what_someone_who_is_not_me_owns" with no concern for the owner, and "no person deserves this much wealth" with no concern given to the very important question of: Who can judge what anyone "Deserves"?

The premise of your objection to it is that there is nothing of a higher moral status than protecting ownership of property.

Why is that more important than any other moral axiom?

They can keep their wealth because the rest of us protects it, often with our blood. (Military and police, for a start, but that’s just scratching the surface.)

What do you propose should happen in Bezos' case? Let's assume that he doesn't have $139B in the bank, but most of his wealth is the value of his Amazon stock. Should he be forced to give up his ownership in the company he built? I have heard people opine that people like Bezos should be taxed at 90%, but what if he doesn't sell his shares?

If he wants to sell $10M or so to buy a nice house and a new car, do you think he doesn't deserve to do so? Where do you draw the line?

With 139 billion he can buy a 10M home every day for 38 years straight.

So yeah. A line can and should be drawn somewhere.

> Should he be forced to give up his ownership in the company he built?

How do you even picture that claim? Is it Bezos literally building every warehouse with his own two hands? Is it him being at a thousand places at once dealing with paperwork, marketing and packaging all by himself? For every billionaire out there there are thousands of workers that were denied their share of the success. I would say the only way someone could be a honest "self made" billionaire is by mugging an other billionaire in a dark alley.

There's a colloquial sense of building something that doesn't require that you do 100% of the work yourself. For example, when people say they're building a house, almost always they're just hiring someone else to actually build it and all they've contributed was money.

Besides that, there are some billionaires that did get their wealth honestly in my estimation, like JK Rowling and Markus Persson.

> JK Rowling

A good point. I wasn't aware that she was a billionaire and she apparently gave most of it away by now, dropping her well bellow a billion again.

> Markus Persson.

I remember that there was a lot of controversy around Minecraft, but I can't accurately recall the details to counter that.

When you say, “draw the line”, my gut reaction is “curves beat lines.” Cliff thresholds often lead to bad behavior. I think in all cases, not just with Bezos, the following tax policies should be under consideration. What the precise points should be is more a matter for experts. With the below in place, I don’t see too much harm with being a billionaire in stock in the company one founded.

- Significantly higher marginal tax rates further up the income ladder. US high end marginal tax rates are historically and relatively low; at the same time the US runs an incredible deficit. It’s crazy.

- Increasing tax rates on dividend earnings for individuals, so that they converge to the income tax rates based on some income/earnings thresholds. Large share holders like Bezos can make millions via dividends, and get a far better tax rate than you or I. It doesn’t make any sense. For mutual funds and companies, etc., dividend taxation could be treated as now without much negative impact.

- Increasing tax rates on capital gains when realized. If Bezos wants to sell $10M of stock to buy a fancy new house and car, great, but at some level of capital gains it makes sense for the rates to rise as it otherwise becomes another kind of income tax dodge.

- Inheritance taxes increasing steeply with the amount of the estate. Sam Walton worked his ass off; his kids didn’t. It’s perfectly normal to want to leave your kids something, but after a certain point it seems rather a social anti-pattern to have a trust fund class, especially at extreme amounts of wealth (which is what we are talking here).

- Limits on loss depreciation for individuals. Perhaps not quite as important but also subject to a lot of abuse.

Of course, I also think there’s much that needs to be done with campaign finance reform, lowering corporate tax rates, automatic antitrust provisions that come into play when a company becomes relatively too big, and increased penalties for corporate externalities (like privacy violations, pollution, etc.).

Hope this helps. What do you think we should do?

By "draw the line" I was referring to how much you would take from him if he wanted to convert some of his equity in Amazon into cash. Although I feel like I do appreciate the points you listed above, even with those measures in place there are no guarantees that "billionaires as a class of people" would cease to exist.

Certainly with someone like Bezos, unless you take it all there is going to be a number that will still net him a billion after all of the taxes. And if you do "take it all", then maybe the next Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Gates starts the next company in another jurisdiction with less of an appetite for taxation, drawing away with it the capital and all of the follow-on effects it provides (jobs, spending in the community, etc.). And given the lengths we know that rich people will go to protect their money, that line has to be drawn at far less than "all" to keep them.

On the other end of the extreme, even if he never sells a share those shares still allow him to wield a tremendous amount of power. So in the short run, all the taxes in the world would change nothing (Amazon does not pay dividends). It would just give him more time to figure out how to evade the taxes in the long run. :)

I am moved by the argument that Walton's kids shouldn't get it all, but I'm not sure that transferring some or all of his property to the government is a good idea. You would then just have a "trust fund class" of politicians and bureacrats! (BTW your Walton comment has got me pumped for season 3 of "Succession")

I like your overall thesis, I just think we should be less punitive with those exceptional people who do indeed add tremendous value to our economy and society.

Why shouldn't they exist? Are you really claiming that by accumulating certain amount of health you become harmful to society? If that is the case what would be that amount that you mention? $1,000,000,000 and what about $990,000,000?

The accumulation of wealth by a single individual is not inherently harmful for society, it all comes down to the intention for which accumulation happens and how is that spent.

Accumulation of wealth by a single individual is a very inefficient distribution of resources (from a maximizing utility perspective) due to the diminishing value of each additional $.

That's a very strong assumption to make. Because you are putting a limit on the capabilities of an individual and the cost of the problems and projects thet may work on.

I don't think the accumulation is inefficient per se, it would depend on what the individual does with that wealth. Bezos or Musk invest that capital in productive enterprises, which arguably benefit society.

Edit: typo.

Accumulation of wealth can never be analysed in its own vacuum, because it does not exist in a vacuum.

Present day accumulation of wealth creates a huge power imbalance, billionaires are citizens, just as I am, why should they have more power, as a citizen, than I do?

If you defend that billionaires should exist then, in my opinion, it's required to design a way to protect the rest of society from this class of people amassing more and more power.

The problem isn't money, it is our power structures. Right now, being a billionaire is almost inherently bad, every billionaire is a policy failure.

Why shouldn't billionaires have more power than you? I assume that you come from a western country, and presumably you work on Engineering or IT industry. Based on statistics we can easily assume that you belong to the 1% richest population of the world. Are you willing to give up on your wealth? If not, why should a billionaire then?

Besides that, hierarchies of power exist outside of realm of money. And they are a natural occurrence. You will not only find billionaires with more power than you, but also a lot of other citizens that belong to these other hierarchies that have achieved their power via their competence.

Power in itself is not dangerous or undesirable, power that becomes tyrannic is.

What is more dangerous is inequality, specially inequality of opportunities. Certainly some times of inequalities of outcome can also be dangerous in certain situations if not kept at check, basically because they may become a source of violence.

Although this argument is phrased in a snarky way I think it makes a good point. It's more important that billionaires and multinational corporations feel that they should obey the law than it is for individuals

The tone of discourse on hackernews seems to have worsened substantially in the five years. :(

Lots if snark and point scoring and no charity any more.

Is it hacker news, or just the internet as a whole?

The internet as a whole has been in a gradual downward slide since eternal september.

Should never have given the unwashed masses internet access... /jk

Civil disobedience for some gets policy changes, and others get blasted with firehoses.

> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.

It is one thing for Musk to publicly proclaim he is willing to go to jail, but are all the rank and file workers?

At what point does the civil disobedience become workers telling their employer they will not violate the law by returning to work and risk jail just to pump up the stock?

Yeah, that is a good question. A worker can reasonably claim that they should not be asked to break the law as part of their job. I am curious to see how all this plays out.

Having said that, I read somewhere that there are like 10,000 employees at Tesla's Fremont plant. Do we really think the County would actually follow through and arrest 10,000 people? Thank Goodness we do not live in such a society.. Perhaps they would arrest just the management, perhaps just Musk? Shut off the power instead? Ugh.

Anyone fired would have an easy case to win. If it came to that generous packages will be offered.

Is such an order by a county executive even legitimate?

That so few are even asking this question in insane to me.

I'm guessing that it needs to be tested in court.

Or at least, that Musk has decided that it does.

Plenty of people are asking, Tesla has already brought a declaratory action in the courts to ask them.

The thing is that is how things are done legally, but Musk is putting the cart before the horse by breaking the order. In other words right or wrong say police show up to enforce the order and order the factory shutdown and musk/employees fail to obey...failing to obey the officers orders in generally a charge unto itself at that point never mind the violation of the county order.

That's because people who actually care rather than feigning curiosity can read the order, which cites its statutory authority, and then can go and read the statutory authority, too.

People who actually care can drill down into the appropriate codes and see that your derisive tone is wholly unsupported by fact.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164535

You have an ugly habit of trying to silence critique by talking down to people using specific claims and relying on their inability to research when it is your claims that are false.

> People who actually care can drill down into the appropriate codes and see that your derisive tone is wholly unsupported by fact.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164535

I've responded directly to that post with direct links to the relevant orders, but it's funny that you make that claim and point to a post (of yours, I note) that is both derisive in tone and almost wholly unsupported by fact (making a claim that is both literally false and which refers to a set of state orders that isn't, and doesn't include, the only state order relevant to the discussion, the shelter-in-place order issued by the Director of Public Health.)

  I've responded directly to that post with direct links to the relevant orders

You're talking in circles. The point here is that you repeatedly said that Newsome's orders cites criminal statute law, e.g.

  "...the order, which cites its statutory authority (to shut down Tesla et al)"

And it doesn't. You can keep pretending that it does and telling people who tried to point that out in a courteous way to, in effect, "go look it up", but I did, and I quoted same. (Feel free to quote any supporting criminal statutes now, which you've been oddly reluctant to do.)

And today's Wisconsin Supreme Court overturn of its Governor's shelter in place order clearly demonstrates that even a Governor can't exceed his authority, even if s/he thinks it well-intentioned.

> The point here is that you repeatedly said that Newsome's orders cites criminal statute law

Nope, I never said any of Newsom's orders did that; I said the state and, relevant here, Alameda County public health orders (neither of which was issued by Newsom) both cited the relevant statutory authority to criminal enforcement. I've even linked directly to both orders and reproduced the citations from both orders, and even pulled out and quoted the most relevant section from a broad chapter cited in the county order. You, on the other hand, have made an inaccurate description of the authority cited in the irrelevant governor's executive orders to support the rest of your unsupported inaccurate claims.

Newsom's 39 executive orders on this emergency (at last count, which was yesterday so I might have missed a couple) are waivers of state law under the governor's emergency powers which are separate from the public health orders that are at issue here. (They are only tangentially relevant in that one of them provides the authority for the 5/7/2020 revision to the State Public Health Order bypassing some usual procedural requirements.)

> And today's Wisconsin Supreme Court overturn of its Governor's shelter in place order clearly demonstrates that even a Governor can't exceed his authority, even if s/he thinks it well-intentioned.

That point was never in dispute, but sure.

Almost all US case law has held that any jurisdiction can make anything illegal unless there's a specific higher-ranking (state or federal) law protecting that act from being made illegal.

Even without any supporting statute law?

There is supporting state statute law for public health orders to prevent communicable disease; that statute law is also what makes it a crime to violate such orders.

Okay, which Code and which Section for CA?

I'll just quote the first part (after the rather extended title) of the Alameda County order, which cites the statutory authority both for the order itself and for criminal prosecution of violations:

> Please read this Order carefully. Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. (California Health and Safety Code § 120295, et seq.; Cal. Penal Code §§ 69, 148(a)(1))

> UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF CALIFORNIA HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE SECTIONS 101040, 101085, AND 120175, THE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE COUNTY OF ALAMEDA (“HEALTH OFFICER”) ORDERS:

Interesting scenario, I wonder if turning off the power would would work considering their business is solar and battery production.

It's not a law, it's an order from a single individual in the county. There's also no law preventing people from going to work, regardless of whether the business should be open or not. And Tesla is not requiring anyone to show up.

Nobody is at risk here other than Elon and executives, but there will be plenty of prosecutorial discretion used to settle this smoothly rather than cause more civil unrest.

> And Tesla is not requiring anyone to show up.

That's an important point.

But is he paying them more to show up than they'd otherwise be paid if they didn't show up?

> But is he paying them more to show up than they'd otherwise be paid if they didn't show up?

That would be reasonable, to compensate for risk and going above-and-beyond?

It would, yes.

But if they're being paid nothing otherwise, one could make the argument that it's coercive. Still, this is the US, and it's arguably unfair to expect Tesla to pay nonworking employees indefinitely, even though Musk is a billionaire.

Musk (and most billionaires) don't have actual billions in the bank. Their net worth coms from owning the stock of the companies they founded. If the company goes bankrupt, they lose their wealth too. And paying for employees (10s of thousands of them) without any revenue or production can have an adverse impact.

If giant companies like Ford and Boeing are having trouble, it's not hard to imagine that a new car company that just recently crossed profitability is going to have solvency issues by staying closed.

Is it actually the law? Is there actually a virus that is so bad that factories have to be closed, but so harmless that grocery stores are open? And if not, can it be legal to close businesses?

You don't really have much of a choice about keeping food services open in some fashion. No virus is as lethal as starvation.

Car factories are much less immediately essential. I can't see how you'd begin to argue otherwise.

He stated, that employes can stay home as paid vacation. So no one is forced to break the law or put him or herself at health risk.

But it will surely gets noticed, who did show up and who did not and so anyone wanting a career at Tesla better shows up.

> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.

> Prohibition is obviously a prime example of this, but if you consider various laws that once existed or are currently on the books but no longer enforced (think laws pertaining to racial segregation, sexuality, drug use, and such) you realize that...

The thing is: public safety laws aren't like racial segregation at all. If they are, I look forward to stuff like "civil disobedience" against child labor laws, etc.

> ...being a law abiding citizen does not mean you are no longer allowed to think for yourself.

That's true, but it also means being accountable and not acting without regards to others. Musk is acting like a petulant brat here, and I hope the Alameda County sheriff talks some sense into him.

Between the twitter rants, the poverty vow, the new child, the name of the new child, and now this, well.. All in the last 10 days or so too. The last few years have not been all that kind either.

I mean, new fathers, even after the other six babies, still do pretty goofy things. However, it's more putting the milk in the pantry type stuff, or mixing up coffee grounds and water.

Not daring public officials to arrest you during a pandemic and all but demanding employees to work during said pandemic.

I feel for the guy, things are tough now. I hope he finds the peace that he seems to need.

Trying to pass off CPAP machines as ventilators, promising that there will be no cases in middle April, and promoting conspiracy theories that the number of deaths have been inflated, when they are almost certainly understated. Yeah, Musk is definitely the guy I wanna be taking advice from in this crisis.

And that’s before we even get to promising to send a submarine to save some trapped kids, and when the person who actually helped save them instead of the mythical submarine says it wouldn’t work calling him a paedophile.

It turned out that ventilators kill coronavirus patients at a much higher rate than CPAP machines.

Cpaps are way more useful as ventilators. If yo are on the vent with covid19 you are as good as done. The problem is one of supply chains.. They are withering and dieing atm. If you don't keep them alive at all cost, the ecosystem around your company is gone once you reopen.

Its even worser In Europe due to car complexity..

Most of that is misleading.

I reccommend people google these events rather than take thawaway1837's post at face value.

I thought all of that is pretty accurate summary without much bias. Which statement is misleading?

More or less all of it.

For example, Elon asked hospitals what they needed and plenty did want CPAP machines (which are a type of ventilator). A much smaller number of invasive ventilators were provisioned (more expensive and probably harder to acquire) as well.

That there are data collection issues that mean COVID19 deaths are inflated (or undercounted! There are factors pushing it both ways) is not a conspiracy theory, it is frequently discussed in mainstream media like the BBC.

For the cave thing, Musk did in fact send people and had them make some prototype mini submarines to help rescue the kids. It wasn't a bad idea (or so the diver who actually found the kids claimed), just not the one they actually went with in the end. The guy he got into a spat with was a British diver living in Thailand who helped recruiting the British divers who actually did the work. Musk won the resulting defamation lawsuit.

Basically all of the statements in the grandparent post omit any facts that get in the way of Musk looking bad.

For the ventilator thing, I agree it was blown out of proportion. I think Elon using the term "ventilator" may have been misleading, but it's also not necessarily wrong, and he did actually deliver the machines to the hospitals.

> That there are data collection issues that mean COVID19 deaths are inflated (or undercounted! There are factors pushing it both ways) is not a conspiracy theory, it is frequently discussed in mainstream media like the BBC.

I have not seen anything remotely suggesting we're over-counting, and honestly the idea is silly. You can't just explain away the number of excess deaths we had in April.

> For the cave thing, Musk did in fact send people and had them make some prototype mini submarines to help rescue the kids. It wasn't a bad idea (or so the diver who actually found the kids claimed), just not the one they actually went with in the end. The guy he got into a spat with was a British diver living in Thailand who helped recruiting the British divers who actually did the work. Musk won the resulting defamation lawsuit.

Yeah but... He still called him a pedophile did he not? Just because he didn't win a defamation suit for a variety of reasons doesn't suddenly make it ok.

My point was about the poster I replied to omitted any facts that got in the way of Musk looking bad. I'm not going to say Musk calling a non-pedophile a pedophile was good (though it was sorta a tit for tat situation, with the guy saying Musk was only trying to rescue the boys for PR so Musk says the retired diver was only trying to rescue the boys to diddle them).

