Let’s say that he’s right, it’s time for factories to open and he genuinely takes every step to protect his workers. And what if a worker gets sick anyways and sues? Could he really convince a jury that he took it seriously, after all the dumb things he’s said about the situation on twitter?
He would’ve been better off not weighing in on the situation before the shut down orders came down. Now that he’s a business owner hoping to re-open he has some stake, but he trashed a lot of his credibility before the shut down for no obvious benefit.
This is an attempt to normalize the behavior.
Tesla board members reportedly concerned about Elon Musk’s use of Ambien - CNBC Aug 2018
Smokes weed on a podcast - Joe Rogan Sep 2018
NASA reportedly paid SpaceX $5 million to make sure its employees didn't use illegal drugs after Elon Musk smoked pot on camera - Business insider Aug 2019
Elon Musk's tweet on taking Tesla private now dogged by drugs claim from rapper Azealia Banks - Dec 2019
I am not entirely sure how come he is perceived as some genius Tony Starkesque world savior figure.
I hope his silliness will come around and bite him in the * one day.
I think this sentence really hits home at the problem. Elon is smart, but smart people make mistakes (Elon is definitely going off the deep end). The issue is that covid is a complicated topic with a lot of nuance. Elon is only paying attention to one part of the conversation but not to the rest. In science you don't only take one side of the conversation (HN actually is generally doing the same thing but from the other direction). The problem with science is that it is complicated and nuanced. If you ignore the nuance, it becomes much more complicated.
So it isn't that he is uninformed, it is that he is hyper hyper informed, but only from one perspective (and uninformed from the other). We could actually generalize that to a lot of conversations in the US (and world). If you turn a nuanced topic into a simple topic, there can be no discussion and everyone sounds like idiots, but that doesn't mean they are uninformed or didn't try to understand (which is part of the problem with a lot of our conversations, because people know they spent a lot of time trying to understand but that doesn't mean they got all points nor understand the deeper meaning).
- Even if there is a risk, it’s minimal if they follow the guidelines
- without money, those workers are going to starve
- without cars Tesla goes bankrupt
- without Tesla those workers are going to starve
The reality is Elon is correct in his assessment. You either open the production in the safest way possible (minimizing risk) or you risk catastrophic loss of jobs and inevitably loss of life / livelihood.
I don't think Musk is an evil person, but everything about his past actions and his personality has shown he is singularly focused on his big dreams: electrifying the automobile industry and getting to Mars. He sees these closures as a threat to his dream, not to his workers.
Again, I don't really think there is anything wrong with this. It takes people with unique drive like this to bring about big change. But it's important to not confuse his drive for something it's not.
The workers should be getting Pandemic UI through the end of July 2020, so no starving would happen, the factory can stay closed for another two months (if solely considering the workers’ pay)
Tesla won’t go bankrupt if they wait 1-2 weeks to restart operations. They’re sitting on a huge cash pile and have other factories that aren’t closed anyway.
Pretty sure that's the point. If Amazon can have warehouse workers delivering non-essential goods without restrictions, why can't Tesla be manufacturing without restrictions?
> What makes Tesla special?
Pretty sure that's what Elon is arguing. What makes Tesla special in that it's the only car manufacturer being restricted?
I think he's probably considered some worker safety aspects of reopening production, and I also agree in reality with the precautions taken the risk is probably low. I also don't think worker safety is high on his list of priorities; more of a necessary thing that needs to be dealt with to get to his actual goal.
- without working, people cannot get money
This is not a physical law of nature, it's how American society has chosen to be, and if there were political will, society could choose to modify that "rule". We've just collectively convinced ourselves that it is axiomatic.
It's really too bad that this whole pandemic hasn't sparked much conversation about how we could structure things so people don't starve when they aren't doing this ritual called work.
Maintaining life at our current standard of living requires an extraordinary amount of work. And if you're going to use society's resources to survive then you should contribute back to society by working, its not a "ritual".
The idea that working is somehow an artificial constraint is completely wrong, and leads to utopian thinking, not actual possible policy alternatives.
But a possible underestimation of the severity of the virus and an extreme desire get to Mars might explain his actions. (I am not saying the order to keep the factory is closed is justified, more in relation to Elon’s Twitter views on the virus)
Big companies like Elon's will survive this. The small businesses won't. He's not greedy, I think the exact opposite.
And I know it happen to me in the past. I guess it's a double edge sword.
This is a weird part of our culture where celebrities are constantly pushed by the twitter-sized attention span of our current day and age to put out oversimplified, exaggerated, and often totally wrong memes.
