I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.
My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.
But imagine the new frontiers it opens! Countries would exchange and trade massive amounts of user data like oil. Want to participate in air travel? Better to sign treaties to buy tracing data, as without it your country won't be compliant with the international safety laws. I see trillions of new wealth being built there. On a serious note, this reminds me of a quote from one book: "the fourth round will be remarked by a fierce battle between materialistic and spiritual forces in humanity". We're like being subjected by a high voltage electrolysis now: those with moral are being dragged to the right and those without it - to the left.
I just got an urge to resurrect Frank Herbert to see what he has to say about all this. Wonder who is our dear Leto the God Emperor, the benevolent monster who is dragging an un-surprisingly quiet and docile humanity to its designated future. One hears the monster has 7 heads.
I'm not sure about the hand me down binary model conclusion. We're in agreement regarding the inevitability of this turn of events, but then again it was apparently clear as day thousands of years ago to "self isolating" monks.
But the clarity of the choice is stark, and like a blast of cold air invigorates one's morals and character.
Interesting how it's turned around. A few weeks ago one of my HN accounts was banned for a neutral note that the lab hypothesis shouldn't be disregarded. Now it's openly talked about on WaPo.
Ubuntu has followed the same path of first building their user base on trust and quality and then monetizing it hard with various shady schemes.
Even coffee shops do it. First they sell high quality coffee for little margin and "don't expect or accept tips". Then they switch to the dark side to monetize the trust: they cut hard on materials, they pay $2/hour to employees and expect the customers to subsidize their minimum wages with tips (that are now accepted and very much expected).
Companies that cut half of the pay are unlikely to offer corporate housing or free food.
Even remote interns need to live somewhere and rent isn't cheap. On the other hand, interns might be ok with sharing a 2bd apt with 3 roommates and paying only 600 for rent and bills. That would leave them almost 2000 a month. Not bad for a 20 yo seeking independence, but humiliating for a 25 yo and a complete failure for a 30 yo.
If Lyft is open to hiring interns from abroad (unlikely) and pay them the same 4800 (very unlikely), then just 500 would get them a very decent 2bd apt. In countries like India, they would be borderline rich with this kind of money.
> Not bad for a 20 yo seeking independence, but humiliating for a 25 yo and a complete failure for a 30 yo.
I was truly taken aback by how out of touch this comment is. A 50% cut to a $9600 monthly salary is $4800, or $57,600 annually. This is above median US household income, and close to double median personal income. It's not "humiliating" or "a complete failure" by any stretch of the imagination.
TBH, the real solution will be reopening the economy with masks on and social distancing. Vaccine is a pipe dream and by the time it might be created, everyone will have been infected a few times.
My conspiracy theory is that the government understands that very soon everyone will wear masks and sunglasses and all the face-recognition tracking will become useless, so to compensate for that, they are pushing hard for alternatives. Once masks get normalized and the infection rate drops to manageable levels, the opportunity to push this app surveillance will be lost.
Let's assume someone got bankrupted by a hospital over a severe coronavirus case. This means that someone has been wandering around for weeks infecting others. Let's assume there is a chain of 10 contacts between me and that someone. The probability of virus transmission is 1% (and I'm generous here) because more people wear masks, because people avoid talking and generally avoid interactions. Probability of transmission over 10 links is 10^-20 and we may stop right here, unless we plan to study quantum particles.
Now let's assume I get a notification that I might have been infected over the past few weeks. The probability that the app is correct is abysmally low. But even if I get infected, I'm unlikely to get sick and I'm unlikely to transmit the virus to others because masks, social distancing and because I already assume I'm infected.
So yeah, this app would be useless and is only good for surveillance.
I don't think you answered the question you're responding to. You're still talking about the app, the question is about all contact tracing generally. Actual epidemiologists appear to disagree with your (I'm assuming) amateur opinion that contact tracing, in general, is useless. They are aware of all the things you mention, and still believe it is useful. There also seems to be examples of success with contact tracing in conjunction with good testing regimes in countries that are faring much better than the US. It seems like arrogance to me to think that we can't learn anything from those successes.
(But I'm very uneasy about these app-based approaches, and much more in favor of hiring tons of humans to do contact tracing instead, or at least as the primary mechanism.)
> The probability of virus transmission is 1% (and I'm generous here) because more people wear masks, because people avoid talking and generally avoid interactions. Probability of transmission over 10 links is 10^-20 and we may stop right here, unless we plan to study quantum particles.
If that were truly the case why are there still transmissions? Wouldn't that imply that in a matter of 5 months it will be impossible to get the disease strictly due to the timeline and required links? ~14 days of transmissible * 10 transmission events / 30 days in a month = 140 days before no more mathematically possible transmissions. Wouldn't that require us being repeatedly exposed to every person on the planet to keep those numbers to a possible level?