Regarding COVID 19, the BBC has been repeatedly telling me that most countries are counting deaths with COVID19 as COVID 19 deaths (resulting in an overcount) and has been telling me that the response to the virus itself is likely causing many deaths due to things like people being more reluctant to go to hospital, higher depression due to isolation/general climate of fear, no in person access to GPs and similar issues.

> I feel for the guy, things are tough now. I hope he finds the peace that he seems to need.

On a Human level, I would agree.

Selfishly and pragmatically, I hope he never does; who else has done so much to enable the progress that is needed in the World right now? People like him are a once in a generation, not because he's a Genius (which I think he is) but because of the amount of risk he is willing to absorb and keeping going at all costs and motivating more and more to the cause in the process.

I think Dr. Zubrin said it best: he's not motivated by Money, he's after Legacy and that draws the best efforts of Humanity forward in order to be a part of it. He is an archetype character out several Sci-fi books.

6 Kids is a good shot at Legacy on it's own, but perhaps setting the bar this high for them in his Lifetime and the opportunity to out-do each other after setting the bar so high was the goal.

Motivated by legacy is also the archetype of several villains. It's not a good or bad quality per se but the actions taken on the pursuit of it make it good or bad.

And Howard Hughes was also motivated by legacy and unquestionably brilliant. Intellectual brilliance and drive can coexist with psychological vulnerabilities and erratic decision making.

> And Howard Hughes was also motivated by legacy and unquestionably brilliant. Intellectual brilliance and drive can coexist with psychological vulnerabilities and erratic decision making.

Id include Nikola Tesla in there as well, just because something doesn't end in a happy contrite Disney-like ending doesn't mean that it wasn't a positive, or a Life well lived that would carry on and inspire so many more to contribute to that end long after either have died.

I personally moved to CO in large part because of Nikola Tesla, and was resolved to do so before Amendment 64 was even a real possibility.

> However, it's more putting the milk in the pantry type stuff

That's an Americanism, right? Your milk isn't shelf-stable?

Most US milk isn’t ultra-pastuerized. The taste is very different, especially if you go for the really fresh, non-homogenized stuff.

It's the same in Europe too (or at least the parts of Europe that I'm familiar with); you can buy shelf-stable milk, but I don't know anyone that does.

It's the reverse in my part of Europe (Poland) - you can buy non-UHT milk, but I don't know anyone that does.

Same in Italy, but it is the reverse in the UK.

It’s literally the only thing available in a lot of Europe - and it’s handy. Means I can buy a dozen litres at once, stick them in the pantry, and only keep one bottle in the fridge.

Some of them literally taste like arse (think they’re packaged with some funky protective atmosphere), others taste like fresh milk.

In California, even shelves aren't shelf-stable. (Earthquake country)

> That's an Americanism, right? Your milk isn't shelf-stable?

No milk, I'm fairly certain, is shelf-stable once opened; shelf-stable (until opened) milk is widely available but not as popular as milk that isn't in the US, and the “milk in the pantry” reference is implicitly in the context of having just poured from it, so it has been opened. So, while it probably doesn't reference shelf-stable milk, it wouldn't be any different if it did.

I didn't know that the reference implies opened milk; I just imagined a dad like myself sorting groceries after the weekly shopping run, and deciding which go to the fridge, and which to the pantry.

It's not an Americanism to keep your milk in the fridge after you open it. Which country are you from where you'd keep opened milk in the room temp pantry (which is what is being discussed here)?

These attempts at "Americans do the darnedest things XD" comments always seem so forced to me.

Really - do we have to immediately "think of the children!" ?

How about "we need to monitor all your communications, for public safety reasons. And also in order to prevent children pornography, I guess". Would this also be a public safety law, and would any form of civil disobedience be unwarranted?

What makes Musk's gesture a form of "civil disobedience" rather than dumb disrespect of law is that he actually has reasonable arguments why it'd be safe in his case. It's not "I don't believe COVID-19 exists and I've screened the factory against 5G anyway". It may be more beneficial to start defining reasonable standards for reopening. rather than semi-arbitrarily declaring X or Y "essential" with no safety standards in place.

Is Elon Musk gonna be working in the factory and traveling to and from it possibly using public transport, or even just a regular car, but having to pick up coffee from the drive thru on the way?

It’s not civil disobedience if you’re getting a bunch of other people to do it on your behalf.

Elon Musk is no Rosa Parks.

According to Elon, he will be yes.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891

Civil and social disobedience is done by activists, not by companies.

This is just greed and putting profits before people.

Less than one week ago we were all cheering for an high level engineer leaving Amazon against working condition in their center. And now we try to justify Tesla reopening a factory?

Hacker News is not one monolithic block of opinions, plenty of people here supported amazon heavily.

And plenty of people disagree with Elon Musk on this.

That said, I see a lot more reports about poor working conditions at Amazon than Tesla, so it's entirely possible to criticise Amazon but agree with Tesla.

Salient point but Mandela,Ghandi,Martin Luther King and their followers were not potential deadly virus carriers.

Elon is just being a grandstanding idiot.

Civil disobedience is about people, not corporations. More specifically, it's generally about people fighting for justice and against bad laws. It's not something that should be used for corporations ignoring safety regulation.

> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply

There's also the opposite example, of people showing more tolerance for arbitrary and authoritarian political decisions out of fear. It's very visible here in Europe right now and for the first time it seems like people didn't wise up since the 1930s at all, the mechanisms that convincingly explained how Nazi Germany and Austria could happen, still work.

Give me irrational civil disobedience over this any time.

I appreciate where you are coming from. (1/2)mv^2 very rapidly becomes unforgiving to the frail human frame due to that annoying square!

Many people might look at 60 -> 70 mph and conclude something like a 16% increase in "danger". However, if we set m = 1 then 60 mph gives 1800 thingies and 70 mph gives us 2450 thingies or 36% "extra danger". I live in metric (with a sprinkle of extra units to taste land) hence: "thingies". I set m = 1 which should avoid problems.

Something as simple as speed is not as intuitive as someone might think. We look at the variable (speed) and it is obviously linear and so we think the implications of increasing it must similarly be linear. But it isn't. The energy in a speeding car is proportional to the square of the velocity of the car. This is a horribly simplistic model but the fundamentals are there.

Now virus propagation ... R is the rate of infection. If R < 1 then infections drop over time. If R > 1 then infections rise exponentially. I gather that R = 3 is the norm for SARS-COV-2 without controls. You can play with a spreadsheet for a simple model to scare yourself.

When the term exponential heaves into view then we should quite rightly shit ourselves and do as we are told. We are far away from worrying about 16:36 which is the result of a one off event but an exponential "thing" over time grows rather fast.

> When the term exponential heaves into view then we should quite rightly shit ourselves and do as we are told.

And yet we didn't collectively shit ourselves to nearly the same extent for any of the other novel viruses that have popped up in the last couple decades and spread exponentially.

Exponential spread is the default state of things. It's only when a virus becomes widespread in a population that the exponential spread ceases, as you indicated in your reference to R.

To use a contrived example: Imagine a new virus SARS-CoV-1337 with an R of 250 and an infection fatality rate of .00000001%. Would it warrant the response we've made to SARS-CoV-2? Clearly not.

Therefore we need to look at the actual outcomes associated with the virus, and then counterbalance those against the externalities introduced by suppressing spread. Implicitly everyone in favor of lockdown is assuming that the mortality avoided by hunkering down until a theoretical game-changer (vaccine, highly effective antiviral, monoclonal antibodies etc) is available at scale, is a bigger benefit than the negatives incurred by trying to prevent spread (lockdown/containment).

My personal opinion is that the externalities of our current approach (I'm speaking from a US-based perspective) far exceed the cost of COVID-19 itself.

> My personal opinion is that the externalities of our current approach (I'm speaking from a US-based perspective) far exceed the cost of COVID-19 itself.

How many lives would need to be saved to encourage the current lockdown, in your opinion?

Let's back up a bit to talk about the two strategies.

(1) Containment lets you indefinitely avoid COVID-19-induced mortality in the short-medium term, at the expense of ongoing, mounting costs to wellbeing and the economy. These costs are certainly non-linear, for example businesses can generally only survive a given number of days/weeks based off their capital expenditure and thus it's not quite as simple as a linear relation. But for our purposes, it's easiest to think of the wellbeing and economic cost as being in direct proportion to how long we spend in containment.

The postponement of mortality only becomes the true avoidance of mortality when we get a "game-changer": a vaccine or a highly effective treatment that seriously improves outcomes.

Given that we must practice indefinite containment until we develop the "game-changer", we are executing a strategy which is based off a temporally unbounded future event. Therefore the potential drawbacks are unbounded given that the strategy involves waiting for a miraculous leap forward in COVID-19 vaccination or treatment.

(2) My proposal is an approach where we try to direct testing resources and governmental assistance to protecting the most at-risk members of society. These groups are encouraged to shelter at home and are supported in doing so.

Bans on freedom of movement, transaction, etc are lifted. Non-at-risk individuals are encouraged to return to work. Given that we inflicted psychological harm on millions of individuals, we also would probably want a policy where someone is allowed to not work, but they must formally quit their job in order to be allowed to collect unemployment for up to a year (we likely also need to adjust unemployment because it's just way too high relative to wage earners right now). What we need to avoid is a case where someone "chooses" (in scare quotes because we have done true psychological damage to people) not to work for a year but their company can't let them go, since otherwise the company cannot replace them with a working employee.

So in short, we let people do what they want, we strongly encourage the at-risk to shelter at home and put out appropriate public health messaging in proportion to the real risk (which means overall WAY less fearmongering since we're so out of whack currently).

The uncertainty benefit is something we should implicitly factor in as well. The ultimate end state of my proposal is much more "known" than with containment (because we have no bound on containment worst-case scenario but we can use Ferguson to get a decent bound for mitigation). We're not sure how much mortality we will see, but with a 0.9% IFR and 82% of the population being infected we get about 2.2 million deaths per Ferguson (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...). I think that's a great upper bound to use.

BTW I think once accounting for vector exhaustion (not everyone has the same risk of infection) and what I feel is a more realistic IFR, we'd be closer to 600,000 deaths in the "realistic" scenario IMO.

---

The last thing I want to say is that I actually think in terms of wellbeing-years or quality-adjusted-life-years, and not just "lives". My belief is that the life of a healthy 12 year old is several times more valuable than the life of an 80 year old with heart disease, to use an example.

So, while it's hard for me to give you a "real" number, I'd say if we could save 20 million wellbeing-years, then lockdown was probably worth it. But keep in mind that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.

> So, while it's hard for me to give you a "real" number, I'd say if we could save 20 million wellbeing-years, then lockdown was probably worth it. But keep in mind that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.

This seems like a very strange take. This is a utilitarian perspective, but with a floor of 20 million years of utility before we take any action. Why shouldn't we take action if the mortality reduction years > lockdown externalities? You're essentially saying "we should take no action to prevent a disease from costing us 20 million wellbeing-years", which seems odd.

> BTW I think once accounting for vector exhaustion (not everyone has the same risk of infection) and what I feel is a more realistic IFR, we'd be closer to 600,000 deaths in the "realistic" scenario IMO.

Are you accounting for the other side effects of Covid? Life long lung capacity loss due to pneumonia side effects, weird not well understood side effects like strokes in young people etc? Most of the people I see minimizing the risk and saying we should reopen seem to entirely ignore those dangers.

> Given that we must practice indefinite containment until we develop the "game-changer", we are executing a strategy which is based off a temporally unbounded future event. Therefore the potential drawbacks are unbounded given that the strategy involves waiting for a miraculous leap forward in COVID-19 vaccination or treatment.

This isn't at all true. Look at China, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have all begun reopening, but with infrastructure in place to track and keep outbreaks contained even as they reopen. Some parts of the US are on track to do the same relatively soon (weeks, not months or years).

> My proposal is an approach where we try to direct testing resources and governmental assistance to protecting the most at-risk members of society.

You realize that this is what's being done now, essentially, its just that tests are so severely limited that that isn't useful. We can't, for example, consistently test employees at nursing homes to make sure that they aren't infectious. Until we can do that, returning to normal is asking nursing home employees to shelter even more tightly than individuals are now, or it's sacrificing lives.

It feels like you haven't looked deeply into the criteria that many metro areas (NYC, WA, and the Bay to name a few) have to reopen. They're specific and clear, and backed by reasonable thought.

> This seems like a very strange take. This is a utilitarian perspective, but with a floor of 20 million years of utility before we take any action. Why shouldn't we take action if the mortality reduction years > lockdown externalities? You're essentially saying "we should take no action to prevent a disease from costing us 20 million wellbeing-years", which seems odd.

You're right, that was my mistake. I got a rough 20 million life-years by taking Ferguson's worst-case scenario and then applying the "COVID-19 takes average 10 years of lives" claim (which is a false claim). Thus arriving at the implied scenario that lockdown proponents say could happen but that I think is an impossible to reach number.

(For context I use Ferguson's 2.2 million as an upper bound, but that 2.2 million scenario involves an overwhelming portion of the deaths being people who were already at death's door. Thus I think 2.2 million is possible but highly unlikely due to the other factors I mentioned, whereas the 20 million life-years figure I view as basically impossible to hit because it implies that same worst-case scenario but with the wrong distribution of age)

At that point I thought to myself "wait, I forgot to account for the negative externalities". But as you indicated, that logic was wrong.

So, allow me to retroactively change my answer to just 20 million life-years period.

Thanks for pointing that out.

> It feels like you haven't looked deeply into the criteria that many metro areas (NYC, WA, and the Bay to name a few) have to reopen. They're specific and clear, and backed by reasonable thought.

No, I understand their criteria but fundamentally disagree with the entire approach of containment, as I explained in the GP comment you replied to.

> This isn't at all true. Look at China, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have all begun reopening, but with infrastructure in place to track and keep outbreaks contained even as they reopen. Some parts of the US are on track to do the same relatively soon (weeks, not months or years).

I don't believe that the US can use the same strategy that China, South Korea, or Taiwan has been using. They have much better control of their borders and are a much more homogenous and compliant population.

> The postponement of mortality only becomes the true avoidance of mortality when we get a "game-changer": a vaccine or a highly effective treatment that seriously improves outcomes.

I don't think this is correct. Every day that passes by, we learn a little bit more about this virus and get a little better at treating it. For example, in the past few weeks doctors have discovered better ventilator protocols [1] and potential benefits of anticoagulants [2] in treating Covid-19 patients.

None of these are "game-changers" but they incrementally improve patient outcomes and that's a good thing. The more time we buy to make discoveries like these, the better off we will be.

Put another way: would you rather have been of the first few patients in Wuhan when doctors had no idea what this virus was or how to treat it, or would you rather have it now? What about a few months from now?

[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928236

[2] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/930165

So I totally agree that we over time will get slightly better treatment outcomes. But I think the negative effects of containment far exceed those marginally improved outcomes, therefore we still need the "game-changer" that I've been referencing in order for containment to have been worth it.

>that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.

Absolutely wrong. And you are missing:

- lockdown reduction in suffering, due both to the acute phase of the disease and after effects

- No-lockdown-externalities, including damage to the economy if the disease is allowed to spread through the entire population

And perhaps most importantly:

- the risk that a huge reservoir of infected people will lead to repeat waves caused by mutations, and even worse that cross-species infection occurs (we already know cats and dogs can be infected - pigs and poultry could be next); then we risk flu-like antigenic shifts.

Put all this into the equation and I think the only thing we should be contemplating is how to eradicate the virus as soon as possible.

> the only thing we should be contemplating is how to eradicate the virus as soon as possible.

Do you think that eradication is actually a possibility? Or are you using it as a metaphor for "contain it super well"?

There are a number of reasons why eradication is completely infeasible. In short, COVID-19 is a highly infectious respiratory disease and it came from a zoonotic origin. We know there are animal reservoirs at this moment.

Therefore eradication is impossible. We've only ever eradicated two diseases in all of human history.

No we didn't (collectively shit ourselves) and we did not really heed the lesson that SARS-COV-1 gave us. I really hope we don't see a leet SARS. It will probably have a really cool Tik Tok page though.

I take it that your term "externalities" (I haven't heard it before) is referring to the side effects eg economic of our attempts to deal with it.

The cost of COVID-19 to an individual seems to range from "meh" to death by lung destruction. There are some identified risk factors - being male, smokers (some "initial immunity" but worse outcomes), skin colour (this looks like correlation rather than causality but needs working through), being old (70+ is the current threshold), diabetes.

Until you know (test, test, test again) that you have actually had the disease then I suspect you will be always looking over your shoulder. Once you know you've had it and hopefully survived then you can plan forwards. There are many reports of additional snags post infection eg renal problems and lung damage, not to mention the mental trauma.

I'm speaking as a UK bod with a small company to worry about that still has a few months left in the bank. I'm alright Jack but I worry about my fellow people.

> No we didn't (collectively shit ourselves)

Agree to disagree on that one :)

> and we did not really heed the lesson that SARS-CoV-1 gave us

Agreed.

> I take it that your term "externalities" (I haven't heard it before) is referring to the side effects eg economic of our attempts to deal with it.

Exactly, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative. Just keep in mind that the economy is not some abstract notion, but rather is you and me and everyone else. In other words, economic damage isn't something that just hurts rich shareholders, it hurts everyone because there's less wealth.

Suspension of elective surgeries, which happened all over the country here in the US, is one of the best examples of such externalities that were caused by panic and bad policy rather than reality. For example, here in California we suspended all elective surgeries for a month. But we never were close to being overrun, and given that the vast majority of these surgeries are out-patient, there was never a need to pre-emptively cancel them. Lastly remember "elective surgery" sounds a lot like "non-essential work" but basically any pre-scheduled surgery is elective: organ transplants, hip replacements, arthroscopic labral repair (I'm waiting on that one currently), etc.

> Until you know (test, test, test again) that you have actually had the disease then I suspect you will be always looking over your shoulder.

That's why the strategy I advocate for does not rely on the availability of testing capacity, because the goal is not to practice indefinite containment.

If you've decided that you want 80% of society to behave as normal and gradually become infected and recover, then PCR testing loses a lot of its utility. It's mostly useful for clinical diagnostic reasons, to get a loose handle on spread, and finally to use as validation for other tests like serological tests.

> There are many reports of additional snags post infection eg renal problems and lung damage, not to mention the mental trauma.

These post-infection snags are quite rare, based off the evidence I've reviewed. Personally I have observed that so many advocating for lockdown make references to the supposed widespread organ failure, strokes in young people, etc, and the evidence just does not support those claims. These outcomes do happen but they are incredibly rare and given that they are logical results of inflammatory cascades (cytokine storm for example), we see the same outcomes in disease like Influenza that we are not losing our collective shit about.

> not to mention the mental trauma.

I believe the mental trauma caused by the wide-spread panic and fear-mongering is vastly worse than the mental trauma of recovering from COVID-19.

25-50% of people that get COVID-19 are entirely asymptomatic or are paucisymptomatic.

For many, it's like getting the flu.

And for some - significant numbers, but not as many as we're led to believe - it is a horrendous disease that results in invasive ventilation followed by likely death.

---

Not quite mental trauma, but fear of going to the hospital has led to people who actually have COVID-19 to avoid getting treatment because they don't realize they have COVID-19 (yet are experiencing serious adverse conditions):

From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=rec...:

"Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic."

---

Now onto real mental trauma:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

* "Third, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a parallel epidemic of fear, anxiety, and depression. People with mental health conditions could be more substantially influenced by the emotional responses brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in relapses or worsening of an already existing mental health condition because of high susceptibility to stress compared with the general population."

* "Finally, many people with mental health disorders attend regular outpatient visits for evaluations and prescriptions. However, nationwide regulations on travel and quarantine have resulted in these regular visits becoming more difficult and impractical to attend.

And my favorite, a case study of COVID-19 related paranoid delusions in a schizophrenic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7162758/

---

Sorry for the massive wall of text.

> For example, here in California we suspended all elective surgeries for a month. But we never were close to being overrun

..because CA locked down in a timely way. How do you know hospitals wouldn't have been overrun otherwise? They were in some places (Italy). This is playing out in real time after all, and nobody has a crystal ball, especially not Elon Musk.

Now, there are early indications that reopening is resulting in new outbreaks, like at the night clubs in South Korea.

> ..because CA locked down in a timely way. How do you know hospitals wouldn't have been overrun otherwise? They were in some places (Italy). This is playing out in real time after all, and nobody has a crystal ball, especially not Elon Musk.

Well, New York is a great comparison, but let's pretend that the lockdown did avoid an overrun in California and that otherwise it would have happened.

As I indicated, given that the vast majority of these (highly important) elective surgeries are out-patient, there is not a huge need to plan ahead when it comes to suspending surgeries. On the contrary, when we do realize that we are at capacity we can suspend elective surgeries at that moment and no sooner.

BTW, the utility of elective surgeries should always be counterbalanced against the utility of extra beds for COVID-19 patients. Many of these elective surgeries are still more important than COVID-19 treatment even when we hit an overrun scenario. So it very much depends on the surgery in question, and such blanket suspensions are a very bad idea.

> Now, there are early indications that reopening is resulting in new outbreaks, like at the night clubs in South Korea.

Right, which is precisely why the practice of indefinite containment is so flawed. Once you start doing it you can basically never stop (until you've teched up to a vaccine / game changer treatment)

This isn't a contrived example though. Thousands of people are dying every day. That's why we care about this one and not your contrived example. When yours is killing a 9/11 every day then we care about it.

Yes, but my position is that the following externalities are equally or indeed more important to be mindful of:

- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to social isolation

- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to fear of going to a hospital (this is a real effect)

- worsened all-cause mortality due to social isolation and a culture of widespread fear

- worsened mortality attributable to mass unemployment (note that some small portion of unemployment would have happened without lockdown but the vast majority of damage is self-inflicted and thus directly attributable to lockdown)

- worsened quality of life (the missing link that lockdown proponents tend not to address) amidst the entire population

- externalities that occur when suspending in-person education, such as the widening inequality gap between students whose parents can afford to buy them personal computers/laptops/tablets and those whose parents cannot.

- shifting to a global perspective, the impending global food shortage is predicted to make COVID-19's mortality look like a drop in the bucket

Finally, I'd like to point out that COVID-19 deaths here in the US are dominated by the extremely elderly which implies (but does not prove, of course) that our lockdown policies were ineffective at protecting the at-risk groups that we should have been focusing on the whole time

And those are the factors that the epidemiologists and policymakers need to balance when setting the policies. But that's a decision that they should be making, with access to all of the available data. It's not a decision for one hot headed billionaire with a large financial incentive to reopen.

The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.

Now the job of the modellers is to predict COVID-19 mortality under various scenarios, and it's the job of policymakers to counterbalance those predictions against the economic realities, etc. So, it's not necessarily a problem that epidemiologists would focus on predicting just along the dimension of COVID-19 mortality.

But unfortunately our policymakers have completely disregarded that need to weigh both the positives and negatives and instead have talked about "following the science" and basically myopically parroted whatever these highly opinionated epidemiologists (Ferguson, everyone at the IMHE, etc) were saying, without mentioning the negative externalities associated with lockdown, except in passing in a way that implies that economic damage will be constrained to shareholder returns (which is completely false).

>The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.

Do you have a source for this?

Two of the most influential models in shifting public policy have been Ferguson and the IMHE's model.

Here's Ferguson:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

> We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in Chinaand South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term. Mitigation will never be able to completely protect those at risk from severe disease or death and the resulting mortality may therefore still be high. Instead we focus on feasibility, with a specific focus on what the likely healthcare system impact of the two approaches would be.

(From Page 4)

Now let's shift to the IHME model. They do make passing reference to the econonic impact, same as Ferguson, but don't go any further:

http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...

> The overall financial cost over a short period of time is likely to be enormous, particularly when juxtaposed against the substantial reductions in revenue for many hospitals due to the cancellation of elective procedures and the broader economic consequences of social distancing mandates.

---

Now as I said, it's not necessarily their job to forecast the economic harm. But unfortunately we have created this notion that being pro-lockdown means "believing science" and therefore thinking that the lockdown is a bad idea is being "against science". Our politicians use these exact words, and as I said their actions show that they are not holistically evaluating the downside risk. On the contrary it appears to be a very simple game-theory type calculation where their incentive structures are leading them to make irrational decisions. COVID-19 mortality is much more "visible" than the fuzzier and longer-term mortality caused by our (IMO misguided) response to COVID-19.

It is hilarious and sad at the same time that a country which is perhaps uniquely suited to embark on a moon-shot Apollo style program of testing regiment for EVERYONE instead chooses to self inflict all sorts of wounds.

It was in the cards, which makes it even more painful to see.

Testing EVERYBODY would be cheaper than what is happening now and an inspiration to the whole world, inspiring awe and respect.

I think that people are greatly overdoing social isolation point, especially whose who works from home. Seriously, when I was stay at home mom, I was way more isolated for way longer then this. And I am salty about this, because people act after two weeks as if they were on lonely island for ten years. When I had issue with isolation, people (both online and occasionally irl) acted as if I said something offensive for even mentioning it or being affected by that.

This is literally situation in which everyone is in the same situation as you, you can call to people who are in the same situation all the time. If you work from home, then communication from work is almost the same as before. I can see this from someone who is old and can not use tech, but really, this is not what isolation is.

I hope you don't mind if I copy-paste a section from a piece I've already written that goes into this a bit. The TL;DR is that social isolation leads to worse outcomes, regardless of emotional loneliness. Also on the contrary, I think you are "underdoing" the social isolation point and are underestimating the extent to which this has affected everyday citizens. Keep in mind that there are some people here in the US that have literally not left their houses for the last two months except for maybe a weekly grocery store trip.

Finally, we need to examine the effects of social isolation itself. Beyond the fact that social isolation prevents the natural exchange of microbes that occur between humans engaging in social contact, it should be noted that social isolation is directly thought to lead to increased all-cause mortality due to worsened health outcomes across pretty much every dimension that we can examine. One review (https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf) of the impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults concludes that “mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model”.

It’s now popular to refer to what was previously called “social distancing” as “physical distancing” to note the fact physical distancing does not necessarily lead to loneliness; this is because loneliness can (perhaps) be mitigated to a limited extent by usage of social media and videoconferencing. Troublingly, we can see that it is the social isolation itself, and not the emotional feeling of loneliness, that is associated with death, and thus we can surmise, at least in older adults (but almost certainly in the broader population as well), that the widespread recommendations of social isolation (“stay at home”, “social distancing”, etc) will lead to increased all-cause mortality.

Finally, we wish to highlight that a small increase in all-cause mortality amidst the general population due to social isolation could very easily dwarf COVID-19-associated mortality, which as we have discussed is primarily constrained to a very limited subset of the population.

It seems like the parent is supporting the ability for the Tesla Alameda factory to operate, and is not questioning the ability of the government to shut it down.

> But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.

To claim that the environment is unsafe (or safe for that matter) one must _test_ their beliefs against empirical evidence, not just _illustrate_ such theory with selected facts. Has the government done that in this case?

Ladies and gentlemen, can we agree on 1 thing though? This is not even comparable to speed limits. The law is enacted by legislative action, not by Alameda's county board, nor the administrator nor its health official.

Show us please what law Elon Musk is going to break. Can a lawyer chime in please?

> "Support" is a bit of an overloaded word. I do agree with you that I do not support a government policy that isn't evidence-driven. But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.

On the flip side I support the elected legislature's ability to do this, but if you read the legal arguments being made it's pretty unclear that the legislature has in fact passed any law doing so. Read paragraph 32 of the complaint for what I find to be the most convincing argument for this: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.359281...

Thanks for the link! I'm surprised to find that California's legislature did not pass statutes making refusal to obey lockdown rules crimes.

In many places it's all governors' EOs and mayors' orders. Here in Texas, for example, no statutes have been passed enabling localities to dictate and enforce stay-at-home orders or wearing of masks, and the cities and counties thus lack the authority to do much of what they nonetheless have gone on to do in terms of ordinances and executive orders.

We're a nation of laws, and we have generally been very particular about process. Due Process, yes, but also all manner of procedure, from electoral, to parliamentary, and others. Besides that, the Constitution still applies -- no part of it has been suspended -- and much of it has been incorporated against the States (term of art for: "it wasn't clear before, but now is under Supreme Court precedents, that these various parts of the Constitution that talk of what Congress can't do apply to State legislatures too").

So around here, many people are wearing masks, but they don't have to, not legally, and those signs that say "customers must wear masks by order of the city and county" are correct but legally toothless. In fact, around here I see enough people not wearing masks at notable stores, like Central Market, and all the big box stores that are open, that I can only conclude there is no attempt even to enforce those unenforceable edits. If the county executive wants to require the wearing masks, they'll have to lobby the legislature for new statutes.

People will much more likely support their governors and mayors when the legislatures are also standing with them, and less so when they are not.

Maybe that's not the best analogy, since evidence exists that setting speed limits that are too low actually costs lives.

The speed limit analogy doesn't really reflect the magnitude of the conflict we're seeing here. Should the government be allowed to pick and choose businesses that are allowed to open as if they were eggs in a basket? The speed limit example applies to everyone equally, and a difference of 10mph in the speed limit isn't going to potentially bankrupt successful businesses.

Given the speed limit analogy, the corresponding action here would be to allow all businesses to operate in distanced-mode (6ft, thermo guns, etc.) equally. Any business that cannot function in this mode would be at a disadvantage, but it wouldn't be because someone on a small government panel disliked their eggs.

My 2 cents -- I agree with OP, California apparently tends to exercise their power a bit too often at the expense of their constituents. I can't imagine how a black-and-white veto on businesses could be considered as sensible policy... The government should be more incremental in their decisions, i.e. with slow business-agnostic openings.

i guess your ignoring the fact that if your county didnt have the authority to impose a speed limit but did so anyway than its not illegal to ignore it.

Then you challenge the speed limit in court. You dont order your 10,000 employees to disobey it.

Get your facts straight it's only 1/3 of ten thousand and they will be separated into 3 shifts . Also they claim to have safe hygiene standards . I don't have any reason to doubt their clAIm . What do you get from going to court . You can't get the billions wasted in time cost And penalty of having artificial limits on you while your competition is allowed to operate and you lose market share.

Your logic is sound, but the calculus changes when dealing with matters that touch on rights and freedoms.

In all likelihood, these closures are a direct violation of the First Amendment. I think people are tolerant of these restrictions for limited periods of time, but when the emergency drags on forever and becomes increasingly arbitrary, it starts to lose credibility.

Politicians have limited power, even during an emergency. And especially when the emergency looks like it's going to be in effect to some degree for maybe a year.

Remember also that the people who go out are doing so by choice. And most people mostly choose to stay home. It's not clear that we need a big enforcement hammer here.

This isn't any more a violation of the First Amendment than making it illegal to sow panic by shouting "Fire!".

Being pretty sure it's not going to end too badly isn't sufficient reason to ignore either restrictions.

Even if it's not a violation of the First Amendment, it's close enough that it flips the responsibility. Now the government needs to continually convince people that it's not a violation.

America is about freedom and limited government. That means some policy options are off the table or treated with extreme skepticism.

It's a violation of basic freedoms, that's true, but it's not one without reason (hence my example). I do agree with you that measures like this require constant justification, as would be the case in any democracy. I do not think that flouting these measures arbitrarily is the best way to achieve this.

I don’t know if it works that way in California but in many places if the government tries to restrict basic rights like the right to go where you want to and the right to earn a living, they better be prepared to explain it to a judge. It’s just basic accountability.

I think a government should be able to provide strict guidelines on how a business can comply and get approved for staying open. Some States have that in place for companies that are on the list of exempt businesses, and those lists can be ridiculously long, with plenty of not-essential-at-all businesses.

The current problem is a lack of clear guidelines. To me it seems that the plan is to not have one.

Now, I do condone Musk's. I think his 9yo tantrum throwing behavior is on par with the child king staying at the WH.

speed limit is a great choice for an example here, since damage via motor vehicle collision is exponentially related to speed. ie the difference between potential for injury/death is considerable higher between the 40-50 increase than the 50-60 increase.

When I drive my car, I'm not worried about my ability. I'm worried about other's ability. Are they texting? Are they drunk? etc.

If everyone is capped at 50mph, then the potential for damage is much lower than if everyone was capped at 60mph. It's not about personal safety or whether your vehicle can safely operate at higher speeds under ideal conditions. It's about the potential to injure others (or others to injure you) if those ideal conditions aren't met for some reason (user error or extraneous conditions) and our ability to account for when those ideal conditions aren't met.

People here are missing why, exactly, the government wants to lock down the admittedly low-risk Tesla factory. It's about political sustainability.

Right now, the government has a simple story: essential businesses stay open, and everything else stays closed. It's quick to express and easily understandable.

But as soon as the government starts picking and choosing "nonessential" businesses to allow to open, every single nonessential business will be clamoring for an allowance and emboldened to present themselves as heroic frontline workers. You'll see every nail salon in the state market themselves as paragons of safety and virtue, professionally run, basically cleaner than the best medical facilities in the world. And if the government allows Tesla and refuses nail salons/meat packing facilities/hookah bars, you'll have a large constituency who'll be pushing duplicitous but superficially plausible arguments like "Newsom loves his BigTech buddies like Elon Musk but hates everyday regular businesses like Tyson."

The quarantine only has power so long as the public understands it and supports it, and the government has made the plausible assumption that picking and choosing nonessentials would undermine public understanding and enforcement of the quarantine more than the value that would come in allowing certain safe nonessential businesses to return to work.

This is exactly right and it's pretty disgusting for Musk to put his self-interest ahead of the public good. It's also disgusting that people are cheering him on.

I don't think the US, as a nation, has the capacity for self-sacrifice that's required to contain a pandemic. At least not anymore. This is in strong contrast to previous global crises, like WWII.

It doesn't bode well for our response to global climate change, either.

yeah we really are doomed unless drastic change comes to how these kinds of decisions are made and how they are enforced. The American middle-class didn't even want to stay at home for a few weeks to prevent an epidemic that could directly kill them. I highly doubt they will give up their suburban houses with air conditioning and their two luxury cars to move into an apartment in a big city and take public transport for the sake of the climate.

Better to ask whether the US, as a nation, has the capacity to carefully consider the long-term ramifications of our various choices, and to choose the best option regardless of politics and mob sentiment.

The cries of "if even one person dies, it's too many" ring hollow. We know large numbers will die. The question is how to minimize that number. There is no safety.

Just my opinion, but the United States' aversion to any sort of collective nationhood or individual sacrifice is going to be its undoing. The problems we are facing are getting more complex and require greater co-operation, not less.

Agreed. Whats so hard to understand about laws applied uniformly? We can complain that there's no avenue for fast reopening of low risk non-essentials, but to complain that policy failure means the policy is "not evidence based" is myopic.

I kind of get it: you can imagine a world where the government offers a fine level of granularity specifying how and when different facilities in different industries can open, and that would be more "rational" than blanket prohibitions.

But that ignores the actual process of policymaking: imagine a program that consists of thousands of lines of nested if-else statements, that gets a hundred PRs per day from devs implementing requirements from a dozen different PMs who aren't even necessarily communicating with each other or that knowledgeable about the actual product requirements, who also might be getting bribes to put in buggy code that happen to favor certain actors.

Optimistically, even given all that you might be able to build a policy that generates more efficiencies than a whitelist of a couple sectors. Even if you can, though, you won't be able to effectively communicate the why of any particular decision to the public. So they get pissed off when you allow people to go to the beach on a sunny day to pop open a bottle of beer while you disallow in-person religious services.

This is basically my main complaint about the approach in the US. That ship has long sailed, but it should have been straight quarantine. We got soft 'shelter in place' that was basically disregarded based on what I saw ( in IL suburbs at least; can't speak for other places ) and not applied uniformly. And I don't even want to get started on our governor deciding that golfing is somehow essential to the quality of life here.

In short, I understand the anger. I even understand the guy, who did not want to wear a mask out of spite at my wife's place ( more specifically, he did not want to wear it, because eff IL state government; he put it on when he was told it was office policy.. ). But it is getting messy and we better figure it out quick, before that powder cake gets lit.

The opportunity to contain it has passed and now we really need to think hard what to do next, because options are not great.

The best solution would have been for the US to shut down from mid-February to the end of March to get time to put together a comprehensive testing and contact tracing program, but that was never in the cards: people wouldn't have accepted it coming so soon, and wouldn't have accepted sitting in quarantine for two months when weekly national deaths weren't even breaking double digits.

As for what now... unfortunately I don't think there's a good way out for the USA. Other highly developed countries have established a tenuous path toward controlling the virus (in different ways), but Americans seems intent on running headfirst into the abattoir.

I will admit that in January I was sure CNN was selling a pandemic scare ( and at the time I basically dismissed it as an exotic flu ). But in February the writing was on the wall, which is why we were slowly stocking up on essentials.

There are few times to accept government restrictions, but I would say pandemic qualifies. Hell, I was almost ready to accept Trump's flimsy characterization of the pandemic as war with invisible enemy since I was half hoping he would impose stringent restrictions. But he chickened out. And now we have this wishy washy, no mans land, not quite quarantine re-opening.

To say that it is a cluster fuck is an understatement.

In January I had the fortunate timing of moving to China a day before the Wuhan lockdown went into effect (talk about culture shock). Though my thinking on the pandemic has evolved since then, I came to three immediate conclusions:

1) COVID-19 is a BFD

2) The PRC, in culture and governance, is exceptionally well-equipped to handle disasters of this type

3) The USA, in culture and governance, is exceptionally badly-equipped to make this pandemic unfold as anything except a giant clusterfuck

Those seem to have held up pretty well.

> Whats so hard to understand about laws applied uniformly?

The law was applied arbitrarily from the beginning of the lockdown. There was never uniformity, and the decisions about which businesses are essential was arbitrary rather evidence-based. In what rational world is a marijuana dispensary considered more essential than a car factory?

Presumably, someone who's undergoing chemotherapy and needs something to help with the resulting nausea.

How will they get to the dispensary?

Many delivery services are operating, or they could have a caregiver pick it up for them.

What sort of vehicles will those deliverers and caregivers use?

> What sort of vehicles will those deliverers and caregivers use?

The one they already have. How were they buying groceries and making deliveries before the pandemic? I understand where you are going with this, but that's not a good faith argument for keeping car factories open.

I'm not sure how you can type this out with a straight face. A store that sells medicine is obviously significantly more essential than a factory for luxury cars - especially considering that most people who can afford them also most likely can just work from home.

This argument would make more sense if tesla wasn't defined as essential by most relevant legal definitions of essential [0] - or at least portions of their business (solar panels) are and those portions were also shut down by the county.

[0] Basically all of these include the federal governments list that can be found at the link below. This list explicitly includes the manufacture of solar panels amongst many other things.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Versio...

The only one relevant legal definition that doesn't, is Alameda county. But even they say "Businesses may also operate to manufacture distributed energy resource components, like solar panels."

https://covid-19.acgov.org/covid19-assets/docs/5-4-20%20Alam...

The factory in Fremont manufactures cars not solar panels or grid batteries.

Are you sure? I have the impression (not sure from where) that it was both cars and solar.

I'd also point out that the federal list includes the following, so most of my point stands either way

> Workers critical to the manufacturing, [...] of vehicles

The list you provide is 20 pages of bullet points listing jobs that are supposedly essential. I actually have a hard time figuring out a job that wouldn't qualify as essential.

Also, at the top of the document:

> This list is advisory in nature. It is not, nor should it be considered, a federal directive or standard. Additionally, this advisory list is not intended to be the exclusive list of critical infrastructure sectors, workers, and functions that should continue during the COVID-19 response across all jurisdictions. Individual jurisdictions should add or subtract essential workforce categories based on their own requirements and discretion.

Indeed it is, it turns out that there are lot of things that need to happen to keep the country semi-functional.

While the document says it is advisory, it was incorporated into the general California order as things that should stay open (and the orders in many other states).

It is advisory in nature because public health like this is a state matter not a federal matter.

>But as soon as the government starts picking and choosing "nonessential" businesses to allow to open, every single nonessential business will be clamoring for an allowance and emboldened to present themselves as heroic frontline workers

This is the list that the state and counties are using. They have been picking and choosing who gets to open on a case by case and largely arbitrary manner since the beginning.

Can you give some examples of being arbitrary? Seems to me like they have a well-documented and communicated list.

The list contains basically every business in existence. The application is what is arbitrary. Factories with PPE and distancing is a no go, but construction is OK. You can go to a liquor store but can not get heart surgery. Then, on a national level you get bizzare edge cases like attempts to shut down drive in church services

It seems pretty clear to me that elective heart surgery, you forgot that qualifier, would be restricted when it can only take place in a building that may be covered in virus. Liquor stores don’t contain intubated individuals suffering from COVID-19, so the risks are clearly different. Is that arbitrary?

In a country of 330 million you’re bound to get edge cases, that doesn’t prove anything.

Yes, I consider these examples to be arbitrary. The risks are different, but is not clear that one is safer than another. Interpretations are different county to county with no rhyme or reason, with safer locations implementing more restrictive measures.

Examples of bad edge cases prove that bad edge cases exist. These too are arbitrary, but by definition, less commonplace.

> You can go to a liquor store but can not get heart surgery.

You can still get your heart surgery if it cannot wait. I know this because my dad had to get a cardiac stent fairly recently. But if you're getting a pacemaker (or another elective surgery), that can wait, there's no reason to risk it.

And with regards to the liquor stores: there are a lot of alcoholics in the US, and I live in a state where the state sells everything strong. If they closed the ABC stores, you'd see the ERs fill up with alcoholics going through withdrawal.

Just to clarify something that seems to be a point of confusion in the current reporting environment, since you mentioned Tyson and meatpacking in there...:

Meat packing plants are essential businesses. They should be operating. State and local lockdown ordnances are not preventing them from doing so.

The issue about meat packing plants being closed is not that they are being forced to shut by overzealous Democratic governors. They are being shut by their owners, insurers, and occasionally government actors, when - while trying to operate as an essential business - an outbreak of Covid starts to affect their workforce and makes continuing to operate too much of a public health and private liability risk.

Everybody wants meatpacking plants to be open if it's possible to do so. The workers, the owners, the government, and people who like eating meat. But if it can't be done without exposing large numbers of meatpacking and meat supply chain workers to the risk of Sars-Cov-2 infection, then in spite of how essential they are particular plants are going to have to close.

Now it is possible that Tesla will be able to open up and operate and not become a Covid hotspot. But there's definitely a risk that they will, just like the meatpacking plants did. And is that risk worth taking for luxury cars, rather than food?

Not that this affects what you're saying and it doesn't necessarily make for a practical srgument, but it sprang to mind.

Do car parts in the supply chain go bad? What about livestock? Like can you literally just keep cattle and pigs and chicken alive longer if demand drops short term?

Given the number of farms getting ready to kill their unsold livestock, the answer is no, you can't just keep them around. It costs money to keep livestock fed and healthy, and if they can't be sold then farmers lose money every day. Eventually the farmers need to prevent further losses by killing the animals.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/25/us/chickens-depopulated-d...

It's not really doable from what I've been seeing. The animals grow to big and living conditions worsen

Everybody wants meatpacking plants to be open if it's possible to do so.

Some vegetarians would prefer they close.

And vegans! I hope some day we can end factory farming.

Hmm. But would your mechanism of choice for the shutting down of an entire industry be the forced closure of businesses due to widespread illness among their workforce?

Why ask such a leading and rhetorical question in this case? What is it supposed to foster in a discussion?

Nope. Why do you ask?

> Right now, the government has a simple story: essential businesses stay open, and everything else stays closed. It's quick to express and easily understandable.

That ship sailed a while ago.

Home Depot is open and packed to the gills (literally people lining up to get in the front door at my neighborhood Home Depot which is about 20 minutes from the Tesla factory). Most of the people shopping there aren't doing anything essential -- their home improvement projects and gardens can wait.

Similarly, marijuana dispensaries are still open in California. They aren't really essential: unlike in the case of alcohol, withdrawal from marijuana is not dangerous and smokers could go without it. Yet dispensaries are "essential".

On the other hand, car parades and just "going for a drive" are officially discouraged even though there is no chance of contact with strangers when you are inside your car.

At this point, to say that those businesses are essential, and yet a car factory is not, is plainly ridiculous.

What kind of rational decision-making process results in marijuana dispensaries being more essential than car factories?

The government can't get out of this by claiming it can't pick and choose, because it has already been picking and choosing for a while. It has given the green light to more questionable cases than the Tesla factory.

I think marijuana dispensaries are a weak example. There probably is a fair number of people who actually need their medical marijuana.

They are essential because people stay home and some up.

> Home Depot is open and packed to the gills (literally people lining up to get in the front door at my neighborhood Home Depot which is about 20 minutes from the Tesla factory). Most of the people shopping there aren't doing anything essential -- their home improvement projects and gardens can wait

Shops where I live mandate masks and either gloves or hand sanitizer. Also, people have to wait two meters from each other and only limited amount of people can be in at the same time.

It seemed reasonable to me to allow shops like Home Depot if the above restrictions are hold. You are more likely to get Covid by prolonged contact then by brief one. And if they expect people to stay at home, it makes sense to allow them to do something with that time so they dont go crazy.

Gardening and home restriction are reasonable, smart activities for lockdown.

Home Depot is open because you need it to be open, say for essential repairs (broken water pipe or what have you). I think something like Home Depot is actually pretty high up on the list of essential things.

That people go there for non-essential reasons – sure. I think it’s a sound policy decision to say that you do not investigate the reasons why people go shopping. That would create complicated overhead and be hard to enforce.

Also some essential/nonessential reasons depend on your risk sensitivity. People start gardens for reasons ranging from mental comfort to hedging against raising food prices in the coming months due to how thoroughly shot the agriculture is now.

marijuana is an important, life-saving medicine for a lot of people. Being able to visit a hardware store is important because some home repairs simply cannot wait. A car factory on the other hand has literally no reason to be open right now, the car industry is literally crashing right now because there is so little demand for cars.

In Illinois the marijuana dispensaries provide medical marijuana to patients. Seems like a good reason to stay open. Home Depot has all sorts of essential products from water heaters to screws to air filters to cleaning supplies and plenty more.

A Tesla factory doesn’t offer prescribed medicine or household items I may need while staying-at-home.

I feel "the government" in the above post is conflating the local government and the state and federal governments in a very unhelpful way.

It's great that they are promising that, but I'm just going to leave this here:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man...

Tesla Had 3 Times as Many OSHA Violations as the 10 Largest US Plants Combined

CEO Elon Musk once called California OSHA the 'most stringent' safety organization in the US.

It's worth noting that most of the competitors are not making cars in California, so he may be correct about that.

Indeed, and you hear far fewer stories like this about NV.

Except for thousand-word exposés in mainstream newspapers and on cable news networks.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/1...

I didn't think OSHA was just a California thing. Is the state program really a world unto itself?

California OSHA is a very different beast from federal OSHA. My wife works in environmental safety (factories are an environment) and she refers to it as "Strict AF".

Federal OSHA is basically the bare minimum as to what can be implemented. Most states layer on additional regulations as they see fit. California's Department of Labor, "Cal/OSHA", has the most stringent standards beyond federal OSHA's standards.

OSHA standards are basically a federal minimum, states are able to go above and beyond.

They are called OSHA-approved state plans. They have to be at least as strict as federal OSHA to be approved. See the OSHA state plan FAQ[1] for more info.

Honestly the OSHA enforcement I've seen has been a joke. One summer when I worked a landscaping job, my employer was fined $5,000 because I was caught using a weed-eater while wearing shorts. (It was hot out and I didn't care if I got an occasional pebble flung at my shins.) My coworkers had similar stories.

1. https://www.osha.gov/stateplans/faqs

"I didn't care"

That seems like the point. People learn what risks to take from experience; the employer has more experience than new/young employees, so you force them to care. I "didn't care" initially about breathing drywall dust, but later I changed my mind.

And when it's the employer who "doesn't care" the employee rarely has a choice.

I guarantee that if you drove around and looked at people using weed-eaters that day, at least 1/3rd of them would have been wearing shorts. Heck, I bet the majority of them weren't wearing eye protection.

I'm an adult and I can accurately evaluate the risk of pebbles hitting my shins. Unlike dust or toxins, there's no lag between my actions and noticeable harm. Also, the maximum possible harm is limited. Nobody was ever crippled or killed by a weed-eater throwing pebbles at their legs. OSHA's action in this case was entirely unnecessary.

Stories from my coworkers were equally ridiculous. One time the company got fined because a worker was wearing earplugs instead of earmuffs. Both block sound just fine! If anything, the earplugs should work better because safety glasses can break the seal of earmuffs.

Weed wackers throw a lot more than just pebbles and there can be a lag between your actions and noticeable harm.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3219886/

Doesn't that prove my point? Weed wackers have been around for 50 years, used by hundreds of millions of people, and the worst you could find was a freak accident that was treated successfully. I was far more likely to suffer from heat stroke than from any weed wacker related injury.

No it doesn't, it's also not the only thing that turned up when I googled 'weed wacker safety' just the most interesting. Obviously, it shows that there are more things hidden in grass than 'just pebbles' like you insisted.

Plenty of people get lacerations and other injuries from weedwackers but your employer has a duty of care to you to prevent the possibility of that happening. This has been codified by safety laws.

If you're using a weedwacker in your personal life feel free to do it nude for all I care but as others have pointed out if it's optional and unenforced that effectively means that employers won't do it.

Legitimately don't understand your comment – how is enforcement "a joke", but then you immediately give an example of enforcement being strict and effective?

What? It was arbitrary and ineffective. OSHA never busted people for actual dangerous stuff like being high on the job, lacking eye protection, driving without a seatbelt, or smoking next to gas cans. It was always stupid bullshit like wearing shorts on a hot day.

After the fine, I wore shorts for the rest of the summer. So did plenty of other workers. OSHA didn't seem to notice.

Cal OSHA is great. We once had a pressure vessel delivered and I discovered a small ding in it. We called the mfr and without looking they said "don't worry about it". We called the cal osha pressure vessel unit about it (they had issued our permit after all) and 5 minutes later had a call from the manufacturer asking what the hell was going on. 45 minutes later someone from cal osha showed unannounced (from Oakland to Redwood City in 45 minutes in the middle of the day -- he must have hopped in his car as soon as we got off the phone wit the receptionist). He decided it was safe and gave us a ticket as evidence.

As it happened we were being sued by a welding contractor company who'd sent us unqualified personnel who were not making safe steam welds. We had to cut them all out and we all had them around the shop as "trophies". It was an expensive lawsuit -- hundreds of $K. Since he was a nice guy and clearly knew his stuff, when he asked about them we showed him some and told him about firing the contractor. He said, "give me a copy of that lawsuit". And a few days later that was the end of it!

Funny thing about steam pressure vessels: there's no safety barriers against them blowing up (just tons of rules to try to keep that from happening). If that vessel had exploded it would likely have taken out the entire city block, and possibly the elementary school across the street. So we were delighted to follow all the rules. When I was perched on a ladder tweaking some instrumentation I was comforted that that if anything went wrong I'd never know.

Some of the California county toxics agencies on the other hand....some too strict and some, IMHO, excessively lax. Word to the wise: f you want to run a (legal!!) drug lab do it in San Mateo county not Santa Clara County.

Santa Clara had and has fabs, I don't think San Mateo did.

This is different.

I mean crap like the Santa Clara County inspector insisting that our solvents go into metal secondary containment because they are potentially flammable. But they are corrosive and per the MSDS shouldn't be in metal, though plastic is safe. When I asked what she wanted she said, "Are you arguing with me?" In the end I put metal trays (turns out commercial pan pizza pans meet the spec) under the plastic bins.

