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How Democracy Died.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

Cooperative Real Time Strategy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Recently, I started playing Starcraft II again. It’s one of the best real time strategy (RTS) games available, aside from Homeworld and Homeworld II. I really wish Homeworld III would launch.

I’m on Battlenet as Taranis, and you can say ‘hi’ – but be warned: I’m an old guy playing a video game and I won’t say I’m competitive as much as competent. I don’t like the competitive side of the game that much. In more competitive modes, I prefer Free For Alls, but I really like the cooperative gaming because I’m not playing against other people, instead playing towards a common goal. And in cooperative mode, I almost always play Vorazun (pictured) – cloaked units with high damage, the ability to stop time every 4 minutes, and I just really like the sound of the dark templar slashing through things. I could go on.

It’s fun.

As we were discussing in chat today, there are some jerks in cooperative mode, but you can always block them. I’m not sure if that means you can’t play with them, but it certainly means you don’t have to listen to them.

It’s fun for me playing in cooperative mode. Some people are better than you, some aren’t, and sometimes you make a misstep, sometimes they do, and it’s not about who is the better player as much as filling in each other’s gaps and winning the objective. Sometimes you lose. Losing is a learning experience. Don’t lose your temper, raise your game.

Cooperating. There just aren’t enough games that let you do that. Even what I consider to be one of the best rts ever, Homeworld II, didn’t have that.

When I play a game, I don’t like to be around jerks. Most of the time I’m playing games it’s to escape from a world full of jerks. Why would I set myself up to deal with them while I’m supposed to be having fun?

We need more cooperative games against non-players, and AI has reached a point where we could be doing that. I think we should. We don’t need people practicing hating on each other and getting under each other’s skin – there’s plenty of that in the real world.

Who knows? With more cooperative games, maybe being a jerk won’t be seen as an asset in the real world as much.

The False Dilemma and Democracy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

For no good reason, I was going through the list of logical fallacies and, given that the US Presidential Election is coming up, the False Dilemma stood out:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many. (Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2024).

This has been one of the things that has confused me for some time with regard to democracy, amongst other things. In the context of democracy, it seems that the two party system has become dominant – the binary system. I don’t know why this is. It can’t be a simple reason.

I did what we do these days. I asked ChatGPT why democracies devolve into two party systems. You can see it’s response through the image, and it made me look up the bullet points of First-Past-The-Post, Winner-Takes-All Effect (in the context of voting), Duverger’s Law, etc.

Most interesting is the last paragraph:

…While these factors explain the prevalence of two-party systems in certain democracies, it’s important to note that not all democracies follow this pattern. Some countries have proportional representation or mixed electoral systems that encourage the presence and success of multiple political parties, leading to multi-party systems that reflect a wider range of political perspectives.

This got me curious. Which countries are these? The answer is (in alphabetical order): Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden.

That’s 8 countries. There are a total of 74 democracies in the world as of 2024, with 50 of them considered ‘flawed democracies’ according to WorldPopulationReview, which references the 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

I filled out the form to get the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and wondered why I needed to fill out a form.

There are 195 countries in the world. Less than half are democracies (74/195) according to that information, but according to other information there is more democracy:

OurWorldInData.org/democracy | CC BY, source link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-nondemocracies-fh?time=earliest..2022

That’s a bit confusing. 47.14% of 195 countries being non-democracies is 91.923 countries, and while I love precision, countries are not decimals. 52.86% of the world being electoral democracies means that 103.077 countries are electoral democracies. It’s just math.

We’ll have to accept that there is some error in what constitutes a democracy or not. Let’s work with the original 74 democracies.

Of the 74 democracies, only 24 are not considered flawed. How many of those countries that are not 2-party systems considered not flawed? According to this data, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden are not flawed, but Brazil, India and Italy are.

5/8ths of democracies that are not 2 party systems are considered democracies, 3/8ths are considered flawed democracies.

When I started writing this, I had hoped that countries with more than 2 political parties would be considered more democratic, and on the scoring it’s not very clean cut. In fact, Brazil, India and Italy being flawed democracies demonstrates that a system not made up of 2 parties isn’t a silver bullet.

Is it that false dilemma’s can have more than 2 options? It’s possible.

A false dilemma is also an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available, and maybe that’s the real problem: It’s not the number of options, it’s access to better options.

