You know, a lot of this might have been cured by China having higher food safety standards. So... we're asking the Chinese to become more Authoritarian to protect us. The irony here is not lost on meevilthecat said:
Corvid-19 and its impact (name edit)
- Thread starter Saint of M
- Start date
I'm not saying tie China to this virus as in they need to fix it. I'm not saying "Oh hey China, what are you going to do about a dad breaking quarantine here in St. Louis?!"evilthecat said:
But just saying Oh its a global problem now, lets ignore the country and conditions that led to this outbreak, and the terrible response of said country and their almost certain deflating of the numbers of infected and dead because...we don't want the totalitarian Government to be embarrassed seems...odd.
It is a global problem now, but it wasn't when it started and it started in Wuhan, China.
Considering the unchecked spread of Covid-19 in most other parts of the world, I am not sure how we can fault China to any real extent. Covid-19 is highly contagious, which has made it hard to stop its' spread. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things we can fault China for in this case, such as their tampering with numbers, but that they failed to contain a contagious flu in the first few weeks of its' spread is hardly one. Doing so would have required near super-human levels of prescience and reaction speeds.Silentpony said:
By all estimates, it wouldn't have taken many infected people leaving Wuhan for Covid-19 to go pandemic sooner or later due to how easily and quickly it spreads.
I'm not faulting them per se, but geography does exist. I feel like we're doing the Chinese government a favor by saying "Well it could have started anywhere, and it was bound to spread"Gethsemani said:
This isn't that whole China is the dirty man for Asia thing, but I still don't get how its racist or even wrong/offensive to remember where this virus started.
No, nonononono. That wasn't your original point. Your original point was that work doesn't give you a sense of purpose. There's one hell of a disconnect between those two statements. And I'm telling you that you should do your job with your sense of purpose behind it. If, despite dedicating extra time to the customers, your only gratification from your job is the check being handed to you or if your boss changes something you told them to, then it isn't your boss that doesn't care about your talents, it's you. If you're helping people, making their lives better through your efforts, being compensated for it, and feel purposeless, it's you that doesn't respect you enough.trunkage said:
Gethsemani already answered this oneSilentpony said:
Covid-19 has proven incredibly hard to contain. Countries with access to enormous resources and many weeks to prepare have been unable to prevent it from spreading.
I know that tallying the Chinese government's great sins against freedom is an ever-popular pastime, but manipulating statistics for political gain happens everywhere. It's why fact checking as a practice exists. While it might certainly be fun to laugh at the Chinese government trying to censor Plague Inc, it's also trivial and of no real interest to anyone living outside of China except as the source of manufactured outrage.
People aren't attacking east Asian people in the street to protest the supposedly inadequate response of the Chinese government. They're doing it because they're racist, and the fact that this viral pandemic originated in China gives them an excuse to indulge their racism. The idea of Chinese food as weird, foreign and unhygienic plays a surprisingly big role in anti-Chinese racism, so the constant fixation on blaming this outbreak on some kind of particular quality of Chinese food preparation or hygiene is a pretty transparent nod to stereotype.
Neutrally pointing out that the virus was first transmitted from animals (probably bats) to humans in Wuhan, China is one thing. But insisting on still referring to it as the "Wuhan virus" is a pretty transparent attempt to mark it with some kind of foreignness or otherness and to score points with the Fox news crowd, who already have an emotional distrust or dislike for foreigners or Asians in particular.
Coronavirus bad.
Coronavirus Chinese.
Chinese bad.
It's not very clever, but to a certain kind of person who has been primed to see it its very obvious.
Unfortunately, it's not such much about what you think because you're not the target audience. It's what lots of other people think who are the target audience, and what they're being induced to think is to hate and blame China. I might point out there have already been conspiracy theories that this was a deliberate ploy by China to wreck the world economy (and presumably step in and take over afterwards).Silentpony said:
Mind you, some in the Chinese government are blaming the US military. Russian media has also accused the USA and UK of waging biological warfare and starting the virus. Because, you know, why not?
