For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection.
Wow, could be be any dumber as a society? Anyone who gets vaccinated protects everyone else. We should be jabbing random stray animals who wander through the fucking vaccination sites.
I read this novel long ago, maybe when I was 8 or 9. I’d almost completely forgotten it. It presaged the liberals’ wished-for perma-lockdown future.
Asimov portrays in The Naked Sun a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians practice physical distancing, and interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as “seeing”) is seen as a repugnant chore….Sex is only practiced for reproduction when replacement of a citizen is necessary, and is considered a chore even more repugnant than seeing. A character remarks that to be in the same room with another person is “most unpleasant…. I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me.”[3]:113 A doctor has to “get hardened” to it….The Solarians’ phobia against in-person contact is so strong that a character commits suicide to avoid it.
Sound like any people you know? At least a lot of them are moving that direction for sure. Not bad for 1956.
What’s particularly weird about the Fat Acceptance movement is that because I’ve been fat, I can say authoritatively that you feel like a fucking rusty garbage can when you’re fat.
You don’t need a goddamn doctor to tell you it’s unhealthy. It’s perfectly clear from living in your own body.
So much for that mega-surge of DOOOOOM:
So weird how I have memories like “I loved school” even though I was insanely bored throughout most of school and was reading under my desk almost nonstop, and so now when I look back I think, “school was fun”! 🤦🏼♀️
— Anna Gát 🧭 (@TheAnnaGat) April 11, 2021
I haven’t retconned my memory that way. School was a nightmare, but I was also reading under my desk all the time. I still managed to read 1-2 books a day in school, down from my average 3-4.
For a while, I’d attend entire semesters of classes, barely knowing what class I was in. Often I never brought any actual schoolbooks to class for months at a time.
Another example of user-hostile tendencies out in the wild.
WordPress has decided to discontinue the “classic editor” unless I pay them for it. I can’t do this “new” editor. It doesn’t work at all for me.
I am not sure for whom the new editor is intended or what purpose it’s supposed to serve, but it’s completely impossible to use for normal blogging. I literally cannot understand what the stated purpose of it is when I read the Automattic corporate guides covering it, and I have very high reading comprehension.
Tried to use the new “editor” once. Could not figure out in half an hour how to publish a single text post. Gave up and switched back to the old one. So I wonder again what purpose does it serve? My guess is it’s corporate-aimed, to drive consulting and consulting fees in the professional WordPress dev space.
Bet I am right.
New in Bloomberg — Amtrak should focus on upgrading speeds in the northeast where intercity trains are useful and popular, not keep trying to add new routes.https://t.co/oJWgQbkavE
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 11, 2021
If Yglesias says it, you know it’s wrong. And this is! At least he’s half right. But where I come from, being half right is being all the way wrong.
What a doofus.
Larger point is that the "open web" is only being resurrected for people well-off enough to afford 60 subscriptions and for the rest, information is locked away. Which is a throwback, but to the 70s and 80s, without the shared experience of trusted over-the-air news
— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 12, 2021
The mega-project of the last decade has been to lock away all information again, to make it inaccessible, to leverage copyright to destroy fair use and free access, to make sure that the people do not and cannot know too much.
Makes ’em uppity, you know. Can’t have that.
CNN article on how to safely fly claims that 90% vaccine efficacy means that🙄 for every million who fly, we could have 100,000 infections. NO NO NO. That’s not what that number means. Also, this didn’t even happen when millions flew unvaccinated. So how could it make sense now? pic.twitter.com/4MLW5oFw4f
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 11, 2021
I see crazy shit like that all the time. I’m terribly bad at math but I’m frankly a genius when I compare my lack of ability to the crimes I see people committing against basic mathematical reasoning.
How do you get so dense, and then demonstrate it in public? Like that one mook who wrote about how up to 134% of people would have to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Just exactly how do you get so malfunctional and make such obvious mistakes?