When we moved in there was a copper pipe from one lab to another marked "nitrogen". The previous tenant had had the building declared safe (we had the paperwork) and moved out. When it was our time to move out (raised a large B round, were hiring like mad!) we couldn't get the facility cleared because of this damned copper pipe. Not only did they want it removed but they wanted remediation (I guess in case nitrogen leaked into the atmosphere). I am a packrat so had the previous tenant's paperwork and only that spared us the agony. We were manufacturing product for human clinical trials there -- the last thing we would want was anything toxic or dangerous around!!

(the city of Santa Clara had a nice map showing where the water came from and we were on well supply. For the reason you mention we had bottled water brought in, something I would normally refuse to pay for. If you live in Santa Clara don't worry -- only the industrial districts have this problem. The residences are on a safe supply, I think it's even hatch hetchy water).

Tesla has a very rich history of destroying the lives of whistleblowers and injured workers

The Musk apologists in particular are very keen to never talk about this, since based on documents produced under oath, Musk himself is extremely vengeful and personally oversees the retaliation.

E.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

There is more of this coming down the pipe in a few weeks, but it's not like the Tesla fans will care. I mean you can basically google "Tesla whistleblower" or "Tesla injury" and get hundreds of results of awful stories that probably don't even happen in sweatshops, but clearly if you're "saving the planet", destroying a few lives is excusable.

Like I've said before, Tesla is to EV what blood diamonds are to jewelry.

> but clearly if you're "saving the planet", destroying a few lives is excusable

You shouldn't put it this way. The point is he was a dick when he didn't need to be. That's not okay. But if there was a button that said "save the planet but destroy a few (<50) lives," it wouldn't be unreasonable to hit it.

> But if there was a button that said "save the planet but destroy a few (<50) lives," it wouldn't be unreasonable to hit it.

Of course, you are assuming the button actually does what it says. Maybe it just kills 50 people and saves a tree.

There mindset reminds me very much of religious men rolling into colonies and being ok with any kind of thing so long as they could maybe save a savages soul or two.

Once the argument hinges on grandiose intentions, damn near anything becomes "reasonable" and that is cause for alarm.

"If we can save/provide for/help just one person, it'll al worth it." ad infinitum. Such trash logic.

It's perfect logic, just not for humans.

Seriously though, "the end justifies the means" is a perfectly valid argument, and there's no point thinking yourself in circles, trying to bend the rules of logic so that it stops supporting a conclusion you don't like.

Instead, it's better to investigate assumptions and applicability - and there you'll note that humans are far from perfect rational actors, that people plan badly, miscalculate and forget about past costs all the time, and that power corrupts over time - and with those assumptions, a flat-out ban on "the end justifies the means" is now absolutely reasonable. Not because it's not a rational view (it is), but because it doesn't work for humans, with our faulty, hostile wetware.

> it doesn't work for humans, with our faulty, hostile wetware.

Do you believe there is a future of humanity in which we don't figure out how to handle this? Does this seem like the kind of thing that can be figured out through group discussion, or is it better approached by strong leadership?

My personal philosophy is that we should operate like a game with players and refs. The refs technically have power, but aren't allowed to tell the players what to do. The players do not get to make the rules.

I think people should very clearly delineate between phases of their life where they are taking responsibility and focusing on society (refing), and phases of their life where they're just enjoying it (playing). No mixing the two. Either serious mode, or fun mode, but the moment you mix the two you get a conflict of interest: players should not ref. Fun people have a hard time being taken seriously, serious people aren't much fun.. it's just a bad thing to mix.

At the same time, refs need to know how to play. If a ref hasn't played for a long time, then their heart can't really be in the game. So refs are somewhat obligated to just let go sometimes, and later maybe they'll come back, remembering that the power is not what's important; the game is what really matters.

> a flat-out ban on "the end justifies the means" is now absolutely reasonable

Especially because nobody ever completes the original phrase...

"The ends don't justify the means, because the means make the ends."

If you use war to prevent suffering, you get suffering. If you use hate to stop hate, you get hate. etc.

This is a long way of saying, we become the very thing we fight. Humans aren't capable of using "the ends justify the means" without that happening, due to our faulty, hostile wetware... as you note!

>"the end justifies the means" is a perfectly valid argument

Sure, it just tends to be incredibly destructive, like you imply at the end of your comment. For me, this makes it bad.

I've always viewed "saving their souls" to be a kind of false rationalization to cover up the true desire for conquest.

> Of course, you are assuming the button actually does what it says. Maybe it just kills 50 people and saves a tree.

You really assumed the worst of me. Of course the button does what it says, that's the point of the thought experiment. The point is that it's _not_ what Elon is doing, and it shouldn't be put in that context. The point is, if Elon was doing that, then by all means please continue. The problem is people believe he is saving earth, not that saving earth is a bad idea (even at the cost of many, many lives).

The idea that Elon Musk would stop producing electric cars or solar panels in the event that he was made to stop questionable management tactics within his companies is an odd one. I realise that the U.S' regulatory appetite isn't what it used to be, so he'll probably keep getting away with this kind of thing, but you shouldn't have to accept his or any other leader's bad behaviour in exchange for the goods his company provides.

Your link doesn't agree with your text. The TESLA documents explicitly say that they are not providing PPE to everyone, but that people can bring their own masks.

> Bring and wear your personal protective equipment (PPE) – If Tesla has provided you with a face covering, you are required to wear it unless otherwise told by your local leadership. If Tesla has not provided you with one, you may bring or make your own following the Center for Disease Controls guidance

The advice in the link covers all Tesla sites. At the Fremont site, Tesla is handing out masks on entry, which means it is mandatory to wear:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/tesla-factory-employees-will...

No, there was a Tesla internal e-mail saying that Tesla will take temperatures of Fremont factory employees and hand out masks. Whether that's actually happening is unknown at this time.

If personal protective equipment is required, the employer has to provide it. It has to meet the usual NIOSH standards. Which means N95 or better masks for everybody. Hard to get, but if Tesla is "essential", they should be able to get them.

And are all those users fitted and trained for their N95's? Also unknown, but even more unlikely.

N95's often have yellow elastic bands, and we know Elon doesn't like yellow-colored safety things. This isn't ad hominem. He literally has endangered workers because he dislikes yellow. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...

It's an incredibly, self-evidently stupid article. It's the accusations of one fired employee immediately disproved by Tesla who supplied photographic evidence.

> Musk, apparently, really hates the color yellow. So instead of using the aforementioned hue, lane lines on the factory floor are painted in shades of gray. (Tesla denies this and sent Reveal photos of “rails and posts” painted yellow in the factory.)

While I don't know anything about this non-controversy, my suspicion is that their limited use of colour is based on sound UX principles. Car factories have nothing but dangerous equipment from one end of the room to another; placing lawyer-approved caution markings on everything ends up backfiring as workers start to tune it all out. So what was the point?

At the end of the day safety is all about good training, not how much yellow paint you apply to stuff.

Yeah, I guess it's reasonable to expect sound UI/UX decisions from a company that sells touchscreen-controlled car interfaces which have been clearly demonstrated to be safer.

That sentence was a lie. Touchscreens are less safe (read: more distracting, impose a higher cognitive load, lead drivers to veer while operating them) than tactile buttons. Touchscreens are excellent at reducing BOM costs, and they're excellent for glossy marketing pitches. Unsurprisingly, Tesla is big on touchscreens.

Finally, photos of "rails and posts" painted yellow doesn't contradict the fundamental assertions in the article that the color scheme of the factory floor is dominated by Elon's aesthetic sense. And it's not like Tesla has a strong record on safety in general: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...

Your response is a non sequitur.

Also I don't understand what your point was. I don't disagree with anything you wrote in that post, nor does anything I wrote previously imply disagreement with any of that—which I suppose is unsurprising given that it was a non sequitur. For the sake of completeness, let me enumerate all our agreements:

1. Touch screens are bad interfaces for a car in motion.

2. Removing physical buttons saves money and is great marketing.

3. There was an aesthetic aspect to the choice of factory floor colours.

4. Tesla factories have a poor historical safety record.

Anything else?

None of that detracts from the fact your original post was monumentally stupid and (despite your pre-emptive assertion) an entirely ad homenim making conclusions about Elon's motivations and Tesla's decision-making processes based on nothing more than one link to a tabloid-quality sensationalist report.

We don't even know who actually designed the factory floor colour schemes—and I doubt some rando fired line worker knows either. I suppose we just have to assume that Elon is soly responsible for bike-shedding every single nuance at a 40,000+ employee company.

I'm not a psychic, but reasoning came from a direct quote from one of his underlings. And yes, I linked a tabloid because tabloids are more fun, and that's about the level of seriousness we should cover him with. If you want something more reputable, here's Reveal's investigation: https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...

It's based on current and previous employees (at least at the time of writing), so you can put your concern that the source was a "rando fired line worker" to bed. :)

The quip about N95's having yellow bands was silly, but the problem is deep. N95 respirators are uncomfortable, hard to wear, and easy to mess up, and Tesla's well-documented (see, above) history of worker safety suggests they don't have the kind of safety culture required to actually keep their workers safe.

The tragic thing is it isn't actually hard, in the quantum physics/rocket science sense of the word. It's just a bunch of small steps that you can't mess up!

> I linked a tabloid because tabloids are more fun

Q.E.D.

You do realize that medical staff working in ICUs are often unable to get N95 masks, right? It doesn't matter what the regulations say if what they ask is impossible.

If the supplies required for Tesla workers to safely perform their jobs aren’t available, maybe they shouldn’t be reopening their factories. All this reopening is at the expense of the employees being prematurely forced to resume work. From what I’ve seen, those that are pushing for reopening aren’t the ones that are likely to actually contract the virus at their job.

> make your own following the Center for Disease Controls guidance

CDC guidance is that home-made masks aren't a replacement for social distancing. They are a risk mitigation technique for use in the handful of situations where social proximity is unavoidable.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

County officials were ready to let them open a week from today, but wanted a little more review and input into Tesla's plans. But apparently they ran out of patience.

Musk's previous defiance of the health order (without all these super-special controls) likely -does- encourage health officials to make extra-super-sure Tesla is in compliance, though.

>> Musk's previous defiance of the health order (without all these super-special controls) likely -does- encourage health officials to make extra-super-sure Tesla is in compliance, though.

Or it shows the governor and government officials that he is being serious about taking his ball and leaving the state.

So we DO negotiate with terrorists when it's economic...

Terrorists? I don't think that word means what you think it means

What will happen to the workers who defy the reopening? If they will be fired, that is terror.

Word choice is important to communicate your thoughts: "terrorism is the use of intentional violence for political or religious purposes"

True. And I am glad, that I did correctly use the word "terror", which you managed to misread somehow, and then blame me for your own mistake.

Are you taking everyone on ycombinator to be a fool. The previous comment talked about 'terrorism' so when you use the word 'terror' it's connected to have the same meaning.

The top comment explicitly said "economic terrorism". Did you have trouble understanding the meaning of that?

Firing an employee is not violence.

Terror does not require violence. It is silencing political opponents by abuse of power assymetry.

Wrong. The definition of terror is using violence to advance political goals.

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_(politics)

His employees have families here, kids in schools, hobbies. He can leave, so can his ball, his employees likely will just get themselves some shiny new netflix/twitter/facebook/google badges and move on

You think Musk cares about his employees? For starters he's talking about the factory. 99% of people working there aren't even Tesla employees, they're hired out contractors. He can fire them all with almost no financial consequences and activate his online troll army to attack anyone that dares say bad things about him. Maybe he throws in some crazy tweets so the media is distracted and doesn't report on it - sort of how the media has been mum to point out the huge bonus this CEO just earned in the middle of a great recession because "OMG Musk named his baby what?" and "OMG MUSK LISTED TWO HOUSES".

As for the handful of Tesla employees that can't move, he can just leave them there in an office. Tesla's turnover is comically high, so within two years there would probably be no employees left and the office can be closed.

>netflix/twitter/facebook/google

Those companies don’t manufacture shit and would not have any use for people trained in car assembly.

Notably, the county officials made that claim after Tesla went ahead with a lawsuit. We do not know the truth here.

The county will spin it like that but you don't know if the county's position right now is likely driven by Musk's insistence and "dare you take action" approach. The county has to save its face - so they will spin it about safety and that we were close to making this happen.

I really doubt that. As the other comment noted the official didn't say that until after the lawsuit was already filed and this issue spilled out into the public eye. Tesla's whole issue with the county seems to be they couldn't get a straight answer from them. Seems unlikely they would have gone through the public trouble of a lawsuit if the country officials were communicating that they were going to allow reopening in just a few days.

It seems far fetched that they would be open in a week. We literally just had guidance that phase 2 would be very slow in coming from Santa Clara and these folks all are coordinating.

I think out of a bit of necessity you'll see them softening more than they would want. ie, they are health folks - their only analysis is health (ie, economy is irrelevant / financial impact is not their mental model). Obviously we are safer from covid in total lockdown. Can the world continue like that until a vaccine is ready in 12 months? I'm not sure.

Honest question, why do public officials get to have another week to and more time to review when everybody else has to abide?

They're publicly elected officials, get their salaries paid by taxes, and should deliver, same as anyone else. In the private sector "a little more time to review" can get you fired, why is it any different for the public sector?

A job is a job, get it done on time.

Man, Ol' Musky really doesn't like to be told 'no' or 'wait', does he?

>A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco, and many other businesses open in California today.

No, Tesla has a history of higher injury rates than similar factories, and of trying to hide their high injury rates. There are multiple stories about this, very easy to find. Here is a podcast episode on injuries at Tesla[0]. Tesla has a history of being cavalier about worker safety.

[0] https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/working-through-the-pain...

This is independent of opening the factory during COVID or not. By this logic, Tesla should never be allowed to open their factory - COVID or not. And that doesn't seem to be the county's position - by far.

If Tesla cannot properly account for safety pre-covid, why should they be trusted to properly account for safety post covid? Especially when the guy insisting on opening the factory has been downplaying the risk of covid consistently from the beginning ("The coronavirus panic is dumb", "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April", etc.)

Because they already did it in Shanghai

I find the theoretical consideration more compelling than specific facts. If Tesla demonstrably is above the law, then incentives to do the right thing seem to be lacking. Whenever people get into an argument about whether someone or something is good or bad, my reaction is, what is the mechanism that would force them to be good? If the answer is absolutely nothing, then I'm going to bet that the people saying they are bad are correct (and of course if there are huge incentives, then the people saying they are good are likely correct). Either way, I don't think it makes sense to shrug and say they're probably as good or bad as everyone else.

They ask for voluntary compliancy as any court challenge against their orders would see the orders revoked. The county will not push Tesla on this as they know they will lose the court case.

No. Higher rates are due to stricter regulations/enforcement. No other company manufactures cars in CA.

With a new and developing situation like COVID, where the unknowns are more than the knowns, being more safe may mean being less evidence-first, and being evidence-first may mean being less safe. The advice was against wearing masks for so long because even though wearing masks was the cautious thing to do, it was not what the evidence suggested. If we wanted to go by evidence alone, there probably would be an advisory even today saying "there is no evidence masks work. I guess you can wear it as a fashion statement, but we have no evidence it would help with preventing the spread. You definitely shouldn't force shoppers, workers, travellers, etc. wear one, because evidence does not show it is required or even helpful."

I think the evidence is so far NOT to protect you (might be a bit) but to protect AGAINST you. Hence the advise so far is if you have the sickness you should. Otherwise ... which is the BAD advise by who. From a public health and human dynamics point of view.

The key issue is that you do not know you have it. And asking people to protect others as the main theme does not work.

The full mask on is important as it eliminates the incentive of not having the inconvenices. And stop the spread.

For work environment it is a risk and they should have some always on. Otherwise it will spread. In fact if one not on and start, the mask is the best collector of gems.

It protects others more against you for you to wear one than for them (e.g. in dry conditions a droplet can evaporate into one that is more of a hanging aerosol by the time it gets to their mask where it could have been stopped by yours).

You only have to sit across the table from an exuberant interlocutor to understand that masks help slow the spread of viruses. Surely everyone has noticed that people spit when they talk. That studies have a difficulty capturing that has more to do with how difficult good social behavior studies are.

Apologies to those who have seen this before:

"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/

This treasure trove contains gems like, "medical interventions based solely on observational data should be carefully scrutinised, and the parachute is no exception." and "The parachute industry has earned billions of dollars for vast multinational corporations whose profits depend on belief in the efficacy of their product."

Yes! And also, I would advocate reading Slate Star Codex's "A Failure, but Not of Prediction"[1] as a follow-up, which sort of resolves the "parachute paradox" of why you should believe in the efficacy of parachutes for skydiving in the absence of RCTs, and when you should require them for a belief.

I summarized the heuristic in that discussion [2].

In the case of parachutes, that heuristic would (lead you to) say that, we know (from RCTs) that parachutes slow the fall of objects, we know humans suffer greater injury the faster they hit the ground, and parachutes are inexpensive relative to the potential risk, therefore you should believe they work in the absence of an RCT.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908365

>This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

I hope however you do support respecting the law even in cases where you disagree with a decision.

This country was founded on the opposite of that; there's a lot of people who live here who identify with that spirit. There's also a litany of unjust laws in the past that were enforced regularly that we look very much down on today. Whether that happens in the future with COVID-19 regulations, who knows, but blind respect of the law is not really something Americans are known for.

> For as in absolute governments the King is law,

> so in free countries the law ought to be king;

> and there ought to be no other.

