lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​


i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi


I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory


they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"



Bovigender (click flag for more info!)
bovigender pride flag, by @arina-artemis (click for more info)



Keeble
@Keeble

Look, trust me. I understand the frustration at people who don't wear masks. I work a customer-facing service job in a liberal area, and very few customers or coworkers wear masks, even the young leftists. I'm one of like two employees left who mask daily and this a job that gives the masks out for free still. And, yes, this is incredibly sad and bleak. I wish it were different.

Here's the problem, though--as anyone who has tried to get people to mask has likely experienced, for most people there is basically nothing you could say as an individual layperson to get someone to start wearing a mask again. Period. Think about it like smoking--do you really think youd be able to get someone to stop smoking by telling them about data on lung cancer? do you really think they don't know that? you really think that yelling at them from a sense of what will come across to the smoker as a condescending sense of unearned moral superiority will work either, even if you're 100% right? Masking, is, unfortunately, a losing issue. Which, yes, to me is personally weird: ive been dutifully wearing mine everyday; its hardly something i think about at all. its like wearing socks. and yet i have NO CLUE how to get people to move on this. Because it is true that, much like "only" 14% of smokers get cancer, most non-maskers wont get covid, much less long covid. but the reason people will start again can't really be data (people dont make decisions bc of data, really) and it cant be shaming/condescending people (that never works for anyone). i dont know what works, on the short to medium term.

But. Think about how long it took societally for anti-smoking measures to take hold. Years, decades even. There are tons of smokers now, many of whom want to quit, most of whom know its terrible for them. It took a concerted, coordinated movement, who had one message at a time, that they focused on one-by-one with laser precision, with the power of the literal surgeon general at their side at that.

you know what people will get on board with, like immediately? ventilation, because it doesn't require much individual decision making on their part. Instead it more closely resembles the sort of populist cause celebres that inspire people to actually act--there is a power structure above you that has the power to make things safer for everyone, but isnt because it will cost them marginally more money in the short term.

What this requires though is coordinated action and messaging rather than mourning and cathartic yelling (as much as i understand why this mourning and catharsis is needed). A good parallel in contemporary organizing is the Jewish Voice For Peace's actions in grand central station to campaign for a ceasefire in gaza, one of the protests that made the news and drove home the change in opinion that happened. As Vincent Bevins (author of the Jakarta Method) put it recently:

I was also impressed with that action the one at Grand Central Station like the Jewish voice for peace one...it was quite clear like they're all like they all identify like, as Jews, they're all wearing the shirt. They're like, "we're here for this reason. We are this group of people. You can't say that we're not." You know, like, "we we are very very clearly organized as this group and with this message." and I think that was quite powerful...
You can't get a half a million people on the street in London that are all going to have a perfect answer for, you know, the evolution of Hamas...if you make [the protest] about everything then you'll be able to find someone that slips up, or is stupid, or says the wrong thing or is like, just put there by MI5 to say the wrong thing...This is what happened in Brazil...one thing that made [Brazil's 2010s protest movement] really untenable is it really became about everything. Like, everyone was invited to kind of bring whatever cause they wanted to the streets; like literally WHATEVER. and so the government, which was even like, trying to be sympathetic didn't know how to read the streets! and so, the media ended up kind of picking and choosing the things that worked best for them. 1

Think about how this relates to covid. Right now, i see most covid-concious people still doing their own safety measures but beyond that in a resigned state of half mourning, half disgust. Right now a lot of that gets released as anger, as frustration, as a steam release, or as thoughts you choke down. These are individual actions, not group action.

What is needed is this kind of message discipline, on focusing on the thing you think you can win on, go as far as you can with that, and be prepared for a long term fight. Ventilation is an easy one bc you can point to individual state board of health suggestions and go "why are we not meeting these" to whatever person with power that the group is focused on (which requires a named target rather than gestures vaguely at everything. Making a scene at city council or school board meetings, about that one issue. dont even mention masks. Governments set recommendations on this stuff, so make them live by it.

I, for one, would be willing to volunteer time to such a movement, to such an organization. but nobody can do this shit alone. We can make the world safer for everyone, including the people who dont mask, without making them really have to change their behavior. It requires, though, for anger to turn into coordination, into tactics.


  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWSkSqm9p0w


kda
@kda

Like, I can nicely encourage people to wear N95s forever, and once in a while, that yields non-zero results! I guess! But the mask fight is… …not a winning battle, at least not during this pandemic.

Everyone deserves clean air — air without airborne pathogens, air without wildfire smoke, air without highly-concentrated VOCs and other chemicals released from plastics and various other chemicals indoors, and air without brake and tyre dust from (increasingly heavy, particulate-emitting!) vehicles in it.

And in basically every case, how we get clean air is demanding it from property owners and government agencies.

General COVID &c. safety information still needs to be spread to people, just in case they decide for personal reasons that they want to take it more seriously, but the most effective political demands we can make at this point amount to:

Give us clean air.

We usually have clean water and safe food, but as it is right now, most indoor air is not clean. We can change that — and we can change that by applying pressure against the powerful, not screaming into the void against an unyielding flood of propaganda.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

also from an ecological perspective adequate per-building ventilation is largely 'free' -- the buildings are already air conditioned, but putting in proper filters and doing enough air exchanges with the heat exchanger in the exhaust where you harvest either heat or cold from the exhaust gets you all of the way there, without that much change in energy.

but what it does get you is a constant, low level removal of soot particulate cars ambiently generate from every building large enough to require ventilation.

we have the ability to turn our cityscapes into, essentially, mussels for air -- filter-feeding ambient landscape.

there's a lot of ways to spin it.

but "they don't want to make it less likely to get sick from the flu or covid or whatever" sorta sells itself -- us vs them, highlights personal risk, shows collective benefit


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

i've asked places about it and they're like yeah, we would like to, but there's like 3 guys who do installations in the county and they're busy and also management doesn't want to pay for it"

so once again everyone gets left to die by ownership

yep! and this also ties in to the point in the original posts about how so many contemporary protest movements (occupy wall street, brazil 2010s, tahrir square in egypt, etc) COMPLETELY failed to achieve their initial goals largely bc they weren't targeted and just kinda...became about everything

I get that, but I think that ventilation and UVGI are sort of the same thing. The key talking point is equivalent air changes per hour, e-ACH. Talking about e-ACH unifies ventilation, filtration, UVGI - all of which are structurally similar in that they are demands on property owners and government regulators.

The regulation is an e-ACH target; the rest are tools that can be adopted based on the needs of an individual space.