Are there any masks to buy? A lot of news articles are about governments seizing mask shipments. Furthermore, I think most masks are being allocated to hospitals.
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3 days on plastic...
I actually thought viruses lived forever, but I was wrong. The paper linked in this article says 1 day on cardboard, 3 days on plastic.
EDIT: Washing your hands well is probably sufficient; excuse my paranoia suggesting gloves, extraordinary times.
Other small warehouses I have personal knowledge of have been equipping their workers with masks and gloves daily in addition to hazard pay. It is just lack of attention to the issue that has caused the problem at Amazon. 99 out of 100 times I would support Amazon in any labor dispute. However, in this case, Amazon has not acted intelligently and the demands were very reasonable. The cost of equipping employees is much lower than the cost of more warehouse shutdowns due to illness and the comparison is so ridiculously in favor of "equip the employees" that even the hardest-hearted, self-interested Scrooge of a manager should be able to see the utility in equipping employees appropriately. As other even larger employers like Walmart have moved to make protective equipment available to all employees, Amazon is left looking stupid/evil/self-destructive in its approach here.
This person is advocating boycotting Amazon and going to local grocery stores instead. What the hell? How is that better?
I think it's more complicated than that. There are viruses that are enveloped in a membrane, and ones that are not. Unenveloped viruses can survive much longer on surfaces. IIRC, Covid-19 is an enveloped virus.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462923/:
> Non-enveloped viruses, such as coxsackieviruses, rotavirus, or poliovirus, can survive for extended periods on surfaces (9, 10), while enveloped viruses, including H1N1 and human coronaviruses, remain infectious on surfaces after several days (6).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1564025/:
> Most viruses from the respiratory tract, such as corona, coxsackie, influenza, SARS or rhino virus, can persist on surfaces for a few days. Viruses from the gastrointestinal tract, such as astrovirus, HAV, polio- or rota virus, persist for approximately 2 months. Blood-borne viruses, such as HBV or HIV, can persist for more than one week. Herpes viruses, such as CMV or HSV type 1 and 2, have been shown to persist from only a few hours up to 7 days.
Where does he say that?
If you have the money yes, apparently : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/global-battle-...
This reminds me of a class of housing advocates who insist a higher minimum wage or rent control will solve housing problems. No, you still have 1 unit for 1.x people; the overriding issue is supply.
They could, for instance, limit the orders they accept to base necessities like food, cleaning supplies, etc.
They already did. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-essential-goods...
Amazon isn't that big in Poland (most people buy on home-grown allegro or chinese alliexpress) so nobody will cry if they go under. It seems every month there's a story about these warehouses. It quickly becomes the stereotypical worst place to work.
Profiteering is undercutting every possible thing. The profit motive over a democratically planned economy is horrible most of the time but really becomes a mess in a crisis.
How would this even be tested or proven to any reasonable assurance? The PCR test is questionable enough as it is. "Hold on sir while we build this biolab on your front lawn and isolate all objects that could've come from outside of the house then test them"
So they're still selling non-essential stuffs, just not restocking their warehouse with them.
I agree that setting rules and transparency is a good thing - but a lot of that probably depends on the management at that particular warehouse.
As someone who lives in a housing market where at least 30% of houses + apartments are sitting empty for months/years because their owner is being irrational (i.e. unwilling to drop to a market-clearing price), "rent control" (in the form of not just preventing rents from rising, but also capping the initial lease price landlords are able to ask for) would fix a lot of things.
Of course, anyone who thought the new rules would mean they could no longer profit in the market could get out of the market, selling off their real-estate assets. There'd be no limit on purchase prices for ownership transfer. But, of course, without the hyper-inflated (even though illiquid!) rental income, the units would be inherently less valuable, so they'd lose resale value, too.
> my grandma is immune compromised from chemotherap
Anyone in that group should be fully isolated and the advice for dropping goods etc, receiving packages is to leave them for 24 hours before handling if possible.
The hystrionics about shutting down important logistics to appease certain individuals media induced madness is a serious issue in itself
(with thanks to dril: https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762)
Because from what I have read that is extremely unlikely.
This whole situation is a really good example of why worker's unions must exist.
See https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/amazon-begins-running-temp...
> Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.
From https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo...
> Zapolsky’s notes imply the company’s attempts to purchase N95 masks from China fell through. “China has deemed N95 masks as ‘strategic,’” Zapolsky wrote. “They’re keeping them for optionality. They also want to use them for ‘diplomacy.’ The masks in China that we thought we had probably got redirected by profiteers.”
And https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-essential-goods... for changes to stock essential goods.
> “We are seeing increased online shopping, and as a result some products such as household staples and medical supplies are out of stock,” reads an announcement on Amazon’s official forum for sellers. “With this in mind, we are temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so that we can more quickly receive, restock, and deliver these products to customers.”
And https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/update-from-amazon...
> To date, we’ve made over 150 significant process changes to ensure the health and safety of our teams. We’ve shared details on the safety precautions we’ve taken to date on the Day One Blog, and today, I want to give an update.
> Disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer are already standard across our network, and the procurement teams have worked tirelessly to create new sources of supply to keep these critical items flowing. The millions of masks we ordered weeks ago are now arriving, and we’re distributing them to our teams as quickly as possible. Masks will be available as soon as today in some locations and in all locations by early next week. Any N-95 masks we receive we are either donating to healthcare workers on the front lines or making them available through Amazon Business to healthcare and government organizations at cost.
> We’re conducting daily audits of the new health and safety measures we’ve put into place. We’ve shared some of the photos of these measures here. We also assigned some of our top machine learning technologists to capture opportunities to improve social distancing in our buildings using our internal camera systems. With over 1,000 sites around the world, and so many measures and precautions rapidly rolled out over the past several weeks, there may be instances where we don’t get it perfect, but I can assure you that’s just what they’ll be—exceptions.
> Finally, I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate our teams for serving their communities. If someone would rather not come to work, we are supporting them in their time off. If someone is diagnosed or comes to us who is presumptively diagnosed (but unable to get a test), we are giving them extra paid time off. In addition, we are also contacting people who have been in close contact with a diagnosed individual and giving them time off as well, for 14 days, to stay home with pay.
There's even more that Amazon has done in response to COVID-19 at https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to.... I really don't get what all the outrage is about. It seems like a manufactured crisis, amplified by a series of biased news outlets, in order to push a narrative against big corporations, presumably in favor of unionization.
Why would this stop houses from being left empty? It seems a better idea for stopping housing being left empty is to heavily tax houses which are left empty.
Why not have bread lines only in a crisis, when you can have them all the time instead?
If one delivery guy gets it and is busy driving around neighborhoods asymptomatic for weeks the delivery would cause spread. If one grocer gets it and is busy running his store asymptomatic for weeks then many who visits could get it. So its just luck.
The goal with these measures is to buy time for hospitals. And they both will.
The social distancing stuff makes sure flow to the hospital is not as high as it would be if everyone was not social distancing. What matters at the end of the day is how many free beds are at the hospital and what plans they have to handle overflow. Korean hospitals had plans on how to coordinate with each other and between regions for docs/equipment etc to handle overflow/overload.
You state this like it's an obvious measure; you're irrational over 2 months is my rational over 2 years.
Vancouver was absolutely booming in February after some of the steam was released in late 2019. Those vacancies are primarily because owners are using the house as a value store. How would caps on initial rental rates help at all? Those same owners would just never list them.
Rather than arbirtrarily cutting owners off at the knees, forcing them out, it would seem easier if you just left the area.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
> One of the messages from Amazon employees concerned wearing masks in warehouses. According to the man who wrote to us, employees are prohibited from using them. Why? - Not to spread panic - he explains in an interview with Onet. - These are the top-down guidelines. The exception is a lady from a medical point, she alone can have a mask.
> Onet's interlocutor also said that until two weeks ago Amazon workers were also forbidden to wear gloves. - It has now been lifted. People can work in gloves, but only material ones, not rubber one. Why is it like that? I have no idea - says an Amazon employee.
