They want to dump on platforms for taking action against hate speech and instigating violence because "someone else censored political activism". It's a disgusting point of view.
You're worried about free speech - but what happens when an elected official calls for violence against a group of people? What happens when those calls for violence are answered and people die?
There is a reason yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech, and companies should be in the business of censoring speech that incites violence.
It will have to come from the community then. A community has no inherent right to a service - or to the time and effort of the people who build and maintain it.
So maybe alternative won't arise - because spending hours building a product and paying to host it for people who can't or won't pay is a hard sell.
The fear of death due to infection by a pandemic is new. The need for PPE and lack thereof is new. Firing whitleblowers in the face of a pandemic and meeting to smear them (with public proof thanks to a leak) is new.
We didn't think Amazon was nice and cuddly - but this is a good point for Tim to exit.
Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical. I think we can criticize Amazon's long history of being repressive without shaming someone who publicly did the right thing.
> The fear of death due to infection by a pandemic is new. The need for PPE and lack thereof is new.
Very specifically, yes. A bit more generally, it's not different from a pattern of conditions like "heat so extreme it required the regular posting of ambulances to take away workers who passed out, strenuous workloads in that heat, and first-person reports of summary terminations for health conditions such as breast cancer".
> Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical.
I don't agree that doing one good thing undoes bad things that went before, and that it absolves one from criticism.
Sure, but at the same time, it is our civic responsibility as skilled programmers to deliberately starve Amazon of the labor needed to build their oppressive systems. It is not wrong to remind ourselves of that greater responsibility, especially in the context of Amazon being vulnerable to organized labor action today.
To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term complications.
But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.
I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.
There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon due to raw materials/resources.
Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits these criteria.
Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.
EDIT:
>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk
People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ, no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc. All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.
It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked "plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to get it first" pretty quickly.
If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund education, for example.
I'd never thought it all the way through until last night. But I don't see how we make it though this without something on par with the Great Depression.
Right now Microsoft and Amazon have this little bump due to WFH and stockpiling, giving tech workers reason for hope, but that'll start fading soon and they'll go down with everyone else.
It's the whole boiling frog parable really, isn't it.
* Some virus in China: no big deal it's China.
* Some virus here: no big deal it'll blow over.
* Lots of virus here: no big deal we'll WFH for a while.
* "A while" is up and more virus: no big deal we'll keep WFH.
* Unemployment is 6M/wk: no big deal look at AMZN/MSFT.
* Pork processing plant shuts down: no big deal there's other food.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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This should scare the shit out of everyone still living.
Why do we think that in two years, we'll still have enough of a supply chain that vaccine development can continue unimpeded?
People talk about a V-shaped recovery, but I think we're very close to the tipping point. This depends on the existence of expendable pocket money for the public, an existing supply chain, and stable cash flow. All of this will be gone in about two months. If we're stuck with this for two years? There will be no product to buy, nobody to buy it, and no infrastructure to build it. Home values will drop, people will default, and the whole country from NY to SF to Dubuque will look like Detroit of 2008 or worse, cities and suburbs alike, but there won't be a "not-Detroit" of investors to come and fix things this time. Most of us who are young, intelligent tech workers living through a 13-year boom cycle have a hard time understanding this.
Not looking forward to this. The lone bright spot, China (assuming they're able to keep things in check) starts hiring the brightest from around the world, and that's how this empire ends.
The main difference here is that the Fed is refusing to fail. They have acquired more assets in 45 days than they did for the entirety of any single QE period. With nominal rates in the gutter and the appetite for US debt still high, the Fed will print, and print, and print. Asset class will get bailed out regularly.
People think this has a major negative impact on the national debt, and while it's somewhat concerning, it's really not that much of an issue as long as people want our debt that we denominate in our own currency.
The problem is that populism will continue grow unchecked as the asset classes are bailed out and their assets are propped up and backstopped by the Fed, while the common man gets a smaller and smaller share of the bailout funds. Politicians will quite rightly point this out and will use it as a lever in their campaigns. If it all sounds familiar... well, the man currently in office is an expert at that angle.
That doesn't mean we aren't fucked. I am merely saying that it's pretty unclear what the future holds, as evidenced by the stock market's precarious position.
Thank you for everything you said. The reality is more nuanced and depends on the specifics. The "law" being zealously cited here isn't a rule. Nor is the thought an approach is wrong if a big organization failed at it.
