Re: [tlug] From an enthusiast TLUG follower

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On 29/8/2020 11:00 pm, Curt J. Sampson wrote:
> On 2020-08-28 13:50 +0800 (Fri), Raymond Wan wrote:
> > The land border between Canada and the USA is the "longest undefended
> > land border in the world" and that has been effectively closed.  For me,
> > closing that was a bigger surprise that whatever Japan is doing.
> Why? If you've been doing an at least somewhat reasonable job of
> controlling the pandemic in your own country, and your neighbours have not,
> why on earth would you not close your border?


Oh...I do agree with the closure of the border.  After all, 
if the roles were reversed, I'm sure the USA wouldn't 
hesitate closing it, regardless of whoever is the president. 
 And they should not.

But that border is fairly hard to "close".  There are long 
stretches where there is no immigration officers or police 
from either side of the border.  A while ago, I read an 
article that said there are roads from one to the other 
where the only deterrent is a small pylon.  The border 
patrol that was interviewed for that story (I forgot from 
which country) said that the "nice" people would move the 
pylon back after they passed through.  :-P

Of course, such crossings are in remote areas of the two 
countries.


> > Hopefully when this wave ends, we learn from the experience and figure
> > out ways to avoid this from happening.
> It's a nice hope, but before COVID-19 this experience had _already been
> had_, and some countries _had_ learned from it. Why would a country that
> didn't learn from the last one, or the one before that, suddenly change?


Yes well, technically speaking, China and Hong Kong 
experienced covid-19 first.  (We're coming to the end of our 
third wave; and it was far worse than the first two waves.) 
That should have been a warning to everyone else.  But 
things didn't turn out better for other countries.

Before this third wave, locals here were amazed at how 
places like Europe and the USA couldn't control it.  And 
then the third wave hit us (which is still not as bad as 
many places).

So, yes, no one learns from this...  I hear of actors, 
lawyers, business people, etc. ultimately becoming 
politicians.  I rarely hear of scientists or engineers 
becoming politicians; I think that's what we need...

Ray