> This is locking down for the sake of locking down, not an evidence-first safety driven approach. That is something I cannot support.
"Support" is a bit of an overloaded word. I do agree with you that I do not support a government policy that isn't evidence-driven. But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.
As a simple analogy, perhaps the speed limits for highways in my state are capped at 60 mph, but there's evidence that the roads can safely accommodate drivers at 70 mph, they're well-maintained, they are built to appropriate safety standards, etc. I wouldn't support the government keeping the speed limit at 60 mph based on flimsy evidence. But I also wouldn't object to the government enforcing the speed limit as it is - because the end result of saying that every driver has the right to make their own private judgment of whether the speed limit laws are validly reasoned is that there is no speed limit anymore.
You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.
Prohibition is obviously a prime example of this, but if you consider various laws that once existed or are currently on the books but no longer enforced (think laws pertaining to racial segregation, sexuality, drug use, and such) you realize that being a law abiding citizen does not mean you are no longer allowed to think for yourself. Read up on "Jury Nullification" or "Jury Equity".
Civil disobedience typically involved still getting punished as a matter of protest to change public opinion. If Elon Musk is doing this as civil disobedience, he is using the resources of Tesla and the forced compliance of his workers in order to make a political statement. I don't really see that as better.
Instead, it seems that Musk is doing this just because he thinks he can get away with it, or because he is simply angry with the elected officials of his county. In such a situation, Tesla and Elon Musk should rightfully be punished for their actions.
Civil disobedience is typically, but not always, punished. We will have to see how this plays out.
There is also the question of which branch of government gets to have a say in the enforcement of a law. Consider California's approach to marijuana use vs the Federal government's. Or consider how there are numerous sanctuary cities that are in defiance of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It's not complicated because there is no conflicting guidance from the federal vs state governments. Once the federal government orders everyone to open up it will be unknown what the right answer is. States that want to continue with the lockdown will likely sue the federal government, or companies that want to open up would sue the state. The courts will weigh in and it will probably go "something something interstate commerce" and the federal government will win, forcing the states to open up.
After that it really depends upon how states respond and you could be stuck in a giant game of chicken. This is where it might get complicated and risky - mostly for people trying to abide by the law. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But in this case, the government wont' really arrest you for not opening your car factory. But the state might arrest you for doing it.
In the case of Marijuana, it's really quite simple: everyone in California using marijuana can be arrested by the federal government. They just choose not to, at least usually.
ICE is a bit more complicated. They are trying to compel cooporation from local law enforcement, who is not responsible for enforcing immigration law. They aren't asking them to enforce it directly themselves though.
> To be fair, Musk's tweet especially says if anyone is to be arrested for this, it should be him
To be fair, you can't both commit a crime and pay other people to commit crimes and get them out of the legal consequences by tweeting that you are the only one who should be arrested.
Not sure about the rules in the US out that country. But it's it really a crime to go to work? Especially some national law and state law seem to allow it. Just the county's burocrats seem to prohibit it.
the crime here is county officials engaging in literal economic repression. It's not a matter of when the government orders whatever is says this week.
The fact of the matter is that if a business feels it's time to reopen, it should do so, cautiously of course.
Neither the employees or customers are forced to go. They have a right to refuse. They don't have a right to dictate what others decide to do with their business
> I don't see how he could be arrested given that none of this lockdown was implemented in criminal statute law.
Yes, all of it was. Or, more precisely, it was implemented under statutory authority of county and state public health officials whose orders are enforceable under preexisting criminal statutes and do not require additional criminal legislation for each new order.
In fact, Newsome's Executive Orders refer only to GOV § 8567, which only refers to procurement powers of state agencies. It specifically does not create any criminal statute, which in CA happens to be a very involved process including traversing multiple legislative committees.
In other words, he could trigger a process to confiscate your steel if he can establish urgent necessity for all of it, but he can't make it a crime to build a car. You're flat wrong on this.
> In fact, Newsome's Executive Orders refer only to GOV § 8567
This is both false and irrelevant; it's false because Newsom’s 39 (to date) executive orders relating to COVID-19 (they are almost daily) reference more than just that section—i.e, the first, EO N-25-20 (3/12/2020), references government code sections 8567, 8571, and 8572 [0]; but more to the point it's irrelevant because while the EOs have some importance in state COVID-19 response, they aren't the shelter-in-place order, which is a Public Health Order issued by the State Public Health Officer / Director of Public Health on March 19, 2020 [1], citing Health and Safety Code Sections 120125, 120140,
131080, 120130(c), 120135, 120145, 120175 and 120150, which pertain to the power of the Department of Public Health to issue such orders and the obligation of local officials to enforce them.
To quote it: "Pursuant to Government Code sections 26602 and 41601 and Health and Safety Code section 101029, the Health Officer requests that the Sheriff and all chiefs of police in the County ensure compliance with and enforce this Order. The violation of any provision of this Order constitutes an imminent threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both."
Now, go read what those specific codes actually say. None are criminal statutes or encompass criminal statutes.
26602.
"The sheriff shall prevent and suppress any affrays, breaches of the peace, riots, and insurrections that come to his or her knowledge, and investigate public offenses which have been committed. The sheriff may execute all orders of the local health officer issued for the purpose of preventing the spread of any contagious or communicable disease."
41601.
"For the suppression of riot, public tumult, disturbance of the peace, or resistance against the laws or public authorities in the lawful exercise of their functions, and for the execution of all orders of the local health officer issued for the purpose of preventing the spread of any contagious, infectious, or communicable disease, the chief of police has the powers conferred upon sheriffs by general law and in all respects is entitled to the same protection."
> Now, go read what those specific codes actually say. None are criminal statutes or encompass criminal statutes.
The criminal statutes are cited earlier in the order, at the very beginning:
“Please read this Order carefully. Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. (California Health and Safety Code § 120295, et seq.; Cal. Penal Code §§ 69, 148(a)(1))”
HSC 120295 is the key one (the others deal with resisting arrest and interference with executive officers): “Any person who violates Section 120130 or any section in Chapter 3 (commencing with Section 120175, but excluding Section 120195), is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not less than fifty dollars ($50) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment for a term of not more than 90 days, or by both. He or she is guilty of a separate offense for each day that the violation continued.”
The most key part of Chapter 3 for this purpose is HSC 120220: “When quarantine or isolation, either strict or modified, is established by a health officer, all persons shall obey his or her rules, orders, and regulations.”
This is municipal code, not criminal law. Very important distinction. Like with a traffic ticket, they can fine for not complying. They cannot arrest you, however.
Where they "get" you is if you blow off the court about resolving the fine which is contempt of court, which is a criminal offense.
It blows my mind how supposedly smart people know so little about the law. It's a lot like programming. The keywords are important and the logic used as well.
I guess we'll find out what the judges the locals voted for and the juries summoned are made of. Even then, their decisions can be overturned by a higher court or appealed so that basically means nothing. They can say "criminal municipal code violation" and a good judge should say, no, that's not how this works. I guess it is LA, though...
No, the code cited in the order is State (not municipal or county) code giving certain authority to county public health officers, neither municipal codes nor municipal officers are involved. Also, municipal codes in California can have criminal components, so the contrast drawn is false as well as not germane to the relevant facts.
> Like with a traffic ticket, they can fine for not complying. They cannot arrest you, however.
Being stopped and issued a traffic ticket is a non-custodial arrest and the “fine” people pay if they don't dispute tickets is legally forfeiture of bail. But, in any case, unlike minor traffic offenses, violating a county public health order issued to control communicable disease is a criminal offense punishable by fines, jail, or both; the Alameda County order cites the relevant state criminal law.
> It blows my mind how supposedly smart people know so little about the law.
You started off strong, but overreached. If I say to my spouse or child "You fucking stupid cunt, I've told you a thousand times to put the dishes away! You good for nothing piece of shit, you can't even get that right!" That's violence.
No it is not. Problems with drawing the line between what is acceptable and what is "violent" speech are caused precisely by the fact that this axiom is completely false. You cannot have free speech, and by extension speech at all, without causing what you percieve as "violence".
First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive. The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.
Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards. If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.
On the more serious side - what about "psychological violence"? What about when your wife treats you like a slave and verbally abuses you on a daily basis? If your wife mistreats you, then just leave. Her words cannot stop you. What stops you is more likely the threat of being beaten, that she will make it impossible for you to see your kids and she will take your house. The violence is physical, economical and sociological, not verbal.
Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life. Is this violence? Not at all, I will just shrug it off and continue to enjoy my day. I will get some downvotes and maybe be less frequent in visiting left-leaning websites. We lose the ability to talk to each other, but it's far from being violence. It's just stupidity on both sides.
Almost all situations of real interest and disagreement will be grey-area and call for a pragmatic vs. a dogmatic approach.
> First of all, do not put equality sign between physical and being verbally abusive.
I am not, in general -- let's try to confine ourselves to my specific example.
> The first one is something external that you have no control over, no matter how much you fight, the second you can just shrug off and continue with your life.
This is a dogmatic assertion that is not supported by the evidence. If I were feeling less charitable, I could counter that of course you could do something about physical violence -- you just had to train harder, have better weapons, or build a coalition. People are emotionally abused. Stating that in some cases, some people can transcend that abuse is ... not really relevant. It's interesting, and should be studied so that perhaps we can confer immunity to more people.
> Problem with your example lies in the lack of context. On the more humorous side - maybe your wife is a cunt and your children are little bastards.
As soon as you admit context you admit that abusive speech could be an act of violence, as well as true speech. As you say, yourself, context matters. This is why dogmatic approaches to this issue are doomed to fail.
> If you percieve any kind of abusive expression, no matter of the context, as violence, ...
Let's just stick to my example. To disprove "speech cannot be violence", I only have to find one example of speech that is violence. I don't have believe or prove that all (abusive) speech is violence.
> then you're just done. There is no useful way that you can contribute to culture and society, because you cannot participate in discourse anymore.
This is nonsense. It's smacks of litany rather than logic. A person can be a productive member of society in many ways, yet hold beliefs that disturb you.
> Going further - your comment disgusted me and I've felt that it violates some of the most important values I have in my life.
I can't know, but your words suggest that you are looking to be disgusted. We all like to be self-righteous at times, but I doubt we are as far apart as you believe.
I have deep knowledge of computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, and emotional abuse. All of these areas teach that nature has no respect for our ontologies.
We may try to draw a hard line between violence and speech, but we mislead ourselves. Almost all of the cases worth debating occur at the fuzzy edges of these concepts.
Failure to realize this may result in the sense of having a crystalline framework, but ultimately it misleads.
Violence is an act of communication and as such always bound to the context it happens in. If someone accidentally punches you during a sports match it may look violent, but you very likely won't feel violated, because you could assume the intent to hurt is not given. If someone delivers the same punch on purpose in front of your peers, you will feel extremely violated.
Two punches, equal in their physical qualities and physical pain, one much more violent than the other. What hurts more or does more lasting damage depends on the context. There are people who have been hit as a child and have no problem with it. There are people who have never been hit physically but verbally abused who will have to deal with this their whole life.
To think violence is only violence when it is physical certainly has not much to do with how people exert force onto each other in daily life. Of course this doesn't mean that every communicative act that challenges your world view, critisises your actions, highlights you mistakes etc. automatically constitutes a violent act, although you certainly might feel bad afterwards. This is why the dictionary definition of violence has "intent" in it. If someone tells you your whole life was a lie they might not intend to hurt you with their words, even if you are devastated. If someone tells you, your hair looks shitty, they do.
Note: whether you feel hurt or not plays no role in the definition of the word violence.
"behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something."
Notice that word "physical". Liberals have tried to define the word to be associated with words or 'hate speech' in an attempt to shut down speech they don't want to hear. It doesn't mean they're correct.
If you want to clarify your thinking, you should consider these key questions:
1) Why is violence bad? What is it we're trying to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?
2) Are there instances of speech, which in specific contexts can, cause the same negative outcomes that we try to prevent when we seek to prevent violence?
3) Is it really true that physical violence is inescapable, while abusive speech only causes harm if the listener lets it?
