COVID19: The future will judge our overreaction

Human-based governments are not well equipped to handle the contradiction we are facing now.    We have to make decisions now based on the influential population we have now.   As a result, we are unable to consider the needs of the influential population we will have when this crisis is over.   Most of the decisions made now will benefit people who will no longer be around when the future has to deal with the consequences.   In addition many of those who do survive will be handicapped directly by the policies we made to benefit people who are no longer around.

Medical Privacy and Pandemic Privacy

Given the established one-size fits all medical policies, we have no choice but to allow the general population only to know general counts of cases and outcomes with no additional information such as precise locations and the specific age or other characteristics of that location’s patient.   I ask whether there has ever been a time when anyone in government has seriously defended this approach with a serious consideration that an epidemic could actually happen before the collapse of society.

Covid19: Rolling Quarantines

Based on the recent policy decisions, we have learned that pandemics are unavoidable and unpredictable.   We learned that the best minds in epidemiology dictate a policy that inevitably kills businesses instantly, and obliterates capital everywhere.   We learned there is no point in any form of long-term planning or investing because the public policy is that everything is expendable when it comes to fighting a pandemic of anything with an elevated rate of mortality.

Covid19: Competing purposes of testing

As during the Prohibition where people moved their social gathering from public bars and saloons to their private residences, I think the same thing will happen now.   Social gathering in comparable numbers will resume but they will be in private “speak easy” locations with restricted entry to those who have the right test results instead of knowing the right password.

Covid19: Eastern Airlines Flight 401 for our time

The world is getting close to the terrain and it is speeding up, but we’re entirely focused on some problem.   That problem we are focusing on is serious, but if left alone it will not alone lead to the demise of the entire modern economy and the civilization that economy supports.   On the other hand, single-minded focus on this problem can leave everything in ruin.   I don’t trust the pilots.

Punctuated liberty as new normalcy

With this more diffuse spread of the disease and early warning from experience out of China, we could be implementing their late-stage practices right up front. Require people to check-in/check-out of each public gathering space, have them record their names and times when the enter and leave, and record their responses to health questions along with a quick temperature reading.

Covid19 National Emergency based on tunnel vision data

I don’t think the rapid declaration of emergencies and the cascading declarations at every state and local government was a prudent decision.   I would like to imagine a dedomenocracy would have come up with a wiser plan of action.   A wiser plan of action would be to be much more selective about declaration of emergency and focused in such a way to minimize the impact.

Covid19 National Emergency will quarantine potential heroes

The more likely scenario at this time is that a lot of vulnerable people will get the illness, many will have the complications that will overwhelm the medical systems, and many will die.   If we continue to quarantine our potential heroes, the situation will be far worse with rapidly declining medical capacity or even a rapidly declining carrying capacity for the entire population.  

Mobilization with Data

Unless we permit the algorithms to project the trends into the future, thus inventing modeled data for future values, the algorithms would conclude on policies that may not be distinguishable from the current politically biased decision making.   Government by data must permit dark data, data generated by models, as equals to bright data of trusted observations.

Automation as substitute for training

Much attention is spent on the job-loss implications of introduction of automation to improve productivity.   Meanwhile, automation is also used for job-preservation of older workers in outdated yet still essential practices, and this too has some unfortunate implications for the future.   Eventually the simulation of an earlier age will fail catastrophically in the fact that that age no longer exists.   Alternatively, eventually we will run out of older workers who can work in that simulation.