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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Since each person's conception of "essential" is different

There was someone on WGN-TV a few weeks ago lamenting that it was insulting for all of the hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors to be called "non-essential."

I thought it was more insulting for that person to value the work of hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors on an equal basis with firefighters, doctors, paramedics, and actual real "essential" workers.

Nobody calls a holistic lifestyle consultant to run into a burning building to save a baby.

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An irony of the "lockdown" is that all the activities that aren't "essential" are the reasons people have to live. "Essential" covers most of the basics in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the absence of Maxlow's top line items, why bother with the "essentials?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

If doing yoga or going to the gym are the only reasons someone has to live, they need mental health counseling.

Why do essential workers all have to be valued on an equal basis as firefighters, doctors, etc? How are you measuring value?

Why do essential workers all have to be valued on an equal basis as firefighters, doctors, etc?

Because that's what the word "essential" means: Things you can't do without. Not "things I really really really like."

How are you measuring value?

People who save lives > people who don't save lives.

That's a reasonable definition of "essential", but at least in the US the term isn't used this way. Takeout restaurants, Starbucks, etc. have always remained open as "essential businesses".

The wording was problematic from the start. It probably would have been better to classify businesses into "risky" and "not-risky" or some sliding scale of risk, rather than using the "essential" label that comes with moral baggage. Close or restrict risky businesses (indoor, large crowds, etc.), keep open not-risky ones.

It made more sense at the very start, when many people expected that we'd spend 2-4 weeks doing only "essential" things and then we'd return to mostly normal life. But yeah, it became clear pretty quickly that wasn't the trajectory, and the required messaging shift never ended up happening.

Those people were under informed. Everybody "in the know" knew mid-March, before the lockdowns, that health officials wanted AT LEAST 8 weeks of shutdown to be able to have an impact and measure it.

The information was out there..

I'm pretty sure that, much like with Prohibition, the moral baggage is the entire point. The idea is that for this disease - and only this disease - we have the absolute moral obligation to minimize the number of deaths no matter what, and that anyone who suggests there are tradeoffs is a monster who literally wants to sacrifice people.

in the US the term isn't used this way. Takeout restaurants, Starbucks, etc. have always remained open as "essential businesses".

Not where I live. All restaurants were shut down, even for take-out. They were only allowed to offer take-out food when restrictions started being lifted.

Interesting, I'd only heard of that happening in other countries.

50 states, and 50 different sets of rules.

Just curious, which state is this? (you don't have to respond if you don't want to -- I don't want to violate your privacy, I just want to know)

It just seems to me shutting down takeout makes it harder to enforce a lockdown. It assumes everyone is able to cook, which doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption.

Yep. Dairy Queen, for instance, had lines of cars wrapping around the building and lining up in the street during the height of our "lockdown". Tons of things were still open in-person, too, like grocery stores, and there was no mask order and maybe 1/4 of people were wearing masks, at best, and almost no employees anywhere. Only exception is that a couple weeks in (IIRC) Costco started requiring them. We didn't get a mask order until a couple weeks after we ended our joke of a "lockdown". The police don't follow the order (sigh) but almost everyone else is, at least. But now everything's back open, more-or-less entirely.

It's no wonder we're still muddling along with this problem, months into it.

Both firefighters and doctors are a relatively recent “invention”, I’d say 100-150 years old (with the medical profession being re-invented after a first stint back in Antiquity). As such there’s nothing “essential” about them, you could say that bakers, fishermen or even sex-workers are more essential than doctors and fire-fighters.

Both firefighters and doctors are a relatively recent “invention”

So what? What does that have to do with anything?

you could say that... even sex-workers are more essential than doctors and fire-fighters.

You can say that, but you'd be wrong. That's the great thing about the internet. Anyone can say anything no matter how false it is, and they get to be on an equal footing with people who know what they are talking about.

And people died because of them lack of them.

It's a pretty twisted definition of "essential" to include only the things that are definitely going to kill you if you go without and not to include the things that just might kill you.

I was only saying that we managed just well enough without firefighters and medics for thousands of years, had they been really “essential” we would have kept/invented those trades well before we actually did. Were you to have asked my peasant grandmother what she reguarded as more essential between a doctor and a priest she would have totally chosen the priest, reason being that she knew she was going to die anyway (we all will) but the priest was one of the only persons who could take care of her soul.

Again, doctors and firefighters might look “essential” for a secular and technological society like ours (one where we’re afraid of death and where we value physical stuff that could burn) but that hasn’t always been the case. It still isn’t in many parts of the world.

> ad they been really “essential” we would have kept/invented those trades well before we actually did

Unless things change over time, as such requiring new facilities. We didn't have nuclear power station inspectors (or regulations) thousands of years ago, so are they also non-essential?

> It still isn’t in many parts of the world

There are "many" places in the world were death is not feared and people are happy to see their stuff burn? Barring nomadic jungle tribes with no persistent possessions or home locations in the first place, which societies are you describing?

The fact that our ancestors commonly died of tuberculosis doesn't mean they where happy to do so.

100 years ago if you cut yourself shaving, you might die and no doctor could help. We have since upgraded our expectations in medical outcomes.

> yourself shaving, you might die and no doctor could help

In my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) often times the barber was also the doctor and the dentist (was called "felcer).

There could be a couple different usages of "essential" in this case. There is the services that are needed to keep people alive, then there are services needed to keep people healthy (including mental health), and finally services needed because taking them away would induce a large amount of non-compliance with the public.

Then there is the twisting of "essential" -- the home center needs to say open because if a pipe busts in your house you need to get replacement parts to fix it. But most people go to the home center to pick up materials for home projects that they can now do because they suddenly have a large amount of at-home time on their hands.

> Things you can't do without.

This gets tricky. Of course we know that when there's a fire, a firefighter is often imminently essential. But it's trickier to imagine a society where all "non-essential" jobs are banned indefinitely. You wouldn't die in a matter of minutes like in the fire example, but you'd also probably find such a society unrecognizable to the extent that you might reconsider what types of jobs are and aren't "essential." There'd be a lot of poverty, a lot of hunger, and yes, it would cause a lot of people to die.

If the income from teaching yoga is what feeds and shelters you then yes, teaching yoga is essential.

Essential services are essential to others.

Income is trivially addressed, given political will.

Do you call a Walmart cashier to save a baby? Wine story employee? Cannabis dispensary staff? I felt insulted that in the country I live in luxury wine stores were essential and open throughout the lockdown while gyms were not. If I can forego gym for a few months, sure as hell you can survive without a bottle of Bordeaux. And this is with all the rhetorics about public health.

> I thought it was more insulting for that person to value the work of hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors on an equal basis with firefighters, doctors, paramedics, and actual real "essential" workers.

Part of fairness is in treating equal things equally, and unequal things unequally.

Even talking about non-first responders, the folks in supermarkets are more essential on this spectrum than beauticians of various niches IMHO.

When armies mobilize, they don’t carry supermarkets, but they do carry barbers.

You ninja'd your comment into something completely different... Responsing to your original comment about MREs: the supply chains for supermarkets already exist. I'd be very surprised if there were enough MREs to feed everyone for a year and then still have the ability to restart normal supply chains from a dead stop.

Regular people shop at supermarkets so they don't starve. Armies carry food supplies so they don't have to shop at local supermarkets. They bring barbers because tight haircuts are essential to military dress and clean shaved faces are critical to tight sealing gas masks.

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