Because there are multiple paths and the virus really spreads like a wave frontier in a 10 dimensional space of human to human contacts graph. The virus also spreads in a non uniform way: it's not about the distance between two interacted persons, but about the nature of their interaction, whether they weared masks and so on. The virus also really likes to stick to surfaces, like door handles or plastic wraps, and this vector of transmission is very difficult to trace even manually. Think of credit cards. The virus floats in the air like smoke if someone coughed and others may catch it this way. An app can't account for that and instead builds a social graph of interactions. The app would notice a lot of people crowded in a parking lot and would assume the virus was transmitted between those 50 people, but it wouldn't know that all those people sit in their cars, so the app just made the transmission chain 50x less useless. A few more such gatherings and the relevance of tracing drops to those sub quantum levels of homeopathic medicine.
"you've come in contact with someone infected! use this coupon code to get 10% off your test at select locations. Need a mask? click here to buy one and save your family".
With 95% infected not showing any symptoms, contact tracing is pointless, as it will be about tracing contacts of those few severely ill. With this in mind, contact tracing is really just a way to sell survelliance to people and then seal it in laws.
They are doing well. The symptoms are the same as mild flu or allergy, and the effects are nearly non existent except in already old and sick. If half of infected got severe complications, it would be a blood bath with military on the streets already.
Average life expectancy based on age and comorbidities of the people who die is around 10-13 years. That is not an insignificant lifetime reduction.
0.5%-2% of the people who get it, die. That is much worse than the flu that kills 0.04-0.1% of the infected. The flu itself is already pretty deadly and this is much deadlier.
But it's not deadly enough to reverse the climate change. Humans are smart animals: they will adopt to the virus real quick, restart the dirty economy machine, get their previous life expectancy back and suffocate in dirty air, water and unbearable weather. But they will die on their terms, with pride and dignity.
TBH, it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions. This happened because the CA's AG chose to be a good guy, leveraged his power and put a lot of effort into fighting the bad guys. I'm sure he's been offered fat kickbacks and received thinly veiled treats. After this stunt he won't be offered a high ranked corporate position to scheme shady things and won't be able to buy yachts and helicopters left and right. That's basically the price he's paid. I think attributing this win to some "voices" would be dishonest.
So he made a sacrifice because, what, he just woke up one morning and felt like it? No. It's because the public brought it to his attention with enough public support to probably not hurt his career.
Sometimes it's because they woke up and felt like it. You don't immediately stop having having feelings about issues like you or me as soon as you're in the AG office.
If that's just too wild to consider, it probably also looks good come next election.
> Sometimes it's because they woke up and felt like it. You don't immediately stop having having feelings about issues like you or me as soon as you're in the AG office.
Maybe, but probably not in this case.
The idea being put forward here is the AG's actions had "it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions" and other kinds of activism. That's clearly false. There are literally millions of good causes and issues, and no one just wakes up and decides to help one in particular. They need to learn information about both the problem and the action, and that information needs to be brought to their attention. For instance, it's almost certain there's something like a charity that you'd certainly give money to, but you don't because you're totally ignorant of it. It'll take a news article, a conversation with a friend, etc. to bring it to your attention, first.
Petitions and activism are, among other things, ways of steering the attention of those in power. I doubt the AG would have taken action independently unless his attention has been so steered. Organizations like ICANN are not of perennial law enforcement interest.
> The idea being put forward here is the AG's actions had "it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions" and other kinds of activism. That's clearly false.
It's likely false, because I'm sure it had something to do with those petitions even if a very small amount, but there are many other possible reasons it could have become a priority to an AG. It's not either the petitions or he did it out of the goodness of his heart.
But my point wasn't to imply he did it because he's a good guy, but to point out he's a regular person with myriad motivations which likely includes doing what he thinks is the right thing in the calculation of what to do. There's no reason to assume that just because someone holds public office they're entirely self-serving. People are more complicated than that.
I think it's basically the theory of democratic elections though.
That someone has to present themselves as a non-sleazy person with non-sleazy plans to get elected, and if they do something different once elected or otherwise do something the voters recognize as super sleazy, they won't get re-elected. So a person in an elected position is responsive to public opinion, or does not remain elected.
Whether it's working out so well for us in the USA, I dunno.
Other than your cynicism about the effectiveness of petitioning for redress, why do you think this is true?
What in Becerra's background makes you think he's angling for a revolving-door job?
Other than you showing us that you "know" how the "game" is played, what can you back this view up with? Something seems lazy here, and it isn't the people writing letters.
My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.