NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay | Hacker News Reader

NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

iapps.courts.state.ny.us

386 pointsbananapear409 comments

This is a confusing headline. The judgement here is in NY state court, and pertains to employees of and in the City of New York, which enacted a vaccine requirement for employees of the city and later private employers in the city. Months later, Eric Adams was elected mayor of NYC, and he issued an executive order exempting athletes, performers, and artists from the mandate.

Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.

My state's republican governor sued mayors closing down construction sites during the peak of the pandemic, and also exempted a dizzying number of industries and sectors.

For example: if you sold an ATV to a town police department, you were deemed an essential business and thus got to ignore the closure orders and keep your entire business, both offices and showrooms/repair centers, open.

...but then his administration also went around shutting down bicycle shops in the city. Guess what a lot of medical staff and "essential" blue-collar workers depend upon for transportation, particularly since the public transit system was largely shut down, dangerous to be on public-health-wise, and doesn't operate at hours useful for some shift workers?

Eventually he got the message, but not after a lot of very cringe comments to the press about the pandemic being "real" and implying that bike shops were just frivolous luxury stores.

Nothing says luxury like riding a few hundred dollar used bike through the pissing rain.

The poor blue collar working man has a truck for every family member, and a heavy duty truck for the old man.

Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?

It doesn't, that's the point. The mandate presumably would have been legal if Adams hadn't added those arbitrary exemptions.

Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued):

> “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.”

Source:

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

Yikes. This reads like a gish-gallop of anti-vax talking points. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the decision to reinstate the employees, but this legal reasoning is embarrassing.

Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…

I think it is important to understand that not all people who against vax mandates are anti-vaxers.

I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.

Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications.

Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax.

It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.

This argument is useless in the face of the COVID shots because they do not prevent transmission, an important factor in herd immunity being effective.

Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.

Your lack of understanding how vaccines work belies your argument. No vaccine prevents transmission. That makes no sense. In order to prevent transmission, your immune system must prevent any infection, regardless of how minor. No vaccine guarantees absolute prevention from infection. Depending on mode of transmission, any infection can be transmissible. Thus any vaccine may not prevent transmission, for anything.

Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.

> No vaccine prevents transmission.

Wrong. Some viruses don't get transmitted if the person is not symptomatic, even if there's an infection. Your lack of understanding belies your argument.

> Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.

Well, first of all, the vaccine has to be:

* effective,

* free of major side effects,

* for a virus that kills a large portion of the infected and that kills more than just the elderly and obese,

* and not mandated for people to actually live.

The COVID shots and mandates did not meet any of those requirements.

And if you complain that my last requirement is too much, remember that in the United States, the Federal Government has severe limits on its power on purpose. Sure, the government should be able to prevent unvaccinated people from accessing government facilities, but only temporarily (while the pandemic is going on) because the government has jurisdiction over those things.

But it does not have jurisdiction over telling businesses who they can and cannot do business with.

Not just the federal government! All levels of government have limits on their powers. Important in the context of a New York state court ruling.

Yes, exactly! Thank you for saying that when I forgot to.

Ok I have more vaccines then the law requires because I went places where it made sense to get more shots for more disease.

I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:

- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.

And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.

How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.

I am not debating the efficacy of a particular vaccine and I care not for your rationale -- save your breath.

Your arguments, however you feel may be justified, are not in favor of vaccination, and by definition are anti-vax. Ask yourself what would need to be different for you to be in favor.

This kind of binary thinking where you want to put everyone not fully toeing the party line into the evil group is exactly what makes issues like this so politicized. All it does in the end is divide and thereby push people further into opposition of what you are trying to force on them. In other words if you want more people to actually become anti-vaxers rather than people questioning or just being hesitant about a specific novel vaccine, keep doing what you are doing.

> vaccines take years to test not months

This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.

This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before.

Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a high probability of succeeding, not only technologically but financially. If you're lucky, you find someone to fund phase-1 trials. After those trials are done, you analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-2 trials. You have to finish those trials, analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-3 trials, which are extremely expensive.

If there's someone who guarantees funding for all three phases up-front, you can go a lot faster, without sacrificing scientific integrity at all. You can begin recruiting people for the phase-3 trials before phase-1 trials even begin. You can immediately begin the next phase of the trials once you know the vaccine passes the requisite safety threshold, even if the previous trials are still returning data.

Normally, these things are done strictly in order in order to minimize financial risk. If there is no financial risk, you can do a lot of things in parallel.

> And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.

The vaccines reduce your risk of serious disease or death by orders of magnitude. That's extremely strong protection. They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.

> How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.

The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.

> > vaccines take years to test not months

> This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.

This is not at all true. There is only so much you can parallelize things, as every software dev should know. It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance. (Does this trigger autoimmune issues? Birth defects, like thalidomide did? And some birth defects - mental ones in particular - might not become apparent for years!)

> They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.

There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.

> The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.

One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations, and long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.

> It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance.

A couple of things. First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?

> There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.

I haven't seen anything to suggest this.

> One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations

CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.

> long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.

Long-term side-effects of vaccination are very much knowable. There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects, and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects. Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.

> First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

This is perhaps not an argument in favor of the proven safety of vaccines for pregnant women.

> Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?

We fundamentally do not understand the human body. We do not know why many common medications work, and many of the reasons we think others work are likely wrong. And we know that many chemicals carry future risks of birth defects.

> CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.

This is because people in their 20s and 30s are so unlikely to die outside of accidents and malice, not because covid was a large absolute risk. The risk of death for someone over 65 was iirc 100x that of someone under 55.

When you limit the group to "otherwise healthy people under 40" the risk ratio skews even further. This is normal. But it means that those people receive a much lower benefit from vaccination.

> There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects

Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis. Antigen fixation, leading to reduced protection against future variants. The immune system identifying the mRNA delivery vector as a threat, preventing the use of future mRNA treatments.

"But those aren't proved" is really not convincing to me. For an EUA for at-risk populations, ok. For mandates? Heeeelll no, go cross those Ts first.

> and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects.

The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

"Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

> Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.

This is medicine we're talking about, a bit of uncertainty and doubt is very much justified - especially when the process has been politicized.

> We fundamentally do not understand the human body.

This is not true. We understand a great deal about the human body. What's relevant here is that we understand the mechanisms that cause serious vaccine side-effects, and we understand why those side-effects appear within a few months.

> Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis.

Myocarditis occurs soon after vaccination, not long afterwards. It's also a very rare side-effect (it actually occurs more often from the virus itself).

> The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

What does this have to do with long-term adverse side-effects? The types of changes that a vaccine causes in the immune system are understood, and the reasons why those changes sometimes cause adverse side-effects are also understood. The mechanisms do not spring into action years later. The side-effects begin within months, at the latest.

> "Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

You're just dismissing immunology out-of-hand, based on vague statements about science not knowing how the body works.

> especially when the process has been politicized.

The politicization was on the side of the vaccine "skeptics." One of the most infuriating aspects of the pandemic has been how the most effective single tool for saving lives, a tool that has minuscule risks, has been subject to so much FUD. This tool is safe enough and beneficial enough that I would have absolutely no problem with mandating it for participation in society, the same way that seat belts and airbags are mandated.

The etymology of vaccine comes from vacca, which is Latin for cow. Vaccines were originally discovered after finding that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to smallpox, which otherwise not only made people gravely ill but had a mortality rate upwards of 30%. The reason, it was discovered, is that they were regularly exposed to cowpox which sufficiently strengthened their immune systems to provide effective immunity to smallpox. And thus the field was born.

Herd immunity does not make vaccines work better, but is a tertiary effect whereby unvaccinated individuals can receive effective protection simply by living in an area with a high vaccination rate. In extreme cases (such as with smallpox) diseases can even be completely eliminated, but this requires extremely effective vaccines that prevent infection and spread, vaccines that are robust against mutations, and diseases that are unlikely to be able to exist without humans. None of these factors apply to COVID or the vaccines developed for it.

The etymological tidbit is but a distraction from the meat of the issue, which is that you are wrong.

Namely, herd immunity absolutely does make vaccines work better, and is the basis of all vaccine policy in the modern world. I'm not even sure how you can state it's a tertiary effect when it is the primary reason vaccine policies exist.

You're simply spreading misinformation. Herd immunity due to vaccination has resulted in the eradication or near eradication of multiple deadly infectious diseases over the last few centuries. And if not for humans, then look only to farm medicine. Ignoring the power of vaccine policies and mandatory vaccination walks humanity back hundreds of years. Eradicating small pox took hundreds of years. We've been combating COVID-19 for close to three years.

Ask yourself: what qualities of a COVID-19 vaccine would satisfy you?

The entire point is that a smallpox vaccine does provide genuine immunity from smallpox to the point that was so apparent that we could casually observe even the tiniest micro-population (milkmaids) were somehow just completely immune. They didn't get it, they didn't spread it, and their immunity didn't just disappear in a few months or because of a slight genetic variation.

And, also critically, there is no non-human transmission vector for smallpox. It travels exclusively between humans, contrasted against COVID which thrives in both human and animal populations. So if you were unvaccinated and spent all your time around milkmaids - you would not become infected, because there was no vector for the disease to get to you. If 90% of your company were milkmaids, you may get it if one of the other unvaccinated was infected, but the odds would be reduced. This is what herd immunity refers to.

You can observe the effects of 'herd immunity' with the current COVID vaccines in places such as Gibraltar. They achieved greater than 100% vaccination rates, and early on, by vaccinating not only their entire population, but even a large number of migrant workers. They ended up with a death rate of 3,204 per million contrasted against 3,266 for the US. And their infection rate was one of the highest in the world at nearly 60%, but that was probably more so due to extensive testing than greater susceptibility.

The problem is that this is a very first mandate for vaccination we ever imposed on ordinary people.

The US has very complex society and diverse population, so mandates do not work and might create backclash.

I think mass vaccination can be easily achieved by mass marketing. Mandates just made this way too political: and as we can see did not achieve a thing.

> The problem is that this is a very first mandate for vaccination we ever imposed on ordinary people.

That's not true! It used to be you had to show your smallpox vaccine scar (the vaccine left a distinctive mark) in order to enter many businesses.

That is true. I forgot about that.

And why did they check for scars? Because people were forging their vaccination certificate (like now with COVID). So this mandate thing did not really worked well.

I imagine the scar would be relatively easy to fake with makeup. I always assumed it was just the most obvious way to verify smallpox vaccine status. Did we even have consistent medical records back then?

It's okay if some unvaccinated people manage to cheat the system, as long as the vast majority cannot. Similar to how laws against thievery are useful even though thieves still exist.

We knew the odds the Covid vaccine would substantially reduce transmission were very low. Covid first impacts your mucosal immune compartment, which means an infection first gives you all the symptoms exhibited by a mild case of Covid. It also mostly spreads from there as you exhale.

The vaccine does not target your mucosal immune system. It's injected. Thus, the vaccine will help you if you develop a severe case of Covid that spreads beyond your throat/sinuses/lungs. Immune system compartments work largely independently. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27169/

> The first is that immune responses induced within one compartment are largely confined in expression to that particular compartment. The second is that lymphocytes are restricted to particular compartments by expression of homing receptors that are bound by ligands, known as addressins, that are specifically expressed within the tissues of the compartment. (Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.)

One can be absolutely pro-vaccine, want to drive down vaccine hesitancy rates and still think that mandating vaccinations is not the way to go.

For example they could argue that people will rebel against "you must do X" reflectively, but a well designed and sensitive information campaign might win them over.

> One can be absolutely pro-vaccine, want to drive down vaccine hesitancy rates and still think that mandating vaccinations is not the way to go.

One would then be quite ignorant of the history of how vaccines are rolled out. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211029-why-mandatory-va...

This is a crazy level of absolutism that seems only to exist to force a "with us or against us" reaction.

I think everyone where I live should probably be supplementing vitamin D in the winter months because it is damn near impossible for even people working outdoors all day to get enough vitamin D through natural sunlight at this parallel. Never would I dream of mandating a vitamin D regimen to people. My lack of wanting a vitamin D mandate, by your very argument, would make me anti vitamin D.

I take vitamin D daily, and have convinced others they probably should too, which I think makes me an advocate on some level. If even your top percentile advocates are "anti" from your operating definition, because they don't go far enough, you may be an extremist.

