This stopped working in the mid-Atlantic when invasive tiger mosquitoes arrived. They need like a bottle cap sized amount of water so even things like a flower can hold enough water for them to reproduce.
We’re using scented lures which have the right salt + lipid combo to attract mosquitoes. It helps but I still wish Nathan Myrvold had seriously developed that “photonic fence” product.
I think the next best thing is an automatic turret that fires salt bullets or something, maybe AI. Hopefully it doesn't take an eye out, but if it took out like 1million mosquitoes for 1 eye, worth it?
It was, and I was pretty clear that I understood that. It dodges my point, though, and I've asked that they acknowledge it: should you distrust unhealthy doctors, not can you? Is unhealthiness in one's personal life disqualifying for the ability to provide stellar health advice in one's professional life? Should cops be held to the standard of being exemplary citizens who don't even speed? Have you ever sped? Do you know anyone who has never sped?
Maybe! Is their health status directly related to their specialty? Is it a readily curable condition? Is their advice reasonable?
Or are they a lung cancer specialist chain smoking cigarettes at the appointment?
> Should cops be held to the standard of being exemplary citizens who don't even speed?
Yes, cops should be held to a higher standard than the general public. Being a cop while committing a crime should be an aggravating circumstance in the justice system, not a get-out-of-jail card.
Should we expect perfection? No. But 547 speeding tickets is unacceptable.
Yes, the doctor's advice is reasonable and no the doctor is not smoking at a lung cancer appointment. The premise is that they are messing up off the job. If you think an oncologist shouldn't be able to get as good of a job because they smoke cigarettes or eat burgers, that is where we disagree. Apart from calling that illiberal or saying it has negative utility in its consequences, I don't know how to argue that; it's a values difference. I appreciate you actually taking the position, though.
Same for your cop positions. You say they should, I say they shouldn't. If it's clarifying, I can add that I agree that cops should be held to a higher standard while being cops, ie. that things like qualified immunity are working in the wrong direction, and that they shouldn't be held to a lower standard, on- or off-duty.
As far as I'm concerned, speeding tickets in the course of your private life are between you and the ticketing authority. If he's not paying his fines, if he's violating the social contract, sure, escalate. If we want to punish speeders with more than fines because of endangerment, like the article strongly suggests, sure, change the law. But as long as he's compliant with his fines and we're only giving him fines, it's not just to continue to pile on consequences.
So why were public outdoor areas like skate parks filled with sand to “promote social distancing”?[1] Or parking lots at beaches and state parks closed “to curb the spread of coronavirus”?[2]
LA County Parks is implementing following changes effective November 30, 2020:
All playgrounds will be closed.
Fitness zones and exercise equipment will be closed.
Parks and trails remain open for outdoor, passive use for individuals or members of the same household. Masks and physical distancing are required. No group gatherings are permitted
I agree with you that some protocols were dumb. Schools should have opened windows, or added UV-C lights, or replaced high-traffic surfaces like doorknobs in large common areas with antiviral materiel, added foot-use mechanisms for opening doors, and so on. Or, if it was too expensive for any of that, asked cleaning staff to spend more time on high-transmission areas like bathroom faucets and doorknobs even if it meant less time elsewhere. But I think there's something more than just outdoor vs indoor going on.
The hypocrisy was most notable in experts who said those protesting against the lockdowns (outside), who were considered right wing, were risking spreading the disease, but then said the opposite when the protests supported a left-wing narrative.
Also the CDC who said you had to stay six feet apart even outside who then were OK with people gathering close together during protests and shouting (specifically called out by the CDC as a risky behavior).
We do a lot of risk/reward balancing in life. Maybe we can discuss specific cases, if you like, but "I want to whine about public health restrictions" and "someone got murdered by the state" perhaps have different risk/reward profiles.
We know ventilation matters. Public health officials flubbed this one pretty reliably; schools and doctors' offices should've had HEPA filters in every room instead of clorox wiping everything obsessively. Outdoor protests, in hindsight (and of either kind), were a nothingburger for COVID spread.
As suspected, no such ban. You were able to work in your garden at will. And as the article notes, almost immediately reversed.
A note about this:
> Curiously, the state’s list of “not necessary” items doesn’t include lottery tickets and liquor, which stores can continue to sell.
Alcohol withdrawal is deadly. No one needed a bunch of extra ICU cases. (I can’t speak to the lottery. I wonder if there’s a legal issue there, though.)
"For severe alcohol-withdrawal cases, hospitals often respond with heavy sedation, sometimes to the extent that the patient has to breathe through a tube on a ventilator."
Surely you can see how "more patients in ICU needing vents" would've been a problem?
(This is, incidentally, why experts are important. Liquor stores being essential businesses doesn't make sense to laypeople. Here, for example, is an article from April 2020 attempting to explain it; this info was out there! https://www.allrecipes.com/article/why-are-liquor-stores-con... But people prefer the uninformed dunk.)
> Boy at the time they seemed panicky and capricious. Wrong?
As Donald Rumsfeld once got mocked for saying, there are known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. There were a lot of unknown-unknowns at the start of COVID. Sometimes they absolutely missed the mark. I'm still mad about them not prioritizing ventilation and better masks than cloth. But it was a period of mayhem.
Agree, but we don't live in a technocracy—or at least we usually don't.
If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained. That's how our system works, even when there are negative externalities to some "undesirable" behaviors. And if those externalities are so undesirable (second-hand smoke, say) as to restrict them, our democratic representatives pass laws to do so.
