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I feel like a bad liberal for saying this, but I’ve recently been pretty happy about living in a red state. That’s a problem.

I don’t know how to make this happen, but we have to find a way to get masks off of the poor service workers. They’re miserable, and the ones that I know are sick to death of wearing them while few of the customers do (again, red state).

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Agreed. It really is disgusting to see/attend events in which (fully vaxed) server class is uniformly masked, while (fully vaxed) attendees are not. It is amazingly and odiously classist. Remember the whole controversy about AOC's "Tax the rich" dress at the Met? To me the despicable component was seeing the contrast between the uniformly masked servants (whom I would wager all the tea in China had to present proof of vax for that gig) and the unmasked elites in attendance. WTF.

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It's not classist, it's just practical. You can wait tables while wearing a mask. It's harder to eat a hamburger while wearing a mask. I mean, it is also true that dentists tend to wear masks while their patients do not, despite the fact that I would be that most dentists are wealthier than there average patient.

Also, it isn't like going to a restaurant is something that only the 1% does. I suspect many of those waiters themselves go to restaurants on occasion.

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Go look at the pictures of the Met Gala. What's striking is not just the contrast between the masked workers and the unmasked guests: it's that all the workers are wearing black masks. Not N95's or KN 94's, much less masks of their own choosing. I cannot find a single picture of a server there in anything but a black mask.

The masks are part of their prescribed dress code.

If you're OK with that, then fine, but let's not pretend that it's purely about safety. They're clearly being told to wear a particular kind of mask for the aesthetics of the event. I think that adds to the ickiness.

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That Met Gala is hardly a normal event.

That said, it remains true that, since people at the Met Gala were eating, it was a less reasonable to expect them to wear masks than staff. I'd add that I'm pretty sure that there wasn't even a mask mandate in effect in NY in September.

Also, dress codes are kinda standard for wait staff in black-tie events (I'm sure most people would be pissed if a waiter at their wedding showed up in an "I'm with Stupid" t-shirt) so I would expect that masks would also be uniform at such an event.

Basically, I don't get your point.

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So it seems like you're acknowledging that it was okay for any given person to not wear masks at all at the event (not just while eating), and that the wait staff were just wearing them as part of a dress code. You don't see why people would object to requiring PPE as meaningless workplace attire for service employees? In a pandemic, can't we handle workers wearing masks or not depending on their preference? That seems a lot less obnoxious than an "I'm with Stupid" tee.

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Matching masks was dress code. Requiring masks in the first place was an effort to reduce transmission.

And the fact that it is OK for a given person not to wear a mask is different than saying that we shouldn't do it all. While I would expect everyone being masked is more effective than some people being masked, I would also expect that some people being masked is more effective than no one being masked.

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Since that isn’t what he said, you are mistaken.

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Never ceases to amaze me how determined progressives are to make everything class warfare. Now the Met Gala stands for 335 million Americans? I live in a upper middle class area in the rich sf Bay Area, and absolutely everyone wears a mask indoors, and probably 85-90% outdoors! Most people I see not wearing them are gardeners, construction workers, and trash collectors. But I’m not inclined to think that says anything about class war, just that situations vary.

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Why are people wearing masks outdoors in the Bay Area? To first approximation, you can't catch Covid outdoors. I know people who wear masks outdoors because it is below freezing, but that can't be true in the Bay Area right now.

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Virtue signaling would be my guess, although that “first approximation” part bothers me. What about second and third? Huh? How about them?

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My particular KN95 masks are black, so there is always the possibility (though it's not one I believe) that the servers were given something similar for the dress code. "Here's the most effective mask around, please wear this type as part of your dress"

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Exactly, Neal! Well said.

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Well, dentists only started wearing masks to protect themselves from AIDS, not to protect their patients from them. Prior to 2020, if you went to a physician's office your doctor wasn't wearing a mask.

If servers want to wear masks to protect themselves that's fine, they should be encouraged to do so. But in fact they're being made to wear masks when patrons are not, as a way to protect the more elite patrons from the possibly germy servers.

Your argument is the same "well it's no big deal to wear a mask so no one should complain" when in fact lots of people think it's a bigger deal and the cost of that bigger deal is higher than the benefit.

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I'm too lazy to look it up for dentists, but it seems that, at least with surgeons (and a lot of dentistry verges on surgery), the primary reason to wear masks is to protect the patient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20surgical%20facemasks,members%20of%20the%20surgical%20staff

While that AIDS crisis may have triggered more PPE use among dentists, the particular trigger was David Acer infecting several of his patients rather than the other way around.

With respect to servers, this idea that patrons are thought of "more elite" than servers is dumb. Going to a restaurant is a fairly common activity for people of all economic levels, even if some people might go to McDonalds while others go to the French Laundry. It's just that businesses tend to be a bit stricter on how their employees act than how their customers act. I mean, there's a reason why the sign behind the sink says "Employees must wash hands," rather than "Everyone must wash hands." The server is getting paid to be there, the customer is not.

I'm a lawyer. When meeting with clients, I tend to wear a suit, while they wear whatever they want and I tend to try to accommodate their schedule rather than vice versa. this isn't because they are "more elite" than me, it's because I'm getting paid, while they are paying me.

Maybe in the grand scheme of things masking servers isn't all that helpful. If so, and if it bothers enough servers, maybe we should stop. But making this a class thing is dumb.

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It is a total class issue.

The people being forced to wear masks are those that can't fight back: low income workers and children.

I was at an eating establishment recently, a very popular one. Unmasked people were on top of each other as it was very crowded.

Yet the only people wearing masks were waitresses and cooks.

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But it seems like a good thing that employers are protecting their staff, no? In my experience, safety requirements for the workplace are at a higher level than in life outside work, and that's probably a good thing.

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If employers gave a crap about protecting their staff, they would mandate vaccinations among the staff and the patrons, not hang a lampshade on the problem. I encourage them to do so.

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The thing to do would be to tackle ventilation, which not enough people are doing. I visit companies that are still doing a lot of performative surface cleaning. Those companies are never exploring ventilation improvements.

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The problem is that ventilation improvements usually involve substantially invasive modifications of the building, unless you're in a space that is already designed for indoor-outdoor use in good weather. This is especially true with recent buildings, that often have fire codes and/or energy efficiency codes that prevent windows from being openable and make most doors remain closed and block airflow.

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They might lose too many workers.

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I'm guessing though that that's more likely to happen in Blue areas, not the Red states that the OP mentioned that he's happy to live within

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Simple. We recognize two facts:

o Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people; and

o Masks have never been very effective at slowing the spread of the virus. What they are very good at doing is signaling compliance.

Once everyone pulls their heads out of their asses and admits these facts, we can get rid of the masks.

But then, the folks who promulgate mask policies really seem to like swanning around maskless while their social inferiors are clearly identified by their masks. Maybe it will never go away.

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Both points are incomplete, see edits below

1) Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy (vaccinated) people; and

2) Masks have (strike never) been very effective at slowing the spread of the virus.

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You are a victim of propaganda. The data out of South Africa and the UK make it clear Omicron is nearly harmless to healthy people regardless of vaccination status.

Also, prior infection with Omicron provides better protection than the vaccines. So a person who has survived Omicron infection (ie, almost anyone who catches it) will enjoy relative immunity from subsequent infections, free of charge. You can't say that about the vaccines, which today do not provide any protection from Omicron infection.

And I can't begin to address your ideas about the efficacy of masks. I don't know where you are getting your information. In any case, here's more than you ever wanted to know about masks in the age of Covid: https://hectordrummond.com/the-face-mask-faq/

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"Vaccines do not provide any protection against infection" is an egregious falsehood, but I suspect you know that and are stirring shit for some reason.

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Not an falsehood, an exaggeration. Current vaccines provide very limited protection against Omicron infection. All you have to do is look at the Omicron infection rates in highly vaccinated places like Israel and Denmark.

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All you have to do is look at the difference in the case rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Last I checked it was 3x for the unvaccinated.

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My brother and several other people I know were knocked on their ass by omnicron. So I’m not sure where you’re getting “harmless” unless you define harm as to only encompass hospitalization and death.

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Certainly true that many vaxed/boosted have had tough ten day stretches with Omicron. The statistical evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death from omicron (or delta, for that matter) is overwhelming. Everything in life is a cost-benefit analysis, including speed limits and legality of pools that conceivably could be accessed by toddlers. For those who want to continue Zero COVID fight against less acute but still difficult sub-hospitalization cases, please wear an N-95 and protect yourself. Others can make their own choices.

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Yep, that's what I mean by harm.

After all, I was knocked on my ass by the second Pfizer jab. I considered that annoying, not really harmful.

