Mask of the beast (aka tinfoil hat time Part II)

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by tango, Jul 28, 2020.

  1. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    It's those damned guns.

    If only they wouldn't pull their own triggers.

    And then again, I hear an M-4 say just the other day, and it was justified in saying so.... "Guns don't kill people... bullets do."

    It is sad how often we, as a society, pontificate about band-aids instead of dealing with the etiology of a broken society.
     
  2. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    Arguably bullets don't kill people either, they die from either blood loss or severe internal trauma.

    Bandaids are easier to discuss than fixing things properly, just as it's easier to tear down a strawman than an actual argument. So many people want a cure without pain, progress without change.
     
  3. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

  4. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    Some good ones in there.

    Here our fuhrer came up with the brilliant idea of requiring people to order a meal in order to be allowed to buy alcohol at a bar. Sadly he didn't define what counts as a "meal" so nobody, including the department charged with enforcing his diktats, knows whether a bowl of chips is enough or whether it needs to contain multiple courses or what. For good measure once you've finished your meal you can't order any more beer. Because apparently you suddenly become more contagious when you eat the last couple of fries.

    Then there's the question of whether children are contagious. In the UK children over 11 are required to wear a mask but in my state children over 2 are required. Quite aside from the - er - interesting process of persuading a three-year-old why they need a bit of cloth in front of their face and the undoubted health benefits of children wearing masks they dropped in a muddy puddle, the question of whether an 8-year-old child is safe or deadly remains unknown. That's what settled science looks like, apparently.

    Now the talk is of schools resuming and suddenly people are shouting SCIENCE because the children who have shown no signs of being badly affected or spreading the virus are suddenly causing concern. Kids becoming contagious just as school starts. That's science for you.
     
  5. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    Jeremy Clarkson, former presenter of motoring show Top Gear and presenter of The Grand Tour, wrote an article about how he was berated by someone for not wearing a mask. He said the person's monologue was so long and profanity-filled that he didn't even get chance to point out that they weren't wearing a mask either.
     
  6. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    I heard that today called "masker berating."

    Don't say that too quickly.
     
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  7. Cloudwalker

    Cloudwalker The genuine, original, one and only Cloudwalker Staff Member

    When something like that happens to me I either walk away, hang up, or hit "delete" about the time the first profanity comes. No reason to put up with that.
     
  8. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    It's one of the curious ironies of the self-appointed mask warriors - if you aren't in absolute compliance with how they think you should be then it's OK for them to ignore all the other guidelines (maintaining distance etc) to get in your face and shout at you. Because we all know the best way to stop the spread of the virus is to get in someone's face and shout at them.
     
  9. IMINXTC

    IMINXTC Time Bandit

    Curious: A sawmill about 100 miles away shut down for several days because of a false alarm covid case. One confirmed case can shut down the whole crew. Security (me) is tight where I work and there is a lot of resentment, but if they quarrantine the place...
    A construction site in the Big Sky region came down with 100 confirms.
    I suspect very highly it would kill me, and I am a total asset to the space-time continuum. Somewhat.
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2020
  10. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    A drumette is a little drum.

    A majorette is a little major.

    A dinette is a little dining room table.

    I see a trend...

    ;)

    This whole "we must all be afraid because we are all going to die and have a moral duty to save other people from themselves" is driving me nuts.
     
  11. IMINXTC

    IMINXTC Time Bandit

    Yeah.
    "And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean." Lev 13:45
     
  12. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    I think the key thing that gets lost among the howling about safety and posturing about protecting everybody is that everybody's needs are different.

    Based on my lifestyle my understanding is that if I contract it, which isn't a given at any time, my chances of surviving it are something like 99.96% (I forget the exact figure and the CDC may have revised estimates between then and now, but the gist is the chance of it killing me is slim to say the least). For older people the chances of death are higher, as you suggest above. For people with comorbidities the chances are higher.

