[xxxxxxx12]

You do realize that normative claims like "they ought", "government should", etc. are precisely the faculty-lounge, haughty idealism, that's worth absolutely nothing to people as they are, spoken from a position of privilege, condescension and fake expertise?

Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't act like paranoid agoraphobes exaggerating their actual risk?

It's no secret that most people overestimate their risk by an order(if not multiple) of magnitude.

[joshuamorton]

This has nothing to do with what I or the other poster said. I'll reiterate that many people who were forced to work were not happy about that fact.

You're somewhere between pretending those people don't exist and claiming that those lower class people who didn't want to work but had to are also morally bankrupt. It's neither coherent nor respectful of those you claim to be defending.

[xxxxxxx12]

Per your bio, you work at Google. You're divorced from the experience of struggling people.

[joshuamorton]

I'm reiterating the experiences of my friends who work in the service industry and whom in some cases have been unable to pay rent reliably the past year.

Having to make the choice between going to work at a job where you have health concerns and losing your home is not a fun situation. You're correct that this is not a choice I've personally had to face, but it is a choice that many people have had to deal with. The issue, that you keep ignoring, is that people who "kept working" did so in many cases not by choice, but by necessity. Yes, the privilege that some (including myself!) had to continue working safely is nice. But you shouldn't use that to discount the opinions of people who had to continue working unsafely, but did not want to.

And you are continuing to ignore those people. Anecdotally, those people make up the majority of those in service industries that I know. They weren't happy to have to continue working. They were scared. Were it economically feasible, most of them would have preferred to stay home and not work. But that option wasn't available to them, because not working would mean losing their homes too.

And it is ridiculous for you to try and weaponize my privilege to ignore those people's opinions.

[haswell]

That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make. You know nothing of their background, upbringing, path to where they are today. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish in this thread anymore, but it certainly is not constructive.

[xxxxxxx12]

> That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make.

No, especially in the context of the pandemic, it's easy to start talking about pandemic policy as though "everyone should just do X" where X is something extremely convenient, profitable, even pleasant for tech workers and other white collar jobs.

[Retric]

You say that yet his statements directly line up with what a friend working in a grocery store said. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually talked with anyone working in Amazon’s warehouse, but I can tell you it’s a very hard job that’s better paying than most people working there can get elsewhere. Some felt it was important, many of others actually quit over COVID.

On the other hand pointlessly attacking people just makes you seem foolish.