How Stupid is this Respect My COVID Space Idea?

I find it so interesting that Americans, especially, known for their incredible waste of space, insisting on three foot circles around themselves when in public. This used to totally floor Europeans and Asians.

Interesting! I have never heard of this before. Where are you getting this? Sources, please.

Triple A, Michelin travel guide. Its been a standing joke in international travel for 50 years, what rock do you live under?

Americans are always being scolded for not being 'sensitive' to the traditions and norms of other cultures, so for crying sake, why can't others be 'sensitive' to the culture here in the United States???????

This is exactly the kind of hypocrisy that pisses off so many people who are willing to actually use their brain and think.

I think the general consensus of countries with 1000 or more years of history behind them that we are too young to have a "culture". LoL Somethinglike the I cant get hired without experience but if you dont hire me how can I get experience deal.

Of course if you ask the French they will gladly tell you no one has culture but them so there's that.

The corona virus mutates, so it is reasonable to suppose that it will never be eliminated. It is here to stay. So what are we to do? Here in Ontario we have just passed the one year anniversary of the "temporary" two-week flatten-the-curve lockdown. It seems to have morphed into an eliminate-the-virus lockdown, which is impossible. The lockdowns cannot continue indefinitely. Societal collapse will result. Resistance to the imposed public health measures is growing. In parts of western Canada people are saying, F__k it! We're done. We've had enough. We would rather take our chances with the virus than go on living like this. Joe's Bar has opened in defiance of the lockdown laws, and I'm going there to support Joe and have a drink with my friends. No masks. No social distancing. There is more to life than always worrying about death.

Yes, there comes a time when we have to accept that humans will have to evolve to survive the virus.

its not funny that you started this rant with that sentence the same day this report is published.

Variant B.1.1.7 of COVID-19 associated with a significantly higher mortality rate, research shows

"There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

Walter Reuther

As I mentioned in my #15 post, I wear a pin on my lapel that reads, "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid", and after reading your referenced report, I'm so afraid that I need a drink. I'm going down to Joe's Bar to have a beer with my pals. On the way, if I see someone wearing a hazmat suit, I'll wave, because I'll know it's you.

I notice that the "almost good answer" ratings of both my #15 post and my #62 post have been removed. See WCarts #5 post for fatality ratios (that post has also had "good answer" votes removed). Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. Photo of the tag I wear. You think it's stupid? I think a laser-ring hat is stupid.

My fav of the decade,

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups”

Our region of 100,000 people typically has about 25 active cases of Covid-19 (all quarantined), so, judging by the many, many people I see outside and alone in their cars, wearing masks, I agree with the quote. Reminds me of the play "Rhinoceros" by Eugene Ionesco. Theatre of the Absurd is the genre.

It's not a rant. It's reality. I'm sorry you don't like reality, but that's the way it is. If you want to get angry at somebody, get angry at China.

That brings to mind, this funny song; Life is too short to worry.

https://youtu.be/wr-kn0JG5p4

Green is more visible than red.

Also, a cattle prod would be more effective.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf

Lockdown enthusiasts should read E.M.Forster's short story, "The Machine Stops". It describes a future in which all of humanity lives underground, each assigned to a single room. "hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee". All communication with others is done via an audio/video network (incredibly, Forster wrote this in 1906). People listen to and give lectures over the network. Food, clothing, music, are delivered at the push of a button. When tired, the occupant summons a bed to rise from the floor.

Lockdown enthusiasts will have difficulty understanding, at least for the first half of the story, that Forster is describing a dystopia, because it is a world that haters of liberty would love to see implemented. Forster writes, "The clumsy system of public gatherings had long since been abandoned... People never touched one another." But everyone "knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously." (shades of FaceBook!)

The woman in the story ("...in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as fungus.") receives a video call from her son, who, to her shock and alarm, wants to see her in person to tell her something (the same shock and alarm I witnessed recently in the eyes of a masked friend when I invited him to come by for a visit). "But you can see me!" his mother exclaimed. "What more do you want?" Finally, overcoming her revulsion and fears, she agrees to meet with her son. He tells her that he has been to the surface of the earth, that he has been outside the machine, and has breathed the air without a respirator (without a mask!). He tells his mother things she does not want to hear. Presciently, they are the kind of things that many today do not want to hear. It is a story for our times - written in 1906.

