What's always in question if is there suffcient amount of virus to infect someone. It's an empircal question that is just starting to be answered.
66 karma · joined March 14, 2020
Just realize that to a significant part of the thinking public, it's NOT about that. It's about the government controlling everything from the size of your soda to your toilet seat size to the way your kids are educated to how you get your healthcare.
A significant part of the public does NOT believe if it's a good idea, and there are bad consequences to someone not following the good idea, it therefore ought to be a law. It's not cynical on their part at all.
Just trying to share with you the perspective of these people.
There are technical solutions coming down the pike at our benighted lawmakers that are going to change the balance of power and force them to be more attentive and truly represent their constituents. That's all I can say for now.
Pelosi and Feinstein DO truly represent their constituents as far as I can tell, it has to be said. I don't particularly like either of them, but then I don't particularly care for the people they represent either.
I actually remember the Skokie march. We were kids. I loved the ACLU and so did everyone else I knew. They were like Free Speech super-heros. They were an institution, a force, feared and respected.
Now, yeah, well....
2) The fact that Afghanis had AK47s and RPGs just everywhere in Afghanistan before America invaded in 2002 and without a 2nd Amendment is not evidence that Americans don't need a 2nd Amendment. It's evidence that America armed the Afghanis in the 80s when they were fighting the Soviets with RPGs and AKs.
3) The point of the 2nd Amendment is to legally preserve an armed population. Afghanistan proves that an armed population can resist an invading government. Americans are not interested in rolling the dice with their Liberty at stake on some future, hypothetical blackmarket. Thanks.
4) Anyone reading this exchange who was undecided can come to the clear conclusion that you yourself admitted only an armed populace can resist tyranny.
5) Americans don't think Men gave us our Rights- including our Right to resist tyranny; we think those Rights come from our Creator and men have nothing to say about them and men who think they do are tyrants who need resisting. The 2nd Amendment is an expression of that fact- a discovery about reality, not an free invention of men's minds.
Well, since you brought it up, actually, the rule of men and not laws is exactly what we're afraid of.
To you it's a feature, to us it's a bug. The number of people killed by their own governments in the 20th century proved us right once and for all.
We don't think our Rights come from Men. They didn't come from Men and can't be removed by Men. They are inalienable Rights we were born with.
We don't care what the government d'jour thinks it can do. We had these Rights before there was an America, and every person everywhere has these Rights as well. That's what "endowed by their Creator with Inalienable Rights" means.
Whether or not people choose to stand up for them is another topic.
Just so you have a clear idea where we're coming from and what the words, "from my cold, dead hands" mean.
Everyone had guns to answer your question directly.
Are you suggesting we can all have as many AKs as we want forever in exchange for the 2nd Amendment? Because unless you are, you're either ignorant of things you choose to comment on, stupid or trolling me.
I'll take all three for 500, Alex.
..is a Babylon Bee headline that just writes itself.
That is the whole reason we have a 2nd Amendment. That's what it's about.
We went in with everything to Iraq and Afghanistan and did we subdue them? No. Why not? Because they had guns, and with guns, they acquired further weaponery to fight us; No other reason.
So you remove all the guns from "people who shouldn't have them" and how do you propose people should resist a tyrannical government?
Serious question, I am not mocking you.
Everyone knows the EFF and the ACLU are thinly camoflaged shells of their former selves, tactically pushing for whatever will advance their quest for power. Yeah, we know that if we want help defending our Constitutional rights, we go to non-psychopathic organzations like FIRE and Judical Watch and Project Veritas.
They defend strong encryption because it's a tool their side still needs, for now. Defending the Constitution and free speech is just a temporary tactic for them until they get more power, the sort of power they now wield openly on campuses across this nation and which you use to silence anyone who disagrees with them.
After that, they'll start talking about how old the Constitution is, how its from another, quainter time, and how it needs now to be put aside.... and how important it is the government oversee people's speech lest someone utter hatespeak .....and consequently we must ban strong encryption.
Or, in their own words: https://www.eff.org/pages/speaking-freely-sandra-ordonez
I appreciate that you either can't see that or don't buy it so I end my participation here having tried to make the point as clear as I could. That is not a sly way of saying "I'm right, you're wrong" by the way. I am just out of words and ideas and time to re-express the relationship again.
Very best to you.
The government should not be able to forbid a person form effectively defending his or herself ; it's a natural right which can't be taken away by any government. 3D printed guns gives you back that right if your state has taken it away i.e. China. They are hard to detect so this is another plus ion the same vein as the first.
This is the point of the project as I understand it, as per the project's creator.
A cynical person might even float the idea that Amazon WANTS that to happen so that there IS a regulatory burden because it can bear it and its would-be competitors / start-ups can't.
But that's too dark even for me... for now.
