> 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]
Musk is talking out his ass and undermining public safety. If this is also how he approaches product design I don't think I ever want to get into a Tesla again.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/9/21253127/elon-musk-lawsuit...
Gavin Newsom really is Gavin Belson...
A friend just got a job at a local city council working on their climate change action plan. There are ~20 people working on it, all making ~$80k a year. The city has 30k residents. Every single city of this size or larger in the entire country is going to duplicate this effort, and pay these salaries, and maybe even come up with different solutions to the same problem.
City A will ban the use of some chemical, and a handful of miles away a different city with different rules will rejoice in the use of the same chemical.
It all feels awfully redundant to me.
In the SF bay, SF itself is a city and county. The other counties have health authorities, but so does the city of Berkeley. All the health officers of the Bay Area counties are working together, so effectively creating a larger jurisdiction. But Los Angeles is 400 miles (600km) away and in a totally different situation, so it makes sense to do things locally in large states such as California. Different levels of jurisdiction allow for flexibility, so for example, the state may declare non-essential businesses closed, but the local health officer can define the list of essential businesses or activities--or issue exemptions.
It also allows some level of local control. Smaller less-populated counties in Northern California where the population is more against the quarantine rules, and where frankly there is less need for them, can have less enforcement, or change later if they find they need it.
For a different example, look at France, a highly centralized government. The central government makes all health decisions, but they they still divided the country into zones (Paris and the east were hardest hit by the virus). While all areas had restrictions, they were more strict in those regions, and now that they are starting to re-open, each department has a list of criteria. So each department will have different levels of openness, just like counties in the US.
1. The governments communication here is less extreme, and generally more reasonable. A few weeks ago a Dutch restaurant holder announced that he was going to open his restaurants regardless of the lockdown because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to handle it financially. This sparked a lot of debate and at some point, during a press conference, the PM was asked about it. He replied by saying he completely understood what the restaurant holder felt and saw it as a cry for help. He promised he would do anything to help restaurants survive. He wasn’t mad at the restaurant holder, instead, he showed seemingly sincere compassion. It defused the situation.
2. The Dutch government has said many times that everything they do is almost 100% based on their scientific advisory panel. They recently added some economic and behavioral experts to that panel to balance it out and we are slowly moving out of lockdown. Note that the approval rating of the Dutch PM has absolutely skyrocketed during the past couple of months and this makes it much easier to bring the bad news :)
3. There’s this Dutch tradition of late night shows that a lot of people watch. They all have basically the same format and the guests (during the past months) were mostly government people, virologists, doctors, economic experts etc. These shows are interesting in that it's just a few hours of talking, but they have millions of daily viewers. It creates sort of a common reference frame for the discussion to move forward. That restaurant holder for example was a guest that night, and asked to explain why he wanted to open up. 30 minutes of listening to a much more nuanced picture of how this has been for him, his staff and others in the food branch helps understand his motives. Also, because the same table hosts a government representative, a virologist and an ICU doctor you bet the guy had to walk back his earlier statement (at least partially) as it was carefully explained to him how opening up to soon might just make things worse. His position shifted from "I'll open up regardless" to "I'm asking the government for more relief money so we can survive this."
I probably oversimplified some stuff, and I'm not sure about these observations at all. There's a lot more at play most likely, anyway, this should give you some insight in how things are going elsewhere.
(Also are any of the shows you describe in #3 in English? Would love to check them out)
Thing that is most disturbing here is peoples desire for normalcy overrides their ability to do simple arithmetic.
The only place I've ever been where a decent in-person political discussion was hard to find was the norcal tech bubble (not to bag on the left, I've just never spent time in any stereotypical right-wing stronghold).
There trick is understanding that most people use politics as either: a way to provoke a reaction out of the person they're talking to, and/or use politics as a proxy reason to hate others when the real reason is one that they can't admit outloud or even to themselves (e.g. class, subculture, race, sex (there's more, but those are the big ones)).
"The economy" isn't some abstract thing that produces random stock market numbers. It's everyone's livelihood.
Which is not to defend the managers who are pushing for things to open when they don't have front-line exposure.