Funny how millions of people who had all the common vaccines except the covid "vaccine" suddenly became anti-vaxer. That like saying someone who smokes cigarettes, pipes and shisha but not cigars must be anti-smoking.

The common western covid "vaccines" do not have the properties of other common vaccines. They are at best comparable to flu shots which I know no one under the age of 50 who has ever took them. Are these all anti-vaxers now too? Have you ever head anyone talk about herd immunity related to flu shots pre-covid? Almost everyone alive today apparently prevented herd immunity for flu most of his life by not taking the flu shot. So we're all anit-vaxers.

>I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.

You need some more moments I guess, you clearly didn't think this trough.

This definition of "anti-vax" is broad enough to include those who happily received the vaccine, but oppose mandates.

That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.

That's because being anti-mandate is effectively being anti-vax from a public health policy perspective. By construction, effective public health can't be about individual choice, and the astonishing efficacy of vaccines in history has relied on this principle.

The legal reasoning doesn’t need to go beyond the first line, which I believe is now scientific and popular consensus?

“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.”

“A talking point” is a very sleazy turn of phrase. You don’t say it is wrong, incorrect, harmful; you just apply guilt by association even though the statement in question may have merit by itself.

> Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.

This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk.

That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).

That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this.

This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).

> Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative.

Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021.

> Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics

The trials were always designed to test protection against symptomatic disease, severe cases and death. They were not designed to test protection against infection. Everyone who read the trial registrations and the studies knew this from the beginning. The fact that this has recently been presented as a big revelation in the media just shows how uninformed the public (and much of the media) is. It's also a reflection of the revisionist narrative (i.e., we shouldn't have done anything about CoVID) taking hold.

Protection was falling steadily at the time delta disappeared completely, and continued falling on the same trend far below zero.

Your description of the trials is perfectly inverted! I wonder how that happens. The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections. They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so, and as for death, more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! They definitely didn't make claims about reducing the death rate because it was so tiny to begin with that they couldn't get a big enough sample of COVID deaths to make any conclusions, not even with 64,000 odd people.

> The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections.

> They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so

I'm sorry, but you're wrong on both of these points. From the Moderna phase-3 trial description [0] on clinicaltrials.gov:

> Primary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Efficacy: Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273

If you look at the trial protocol, there is no regular PCR testing (except for at the start of the trial and at administration of the 2nd dose). Only people who have two or more symptoms are tested. This means that the trial is only meant to test efficacy against symptomatic infection (also known as "CoVID-19," the disease, as opposed to the virus, "SARS-CoV-2"). From the scientific paper[1] on Moderna's phase-3 results:

> Covid-19 cases were defined as occurring in participants who had at least two of the following symptoms: fever (temperature ≥38°C), chills, myalgia, headache, sore throat, or new olfactory or taste disorder, or as occurring in those who had at least one respiratory sign or symptom (including cough, shortness of breath, or clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia) and at least one nasopharyngeal swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample (or respiratory sample, if the participant was hospitalized) that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) test.

Then, later on from clinicaltrials.gov:

> Secondary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of Severe COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273 or Placebo

So you see that the idea of preventing "severe CoVID-19" goes back all the way to the formulation of the trials in early 2020.

And more detail from the scientific paper:

> A secondary end point was the efficacy of mRNA-1273 in the prevention of severe Covid-19 as defined by one of the following criteria: respiratory rate of 30 or more breaths per minute; heart rate at or exceeding 125 beats per minute; oxygen saturation at 93% or less while the participant was breathing ambient air at sea level or a ratio of the partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen below 300 mm Hg; respiratory failure; acute respiratory distress syndrome; evidence of shock (systolic blood pressure <90 mm Hg, diastolic blood pressure <60 mm Hg, or a need for vasopressors); clinically significant acute renal, hepatic, or neurologic dysfunction; admission to an intensive care unit; or death.

0. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427

1. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389

Kyrie Irving isn't a firefighter.

No, he a chimney since he gets swept

In Cleveland we still call him the bus driver

The argument at the time was that it was "creating a double standard that disadvantaged local artists and athletes" compared to performers that were not residents of NYC (but commuted in for work).

https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/153-22/transcr...

Stuff like this and allowing certain events while vilifying others as "superspreader events" killed a lot of people's belief in mitigation strategies IMO. A virus is a virus and doesn't recognize human needs or wants. Either there are no exceptions for anyone or we shouldn't bother.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS.

Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

People were rabidly cheering it on too. Police going around shutting playgrounds and arresting parents for playing outdoors with their children, while at the same time the politicians they voted for were constantly and egregiously shown to be flouting the rules on frivolities, parties, travel, fun. And there were excuses for the politicians and bloodlust for the commoner trying to exercise or raise their child. Absolutely flabbergasting.

I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it. Covid has been a really amazing learning experience for me.

“I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it”

That’s how the US has worked for a long time. See the war on drugs and mass incarceration, laws against black people and extreme political polarization. There was always a group of “others” that people wanted to get punished.

I bet if Trump had been a little smarter he would have got away with a lot more while people cheering him on. But it seems a lot of political institutions are eroding so maybe the next strongman will be able to go way further.

Yes that seems to be how it goes. Drum up irrational fear, lay the blame at the others, create hatred against them, then it becomes almost a self-sustaining mass psychosis. Intellectually I understood that's basically how it works, I guess I just didn't want to believe it.

People didn't care that vaccines didn't stop the virus spreading, they didn't care that insignificant transmission occurred due to individuals or small family groups enjoying the outdoors, they didn't care that some people were as irrationally scared of the vaccines as they were of covid. It wasn't about any kind of measured response designed for the real greater good. They wanted to see those hated others suffer and be punished for their heresy and audacity.

Is fear of dying irrational? I mean, it's going to happen to us all anyway, so does it matter if it's via airborne virus or whatever it is that conservatives fear is going to kill them?

Fear of dying of covid because someone is taking their child to play in a park certainly is.

And was the contagiousness of covid perfectly understood as soon as it was discovered?

Certainly by the time vaccine mandates came around, we had a pretty good idea of the contagiousness and lethality of the disease.

At that point, they had also taken the caution tape off the playground by me. I'm unaware who mandated that. As far as I can tell, many aspects of the disease and vaccines are still quite controversial, though it seems to me that vaccines are helpful.

> fun.

Its an amazingly corrupting kind of power, the ability to dictate the way others can have fun.

You've got cause and effect backwards. Societies have to overreact to pandemics, because those that didn't got wiped out - eventually. Enforcement of quarantine and similar measures through extreme social norms is a necessary adaptation to the threat of plague; civilization wouldn't be able to exist without it.

No I don't think I do have it backward.

What was the point of writing that?

It was commensurate with your reply. What exactly is the cause and what is the effect that you think I have backwards?

You think that the authorities are creating an internal enemy to sow division. I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.

> You think that the authorities are creating an internal enemy to sow division.

They do and have done so many times throughout history.

> I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.

Fear is an instinctive response to many things, and that can be and is manipulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cYPm__73XI I still remember this video that was widely circulated. The bans were never more than politicians wanting to look like they were doing something.

Home Depot was open because people need to fix shit around their house if you want them to stay home. What's arbitrary about that?

I agree with you about the beaches. But in the early days, we didn't really know what worked and what didn't. People said 6 feet apart was safe enough indoors because "droplets containing the virus fall to the ground".

It was arbitrary because small hardware stores had to close, while big ones could stay open. Also, because in most states someone in the governor’s office just went down a random list of professions or business types and decided on the spot whether to shut them down or not. That’s the very definition of arbitrary and capricious. It also fails the rational basis test, since the government hadn’t even come up with a rationale for why certain businesses have to close while others can stay open. Or why a Walmart could have a 500 people in it, while churches were limited to 10 people at a time (regardless of the size of the church’s building, even), etc.

Then why?

Then why what? Can you elaborate a bit?

Sorry, why would he do this? If he wasn't doing it thinking it would help then what?

I’m not sure which person you are referring to, but it doesn’t matter if someone thought it would help. That’s not sufficient.

The rules vary somewhat from state to state, but in general a government order must be narrowly tailored to serve a legitimate government interest, there must be a rational basis for how the order will actually serve that interest, and it must not be arbitrary or capricious. It has to have all three or it’s out. Notably, “I thought it would help” isn’t quite on the list.

If you can explain why something might help, then that could form your argument for the rational basis test (although it would be better if you could explain how it _will_ help, rather than how it _might_ help). But the order had better meet all the other requirements as well.

There are often other requirements as well. The agency writing the order must have the explicit authority to do so. Some types of orders are limited ahead of time by legislation. For example, many states have a written maximum amount of time that any order based on a state of emergency can last. Etc, etc.

I didn't know about small hardware stores being forced to close. That's the arbitrary part then. If it was a question of space, they should've been allowed to continue business with curbside pickups.

Religion and community are important. But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

> But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

Not everyone puts priorities in that order. For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.

Plus, any order which treats businesses differently is going to be arbitrary. If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.

> If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.

It literally is not. I don't think you understand what "arbitrary" means. It's not "I don't see the difference".

> For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.

So have the service in the parking lot of the church. Or on an open field, the way JC used to preach. Not having daycare is far more disruptive to far more people objectively. Way more people go to school and daycare every day, than go to church. Way more people depend on having a school or daycare to send their kids to, than go to church.

> I don't think you understand what "arbitrary" means. It's not "I don't see the difference".

Arbitrary here means that the rule wasn’t decided rationally. The government must typically establish a “rational basis” for any rule that they want to impose on people.

It is commonly understood that being indoors with a lot of people increases the risk of transmitting a virus between those people. The risk is understood to go up when more people are present, but it is also higher when the building is smaller than when it is larger.

Thus, a rational basis for the maximum occupancy of a building during a pandemic would be based on the number of people per square foot. A rule such as “1 person per 100 square feet” treats both large and small groups fairly, as well as treating large and small buildings fairly.

When we look at specific rules that were actually in place during the pandemic, we often find that there was no such rational basis. The rules were instead arbitrary. In NYC, churches were limited to a flat 10 people in the building at any one time, regardless of the size of the church building. This limits a large church more than a small one, and thus the rule is arbitrary. It would have been no more arbitrary if they had rolled dice to pick the number.

Similarly, the same rule in NYC did not apply to big–box hardware stores. A Home Depot could have hundreds of people in it all the time! No matter how important hardware stores are, this is an arbitrary distinction. There is no rational basis under which the virus is dangerous to a group of 11 people who are in a church, but not to a group of 11 people who are in a Home Depot. The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important. What is important is that the difference in how the rule applied to them was arbitrary.

> The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important.

It absolutely is. The risk between churchgoing and Home Depot shopping, or going to school vs a bar may be equivalent, if we accept your analysis. But when taking risks, we also consider benefit. Risk for little to no benefit is best not taken. Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit. If you can't accept this basic principle, there's no point in continuing this discussion further.

Education/childcare and having a habitable home are more important, objectively, than getting drinks or worshipping in-person inside of a building. Safe alternatives for the latter existed - drinking beers on your porch, or having church services in a field.

Not everyone judges the importance of things the same way. If it is ok to force churches to meet outside (and many churches did), why not force Home Depot to move their goods outside to sell?

> Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit.

This is true. We each judge both the level of risk of each action we take, and the amount of benefit we gain from it. It is an _individual_ decision whether or not to go into a building, based on our _individual_ level of risk tolerance and our _individual_ benefit from whatever is in the building.

As a result, we long ago decided that if the government wants to step in and ban something that is risky, it must always have a rational basis on which that level of risk is determined. This prevents the government’s decisions from being arbitrary, and from favoring one party or group over others. (There are other requirements as well.)

For example, at some point we decided that crowded buildings were too large a fire risk. The government decided to allow the fire department to regulate the maximum number of people that could occupy every room of every building. In order to prevent this from being arbitrary, the fire department must base their determination on the actual fire risk: the materials the building is made from, the rate at which fire can spread in those materials, the number and size of the exits from the building, etc. The purpose of the building doesn’t matter: a church with 10,000 square feet and fire doors gets exactly the same maximum occupancy as a store with 10,000 square feet and fire doors (all else being equal; a real store would probably get dinged for having a bunch of additional flammable material in it).

