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> You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home

by gwd 7y ago

> You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what if catching it only gives you a 6-month immunity? The only way to stop it would be for the entire world to manage be SARS-CoV-2 free at the same time. Otherwise, we're looking at a situation where the thing might just keep going around the world indefinitely.

scotty79 7y ago
> Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? Seems perfectly fine to me. Some essential jobs require manual skills but I think those can be organised to avoid most of the physical human contact. Some can be phase out by more automation. And we have so many inessential jobs in this economy that shedding them might be beneficial to us all. Do we really need new snowboard clothes every season?
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Not really. The delivery riders, Uber drivers, couriers and postal workers that bring you all that stuff you can order online like food and goods. The people that work maintaining the cables for your ISP (and the technicians in their data centers) that let you work from home in the first place. The people that clean your streets. Ambulance drivers. Taxi drivers. Cooks. The people that collect your garbage. The people that maintain your cities. These are all just off the top of my head. Really think hard about it; it's pretty easy to take a whole bunch of stuff for granted especially when you work in high-tech areas. I'm extremely fortunate that I can work from home, but what if my fridge breaks down or I just run out of milk and my Internet happens to be down?
  - scotty79 7y ago
    My point is that each delivery rider can do his job without getting within 6 feet of any other person during his shift. They do come closer but their job can be easily changed so that they don't. Uber drivers are entirely other thing. Maybe driving people should be only allowed if you have a car that has completely separate spaces for the driver and the rider and where spece for the rider can be fully vented and disinfected after each rider, which maybe again should be mandatory. A lot of people can't do their essential jobs remotely. But very few of them can't do those jobs not in groups and not in contact with other people. The world before covid looked how it looked not out of necessity, but just because we didn't have to pay attention to some things.
    - knolax 7y ago
      Have you considered that most normal human beings require social interaction with others to maintain mental health. Solitary confinement is considered torture by many for a reason. In addition, digital forms of social interaction are obviously not subsitutes for physical interaction, especially considering the harmful effects social media and dating apps already have on mental health. I definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where Zuckerberg and co. control all my social interaction with others.
      - scotty79 7y ago
        Social interaction doesn't require breathing the same air. Internet is wonderful place of bustling social interaction. I'm doing way more social interaction with you just by writing this comment than I usually do by going outside and apparently Zuckerberg has no say in it. Solitary confinement is a torture not because of the solitary part. It's because of the boredom part. How unpleasent do you think would be solitary confinement for nearly all people if it was done in a library with internet access and netflix account instead of small dark empty cell?
        Mirioron 7y ago
        It's not the same thing though. We know that there are chemical responses for things such as touch and other physical interactions. You don't get that online. It's a vastly different thing.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? No, of course not. But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently. We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to help them open bags. I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people would generally be healthier. We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch the handle. Walmart has that mastered. We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated. We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older cultures have such practices. We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that. We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is not the norm in other countries. We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems. I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever. They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real value. American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get it. A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work" and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or die due to clinging to it. A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change. This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age. Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is not the only option.

by gwd 7y ago

scotty79 7y ago

> Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? Seems perfectly fine to me. Some essential jobs require manual skills but I think those can be organised to avoid most of the physical human contact. Some can be phase out by more automation. And we have so many inessential jobs in this economy that shedding them might be beneficial to us all. Do we really need new snowboard clothes every season?

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
Not really. The delivery riders, Uber drivers, couriers and postal workers that bring you all that stuff you can order online like food and goods. The people that work maintaining the cables for your ISP (and the technicians in their data centers) that let you work from home in the first place. The people that clean your streets. Ambulance drivers. Taxi drivers. Cooks. The people that collect your garbage. The people that maintain your cities. These are all just off the top of my head. Really think hard about it; it's pretty easy to take a whole bunch of stuff for granted especially when you work in high-tech areas. I'm extremely fortunate that I can work from home, but what if my fridge breaks down or I just run out of milk and my Internet happens to be down?
- scotty79 7y ago
  My point is that each delivery rider can do his job without getting within 6 feet of any other person during his shift. They do come closer but their job can be easily changed so that they don't. Uber drivers are entirely other thing. Maybe driving people should be only allowed if you have a car that has completely separate spaces for the driver and the rider and where spece for the rider can be fully vented and disinfected after each rider, which maybe again should be mandatory. A lot of people can't do their essential jobs remotely. But very few of them can't do those jobs not in groups and not in contact with other people. The world before covid looked how it looked not out of necessity, but just because we didn't have to pay attention to some things.
  - knolax 7y ago
    Have you considered that most normal human beings require social interaction with others to maintain mental health. Solitary confinement is considered torture by many for a reason. In addition, digital forms of social interaction are obviously not subsitutes for physical interaction, especially considering the harmful effects social media and dating apps already have on mental health. I definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where Zuckerberg and co. control all my social interaction with others.
    - scotty79 7y ago
      Social interaction doesn't require breathing the same air. Internet is wonderful place of bustling social interaction. I'm doing way more social interaction with you just by writing this comment than I usually do by going outside and apparently Zuckerberg has no say in it. Solitary confinement is a torture not because of the solitary part. It's because of the boredom part. How unpleasent do you think would be solitary confinement for nearly all people if it was done in a library with internet access and netflix account instead of small dark empty cell?
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        It's not the same thing though. We know that there are chemical responses for things such as touch and other physical interactions. You don't get that online. It's a vastly different thing.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? No, of course not. But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently. We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to help them open bags. I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people would generally be healthier. We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch the handle. Walmart has that mastered. We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated. We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older cultures have such practices. We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that. We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is not the norm in other countries. We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems. I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever. They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real value. American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get it. A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work" and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or die due to clinging to it. A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change. This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age. Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is not the only option.