ba2plus's comments

Network just keeps getting more and more relevant every year. Every time I hear the "We're in the boredom-killing business!" rant, I think of all those dead-eyed fake-smile influencers.

Actually, I was thinking of my own country, Canada. There's still occasional small outbreaks, but aside from some limits on large gatherings and some requirements to self-isolate when traveling between certain provinces, things are starting to open back up.

>Long term pain solved for government officials not for it's citizens.

Only financial pain. But that was inevitable as soon as the pandemic hit. Given a choice between financial pain for a few decades, and financial pain for a few decades combined with a potential literal decimation of the population, I'm perfectly fine with the solo financial pain.

Short term? No, definitely not. Short-term economic pain was going to happen regardless of policy. Stay open and let the virus spread like wildfire, or shut down and ship helicopter money to people to prevent social unrest - either one brings short-term pain.

But there's absolutely a way to avoid long-term pain: the aforementioned lockdown/helicopter-money plan. Shut down, have everyone not absolutely essential stay isolated as much as humanly possible, provide direct cash payments to individuals or huge wage subsidies tied to mandatory guarantees not to lay anyone off, provide free health care to everyone affected, and enforce internal travel restrictions to keep outbreaks contained. Countries that have gone down this route are now starting to open back up with minimal death tolls and stabilizing economies.

The US, to put it mildly, did not do this. Practically every level of government of all political stripes completely bungled it. Counties screwed up, cities screwed up, states screwed up, legislative and executive federal branches screwed up. It was a hodgepodge of counterproductive idiocy by politicians and officials of all political parties and ideological stripes. And Wall Street & friends aided and abetted this insanity by whining about how a full shutdown early on would "harm the economy".

I'm not talking about mask policies. I'm talking about "get employees back to work at all costs to save profits" policies.

With garbage HVAC systems that were built half a century prior by the lowest bidder and largely unmaintained since then.

Wall Street has decreed that capitalism must go on at all costs. That requires workers to show up to work. That requires that workers don't need stay home to watch kids. And that requires that kids not be at home during business hours.

Few believe that this is the right thing to do. Powerful businesspeople believe it's the profitable thing to do. So, here we are.

And a Starlink network would mean an instant global Martian internet.

There's been some really interesting ideas for a new generation of telescopes that Starship's cargo capacity could enable. Telescopes on the far side of the moon are the classic example. They'd be shielded from the sun for 14 days out of 28, permanently shielded from Earth, and still have all the advantages of being in a vacuum. Gravitational-wave telescopes on the geologically-stable lunar surface are another interesting idea.

But I think my favourite idea is infrared scopes in the polar craters, some of the coldest places in the solar system. You don't need a complicated JWST-style extendable sun shield or limited helium supply. You are limited in terms of direction, but that's not a bad tradeoff.

Mars could be the key to opening up the entire solar system. It's close enough to the sun for solar power to be practical, it's proven to have the mass amounts of subsurface ice and atmospheric CO2 needed for Sabatier-process methane/oxygen production, and it has a very shallow gravity well that would make it easy to lift huge propellant loads into orbit.

I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that Mars-based tankers supplying propellants and breathing oxygen would be commonplace through the solar system by the end of the century.

When I conquer the world, I'm going to make June 2 a global holiday in honour of Clair Patterson. Despite his not being a medical professional, he's easily on par with Jonas Salk, Ignaz Semmelweis, Joseph Lister, and other more famous medical revolutionaries in terms of his contribution to public health.

>If the above don't work, we could be looking at mass unemployment, unbearable private and government debt, and more civil unrest

Given the fact that there's never been a successful coronavirus vaccine, and that there's a huge portion of the American population that regards mask-wearing and hand-washing to be tyrannical affronts to civil liberties, I think we all know how things are going to play out.

>Serial Experiments Lain: Godly programmer

Alternatively, a godly program.