If I read the “Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation” section[1] of Brendan Eich's Wikipedia page then it appears he was cancelled:
- employees publicly speak out, telling him to resign
- widespread media reporting
- an online campaign to have him removed starts
- “online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser”
- “CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign”
- Eich resigns
I'm not sure how that could be anything other than part of cancel culture, other than it being ahead of the current trend by a few years.
There isn't anything in there about "employees publicly speak out". Some board members (not employees) stepped down but IIRC they did not actually speak out and call for Brendan to resign.
Everyone on that list worked for the Mozilla Foundation, and would not have reported to Brendan as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation (which made that tweet misleading at best). I referred to that group already in the comments here.
AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees spoke out publicly in this manner, and internally I did not hear any such sentiments from Corporation employees. On the contrary, a lot of Corp employees expressed anger at that Foundation group ... not because they supported Brendan's Prop 8 position, but because that Foundation group poured fuel onto a fire that was doing great harm to Mozilla.
Mozilla employees were very much against the hatred directed at Eich.
There was even a blog post from a homosexual woman who worked for Eich, where she said what a great boss and friend he had always been to her, how well he treated everyone including gay employees, and how much the hatred directed at him was misguided.
The logical conclusion we have to make is that a political donation or opinion does not necessarily indicate bigotry.
There is an obvious selection bias in support for the boss though. If you like your job it is not smart to publicly speak out against your boss. Perhaps especially if you belong to a group the boss may have some grudge against.
There's also another selection bias against talking in support of somebody who's being cancelled by an internet outrage mob. Perhaps the only reason anybody would feel safe in doing so is if they were a member of the group the mob was purporting to be outraged on behalf of.
Yes, and I'd argue this is the strongest form of selection bias in such circumstances -- and the one that takes the most courage to avoid falling to.
First they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
Then they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
...
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
When people select themselves out of speaking up for others because of fear, the purity/outrage spiral can get out of control.
Good point - the pressure goes both ways. Supporting an ousted boss and thereby criticizing current leadership is also risky.
I think the real problem was that Mozilla had built a strong community support on representing certain values and freedoms in contrast to Microsoft (which was the dominant competitor at the time) as being perceived as more trustworthy. Firefox only became successful because lots of supporters advocated it and web sites made an effort to support it.
But this support only exist as long as you are perceived as honest. During his week (?) as CEO Eich (and other Mozilla spokesmen) emphasized that Mozilla as an employer recognized same-sex marriages and provided equal benefits to same-sex spouses. The CEO clearly disagreed strongly with this policy, but at the same same swore to uphold it. Who cares if he believes in it then, right? But it clearly shows that the leadership does not actually care about the values they espouse, which is a broader problem that this particular issue.
I don't really think a browser or other software should have a stance on marriage equality. But the fact remains that Mozilla as organization and employer did have a stance, and the CEO disagreed with this stance - but claimed it wouldn't matter at all.
If the mission of Mozilla has just been to make money, nobody would have considered it problematic. But then again it would never have become successful in the first place without the community support, based on trust.
I think that’s the sort of perverse reasoning that gets you into a purity spiral in the first place. I disagree with plenty of things, morally or otherwise, why would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives? The premise of this seems to be that anybody who has a stance on anything can not be expected to tolerate anybody else having a difference stance. I can see how the people of Silicon Valley might come to expect that, but it’s not normal.
But a CEO is expected to lead representing certain values. Often a CEO is chosen exactly due to their values and expected to further them through leadership. You would also think it was weird if the Mozilla CEO was funding campaigns against open standards or open source. Whatever your personal stance on marriage, Mozilla as organization had one stance which the CEO strongly opposed. So it would not be crazy to expect he would want to change their policies.
The damage control strategy was to insist that his values would not affect Mozilla, which is kind of a weird stance to have as CEO.
> would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives?
In this context it is worth noting prop 8 was exactly about preventing other people from living their lives a certain way. There is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody life choices and then to actively try to destroy their marriage!
Not everyone who needs medical help for Covid-19 needs a ventilator. Some just need supplemental oxygen.
And people go to hospital with other conditions. If hospitals are 100% overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases, then they may struggle to treat strokes, heart attacks, car crash victims, cancer patients, etc...
Can we expand the capacity of the healthcare system for those treatments? Oxygen is not without danger, but it can be safely handled by non-professionals, and it's relatively easy to manufacture.
I've never actually heard anybody discuss any treatments besides ventilators, so I have no idea what's feasible.
