The point you made is that businesses have no accountability to society. If I’m misunderstanding correct me because I don’t want to argue about something you haven’t actually said. I do agree with much of what you posted with regard to the financial impact it could have on a business. There should be some ways to help businesses in these situations but with Covid, I don’t think it would have been that big of a problem had it been handled better. What I mean is, you had people go on unemployment because their places of employment were forced to close. If it were only high risk people who had to choose between work or their health, it would have been a lot fewer people we would have needed to accommodate somehow. Most high risk people were the elderly who probably weren’t working anyway.
If I understand you correctly, I’m alright with that. I don’t see a reason to tolerate violent people, thieves, etc.
I’m no Rand expert, but I believe that was actually her argument against libertarianism.
I am an old guy who agrees with you. I managed to work around the relatively mild restrictions imposed in my home state. However, I bitterly resent the severe impact the that totalitarian nonsense on my teenage son.
There are no Rand experts, only apologists and cultists. The thing about libertarians is that Rand was a significant influence on them. She had issues with everyone as no one, in her opinion, really understood her. The idea being she was so complex and deep that mere mortals couldn’t hope to reach her level. The truth is that she was neither complex nor deep and any misunderstandings of her beliefs were due to them being poorly thought out and not based on reality.
I was in my senior year of high school when it happened. It had a significantly negative effect on my early adulthood.
Meanwhile, a couple of the teens I was working with as a therapist thrived with the removal from high school and the bullshit that goes on there. Smart, sensitive kids generally. I suppose there were also poor students (stupid kids) who were also relieved, but they aren’t as likely to present for psychotherapy for their anxiety disorders.
But of course others came in. Most affected from my perspective as a therapist in private practice (kids-wise) were the kids sent home from college. I had several; a big spike for me in that demographic.
Then of course there were the people who lost people. And the people with autoimmune disorders and other health complications.
It seems silly to me to hindsight the whole thing. To what purpose? Some people benefited, others did not. The loss of my office was a tremendous blow to me. My furloughed husband (drop in pay for us - whose companies continued payroll?? didn’t most people just get unemployment and the stimulus checks?) thrived.
Some people lived who would probably have died. Some business failed which would not have otherwise.
I am frankly pretty bitter about the post-lockdown changes that benefit entities at the expense of consumers, i.e. companies that reduced services because of covid but not prices, and have maintained reduced services because profits increased, e.g. airlines.
On the other hand, we’ve lost a lot of small businesses where I live because they couldn’t/can’t find workers, which I assume has to do with the lockdown, though not sure why restaurants can’t find dishwashers and other entry-level workers. Did they become addicts during covid? Were they disincentivized by the stimulus checks? But how are they living now? Homeless? But why the housing crisis? Who pays the rent? (Tip: not welfare. That’s a myth.)
Depending the direction from which you view the thing, you can come to either conclusion. I like to think that the people in charge were well-meaning (this is how I avoid despair). I like to think that we learned things. So we move on.
What was the shut down like for the youth?
Did they just close the schools and make you stay home all day?
Are young people back “to normal” now? Or do you still feel disrupted?
That describes my son pretty well. He did fine. School work wasn’t a problem. Me, him, the girl next door and her mom would take bike rides & play outside a good bit.
We were a little worried but when he returned to school he did great (still does) and fell in with a good group of friends pretty quickly.
I think a lot of the grumbling is more abstract than most would like to admit. They’re telling a story about a story where somebody got screwed somehow. Nobody I know or have talked to about it had their life artificially collapsed, except one guy who refused to comply and rage quit his spite my rich dad job, at which time he had to rely on his trust fund.
So theres that.
The week before this all happened, everything I thought was going to happen, happened.
Snitches, forced masking etc etc.
It secured my feelings on how dangerous the “mint” is. They were only looking out for their azz and regardless if it backfired short term, it also showed the global council wants and is discussing “control” in everyone complying with whatever orders they wish.
A vivid memory I have is I’m driving in a grocery store parking lot again the mask mandate was removed. I see this creepy looking fella middle aged guy walking out the store in a trance with a mask on, but does even look crossing the street, like he was possessed cars stopped. He still needed a mask but didn’t care when walking across the street. It was like a sci fi movie.
They closed the schools and had us do online “work” that the teachers just graded at 100%. As for me personally, I lost contact will all my good friends in high school except for one. I know of one guy who was extremely charismatic and one of the more popular kids, who was devastated by the lockdowns. I don’t know what happened to him, but I hope he is doing well.
The lockdowns were especially upsetting for me because I saw them as a vast overreach of government power. Young people are definitely back to normal, though, albeit probably cognitively inferior to how they could have been.
He was probably cognitively impaired. Extreme isolation can do that, and someone like him would have self-isolated as extremely as possible.
Having raised a kid through it and seeing the after effects, that really was a “make or break” period.
We really took on the home school front hard, and had an organized schedule for our kid, curriculum, and tapped into our own backgrounds to give them all that we could. The only “outsourcing” we relied on was Ms Frizz’s “Magic Schoolbus” for the science lesson of the day, because that’s a field that the Mrs and I struggle with.