Let go of left/right talking points, shallow pattern-matching, and groupism, and deeply consider these questions.
Well, I'm sure a nuanced argument about the boundaries between concepts can be settled by the first Google result.
I'll take your Google result and throw you this Oxford English Dictionary result, which admits a more nuanced interpretation: https://www.oed.com/oed2/00277885
That definition is the same as the one I gave. It talks specifically of "physical" violence, at least as the main definition.
When I was growing up, we always had this phrase: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." It was usually the response to a kid complaining of being verbally teased at school, in the sense that he needed to ignore it - don't bother the teacher / parents about it unless the bullies start using their fists to hurt you.
The left has tried to redefine violence over the years in order to create the idea of "hate speech" which they want punished the same as violence.
A more interesting example would be giving an order to fire rubber bullets into a peaceable crowd. In the same sense that someone has committed murder if they hire a hitman, we could say that the speech act of giving the order, is a violent act.
Your example of a stream of abusive language, is not the equivalent of that. If someone is punished for such an act, they are not being punished for committing a violent offence.
I do wish people would stop trying to shift the definition of 'violence'. I don't want to have to make a habit of saying 'physical violence' just to close the door on it.
The difference between your view and the view you are commenting on is (as so often) whether we look at the act or the outcome. And honestly, given the dictionary definition of violence both are valid perspectives.
Cambridge Dictionary says: violence – extremely forceful actions that are intended to hurt people or are likely to cause damage.
Nowhere does it say these actions have to be carried out with the body (and if we are pedantic here, yelling into a room can be very physical as well as you are literally moving air with your breath).
Violence is a matter of communication. If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.
This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.
> If your girlfriend accidentally turns around and hits you in the face with full force, it hurts, but that doesn't mean it was violent behaviour. If she however hits you on purpose with bad intent, it can be weak as hell and still constitute violent behaviour.
Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.
Boxing is a violent sport, but isn't criminal.
> This means violence is not purely physical, but also an act of demonstrating/communicating power over the other. And as an act of communication there is more to it than it's pure physical components.
I don't think the word 'communication' is helpful here. I think what you're getting at is intent.
> Disagree. That is a violent act, but one without violent intent.
intent is in the dictionary definition of the term violence, which is my point. How do you know it is intent? It is beeing communicated (be it verbal, nonverbal or otherwise).
Defining acts like these as communication has a long tradition in system theory, which among other things is used in therapy of families and relationships, so this is not really a creative act on my side.
That people at times use actions (including violent ones) to communicate is nothing new, everybody who has a child knows this.
In conversations like this, it's unhelpful to defer to your favourite dictionary. For one, I can point to another dictionary whose definition of 'violence' makes no mention of intent. [0] (Originally I'd thought to use the Oxford dictionary for this example, but I'd missed that their definition, like Cambridge's, does mention intent specifically :-P )
More than that though, I'm able to have my own take on the meaning of a word.
Philosophers have no use for dictionaries when exploring the meaning of 'free will', for instance. For someone already fluent in English, the dictionary contributes nothing.
> How do you know it is intent?
Ah, I wasn't clear. I don't think violence is a matter of intent, but I think 'intent' may be a better word for what you were referring to as 'communication', unless I misunderstood your point.
I can see that it makes some sense to view violence as 'communication', in the same way evolution is steered by 'communication' between species, but I don't see that this perspective is bringing much to the table in this context.
> Instead, it seems that Musk is doing this just because he thinks he can get away with it, or because he is simply angry with the elected officials of his county. In such a situation, Tesla and Elon Musk should rightfully be punished for their actions.
Here is the thing about the Tesla culture, which is like a more subdued one then the one at SpaceX: some people are 'all in' about the cause and are putting their Lives at risk working 10+ hours everyday.
One of the reasons I decided to go work for Kimbal instead of Tesla was the mandatory Swing shift for Supply Chain (at the time) ahead of the Model 3 ramp. People were putting in 60+ hours in 4 day schedules. Burn out is not possible, its near exepected. They also offer really amazing Health Packages, like the best any other Multi-national corp ever offered me because they understood it as critical component to success in such an ambitious goal. At Kimbal's place I could do 60+ hours over 6 days, which if you've done either is taxing, but the former wipes you out and messes up your circadian rhythm, which as you get older is harder to re-adjust on the fly.
If you honestly think there aren't people waiting to just go back to work at the HQ factory to do what they joined up for int first place then you haven't met many Tesla people, let alone any SpaceX guys.
Is this fair? I think if Elon/HR has stipulated there are no consequences for those who can't or won't return, then, yes. The Factory has only just been able to recently turn things around after an amazing Manufacturing feat from the Fremont Team, only to have this stifled by the Local government, who oddly benefit a great deal from the revenue generated from Fremont.
If any of you have been to Fremont, you'll know there isn't much Economic activity there, even for the East Bay. Lots of local businesses, little restaurants and some fast food places rely heavily on Tesla employees. This is a lose-lose situation which may be due to political reasons, but if a fine is all the stands in the way of making the deliveries back-log get smaller, then its worth it. (Elon is saying he is willing to get arrested for it?)
People have paid in full for a Model Y, which has been refined due to Model 3's hard-earned lessons, the losses and missed opportunity costs are immense. If they have to move production of Y to Shanghai and re-import them to the US then not only is that a supply chain nightmare, but it completely undoes the cost-savings that made Shanghai imperative in the first place.
I don't blame him, this has also boosted the stock price above 800 again, too. So the Market agrees with his decision.
> Jesus, the frickin Nazi Youth did the same thing!
Personally speaking, I met a person that was Hitler Youth when I lived in Southern Germany; and for a majority it was less about a dark haired, dark eyed Austrian talking about the 'aryan master race' then you'd think, and more about not wanting to die of hunger as all the farms were Nationalized.
> Why don't people ever see the leader worship and authoritarianism (fascism) in corporations?
I've said before and I'll say it again: I'm not in the cult of Elon, I care what he enables not what he is/isn't. You cannot deny that EV has succeed in large part because of Tesla, I worked for all the major Car manufactures with a real EV program (BMW/VW/Nissan) and those are now completely shifting in large because Tesla succeeding in it's Mission statement.
SpaceX delivered on its promise of making Rockets re-usable and more affordable etc...
Those are his companies, which he founded and risked eveything to get to where they are, but its the People who work in them that I support and champion. I just find Elon funny in a meme troll-like way, especially towards those who seem to take offense to every action/indiscretion he makes.
I did not mean to imply you were in the cult of Elon.
As a teacher of American History I have read countless diaries of these kids, they were brainwashed while they were in the scouts. I do not blame them either.
>Those are his companies, which he founded and risked eveything to get to where they are, but its the People who work in them that I support and champion. I just find Elon funny in a meme troll-like way, especially towards those who seem to take offense to every action/indiscretion he makes.
You could have championed the people in Hitler's armies as well.
> I did not mean to imply you were in the cult of Elon.
That's the issue with hyperbole, it tends to lends itself to extremes.
> You could have championed the people in Hitler's armies as well.
Back to the Nazi narrative, no I personally wouldn't have, want know why? During the (illegal) Iraq and Afghan Invasion I was in staunch opposition, and I went to a Pro-war University and come from a Military family. Both of my cousins were vets of both Iraq and Afghanistan, one with 3 tours in total. I was supposed to be the third, but realized in the 6th grade killing for the State is still Murder and that War is not a career--I wanted to help preserve Life, not destroy it.
I'm glad I got accustomed to having to do with less, as my family practically shunned me for this position and were aghast at my Anarchist leanings and didn't support me in anyway because of my refusal to accept the BS narrative that was sold to them.
So, having lived amongst and worked with said former Hitler Youth, something I'm sure even you as Historian probably cannot say, it was ultimately an experience that led to compassionate acceptance.
He didn't want to fight in Hitler's BS war of Genocide. He was hungry and did what he was told as a child from a rural farming family who had their land stolen from them and was subject to go days/weeks without eating.
He was the 'Opa' of the family I worked for on the farm, I would bring him coffee in the morning while he sorted through the potatoes we planted, harvested out of respect, and despite what you may want to think I never saw a blood-thirsty genocidal maniac.
Instead I saw a broken man who was forcefully inducted to march and sing to feed his Family, who later became a farmer himself after the war and inevitably lost his farm due to Chernobyl's fallout, and a Man who still suffered the affects of unfathomable levels of scarcity as he would regularly take whatever looked edible from our compost bin, despite having access to the store and the farms fresh produce.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you're an Educator you really should have better arguments to base your views/convictions on. Nazism was a horrible system, but there are more cogent ways to convey your position than resorting to 'well, Nazis...'
>simply angry with the elected officials of his county
Erica Pan received zero votes for her because she has never appeared on the ballot. She's an appointed not an elected official. This is her choice and the public has no possibility of direct electoral response to her decision to forbid Tesla opening.
When it comes to a choice between Musk's judgement versus elected officials, I'd suggest the former has a superior track record to the latter. Not to mention, any punishment will blow straight back at them when Musk then moves the Tesla factory. It's quite amusing really.
Even if Musk is right and the county officials are wrong, he still has to follow the law. If he thinks he can get away with breaking the law because he can threaten to move his business, I would support jail time for him. The attitude that having money puts one above the law is not something that should be tolerated.
Just to be clear, the public official who tweeted that has nothing to do with Alameda County. She's an assemblywoman from San Diego. And I'll note that her angry tweet doesn't endanger anyone's life.
So far, Alameda County officials have been very subdued in their response - too subdued, in my opinion. They're afraid of Musk moving his factory out of town. It's a terrible message to send that large businesses can ignore public health regulations, and avoid consequences by threatening to leave.
Do you support throwing non-violent drug offenders in prison too? Or are you in only in favor of jailing rich people who might actually have enough leverage to prove in court that the law is unjust (or better yet, completely unconstitutional)?
I support jailing executives who willfully violate the law, especially if they think that they can get away with it by threatening to move their business elsewhere. We can't live in a society in which money buys you the right to violate the law.
You can believe that the county's rules are unwise, but they're in place in order to protect public health. Right or wrong, Musk is violating those rules and thinks he'll get away with it because he runs an important company. There has to be a clear message that he won't get away with it. Fining him won't make a difference. Prison time might.
I have no idea what (if any) compensation Tesla workers receive while not working during the pandemic, nor do I know if those workers will be penalized for not working - particularly for not working while the factory is open in violation of state restrictions.
The county order prohibits both businesses operating and individuals engaging in out-of-home activity except as explicitly permitted by the order, and violating a county public health order is a crime (misdemeanor) punishable by up jail.
Automobile manufacturing is not one of the listed exceptions, so it is illegal both to operate (for the owner) and to go to work at (for the employees) such a business.
> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.
> Prohibition is obviously a prime example of this, but if you consider various laws that once existed or are currently on the books but no longer enforced (think laws pertaining to racial segregation, sexuality, drug use, and such) you realize that...
The thing is: public safety laws aren't like racial segregation at all. If they are, I look forward to stuff like "civil disobedience" against child labor laws, etc.
> ...being a law abiding citizen does not mean you are no longer allowed to think for yourself.
That's true, but it also means being accountable and not acting without regards to others. Musk is acting like a petulant brat here, and I hope the Alameda County sheriff talks some sense into him.
Between the twitter rants, the poverty vow, the new child, the name of the new child, and now this, well.. All in the last 10 days or so too. The last few years have not been all that kind either.
I mean, new fathers, even after the other six babies, still do pretty goofy things. However, it's more putting the milk in the pantry type stuff, or mixing up coffee grounds and water.
Not daring public officials to arrest you during a pandemic and all but demanding employees to work during said pandemic.
I feel for the guy, things are tough now. I hope he finds the peace that he seems to need.
Trying to pass off CPAP machines as ventilators, promising that there will be no cases in middle April, and promoting conspiracy theories that the number of deaths have been inflated, when they are almost certainly understated. Yeah, Musk is definitely the guy I wanna be taking advice from in this crisis.
