General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand To Make Ventilators (vice.com) 114
On Monday, General Electric factory workers walked off the job and demanded that the company convert its jet engine factories to make ventilators. From a report: Workers protested at GE's Lynn, Massachusetts aviation facility held a silent protest, standing six feet apart. Union members at the company's Boston headquarters also marched six feet apart, calling on the company to use its factories to help the country close its ventilator shortage amid the coronavirus pandemic. These protests come just after General Electric announced it would be laying off 10 percent of its domestic aviation workforce, firing nearly 2,600 workers, along with a "temporary" layoff of 50 percent of its maintenance workers in a bid to save the company "$500 million to $1 billion." This news came as Congress stood ready to pass a multi-trillion dollar corporate bailout that would include at least $50 billion in federal assistance and $25 billion in loans and temporary tax relief for the aviation industry, as well as a further $17 billion for federal assistance to companies deemed "crucial to national security" (e.g. defense contractors like Boeing or General Electric).
Never a better time to join the IWW (Score:5, Insightful)
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Russion trolls be busy.
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The Wobblies aren't communists, unless maybe your definition of "communist" is anyone who wants to belong to a union.
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Sadly, many people who keep reciting the talking points seem to believe this sort of nonsense. The whole anti-communist fervor early in the 20th century is one factor that prevented the workers movement from gaining a stronger foothold. Probably why the US labor day is on a different day than the rest of the world.
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Word Games (Score:2)
The Wobblies aren't communists, unless maybe your definition of "communist" is anyone who wants to belong to a union.
This is wink and nod dishonest bullshit and you know it. The Wobblies describe themselves as "revolutionary industrial unionism" [wikipedia.org] and openly state their goal of destroying capitalism. They're communists. But the label communist has justifiably gotten a bad rap, so you guys play these word games.
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You do realize that there are many groups who think capitalism should be destroyed, don't you? If you think the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon jungle, for example, are also "communists" then you really need to review the meaning of the word.
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I've never considered ignorance to be a virtue myself, but to each their own, I guess.
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You are a brainwashed idiot. You don't seem to understand anything involving unions or politics.
I assume you think Obama was a socialist. Hint: if you think that, then you're not just a fascist, but have proven yourself an ignorant idiot.
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If you think that someone's opinion of Obama, factual or not, means they belong to a specific political movement, then you are everything you just alleged. You just demonstrated that you do not posses even the most rudimentary understanding of fascism while criticizing someone else's understanding of Socialism, and falsely assigned a political ideology to someone after assuming that same someone was doing it to Obama.
You basically created a straw man, stuffe
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This is from the preamble to their own constitution taken directly from their website:
"Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."
Class struggle? Classi
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Socialism, communism, call it what you like. There's little difference between the two.
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Having seen the glorious fuckups that socialism has created in Canada, with a parent and grandparents who lived under communism endear me to neither idea. Maybe learning more before you post would have suited you better.
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So had you grown up black in the antebellum South, I suppose you would have been anti-capitalist?
Doubtful. Since most blacks happened to embrace capitalism in leaps and bounds in that post-period. You seem to fundamentally not understand the differences between localized views, and ideologies which butcher people by the millions in order to create the perfect society.
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So your argument before was, "Hey, my family has seen the devastation of [x] system, therefore, I am opposed to it" and now your argument is, "Had my family been subject to the devastation of [x] system, we would have embraced it"? This is to say nothing of the 1.) dearth of choices that freed slaves had and 2.) the massive grift pulled on them of 40-acres and a mule. Additionally, I am very interested in massacres perpetrated by organized labor. Not against organized labor, mind you—those are plentif
have to sympathise sometimes (Score:5, Insightful)
As an hourly wage-earner with a lifetime in the skilled trades, I have to sympathize. There are a *lot* of companies in the USA that need to have zero employees for a while. That should get their attention. Did you know that a hundred years ago, people *died* so that you could have a 40-hour work week?
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Did you know that a hundred years ago, people *died* so that you could have a 40-hour work week?