It doesn’t matter that some buildings are used for frivolous purposes like entertainment while other are used for serious business. The fire doesn’t care about that, so neither can the fire department. This protects everybody against corruption and abuse of authority. Suppose the Fire Marshall was a crazy Fundamentalist, and arbitrarily decided that your bar should have a maximum occupancy of 2? You’d be out of business, and quite angry. By the same token, suppose the Fire Marshall was anti–religion, and arbitrarily decided that your church should have a maximum occupancy of 2? Same result. The rational basis rule is intended to protect us all from oppression at the hands of our neighbors, even when we have differing ideologies.

A virus doesn’t take into account the importance of the building when it infects people, and therefore pandemic restrictions on occupancy cannot take that into account either.

> why not force Home Depot to move their goods outside to sell?

Because a lot of products can't stay outside. It would be incredibly disruptive to operations. Not to mention that many stores, including Home Depot, did start offering curbside pickup to reduce risk.

Fire danger is omnipresent and essentially forever. Pandemics are not. So your analogy doesn't apply. I don't even know why I'm bothering. F it. Have a good weekend. Pretend you won the argument.

A small hardware store in town went out of business because they were forced to close. Same for a lot of other small stores. I could understand reducing number of people in the store but closing totally while keeping others open simply didn’t make sense. I think the exceptions had more to do with successful lobbying than with health reasons.

You could probably make a pretty good argument. A firefighter deals closely with the population in non-voluntary situations. An athlete or performer is likely quite a bit separated from the crowd watching them, and they're choosing to be there anyway. I don't know if there was actually an attempt to justify the decision, though.

And I imagine someone could also make a pretty good argument in the other direction. A firefighter is probably going to be wearing a mask. Performers by their nature are yelling into a crowded indoor space.

Because it doesn’t matter who has Covid in a fire.

Dunno how it is in NY, but in my city, the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires (around 40 EMS calls for every fire call). IMO if you're getting a ride to the hospital from someone it matters if they have COVID. And even though the vaccines don't guarantee that you won't get infected, the government does have an interest in preventing severe infections. COVID was the #1 killer of first responders

> the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires

Why does the fire department do medical stuff in the US? Why isn’t it medical people providing paramedics? Seems like something that should be left to professionals?

Most common example is probably motor vehicle accidents where firefighters (in concert with police officers) will secure the scene, gain access to the vehicle(s) if necessary, etc.

A lot of firefighters are also EMTs and paramedics. Both because in places with volunteer firefighters they can just work as EMS, and also because there's quite a bit of overlap in that if you need a firefighter there's a decent chance having EMS around would be beneficial as well.

Firefighters who aren't trained in EMS are not providing medical care, so saying "leave it to the professionals" is pretty dismissive in this context.

Because professionals will charge you second house mortgage.

What makes you think the fire department's medical staff aren't professionals? My city FD has 148 EMTs and 88 paramedics and are assigned to every station and unit in the city.

My county is kind of weird, but only firefighters are allowed to be paramedics here. They are considered professionals, they have to take the same classes and get the same certs as paramedics in other areas

I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.

>I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.

Except that doesn't apply to this situation. IIRC, ~95-97% of cops, EMTs and firefighters in NYC were already vaccinated and those that weren't were given ample time (extended several times) to get vaccinated.

As such, that was never an issue.

That said, there certainly was an arbitrary and capricious standard applied in this case.

I would rather have a live and vaccinated firefighter take me to the hospital than have to wait at home because an unvaccinated firefighter died of COVID or is hooked up to a vent

Someone healthy enough to be a firefighter has a near-zero chance of being hospitalized because of Covid.

Can't be that near zero if COVID deaths were about the same as all other causes of firefighter deaths combined in 2021.

Didn't know that. Thank you.

Of course, there's the huge complicating factor that the official figures for "covid deaths" conflate "died with" and "died from".

I found https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... which says “there were 70 non-COVID-19 on-duty firefighter deaths and 78 firefighter deaths resulted from COVID-19 in 2021”.

Also “In 2021, 1,353,500 fires resulted in 3,800 civilian deaths and 14,700 injuries”. By comparison, Wikipedia says there were 42,915 deaths due to motor vehicles in 2021, more than 10x. So it makes sense that even if fire department only dealt with road crashes they would spend more time on that than on fires.

By that logic, firefighters should have been exempt.

Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism. Having competing priorities is common enough, I don't see what doesn't make sense here. The city wants everyone to be vaccinated but it also wants broadway and basketball to be happening more, so they came up with this policy.

Why do firefighters have no effect on tourism? Without them you can not run a city. Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

Well clearly there is an elite class to whom body autonomy is granted, and an underclass who must follow arbitrary and capricious rules. OP appreciates that celebrities and entertainers are our betters and should not be held to the same standard.

An attitude which I've found to be curiously pervasive amongst self-proclaimed egalitarians and socialists.

FWIW, there was a vocal contingent of Marxists on Twitter who saw the mandates for the erosion of worker power and rights that they were, and vigorously opposed them. Richard Wolff even came around eventually, as well as Jimmy Dore after having his own personal run-in with the nasty side effects which are all too common with these vaccines.

Sadly, though, some of the most awful scapegoaters of the unvaccinated were indeed on the "left." Noam Chomsky even said they should be excluded from society completely, and if that meant they couldn't even obtain food, well, that would be their problem.

I don't think this mandate had much to do with body autonomy, but job autonomy, which yes, rich people have quite a bit more of.

Reality is that not letting Kyrie play basketball cost New York millions, and firing a firefighter doesn’t. Tons of people lose their jobs when entertainment acts close because the performers aren’t vaccinated. Money talks, does that mean celebrities should not be held to the same standard? Not really, it just means that holding them to the same standard would cost more than adams was willing to pay, whether it was the right thing to do or not.

Yes exactly. You are allowed to infect people with a deadly pandemic if you're rich, but if you're poor you have to risk personal medical consequences or lose your remote job.

This is the issue. Politicians claim it about health and saving "grandma", but when the number of dollars get big enough, all that goes out the window.

So apparently getting vaccinated is critically important, but not more important than money.

Because they can be replaced by vaccinated people I guess and if one or two can’t that’s ok because they’ve still got all the other ones. Kyrie and the Yankees can’t be replaced.

I’d be willing to bet I could more easily find a team full of people to swing a bat or throw a ball than a couple thousand people willing and able to rush into a burning building.

Can you get people to pay to watch them?

> Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

Spoken like someone who hasn't been to New York. I love the city, its a fun and vibrant place. But they have some unusual trash policies (primarily they don't have alleys so trash has to be dumped on the main sidewalk) and wherever you go its not uncommon for the sidewalks to be lined with trash waiting for pickup.

I have been to New York and I have also seen Paris during a strike of garbage collectors. It gets ugly very quickly once collection stops.

The number one thing I have noticed in New York was they seem to make trash collection as loud as possible ideally at 3 in the morning :)

How would they collect trash efficiently during the day when many streets are packed. Not to mention the extra traffic a slow moving often stopping garbage truck would cause

Aren't NYC's financials a basket case though? Surely its politicians don't care much about bringing revenue to the city, rather bringing profit to their friends and families and lobbyists. That is what makes more sense here.

My understanding is that a significant number of Yankees were unvaccinated and would not have been able to play home games. There are a significant number of New Yorkers that would’ve been very upset had that come to pass, so politicians acted according to public will and gave them an exception. Does that mean this wasn’t also corruption? No, but it is a reasonable thing to do even without corruption imo.

You just said it was for revenue to the city though.

I'm not really convinced about this new explanation either. I've seen little to no evidence that upsetting significant numbers of people factored into any other decisions around covid response, including the significant number who were upset by the creation of these double standards.

I'm going to have to stick with pure and simple corruption as the simplest and most likely explanation, unless there is some extraordinary evidence supporting some other less likely one.

I meant revenue that went to businesses/people in the city, like the general ecosystem not just the government. And a large part of the backlash was from people whose jobs were eliminated until full scale entertainment came back. It was a big deal to tons of people.

And I meant it's just simple corruption because there is little to no evidence that can be produced which supports the fringe theory that politicians care about the city's finances or what is and is not a big deal to the common people.

They care about their finances and those of their friends and lobbyists and donors, so corruption is the simplest and most obvious explanation.

So you say there's no evidence for one theory then offer your own with no evidence?

There is lots of evidence that politicians are corrupt.

This is the reason they did it. It's also the reason that most firefighters and others like them do not vote for politicians like Eric Adams. Despite the fact that he's a former police officer.

> Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism.

I believe this is the most cynical thing I've read yet today.

> I don't see what doesn't make sense here

If the Athletes and Performers are so irreplaceable, then wouldn't you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it before you would require the firefighters? They are so replaceable, afterall...

> so they came up with this policy.

They wanted to force compliance, but then realized there are some people who see themselves as above compliance, so they carved out their own policy in a telling way to kowtow to them.

Dollars are replaceable. People aren't. You can't actually be happy to wrap this cynicism around this, can you?

> you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it

No, because they will just refuse. That’s the whole problem.

People are replaceable, resources aren't.

Are there athletes or performers older than 55 so covid vaccination would have positive effect?

There are certainly some stage performers over 55, but it's a small minority. Patti LaPone is 73 and is still on the stage.

because they travel into the state from elsewhere to work.

Not merely arbitrary. From the decision: "This Court aggress that the Commissioner cannot enact a term of employment on City employees and has exceeded his scope of authority..."

That part of the ruling, too, was based on the arbitrariness of the order (in particular the fact that the rule was indefinite rather than temporary, and applies only to city employees and not private employees once the private rule was rescinded).

That definitely plays into the sabotage thread. Any competent corp counsel would have been able to navigate around this issue.

Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people.

The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.

Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.

When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.

Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

People like government overreach when they agree with it completely forgetting that they won’t always.

Rights aren’t just for your side.

Absolutely. This is why I laugh when republicans who support all republican actions try to consider themselves libertarians. I guess it's the trendy term to be now.

If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

This last sentence is such a massive slippery slope that an answer isn’t even necessary.

Forgive me, but what is it a slippery slope of? I immediately thought this logic was already applied to things like child toy regulation or lead paint warning regulation or food recall regulation or workplace safety regulation… it’s really common for the government to enforce people to do things (or ban people from doing other things) in certain contexts because of the danger otherwise.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".

Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.

Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.

Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.

I actually think the government can and should regulate food consumption. We already did it with cigarettes and trans fats. Omega-6 fatty acids should be next. A more fair but less politically viable alternative is to tax the healthcare of people with >%30 body fat. But these should probably have 10 year limits with the ultimate goal of changing people's habits.

Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do. But why would you bring me into this?

>Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do.

More like I want to solve an increasingly unsusatinable cost to society:

>People with obesity experienced a statistically significant twofold increase in average direct healthcare costs per year (EUR 5,934), compared with controls (EUR 2,788) and had statistically significantly higher indirect costs compared to controls. Total healthcare costs for people with obesity and one or more of the 11 comorbidities were 91.7%–342.8% higher than total healthcare costs of the population with obesity but none of the 11 comorbidities.

>Obesity was associated with an increase in both direct and indirect costs. The presence of comorbidities was associated with additional healthcare costs.[0]

[0]https://doi.org/10.1080/14737167.2022.2053676

So you want to solve a problem created by authoritarian enforcement of healthcare costs distribution by introducing authoritarian enforcement of lifestyle?

Sounds like the more reasonable solution is to remove taxpayer funding for healthcare. That way, people who make bad choices wouldn't be subsidized by the public.

Yeah, except that's even less politically viable.

These are still negative regulations (don't do this), which are fundamentally different than the COVID vaccine regulations.

A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

They don't though.

None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.

> only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID

We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?

Yes, exactly. We shouldn't upend everyone's lives for the sake of the elderly and the feeble. The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US is near the average life expectancy[0]. There's a case to be made that the lockdown-related life loss, including the great increase in deaths of despair, as well as future poverty in children who more or less lost two years of schooling, will exceed the Covid death toll. Our policy response has been madness.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Not all policy decisions would necessarily result in "upend[ing] everyone's lives".

Many person years were lost: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

Yes, many person years were lost, mostly among the elderly and infirm. I am truly sorry for your loss, whether your father was in that group or not. But the fact on the ground is that "do nothing" and "do something stupid" were the only two choices that actually happened around the world, and regrettably mostly the latter. Pretending otherwise is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.