He didn't say that. He said there's an incentive to doing it which is a fact and hospital administrators are pressuring physicians to do it:
> Fact check: Hospitals get paid more if patients listed as COVID-19, on ventilators
> Jensen said, "Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for – if they're Medicare – typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000. But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000."
> Jensen clarified in the video that he doesn't think physicians are "gaming the system" so much as other "players," such as hospital administrators, who he said may pressure physicians to cite all diagnoses, including "probable" COVID-19, on discharge papers or death certificates to get the higher Medicare allocation allowed under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. Past practice, Jensen said, did not include probabilities.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
> predicted no cases by the end of April
This was when Dr Fauci, WHO etc were all giving away wrong info. Why are you trusting them but not trusting Elon?
Dr. Fauci:
> Top disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is 'minuscule'; skip mask and wash hands
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-di...
> Don't wear masks:
> Fauci told cruises were totally fine on March 10th.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douggollan/2020/03/09/fauci-say...
People need top stop calling everything they don't like "conspiracy theories". They are often guilty of what they accuse others of 1000x.
Elon said on March 19 that cases would go to zero. WHO had declared a public health emergency in January and in February was warning publicly that western governments weren’t taking it seriously. WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11, eight days before Elon’s tweet. Here is what they were saying Feb 28, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/who-raises-risk-assessment-o...
Regarding your other quotes
1. This was February 17. Yes, the mask advice was wrong although in line with western medical establishment thinking.
2. Fauci did not say cruises were totally fine. he said not to go if you were elderly or had a preexisting condition. Which is probably the majority of cruise line passengers. Two days before he had already said “When I say protect, I mean right now. Not wait until things get worse. Say no large crowds, no long trips. And above all, don't get on a cruise ship.” (Dr Fauci, March 8)
Elon has repeatedly shown himself to not understand the threat of the virus.
Fauci said on March 10th "If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship."
So how exactly is Elon opening his factory consisting of young employees with easy social distancing worse than what Fauci says? It's much easier to stay at a distance and wear masks at a factory than on a cruise ship. He even states that those who are afraid aren't required to come. Only those who want can come and work. How is there anything wrong? I just don't get it.
Here's CDC post from May 1st regarding how this is "comparable time period during a recent high severity flu season":
https://www.facebook.com/CDC/posts/10157900783181026
> According to the latest CDC COVIDView report, increases in hospitalization rates for COVID-19, which are cumulative, have started to level off. The hospitalization rate is highest among adults 65 and older and similar to what has been seen during a comparable time period during a recent high severity flu season
Fauci, WHO, modelers etc whose only job is to make predictions on these sort of things have been consistently wrong and yet people are willing to take their advice as gospel.
I’ve never heard anything about factories only employing healthy young people. That sounds like age discrimination, so if Elon is doing that he could also be reported.
The people who are staying home are being threatened with loss of pay and unemployment insurance. Have you read any of the news articles about the workers who have died at meatpacking plants because their managers pushed them to keep coming in and then the whole plant got infected?
> Fauci, WHO, modelers etc whose only job is to make predictions on these sort of things have been consistently wrong and yet people are willing to take their advice as gospel.
Wrong in the wrong direction. They underpredicted how bad this would be. The White House including Fauci was touting the IHME model of 60,000 deaths from the virus by august 1st, we are already at 80,000 deaths and rising fast. Same for other modelers, e.g. Imperial College who predicted 20,000 deaths in the UK with lockdown and the UK has already hit 40,000 deaths.
Doesn’t exactly cause me to think Elon is more trustworthy. Everything he’s sharing and pushing online has been to downplay the threat of the virus even more than our governments have. I think he obviously cares a lot more about his factory and making money than he does about the virus.
> I’ve never heard anything about factories only employing healthy young people. That sounds like age discrimination, so if Elon is doing that he could also be reported.
You are being disingenuous here because it's obvious that most employees are under 60-65 years old anyway in workforce. Age of Tesla and SpaceX employees is quite young:
> While the median age is also lower than the average though closer to the pack with 29 for SpaceX and 30 for Tesla.
https://electrek.co/2016/03/07/tesla-and-spacex-standout-in-...
While 80% of US coronavirus deaths have been among people 65 and older:
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-us-coronavirus-deaths-a...
> because their managers pushed them to keep coming in and then the whole plant got infected
Again, you are being disingenuous because neither Elon, nor my comment said he's pushing people to come in. In my parent comment I specifically stated this but seems like you either ignored it or are being insincere: "He even states that those who are afraid aren't required to come. Only those who want can come and work. How is there anything wrong?"
