Have you ever worked in the Amazon warehouse? I've been both L1 (Sortation associate in the warehouse) on the floor, and now L4 (entry level SDE). I'm not going to refute your claims - it just seems most people screaming "Think of the warehouse workers!" have never actually worked in any warehouse, let alone an amazon one.
This is a strange comment: you take no issue with what they're saying, but seem to imply they can't have an opinion on anything they haven't personally experienced.
Not in an Amazon warehouse, but yes I have worked in a shipping warehouse in my early adulthood (19). It was hard work, sure, and my boss was an asshole who later got committed to the funny farm (seriously!). But I never had to take a shit while driving, I was never worked like a slave, and nobody ever implied something bad might happen to my family's jobs if I talked to a union rep either.
There's degrees here, and Amazon treats vulnerable people with a very high degree of hostility and abuse. That fact alone tells me everything I need to know about the people running that organization. They're not about mutual benefit - the real reason for capitalism - they're about exploitation, and they'll do it to anyone and everyone they can as long as they can get away with it.
Did you mean this as in, 100k is not quite middle class, or 100k is over your bar for middle class? Here in Seattle, I make around that with 1 yr exp and certainly don't feel secure or comfortable with it.
You don't feel secure because you're spending a large percentage of it. If your life choices were such that you were banking 2k/mo of your salary, you would probably feel quite secure. That would certainly involve other sacrifices, and I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong. Just that it's a choice. Comfort vs convenience vs security vs whatever other factor.
It's probably safe to assume that the largest reason the parent doesn't feel financially secure is because of the cost of housing.
So, sure, the parent could make a different choice, and move to a lower cost of living area, but then they'd be making significantly less, and might still not feel particularly financially secure.
Even now, with many companies realizing that remote work is ok, and planning to allow some form of it permanently, many also plan to change (lower) people's salaries based on where they end up deciding to live, even if they do the exact same work.
> For what it's (not) worth, it prompted me to sign up today. :)
More for my understanding than anything else, and with every guarantee that I won't present any follow-up questions or statements, but why was this the tipping point and not the actual disease risk mitigation resulting from the vaccine?
Not me, but a coworker of mine is the only guy in my office who hasn't been vaccinated (rest of us got second dose at end of January) because of adverse reactions to past (milder) vaccinations. He correctly assesses that he's in a very low risk environment, but at some point he'll probably risk the vaccine to not have pariah status.
But for the last 3 months, there was nothing to make the tradeoff worthwhile to him.
Glad that he didn’t value not being a disease vector which could spread the virus to someone who may be at risk. Vaccines work when most of society get vaccinated, it only requires a small minority of egos to make a forgotten disease rear its ugly head again.
My guess: GP is young and healthy, so the chance of significant harm from COVID is nearly zero, and the vaccines for COVID have significantly worse side effects than pretty much any other vaccines given today. Thus, until today, it was a high-risk low-reward proposition.
Anecdotally, dozens of people in my social circle (aged 30-50) reported that the worst vaccine side effects were (1) a sore arm and (2) 24-48 hours of sleepy brain fog (even after the second dose). Among first and second degree connections on Facebook, I know of exactly two people who experienced the full gamut of flu-like symptoms, such as fever, chills, and whole-body aches for a day or two. Take this with a grain of salt, but I'd estimate an upper bound of 10% for "moderately unpleasant" side effects among young-ish, moderately healthy individuals.
Anecdotally, dozens of people in my social circle (aged 25-45 or so reported severe side effects, including at least three or four of sore arm, fever, chills, headaches, exhaustion, body aches, nausea, and brain fog. My girlfriend and I had five of them, for an entire day.
I'm not sure if your group's experience or mine is more typical. That's why comprehensive data is required to sort things out, and limited-number anecdotes are useless.
Basically none of which rises to the point of hospitalization and is gone in a few days.
