The Mexican government ordered all non-essential offices to be shut down from May 1st to May 5th of 2009 in an effort to prevent the further spread of the swine flu, however it appears that some architecture firms decided to not abide by this federal order. TEN Arcquitectos emailed its staff telling them to show up to work on May 5th, even though the government ordered a shut down in the interest of public health.
Additionally, all businesses not following this order will face fines if denounced to the Secretaria del Trabajo y Prevision Social, the government's branch in charge of labor laws and employee protection. http://www.stps.gob.mx/
when i was an arch student we had a break in the water line and the school had to "close the building". this meant that the bathrooms didn't work and you had to walk about a quarter mile to a different part of campus just to piss or shit. even so, myself and at least half of the students & nearly all of the instructors continued on with studio classes anyways. un-sanitary conditions are really no excuse to pause architecture.
on the other hand, if the power goes out & you can't check archinect...
Do you always base your opinion upon those of your family? Have you done any of your own research on the topic?
Consider these scenarios for what could happen after you graduate and are no longer are covered by your parents' and or school's health plan -
1.) you can't find a job and end up getting seriously ill or injured with no health coverage at all.
2.) you do find a "survival" job that provides health insurance, and end up getting seriously ill or injured. Your medical bills are covered but you but you're basically stuck in that crappy job indefinitely because you can't change health plans due to insurers barring coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
3.) you get a decent job with health insurance and become ill or get injured while covered by their plan. a few months later you are laid off. you take the COBRA coverage but after it runs out you're unable to buy an individual health plan at any cost again due to your pre-existing condition.
These things are happening every day to people all across the country. They're happening to people of all socio-economic and educational backgrounds. They're happening to people who've done everything right. They're typically not circumstances anyone who isn't a multi-millionaire can buy their way out of no matter how hard of a worker or how good of a saver they might be.
The current system is seriously eroding the ability of people to change jobs, start their own companies, or to step out of the full-time employment market to pursue other interests - and that has already seriously hurt this country.
To my mind everyone is entitled to access to health care. No one should have to die or suffer needlessly just because they weren't lucky enough to hold onto their job.
Health care and employment should have absolutely no relationship to one another. Please note that economic status does not equal employment; if one can afford better care they have every right to pay for it.
Amen 4arch,
It sees when you mention european health care system to Americans, it conjures a negative stereotype, although probably most of those with that opinion have never left the U.S. or never lived in Europe. Just ask any European how their healthcare system works and if they are happy as opposed to any American that is paying high premiums and still gets to get a bill for god knows what....(bottle of tylenol $80). People in the U.S. are afraid to go to the hospital even if they have insurance and not to mention people that don't have insurance. People do some research on health care systems abraod before you judge them.
I'm pretty sure that this issue is the ONE that would keep me from working in a country.... Then again, isn't the US the ONLY developed country in the world without universal healthcare?
The idea that healthcare only exists for those who can afford it is beyond absurd to me... YES, I pay for it through my taxes, it's not free, but at least it's available to anybody who needs it. It's in everybody's best interest (except for health insurance companies) to have a healthy populace. End of story.
Well it sounds like people have a problem with the cost of health care not the companies that provide it. Do you think that the government mandated prices we currently enjoy will actualy go down with a universal health care plan or up? Maybe instead of attacking free market health care ( which it isnt ) we should find out why a bottle of tylenol is being billed at $80 first.
i think it's absurd that healthcare costs are out of control, that 80% of the costs come at the end stages of our lives, that a procedure that is proven by data to be ineffective in one part of the country, is casually - and unnecessarily provided - offered in another part of the country.
Interesting JK as members of my family are also in the healthcare industry as are a few of my good friends and they all think something more in the way of a nationalized system is needed.
As to the original poster's intent: It's lame for an architecture firm to tell their students to come in when there is a city-wide ban on going to work. Very little we do is so important that it can't wait a few days, the exceptions being construction-related (for example if something like a steel order has to be placed before rates go up).
