Ofer

lkrupp said:

Volunteer reporting is about as useless as self-nominating surveys. There is no way that volunteer reporting will produce any worthwhile data concerning the status of employee vaccinations. Even if Apple were to mandate a response people would lie through their teeth, especially the hard corp anti-vaxxers. The only way to get any semblance of accurate data would be to require employees to show proof of vaccination. Sure, there might be few that would resort to counterfeit vaccination cards but it would be much harder than simply lying on a survey.

The people who run surveys and volunteer reporting always forget about human nature. Personally I love screwing around with telephone surveys. I always respond to their crafted questions with answers that go against what they want to hear. Political surveys from politicians are the most fun to mess with.

AppleZulu said:

The causes of this are myriad, and most are things that should be fixed ‘upstream,’ but politics prevents it. 

There is nowhere in the US where someone working full time at minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment. It’s not just the cost of rent and real estate at play here. 

If a business bought its raw materials at below cost and expected government and others to pay the difference, everyone would be angry at the business and expect it to carry its own weight or close up shop. When the same business buys labor at below cost, everyone defends the practice and blames the workers for not deserving to be paid enough to cover the costs to survive and show up to work. 

If cost-of-living-based minimum wage was enforced, consumers would spend more in direct costs for some things in order to pay workers’ basic wages, but we’d spend a lot less on government programs to subsidize housing, food and programs for homeless people. Which do you think is more efficient? Paying the costs of labor directly through the goods and services the labor produces, or subsidizing those same costs through charity and government programs?

Next, we blame people who have mental health problems for having mental health problems. We’ve been conditioned to think it’s just weakness and lack of willpower, instead of acknowledging it’s a health issue, just like heart conditions or cancer. As noted above, state mental health hospitals have shuttered nationwide. Conservatives think they’re saving money, and liberals think they’re giving people personal autonomy by making it next-to-impossible to commit a severely mentally ill person to a mental hospital. The result is mentally ill people living on the street doing mentally ill things, and the public blaming local authorities for impossible problems they didn’t create. 

I could go on about addiction next. There is a direct line from corrupt pharmaceutical companies marketing opiates as ‘harmless’ and people lying in the street with needles sticking out of their arms. 

The list goes on. We can take responsibility for our civilization, check our political theologies at the door and go upstream to fix these problems at a lower cost, or we can let it all tumble out into the streets and be angry at people who didn’t actually cause the problems in the first place.