antiSingularity

Oddly enough, microwaving frozen mice was one of the very first non-radar applications of the microwave magnetron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

Sorry, what "moral high ground" did it ever have? SV is just a place for smart people to create interesting new toys, and has developed an incredibly predatory and monopolistic VC-funded business practice in the process. For some reason, its inhabitants have determined that this makes them morally superior to everyone else.

Does blaming the declining mental and physical state of previously healthy people on "lockdowns" also get vaguely political? My wife and I did not come near to breakdowns as we tried to care for our young family through the lockdowns and restrictions because of Covid itself, I can tell you that much.

In my opinion, blaming it on the pandemic is misleading, and hides the true cause of our problems. As I said, supply chains are disrupted because everyone was confined to their houses and completely changed their consumer and business spending habits. Referring to the title of this article, Intel NIC orders are not disrupted because all of the factory workers are dead of Covid. They are disrupted because supply and demand of all goods has radically changed, and our modern way of life depends on a very fragile balance of the flow of goods being maintained.

As I also pointed out, we will also never know how much good we actually did. You can tell me it's "obvious" that it did, but there's no evidence to back that up.

They also released vidoes of people literally dropping in the street "with Covid".

You've got that mixed up. The reason that supply chains are in disarray are because of the enormous disruption caused by Covid restrictions and lockdowns, not because people were literally dying of Covid on the job.

You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).

A parent suffers from a genetic condition, which makes that an accurate description of their lives when symptoms are bad. Very sadly, their response to the AZ vaccine has made that a daily occurance for the past 6 months.

I too have a long term view of this whole situation, and based on what I see of the never-ending impositions on our every day lives that have removed all trace of many things that made life pleasant, easier, and civilized, have taken steps to ensure that my family do not suffer un-necessarily.

And how exactly does me getting vaccinated protect someone else? I understand that you will probably be outraged by me even asking this question, but I am for real. The official messaging here in the UK has recently removed the vague suggestion that being vaccinated protects others.

If you bring out the usual line that "being vaccinated stops you having such bad symptoms and thus passing it on to others", then surely that means I would have a higher chance of being asymptomatic if I do still catch Covid, and thus not knowing if I am putting others at risk? I suppose you might tell me that's why I need to also regularly test, but then why get vaccinated?

>I'm sorry for them - and I hope they recover - but they should be considered a hero.

I think they would find your gung-ho attitude deeply upsetting, especially when they are of an age where the personal protection offered by the vaccine is significantly more relevant than any supposed benefit to others.

How can I imagine such a thing? Being a parent makes you do superhuman things. It's just not an option to "not feel like getting out of bed" - for all I know, the extra motivation of needing to care for my young family made me get on with life even when I did feel as bad as your hypothetical well-rested person.

My immune system would definitely be better if I hadn't been confined to my house for months, and banned from seeing anyone for months after that.

And who gets to define my anecdote as "disinformation"? Surely you can't be saying that any story that runs counter to a particular given narrative must be false? (FWIW, it is completely true).

How do you know the disease would be worse? This particular relative is in mental anguish, as the kind of statements that you just made are the only available opinions on whether you should get the vaccine. After 6 months of feeling like death, they are questioning the decision.

ps. Are we ever going to re-set the Covid death count at the end of a year? At approx. 300k deaths per year in the US, Covid is the 3rd-biggest killer.

It happens, when the kids bring back a particularly nasty disease from nursery. We recently had RSV, and that lasted a month for me.

Just goes to show the validity of anecdotes thrown around anonymously online, right?

As a parent of two small kids, I would struggle to notice if I had "Long Covid". Most of the symptoms sound like my every day experience!

ps. In my subjective opinion, Long Covid is completely overblown. I know even fewer people that have suffered from it (0) than people who have had symptomatic Covid (2).

If we're going to throw anecdotes around, a very close relative of mine has had a severe reaction to the Covid Vaccine (AZ, I believe), and has been off work for 6 months and counting with a variety of health issues.

I am not going to spend my time watching videos of other people in VR. You're seriously disconnected from what young people are doing. Search "dirt jumps" on youtube.

Hard to tell if you're serious. If so, the "VR Metaverse" will only exist for a select few techno-elites, and I'm not really sure what they would say to each other. Probably end up just scrolling on their phones in VR.

>To where? Who knows, but I imagine people will have a choice of multiple services instead of one or two big behemoths (i.e Facebook & Twitter).

Hopefully, they will re-discover the joys and challenges of in-person communication and social networking.

It's well known that Zuckerburg won't let his young kids use any FB products. Obviously - dealers don't get high off their supply, and definitely don't give it to their own kids.

>“Congresswoman, My daughters are five and three and they do not use our products. Actually that is not exactly true my eldest daughter, Max, I let use Messenger Kids sometimes to message her cousins,” said Mr Zuckerberg.

Everyone now knows upper management of FB (the company) are awful human beings. FB as a website / app is dead. Instagram is becoming much more widely known as a source of terrible online addiction problems for young people. It's really annoying how deeply ingrained Whatsapp has become into life (especially where I live), but they will have to squeeze a lot of money from it to make up from the decline of the first two platforms. Yes, I think the article is completely correct.

You only killed several hundred other plants (in the form of resource extraction and refining) to do this!

And these are precisely the people we just shut down the global economy (and culture, and inter-personal connection) to apparently "protect".

"Is this the best tool for the job"

is a very simple statement that should be universally applied. Somehow, people have been convinced that "tech", now re-defined as "the latest and greatest internet-connected widget", is the best tool for every job, when (for example) regularly meeting up with friends is actually the best way to form deep social bonds and reap the rewards in personal development, or finding some other way to entertain yourself than passively staring at a screen is a more productive way to occupy your brain and life energy.

We really have become ensnared by our own creations.

>I know, we hear much talk about transformation -- about the coming Great Singularity, the Omega Point, the emergence of a new global consciousness.

I have an alternative theory, something like an Anti-Singularity. Or maybe the Peter Principle of engineering development - every piece of software and hardware will be developed one stage beyond what is possible to debug or make reliable. Thus, we will end our technological days desperately trying to make disparate and barely-functional systems do something useful.

For evidence of this theory, be a sysadmin.