The most active activists for national healthcare I've met have all been doctors, some very very highly placed even (and recognizing that their pay would probably decrease under a single-payer scheme).
coming from previous SARS city, i think its horrible to force ppl to work during swine flu... n i'm very surprise ppl here are very comfee with this kind of enslavement, or may be they got used to it.
aspect, I lived in Toronto during the SARS thing, the worst place to be outside of Asia. I made it to school and to work every day. A close friend worked in the morgue of the biggest hospital in the city, and my then-girlfriend got sick (not SARS) and I had to take her to the hospital at the peak of the hysteria.
You say "i think its horrible to force ppl to work during swine flu". You do realize that normal seasonal flu kills almost 40,000 Americans (and 4,000 Canadians) a year?
This is media hysteria at its worst. Wash your hands, don't make out with any sick strangers, and you'll be fine.
There's no cure for seasonal flu either, but there are vaccines for the strains that make the yearly rounds. Every year, experts make predictions about what flu will strike, and batches of vaccine get produced. Sometimes the experts are correct, sometimes they are wrong. Seasonal flu does indeed mutate, and that's why we don't have a single vaccine that would wipe out flu forever.
If you listen to the experts (ie not the news media), they are saying that this H1N1 flu is not very virulent. It has killed people, unfortunately, but just as many people get killed every single day on our roads, and yet we still leave our homes and go to work and school and the grocery store.
And this flu has not "outsmart todays technology by evolving new codes... " It's simply a new version of an old flu. Its DNA has already been sequenced and scientists are working on a vaccine.
We always talk about other countries gov't health care but fail to talk about the existing universal health and auto insurance in this country that all military have. Why can't we replicate the system for everyone. Even non military can get treated for next to nothing on base hospitals. And military car insurance is insanely cheap.
Dustin, everything you say is true, but: the issue brought up was that the government - not the media - mandated that non-essential offices be closed. According to an anonymous poster, TEN Arcquitectos decided not to follow the government mandate.
In that situation, as an employee, I probably would have lied - or more likely it would have been the truth - and said my kid's school was closed and I didn't have childcare so I had to stay home anyway. Maybe it would have cost me my job.
h1n1 is not a seasonal flu, it comes from livestock stock... why would u risk ur life to convince yourself that is safe? and justify those arch office forcing ppl to go to work?
liberty bell, you are right about that. And I think my opinion is still that there has been a huge over-reaction, the Mexican gov't included. It's likely that many more people have been infected than their gov't is letting on (for various legitimate and less-legitimate reasons).
aspect, again, you are partially correct but show a lack of understanding of what this flu is, and how it works. "it comes from livestock stock" is partially correct. But it's not that simple: it is a hybrid of swine, bird and human influenza viruses. It can pass back and forth from human to animal and back to human again. But this almost irrelevant, as unless you work on a pig farm, you simply aren't going to get this flu from an animal. If you do get it, it will be from another human being. And how does that happen? It happens when you somebody sneezes on their hand, touches a surface, and then you subsequently touch that surface and then rub your eyes, lick your fingers, etc. It's called cross-contamination and it is easily preventable by simply being aware of what you touch, and washing your hands PROPERLY, regularly throughout the day. This is the same preventative method as with any other flu virus. (If you need my credentials, I have taken the U.S. OSHA Bloodborne Pathogens training.)
Since I don't know about seasonal flu deaths in Mexico, I can only comment on US/Canada statistics:
Number of deaths from H1N1 flu in US/CAN since 'outbreak': 3
Number of deaths from seasonal flu in US/CAN in the same time: Approximately 2300
As stated earlier, seasonal flu kills about 40,000 people in US/CAN every year. FORTY THOUSAND.
More people have died from straining too hard on the toilet over the last three weeks than from H1N1.
seasonal flu are virus evolve among human coding...
as u said, swine, sars, bird flu are animal virus being transfer to human and its was the differences of an animal virus code being proliferate at human makes it dangerous...
i think is a good thing for architects to read "black swan", nassin nicholas had explained very detail about the pseudo logic of statistic... what changes the world in history never shown in statistic but black swan...
unfortunately we architects got used to forecast with statistic being fed by the government/developer... those are the future the authority want us to believe not the real future...
I actually don't understand much of what you wrote in the first reply due to what I think is a language barrier, so I think I will skip that.