And that’s before we even get to promising to send a submarine to save some trapped kids, and when the person who actually helped save them instead of the mythical submarine says it wouldn’t work calling him a paedophile.
Cpaps are way more useful as ventilators. If yo are on the vent with covid19 you are as good as done. The problem is one of supply chains.. They are withering and dieing atm. If you don't keep them alive at all cost, the ecosystem around your company is gone once you reopen.
For example, Elon asked hospitals what they needed and plenty did want CPAP machines (which are a type of ventilator). A much smaller number of invasive ventilators were provisioned (more expensive and probably harder to acquire) as well.
That there are data collection issues that mean COVID19 deaths are inflated (or undercounted! There are factors pushing it both ways) is not a conspiracy theory, it is frequently discussed in mainstream media like the BBC.
For the cave thing, Musk did in fact send people and had them make some prototype mini submarines to help rescue the kids. It wasn't a bad idea (or so the diver who actually found the kids claimed), just not the one they actually went with in the end. The guy he got into a spat with was a British diver living in Thailand who helped recruiting the British divers who actually did the work. Musk won the resulting defamation lawsuit.
Basically all of the statements in the grandparent post omit any facts that get in the way of Musk looking bad.
For the ventilator thing, I agree it was blown out of proportion. I think Elon using the term "ventilator" may have been misleading, but it's also not necessarily wrong, and he did actually deliver the machines to the hospitals.
> That there are data collection issues that mean COVID19 deaths are inflated (or undercounted! There are factors pushing it both ways) is not a conspiracy theory, it is frequently discussed in mainstream media like the BBC.
I have not seen anything remotely suggesting we're over-counting, and honestly the idea is silly. You can't just explain away the number of excess deaths we had in April.
> For the cave thing, Musk did in fact send people and had them make some prototype mini submarines to help rescue the kids. It wasn't a bad idea (or so the diver who actually found the kids claimed), just not the one they actually went with in the end. The guy he got into a spat with was a British diver living in Thailand who helped recruiting the British divers who actually did the work. Musk won the resulting defamation lawsuit.
Yeah but... He still called him a pedophile did he not? Just because he didn't win a defamation suit for a variety of reasons doesn't suddenly make it ok.
My point was about the poster I replied to omitted any facts that got in the way of Musk looking bad. I'm not going to say Musk calling a non-pedophile a pedophile was good (though it was sorta a tit for tat situation, with the guy saying Musk was only trying to rescue the boys for PR so Musk says the retired diver was only trying to rescue the boys to diddle them).
Regarding COVID 19, the BBC has been repeatedly telling me that most countries are counting deaths with COVID19 as COVID 19 deaths (resulting in an overcount) and has been telling me that the response to the virus itself is likely causing many deaths due to things like people being more reluctant to go to hospital, higher depression due to isolation/general climate of fear, no in person access to GPs and similar issues.
> I feel for the guy, things are tough now. I hope he finds the peace that he seems to need.
On a Human level, I would agree.
Selfishly and pragmatically, I hope he never does; who else has done so much to enable the progress that is needed in the World right now? People like him are a once in a generation, not because he's a Genius (which I think he is) but because of the amount of risk he is willing to absorb and keeping going at all costs and motivating more and more to the cause in the process.
I think Dr. Zubrin said it best: he's not motivated by Money, he's after Legacy and that draws the best efforts of Humanity forward in order to be a part of it. He is an archetype character out several Sci-fi books.
6 Kids is a good shot at Legacy on it's own, but perhaps setting the bar this high for them in his Lifetime and the opportunity to out-do each other after setting the bar so high was the goal.
Motivated by legacy is also the archetype of several villains. It's not a good or bad quality per se but the actions taken on the pursuit of it make it good or bad.
And Howard Hughes was also motivated by legacy and unquestionably brilliant. Intellectual brilliance and drive can coexist with psychological vulnerabilities and erratic decision making.
> And Howard Hughes was also motivated by legacy and unquestionably brilliant. Intellectual brilliance and drive can coexist with psychological vulnerabilities and erratic decision making.
Id include Nikola Tesla in there as well, just because something doesn't end in a happy contrite Disney-like ending doesn't mean that it wasn't a positive, or a Life well lived that would carry on and inspire so many more to contribute to that end long after either have died.
I personally moved to CO in large part because of Nikola Tesla, and was resolved to do so before Amendment 64 was even a real possibility.
> That's an Americanism, right? Your milk isn't shelf-stable?
No milk, I'm fairly certain, is shelf-stable once opened; shelf-stable (until opened) milk is widely available but not as popular as milk that isn't in the US, and the “milk in the pantry” reference is implicitly in the context of having just poured from it, so it has been opened. So, while it probably doesn't reference shelf-stable milk, it wouldn't be any different if it did.
I didn't know that the reference implies opened milk; I just imagined a dad like myself sorting groceries after the weekly shopping run, and deciding which go to the fridge, and which to the pantry.
It's the same in Europe too (or at least the parts of Europe that I'm familiar with); you can buy shelf-stable milk, but I don't know anyone that does.
It’s literally the only thing available in a lot of Europe - and it’s handy. Means I can buy a dozen litres at once, stick them in the pantry, and only keep one bottle in the fridge.
Some of them literally taste like arse (think they’re packaged with some funky protective atmosphere), others taste like fresh milk.
It's not an Americanism to keep your milk in the fridge after you open it. Which country are you from where you'd keep opened milk in the room temp pantry (which is what is being discussed here)?
These attempts at "Americans do the darnedest things XD" comments always seem so forced to me.
Really - do we have to immediately "think of the children!" ?
How about "we need to monitor all your communications, for public safety reasons. And also in order to prevent children pornography, I guess". Would this also be a public safety law, and would any form of civil disobedience be unwarranted?
What makes Musk's gesture a form of "civil disobedience" rather than dumb disrespect of law is that he actually has reasonable arguments why it'd be safe in his case. It's not "I don't believe COVID-19 exists and I've screened the factory against 5G anyway". It may be more beneficial to start defining reasonable standards for reopening. rather than semi-arbitrarily declaring X or Y "essential" with no safety standards in place.
Is Elon Musk gonna be working in the factory and traveling to and from it possibly using public transport, or even just a regular car, but having to pick up coffee from the drive thru on the way?
It’s not civil disobedience if you’re getting a bunch of other people to do it on your behalf.
> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply.
It is one thing for Musk to publicly proclaim he is willing to go to jail, but are all the rank and file workers?
At what point does the civil disobedience become workers telling their employer they will not violate the law by returning to work and risk jail just to pump up the stock?
Yeah, that is a good question. A worker can reasonably claim that they should not be asked to break the law as part of their job. I am curious to see how all this plays out.
Having said that, I read somewhere that there are like 10,000 employees at Tesla's Fremont plant. Do we really think the County would actually follow through and arrest 10,000 people? Thank Goodness we do not live in such a society.. Perhaps they would arrest just the management, perhaps just Musk? Shut off the power instead? Ugh.
Plenty of people are asking, Tesla has already brought a declaratory action in the courts to ask them.
The thing is that is how things are done legally, but Musk is putting the cart before the horse by breaking the order. In other words right or wrong say police show up to enforce the order and order the factory shutdown and musk/employees fail to obey...failing to obey the officers orders in generally a charge unto itself at that point never mind the violation of the county order.
That's because people who actually care rather than feigning curiosity can read the order, which cites its statutory authority, and then can go and read the statutory authority, too.
You have an ugly habit of trying to silence critique by talking down to people using specific claims and relying on their inability to research when it is your claims that are false.
I've responded directly to that post with direct links to the relevant orders, but it's funny that you make that claim and point to a post (of yours, I note) that is both derisive in tone and almost wholly unsupported by fact (making a claim that is both literally false and which refers to a set of state orders that isn't, and doesn't include, the only state order relevant to the discussion, the shelter-in-place order issued by the Director of Public Health.)
I've responded directly to that post with direct links to the relevant orders
You're talking in circles. The point here is that you repeatedly said that Newsome's orders cites criminal statute law, e.g.
"...the order, which cites its statutory authority (to shut down Tesla et al)"
And it doesn't. You can keep pretending that it does and telling people who tried to point that out in a courteous way to, in effect, "go look it up", but I did, and I quoted same. (Feel free to quote any supporting criminal statutes now, which you've been oddly reluctant to do.)
And today's Wisconsin Supreme Court overturn of its Governor's shelter in place order clearly demonstrates that even a Governor can't exceed his authority, even if s/he thinks it well-intentioned.
> The point here is that you repeatedly said that Newsome's orders cites criminal statute law
Nope, I never said any of Newsom's orders did that; I said the state and, relevant here, Alameda County public health orders (neither of which was issued by Newsom) both cited the relevant statutory authority to criminal enforcement. I've even linked directly to both orders and reproduced the citations from both orders, and even pulled out and quoted the most relevant section from a broad chapter cited in the county order. You, on the other hand, have made an inaccurate description of the authority cited in the irrelevant governor's executive orders to support the rest of your unsupported inaccurate claims.
Newsom's 39 executive orders on this emergency (at last count, which was yesterday so I might have missed a couple) are waivers of state law under the governor's emergency powers which are separate from the public health orders that are at issue here. (They are only tangentially relevant in that one of them provides the authority for the 5/7/2020 revision to the State Public Health Order bypassing some usual procedural requirements.)
> And today's Wisconsin Supreme Court overturn of its Governor's shelter in place order clearly demonstrates that even a Governor can't exceed his authority, even if s/he thinks it well-intentioned.
Almost all US case law has held that any jurisdiction can make anything illegal unless there's a specific higher-ranking (state or federal) law protecting that act from being made illegal.
There is supporting state statute law for public health orders to prevent communicable disease; that statute law is also what makes it a crime to violate such orders.
I'll just quote the first part (after the rather extended title) of the Alameda County order, which cites the statutory authority both for the order itself and for criminal prosecution of violations:
> Please read this Order carefully. Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a
misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. (California Health and Safety
Code § 120295, et seq.; Cal. Penal Code §§ 69, 148(a)(1))
> UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF CALIFORNIA HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE SECTIONS 101040, 101085, AND 120175, THE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE COUNTY OF ALAMEDA (“HEALTH OFFICER”) ORDERS:
It's not a law, it's an order from a single individual in the county. There's also no law preventing people from going to work, regardless of whether the business should be open or not. And Tesla is not requiring anyone to show up.
Nobody is at risk here other than Elon and executives, but there will be plenty of prosecutorial discretion used to settle this smoothly rather than cause more civil unrest.
But if they're being paid nothing otherwise, one could make the argument that it's coercive. Still, this is the US, and it's arguably unfair to expect Tesla to pay nonworking employees indefinitely, even though Musk is a billionaire.
Musk (and most billionaires) don't have actual billions in the bank. Their net worth coms from owning the stock of the companies they founded. If the company goes bankrupt, they lose their wealth too. And paying for employees (10s of thousands of them) without any revenue or production can have an adverse impact.
If giant companies like Ford and Boeing are having trouble, it's not hard to imagine that a new car company that just recently crossed profitability is going to have solvency issues by staying closed.
Is it actually the law? Is there actually a virus that is so bad that factories have to be closed, but so harmless that grocery stores are open? And if not, can it be legal to close businesses?
Civil disobedience is about people, not corporations. More specifically, it's generally about people fighting for justice and against bad laws. It's not something that should be used for corporations ignoring safety regulation.
Oh yes, billionaires and corporations figured highly in Thoreau’s _Civil Disobedience_. From Walden Pond to Elon, it’s a straight line of coherent thought.
I really think that the word "billionaire" needs to stop being used as a bad word.
Billionaires are citizens too. They are bound (imperfectly) by laws. Therefore they too encounter situations where practicing civil disobedience makes sense.