Any adult knows that being stuck with options we don’t agree with is unfortunately common. Yet a democracy is supposed to allow for better options. Why aren’t we seeing that?

The Day’s Satire.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

A friend of mine shared a post on Facebook today that stated, “There’s something deeply ceremonial about the first sip of coffee. It’s like the opening act to the day’s drama.”

My comment, made during my first cup of coffee, was: I prefer to view it as satire. I’m just not sure what it’s satire of. That makes it funnier.

I do know what it’s satire of, I think. It’s satire of what one would believe would be sanity. The day went accordingly. First, a little bit of background.

The *Gasp* Background.

Globally there has been some changes in weather patterns. Some say it’s climate change, some deny that, but regardless of who says what everyone agrees that the weather is not really what we would like, which is why the English went out and conquered other countries to have tourism in: Terrible weather. This time, though, it’s on a planetary scale.

It’s so bad that some people accused of being smart by very loud cults of mediocre people have decided to invade Mars, a planet that actually has worse weather for humans than Earth. Rather than admit the mistake, the cults and all who would listen are encouraging people to leave the planet by making the weather here worse. It could be that European countries tried that, but sailing ships just didn’t pollute enough so they had to work extra hard. You know. Times were tougher to make other people as miserable as the weather in Europe made them, so they had to put in that extra effort.

Anyway, in the dual island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, not very far from the equator, anecdotal evidence jumps out at you and smacks you with anything available. It’s all anecdotal because there seems to be some trouble with handling information by the governments that have came, went, stayed, and sat. It’s not political, it’s just… well, I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty clear what it isn’t: working.

Because Trinidad and Tobago is bleeding edge when it comes to State Enterprises, handling Water and Sewage is handled by the Water and Sewage Authority, known by the acronym WASA. I suspect that they tried SAWA, but it may have been confused with the local pronunciation of San Juan and so they went with WASA.

This dry start to 2024 did not surprise anyone – except, apparently, WASA. They did know, of course1, and that article in the footnote is a short read and I must warn you: It isn’t satire, it isn’t fiction. It’s just sort of what you expect from a state run enterprise in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, to my point, it is satire of the way things should be done.

I know, I know, that’s anecdotal. Bear with me, I’ll just give you a rundown from Today.

Today.

Just before this, there was a light dusting of rain outside. The condensate was so surprised that it threw itself at the ground and mist. This is likely partly because of Sahara Dust, though I suspect other regions have offered their dust as well. With the dry, there’s been plenty of dust here in Trinidad as well.

So this apparently happened. Two 1000-gallon water tanks were stolen from a fire station, reported yesterday by the Trinidad Express Newspapers Facebook page, and since I was on my first cup of coffee I laid into the whole situation.

What’s even weirder about this is that in World War II, when the United States had the Navy base in Chaguramas, according to someone who was Master-At-Arms for the base during that time, there were plenty of water wells in Chaguramas. Before he died, he wondered what had happened to them, and was less than pleased when I laughingly suggested that the United States may have taken them with their ships when they went home.

But just on the points. Between March 2nd and March 11th, the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Services lost 2 tanks. Let’s call that a week because of schedules, and the the author of this post being kind. So in one week, presto magico, 2 tanks that can hold 1,000 gallons of water each disappeared from a Fire Station which is in charge of putting out fires with… say it with me… water. No one noticed. No one saw. They just vanished. To suspect a thief pulled up and stuck them in the trunk of a car seems a stretch. It could be that someone just picked them up and walked away with them and wasn’t noticed by the fire service officers.

Now, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has a way that they deal with crime. They call them ‘anti-crime exercises’ to distinguish them from the rigorous calisthenics never attributed to Trinidad and Tobago police. These exercises in other parts of the world are called roadblocks, which appear on Waze faster than the police can set up, and are done during high traffic periods so that no one can complain that they are causing traffic, instead they are just making it worse, with all those idling engines of vehicles releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the government can plan for making a plan.

If a criminal gets caught in an ‘anti-crime exercise’, they must want to be caught. So of course it only makes sense in a Trinidad and Tobago sense that to find those 2 water tanks the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service will have roadblocks to try to find them, costing taxpayers more in petroleum products and deodorant than the tanks are actually worth, while when everyone gets home there will be no water to take a shower with.

They likely won’t find the tanks, but the police services have to look good, and the politicians have to say things that sound smart to people who aren’t. That’s a global issue, but it has it’s own flavor in Trinidad and Tobago.

