Of course it’s horrifying, especially since these actions are supported by a majority of the population.
There are a few countries with little or no entry restrictions. Mexico in particular is fairly close to Canada and is open. If you are able to work remotely, I’d strongly suggest looking into it. Canada is not going to change its policies anytime soon, sadly.
I’m not sure what the restrictions are, but can they actually prevent you from leaving if you are flying internationally? What about for a medical or other “official” purpose?
Edit: seriously scary that this post is flagged. Not cool.
Yeah, this is some serious mass hysteria, and it's not getting better.
They are pinning one side against the other, and it's propelled by the government.
You can't even search COVID related terms in Google without it being regulated. Try searching anything related to anti-vax. They have pushed up all the government sites at the top of the rankings for any searching that have the word COVID in it. Things are bonkers.
Indeed. Any mild criticism is immediately flagged, downvoted, and deleted. I don’t care how serious the pandemic is, it doesn’t justify mass hysteria.
As I said, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Your best bet is likely Mexico and/or a way into certain US states like Texas or Florida. Not sure if you can get a permanent residence card from abroad, but it may be something to investigate.
I posted this on here because I thought I can open an intellectual dialog, where we can have a mature chat. Instead, my post gets flagged, for who knows what.
Seriously losing all respect for this site - it's the same as every other place that is supporting this mass hysteria.
This isn’t going to end. There is no point at which things will return to normal. If you think otherwise, I’m sorry but you simply haven’t been paying attention.
If vaccine mandates bother you, I strongly suggest moving to a rural area or to a region/country with less restrictions. Otherwise you will inevitably be forced to receive yearly boosters in order to participate in society.
Tokyo used to have a lot of trash cans and removed them after a terrorist attack. I think everyone would prefer to have the trash cans. It absolutely sucks to carry around your trash for hours, and not everyone does it.
People do litter here, but there's an army of old people that clean the streets... like this article is suggesting.
If you actually watched him, you would know that he takes on a lot of hard hitting issues.
It is a comedy show, but it's not there to educate you on these subjects. It is there to pique your intrest, and to inform you that an alternate way of looking at the subject exists, and you should go learn more about it.
Is he any more or less biased than any other journalist out there? Everything in this video was factual. Do you have criticisms of the actual content besides that it was entertaining?
Edit: re: "investigations"
This isn't investigative reporting. You could have put the information in this segment together sans comedian from your laptop with probably 20 minutes of googling. It's all well known facts that are out there that he's bringing to the surface.
About the last thing people in small towns want are arrogant city folks coming in, kicking them out, and moving them to a nightmarish megacity. It might come as a surprise to denizens of coastal cities, but no one in a small town looks at NYC or SF and thinks it’s a successful, nice place to live.
If you want to help small towns, push for more remote work. There is absolutely zero reason why millions need to be crammed in a single geographic location when we all work online anyway.
> but no one in a small town looks at NYC or SF and thinks it’s a successful, nice place to live
Cities are like poker tables, whereas countries are like a casino. Sitting at the highest poker table in the casino means nothing, to make it worthwhile you have to actually win and thrive at it, otherwise you'd be miserable, losing each and every hand.
If the US is a casino, then NYC , LA, SF, Chicago are the big tables. But each and every player has a goal to win as much money as they can with the least effort...and in order to do that sitting at the biggest tables might not be the best strategy after all. In fact it could be the worse strategy of all.
> There is absolutely zero reason why millions need to be crammed in a single geographic location when we all work online anyway.
If you think the level of your game is up with the pros and you want to sit at the big tables then you might as well go physically there to take advantage of all the positive effects of playing 24/7/365.
Same reason why people want to go to Vegas , Atlantic City and Macao to play poker instead of simply playing online.
> If you think the level of your game is up with the pros and you want to sit at the big tables then you might as well go physically there to take advantage of all the positive effects of playing 24/7/365.
Uhhh what? Ignoring that there is more to life than making as much money as possible, I'm currently working remotely for a company based in one of these areas and doing quite well, so I guess I can "play with the pros", but what possible advantage do I get by giving up my $1k/month mortgage and no commute to go pay twice that for a studio apartment and a traffic jam?
The thing is that when you live in a big city you never stop playing, once you are done competing in the work setting you actually start competing in the social setting.
WHile working remotely for a company based out of NYC/LA/SF you are at those poker tables, but only during the time you work, so that makes it an 8/5/210 vs. a 24/7/365.
You miss out on the serendepity and the social part which is equally as important and can give you the biggest breaks.
I honestly do not understand what your getting at here. I think your suggesting my career is diminished because... I don't spend every waking minute with my co-workers or others in my profession? I wouldn't do that if I lived in NYC/LA/SFC either, I have no desire to be on 24/7/365, especially for the vague benefit of "serendipity".
If your career only advances because you went to the bar with your co-workers your workplace is broken. And I bet I'll find a far better start up partner at a hackathon or a conference (or just at work) than the local pub.
Competition is not solely about the working environment.
Competition also happens in the social environment both during working hours with co-workers but most importantly once you clock out.
Once you clock out the competition moves to other venues: the bar, the club, the parking lot, the gym, the shooting range...
Each of those venues is embedded in the big city.