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It's true that there are real harms from the vaccine side effects. But they tend to last a day, and can be scheduled in advance, while the harms from illness usually last closer to a week, and don't get scheduled in advance.

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Well, because of my elephant-like memory I recall way back before 2020 this sort of thing happened to me and everyone I knew once every year or two. As I recall, we managed without masking in public, lockdowns, vax passports, demonization of the unvaxxed, quarterly GMO boosters, banning from social media of discussion of cold or flu remedies, etc.

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I agree. But we also managed without calendars on cell phones, video meetings, ride-hail cabs, or shared scooters. Just because we used to deal with all the problems of something doesn't mean that they weren't real problems.

Saying that we should go back to not expecting people to wear a mask or get vaccinated sounds to me like we should go back to not expecting people to have calendars on their phones or have an easy way to hail rides.

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Yes, I think "Harmless" and "Mild" in this context may both be accurately translated as "does not land you in the hospital."

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Being in a blue city in a red state (in my case, Austin) seems like the best situation. Most people are conscientious of others and wears masks in crowded locations, but without the burdensome requirements.

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I definitely felt that very strongly the first half of last year, when I was living in Austin too. (Now that I'm back in Bryan/College Station, I no longer get those benefits.)

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My Brother in Law owns a restaurant. My wife and daughter are servers. Luckily we live in Idaho where they aren't mandatory. But the day they because optional... not a single employee chooses to wear one.

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Fellow Boisean here. (Love your comments, by the way!) Among restaurants in general, I haven't yet seen much consistency here. I can think of some places like your brother in law's, and those are awesome. There are some others where they clearly aren't required but still plenty of staff are wearing them. This can get frustrating when it's loud and you can't clearly hear or lipread what they're saying. And among the corporate chains, it's clear they are getting edicts from the top that they still have to wearing them.

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Bad Boys btw.

I am a curmudgeon here. I appreciate your appreciation.

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Off topic to the main thread, but related to this post, guess which massively overrated chain may finally may be coming here:

https://boisedev.com/news/members/in-n-out-meridian/

I should pledge to go to Bad Boy Burgers on the grand opening day, and stay far away from the ninth circle of traffic hell that intersection already is.

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+1 on your assessment of Eagle Rd. It was originally designed to be a semi-freeway with interchanges at every section mile road, but ITD chickened out and cowered to all the developers who saw an opportunity to sell stuff with all those eyes traveling down the road. Just piss poor infrastructure planning, that road.

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I'll have to get back around to trying them, can't remember the last time I have. We have a plethora of hyper-local burger joints here so there's fierce competition when that strikes my appetite.

And what I appreciate about your contributions is how different they are to the typical Slow Boring reader/commenter, whose backgrounds and sensibilities tend to have plenty of common with Matt's. I apologize if this is too glib, and correct me as appropriate, but "working class/blue collar" are the sensibilities I sense from you, and I think that's a very valuable perspective that needs to be heard--not just among us here but of large swaths of society.

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I would say that philosophical blue collar is definitely the vibe I go for. I was enlisted military. My wife is a cashier. My daughter is going to CWI for mechatronics. I do have a Bachelors degree... that I earned online in the Military that has nothing to do with my actual job. My job is skilled technical in the energy sector. I travel all over the country and work with millwrights and welders and pipefitters. On a typical job there are two engineers and 20-30 techs/blue collar workers of which I am one.

When I am in Boise, not a single person I associate with regularly has a college degree. Both my Brother in Laws are HS drop outs. One has a Construction business (successful) and one owns restaurants. Successful. The hardest working person I know is my wife. She is 50 and works circles around the other cashiers/servers.

But in some ways I straddle the fence between two worlds. I am an avid reader. My parents were both computer programmers. Dad got his Masters in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon. Brother is a top engineer at Boeing. Sister is a Tenured College Professor. I read Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. I work internationally. My ex-wife is English. My wife and I make a decent living (six figures).

But at the heart of it, I have this blue collar view of things. If all the bankers and lawyers in the world disappeared... oh, we would have a melt down, but civilization would continue.

If all the welders and electricians in the world disappeared. We would be in the dark ages within a week.

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I share your worldview. My father was an Ivy League professor, but every time I walk out my door for a smoke and look at the sidewalks, streets and buildings that make New York, I bless all the men without fancy degrees who built them, and all the women without fancy degrees who raised the men that built them.