What’s even more amusing about this whole thing is that the Trinidad Express’s post didn’t even have a picture of the fire station in Chaguramas so they used a picture from TriniView.com. How do I know this? In the lower right hand corner, it said in white letters, “Triniview.com”. I didn’t even know that was a site. I grabbed a screenshot of that, though I won’t post it because I don’t know if I want to use an image-of-an-image being used questionably by a media company.

The whole thing is as it is. Sure, I wrote about it in a satirical way – but how else can one look at this? Is it satire? Can reality be satire?

I’m sure I don’t know.

Today I picked an example from Trinidad and Tobago. There are plenty around the world happening every day, where fiction writers keep throwing away half-finished books as they read the news while unscrupulous people who admit that they aren’t writers do adverts on how to sell books and make thousands of dollars a day… from AI generated content.

In a world that doesn’t make sense, that seems to fit too. This stuff happens every day.

The masses just accept it.

  1. “Dry On Ideas“, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Saturday, 9 March 2024. ↩︎

How To Be Unpopular.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Information, opinions, misinformation and misinformed and irrational opinions flood us every day and it seems to be accelerating. When I wrote about the lack of comprehensive human rebuttal about Noam Chomsky’s take on AI, it accidentally seeded this post because it’s about something we just don’t seem to have the opportunity to do much of anymore.

Reflect. Consider. Think things through.

I was looking through Facebook reels as I unfortunately do, and looking at the comments on them. There’s a lot of value signaling going on about videos that don’t give the greater contexts of the situation. It’s amazing, really, how because of that value signaling people go about constructing strong opinions without rationale. In turn, people want views because if you don’t have views, what’s the point of doing it?

For me, the point of doing it would be to share good knowledge. We didn’t get where we are today as a society by not sharing good knowledge, but the signal to noise ratio has become… well, a noise to signal ratio. Add into that the up and coming role of artificial intelligence in the mix, with the US Presidential election coming up and the continued aggression of Russia against Ukraine, the tragic affair of Hamas and the state of Israel with a lot of humans in between… things aren’t going to be better soon.

It’s time to be unpopular. To think things through. To find the meat that is hidden in all this tasty, cholesterol-ridden fat presented to us because people want views, likes, shares, etc. It’s a good analogy, actually, because some people have more trouble with cholesterol than others. If I walked past a steak my cholesterol would increase, so I won’t tell you what I had for dinner last night.

Some people are more gullible than others. Some people are more irrational than others. We know this. We see this every day. I often make jokes about it, as I told a cashier a few days ago in a store, because it’s my way of coping with the gross stupidity that we see.

So how does one become unpopular? It’s pretty simple.

Worry about being wrong. Decide not to do something because you’re not sure the impact it will have. Humanity tends to gravitate to strong opinions, however wrong they are. Marketing tends to maximize that, and marketing has become a part of our lives. I see lots of videos and ‘hot takes’ on Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais, but they tend to take them out of context and beat them with an imposed context – and somehow, despite all of that, they are popular and no one stops to consider why. Why are these comedians still held in regard? Because they dared to be unpopular. They, and I dare say this, dare to be authentic, thoughtful, and funny despite how many people think that they are unpopular.

All too often people are too busy value signaling to think about whatever it is. They need to have an opinion before they watch that next video, read that next tweet (It’s Twitter, Elon, it always will be)…

Slow down. That’s how to be unpopular. Think things through before communicating about it. The world will not end if you don’t have an opinion right now.

Once upon a time, there was value in that.

I’ll let you in on a secret: There still is.

Here’s what to do: Watch something/read something. Find out more about it. Think about it in different contexts. Maybe then do something or say something if you think there is value, or maybe just don’t say anything until you do.

When A Comedian Is a Trusted Source.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Getting an AI to generate Jon Stewart as a superhero was tricky. Fortunately, you can tell it’s AI by the hands that… well… let’s go with ‘moving really fast’ or something.

The return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show made me smile today. It will be good to have him around through elections.

I started watching The Daily Show in the early 2000s and really appreciated the satire of things going on in the world. When outside of the United States, I found ways to watch it because it not only informed, it entertained. This was a team effort but the delivery by Jon Stewart never disappointed.

He openly criticized the media, as someone needed to, and the platform of being after cartoons and/or puppets really made the point. He was like a news anchor with the spirit of George Carlin.