>-Thomas Paine

I agree that blind respect of the law is not inline with American culture, but petulant disrespect of the law should not be encouraged either. The way Musk has been conducting himself lately strikes me less as someone who is pushing back against irrational dogma, and more like someone who's throwing a tantrum because he's unhappy that a pandemic is hindering his ability to run his business.

I wouldn't disagree with that. I'm enjoying it all the same.

Did you read more the the tweets? his recent Joe Rogan interview shows the contrary.

> his recent Joe Rogan interview shows the contrary

I listened to the interview and found Elon ridiculously dismissive of the risks and when he started arguing Shanghai's gigafactory not having any employees die of COVID-19 was proof of the shutdown being unnecessary, it became hard to continue listening at all. How many of those workers got infected and went on the increase community spread to non-employees? Why are we only considering employee deaths? It's as willfully ignorant as people saying things like "I don't wear a mask because I don't have any symptoms."

You can also consider the effects of reopening factories (like Tesla's Shanghai) on the spread of C19 and view the manufacturers' sanitary policies as successful (in avoiding a rapid 2nd wave). I guess Musk talks about deaths (over thousands of employees) because it's the most reliable indicator, one that does not depend on, say, testing policies.

Blind respect of the law is looked down upon - but there are proper channels to change the law as defined in our constitution and proper protest.

Read the federalist papers and the actual writings of our forefathers. You will be quite surprised. The constitution was framed to prevent the people from being stupid and killing the nation just as much as it was to prevent a monarchy.

Absolutely not. Garbage laws deserve no respect. Society routinely violates speed limits, copyrights, and so forth, to the benefit of all.

Tell us about the widespread societal benefits of violating speed limits.

All I can think of now is:

> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

-- https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762

Less wasted time and lower pollution.

Fuel efficiency of most cars drops precipitiously at higher speeds. You're generating more pollution by speeding, not less.

Maybe in 1974. My car does about the same at 80 MPH as it does at 65 MPH, as counterintuitive as that seems.

It helps keep people from driving too complacently and unattentively.

While it is fallacy of herd mentality, the safest speed nonetheless tends to be the speed of the other vehicles around you. Speed deltas are the real danger—not failure to adhere to a specific, oft-arbitrary number.

If people hadn't violated the 55 MPH NMSL frequently and flagrantly, we'd still be stuck with it.

Setting speed limits based on political goals rather than engineering principles costs lives.

Not OP, but I think Musk should definitely respect the law. I also think he should leave the state if they're jerking him around--he'll get far better treatment elsewhere.

Tesla's whole legal case revolves around the argument that the county is not respecting the law. This isn't really about respecting the law it is about a disagreement between the county and Tesla about what the law is.

>disagreement between the county and Tesla about what the law is

and that's perfectly fine, however, those disagreements happen in a court. I don't think disagreeing with a county order gives you the right to simply ignore it. If Tesla thinks this is wrong they can sue, which they did, and that should be it.

There is a state level order and a county level order the state level order says to open the county says stay closed. They can't do both. They consulted a lawyer, chose to follow the higher authority, and asked a court to confirm they are in the right. What they are doing is entirely reasonable.

This is straight-up false. The state-level order delegates final decision-making authority to counties. Stop spreading misinformation.

> California Governor Gavin Newsom said Thursday that state-level guidance allowing manufacturing to resume some production didn’t supersede county-level restrictions. The company had unsucessfully tried to argue that Tesla’s production should be considered critical infrastructure.[1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/9/21253127/elon-musk-lawsuit...

You might be the one who is spreading false info. I clicked your link and its reference to Newsom's statement is a linked CNBC article. In that article there is no such quote from the governor only a reference to the county's website claiming that their order takes precedent over the state which is the whole dispute here.

In other words that Vox article falsely attributes a quote to Newsom which he didn't say or at least their source doesn't support their claim.

The governor’s own order: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.4.20-EO-...

> Nothing in this Order shall be construed to limit the existing authority of local health officers to establish and implement public health measures within their respective jurisdictions that are more restrictive than, or that otherwise exist in addition to, the public health measures imposed on a statewide basis pursuant to the statewide directives of the State Public Health Officer.

Tesla has simply had their lawyers argue nonsense in their filing. It’s a PR move to fool people into believing that they have any semblance of a case.

That raises the question of what their existing authority is. I guess a judge will quickly throw it out of court if their lawyers are full of it.

Serious question. How did you feel about Uber/Airbnb, all the scooter companies, all the e-commerce companies that were/are ignoring local laws to operate?

Is this somehow different? If so, how?

I feel the exact same way about it. They shouldn't be ignoring local laws, companies don't stand above appointed and elected officials. They don't get to make the rules.

And appointed/elected officials don’t have unlimited power to pass whatever laws they want, regardless of the will of the local people. Two sides to the same coin.

Why should it be incumbent on Tesla to suffer the county's mistake? The county can try to enforce it if that's the path they want to take.

Historically, the process has been to break the law you consider invalid, be charged with violating the law, and then make your defense in court. Courts generally rule on situations, not laws, and dislike being asked about hypothetical situations rather than actual events.

Remember when the government told people NOT to wear masks. I proudly and strongly went against the government then.

California at the state, county and city levels routinely flouts federal laws that they vehemently oppose. I think many of those decisions make sense and act as a catalyst for change. I also think Tesla's stance makes sense and is a catalyst for change.

There is no law being broken here, it's local county orders with (currently debated) legal authority by a single official.

"It's not illegal" is a shitty ethical basis.

Many other companies and factories are open, workers are not required to show up, and if they do they're following guidelines developed from the factory presence in China with thousands of unharmed employees. This is on top of most of the state being effectively open for weeks already.

What is the ethical quandary here?

Let's start with, "respecting public policy."

What if public policy - or single official's order in this case - is wrong and they disagree with good reason?

"Is wrong." OK, and just by force of personality Elon establishes that? Since when is Elon an epidemiologist? Sounds like about as much as he's a underwater rescue expert and ventilator manufacturer.

Take a step back, he's a troll juicing his stock price 80% of the time. Read elsewhere where he has a $700B bonus hanging in the balance here, and so how is that not the simplest explanation? There's your "good reason."

I believe the people who say it's still unsafe. If you don't and want or need the work, I think they're hiring in Fremont, or will be soon.

The TSLA bonus is $700 million, not billion. That's less than 2% of his current net worth and changes nothing in his life. It seems the simplest explanation is that he really does care about the company and the people as evidenced by his continual investment into his ventures at the risk of bankrupting himself several times.

And Elon is not alone in this, he's joined by millions across the state and country that want - and need - to open up to counter the economic disaster that will create far more suffering and chaos. It's an absolute fact that this virus is nowhere near as fatal as first thought in March. Everything has a cost and risks must be weighed. The 3rd leading cause of death in the US is medical errors, but we don't shut down hospitals because of it, do we?

You're free to believe whoever you want and stay inside for your safety, but not everyone has that luxury as they face hunger, suicide, depression, overdoses, diseases, surgeries, domestic abuse and violence, and other life-altering stress that has nothing to do with covid19 and hasn't conveniently stopped because this virus came around. The people want choice, and I believe their freedom to make that choice is of utmost importance.

The "B" was obviously a typo. :)

It seems the simplest explanation is that he really does care about the company and the people as evidenced by his continual investment into his ventures at the risk of bankrupting himself several times.

His care "about the people" is belied by his inability or unwillingness to care for "the people" as the union he is fighting so bitterly would do. Perhaps he really dislikes unions because they take too good of care for their members? Not to put too fine a point on it, but I can think of another prominent American who is proudly waving their negligence at the nation.

he's joined by millions across the state and country that want - and need - to open up to counter the economic disaster that will create far more suffering and chaos

"Want" doesn't protect people against viruses. "Should Elon incur liability for this?" is a question I want to see discussed. To be sure, there is chatter in DC about giving employers immunity for this, but nobody other than the Chamber of Commerce will associate their name with it, so I assume politicians know it might be a damaging issue to get behind.

But the virus is here, and again by force of personality this can't be changed. What people are clamoring for is some kind of a safety net, and they've been inculcated with the idea that a job is the only safety net they have, or can control. This is not the be-all end-all, because this is all the government's job, another aspect of the crisis in which they are being negligent (certainly the corporate 'stimulus' didn't involve complicated forms and crashing websites and time limits).

Yes, hunger, suicide, depression, and all the rest are due to the hopelessness that an ineffectual government, what some are calling a failed state, is declining to provide in an emergency. $1200 is a pittance.

The people want choice

There is no "choice" in virus exposure, it is not available. It is not subject to politics nor policies. That people believe that it is, is a travesty and I'd say a crime against humanity for convincing people to act against their own interests where their life hangs in the balance. In the service of capitalism, all because people in power don't want to use the tax dollars we pay to provide a less suicidal environment for us with our own money, within which to endure an extended quarantine. So we can stay alive.

Do you really think this should be portrayed as a luxury?

You meant "it's legal". Then you would have to concede that people should be able to do legal, unethical things. You may think Elon is a jackass, that does not mean he has to close his factory.

There's no such thing as "unethical." Everybody has values and reasons why they do stuff. Other than that I don't understand your first two sentences.

You're right that Elon being a jackass doesn't mean he has to close his factory, but at the same time it can be the reason why he wants to contravene public orders and policy to reopen it.

> There's no such thing as "unethical." Everybody has values and reasons why they do stuff.

I have values and reasons that guide my own actions. There’s a much larger space of values and reasoning that I personally don’t adhere to, but consider valid for other people to choose for themselves. Anyone acting according to values or reasoning that falls outside this space is behaving unethically in my view. Whether or not something is ethical depends both on the internal motivation of the actor and the beliefs of the observer, but it’s still a useful concept as long as the relevant people in this formulation are properly udentified.

This variation makes it a shaky basis for law, which is a somewhat blunt instrument. It will inevitably allow some acts that some people view as unethical to go unpunished by the courts, and will probably disallow some acts that some people consider morally required: There’s too much variation in the personal beliefs of the populace for there to be a frontier that neatly encompasses all the guiding principles for their personal actions and also stays within the bounds of what people consider acceptable behavior from others.

You're simply using the wrong (though popular) word. The "un" in unethical" means "without," not "different."[1] This is basic English (and Old High German, and Manx, and...). However, if your goal is to disregard and negate the basic intelligence and/or humanity of another person or group, then it might be the right word, but this path leads to some very bad places.

>Whether or not something is ethical

You eating a hamburger when I think meat is murder doesn't mean you don't have any ethics.

>There’s too much variation in the personal beliefs of the populace for there to be a frontier that neatly encompasses all the guiding principles for their personal actions and also stays within the bounds of what people consider acceptable behavior from others.

You're describing morality, AKA a shared set of ethics, and people have been fighting to establish their preferred morality on other people (AKA "stop doing that thing I don't want you to do") for as long as people have had shared identities. Everybody who had participated in that history has acted according to a set of ethics, but the way you use the word, whether one of those people has any ethics depends on what side you're on. Not true.

I know I'm pissing in the wind here, but it's simply the wrong word to use.

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/un-

The “un-“ prefix in “unethical” means “violative of; contrary to”, and the word as a whole refers to something that is in violation of an ethical standard. It is generally used discursively, to refer to the speaker’s ethics rather than those of the actor performong the action being discussed.

I know how you're trying to use it, I brought up the etymology. Your usage isn't new, I'm just adding rigor. Even "violative of; contrary to" categorically negates the validity of the actor's reasoning. Taking the descriptive position is your option, but I hope we can agree that that would be "literally"-ing the word, given the science.

I’m fundamentally a descriptivist when it comes to language: words mean what people use them to mean, not what they “should” mean based on etymological history. Negating the validity of the actor’s reasoning is generally what people who call things unethical intend to do, and I see no evidence that usage has changed significantly in recent years. As their intentions are clear, I see no benefit in claiming the concept is nonexistent.

In fact, deigning to judge an act as either ethical or unethical is implicitly admitting that the actor has agency and therefore reasoning powers: someone’s reasoning cannot be invalid unless it exists.

> There is no law being broken here, it's local county orders with (currently debated) legal authority by a single official.

The fact that someone has questioned legal authority does not mean there is no law being broken. The existence of “freemen of the land”-style tax objectors doesn't mean no law is broken when you fail to pay federal income tax.

It is a federal and state public health order. They've since changed those orders. The county has even less authority, especially by a single individual and in contrast to the state.

Also laws only work as long as the citizens believe in them and civil obedience is a thing. There needs to be good reason for the shutdown and its effects, and many do not agree with the county.

> It is a federal and state public health order.

There has been no federal public health order (there's been a federal national defense order to keep meat plans open to promote the spread of the virus, but that's the opposite of a public health order), there are, relevant to the case at hand, state and county orders.

> They've since changed those orders.

Yes, both the state and county orders have been updated over time. What's your point?

> The county has even less authority, especially by a single individual and in contrast to the state.

No, actually, state law makes county public health officers the main authority to issue orders for the control of communicable disease.

> Also laws only work as long as the citizens believe in them and civil obedience is a thing.

Shutdown orders have overwhelming majority support; there is a very loud (predominantly elite) but small minority opposed.

They've changed those orders to be more open. That's the point. This single county is disagreeing on flimsy reasoning. You're free to follow whatever law you think exists. Others have the right to counter orders they feel are unjust.

Where do you see this overwhelming majority support? If that were true, there wouldn't be any news about so many violations of these lock-down orders. They would just be arrested and shutdown. But that's not happening is it?

What law?

>This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

conversely, Tesla defying the order and bypassing the courts is defying the rule of law which I have trouble supporting.

Actually, I do agree with that, my PERSONAL opinion is that the panic around COVID-19 was artificial to a large degree from the very beginning. Most measures taken against it in many countries seem to me absolutely pointless and badly planned through.

The keyword here is "personal". Despite disagreeing with the policy, I don't gather parties at my properties and encourage public protests. What Musk is doing here is much worse, though, he blatantly says "fuck you" to the government and does it in maximally public way possible. If he doesn't get punished for that, it will be such a special attitude that I don't even know how to think about that. CA "authorities" should loose all authority after that.

> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

The lockdown is literally the opposite. Show me the numbers that prove that COVID-19 is going away. Seems much more likely we'll see another spike soon due to opening early _against all evidence_.

Then what do you suggest? Lock down for 1-2 years to turn widespread community transmission into eradication? If hospitals aren't at capacity what is the problem?

How many people at the lowest of the lowest rung on the ladder being pushed to famine and death because of disrupted supply chains does it take for you to start caring?

The global perspective of this disease is horrifying any way you turn it, and economy has a central part in managing it successfully.

> Then what do you suggest?

Waiting until we execute a successful testing and tracing program. Even the federal government guidelines for reopening are clear on what the alternate suggestion is, despite what the figurehead of that government seems to want his followers to think.

For that to work you need to get the spread down to workable numbers again, which hasn't happened with the current lock down. It's in the limbo of too harsh to actually use the medical resources but too light to set it on a quickly lowering path with a workable timescale.

If 5-10% has it you can essentially just assume everyone has been in contact within 1 or 2 steps with someone who has it, no need for fancy privacy invading tracing.

Testing is good to catch people early, but if the capacity isn't here 2 months after the Italian outbreak, when will it be?

I mean, tragically, testing capacity in this country may never be where it needs to be, because we don't have an election coming up soon enough to replace our incompetent leadership in time to help.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't push back on the claim that the only two options are uncontrolled spread and never ending lockdown. There is another way, it isn't hypothetical, it is being executed elsewhere. We just aren't taking that path.

Not sure why you are downvoted.

Its likely there wont ever be an effective vaccine and folks seem to want to quarantine us until that happens.

At some point people are going to have to be exposed

Nobody wants that. What people want is testing and tracing program like the ones other countries are having success with.

The "they want to keep us locked down forever" talking point is a manufactured distraction.

Testing and tracing doesnt change the fact that everyone will need to be exposed at some time.

A vaccine isnt likely

Oh I think I see your perspective now. Yes, if you don't believe a vaccine will be developed then I can see where you're skeptical of the end game of testing and tracing.

But your certainty of the unlikelihood of a vaccine is far too strong far too early. There are on the order of ten to a hundred promising efforts toward developing a vaccine well under way. It may very well be that a year or two from now, each of those will have failed. If that is the case I will be open to hearing about how best to manage this indefinitely, and you may be right that testing and tracing won't help that much (but it still seems like we may want to control the order and rate at which people are exposed).

But we're really far from having the evidence to support your claim with any certainty. We haven't run out of ideas for how to make a vaccine yet, we're just getting started.

Nature has a way of winning the long game. I fear vaccines overall will soon lose momentum much like antibiotics have.

Both are really new medical technologies in the scope of life.

I can only speak for San Francisco (and to a lesser extent the Bay Area): we do have workable numbers at this point. Approximately 150 new cases reported per day and declining. Our testing is also ramping up relatively quickly, especially in SF, and so is training for contact tracers. The mayor is planning for mid-May to start reopening, as a result of these numbers.

https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/

The Bay Area has high testing and contact tracing ability. As an extreme, Santa Clara County (just south of Tesla) is at a 1.5% weekly positive rate and contact tracing every positive.

What if the government can't execute test & trace successfully? Right now we can only test around 0.1% of the population per day and that capability is growing linearly.[1] The lockdowns aren't restrictive enough to get R0 far below 1, so it's not clear how long it will take for new cases to drop low enough for test & trace to be feasible.

1. https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/12599631214325555...

I think we should be demanding improvements to that situation rather than demanding to be allowed to reopen unsafely.

