Anecdotally, a friend of mine has attempted to hire homeless people on multiple occasions to help him in residential demolition projects (no clean clothes, resume, or shower necessary). In one instance, he scheduled work for the following day and zero out of 8 people showed up. I'm sure there's homeless people that would like to work their way of the situation, but I don't think they are in the majority. Any solutions to this problem need to be more realistic about the motivations and intentions of the group they're trying to assist.

Anyone ever worked on something like this or have any idea where to start looking for providers? The industry itself seems rather opaque.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333435

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Once you've got the workflow in place, finding an assistant is really just a process of elimination. You can easily find someone with C1 English skills for less than $10/hour on Upwork.

You'll need to filter through a bunch of bad ones to get to a good one, but again, this is an upfront time investment. Establish expectations early and fire quickly at the first sign of issues. Trying to "make it work" is worse than accidentally losing a good candidate.

I would also encourage you to post it as a full-time position, as you don't want to be competing with other clients (you still will, but if you're their primary professional focus that pays the rent, you won't lose out in most deadline situations).

Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.

The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.

The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.

For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.

I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.

The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.

This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.

Is there a standardized/best practice way to do this? Some convention for file names or format?