In these times, we need people like him, we need teams like that. Often, for me, it was a way of realizing that I wasn’t crazy because when I spotted idiocy being reported, I began to question myself. Is it just me? No, it wasn’t, no, it isn’t, and no, I wasn’t alone in silence wondering whether I should write about it, or even if I could in an engaging way. Watching it be done right and comprehensively while being pretty politically agnostic allowed the issues to come out of the mayhem of the media spin doctors.

When Trevor Noah took over, it didn’t feel the same. He’s a funny guy, and he’s closer to my shade of skin tone, but it just didn’t feel the same. I lost interest. Maybe I’m not ‘woke’ enough despite being sentient for longer than most ‘woke’ people.

Having caught up on his “The Trouble With Jon Stewart”, it’s apparent that he’s kept up his skills and further refined them. I loved how the episodes started with the team spitballing the show beforehand. I imagine working on ideas with him would be fun. Much of what he has done before keeps coming back, too, like George Carlin’s quotes and videos.

The world doesn’t make sense. It’s completely appropriate that he’s a trusted source because he earned it.

US News sites, GDPR, and Paywalls.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

ReutersInstituteonGDPRReuters Institute posted a thread on Twitter regarding how news sites in the United States reacted to the General Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the fallout. It’s an interesting thread, but the article linked to is actually quite thought provoking.

…One publication, USA Today, rationed EU users’ access, redirecting them to a GDPR-compliant bare-bones version of their site. Other US news sites, like The New York Times, immediately adapted to the GDPR and didn’t block. Although some of the hundreds of US sites that blocked remain blocked to this day, others, like the Los Angeles Times, restored full access after a number of months, and others after a number of years.

The differing strategies of these news sites allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects on consumption of temporary website withdrawal and temporary rationing…

This holds interests for other reasons, which I’ll get to later. What they found was:

…In conclusion, our study supports the theory that, under particular conditions, unavailability can reduce a product’s desirability, affecting future choices. Sour grapes, in this instance, had the upper hand…

So this demonstrates how making something exclusive doesn’t always make it more sought after.

The full study, “Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union“, is also worth a read if you want to get into the details – as I think you should.

The reason I brought this up is that we often consider site technical issues or business decisions as something that impacts whether a site’s content is seen. It has a latency issue after correction, it ends up, and while there’s not enough information from the study, it does seem the proportionality of return to use is proportional to to how long the content was unavailable. There are two issues I’ll bring up, the first being…

Paywalls.

I take issue with paywalls.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in writers getting paid, and I would like to get paid sometime for writing. I subscribe to a Iona Italia on substack and Unherd.com presently, and have been toying with going back to subscribing to Scientific American. I’m tough when it comes to subscriptions. I subscribe to Iona because I think reading her can make me a better writer – and while the same is true for Unherd.com, I enjoy the articles because they’re not just run of the mill, even those I find issues with. It’s original.

However, today I saw an interesting article on Twitter by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which dutifully distracted me by pointing out it was my last ‘free’ article for the month as some sites do. They have been getting me to click, according to the HBR article limits at present, 4 times this month and it’s the 19th.

I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the other articles I read on HBR. Still, what’s the cost, then?
$12.50 US a month.

So for 4 articles in 19 days, that would put me at 6.3 articles in 30, which comes up to $1.98 an article for me. I’m sorry, HBR, I just don’t see spending $2/article, when an article might take me 7 minutes to read. Now, this is not to say HBR doesn’t have good articles, but how often are they interesting enough for me?

Short answer: not enough for me to subscribe.

Does that mean I’m unwilling to pay HBR for articles? No. It means I don’t want to pay their monthly price because I can’t depend on them to be interesting to me every month. This was the problem with magazine subscriptions I had (and why I’m still debating renewing my ancient Scientific American subscription), whereas with Unherd.com I spent around $49/year, and while I’m not reading them every day, I peruse the site at least 3 times a week, reading at least12 articles a month. Quick math, dropping a dollar off the annual subscription gives us $48/year, which comes up to $4/month, where I’m reading 12 articles in a month and paying… $0.33/article.

More importantly, given it takes me the same amount of time to read an article on HBR as Unherd, I’m getting more time reading for the price. Now, this is unfair. HBR is a niche market and few of their articles would appeal to me – but the few that do, I might pay for, but I’m not going to pay more than I do for a can of Coke for something that lasts me 7 minutes. I’m a reader, not some client visiting a hooker.