The risk of hospitalization among even 18-29 year olds is not negligible. Neither is the risk of permanent side effects like diabetes. Those autoimmune conditions can and do strike even perfectly healthy individuals.
It is weird how the vaccine is probably 1000x safer than getting the virus, but young people in particular are happy with the idea that "that won't happen to me, I'm healthy and young" when it comes to the virus, while they're deeply concerned about vaccine side effects that really aren't concerning at all.
(And BTW "robust immune system" doesn't help you if your own immune system turns on you due to the virus).
You can't just weigh "The risk and severity of bad effects from COVID" with "the risks and severity of the bad effects from the vaccine". You also need to factor in that the probability of an unvaccinated person getting COVID isn't 100%.
About 10-30% of Americans got COVID-19 so far, depending on how you tally the numbers. Of those, approximately 8% can be expected to experience long-term effects that disrupt their daily lives:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91270
>About 8% of all participants said at least one activity of daily living suffered long-term consequences, most commonly household chores.
That puts the net risk for non-vaccinated people at no less than 0.8%.
By contrast, the incidence of blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine, which caused its ouster, was about 0.001%. That's a factor of 800 in favor of vaccination with the worst of the vaccines.
And how do you measure the mid to long term risk of a novel mRNA technology which is effectively in trial now, under emergency approval, when vaccines typically take years of safety evaluations? Particularly considering that there are preprints out with a mechanism identified for reverse transcription of the spike producing mRNA, which could result in chronic inflammatory disease in some proportion of recipients, given that other preprints claim that the spike protein itself is a general inflammatory agent and may be responsible for clotting/vascular symptoms.
Note that reverse transcription of COVID RNA also is a convenient explanation for post symptomatic positive tests as well as long COVID symptoms.
I think it's irresponsible to downplay the risks associated with this novel technology, especially when people still have the option of continuing to socially isolate to some degree.
Vaccines either cause side effects in ~3 months or they don't. They could conceivably trigger long-term autoimmune conditions but they don't hide for years.
And we have a long track record of understanding this because viruses and vaccine cause the same kinds of autoimmune conditions. I had viral pericarditis once from a common cold that struck a month or two after I got over it. We've got hundreds of years of experience with it.
The issue with vaccines taking a long time to get approval is development time and efficacy data. Both of those were able to be done quickly due to the massive pandemic and due to the 10 years of preparatory work done on SARS-CoV-1 and mRNA vaccines.
And your interpretation of the reverse transcription article is just bullshit misinformation.
And you're still not escaping from being exposed to SARS-CoV-1 mRNA, it'll become endemic. You're getting it from the virus or the vaccine, there's not really going to be any skipping out.
(And if the LINE-1 results are correct this is how we pick up genetic material from all kinds of RNA viruses, our genome is littered with historical pandemics).
> The issue with vaccines taking a long time to get approval is development time and efficacy data. Both of those were able to be done quickly due to the massive pandemic and due to the 10 years of preparatory work done on SARS-CoV-1 and mRNA vaccines.
Not only that, but Operation Warp Speed (hate the name, but have to give it some credit) removed bureaucratic hurdles that allowed many of the normal steps to be done in parallel rather than serially. That doesn't mean that those steps were rushed or done in an unsafe manner.
>Particularly considering that there are preprints out with a mechanism identified for reverse transcription of the spike producing mRNA, which could result in chronic inflammatory disease in some proportion of recipients
This doesn't make sense because the mRNA-based spike protein, unlike the natural spike protein, is specifically tuned to annoy the immune system. Any cells incorporating the vaccine mRNA into their DNA will be summarily executed for the very same reason that the vaccine works as a vaccine in the first place: it's an antigen.
>I think it's irresponsible to downplay the risks associated with this novel technology
What's irresponsible is couch-quarterbacking the epidemiological community and the medical authorities of ~every developed country in the world, based on preprints, in the face of a pandemic that has claimed ~10M lives globally.
