earthtourist

The Patriot Act was not inherently time-limited. A virus will have an end at some point through a vaccine or therapies. Terrorism does not have any end. In fact it is timeless.

If you want to convert this from a contentless ad hominem to an actual argument feel free to point to some relevant examples in history, if you can.

You seem to have two basic arguments:

1. That the lock downs were unnecessary/ineffective.

And since the evidence and experts disagree with you, it seems incredibly dubious that you're right. As with climate change denial, there is always some minority taking the contrarian view, but the scientific consensus should still rule the day.

And even if it does turn out to be true, it was still the scientific consensus during an emergency, so it made sense to do it as the best available option. We can't undo the lock downs and we're already working to phase them out. So there's really no cogent argument here.

Also, the comparisons to the flu are a sign you don't have your facts straight. Expert models predicted the potential for millions of dead Americans without intervention. And it seems entirely backed up by the actual data we got from New York.

You also don't seem to understand that flattening the curve reduces death, it doesn't just spread it out over time.

2. That the lock downs are bad for freedom.

This is entirely based on the slippery slope argument. You can't actually point to any governmental abuse, at all. Every government official seems to be acting entirely in good faith across a massive country. Which is why no reasonable person is worried about this. The people protesting the lock downs are a tiny minority of extremists and contrarians.

You have to ask yourself "am I being too extreme in my views, or is every educated/informed person blind to the danger?" and it's pretty obvious which of these is the case.

There is simply no justified cause for concern that lock downs are going to become a tool of oppression. The lock downs are happening with the consent of the people and the courts.

And it's extremely time-limited, not open-ended. There is absolutely no way the lock downs will go on indefinitely. And there is no way they will happen again without the consent of the people. There is simply no reasonable cause for alarm.

P.S.

I would expect your position on allowing people to poison their fellow citizens with radioactive material might be similar to your position on poisoning people with a deadly virus. That would be consistent with the extremist views you're espousing.

It is a huge hammer and this is a huge problem. We normally arrest people for endangering the public. People not abiding by the lock down are clearly endangering the public. They should be arrested.

I don't see any slippery slope or danger of totalitarian take over. The virus is inherently time-limited.

Your personal liberty ends where my nose begins.

When it comes to rights, we always have to ask "what are the reasonable trade-offs?". There are no absolute rights, even in the U.S.

Most people believe it's clearly reasonable that we lock down our cities to prevent mass death. The economic pain is great, and it's very inconvenient for all, but it's much better than mass death.

You're entirely free to read/watch/do anything you want in your home, you can exercise, talk to anyone about anything you want, get food, take care of essential things.

You're not free to risk killing many people just so you can enjoy leisure activities. That would be privileging your personal liberty over the lives of your fellow citizens. And, incidentally, you would be depriving some of them of their personal liberty by virtue of killing them...

Does it bother you that you can't own significant quantities of radioactive material and carry them around while you're in public? Clearly laws forbidding this are an infringement of personal liberty. But they're an incredibly reasonable infringement so it doesn't bother you, I'd assume.

A democratic society should be governed by the people. We, The People, have decided that the lock downs are good. We have in effect demanded and endorsed them. So you're disagreeing with the majority of your fellow citizens, not some dictator.

For some unknown reason you believe these lock downs are unreasonable, without any clear rationale.

The local government is doing what the majority of its citizens want it to do. This is exactly the purpose of having a government.

Every libertarian I know believes governments should provide intervention in these kinds of situations. If you don't, that makes you an anarchist (or whatever).

IIRC this is why the U.S. military (in certain cases?) uses a pre-generated list of code names. If you let humans do the code names, they'll choose names that leak info.

I wonder how it is cleaned. Parts of it look like they might be hard to clean effectively. Is it water resistant and capable of being (safely) sprayed down with a disinfectant?

I like the idea of supersonic passenger jets existing again. I'm not sure I really see the point though.

Would you rather fly in business class comfort for 8 hours or with less comfort for 4 hours? Almost doesn't seem worth the expense and risk of going supersonic.

I would be so much more excited about an airplane that was large enough that economy class seating was as comfortable as business class seating is today. That would be much more revolutionary.

I would also get excited about an airplane that was vastly safer than the already-quite-safe airplanes we have.

An airplane with a fail-safe fuselage that can disconnect from the rest of the plane, parachute to the ground and land (or float) safely. This could potentially eliminate fire danger by jettisoning everything flammable (gas filled wings, engines, cockpit, and whatever else).

The fact that flying is uncomfortable and still-too-scary to millions of people are the biggest opportunities for innovation that I see.

Flying at 500+ MPH is already quite fast given the size of the planet.

Yes, and no one should try to play competitive games across a continent. Competitions must be regional. Internet latency is great within a few hundred miles.

You can't run a server for yourself for most games. You have to sign into a proprietary service to download/run games. We already lost this battle. I'd like to at least get some advantages like less cheating!

The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating.

The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a lot of game state that enables cheats. With a "thin client" like Google Stadia, there should be a lot less opportunity for hacks. The incoming game data is an audio/video stream, which makes many hacks hard/impossible.

It would be great to play FPS games without any cheaters, they can easily spoil an otherwise amazing game. Maybe future online tournaments will be cloud gaming only.

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing.

The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire.

Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school".

Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.