Category: Human nature

Sean Connery as an inspiration for American suburban life

by philg

From one of our Facebook friends:

RIP, Sir Sean Connery. Your impact on my childhood and becoming a man cannot be understated. Thank you.

This led to a mystified chat discussion. The guy who posted this has been married for 25 years, works at a desk job, never does anything without first asking his wife for permission, never expresses an opinion that he and/or his wife think might upset the town’s cabal of stay-at-home moms, and is an apparent slave to his high school-age daughters. What was the connection between James Bond and the suburban soccer dad? How had Danny Dravot’s attempts to take over Afghanistan in The Man Who Would Be King inspired his trips to Costco?

Also, if Joe Biden delivers on his promise to shut down the United States, do we start calling Anthony Fauci “Dr. No”?

Related:

  • Wikipedia reveals the inclusive nature of the U.K. Connery was knighted by the Queen in 2000 despite (a) living in the Bahamas to minimize income tax liability, and (b) supporting Scottish independence.
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Fears in the 1990s versus fears in the Age of Corona

by philg

Happy Halloween! Let’s consider how our fears have evolved.

In the 1990s, we were afraid of the following:

  • The government would invade our privacy via CCTV cameras when we were out walking around.
  • Microsoft would crush upstart competitors by bundling software with similar capabilities into their monopoly operating system. This could cost each of us $100 or more.
  • Everyone will be killed by HIV/AIDS
  • What else?

Fears today:

  • We don’t have to worry about CCTV cameras on the sidewalk since (a) it might be illegal to be out on the sidewalk to begin with, (b) if it were legal, we’d have to wear a mask.
  • Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, et al. will deplatform anyone who disagrees with what they deem to be RightThink on a wide range of issues.
  • Everyone will be killed by COVID-19
  • What else?

A friend’s minivan, decorated by a recent high school graduate…

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Humans are defeating nanny tech in cars?

by philg

A typical new car has a lot of driver assistance features designed to make driving safer. Examples from Toyota:

(Blind Spot Monitor and Rear Cross-Traffic Alert are separate features, not on all trim levels.)

And the latest, for the 2021 Camry:

But insurance companies don’t cut rates for cars that have these features (source). Here are some possible explanations…

  • highway driving is already very safe and most of these magic features, e.g., blind spot monitor and lane-keeping, work only on the highway
  • humans aware of these electronic guard rails drive more carelessly to the point that the risk is the same
  • the insurance market is inefficient
  • the technology does not, in fact, work well in real-world conditions (our Honda Odyssey blind spot monitoring works great, though, which might be why this fine machine is the choice of Amy Coney Barrett!)

Readers: How do we explain the apparent contradiction?

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Time to love smokers again?

by philg

Strolling by the smokers’ ghetto outside one of our local airport’s FBOs made me wonder when it will be time to abandon our fanaticism regarding the occasional whiff of tobacco smoke. We are certain that any of our fellow humans may kill us with a breath of coronavirus. Why do we worry about the unpleasantness of someone smoking a cigarette 5′ from an exterior door versus 20′? Do we still need Mini-Mike Bloomberg’s 2011 ban on smoking in various outdoor places, such as beaches and parks?

Do we have the energy to fight the anti-smoking battle at the same time as the anti-coronaplague battle? When do we admit that we’re not as capable as Adolph Hitler and his loyal Germans and even they had trouble fighting on multiple fronts?

I’m not a smoker, but I’m now ready to welcome my smoking brothers/sisters/binary resisters with a hearty “You could be exhaling a lot worse!”

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Timelock refrigerator and/or kitchen doors for work-from-home fatties?

by philg

Our national strategy for dealing with a virus that attacks fat people has been to order everyone to stay home and make trips to the fridge every 15 minutes since mid-March.

Since our coronapanic lifestyle shows signs of becoming permanent, how about the following: timelocks on the refrigerator and/or kitchen doors so that cower-at-home Americans can hit the fridge only at mealtimes? No more midnight snacking. No more second breakfast.

Readers: Would this be a good strategy for minimizing the Covid-19 death rate going forward (a thinner population is a safer population!) and also for minimizing the deaths associated with our shutdown?

Bacchus, from my Boboli Gardens photos (on film!).