Newer variants are hitting young people harder. COVID is getting more dangerous to that group. Plus, as other posters have said, the vaccine is extremely safe.
Interesting, as someone who got vaccinated the first day it was available to all adults in Utah(3/24), I'm surprised that this news changed any ones mind. But either way I'm glad it did!.
The vaccine does carry the risk of side effects and adverse reactions. That risk, for most, is VERY small.
But if the person in question also has very low risk of contracting or spreading Covid (works from home, rarely goes out, young, healthy) and if being vaccinated doesn’t actually enable you to live any differently than you already are, then there’s no compelling reason to get vaccinated and assume the risk of side effects, no matter how small.
The logical decision here involves civic duty. I certainly fit into the low risk category, etc., but I also exist in society and am a willing participant, and as such have certain responsibilities to other people in my community.
As an American, I can tell you that most Americans aren't big on civic duty. And when we are, it's mostly limited to getting out to vote and not complaining too much when selected for jury duty.
American individualism also tends to downplay a person's responsibility to anyone outside their family, which some even restrict to their immediate nuclear family.
It's a shame, and I think it's one of our biggest failings as a culture. Ironically this is one of the few things where the American left and right are fairly on the same page, even if most won't admit it.
(I'm painting a pretty dire picture here, but it really isn't that bad. Communities exist everywhere, and people who care about others exist everywhere. It just seems like when the chips are down, people tend to turn inward rather than outward.)
It does... but again, if being vaccinated means that you still have to do all the other things that are done to limit the spread, then you are perceivably ALREADY doing your civic duty when you go out by masking up, distancing, and otherwise staying home.
Also, if vaccination doesn’t change the risk enough for you to drop some of the other precautions, that also lowers the perceived value of the efficacy of the vaccine as well.
vaccination is probably the most broadly effective, but there are many ways, big and small, to limit the risks of transmission, so don't fall for the fascist line of thinking that there is only one true way, especially when an understanding of the risks (airborne is highly unlikely) and effectiveness of the various mitigations (no, you never needed masks outside unless tightly packed for extended time) is so woefully lacking.
and civic duty is voting, educating yourself on policy issues, obeying reasonable laws, and tolerating and even celebrating differences of perspective and opinion. it's about participating effectively in our democratic republic. it doesn't encompass every possible responsibility to every other human, like the term 'moral duty' might.
I don’t understand this. Does the hypothetical low risk person hypothetically work from home and rarely go out.. forever? If no, when/what is the trigger that changes this behavior?
If going out means the hassle of wearing a mask, staying distanced, and all the other rules, then, yes.
Put another way, if going out feels like a big hassle, and getting vaccinated doesn’t remove enough of the rules to make going out NOT feel like a hassle, then there’s no reason to change one’s “going out” habits. And if there’s no incentive to change one’s “going out” habits, then there’s no reason to go through any process or procedure that only perceivably benefits you if you leave home.
I will be getting my vaccine soon myself.
But the world has changed. If I was isolated and nervous to “put myself out there” pre-pandemic, then I’m nearly agoraphobic now.
Nobody I work with wants to return to the office, nobody wants to return to having fun outings (at least not outside their own social circle).
There’s literally nothing for me to return to doing. I’ve built up a relatively solitary life with my dad in the last 12+ months, and everything outside of it is gone.
If you feel that you have so much to return to that the idea of rarely going out, forever, sounds unrealistic, then I would
consider yourself lucky.
I intend to get vaccinated just to be safe to anyone I might come in contact with, but to your point, even once I get vaccinated, I honestly see no trigger to change my behavior. I highly doubt I’m alone in this.
I would prefer to wear a mask at the grocery store, but not at work when physically on-site. I'm low risk, and don't really have any desire to go out and get vaccinated mostly because I'm lazy, don't like needles, antisocial, and generally anxious in public.
I don't really ever go out willingly, so I didn't really have an incentive to get vaccinated. Now I can get vaccinated and not wear a mask at work when it's 100+F in a few months.