If it was a case of just seeing if they need oxygen then it'd be trivial.
The issue is when they deteriorate, what do you do then. There are hundreds of ways for people in hospital to "go wrong" knowing when where and how to intervene requires both nurses and doctors. All of which take 3-9 years to train
Besides close monitoring of people on O2 to adjust amounts and intubate if that time comes, there are potentially other components of supportive care that might alter outcomes, like IV anti-virals (e.g. remdesivir) or anti-coagulants, e.g. heparin. Some anti-coagulants can be given at home, but the strong doses being discussed also come with high risk of bleeding, benefitting from bed rest and close observation. For a good slice of the sickest COVID patients, hospitalization is helpful and hard to replicate at home, even with our limited therapies.
That said, oxygen and heparin at home could be good for a lot of patients. Improvements in prognostication may help distinguish that group in the future.
Oxygen is very regularly given outside of the hospital for a range of ailments. There is a thriving industry selling home and portable oxygen delivery units.
Yes, but how many lives will it save? The answer is unclear but it seems to be lower than what most people would expect.
The basic assumptions were not well supported when the decisions were made. All the models we had were based on a very, very low level of testing and unreliable information from other countries.
I read the study and nowhere does it mention when or how ventilators were applied.
If ventilators are a scarce resource/bottleneck and ventilation is applied by prioritisation then I could see the mortality rate skewing up as a function of treatment being applied too late.
It is worth bearing in mind the mortality rate of non-swamped health care systems.
For every NYC/Paris/Lombardy/Wuhan there is a South Korea/Taiwan/Hong Kong with very different data profiles.
I would love to see the mortality rate for ventilation support in these countries/cities...
What's an acceptable death rate look like for you? Anecdotally does that number change if we're talking about your life, or the lives of people you are responsible for?
I’m not sure if it’s possible to have an earnest conversation about that when one party can easily claim the moral high ground by expressing outrage that the other party might not be willing to go to literally all costs to save a single life.
I do see some of that argument being made, however, I see a lot more false information coming from one side, as well as ignoring the advice of experts, and actively quieting people in the government who dare to publicly disagree with the president's statements. So, yeah it is pretty hard to have an unbiased discussion on this. I obviously have my own biases here :).
> What's an acceptable death rate look like for you?
We make arbitrage like this when setting pollution laws, or speed limits. The issue here is that we don't know the cost of flattening the curve. We know that GDP is strongly correlated with life expectancy, and the loss of GDP worldwide will have important sanitary impact, but it's hard to quantify this.
That being said, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to flatten the curve. Considering we don't have the data to make the right decision, we use a greedy algorithm. But I'm quite convinced that we'll be worse off in the long term. Incidentally, we choosing to save old people over poor people.
Most economists say we should listen to health professionals and not re-open to early. And that if we do re-open too early its likely to cause more long term damage to the economy
Most economists have stayed as far as humanely possible from evaluating lives vs GDP.
Which is a shame.
It’s like the one example where some back of the envelope yet informed numbers might improve public policy vs the status quo..blind panic and a livelihood crippling total lockdown.
To be clear, I fully support Strict social distancing and think the idea of their being a trade-off between government policy on the matter and economic performance is off-base. People will social distance whether the government tells them to or not, and if the pandemic worsens substantially then the economic impact will be even worse. That is to say that the best thing to do from both a lives saved AND an economic perspective is to contain the pandemic to a manageable level. </br>
All that throat clearing out of the way... this is a silly argument and one that is not applied in any other domain. Should we ban cars? How can you possibly say that the many thousands of people who die in automobile accidents each year are an acceptable loss of life?
To put it in perspective, approximately 37,000 people die per YEAR from automobile accidents in the USA
With all the measures already in place, and strong possibilities of under counting COVID19 has already killed more than 50,000 people in less than 4 months.
A better argument would be banning obesity. ~300,000 people die from obesity related diseases every year
Given the number of people who were working until the lockdowns were announced by the government, and how many customers were still buying nonessential services, I think the majority of those jobs would not have been lost.
I don't think the data supports that assertion. I don't have the link handy, but OpenTable published data showing that in Atlanta at least, restaurant bookings were down ~90% before the stay-at-home order was issued. The situation was similar in many other areas as well.
This might sound good as a sound bite but offers no thought behind it. One thing that is clear is that we cannot go to extremes on either end.
On one side - we cannot stop the economy to contain the virus, because that would turn into every person having to grow their own food and carry their own water with a bucket from the river. Many many people would also die.