    In my situation I live with my wife who is a couple of years younger than me and seldom interact closely with older or more vulnerable people. Therefore, from our perspective, the virus is all but a non-event. On the rare occasions we do interact closely with older people we take appropriate precautions, largely driven by their level of concern. We know one couple in their 70s who don't even want us to go into their house without a mask, and another couple in their 70s who have never held back from hugs and handshakes. Both are arguably vulnerable, it's just the second couple isn't afraid of it. Naturally people who face a higher risk, or who live with older people, or who frequently associate closely with older people, take different levels of precautions. The part that's stupid is the one-size-fits-all approach and the way it's backed up with such zeal by the mask warriors who "follow the science" even though many of them wouldn't know science if it ran them over is even more concerning.
     
  13. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    Talked to the local non chain hole in the wall pizza store owner tonight.

    She can't get help because everyone is afraid to work, which being interpreteth, meaneth, " why schlepp pizzas when the Feds pay me $600 a week to not work..."
     
  14. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    That's not possible.... the smart people at Yale said that $15/hour wouldn't discourage people from working.
     
  15. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    Well, we am out in the sticks, so's we ain't figgered out how to sell a whole pizza for $10 but pay the high school drop out $15 a hour to make it, so we just pay what the gubmint say we has to pay, what is $7.35 an hour. But when the gubmit is sendin' em checks for not working at all, it's tough.

    It ain't the $15 a hour for working that hurts.
    It's the $15 a hour for not working that hurts...

    God bless her. She lives about 35 miles away, and is working such long hours that for the last 6 weeks, she's been living in the local Comfort Inn so he doesn't have to drive the 45 minutes to her home at 12:30 every night...

    That's why the USA works. Sacrifice. Determination. Hard work. Grit. Freedom.
     
  16. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    It's worth making sacrifices when there's something to be gained. The way the system "works" at the moment it seems more lucrative to sit with your hand outstretched than to do anything useful.

    Especially in this silly pandemic world where the fuhrer can order your business to close with no more than a few hours' notice it's hard to see why anyone would want to start a new business, unless it was one that could fly under the radar. Even without the COVID silliness it seems more and more that enterprise is punished every which way, from silly health care costs to ever-more taxes and regulations.
     
  17. IMINXTC

    IMINXTC Time Bandit

    One key feature of upcoming (if ever) legislation will protect companies from lawsuits over covid 19. These bigger firms don't seem willing to screw around with the possibility of getting sued by employees who might or might not have contacted the virus on the premises.
    And the way current tracing and quarrantine policy is going it stands to reason that a company, like mine, will facilitate every reasonable policy to keep from having to shut down while people are quarrantined and traced. That cost and loss of profit cannot be recovered and layoffs and furloughs hurt employees and the economy at large. We support an army of contractors and truckers.
    Employees where I work get the message and appreciate the effort to protect their jobs, and the effort to keep the virus out, if possible, though they resent the restrictions. I don't monitor employees; they are self-monitored.
    But nobody else gets in without being screened and documented. If they lie, then we have recourse. My company is global and the standards are implemented corp-wide.
     
  18. RabbiKnife

    RabbiKnife Open the pod bay door, please HAL. Staff Member

    Wait

    aren’t you in Idaho?

    I would think “recourse” would be immediate and the cause of death wouldn’t be “covid” but “rapid onset heavy metal poisoning”...
     
  19. IMINXTC

    IMINXTC Time Bandit

    Montana. Not far from the truth.
     
  20. tango

    tango ... and you shall live ... Staff Member

    The trouble with trying to introduce legislation, as I'm sure the good Rabbi is even more aware than I, is that so much of the time it creates all sorts of distortions and perverse incentives that benefit nobody and are often little more than a waste of resources.

    A friend of mine works in an adult educational setting. Every single time someone uses a pen they wipe it with disinfectant. They'll wipe a computer mouse after every use. Every which way you turn there are little bottles of hand sanitizer that people are expected to use. Perhaps I'm cynical about such things but I figure as long as you don't suck the pens or lick the mouse you're OK, and as an adult it's my responsibility to wash my hands rather than Everybody Else's responsibility to make sure every last thing I might touch is clean. Sadly it seems that ineffective posturing is far more visible than doing anything useful and as long as companies do lots of highly visible, even if comically ineffective, posturing they can point at how they are Doing Everything They Can without actually doing anything useful.
     

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