So what? People died for just about everything we have today and take for granted. It took centuries upon centuries for us to reach a point where people weren't chattel for barons or kings. We haven't quite figured out that it's not good for us to kill each other, but at least we're cutting down on sacking cities and the accompanying rapes and looting a little bit.
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I have no idea why you defend bullshit jobs like this. ... why are you not getting a real job an let a robot doing the "potato ship bag filling"?
You earned less than I earn in an hour
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He/She said " one of my FIRST jobs". Maybe you were making bank with your first job, but I doubt it.
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You earned less than I earn in an hour ... why are you not getting a real job an let a robot doing the "potato ship bag filling"?
I call bullshit on your first job paying you more than this. Especially since his job was worth more than your minimum wage, something which was only introduced in Germany in 2015, and became a divisive part of the 2013 election, meaning that a shitton of German jobs were paid at a lower rate than that still.
You never earned less than $11/hour in your life? Congratulations on being a spoilt entitled arse, not everyone has their life handed to them on a silver platter. Remember that when the cleaning lady em
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Yeah, I did a ten hour shift on Christmas Day for £2/hour in one job, back when discussions on introducing a minimum wage were looking at around £3.80/hour.
People that have never worked a shitty job earning shitty money should really not try and judge those that do.
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I did not judge him.
The point is: countries with high automation, like Norway or Germany have low unemployment rates and high minimum wages. Fighting against automation, or claiming: I like doing simple jobs as filling potato bags makes no real sense.
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My first "real job" was at the university as systems administrator for 3 unix clusters ... somewhere around 1987 ... can hardly be automated to a robot, though.
Re:have to sympathise sometimes (Score:4, Insightful)
Ford Motor company went with a 40 hour work week because the factory was so expensive that having better rested and more alert employees was worth it.
Holy carp, where did you ever come up with that bit of historical revisionism, the Ford web site? By all the gods, that is the most uninformed thing I've read all day..
Henry Ford put more value on the machinery than on the humans who worked in his factory. My dad met UAW people who risked their lives to unionize the Detroit factories. There were jobs that would leave workers permanently disabled with repetitive stress injuries in less than a year on the assembly lines, and they refused to adjust the line because it was cheaper to replace the worker. There are damn good reasons why the Ford (and other) factories were unionized in spite of bands of thugs with Tommy guns and lead pipes breaking up the meetings.
What 40 hours week? (Score:2)
Oft-repeated bullshit. South Korea, for example, has the same unionization rate as the US, but their workweek has only recently been reduced to 40-52 hours [npr.org].
Unions are nothing but (wanna-be) monopolies, openly seeking to maintain — and raise — the prices of what their members are selling (their labor). And they should be treated like other monopolies — with anti-trust laws.
You're welcome to assoc
Re:have to sympathise sometimes (Score:5, Insightful)
What job is it that legally requires you to be salaried exempt? Or are you not in the US? Cuz I've never seen it. The law allows you to be exempt, your employer requires it. But they wanted to pay you overtime, they could.
Place the blame where it belongs.
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The point is, this — these aspects of employee-employer relationship — shouldn't be decided by government. Period.
The AC-grandparent is content with his job — his hours are compensated by the pay he finds satisfactory — and that's all there is to it.
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The point is, this — these aspects of employee-employer relationship — shouldn't be decided by government. Period.
No, the point is, this aspect of his job is not being decided by the government, it's being decided by his employer, and they're apparently lying about it
The AC-grandparent is content with his job — his hours are compensated by the pay he finds satisfactory — and that's all there is to it.
Apparently, given his whining about not getting overtime, he's not entirely content with his job. Or maybe he's one of those sorts who are not happy unless they're unhappy. That's certainly common enough here.
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This is to say that no, I don't have much to complain about but I could give a rats ass because a bunch of union fucks have their damn panties in a bunch.
so you would rather tear down a union that has done good things for it's members than organize to improve your own lot?
shit's gettin' crazy (Score:1)
the workers are (attempting) seizing the means of production
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People want to work, especially in the United States where culturally your job is part of your identity.
