Regarding Trump and his immunocapitalist behavior: I understand the position of the "Great Barrington Declaration" would be to make a majority of the population "acclimated" as soon as possible. Only lock down the vulnerable population. This could be effective because covid is not as deadly as yellow fever and not dangerous to a significant portion of the population. Setting aside all the Fauci political piss matching, I do wonder what might have happened with that approach.
> Regarding Trump and his immunocapitalist behavior: I understand the position of the "Great Barrington Declaration" would be to make a majority of the population "acclimated" as soon as possible. Only lock down the vulnerable population. This could be effective because covid is not as deadly as yellow fever and not dangerous to a significant portion of the population.
Hindsight 2020 (pun intended)
> I do wonder what might have happened with that approach.
2022 would have happened in 2020: we would have saved 2 years.
Right now in 2022, as most people have stopped caring, don't wear mask etc, I'd say the majority of the population has acclimated, while a minority is trying to hold back and use FUD for favor their preferences.
I don’t think if we went fully uncaring of the pandemic in 2020 we would have the same results in 2022. We didn’t have vaccines, antiviral drugs, knowledge of how to treat, a less pathological strain in circulation, etc. in 2020.
The Great Barrington declaration did not suggest "going fully uncaring" just that our efforts should have been targeted rather than generalized to the whole. I too wonder what this would of looked like. Children would've absolutely had an easier time of it if we did.
it didn't even require a "great declaration" to realize, as a thinking layperson, in ~april 2020 that this pandemic was serious but not nearly as deadly as the bubonic plague or the spanish flu, and that the elderly and unhealthy were disproportionately affected. that in turn made it obvious that targeted efforts were the right approach, but both parties were unwilling to do the right thing and let the opportunity pass for wielding and centralizing political power.
I used to live across the street from Golden Gate Park. I saw a homeless guy walk out of the park proceed to pee in the bushes next to our front door. In a moment of weakness I ran outside and yelled at him that he should be peeing in the GIANT PARK RIGHT THERE <gestures with hand>. I got a blank stare which is what I deserved....
Like many decisions in life, it may just depend on the spirit with which a plan is carried out. If it's intended to help the homeless, even a bad plan will likely do good. If it's only intended to get the dirty people out of my eyesight, then it will probably do harm. How do we know the spirit with which a state-level plan will be carried out? Not sure. The plan will not dictate how they would be treated on a personal level once on this fantasy isle.
My experience with the homeless has instilled that it can be very difficult to help them in a way that I would consider helping. I always accuse my wife of believing that each homeless person is just one protein bar away from becoming a contributing member of society. But if I convince you that many homeless people have a best case scenario of net negative to society, what do you propose then? Probably just help them as much as we can? I think there are probably best paths, but no total wins.
This is all based on my experience volunteering at homeless shelters (in SF) and trying to interact with the homeless near me (now in NC). 100% anecdotal. But now I'm just another member of society shrugging at the homeless. I suspect most of us here are. Lots of strong opinions, but not much action. I'm guilty of that too now.
7 years ago I left silicon valley and moved to Raleigh, NC. It was part of our grand plan to move all the extended family back to the same area.
As part of this move I became involved with a couple manufacturing companies. I couldn't help but start helping with their IT set ups. I built some web apps to provide access to information locked up in their horrible ERP/MRP systems. 7 years later and these folks still call me a hero. Some simple web apps made a significant improvement to their productivity.
What I did was not rocket science. But it required spending time to understand the business, their workflow, and the bottlenecks. The solutions were simple after all that time was spent. The work ended up being very rewarding. There were no project managers, so I was full stack from the metal to the end user. It was also not bogged down by scaleability / uptime concerns. If something crashes, my user base is something like 30 people. I deploy with an ssh and git pull.
Anywho, I hope you get my point. I'd love to help Elon throw someone at Mars and he's my hero on many levels. But your simple IT skills could make you something of a small pond Elon for lots of non silicon valley people.
I started last year and inherited a horrific ERP system (and ancillary code for things like production scanners).
They realised they needed an ERP but they where unlucky in who they got to build it, things I take for granted as simple things to do (an interactive timeline showing job start stop, per user/department in d3) has had a massive impact on how they run things (it surfaced issues around job tear down/turnover).
Efficiency against estimate tracking (it's a table that's red/green if over under) in real time again made a huge difference since it surfaced issues with optimistic estimates from some operators and pessimistic estimates from others).