I would also imagine gloves are a better transmission medium for the virus as well...
I then go to my car and see used plastic gloves thrown all over the parking lot. It made me so mad. I just want to yell out "Be Better, People!".
The obvious solution would be for the employer to provide it, but with the current shortage it's probably not happening.
"PPE is very hard to get right now" is one thing but the workers are complaining about stuff like not even having access to hand sanitizer. That's basic shit. If you can't get your employees a way to properly wash their hands you shouldn't be operating a business during a pandemic. I don't care whether it's because costs have climbed or you made an oopsie, if your facilities don't have essentials like:
running water + soap so people can wash their hands
usable toilets
central heat/air so that employees don't overheat or freeze
Then you're not prepared to operate them. Amazon is not some small business. They have billions of dollars at their disposal that they could have been using to prepare for an epidemic - basically an absolute certainty that one would eventually impact local amazon fulfillment centers, sooner or later - by stocking basic stuff like soap, gloves, etc. Arguably they should have been keeping those stocked and available for day-to-day business, but whatever. Incidentally I mentioned heat/air there because people getting sick from overheating inside Amazon warehouses is a common occurrence. These facilities are not well-run.
There are many other complaints in the article that are not addressed by your defense here. How is "you're making sick people work overtime during a pandemic" a manufactured crisis? Do you really think that's a good business strategy and something workers should be okay with?
Sure maybe they can't get their employees n95 masks or even surgical masks. Aside from that they had plenty of opportunities to build a stockpile of that stuff in advance - if they didn't then yes, they can't exactly just bring in a truck full of them tomorrow. Sure. But does that mean it's okay that it took them weeks to quarantine a couple of union organizers after exposure to an infected employee? If Amazon is doing such a good job why weren't the infected employee's interactions tracked immediately and responded to by quarantining all employees who made contact with them right away?
Zero of the grocery stores I have visited have gloves or masks on, so why aren't people wailing about them?
N95's are actually useful for reducing spread in public places despite that the government is telling people 'no masks' - it's even more aggressive propaganda that Amazon's lack of maks policy because it's frankly a lie. The systematic objective is to get the N95's to healthcare workers leaving only cloth masks for the public, which is not necessarily going to help hance the finality of the 'don't bother with any masks' policy. It's point-blank internal affairs wartime propaganda, straight out of the movies.
Amazon workers are not more special than the grocery store, or pharmacy workers, none of whom get masks, because they're all going to the medical staff who need them considerably more.
The staffer should not have lost his job but someone should have explained 'what's up' to him.
As opposed to, what - exactly? This is quite a forced dichotomy you are presenting here, and I really don't think it is helpful, nor informative. I would expect this kind of commentary on Twitter, but I would have had a higher standard for HN.
Twitter makes money off of lighting fires under its users' asses, as does much of the media today. What you are doing here is trying to protect what THESE companies stand for. I find that to be much more revolting than those who are defending Amazon.
The OP was literally advocating for a centrally ("democratically") planned economy. Having production dictated by the political process as the default is the extreme position.
Developed countries all find some balance between central planning and laissez faire, but they do so by assuming the free market as the default. Intervention and central planning is only applied to specific cases where there is a concrete public interest in doing so.
1. how often capitalism has bread lines in countries economically linked to, but outside of, the US and other rich capitalist countries, in the "global south";
2. the fact that bread lines in "socialist" (but not actually socialist) countries like Venezuela are in large part due to US policy and sanctions, and are over-reported anyway;
and 3. the fact that socialism has never been tried in a fair way because it is an existential threat to the wealth of people like Jeff Bezos, who prefer to strangle it in the cradle instead.
But thank you for regurgitating the ignorant "bread lines!" trope when there are actual, literal bread lines in the US right now!
Putting profits over people. Which is what capitalism, and as a result, American corporations end up idealizing.
You really think Bezos gives a shit about some warehouse worker? Over generating more profit so he can be richer? I've got news for you bud.
