Not only are there much bigger priorities, but it's also ridiculous in some forms, and that creates another type of distraction from what actually matters.

The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon.

OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there.

I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example.

But I've been surprised before.

Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.

The parent is also certainly on to something with the Cluster B's and those pesky "ideologically intolerable fact[s]", I'm just not sure it's so one-sided.

The entire thing was ideology first, science second, to the point of science worship. Many people with a reasonable grasp on science were labeled as heretics simply for asking questions or talking about anything that suggested masks/vaccines weren't 100.00% effective with 0.00% downside. Remember Faucisexuals? Yikes.

As someone said, we need to stop "believing" in science (or not) and start "understanding" it.

The earliest piece of advice was "please don't go out and buy all the masks because the hospitals need them (and the common ones won't protect you anyway because the virus is too small - you'll need an N95, which are expensive and also needed in hospitals)"

A little later, the advice was "on second thought, if we all cover our mouths and noses, we'll probably slow the spread by virtue of not coughing and sneezing all over everything. Save the N95s for the doctors, and cover your face with I-dont-care-what".

The opprobrium cited the earlier advice, with a "wait, you said these were useless, now we have to wear them?"

Instead of addressing this most simple point of confusion, it jumped to "MASKS WORK! SHUT UP AND PUT YOUR MASK ON, IDIOT!"

By the time production ramped up and we had N95s to go around, the conversation was already stupid beyond repair.

Again, it was never The Science™, but the piss-poor communication of it - and by people who should have known better.

If someone tells me I'm incapable of driving because I had a glass of wine with dinner, I'm likely to laugh at them and disregard everything they say after that, because I now perceive them as someone who understands neither drinking nor driving.

It doesn't take a PhD to understand that people react differently to alcohol (etc, etc). Most people I know figured that out before they were 18 and had a pretty robust understanding by their early 20's.

The right level of discussion, IMHO, is not paternalistic, absolutist condescension, but one that promotes self-awareness and enables people to appraise individual risk in specific situations. (Be careful: if you assess wrong, you die or go to jail!)

I'd also disagree that the people who excuse their behavior like this are seizing upon nuances of academic discourse, but rather rejecting an insultingly-simplistic slogan held up as some kind of absolute truth.

It reminds me of a line from this thing my dad had framed, to the effect of "Be wary of giving advice: the fool won't heed it and the wise don't need it." Somewhere in the middle are reasonably-intelligent, non-sociopathic adults who need to understand the limits/risks/benefits so they can make informed decisions.

To the original point, I think we'd have seen much better results and much less collateral/residual damage if we were in the habit of "ELI18" and not "ELI5".

Why wouldn't we want to know how effective (or not) a given intervention is? It feels like a way to avoid embarrassment.

But I'd argue that most of the lessons to be learned are not about virology or the minutiae of masks. They're about the consequences of politicizing something that's not political, of implementing drastic measures with poorly-communicated rationale.

They're of non-physicians spreading their own opinions and misexplainations (however well-intentioned) while condescending to other non-physicians that they're not entitled to their own opinions because they're not a physician. Like, what?

The issue was never about masks, but of two highly-polarized groups (few of them having any real knowledge on the subject) dehumanizing the other under color of Science™.

It was purposefully misunderstanding and sloganizing Science™ into simplistic, unscientific statements like "Masks work" and "Masks don't work" [for what? for whom? etc]. Objective science isn't sold as bumper stickers and lapel pins on Etsy.

It ignored completely and purposefully the two extremely basic and fundamentally different modes of operation: protecting the wearer from inhaling Bad Things (Masks Don't Work) and protecting people other than the mask wearer from what the mask-wearer is exhaling (Masks Work).

The Science™ on this hasn't really changed in any meaningful way, and the whole subject is tiresome. People who can't think past Mask Good or Mask Bad might think otherwise, but their opinions are perhaps even less valuable than this study.

Besides, if you're not a physician or have a PhD in maskology, how could you possibly begin to evaluate this evidence anyway? It's so very complicated and technical, see. You should be Trusting The Experts™.

Whether the trampling is done by the one wearing the boot, the one cheering it on, or some combination of both is only of academic interest. The anti-due-process attitude is contrary to some of the most fundamental tenets of our legal system.

Q: If it weren't ethically dubious and of questionable constitutionality, why not just put cameras in the intersections themselves (which The Government certainly controls), rather than leasing spots on private lots adjacent to them? Why not extract this data from extant highway cameras (which The Government can surely access for free)?

A: Because, like a masked cartoon burglar hiding in the bushes, they don't want the public to know what they're doing, because they know what they're doing is Bad.

  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveillance-data.html

You don't get to trample all over civil rights and then accuse the other side of "making it political".

It would cost money for your city to buy its own camera system. These are presumably free, or perhaps even paying private property owners to lease the parking space. They can then turn around and charge municipalities and cities (and car repo companies, etc) for access to the information.

The police, et al, have about what they can gobble up and save, but there's nothing in the constitution about buying evidence from data brokers.

I'd bet having the comings and goings of everyone from the local WalMart and a few convenience stores at key intersections is very useful for tracking people down. At least one brand advertises the ability to get notifications when a vehicle is seen on any camera.

I'm not sure which. It's very hard to say, especially since none of us are LeonardoDaVinciologists.