> Wrong in the wrong direction. They underpredicted how bad this would b
Again, being disingenuous. You specifically used the example of the revised IHME model of 60,000 deaths and not the one which they predicted before that where they predicted 510,000 deaths in G.B. and 2.2 million in the U.S. The 60,000 deaths prediction also stated the range to be between 31,221 and 126,703. Neil Ferguson, the modelers of the Imperial College model was recently caught and caused him to resign because despite being infected himself, he wasn't following his own quarantine guidelines and was sleeping with a mistress:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/exclusive-govern...
The same Imperial College's Neil Ferguson has been consistently wrong about many predictions:
> [Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . .
> In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
> In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
> In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.
> Last March, Ferguson admitted that his Imperial College model of the COVID-19 disease was based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus. Ferguson declined to release his original code so other scientists could check his results. He only released a heavily revised set of code last week, after a six-week delay.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-rea...
CDC has specifically stated that this is similar to "a recent high severity flu season":
https://www.facebook.com/CDC/posts/10157900783181026
> According to the latest CDC COVIDView report, increases in hospitalization rates for COVID-19, which are cumulative, have started to level off. The hospitalization rate is highest among adults 65 and older and similar to what has been seen during a comparable time period during a recent high severity flu season
We cannot just keep everything shut down forever when a large majority of deaths are in older than 65 years and people with pre-existing health conditions. Because of these draconian lockdowns, the number of suicides, mental health related issues, suicide hotlines have exploded, child abuse and domestic abuse is skyrocketing, people with other health conditions including cancer diagnosis are going undiagnosed. Doesn't even mention the millions of people jobless, losing their business and unable to afford food. The UN says that 130 MILLION people worldwide could be on the brink of starvation by the end of 2020 due to coronavirus lockdown. They predict that 300,000 could die every day over a 3 month period if people are not able to get the help they need. Tell me more about why we need to stay locked down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200501032211/https://www.wfp.o...
Have you looked at the numbers of how many deaths per year we have from cigarettes, flu and pneumonia, car accidents etc? Should we ban cigarettes and driving too until there are zero deaths?
Wrong. The numbers you are quoting are Imperial college predictions, not IHME. And those predictions are for a ZERO mitigation strategy where the disease runs through the entire population to achieve herd immunity (i.e. what humans used to do before disease theory was understood during smallpox epidemics or the Black Death). They are non-falsifiable because we didn’t actually try such a strategy. I’m wondering if you didn’t read the paper yourself because I’ve seen these numbers flying around and invariably people are getting the info from secondary sources who misrepresent it.
You can see the actual paper you’re referring to here (and have mistakenly cited as IHME). https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m... “ In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.”
They go onto model interventions such as closing restaurants, schools, isolating over-70s, and so on, all of which they predict would lead to significantly less death toll - you can see the figures yourself.
And you can see from this early April article that their model in fact far underpredicted the number of deaths from an intervention strategy. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai...
> LONDON (Reuters) - UK deaths from the coronavirus could rise to between about 7,000 and 20,000 under measures taken to slow the spread of the virus, Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College in London who has helped shape the government’s response, said on Sunday.
The IHME model, on the other hand, never had these numbers. You can see the IHME model dating to March 25, 2020 at http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/research...
> We estimate 81,114 (95% UI 38,242 to 162,106) deaths in the United States from COVID-19 over the next 4 months.
In just two months, we’ve already passed over their prediction of 81k deaths in the USA.
You’ve posted a lot so I don’t want to respond to everything because I don’ think this will convince you, but if you actually look up the “predictions” referenced in that Telegraph article you’ll understand it misrepresents Ferguson’s quotes. For instance, the death estimate from bird flue was only if that strain jumped over to be easily human-to-human transmissible, which it never has. The prediction for BSE was 50 to 500k, which is admittedly a pretty large range but the final number of 177 fell within it. The “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu was explicitly a worst-case scenario - not a prediction of what was actually going to happen. Obviously there were non-worst-case scenarios too. It turned out H1N1 wasn’t as dangerous as some early estimates predicted.
As far as Ferguson’s code having problems, seems like it. But again, his model significantly underpredicted how dangerous COVID-19 would be if we responded using NPIs, so pointing to it and other models as the problem makes no sense.
Cigarettes and driving aren’t contagious - cigarettes barely affect anyone else via second-hand smoke and we spend enormous sums of money on making driving safer every year.
Obviously there is a cost-benefit calculation to be made in everything. COVID-19 is getting a much stronger response than flu because it is so much more deadly than the flu or common cold viruses.
Oh Christ don't remind me, Jesus the smell wow....
Thus for example, if you test postive for COVID19, but die from massive blood loss from the car accident that brought you to the hospital in the first place, you are recorded as dying from blood loss, not COVID19. If you have stage 4 cancer and a few weeks to live, and also have COVID19, and you die in a few weeks, you are recorded as dying from cancer, not COVID19.