> I really don't think it is helpful, nor informative
Only if you want to protect monied interests, or you're one of those temporarily embarrassed billionaires...
I'm currently in France under quarantine. Almost all supermarkets got their workers mask or protection screens, same for bakeries, same for police forces.
Amazon workers still don't have any protection at all. None of them.
In my opinion, perception management is more important than content and substance for 99.9% of companies and executives.
This is the thing causing most problems in society today, in my personal opinion.
They are!
> government is telling people 'no masks'
People are calling out the government too...
It always surprises me how quickly HN commenters want to jump to the defense of rich corporations and billionaires.
> The staffer should not have lost his job
But he did, because Jeff Bezos is greedy and has no regard for human life.
> because they're all going to the medical staff
Not true, in fact Amazon was contemplating donating their stockpiles to police forces for good PR.
That being said, my heartburn pills sitting outside while I'm out of them inside sucks out loud.
I am aware that there are actual bread lines right now, as implied by my original statement.
Of course, the bread lines we are facing has more to do with (at present) a rapid shock in demand, rather than actual food shortages.
Whereas in actual historical socialist countries (like Soviet Russia, East Germany, etc.) did actually have shortages on a regular basis.
> the fact that socialism has never been tried in a fair way because it is an existential threat to the wealth of people like Jeff Bezos, who prefer to strangle it in the cradle instead.
There is no notion more riddled with folly and arrogance that "socialism has never properly been tried". That the USSR was defeated and China was bullied into submission by the likes of a few wealthy corporations is nonsense.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oregons-coronavirus-education-l...
The Oregon teachers union is blocking student transfers to online charter schools for fear that the students will remain in the charter schools and won't return to public school next year.
It would be much better if we instead broke down the barriers to moving between jobs like portable healthcare benefits so companies have no leverage to keep employees around and employees can easily change employers if the employer doesn't treat employees fairly.
No. You just seem to have reacted reflexively seeing the word "planned" placed next to the word "economy," without seeking any clarification or understanding or even really putting it in context.
The OP was clearly focused on criticizing prioritization of profit-seeking over all other interests, and the corrosive effect that has had on our ability to respond to this present crisis.
> Developed countries all find some balance between central planning and laissez faire, but they do so by assuming the free market as the default. Intervention and central planning is only applied to specific cases where there is a concrete public interest in doing so.
And you know what? This crisis is uncovering a lot of areas where less laissez faire and more government intervention would have been "concretely in the public interest."
The market system is an imperfect means to an end, not an end itself.
It's just not hard to see that these companies are not doing very much to take care of the people who are making these warehouses run, because they are considered to be expendable or replaceable. That's pretty shitty!
Just figured you may want to know, because you have a decent point.
The current national strategy is to get the masks (particularly N95s) to the frontline workers, some of whom are running out of PPE while having to enter and work in hospitals full of COVID patients.
This 'blame the rich' populism is irresponsible.
Amazon workers are currently following the same recommended national strategy - which is the responsible action.
If they were all wearing N95s, the 'blame the rich' crowd would be screaming that 'Amazon is taking away needed resources form medical staff'.
>>>>> "People are calling out the government too..."
No. They are calling out 'no cloth masks' policy, they are not calling out the 'get medical workers the N95s' policy.
>>>>> "because Jeff Bezos is greedy and has no regard for human life."
Rubbish sensationalism.
>>>>> "fact Amazon was contemplating donating their stockpiles to police forces for good PR."
1st - They didn't. So this point is not relevant. 2cnd - Donating materials to responders is a 'good thing'. It's ridiculous to split hairs and say 'it's immoral to give to police but not hospitals' 3rd - You have no evidence that their only motivation for making said donation was 'PR' and not 'Goodwill'. You're making up facts.
I also believe that while many people are allergic to this right now, especially on meritocracy-loving hacker news, over time, this position will become more popular with most people because capitalism is structurally unable to solve its own problems and increasingly people’s recognition of that will overcome their fear of the unknown.