Billionaires are indeed citizens and no one is taking away their rights, per se. However, it is my opinion that as a class of people they should not exist (astute readers know how to flag clear opinions so they need not always be noted as such for the sake of brevity). In 2018 the median household income in the US was $63,179 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N; numbers from other sources vary a bit but all around that point), and of course most people don’t have much for savings. $1B : $63,179 :: $15,828 : $1. My household income is quite a bit above the median and puts me in the top few percentiles, depending on how one adjusts for location. I pay a fair bit in taxes. I feel plenty incentivized to work hard; I would like to earn more and have a bit more money. At the same time, I have been incredibly fortunate in a variety of ways. It is difficult for me to see any credible policy rationale for why anyone should have 10,000 times more money than the median American household (and that’s for a modest billionaire). The extralegal advantages that come with such wealth are considerable, and worthy of pejorative usage.
What do you propose should happen in Bezos' case? Let's assume that he doesn't have $139B in the bank, but most of his wealth is the value of his Amazon stock. Should he be forced to give up his ownership in the company he built? I have heard people opine that people like Bezos should be taxed at 90%, but what if he doesn't sell his shares?
If he wants to sell $10M or so to buy a nice house and a new car, do you think he doesn't deserve to do so? Where do you draw the line?
> Should he be forced to give up his ownership in the company he built?
How do you even picture that claim? Is it Bezos literally building every warehouse with his own two hands? Is it him being at a thousand places at once dealing with paperwork, marketing and packaging all by himself? For every billionaire out there there are thousands of workers that were denied their share of the success. I would say the only way someone could be a honest "self made" billionaire is by mugging an other billionaire in a dark alley.
There's a colloquial sense of building something that doesn't require that you do 100% of the work yourself. For example, when people say they're building a house, almost always they're just hiring someone else to actually build it and all they've contributed was money.
Besides that, there are some billionaires that did get their wealth honestly in my estimation, like JK Rowling and Markus Persson.
When you say, “draw the line”, my gut reaction is “curves beat lines.” Cliff thresholds often lead to bad behavior. I think in all cases, not just with Bezos, the following tax policies should be under consideration. What the precise points should be is more a matter for experts. With the below in place, I don’t see too much harm with being a billionaire in stock in the company one founded.
- Significantly higher marginal tax rates further up the income ladder. US high end marginal tax rates are historically and relatively low; at the same time the US runs an incredible deficit. It’s crazy.
- Increasing tax rates on dividend earnings for individuals, so that they converge to the income tax rates based on some income/earnings thresholds. Large share holders like Bezos can make millions via dividends, and get a far better tax rate than you or I. It doesn’t make any sense. For mutual funds and companies, etc., dividend taxation could be treated as now without much negative impact.
- Increasing tax rates on capital gains when realized. If Bezos wants to sell $10M of stock to buy a fancy new house and car, great, but at some level of capital gains it makes sense for the rates to rise as it otherwise becomes another kind of income tax dodge.
- Inheritance taxes increasing steeply with the amount of the estate. Sam Walton worked his ass off; his kids didn’t. It’s perfectly normal to want to leave your kids something, but after a certain point it seems rather a social anti-pattern to have a trust fund class, especially at extreme amounts of wealth (which is what we are talking here).
- Limits on loss depreciation for individuals. Perhaps not quite as important but also subject to a lot of abuse.
Of course, I also think there’s much that needs to be done with campaign finance reform, lowering corporate tax rates, automatic antitrust provisions that come into play when a company becomes relatively too big, and increased penalties for corporate externalities (like privacy violations, pollution, etc.).
By "draw the line" I was referring to how much you would take from him if he wanted to convert some of his equity in Amazon into cash. Although I feel like I do appreciate the points you listed above, even with those measures in place there are no guarantees that "billionaires as a class of people" would cease to exist.
Certainly with someone like Bezos, unless you take it all there is going to be a number that will still net him a billion after all of the taxes. And if you do "take it all", then maybe the next Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Gates starts the next company in another jurisdiction with less of an appetite for taxation, drawing away with it the capital and all of the follow-on effects it provides (jobs, spending in the community, etc.). And given the lengths we know that rich people will go to protect their money, that line has to be drawn at far less than "all" to keep them.
On the other end of the extreme, even if he never sells a share those shares still allow him to wield a tremendous amount of power. So in the short run, all the taxes in the world would change nothing (Amazon does not pay dividends). It would just give him more time to figure out how to evade the taxes in the long run. :)
I am moved by the argument that Walton's kids shouldn't get it all, but I'm not sure that transferring some or all of his property to the government is a good idea. You would then just have a "trust fund class" of politicians and bureacrats! (BTW your Walton comment has got me pumped for season 3 of "Succession")
I like your overall thesis, I just think we should be less punitive with those exceptional people who do indeed add tremendous value to our economy and society.
Why shouldn't they exist? Are you really claiming that by accumulating certain amount of health you become harmful to society? If that is the case what would be that amount that you mention? $1,000,000,000 and what about $990,000,000?
The accumulation of wealth by a single individual is not inherently harmful for society, it all comes down to the intention for which accumulation happens and how is that spent.
Accumulation of wealth by a single individual is a very inefficient distribution of resources (from a maximizing utility perspective) due to the diminishing value of each additional $.
I don't think the accumulation is inefficient per se, it would depend on what the individual does with that wealth. Bezos or Musk invest that capital in productive enterprises, which arguably benefit society.
That's a very strong assumption to make. Because you are putting a limit on the capabilities of an individual and the cost of the problems and projects thet may work on.
Accumulation of wealth can never be analysed in its own vacuum, because it does not exist in a vacuum.
Present day accumulation of wealth creates a huge power imbalance, billionaires are citizens, just as I am, why should they have more power, as a citizen, than I do?
If you defend that billionaires should exist then, in my opinion, it's required to design a way to protect the rest of society from this class of people amassing more and more power.
The problem isn't money, it is our power structures. Right now, being a billionaire is almost inherently bad, every billionaire is a policy failure.
Why shouldn't billionaires have more power than you? I assume that you come from a western country, and presumably you work on Engineering or IT industry. Based on statistics we can easily assume that you belong to the 1% richest population of the world. Are you willing to give up on your wealth? If not, why should a billionaire then?
Besides that, hierarchies of power exist outside of realm of money. And they are a natural occurrence. You will not only find billionaires with more power than you, but also a lot of other citizens that belong to these other hierarchies that have achieved their power via their competence.
Power in itself is not dangerous or undesirable, power that becomes tyrannic is.
What is more dangerous is inequality, specially inequality of opportunities. Certainly some times of inequalities of outcome can also be dangerous in certain situations if not kept at check, basically because they may become a source of violence.
People shouldn't be allowed to be too tall either. No one deserves to be 6'3 when the average height is 5'7. The extralegal advantages that come with such height are considerable and worth correcting.
I think this is a fantastic analogy, except instead of 5'7 and 6'3 it's 5'7 and 50,000' tall. You bet society would start to have some pretty interesting laws if there were a bunch of people running around that were ten thousand times the size of the median person. It would be agreed that people of this size, while capable of incredible things, present a significant problem for the general population and they consume A LOT of resources. Certainly the population would prefer if they were only 1000 feet tall, after all, it's impossible to maintain perspective if your head is in the clouds, far from the median person.
That website rubs me the wrong way in so many ways - the premise of "what could we do with X% of $what_someone_who_is_not_me_owns" with no concern for the owner, and "no person deserves this much wealth" with no concern given to the very important question of: Who can judge what anyone "Deserves"?
They can keep their wealth because the rest of us protects it, often with our blood. (Military and police, for a start, but that’s just scratching the surface.)
Aside from the fact that Elon was born into a wealthy family (which is vaguely like having tall genes, I guess?), he can discard his massive wealth at any moment with considerable ease compared to the task of somehow reducing your height from 6'3" to 5'7". He actively chose to accumulate wealth and hold onto it, there are plenty of successful businessmen who aren't billionaires or aspiring billionaires.
Are you really going to pick height as a comparison point for being a billionaire? Did tall people take their height from short people? Is height taxed?
The great man theory is overrated, and this case in particular because many of Newton's discoveries would have been found by his compatriots anyway- Leibniz already invented calculus independently of Newton, Hooke had developed theories of gravity at the same time of Principia Mathematica as well. If not Bezos, you'd be thanking the Waltons or Sol Price. If not Musk, then Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning- the engineers who actually founded Tesla.
Actually they wouldn't have needed Bezos for that. Online shops have been a thing before Amazon existed, and even today Amazon is not the only online shop, it's just the first that comes to the minds of most people. Do you also thank the marketers that made "Kleenex" a common word for paper towels to wipe your nose when you have a cold? Given Amazon's theoretical inexistence, others would have undoubtedly filled that void instantly, just like if Kleenex never existed.
If anyone, thank Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web, without which none of the aforementioned online shops could exist. And last I checked he didn't become a mega-billionaire from that invention.
Organizing other people's labor isn't easy though. Have you ever tried to do it? It's very hard and very stressful. When governments have tried, they have tended to fail miserably. So why would anyone undertake this difficult and stressful task without a strong incentive to do so?
I agree in general that workers should get a bigger piece of the pie, but if entrepreneurs and executives aren't providing any value, then why aren't groups of workers getting together en masse and forming their own companies? It seems pretty clear that this "organizer" role is essential and can't be done by just anyone.
Is the reason Bezos gets up every morning because he thinks to himself, "man, if only I have $200 billion instead of my $145 billion"?
Let's be real: Bezos is not "organizing" Amazon so much as he organizes a cabinet of Executives who do the same recursively until some worker does the actual work.
> When governments have tried, they have tended to fail miserably
So the federal government, which must coordinate the efforts of over 2 million employees across a more broad spectrum of activities and labor than Amazon does, doesn't count?
And is the job so hard as to mean hundreds of billions? Or is that just want the market will pay to keep Bezos around? I could understand that part, as it means the market believes Bezos current activities are worth that much. But does that mean he deserves it? I should hardly think those arguments are the same.
"Let's be real: Bezos is not "organizing" Amazon so much as he organizes a cabinet of Executives who do the same recursively until some worker does the actual work."
Organizing a cabinet of executives (who then organize recursively down the hierarchy) is also very difficult and stressful, so I'm not sure what the point is here? Again, it seems clear that this role is necessary and important, otherwise we should see lots of big and successful companies running without CEOs or executives.
"So the federal government, which must coordinate the efforts of over 2 million employees across a more broad spectrum of activities and labor than Amazon does, doesn't count?"
While I don't think anyone would point to the US government as a model of efficiency and innovation, I'll grant that they do organize a lot of labor, but it primarily concerns the responsibilities of governing that we have specifically decided are special cases that the state should take care of (in spite of whatever inefficiencies it may cause). When states have tried to organize labor more generally, in order to do things like extract resources, grow food, build stuff in factories, set prices, etc., it has not gone well in most cases.
"And is the job so hard as to mean hundreds of billions? Or is that just want the market will pay to keep Bezos around? I could understand that part, as it means the market believes Bezos current activities are worth that much. But does that mean he deserves it? I should hardly think those arguments are the same."
What someone "deserves" is subjective. My point is just that it seems we do need to provide entrepreneurs and managers some kind of incentive if we want people to create and manage businesses, since doing so is hard work that requires unique skills. How strong that incentive should be is debatable, but if you have one, there will always be people who put way more energy into pursuing it than others, and so are much wealthier than others.
I recall the quote from Thoreau, saying we must also stand up to those "who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity."
The point of the essay is to exhibit disobedience to government when that government is perpetrating injustice. Somehow halting the production of luxury cars for a few more weeks, with the explicit intent of trying to save lives, doesn't seem like an injustice to me.
> Somehow halting the production of luxury cars for a few more weeks, with the explicit intent of trying to save lives, doesn't seem like an injustice to me.
Forgive the cliche, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
"Trying to save lives" is the new "think of the children". It's the same mentality that gives us legislation like the EARN IT act.
--
The question we should ask is, (1) has the government provided a reasonable justification for placing such limits on commerce, freedom of movement, etc. And (2), is the strategy we're pursuing, from a public health perspective, the right one?
My answer to both (1) and (2) is "hell no". The rules our government has ruled out are arbitrary and capricious and are largely based on superstition. Case in point: closures of public parks and beaches.
