Machiavellian

It's a little late, but here's a short one.

The past few days of ridiculous heat continued in the morning, with the interior ambient temperature hovering near 30°C at around 1000hrs local time. Then it decided to rain hard twice.

The interior ambient temperature now is still about 29°C. Remember what I mentioned about humidity and wind? Well, I think that the humidity is a little lowered, so despite the lack of wind and still-ridiculous interior ambient temperature, it actually feels sort of cooler now.

I read a couple more volumes of KonoSuba. I think I can probably finish the entire series by tomorrow. I did spend the early morning reading a few more articles from The Best of BYTE: Two Decades on the Leading Edge, again tapping into the natural light from the sun to assist in the reading off the dead-tree book. It's still largely a passive-entertainment sort of day for me, so nothing that involved heavy [intellectual] lifting was needed.

I did update Eileen-II through the support assistant software that comes with her though. This included the side-loading of the new BIOS firmware, an always harrowing experience---if you brick that, you brick the whole machine with little to no hope of recovering.

In other more current-affairs type news, the ``conscientious objectors'' to vaccination against COVID-19 (or was it vaccination in general?) have raised their collective heckles against the new rules that were released yesterday, claiming that the decisions discriminated against those who were unvaccinated.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. All decisions are discriminatory in nature, with the only question on whether that discrimination along the decision boundary was morally/ethically/socially acceptable or not. And in this particular instance, it is, with the addition of some heavy-duty science in demonstrating that the vaccinated, if they do get hit with COVID-19, do tend to get less dangerous symptoms than those who are not.

I had mentioned in meatspace many times that the true way out of perpetual lock-downs from a pandemic is to have it burn through an entire population, an outcome that was unthinkable before vaccines were available, but is now plausible once vaccines are available. The only reason why we can't say things like that is because of how brutally inhumane it sounds despite it being the eventual outcome that every society needs to get through in order to be ``COVID-resilient''. This is doubly true for politicians because anyone who says this out loud will be committing political suicide through a demonstration of anti-empathy of a rather personal nature, which brings the message of how they are not really ``representing'' the voters in the starkest most inhuman sort of way.

But, just because no politican can say this out loud doesn't mean that they cannot pursue it as part of an exit strategy. And the latest adjustments of restrictions can be seen as subtly moving towards that end-state. Of course, they will not allow it to burn through the population completely out of control---overwhelming the public healthcare system is always a legitimate concern---but through what they hope to be a controlled release.

I suppose this might be the new modus operandi of the government of SIN city---instead of strong-arming people with heavy-handed laws, they just make things super annoying and rage-inducing for those who refuse to comply, maliciously or otherwise. But to be fair, this modus operandi doesn't seem to be generally applied---it seems to only be for actions that tend to affect a larger number of people at once. In situations where the target group is small, the old heavy-handed ways seem to be preferred. Which makes sense in the Machiavellian sort of way.

Anyway, I see myself staying home still for this week (other than the usual Saturday worship service at church). I don't need to go anywhere specifically, but I do like to head out to a nice place to sit, drink/eat, and read. I can do that safely from home, but after a while it probably feels nice to just head out for a change of scenery.

I think I'll stop about here for now. I might want to go cycling for a bit tomorrow---my mind's not made up just yet. Gotta get more of that kind of care-free fun going before my sabbatical comes to an end, where I need to snap back to what society expects/demands from me.

Till the next update.