New York Times does this, as do a few other sites, and each time I go through a similar process. I call it ‘signal to noise’ because for me, that’s what it is. I get better signal to noise with Unherd than I do with HBR, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the signal from HBR. I’m just not willing to pay for what I consider noise. Attenuate, attenuate!

So in my mind, people are leaving dollars on the table. I might start an account for $10 and pay 33.3 cents an article, and replenish the account if I get value for it. If I’m reading enough, the subscription price might be a deal.

This all lead me back to the days when I sat with Phil Hughes in Nicaragua and discussed revenue for print publications with him, then publisher of Linux Journal. He of course had a lot more experience than I, and he told me why print and web advertising were such different beasts – it has to do with verifiable views, which at the time were easily gamed by simply refreshing the pages. Now they can be gamed by bot farms, so the cost of web advertising began low and has credible reason not to increase except for one major thing: User accounts, which the newspapers and magazines have unimaginatively done without considering the money they’re leaving on the table.

Why am I so concerned? My real issue with paywalls is that they keep me from accessing information, or knowledge, and that affects how I make decisions – just as it affects how you make decisions. When you cut out segments of society and create silos of information, the Internet simply is repeating the same thing that print publications do except… you can’t let me read your magazine when you’re done, and I can’t do the same. There was a time when people would find valuable things in old magazines laying around.

So what happens when I see that I’m out of articles on a site? I roll my eyes, move on with my life and ignore links to the site for an indeterminate period, much like the Reuters Institute paper shows. It could be a month, it could be 2 months… and I’ll simply forget I have ‘free’ articles to read.

Yet even with that, I have the luxury of spending 33 cents on an article. Some people don’t. Some people may not even have access to a credit card in some countries, and just like that, the digital divide becomes an informational divide. The only real answer in my mind is to increase advertising costs to cover that of the writers, the editors, and the boss’s nephew manning the photocopier and fax in the basement.

Derivative Knowledge

Now, all of this impacts something else.

It impacts AIs being trained on the Internet, who are unlikely to see paid content and thus are stuck reading free websites. That seems stupid, but in the house of cards of business, maybe there’s an upside to having an AI trained without subscriptions. I just don’t know what it is.

There was a time when I thought all information should be free. There was even a stab at a Creative Commons license for developing nations, which would have been more equitable and allowed those who could afford to carry the cost for those trying to catch up. This could also work for AIs being trained, but, with the popularity of VPNs as they are, information accessibility in developed nations could easily be subverted by simply using a VPN server in Haiti, as an example.

And all of this leads up to derivative knowledge, because that impacts decision making – not just of machines, but that of people.

If the media industry on the Internet wants to actually be read and interacted with… understanding these things better makes sense. Or, that latency of not visiting could catch up, or… we could just leave a bunch of people behind because we couldn’t find a better solution.

Calm Down.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my social networks, well intentioned armchair epidemiologists pounce on every tidbit they find related to Covid-19, depositing them in my newsfeed with the same level of pride a cat must feel when it drops a ravaged mouse for it’s owner. Some are recycled, some are not, and if it’s coming out of some countries, the media is so busy with the spin machine that they don’t seem to know at some point laundry needs to get into the dryer to be of use.

It’s tiring.

The truth is – whether accepted or not – is that we have experts at the World Health Organization and through governmental health agencies all over the world on this and they are doing all they can.

Another truth: We have doctors and nurses and other medically trained staff, even putting their own lives on the line as the work without appropriate protective gear. At great personal expense and risk, they are the front lines doing what they can in the face of a pandemic.

Another truth: They’re learning as they go. An update today may not be legitimate tomorrow, what may be true in China may not be true in Italy, may not be true in the U.S. All the experts are learning as they go.

Another truth: A vaccine has to go through trials, which is about a year. So we’re in this now, no vaccine will come out tomorrow. Or today. You can stop looking for updates on that. If a vaccine shows up, it will be experimental, and that comes with risks.

Another truth: Media and social media are rampant with all sorts of things, but unless it comes directly from a legitimate source, such as the World Health Organization, consider it speculation.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” – Mark Twain

 

Do what the local authorities tell you to. Wash your hands. Don’t go around sticking things in your mouth. And wait.

Wait for the truths. Otherwise you’re just raising your anxiety and the anxiety of those around you.