Tiny concerns
Jul. 29th, 2020 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqI fired up Semagic with a specific topic in mind, then got distracted by Reddit (I had to tell somebody they were wrong on the Internet), and by the time I got back here I had forgotten what I was going to write.
On the subject of Semagic, it just received its first updated in years. I am pleased to see that this program is still getting some measure of support.
I don't think I've mentioned the pandemic here, even though it's been an ongoing issue for months. In part, that's because it's become a weirdly political issue, and I prefer to steer my political posts to Facebook since it's already a steaming shit pile of politics anyway.
We've been faring well through the outbreak so far. Our province has handled it pretty well, and we're still in good shape in spite of the recent minor spike (we were down to a single active case when some idiots attended a large funeral out in Alberta and brought the virus back to share with friends and family here).
atara and I have been doing our best to keep ourselves safe. We have not dined out since the start of March. We avoid in-person shopping as much as we can, wear masks, and spend as little time in the shops as possible. We keep a log book with locations and times as a form of contract tracing in case there are any significant outbreaks here. We are both high-risk individuals if we catch the virus, but she is more concerned about it than I am. We engage in low-risk behaviour.
On a broader level, for the most part Canada has handled it fairly well - though we've seeing a small up-tick in the past couple of weeks. Our biggest concern at the moment is not with our own handling, but that we share a border with this:
It's like living next to the world's largest fraternity house in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. You've managed to mostly get the zombies out under control, but your neighbours insist on partying like nothing is going on. You see them standing out on the lawn, bazooka-chugging beers and denying the presence of zombies, even as those self-same zombies are gnawing on their heads.
What is even less assuring is that their leadership is clearly lying about the zombie count. The kind of knife-edge flattening of a curve just doesn't happen with real data. I just hope that our leaders up here are not fooled by these bogus figures when it comes time to consider opening the borders. We've already got a problem with our neighbours sneaking over the border (either by boat, or using the Alaska loophole to get into the country when they have no intention of passing straight through to Alaska).
Yesterday we had reports of troops coming up here and ignoring the 14-day quarantine rule because they didn't feel like sitting in a hotel for two weeks. We've had people come up here under the family exemption and ignore the 14-day self-isolation rule, causing local outbreaks when they wandered away and went shopping/dining while symptomatic. Arrest them, deport them, and ban them for life. I wish our border services were a bit more aggressive with these folks.
Recent polls have shown that support up here for keeping the border closed indefinitely are running at about 90%.
It's not that we don't like our neighbours - indeed, a large percent of our population have friends and family on the other side of the border, and it sucks not getting to see them.
The driving fear is that the the infected horde have demonstrated an inability to follow even the simplest rules when we let them into the country.
It didn't have to be this way.
It doesn't have to be this way.
But it is.
On the subject of Semagic, it just received its first updated in years. I am pleased to see that this program is still getting some measure of support.
I don't think I've mentioned the pandemic here, even though it's been an ongoing issue for months. In part, that's because it's become a weirdly political issue, and I prefer to steer my political posts to Facebook since it's already a steaming shit pile of politics anyway.
We've been faring well through the outbreak so far. Our province has handled it pretty well, and we're still in good shape in spite of the recent minor spike (we were down to a single active case when some idiots attended a large funeral out in Alberta and brought the virus back to share with friends and family here).
atara and I have been doing our best to keep ourselves safe. We have not dined out since the start of March. We avoid in-person shopping as much as we can, wear masks, and spend as little time in the shops as possible. We keep a log book with locations and times as a form of contract tracing in case there are any significant outbreaks here. We are both high-risk individuals if we catch the virus, but she is more concerned about it than I am. We engage in low-risk behaviour. On a broader level, for the most part Canada has handled it fairly well - though we've seeing a small up-tick in the past couple of weeks. Our biggest concern at the moment is not with our own handling, but that we share a border with this:
It's like living next to the world's largest fraternity house in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. You've managed to mostly get the zombies out under control, but your neighbours insist on partying like nothing is going on. You see them standing out on the lawn, bazooka-chugging beers and denying the presence of zombies, even as those self-same zombies are gnawing on their heads.
What is even less assuring is that their leadership is clearly lying about the zombie count. The kind of knife-edge flattening of a curve just doesn't happen with real data. I just hope that our leaders up here are not fooled by these bogus figures when it comes time to consider opening the borders. We've already got a problem with our neighbours sneaking over the border (either by boat, or using the Alaska loophole to get into the country when they have no intention of passing straight through to Alaska).
Yesterday we had reports of troops coming up here and ignoring the 14-day quarantine rule because they didn't feel like sitting in a hotel for two weeks. We've had people come up here under the family exemption and ignore the 14-day self-isolation rule, causing local outbreaks when they wandered away and went shopping/dining while symptomatic. Arrest them, deport them, and ban them for life. I wish our border services were a bit more aggressive with these folks.
Recent polls have shown that support up here for keeping the border closed indefinitely are running at about 90%.
It's not that we don't like our neighbours - indeed, a large percent of our population have friends and family on the other side of the border, and it sucks not getting to see them.
The driving fear is that the the infected horde have demonstrated an inability to follow even the simplest rules when we let them into the country.
It didn't have to be this way.
It doesn't have to be this way.
But it is.
