> Read 18 U.S.C. § 6002 it does not grant blanket immunity. If I testify truthfully and reveal perjury in the past I can be tried for that perjury now.
I think you're reading it wrong. It doesn't grant immunity for perjury committed while testifying under immunity, which is a completely reasonable exception. Without it, a guilty criminal would have no incentive not to give false testimony portraying his guilty friends as innocent.
> When is your workplace ever certified disease free?
Never, but taking these actions in this situation is definitely negligence at best. It's like running a hospital forcing people to work without providing soap or hand sanitizer.
> Facebook is not telling them they have to come into the office. Rather, it’s the contracting companies that these people actually work for.
Though that's one of the benefits of outsourcing: you get all the benefits of squeezing your workers to the maximum (which helps the bottom line), while still having deniability for PR purposes.
Facebook is responsible unless they loudly and publicly order their vendors to treat their employees better.
> Completely bullshit. They held her in prison for a year with no charges and now they want her to pay a quarter million in fines? Fuck off.
It's not bullshit. Manning was basically obstructing justice by disobeying a court order. If sanctions like this didn't exist, people wouldn't have any incentive follow court orders at all, and the court system would become ineffective and break down.
Also, I'm not sure if the concept of "charges" is even relevant here. Aren't those leveled by a prosecutor? In contempt cases the judge is directly punishing noncompliance with court proceedings.
No, it isn't yet. I'm in the office right now, with thousands of my colleagues.
> And you aren't going to be able to test ~60 _million_ people who will ultimately be infected with this
Maybe not, but you don't want to discourage people from getting tested now. Getting a positive test is an important cue to take extra stringent isolation measures.
Aggressive testing helps reduce the need for stringent, general measures like lockdowns:
> There's no cure. Bodies will pile up regardless.
There's not cure, but there is treatment. Many deaths will be avoidable if we can slow down the spread, to spread out the load to avoid overwhelming the medical system too much.
> Politicians should not take advantage of emergencies by tacking wish list items on to bills that address the emergency.
What exactly are the unrelated wish list items here? Everything I'm seeing here looks on point and directly relevant to this crisis.
Workers need rights to sick time right now, or the virus will spread even more quickly and this will be worse. People are going to be losing jobs or hours because of this, and if they don't have extra cash they're going to need food assistance. Medicaid is about to get hit hard, just like every health insurance program. The elderly and disabled people are vulnerable groups, and are going to need greater levels of assistance during the coming disruptions.
> "Hey, it's an emergency, pull out your wish list for the past four decades."
All the proposals listed in the article makes total sense in the context of this crisis. Sick time for people to quarantine, food assistance for the people whose incomes will drop due to the fast approaching recession and isolation measures, all totally on-topic.
The US has long-understood systematic problems that will contribute to making this crisis worse. If you want to mitigate the crisis, you'll want to fix those issues that you can.
> Because if we do react strongly, and it does largely contain the virus, that will also be "proof" (quote-unquote) that it wasn't anything we needed to be so proactive about in the first place.
Even if every other country has Y2K levels of success containing the Coronavirus, we can still point skeptics at the example of places like Italy to prove it was a real threat.
> A pardon is not possible because she has not been convicted of any crime.
Is that true? Wasn't Nixon pardoned for his crimes without actually being convicted of anything? He didn't even manage to get impeached, since he resigned before that could happen.
> And my ears are asymmetrical. It does show up in photos from front on (though perhaps not to the extent in this article).
Yeah, I was surprised the article made such a big deal about that. My ears are also a little asymmetrical, and Stephen Colbert's [1] are very obviously so.
[1] A famous American comedian with a nightly talk show.
> COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too.
Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested. One of the most important things we need to do right now is detect the people who got the virus through community transmission.
> Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.
I'd say that testing those people should be lower priority, since an assumption they're infected is more likely to be accurate, so they can take preventative measures without needing a test.
> Amazon has not done anything to combat counterfeit items on their website before now, I don't expect much from them now.
I think they have, but their efforts are usually spastic and reactive, so they don't do much good.
I remember during the eclipse a few years ago, they told everyone who bought eclipse glasses from them not to use them and refunded their money. There were lots of articles showing most of the ones being sold on Amazon were inadequate or had fake certification markings. Unfortunately, Amazon only took action a few days before the eclipse, after millions were sold and it was almost impossible to find alternatives.
> The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.
And they've delivered that by building a fragile system with too little safety margin or redundancy.
It's like building an application that can serve the absolute greatest number of requests for the absolute lowest price by having absolutely no redundancy. It looks great, until a disk fails.
> The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with.
I wouldn't call those choices informed, it'd call them myopic. A smart, informed choice with a time horizon of 6 months can be an exceptionally stupid one with a time horizon of 30 years.
You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.
I think you're reading it wrong. It doesn't grant immunity for perjury committed while testifying under immunity, which is a completely reasonable exception. Without it, a guilty criminal would have no incentive not to give false testimony portraying his guilty friends as innocent.
You might want read this: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?re...
> Again, this violates the 5th amendment.
That's your opinion, but the Supreme Court's opinion differs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastigar_v._United_States