It's not like people are demanding less testing. Public demand for testing is as high as it's possible to be. Test capability is being ramped up as quickly as possible, but even if we manage to double it every month, it will be February of 2021 before we can test everyone once a week.

No, there could be more public demand for testing. Just to take an example, instead of armed protesters demanding reopening, they could be protesting for a better public health response.

Test capability is not being ramped up as quickly as possible. Other countries with less wealth than we have are still able to test more people per capita. The federal government has been hesitant to use powers and financial capabilities that it uniquely has in order to ramp up testing more quickly. A lot is being left on the table here. But it's not what we're talking about because the distraction campaign is working. It's really a bummer.

We don't need to test everyone, just the subset of people who may have been exposed. And we need a lot more tracing to find those likely exposures from known positive cases.

I don't understand why people act like there is some law of nature that is forcing this to be so much worse here than in some other places. There are countries who are not struggling as much as us, we could be more like them, we just aren't doing the work to get there.

If we double it every month, since right now we're testing ~275,000 a day, we'd hit Harvard's estimate of the minimum necessary tests of 500,000 a day in less than a month. The thing that continues to be frustrating about this debate is that we have reasonably clear, achievable guidelines for getting numbers under control and, at least at a national level, we're just not doing them, because the federal response has been a bungled mess.

Increase production of hand sanitizer, masks, gloves, test kits and other supplies as much as possible. Ensure all medical, food and other essential workers have access now and for the foreseeable future to the supplies they need to perform their jobs safely.

Provide masks and hand sanitizer to every citizen and at a minimum recommend usage at all times outside of the home.

Establish working contract tracing programs, so that spread can be limited.

Once those things have happened (they haven't), re-opening could start to be done safely. Until then, the government's role should be to provide financial, medical and food assistance to the fullest extent possible so that the people and companies who are twiddling their thumbs don't die or go bankrupt while they wait.

The government can literally print money. They could begin distribution tomorrow. They cannot print masks, tests, hand sanitizer, vaccines, gloves, food, etc.

I agree with all of your points, really. Tesla very well may be able to provide a relatively safe environment.

> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach.

The problem is here, I think.

Let's say I never drink poison. I have no data supporting that poison does any harm at all, therefor my policy of not drinking poison is not evidence-driven.

If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.

There are many businesses open and millions of people all around the state going to work, shopping, eating, and generally interacting outside. This lock-in effectively ended weeks ago.

I mean, I'm in SF so it's pretty aggressive here, but it's extremely not ended here.

I also don't really see your point.

Obviously not every area is the same, hence why CA state and Alameda county don't agree.

The point is that there has been no real social distancing for weeks in many places because most people are already in plenty of contact with each other.

Even if every person is still seeing exactly as many people as before, which I doubt, being mostly constrained to gathering in outdoor places is still a healthy degree removed from "No Lockdown."

Outside = outside their homes.

People are together inside stores, restaurants, hospitals, and other buildings. Delivery services are driving hundreds of miles through many neighborhoods while handling food and packages which are taken inside and opened. Public transportation has full planes, trains, buses and even Ubers. People are breathing the same air and touching the same things like doors, benches, gates, chairs, signs, and many other surfaces. Many wear a flimsy mask, several wear it incorrectly, and almost nobody has gloves. Every day that goes by, people get more lazy, tired and complacent.

My UPS driver last week wore shorts, short-sleeve polo, no gloves, no mask, and directly handed me a package and the tablet to sign. The idea that a highly contagious disease is somehow still contained in such a populous area defies any rational explanation.

> If lock-in is successful it may very well look like it was unnecessary.

Absolutely. This is the curse of most public health programs, and indeed a lot of public programs in general: when they work correctly it looks like they're not needed. The Covid pandemic has just shoved this process front and center rather than leaving it in the background.

HN readers, of all people, should remember the Year 2000 bug: we heard dire, almost apocalyptic predictions of the havoc it could wreak; we spent extraordinary effort and money scrambling to fix as many date-handling bugs as we could find across countless systems and software packages; then the year rolled over and... nothing much happened. But, of course, the end state of "the Year 2000 bug was vastly overblown" and the end state of "all our painful work paid off and saved us" were effectively identical. So it is with the lockdown.

> A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco, and many other businesses open in California today.

That's not clear. To get infected you need to be exposed to a certain number of viruses. I don't think the number is known for sure for this one, but for similar viruses its something like 1000.

A sneeze or cough expels millions, which is why people who are sneezing or coughing are so good at spreading it. Someone who isn't sneezing or coughing but who has it expels much fewer, taking maybe an hour to expel by breathing enough to infect someone else. Talking would cut that down some, but still take a while.

An infected person shopping at Costco or Home Depot who is not coughing is very unlikely to infect other shoppers that they pass while shopping. It would only be in line to checkout where other people would be near them for longer times, but if the business is doing reasonable crowd control those times should not be long enough for anyone to get the 1000 viruses.

This is why churches and movie theaters are much more dangerous. There you are near the same people for an hour or two, so even staying 6ft apart you might get enough total viruses during your visit to become sick.

Is a Tesla factory more like a Costco or Home Depot, where everyone is moving about and most of your encounters with others only last a short time, or is it more like a movie theater or church, where you are fairly stationary as are those around you? If a work shift is 8 hours and people are mostly stationary, I'd not at all be surprised if you need them to be much farther apart than 6ft to make it safe.

Anyone who has seen footage of a modern car factory and a post-COVID hardware store will know that this is absurd.

Car factories like Tesla's are already very clean places. They're already dealing with physical and airborne dangers—robots need clearance and the air must be aggressively exhausted and scrubbed to deal with fumes from paints, plastics, solvents, welding etc.

Much of the physical part handling is performed by or assisted by robots. Much of the transport is performed by conveyors. Employees generally don't need to be in close proximity or touch the same surfaces as other employees. Unlike a consumer store, Tesla can effectively mandate 100% compliance around PPE, whereas hardware stores are full of self-entitled pricks who don't wear sufficient PPE and linger in aisles forcing people to regularly trespass the 6 foot buffer...

> Carmakers are also defined as a COVID19 critical industry, and every other carmaker manufacturing in the United States is either open, or capable of open today. This puts Tesla at a serious disadvantage.

False. Most of car factories are still closed in USA. Source - https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/follow-latest-assembl...

I don't understand how your source supports your current claim. No where does it state the total number of factories closed, but does state that almost all listed factories are opening in May.

Tesla was also in discussion with alameda county (confirmed by both sides) to reopen on May 18th. Then Elon decided to throw a tantrum and reopen week early, just because he’s rich and above the law.

And even if we assume carmaker to refer to the company, that still only puts us at 7/14 that have resumed manufacturing.

This is like saying I should get to speed because I have evidence that I can probably drive at that speed safely. Even if that was the case, and even if the county was willing to give me special treatment, does it seem right to demand special treatment immediately and deny any requests for clarification? Even if I was a special snowflake how should this policy apply fairly to others in the county so as not to invoke any lawsuits for favoritism?

I like Tesla but the world doesn't revolve around it.

Traffic regularly goes above the speed limit without mass arrests — or any arrests at all.

> A Tesla factory is a much safer place

Citation needed please.

Tesla's factories are the most dangerous car factories in the US by an order of magnitude more __than all other car manufacturers combined [0]__.

With such a bad safety track record, they must be completely high to believe that they are going to be doing significantly better with a pandemic going on.

Right now, not only the safety of their workers is at stake, but also the safety of the whole region around their factories.

Their track record proves that they cannot be trusted with the safety of their workers, what makes anybody believe that they can be trusted with the safety of whole regions instead?

Doesn't make any sense to me.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...

Someone pointed out that California OSHA is known to be strict, while other auto manufacturers are in different states. So it's unclear whether Tesla is objectively less safe or if the regulating body is simply more willing to hand out citations. Perhaps injury rates would be more telling, though California may have broader rules for what counts as injury.

I guess my point is it may not be true that "more Cal OSHA citations" == "less safe".

Good point, thanks.

> Carmakers are also defined as a COVID19 critical industry

Can someone enlarge on this a bit? I can see how auto repair can be a critical need, but I don't see why auto manufacture is critical during this phase of the pandemic.

It's because state energy policy classifies electric vehicles as part of the "dispersed energy" industry, along with solar panel installers and so forth.

Have you tried to repair a Tesla?

It's political.

Car makers are the biggest employers in states essential to the GOP's electoral chances so they were deemed essential by the current administration.

Maybe so. Separate question: why were they deemed essential by California?

It's important that cars continue to be available at reasonable prices, so it'd be very dangerous to snip off parts of the supply chain that makes that happen, even if it's not obvious why they can't take a break. Central planning is known to be risky and have surprising failure modes.

The unsold stock of cars is so high right now that carmakers are renting out airports and have container ships parked full of them.

https://www.torquenews.com/1084/subaru-leases-airport-park-3...

On the bright side, you can get an Aston Martin for $20k off, which is probably in the ballpark for my budget for my next car. ;)

I can't get over the fact that hospitals, nursing homes, and critical parts of the food supply chain, lack crucial PPE and hundreds of emergency staff are dieing, but Elon Musk's car factory has an ample supply so that your luxury car can be delivered on time. I don't get how anyone can justify that.

Our doctors and nurses are just fodder.

>The reasons for not restarting production seem to be dogmatic and not evidence driven.

And what about the reasons for restarting production? We all know this decision is being driven by Musk's misguided ideology.

> A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco.

It's not based on safety, it's based on need. People need a way to buy food, so stores like Costco that sell food are still open, even though it puts people at risk.

By contrast, we do not need to be producing new cars right now, so putting people at risk in order to build them is unnecessary.

> because IMO Home Depot should 100% be closed

Not sure I agree with that. Covid or not, toilets will continue to break down, trees will continue falling on roofs, boilers, thermostats, ACs, stoves and fridges will continue to die. How's someone going to shelter in place if their shelter isn't habitable? Now, more than ever, people need their homes to be in good repair.

Y’know what? You’re 100% right, I agree. I have edited that bit out of my post.

And what of the employees of Hobe Depot and car manufacturers who depend on their income to purchase said groceries?

Digging in on the Home Depot should be closed narrative. In the event that my home needs repairs, how should I be able to do so if you close down stores like Home Depot? Even if you suggest that someone should go through a contractor instead of fixing their own broken plumbing or a leaky roof, where do you think most of the contractors get their supplies?

Where Tesla is really at a disadvantage is in not being able to go a few months without making cars. No other shut-down car company is complaining like Elon. Maybe it's a problem he has in running the only non-union auto manufacturer? Well, he or Tesla should have enough money to provide for the workers during furlough. Oh, but he's a good corporate citizen, spending his time "cutting waste," so now when something big happens the company doesn't have the resilience to ride it out safely.

Furthermore, while all of the above were his choice, reopening isn't. He's being a rich baby and whining because he's not allowed to do whatever he wants to do. I hope the county/state smacks him down.

>This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach

What is this well of coronavirus evidence that the state is rejecting or ignoring? People aren't using the word "unprecedented" just because it's hard to type.

>Tesla claims their plan will ensure 6 ft of distance for every employee, and PPE and masks are provided and mandatory. Even the HVAC is changed to optimise for fresh air turnover and filters are changed on a regular basis.

Where is the evidence that this is the (second) safest approach?

>No other shut-down car company is complaining like Elon.

Elon is not complaining, he is reopening along with the other automakers. Workers for Ford, GM returned to work on the same day Tesla workers did (May 11) and the US Ford and GM factories will start running May 18.

Only some social media folks are enraged and freaking out about a business opening - they are the ones being petulant.

Of course this is going to be taken to the courts and we'll see how much a Governor's decree can accomplish when it comes to affecting critical industries that are supposed to remain open, of which auto manufacturing has been designated as one.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/05/11/michiga...

There's a not-insignificant chance that an employee will die from Elon's choice here. Should he incur liability for it?

From my interaction on Twitter there was full on mobs of people calling Elon typical names plus saying he’s forcing the workers to work and since he’s anti union Tesla should be shut down.

We’re dealing with peak information warfare here. Mobs of people echoing what their media sources project.

Or maybe people just geniuinely disagree.

Why is Tesla not allowed to be open, then? Is it classified differently somehow?

A state thing surely.

The county of Alameda is overriding the state of California's rule that would allow them to open and the federal classifications that would allow them to remain open.

These are basically broad guidelines that can be modified locally. The county with Teslas factory has made it repeatedly clear that it does not consider the factory to be essential. However as far as I understand it is enforcing stricter rules in general and not just singling Tesla out.

> A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco, and many other businesses open in California today. We aren't talking about sporting events here: we're talking about some of the lowest risk and unavoidable interactions.

Indeed, according to [0], as of mid-April (can’t find anything more recent), 30 grocery workers have died. This number is coming from a union representing 900K members. I don’t know how many grocery workers there are in the US, but obviously it’s at least 900K. To have only 30 die from that pool of workers in what could be argued as one of the most high risk jobs (coming into contact with huge numbers of people every single day) should probably say a lot about how much risk there is for the average Tesla assembly line worker. But as you said, evidence, or even common sense seems to go out the window here.

0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/14/coronavirus-...

The latest number from UFCW is 72.

This virus has a low mortality rate in people younger than 60. Most UFCW workers are significantly younger than 60, so you wouldn't expect a high number of deaths.

The protections in place are not to protect 20-40 year old grocery store workers who would get this virus and likely handle it fine; they're to prevent spread to vulnerable age groups and those with pre-existing conditions, and to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

This goes both ways. I assume the lock down in the US was late because of supposed lack of evidence for community spread of the virus.

lack of evidence isn't evidence of non-existence.

The reason the US lockdown was late is because the administration is incompetent. Why is it that other countries locked down as soon as possible, despite "lack evidence"?

It's because a default fail-safely system is better than a fail-deadly system.

Maybe the word "lockdown" means something different to you. But in my state (IL), we never had a "lockdown" in any sense of that word.

In retrospect, in particular (to use an example from another area of the USA), the state of NY and NYC did not take COVID-19 seriously. Even while supposedly concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they were returning known-infected people to old folk homes. This was not a lockdown action...

The reasons that the USA response to COVID-19 was X and not Y are a lot more complex than the simple statement "because the administration is incompetent". The full history of how well the USA did (including internal geographic areas vs. others) vs. the rest of the world is still to be written.

The world is definitely a more interesting place with Elon Musk in it!

It does smell a little to me like he's doing this partly for the attention and outrage (i.e. publicity and marketing).

Which is a tad irresponsible.

I agree with your rationale. Some manufacturing that is deemed essential is and was allowed to continue during the height of the pandemic so long as safety measures were taken (well outlined by Corning), PPE, physical avoidance, hygiene, air treatment, mindfulness, etc. If that protocol allowed some manufacturing to continue during lockdown I don’t see why it would now be insufficient while lifting some restrictions (or as your example Lowe’s and The Home Depot remaining open).

You had me until you started talking about Home Depot and Costco. Stores like these aren't open because of their virus control measures. They're open because people need food and home repair. Otherwise they'd be closed too. Comparing them to car manufacturing severely weakens what could've otherwise been a potentially more compelling argument.

Important to note that the 2 metre distance applies to people who are standing still or walking normally.

As soon as they start working, running, cycling, singing, etc the distance has to increase.

We've seen video of Tesla employees wearing PPE (the ventilator video) and every single person in the video made multiple errors.

(I don't hate Musk, and it is weird how he's so polarising).

Yup, becomes something like 2m + 5s following time

For what it's worth, I doubt that Tesla's facility would have ever been shut down if it were in BC. Manufacturers here just had to demonstrate that they could operate safely, and in accordance with distancing rules, cleaning requirements, etc.

Seems to be working pretty well.

> Carmakers are also defined as a COVID19 critical industry,

There is no such thing.

There are federally-defined critical infrastructure sectors, which are independent of COVID-19, and may or may not be relevant to any state or county emergency order (many such orders have used the federal critical infrastructure sectors list as a baseline, with or without modification, either incorporating the list modified or in its original form or referencing it), but there's no such thing as anything defined (outside of particular state or county orders) as a “COVID19 critical industry”, and carmakers are not so designated in the only orders relevant to the Tesla case.

Are they buying increased long term disability insurance for the employees, insurance that covers respirator illness?

Because that matters a lot more to the people that are inevitably going to be impacted than the statistics about how big the factory is.

B. but..but Tesla is not merely a car maker, it is a TECH company!

States are letting the Big 3 reopen car plants, even in Michigan next week. California is putting Tesla at a competitive disadvantage if they can't follow suit.

> The reasons for not restarting production seem to be dogmatic and not evidence driven.

We know that being in close indoor proximity to other people creates a risk of spreading infection (6 feet is just a guideline, it's not an impenetrable barrier). Therefore, opening a factory is not as safe leaving it closed. There's your "evidence".

By that logic, the state should have the power to close any business whenever it wants. After all, we live in a world filled with communicable diseases. Those aint going away, and there is a good chance -- almost a certain chance -- that covid will become endemic like SARS I and just be with us permanently.

So, no, that is not enough evidence that the degree of danger warrants the personal restrictions and power grabs happening all over the state -- almost all by governor decree and without any laws being passed.

How much can Musk's claims of safety precautions be trusted given the factory's record of both safety violations and suppressing information about safety violations?

"Inside Tesla’s Model 3 Factory, Where Safety Violations Keep Rising" https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...

"Tesla says its factory is safer. But it left injuries off the books" https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...