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I was curious about your moniker and found this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Trees

My interest was piqued because I live in the City of Trembling Leaves.

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Boise is a corruption of the French "les bois" (a common phrase to name things here), meaning "the woods", apocryphally said by French explorers when they found a lush area after long travel in the semi-arid environment of the Snake River Valley. Trees are pretty awesome, so in thinking for a username here I went with this as a way to identify with where I live while hopefully not identifying much more.

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Well, now le chat out of du sac.

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I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now. Personally I have been using N-95 masks as PPE for over four decades as does virtually everyone who works in dusty environments. All day every day where conditions demand it. And doing physically demanding work while they are at it. If it poses no inconvenience to myself, a senior citizen, then a little less whining about it would be in order.

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I am happy that you find mask-wearing to be not in the least bit onerous. You should keep wearing an N-95 in order to protect yourself -- which is far more protective to you than someone else wearing a cloth mask. Maybe you think I am ludicrous, but it breaks my heart that my seven-year old daughter never sees another human face during her seven hour school day, not even during outside recess (exception for brief lunch at which silence is enforced). The entire K-12 school is vaccinated: from 5 year old kindergarteners to the head of school. Whom is my vaccinated seven year old daughter protecting by wearing a non-N-95 mask, especially give overwhelming evidence on vaxed/boosted avoiding hospitalization and death? Couldn't staff so inclined wear N-95s and therefore protect themselves above and beyond the triple dose of vaccines they have received, if they want further protection? Why does my seven year old, who is an only child, have to pay the price of not seeing the faces of peers?

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Thank you. The emotional costs have not been stated enough in this regard.

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There is no such price. But maybe you could teach her that what she is doing is protecting other people. Just like they do when children in classes have severe allergies to things like milk or dairy products and these are banned from school lunches. Children can and do catch covid. And while they may be asymptomatic they can certainly transmit this to others who are more at risk.

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I disagree with you profoundly. My daughter has one childhood; two years of it have been materially impacted by masking or zooming -- sacrificing for those far older than she, sacrificing for those who now can be vaxed and boosted and therefore, according to overwhelming statistics, avoid acute outcomes. Even more so if they wear N-95s like you You arrogantly say "no price" with 100% confidence. How could you possibly know that? You have never met my daughter. Goodbye.

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One thing about Covid that has been annoying is having random people (with no/limited experience) tell you what to do in your personal life with no knowledge of your personal situation. "There is no such price" is a strong assertion with no justification, and I disagree.

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A dirty secret about COVID politics. Both the right and left coalition have busybodies.

When the Right or Left coalition feels government action is necessary, the busybody subset of the coalition will use that as an opportunity to meddle in people's private affairs.

A portion of the COVID NPI forever crowd is the busybody contingent of liberals who really want to tell you what to do. They are also disproportinatly likely to favor "deplatforming"

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Thanks, Man.

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The next time Peter G backs up a claim he makes will be the first time, at least based on what I've seen on this site.

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Peter G is on a roll today. Your kids must suffer to protect us old codgers!

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Well, if you want grandparents sure. If you feel they are disposable that's on you.

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It's disingenuous to claim that wearing an N95 mask isn't inconvenient. N95 masks are of necessity uncomfortable, they have to be to maintain a tight seal. The first thing anyone who has to wear them does is take them off as soon as practicable.

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People in Asian countries often wear masks when they themselves are feeling a bit under the weather. It isn't the norm in Asia to wear a mask all day in public when they are feeling healthy. And it seems to really just be a thing in East Asia anyway.

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I’ve traveled a fair amount of east Asia a fair amount. On the other hand I was in Korea a couple months ago and people were following the outdoor mask mandate but the moment you entered a bar or restaurant the masks came off. Clearly it’s performative.

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I've worn N95s plenty in work environments, in construction and manufacturing, engineering site visits, remodeling work at home, etc.

When necessary, they're necessary. But they *suck*, lol, and I would never wish one on somebody without a clear reason.

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We have a clear reason.

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That seems a stretch.

Moreover, if we had the means to enforce universal N95 mandates, then we’d have the means to enforce a far more effective, briefer, and less irritating vaccine mandate.

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In crowded, indoor, poorly ventilated spaces, I think this assessment is accurate.

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Mandating N95 Masks is far more of an infringement than mandating vaccinations.

The only justification for an N95 Mask update is if we were in the middle of a COVID vaccination mandate period and were waiting to finish the vaccinations.

