All of this article, all day, every day.

vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/cursing-peop… article HT @AndrewHayen, so you can also blame him for the Sunday morning rant to follow.

There's so much to unpack here, so I'm going to have a bit of a crack at it in a twitter thread.

I think the endless debate about masks is a symptom of a whole heap of COVID-induced but also more secular trends all coming together in a giant pandemic-flavoured mess.

https://twitter.com/deb_cohen/status/1282244768257499136

First up, pandemics are scary. There's lots of things from the Sandman model of risk communication that tilts them towards being high outrage.
- limited personal agency
- unseeable
- perceived as being imposed from outside
- "unnatural" (I dispute this)
- novel

Public service:

Dear Employer,

I don't understand why you trust your employees enough to engage with your most valuable asset - your customers/stakeholders - but insist they need a medical certificate if they tell you they're sick. If your business is so precarious and without redundancy it'll fall over if someone has a sick day, you probably suck at your job and should reassess your business plan.

If you think your employees are liars who want to take advantage of you, you might not be nice to work for.

The discourse around data is fundamentally broken.

My parents are scared to use internet banking "cause we'll get hacked" despite it generally being fairly safe (Westpac's efforts this week not withstanding) while generally trusting the government. In the meantime, the government have directed the military signals intelligence squad to spy on Australians (in addition to foreign governments spying on us for them), raided the journo who reported it to catch the whistle-blower who leaked it, so they can put them in jail