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Nobody cares about the Beirut explosions?

by philg

When there is a massive explosion in the middle of a city of more than 2 million people, you might expect people around the world to be interested. Certainly that was true in 1917 when, despite World War I going on, people were interested in the Halifax Explosion (see “City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion” for some excerpts from a good book on the subject).

Some graphics from the NYT, taking a rare break from Trump hatred:

Let’s consider my Facebook feed as a good proxy for what the coastal righteous care about. None of my friends care about this explosion! Here is a list of topics from the past few hours:

  • Covid-19 will permanently damage everyone whom it infects, even if it doesn’t kill everyone
  • Trump appointed an anti-abortion person to something
  • whether flight instructors should work in the age of Covid-19 (posted by a Shutdown Karen CFI)
  • Trump struggles to say ‘Yosemite’ at White House speech
  • various articles about whether America’s unionized public school teachers can be forced to work and whether America’s non-unionized private school teachers can be forced to not work
  • exhortations to wear masks more and “more better” (covering the nose, for example!)
  • 2015 Tianjin explosions (loosely related!)
  • “So far 2020 is like looking both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by an airplane” (a meme that could apply to Beirut!)
  • a post about how Republican leadership is bad for the U.S. economy
  • stuff about what will happen when Trump refuses to leave office in January 2021 (with opinions by “experts” on the subject of something that has never happened, i.e., a U.S. president refusing to hang over the reins)

Is it fair to say that Covid-19 primarily affects the mind? Americans (nearly all of my Facebook friends are American) no longer think about anything but their personal welfare with respect to Covid-19 (the Trump-related stuff counts because these people believe that the Great Father in Washington can determine whether or not they are infected).

Related:

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Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition?

by philg

Back in 2016, I wrote “Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.?”, pointing out various advantages for American society if we could reduce alcohol consumption. This proposal was not well-received!

What about in the Age of Corona? Technocrats are gearing up for a massive testing and tracing operation. Example: “Here’s A Way To Contain Covid-19 And Reopen The Economy In As Little As One Month” (Forbes, by a Boston University econ professor). Excerpts:

The solution is PCR group-household testing of all American households every week. … If a household tests negative, each household member would be notified to go to their local pharmacy to receive a green wristband coated to change to red after one week.

This system is voluntary. But if you choose to have your household tested and receive your green wristband, you’ll be permitted by your employer to return to work, by your teachers and professors to return to school, and by proprietors to enter their restaurants, shops, cafes, etc. You’ll also be allowed to frequent the beach, attend concerts, go to the movies, …

Any household that tests positive will be required by the local board of health to quarantine in place for two weeks and then be re-tested. Households that don’t voluntarily get tested will be free to come and go as they wish. But without their green bracelets, they will have a hard time entering into workplaces and other establishments. Employers who hired the untested could face legal liability. The same holds for any business serving the public who lets someone onto their premises without a green bracelet.

My Dutch friend: “This will be just like it was for Jews after the Nuremberg Laws and similar. They were perfectly free, but couldn’t run a business, buy a movie ticket, or go to school.”

Electronic bracelets can also work: “People-tracking wristbands tested to enforce lockdown” (BBC). See also “US, Israel, South Korea, and China look at intrusive surveillance solutions for tracking COVID-19” (zdnet)

Covid-19 is a pernicious disease. It has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide so far. But what if we could use the above technology and infrastructure to stop a much more destructive killer: alcohol. WHO says that 3 million deaths worldwide are attributed to alcohol. The average age of a death with/from Covid-19 in Massachusetts is 82 and more than 98 percent of those who died had “underlying conditions.” Alcohol often kills people who could have lived for another 40-100 years. In terms of life-years, therefore, we could save many more by discouraging alcohol consumption.

(Is Covid-19 different because an alcohol-related problem is due to a failure of personal responsibility? Consider the child of an alcoholic or a passenger in a car struck by a drunk driver.)

Given that people can brew their own beer or distill their own vodka, presumably it is not possible to achieve a 100 percent reduction in alcohol consumption. But if restaurants, bars, and airlines (to the extent any are left) were not offering alcohol to every customer and there were no convenient liquor stores (“essential”!), wouldn’t it be fair to expect at least a 10 or 20 percent reduction in alcohol-related deaths? (marijuana consumption increased following legalization in Washington State; shouldn’t we expect alcohol use to be reduced following prohibition?)