Arguing (2) is out of the scope of this comment but suffice to say that my belief is the negative externalities introduced by our COVID-19 response are far, far worse than COVID-19 itself.
--
FWIW, I am not a fan of Musk in general. I am inherently suspicious of people that are trying to save humanity. As we have seen with Musk - for example, how Tesla factory workers are treated in the pre-COVID-19 era - because he is working tirelessly to save humanity, he is willing to sacrifice actual humans to achieve his goals. Because after all, in the scheme of things, if you're talking about fighting existential threats like climate change or being stuck on one planet, what's the cost of even 100,000 human-lives' worth of wellbeing in comparison? It's not even close.
But when it comes to COVID-19, I absolutely think Musk is right. Yes he has made some absolute asinine comments/predictions but his general points about suspension of civil liberties, and statements that COVID-19 is not nearly as lethal as we were told...all of that is totally true in my book.
> "Trying to save lives" is the new "think of the children". It's the same mentality that gives us legislation like the EARN IT act.
Is not "but what about my freedom" the same thing? This is a nonsense argument.
> But when it comes to COVID-19, I absolutely think Musk is right. Yes he has made some absolute asinine comments/predictions but his general points about suspension of civil liberties, and statements that COVID-19 is not nearly as lethal as we were told...all of that is totally true in my book.
Forget the nonsense and call it for what it is. It has nothing to do with civil liberty. It has to do with money, power, and influence.
People actually suffering and not knowing where their next check comes from, well, we don't really care about them. But when finally the rich software engineers get a little less comfortable, the screeches for freedom would make even the largest eagle blush.
If it was about them then the federal government would provide aide so that a proper response can be undertaken.
I disagree. The rich people who can avoid the poor are the biggest proponents of opening up business. In fact, I see this sentiment on hacker news more than anywhere else- because software engineers are rich and benefit from the working poor everywhere, they want the economy to reopen so their portfolio grows again.
The federal government is providing aid and today discussed a 25 trillion dollar deal. That is more than all the mortgage, auto, and student loan debt combined.
The problem is that govt is slow and payments by themselves are not effective because of the cascading effects of economic shutdown (you cant spend money when services aren't running in the first place). It's the lower and middle class workers that are suffering the most without a paycheck.
Also, in case you missed it, the stock market has been on a rapid rise for a month now and the NASDAQ is currently positive for the year. Portfolios are doing just fine.
The federal government discusses a lot of things - the large majority of which never get passed. This is not an argument.
If the stock market is doing fine then perhaps we don't need to rush to reopen. Or maybe it's completely propped up based on nothing, countless measures of pumping money into industry, and monetary policy.
> (you cant spend money when services aren't running in the first place). It's the lower and middle class workers that are suffering the most without a paycheck.
Aide shouldn't be for spending money on Tesla's and other junk. It should be for rent, food, etc, utilities, etc. So this argument is pointless.
The poor and middle class have already been suffering for years - expensive healthcare, lower wages, less pensions, regressive taxes. Yet now people suddenly care? It's basically all a lie. Just admit it - you don't want to lose money for yourself, and you don't care if other people you don't know die or get sick or work in poor conditions.
The stock market is not the economy. Also you can't selectively choose to only open certain businesses because they're all connected. Tesla alone has thousands of vendors and suppliers affecting hundreds of thousands of jobs.
I'm a startup founder who has lost major revenue. I personally know dozens who have lost their businesses and jobs and a few who have gotten sick. More aid is not going to make any difference and the economic disaster is going to cause much more suffering and death. Supporting family isn't free. These are known effects and must be balanced against the new data we have about covid19.
But now you're resorting to baseless accusations and personal attacks so let's end it here.
Phhft, some aid. The people get just crumbs under the table. In Europe, many countries pay 80% or more of furloughed salaries. This is how it’s done. (There is shenanigans there too, but less.) The cares act is joke.
In the US, the megacorps got theirs. Now the populace has to work. No tests, just work comrade. For Mother US!
People who oppose EARN-IT act did provide their reasons. I get it that you don’t believe their intentions. Do you have any plausible theories on this supposedly secret motives of Alameda county officials? You say it isn’t saving lives, so what do you think it is? What do they benefit from keeping a factory closed unnecessarily?
> supposedly secret motives of Alameda county officials?
This is an arbitrary goal post. There need not be any secret motive of the county officials to make their reasoning incorrect or the law not right. Their motives could be completely public and still scrutinized and found to be incorrect.
> You say it isn’t saving lives, so what do you think it is?
I think that they intend to save lives but that their understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the best way to address it is so overly simplistic that the myopic policies they are instituting are going to lead to larger mortality over the long-term. Which is the pattern we see at the broader scale as well when we examine the US' response to the pandemic.
So, like I implied above, their intentions are good, but intentions are largely worthless.
I'm responding to how this all aligns with Thoreau's concept of civil disobedience. Billionaires more interested in the expansion of their own business at the cost of the lives of their workers is the exact opposite of what Thoreau considers justice.
I recommend learning more about these ideas before building them into your narrative. You may realize, for example, that the people who have been working on COVID response full time for months have put a lot more thought into it than you.
It's not about good or bad. It's about power. Billionaires have a shitton of power, and we need rules to rein them in. To protect us from them.
That's in the abstract. Let's take this concrete example. Say there is some worker in this factory. They don't want to go to work. They don't feel safe. Now they are torn between two authorities. What happens if they do show up? What happens if they don't show up? Will they be seen as "not a teamplayer"? Will their career stall out compared to their yes-men colleges? Maybe even get fired without any cause given. Half a year later so as not to make it obvious?
> Let's take this concrete example. Say there is some worker in this factory. They don't want to go to work. They don't feel safe. Now they are torn between two authorities. What happens if they do show up? What happens if they don't show up? Will they be seen as "not a teamplayer"? Will their career stall out compared to their yes-men colleges? Maybe even get fired without any cause given. Half a year later so as not to make it obvious?
Yes, I think pretty much exactly that would happen. (I'm not super up-to-date on the CARES act or other legal measures that they might be able to take, or if unemployment pays out to people who "quit" their jobs currently, so there's a small chance that those are options)
However my conclusion is that's an example of why forcibly shutting down businesses was a terrible idea in the first place and never should have been done.
But yes I totally agree, our governmental systems are not set up to handle these questions.
I must confess that when the "flatten the curve" meme started spreading around and the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers were being given, that I actually believed in flattening the curve and thus initially supported the lockdown. I should have known at the time that the goalposts were going to be moved. In retrospect it's incredibly obvious.
I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to the threats of “new normal” and how damaging the response has been and continues to be.
The math didn’t check out on “Flatten the Curve” from the very start. It is very, very hard not to get caught up in the panic response, and in that moment the sheer number of people who would accuse you of endangering lives for even doubting the response was necessary, correct, proportional, scientific, or even legal, was enormous.
In MA ~60% of COVID deaths have been in nursing homes. That’s 3,000 deaths in an extremely narrow population (< 50,000 people) and the state was busy shutting down life as we know it and totally failed the people actually at risk. In NY they sent known COVID cases into their nursing homes. In RI 70% of their total fatalities have been in nursing homes.
We need the end of lockdown, we need to halt the drift into totalitarian and draconian tracking measures, and we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population.
As far as TFA, it’s the typical Elon lightning rod effect but the fact is all the other auto manufacturers have reopened, and Alameda County is no hotspot. It should be entirely uncontroversial that Tesla is reopening and in the meantime challenging any continuing shutdown order in court. I doubt a preliminary injunction would be granted based on the required legal standard, although judges have surprised me in the past!
>we need strictly targeted and laser focused protections for the at-risk population
Exactly. And if we had been prepared with enough testing capability and protective equipment, that would have been the way to go. But we were not prepared. So we had to go with plan B. The US is not good at health care. There are consequences for that.
You realize that even if the lockdown ended tomorrow, that doesn't change the fact that the economic effects are still going to exist from other countries suffering from Coronavirus related issues, yes?
The rallying cry around ending the lockdown is complete and utter bullshit considering other countries that have tried reopening (including South Korea and parts of Japan) were slammed by a second wave of infections.
Opening up won't stop the at-risk population from being afraid to work, nor will it stop people from getting sick and being unable to work.
Economic effects are still going to exist. This is a tautology. What matters is the change or trade-offs in effect from taking one course of action or another.
We have over 20 million unemployed (probably a significant undercount) through a self-inflicted lockdown in just a couple months. Leading economic experts such as the US Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve have warned strongly of “permanent economic damage” if we continue the lockdown. I would speculate this lockdown is firmly ushering in the next era of “essential” mega corporations and the utter destruction of small business.
And in New York, the majority of new cases in the last few weeks have been from people “strictly observing social distancing.”
Like focusing a laser increases the energy that can be brought to bear on a single point and magnifies the overall effect, so too can highly targeted common sense measures save more lives than this “utter bullshit” general lockdown.
I’ll give the specific example again. While we’re doing ~30k tests a day nationwide, we still haven’t tested every nursing home patient and worker. In fact, NY Times reports many nursing homes have not gotten access to barely any testing at all, even for their recently deceased. So a sub-population of 1.3 million residents is bearing 35% of total fatalities (in 14 states it’s more than 50% of all fatalities) and this lockdown diverts massive resources and energy away from saving those lives.
Do I have that right? 0.4% of the population has seen 35% of the total deaths? Over-represented by 87x. By the way that’s an undercount because only 33 states actually break out data for nursing home deaths. But instead the political response is fear mongering, preaching a new normal, and shaming people who go to the beach.
> the initial 4-5% case fatality rate and 20% hospitalization rate numbers
Those are the current stats I believe. The IFR is of course lower, but probably not wildly lower. As of yesterday the UK's chief medical officer was estimating it at 1% or a bit less.
Although this argument is phrased in a snarky way I think it makes a good point. It's more important that billionaires and multinational corporations feel that they should obey the law than it is for individuals
Civil and social disobedience is done by activists, not by companies.
This is just greed and putting profits before people.
Less than one week ago we were all cheering for an high level engineer leaving Amazon against working condition in their center. And now we try to justify Tesla reopening a factory?
And plenty of people disagree with Elon Musk on this.
That said, I see a lot more reports about poor working conditions at Amazon than Tesla, so it's entirely possible to criticise Amazon but agree with Tesla.
I only support civil disobedience for "human rights issues". That is the only thing really merits the term.
Things appearing as civil disobedience for money issue are virtually always terrible - as soon as "radicalism" or "iconoclastism" becomes a business, it's worst business.
Prohibition was a terrible policy but the people that fueled the defiance of prohibition were mobsters, scum that had a terrible and arguably on-going terrible effect on the country.
Even 1960s drug proponents became awful at the point they became drug dealers.
Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines the right to work.
I'm not interested in casting Elon Musk as some sort of heroic figure, and if it turns out he has coerced his workers or endangered them in practice, not just theoretically, he should pay for that.
But the freedom to work is absolutely a human rights issue.
So, this quoting of Article 23 seems to considerably distort the intention of the article:
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
What is described is something like the right to be considered for work if one is qualified. Maybe to the provision of work. But saying that this article guarantees a factory owner the right to restart that factory when they feel they'll be providing work along with making a profit, does not ring true.
Oddly enough, in this case the local and state government does have a reason and did follow due process. A company that disagrees can sue -- more due process.
Have you been tested? Every day? You can't confidently say you're not infectious when a large proportion of cases are asymptomatic, or very mild. By all means be gung-ho about your own life, but your rights stop at the point they risk other people.
this is like saying have you regularly proven that you are not guilty of crimes?
It is really not how it should work at all.
Assuming everyone is infected at all times is both absurd and most importantly unworkable and counterproductive. The net effect is the opposite of what it wants to achieve.
Exactly. Which is why, when there is an epidemic of a dangerous disease, measures need to be implemented that assume that everybody is infectious unless proven otherwise.
No, that's not the point. If the small risk of someone dying from covid19 is enough to take away everyone's rights, what keeps your state from taking away your rights for a similarly flimsy reason, such as the risk that you will commit a crime?
