261–270 of 332 posts
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A car or any other motor vehicle imported to Germany from outside the EU is normally subject to a 10% import duty and a 19% import value added tax.
Worth noting regarding VAT: if one has a VAT number, it is not a cost. It simply gets passed on and the business claims it back. Different story for an end consumer.
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>but I do know that continuing to pursue current policies until some indefinite point in the future is untenable. Go strawman, go! California and NY both have plans for slowly reopening in the comings weeks or months with various metrics guiding the timelines.
Serious question: can you show me the metrics for california with concrete targets that will trigger reopening? The last plan I saw wasn't a plan at all, it was just guidelines.
- 1.5 tests per 1000 people per day - No deaths in the past 14 days - Some max number of cases per day that's really low - Stockpile of PPE (I forget the exact numbers) - A minimum number of contact tracers (I think also 1.5 per 1000 people, although it may be an order of magnitude lower)
The bay area has a more stringent set of guidelines (minus the number of deaths that another person linked to).
This is the very best article I have read on the lockdown: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade... The positive is that Washington state acted early and the Bay Area followed quickly which resulted in lower hospitalization and deaths. Tech’s quick move to WFH probably helped slow the spread. This was driven by the Washington state health officials who worked with Microsoft. Bay Area tech compa…
I wouldn't be as critical when it comes to making only demands that will be accepted. That's not really manipulative IMO, and Swiss authorities were also very open about doing this. Announcing a short lockdown then extending it (when it was clear from the beginning) is more problematic - basically, giving people false hope because they know that telling people to lock down for 3+ months would lead to a large number o…
The issue of masks is/was more complicated than just an intentional lie.
Medicine has a rather well-known history of really bad ideas that, at their time, were perfectly reasonable ideas within the knowledge and commonly accepted paradigms of their time. Bloodletting, arsenic, later high-dose Vitamin C (and after that, D), Resveratrol etc.
It took until the middle of the 20th century for randomised trials to become the gold standard of medicine. And even today, "evidence-based medicine" is still distinct enough from just "medicine" to require that term.
If you're not in medicine/biology you probably consider some logically sound idea based on your understanding of a system a useful tool (i. e. "people are interested in dogs, so I'll start a podcast on dogs and people will listen"). In medicine, this is crazy-talk! Unless you have meaningful statistical data, you do nothing except try to somehow get data!
This instinct can, very rarely, go overboard. And that's possibly part of the answer here: there really wasn't any meaningful data on mask use for this sort of purpose. Therefore, the standard instinct kicked in, just as it would have for suggestions to eat lots of Garlic. Or, you know, Hydroxychloroquine.
The second issue is that for N95 masks, it is actually true that laypeople are extremely unlikely to get them to fit correctly to be useful. In a healthcare setting, this involves a mandatory training/fitting that includes a special chamber with high concentrations of some odourant or fog to find leaks.
Then, I'm not 100% sure if this idea of a lie intended to preserve masks for healthcare workers originated with the medical establishment, with politics, the media, or the public. But I'm almost certain that this narrative ("they are saying masks don't work to protect supplies...") was "out there" at the time. Even if somebody was trying to manipulate the public in such a way, somebody else along the route seems to have exposed this strategy at the same time. I wouldn't even be surprised if it turns out the same person/group was the source of both, basically telling us "masks don't work very well, one might even say not at all (wink wink), please let them go to those that can make the best use of them".
This reminds me of a piece of this: https://chomsky.info/19960413/ Specifically, near the end > Meaning, setting up a picture — it’s called anti-politics — the picture — but a very specific kind of anti-politics — you have to establish the image, you know, get into people’s heads, that the Government is the enemy- the Federal Government. State Governments are okay, because they can be sort of controlled by business a…
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I don't think this is very damning nor unexpected. A plant with the degree of _change_ that Tesla has on its product line would likely have a very very dynamic production floor - resulting in more violations. It also seems that the OSHA rules were not designed for Tesla's unique processes, so many of those violations, if you actually read them, are not relevant to Tesla and have nothing to do with safety. This proble…
> Also, there have been no deaths or serious injuries, so it's hard to argue that safety was actually compromised here. Safety was compromised due to the Heinrich/Bird safety pyramid, or accident triangle: > It shows a relationship between serious accidents, minor accidents and near misses and proposes that if the number of minor accidents is reduced then there will be a corresponding fall in the number of serious ac…
I'm not familiar with Tesla assembly lines, but my understanding is that they are highly automated with complex robotics. This would be a typical example of a system where many safety risks are systemic and more strongly dependent on design errors than on worker safety behaviours, which is exactly the type of system in which the structuralist interpretation of the Heinrich-Bird pyramid ("reduce the small stuff at the base of the pyramid and the stuff up the top will drop down and disappear") is really inappropriate, as it can reduce attention paid to safety at a system design level.
Bold move to extort public officials with threats to move a factory you're attempting to fully automate and a few hundred white collar positions to a state where your main bargaining chip is jobs when you possess less than 5% market share, a vertical monopoly and a luxury product in a crashing market. Excited to see how this one turns out.
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The thing is, people everywhere want to work, with extraordinarily few exceptions. A government doesn't really need to incentivize work in general, only some specific kinds of work which are underperformed.
Citation? I find it funny that no matter how many times history, and even contemporary events, have taught us otherwise, people still believe "People don't need strong incentives to work!"
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Thank you for being a diamond in the rough, Dan. Your tireless work keeping Hacker News a safe haven for free thinkers and polite politic is essential during times like these.
I think we need to do more in this space. As HackerNews had become more popular, it has begun the inevitable transformation from a place of analysis to a place of advocacy. ...which inevitably results in a drop in quality and substance and a rise in partisanship. HackerNews thrived for a long time by keeping under the radar, but what we really need now is a new mechanic that rewards dispationate analytic content and…
I strongly (if sometimes hypocritically?) agree. A critical mass of people who acted to preserve that culture was helpful in the past.
What can be done going forward? Do you have any ideas for how to create this mechanic?
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Serious question: can you show me the metrics for california with concrete targets that will trigger reopening? The last plan I saw wasn't a plan at all, it was just guidelines.
I don't see the difference between plan and guidelines from any practical point of view. There is a statewide timeline and counties can open slower/faster. There's a list of criteria for counties to consider. This is a slide deck summarizing things at a state level, it notes a variety of metrics that are being looked at: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Update-on-...
Cancelling my Tesla pre-order - this is an abuse of workers (more blatant than before).