If you frequent certain places in NYC/LA and you know how to carry yourself and are socially competent, sooner rather than later you'd be offered a role in some independent film.
Also Poker games, big sport events which double as networking opportuinities, tennis clubs, yacht clubs....
I powerlift in my spare time. I have a group of friends who do so, we both compete and encourage each other. I fail to see how this is somehow better because we're doing it in LA. As for the idea that the shooting range is "embedded" in the big city like it's something I can't get in the rural US... just weird.
As for getting offered roles, I haven't had any issues. Oddly their generally based on my work skill-set and my professional network built up over a career of doing good work and delivering results while empowering my reports to do the same, not being "socially competent" at the tennis club.
> but no one in a small town looks at NYC or SF and thinks it’s a successful, nice place to live.
The kids do, which is why these places suffer from massive brain/youth drain. The kids are bored in the small towns and see their future in a more exciting big city. Sometimes they are disillusioned and come back, often they don’t.
You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.
I wouldn't chalk that up to individualism as much as to the idea that the Internet has caused people increasingly to identify with groups that don't correspond to physical proximity.
Considering how the US government has spent its trillions in the last few decades, keeping money offshore might actually be an ethical move. If buying products from a company that exploits workers in X country is unethical, why are taxes used to fund wars any different?
Because for many people (this author included), this topic is akin to a religion, complete with holy literature (sci-fi) and a high priesthood (scientists and sci-fi writers.) So when a "god" like Stephenson (the word god is used in the article to describe him) doesn't preach about the imminent End of Times, everyone gets nervous.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:
But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.
And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”
I followed up. About what?
Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.
Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”
The author was talking to his son, who was feeling unmotivated about going to college because the world was ending soon. The author's reply was the section I quoted.
Within this context it reads as a father instructing his child about the importance of learning so they can recognise opportunity when it arises. Is it culty because of the dome?
The exact same conversation could be had at an obscure religious cult ranch in the middle of the desert. Remember, these people are completely serious.
“Dad, I’m depressed and unmotivated about going to college.”
“Son, the world is ending in the near future in sci-fi fashion and I want to make sure you survive in the dome.”
No matter how bad climate change is, I can assure you, we won’t be living in a dome to escape the hellscape in 20 years. People who believe this are exhibiting cultish behavior.
The "fi" part in "sci-fi" stands for "fiction". While it could be said that we're not sure about precisely how the world is ending, we can certainly make some projections. Making sure your children can survive even a pessimistic projection isn't necessarily cultish behaviour, especially if it's based on evidence-based modeling (whether or not this specific example is I cannot say, I'm not terribly interested in finding out what fresh hell the future has planned for me. Reality as it is is bad enough).
Do you have anything to support the assurance? If we have to spend whole lives indoors with A/C and CO2 scrubbers that is practically as bad as the domes.
(It is likely that elevated CO2 levels will harm human cognition, it isn't widely known probably because it's too depressing. There are counterarguments like "oh that happens only above 1000ppm we're far from that" but they're based only on short-term experiments.)
Do you honestly believe that everyone will spend their lives inside an air conditioned room and with CO2 scrubbers?
My assurance is reality. Reality isn’t a science fiction novel.
Interestingly you only get these absurd predictions from a very narrow group of people, which lines up quite well with what my original comment said. It’s a religious movement, not an accurate assessment of climate science.
The reality is that worldwide CO2 production isn't going to decline anytime soon. What's absurd about predicting that? And if it's only agenda of narrow group of people, where are the majority voices supported by research?
Because absolutely no climate science says that increased CO2 in the next twenty years will lead to humans living entirely inside with AC’d units? Again, this is basic science.
The real effects of climate change will be difficult enough. We don’t need to waste energy on inventing fantastical ones.
Combine this with wetbulb temperatures which force everyone to stay in airconditioned indoors for weeks or months in large part of world (this too is supported by climate science). Fantasies? I hope so but expect the worst.
You’ve moved the goal posts about five times now. First it was our entire lives indoors. Now it’s just a few months a year in some parts of the world. First it was in the next 20 years. Now it’s by the end of the century.
A single study that predicts brain damage from CO2 “by the end of the century” is pure speculation at this point. The link you shared even says it’s still very unclear what the effect is.
I’ll say it again; the actual science says that climate change is a serious problem. It doesn’t say that we are headed into the apocalypse in the next decade.
Ok sorry I was unclear. In 20 years it could be just a few months indoors, and by end of century all the time.
The actual paper linked from the article links to some research like: "systematic relationships were found between most of the cognitive function scores and CO2 concentration, including from 550–945 ppm". Thinking that in 20 years we could go over 550ppm outside certainly isn't a fantasy, or?
The estimates vary, but between half a million and a million people have died from the war and its aftermath. Not including Syrian Civil War or Libya, which were absolutely consequences of destabilizing the region.
No matter how bad Saddam was, invading was a bad solution.
There are a few countries with little or no entry restrictions. Mexico in particular is fairly close to Canada and is open. If you are able to work remotely, I’d strongly suggest looking into it. Canada is not going to change its policies anytime soon, sadly.
I’m not sure what the restrictions are, but can they actually prevent you from leaving if you are flying internationally? What about for a medical or other “official” purpose?
Edit: seriously scary that this post is flagged. Not cool.