What I know is this: The mortality rate of the worst flu pandemic in Western history (1918-1919) was 2%. This means that of all the people who got that flu, 2% died. For seasonal flu, the mortality rate is about 0.1%
As I mentioned above in my last post, "It's likely that many more people have been infected than their (Mexican) gov't is letting on." This is for reasons which include lack of tools to diagnose, media relations having to do with tourism, etc. I live in the Canadian city (Winnipeg) where the DNA of this virus was decoded. Our level-4 labs are the equivalent of the highest-risk labs in the US. The experts here are telling us to expect a big jump in the number of infections in the next couple of weeks, as is the case with every flu virus.
What you seem to be ignoring, aspect, is that even if this flu infects a lot of people, it is extremely MILD and EASILY PREVENTABLE. You can panic if you choose, or you can look at the science that says that even if experts aren't able to contain the virus, the chance that you'll contract it and subsequently die from it are as close to zero as one can feasibly get. You can deny the statistics all you want, but the ones I posted are real: 3 deaths vs 2300. If you want to ignore the facts and panic about a non-existent threat, then by all means.
One last thing: you said "while for the swine, the relative % is much higher... " Who cares? The relative percentage (you mean to say mortality rate) is meaningless when so few people are getting infected in the first place.
I think this is the end of the argument for me. It's been real.
May 9, 09 4:53 pm ·
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Swine Flu Architecture Office Shut Down in Mexico
The Mexican government ordered all non-essential offices to be shut down from May 1st to May 5th of 2009 in an effort to prevent the further spread of the swine flu, however it appears that some architecture firms decided to not abide by this federal order. TEN Arcquitectos emailed its staff telling them to show up to work on May 5th, even though the government ordered a shut down in the interest of public health.
Additionally, all businesses not following this order will face fines if denounced to the Secretaria del Trabajo y Prevision Social, the government's branch in charge of labor laws and employee protection.
http://www.stps.gob.mx/
Government provided health care is great.
better than corporate profit driven health "insurance"
Wow! Only four posts in, and already a battle of ideologies. Good work!
why should they shut down? who said an architecture office is 'non-essential'? why would anybody admit that, even if they thought it might be true?
I'm with platypus on this one - my family is full of health professionals and they all agree that government-controlled health care would be awful.
awful for their salaries or awful for nearly 50 million people without health care?
when i was an arch student we had a break in the water line and the school had to "close the building". this meant that the bathrooms didn't work and you had to walk about a quarter mile to a different part of campus just to piss or shit. even so, myself and at least half of the students & nearly all of the instructors continued on with studio classes anyways. un-sanitary conditions are really no excuse to pause architecture.
on the other hand, if the power goes out & you can't check archinect...
jk,
Do you always base your opinion upon those of your family? Have you done any of your own research on the topic?
Consider these scenarios for what could happen after you graduate and are no longer are covered by your parents' and or school's health plan -
1.) you can't find a job and end up getting seriously ill or injured with no health coverage at all.
2.) you do find a "survival" job that provides health insurance, and end up getting seriously ill or injured. Your medical bills are covered but you but you're basically stuck in that crappy job indefinitely because you can't change health plans due to insurers barring coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
3.) you get a decent job with health insurance and become ill or get injured while covered by their plan. a few months later you are laid off. you take the COBRA coverage but after it runs out you're unable to buy an individual health plan at any cost again due to your pre-existing condition.
These things are happening every day to people all across the country. They're happening to people of all socio-economic and educational backgrounds. They're happening to people who've done everything right. They're typically not circumstances anyone who isn't a multi-millionaire can buy their way out of no matter how hard of a worker or how good of a saver they might be.
The current system is seriously eroding the ability of people to change jobs, start their own companies, or to step out of the full-time employment market to pursue other interests - and that has already seriously hurt this country.
To my mind everyone is entitled to access to health care. No one should have to die or suffer needlessly just because they weren't lucky enough to hold onto their job.
Great post, 4arch.
Health care and employment should have absolutely no relationship to one another. Please note that economic status does not equal employment; if one can afford better care they have every right to pay for it.