In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.

Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.

Excess deaths per capita show us where cultures are better than others at policy. Yes, some of those cultures have healthier people.

e.g., Those countries that paid only the sick to stay home were smarter than those who locked down everyone.

We should have invested in the infrastructure that will be of use in the next pandemic.

There are many obvious good policy decisions other than "do nothing".

I do realize that in the country run by Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpers that nothing useful will happen.

What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"? Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.

Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

> What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"?

I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.

Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.

The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.

> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.

> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.

> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers. Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.

According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.

> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).

> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.

I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.

> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/

> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.

The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?

I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?

Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.

I did not ask about vaccine mandates.

What's the best source on this? I know it's true, it's just sad and tragic that the Atlantic is still saying they prevent infection.

>None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.

People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.

<insert item here> is a threat to our <choose one of: lives, democracy>, and so these regulations and encroachments must be enacted!

Speaking for myself, I'm obsessed with corporate overreach in general. It just so happens that government is the largest and the most well-armed corporation around, so it gets considerable attention as such.

Sabotaged is a politically biased way of describing the events here. The reality is different as my sibling comment pointed out

Confusing: you haven't written a sibling comment? What are you talking about? Did you use a second account?

Are you your own sibling?

> sibling (n.) (computing theory) A node in a data structure that shares its parent with another node.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sibling

> share (v.) To have or use in common

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/share

> another (det.) Not the same; different

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/another

Being one’s own sibling is incompatible with the accepted definitions, so no.

Did I use the term incorrectly? A sibling comment is someone else’s comment that shares a parent comment, is it not? I’ve seen others use this term

I think that the confusion is with the word my. If you had said a sibling comment, it would likely have been immediately clear. Linking or quoting the sibling comment would avoid linguistic ambiguity altogether.

I see. I will try that next time

Eric Adams' "performers and sports players" exemption was specifically to allow Broadway to re-open and to allow Kyrie Irving to play in Brooklyn.

The whole thing was a farce anyway so it doesn't matter.

It wasn't Kyrie, it was the Yankees. The opening came just before the start of the MLB season but well into the NBA season.

Rumor was Aaron Judge, the Yankee's biggest star, was unvaccinated. He personally sidestepped question about vaccine status and the team had publicly said a few (two?) players on a Yankees hadn't had their shots. Before opening day there were questions about if Judge would be able to play in New York.

The whole thing ended up being a mute point, because everyone on the starting roster[1] eventually got their shots so they could travel to Canada to play the Blue Jays.

[1] they later traded for an unvaccinated player

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/sports/baseball/aaron-jud...

moot

Yeah, I also meant opening day roster, not starting roster. Can you tell I couldn't sleep last night?

DeBlasio was known as the "Dope from Park Slope", but this one is pretty inept thinking as well.

This is 100% correct [1]:

> Mayor Eric Adams plans to announce on Thursday that professional athletes and performers working in New York City will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19, according to a person familiar with his plans.

> This means that Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star point guard who has refused to get vaccinated, will be able to take the floor at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time this season.

Adams is awful. NYC mayors exist to further the interests of property developers, corporations and the police unions. If that means that a public health measure needs to be sabotaged so some anti-vaxxer can play for the Nets, so be it.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/sports/kyrie-irving-nyc-v...

Can you explain what's confusing about it? Seems perfectly crystal clear to me.

It's confusing because it makes it's technically correct [1], but doesn't really get at the heart of the matter. If 'tptacek hadn't pointed out the subtlety that it was the arbitrary nature of exceptions added later that was the reason for this judgement, I would not have understood or noticed it.

It's like saying "On-call developer fixes problem caused by program written in Java" – correct, but doesn't point out, for example, that it was caused due to a commit pushed to production on Friday evening after overriding the failing CI tests.

----------------------------------------

[1] Which, as they say, is the worst kind.

This whole thread sprawled! I just meant that it wasn't clear who the ruling applied to, because New York City is easy to confuse with New York State.

I think that the headline describes the ruling better

Vaccine mandate is unlawful to begin with so there is nothing to sabotage.

Because it's confusing: the NY Supreme Court is just a trial court, it's not at all like the US Supreme Court. The top appellate court is called the Court of Appeals. It's called "supreme" because it has general jurisdiction, as opposed to things like traffic court.

It is confusing because NY likes to be confusing.

Almost every other state the State Supreme Court, is the top court of the state, just like the federal court

And the Court of Appeals is lower than the State Supreme Court.

Why NY needs to needless complicate everything is beyond me

I guess it's because it's old. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court):

> The New York Supreme Court is the oldest Supreme Court with general original jurisdiction. It was established as the Supreme Court of Judicature by the Province of New York on May 6, 1691. That court was continued by the State of New York after independence was declared in 1776. It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846.

The name predates the US Supreme Court (in fact, predates the US itself), and many other state courts. Basically, someone changed the naming convention out from under them.

it being old does not explain why it could not have been made into being the Top court.

Thanks for digging this up. How cool!

There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.

>There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.

I imagine that the entire New York Legislature are hanging their heads in shame for confusing a few dozen folks on HN who don't even live in the state.

I further imagine that it will immediately become important for the governor to call an emergency session of the Legislature (which normally meets from January to June) to change the name of the court after they read your comment.

I suspect the current Governor of NY would rather just abolish all the courts since she clearly does not believe in arresting or prosecuting any crime

> It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846.

Sounds like they blew their chance to name it properly. Oh well.

That is bizarre. Most states call them "superior" courts. Supreme implies, well, the superlative authority, and it is definitely not.

Apparently Maryland also names it's courts confusingly, which I only know because on the ballot in a couple weeks is a constitutional amendment to change it to be what you expect.

(and googling it just now to give you details, I arrived at Ballotpedia which said Maryland and New York are the only two states that don't call their top court "supreme". Maryland for not much longer probably, as ammendments on the ballot always seem to pass here. But even Maryland doesn't call a different court supreme!).

> Question 1 would rename the Maryland Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court of Maryland and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals to the Appellate Court of Maryland. It would change the name of a Judge of the Court of Appeals to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland and the name of the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland. It would also change the gendered language to gender-neutral in the articles of the Maryland Constitution that would be amended.[2]

> Maryland and New York are the only states that do not refer to their state's top court as the supreme court

—https://ballotpedia.org/Maryland_Question_1,_Renaming_of_the...

(OK, so currently in Maryland you start your appeal at the "court of special appeals", and if you don't like the finding you can appeal further to the "court of appeals"? The Court of Appeals is a higher court than the Court of Special Appeals? I'd say that's almost as confusing as New York, although maybe not quite).

I can think of another context where "special" is a pejorative... :)

Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place?

The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by declaring nearly all public spaces "sensitive areas" in which licensed individuals may not carry for their protection. Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?

How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?

it's important to note that this is not the top court in new york, rather the beginning of the process of retrial and appeals. So, in effect, nothing will happen as a result of this ruling other than more appeals

The consequences in theory are political. Theoretically Congress should be impeaching Presidents and expelling members that do not uphold their oaths.

Executing consequences into popular Presidents or other members of Congress would also be politicized and have political consequences for Congress, so it doesn’t happen. That said, leaving impeachment or expulsion of legislative members to the Courts would also give them too much power.

So the real consequences are at election time. If you ran to retain your seat, and lost, that’s your comeuppance. It’s not granular, but it gets the job done eventually. This is also why control of the White House flips back and forth so much: nothing any President does is particularly popular most of the time, they just have the votes to do it. Incumbents do get massive advantages in staying power but in the present day, two terms looks like about the maximum we would be able to tolerate a President’s political party in the Oval Office and typically after midterms they no longer have the votes in Congress either.

Most of this is generally applicable to the States, but I don’t know New York politics specifically but would note that the previous Governor was put into a position where he was pretty much forced to resign both for scandals and for the actions he took while in office; and that was a slow slow build up.

This is pretty good insight. Now I'm wondering what public data sources show overturned bills as well as all sponsors of a bill. I think Congress' website tracks the latter, but the former might be difficult to obtain.

Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels wrote a whole book showing that voters do not keep track of what elected officials do, and so politicians are not punished for bad behavior, see excerpt here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/longer-elected-terms-lead-t...

Correct, which is why I spoke mostly of Presidents and Parties who are all big enough targets that most American voters do form opinions about what they’re up to, even with only vague notions about the details. Individual members of Congress can usually skate by, but that’s only as true as their district or State is uncompetitive.

And in States where “big issue” lawmaking is deferred to the public via referendum on a regular basis there’s almost no incentive at all to mind what the legislature or governor is doing; especially if tax increases also have to be voter approved. Who do you hold accountable when it’s the voters who make a bad decision about a law?

The emphasis on parties might be the most accurate part. This is a possible reason for the so-called "Panama Exception" -- a nation the should be a dictatorship and yet has been a thriving democracy:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-panama-exception

This is also shown in polling data, where congress on the whole has an approval rating of less than 10%, yet most years the incumbent is reelected

That statistic alone has me questioning if democracy is a good system

That’s easy: it’s not our guy! It’s those other guys! We’re wonderful and they’re terrible!

That’s how incumbents can maintain their edge whilst Congress as a body is untrusted.

I’m convinced that capping the House of Representatives at 435 was a mistake, and Federalizing most laws even more of a mistake. The question isn’t whether democracy can scale, but whether ours can within its present constraints. The reforms I would want to see are mechanical; not social, economic or judicial. A Continental-sized nation with hundreds of millions and growing probably needs thousands—not a few hundred!—of legislators if representation is to be meaningful. Short of that, my Representative has 700K+ constituents, so any one individual holding her accountable without other connections is a pipe dream at best.

> That’s easy: it’s not our guy! It’s those other guys!

I mean, that has certainly been true for me, and many other people. I sent someone to Congress I liked. Congress then has a wide spectrum of people who end up doing whatever a small group decides (this term, whatever Manchin and Sinema want). It's pretty easy to like your guy but not the end results of the process or the body as a whole that produced it.

> It's pretty easy to like your guy but not the end results of the process or the body as a whole that produced it.

This is the biggest argument against my ideas of reform: this is compromise actually working even with all the flaws I think are there. In the absence of consensus the consensus is to do nothing at all, which drives the people who want to do a lot and quickly crazy.

That said, Federated States in a Union with a weaker Federal government than we presently have would have fewer compromises they would have to make at the cost of also having to live with the fact that others who are ostensibly as much a part of the nation as you are are going to live differently; and as people, humans really, we tend to hate that. C’est la vie.

> others who are ostensibly as much a part of the nation as you are are going to live differently

I don't honestly think that most people care about people "living differently". They care because people affect each other. And the rules in your state affect me living in my state quite a bit.

They do. It can be expressed through many different means but the end result is the same: people want to exert control over each other, especially people they consider “their own”. Having a representative legislature with members on equal footing is a bulwark against this. Which is why in the absence of consensus the consensus is to do nothing at all.

> And the rules in your state affect me living in my state quite a bit.

So two things about this: you’re not exactly wrong, but as far as humanity goes: the Earth is a closed system which means as far as we go there’s no limit to this line of thought except those we impose upon ourselves. Recognizable borders are a compromise, even internal ones.

What I do might affect you, and things my State does might change conditions in your State in the abstract, but in the absence of a damages claim or a legitimate grievance, we are not automatically entitled to effect the lives of others as we see fit. Which is why we have representative legislatures and governments: these are chambers and actors which are vested with powers to negotiate amongst themselves on behalf of their constituents and diplomatically engage with other governments.

I have been in favor of 3 changes to the House.

1. Wyoming Rule. No district should be larger than the least populist state.

2. Make DC a Museum. With modern technology there is no need to "send" legislatures to Washington DC, they can vote, meet, etc all remotely. This will make lobbying more expensive, and put the representatives back in their actual communities, because lets face it most of them represent Washington DC not Local Communities.

3. Expand the Term to 4 Years, with a 2 year offset to the president Election. So every 4 years the entire house is elected as a Mid Presidential term Election

I'm entirely in favor of making lobbying as expensive as possible, but I disagree that there isn't something to be gained from having people be in the same physical location to achieve a common goal. Some things just can't be done very well over Zoom.

I do wish that more federal functions would be spread out throughout the country, in the same way that Germany does; many of their federal agencies are headquartered in places far away from Berlin. There's no reason why the USDA shouldn't be headquartered in Kansas City, the Fed in New York, and the Department of the Interior in Wyoming.

