2020, the Year of Everything Fake | Hacker News Reader

2020, the Year of Everything Fake

graymirror.substack.com

27 pointserichocean24 comments

>Some readers may ask why I am not considering the failures of the White House, and making the case that the President is also a joke.

Some readers implicitly understood why when the author presented the pricipal disaster of 2020 as the death of '1/4 of all small businesses' and bailed before 20k words of statue-avi rationalist faux-erudition gave them aneuryisms.

Totally lost me at

> “IQ” is pseudoscience—no one is intelligent. There is no such thing as intelligence—just inverted stupidity.

Yeah, IQ isn't a great metric. No, the entire concept isn't bullshit.

I believe the author was being ironic, as they essentially go on to make an argument based on intelligence (von Neuman, etc.). The tone here is also a light one.

> 1/4 of all small businesses are dead.

Do you have a source for that? I mean you might be right, but I haven't heard anything like that. Also pretty much every restaurant I went to before (non-chain) and after the pandemic are open today. I know of 1 that closed permanently, with 100s of others that I frequent. Some are even expanding.

> Fourth: caring intensely about making everyone wear a mask, while not caring at all whether it’s a real respiratory filter or a paisley do-rag bandana

Most serious coverings were more effective than nothing. And from what I've seen any fashion/joke-only coverings were denied or criticised immediately.

In my country ( nordics with mask mandates ) the single layer mask is explicitly forbidden and is scientifically proven be worse than no mask at all, as single layer cloth disperses droplets making spread worse. I would be kicked out of any store if I wore a single layer mask.

In other countries the same scientific dogma states that single layer is not only allowed but even recommended as better than nothing.

Sigh...

What kind of material causes more dispersion than nothing?

I can't handle the pretentious writing style. Topic aside, the writing alone made me angry.

Edit: didn't realize this was Moldbug. Right in line with his other work.

You got really close here, but in comparing USA to Taiwan somehow assumed TPTB here want to save Americans from pain and death. Sorry, you'll have to take the class over. Don't worry, they'll give the class again very soon. We had to wait twelve years last time. Now that they've figured some things out, this class will repeat every three years at the maximum.

> It [USA] does not have a government because the thing it calls a government cannot tell its people what to do, and make them do it, which is the basic function of a government.

May be at the micro level governments should have the capacity to force involuntary action. But if it is democratic then I think by definition it is the people telling the government what to do.

I think the word he is looking for in the beginning is surreal.

> Second: after it took two days to invent a defense against the disease, spending eleven months deciding to use it. Then, eleven months later, not already having made enough for everyone.

Seriously? It took two days [citation needed] to do some chemistry, but the rest of the time making sure that that chemistry had resulted in what was actually a valid and safe vaccine against the disease. And ramping up production is hard, and you don't want to scale up the wrong lab bench process too soon.

I interpreted this as referring to masks? The immediately preceding point included the phrase "new respiratory disease". For that, masks worn in healthcare are more effective than a vaccine could possibly be, and have been for the entire year.

Read farther down, where the article elaborates on the short numbered points such as the one that the person you are replying to quoted.

That particular point gets almost 30 paragraphs of elaboration starting at the heading "Our yearlong journey to Mars".

Somehow I skimmed past that one... frankly this undermines TFA. We didn't know in February (with all the suspiciously-timed reports of mutations, do we really know now?) that this vaccine was so effective. We did know that respiratory illnesses are spread when people breathe on each other. Every other nation on earth (maybe there were exceptions, but I don't care) figured out how to get people in masks (and how to get people tested!) Why not us? TFA would like Trump to take credit for saving the rest of the world through reverse psychology, but that's goofy, and besides it emphasizes conflict more than necessary.

There is conflict, political and otherwise, in other nations. Yet somehow they were able to mask up and reduce public interaction. For the good of the public, the public needed to do something the public would prefer not to do, and in dozens of nations, the public did it. TFA is too USA-conservative to notice why.

In USA our rulers are not accustomed to bargaining with the public, because our unions are moribund. In other nations, not only unions but other collective powers as well are regularly heard by the government. In such a situation, it's obvious that people expected to stay in their homes without working need some money in order to that. That's not obvious to our politicians, because they're too busy stealing all they can for their billionaire masters. People without years of salary in the bank find their situations untenable. In other nations they would be fine.

This is like the opposite of anti-vaxx.... any-vaxx? Just shoot up millions of people and hope for the best!

flagged? because humor is illegal. everything you say or do can and will be taken literally.

HN downvoters can handle humor in small doses. A wall of text like TFA is certain to contain several phrases about which they'll have to think really hard in order to exclude the possibility of wrongthink. Humor is tough! Want to go shopping?

Yes, a lot of literal interpretation in this comments thread.

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