Happy Mother’s Day to those readers who identify as “mothers”!
Conversation with a 10-year-old:
- Why do they tell us to wear masks and avoid crowds if we can’t catch coronavirus?
- When adults want children to do something for their benefit, one good strategy is to tell the children that it is actually for their own benefit.
- Like Mother Gothel in Tangled!
For readers unfamiliar with this epic retelling of the Rapunzel story, the senior citizen Mother Gothel (a witch who identifies as Rapunzel’s mom) keeps the healthy 18-year-old imprisoned by telling her that the outside world is full of danger and peril.
Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this towerThat’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear
Guess I always knew this day was coming
Knew that soon you’d want to leave the nest
Soon, but not yetListen to your mother
It’s a scary world out there
Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear
Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes
The plague
(Lyricist Glenn Slater should get a prize for that last line!)
Although the typical Covid-19-tagged death in Massachusetts is of an 82-year-old with “underlying conditions” (more than 98 percent), our media tends to feature healthy young people cut down in their prime by the evil virus, an ever-present lurker in any activity that young people might formerly have enjoyed. The result is a remarkably high number of healthy young people isolating themselves out of personal fear, just as Rapunzel isolated herself voluntarily until shortly before the movie picks up her story.
I think the “young people shouldn’t care because it won’t kill them” argument is flawed for a couple of reasons:
1. We can see that restaurants, bars, music festivals, etc. won’t ever reopen and the economy won’t recover until the problem is at least reasonably under control. So to the extent that we selfishly violate the rules for short-term gain, it’s like playing iterated prisoner’s dilemma with the strategy “defect, defect, defect.” We’d all be better off if the government could get everyone to knock if off for a while.
2. There are many things short of killing you that are deeply unpleasant. Imagine I told you I have a restaurant where I can guarantee you you won’t die from eating the food (you’re excited already, right?), but there’s a high likelihood you’ll get norovirus which will cause you to vomit and have diarrhea all day and night for 48 hours. Your other options are to order delivery or stay home and cook your own food. How compelling is that restaurant experience going to be? Regarding the idea going around that all young people can get this virus once and then we’ll have permanent immunity, I’m not sure where this idea is coming from. Many viruses have multiple strains and/or the immunity is short-lived.
3. Even if a young person is willing to get sick to try to support the local economy or something, this isn’t purely about them; imagine I give you a button that you can press to earn a million dollars, but doing so will also kill a random person in your community. That may or may not be compelling depending how selfish you are. Now what if instead of certainly killing a person, there’s only a 1% chance of killing someone, but instead of getting a million dollars, you get to see Cats in a theater instead of waiting a few months and streaming it on YouTube. How compelling is that? Young people have to live with the consequences of their actions for a long, long time.
4. This virus has only existed for about six months: no one knows what the long-term effects are.
Of the people killed by/with Covid-19 in Massachusetts thus far, roughly 1.3 percent have been under the age of 50. For all of the deaths, more than 98 percent had “underlying conditions”. (See https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-may-9-2020/download )
If we ignore the “underlying conditions” and assume that Covid-19 would kill 240,000 Americans total (the worst-case official estimate that I have seen), that would be about 3,000 under-50-year-olds who might die from Covid-19. That’s far lower than their risk of driving and yet these people don’t cower at home afraid to go out on the highway. Why couldn’t the under-50s carry on with their lives while the elderly/vulnerable cower?
“Why couldn’t the under-50s carry on with their lives while the elderly/vulnerable cower?”
Cause Boomers have FOMO and political power.
PS was denied membership in a gliding club because I am a corona nonbeliever. Pretty funny.
We can agree that the idea of the chinese aids (meme), is worse than the the actual virus (gene). So shut down the main dispersers of the meme: facebook, google, reddit, twitter, amazon, and their subsidiary sites. They provide nothing essential.
How can you tell a company spreads the chinese aids meme? If a company discourages or bans the use of the term ‘chinese aids’, it is spreading the fear meme. Let people bittorrent freely. Copying is a basic human right and the source of all human progress.
Let German power metal inspire us.
In the sky a mighty eagle
Doesn’t care ’bout what’s illegal
On its wings the rainbow’s light
It’s flying to eternity
Eagle fly free
Let people see
Just make it your own way
Leave time behind
Follow the sign
Together we’ll fly someday
Helloween — Eagles Fly Free
https://www.last.fm/music/Helloween/_/Eagle+Fly+Free
P.S. Reddit has turned on Elon Musk since he became a freedom fighter.
@mememe: Jeez I would have thought Reddit would be jumping up and in joy for his new baby “X Æ A-12”. For those of you not familiar with Musk’s partner Grimes (one name, no last name, but before she transcended humanity her name was Claire Elise Boucher), she’s the one Elon credits with the choice.
Musk says: “”First of all, my partner is the one that, actually, mostly, came up with the name,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said. “Yeah, she’s great at names.”
Yeah. Great at names. Better tell her to stay the f*** away from the kitchen and anything sharp, poisonous or flammable, though. The kid, too. I guess it’ll be OK with his cyborg pals on the Moon.