Covid wasn't like that. Suddenly every governor & city manager had near-dictatorial "emergency" powers to implement whatever restrictions fit with the risk/reward tradeoffs of whatever experts happened to have their ear. Some of these experts were right, some of them were wrong.
I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority. I'm not an expert, but I am a voter, and I am fine looking back and saying with hindsight, "No, the use of those powers was in excess of what was reasonable, even given what was known (or not) at the time"—and voting accordingly.
> If the government had widely publicized the (imperfect, of course) thinking of experts and allowed informed citizens to make their own tradeoffs, I don't think anyone would have complained.
They did that, widely. The alcohol withdrawal thing was all over; that's how I know about it. (Googling it finds articles all over, in both national and local news outlets. ChatGPT will also happily explain it.) They can't force people to listen, though, let alone comprehend.
> I guess the question is whether Covid was so terrible a threat as to demand that kind of subjugation to authority.
One must be careful not to inject too much hindsight into that assessment.
Yup yup yup! The lack of investment in air purifiers/ literally moving classes outside in warm areas continues to show me that most of America is painfully stupid about air quality.
To this day, Americans hatred of air purification is so strong that they will actively spread FUD about how “stronger filters in your furnace filter are bad cus it’s not supposed to filter air and it’ll make your machine work harder”. As it turns out, an enormous amount of poor air quality comes from all kinds of heaters.
Americans deserved to reap what they sowed here. I lost a whole lot of my sympathy/empathy for my countryman due to this. I regret that I didn’t switch to one-way masks as a way to further revel in the low trust of my society.
Notice how people that complained about this never ever quoted any stats? That's because its absurdly rare in practice. But the DFP policies did have a measurable impact. In Oakland alone, an extra (as in above the average for Oakland) 2500 or so murders have occured since DFP policies went into practice. So as someone who lived in Oakland, I want to you hear this. You are responsible for killing thousands because you didn't bother to look at the stats for violent crime. I literally saw people die on the street for the first time in my life because of you. 1000s, just in Oakland. That's you...you are responsible for that. I want you to know that.
"But as Trump was making these comments, Oakland was in the midst of a historic drop in homicides. The Bay Area city ended 2025 with 67 people killed, according to data from the Oakland police department, half of its 2021 high of 134."
> The laws says if you do this, you owe a fine. If you pay the fine, it's following the law.
You're following the part of the law that punishes you for violating the other part of the law, not the law that originally punished you. This is an important distinction.
In California cops, family members of cops, and related personnel (e.g. police union officials) can get a special insignia on their license. So when they're pulled over and are asked to present their license....
The FOP (Fraternal Order of Police). Also a thing in NY and NJ.
Fun facts... the insignia you put on your license or on your car also has a thing like a registration tab... The FOP says its "to show your ongoing support", everyone else with a room temperature IQ knows its "to show you're 'paid up' on your protection money for the year".
Oh, and some enterprising souls have created "counterfeit" FOP insignia and stickers and other regalia (or for those tabs), and sold them on eBay... only to have the weight of the police union's attorneys come down on them with cease and desists, etc.
It's probably for the better they're taken down. In California, and perhaps NY and NJ, too, the status shows up on your DMV records, so when a cop runs your license or your plate (and I presume plates are scanned and run automatically), they'll see the discrepancy immediately. So someone is just asking for trouble by using fake stickers, just like if they went around flashing a gang sign when they're not actually a member.
That in itself blows my mind, why on earth should someone see your membership in this order? It's not a LE agency, and in many states the FOP allows membership for retired cops.
I do agree with what you're saying, though, but the issue to me is why that's even something that should show up when your plates are run, "Oh, you're a cop somewhere, or used to be".
I don't remember if the DMV status is actually FOP, or something else, but I knew a lawyer who worked with a police union who had this status. But that's just icing on the cake compared to stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bi...
I have a friend who's a union leader (as in actually runs a sizeable union) and, in the eyes of most people, a straight-up socialist. He convinced me public sector unions are a horrible idea precisely because of the above. I had known about the above, but I always had trouble squaring my support for the right to unionize with the problems with public sector unions. He basically gave me permission to call a spade a spade.
What about the Federal register of LEOs who have been terminated or resigned to avoid termination? Very useful concept for transparency...
... but the police unions that represent approximately 70% of the nation's police have negotiated it into their CBAs that this register "cannot be used for hiring or promotional purposes".
I think the FOP stickers are quite bad, but it's obviously not a "protection racket"; virtually nobody around here has them, and for a protection scheme to work there has to be some pressure to buy in.
> Among the questions he would not answer was: “While driving the RAM 1500, have you been involved in a collision with a car, pedestrian or cyclist?” (We can’t independently find that out because license plates are not in the city database of crashes for some reason.)
"Many people in mental health crisis fear that if they dial 988, law enforcement might show up or they might be forced to go to the hospital. But getting sent that kind of 'involuntary emergency rescue' happens to around 1% of callers, suggests new data from Vibrant Emotional Health, the administrator of the 988 Lifeline for suicide and mental health crises."
Nah he’s bullshitting. It’s 1% of calls, not callers. If you’re in the 1% you’re not making another call. If you’re in the 99% you get to call again tomorrow.
Listen, if you want to check your wellness be my guest. I won’t be.
An hour later, monarch having a seizure on our porch. Oops. Never again.
reply