Corvid-19

I dunno, everyone’s panicking about this Corvid-19 that’s going around; I don’t think we need to worry about crows very much (except the one above), I think we need to worry about parrots who spend all day at home learning to imitate our voices and then use Alexa to order themselves large quantities of seed from Amazon.

Seriously though: in order to do my part to flatten the curve, I will be working from home the next two weeks and see how that goes. We are victualled (didn’t do any panic buys, I usually have a few weeks of staples in the house anyway) and not that social anyway, so no hardship (as long as the power and water stay on). It will also save nearly two hours a day commuting, so I will have some more time to work on designs (continuing work on a drastic overhaul of Strongman, and soon it will be time to start serious development work on China’s War, and I have had a couple of ideas for new things in the meantime).

I’m trying to do my best not to obsess about this, there isn’t that much new news every day so why watch it endlessly over and over again. But this is an important event, and I am hopeful that we will listen to our better angels and make some important changes to how things are set up in this world. 

Thomas Homer-Dixon (now at Royal Roads University) is the only futurist I bother to read with any attention. He wrote this about how this pandemic may bring us a better, or better-planned world. And I’m not as worried about this pandemic as I am about the next one, for people will have forgotten all about what they did to mitigate this one and be nonchalant about the next.  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-coronavirus-is-a-collective-problem-that-requires-global