>but I disagree that there isn't something to be gained from having people be in the same physical location to achieve a common goal.

So then I assume you also reject Full time work from home?

I can not think of a single reason why Congress needs to be in the same physical location to read a bill, take public comment on a bill, then vote on if that bill is good for their community or now. That is the SOLE and ONLY function of the US House of Representatives.

If they are doing other things, well that is beyond their scope of work and should be curtailed.

Full time remote work can be done for a lot of jobs, but even those you would agree that occasional in-person time helps. I'm not taking an absolute position one way or another.

> that is beyond their scope of work and should be curtailed

You and me both ;-)

Relationship management and government oversight.

"Streamlining the actual process of the legislature so that more can get done"

"For the important stuff, insist on two votes, but for everything else, make it easy to get stuff done fast"

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/streamlining-the-actual-pro...

Democracy is fine. Representative democracy can go to hell.

You're contradicting thousands of years of political philosophy and theory with that statement. Democracy is a complete mess of whiplashing changes. It's only real redeeming factor is that it's better than tyranny by a monarch or aristocracy. That's an incredibly important factor though, so you need to find a way to make it work. Representative democracy is a way to temper the erratic will of the people and turn democracy into a workable form of government.

Most of those thousands of years of political philosophy was devised by that very aristocracy. Of course they're horrified of "mob rule", if it means that they get stripped of all the wealth that they have so patiently fleeced from their slaves / serfs / workers for generations.

In practice, all the claims that were made about representative democracy being superior to direct on the basis that it's "less erratic" have been proven false by experience - just look at who we keep electing to Congress etc. At best, it gives the whole circus some veneer of respectability - as in, our representatives still make an erratic mess, but they do so with gravitas. But even that doesn't last for long - at some point, if enough voters really feel like it, you get someone like Donald Trump.

The worst thing about representative democracy is the sham scalability. In theory, a parliament can "represent" as many people as you want - there's an upper limit on the number of MPs who can still hold a coherent discussion, but there's no limit on how many people each MP "represents". However, the higher that number is, the more said "representation" is removed from the voters, and the more of a sham it is. With direct democracy, because of how poorly it scales, you have to keep the scope of the government small for it to function at all procedurally, and then come up with some federation arrangements above that - and that's a good thing.

In the other comment seneca points out that you're ignoring history with your comment. You might want to consider a system that goes in the other direction, and adds more layers of representation:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...

We need an option 'against all' and if that option wins, all candidates are disqualified for life.

Then approval rating would mean something.

That arguably makes vote splitting worse. Do you cast your vote for the least bad corrupt candidate so the other candidate that wants to [legalize killing babies/control women's bodies] doesn't win, or do you vote for the "against all" option so that both corrupt candidates get disqualified?

Assuming we need some kind of government, then does "against all" actually offer an improvement over the current system? The economist Kenneth Arrow suggested something in the opposite direction, approval voting, where the voters get as many votes as their are candidates, so the voters have the option of voting for everyone except maybe the absolute worst. Arrow did the math and liked the results from such a system of voting. And also, what is the goal of voting? Is it to give an individual an avenue for self-expression, or is it to achieve the social goal of forming a government? This is the argument against self-expression:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-a-system-of-voting-a...

Paraphrasing Winston Churchill: democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. For those decisions that need to be made collectively, democracy is just the worst bad method we've come up with.

But one huge benefit of freedom is that if we embrace freedom, the vast majority of decisions can be made individually, or by mutual agreement of consenting individuals, and not collectively. So the negative consequences of democracy aren't as impactful.

Perhaps democracy is fine, but we are just doing voting wrong. See this page for some interesting alternative voting systems that have different / better outcomes: https://ncase.me/ballot/

It's a little weird to be concerned about this now around COVID policies, and not during the last fifty years of laws passed by republican state legislatures that barely last past the ink drying on the law before getting slapped with an injunction and ultimately struck down by the courts, but not after the state AG wastes millions of dollars in taxpayer funds fighting it as high up the federal court system as possible.

Just to name a few: Book bans, anti-LGBTQ bills (bathroom bills and more), edicts on what doctor can or cannot say to patients (or must say to patients), ag-gag, voting restrictions, and anti-abortion-choice laws.

All passed with the full knowledge they'll be struck down almost immediately, with the express purpose of tying up funds of progressive non-profits and getting to brag to their base about how they're trying to further 'The Cause' (you know how conservatives are always going on about "liberal virtue-signaling? As always, they're great at projection.)

I'm not concerned about COVID policies. I'm concerned about policies and laws in general that are passed with the knowledge of their supporters that they're unconstitutional, and are later determined in the courts to indeed be unconstitutional.

Nothing about this is partisan to me. People who knowingly and intentionally violate their oaths should see consequences for their actions.

Hot take to look at the oversteps of authority around covid response… and start blaming Republicans.

The Bonta team in California has been eggregiously playing the circuit-to-district football, violating fundamental rights of citizens. The 13th circuit is in bed with California state district attorney and the state legislator (both the husband and wife, "Bontas"). Wife is a legislator and the husband is the CA District attorney.

Lawyers are totally baffled at what is going on.

> How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?

Same way no one suffered any consequences for deciding to support the opposition in the Syrian civil war to piss off Assad long after it was obvious they weren’t going to get him out and the only consequence was going to be lots of dead Stands mom Syrians. Same way there were no consequences for bombing Libya into civil war and open air slave markets. Same way there were no consequences for no WMDs in Iraq.

There needs to be a coalition to make them pay. It needs to be not just powerful enough, but committed.

>where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place

You've hit the core problem of society/government that countless generations have tried to obfuscate via an academic body that implies that social interactions can be studied/understood like natural sciences.

At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you don't you'll get arrested. Run from the police when they try to arrest you? You'll get taken by force.

Reject Capitalism? Starve to death on the streets.

Sure, there's political theory and economics can act like "utility" drives all things, but at the end of the day, it's the threat of some sort of violently bad outcome that keeps society in check.

The recent rub is that we have (probably correctly) decided that violence is bad and we should all just be chill and work together because it's good for all of us. We've also created hyper complex systems that couldn't even theoretically be kept in check with violence (Who am I going to punch when I was duped by a crypto scam?).

So instead of angry mobs tarring and feathering bad politicians/business people (probably bad) we just grouse on the Internet (bad but not as bad).

And stuff like this keeps happening, because an increasingly large number of people (especially the wealthy and politicians) are realizing the threat of violence isn't that great anymore. Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants and he's revered for it because people who still have a risk of violence in their lives are jealous but believe they one day could get to a similar place.

There's not really a solution other than figuring out how to may people be chill and cooperative on their own (good luck).

> At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence

Cripes. Nope.

If this was true, how do you explain backyard cookouts, pool parties, trick-or-treating, or Christmas present exchanges?

How do you explain folk dance festivals, buskers, and non-royal weddings?

How on earth do you explain hugs?

Social interaction which is based on mutual trust (whether from family or sustained direct interpersonal interaction) is not really what we're talking about here. Folk dance festivals do not feed the world. The social structure of modern society is, by and large, about interactions between mutually distrusting strangers and their agents as they negotiate the exchange and distribution of economic resources. Basically everything you own and consume was produced by people you've never seen or interacted with.

You’re talking about capitalism not social structure. The post above that brought up social structure is also a red herring. This is about legal power and the threat of coercion. It would be trivial to implement a law to punish (say) Eric Adams or someone else in or formerly in nyc government for what they did. There are probably some basic mechanical reasons that is not generally done (although I don’t mean to dismiss the idea).

the idea is that sanctioning past behavior, which was legal at the time, is super extra bad (ie. no retroactive punishment), because then you can never be sure that the the ruling powers that be won't send law enforcement after you. (of course the brutal truth is that you can never be sure, hence people should realize that there's no opt-out from politics)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law

>It would be trivial to implement a law to punish (say) Eric Adams or someone else in or formerly in nyc government for what they did.

Sure, but what, you're going to send the mayor to Jail (violence) over a political decision he made?

That would not be trivial.

Fostering good will to prevent future violence.

Because every stick needs a carrot.

Positive reinforcement is not antithetical to the threat of violence and can go hand-in-hand. If you're good to me I'll treat you like family. But violate that peace and me and my clan will come down on you with furious anger. That's how people have lived for time immemorial.

Even so, violence isn't so much the basis for society itself, just the govt. And either way, it's only how outliers are dealt with. Most of what most people do all day every day is constrained by things like their family and peers' expectations and their commitments. I'd say social structures are primarily based on cultural norms.

Speaking as the son of someone who runs operations for the a federal district court, every ounce of the “violence” bit is covered by pounds and pounds of cultural norms and a fair bit of ritual as well.

Our aversion to violence is not new. In ancient Rome, it was sacrilegious to bring weapons inside the pomerium.

>If this was true, how do you explain backyard cookouts, pool parties, trick-or-treating, or Christmas present exchanges?

How do you explain why you get to determine the guest list?

> Sure, there's political theory and economics can act like "utility" drives all things, but at the end of the day, it's the threat of some sort of violently bad outcome that keeps society in check.

Being incarcerated or dead is very low utility for most people ;)

Gotta DeMorgan's that statement to capture the true essence: Being not-incarcerated and not-dead is high utility for most people.

Free and alive (life and liberty)

> At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence

Put another way, people with nuclear weapons don’t need to pay parking tickets.

>Reject Capitalism? Starve to death on the streets.

What's "rejecting capitalism?" You can't blow up the NYSE, but most everything else is fair game. Your employer isn't going to care if you reject capitalism so long as you get your work done. If you don't want to work under a capitalist, you can join join or start your own cooperative. If you can't do that, you can be an independent contractor. If you don't have the motivation to do that, you can fall back on the charity of others.

>Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants

Musk got ousted as board chair at at Tesla, and was forced to buy Twitter at a very overpriced valuation.

I am sorry, if you 'reject capitaliam' but have to check if 'your employer' cares, and pay 'your landlord' and go to the same grocery store, what exactly have you rejected?

I'm not the person to ask, but plenty of people claim to reject capitalism and participate in society like Rage Against the Machine.

Simple example - bhuddist monks, they don't take part in capitalism, they do their own thing.

Would you be allowed to build a monastery on top of a random mountain in America today? Clearly not. Force will be used to remove you.

So you portrailyal of 'anything short of terrorism is fair game' is totally inaccurate - the only way you are allowed to reject capitalism by selling tickets to a concert where you just talk shit.

You could always move to a communist country. However internet communists always get real quiet when you suggest that.

Based on what you're describing "reject capitalism" is just edgier phrasing for "not respecting property rights" (ie. expecting your employer to give you money for nothing, or for your landlord to house you for free).

> At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you don't you'll get arrested. Run from the police when they try to arrest you? You'll get taken by force.

Is this true for all social structures, or just our current one?

The social structures that emerge are time dependent. The people living in the middle ages had no way of predicting the social structures of today. Since we can't predict the social structures that the future will bring, how could we know for sure that there isn't X social structure that doesn't need violence to propagate itself?

We can talk about the likelihood of X social structure emerging, sure. But to make the universal claim about all social structures, viz "human nature", is flawed reasoning

>At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence

This is completely wrong. Our current social structure in the United States is build on the threat of violence. Sense of duty, sense of shame, fear of ostracism, respect for tradition and family are all forms of social structure that have existed since we were crafting tools from stone. Of course all of these non-violent forms of social structure require a somewhat homogeneous population that shares the same values and culture. Many native American tribes had social structures like this where there was no police force, no threat of violence to enforce social norms. However, when a hodgepodge of people with different beliefs, different cultures, different educational levels, different educational values, different religions and different histories are jammed together in overcrowded cities the result is always going to be the same. Perhaps we should write "Our diversity is our strength!" On the side of all the prisons and police cars to make people feel better.

> sense of shame, fear of ostracism

I think you have a loose definition of violence.

“Go live in the forest” is very violent, in practice.

The duty and and family stuff are arguably window dressing on the ostracism violence.

Elon is bound by all the modern societal rules, markets and law.

He wanted to weasel out of his M&A agreement with Twitter. No luck, contract law is well established.

