...it's only a matter of time before we lose the Covid-19-Free award. I can guarantee that we will not be doing another lockdown as the medicine was worse than the cure. "How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Live with the Virus": Coddle your old & infirmed, bolster your hospitals, educate your citizens and just get on with life. We should have wised up at week two of the lockdown.
What we should wise up to is the magic money tree. Allow me to explain.
New Zealand like many countries had decades of neoliberal shitfuckery which had run the health system down to run at close 100% capacity most of the time, especially in winter, in the name of "efficiency". When a crisis hits it's hard to run it back up quickly. The lockdown of some form was necessary because of this while decades of damage is rapidly undone before anyone wises up. The large overall rapid spend up by the government was also necessary so nobody sees the whole system fall over in the first gust of wind.
But now the public have seen the magic money tree the government has, and they can't put it away - you know that one governments bring out for war and tax cuts but there's somehow never any money for hospitals or roads or whatever - and it's be used to pay workers of closed businesses, healthcare and interestingly, house the homeless during the lockdown. Note the government is going to keep housing the homeless in motels etc. permanently. It's not kicking them back out on the street that would be a bad look, plus that would draw attention to the magic money tree thingy, and thus uncomfortable questions would come up.
We could comfortably afford to do one full lockdown due to low national debt, the government paid wages and stacked it on the national credit card. Basically we borrow from future generations to make up the shortcoming of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: it's fragile and unable to cope with any kind of crisis because the free market can't price being prepared and resilient.
But we couldn't cope here with a second lock-down, that would really> hurt.
What bothers me with our self-back patting we are doing in this country right now is how perilously close we came to disaster and how much that is our fault as a nation. We should not be comfortable about that. That was a close call.
Not only does excessive packaging was plastic and fill landfills, it also affects transportation. You don't need to put a small flash memory card in package that's bigger than a mousepad. You don't need to put metal foil on a toothpaste box. You don't need to put a power supply or a bottle of booze in a velvet bag. And do you know what? We don't need to buy things that have excessive packaging. You vote for plastic waste with your money.
We need something a simple as restricting the amount of packaging based on a formula. Ever noticed how that box of cereal is only half full by volume, and is also far from the optimal shape to save material. It's designed to look as big and eye catching as possible on a shelf because.... every other box of cereal is like that. A simple regulation about packaging surface area vs volume and shelf front presentation maximum size and suddenly you have wiped out about half the packaging in a supermarket.
The simple fact is we've made some crude machine learning algorithms that can be trained but this is not true intelligence, that can make intuitive leaps and predictions about things it has never experienced based on first principles. We are nowhere near being able to create something like that. We may never be able to do that.
I strongly doubt this because its the classic question, can machines ever be alive? Which can be further reduced to the base question you're actually asking: can an arrangement of atoms be alive? Why, of course they can and sentience is an inevitable an emergent property of arrangement atoms that is alive.
We're further along than we realize.
We live in a universe apparently tuned for life to emerge by itself and progress to sentience and whatever follows. Evolution did all this by itself, with only the right conditions and time to do it, without external influence. Therefore therefore superhuman AI intelligence can emerge simply from the right conditions which we seem to be trying damn hard to create.
"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc