A friend gets a guaranteed salary as a tenured professor at M.I.T. If he wants to drive away from his comfortable home, fight through the Boston traffic (back with a vengeance), and work all day in his office, he must comply with all of the procedures laid out at https://covidapps.mit.edu/covid-pass:
He prefers not to deal with this and therefore he has opted out of the system. What’s the consequence to him of failure to comply? He doesn’t have to commute and doesn’t have to work with students except in the rare instances when a student is able to pin him down and demand a Zoom meeting. Excluding infancy, he’s never worked less in his life.
“Get the app, do what it says, and you’ll maintain your campus access.”
Too bad that Stallman has been canceled over a Minsky related mail that has been deliberately misinterpreted by The Party. He had been predicting this for more than 30 years.
“Get the app, do what it says, and you’ll maintain your campus access.”
File this under “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.”
Scary.
The most scary thing for me is that the students kicked out Stallman over some passages in his writings in order to “feel safe”.
Now they are mindlessly following computer instructions. I guess they “feel safe” now.
It is very sad that this is happening at MIT of all places (but once you replace Scheme with Python for introductory courses, the race to the bottom has begun).
He never worked in his life, period.
That goes for most academic faculty in the US. Leeching off taxpayers is not work… work is when you make or do something other people want enough to pay for willingly.
Leeching off taxpayers? MIT is a private university. Anyway, lots of people in the US seem quite willing to pay thousands of dollars to get a university education, which by definition is taught by professors.
Your idiotic notion of work makes no sense. By that definition we would never have safety inspectors, parking inspectors, and a bunch of other unpopular jobs that are necessary to keep a society working.
I guess you never did anything for other people too, Jack. Or you wouldn’t call actually serving other people “idiotic”. Your “private” academia is mostly funded by taxpayers (and, yes, I know what I am talking about, I have “Principal Investigator” on my CV). But the real elephant in the room is the charade called “accreditation”. Without government enforcing the exclusion of upstart educational competition the traditional academia would’ve gone bankrupt long time ago. By now it’s just a scam which entices students into debt slavery for the privilege of being brainwashed into thinking that totalitarian technocracy is a good idea. All while teaching them next to no actual work skills, or work ethics. There’s a reason why high-tech is so dependent on foreigners: the products of American academia are mostly useless (except for rare cases of actual autodidacts).
@averros Please don’t distort what I wrote, I never said serving other people is idiotic. Only your narrow view of what is work. I agree with you that private academia is mostly funded by taxpayers, but so is a lot of private enterprise in America! From factories to mining to farming, a lot depend on huge government subsidies. Next you will say that farming is not work?
“From factories to mining to farming, a lot depend on huge government subsidies. ” ???
You mean on tax breaks to mitigate disastrous consequences of government policies, compensation for prohibition to trade freely tax write offs for research drilling the yields no oil? That’s how American tax code works for everyone. Investment losses and R&D are written off but the core of government income are taxes paid by enterprises, farms and individuals who are paid by these enterprises.
Are you saying that government bestows money on private enterprises and individuals and all is held together by Academia? That’s perverted view of American economic system. Why the charade of income taxes at all?
Tariffs on foreign goods are not “financing” enterprises and farms but are the major original tax that was deemed constitutional without need of constitutional amendment. No need to put cart before the horse in this discussion.
Nuts. It’ll be funny when they try to put this type stuff on real people. Wonder how fast MIT is losing HVAC employees.
The craziest of all is inclusion of item “You do not need to wait for your COVID-19 test results in order to aces campus. You may test on the day you need to be on campus…” It is set of instructions that a descended of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Vice President Frito from movie “Idiocracy” would have written. No my money would go towards MIT tuition for anyone.
I abhor the tone with which this blog treats COVID science and its desperate attempts to spread misinformation.
However, I feel the problems noted in this post do not arise from COVID scientific advice, excessive woke, or even “liberals”. Instead, they come from a nanny state that is rooted in the common law principles that so-called law-abiding conservatives have given us. These bullshit MIT procedures likely come out of a “cover my ass” fear of lawsuits, and the increasingly condescending and legalistic way that a common law system pushes against common sense. A system that punishes common sense and rewards doubling down on idiocy (just like in security theater). No one ever got arrested for being too careful, etc.
I live in Western Europe. In a country that has and is still struggling with COVID. But there is no common law system here, and common sense often prevails. Children have never had to wear masks in schools or kindergartens (a concept which is totally idiotic to anyone that has ever seen kids play). Adults wear masks while in crowded situations such as rush time subway, but not in most every day situations where distancing is possible. There are idiots on both sides: right-wing fanaticals and anti-vaxxers that occasionally are out protesting, and woke righteous people that are keen to install the privacy-invading COVID apps or double mask when driving a car with one person. But there is not pervasive takeover of society either with ludicrous “safety” procedures or with willing abandon of disease-spreading measures in the name of “freedom”. What is in the middle, common sense, prevails.
Amen!
Here’s a paradox- in certain liberal US states your mask stance etc would definitely classify you as a misinformation spreader and a very dangerous covid science denialist.
I agree with you that the “war on terror” has started security theater and dystopian measures, which now the left is happy to continue and surpass.
The tone of this blog on the other hand is satirical and funny, which I find appropriate given that #Science changes weekly.
In February 2020 masks (including KN95) were deemed useless in Germany and Covid19 was seen as just another flu. A short while later a well known virologist was spotted in the supermarket, wearing a mask (when no one else did that). Then cloth and paper masks were made mandatory in supermarkets. When KN95 became widely available again, KN95 masks were made mandatory in supermarkets. The story that Covid19 is similar to the flu has disappeared completely.
To this day, I’m not aware of any serious study that estimates the number of people who have naturally had Covid19 with mild symptoms or without realizing it. My own estimate, partly based on neighbors coughing during outbreaks, is > 50%.
Jack: I think that IM is correct. From the perspective of a typical American, you are denying #Science. Palm Beach County follows the science and children must be masked in school.
(Palm Beach County also follows the science to conclude that the same children may meet for indoor after-school basketball without masks. Science is complex!)
Separately, which Covid-19 scientific principles do you believe have been denied here by one of my posts? (And if there is such a thing as Covid science, when can it be turned into engineering so that a country can prevail over Covid?)
Ah – got it – so Jack is French and got denied admission to MIT (not because French, though).
Those two factors would explain 96% of his unpleasant personality and inchoate hostility towards the rest of us.
I’ll attribute the other 4% to poor breeding & diet.
Why is this idiotic MIT policy is a fault of Common Law? In Mascachusetts and other so called “liberal” – voting “blue” states Common Law is a curse phrase and those who adhere to it are heretics to be punished by full strength of state machine. Jack, you are for Duck Soup’s fame Rufus T. Firefly – style jerk nee policy, and Massachusetts demonstrates it, but it really shows now in Australia that has little law safeguards against it.