Since we're not mandating vaccines we shouldn't mandate masks

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I'm glad that you have been able to properly use your PPE during your long career. It has undoubtedly protected you. But there is a huge difference between wearing required PPE and walking around in a N95 to alleviate the anxiety of others. Worried about COVID? Stay home or wear a N95, but don't ask me to wear one.

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👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

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Peter, weren't you the other day talking about how Americans wouldn't stand for eating less beef for any reason and it would be political suicide to take that as a goal? No one responded "well then people in India must be made of sterner stuff, they never eat beef." Because that wouldn't be responsive: people are more or less okay with a certain practice depending on their cultural expectations. Resilience has nothing to do with it.

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"I find the idea that masks are an onerous burden ludicrous. Apparently the people in many Asian countries are made of sterner stuff for they have no difficulty using masks as they have for decades now."

I remember reading an article [1] from long before the pandemic talking about masking culture in Asian countries. One of the points it made was that many people wore masks **specifically to prevent person-to-person interaction**. To quote [1]

"Juvenile psychologist Jun Fujikake has made similar observations. “When we deal with others, we have to judge whether to do things like smile or show anger,” he explains. “By wearing a mask, you can prevent having to do that. The trend of wearing a mask to prevent directly dealing with other may have roots in the current youth culture in which many of them are more accustomed to communicating indirectly through email and social media.”"

Such people aren't "made of sterner stuff"; they just had a different cost-benefit analysis than many of us do.

I find it amusing (and frustrating) that it used to be widely acknowledged that masks degrade or outright stop human interactions --- indeed, that was often their purpose! --- but now people will twist themselves into pretzels to deny such an obvious truth. Go ahead: tell me with a straight face that masks do not in the slightest impede human interactions.

The article goes on to note a bunch of other non-disease reasons to wear masks. Again, it's a different cost benefit analysis not toughness.

[1] Possibly this one: https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/why-do-japanese-people-wear-surgical-masks-its-not-always-for-health-reasons

EDIT: The point is echoed by many in the comment section of [1]. To quote the highest rated comment:

... No, in a land where so many are cripplingly shy, this device [a mask] offers a shield against the scary outside world. For the socially inept, it's like a cloak of invisibility, helping you to hide and live inside your solipsistic cocoon.

A girl worked in my office l for twelve months, and we never once saw her face, she was never hear to speak above a whispered squeak, and she never once made eye contact with a living soul. A healthy society would fear for her mental health. Here, she was praised for being kawaaiiiiiiiii.

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Hey whippersnapper. I had to walk uphill to school both ways in snow when it was 120 degrees, carrying my horse while babysitting my seven siblings with no clothes. And by god we were thankful for the opportunity.

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When I was young sometimes we would have temps of -120 degrees...or lower!

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Yeah, and the very first thing you did when you could scrape together a couple bucks was buy a car with snow tires and air conditioning --- and you were even more thankful then..

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Yes. But my first car was a hand crank. None of this fancy starter motor yet you young kids have today. We didn’t have ABS braking. We would just pull the lever. We were so poor, there was only one seat that we would take turns sitting in. The others would stuff themselves into the trunk. Now sonny boy, you complain if u don’t have leather.

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Have you actually been to Asia? I visited Japan, China and Hong Kong pre-COVID. At any given time <1% of people were wearing masks. They were socially acceptable, but also quite rare in practice.

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I have indeed been to Asia (not that lived experience matters for this purpose), and it is absolutely over 1% in many pre-covid contexts --- especially public transport. Seriously, just look at any stock footage of the Tokyo subway with a reasonable sample size.

For example:

- I count 5 masks in a photo with ~50 visible faces (certainly under 100): https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/06/21/national/population-woes-crowd-japan/

- 6 masks in similar context: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tokyo-japan-april-17-2017-green-1214076736

I challenge you to show me a photo from Tokyo mass transit in the last decade with at least 50 clearly visible faces and no masks.

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I have a brother who has a very woo-susceptible girlfriend of the far left variety, and very regrettably they refuse to get vaccinated. And as an odd side effect of that, they are planning to move from the Bay Area, a region which otherwise has long satisfied their worldview, to the South, due to whether restrictions on unvaccinated people are being placed.

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There is a burrito place near me that does everything by the book. You tell them what you want and they glove up and move down the line adding ingredients. Then they ring you up and take their gloves off. Then they got back to the order station and glove up and repeat the process.

