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Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly wonder if this writing style is conscious and intentional though, or rather un(sub)conscious and accidental. Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that…

Oh, it's likely not conscious by the author. The most convincing of these one-sided views are the ones written by people who are "true believers" in their agendas. Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic. Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propag…

That actually makes a lot of sense....the desirable qualities for a journalist in 2020:

a) good/popular writing style

b) an ideologue in subjects that have high ideological "weight" in the population

Honesty, accuracy, fact checking, nuance, all of the traditional desirable attributes for journalists are now not only not required, but extremely undesirable.

And depending on the particular organization (say, a relatively reputable organization like the NYT), the only thing you need are editors who can proofread the article before publishing, replacing explicit assertions with a variety of weasel words, a big chunk of which could likely even be automated to insert suggested edits that just need a manual review.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#102
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re they confirmed not positive before it reopened? Otherwise, this literally means nothing.

I wouldn't go so far to say it "means nothing". If they were confirmed not-positive before the reopening how come this information was not publicly made available beforehand? If they weren't tested and then went back to work during the reopening, doesn't this indicate a lack of diligence in screening returning employees? In any case the main issue is that Musk reopened the plant against local authorities' wishes and…

In a free and democratic society it is the authorities who need to be held under scrutiny.

I get that the government needed to react quickly and impose emergency measures. But now that things have calmed down, we should apply the same standards to business closures that we do to everything else: governments must justify why a business cannot reopen, must apply the rules consistently and fairly to every business, and can be challenged when they don't live up to those obligations.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean where Musk is basically saying “please don’t hold my demands of my workers against them. Punish me instead, please?”

bail is cheaper than missing production targets.

Quarantine is where you restrict the movement of sick people.

Tyranny is where you restrict the movement of healthy people.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#104

Somewhere in Musk's calculus, he must have determined just how many people can get sick and die without it being too much of a PR problem.

For autopilot it’s around 5. That dangerous fraudulently advertised software should be pulled off the road. Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free. Not to mention the laughable promises of full self driving being available anytime soon, which cause customers to overestimate the system’s capability.

> Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free.

They aren't just "warnings". After the 2nd or 3rd warning, it disables autopilot until the end of the ride completely. So you cannot just drive "hands-free" with autopilot and ignore the warning.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#105
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world. But it is this way, so what's your point? We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.

My point was to respond to your "what if there's never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?" There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more. It's also not too late to do more. But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's…

I'm not advocating that we just forget about the virus. We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life. There are social distancing policies for businesses, people are wearing masks, etc. -- but businesses are reopening.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For autopilot it’s around 5. That dangerous fraudulently advertised software should be pulled off the road. Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free. Not to mention the laughable promises of full self driving being available anytime soon, which cause customers to overestimate the system’s capability.

> Yes there are warnings not to abuse it, but that flies in the face of the marketing and videos of Musk where he uses autopilot hands-free. They aren't just "warnings". After the 2nd or 3rd warning, it disables autopilot until the end of the ride completely. So you cannot just drive "hands-free" with autopilot and ignore the warning.

That has nothing to do with the marketing.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant. To give an example which way it goes: in Poland, the virus appeared a few weeks ago between coal mines workers. Yesterday there was a decision to temporarily shut 12 coal mines down.

> It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.

Yup. But they brought it into the factory. No? Or am I missing something?

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#108
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was to respond to your "what if there's never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?" There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more. It's also not too late to do more. But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's…

I'm not advocating that we just forget about the virus. We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life. There are social distancing policies for businesses, people are wearing masks, etc. -- but businesses are reopening.

> We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life.

Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.

This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.

And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.

Yup. But they brought it into the factory. No? Or am I missing something?

Were they actively infected or immune with antibodies already when they started?

Re: Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.

Yup. But they brought it into the factory. No? Or am I missing something?

From the article:

> the company had reported several cases of the coronavirus, and the employees affected were told to stay home.

I'm self-employed and my little software company took a sharp hit with the pandemic. Not being one to wait until all the money runs out, I took an "essential job" stocking groceries at the nearby Walmart. Every day, before employees can enter the store, they are screened. In the time I have been there, several employees failed the screening and were sent home. Two of those turned out to have the virus.

Tesla and other employers have similar screenings, so unless the employees lied about being symptomatic, they should not have been among the workforce. Add to that, the CDC just announced findings that non-symptomatic spread of the virus was very rare.

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