Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[XXX-er]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saska...ists-1.5541748

Canada's own version of a scientist going off half cocked

[TBS]

Do you want unions? Because that's how you get unions.

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Amazon, food processing/food service all could get organized. Workplace safety could be the spark that starts the fire.

Only issue I see is a ability to conduct organizing efforts in a pandemic...


And on that note, a little musical interlude from Della Mae

[Mazderati]

Amazon appears ready to fight tooth and nail to prevent unionization.

https://www.businessinsider.com/whol...eat-map-2020-1

[Benny Profane]

Bezos is our present day Henry Ford

[LongShortLong]

Bezos is our present day Henry Ford

Wasn't Henry known for paying high wages though? Ruffling the feathers of the good capitalists by overpaying workers?

[old goat]

He was shot and killed right after that speech.

[RockinB]

If your escalation bears no fruit there is always HR (eeek!) or maybe your company has a ethics hotline or ombudsman.
Thats if those are even an option in your situation. If you are in a small biz those could all be rolled up into your boss.

I have been in your position where management has failed on a legitimate safety concern and you have to escalate and put a spotlight on yourself to get it handled.
But someone has to do it!
I couldn't deal with the worst case scenarios knowing I should have done something about it.
And doing something rarely comes with kudos.
Except from me.... fight the good fight good luck RocknB!!!!

Thanks for the well wishes. I sent the email this morning. I personally didn’t want to get safety people involved at this point (or the union) and figured I would have a better chance of success dealing with just my supervisor. The email was to the point and I tried to be as careful with my wording as I possibly could.

My supervisor called me and we had a productive conversation. I think he just didn’t realize that a lot of us are taking this more serious than he is and it was an eye opener for him. We shall see how the group conference call goes this afternoon, but I’m glad the tone has been set prior to going into that call.

Sorry to get you all involved in this. I was stressed last night and needed to vent my frustrations somewhere.

[old goat]

Remember when the Patriot Act got passed in the aftermath of 9/11 without most of the senate even having read the bill, because of the panicked political environment and the pervasive national sentiment of "everyone must do everything they can to address this emergency"? It's still law, and we're still pointedly targeting muslim people (or people who we confuse for being muslim) under its auspices. Giving the government (the police) the ability to use data from your phone to decide how to restrict your physical movements is an absolutely horrifying prospect. Look at the voter disenfranchisement operations that happen in red states already. Now imagine you show up to vote, but your phone's GPS history shows you likely live in a predominantly poor democratic part of your district... would anyone be surprised if these folks were more likely to be barred from entry due to "risk of infection"? "Ah sorry, nothing I can do, but the computer here says we can't let you in. Yeah seems like it determined you were in contact with a sick person. You should have received a ballot in the mail though, have a nice day!" And this is without even considering political protest/demonstration or anything like that.

That said: the Google/Apple proposed protocol was about as un-Orwellian as it could be, pretty much. Hopefully that's the model that gets used; anything GPS-based ought to be an absolute non-starter. Every person with a smartphone ought to be terrified at this notion and extremely critical of any proposals, heeding experts in software/technology/privacy much in the same way that we are heeding experts on infectious disease with respect to social distancing protocols.

The protocol I mentioned earlier would have people use the phone tracing to refresh their memories about who they had contact with in order to voluntarily provide it to the tracers. It did not envision the govt having access to the data, which is not to say that couldn't happen. Both phone owners would have to voluntarily install the app, which is not to say it couldn't be installed without the person's knowledge and consent. One advantage of the cell phone thing is that it would enable the tracers to find people you sat near in a restaurant or a stadium, not just people you know. People would want to install the app so they would know if they had been exposed.

One thing that has to be decided is what constitutes a significant contact. 15 minutes within 6 feet is a criterion I remember.

This is not the Patriot Act. Very few jurisdictions are citing people for violating distancing. As Cuomo pointed out, in the worst hotspot in the country compliance was voluntary and very successful.

[muted]

Amazon appears ready to fight tooth and nail to prevent unionization.

https://www.businessinsider.com/whol...eat-map-2020-1

I hope they unionize, because I think most of will be working for Amazon soon enough.

[MontuckyFried]

The protocol I mentioned earlier would have people use the phone tracing to refresh their memories about who they had contact with in order to voluntarily provide it to the tracers. It did not envision the govt having access to the data, which is not to say that couldn't happen.

Hmm... Have you already forgotten that things like this exist?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

[GoldMember]

Dude never said he wasn’t going to do his job, rather that he’s not stupid enough to trust the views of politicians over science and medical advice.

The ‘just fucking do it or quit’ attitude is literally how people die at work, and how kids lose their moms and dads as a result. Not like you’d give a fuck though, apparently.

I'm just here to say I truly admire your avatar. That's some goodness right there.

[Core Shot]

Sorry, I’m old school.
I love disabled people, but want to have my cake and eat it too by throwing the r-word around in non-serious contexts because I still think it’s inherently funny.

I dunno, I guess I’m turning into one of those old people who doesn’t phase language out with the changing culture. My bad.

Only a ‘Tard would call someone retarded

[old goat]

Thanks for the well wishes. I sent the email this morning. I personally didn’t want to get safety people involved at this point (or the union) and figured I would have a better chance of success dealing with just my supervisor. The email was to the point and I tried to be as careful with my wording as I possibly could.

My supervisor called me and we had a productive conversation. I think he just didn’t realize that a lot of us are taking this more serious than he is and it was an eye opener for him. We shall see how the group conference call goes this afternoon, but I’m glad the tone has been set prior to going into that call.