So back to original question- what about the risk of future, widespread #AmazonHate ?
Serious question, not being combative with you.
Doesn't Amazon have a very real hazard here which could result in burdensome regulation and or customer defection?
Forced to hand over == I had no choice. Forced to.
Do nothing for me == I was "reassigned" after someone accused me, without anything even remotely resembling proof, of something people in my position were accused of every day in every workplace covered by this union. Enduring baseless accusations are a part of this job. That's why we have CCTV cameras.
This was not an unusual accusation. I was not fired; I was reassigned to a place the company keeps for the specific purpose of making people quit- it's physically unendurable by anyone, generated no revenue for the company and existed as I said to make people quit.
So the company had a reliable supply of pretenses from third parties they were free to ignore- or act on- and a location whose existence was malignantly designed to force people to quit.
Unions play this game with the employers. We will pretend we don't know what you're doing and represent to our members there's nothing we can do.
They could have, for instance brought to bear the fact that this reassignment place had zero value to the company and had never been manned, ever, and generated no -zero- revenue , but did have the redeeming quality of making anyone who was assigned there quit.
They could have referenced the fact that the company receives 100s of complaints per year all of which they dismiss for total lack of evidence and this was one exactly like those except for the fact that the CCTV evidence exactly contradicted the complainant's assertions. They could have said that.
But that would create an antagonistic relationship between them and their partner and to what ends? What good would it do them? Besides, there's more than one way to skin a cat, right?
In highly unionized workplaces, all that happens is the employer antagonizes and provokes the employee until they quit. That's clever, but sometimes it backfires if the employee digs in. Then we all read about it in the papers; we know this as "going postal".
That's right.. the postal office, that bastion of union strength has a managerial policy of continuing to turn up the heat on an otherwise un-fireable employee until they quit, which most do but now and then one of them "goes postal".
Just have decent working condition laws, a right to work, and vigorously enforce the laws against smearing past employees and you'll have a market where employees are truly free to leave and be hired elsewhere.
Since you're interested in management-labor relations you might also want to know I was working in Silicon Valley when the whole Apple-Google-HM-and-Every-Other-Company-Known-To-Man / Do-Not-Hire scandal went down. Actually, I could have become a claimant in that.
Here's the deal. Companies are going to do whatever they want. Getting caught and fined is cheaper than obeying the law and to the extent that isn't true, then we have a container ship worth of dirty tricks we're willing to play on our employees, just like they did me. They have "labor shortages" and "narratives about how Americans aren't interested in STEM and all the rest of this garbage... it never ends.
No cop of any form is going to stop them; policing them just gives false hope to employees, and creates a false trail for researchers to fumble over. Unions shops and Amazon, both, do whatever they want.
So let them- within clear safety strictures (but see Amazon's forklift scandal in Indiana a few months ago to see how THOSE laws all worked out). Then we all know what reality is and we can negotiate it. Just let employees move on unmolested- which is what the aforementioned Google et. al. scandal was trying to prevent- and the market will work.
I don't expect the government to intervene because that's not their expertise.
In short I expect Bezeos to apply the same level of creativity and innovation to his employee's and fellow American's well-being and safety during this crisis as he's applied to the task of creating the greatest buyer/seller/supply chain marketplace the world has ever seen. I expect that and so does everyone else, even if not in those words.
Nothing could be clearer than there's a universal and urgent need to identify and then do the decent thing during this emergency.
There's lots of truly terrible things that could be allowed to happen "naturally" if we just let anyone work under any conditions for any wages. Then we're China or some really terrible place. But one of the main values of the West is exactly we're NOT China and we don't do ruthless things to people and we don't suffer those things to be done by others.
In the end, and make no mistake about it, that's the general neighborhood we're playing in for the moment, a civilization is more than the price of its aluminum or labor or even its stocks. Now is the time when we enact our deepest values.
1.) Everyone gets fever checked at the door starting shift. Fever people go home.
2.) Scheduling is devised to segregate employees into non-overlapping groups. We're a work family and we work together in some area. Whatever has to be done to the schedule or even the job details itself to effect this, as far as possible, is done. The goal is to make each family unit as small and physically localized as possible.
3.) Obviously, everyone gets a mask when they become available. If you happen to have access to a mask, then bring it and use it- you're protecting yourself and everyone else around you (from you). (Woodworkers, potters, construction and cement workers etc. normally had a ready supply of N95 and N100 masks on hand in the beforetime).
4.) Hourly hand washing-sanitizing or whatever your skin can bear.
5.) Social distancing rules apply to customers and employees both (thinking of grocery stores here) communicated through signage, flyers and serious verbal intervention if needed.
4.) Employees are authorized and ordered to do what they have to do to keep their personal distance from obtuse / heedless / intruding public without respecting usual rules of "courtesy" and without fear of management discipline. So also between employees.
