I also live in Oakland. I've lived in Alameda County for the past 8 years. I also paid 14k in real estate taxes last year to said county (I know that's small potatoes to some of my peers here but it's exorbitantly higher than most everywhere else).
I 100% support Elon here. The masterfulness of what he's doing is that over 10k employees are employed at that factory. If they can go to work - so can everyone else. He's essentially tossing a moltov cocktail at the whole house arrest bullshit.
There are over a million jobs in Alameda County and what Tesla is doing here stands a high likelihood of causing an outbreak that detains the other 99% of us for longer than need have been, so that he can meet his looming performance targets and get paid $800 million.
High likelihood of causing an outbreak...? Not sure how you're reaching that conclusion. Their stated approach seems much safer and more conservative than any grocery or retail store currently IMO.
Grocery stores aren't open because of their extreme safety, they're open because of necessity. In fact they've been discussing closing grocery stores to the public too (and forcing pick-up etc.).
Grocery stores are orders of magniutde less safe and orders of magnitude more frequented than Tesla factories. Let's be VERY conservative and propose that the factory is a mere 10× less risk than a supermarket. Let's assume that grocery stores are used by 100× more people than Tesla factory employees. That means grocery stores represent a 1,000× higher risk than Tesla's factory. And that's conservative.
But it's actually worse than that. If working at the Telsa factory reduces the frequency in which these employees must visit a supermarket (reduced use of store-bought toilet paper, reduced consumption of store-bought food) then its opening could arguably lower the overall risk profile.
I was just responding to arguments with other arguments. That's how an internet discussion works. If you say I was "rationalising" Tesla's decision to open the factory, you were equally "rationalising" the County's decision to keep it closed.
There's quite a difference between 10000 people who come together in the same place every day and then return elsewhere. Let's assume it is more like 3000 people on three shifts consistently. Then they all go home, shop at dozens of different grocery stores where the rest of us are trying to buy food, and so forth. It adds a lot of edges to the contact graph at the moment when we are trying to sever the edges we don't need.
Wait.... are you talking about grocery stores or factories? Facetiousness aside, your statement about thousand congregating and dispersing all over a community is true of grocery stores as well, with the added bonus of having a different mix everyday.
That said, I think you're right about severing all edges we don't need. No easy way out of this unfortunately...
You shop at your nearest grocer, or a nearby one, so the group mixing isn't that much. It's actually a fairly consistent group of people picking up eggs at the corner market. Tesla's autoworkers aren't paid enough to actually live in Fremont, so many of them are going to drive in from Stanislaus, Merced, and San Joaquin counties, creating exactly the kinds of long-distance links we don't want.
You live in a county with a democratically elected representative government. If you manage to convince most of your peers that you (and Musk) are right, you get to set the conditions of the health order by electing whoever you please. Otherwise, you have to deal with the democratic result, within the bounds of the US and CA Constitutions.