I think this has a lot of intellectual appeal. Capitalism has done a lot of progressive things and nationally coordinated, centralized industry is incredible. People often point that out and they’re right. But the economy and industry we have now is socially operated - through an international division of labor from farmers to programmers - even though it is privately owned and run not to satisfy the needs of workers and people, but to increase profits. This central contradiction between how production is organized - profit for those who own capital - and who runs it and who it should benefit - everyone, as decided democratically - is behind the dysfunction and social crises we’re rapidly plunging into.
Hold onto your seat! Things are going to get crazy, and I recommend reading Marx, he’s a lot more lucid and clear thinking than people who go half way like Bernie. In the meantime I’m not worried about people who dump on me for the horrors of “communism” because they sound more absurd every week.
His point was that capitalism's optimization function steered us in the direction whereby most of our "wealth" in this country is derived from the assumption of intact and normal flowing international supply chains to fuel the engine of consumerism instead of being based on the actual capability to produce and deliver finished product from raw material in a time of crisis or otherwise.
Globalism has spelled doom in the sense that we haven't been making sure to maintain our own industrial capability, while instead raking in as much "capital" return by exploiting the wage gap found internationally. Yet as soon as that decision bit us in the ass, our capability as a lone nation to take care of our owm has essentially been sold off to the lowest bidder elsewhere, who is now more than happy to turn around and hold said resources hostage as diplomatic leverage.
But no, please. Yet another entertaining and predictable rant about the socialist boogeyman would be great. Has the bonus of distracting from the actual problem as well, so kills two birds with one stone. /s
I'm so tired of hearing people hit stop points over capitalism vs. the merest notion that a nation should have some level of influence over the market and industrial infrastructure it maintains in the interests it's own security.
0x is absolutely fucking right. Unrestrained capitalism encourages selling the jewels right out from under the nation that is dependent and instrumental to the very jewel's existence. No goddamn pile of dollar bills or IOU's is capable of taking the place of actual, physical, manufacturing capability ready to go, unreliant on unreliable trade partners in a time of crisis. It's a case of personal safety, writ large.
The fantasy of a world pacified through economic interdependence was a bloody sham from the beginning, made even worse by the vices of the ultra-wealthy, and exacerbated even more by the aspirations of the swathes of temporarily inconvenienced billionaires that seek to figure out how to get on top of the carriage one day so maybe they get their turn at playing the part of the "Invisible Hand".
So I counter your Socialist boogeyman once again with "look at where your Global Capitalist paradise got you: Diplomatic tensions through the roof, your primary economic rival holding most of the relevant industrial cards; an isolated population, paralyzed by a virus you can do nil about because you sold/didn't build the factories, a collapsing economy, and in the same breadlines the "Socialists" you so despise are in".
So quit the bloody rhetorical posturing. It's all been said and it does nothing to help with the problems at hand. The country needs to industrially mobilize once more: without the crutch of foreign powers oh so eager to provide a workforce on the condition we show them how to build the actually challenging bits and leave all the physical assets with them, to be held hostage the first time things get tough.
I have no grudge against the Chinese or anyone else at the moment. We're all in this pandemic, so they're going to do what hi.ans do and look after themselves. If anything,I'm more pissed off that my own country which so pounds the drum of being responsible and self-sufficient has been on the global trade dole to the point it's forgotten how to pick itself up and go without squabbling over who gets the contract, and how hard can I screw my workers.
I don't how one could see the phrase "planned economy" and not think the OP meant something other than "planned economy". One can criticize profit motive and not promote a planned economy. The OP is literally a self-professed Trotskyist[0].
> And you know what? This crisis is uncovering a lot of areas where less laissez faire and more government intervention would have been "concretely in the public interest."
Please do tell.
> The market system is an imperfect means to an end, not an end itself.
No one said it was an end unto itself.
I am arguing against 0x262d's actual, explicit, literal Marxism.
0x262d's positions actually seem pretty reasonable and interesting, though we'd probably find disagreement if we got deeper into details.