He is also wanted to just do automatic assembly for Tesla, no luck there. You might remember when they had to set up tents connected to the factory building to extend the assembly line, etc. all because the markets demanded results. (Many people were shorting Tesla.)

...

Sure, he built a nice cult of personality for himself, it allows him a few degrees of freedom in the eyes of those people. But the vast majority of the people don't know much about him, and don't care. Not everyone is glued to Twitter, HN, Forbes billionaires toplists, etc.

Similarly Trump built a bigger one. And a lot of authoritarian assholes too. It was the norm for a long time after all, pharaohs, divine kings, etc.

>Who am I going to punch when I was duped by a crypto scam?)

This is what group violence is historically used for. When responsibility was so diffused among so many people that you couldn't fix things by picking one of the most responsible and making an example out of them the king or whoever would have everyone in the group subjected to violence or some other punishment under credible threat of violence.

In cases of judicial review where the courts strike down a law, it's usually not as simple as you're trying to make it.

First of all it's not at all clear in advance that the laws are unconstitutional, and that the lawmakers are "perpetrators". Plenty of times the laws are challenged and the courts uphold them. The whole point is that laws often push boundaries or address areas not previously addressed by the courts, and of course courts are political too. Lawmakers are trying to do what they believe is right for the people, and courts are too, and sometimes they disagree, and all of this is legitimate.

And second, what would it even mean for a court to "penalize" lawmakers? For the government to penalize itself? The lawmakers are elected and often passing laws their constituents voted them into office precisely in order to pass. Do you want to fine the lawmakers and take away their salary? Do you want to fine the people who voted for them? No, of course not. That's ludicrous. Just as ludicrous as legislatures (or governors) fining judges when they think judges decide cases wrongly.

This isn't criminal, it's legitimate disagreement over what policy and law ought to be. Penalizing lawmakers doesn't make any sense. In the end the court overturns something, and if a change is dangerous/disruptive enough the courts place an immediate injunction until the final decision is made. This is how democracies work.

(On the other hand, if a legislator breaks a law personally, e.g. murders somebody, they are tried personally and go to jail just like anybody else.)

I’d like to see them held accountable. Every person who was affected by an unconstitutional law should have the ability to sue for damages arising from the intentional abridgment of their constitutional rights.

Our rights would remain more intact if lawmakers actually faced personal financial penalties when they try to deny us the already very few rights afforded to us by the constitution.

How are you going to handle it when the Supreme Court reverses itself on decisions decades later? Or even just a few years later when a new Justice is added? Does all the money from damages get returned, with interest and accounting for inflation?

Law is never settled and courts disagree and reverse frequently... So I don't think you've really thought this through... :)

Including who is going to pay for all those damages, which is going to be the taxpayers, so hello much higher taxes! ;)

Three strikes. Politician voted three times for laws that later were deemed unconstitutional by the SC, so the politician can only be a politian again after 30 years and some mandatory training and test.

What is not fair about this?

What's the punishment for that SC when a later SC overrules it, three new justices later?

And while we're at it, are we also creating a three strikes law for lower courts that get overruled by the SC three times?

And what about the courts below them? What if they get overruled by a higher court... which in turn gets overruled by the SC?

I can't wait to keep track of all this ;)

The biggest risk would be that a politician will be wrongfully denied participation when they actually were fit for the job. That's a smaller price to pay than living with a politician who works against the constitution.

Blind adherence to a document written ~200 years ago, in a world that has vastly changed cultural and social norms is incredibly short sighted. People elect politicians based on trust, and if the politicians decide to pass a law that is the will of the people manifested.

What are the options if that trust is abused?

People emotionally trick other people into voting for them and then do whatever is on their agenda during their mandate.

You put up with it until the next election where a new rep abuses you the same way. That way you get the will of the people written into law your whole life long.

There is no universal solution to "emotionally trick other people into voting for them". If the politicians don't follow up, you vote them out. The problem in the US stems from lack of choice, owing to the entrenched 2 party system. Almost every other country around the world has more than 2 options, and there are many examples where democracy is functional.

If you're assuming that every voter is intelligent enough to make their own voting decisions, then no one is being "tricked". And assuming to the contrary puts you on a slippery slope of who gets to decide if someone was "tricked" vs not.

I assume that many people find out themselves that they've been tricked shortly after the election and almost 4 years before the next election, when the first promises are broken.

> If the politicians don't follow up, you vote them out.

That's what I think where it lacks options. You cannot really vote politicians out. You can only vote politicians in. In some cases you can even only vote for parties, not for people. The ancient Greeks used to vote people out. I would at least want to be able to vote for party X, but not this guy, not this other guy and definitely not that guy who was the worst liar over the last 20 years, but somehow managed to stay afloat every time.

People don't elect politicians based on trust, that's crazy. They choose the lesser of two evils (in the US generally).

The current Supreme Court is a right wing nightmare, so that sounds like an efficient way to get all the liberals out of government. Hard pass, what is fair about letting unelected judges determine who I get to vote for?

Ok, fair point, but how else can we get politicians to behave better? I don't think that assigning immense powers for four years without personal repercussions for bad actors has worked very well.

Its worked better than literally every other system that has been tried, though money definitely corrupts it. House members are elected every other year and have plenty of power if they want to use it.

you didn't read my comment in full, note the use of the word "personal" financial penalties.

I guess the politicians at a loss could try to sue each individual plaintiff that was previously paid out, but that seems improbable. That would be a good thing in practice, if you toe up to the line so close that multiple courts overrule each other you lose regardless. That would help keep our rights intact.

I mean that's just ridiculous. 'Unconstitutional' is incredibly vague & subjective (and incredibly political), to the degree that most developed countries don't allow judges to overturn laws based on this at all. (1) As an example of how subjective 'unconstitutional' is, consider that different levels of the judiciary disagree with each other about whether a law is constitutional or not all the time. It's very, very common for one appeals court to declare that a law is in accordance with the constitution or not, and then a higher level to disagree completely. If judges who've devoted their entire lives to the field can't agree and constantly overrule each other....

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

The remedy in American law is supposed to be electoral, not legal.

> How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?

Isn't this like saying developers should suffer consequences if they allow bugs to get into their code? Because we are perpetrators of flawed code, like law makers are perpetrators of flawed laws?

> Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?

Because to do otherwise is to abandon civil process (where people get to argue about laws, and they have the right to be wrong without further consequence than being wrong) and enters into what would effectively devolve into mob rule.

because its not always accidental. look at abortion laws before there was reason to challenge them, or many blue state gun laws. they're giant "fuck you"s to getting told to stop doing smth stupid. like NY gets its gun law overturned so its like "fuck you we're gonna make super invasive requirements for testing (which you cant even do in state) and turning over social media handles (hella chilling effect)." or almost all the lockdown orders that got overturned, but after 1-2 years of being in effect.

really grinds my gears cuz they KNOW these laws will get killed in court but it will take 3-4 years so in the mean time stfu and deal with it.

That's actually an old and effective political strategy. Perhaps distasteful, but part of the game in the same sense that icing the kicker in football is part of the game (as consequence of the rules of time-outs).

I've even seen it used to good effect to strong-arm otherwise unreachable organizations when they choose to be anti-social. During the housing crash, one of the major non-profit universities a city panicked about its investments going shaky and abruptly decided to stop paying into some multi-decades-long standing donations that back-stopped some city services. The non-profit was paying into that donation pool because state law that had made sense in the 1900s and a lot less sense in 2000 made those non-profits non-taxable (but they had eaten up a significant percent of available real estate in the city center, none of which could generate tax revenue to pay for city services).

The city responded by preparing an ordnance that would tax out-of-town students directly.

The uni responded that this would be obviously illegal on its face as per state law.

The city responded that they believed the uni was presenting a reasonable legal theory that they were happy to debate back-and-forth in county, circuit, state, and appeals court for the next five years.

The university returned to the negotiating table and hammered out a new plan to pay a percentage of their former amount into the donation pool, preventing what would have otherwise been a heavy disruption in city services at a time when everyone was hurting from the housing crash.

Messy, but this kind of creation of leverage is what makes political systems operate at all at multiple scales of governance.

Don’t developers face consequences over bugs in their code? Too many and you might get shown the door.

> Don’t developers face consequences over bugs in their code?

If face significant consequences, there would be no developers left.

> Too many and you might get shown the door.

You are much more likely to get shown the door for being hard to work with, being crass, not showing up to work, not following process (that doesn't eliminate bugs but mitigates consequences), etc...

> If face significant consequences, there would be no developers left.

Complete ass pull, many proffesions face consequences

> You are much more likely to get shown the door for being hard to work with

Because the entire industry is full of chancers, startibg with folks who hold the purse strings.

Responsibility for safety only ever came through government regulation. Before that, construction industry made fire escape ladders out of wood.

It's about warranty.

If you can't warranty something, it's worth less than if you can.

And if you do warranty it, but don't back it up, that's fraud.

People are tired of false promise and baiting into hazard.

More like saying engineers - who, like elected officials, take an oath - ought to suffer consequences if say a bridge, whose plans they signed, collapses.

Not agreeing or disagreeing. Merely adjusting the analogy

> Isn't this like saying developers should suffer consequences if they allow bugs to get into their code?

If your code kills someone in a foreceeable and predictable manner, then you should.

Other branches of engineering have to do their work properly

The separate branches of government limit each other, but they can't impose punishments on the other. That's up to the electorate.

They can, if the laws are written with criminal consequences. Most are not, with good reason. So many things which end up in courts just aren’t clear enough for the outcome to be obvious.

In general, such consequences would be applied by the public. If the people feel that the executive overreached and is no longer honoring their oath, the people don't re-elect that executive. There are some exceptions (such as the impeachment power of the federal Congress), but in a system where the public elects the executive, the last recourse of a bad executive is the public's right to elect someone else. And even in cases like the power of congressional impeachment, the punishment they can extend is removal from office and nothing more.

No, if someone broke the law in the process of exercising the executive authority, that's a different issue. But we don't generally have laws of the form "the executive is not allowed to infringe on non-fundamental liberties during an emergency," because history shows that emergencies happen and sometimes people just have to be told what to do (arguably, that's one of the reasons we bother to have an executive at various levels of government).

You’re seeing this play out with student loan forgiveness.

Most legal scholars don’t believe it’s legal and will be overturned. But everyone also agrees any money given out will not be returned, so they’re rushing to get as much debt forgiven before it’s overturned.

Possession is nine tenths of the law.

Ancient Athens -- birthplace of democracy -- had an answer [1]. The sponsor of a law that was later found to be, in modern parlance, unconstitutional, could be fined.

Also worth considering: ostracism [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphe_paranomon

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

This is what 18 USC 242 was written for. Allowing for punishments up to the death penalty for depravation of rights under the color of law. You’d need a federal government who would be willing to prosecute such a case however, but it’s possible.

Unless the government actually about faces and holds the elected officials responsible, it devolves into unsanctioned violence, be it domestic terrorism, civil war, unrest, whatever the game of the week. That's what happens.

>Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place?

Unfortunately the penalty falls only on the taxpayer, and not at all on the lawmakers who pass unconstitutional laws or declare executive actions that they do not have the legal authority to declare as law. Indeed, lawmakers routinely flaunt their ability to enact laws that they know are unconstitutional across the political spectrum, to abortion laws (pre Dobbs) in "red states" to gun laws in "blue states". The recent NY legislation in the wake of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision is the perfect example. It contained all sorts of blatantly unconstitutional measures, like requiring those applying for gun permits to turn over all their social media accounts for scrutiny. But since there is no potential penalty suffered by lawmakers who willfully and knowingly violate the Constitution, this sort of unlawful, blatant political pandering is going to continue.

Imagine, for a minute, that it was a crime for a politician to try to pass unlawful laws. That would, sooner or later, be abused by the group with political control to effectively criminalize opposition. Declare their opponents' efforts unlawful, convict them, and they're out of the way.

You have to consider not only the effects of nominal usage, but also the effects of abuse. In this case, they're extreme.

Penalties are generally meted out using the press (smear reputations through excessive focus on one person, show kompromat) and economic actors (withdraw sponsors, withdraw funding, etc). In the rare case that someone fails to be adequately railroaded using press and economics, yes, judges do mete out hefty fines and jail sentences, as a punishment of last resort against regime opponents, or give slaps on the wrist to regime allies (in this case, slap on the wrist). All justified with a 20-page verbal "explanation", of course, but those are just meaningless words for ultimately political decisions.