And still you are supposed to follow the rules. Even the one you don't like.

Especially if you are a business.

You could write a convincing argument for pretty much anything, that it is not the point.

The focus is not on how we can make this safe, it is how can we control and lock this down.

Different approaches, maybe similar outcomes, but one involves much less economic activity.

Any idea why carmakers are defined as a critical industry? That strikes me as similar to defining something like cell phone manufacturers being defined critical.

How do you know it is not evidence driven ? Do you have expertise in infectious disease ? Do you have any data to prove that Alameda county has the means to control spread, has requisite number of PPE supplies ? Do you know if the county has the adequate testing capacity or contact tracing ? All of county's indicators are documented here: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/

I would say it is highly evidence and data based and Musk is being a petulant child

> That is something I cannot support.

Then work with Alameda County to give permission to Tesla to reopen. What Elon Musk did, however, is openly defying the law.

Sorry but I'm downvoting this. It's besides the point IMHO whether or not that decision by the county is right or wrong. Simply defying a public order in itself should be the focus here. If Tesla gets away with this, it will be (yet another...) case of "be rich and the law doesn't apply to you."

Which is short-sighted, since it undermines the rule of law, i.e. the very base upon which people can rich without being afraid of pitchforks.

He makes a very good point. You shouldn't down vote an opinion only because you disagree with it.

I downvoted it because this (IMO not very good point due to it missing the point) took up the entire first comments page.

18-xx months locked up and no production is not a valid policy either, so start the work with certain safety measures.

German car makers are doing similar things (reopening under certain conditions)...

German overall response to covid was good. From closing and restricting shops soon, to ridiculous amount of testing they were doing. There was also considerably less fit about original closing, making it politically easier to close things soon, pay for testing and then slowly reopen.

German automakers were not Covid truthers claiming it is all hoax and what not. They did negotiated and so, but fundamentally cooperated.

> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach.

You are stating that like it was a fact. It's NOT. Where is the evidence to support that Tesla factory is lowest risk? Now perhaps if all of the original KUKA robots are on and assembly lines are automated then it would probably be a different story. But apparently it's not, is it?

We still haven't fully grasped the full cause and damages SARS-CoV-2 will bring to people (for instances, originally we thought children are extremely low risk, but they are NOT, they could be infected and DIE too!). We still haven't even near the order of magnitude of CODVID testing AND contract tracing programs needed to reopen economy, what on earth you think reopening is a good idea?

What about the healthcare workers sacrificing their lives to save selfish people like Elon Musk? Those ICU doctors and nurses are EXTREMELY fatigued. Premature reopening will most likely bring another big wave of infections and deaths, and then we are back to square one - wasting all these past 2 months of hard physical distancing measures.

As a long time EV driver and a big fan of Elon Musk, I am deeply disappointed at him on this.

PS: Tesla's Return back to Work playbook has no mention about doing daily testing for its employees, we do know asymptomatic transmission accounts for huge percentages. How does he plan to address that? What kind of hero he is to calling for his employees to go back to work and die for capitalism?

I'm inclined to agree with OP here on the point that a factory is inherently safer than a grocery or retail store. At the former, the same set of people are working in a rather insulated environment where you can establish strict rules and protocols employees must follow. At the latter, there is a new mix of people going in and out everyday and it's much harder to force them to adhere to your rules.

Not saying we should "reopen" ASAP but if we can identify and implement low-risk solutions that let people get back to work, then we should - and sooner rather than later.

Sorry to call you out, but your link contradicts your statement.

> If Tesla has provided you with a face covering, you are required to wear it unless otherwise told by your local leadership. If Tesla has not provided you with one, you may bring or make your own following the Center for Disease Controls guidance.

"A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be..."

Actually home is a much safer place to be.

"not an evidence-first safety driven approach."

Not true, staying home is why so many place have 0 new COVID-19 cases. That's evidence-first so Musk is selectively ignoring it because he wants to make his cars.

Even when its a stupid law, you are not above the law.

Do you own Tesla stock?

[flagged]

>Those of us living in Alameda County don't really care if people from New South Wales support our pandemic defense posture or not

Is this a jab at all immigrants, or only some of us?

The comment is not from an immigrant. It is from a person who presently resides in Australia.

This has got nothing to do with nothing but I find it funny that they named Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, and then they stopped caring about naming states and just said that's West Australia, that's South Australia and that's North Australia.

I'm pretty sure they just listed a place that's far away from Alameda County. Why do you think it has to do with immigrants?

Except when it’s unconstitutional. It’s almost certain that all of this won’t hold up in the supreme court.

Be specific. What court case against public health officials could somebody today bring to court, successfully appeal all the way to the SC, and win? My guess is that the SC is going to look at our laws, the Constitution, and conclude that in the case of serious medical situations, the government has the right to limit the movement and speech of individuals and corporations, while still allowing for democratic processes to elect new officials who might enact more stringent or lenient laws within the constitutional framework.

Interesting test of the bill of rights isnt it ?

Where is the balance ?

Individual not being able to work and feed his family vs some of society getting sick and those who had pre existing conditions sometimes dying.

How do you predict what is worse ?

If you read about the impact of the great depression it makes covid look rather trivial. Do we repeat the great depression and is that for the benefit of society as a whole ?

I think you could get away with movement, but do you really thing restricting speech would hold up?

Beyond someone actively trying to get everyone to go outside at the same time and deliberately infecting people right now, I don't see what could pass the brandenburg test.

Imminent lawless action is a really high bar.

I keep hearing people assert this, but never seem to provide a legal explanation of how it would work. My understanding is that the US has upheld the longstanding use of the police power to preserve health, safety, and the general welfare. I’m curious what you think the court’s rationale would be.

I guess I have a hard time believing either that the court would entertain the idea that the county has no legitimate interest in its residents’ welfare, that they would reject legal precedent older than the US constitution, or that they would take up a challenge based on a factual disagreement about epidemiology.

My mind is open to a reasoned legal argument!

How does a great depression level event benefit society ?

When you tell everyone to stay home its not an individual you are impacting. You are damaging the entire social structure to prevent damage to the social structure.

Is the cure worse than the disease ? Prove the disease is worse because you are supposed to have due process to remove rights.

This doesn’t really address my question. I’m not spoiling for an argument over what you think is the right course of action. I’m curious about why the court would second guess the decision making of the county.

Let’s for the sake of argument say I thought that the county’s decision were silly. Governments do things that some people think are silly all the time. Yet, the court intervenes only in very few specific cases, under a very carefully chosen set of circumstances.

Not a lawyer. Tesla competes with GM, Ford, etc. Tesla is not a local business. Tesla's primary trade is interstate commerce. Court may decide the county is unfairly restricting Tesla and giving an unfair advantage to competitors.

Also, while I've been happily self isolated for two months and plan to continue, I don't believe that many of these restrictions would be upheld if challenged in court.

Why can a Target stay open and sell non-essential merchandise while a competitor that doesn't also sell groceries can't? To be fair, Target and Wal-Mart would need to have ceased selling non-essentials.

But then the government is deciding what is and isn't an essential good...

Which is why I don't think it would/will hold up.

Thankfully, people with the jobs/means to stay home actually staying home has relieved some of the pressure, so restrictions can be lifted without actually causing everyone to rush to the bar or sports event.

The vast majority of auto-manufacturing isn't opening for another week. It's hard to believe he's at a disadvantage when Michigan hasn't opened their plants either.

But it does point out the fact we are doing damage to prevent damage.

The curves do intersect and likely already have

It may suit public safety to indiscriminately handcuff every citizen, and we have the constitution to prevent that outcome. Confining everyone to their homes is hardly different in that regard.

Specifically the fourth amendment stipulates that the application of the law must well-justified, well-focused, and procedurally sound. In addition the first amendment guarantees freedom of assembly, which makes orders to disperse unsound.

There is actually a classic Supreme Court case upholding states’ right to interfere in business operations for the sake of public health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_Francaise_de_Navigat...

Courts have repeatedly held quarantine regulations constitutional within recent years both during Ebola and COVID-19 related cases.

Never mind that health departments regularly shut down restaurants and food industry operations when food-borne disease outbreaks occur.

That case involved quarantine of individuals, not a generalized shutdown of almost all businesses.

I live in Oakland and support Elon Musk's decision.

I also live in Oakland. I've lived in Alameda County for the past 8 years. I also paid 14k in real estate taxes last year to said county (I know that's small potatoes to some of my peers here but it's exorbitantly higher than most everywhere else).

I 100% support Elon here. The masterfulness of what he's doing is that over 10k employees are employed at that factory. If they can go to work - so can everyone else. He's essentially tossing a moltov cocktail at the whole house arrest bullshit.

Elon is a true patriot.

There are over a million jobs in Alameda County and what Tesla is doing here stands a high likelihood of causing an outbreak that detains the other 99% of us for longer than need have been, so that he can meet his looming performance targets and get paid $800 million.

High likelihood of causing an outbreak...? Not sure how you're reaching that conclusion. Their stated approach seems much safer and more conservative than any grocery or retail store currently IMO.

Grocery stores aren't open because of their extreme safety, they're open because of necessity. In fact they've been discussing closing grocery stores to the public too (and forcing pick-up etc.).

That doesn't disprove bavell's point.

Grocery stores are orders of magniutde less safe and orders of magnitude more frequented than Tesla factories. Let's be VERY conservative and propose that the factory is a mere 10× less risk than a supermarket. Let's assume that grocery stores are used by 100× more people than Tesla factory employees. That means grocery stores represent a 1,000× higher risk than Tesla's factory. And that's conservative.

But it's actually worse than that. If working at the Telsa factory reduces the frequency in which these employees must visit a supermarket (reduced use of store-bought toilet paper, reduced consumption of store-bought food) then its opening could arguably lower the overall risk profile.

I really don't think the situation is simple enough that you can rationalize a decision to it in 15 seconds.

Moot—I'm not the one making the decision.

I was just responding to arguments with other arguments. That's how an internet discussion works. If you say I was "rationalising" Tesla's decision to open the factory, you were equally "rationalising" the County's decision to keep it closed.

There's quite a difference between 10000 people who come together in the same place every day and then return elsewhere. Let's assume it is more like 3000 people on three shifts consistently. Then they all go home, shop at dozens of different grocery stores where the rest of us are trying to buy food, and so forth. It adds a lot of edges to the contact graph at the moment when we are trying to sever the edges we don't need.

Wait.... are you talking about grocery stores or factories? Facetiousness aside, your statement about thousand congregating and dispersing all over a community is true of grocery stores as well, with the added bonus of having a different mix everyday.

That said, I think you're right about severing all edges we don't need. No easy way out of this unfortunately...

You shop at your nearest grocer, or a nearby one, so the group mixing isn't that much. It's actually a fairly consistent group of people picking up eggs at the corner market. Tesla's autoworkers aren't paid enough to actually live in Fremont, so many of them are going to drive in from Stanislaus, Merced, and San Joaquin counties, creating exactly the kinds of long-distance links we don't want.

You live in a county with a democratically elected representative government. If you manage to convince most of your peers that you (and Musk) are right, you get to set the conditions of the health order by electing whoever you please. Otherwise, you have to deal with the democratic result, within the bounds of the US and CA Constitutions.

Why are you reading HN then, instead of a local Alameda County forum?

The county officials making these arbitrary rules and extensions are unelected, so they don't necessarily represent those living in the county either.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they are appointed by electeds. They're part of an elected administration.

You should. Australia's had much better coronavirus outcomes than the US has:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The US has a lot to learn from both Australia and New Zealand.

NSW ordered everybody to stay at home for 90 days except with a permit. Their lockdown is a lot more severe than ours, and they sealed their borders while we did not, and I don't credit being in the southern hemisphere as part of their policy, even though it has contributed a lot to their objective outcome.

Then learn from South Korea and Taiwan as well. Both northern hemisphere, both have better results than the US.

I don't think it's very useful to discuss the aggregate outcome in the USA. Fewer than 1% of US excess deaths have been in California, although 12% of Americans live here.

California has had worse outcomes than Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and South Korea:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/

It's a big state. See how small the number is for Alameda County?

By the way, I'm definitely not arguing with your conclusion. What we have to learn from Taiwan and Korea is that with a robust test and trace, we can go back to work. We just don't have it yet.

> See how small the number is for Alameda County?

Alameda County is worse per capita than Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. It's also worse in absolute numbers than New Zealand and Taiwan.

I live in the Bay Area and I support Elon's decision.

This is not a vote-based discussion. You have to support your point with facts/projections.

You might not care, but look at the COVID-19 statistics coming from New South Wales. I think they're entitled to have their perspective considered.

(Disclaimer: I also live in NSW and I wouldn't live anywhere in the USA even if you paid me a literal, tax-free million dollars.)

I'm not sure what exactly you derived that from but it appears to cross into personal attack and that's not allowed here.

Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23148744. We're here for curious conversation and can't have both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"dogmatic and not evidence driven" this is false and there is plenty of evidence to be concerned about factories as they are one of the primary vectors of spread in the post-lock-down world.

All over North America, the food-related factories that have remained open have become cause for outbreak. Here's a shortlist of the breakouts in Canada [1].

Cargill plants alone are responsible for a material % of those infected in Canada.

"A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco"

First, where is the evidence, second our 'food supply' is definitely an essential service, wheras Tesla factories are probably last on the list of 'things we need to re-open' to get going.

From a PR perspective, Musk is setting himself up for big trouble - odds are there will be some kind of outbreak, and even if his decision is not a factor, some Tesla employee, somewhere may die from Covid and then he will get blamed.

The CNN headline will read: "Tesla worker dies of Covid-19 after Musk orders plant re-opened"

Musk already has enough bad news, this is going to be and existentially problematic meme.

Mabye Musk is not the great businessman they say, because if it was, he'd realize that his customers are highly motivated by his 'green' / 'good' cause and that there is an incredibly amount of goodwill in his customer base. Tesla would not exist without this kind of goodwill (i.e. celebrities waiting 18 months for delivery, bragging on Twitter about it).

Instead of playing the 'Trump Card' on Twitter and getting people back to work, using 'The Constitution' style rhetoric, he should be playing some other card, like signalling how much his workers are important to him, how he's going to have 'special healthcare' for all Covid-related issues, how he's going to provide full pay for anyone hit by Covid, and provide extra vacay days for those who have family members hit by Covid - etc..

Musk is burning a lot of goodwill here and for what potential upside? He can open a factory a few weeks early? The County has even indicated that they are 'ok' with the factory re-opening so long as they've approved his plan. So basically he's getting into an international war over whether or not county officials should have a say in his 'special COVID plans'? Where is the ROI on this action?

I think Musk might be starting to cave under the constant stress and constant grind.

[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/these-are-the-meat...

Well, the ROI might be market expansion of Model Y and Cybertrucks towards the government-averse masses in mid-America and a few other states... Might be a decent advertisement to those demographics.

Minor quibble but I would suggest rural America as a far more accurate descriptor than mid-America.

That's an interesting point, but I don't think he's going to be getting many points there and it's coming at an existential risk to his core customers.

Musk is starting to 'look bad' and he's burning political capital for no reason.

Conversely, there's a real opportunity to look like a hero and leader here.

>This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.

It is 100% evidence based. Reduction of gatherings = reduction in transmission. There's no way around this. People may be more likely to get covid from costco, but reducing interaction to only costco is still reduction of transmission.

This idolization of Elon Musk and contrarian logic that really doesn't even make common sense is getting on my nerves.

It's like one of those people who said that face masks weren't protecting people from covid using faulty but overconfident logic.

Uh hello? A face mask blocks light and slows down

I came here to say this.

It isn't just the car factory one needs to look at: Where are these employees eating lunch? Have they redesigned break rooms? How are employees getting to work - collective transport? Since employees are out more due to work, are they more likely to stop elsewhere or have small gatherings since everything feels like it is returning to normal?

And as you said, going to less places means there is less chance of getting infected.

Behind the scenes Musk's lawyers told him to do this - - an arrest is a significant action that may be necessary for his lawsuit to go forward. He is daring Alameda county to arrest him, and their lawyers know this game as well.

>Carmakers are also defined as a COVID19 critical industry, and every other carmaker manufacturing in the United States is either open, or capable of open today. This puts Tesla at a serious disadvantage.

So locking down is just "locking down", but arbitrarily classifying car building as essential during a massive economic downtown is a-okay with you? Seems reasonable.

>and every other carmaker manufacturing in the United States is either open, or capable of open today.

Wrong, many are opening on May 18th, which is when the government of CA would have opened Tesla. They couldn't wait 10 days.

>This puts Tesla at a serious disadvantage.

First of all, what does the health of the public have to do with the fairness of car competition?

Second, I thought Tesla had unlimited money and unlimited demand? What's the issue if they're closed for a few weeks?

>What's the issue if they're closed for a few weeks?

If you think a few weeks is all its going to take you arent paying attention to the lack of testing capacity or the lack of a viable vaccine.

6 months minimum and likely 18 months is how long things will take to get testing or a vaccine in place ( if one is actually viable )

How many weeks have already passed ?

> A Tesla factory is a much safer place to be than a Home Depot or a Costco, and many other businesses open in California today

This is enough of a reason and unlike Costco, consumers are not going to Tesla factory to get infected and spread infection. I think Bay area counties are on a power trip right now and unable to provide reasons and rationals to keep things shut. It is not Tesla who needs to convince the county officials why they should be operating, it should be other way around.

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