Infinite Quack

What don't most conservatives realize? Answered by Peter Kruger What I'm hearing in this post is the anguish of someone who holds an actual conservative philosophy, an actual system of values. I may not agree that conservatism is the way to go (I think the world is changing fast and we'd best change with it), but I have 100% respect for someone who holds that other system of values with honesty and open eyes. The people he's angry about, who insist on calling themselves "conservatives" and who sully the name... they are not demonstrating that they hold a system of values. What they're demonstrating, I feel, is best summed up by the term "cult". A strongly held view crosses over into becoming a cult when you insist on members holding beliefs regardless even of directly observable facts. Denying reality has no place in a system of values. Denying reality is not a philosophy, it's a deranged state of mind. Treating every inconvenient fact or obs...

The New York Times normally sets a limit on how many articles non-subscribers can read. They've exempted their Coronavirus coverage from those limits. Like everyone else, I'm glued to the news as this tragedy unfolds. I've been watching stories about the virus move higher and higher on the page. For weeks the Times has made it their top story, and the way things are expected to go, that will continue for a lot longer. So far -- so far -- my own family has yet to be directly impacted. It's heartbreaking to imagine what it has been like for so many families that haven't been as lucky. When someone acquires the full set of symptoms, it is nasty and dangerous. Around the world, nearly 60,000 have died, says the Times, and with tests hard to get in many places, it's likely those numbers are under-reported. Over a quarter million people are known to have caught the virus, and that  number is likely to be dramatically  higher in reality. Recall part of what made HIV s...

Trump tests negative for coronavirus as questions mount over his personal risks in face of pandemic   Kwik-Faks[tm] for the impatient: Trump has tested negative for the novel coronavirus. Trump was seen stomping around the White House today, proudly brandishing a white folded piece of paper, and bragging about how negative his test results had been. Trump then held an impromptu press conference in which he went on at some length about how his tests were the best, that he tested better than anyone on Earth, and that he was thinking of becoming a doctor so he could administer negative-result tests to other world leaders, or something to that effect. Trump eventually unfolded the piece of paper, which turned out to be the words "Presadent Trump tests 1000% Negative" written in crayon. White House aides lined up to take turns at the podium, praising the President on his good health, and how clever he had been to get such an astoundingly negative result. Trump then roughly shoulde...

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them "Retail arbitrage", better known as hoarding and price gouging. It's one thing to do that with dolls or something. It's another to do it with a product whose purpose is to slow the spread of a deadly infection. The grocery store near us has had no hand sanitizer on its shelves for a while. (Side note: You can make your own sanitizer with aloe vera and isopropyl alcohol. See How to Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer .) In a country so in love with capitalism, it's unrealistic to expect people wouldn't try to profit off the tragedy. But it's basically no different from war profiteering. One would wish that people's conscience would tell them they're crossing a line. Someone's always going to be willing to cross it, though -- whether out of greed or desperation, or just not caring very much that what they're doing harms society. This also exemplifies what's wrong with the libertari...

Microsoft, Amazon Advise Staff to Work From Home as Coronavirus Spreads, Facebook Contractor Confirmed Infected Though COVID-19 is ultimately going to affect everybody, this particular outbreak, the first significant one in the US, has had a particular impact on me -- though I'm not aware of anyone I know having caught it. A few years ago my wife and I took a vacation in Hawaii (on the Big Island) with family. We discovered her breathing was easier. We took a second trip to test it, and confirmed that she felt better on the island, worse again in the Seattle area ("east side", to locals). So we set out to make it permanent. We bought a house on the island a couple years ago, got our Seattle-area house sold last year. But I had to maintain a presence in Seattle for the sake of my employer Amazon, who were cautious about granting me broad approval to work remotely. I was permitted to do that for one week per month at first, then two. I got an apartment in downtown Seattle a...

Facts illuminated by recent events: People are only rational actors up to a point. Even when acting rationally, it may be just rational self-interest that motivates someone. Short-sightedness and greed. Brainwashing, sadly, does work. It doesn't require any instruments of torture either. A slow drip of falsehoods, spiked with righteous anger and salted with paranoia, will convince millions given enough time. Systems of law are not magical. Just as money only has value because everyone agrees it does, laws only have force because social norms dictate that they be followed. If enough people decide to ignore those laws, or that they mean something different than the words which compose them, there is no higher system to which the rest of us can appeal. Empires have fallen before and it will happen again. Nothing renders the United States of America immune to collapse. Its great wealth and military might won't matter if it rots from within. They might even make things worse, fallin...

Planes versus trains: 1) Before you board a plane as a passenger, you must go through a long, tedious, vaguely insulting process with the TSA. It's security theater which probably doesn't stop any terrorists. Nonetheless, you must get to the airport 90 to 120 minutes before the flight takes off, and that's mostly due to the potential for delays during security screening. After that, you're kept in a sort of security bubble, including the umbilicus from the airport to the plane itself... all to avoid letting suspicious people near the plane. Before boarding a train, you must do none of this. You can walk into the train station 15 minutes before departure. This is a huge time savings. Advantage: trains. 2) Boarding a plane is terribly inefficient. Being a narrow tube with a narrow one-person walkway and (usually) only one entrance at the front, you end up forced into a single line of people. The whole line stops when the guy or gal at the front reaches their row, and has ...