Well the whole "The government is spying on everything you do and has backdoor access to all apps and social media accounts" turned out to be true. Literally everything we do is at least recorded somewhere.Marik2 said:
Another great assumption. Let me say this another waytstorm823 said:
1. I have a purpose. Don't worry
2. My work is impeding that progress and is only necessary to earn money
3. I'm in the industry that SHOULD be able to provide access to my purpose but, being in different companies and looking around at other people's experiences, bosses are only interested in getting their way and demonise anyone who has different ideas.
5. Capitalism isn't about Freedom. It's about Freedom for 'top tier' certain individuals. It's triage of power so only certain people get their way. You know, exactly like politics - a triage for power so politicians can exploit people.
6. 'Top tier' is in quotation marks because it's never about merit. It's about who you know. It's how you triage power - give it to people who agree with you and definitely don't question what you're doing and why.
Now, as to talent - they only care that I do a job. Talent isn't necessary because it's a threat to the bosses position. You can't hire people who do a better job then you as they might replace you. Talent is actually determinantal to a business. And if they ARE better than you, you better systemically and thoroughly destroy their reputation. See Trump as an example of this. (It's why when some boss treats people nicely its in the news.)
Well consider this; This virus has given governments unprecedented levels of control over their population.Marik2 said:
Did you know that governments are allowed to put their entire populous effectively under house arrest? I didn't.
It's less about the what the Chinese government has done, and more on what the Western population is doing to their local residents of Asian ancestry. America did something similar with AIDS, so there is precedent on the dangers of this crap.Silentpony said:
The real issue is a matter of company culture.trunkage said:
There's two broad approaches for company leadership:
1) You're doing business to make money
2) You're making money to do business
In the first case, it's all about the bottomline, the company is doing whatever it's doing for the sake of profit, and therefore, the more profit, the better. Going after money for money's sake is dehumanizing because the safest way to do so is inhuman, setting up an apparatus of humans and beating them into shape as cogs in the machine.
This is in contrast with the second approach. In this case, leadership mainly wants to do certain work for the sake of that work, and the money is just how they facilitate that. Innovative approaches are much more likely to be welcomed, worker development is valued, bosses keep an eye out to train an employee to replace them so that the boss can move up the ladder.
These are very broad strokes, but they fit all the companies I've seen. I've interacted with companies in both approaches, and I know which ones were those which valued me more and treated me like a human.
It is also a broad pattern that the second approach is unsustainable given a sufficiently large social network to where a worker won't even have ever met half the people in the company. There's been a lot of work in psychology that establishes that humans have a difficult time maintaining a social network greater than 100-150 people on well-known terms, and you have to subtract family and friends from that. Social organization in many respects is about managing and working around that limit. It's safe to say that any sufficiently large company simply can't treat its employees as cooperative humans due to our mental social network limits. Good companies will try to compartmentalize around this, but that in itself has difficulties in management. Any corporation of beyond a thousand employees is going to be far past that.
It's not quite fair to lay 100% of the blame on "capitalism" for our human failings. One can say that the broad tenets of capitalism do encourage the consolidation of capital into increasingly fewer hands, resulting in larger coalitions of humans being necessary to be competitive in business in order to not be overwhelmed, which drowns out the more humanistic approach to business. But something that I don't think socialists/communists give enough credit to is the social network limit that encourages such an approach, and the absurd difficulties added by networking multiple groups of cooperatives in sync to do the job that a single corporation could do alone.
If there were a clean solution that was easily found, we wouldn't have been arguing about it for so long.
Well, not really a conspiracy theory if it's true, or has a chance of being true. Being rubbish is part of the definition.Marik2 said:
As you say, there are open secrets, though, lots of them, but those aren't the same.
I certainly did.Red Sentinel said:
It is not exactly the first quarantaine or curfew in world history.
I think a lot of it is a more simplistic notion of power dynamics. People in power exercise more relative control over society, and arrange society more to their benefit than the masses. There are lots of ways we could benefit the workers whilst making relatively little difference to the basic corporate structure: the most obvious are greater worker involvement in business decisions, through processes such as forcing a substantial chunk of corporations to be owned by their staff rather than the usual faceless shareholders with no particular tie to the corporation other than it being a convenient vehicle for their investments.SupahEwok said:
The social dynamics of how many close friends we have doesn't need to be that much of an issue. It's about expanding the investment in decision-making to more people and away from a relatively small shareholder/manager class.