Cutting off water and electricity for order violations sets a very bad precedent, and is highly irresponsible. I'm shocked that it's even legal to do so.
This is kind of like that Bruce Willis movie scene where his wife tries to say her affair with his best friend was "an accident" and he says something like "Whoops! I fell down and my dick accidentally ended up in your wife."
If you don't want your water cut off, don't invite your 200 closest friends over during a pandemic, two weeks after they announced this was a potential consequence and after the police have previously visited your house and warned you in specific. Duh.
This power & water cutoff thing was originally introduced in 2019 to combat unauthorized commercial cannabis farming as an alternative to criminal charges (which is not terrible because no human basic needs are being withheld in a commercial context).
Now suddenly it's being expanded to combat residential ordinance violations, which is a quantum leap in bad ideas. I'm surprised that nobody sees the problem here, especially the enlightened HN crowd. It's not like there haven't been sufficient tools to deal with property nuisances & safety violations for hundreds of years in ways that are effective against both rich and poor, and especially not tools that can lead to such terrible consequences for the poor as we slide down this slippery slope.
(To be honest I wonder if shutting off power will work... can they just get a generator or set up tiki torches?)
oh and new business idea: powerbnb
Also, an idea: rather than handing fines and fees to the government -- which incentivizes all kinds of bad behavior, from civil forfeiture to crazy permitting laws -- you stick it in a general fund, and hand it back -- evenly distributed -- to the taxpayer as a dividend at the end of the year.
Do that for every bit of revenue that government makes outside of collecting taxes.
I'm curious where this falls down (outside of implementation difficulties).
Direct action against a property makes it much harder for them to continue.
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/davidryucc/pages/2849/...
The announcement comes two weeks after Garcetti first warned that properties hosting "un-permitted large gatherings" could have their water and power service shut off as a consequence.
Seems completely reasonable to me. I find it bizarre that the internet has an issue with it, the same internet that talks like the Gestapo about trying to force every last person to wear a mask at gun point.
Punishments granted for health violations shouldn’t make the situation even more dangerous. This won’t stop parties.
This is incredibly melodramatic. To think that restricting a party during a global pandemic risks freedom more than, say, backing coups in Honduras is a ridiculous position.
Also your comment could be made about literally any enforcement action ever taken.
Then our own president said some people didn't even know they had it comparing it to a cold. Then reports that some doctors have been threatened to lose their job if they don't sign off on COVID because the hospital gets extra money even if someone died from Cancer. Then another doctor thought the ventilators were doing more harm than good so if the doctors kill people with ventilators that's a extra 50 grand. Some people are worth more dead than alive. I think there's a virus just like other things but we're being played in a way to influence the election. Just like how with Obama they were scaring everyone about Swine Flu, working on a new vaccine for that too but that just kinda fizzled out. I know I'm skeptical personally and it is very concerning all the big sites are censoring this stuff. I think because the big drug companies run advertising on these sites, I know in other countries they banned advertising drugs but in the USA that's big business.
(this channel is like the TMZ for youtuber/tiktok)
Covid will never go away till we develop a vaccine.
I get the impression some countries aren't taking this as seriously as others.
https://covid19.healthdata.org
The estimate is that the US will be at 300,000 deaths by end of year. Whilst NZ will be at 22. US is 65x more populous so if they adopted similar policies would have been at 1430 deaths. And it could even be a million deaths by the time a vaccine is readily available.
And people like to bring up the island nonsense but fact is that the borders are largely closed with Canada and Mexico so the problem is purely to do with domestic policies and behaviours.
It has to do with how people behave, as we see in the article here, and NZ gets much less international traffic than the US and the island take has some merit. Iceland had 10 cases, Madagaskar around 150. You could argue that South Korea is an island too since there probably is little exchange on land routes. Australia wishes to be a continent, but... okay, maybe it really doesn't really fit here.
Infections aren't spread homogeneously, so I believe behavior of people is the main factor. Too bad, because you cannot just blame all this on someone.
I think the causes of infections get misattributed just like the performance of economies to immediate government policies.
I wouldn’t choose to be in any other country at the moment, but this second lockdown has caused much more negativity than the first.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/424048/covid-19-what-hap...
This is about electricity and the law and COVID-19.
It is also society’s loss to see the state and her leaders lowering themselves to such spiteful tactics.
If it’s against the law, arrest them. Denying them access to civilization is just the sort of retributive justice that makes so much of US law and order problematic. What next? Ban them from buying food? Force them to wear dunce hats in public? Throw them in the village pond and see if they sink?
Arguably it’s far more serious than a law and order issue though. A CDC cordon and enforced quarantine would have tackled the actual issue: public health.
