Chapter 6 - nerd see, nerd do.

I visited my parents today.  Like a good son, I stayed back 12 feet so I wouldn't infect them with covid 19.  We talked about how poorly Trump has managed this whole thing. No suprise just look at how many of his businesses failed.

When I got back to the house my friend had rototilled the ruts I put in the yard.  We couldn't roll them out because the roller needs a big pin that we couldn't find.  So we cleaned up a corner of the yard instead.  He was taking the back end of his mid sized tractor off the ground trying to rip the wires out of the last post that is on that side.  He can't stand to lose, I think I saw him drive his truck over there later with a set of wire cutters.

I sacrificed the pallet remains I tore apart for greenhouse shelves on the altar of the new fire pit I put together the other day.  Suddenly it was trivally easy to pick up all the miscillaneous chunks of wood with nails in it, after not being motivated to clean them up for a week now.  It took me all of 5 minutes to clean them up when I offered myself the reward of fire.

Fire does that. It is so relaxing and amazing for our psyche.  I wasn't joking about it being a sacrifice. Seeing that flame burning through the plyboard pieces I was able to let go of things that had been bothering me for weeks. 

I release my old life to that fire.  I dedicate myself to a new life of service to humanity.  To finding new ways of living more in harmony with nature.

I was thinking the other day how ancient peoples would have seen a pandemic like this as a sign from god that what they have been doing is wrong.  That they had displeased god in some way.  They would make things taboo to try and fix their relationship with god. We laugh at this, but they actually had a point.

We were wrong, because our actions directly lead to an illness clear on the other side of the world to infecting us with this same disease, faster than I ever got a package from wish.com delivered to me.

If we don't change, if we don't analyze the problem and change our behavior, then more and more viralent diseases will sweep the world, until one of them sweeps us all away.

 Doing nothing is crazy.  It is the very definintion of insanity.  We need to prepare for the worst, not the best.

Read to the end, I will am going to propose something extreme to just provoke you and make you think.  The following should anger anybody that isn't an idiot, on both the right and the left.

I am proposing we have 4 week quarantines for anyone wanting to go across any border.  That instead of travel between counties that we do teleconferencing and telepresence instead. 

Robotics is very good, in many ways you could put on a vr helmet and slip your arms into feed back sleeves and gloves and walk around a factory on the other side of the earth in real time, able to hear and interact with anyone and anything almost as well as if you were there in person.  And that if need be we start a manhatten project level effort to make it so. And give this tech patent free to the world.

There is absolutely no need to travel between countries and if you feel the need to do so, then you should gladly accept the month long quarantines as doing your part to keep humanity safe.

And instead of having factories on the other side of the earth making things and inefficently shipping them to us, then those workers can VR into factories in our coutries and  have to abide by our standards for worker safety, pay, working hours and conditions, and polution. Would this be bad?  How would it help or hurt the workers of all counties? The businesses? Be specific and detailed. Read to the end before you reply.

I want to make it clear that I agree that international travel is important, so important that some people should be willing to stay on military bases for a month each time they cross a border. I leave aside the point that this appears to just be a right that people from rich families have. Poor people rarely travel.

This is all an argument from the extreme, an absurd level that we would be insane to adopt.  So absurd that it could be used as the basis of a science fiction story.

If you can propose doing less than this, that would make us just as safe, then I welcome your input to this discussion.

 I am really interested in hearing what anyone thinks should actually change after all this is over?  Should borders be completely open everywhere? Should we lock them down?  Should we be quick about locking borders down when there are issues and just as quickly open borders back up again? Should we do something completely different?

Please share!