They took people's livelyhoods away, and now they gotta pay.

This idea seems to be exactly the essence of the ruling. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

People were coping and seething while (not actually) working at their FANG jobs.

Later I got voted up from people who got back from (actual) work, who read HN

They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination. The resistance to vaccination is entirely political. The mandate was not, but instead in the interests of public safety and health. Easing the mandate for special cases was a terrible decision. The decision to ease the mandate should be reversed, not the mandate itself. So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.

A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics.

The mandate should have never existed.

> They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination

The idea that you can order someone to perform a medical procedure because they work for you is disguisting.

Where does this end?

Not at all. We require school children to undergo medical procedures before they may participate in city-funded education. The tone of alarm is unwarranted. This is not a slippery slope situation.

> This is not a slippery slope situation.

I think it is. Governments aren't that trustworthy if you ask me.

The paranoia is a bit too late. Emergency powers were established by Congress a century ago, and at least 60 national emergencies have been declared since. In New York State, a state of emergency declaration permits the governor to direct local officials and state agencies, and to suspend state and local law or regulation to facilitate disaster response efforts. If there ever was a slippery slope, it has long since been descended many times.

I am negotiating my life, not the ones of my great-grandparents.

Then you should have been there back in March of 1789. Government is for those who participate, not those who whine about it after the fact. You certainly aren't required to abide by laws or social contract if you don't value the liberties and protections granted by the Constitution and US citizenship.

Were you?

I was in the cafeteria selling smokes.

> Where does it end?

It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID. The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected. No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.

>It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID.

Way to dodge the question. Also, I think you're missing the point. I don't think OP or most other anti vax mandate people think that the covid vaccine is a risky procedure, or that the public is better off on net for it. They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.

>No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.

You literally do, though. It's not against the law to get on a packed subway while you're sick as a dog, for instance.

> They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.

This is just a part of what is so ridiculous about their objections and reveals ignorance and a misunderstanding of law. The government isn't required to establish precedent here because it is already the law of the land.[1][2][3] That said, precedent has been very well established for a very long time.[4]

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title50/cha...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergencies_Act#Emerg...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

> it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures

Does it, though? Just because the government can mandate employees be vaccinated as a condition of continued employment, doesn't mean they can mandate employees be sterilized (for instance). No reasonable person would say the second follows from the first. Law isn't code.

> The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected.

The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.

It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.

And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).

If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.

> The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.

Congress did decide this already by passing legislation a century ago granting temporary increased powers to the executive in event of national emergency and its declaration.

> It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.

Government employment is already dystopian and private employers can have any requirements they like short of discriminating against religion, race, disability, etc. There are no federal protections for political disposition.

> And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).

The virus was already circulating due to unpreparedness and slow reaction by the administration in office. Had we seen a two week stay home order in February, the crisis would likely have been averted, but the executive was overly concerned about the economy, which tanked anyway regardless of putting 300M+ Americans at risk of infection, illness and/or death.

> If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.

Again, COVID was already circulating by late February 2020, and if two vaccinations a year are required from now until the end of time, it is still a very small price to pay, a minor inconvenience at worst with the benefit of increased resistance to infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and/or death.

> private employers can have any requirements they like

The term used was 'insuburdination' - disobeying legitimate command of employer.

If employer can command you to vaccinate, then they can alsi command you to have windom teeth removed. They can command you to tatoo a barcode on your forehead.

False analogy and exaggeration fallacy, as wisdom teeth are neither deadly nor contagious, and requiring vaccinations does not mean they get to require orthodontics. All employers have wisely required their employees get vaccinated, as one sick employee can decimate the whole company and put it out of business. You don't have to comply if you're antisocial and don't care if you get sick and die nor who you take with you, go ahead and revel in your entitlement, but you'll no longer work there while you do it. Employers usually have dress and grooming codes also, this is nothing new, so they may require a haircut, shave, bathing, etc., but none will require a barcode tattooed on your forehead, but even if they did, you could always refuse and quit. There is no problem here other than narcissism, and no employer will require you to be evaluated and treated, but you may avail yourself of the health insurance your employer provides to treat your mental illness and mitigate the obvious issues with ego that strain every relationship in your life.

What happens when a virus comes along that kills at a higher rate, say 35%? You're saying people should be willing to work alongside others when there is a 35% chance of a pandemic level virus killing you because a peer thinks science is dumb?

I think you've gotten your hypothetical scenario a bit scrambled.

Given a safe and effective vaccine, you and your vaccinated coworkers would either not become infected at all or would experience very mild symptoms and be left with supercharged immunity (immunity from your vaccine + immunity from infection). Your dumb, science-hating coworker would suffer much worse symptoms and maybe die (a little over 1 in 3 chance given the 35% fatality you postulate).

Your vaccine, first and foremost, is supposed to protect you.

But with covid that is not at all what we are seeing.

This was especially painfully clear in places with strongly-enforced "vaccine passport" regimes during the period they were in force before being abandoned. The vaccinated spent time with other vaccinated and were infecting and being infected by one another and birthing new, more transmissible vaccine-evading variants of the virus. Vaccine efficacy actual goes negative (i.e. vaccine recipients more susceptible than unvaccinated persons after a few months: "Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...) and vaccine recipients are infected and infectious for at least as long as unvaccinated persons (e.g. "Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" in NEJM https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767428/).

>So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.

What are talking about? What piles of bodies?

If you believe that punishing political dissidents is an acceptable way to operate, your just priming your political enemies to become brown shirts.

Not really, they were watching out for the health of other employees who had to work with employees that refused to do the most basic acts to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.

You're 100% bought into the propaganda. Isn't it time to pause and reflect?

Btw. "the science" hasn't changed. The vaccine never stopped the spread. There were no studies indicating that it did (medical trials were about hospitalisations / death, not infections / spreading). You fell for the fake science propagated by fake news media.

That is a pretty disgusting statement. What ""the science"" are you talking about?

The vast majority of doctors and scientists strongly recommend taking the vaccine. It is not about stopping 100% of illnesses and infections, but it is 100% about significantly reducing the chance of hospitalisation and death.

What are you talking about? Sounds like the time to reflect is all yours.

Did you read the comment I replied to?

It mentioned nothing about decreasing hospitalisation or death (which is true and I agree with!).

It mentioned “saving coworkers” which implies that the vaccine prevents infection or transmitted, which is not true.

Despite a lot of people (Biden, Fauci, CDC) explicitly saying it does, and invoking “science”.

Interesting, I never bothered to investigate the basis of that claim. According to https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02328-0, a recent study does show that the vaccine was effective at preventing the spread, which is unsurprising to me. What is surprising is that the article claims this was the first study of the effectiveness against spreading an infection.

> those who received at least one vaccine shot were 24% less likely to infect close contacts

At best you could claim “reducing the spread” (but marginally) and in now way “preventing”.

Another study from March:

>protection waned to around 10% after only 4–6 months

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00775-3

It would only be a measure of postponing some of the rising transmission rates if people don't get boosted every few months. Also it would have to be compared against the effects of natural immunity.

When you willingly refuse to get vaccinated, and are thus more likely to catch and spread COVID, shouldn't we make you pay for any lives you've contributed to taking away?

The effectiveness of the vaccines in terms of preventing spread weren't studied, per pharmaceutical company testimony to congress. The whole notion that you getting the vaccine would prevent grandma from dying was a whole-cloth fabrication.

And if they were, would that change the ethical calculation here?

If we had a sterilizing vaccine, and you refused to take it, and got me sick, could I hold you responsible?

I'm just trying to understand exactly to what extent other people's selfish choices should be allowed to endanger my life and livelihood.

Then things might be different, but in our present reality it was always transparently clear to anyone who had eyes to see that the justification for coercination was founded on nothing more than hysteria, lies and wishful thinking.

While I agree with you that people should get vaccinated (if they want. Their body their choice), I feel like the argument of "to what extent other people's selfish choices should be allowed to endanger my life and livelihood" doesn't hold up.

You probably live in some developed country. If it's the US or Canada, I can say for sure that you live in a country that was founded on the exploitation of others. We continue to knowingly benefit off of such exploitation by importing and purchasing products produced by cheap and often abusive labour. We use electronic devices whose manufacture is mostly in China and other such countries where there is recorded abuses and in some cases downright modern day slavery. We continue to use these devices despite knowing that many of their essential metals are mined by exploited children in Africa.

I'm trying to understand exactly to what extent our selfish choices should be allowed to endanger others' lives and livelihoods

This take has a straw man vibe. Who cares about the "what if"? Let's address what happened yesterday and how that impacts today.

It matters because vaccination has slowed both the severity and rate of spread of the disease, due to a reduced viral load shedded by the vaccinated individual.

It isn't a binary yes or no, but it has been a gradient. And every policy decision is made on a gradient of harm/benefit. So yes, it is entirely relevant about what the ethics of the hypothetical would be.

Not getting vaccinated is an action that directly harms other people, for what turns out to be no net gain. Requiring vaccination... Is an action that directly harms a few holdouts for some net gain for the rest. None of this is an absolute ethical question, and the degrees of harm and gain are this completely relevant to it.

I agree. We should take away all human rights from the unvaccinated, too!

And anyone talking about vaccine problems, they also need to go.

We could make a special disinfo re-education summer camp, where we will send all the plague rats and political dissidents. We'll let them out when they're good people again, and tow the party line!

Please stop dancing around the issue, and tell us exactly what these 'vaccine problems' are, and how they compare to the 'problems of actually catching COVID [1] without having gotten vaccinated'.

The comparison will not be favourable to you. [2]

[1] Your camp spent the past two years both telling everyone, and doing your best to ensure that everyone is going to catch it anyways, so this seems like a reasonable comparison to require.

[2] The risk of treatable myocarditis from catching COVID is vastly higher than from the vaccines. The risk of injury and death from less-treatable complications is incomparably higher. If we're all going to get it anyways, you're choosing to both hurt yourself, and others by not getting vaccinated. You can't even freeload off herd immunity...

My camp? Fuck off with that. No one's in my camp - especially not radicals like you.

I'm not going to argue with you on vaccine effectiveness, because that's actually not my point. I'm not afraid of people discussing the effectiveness of vaccines - I'm certain the correct opinion will win out.

What I am afraid of is the cruelty of political radicals - which this issue has created in excess.

During the pandemic, people in my corporate slack channels were GLEEFULLY fantasizing about all the vaccine deniers that were going to be fired due to Bidens executive order. This behaviour is terrifying, and anyone who carries this out is reprehensible. Even a moron is a person and has rights.

And the fact that you don't see this as the actual issue is evidence you're still possessed by this nonsense. I posted a snarky sarcastic comment about government suppression and you're talking about vaccines.

FYI, the case was decided in Richmond County a/k/a Staten Island, arguably NYC's most conservative borough. The judge, a Republican, was elected in 2018. [0].

[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Ralph_Porzio

What was wild is the amount of hate and vitriol directed towards those who chose not get to vaccinated and lost or risked losing their jobs.

This forum was not exempt from that hate.

I hope this court opinion is enough to sway the opinion of those who held such extreme beliefs in this vaccine mandate that there are different opinions, and it doesnt have to be so extreme when deciding how to move forward with things that affect peoples livelihoods. Sometimes you do what is best for you and I do what is best for me is a perfectly logical and sane reasoning.

There wasn't hate, at least not broadly. There was anger, sure, but not hate. At the time the focus was on making sure the vaccinations were taken seriously so as to protect those who couldn't do it, and plenty of people instead made ideological and self-centered decisions (their right to do so) rather than compassionate and ethical ones.

There wasn't broad levels of hate?

Da fuq?

People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.

People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.

Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.

> There wasn't broad levels of hate?

> Da fuq?

> People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.

> People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.

> Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.

Right, that sounds like what I said earlier, mandmandam:

"There was anger, sure, but not hate" - and you affirmed it; white-hot anger. And it was deserved. But broad hate, no. We just wanted people to be responsible.

When you violate the social contract (protecting others by doing what's due), you attract anger.

I'm not really here to debate it; anyone saying otherwise is spinning our anger for others' irresponsibility and others' putting the immunocompromised in danger.