5.) Delivery people live outside, w/ exception of bathroom breaks, which can also be taken at delivery people's residences, where practical.
6.) Deliveries are assembled and placed outside by inside people.
7.) Inside people do not get close to outside people.
8.) Outside people do not get close to customers, including inside customers homes, enclosed porches, etc.
Knowledgeable healthcare professionals please improve this.
You assume the striker always has the moral high ground, why?
That's a big assumption. I've lived this. When I worked in a union job, I was forced to hand over a part of my paycheck to my union who did absolutely nothing for me when management went hostile without cause. As far as I could tell, the union was a gigantic executive/manager pyramid which was supporting its lifestyle on our backs. No bathroom break, no breaks at all- literally law breaking- no protection from management abuse of any form.
This is the case in a lot of jobs. The facts on the ground as I lived them are- unions do nothing for workers. They run campaigns for Democrats. Democrats empower unions. The worker still gets screwed.
Give me a right to work state and enforcement against past jobs badmouthing former employees - which is something no one ever enforces or in any way patrols for employers doing and which is ruinous to working people's prospects- and I'll be fine.
What's the ultimate goal- to serve and support unions or make life better for the working person? Because they aren't the same thing.
Where do you think the government gets its money?
We tip our delivery / pickup people 5 bucks for orders which are well south of $100. Masks and hand sanitizers and gloves are what they need to do their jobs. That and customers keeping away from them 6-10 feet. You can't let yourself just walk up close to someone you see working in a store to ask them a question, like you could in the beforetime.
The take away is this- truck drivers, stocking clerks, checkout people are essential to a functioning society. Hollywood stars, entertainers and media personalities are not.
Everyone wants the nicer things- the pro edition, the nice coffee table book, but it's not worth it to those same people.
This produces people who see things that are nice that they want, but they can't justify paying the extra money for.
Those people sometimes say things like "why is edition X so expensive? It's not worth it". In other words, it's economic nonsense to buy that thing.
But that's the point- it's not worth it- to you. But to some people, it IS worth it, and they're the target market.
The consumer self-identifies and self-selects which category they fall into. The fact that something isn't "worth it" or "too expensive" means that the consumer does not belong to that category of people for whom it makes economic sense to buy that product.
Affinity offers a huge amount of functionality at a price everyone can afford. Some people have more money which they would use to buy more Affinity stuff, if it was there. That's what those books are - more wonderful stuff for people to whom its worth it.
Differential pricing is how companies keep things affordable. In some sense the people to whom extras are worth it subsidize the low cost of the essential core for everyone else.
It's pretty nice.
Wrongest observation in the article:
"For the very fact that we are saving airlines indicates their role as utility"
An industry can be essential to society and still not be a utility, and that's a feature, not a bug. Nationalizing an industry implies the State has the knowledge to run it. But an entire industry of experts is already dedicated to doing just that. Nationalizing it implies the State would pay those same people or their equivalent to do what it is they already do. Why would it do that ?
This is true of critical and non-critical industries. The government does not possess the knowledge to run specialized industries. That's exactly why Socialism always fails, and yes, it does always fail.
In America at least, even "utilities" are not State owned, at most they are regulated, and the constant object of regulatory capture because of it.
His other main point, that this is not a Black Swan, it's a White Swan (a disaster they should have seen coming and planned for) is stronger. However the exact scope and duration of this event is itself something of a Black Swan, no? The entire world is in lockdown for an unknown duration. Did you want that priced into every airline ticket you buy? It's not a rhetorical question, you have to decide if this is something you yourself would have wanted, back in the beforetime.
For that matter, how does a nationalized airline industry raising your taxes to pay for Black Swans sound to you? Think that's where the money would ultimately really go? How's your Social Security lockbox doing?
The reason we stem the bleeding in our industries like airlines isn't because their lobbyists incite Congressfolk to sin or even because they're utilities in all but name. Life could go on if the major airlines all failed all at once. After some time, there would be new airlines and until then charter planes for critical things and telecommute, like now.
The reason we bail them out is because the net downstream cost of not doing so is many times the net cost of doing so. People have to have jobs to go back to after this is over. There has to be an economy. There has to be industries with jobs to go to.
The demand for air travel will certainly be there, air travel is not a new invention waiting to catch on, is it? So the question to be answered is: is it wiser to birth a new airline industry or treat the wounds of the one you have? Here I define wiser to mean: less costly to the government and less ruinous of people's lives.
In the US at least, everyone is getting hard cash presently to see them through, #masshole not withstanding. Many industries and even banks(!) are stepping up in all sorts of creative and genuinely helpful ways. This will pass; we will survive thanks to people's willingness to endure #lockdown for the sake of others. Everything else beyond that is gravy from historical and biological perspectives.