Take a moment to consider what you seem to be saying here. You’re essentially pondering if it should be okay for a billionaire industrialist to willingly sacrifice the lives of between 1-50 people.
> How low of an IFR would it take before you accepted that exposure?
If we lived in a sane world that valued EVERY individual human life above the self-serving dreams of an egotistical, arrogant sociopath, the answer would be zero.
> Would incidentally exposing them to the common cold be ok?
Such a question screams for a sarcastic answer: in case you haven’t noticed, Covid-19 is not the common cold.
> You’re essentially pondering if it should be okay for a billionaire industrialist to willingly sacrifice the lives of between 1-50 people.
I was unaware that Tesla workers were slaves. Unless they aren't - in which case they would have the option to not return yet.
> If we lived in a sane world that valued EVERY individual human life above the self-serving dreams of an egotistical, arrogant sociopath, the answer would be zero.
Well, factories kill people in accidents. Not often, but it happens. Does that mean we can never reopen factories, even without disease?
> Such a question screams for a sarcastic answer: in case you haven’t noticed, Covid-19 is not the common cold.
No, it isn't. But this is a thought experiment - and an example of orgs willingly exposing masses of people to a disease.
In the real world, we are all making choices that involve a degree of risk. Whether to fly for that business meeting. Whether to eat at a restaurant. Even if you dont think it, there is risk. Yes, even going to work entails risk.
What is important is that (a) it is voluntary and (b) it is disclosed.
Your comment is very insensitive. You come from a position of priviledge. Not everyone has the option to stop working. People have mouths to feed. Debts to pay. Parents to support. I am sure there is more than 1 tesla worker that is anxious to return back to work.
Why would you hold them back? Do you really think you know better than the person affected ?
As an Aussie I grew up on a healthy diet of US exceptionalism propaganda. At some point I came to the realization that the US is an empire in decline.
Now, I’m starting to think the US is already a failed state. I’m pretty frightened to be living in this timeline. It’s like the collapse of Rome, but with wifi, vape pens, memes and nuclear arsenals.
This has been the party line since at least the 1970s if not earlier. Like a lot of similar predictions, it's sure to be true eventually. However, the propaganda makes it impossible to judge if it's happening now.
There may be a resurgence in covid cases in the US shortly, but it's interesting that there are some countries not named America, Italy, or Spain, that are seeing daily growth of 5-10% and we're not talking about them.
Keep in mind that Rome collapsed over centuries, and as it did so many people barely noticed it happened and lived out their lives like generations before them in small farming communities. Even if the US collapses, there'll be vast parts of the world like in Africa and India where it'll just be an interesting international news tidbit with little impact on their actual lives.
As for someone living in Australia, you'll be fine in that corner of the world. Why do you think so many billionaires are buying bunkers in New Zealand?
>As for someone living in Australia, you'll be fine in that corner of the world.
(While not a member) Australia relies on NATO. Without it they would exist at the mercy of China. Without the US, NATO goes limp, especially in the naval power department.
Why would China wander over to Australia? China would probably look west into the Indian ocean more than they would look east, because that's where their oil comes from. They'd also have to get past Indonesia first, and frankly Australia has had more foreign policy problems with Indonesia in the past than with China. East Timor and illegal migrants come to mind.
Australia is as safe from a war in Eurasia as the Americas are. The events of WW2 made that quite clear. Imperial Japan even at its greatest extent was only able to make bombing runs on Australia's north coast. Frankly, there's nothing really worth fighting over as far away as Australia is from the rest of the world. Australia's key foreign policy objective is to play nice with the global naval power. Not because it needs protection, but it needs to not get locked out of the global shipping and trade network.
This whole argument is silly. War is dead. China will not conquer your land but they will buy your corporates and leaders souls. Why did the brush fires happen?
The seeds of the civil war were sown during the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The cracks were always there. I see the same left/right arguments from friends in the UK and Brazil.
The decline of the USA, to the extent that there is one, is due to demographic and dysgenic changes.
This can be alleviated by fixing housing costs in the most productive cities - SF etc. - where the most intelligent and productive people congregate. Cheaper housing will encourage these people to have children instead of forgoing them.
It can also be fixed by fixing immigration, so that the most intelligent and productive can migrate, ensuring diversity (no more than 10% from any one country) and equality (no more than 50% male from any one country).
The country also needs to fix the 'welfare cliff' - where under certain conditions it is more financially rewarding to have children and not work than to do the opposite.
> This can be alleviated by fixing housing costs in the most productive cities - SF etc. - where the most intelligent and productive people congregate.
You can barely convince these intelligentsia that street defecation is problem that can actually be solved. No thanks.
Honestly I don’t really understand the end game of disinformation campaigns like this.
It’s one thing to spread propaganda in order to influence elections and get a crooked bureaucrat into power that can enrich some corporate buddies. But it’s another to deceive people about a global health crisis. If you’re successful, people go outside and trigger a second wave of infections - lots of people die and we’re back to square 1. Economy will still be fucked.
If 1-2% of people die quickly, the economy will not be fucked. That's a politicized untruth put out to counter other politicized untruths.
The people protesting and doing other stupid things are actually helping those of us that are isolating. The quicker they spread it and create herd immunity, the less time we have to wait. This obviously depends on whether an individual can get reinfected, but I haven't seen anything conclusive one way or another and it feels like this has also been misleadingly politicized.
Obviously a deluge of cases is absolutely terrible for the healthcare workers, as well as other essential employees that are exposed to the mob-herd (eg grocery store workers) and likely won't receive adequate healthcare. So I'm certainly not advocating, merely analyzing.
Why do you care more about "the economy" than the lives of 2% ~= 6 million people? The Fed could take back it's massive Wall Street bailout and give it to workers. Rich people would hoot and holler but no one would starve, and the public would be much less anxious to lift the quarantine.
>herd immunity
There is no natural herd immunity for the flu or common cold. It's totally possible that after a few months people who survive become reinfected, which would massively increase the death rate if you already have lung damage when you get it again.
>The quicker they spread it and create herd immunity, the less time we have to wait.
If we are going to allow most people to become infected anyway, such that we encourage people to go to large gatherings without even wearing masks, then surely there is no reason to have any quarantine at all, so we wouldn't be waiting to lift it. But you seem to think we would still be waiting, just for a shorter amount of time, so you are clearly very confused about this whole situation.
If you think it is a Russian campaign, as people have previously asserted, you might get some perspective by looking at what seems to be happening in Russia right now. There is a Wikipedia page on covid in Russia.
The Russian statistics look fishy to me, but not in the same way as the Chinese ones. They have surging numbers of new cases, but a outlier very low claimed death rate. Of course, the latter might just be lagging. And there are supposedly similar protests in Russia as in the US - what does that mean? Are they real? Is it, say, the CIA? Or some internal conflict, or genuinely grassroots?
> and also our feelings about Cloudflare attempting to build support in this manner, especially now, during the Corona Virus situation.
Weird angle. Unless the RPKI standard is somehow actively encouraging people to violate social distancing policies, I don't see any connection with Covid-19..
To me this whole article just reads like a network operator complaining that someone else is trying to hold them accountable.
It’s a small business. Their staff could be infected or furloughed, or worse.
In terms of our day to day lives it might feel like the proverbial month of Sundays right now, but for operations teams it’s more like an unending stream of Friday afternoons in terms of sensitivity to making big infrastructure changes.
Yeah, that was how I read it - the impact of getting this wrong is that you break the internet for your customers (and staff, if they're all or mostly WFH) at a time when they're potentially depending on it to eat (e.g. if you're in a vulnerable group and need to order food for delivery) or work.
We've known BGP's been vulnerable in this way for years, so it's a bit of a weird time to actively encourage people to publicly shame their ISPs for being "unsafe".
isbgpsafeyet.com only appeared at 4 p.m BST yesterday, a Friday [1]. It's the timing of that which I took the OP to be commenting on. The GGP mentioned that we're in a month of Friday afternoons, this page dropped literally towards the end of the working day on a Friday afternoon!
As you say, Cloudflare have been promoting RPKI for a couple of years now and it's disappointing that more of the big players haven't implemented it yet but is now the time?