I don't know much about Marxism, but I do know it's broader and more varied than some strawman desire for a Soviet Union Part Deux. I also think it will be possible to transcend capitalism without disaster, and libertarians have done a good job convincing me that's a worthy topic to think about and a worthy goal to work towards.
> Please do tell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
> Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators....
> Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.
> And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators....
> The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis....
> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business....
> In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
That's just something I read recently.
There's also the general fact that capitalists love efficiency and hate excess capacity, which means they tend to sacrifice resiliency. There's no profit today in maintaining capability to handle a disruption in a socially beneficial way, so they specialize for their hothouse environment. Heck, if some apologists for price-gouging had their way, such a firm could even profit handsomely from a crisis they failed to prepare for.
No, because that wasn't my original claim. My position was that we explore how he understands the concept of "democratically planned economy" rather than jumping to Soviet conclusions. It's really all in the details.
I said:
> The OP was literally advocating for a centrally ("democratically") planned economy. Having production dictated by the political process as the default is the extreme position.
And you said: "No".
Either you were saying "no" to my assertion that the OP was advocating for central planning by default, or you were saying "no" to my assertion that such a position is extreme. Please clarify.
> My position was that we explore how he understands the concept of "democratically planned economy" rather than jumping to Soviet conclusions.
OP is a self-professed literal Trotskyist. Trotskyists were (among) the original Soviets. I'm not jumping to any conclusions. It is quite plainly implied by the label.
The homeless bit is a false dilemma. While housing the homeless can be cheaper than the services they require from living on the street, luxury condos aren't making them homeless, and freed up inventory won't go to them, it will go to someone making six figures with too many roommates.
Homelessness is incredibly tricky because there are different causes of homelessness. There's struggling service sector workers living out of their cars, but there are also homeless with severe mental health issues and drug addictions (cue the SF Civic Center Bart station video). Housing them somewhere could make sense, and it's an inefficient use of money to do it in urban centers, but at the same time, it feels unethical to put the problem out-of-sigh in some remote ghetto. That, and you need coordination for any sort of homeless policy like that so cities don't start busing their homeless elsewhere.
I do actually agree with this criticism.
> There's no profit today in maintaining capability to handle a disruption in a socially beneficial way, so they specialize for their hothouse environment. Heck, if some apologists for price-gouging had their way, such a firm could even profit handsomely from a crisis they failed to prepare for.
So here's an interesting question: if charging extra for items in high-demand during a crisis (price-gouging) were legal, would there be enough?
Consider that housing inventory can be a cost, and that for many companies controlling costs is a necessary step if they want to stay in business. They might even want to have some excess inventory to handle shocks in demand. But if they can't charge more for selling goods that are in their reserve inventory, then they won't be able to cover the costs of holding onto that inventory for so long.
Those costs exist, and society has to pay them, even when the government is the one holding the reserves. Now, if we don't want consumers to have to pay the extra cost during a crisis (which is fair, because many people might have lost their jobs) we could just have the government step in and pay the difference.
It may seem like it would be rewarding price-gouging, but all it would be doing would be to delay government paying the cost to warehouse reserves.
What's more, is that the government would only be paying for those reserve goods that it would actually need. There are an endless number of goods that could possibly be needed in a disaster; stocking up on them all would be untenable. Allowing corporations to do most of that work would drastically reduce the burden on the government (and the average citizen).
Lastly, even when government's prepare, they don' know all of what those needs might be (again, the example of Switzerland not stocking up enough of masks).
NOTE: I am not saying I am OK with people price-gouging for goods already on the market. I'm just talking through a situation where a legal change might allow corporations to have better incentives with regard to disaster preparedness and redress the flaw we both see in the current system.
While luxury condos don't "make" homeless people homeless; they're just a graphic depiction of how flagrantly housing prioritizes profit over the actual use value of housing people. And they could make homeless people not homeless if we had a sane system.
As for support for homeless people, I agree that it's tricky and we shouldn't just shove them somewhere, but it's not insurmountable EXCEPT when systems for supporting people are systematically defunded and people are kept without the support/job/community they need. And that's the case everywhere. It seems much harder than it is because it's impossible to solve within unrestrained capitalism, which is the natural state capitalism slides towards all the time.
