Loons

Man, Covidians are a hoot. The only one of those that is meaningfully true is the first point: Covid is airborne.

The rest are distractions or minuscule or irrelevant. Pandemic is essentially over (for most people). Herd immunity definitely happened — it just wasn’t sterilizing and neither were vaccines.

Listen to Zeynep, not these loons. They’ll steer you into paranoia every time because it benefits them to do so.

Mandatory

There was a science fiction book I read a while ago where someone who’d experienced the effects of time dilation emerges into a future where there is mandatory homosexuality. It’s not seen as a bad or a good thing (from the meta perspective of the book), just something that happens.

The people of the future this character emerges into see relationships between men and women as too fraught and dangerous — and primitive — so society moves to enforced compulsory same-sex relationships only. I was thinking about this in relation to how many (mostly) feminists wish to make being attracted to someone else morally verboten, or not permitted until it’s (somehow) authorized. The future portrayed in the book is a somewhat-likely future for us too I guess.

I can’t remember the book, though. It’s hard sometimes when you’ve read thousands of them.

Informal

Formal methods are too difficult and time-consuming. Formal methods increase the development time and cost 1,000x to 10,000x (or more), so can only be used for absolutely-must-work software and even then, usually only crucial parts of that software.

This will pretty much always be the case, so formal methods are not the solution we are looking for.

Common Comment

Most commenting rules usually specifically prohibit commenters from discussing the one part of the whole area of inquiry that I find interesting or would want to know about, examine, and dispute, so that’s why I almost never comment anywhere.

It probably makes sense from a community perspective but means forums and such are banal and pointless for me.