Since Americans have now decided that “saving lives” is more important than what used to be considered individual rights… If we succeed with alcohol prohibition using test/trace tech, why not use the same technology to attack HIV/AIDS, which has killed more than 700,000 Americans? (Covid-19 would have to kill 7 million Americans to take away a comparable number of life-years, due to the much younger age at which HIV/AIDS victims perish.) There continue to be 6,000 deaths annually here in the U.S., which is roughly comparable to the life-years lost from 60,000 Covid-19 deaths.

None of these public health interventions were doable in the 20th century. Epidemiologists predicted that HIV/AIDS would spread beyond the LGBTQIA+ community and kill millions of Americans. White upper-middle-class single Americans were terrified in the 1980s by this disease that merited cover stories of TIME magazine multiple times. Nobody would have tolerated the criminalization of sex outside of marriage in order to “save lives”. Today, however, there is no limit on the power of the government when there is a public health goal. (Maybe outlaw all sexual activity? If people want children they can be imported via immigration and/or produced locally and without HIV risk via IVF.)

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Is it more difficult to be a mother today compared to 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago?

by philg

From our local public radio station: “I Love My Kids But I Loathe Mother’s Day — Especially This Year”.

… our culture has a pretty long rap sheet of under-appreciating women. And day in and day out, those moms tend to not get the credit they deserve because they make so much look easy: holding together infinite moving parts to accomplish the mission of the family machine, plus adding glitter. Metaphorical glitter. Sometimes real glitter, added by real children. Which the moms are usually stuck cleaning up.

The truth is, of course, that at this moment nothing’s okay for anybody. And I get that it isn’t the holiday’s fault that we need to adjust gender and work roles and laws and unwritten rules. But right now, it’s easier to imagine a marginally improved version of Mother’s Day (minus the false pedestal mess) than to dare to dream of civilizational change.

Solidarity, moms. Each and every one of you: Happy sub-optimal holiday in these sub-optimal times to some of the most superoptimal people on Earth.

In other words, something humans have been doing for 200,000 years is now intolerably burdensome, despite a climate-conditioned home packed with labor-saving machines.

Readers: Is motherhood in fact now more burdensome than in earlier eras? Or it was always intolerably burdensome, but mothers did not have as many outlets for complaining about the burden so we don’t how unhappy women were in Ancient Athens, Siddhattha Gotama’s India, or the China of Confucius?

Related:

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Your lockdown may vary: Senior Epidemiologist Edition

by philg

From last month, https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/15/your-lockdown-may-vary/:

Are we actually all in this together? I talked to four friends from the aviation world in the last few days. One is isolated on 40 acres of oceanfront with 12,000 square feet of interior space, a dock with a sailboat and a power boat (not in the water yet this season), jogging trails, a tennis court, a hotel-size home gym, etc. One is isolated on 90 acres of ocean inlet with more than 8,000 square feet of interior space, a pool, a tennis court, a dock with multiple boats. One is on 20 acres of oceanfront over in Europe (in a country that is smart enough to do load balancing of patients to hospitals). One is in a city in a southern state with ample health system capacity. He’s on more than 2 acres with more than 13,000 square feet of interior space.

(I found out later than my friend on 2 acres also owns 200 acres of land a 15-minute drive away and goes there for dog walks.)

What about the epidemiologists who are promoting lockdowns for the benefit of the general public? I previously noted “Shutdown decisions are made by people with no skin in the game; when would they ever decide to reopen?”

Now it seems that at least one epidemiologist is involved with some skin… “Imperial scientist Neil Ferguson whose advice led to lockdown being introduced QUITS government role after ‘breaking the restrictions to meet his married lover'” (Daily Mail):

  • Prof Ferguson has been a vocal supporter of lockdown, continually telling the public to follow the restrictions
  • However, he has now admitted he allowed his married lover to travel across London to visit him at least twice
  • Antonia Staats, 38, lives with her husband, in his 30s, and two children in a £1.9 million house in south London

The tabloids used to have to make up stuff like this!

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