While I am not a fan of some of Cloudflares actions over the years, they have been positive in the RPKI space for the last several years. They've hosted multiple meetings in their offices with some of the largest networks in the world to discuss RPKI strategy and deployment. They've opened sourced software to lower the bar for entry. Their staff was accomdating to other network operators when they rolled out Origin Validation to not black hole parts of the Internet and reached out to networks to let them know of the error to get it fixed. They, like the network I support have been impacted by some of the same hijacks and I share their frustration when major carriers are not only slow to deploy RPKI or have no plan at all (or even a plan to properly filter their customers: see Verizon). They've been a part of the fight along with other folks who are silent (but those who know, know them).
RPKI is no surprise. People have been beating on their upstreams for it for well over a year. Almost all Internet Exchanges have enabled BGP Origin Validation on their route servers (thanks to the efforts of folks like Job from NTT). It's about time we have a site like this that highlights the overall status of it. That said, there's more we can be doing here to provide metrics on RPKI adoption on the Internet.
Maybe bad optics to do it right now but it needed to be released at some point. If they delayed it until we were at the tail end of the curve of Covid-19 infections, this blog could still rely on "we're still recovering from the pandemic" to support the "bad timing" argument.
For some, it's never the time they should do something. ISPs are notorious for dragging their feet and they'd just find new excuses if CF had delayed the publish.
I mean, the bigger ISPs will just ignore it like they've ignored IPv6 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, AAISP started automatically assigning IPv6 addresses ~9 years ago, so you can hardly accuse them of dragging their feet. The OP was published on a Saturday, after all.
> To me this whole article just reads like a network operator complaining that someone else is trying to hold them accountable.
Not really though, they do agree in the post that something needs to be done, they just don't agree that RPKI is quite the right answer and that Cloudflare's fearmongering scaretactic is the right move to push for RPKI.
IMO it's easy to have an opinion on either side of the fence - based on what you've done (or not done). Cloudflare, for example, committed to RPKI very publicly in 2018 [0]. This article, by ThousandEyes, does a nice job of visualizing the problem [1], published in July of 2019. As I read the parent article to this thread it strikes me as a bit defensive - which smells of a lie of omission (not exactly the whole truth, but conveniently cherry picked). They do very little in the article to state two missing arguments: 1) their timeline to implement RPKI (they only state: "At this stage we are looking in to this. We want to be sure we take the right approach, some of which will involved asking our transit providers what they are doing about it.") and 2) the rationale for not being further along of protecting customers with regard to the topic of RPKI.
They also grab Coronovirus as a rationale for doing nothing right now:
"Since this has now happened a few times, we felt it worth giving some more information that may be useful to customers and others who've seen these tweets (either directed at us, or at other ISPs), explaining a bit about what BGP is and how RPKI can extend it, and also our feelings about Cloudflare attempting to build support in this manner, especially now, during the Corona Virus situation."
If you look at this NANOG thread [2] nobody is complaining about ATT announcing they have implemented RPKI. So is there a negative downside? No. Has CloudFlare pushed some carriers into an awkward position given they are showcasing the true state of carriers as it pertains to route security in BGP? Yes. Andrews & Arnold are trying to tell their customers that their safety is paramount. Yet, they don't have a timeline to address the problem that other carriers have spent considerable time implementing over the last couple years. So, while Andrews & Arnold may be a great ISP - are they above public disclosure of an area they need to improve? No.
I applaud CloudFlare for showing end users which carriers are not spending time and resources on doing their due diligence to protect their customers. Especially business customers who rely on their parent AS to operate their business safely. Andrews & Arnold's response is suspect at best given their subjective response to the "why" behind why they've chosen to do nothing.
Finally - beyond CloudFlare NIST has been publishing these statistics for much longer. Just because CloudFlare has shown light on the topic - does not mean they are the bad actor. There are plenty of other outlets that have been highly supportive of these deployments - NIST [3] and RIPE [4], among very vocal proponents.
So, after parsing the reality of the values of RPKI for a small amount of time - the question around why Andrews & Arnold have chosen to do nothing feels different and, in my opinion, even more appropriate. Beyond that their response feels very hollow and weak on the technicalities which have put them in a spotlight they'd rather not deal with right now.