There are also many future dystopian anarchy novels where no rules are set, like Samuel Delaney's Dahlgren. Another pair I liked are Cory Doctorow's Walkaway and Radicalized. If you want a true classic of the genre, look no further than George Orwell's 1984. If you want to stay relevant to pandemic induced dystopias then Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood fits the bill. But we have to remember that these are all just one individuals perception about how things might go wrong and not how things must inevitably go wrong.

None of these are real. They are fiction.

The lockdowns are certainly irritating and everyone, including me, are eager for when they can safely end. I doubt the lockdowns will continue for another year. So social life will be coming back soon but probably slightly altered from before 2020. What worries me is premature easements that just allow this disease to mutate and flourish despite vaccines.

It is those who enjoy the lockdowns I worry about, and there is no shortage of them. Shop owners up here who defy the lockdown orders receive death threats. The police, in their zealous enforcement of the recently implemented laws, certainly appear to be enjoying their new powers. Politicians, through their emergency measures lockdown legislation, are causing bankrupcies, despair, suicides, drug abuse... They express their concern for these "difficulties", but they won't lose a nickel from their own salaries (Some have been discovered vacationing in the Caribbean after ordering travel restrictions on everyone else) Governments are always more eager to grab power than to relinquish it. For those in love with power, the specter of virus variants is surely making their mouths water. Already there is talk of a "third wave", which of course will mean more lockdowns. Endless variants (untouched by vaccines) will be an excuse for endless lockdowns. Endless lockdowns will mean the end of individual liberty. I do not share your optimism.

Another story I recommend to anti-liberty lockdown enthusiasts is one written by Philip K. Dick ("I'm a real Dickhead!" is how a friend describes his love of this author.) Set in the near future, everyone must carry a card listing any and all doctor prescribed medications for the holder of the card. The police have the authority to arbitrarily stop anyone and demand that they produce the medical card. Then, using a portable scanner, they get an instant readout of all of the medications present in the detained citizen's body. If the readout doesn't match what is on the card, the person is immediately arrested, taken into custody, and transported to an undisclosed location. I can't recall the title of the story. It describes a world that lockdown enthusiasts dream will come true. (If they do find the story and read it, maybe they too will call themselves "Dickheads".)

I suspect that it would be almost impossible to find a 'lockdown enthusiast' (outside of a work of fiction; Asimov had one of my favorite versions of the isolation premise). I'm confident that lockdown enthusiasts are less common than say, syringe enthusiasts. *Most* of us are not thrilled with getting stuck, but are willing to endure it if it will help avoid tetanus, smallpox, etc etc, and even...Covid. The vast majority of us (outside those with criminal occupations) don't enjoy wearing masks. But we wear welding goggles when welding, respirators when spraying hazardous paints, and we're willing to wear masks to not only protect ourselves, but reduce the risk to those around us.

Lockdowns are a terrible thing; you won't find anyone that says they aren't. But when not wearing a mask is viewed as a political statement instead of a health issue, and failure to wear masks drives up infection rates of a deadly disease to the point that hospitals can't cope, then there just aren't many tools left in the toolbox to protect us.

Saying that there are 20 cases out of 100k people doesn't mean much, if the 100k people are spread across half a million square miles. Unfortunately, if you have 100k people in a small city these days, you'll be fortunate if there are only 20 new cases a day.

It would be helpful to stop with the straw men and have a civil discussion about the best path back to normalcy.

Charlie

Re: "almost impossible to find a lockdown enthusiast"

Are you blind? Lockdown enthusiasts are everywhere! When I stated in an earlier post that our region of 100,000 people (80,000 city plus surrounding area) has averaged 25 active cases, I did not mean 25 new cases a day. I meant 25 total - and those 25 are in quarantine. So the absurdity of people here wearing masks outside and while alone in their cars is obvious. They are lockdown enthusiasts. Their mask wearing has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with communicating their sense of virtue to others. You state that we willingly wear protective goggles when welding. Well, suppose those 25 people, to pass the time while in quarantine, decide to do some welding in their basements. Should we all, in response to that activity, and to show our safety consciousness, wear welding googles everywhere we go in the city? It makes as much sense as the mask wearing.

