3 ms·

The payoff is very clear. Every government loves a crisis because it allows them to pass laws which normally would come with a lot of societal pressure. The mer

The payoff is very clear. Every government loves a crisis because it allows them to pass laws which normally would come with a lot of societal pressure. The mere act of having to verify yourself when going into a mall, restaurant, bus, train gives enormous tracking and control capabilities. In a decade, people will forget why these measures were implemented, but they will still have to abide by them. Just like we still have to take our shoes off at the airport, can't take any liquids and can't have our families watch us board the plane. Well, simulating lots of sick people is very trivial, ever since the idea of asymptomatic disease came into play. Feel completely healthy? Better get tested! You could have entire populations being completely healthy, but the tests could still report diseases and you'd have an asymptomatic pandemic going on.

ketzu 5y ago
> The mere act of having to verify yourself when going into a mall, restaurant, bus, train gives enormous tracking and control capabilities. Then they messed that up quite well here. And that doesn't seem all that great a payoff at all. And way easier and more reliably achieved by getting position data from smart phone OS vendors. There is zero cost benefit analysis in the world that would make this pandemic a useful strategy to get easily falsifiable, hardly enforecable, coarse location data on the population. > Well, simulating lots of sick people is very trivial, ever since the idea of asymptomatic disease came into play. Feel completely healthy? Better get tested! You could have entire populations being completely healthy, but the tests could still report diseases and you'd have an asymptomatic pandemic going on. I was talking about sick people in hospitals (hence the mention of hospital staff being complicit or the need of people simulating being sick and possibly dying). That might not have been very clear of me.

ketzu 5y ago

> The mere act of having to verify yourself when going into a mall, restaurant, bus, train gives enormous tracking and control capabilities. Then they messed that up quite well here. And that doesn't seem all that great a payoff at all. And way easier and more reliably achieved by getting position data from smart phone OS vendors. There is zero cost benefit analysis in the world that would make this pandemic a useful strategy to get easily falsifiable, hardly enforecable, coarse location data on the population. > Well, simulating lots of sick people is very trivial, ever since the idea of asymptomatic disease came into play. Feel completely healthy? Better get tested! You could have entire populations being completely healthy, but the tests could still report diseases and you'd have an asymptomatic pandemic going on. I was talking about sick people in hospitals (hence the mention of hospital staff being complicit or the need of people simulating being sick and possibly dying). That might not have been very clear of me.