Depriving people of the right to earn a living regardless of their health status and regardless of their health practices (PPE, distancing in the workplace, sanitizing surfaces, air filtration) is absolutely not due process. It is the sort of arbitrary and absurd regulation which is quintessentially Californian. California has a history of depriving people of human rights without rhyme or reason; this is just furthering the trend.
* making it illegal for homeless people to exist in cities (loitering laws etc. when the homeless cannot help but break the law)
* taking away the right to bear arms as soon as black people started carrying firearms for self defense
* a long history of police brutality in the LAPD against minorities
* Los Angeles refusing to protect Asian Americans during race riots
* The California Dept of Labor refusing to enforce minimum wage laws regardless of the citizenship status of workers (only the federal government has to enforce border and immigration laws)
We're talking about California in this thread. If you want to talk about the federal government you're free to do so.
Governments do not have rights, period. They exist solely at the consent and continued pleasure of the governed (or should at least). That is to say, every human has rights, because they are an individual human. The rights of people are self-evident and stem solely from the fact that people are human.
Governments have no rights. There is nothing that is owed to them due to their existence as governments. Were a particular set of people not to form a government, no other government could rightfully enter to assert their 'right' to govern.
Gandhi was brown, and his policy of civil disobedience was essentially based on the premise that a government only derives its legitimacy from the will of the people to be governed by it. Leading to the act of mass civil disobedience.
Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1]. So one could argue that this is, in fact, a Human Rights issue. Just because this guy is a billionaire does not mean that these rights do not apply to him.
The full phrase is "the right to work in just and favourable conditions". Which concerns his workers too.
Though suggesting that Musk's "human rights" are being violated through closure of his car factory in the middle of a pandemic is making a complete joke out of both his argument and out of the concept of human rights.
Yes I read the link before I posted it, I just didn't think the full phrase added anything to my response to the OP. :)
Anyway, I would think that being unable to open your own factory while your competitors are allowed to be open when you have done nothing wrong, would be quite "unjust and unfavorable". I mean it isn't like he can conduct this type of business from home instead.
Edit:
Here is the full sentence according to Article 23 from the Universal Declaration of Human rights:
1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. [1]
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Paraphrasing here, but I very much read that as "Every human has the right to work in just and favourable conditions", not "Every corporation has a right to operate under equal economic treatment."
if your factory is closed while your competitors are allowed to be open that would definitely be unfair if all other relevant conditions about the factories were the same, in this case if they were in proximity to each other.
And just in case you're going to ask what proximity has to do with the matter of justice, it is because as his competitor's factories are located elsewhere than Alameda they fall under different jurisdiction, do his competitors ever have any regulation based on where they are located that they can then refuse to obey because Tesla's Alameda factory doesn't have to do it that way?
If there is unfairness here it is of the same sort of unfairness engendered by the world being a large globe with different climates, countries, governments, currencies, and cultures and where you choose to place your factory means your natural greatness of being must be hampered by the base restrictions of existence.
The irony of bringing up the right to work in a discussion about a US corporation wanting to reopen their plant. So is Tesla going to offer everyone who wants to work a job, because it's a human right? Exactly, that's not what the right to work is, neither does it mean that corporations can just be restart plants without care about regulations.
> Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1]. So one could argue that this is, in fact, a Human Rights issue. Just because this guy is a billionaire does not mean that these rights do not apply to him
This nicely illustrates the folly of trying to reason about a situation from a pithy statement of some cherry-picked "right." Are we violating the "right to work"[1] of young children when we forbid them from quitting school getting a a factory job? Maybe, but it's pretty obvious that overriding factors are more important in that case. It's the same when we consider an employer who wants to "to work" employing his employees in conditions that some may consider unsafe.
> No, because children don't have a right to work.
I'm not sure what point that's meant to make, but it supports what I was saying. You'd never be able to derive that exception from:
>>> Well, the UN definition of "Human Rights" includes the "right to work"[1].
There's loads of different competing rights, exceptions to those rights, and other social practices that need to be weighed to make a judgement a situation like this. Focusing too closely on reasoning about this one "right to work" ignores all that, and thus leads to less than enlightening conclusions.
Just as Freedom of Speech doesn't give one free license to spout hate speech or shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, one persons right to work isn't more important than another's right to life (or safety from a deadly pandemic).
I'm always amused to see people use the "fire in a crowded theater" analogy. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. coined the phrase in Schenck v. United States.[1] In that case, he sent a man to prison for the crime of leafleting against the draft in World War I.
The court case that gave us the "fire in a crowded theater" example was partially overturned by brandenburg vs ohio. It's not entirely clear which direction the court would come down right now.
Your first example is also impacted by this. General advocacy of violence was upheld as constitutionally protected speech, it's very unlikely that hate speech could ever meet the brandenburg test.
That's not to say that your point about one person's right to work vs another person's right to live is wrong. In fact, I think the court would likely agree with you on that matter. I just think your first couple of examples are flawed.
You can continue to make money and produce things in the food service industry. You cannot continue to do so in a nonessential industry in a manner that puts others at risk in a way that is costly to the state. Don't produce meth, and don't run a car factory before a pandemic has been contained.
> You must also take into account the history of intentional civil disobedience where the government has over reached and the population simply reaches the point where it refuses to comply
There's also the opposite example, of people showing more tolerance for arbitrary and authoritarian political decisions out of fear. It's very visible here in Europe right now and for the first time it seems like people didn't wise up since the 1930s at all, the mechanisms that convincingly explained how Nazi Germany and Austria could happen, still work.
Give me irrational civil disobedience over this any time.
The Logan Act was used to pressure Michael Flynn into pleading guilty. That wasn't a first. It can be an effective threat without actually prosecuting anyone for it. That's more than a sufficient reason to repeal this blatantly unconstitutional law.
I appreciate where you are coming from. (1/2)mv^2 very rapidly becomes unforgiving to the frail human frame due to that annoying square!
Many people might look at 60 -> 70 mph and conclude something like a 16% increase in "danger". However, if we set m = 1 then 60 mph gives 1800 thingies and 70 mph gives us 2450 thingies or 36% "extra danger". I live in metric (with a sprinkle of extra units to taste land) hence: "thingies". I set m = 1 which should avoid problems.
Something as simple as speed is not as intuitive as someone might think. We look at the variable (speed) and it is obviously linear and so we think the implications of increasing it must similarly be linear. But it isn't. The energy in a speeding car is proportional to the square of the velocity of the car. This is a horribly simplistic model but the fundamentals are there.
Now virus propagation ... R is the rate of infection. If R < 1 then infections drop over time. If R > 1 then infections rise exponentially. I gather that R = 3 is the norm for SARS-COV-2 without controls. You can play with a spreadsheet for a simple model to scare yourself.
When the term exponential heaves into view then we should quite rightly shit ourselves and do as we are told. We are far away from worrying about 16:36 which is the result of a one off event but an exponential "thing" over time grows rather fast.
> When the term exponential heaves into view then we should quite rightly shit ourselves and do as we are told.
And yet we didn't collectively shit ourselves to nearly the same extent for any of the other novel viruses that have popped up in the last couple decades and spread exponentially.
Exponential spread is the default state of things. It's only when a virus becomes widespread in a population that the exponential spread ceases, as you indicated in your reference to R.
To use a contrived example: Imagine a new virus SARS-CoV-1337 with an R of 250 and an infection fatality rate of .00000001%. Would it warrant the response we've made to SARS-CoV-2? Clearly not.
Therefore we need to look at the actual outcomes associated with the virus, and then counterbalance those against the externalities introduced by suppressing spread. Implicitly everyone in favor of lockdown is assuming that the mortality avoided by hunkering down until a theoretical game-changer (vaccine, highly effective antiviral, monoclonal antibodies etc) is available at scale, is a bigger benefit than the negatives incurred by trying to prevent spread (lockdown/containment).
My personal opinion is that the externalities of our current approach (I'm speaking from a US-based perspective) far exceed the cost of COVID-19 itself.
> My personal opinion is that the externalities of our current approach (I'm speaking from a US-based perspective) far exceed the cost of COVID-19 itself.
How many lives would need to be saved to encourage the current lockdown, in your opinion?
Let's back up a bit to talk about the two strategies.
(1) Containment lets you indefinitely avoid COVID-19-induced mortality in the short-medium term, at the expense of ongoing, mounting costs to wellbeing and the economy. These costs are certainly non-linear, for example businesses can generally only survive a given number of days/weeks based off their capital expenditure and thus it's not quite as simple as a linear relation. But for our purposes, it's easiest to think of the wellbeing and economic cost as being in direct proportion to how long we spend in containment.
The postponement of mortality only becomes the true avoidance of mortality when we get a "game-changer": a vaccine or a highly effective treatment that seriously improves outcomes.
Given that we must practice indefinite containment until we develop the "game-changer", we are executing a strategy which is based off a temporally unbounded future event. Therefore the potential drawbacks are unbounded given that the strategy involves waiting for a miraculous leap forward in COVID-19 vaccination or treatment.
(2) My proposal is an approach where we try to direct testing resources and governmental assistance to protecting the most at-risk members of society. These groups are encouraged to shelter at home and are supported in doing so.
Bans on freedom of movement, transaction, etc are lifted. Non-at-risk individuals are encouraged to return to work. Given that we inflicted psychological harm on millions of individuals, we also would probably want a policy where someone is allowed to not work, but they must formally quit their job in order to be allowed to collect unemployment for up to a year (we likely also need to adjust unemployment because it's just way too high relative to wage earners right now). What we need to avoid is a case where someone "chooses" (in scare quotes because we have done true psychological damage to people) not to work for a year but their company can't let them go, since otherwise the company cannot replace them with a working employee.
So in short, we let people do what they want, we strongly encourage the at-risk to shelter at home and put out appropriate public health messaging in proportion to the real risk (which means overall WAY less fearmongering since we're so out of whack currently).
The uncertainty benefit is something we should implicitly factor in as well. The ultimate end state of my proposal is much more "known" than with containment (because we have no bound on containment worst-case scenario but we can use Ferguson to get a decent bound for mitigation). We're not sure how much mortality we will see, but with a 0.9% IFR and 82% of the population being infected we get about 2.2 million deaths per Ferguson (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...). I think that's a great upper bound to use.
BTW I think once accounting for vector exhaustion (not everyone has the same risk of infection) and what I feel is a more realistic IFR, we'd be closer to 600,000 deaths in the "realistic" scenario IMO.
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The last thing I want to say is that I actually think in terms of wellbeing-years or quality-adjusted-life-years, and not just "lives". My belief is that the life of a healthy 12 year old is several times more valuable than the life of an 80 year old with heart disease, to use an example.
So, while it's hard for me to give you a "real" number, I'd say if we could save 20 million wellbeing-years, then lockdown was probably worth it. But keep in mind that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.
>that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.
Absolutely wrong. And you are missing:
- lockdown reduction in suffering, due both to the acute phase of the disease and after effects
- No-lockdown-externalities, including damage to the economy if the disease is allowed to spread through the entire population
And perhaps most importantly:
- the risk that a huge reservoir of infected people will lead to repeat waves caused by mutations, and even worse that cross-species infection occurs (we already know cats and dogs can be infected - pigs and poultry could be next); then we risk flu-like antigenic shifts.
Put all this into the equation and I think the only thing we should be contemplating is how to eradicate the virus as soon as possible.
> the only thing we should be contemplating is how to eradicate the virus as soon as possible.
Do you think that eradication is actually a possibility? Or are you using it as a metaphor for "contain it super well"?
There are a number of reasons why eradication is completely infeasible. In short, COVID-19 is a highly infectious respiratory disease and it came from a zoonotic origin. We know there are animal reservoirs at this moment.
Therefore eradication is impossible. We've only ever eradicated two diseases in all of human history.
> So, while it's hard for me to give you a "real" number, I'd say if we could save 20 million wellbeing-years, then lockdown was probably worth it. But keep in mind that means that LOCKDOWN_COVID19_MORTALITY_REDUCTION - LOCKDOWN_EXTERNALITIES >= 20 million wellbeing-years.