Right now only critical businesses are open, this means there are many non-critical businesses with people who want to work, but cannot. There is a temporary shortage in supply so the people are saying. Put us back to work and we will help fix this critical shortage.
Most people do not want to be on Social Security or Unemployment and would rather have a job that paid less than stay on support.
This attit
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Most factories and businesses are open, the service industry has shut down largely, but even that is being supplanted by deliveries. Most office jobs are simply shifted towards remote work and many businesses will finally realize that with the right investments in technology, they can drastically cut office space.
I don't foresee a massive economic disaster. Sure it will have an impact, but with better regulatory frameworks (eg. FDA has now proven it can do things in days and weeks while the rest of the Fede
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I don't foresee a massive economic disaster.
Of course you don't...
You think Trumps $2 Trillion dollars will fix it, and at the same time count as keeping hands off the economy.
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This attitude isn't a Conservative or Liberal Value but an American One. Americans Live to Work, vs other cultures the Work to Live. This isn't necessarily a healthy trait but it is one, that America strongly follows.
Agreed, now mention this in the same breath as UBI and watch folks here go mental.
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It is really too bad that schools are dropping Home Economics. Being a stay at home parent is a full-time job. Old school Home Ech had more then just cooking and sewing. But how to budget your home, dealing with credit, nutrition planning, time management, organization.
Hard to disagree (Score:2)
They be responsible for making the very ventilators that keep GE workers (themselves and others) surviving this thing.
Time to mobilize for war against Coronavirus.
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Re: Hard to disagree (Score:4)
Ventilators save lives (Score:2)
I read that your chances of survival are very low once your pneumonia progresses to where you need one.
My info is, yes, anecdotal, that maybe one in three to one in ten are saved by one. Doctors are claiming it is a last ditch effort to grasp at a chance of hanging on to life.
I hate it when people say "citation please", but can you point me at info claiming a 20-fold reduction in death rate from treating people with ventilators?
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You are simply ignorant.
Who are you even replying to? The person you replied to gave anecdotes of ventilator survival rates which is the topic being discussed. His anecdotes are largely backed by reality https://www.physiciansweekly.c... [physiciansweekly.com]
Your off topic rant has nothing to do with anything being discussed and just because you had a shitty medical issue doesn't make the GP ignorant.
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Ventilators are the difference between coronavirus having a 4% mortality rate and having a 0.2% mortality rate.
Citation Please. I was curious on this topic myself so I looked it up. https://www.physiciansweekly.c... [physiciansweekly.com] this article cites a number of different studies on the outcomes of advanced care. Numbers cited are:
86% mortality in the ICU in China
97% mortality from another ICU in China
66% mortality from one study in the UK
Even without the virus a ventilator still has a 36% mortality.
So basically I have found nothing to back your assertion that ventilators reduce the mortality to 5% compared to non ventilated patien
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That really depends on why they're on a ventilator. Often, it's a chronic condition that will continue to deteriorate, and the respirator is just about life extension.
In this case, it's not a chronic condition, it's COVID, and most patients (without serious pre-existing conditions) will recover as long as they can be helped through an acute symptomatic period (where they may die without a respirator).
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It's not at all clear that massive numbers of ventilators will actually help, v.s. masks and testing systems.
That really depends on why they're on a ventilator.
This is just a layman's analysis, but the CT scans and chest x-rays they are talking about "ground glass" appearance in the lungs: Good imagery here [ajronline.org]
most patients (without serious pre-existing conditions) will recover
The patients ending up on ventilators may never recover, and or will require permanent help from oxygen concentrators, because the fibroblasts and lymphocytes attacking the viral load in the lungs 'burst' the avoili and likely permanently reduce the abil
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You can't use the figures that include things like patients with COPD for patients dealing with a respiratory infection.