On the other side - we also cannot ignore the pandemic and carry as if nothing is happening because that would over-burden the hospitals to the point that they will not be able to treat people with other issues. Many many people would die as well.
So there indeed has to be a balance. And the question "what price are we willing to pay for saving a life" seems to be on point.
A lack of jobs can create dead people, whether through crime or through an inability to afford healthcare or shelter or food.
I'm not convinced that such deaths outweigh the lives saved through these measures, but they're still worth mentioning if we want a full picture of the impact.
A lot of the jobs that were lost won't come back for years. It's not like we can flip a switch and all the businesses that closed will be open again. The small business economy has been destroyed.
True, but that outlook depends a lot on age, life experience and other factors; a lot of people will agree with you unless it's their own life/family.
Also; por qué no los dos? The USA has enough money and resources (and billionaires) to save the lives + not have the suffering (basic income/welfare). That they choose not to might not be the concern of the people who voted for those things but got Trump; they don't want their lives or loved ones to be chosen over 'jobs/economy' just because the people in power are overly greedy and short-sighted.
If the dog is already biting you, eyes and dick/balls work.
If not, you can try to out-aggress the dog, usually dogs aren't stupid and won't attack people who seem to be intimidating. ...on the other hand some breeds have had this instinct bred out of them and will try to kill anything of any size with no regard to their own safety.
IMO what’s important isn’t merely whether something poses proximal danger to human life (which asks for immediate and more severe solutions), but whether something poses greater community burden on a level where it’s hard to trust an individual to self regulate.
Owning any equipment or process with bad waste or ecological burden should also require extra licensing under the same rationale.
Of course it’s an argument because we can simply license based on predictors of burden. Small dogs which are projected to fall below a risk tolerance threshold should have less licensing burden.
Similarly, different classes of vehicles get different licensing requirements; saying all cars are the same is just lazy, and a regulation meant for big risky entities being applied to small ones is what we call regulation moats. We have enough pet owners that we should be able to quantify risks and burdens for the purpose of licensing. Here we have an article which provides empiricism on the community burden from cats.
I'm talking about whether anecdotes of safe dogs is an argument that we might need different levels of licensing. Yes it's an argument, especially in the face of empiricism on the community burden of cats.
It's as much about personality as physical threat.
Cats are far more skittish around people as a rule. There are practically zero stray/outdoor cats that will attack a person unless they're backed into a corner and provoked. The same thing isn't true for dogs, some dogs are simply aggressive.
It seems more likely that a free-roaming cat will get rabies than someones 6 lbs lap dog. Especially because cats (at least in my area) don't require licensing or rabies shots like dogs do.
Cats do too, maybe not as frequently, but I think the important factor is, that the damage is not as severe in most cases.
It probably is related to the size of the animals. If there would be more tiger-sized cats and more Chihuahua sized-dogs it would most likely be different.
I think "not as frequently" is a understatement. Cats are orders of magnitudes less dangerous to humans than dogs are, it's not even something I have to think about when I walk outside. Meanwhile, often times, the only thing that stops a dog from attacking me is the gate of their owner's house. Even that won't stop them from running at me and barking at me though. And yes, I've walked by a house with no gate before and two dogs just came after me and attacked my legs, one even biting me. I'm no dog hater or anything, in fact I like dogs, but dogs are only appreciable if they're on your side. I shudder at the thought that anyone would be able to get a pitbull and do whatever they please with it without licensing or repercussions for letting it loose on the neighborhood children.
EDIT: Forgot to say, it don't matter even one bit what size the dog is or how small it is. If they aren't on your side, they're capable and very willing to bark at and attack you.
That is not what that study says. Yes, cloth masks are not as effective as medical masks. But the study does not compare cloth masks with no masks. The three groups in the study are:
> medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing).
Yes, the cloth mask group had more infections than the medical mask group and the control group. But the control group included wearing masks as usual. It does NOT say cloth masks are less effective than nothing. "No mask" was not studied. Cloth masks might be less effective than wearing no mask (I personally doubt that), but this study didn't say anything about that hypothesis.
I’m totally out of my element here but I’d wager that because the flu is much more pervasive we’re able to extract more reliable statistics, even if it’s from a relatively small sample set.
I'm no statistics expert, but given they can predict election outcomes from samples of a couple thousand people for tens of milions of voters, 40k+ infected with coronavirus is enough to have a very good idea about death rates.
Cancelling has a heavy element of being ostracised from a community and having your reputation destroyed.