Now that it's socially acceptable to wear a mask when in businesses and isn't a fashion trend, I will continue to do it since it should impede facial recognition. Except if it's a bit hot, I now can choose not to :)
I think this will be a great incentive to drive vaccination rates.
I'm really glad that you're going to get vaccinated!
But the thing that really bothers me about your previous rationale is that it doesn't take anyone else into account. What about people who would like to get vaccinated, but can't because they're deathly allergic to components of the vaccine (or some other medical reason)? What about people who would like to get vaccinated but can't afford to take time off work for the shot, or to rest during possible side effects?
You getting vaccinated protects those people too, when you walk past them in that grocery store. They deserve to be out and about without fear of infection just as much as you or I do.
Totally, at the store there's definitely other people to take into account as well as at work. I don't think about other people much in my daily life, so it's easy for me to fall into that (false) mentality of being unlikely to have any meaningful impact by not getting vaccinated.
If you were in a very low risk group, I can see delaying taking the vaccine to avoid blocking a higher risk person. Absent that I truly don't understand declining any of the vaccines for COVID. The risk of serious side effects is negligible. Meanwhile, every day you are alive you move into a higher risk group both for COVID and for longer recovery of mild side effects. So why wait?
I waited a couple weeks after it was open to everyone here. I waited because the only available vaccines were multiple hours away. I wasn’t going to make that trip twice (and potentially find out they screwed up their count or ruined doses or something) when I could wait a couple weeks and get one in my own town. Doubly so since I have less contact with strangers than most.
I was in a similar boat, but I went ahead and drove the couple hours out for the first shot...and then as supply opened up closer to me, scheduled my second 5 miles away. Totally understand the motivation to wait though; my wife got in due to some health stuff, and so there was more pressure for me to just hurry up and get it.
That makes sense. I too waited some extra time for supply to be available in my own area, rather than traveling and taking from others' allocations.
But I'm surprised that the "you can go maskless if you get the vaccine" is a deciding factor for anyone. Wearing a dust mask is so trivial compared to all the other changes and efforts I've made this year.
Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK.
Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.
> I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK
that's not a problem with you, but with cancel culture in general.
Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?
It is basically impossible to get imprisoned in the UK for mere verbal racism, and highly racist opinions are posted in the newspapers all the time. Even the "gas the jews" Nazi dog guy was only fined £800 and it didn't stop him standing for election.
He says he never expected it to get farther than a few friends. It went viral without any promotion on his part. Is there any actual evidence it was all some carefully planned sinister plot to spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason and not something done to annoy his girlfriend and amuse his friends or are you making a judgement based on something other than evidence?
How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?
He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.
> spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason
> How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?
I looked it up. He had all of 400 subscribers when the video was uploaded. He clearly wasn't trying to leverage his massive youtube fanbase at the time. His girlfriend testified in court that her boyfriend wasn't racist. They were both caught off guard by the video's popularity and the response it got from authorities.
She said "I know what kind of person he is. It is just not a very nice thing to say obviously. I didn't think about it being anything other than him annoying me, I didn't think it would have the effect that it did."
> He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.
I mean, on one hand he's got more youtube subscribers than ever, but on the other he lost his job and will struggle to get hired for the rest of his life because people will assume he's a racist because of a joke... I'm not sure I'd call that a win exactly, but I can't blame him from trying to make the best of the situation any way that he can. He seems genuinely interested in fighting against what happened to him so that it doesn't happen to others.
> This not an argument in his favor.
That was your theory, although I still can't imagine what you thought the end goal there was. He goes through all that trouble to manufacture and promote a viral video with a couple seconds of hitler in it but for what exactly? If he were a secret nazi and this was all some kind of master plan what is the pay off here?
If you're really without any evidence that the video wasn't just a joke that people took too seriously, why have you accused him of being a racist with a nefarious plan? What kind of evidence do you think a person should have before they make a claim like that about another person?