Fun fact NY Supreme Court is actually a lower level court in New York.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court

So this will likely be challenged

Wow, NY finally does something right.

This will get appealed. NY supreme court is just their basic trial court

That may be, but it is really difficult to see how anyone will honestly make a case this was not government overreach, and an arbitrary overreach at that. We'll have to let it play out...

Which part?

Speaking as a lawyer, reading this, it feels like it will be overturned almost immediately, and possibly reassigned to a different judge.

There is very little legal analysis, and a large amount of unnecessary, biased, diatribe.

Appeals courts rarely look kindly on that.

All of it?

I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason.

To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better.

Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong.

So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal.

This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.

I actually have no view on the substance of the case. If the decision went the opposite way I would still give you the same view- legal decisions that are closer to political diatribes than they are well reasoned legal argument do not fair well on appeals.

This is definitely in that category. It reads like an internet argument on Reddit, not a judicial decision

They did something "right" alright - this will get smacked down by the next level.

This will fail on appeal. NYC had every right to require vaccines.

No one, especially a government, has a right to require vaccines.

Back pay? Seriously? I thought people weren’t happy about executive power through judicial means, but I’m seeing that same group of people celebrate this.

Also note: the NY Supreme Court is actually the lowest court level in NY. Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.

Courts exist to make people whole.

The court decided the executive branch didn't have the right to fire the workers. Because of that, the workers lost their jobs, insurance, and pay.

How else would you suggest the court make them whole again?

The judicial branch is not in the executive or legislative branch. Courts can invalidate laws and regulations from the executive or legislative branches. It is called Checks & Balances. It has kept power distributed for almost 250 years, preventing it from becoming concentrated in any one branch of government. Should that occur, you'd have bad actors enacting a one-party tyrannical state and tens of millions would die, mostly through starvation, but a good many through a state apparatus. It is familiar music. Our civilization has had to deal with such bad actors for a very long time, but despite the lessons of the past, there are still some who desire the one-party state. There is no sign that we, as a species, has completely eliminated the lust for power that's innate in humanity. It is for this reason that the founding fathers hard-coded such things into our nation which act as a stop-gap for tyrants.

> Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.

Maybe your complaint should be with the State of New York for having such a misleading name for their lowest-level trial court, and not the OP for literally referring to it by its name ;-)

Does that mean NY employees who don't want covid can stop working and still be paid?

[pdf]

another win for the anti-vaxxers

Now how will we force people to do unpopular things without the ability to deprive them of their livelihood?

I can understand why the vaccine mandate would be unconstitutional as a whole, but why shouldn't the city be allowed to fire whoever they feel like firing? New York is an at will state.

"At will" doesn't mean you can fire for any reason.

Even if you don't state the reason (which they did), it would be illegal to fire all black people from a company, because it's trivial to prove for a large enough company.

"at will" doesn't supercede civil rights act and other laws.

This is bad faith interpretation of my comment. We all know what the Civil Rights Act is. My question is what rule exactly is NYC breaking?

thats exactly what the court ruling explains

Did you read the ruling? It’s not actually very long (terrible pdf though):

“Finally, states of emergency are meant to be _temporary_. The question presented is whether the Health Commissioner has the authority to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency. This Court finds that the Commissioner does not have that authority and has acted beyond the scope of his authority under the Public Health Law and in violation of separation of powers. The Petitioners herein should not have been terminated for their failure to comply with the Commissioner’s Order during a _temporary_ state of emergency.”

and then later in the conclusion:

“It is clear that the Health Commissioner has the authority to issue public health mandates. No one is refuting that authority. However, the Health Commissioner cannot create a new condition of employment for City employees. The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work. The Health Commissioner cannot terminate employees. The Mayor cannot except certain employees from these orders.”

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

>Did you read the ruling?

That's a lot of ask of an internet commenter.

In all seriousness, I did see that part while skimming through it, but I don't find it very convincing in regards to public employees. The order came from the Mayor, not the health commissioner. Requiring city employees be vaccinated is an administrative decision. It's within the best interests of the city that city employees not get sick, that the city's health insurance premiums don't go up, etc.

> It's within the best interests of the city that…

Yes, but that’s not the sole requirement. In addition to serving a legitimate government purpose, a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious. Every order has to meet both requirements, and this one only meets one of them. From the ruling:

“This Court finds that based on the analysis above, the Commissioner’s Order of October 20, 2021, violated the Petitioners’ equal protection rights as the mandate is arbitrary and capricious. The City employees were treated entirely differently from private sector employees, and both City employees and private sector employees were treated entirely differently from athletes, artists, and performers. All unvaccinated people, living or working in the City of New York are similarly situated. Granting exemptions for certain classes and selectively lifting of vaccination orders, while maintaining others, is simply the definition of disparate treatment. Furthermore, selected enforcement of these orders is also disparate treatment.”

>a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious

There were two separate orders. The first was for public employees, and the second was for private employees. I agree that the second was capricious, but the first was consistent. The city is allowed to fire city employees. Maybe something about it is unconstitutional, but the ruling completely handwaves this, as well as the justification for backpay.

> The city is allowed to fire city employees.

The city union disagrees rather strongly with that :) In particular, the city’s contract with these workers does not require them to be vaccinated. If your boss sprung a new rule on you and then fired you for not following it, you would be pretty upset too. Especially if it required you to take actions that you thought were potentially risky to your own personal health and safety. I’ll let you read the ruling yourself though, since it was more nuanced than that and I am tired of transcribing from a scan of a printout of a digital document.

Having multiple separate orders that result in an unconstitutional outcome is not really different from having a single unconstitutional order. I don’t know why you keep bringing that up; it’s not very interesting.

Also, awarding back pay is super common in wrongful–termination suits. Any time the harm resulting from a tort is monetary, it is quite ordinary to redress that harm through monetary means. In fact, in most cases it’s one of the easiest forms of harm to redress. The court cannot undo the harm to someone’s reputation nearly as easily, for example.

>The city union disagrees rather strongly with that

Do they? From what I understand these employees aren't being represented by the union. Also, the ruling acknowledges that they did bargain with the union and are therefore not finding a breach of contract.

>Having multiple separate orders that result in an unconstitutional outcome is not really different from having a single unconstitutional order. I don’t know why you keep bringing that up; it’s not very interesting.

My point is that it's not unconstitutional for the city to fire a city employee.

Employment (and unemployment) by the city, which is a governmental entity, is held to a higher standard of scrutiny than private employment. It is unconstitutional for the city to fire a city employee based on arbitrary and capricious reasons, just as it would be unconstitutional for the city to impose any other sort of administrative restriction on its citizens on an arbitrary and capricious basis. Would you find it legal for the city to only issue marriage licenses to those who provide proof of vaccination?

Yeah but the ruling is bogus.

The health commissioner's order didn't say fire the employees [1]. It said that you can't have unvaccinated people on the premise which is clearly within their powers to "control of communicable and chronic diseases ... " [2]. The commissioner never said you needed to fire anybody. It we start taking this to the extreme, I think we can agree if somebody has Ebola its ok for the commissioner to say that person should not show up to work. Such a claim is in direct contradiction with the Judge's statements though: "The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work.".

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/covid/covid-19...

[2]: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

The Health Commissioner can _quarantine_ someone, for a specified period of time, yes. But that’s not what happened. Instead the Commissioner apparently decided that these people, who were not sick, couldn’t be allowed to work and earn their living. But they could still go to grocery stores and baseball games, because those places aren’t important.

Besides, you cannot go by the overall mission of some government agency to decide what they are allowed or not allowed to do. The legislature has delegated specific authority to each agency to take specific actions. An agency, no matter how well–meaning they are, is not allowed to take any action not on their list.

> Instead the Commissioner apparently decided that these people, who were not sick, couldn’t be allowed to work and earn their living

Demonstrably false. The commissioner's order (which I linked above) never required them to be fired. The order solely required they be kept off the premise which is not the same as fired. Sure somebody could fire them and then claim the health order told them to but that wouldn't make it truthful; the health code is very clear on violations being a fines / misdemeanors.

> But they could still go to grocery stores and baseball games, because those places aren’t important.

Sure. Perhaps the agency has the power to stop people from doing that. It's not explicitly listed though.

> An agency, no matter how well–meaning they are, is not allowed to take any action not on their list.

The legislature has delegated a vague do everything to the agency. So, everything is on their list ...

"Except as otherwise provided by law, the department shall have jurisdiction to regulate all matters affecting health in the city of New York and to perform all those functions and operations performed by the city that relate to the health of the people of the city, including but not limited to the mental health, intellectual and developmental disability, alcoholism and substance abuse-related needs of the people of the city. The jurisdiction of the department shall include but not be limited to the following:"

However, the Health Department does have explicit control over "(5) ... operation of facilities by other agencies of the city;". Which is exactly what they were doing. They were telling other agencies that they can't operate their facilities with unvaccinated individuals. They also tailored the order to be as narrow as it needed to be. The unvaccinated individuals are still allowed to work, just not on premise which is how a disease would get transmitted at those facilities.

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/covid/covid-19...

> The legislature has delegated a vague do everything to the agency.

I should have been clearer here. I made a general statement about determining what an agency may or may not do based on a mission statement. This is always a mistake that you want to avoid.

But it’s not really relevant to this case!

The judge didn’t find that the agency overstepped its authority. Instead, the judge found that the agency had created an order that was arbitrary and capricious, because it treated certain groups of people differently, even though they were in the same situation.

> because it treated certain groups of people differently, even though they were in the same situation.

The judge can find whatever they want but to pretend that a sportsball player is the same as a city employee is obviously bogus.

EO 62 [1] very clearly layed out the difference in their situation as concert performers and sportsball players will increase the economic activity of NYC. A city employee just doesn't have the same economic impact as the exempted classes.

Look, the judge is just again vaccination requirements and will find whatever reason they want to justify their position against them. This is pretty much layed out when the judge goes on how the city could've kept its testing strategy despite the fact that the judge doesn't at all justify what effect a testing strategy would have or what effect a vaccination strategy would have or how the two would achieve similar goals or what those goals were (i.e. the judge has no problem making an arbitrary and conspicuous claim about how the state should've ran itself).

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/062-003/emerge...

A random unvaccinated public employee _is_ in the same situation as a random unvaccinated private employee. Either they should both be allowed to go to their place of work and work, or neither of them should. No rational basis can exist for a rule that says that it is unsafe for an accountant working for the government to visit their accounting office, but that it is safe for an accountant working in the private sector to visit their office. The virus doesn’t know if you are a private employee or not; either visiting the office is safe or it is unsafe. It cannot be both.

I've been thinking a lot about judicial review in common law democracies recently, and I tentatively think a better system would be to vastly expand the number of judges that are involved in making a decision. Example, you'd still have a tiered court system, and your case would still be heard in front of say a 3-9 panel appeals court- but after they write their decisions, a couple hundred other appeals judges at the same level get to a simple cast up or down vote on the decision, remotely. That way the case is decided by a larger, more stable pool of qualified judges- it's not like 1 judge dies, is replaced by the other party, and now that appeals court starts issuing totally partisan decisions the other way on a 5-4 vote.

It would hopefully make the judiciary overall less partisan, less of a high-stakes affair to nominate an appeals judge, and less swinging back and forth between 5-4 Democratic or Republican votes

I have a feeling this would make things considerably more political.

If you don’t like what judges decide, get people elected who will write things clearly into law. If they can’t do that, it sucks, go fix the political situation and stop trying to fix that dysfunction by making major systematic changes.

>get people elected who will write things clearly into law

You can pass whatever law you'd like now- the existing judiciary can simply decide that it doesn't apply or isn't 'constitutional', and their decisions aren't reviewable. It's awarding ultimate power in society to a very small group The vast majority of developed countries don't work this way, at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

At a minimum, calling a law 'unconstitutional' should require a supermajority out of a fairly large body

I think you're just describing court packing because maybe you disagree with the outcome based on your partisan politics?

What? No. I'm not talking about adding tons of judges to the existing US system now. I'm describing a future potential system, likely for a new country

I think that would make things more partisan, not less. Those hundreds of judges are not going to have the time to study the case in as much detail as the assigned judges, so their decisions will be based on a quick cursory reading, and their justification won't be on the record to be reviewed by higher courts. While motivated reasoning is always a concern, I would expect it to be more common in decisions made in this situation.

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