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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

They are essential because people stay home and some up.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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