I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...
I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.
So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it?
For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal.
People have committed suicide over this.
Try applying your standards to things you believe in some time. "He says he was a victim of racist discrimination? Well, he still seems to be alive and fed, and has stable employment at Walmart. So that's a touch dramatic."
That is not my standard for "serious". But my standard for "expelled from society" is actually that they be expelled from society.
I agree that the social penalties for racism can be serious. Although I look forward to you naming 3 people who because of teenage postings lost their "career and all or almost all [their] friends", because again I think you're being hyperbolic in a way that undermines your point.
However, I also think that racism is serious. Perhaps this seems crazy to you, but I'm much more concerned with the many lives destroyed by racism (very much including actual murder) than I am with the social consequences racists (very rarely) experience.
You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that lives get ruined and people commit suicide over things that don't reflect who they are.
Demanding evidence of ruined lives for 'teenage postings' is again, an arbitary limitation that doesn't make sense given that we are talking about things that will be happening in the future, not things that happened in the past. We need to wait for social mores to change enough since teenage postings even started existing around 10-15 years ago.
However despite you deliberately trying to set a standard that makes no sense given the topic, I Googled for 5 minutes and satisfied it anyway:
Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears
Two of these kids actually died, which I think is even more than losing their "career and all or almost all [their] friends".
Nobody is arguing for racism. What you're wrong about is the poo-poohing the threat that the combination of shifting social mores, eternally-recorded online remarks, and vindicitive power create.
Implicitly you seem to be suggesting that it's okay if some 'racists' have their lives ruined, since the cause is so just and important. Looking at the stories of these kids above dying - do those stories make you think anything different?
Are they acceptable losses, or did they deserve it? Or is there a problem here to fix?
You probably think of yourself as an empathetic person. So try expanding your empathy to more people.
Perhaps you've had the privilege of always believing only things that align 100% with the views of the powerful. You seem to be a wealthy San Francisco leftist, so I can see how you would live under the basic belief that "if power is suppressing it, it must be bad".
Perhaps you think there is a clean simple line between Good People and Those Evil Nazis Who Deserve What They Get. There is not. Humans are complex.
However, try to conceive that someone could be both dissident and not-evil at the same time. If you need to, you can imagine living in another society where the power actually disagrees with you. What then?
And please recognize that your orthodoxy may change. Maybe you'll change your views, or society will. Then you'll be the "racist", or "Nazi", or "communist", or "kaffir", or "heretic", or "reactionary", or whatever label they're using in 30 years.
I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. My point was that it was dramatic. If you are truly interested in a healthy "larger discussion" you'll hopefully agree that turning down the rhetorical temperature makes it easy to have a good discussion that gets at the truth.
Of course, given that you've decided to spend multiple paragraphs in a personal fantasy building a very poor straw man of me and my views, I think that a good discussion is not really your goal here.
>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard.
Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another poster used those words casually; you're the one who decided that their literal intepretation was the "standard".
On the rest, this just feels like you're pointing at my tone as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or engaging any of the questions I brought up.
I said "Perhaps you believe X". This isn't building a strawman, it's trying to get to the heart of the beliefs underlying the issue. If you believe something totally different than X it'd be great if you would explain it.
A good discussion is my goal. Is it yours? You smugly tried to shut me down with a demand for news stories that you thought couldn't be satisfied. And now you're refusing to talk - with the excuse that you don't think I want to talk.
In any case, I'd welcome a meaningful response that actually addresses my points and the larger discussion.
Bottom line: You seem to think that it's only very rarely that a few terrible racists get socially punished this way, implying you think the situation is okay. I showed you that it's not, it's kids and normal people, and people are dying. What's your reponse to this new information?
Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want.
I just wanted to +1 the validity of the liability claim. At least where I live, that is absolutely the case[1] that you are liable for crimes committed with a gun you did not properly secure.
