ern

This post is mistitled. The original Tweet is:

A 1-meter meteoroid (small #asteroid) has been detected and is expected to safely strike Earth's atmosphere over northern France between 3:50-4:03 CET.

I wouldn't be surprised if my grandchildren are still doing the same bullshit in 20 years.

It was a support request, and IIRC they disabled it remotely.

Maybe a coincidence, but I guess every weird thing that happens is going to raise alarm bells.

I was suspicious of the LastPass concept (storing passwords in a cloud app) when a former employer introduced it some years ago, but they had a strong IT and security culture so I trusted them to make the right choices and adopted it for my personal use.

A few months ago I hsd an issue with my LastPass 2FA device and a policy set by my former employer blocked me from resetting it for my personal account. It was resolved by LastPass, but that was the first strike, and I had spent most of the night extracting my personal account passwords manually from the mobile app, which remained logged in. That was strike 1. This is strike 2.

What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.

The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.

Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.

Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.

It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.

(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).

"Scalia said fewer than 2 percent of the population could prevent enactment of a constitutional amendment. “It ought to be hard, but not that hard" https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how_scalia_and_ginsb...

The bizarre circus of Supreme Court nominees coyly pretending to be apolitical in a plainly partisan nomination process is another indicator that there's something wrong.

My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.

My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.

Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.

I wonder if this Tweet illustrates a divergence in style between scientists and others who code as part of their jobs on the one hand; and people whose primary role is developing software for a living, on the other.

I’m not talking about becoming one of those contractors who are billed out by their companies as “consultants” but are really just serial hired hands. I’m referring to a true consultant role, where you are paid to bring expertise, give advice, and drive technical change.*

He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality.

The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.

One of those countries has been able to trace all cases in the last few months and makes extensive use of genomic sequencing. The leaks have all come out of hotel quarantine breaches. I believe that some Australian states that do not receive overseas travelers have not had a single case in months.

It may (or may not) not be feasible for bigger and non-island countries, although I suspect that the border closures will happen far more swiftly if there's another pandemic in our lifetimes.

New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative.

That said, with vaccines now being rolled out, it may well be that these countries managed to dodge the bullet. It's hard to see what was "inevitable" about Covid, except the dogma (still promoted by the WHO, when I last checked) that travel bans are bad.

WHO changed its position on masks as late as June 2020. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-changes-stance-...

The US government changed its stance by April: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/08/why...

In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).

The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.

I am fairly certain that the US government reversed itself on masks before the WHO did (Wikipedia says WHO changed its advice in June).

Did it have to do with a lack of evidence, or was it a cynical ploy to preserve mask stocks for medical professionals? I recall it being the latter: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking. I also am fairly confident that the WHO was/is opposed to lockdowns and it certainly still opposes travel restrictions.

As for your point about it being a trade-war tactic only goes so far when one realizes that Australia, which has China as its biggest trading partner, most vocally brought up the need for an investigation, and is being punished. Why would Australia start a trade war with its biggest customer?

I am not inclined to dismiss this entirely though:

1) There were concerns about Gain of Function research long before Covid-19. I recall it was discussed on HN even (but can’t find the exact link)

2) There have been outbreaks of SARS linked to labs.

3) China has been secretive and uncooperative with investigations and has turned its wrath against an erstwhile partner (Australia) after that country’s government called for an investigation into the origin of the virus (maybe a coincidence as well though).

I am not inclined to unquestioningly believe the same government that lied/erred terribly on WMDs in Iraq, but I also don’t think we can unquestioningly dismiss the idea that the virus escaped from a lab that was doing experiments that would be expected to produce a virus of this sort, rather than a random mutation that just happened to be in a market in the same city.