Poll: You see a friend on Facebook doing something ridiculously unsafe. His barber made a house call. A picture shows them in a selfie, touching, breathing presumably, no masks. Comments say how nice he looks with new haircut. #
All you have to do is write an article that says RSS is Dead and you'll get lots of clicks, and I'm not sure if anyone will believe you or think you're smart, but you are wrong. Those articles have been written for decades, and my friends RSS is built-in, like HTTP and HTML, DNS, SMTP, POP and all the other michegas that makes up the net. The stack never gives up anything. Also since it never was alive, how can it be dead, n'est-ce pas? #I don't see the point of a presidential campaign. There's no way it can rise above our focus on the virus. Everything in the campaign should go to saving lives, just as journalism wastes our attention on the horse race. The war is in American now. This isn't some far-away thing. It's killing Americans. Now. #
I wrote this piece in the month after my father's death in 2009. I call that event Father's Day on my blog. Anyway, I know someone who lost her father last week, to CV, and wanted to share my writeup of a talk by Bruce Sterling. It's about the big moments in our life when change is more than something we dream about. It seems this is a door that's opening for all of us now, so why not post it publicly. And thanks to Sterling for putting this idea out there, so eloquently.#Gatekeepers pass on ideas from people they respect and not people they don't. It's natural. I do it too. But I've been wrong a number of times this way, and then missed out on important ideas. So I try to pay attention to unusual thinking whether or not I like the person doing the talking. It can be hard to overcome judgement, but it's often worth trying.#
- Here's where we're at with the virus in mid-May 2020.#
- Top line: It makes no sense to "reopen" from the lockdown in the US.#
The purpose of the lockdown was to freeze everything so we could get our act together. To monitor outbreaks of the virus the same way we track the weather. It's not the testing itself that's so important, it's the weather report. There are other methods, like sampling the sewage a community creates. We have to know where the trouble spots are so we can respond. It's like the map of battlefields in a war. We can't respond if we don't know where the outbreaks are, and right now, we don't. #- Once an outbreak happens we lock that community down, the same way people would shelter if there were tornoados forecast or a blizzard, or fires like the ones they have in California and Australia. How long do they stay locked down? Until the outbreak is over. People need to be ready for this and that's accomplished through communication and trust. In the US our leaders are not trustworthy and they are removing channels of communication.#
- We need to isolate people who are infected. Sending them back to their family just means the family members are likely to get infected, feeding the outbreak. #
- In the US, none of this is working. We can't track outbreaks, there is no weather report. We can't isolate people who are infected. We're still at the beginning, more or less where we were in March, though the virus is distributed all around the country now. Most people don't know how dangerous the virus is. The communication field is flooded with lies from the government. #
- We're going to have to hit the wall repeatedly until the people understand how this works. Countries in Asia had an advantage, they had to deal with recent pandemics that never made it to the US, presumably because our health systems and political leaders kept us safe without us being aware. We can't seem to learn from their experience, we will have to go through it ourselves.#
- We're reopening because we don't know better. Our government included. There will be new spikes, more sickness, suffering, incapacity, death. The economy will go into a deeper recession, which will be harder to recover from. #