For all the people not accustomed to naming their children after process control robots and industrial washing machines, that’s “X” as in Generation X, Æ which is the “Elven spelling of A.I.” and A-12, referencing the Lockheed A-12 spy plane, precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird.
Personally I was going for “Maximus Musk” or something related to viral replication like “Polycistron.”
Mother Gothel keeps Rapunzel locked in the tower because of the life-sustaining qualities of her magical hair, without which she turns to dust. The problem for a lot of people in the real world is that they’re not getting treatment for very serious conditions that affect both their morbidity and mortality. The “magical hair” is in the hospitals people are avoiding, or have been told to stay away from.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-coronavirus-real-death-toll-covid-29-cases-a9504911.html
“She added: “Some things will be very hard to trace. If you present late for your cancer biopsy, and so you’re diagnosed two or three or four months later than you otherwise would have. And that impacts your survivability in a way that plays out over many years. We’ll never capture that probably. I mean, how do you capture something that’s subtle like that?”
At the same link, bottom of the page: it seems the mayor of Las Vegas is now facing a recall petition as the result of her offering Vegas as a “control group” for reopening in her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. She’s one politician who wanted to let Rapunzel out of the tower and now she might get kicked out of her tower at city hall.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/las-vegas-coronavirus-control-group-mayor-recall-carolyn-goodman-doug-polk-a9506291.html
The part of the US hit hardest by coronavirus so far is NYC and the surrounding areas, where many people take public transit instead of driving a car. So your assumption that the people affected are willingly accepting the risk of driving a car or are even capable of driving one if they feel unsafe taking public transit might be incorrect.
Protecting the elderly while letting everyone else get infected was basically Sweden’s strategy but turned out to be completely unworkable unless everyone who works at a nursing home quarantines for two weeks before starting their shift and then lives in the nursing home for an extended period of time. In the US, roughly a third of the population is over 50, 40% of adults are obese, and 10% are diabetic, so any solution that only works for “young healthy people” ignores probably most of the population. If you look at the people running our country, they’re in the prime risk group for getting seriously ill or dying, and keep getting exposed to the virus despite essentially unlimited access to testing. What happens then? Even if this strateegy worked, it would mean that an awful lot of parents can’t ever safely see their kids again.
One of my first thoughts back in March when I was preparing my taxes (which ended up getting postponed a few months) was, “I have to waste my time and money filing four tax returns (federal, NJ, NY, and CA) to a bunch of governments that are totally useless and are clearly not capable of solving this problem. Why should I not pack up and move to Hong Kong or Singapore?” The US is looking more and more like a nation in decline. The writing is on the wall. I went to China five years ago and had to make sure I was vaccinated for typhoid and hepatitis A (diseases that are spread through poor handwashing), I thought, “this country seems to have problems with infectious diseases.” Now five years later, the situation is totally reversed. When I watch a video of people going to nightclubs in Taiwan (because they have the virus under control, not because they’re committing human sacrifice in a misguided attempt to save their economy), I feel like how I imagine Boris Yeltsin must’ve felt walking through an American supermarket.
I wonder if it makes sense for elder care facilities to have associated hotels in which all workers can be quarantined as soon as the plague hits. The hotels can be open for the general public in non-plague times. When a plague is declared, the public guests get kicked out, the place is Chloroxed, and the elder care workers move in for two months (or two years, depending on how abundant the abundance of caution is). Of course, the workers get extra pay for this period.
It’s not clear cut, and certainly should generate some debate, nor is it an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-5, but I’m surprised more people haven’t mentioned Stockholm Syndrome in connection with otherwise healthy people who are, effectively, imprisoning themselves. They may be doing it for various “good reasons” but it certainly is difficult and for some, traumatic, and it’s going to influence their behavior for many years, even after the restrictions have been lifted. On a couple of occasions you’ve asked why younger people don’t rebel to this? How is it possible that so many young people, who in ordinary times can’t stop themselves from disobeying their parents’ restrictions (which are, after all, mostly intended to protect them, oftentimes because their parents learned the hard way) but in the days of COVID-19 don’t seem to be rising up and rebelling against it all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
I mention it also because many of the people who are cooping themselves up at home are already suffering or are going to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
I think the lockdowns are going to cause people to feel burnt out because the people complying are changing their behavior for months but still seeing the US fail to contain the coronaplague. It’s exactly the same feeling as being a software engineer and working long hours for months only for reasons that feel outside of your control to cause your project to result in failure or your promotion to be denied.
Of course, the “lockdowns” are only partially imposed from above: e.g. there are people in New York who can’t see their significant others because they live with their parents who are at risk for serious illness if they contract coronavirus from their kids. The government saying, “ok, we changed our minds, go back to your normal routines” without actually getting the problem under control doesn’t change any of that.
There’s also some peer pressure at play. If you’re working from home but start screwing around and have to take sick leave, all your coworkers will know you’re a doofus who can’t follow the rules.