Not really - at the moment all businesses are having to readjust efforts and work with less resources available.
They don’t want to jump into rash decisions with minimal staff or staff dispersed across home locations and not able to work as effectively as normal - which could lead to broken BGP routes.
My home ISP (RCN) also hasn't turned IPV6 on yet either. However, they turned on RPKI between when I tested IsBGPSafeYet.com in the morning and evening.
It doesn't only read like a asinine complaint, it actually is. "How dare someone highlight what we've left undone"
Saying things like "it's scaring our users", "others are not using it", "it's bad timing", "transit providers should be filtering", no actual non-emotional arguments why they aren't doing it and only shifting the responsibility to secure the internet. I'm too done with companies like that.
This is the first week since demand spiked due to COVID that 3rd party sellers are even allowed to sell non-essential goods on Amazon, and they make up over 50% of sales:
It’s true Amazon is still selling non-essential goods, and I understand why the man is frustrated, but it’s very clear even with just “essential goods” being sold, Amazon will still require a large part of their current machinery.
When you’re talking about an organization as large as Amazon Fulfillment, and a virus as infectious as COVID, these half-measures definitely come across as more for optics than actually stopping the spread.
Amazon share price and business activity is surging as a direct result of Covid-19. They need to hire 100,000+ workers to meet the demand. However, the same thing they are profiting from (Covid-19) should also increase many of their operating expenses. Things like healthcare, paid sick leave adequate for the situation (so at least 4 weeks for proper quarantine), good PPE, in-depth infection combat strategies, and so on.
The problem is those operating expenses are only obvious if you have ethics/morality/whatever that concludes individual human life is more valuable than money. So if you're a big corporation that has been designed to enrich shareholders and the space company fantasies of your ego-maniacal CEO, you fight as hard as possible against taking on those operating expenses.
> Things like healthcare, paid sick leave adequate for the situation (so at least 4 weeks for proper quarantine), good PPE, in-depth infection combat strategies, and so on.
They are already doing all the things you suggested:
That makes no sense on several levels. You /want/ growth in delivery to minimize general exposure. PPE is dependent upon supplies not held nor generally available. Assuming that because demand grows they must be making more money and therefore is a nonsequitor assumption of guilt.
Businesses are intrinsically amoral. While humans may have different moral goods, companies only have to make money and, as such, need not concern themselves with petty human morality.
Aw, shucks. I still haven't gotten around to watching that HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.
At this rate maybe they'll have already produced something about the backstory of Adam Neumann + WeWork (who will at that point probably be in prison?) before I get around to watching the Theranos one.
> So any management position is exploitation? Being the boss of any manufacturing business is exploitation?
In many peoples opinion (including mine), yes. This can all be considered wage slavery.
Of course the magnitude and severity varies. A worker in the Gigafactory (probably) has a higher standard of living than the one in the Foxconn factory, who in turn probably has a better standard of living than the worker in the Nike sweatshop. But it’s all the same thing.
Also called a "job". You're telling me I'm a wage slave? (in the last 10 years nobody reported to me, I was never self-employed).
Through this sort of wage slavery in the last 10years, I have achieved an incredibly high standard of living, compared to the regular citizens of any age in human history. I think this narrative is just devaluing the meaning of words and the suffering of those who really are exploited.
A lot of people (even in first-world countries) have zero chance of becoming a multi-millionaire, and even struggle to make ends meet, pay their rent, etc. That is the problem, not highly compensated workers.
And it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
Yes, that is true (though at the same time things have been massively improving in average). What I find amazing is that we live in a time where a person living in a (relatively) poor country, working a non-management job, paying all taxes, _can_ actually get fairly rich. Employment really isn't "slavery".
Would it be great if more people could achieve prosperity - ideally, _all_ people? Yes it would. However, just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this (we can argue about details of taxation, and I don't think in particular USA has a good system, but that's more of "fine-grain detail" in the end)
> it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
I've lived in communism. It really is equal sharing of misery, _not_ equal sharing of reward. The reality is that Musk really puts in way more effort & takes a lot more risk than your average factory worker. But at the end of the day - not even that is what matters. What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia. Not sure what it would take to convince people it's an inherently bad idea - but I feel that at least by now the burden of proof should be on the shoulder of those who advocate it.