Sorry to get you all involved in this. I was stressed last night and needed to vent my frustrations somewhere.

That's what we're here for. (And for the NSFW).

[Rideski]

[mcski]

Sorry, I’m old school.
I love disabled people, but want to have my cake and eat it too by throwing the r-word around in non-serious contexts because I still think it’s inherently funny.

I dunno, I guess I’m turning into one of those old people who doesn’t phase language out with the changing culture. My bad.

Retard needs to be redefined as just another useful word for idiot like imbecile was in the last century. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone refer to a disabled person as a “retard” even in grade school, so I’m not fully sure why it’s got this pseudo n-word rap. I don’t think it is too crazy that the word gets defined as a synonym for imbecile.

Edit: I just remembered happy jack. Never mind. I’m an r-word.

[skaredshtles]

He was shot and killed right after that speech.

Well, of course he did. That speech would have been all for naught had the kid not gotten offed.

[wooley12]

Wasn't Henry known for paying high wages though? Ruffling the feathers of the good capitalists by overpaying workers?

He had to pay high because jobs on the line were worse that shitty.

[bennymac]

So the Urgent care doctors are willfully promoting misinformation?

some are. business at urgent care centers is way down.

[wooley12]

He was shot and killed right after that speech.

Tru dat. Pop was a Ranger and I asked him once if he was scared in the war. He said "At first, yeah. Then I accepted that I was going to die and the fear left. Then only felt sadness for the hurt it would bring my mom."

[mall walker]

The protocol I mentioned earlier would have people use the phone tracing to refresh their memories about who they had contact with in order to voluntarily provide it to the tracers. It did not envision the govt having access to the data, which is not to say that couldn't happen. Both phone owners would have to voluntarily install the app, which is not to say it couldn't be installed without the person's knowledge and consent. One advantage of the cell phone thing is that it would enable the tracers to find people you sat near in a restaurant or a stadium, not just people you know. People would want to install the app so they would know if they had been exposed.

One thing that has to be decided is what constitutes a significant contact. 15 minutes within 6 feet is a criterion I remember.

This is not the Patriot Act. Very few jurisdictions are citing people for violating distancing. As Cuomo pointed out, in the worst hotspot in the country compliance was voluntary and very successful.

Sure, but bear in mind the protocol you mentioned earlier is not the only thing being proposed. There's a huge spectrum of possibilities from "totally harmless" to "unthinkably Orwellian" that could be fairly described as "contact tracing" and it's very dangerous to assume that the term is always synonymous with the harmless type. The whitepapers Google/Apple collaborated on (available here https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing ) provide something in the middle, more toward the harmless side imo. The often praised South Korean approach, on the other hand, is abominably intrusive: real-time government access to the GPS location of all citizens, at all times, with the consequent/inevitable ability to categorize those folks and restrict their movements based on said categorization. Both this wild Orwellian nightmare and the approach where your elderly neighbor signs up to call and ask whose hand you shook at the supermarket are called "contact tracing" and it's important to distinguish between them.

The point re: the Patriot Act is that ceding privacy rights during an emergency, or for a worthy cause, will always have consequences far beyond the bounds of the emergency or the cause. And with any sort of technology/cryptography concerns, our ordinary analogies ("well only the good guys have a key, and they will only open my door in an emergency") are no longer suitable analogies, which is hard to convey to the layperson.

It's unfortunate that, like everything else in this country, the discourse on COVID has been reduced to the crude duality of "science denying braindead retards" vs "smart social distancing people" with no room for anything in between, because it tends to lead otherwise reasonable, scientifically-minded people to treat any objection to or second-guessing of any "COVID-remedying" proposal as the product of science denying braindead retards. The kneejerk reaction away from "Trumpism" or whatever you wanna call the Idiocracy-world that half the country is living in has, in the current crisis, made a lot of people who would otherwise care very much about privacy, the rights of political protestors, police overreach and the always-racist-and-classist effects of any police enforcement of any law, etc. suddenly very welcoming of harsh government interdiction in these aspects of their lives, and this is extremely concerning to me even though I'm not some science-denying braindead retard who thinks COVID is overblown, or a hoax, or that millions of deaths are an acceptable cost for me to be able to go to Applebees again.

[Rasputin]

Insane Clown Posse a model for pandemic leadership.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/...ership/610651/

I now regret referring to Trumpites as the insane clown posse.

[riser4]

He was shot and killed right after that speech.

Worse. I believe it took him four years to die, according to the end narration notes for that episode.

[KQ]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saska...ists-1.5541748

Canada's own version of a scientist going off half cocked

but thanks to Mayor Pete I can pronounce the guy's last name! LOL!

[getoutside]

I was going to look up more related papers, but was too busy searching for porn for the NSFW thread.

priorities!

[KQ]

Retard needs to be redefined as just another useful word for idiot like imbecile was in the last century. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone refer to a disabled person as a “retard” even in grade school, so I’m not fully sure why it’s got this pseudo n-word rap. I don’t think it is too crazy that the word gets defined as a synonym for imbecile.

Edit: I just remembered happy jack. Never mind. I’m an r-word.

How old are you?

I heard it all the time as a child in elementary school (1969-1976) and yes it was used for disabled people both as a description and an insult.

One of my best friends had Downs Syndrome and was often referred to as "retarded." Marie was the best. I'm sad that I've lost touch with her and think of her often.