Better days will come – despite what the Covid doom-mongers say. I’m a cynic, and I agree with this.

The doomsters who say things like, “Even after the virus, you must still stay hiding under your bed, swathed in PPE, crying, until all your friends have forgotten you” really will greatly reduce vaccine uptake. Many liberals have made a weirdo fetish of staying indoors too, and it’s probably those same people now who are the doomsayers.

A significant number of people, including but not limited to influential voices on Twitter, have decided that there will be no “post-Covid” and that thinking we will ever return to a social life that looks like the one we left in March last year is laughable. If you mention that you’re looking forward to a summer holiday, a gig or a football game, they roll their eyes. Get real. The pandemic is here to stay and the old world is dead, idiot.

These are the same people who were proclaiming when the pandemic began that Zoom was just as good as being in person and probably the same ones who were saying back in February that not wanting to shake hands was racist.

Great article here by Zeynep about the pandemic.

Some conclusions (some go beyond exactly what she said in the piece):

1. Sweden is not a great example of anything either way.

2. The virus is overdispersed, meaning its spread is stochastic, making it hard to model and predict.

3. Cluster-busting and backward tracing are the way to contain the virus (absent vaccines).

4. Lockdowns don’t work well after a certain point of spread and many countries most successful at controlling Covid had no or little lockdown.

Most of the West, and the US in particular, took the worst part of every approach because our elites are incompetent and our societal institutions are sclerotic. Other than it greatly helping the plutes, I guess this is why the (mostly lib) worship of lockdown gestated: it seemed to be the only tool available, though it was not a particularly effective one.

Oh, the irony: about six months of my life was eaten up by trying to convince WHO that healthy people *should* wear masks and now Facebook will ban the following as misinformation. (Now, it is indeed false). Not so irony: we'll ban whatever WHO disputes for now not an ideal rule. pic.twitter.com/wHr8iYhFBn

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 8, 2021

Many events that demonstrably happened get memory-holed as “conspiracy theories,” often by the very people and orgs who had been pushing the opposite narrative only months or years before.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia….

This is bad but I miss the enthusiasm https://t.co/ao1yK0nHeY

— Jonathan Korman (@miniver) February 9, 2021

My partner and I were just discussing this the other day — reminiscing about when computers were trying to be more than bland consumption boxes.

Now that computers are a thousand times faster, we are told that everything must be completely locked down for “security,” even though computers (and here I include smartphones and tablets, etc.) are now so blazing fast we could more than easily have cutsomizability and security.

Of course everyone who is not a complete doofus knows the “security” excuse is just a lie to wrest control away from the user and give it to corporations, but most people are in fact doofuses so they are readily bamboozled by such simplistic sophistry.

We lost more than most people realize, and a lot of that history is being deliberately buried now and people who remember being gaslighted about it.

Ash Barty ends long tennis hiatus with flawless return at Australian Open.

Australia’s world No 1 knows how to do a sabbatical. She won the 2019 French Open on the back of one. Based on emphatic 6-0, 6-0 result against the unheralded Danka Kovinic….

In other words, she beat another tennis pro with the same score I would’ve lost to her with. Now that’s dominance.

I am very bad at math, but I wonder if this bit from the article is why I never found even the slightest delight or ability in math, or even in programming?

I’ve always loved figuring things out. The first time I remember feeling the problem-solving glow was in junior high in Algebra I. That giddiness that floods your stomach when you’ve been throwing your brain at something for a while, and then it finally clicks.

I don’t experience any joy like that. At all. Just anger that I wasted so much time on something so inconsequential, on such an irrelevant problem. The same with brain teasers and logic puzzles. Even when I do manage to figure them out (almost never), I’m just annoyed that it had to be done.

There is no real way of discerning the truth of it, of course, but I bet people who get at least competent at math must have some of this feeling. All I experienced was deep and abiding hatred for something wasting my time for no reason at all. And hatred is not a good way to learn.

i just found out plan b is $7 at costco no membership soooo RT to save a life

— (@dianaaso_) February 7, 2021

That’s a damn good price.