Category Archives: Technology and Society
Car Shopping
…will probably be going on line, for good. Test drives do seem like the hardest part.
Laugh Tracks
A history. When they had audience laughter at things that weren’t actually funny, I always found it annoying.
And I didn’t know that Sharon Tate played Jethro’s first love.
[Update early afternoon]
Related: Church adds laugh track to pastor’s jokes.
Dune
There’s apparently a new remake coming out.
Unpopular opinion (which I’ve probably expressed here before): Dune is the most overrated book in SF. And the sequels were terrible.
On a sad note, I recently decided to finally pick up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which has been on the bookshelf for decades (paperback), and read it. I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. Heinlein really needed an editor in his later years.
The Ethanol Standard
Yes, get rid of it. Take it behind the barn and kill it with an ax. It was always stupid, but in a time of possible food shortages, and oil at historic lows, it’s an insane policy. We had stopped using food for transportation at the turn of the 20th century, but these morons decided to bring the notion back.
Not Love In The Time Of Cholera
No, it’s porn in the time of the coronavirus.
Yes, this is my shocked face, too.
Testing
…is coming to your doctor’s office, or even your home.
We have suffered the most from lack of knowledge of who has it, or has had it. We won’t be able to get back to anything resembling pre-virus normal until we can do extensive testing.
[Update]
This would help a lot, too: Searching for a cure from the blood of survivors.
Trust The “Experts”
Public health authorities have failed us at every level, and the powerful people who were catastrophically wrong about China.
[Update a while later]
The long hard road to decoupling from China. We cannot have globalization with countries that do not share our values of liberty and individualism. But we should more strongly embrace the China that works: Taiwan.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A bipartisan call for WHO to make Taiwan a member. That of course begs the question that WHO is an organization even worthy of our funding.
[Update a while later]
The massive failure of the federal government in the pandemic argues against Medicare for all.
Social Impact
The virus is going to redefine home, work, education, and life.
Food Shortages Soon?
I’ve been concerned about this for a while. It shows how fragile our infrastructure is. And it’s why proposals like Zeke Emanuel’s to continue it for over a year is societal suicide.
[Update]
Related: The coronavirus is revealing our technology blunders.