This seems like a very strange take. This is a utilitarian perspective, but with a floor of 20 million years of utility before we take any action. Why shouldn't we take action if the mortality reduction years > lockdown externalities? You're essentially saying "we should take no action to prevent a disease from costing us 20 million wellbeing-years", which seems odd.
> BTW I think once accounting for vector exhaustion (not everyone has the same risk of infection) and what I feel is a more realistic IFR, we'd be closer to 600,000 deaths in the "realistic" scenario IMO.
Are you accounting for the other side effects of Covid? Life long lung capacity loss due to pneumonia side effects, weird not well understood side effects like strokes in young people etc? Most of the people I see minimizing the risk and saying we should reopen seem to entirely ignore those dangers.
> Given that we must practice indefinite containment until we develop the "game-changer", we are executing a strategy which is based off a temporally unbounded future event. Therefore the potential drawbacks are unbounded given that the strategy involves waiting for a miraculous leap forward in COVID-19 vaccination or treatment.
This isn't at all true. Look at China, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have all begun reopening, but with infrastructure in place to track and keep outbreaks contained even as they reopen. Some parts of the US are on track to do the same relatively soon (weeks, not months or years).
> My proposal is an approach where we try to direct testing resources and governmental assistance to protecting the most at-risk members of society.
You realize that this is what's being done now, essentially, its just that tests are so severely limited that that isn't useful. We can't, for example, consistently test employees at nursing homes to make sure that they aren't infectious. Until we can do that, returning to normal is asking nursing home employees to shelter even more tightly than individuals are now, or it's sacrificing lives.
It feels like you haven't looked deeply into the criteria that many metro areas (NYC, WA, and the Bay to name a few) have to reopen. They're specific and clear, and backed by reasonable thought.
> This seems like a very strange take. This is a utilitarian perspective, but with a floor of 20 million years of utility before we take any action. Why shouldn't we take action if the mortality reduction years > lockdown externalities? You're essentially saying "we should take no action to prevent a disease from costing us 20 million wellbeing-years", which seems odd.
You're right, that was my mistake. I got a rough 20 million life-years by taking Ferguson's worst-case scenario and then applying the "COVID-19 takes average 10 years of lives" claim (which is a false claim). Thus arriving at the implied scenario that lockdown proponents say could happen but that I think is an impossible to reach number.
(For context I use Ferguson's 2.2 million as an upper bound, but that 2.2 million scenario involves an overwhelming portion of the deaths being people who were already at death's door. Thus I think 2.2 million is possible but highly unlikely due to the other factors I mentioned, whereas the 20 million life-years figure I view as basically impossible to hit because it implies that same worst-case scenario but with the wrong distribution of age)
At that point I thought to myself "wait, I forgot to account for the negative externalities". But as you indicated, that logic was wrong.
So, allow me to retroactively change my answer to just 20 million life-years period.
Thanks for pointing that out.
> It feels like you haven't looked deeply into the criteria that many metro areas (NYC, WA, and the Bay to name a few) have to reopen. They're specific and clear, and backed by reasonable thought.
No, I understand their criteria but fundamentally disagree with the entire approach of containment, as I explained in the GP comment you replied to.
> This isn't at all true. Look at China, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have all begun reopening, but with infrastructure in place to track and keep outbreaks contained even as they reopen. Some parts of the US are on track to do the same relatively soon (weeks, not months or years).
I don't believe that the US can use the same strategy that China, South Korea, or Taiwan has been using. They have much better control of their borders and are a much more homogenous and compliant population.
> The postponement of mortality only becomes the true avoidance of mortality when we get a "game-changer": a vaccine or a highly effective treatment that seriously improves outcomes.
I don't think this is correct. Every day that passes by, we learn a little bit more about this virus and get a little better at treating it. For example, in the past few weeks doctors have discovered better ventilator protocols [1] and potential benefits of anticoagulants [2] in treating Covid-19 patients.
None of these are "game-changers" but they incrementally improve patient outcomes and that's a good thing. The more time we buy to make discoveries like these, the better off we will be.
Put another way: would you rather have been of the first few patients in Wuhan when doctors had no idea what this virus was or how to treat it, or would you rather have it now? What about a few months from now?
So I totally agree that we over time will get slightly better treatment outcomes. But I think the negative effects of containment far exceed those marginally improved outcomes, therefore we still need the "game-changer" that I've been referencing in order for containment to have been worth it.
This isn't a contrived example though. Thousands of people are dying every day. That's why we care about this one and not your contrived example. When yours is killing a 9/11 every day then we care about it.
Yes, but my position is that the following externalities are equally or indeed more important to be mindful of:
- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to social isolation
- worsened COVID-19 outcomes due to fear of going to a hospital (this is a real effect)
- worsened all-cause mortality due to social isolation and a culture of widespread fear
- worsened mortality attributable to mass unemployment (note that some small portion of unemployment would have happened without lockdown but the vast majority of damage is self-inflicted and thus directly attributable to lockdown)
- worsened quality of life (the missing link that lockdown proponents tend not to address) amidst the entire population
- externalities that occur when suspending in-person
education, such as the widening inequality gap between students whose parents can afford to buy them personal computers/laptops/tablets and those whose parents cannot.
- shifting to a global perspective, the impending global food shortage is predicted to make COVID-19's mortality look like a drop in the bucket
Finally, I'd like to point out that COVID-19 deaths here in the US are dominated by the extremely elderly which implies (but does not prove, of course) that our lockdown policies were ineffective at protecting the at-risk groups that we should have been focusing on the whole time
I think that people are greatly overdoing social isolation point, especially whose who works from home. Seriously, when I was stay at home mom, I was way more isolated for way longer then this. And I am salty about this, because people act after two weeks as if they were on lonely island for ten years. When I had issue with isolation, people (both online and occasionally irl) acted as if I said something offensive for even mentioning it or being affected by that.
This is literally situation in which everyone is in the same situation as you, you can call to people who are in the same situation all the time. If you work from home, then communication from work is almost the same as before. I can see this from someone who is old and can not use tech, but really, this is not what isolation is.
I hope you don't mind if I copy-paste a section from a piece I've already written that goes into this a bit. The TL;DR is that social isolation leads to worse outcomes, regardless of emotional loneliness. Also on the contrary, I think you are "underdoing" the social isolation point and are underestimating the extent to which this has affected everyday citizens. Keep in mind that there are some people here in the US that have literally not left their houses for the last two months except for maybe a weekly grocery store trip.
--
Finally, we need to examine the effects of social isolation itself. Beyond the fact that social isolation prevents the natural exchange of microbes that occur between humans engaging in social contact, it should be noted that social isolation is directly thought to lead to increased all-cause mortality due to worsened health outcomes across pretty much every dimension that we can examine. One review (https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/15/5797.full.pdf) of the impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults concludes that “mortality was higher among more socially isolated and more lonely participants. However, after adjusting statistically for demographic factors and baseline health, social isolation remained significantly associated with mortality (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence interval, 1.08–1.48 for the top quintile of isolation), but loneliness did not (haz-ard ratio 0.92, 95% confidence interval, 0.78–1.09). The association of social isolation with mortality was unchanged when loneliness was included in the model”.
It’s now popular to refer to what was previously called “social distancing” as “physical distancing” to note the fact physical distancing does not necessarily lead to loneliness; this is because loneliness can (perhaps) be mitigated to a limited extent by usage of social media and videoconferencing. Troublingly, we can see that it is the social isolation itself, and not the emotional feeling of loneliness, that is associated with death, and thus we can surmise, at least in older adults (but almost certainly in the broader population as well), that the widespread recommendations of social isolation (“stay at home”, “social distancing”, etc) will lead to increased all-cause mortality.
Finally, we wish to highlight that a small increase in all-cause mortality amidst the general population due to social isolation could very easily dwarf COVID-19-associated mortality, which as we have discussed is primarily constrained to a very limited subset of the population.
And those are the factors that the epidemiologists and policymakers need to balance when setting the policies. But that's a decision that they should be making, with access to all of the available data. It's not a decision for one hot headed billionaire with a large financial incentive to reopen.
The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.
Now the job of the modellers is to predict COVID-19 mortality under various scenarios, and it's the job of policymakers to counterbalance those predictions against the economic realities, etc. So, it's not necessarily a problem that epidemiologists would focus on predicting just along the dimension of COVID-19 mortality.
But unfortunately our policymakers have completely disregarded that need to weigh both the positives and negatives and instead have talked about "following the science" and basically myopically parroted whatever these highly opinionated epidemiologists (Ferguson, everyone at the IMHE, etc) were saying, without mentioning the negative externalities associated with lockdown, except in passing in a way that implies that economic damage will be constrained to shareholder returns (which is completely false).
>The epidemiologists who have been advocating for lockdown have very explicitly ignored all of those sources of mortality entirely. They have only focused on COVID-19-attributable deaths and that's it.
> We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in Chinaand South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term. Mitigation will never be able to completely protect those at risk from severe disease or death and the resulting mortality may therefore still be high. Instead we focus on feasibility, with a specific focus on what the likely healthcare system impact of the two approaches would be.
(From Page 4)
Now let's shift to the IHME model. They do make passing reference to the econonic impact, same as Ferguson, but don't go any further:
> The overall financial cost over a short period of time is likely to be enormous, particularly when juxtaposed against the substantial reductions in revenue for many hospitals due to the cancellation of elective procedures and the broader economic consequences of social distancing mandates.
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Now as I said, it's not necessarily their job to forecast the economic harm. But unfortunately we have created this notion that being pro-lockdown means "believing science" and therefore thinking that the lockdown is a bad idea is being "against science". Our politicians use these exact words, and as I said their actions show that they are not holistically evaluating the downside risk. On the contrary it appears to be a very simple game-theory type calculation where their incentive structures are leading them to make irrational decisions. COVID-19 mortality is much more "visible" than the fuzzier and longer-term mortality caused by our (IMO misguided) response to COVID-19.
It is hilarious and sad at the same time that a country which is perhaps uniquely suited to embark on a moon-shot Apollo style program of testing regiment for EVERYONE instead chooses to self inflict all sorts of wounds.
It was in the cards, which makes it even more painful to see.
Testing EVERYBODY would be cheaper than what is happening now and an inspiration to the whole world, inspiring awe and respect.
No we didn't (collectively shit ourselves) and we did not really heed the lesson that SARS-COV-1 gave us. I really hope we don't see a leet SARS. It will probably have a really cool Tik Tok page though.
I take it that your term "externalities" (I haven't heard it before) is referring to the side effects eg economic of our attempts to deal with it.
The cost of COVID-19 to an individual seems to range from "meh" to death by lung destruction. There are some identified risk factors - being male, smokers (some "initial immunity" but worse outcomes), skin colour (this looks like correlation rather than causality but needs working through), being old (70+ is the current threshold), diabetes.
Until you know (test, test, test again) that you have actually had the disease then I suspect you will be always looking over your shoulder. Once you know you've had it and hopefully survived then you can plan forwards. There are many reports of additional snags post infection eg renal problems and lung damage, not to mention the mental trauma.
I'm speaking as a UK bod with a small company to worry about that still has a few months left in the bank. I'm alright Jack but I worry about my fellow people.
> and we did not really heed the lesson that SARS-CoV-1 gave us
Agreed.
> I take it that your term "externalities" (I haven't heard it before) is referring to the side effects eg economic of our attempts to deal with it.
Exactly, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative. Just keep in mind that the economy is not some abstract notion, but rather is you and me and everyone else. In other words, economic damage isn't something that just hurts rich shareholders, it hurts everyone because there's less wealth.
Suspension of elective surgeries, which happened all over the country here in the US, is one of the best examples of such externalities that were caused by panic and bad policy rather than reality. For example, here in California we suspended all elective surgeries for a month. But we never were close to being overrun, and given that the vast majority of these surgeries are out-patient, there was never a need to pre-emptively cancel them. Lastly remember "elective surgery" sounds a lot like "non-essential work" but basically any pre-scheduled surgery is elective: organ transplants, hip replacements, arthroscopic labral repair (I'm waiting on that one currently), etc.