About 2/3 of patients who get ventilated for COVID-19 will die. Of the 1/3 who survive you'd expect nearly all of them who don't have an underlying permanent lung condition to be weaned off the ventilator.
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I think it's closer to three-fifths who die, actually, but what's your source for that 20% number? That doesn't seem very plausible to me. When the virus is gone, the inflammation goes away, and you can breathe again, unless you're brain dead. You might need supplemental oxygen, but that's quite different from bein
Distinction without much difference (Score:2)
If 3/5's of ventilator patients die, it means 40 percent of them live vs the 20 percent number for which you are demanding a citation.
If I were a cancer patient and some painful, debilitating chemo regime doubled my odds of living from 1 in 5 to 2 and 5, maybe I would go for it, but this doesn't constitute a miracle cure.
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True. The drug most likely to be miracle cure is tocilizumab (Actemra). By blocking the IL-6 antibody over-production that causes most of the lung damage, that drug and others like it seem like by far the most likely candidates for changing this from a high-mortality illness into a common cold for almost everybody.
I'll also be curious whether we see any correlation between countries with high black tea consumption and lower fatality rates, because of theaflavin-3,3'-digallate, though it probably won't ma
Easy to reject (Score:2)
This is just unions being unions — grandstanding being large part of it.
Ford and GE are gearing up for massive production of ventilators already [cnbc.com], union antics have nothing to do with it.
Is it practical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is a jet engine manufacturing plant a practical place to produce ventilators? Obviously they have a lot of specialized tooling, but is it the type of production line that would lend itself to making ventilators? Or are all of the machines too specialized? Also, how long would it take to retool and what about quality control? Since this is (I assume) totally different from producing a jet engine, how many ventilators would fail Q/C?
I have a general understanding of how both jet engines and ventilators work, but know nothing about the manufacturing of either one. I'm genuinely curious if this would make sense to do.
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It doesn't make sense. Unless you want ventilators from machined aluminum.
GE tried to bid on the ventilator craze but it proved to be unnecessary, the US, thus-far, doesn't have a shortage of ventilators, most areas have a surplus. We've only got 6x as much ventilators per capita as the NHS across the pond and even they aren't running out yet.
It's a boondoggle trying to manufacture this stuff right now. By the time they've retooled and got whatever design working and FDA approval, the crisis will be over. Y
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It seems every large company on the planet is trying to get in on the "emergency rushed ventilators" business. Why not? It lets you both stay open when you otherwise would have been shuttered, *and* is good PR.
In the end, the world is going to be paving streets with all the surplus.
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We've only got 6x as much ventilators per capita as the NHS across the pond and even they aren't running out yet.
You currently have 7.4x the number of patients than the NHS infected with COVID, and that number keeps increasing daily.
Maybe your idea of planning should be based on science and trends rather than the Trump school of preparedness.
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the US, thus-far, doesn't have a shortage of ventilators, most areas have a surplus.
LOL You truly are delusional guruevi.
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Perhaps not as practical as a factory who builds ventilators all the time. However, with some retooling, a jet engine company can probably do the job. As these companies usually have Lazer cutters or at least computerized metal punch. Metal press, 3d Printers. They can probably make ventilators at a smaller scale.
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I would imagine that the vast majority of it is CNC mills and sheetmetal machines. I'm quite familiar with metalworking and have friends in the biz.
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hahaha, why don't you go look on youtube and see what a jet engine maker has. Exactly nothing useful for making ventilators. GE has subsidiary (GE Healthcare) that is already going to quadruple production for ventillators. These jet factory workers are being obtuse.
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"I think there is a world market for about five computers^W jet engine ventilators in the world"
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Elon Musk has a history of believing he can provide useful tools in an emergency that the recipients don't want or need. [nytimes.com]
It's a feature of his narcissism.
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Given that air transportation is going to have way more supply than demand for the foreseeable future, isn't it better to get some contributions to supply shortages instead of the inevitable shutdown of the plant?
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"Is a jet engine manufacturing plant a practical place to produce ventilators?"