No one here, except Brave Sir Robin, has acknowledged that Covid-19, due to variants, is here to stay. Like the common flu, it cannot, and will not be eliminated (Although strangely, no one gets the common flu anymore. Hmm...). Covid-19 is not the Black Plague. We know that now. We didn't know it a year ago. But government fear mongering intensity has not abated as a result of this knowledge. See WCarts #5 post for fatality ratios. For most of the population it poses no more risk than the regular flu - and we don't lockdown the world to try to stop the spread of the flu. Lockdowns have already caused irreparable societal damage, and neither lockdowns nor vaccines are going to eliminate the virus or even stop its spread. So what is the sensible thing to do? The sensible thing is to end the lockdowns. Concentrate resources on measures to protect those most at risk from the virus. Let everyone else get back to work and back to living.

Now you are just bloviating conspiracy BS. Go call Mike Lindell. He'll love you.

Typically, you make no specific reference to anything I've written, and present no argument to support your BS claim. It is mindless mud-flinging.

Your claim that lock downs are a government conspiracy is bullshit and YOU haven't presented a single FACT to support your ranting but challenge others for facts?

You are a happy horseshitter arent you?

You get another flag!

Will you quit whining you big baby!

There is a pandemic happening and things are not normal!

If you want to change your local government's response to this pandemic then campaign for a politician you do agree with and stop bothering this engineering blog. If you find that everyone in your area disagrees with you then move or accept that you have no say in the matter. We have no say in your local politics so leave us alone!

My reference to fatality ratios for different age groups, and my stating that in view of those ratios, government response has been disproportionate to the risk to the majority of people, is neither a rant nor a conspiracy theory. It is a fact based opinion completely appropriate to this forum. What is inappropriate is the angry tone in both your and Rashavarek's responses to my posts. It is baffling. Well, actually, it is not baffling.

I suspect the reason for the anger is that you both love the lockdowns; you love the sense of crisis; you love your mask-wearing sense of virtue; you love admonishing anyone who violates the invisible two metre zone of no-entry around your alcohol-washed pure and unsullied self. What you hate is someone like me proposing a simple and sensible solution - that we focus our resources on protecting those most at risk, and let everyone else get on with their lives. I suggest you both hate this proposal because virtue-posturing has become such an important part of your identities in the last few months, and a return to normal living for most of the population would mean an end to that. Abandoning your virtue-posturing is a frightening prospect for you both. I understand. There will be feelings of ego dissolution you will need to work through, and that will be very difficult. (No, please. I ask no fee for this psychological assessment.)

Have you at all considered that Canada's lower fatality ratios are caused by these lockdowns that irritate you. I doubt it.

I've tried to engage you to think multiple times here but you don't even acknowledge my points let alone attempt to rebut them. You don't even recognize a "logical fallacy". Instead you just continue to whine that the lockdowns are not worth it.

It is clear that you won't listen.

Good Day

"See WCarts #5 post for fatality ratios."

Unfortunately Wcarts data, like his outrageous citations of claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, is out of date:-

To be fair to him in this instance, you would expect, the CDC to be up to date, perhaps they stopped updating those estimates as a result of many studies showing the problems with those sorts of estimates. In any case the new more dangerous strains push the figures into the scenario 3/4 area.

This only slightly more recent study puts the overall figure for developed countries at 1%:-

• In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).

(it's lower in low income countries because those countries generally have much lower average ages.)

In either of those two cases (most people on this forum are over 50) one in a hundred are not odds that I want to take for a game of Russian roulette, and you can be sure that if you start going to bars with no social distancing and lots of other like minded people you will catch it.

But that's not the point. As all countries have found: removing lockdown restrictions pushes the R value back above 1; the number of infections rises exponentially; the country's health system becomes overloaded, and, more people start to die from covid and non related conditions.

Worse still: the more cases there are world wide the greater the chance of mutating to a much more dangerous strain.

By the way "lockdown enthusiast" is a totally inappropriate term for people who endure lockdown because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that it is essential. Constantly using that term is not likely to bring anyone closer to your way of thinking.