> Until you know (test, test, test again) that you have actually had the disease then I suspect you will be always looking over your shoulder.
That's why the strategy I advocate for does not rely on the availability of testing capacity, because the goal is not to practice indefinite containment.
If you've decided that you want 80% of society to behave as normal and gradually become infected and recover, then PCR testing loses a lot of its utility. It's mostly useful for clinical diagnostic reasons, to get a loose handle on spread, and finally to use as validation for other tests like serological tests.
> There are many reports of additional snags post infection eg renal problems and lung damage, not to mention the mental trauma.
These post-infection snags are quite rare, based off the evidence I've reviewed. Personally I have observed that so many advocating for lockdown make references to the supposed widespread organ failure, strokes in young people, etc, and the evidence just does not support those claims. These outcomes do happen but they are incredibly rare and given that they are logical results of inflammatory cascades (cytokine storm for example), we see the same outcomes in disease like Influenza that we are not losing our collective shit about.
> not to mention the mental trauma.
I believe the mental trauma caused by the wide-spread panic and fear-mongering is vastly worse than the mental trauma of recovering from COVID-19.
25-50% of people that get COVID-19 are entirely asymptomatic or are paucisymptomatic.
For many, it's like getting the flu.
And for some - significant numbers, but not as many as we're led to believe - it is a horrendous disease that results in invasive ventilation followed by likely death.
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Not quite mental trauma, but fear of going to the hospital has led to people who actually have COVID-19 to avoid getting treatment because they don't realize they have COVID-19 (yet are experiencing serious adverse conditions):
"Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic."
* "Third, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a parallel epidemic of fear, anxiety, and depression. People with mental health conditions could be more substantially influenced by the emotional responses brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in relapses or worsening of an already existing mental health condition because of high susceptibility to stress compared with the general population."
* "Finally, many people with mental health disorders attend regular outpatient visits for evaluations and prescriptions. However, nationwide regulations on travel and quarantine have resulted in these regular visits becoming more difficult and impractical to attend.
And my favorite, a case study of COVID-19 related paranoid delusions in a schizophrenic:
> For example, here in California we suspended all elective surgeries for a month. But we never were close to being overrun
..because CA locked down in a timely way. How do you know hospitals wouldn't have been overrun otherwise? They were in some places (Italy). This is playing out in real time after all, and nobody has a crystal ball, especially not Elon Musk.
Now, there are early indications that reopening is resulting in new outbreaks, like at the night clubs in South Korea.
> ..because CA locked down in a timely way. How do you know hospitals wouldn't have been overrun otherwise? They were in some places (Italy). This is playing out in real time after all, and nobody has a crystal ball, especially not Elon Musk.
Well, New York is a great comparison, but let's pretend that the lockdown did avoid an overrun in California and that otherwise it would have happened.
As I indicated, given that the vast majority of these (highly important) elective surgeries are out-patient, there is not a huge need to plan ahead when it comes to suspending surgeries. On the contrary, when we do realize that we are at capacity we can suspend elective surgeries at that moment and no sooner.
BTW, the utility of elective surgeries should always be counterbalanced against the utility of extra beds for COVID-19 patients. Many of these elective surgeries are still more important than COVID-19 treatment even when we hit an overrun scenario. So it very much depends on the surgery in question, and such blanket suspensions are a very bad idea.
> Now, there are early indications that reopening is resulting in new outbreaks, like at the night clubs in South Korea.
Right, which is precisely why the practice of indefinite containment is so flawed. Once you start doing it you can basically never stop (until you've teched up to a vaccine / game changer treatment)
> "Support" is a bit of an overloaded word. I do agree with you that I do not support a government policy that isn't evidence-driven. But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.
On the flip side I support the elected legislature's ability to do this, but if you read the legal arguments being made it's pretty unclear that the legislature has in fact passed any law doing so. Read paragraph 32 of the complaint for what I find to be the most convincing argument for this: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.359281...
Thanks for the link! I'm surprised to find that California's legislature did not pass statutes making refusal to obey lockdown rules crimes.
In many places it's all governors' EOs and mayors' orders. Here in Texas, for example, no statutes have been passed enabling localities to dictate and enforce stay-at-home orders or wearing of masks, and the cities and counties thus lack the authority to do much of what they nonetheless have gone on to do in terms of ordinances and executive orders.
We're a nation of laws, and we have generally been very particular about process. Due Process, yes, but also all manner of procedure, from electoral, to parliamentary, and others. Besides that, the Constitution still applies -- no part of it has been suspended -- and much of it has been incorporated against the States (term of art for: "it wasn't clear before, but now is under Supreme Court precedents, that these various parts of the Constitution that talk of what Congress can't do apply to State legislatures too").
So around here, many people are wearing masks, but they don't have to, not legally, and those signs that say "customers must wear masks by order of the city and county" are correct but legally toothless. In fact, around here I see enough people not wearing masks at notable stores, like Central Market, and all the big box stores that are open, that I can only conclude there is no attempt even to enforce those unenforceable edits. If the county executive wants to require the wearing masks, they'll have to lobby the legislature for new statutes.
People will much more likely support their governors and mayors when the legislatures are also standing with them, and less so when they are not.
It seems like the parent is supporting the ability for the Tesla Alameda factory to operate, and is not questioning the ability of the government to shut it down.
Your logic is sound, but the calculus changes when dealing with matters that touch on rights and freedoms.
In all likelihood, these closures are a direct violation of the First Amendment. I think people are tolerant of these restrictions for limited periods of time, but when the emergency drags on forever and becomes increasingly arbitrary, it starts to lose credibility.
Politicians have limited power, even during an emergency. And especially when the emergency looks like it's going to be in effect to some degree for maybe a year.
Remember also that the people who go out are doing so by choice. And most people mostly choose to stay home. It's not clear that we need a big enforcement hammer here.
Even if it's not a violation of the First Amendment, it's close enough that it flips the responsibility. Now the government needs to continually convince people that it's not a violation.
America is about freedom and limited government. That means some policy options are off the table or treated with extreme skepticism.
It's a violation of basic freedoms, that's true, but it's not one without reason (hence my example). I do agree with you that measures like this require constant justification, as would be the case in any democracy. I do not think that flouting these measures arbitrarily is the best way to achieve this.
Ladies and gentlemen, can we agree on 1 thing though? This is not even comparable to speed limits. The law is enacted by legislative action, not by Alameda's county board, nor the administrator nor its health official.
Show us please what law Elon Musk is going to break. Can a lawyer chime in please?
I don’t know if it works that way in California but in many places if the government tries to restrict basic rights like the right to go where you want to and the right to earn a living, they better be prepared to explain it to a judge. It’s just basic accountability.
I think a government should be able to provide strict guidelines on how a business can comply and get approved for staying open. Some States have that in place for companies that are on the list of exempt businesses, and those lists can be ridiculously long, with plenty of not-essential-at-all businesses.
The current problem is a lack of clear guidelines. To me it seems that the plan is to not have one.
Now, I do condone Musk's. I think his 9yo tantrum throwing behavior is on par with the child king staying at the WH.
speed limit is a great choice for an example here, since damage via motor vehicle collision is exponentially related to speed. ie the difference between potential for injury/death is considerable higher between the 40-50 increase than the 50-60 increase.
When I drive my car, I'm not worried about my ability. I'm worried about other's ability. Are they texting? Are they drunk? etc.
If everyone is capped at 50mph, then the potential for damage is much lower than if everyone was capped at 60mph. It's not about personal safety or whether your vehicle can safely operate at higher speeds under ideal conditions. It's about the potential to injure others (or others to injure you) if those ideal conditions aren't met for some reason (user error or extraneous conditions) and our ability to account for when those ideal conditions aren't met.
The speed limit analogy doesn't really reflect the magnitude of the conflict we're seeing here. Should the government be allowed to pick and choose businesses that are allowed to open as if they were eggs in a basket? The speed limit example applies to everyone equally, and a difference of 10mph in the speed limit isn't going to potentially bankrupt successful businesses.
Given the speed limit analogy, the corresponding action here would be to allow all businesses to operate in distanced-mode (6ft, thermo guns, etc.) equally. Any business that cannot function in this mode would be at a disadvantage, but it wouldn't be because someone on a small government panel disliked their eggs.
My 2 cents -- I agree with OP, California apparently tends to exercise their power a bit too often at the expense of their constituents. I can't imagine how a black-and-white veto on businesses could be considered as sensible policy... The government should be more incremental in their decisions, i.e. with slow business-agnostic openings.
i guess your ignoring the fact that if your county didnt have the authority to impose a speed limit but did so anyway than its not illegal to ignore it.
Get your facts straight it's only 1/3 of ten thousand and they will be separated into 3 shifts . Also they claim to have safe hygiene standards . I don't have any reason to doubt their clAIm . What do you get from going to court . You can't get the billions wasted in time cost And penalty of having artificial limits on you while your competition is allowed to operate and you lose market share.
A slightly more relevant example is speed limit. Speed limits are generally kinda low. It's that we allow a whole lot of cars on roads. Pretty much any relatively new will be fine at 75, but highways have to support 40 year old beaters with bald tires pulling a trailer. If we had regular drivers tests, we could probably loosen up more laws around driving - but there wouldn't be as many drivers who could qualify.
Most people ignore the speed limit, per their individual judgment. Does limits aren't magical safe driving speeds for all vehicles and weather conditions.
In my experience, most people drive roughly 5 miles per hour over the speed limit. That suggests to me that the speed limit does in fact have a mitigating effect.
>most people drive roughly 5 miles per hour over the speed limit>speed limit does in fact have a mitigating effect.
You got the causality dangerously backwards. That's not how policy works.
"The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile operating speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic exceeds),", as per [1].
Specifically, speed limits are not set by carefully measuring & modeling conditions on the road by direct application of science; there's no finely tuned measuring aparatus nor advanced math model. Instead we rely on drivers judgement aggregated over time, conditions, and locations. Granted, there are certain notable exceptions: bridges & tunnels where speed limit is also informed by structural constraints, and also fuel consumption reduction policy in cases like the 1973 speed limit.
And yes there are natural parallels to civil disobedience; in some cases limits got raised or lowered upon public pressure.
For instance, when I lived in Virginia, it was relatively rare to see someone going more than 5 mph over the limit on the interstate (75 in a 70). I’m Arkansas, it’s very common to see people going 15 over (85 in a 70).
In Virginia anything over 80mph is automatic reckless driving, it's a big deterrent. Only speeding ticket I ever got as a kid.
Also I don't know anything about Arkansas but we grow up in Virginia being completely afraid of State Troopers pulling us over for anything. I've never lived in a place with more general fear of STs.
In addition, drunk driving is a relatively controlled problem. That is, a relatively small percentage of the population do it and law enforcement is able to police it with a reasonable degree of success. On the other hand, it we had an epidemic of drunk driving where say 20% of the people on the road were driving drunk then it very well may make sense for the government to barricade the roads until they got things under control.
You argue that allowing free commerce on the highways is okay with a relatively small percentage of the population being dangerous to others.
And yet you argue that allowing free commerce in America is not okay with a population that is dangerous to a relatively small percentage of the population.
> But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.
To claim that the environment is unsafe (or safe for that matter) one must _test_ their beliefs against empirical evidence, not just _illustrate_ such theory with selected facts. Has the government done that in this case?
"Support" is a bit of an overloaded word. I do agree with you that I do not support a government policy that isn't evidence-driven. But I do support the ability of the government to set policy without convincing every one of its constituents of the validity of its evidence.
As a simple analogy, perhaps the speed limits for highways in my state are capped at 60 mph, but there's evidence that the roads can safely accommodate drivers at 70 mph, they're well-maintained, they are built to appropriate safety standards, etc. I wouldn't support the government keeping the speed limit at 60 mph based on flimsy evidence. But I also wouldn't object to the government enforcing the speed limit as it is - because the end result of saying that every driver has the right to make their own private judgment of whether the speed limit laws are validly reasoned is that there is no speed limit anymore.