LogFAQs > #941941311

Zeus posted...

"Large numbers"? The protests shown by the media were maybe dozens of people.

I struggle to believe that your insistence on looking strictly at protests and ignoring every other instance of people ignoring protocols is anything other than you being deliberately disingenuous. Have you really forgotten Spring Break?

Zeus posted...

Second, a lot of high-income jobs are also essential.

For in-person, public-facing labour (read: the actual high-risk stuff)? Considerably fewer than the low-income ones. That list pretty much consists of health care workers and not much else. Most higher-income essential work can be done from home, and the stuff that can't often doesn't require interaction with many people outside of coworkers (relatively low-risk interactions, given that it's a consistent group of people). Even when it is public-facing and in-person work, high-income jobs are also generally going to be better about supplying PPE and installing engineering controls to reduce the risk to workers than the corporate giants that employ most minimum-wage essential workers. Toss in the number of corporate giants that have leveraged their assets to count themselves as essential (e.g. GameStop), who generally don't pay their employees very well, and you've got a sizable majority of "essential" jobs being pretty low-paying.

Zeus posted...

You might need somebody for a job, but that doesn't automatically make them valuable to that job, especially when you could hire any number of people off the street who could do it just as well. And minimum wage is more than the value of the work in many cases.

If you need to employ somebody to do a job, you need to pay them enough to eat and pay rent. This is no different from using a vehicle: If you need a car to complete a task, you can't complete that task without putting enough gas into it to drive to the necessary destination, and expecting the car to run on less gas than that just because you really need to get where you're going is delusional. The entitlement of business owners who want to be able to pay a sub-living wage for jobs they need done is utterly abhorrent, especially when that decision is coming from corporations that have more than enough assets to do so comfortably. That smaller businesses often can't afford to pay livable wages doesn't mean a sub-living minimum wage is okay, it means your entire economy is FUBAR.

Zeus posted...

Except it literally does that. If the guidelines actually meant s***, they'd be enforced. The fact that they're not enforced suggests that it was likely a farce all along.

... You really do think that public health is the only factor that's being considered in enforcing these guidelines, don't you? Here I thought you were just being narrow-minded and not considering alternatives, but you really do steadfastly believe that there's no other possible explanation?

Zeus posted...

And you could easily protest without taking to the streets, be it posting propaganda, using social media, writing letters, etc.

Yeah, that sounds effective enough to be a realistic alternative. Never mind that people have been doing literally all of those things pretty consistently for as long as BLM has been around and very little has changed, which is a major reason why the whole issue has reached such a breaking point as to result in these protests, I'm sure it'll totally work this time.

Zeus posted...

We might have shut down later, but we shut down longer than a lot of other places and harder than some major nations. And our re-opening has been tame compared to even liberal nations.

Most countries haven't ended their shutdown yet. It's temporally impossible for the US to have shut down later than those countries and also have been shut down for longer because time is linear. I don't know what kind of weird time travel nonsense you're imagining here.

And no, your reopening has not been tame, given the number of instances of bars, restaurants, beaches, and other such places being crowded with people as soon as the government suggested it might not be illegal to do so anymore. That's not how you control an airborne pandemic. That's how you trigger a second wave (technically the first wave would have to end first to count this as a second wave, but whatever), especially when that happens well before case numbers are actually low enough to justify relaxing so much. Yes, some other countries have similarly failed to be suitably cautious in their reopening. Many of them are suffering a second wave as a result. Others haven't, because they waited until case numbers reached safe levels before reopening so aggressively.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.