Corona viruses mutate. Influenza vaccines are continuously being updated to try to keep up with the mutations. The Covid-19 virus is mutating and nothing will stop it from doing so. There is the UK, the Brazil, the South African variants already. There will be more variants. It is here to stay. Unless the entire human race is given an updated vaccine every couple of years (an impossibility), it is inevitable that almost everyone will eventually get Covid-19, just as almost everyone has had the flu. I fully expect to get Covid-19 at some point. Maybe I have already had it. I was feeling a bit out-of-sorts a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that was my Covid-19. The guy in the photo, a lockdown enthusiast (I'm sorry, but that's what he is), is probably going to get Covid-19. You are probably going to get Covid-19. Lockdowns and vaccines are not going to prevent the spread of it in its current form and in all of its future forms. Slow it down, yes, but not stop it. So, do we accept that inevitability, and focus our resources on protecting those most at risk (that is, a year over year schedule of updated vaccines for them), or do we, with no end in sight, continue to lockdown everyone regardless of their risk, and cause ever more societal destruction?

So why bother?

Rather than a facile remark, if you disagree with what I have written in my post, then please present your argument. I am not opposed to reasonable measures to slow the inevitable spread of Covid-19. I am opposed to, and fearful of, measures that threaten our fundamental freedoms. In post #103 I state that many measures implemented here are being successfully challenged in Canadian courts. Charges are being dismissed as unconstitutional under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Maybe you find the news of these successful challenges disturbing. I don't. I regularly contribute to the Toronto group that crowdfunds to cover the legal costs of these court cases. Freedom requires vigilance.

I did not oppose any of your recent unsubstantiated drivel. I asked a simple question. Apparently that is too complicated for you to even comprehend, let alone answer.

Good Day

And yet another rant with no substancial proofs.

I don't know about you Red, but I'd stay away from Canada for awhile. According to Canadian Slidewinder because vaccines don't work and diseases never go away they are all being killed off by smallpox and polio.

I don't know about you, but I have never once worried about either of those diseases because our methodolgy for eliminating such things was quite good even 60+ years ago.

Two things I wish to correct.

First, our sliding neighbor is no more deluded than many here in the US and CR4. Just look at the posts amended by the administration for posting disreputable links. I suspect this maybe why no substantiating links have been presented for they won't stand scrutiny. In fact I suspect our slider is a great rarity in Canada. I say this because Canada has a much better COVID fatality and infection rate than the US. Because of this Canada has wisely locked down the US/Canada border to only essentials.

Second, in 1961 both of those dreaded diseases were still found in the wild. Small pox was absent from North America but still found in Asia and Africa(?). Polio could still be found here and mass vaccinations were still in process. In fact a real freaky incident happened when some of the attenuated virus vaccines were found to be insufficiently attenuated so the vaccine dose was actually infecting some (me?) with live virus. I still remember the almost hidden worried look on my parents faces when my sister and I were whisked to a doctor's office to get vaccine shots only two weeks after getting vaccine drops on sugar cubes.

OH I get that Red, he is no more or less deluded than many here. At the Mark Twain moment I left the conversation and now just snipeshoot. I have found that you might just strike a nerve and wake a brain that way. Direct dissertation is pointless. They have no data to present. They have nothing to back their assertion but screaming louder than everyone else. It's literally all they got. However, a good zinger can have a lasting effect experience has shown. In my other life it was know as Gestalt.

Most have mistaken anarchy for freedom and its only because no one has physically demonstrated how wrong they are that they maintain that ridiculous position. Now when I run up to the fool and blind side him with a hay maker while screaming freedom and you can tell me what to do, and your laws dont apply to me, he MIGHT, repeat, MIGHT, get the message when he comes to.

Not putting money on it though.

Ignoring the unknown possibility of the worst scenario ie. a mutation which is far more fatal, more infectious and more resistant to vaccines: you are failing to address the main imediate problem, that without lockdowns country's health care systems become overwhelmed.

I fully acknowledge the need not to overwhelm the health care system, but the "temporary" two week flatten-the-curve measures implemented more than a year ago seem to have morphed into an impossible we-must-eliminate-the-virus creeping- police-state scenario. Many of the measures defy reason (parks closed for example - with police tape across the entrances!), and many are violations of our fundamental rights and freedoms (equality under the law does not mean big box stores open and small businesses closed). Also, the social cost of these measures is being ignored -bankruptcies, despair, suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence... Children, the lowest risk group, are being taught to fear and avoid others, to social distance and wear masks, to not play together in groups, to shun other children who don't follow the protocols, to sit at desks in plexiglass boxes - like dangerous criminals at a court hearing. What is the long term psychological damage being done here?