More useful than an empty field and 1,000 laid-off waiters.
The jet engine division is part of the same company, has facilities and equipment that are going to be idle, and about-to-be-laid-off workers with at least marginal mechanical aptitude. The healthcare division had demand that will outstrip their manufacturing capacity and equipment already designed. Obviously you are going to get lower productivity from workers that you a
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> Is a jet engine manufacturing plant a practical place to produce ventilators?
They did the math and figured that they won't have buyers for their engines soon.
GE makes medical equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why do you think the GE Healthcare facilities won't be making ventilators?
The obvious implication is that GE Healthcare has more demand than current facilities and headcount could satisfy.
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The similarity between an MRI scanner and a ventilator is not much greater than that between a jet engine and a ventilator.
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So basically if you have a supply of pure Helium the aircraft factory can make MRI machines. Good to know.
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So basically if you have a supply of pure Helium the aircraft factory can make MRI machines. Good to know.
A ventilator is basically a bunch of valves, actuators, and industrial control circuits to mix and route compressed gasses around. There is probably most of the equipment to build one laying around in a machine shop that services an aircraft factory. I'm sure the facilities that can manufacture ventilators are already going full bore, but a line that is currently producing, say HVAC for an aircraft, is probably in a better position to retool to produce ventilators or ventilator sub-assemblies than a line
GE is fine (Score:3)
It's always been my feeling that company balance sheets should be black not red. Last time I checked, GE was pretty close to being insolvent. In a choice between keeping half of your workers or keeping the company I'd choose the company. Because with no company, you have no workers.
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I have long suspected that their financials are for tax purposes only, since they pay basically zero. Much like Hollywood accounting. That is why it galls me so much to see them going to the Government looking for money. Like, if they're gonna ask money from the Feds, maybe they should try paying into it sometime. Like their workers do.
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The main line for me in given report is, that government rolls out massive support of billions and trillions, yet people are to be fired.
In my country (Lithuania), support is only given to companies, that will put effort into preserving workforce at this time of tries. Government also takes part in the coverage of idleness for the workers.
You just have to bundle whole proper package of support, binding it with the responsibilities taken.
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The main line for me in given report is, that government rolls out massive support of billions and trillions, yet people are to be fired.
Indeed if you run around losing money simply getting a loan is not going to make you stop losing money. You can't just survive on loans and debt unless you're the US Government itself.
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If you get money from the government (not even loan), its purpose is opposite to encouraging lay-offs. This has to be set hard.
Or do you have slightest notion of that being start of some New Business? If not, let the silence spell truth.
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I guess hour cuts in current state could qualify for the idleness hours, and be either completely or closely covered by the government.
Well I guess GE knows now... (Score:2)
I guess GE knows now who is on the next list to be furloughed...
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Maybe. Since we are nowhere near running out of ventilators and there are other manufacturers already better suited, it seems like this might be more about agitating than anything.
GE has a life science division (Score:5, Insightful)
gelifescinces.com
Seems to me that if any part of GE will make ventilators, it would be the life science factories and not the jet engine factories.
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Scanning machines at airports are no different to CT scanners in a hospital. The only difference is you send baggage through them and don't need to carefully control the radiation dose.
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gelifescinces.com
Seems to me that if any part of GE will make ventilators, it would be the life science factories and not the jet engine factories.
I'm sure GE didn't think of that and their life sciences division are twiddling their thumbs right now.
GE could do it. (Score:2)
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GE is doing it, their subsidiary GE Healthcare is quadrupling ventillator production and partnering with Ford and 3M so they can crank them out too.
I'm thinking these factory workers are twiiter sjw snowflakes with no common sense. Their parent company is going to making ventillators like hotcakes and they're doing symbolism over substance.
That's some big, brass balls (Score:1)
Not sure about this ... seems dangerous. (Score:2)
I don't know if I want a jet engine powering my ventilator.
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Heroes (Score:2)
WORKERS don't make the rules (Score:2)
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Convert jet engines to ventilators? (Score:1)
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