That matters because it throws off capacity planning and pricing on jobs (we go in too high, too low, too high we might lose the job, too low we take the hit on profits).
All vanilla stuff really.
None of this stuff is particularly difficult (refactoring parts of the existing shitpile are but that's because it's one gigantic pile of mud).
The fundamental problem is that there was a disconnect between the business and the specification of what they wanted, they didn't know enough to know what they could have asked for and the original devs didn't think about how they could improve on the existing business flow at all (I'm not even convinced they even considered the business in a lot of cases..).
In terms of users, about the same 50 on a typical day and I have a similar level of control, from the hardware we buy to the OS to the framework to the programming languages to well everything, it's an awesome feeling of freedom to be able to pick the correct tool for the job.
Technology applied properly can still have a multiplicative effect for a lot of SME's, there is still a vast amount of low-hanging fruit out there.
I'm early into doing this same process right now for a somewhat larger facility. Capacity planning, product tracking, estimating lead times, etc. will make a huge difference in how the facility is run.
I'm an industrial engineer who deals with a fair bit of the IT side of manufacturing. I will echo the bit about it being very rewarding. It'd be cool to deploy something to millions of people, but there's something about making a physical thing work better that's just really cool. It's also way easier to explain to friends and family what you do.
Exactly. You don’t need a 4-10 year degree in CS to solve them.
However, actual rocket science and other hard engineering disciplines is where educated talent is needed. Yet, the salary and startup opportunities are so much worse, that many mechanical and electrical engineers end up working in IT, consulting etc. You don’t build rockets, airplanes, cars or energy plants for the money
Instead of basic income, what if "basic needs" were all free: Food, shelter, healthcare, and recreation. Money would only be free for people who work. Money gives the freedom to do consume goods that are not free.
Sigh. And now to tear down my own thought. Maybe "free basic needs" works (psychologically) for everyone reading HN. But I'm afraid it could destroy a percentage of the population. If someone has no fundamental drive to work, what happens to him/her when work is unnecessary? Hunger is a pretty good motivator. Maybe working any job is better than not working at all (i.e., better for our our mental state). I guess what I'm saying is this: once we meet everyone's basic needs and remove desperation, we still have the problems inherent to idleness.
I don't understand all these posts worrying about "What would a person do without a job." What do retired people do? What do kids do during summer vacation? They live a relaxing and enjoyable life, spending time with friends and family, and pursuing their interests. Sounds good to me!
Some people who retire die of it. Being told by society that you are no longer useful can kill. Obviously, that's not true of most people, but it does happen.
However, I do think the main reason it happens is also because it is accompanied by the ambient message that those who don't work are worthless, drains on society. If not working was more accepted, the death rate of retirement would likely be much lower.
The research shows this is an extremely tiny portion of the population. The vast majority of people will find some kind of productive enterprise.
It seems paradoxical but giving homeless people free housing with no strings attached tends to end with them getting a job and rejoining society. They almost never just lay around all day doing nothing.
It's one of the last great Victorian lies still infecting us today.
What coincidental timing! I was just listining to Johann Hari's "Everything we know about addiction is wrong" TED talk[0].
His central premise is that the drug policies of the last 100 years have marginalized and disconnected addict populations. His proposal is that connection is the opposite of addiction.
Interesting to hear temporally adjacent to the idea you express -- providing the means for marginalized populations to rejoin society should be priority #1.
and all the other social groups humans form, in the order of priority being group size smallest to least.
Emotions are the definable channel to that "gene preserving" desire.
Everything we do in life is to achieve a certain emotional state (think about it). We don't want money. We want what it will mean to us (e.g. security, power, fun, freedom, etc.). We don't want a relationship, we want what it will mean to us (love, belonging, etc.).
Nature's calibrated human has his emotions correctly / optimally linked to spreading and preserving his and other humans' genes.
"Do you honestly believe everything humans do isn't done out of self interest?"
Yes, I do. I believe that I have personal experience of people doing thing detrimental to themselves, that they know are detrimental to themselves, that they do willingly. We are capable of overriding our emotional and physical reactions.
I suspect you have already decided on your conclusion, and will fit all evidence to that conclusion.
The social pressure of always being video recorded could be interesting. Same pressure you feel writing something on facebook: "What will my Mom think of this comment..." Now you see someone with Google Glass show up at the party and it's time to put your video persona on (and your pants).
