Year: 2020

Trisket

Chill Uncategorized

Same here. I know what I write seems the same — that is, vacillation between two poles. However, it’s all about risk and how best to manage it. Right now we are doing incredibly poorly on all axes, aided and abetted by the anti-maskers and (soon), the anti-vaxxers, with contributions as well by the stay-inside-forever libs.

We are appallingly terrible at understanding and managing risk, as a society and as individuals.

Counterfactuality

Chill Uncategorized

If everyone had worn masks from day one (when liberals were the ones saying they didn’t work and were racist) and we’d had a hard one-month lockdown, we could’ve avoided 270,000 deaths and most business would’ve been saved.

Not what happened, though, nor was it ever the likely outcome in the US with our frankly moronic notions of freedom. But it was not impossible. We just chose to not to do it and now are paying the price.

Masks work. Lockdowns work. But only if nearly all people use masks and follow the lockdown strictures, and do both when there’s no crisis already. We screwed it all up and now it’s too late. Such is life with dumbasses.

Oh DoH

Chill Regular-ass Post

DoH is just another user-hostile initiative designed to take control away from the actual person using the computer and give it to large corporations, all dressed up in the “security” excuse that you dipshits always fall for.

DoH means I lose control of my network; any telemetry can connect, and any corporate surveillance malware, with no possible way to control it. It’s an incredibly bad idea but it has been embraced because the security excuse-making and sophistry always wins.

Idieology

Chill Uncategorized

I’m interested in companies who make their products deliberately worse, like Mozilla with Firefox, even when warned of the likely result very clearly.

What’s the reason for this and why is it so hard to divert from an obviously bad path? Well, if a person can die of ideology a company certainly can do so as well. I think that’s the simplest explanation: the leaders and many of the developers of the company had an ideology, it did not comport with the actual world, and corporate death will be the result.

Further examination is interesting but that’s the core problem.

Common Drama

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think this is the most common case, actually. Most people are absolutely garbage outside of their one tiny little area.

Fury to Fine

Chill Uncategorized

Finally, someone else has noticed something I’ve observed often and that many others just deny, deny, deny.

This transition happens frequently and it’s always mysterious how quickly people forget and then reject the idea that anything was ever any different.

Stop Spread

Chill Uncategorized

The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?

Neither. Those in the the 18-29 age group are the most likely to contract Covid-19 and thus most likely to spread it. They express fewer symptoms (making them more likely to ignore it and go out/party) and have far more social contact. Therefore, they are generally the super-spreaders and should be vaccinated first and most aggressively.

This age group also has fairly heavy overlap with essential workers demographically. Vaccinate them, and you stop many spreading events. Then concentrate on the most vulnerable.

Off, Away

Chill Regular-ass Post

These ideas have been occupying most of my thoughts most of the time. Not this tweet — I mean the sub rosa intellectual upheavals behind it that have not names nor form just yet. We are now on the verge of an inevitable apocalypse — though not as most mean it, but in the original Greek sense which was that which uncovers, a revelation of some deeper truth.

We’ve automated old methods while proposing nothing new. We’ve brought the past into the future and declared it all that can be. And in fact, it is all that most can imagine. But the problem space is very large and so is the solution space. We’ve not explored even a millionth of that, and we have more capabilities now than we’ve ever had before.

The next few decades are where we test our quality, and if we find it lacking extinction is likely. But apocalypse (in that original Greek sense) brings the possibility of achieving more, of being more than we have been. What are the chances of that? Small, I think. But then again they’ve always been small. From the first rudiment of life sprung from some warm pool in the unfathomably distant past to the human being born as I type this, it was always a one in a trillion trillion chance.

And yet here we are.