As one final point, it isn't inefficient in any real sense to have people live in cities. In fact, with reasonable infrastructure (admittedly nonexistent in the US), it is much more efficient in terms of any real resources for people to live densely, especially if they need support. The only way in which it is inefficient is that landlords and profiteers siphon wealth away and drive costs up to the sky. This is a solvable problem but it is a problem of capitalist market anarchy, just like cities busing their homeless away.
The original Bolsheviks predicted this and had no hope of success without socialism being achieved in a rich country and coming to their aid; Russia did not have the economic basis for socialism. As Trotsky put it, "When there is little bread, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy."
Capitalism is hurtling towards revolutionary crisis and stopping it is impossible, but if we achieve socialism on a better basis than Russia did, I'm optimistic we can overcome their specific problems. This has to be dramatically more democratic than Russia but the comparison point is, right now, nurses are fired if they wear masks in many hospitals (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/kaiser-permanente-nurses...). We have the economic basis to transcend this, we just have to do it.
I'm just quoting your own words[0].
I get the impression that many people are used to seeing more moderate, mainstream progressive positions slurred with the label "Communist" (with a capital C), and sought to cast your position in a more moderate light. I don't see anything inaccurate in characterize you as a Communist (of which Trotskyists are a flavor). You're certainly welcome to own and defend that position, but it is undeniably an extreme position (even on the Internet).
I can also understand if some want to distinguish socialism (or their own variant of it) from the strain(s) that produced the USSR, perhaps in order to avoid the stigma, no such distinction is possible in your case. Any such association is something you have to deal with directly.
> I have one comment here which is that soviet is just the Russian word for council and originally meant bottom-up, democratic structures of workers and soldiers that eventually took power because they and only they were willing to end WWI, give land to the peasants, and break the power of the capitalist class.
There are other interpretations that paint the revolution in a somewhat dimmer light[1].
> Then, due mostly to Russia's extreme backwardness as well as attack by literally 28 capitalist countries including all the previous belligerents of WW1, the USSR degenerated into a bureaucratic monstrosity that fetishized the word "soviet".
> The original Bolsheviks predicted this and had no hope of success without socialism being achieved in a rich country and coming to their aid; Russia did not have the economic basis for socialism. As Trotsky put it, "When there is little bread, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy."
"I was brutal to my own people because my enemies were mean" is a terrible justification the atrocities committed by the USSR, both at the beginning and throughout the decades of it's reign of terror.
> Capitalism is hurtling towards revolutionary crisis and stopping it is impossible, but if we achieve socialism on a better basis than Russia did, I'm optimistic we can overcome their specific problems.
In principle I think it's reasonable to discuss why the Russian revolution failed to achieve it's objectives, and whether we could achieve them ourselves. Whitewashing the crimes does not lead me to think it will be a fruitful discussion in this context.
> This has to be dramatically more democratic than Russia but the comparison point is, right now, nurses are fired if they wear masks in many hospitals (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/kaiser-permanente-nurses...).
Saying that (the lack of) democratic planning of the economy or the healthcare system has anything to do with nurses being fired for wearing masks (which is truly a terrible tragedy) is illogical. All it takes to deal with that problem is the willingness to put the truth above controlling public perception, something which the USSR[2] and it's Western[3] sympathizers were not especially good at.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22698823 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
I never said they were
> they are not calling out the 'get medical workers the N95s' policy
Why the hell would anyone call them out for wanting to get masks to medical workers? Medical workers should have masks, but that does not mean the public should not also have masks. People are rightfully calling them out for telling the average Joe to not wear a mask, but for some reason people like you are worried about the poor helpless corporations.
> This 'blame the rich' populism is irresponsible.
The only reason we can't produce enough masks domestically is because "the rich" have exported most of our production capabilities out of the country, so they can increase their margins and hoard more wealth. Bringing this to light is not irresponsible, the decisions that the wealthy in this country have made on its behalf is what's irresponsible, and there will be a reckoning.