Further, in reference to my #131 post, and the photo of the guy wearing a face shield and respirator: He appears to be a young man, and therefore would be at low risk even without his protective gear. Nevertheless, although I think he cuts a ridiculous figure, I accept with equanimity his choice to suit-up like that. He may be putting his self-righteousness on display, but it is a harmless display. Not so with your laser-ring hat. In your self-righteous fervour you have ratcheted up the government approved social distancing protocol to an aggressive and dangerous level. To the applause of many here, you have built a device that you know could cause harm to others if they should dare to enter your consecrated two metre radiused zone of exclusion. It is apparent that in your view a person who ventures into that sacred zone is by definition a filthy insect, therefore should that cockroach be shorter than you, look up, catch the 100mw laser in the eyes and sustain permanent vision damage, well, they are fully deserving of that injury, aren't they?

You have no idea of the underlying condition(s) that may affect the man in post #131: my son, for example would almost certainly die if he caught covid. He has had his first jab now but the evidence for whether or not that will improve his chances is not in yet.

The image of that man is a freeze frame taken from a Rebel News (Toronto) video. In it, David Menzies of Rebel News asks him, "You look young and relatively healthy, so how is a person like yourself so terrorized by the virus?"

He replied, "It's not that I'm terrorized. It's just that if I get sick, I could make someone else sick."

He was out and about, and he was in an area where there were many people coming and going. Draw your own conclusion. As I wrote, his gear is an extreme response, but a harmless display. In contrast, your gear is an extreme response, but aggressive, threatening, and poses a danger to others. That is not the only point I made in my post.

Hey thanks for that, now we can all benefit from this "source".

https://www.rebelnews.com/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-rebel/

Draw your own conclusions.

Let us wade out of the mud of your irrelevant verbiage.

The visor and respirator wearing man shown in post #131, by his words and actions, is not wearing that gear because he has some medical condition that puts him at special risk. It is a silly, but harmless display of Covid-19 caution. In contrast, the OP's laser-ring hat, which uses a 100mw laser, is aggressive and dangerous. It could potentially cause vision damage to anyone who ventures into the laser defined zone of exclusion and catches the laser in the eyes. I made this argument in the second paragraph of my post #143. I made other arguments in the first paragraph. You have addressed none of them. The specific topic of this thread is the laser-ring hat, so here are two on-topic questions about it:

1) Do you agree that the laser-ring hat would be dangerous to others if worn in public?

2) Do you agree that whatever the danger level to others from the laser-ring hat, that danger level has nothing to do with Bobby Fischer's anti-Semiticism; nothing to do with Rebel News founder Ezra Levant's political views; nothing to do with whether Ezra Levant embraces or rejects his Judaism; nothing to do with whether Rebel News has had 500 or 500 million views; nothing to do with my views on Canada's Covid-19 response?

I take umbrage at being told my verbiage is irrelevant. It appears to me that you, sir, seem to enjoy being disreputable. How pathetic.

I'm done.

From your non-answer to my two questions, and from the content of your previous posts, I conclude that you disagree with me that the OP's laser hat poses a risk to others - because I subscribe to a certain Canadian news site, and because Bobby Fischer was an anti-Semite.

This will work better at keeping people away:

https://gagstergifts.com/product/fart-to-go/

Guaranteed!

I never knew my car needed this....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2hzNET5Ohw

Man, I don’t know how I missed this one!

Whoooo-Weee!

So, Randall… did you pick up any usable ideas about your hat?

I think it’s clever. Practical? I dunno. Constructible? Maybe. Marketable? 100% YES!

… which makes your Device a perfect addition to the product offerings by LynDoor Industries! We would very much like to discuss the exploitation manufacture and distribution of this marvelous concept.

We can call it The Personal Individual Safe Space Optically Functional Fence Device.

Beware, my friend, of the rascals representing KrisDell Corporation. They might promise you 20 quid, but the good folks at LynDoor Industries can really deliver on our 20 quid… prolly… pretty close, anyway.

Have your people call my people and we will swing a deal!