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Getting involved in a war, trade war, or campaign of human rights abuse is a completely separate category from, say, spending 100 billion on some project. You
by eternityforest 5y ago
Getting involved in a war, trade war, or campaign of human rights abuse is a completely separate category from, say, spending 100 billion on some project.
You might upset the economy a bit. Maybe someone will call you an idiot. But at any rate you made some jobs and nobody died. Nobody is going to demand sanctions unless someone is being badly abused.
We did not spring into action with the pandemic. The only thing we did was make the vaccine, and we can't even keep up with the variants with that.
If we really "Sprang into action" we would have small thermal cameras in our phones by now that would warn us of fevers.
We would have grates in the floor making a constant downward airflow, and vents blowing HEPA air in the ceiling in major public spaces.
Cashiers would have barriers and small filters making walls of clean air indefinitely, not just "Till the worst of the pandemic is over" It would be such a big industry they'd have advertising projections on the acrylic.
Busses would have the same thing.
We would have "Trying to get your employees to work sick" become a 10 year sentence kind of felony.
We'd have subsidized masks that actually do something, with battery powered fans.
We don't do these things because we accept infectious disease as part of life, and there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution like we did with sanitary sewers.
It seems the current system is considered good enough.
- sokoloff 5y agoIt seems fairly unreasonable to suggest that it was a mistake to not or that it would be reasonable to have retrofitted all public buildings to have underfloor (sometimes underground) HVAC ducting added. Think about the typical large slab-on-grade grocery store, Target, Home Depot, Walmart, etc., which is the majority of the places I’ve had to go in the last two years. Given where we are with COVID, that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction.
- bckr 5y ago> Think about the typical large slab-on-grade grocery store You can raise the floor, just like you can drop the ceiling. > that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction At least this person has some creative ideas for saving lives and actually evolving our society, so that we don't lose a million people to the next airborne virus, which I have little reason to believe won't happen next time.
- sokoloff 5y agoCould we have built raised floors in all the grocery stores and big box stores while simultaneously serving the needs of a country in pandemic in two years? That seems beyond optimistic.
- bckr 5y agoWe're not talking about perpetual motion engines. I think you've demonstrated the above commenter's point that > there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution I for one am not looking forward to the next killer airborne virus.