> just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this
I'm not suggesting taking money from the rich. I'm suggesting not giving it to them in the first place.
> What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia.
I'm also not suggesting "equal sharing of resources". The idea that the only possible distributions of wealth are "everyone gets the same" and "unbounded in response to supply/demand" is silly. If all the billionaires in the world had $10million instead of $1 billion, and everyone with >$1million's wealth was scaled down in proportion, I'd be happy. There'd still be plenty to work for.
For me, the key issue with communism was too much concentrated power. That lead to inefficient resource distribution, because the people responsible for distributing had perverse incentives which lead to corruption, and even where the leadership was benevolent, they simply didn't have the mental resources to work out how best to distribute things.
Now, markets solve this problem, by allowing everyone to have input into what the economy produces, simply by spending their own share of our economic output. However, this mechanism relies on economic demand being somewhat evenly spread out amongst the population. Otherwise you end up with the same problem: those in control of demand have incentives to pursue their own self-interest, and even where they are benevolent, they don't have the means to determine efficient distribution.
Bill Gate's philanthropy is a good example of this: very well meaning, but hopelessly ineffective given the huge sums of money involved. Notably, this wealth is being distributed just like wealth in communist countries: in a planned way, by a central authority. Extreme wealth concentration circumvents the market mechanism, and should be avoided for just the same reasons as communism.
But nobody gave them the money! Take eg Bezos - Amazon is textbook example of wealth creation, in the economic sense (lowered the prices, thus people could afford more). His wealth is not "given", it's created! How do you control the distribution of that wealth, other than tax, in a way that doesn't destroy the very mechanism that made it possible?
(honest question, it feels like you have an answer; I just don't see it)
I am suggesting taxation. I'm just pointing out that the idea that taxation "takes away" wealth that people have "earned" pre-supposes an economic system (and ultimately a moral system - think about what it really means to earn something: it means to deserve it) where money accrues to those who perform certain actions (such as selling goods). It perfectly consistent to have an economic system where the rule is that beyond a certain point, you only accrue a portion of the value given by the person obtaining the good.
What is money, other than the power to get others to perform economic activity for you, backed by the state? It is given by it's very nature.
But taxation is "taking money" as opposed to "not giving it in the first place". These are not people who take a salary - if you tax the company into oblivion so that "it doesn't make money in the first place", then you stop the wealth creation. If you tax the transfer from the company to the individual... well, you need to be much more specific on how you do that in a way that is not making them look wealthy. Also, this form of taxation will not ensure equitable distribution of wealth to the contributors of the enterprise (i.e. Amazon warehouse employees would still be "wage slaves") - just redistribution to the general population (and just redistribution, not "equitable redistribution", because that would be too hard a problem to solve). Now don't get me wrong - I am e.g. in favor of "basic income" and think we should strive to offer a decent minimum standard of living to everyone. But it's a big jump from there to "we should prevent people from getting _too_ rich" - both these are initiatives that have some merit and some downsides, but I don't think one helps the other in any meaningful way.
(as a side note, I disagree both that Bill Gates' philanthropy is "hopelessly ineffective" or that the rich drive demand - but these are two long discussions/debates in and of themselves)
As an Australian pulling my hair out about our domestic policies w.r.t to fossil fuel exports / consumption, let me just say I would take token gestures and virtue signalling over total ignorance, passivity and inaction, any day of the week.
I mean, if I woke up and read that 500 million mosquitoes were victim to the Australian wildfires, I might not be so sad either.
But then you watch a video showing the charred carcasses of many beautiful Australian marsupial and bird species littered on the side of the road [1], and you realize jokes aren't really very useful here.
I think they are just pointing out that the people who think they love animals actually only really seem to love cute animals. And when you think about that for a bit, it seems less pure.
> How low of an IFR would it take before you accepted that exposure?
If we lived in a sane world that valued EVERY individual human life above the self-serving dreams of an egotistical, arrogant sociopath, the answer would be zero.
> Would incidentally exposing them to the common cold be ok?
Such a question screams for a sarcastic answer: in case you haven’t noticed, Covid-19 is not the common cold.