Amen 4arch,
It sees when you mention european health care system to Americans, it conjures a negative stereotype, although probably most of those with that opinion have never left the U.S. or never lived in Europe. Just ask any European how their healthcare system works and if they are happy as opposed to any American that is paying high premiums and still gets to get a bill for god knows what....(bottle of tylenol $80). People in the U.S. are afraid to go to the hospital even if they have insurance and not to mention people that don't have insurance. People do some research on health care systems abraod before you judge them.
this story has absolutely nothing to do with government-provided health care. it has to do with labour laws.
I'm pretty sure that this issue is the ONE that would keep me from working in a country.... Then again, isn't the US the ONLY developed country in the world without universal healthcare?
The idea that healthcare only exists for those who can afford it is beyond absurd to me... YES, I pay for it through my taxes, it's not free, but at least it's available to anybody who needs it. It's in everybody's best interest (except for health insurance companies) to have a healthy populace. End of story.
Well it sounds like people have a problem with the cost of health care not the companies that provide it. Do you think that the government mandated prices we currently enjoy will actualy go down with a universal health care plan or up? Maybe instead of attacking free market health care ( which it isnt ) we should find out why a bottle of tylenol is being billed at $80 first.
I think the important thing is, say I name my new firm the "Swine Flu Architecture Office"... what kind of clients might I then expect?
Well, seeing as how I could probably get citizenship in the Netherlands, I certainly have no problem with what I reading here...Dutch Treat
i think it's absurd that healthcare costs are out of control, that 80% of the costs come at the end stages of our lives, that a procedure that is proven by data to be ineffective in one part of the country, is casually - and unnecessarily provided - offered in another part of the country.
Interesting JK as members of my family are also in the healthcare industry as are a few of my good friends and they all think something more in the way of a nationalized system is needed.
KURT obviously raises the most important aspect of this thread:
Swine Flu Architecture Office
Ginseng Chicken Architecture
Which is better?
Maybe some additional firm name advice can be found here.
As to the original poster's intent: It's lame for an architecture firm to tell their students to come in when there is a city-wide ban on going to work. Very little we do is so important that it can't wait a few days, the exceptions being construction-related (for example if something like a steel order has to be placed before rates go up).
The most active activists for national healthcare I've met have all been doctors, some very very highly placed even (and recognizing that their pay would probably decrease under a single-payer scheme).
he he Kurt I had the same thought when I read this thread title. "What? There's a Swine Flu Architecture Office?"
coming from previous SARS city, i think its horrible to force ppl to work during swine flu... n i'm very surprise ppl here are very comfee with this kind of enslavement, or may be they got used to it.
aspect, I lived in Toronto during the SARS thing, the worst place to be outside of Asia. I made it to school and to work every day. A close friend worked in the morgue of the biggest hospital in the city, and my then-girlfriend got sick (not SARS) and I had to take her to the hospital at the peak of the hysteria.
You say "i think its horrible to force ppl to work during swine flu". You do realize that normal seasonal flu kills almost 40,000 Americans (and 4,000 Canadians) a year?
This is media hysteria at its worst. Wash your hands, don't make out with any sick strangers, and you'll be fine.
what generates the fear is more about no cure medicine discover yet becos the code of virus changes...
while ppl die from seasonal flu mainly becos of poverty and lack of health treatment...
the fear of swine/sars flu is fair in my opinion mainly the virus has outsmart todays technology by evolving new codes...
so going back to Mark C taylor of codes and fear, so thing for us to think about...
There's no cure for seasonal flu either, but there are vaccines for the strains that make the yearly rounds. Every year, experts make predictions about what flu will strike, and batches of vaccine get produced. Sometimes the experts are correct, sometimes they are wrong. Seasonal flu does indeed mutate, and that's why we don't have a single vaccine that would wipe out flu forever.
If you listen to the experts (ie not the news media), they are saying that this H1N1 flu is not very virulent. It has killed people, unfortunately, but just as many people get killed every single day on our roads, and yet we still leave our homes and go to work and school and the grocery store.
And this flu has not "outsmart todays technology by evolving new codes... " It's simply a new version of an old flu. Its DNA has already been sequenced and scientists are working on a vaccine.
