“But none of this stuff is insurmountable – it’s just hard. We CAN do this stuff. If you were wringing your hands about unemployed truckers, good news! They’ve all got jobs moving thousands of cities inland!
It’s just (just!) a matter of reorienting our economy around preserving our planet and our species.
And yeah, that’s hard, too – but if “the economy” can’t be oriented to preserving our species, we need a different economy.
“Facebook is a criminal enterprise fully and knowingly complicit in all of this — from the spread of bigotry to the spread of pseudoscience.
Conversely, legitimate advertisers are abandoning Facebook because they want nothing to do with any of this. To remain on Facebook is to be complicit by association” (John Gruber).
“This also implies that when humor-police shows up, they are a symptom of a collective lack of understanding and of unacknowledged taboos. When we ban fun and mockery, we ban challenging insights, and we do so at our own peril” (Steven Wittens).
“Until this week, US taxpayers were literally and directly paying for the Civil War, a conflict whose origins stretch back to the earliest days of the American colonies and continues today on the streets of our cities and towns” (Jason Kottke).
“She has a new book coming on tidying up what workspace — Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life. Guest (sic.) what — I know, I won’t be picking that up — Marie Kondo’s hokum doesn’t spark joy anymore.” (Om Malik).
“Alas, Zoom’s video conferencing technology is best of breed, and because Zoom is easy to use and the quality is so high, it is exploding in popularity now that the whole world is working and socializing remotely. All of the following can be — and I believe are — true: Zoom is popular, useful, and by their own admission not trustworthy” (John Gruber).
Alas, Zoom is the service I am stuck with to do my work. Yet another reason to wish this situation to be over.
Yes! This perfectly sums up what has been bugging me about the otherwise great thing of more and more people waking up the the problems of global warming. Because, if we only focus on that threat we run a huge risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water. We need to fight climate change but we must not forget why we fight climate change!
“The new coronavirus is not an equal-opportunity killer: Being elderly and having other illnesses, for instance, greatly increases the risk of dying from the disease the virus causes, Covid-19. It’s also possible being male could put you at increased risk” (Sharon Begley).
Good news:
+ The mortality rate of Covid-19 is 5 times lower than that of SARS
+ For most people it is no worse than a common flu
+ It seems like only the elderly and especially those who suffer from a previous health condition is at risk
+ The virus is only spreading after a person has become ill and not during the incubation period
Bad news:
– No one is immune to the virus (Of course – because, this is what the main problem is)
– A vaccine will take at least a year to develop
The big unknowns seem to be, and these are my questions (not discussed in the video), how long will we restrict travel to and from northern Italy and other risk areas? Will we have to wait for a vaccine? Or is there a point when enough people, everywhere, has been infected so that it doesn’t matter anymore? And when is that point reached?
It seems that, ironically, the quicker the population get infected the quicker our problems will be over. Nevertheless,
Stay safe and healthy!
Update:This video address the questions I raise. It turns out that the answer has to do with whether we consider the disease to be an epidemic or a pandemic.