In turn, my kid is now in the “high ability learner” track at their school. The came back the next year and were leaps and bounds over their peers, because a vast majority of them basically had “early summer vacation” and spent the time playing video games and attending a once a week zoom meeting that was supposed to replace an entire academic week.
However, we still see “the scars” of that era, primarily in speech. My kid was young enough that they were still developing their ability to communicate, and spending so long isolated from their peers and then coming back to an era where everything was done behind a mask made it that their speech was pretty muddied/muffled. We sprung for speech therapy, which was a blessing, but again: a lot of these kids were just left to their own devices. Now you can’t understand a word they’re saying: it’s all this mumbled mushmouth of sounds with no articulation.
Lack of regular physical activity shows through as well. PE was how we started each day with our kiddo, and I even used it as a chance to get them started on martial arts. Meanwhile, they have some peers that have reached middle age at middle school levels of age.
Coulda been a deep state probe. See how far the public is willing to fold. Libtards folded like wet paper bags ironically becoming the “bootlickers” they love to mock. Of course with zero sense of irony.
That’s possible. There is a chance that the lockdowns will happen again, although I think the reaction would be far more aggressive next time.
It wasn’t not part of the original scenario. I wasn’t thinking most (if any) bosses would be fine with employees staying home and not performing any work at all.
But I think the idea of working from home and a lot of the software that’s become very popular since COVID are more accepted now. Prior to COVID, people weren’t doing that as much. I didn’t know what Zoom was until things got shut down. So my point was just that it had to become something that was seen as an option for bosses to get on board with, which it is now, because lots of people can do their work from home just fine. But if you asked someone if you could it in 2018, they might’ve said no because it wasn’t the norm.
That’s not what I’m saying though. I wouldn’t expect a firefighter to work from home and get paid. How could he do any part of his job? I’m referring to office workers, teachers (although online schooling is terrible), etc. People who can be home and still perform job duties.
Then sure, imo work from home isn’t a big deal.
However, some companies prefer in-office. Their house, their rules. And I again believe in at will employment, as a two way street.
Agreed. I personally think it makes sense, Covid or not. As long as the job can get done. Save on office space overhead. Maybe even share some of that savings as salary increases or bonuses tied to at home productivity, calculated off of real estate savings.
I do not think this should be mandated, however.
The issue ( at least where I am employed) largest utility in the country (USA)…the work was not getting done from home…by office workers i.e. purchasing agents, engineers, analysts, I.T., could not get a hold of them during emergencies, they were not home (out shopping, at the park, at the beach, this was proven by admission)
finally, the CEO mandated at the beginning of this year…everyone is back in the office full time
alot of individuals are unhappy, but IMHO, tough shit
Likely, some. Libertarianism was in existence prior to her, though.
I agree. She wrote some decent stories, but that’s it. I think a lot of the problem is that she wanted a single philosophy that could cover ever facet of life, which is the problem all progressives have. That, and the requirement that people transform into the ubermensch(again, something objectivism and progressivism share).
I was in private practice when we received notice that non-essential workers were not to come to offices as of what, March 19, 2020? My work partner and I desperately acquainted ourselves with Zoom, and I scheduled my more acute clients for that. Everyone was offered it, but 2/3rds said they’d just wait until things opened back up, so we put them in the schedule for mid-April (haha). By May or June I had a waiting list (very sad and stressful, people were crying on the phone when they reached out) and believe I could have worked as many billable hours as I was willing to undertake.
A joy of my life post-covid is that I can work from home during snowstorms or while sick, and probably 20% of my in-office work is with remote patients. We’re to encourage people to come to the office, because the hospital charges insurance a “room fee” (which wtf, I’m in an off-campus outpatient clinic) and some patients I won’t allow remote (agoraphobics), but I’ve now had many patients who are telehealth only, and it works just fine. Office does give additional value in particular for socially anxious people and for getting deeply depressed people up and out of the house (I’ve worked with people lying in bed, and one woman took me to the bathroom to poop, which was awful - it’s not okay, but I wasn’t prepared for it and didn’t know how to handle it in the moment, so allowed it) (actually I’ve been up people’s noses, been there while they got dressed and was in hands going through sleeves, etc). The weird stuff has gotten better since the beginning, and I’ve gotten better about addressing it.
Anyway, as someone living in a rural community, it’s a great good. People can telehealth with their pediatricians about their puking child, broken legs and cars don’t require cancellation, and people are able to take less time off work to make appointments because they can do it from their cars without having to drive 30 minutes.
But again, @Njord, who were these employers required to pay people during the shutdown? My experience was that unemployment + stimulus carried people, so the burden was shared by all of us. If a company wanted to keep people on the payroll, they could, or they could furlough workers. At will. One of the owners of my husband’s company sent…well, who knows to how many workers or which ones, but we got one…personal checks for $5K. It was very nice and a definite loyalty-builder. Good business - at will.
Me & wife did too. Interestingly, my son and all of his classmates became proficient with all of the new digital communication tech almost seamlessly. Like, for them it was new, but not different. There was no inertia to break to get them using it which can be a big obstacle to adults.
Now its just business as usual on snow days & stuff. Doesn’t miss a beat, AND it doesn’t count against them as days missed.