We always talk about other countries gov't health care but fail to talk about the existing universal health and auto insurance in this country that all military have. Why can't we replicate the system for everyone. Even non military can get treated for next to nothing on base hospitals. And military car insurance is insanely cheap.
Dustin, everything you say is true, but: the issue brought up was that the government - not the media - mandated that non-essential offices be closed. According to an anonymous poster, TEN Arcquitectos decided not to follow the government mandate.
In that situation, as an employee, I probably would have lied - or more likely it would have been the truth - and said my kid's school was closed and I didn't have childcare so I had to stay home anyway. Maybe it would have cost me my job.
h1n1 is not a seasonal flu, it comes from livestock stock... why would u risk ur life to convince yourself that is safe? and justify those arch office forcing ppl to go to work?
i found it very strange...
liberty bell, you are right about that. And I think my opinion is still that there has been a huge over-reaction, the Mexican gov't included. It's likely that many more people have been infected than their gov't is letting on (for various legitimate and less-legitimate reasons).
aspect, again, you are partially correct but show a lack of understanding of what this flu is, and how it works. "it comes from livestock stock" is partially correct. But it's not that simple: it is a hybrid of swine, bird and human influenza viruses. It can pass back and forth from human to animal and back to human again. But this almost irrelevant, as unless you work on a pig farm, you simply aren't going to get this flu from an animal. If you do get it, it will be from another human being. And how does that happen? It happens when you somebody sneezes on their hand, touches a surface, and then you subsequently touch that surface and then rub your eyes, lick your fingers, etc. It's called cross-contamination and it is easily preventable by simply being aware of what you touch, and washing your hands PROPERLY, regularly throughout the day. This is the same preventative method as with any other flu virus. (If you need my credentials, I have taken the U.S. OSHA Bloodborne Pathogens training.)
Since I don't know about seasonal flu deaths in Mexico, I can only comment on US/Canada statistics:
Number of deaths from H1N1 flu in US/CAN since 'outbreak': 3
Number of deaths from seasonal flu in US/CAN in the same time: Approximately 2300
As stated earlier, seasonal flu kills about 40,000 people in US/CAN every year. FORTY THOUSAND.
More people have died from straining too hard on the toilet over the last three weeks than from H1N1.
seasonal flu are virus evolve among human coding...
as u said, swine, sars, bird flu are animal virus being transfer to human and its was the differences of an animal virus code being proliferate at human makes it dangerous...
i think is a good thing for architects to read "black swan", nassin nicholas had explained very detail about the pseudo logic of statistic... what changes the world in history never shown in statistic but black swan...
unfortunately we architects got used to forecast with statistic being fed by the government/developer... those are the future the authority want us to believe not the real future...
besides almost everyone has a seasonal flu each year, the 40,000 ppl who die from it may be about 0.00x% of population
while for the swine, the relative % is much higher...
I actually don't understand much of what you wrote in the first reply due to what I think is a language barrier, so I think I will skip that.
What I know is this: The mortality rate of the worst flu pandemic in Western history (1918-1919) was 2%. This means that of all the people who got that flu, 2% died. For seasonal flu, the mortality rate is about 0.1%
As I mentioned above in my last post, "It's likely that many more people have been infected than their (Mexican) gov't is letting on." This is for reasons which include lack of tools to diagnose, media relations having to do with tourism, etc. I live in the Canadian city (Winnipeg) where the DNA of this virus was decoded. Our level-4 labs are the equivalent of the highest-risk labs in the US. The experts here are telling us to expect a big jump in the number of infections in the next couple of weeks, as is the case with every flu virus.
What you seem to be ignoring, aspect, is that even if this flu infects a lot of people, it is extremely MILD and EASILY PREVENTABLE. You can panic if you choose, or you can look at the science that says that even if experts aren't able to contain the virus, the chance that you'll contract it and subsequently die from it are as close to zero as one can feasibly get. You can deny the statistics all you want, but the ones I posted are real: 3 deaths vs 2300. If you want to ignore the facts and panic about a non-existent threat, then by all means.
One last thing: you said "while for the swine, the relative % is much higher... " Who cares? The relative percentage (you mean to say mortality rate) is meaningless when so few people are getting infected in the first place.
I think this is the end of the argument for me. It's been real.
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