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> Wow, I guess I'll just tell my team you want them to die and they should find another job This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are

> Wow, I guess I'll just tell my team you want them to die and they should find another job This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are still deciding what to do. Edit: Be aware, I have enough emergency savings for around 3 years worth of fuck it. I'm not you and you should not be me.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment. As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. [^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
        fzeroracer 6y ago
        > You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it. > Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all. We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
  - devtul 6y ago
    There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims. Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
  - deevolution 6y ago
    A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
    - jschwartzi 6y ago
      You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive. The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
    - peruvian 6y ago
      We can't even suggest people wear masks without them saying we're taking their freedom away. Not way we're forcing people to save money.
    - tschwimmer 6y ago
      I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly. And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan). In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
  - ufmace 6y ago
    It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores. This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  What happens if everyone uses it at the same time?
Loughla 6y ago
>As an institution of higher education, I believe that we should be evaluating all of our options and enacting what is equitable for our employees. Please note that 'equitable' does not mean everyone is treated the same. Some individuals have life circumstances out of their control during COVID. We are already working remotely, we know that it does work. Further, it gives those of us that need it the most the flexibility to protect our families, our students, and our programs without having to choose one over the other. It helps us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively simply because we do not have to choose between work or family. This should not have to be a choice at a place like [institution name]. In our leadership covenants, we sign onto a work-life balance, not work over life. Have we decided to simply eliminate this agreement in our covenants go to increase our (enrollment) profits for the college by having everyone back to work arbitrarily? I would desperately hope not. Was that necessarily the intention? Probably not, but it feels that way to me and probably to others. This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.
- cheez 6y ago
  You work for higher ed. COVID is about to decimate them. I'm not surprised they are taking this tack. It's survival mode now.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    I agree with you, 100%. But we're a commuter campus that doesn't rely on room/board to cover our bills. I assumed we would see more flexibility. I guess that's what I get for assuming.
- klenwell 6y ago
  My company also rushed to reopen our home office today. I and most my team are not located there so we continue to work remotely. But many of my co-workers were puzzled by the rush to get people back in the office after 3 months of working remotely quite effectively. There was also some confusion over who was required to return to the office when. After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work. I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe. My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.
jonathanpeterwu 6y ago
Building on this. If you have the risk tolerance. Just stating that you have to work remotely (if its legitimate) at-risk health, child care, family care I'm sure there can't be a ton of pushback on an individual level. Otherwise it might be a GREAT signal to leave a company who in the midst of a pandemic is irrational.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Companies being willing to throw their employees into meat grinders has generally been rewarded by the market (which also tends towards the irrational).
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    This is absolutely true, and normally those companies will receive reduced profit/revenue if the move is truly detrimental, and the company will slowly die and accumulate debt and drop in share price. Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.

nicoburns 6y ago
Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment. As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. [^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
      - fzeroracer 6y ago
        > You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it. > Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all. We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
- devtul 6y ago
  There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims. Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
- deevolution 6y ago
  A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive. The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
  - peruvian 6y ago
    We can't even suggest people wear masks without them saying we're taking their freedom away. Not way we're forcing people to save money.
  - tschwimmer 6y ago
    I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly. And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan). In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
- ufmace 6y ago
  It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores. This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
What happens if everyone uses it at the same time?

Loughla 6y ago

>As an institution of higher education, I believe that we should be evaluating all of our options and enacting what is equitable for our employees. Please note that 'equitable' does not mean everyone is treated the same. Some individuals have life circumstances out of their control during COVID. We are already working remotely, we know that it does work. Further, it gives those of us that need it the most the flexibility to protect our families, our students, and our programs without having to choose one over the other. It helps us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively simply because we do not have to choose between work or family. This should not have to be a choice at a place like [institution name]. In our leadership covenants, we sign onto a work-life balance, not work over life. Have we decided to simply eliminate this agreement in our covenants go to increase our (enrollment) profits for the college by having everyone back to work arbitrarily? I would desperately hope not. Was that necessarily the intention? Probably not, but it feels that way to me and probably to others. This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.

cheez 6y ago
You work for higher ed. COVID is about to decimate them. I'm not surprised they are taking this tack. It's survival mode now.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I agree with you, 100%. But we're a commuter campus that doesn't rely on room/board to cover our bills. I assumed we would see more flexibility. I guess that's what I get for assuming.
klenwell 6y ago
My company also rushed to reopen our home office today. I and most my team are not located there so we continue to work remotely. But many of my co-workers were puzzled by the rush to get people back in the office after 3 months of working remotely quite effectively. There was also some confusion over who was required to return to the office when. After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work. I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe. My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.

jonathanpeterwu 6y ago

Building on this. If you have the risk tolerance. Just stating that you have to work remotely (if its legitimate) at-risk health, child care, family care I'm sure there can't be a ton of pushback on an individual level. Otherwise it might be a GREAT signal to leave a company who in the midst of a pandemic is irrational.

claudeganon 6y ago
Companies being willing to throw their employees into meat grinders has generally been rewarded by the market (which also tends towards the irrational).
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  This is absolutely true, and normally those companies will receive reduced profit/revenue if the move is truly detrimental, and the company will slowly die and accumulate debt and drop in share price. Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.