4 ms·

Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees

Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.

beanjuiceII 4y ago
- maxbond 4y ago
  I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Do you really think he made such a call based on a hunch and not on the actual IFR data ?
    - V__ 4y ago
      He basically bought Twitter on a hunch, so yes, this is totally believable.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      I'm not really interested in the distinction of whether it was a hunch based on gut or a hunch based on a cursory inspection of the data. I'm fully willing to believe he was as glued to the data as I was during those early months of the pandemic, or more so. He's not an epidemiologist or a public health official, and even if he were those things, decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision. Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.
      - origin_path 4y ago
        "decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision." That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).
        maxbond 4y ago
        This being why I'm criticizing the actions of Tesla, illegally violating the orders of public health officials, while not being accountable to the public at large or even it's factory workers. I don't understand the point you're making.
        origin_path 4y ago
        The point I'm making is that public health officials were making "decisions about other people's lives" despite being "a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision". Those people are not morally or intellectually superior to Musk, far from it. There was simply no moral culpability for defying public health during COVID - it was and still is a tyrannical and expertise-free group of people that should not have any power or really, exist at all. Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.
- CountSessine 4y ago
  522368 excess deaths in the US in 2020 suggests otherwise.
- InsomniacL 4y ago
  That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK. At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity... Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off. Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    How many of those patients actually needed to be at the hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many actually needed to be transported to hospital by ambulance? How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold? We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases. It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making. Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all. The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  No, hospitals are still catching up on the years of “elective” procedures they and to postpone to make room for Covid cases. (Like cancer treatment and the like..)
- afterburner 4y ago
  "everyone"? Bold claim
- jedberg 4y ago
  How could you possibly know that? Sure maybe none of the people who worked at Tesla died from COVID, but what about their families? What about every single person in public they interacted with? There is no way to know how many people, if any, they spread the virus to, who then died, and whether they got the virus at work. But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.
_ea1k 4y ago
Tesla was only singled out for that because of their location. They weren't the only auto plant still operating or reopening when they did.

beanjuiceII 4y ago

maxbond 4y ago
I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
- origin_path 4y ago
  Do you really think he made such a call based on a hunch and not on the actual IFR data ?
  - V__ 4y ago
    He basically bought Twitter on a hunch, so yes, this is totally believable.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I'm not really interested in the distinction of whether it was a hunch based on gut or a hunch based on a cursory inspection of the data. I'm fully willing to believe he was as glued to the data as I was during those early months of the pandemic, or more so. He's not an epidemiologist or a public health official, and even if he were those things, decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision. Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      "decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision." That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).
      - maxbond 4y ago
        This being why I'm criticizing the actions of Tesla, illegally violating the orders of public health officials, while not being accountable to the public at large or even it's factory workers. I don't understand the point you're making.
        origin_path 4y ago
        The point I'm making is that public health officials were making "decisions about other people's lives" despite being "a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision". Those people are not morally or intellectually superior to Musk, far from it. There was simply no moral culpability for defying public health during COVID - it was and still is a tyrannical and expertise-free group of people that should not have any power or really, exist at all. Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.
CountSessine 4y ago
522368 excess deaths in the US in 2020 suggests otherwise.
InsomniacL 4y ago
That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK. At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity... Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off. Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  How many of those patients actually needed to be at the hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many actually needed to be transported to hospital by ambulance? How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold? We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases. It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making. Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all. The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
No, hospitals are still catching up on the years of “elective” procedures they and to postpone to make room for Covid cases. (Like cancer treatment and the like..)
afterburner 4y ago
"everyone"? Bold claim
jedberg 4y ago
How could you possibly know that? Sure maybe none of the people who worked at Tesla died from COVID, but what about their families? What about every single person in public they interacted with? There is no way to know how many people, if any, they spread the virus to, who then died, and whether they got the virus at work. But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.

_ea1k 4y ago

Tesla was only singled out for that because of their location. They weren't the only auto plant still operating or reopening when they did.