If someone has terminal cancer and is told they have a month to live, but contract Covid and only last 3 weeks, what do you put down? Was it the Covid that killed them?
This is something the medical profession has been dealing with pretty much forever. There is no reason to believe that suddenly there is a conspiracy to change how they handle reporting.
That said, hospitals get a bigger payment if the patient has COVID, so they have a very strong incentive to diagnose it.
It gets mucky if they have lung cancer, but I think it's such a tiny fraction of cases that have terminal lung cancer which will kill them in very few weeks _and_ the severe case of COVID-19.
What does that mean? Respiratory failure? Plenty of diseases cause death through respiratory failure.
It's not that straight forward to determine cause of death in patients with comorbidities.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
So what's going on? Either hospitals aren't actually over-counting. Or they are, and COVID is still undercounted. Or the year-over-year numbers are wrong. Which do you think it is?
In all of those three world, hospital incentives are uninteresting. Why bring them up?
There may be cases where people get mislabeled (it's hard to determine what the exact source of death is, especially since COVID doesn't kill directly), but I would be hesitant to ascribe intentional mislabel to people.
We can make an argument about under reporting, over reporting and so on. I wouldn't call either conspiracy theory, clearly both is going on, the question is the relative numbers. I agree that under-reporting is probable higher.
If you listen to the totality of his comments on the Joe Rogan podcast it is quite reasonable. Yes, his is clearly more libertarian then most of the California but people who are totally over-reacting to a few tweets and are literally flipping out and writing comments of hate and insults about him are really the people making fools of them selves. Or comment that basically say all he does is just for greed, and the typical anti all rich people socialist rhetoric is not convincing to me.
As for me, I don't think he handled this COVID situation very well. And with the amount of Twitter follower he has, in this situation to tweet like that was guaranteed to cause a huge shit-storm.
I know he is a genius because he is the Chief Engineer on the most successful rocket company in the world. Those that call him a business man or a marking guy clearly have not payed attention to how SpaceX happened and what his role there is. Doesn't mean he is right on every issue.
He seems to have no problem trading his science geeks following for QAnon crowd. Rather than grasping at increasingly thinner straws I wish him luck and hope it works for him.
The over-under reporting issue is kind of a nonsense discussion in my opinion. Maybe it wrong but doesn't really change what should be done either way.
The entire concept of natural rights like the Bill of Rights means they pre-existed the government and society. You can only deprive a person of these rights through some lawful process. Society is still functioning; we’re not in martial law. Yes people should willingly comply but you can’t force them to.
The alternative is civil war.
But then there was the case of the barber shop in Michigan which just today a judge denied a preliminary injunction where the state was trying to keep them closed.
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/judge-denies-state-reques...
This may be a reference to the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [1] which may be protected by the 10th amendment to the US constitution [3] (reserving rights ... to the people) and the due process clauses [4] from the 5th and 14th amendments to the US constitution.
> Which right gives you the ability to operate your business during a pandemic?
Since "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" [4], the proper questions may instead be: What law gives government the power to close down businesses during a pandemic and was due process followed in the passage and execution of that law?
Arguably, the shelter in place orders may or may not be constitutional. Practically speaking, telling people to stay home for a few weeks using the threat of the shelter in place orders most likely helped the medical community get a grip on the situation, regardless of the constitutionality of those orders, which may explain the lack of resistance in passing those orders. However, at what point is "the cure ... worse than the disease" [5], i.e., at what point will the overall net net net effect of maintaining the shelter in place orders be worse than rescinding those orders?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... (citing to [2])
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause
[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_cure_is_worse_than_the_di...
That's a far cry from uber-expensive luxury cars for the rich that Tesla sells.
Given that reality, it's strange to block Tesla from opening, especially when work is voluntary and with careful safety guidelines. What exactly is the continued shutdown of this facility accomplishing?
In any case, I question if you have any evidence of the claim there is no effective social distancing.
(The parent comment is flagged. Truly amazing times we live in where simply reminding people of their rights is reason to censor.)
His fans seem to think he is some kind of genius, but based on what he has said about COVID he doesn't really seem that smart, or at least not well informed at all. Just by looking at the deaths year over year, it is clear that if anything, COVID cases are undercounted. And his claims that the shutdown of his factory are illegal are blatantly false. I don't know if he just doesn't know what he is talking about, or if he does and is just saying all this stuff for his personal gain. I suspect the former, but idk. This seems like a somewhat common pattern, where very successful and seemingly intelligent people have a few very obviously incorrect beliefs (ex. Steve Jobs and his fruit diet). Maybe they assume that success in one area implies knowledge in unrelated areas (I know I am guilty of this myself sometimes).