Piaget's water-level task[1] is an experiment where participants are shown a bottle with its water level marked and are asked where the water level should be in various rotations of the bottle. Female participants for some reason fail the task at significantly higher rates than male participants, and this test has been replicated all over the world.
I've listened to both episodes of Lex Fridman's podcast where he interviewed Chris and he seems like an extremely humble and intelligent guy. No question he is one of the leading experts on compilers too, and has a lot of hardcore engineering background to prove it.
Sometimes organizations just grow to be too large and too remote to sustain a productive and respectful environment. I don't think anyone is necessarily at fault here.
I take the blame for originally mentioning car accidents, but this is not really something you can compare to COVID especially when you are talking about government mandates. A serious car accident is deadly for anyone, including teenagers or young working-aged adults. A COVID infection is not even close to as deadly for those age groups.
Canada would also have to be okay with completely closed borders for the rest of its existence. Either that or come up with some way to unilaterally enforce COVID countermeasures in every country on Earth simultaneously until it is completely eradicated. I'm sure it was a nice thought when infection rates were low enough, but after thinking long-term about the problem it becomes clear that government mandates can only do much for so long.
Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend mandating anything that gets in the way of people taking those risks if they choose to.
A vast majority of people who contract COVID recover without any treatment. Are you arguing that the minority who don't impose higher costs than locking down the entire country?
Maybe the better question you should be asking is whether a simple majority (50%) is enough to justify drastic and extreme countermeasures mandated by the government, two years into a pandemic, with no end in sight. You might think this is a perfectly reasonable and responsible thing to do, but half of your neighbors strongly disagree. Now that vaccines, testing, and masks are widely available, does the government have a right to continue interfering in people's lives? If so, when does it end?
That is not true at all. The greatest burden on the economy was the lockdowns and extreme countermeasures. People choosing not to get vaccinated may have caused unnecessary burden on the healthcare system, but to blame them for the struggling economy is just wrong.
A lot of smartphone users have IoT devices plugged in at home that, for better or for worse, have a persistent connection to the internet. It would be feasible and useful for these devices to act as personal servers for certain kinds of services. In fact I believe Apple already does this with HomeKit, where users’ AppleTVs or HomePods can act as a “hub” to facilitate communication with devices at home from outside the local network.
I disagree that it is rooted in selfishness. It's healthy to live in a society that has at least some degree of skepticism over public health claims that tend to optimize one variable at the cost of others.
Since this article is about children, there is a lot of evidence to show that kids are experiencing developmental delays that are likely correlated with masking. The long term effects of which is not yet well understood. I would much rather live in a country that challenges assumptions and fosters debate, instead of blindly pursuing countermeasures that may have extremely detrimental outcomes in the future.
How much longer are you willing to live like that? Keep in mind that people who decided to move on are living happy and healthy lives without making as many sacrifices. You can call them "narcissistic" but the reality is that this virus is here to stay, regardless of how many people get vaccinated, for a very very long time.
You are welcome to live any way you like, but please don't judge others for examining the situation and deciding how to live their own lives.
I think you are misunderestimating the value that bringing a new life into the world offers you as a parent, and your community. The world in general, and especially the United States, has never been more peaceful and prosperous as it is now. Human civilization needs more people, now more than ever.
A lot of people caught the virus and recovered from it. Those people have immunity that is actually stronger than that offered by the vaccines. In those cases getting the vaccine is some (albeit small) risk and almost no reward.
That was a poor choice of words on my part. Instead of "pointless" I should have said "impractical." I think most of us agree that we wouldn't want to live in a world where kids are forced to wear N95 masks all day, with tape binding them to their skin, with adults constantly supervising their proper fit, and with absolutely no lunch breaks or ability to drink fluids. If mask wearing done poorly is the only realistic option, then we would be better off without them altogether.
It is the responsibility of public health to take all of these variables into account before mandating countermeasures. The fact that people are constantly placed in situations where mask effectiveness is reduced or in some cases completely eliminated should be evidence that mask mandates are pointless when applied at scale.
At this point, the most vulnerable have a sophisticated arsenal of tools to prevent themselves from being seriously affected by the virus. Vaccines, antivirals, masks like N95 that work to protect the wearer, etc. In my opinion it is no longer the duty of the non-vulnerable, especially children, to carry the burden of the pandemic because of the extremely negative consequences of these countermeasures.
One of the problems I noticed with people citing productivity statistics is that they always come from surveys of employees who are evaluating themselves. I don't know how many people are being completely honest about their own productivity when the remote work benefits are mostly aligned with their personal goals and not necessarily the company's.
Maybe there is a reason why so many more people in leadership positions are willing to return to the office compared to lower-ranking employees. They see a serious problem with productivity that doesn't show up in self-oriented surveys.
How would you feel as a working class citizen, when homeless drug addicts are given a place to live rent-free while you have to work hard every day just to stay afloat? How would you feel if you had children who lived in the same neighborhood as a drug motel? These problems are complex, and require solutions that are more thoughtful than "just give them a place to live and leave them alone."
$15/hr, working indoors in an air conditioned building, in relatively safe conditions, is an absolutely amazing deal for low skilled workers in most parts of the country. Not to say we couldn't do better, but it always helps to see from the perspective of those who are less fortunate to understand why they choose to work at places like Amazon.