How is that different? The customers never wear gloves - they just grab their burrito with their grubby hands and chow down.

It reminds me of all the guys saying schools and the government don't have a right to tell you what to wear. And women saying, "I was sent home from high school for not wearing a bra."

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I get the sense that you would've been in the crowd that correctly said how insane and utterly inappropriate it would be to send home a woman for not wearing a bra in school though. So it's kind of bizarre to use that as an example of how schools and government telling people what to wear is totally okay and normal.

The burrito also seems like a particularly bad example. The whole point of the gloves is to protect from a particularly acute risk (food born contaminants being transferred from the hands of the people literally handling your food into the food itself, thereby making customers sick) that is posed by the service workers in the absence of gloves. The customer doesn't wear gloves, but the risk posed by that is borne solely by the person eating the burrito rather than being spread to others. In contrast, the masks protect everyone from a risk that everyone poses, so requiring them to be worn by some people who pose no additional risk than other people who do not have to wear the mask is arbitrary and creates a burden borne by a selective few (who also just happen to typically be lower earning members of society than the people who don't have to wear the mask).

I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree about these policies, but I just think you might want to come up with better examples or arguments than these ones. They're pretty obviously flawed.

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This isn't really relevant to the discussion, but your comment just reminded me of the time the girls' soccer team at my high school was suspended because their school-issued soccer uniforms violated the school's dress code.

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Oops! LOL

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Yep. I've felt exactly the same way. I feel like a red state free rider. I'm in Texas, my whole family that's eligible is vaxxed (and the adults are boosted) *and* they've had it before.

Our two-year-old's preschool, though, has not shut down for COVID once, even when the principal got COVID. He (my two-year-old) does not wear a mask.

Honestly, I don't know what our family would do if it did regularly close down. Both of us work, and I work from home and have regular deadlines. We have a mortgage. I see on Twitter about schools in blue states closing down and that would just not be possible for us without my working until midnight every night.

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What red state are you in? I’ve seen plenty of unmasked service people here—I assumed any service workers who are wearing masks want to wear them, and I should certainly think they should be allowed, though there’s no point wearing anything but a certified N-95/KN95/KN94 for personal protection.

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Outstanding article. With over 250 comments already, and us Westerners regularly getting the short stick of these articles being published too early while we're still sleeping, I apologize if someone has already made this point or something similar to it, but here goes:

There's been a weird, disturbing, and bad strain of sentiment among some of the left that could be termed as a "politics of asceticism", an opposite of the politics of abundance Matt described here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/abundance-scarcity. The core of the strain is that the only solution out of major problems is to sustain long, indefinite sacrifice toward pursuing that sole solution.

This is seen all the time in global warming discourse: so much emphasis on solely reducing GHG emissions to the point that it would lead to a drastic reduction in the quality of life, as opposed to building as much clean energy as possible to create a cascading effect to address AGW even more furtively (again, as Matt said here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance). And you see it in the housing discourse where so many are convinced that building more housing of any kind doesn't work, and to the extent that you are going to be abundant, it has to be solely toward what's deemed as affordable housing, and barring that, you can only deal with redistributing the existing scarce stock. (There's a zillion articles from Matt I could cite so I won't bother here.)

And so it goes for covid. We've invented excellent vaccines that have significantly and consistently blunted the virulence of SARS-CoV-2. But that's not sufficient for the ascetic covid hawks out there wanting a sustained and vigilant abstinence from some very basic human qualities, like being around other people and seeing them smile. It is a dead end as far as politics and policy goes.

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Covid as fun-seeking-missile was very definitely a thing, and it hasn't gone completely away. People on a REMOTE BEACH during a PANDEMIC, they might even be HAVING A GOOD TIME!

Thankfully, at least we're not Australia.

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Jan 31, 2022
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as User01 mentions, I don't think this is unique to any one side of the political spectrum. I think there's just always been an association of a certain kind of asceticism and "purity" types of moralism, and this has existed across the political spectrum in many different societies, and probably always will in some form or other.

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I am increasingly certain that whatever the infectious disease and public health people tell themselves in their conscious minds, in their reptile hindbrains they’re just enjoying being *important* and want to spin that out as long as possible.

Even a well-versed layperson can see that there are no NPIs short of “China” which will have any impact on this going forward, and that therapeutics and vaccines have reduced the threat level to near-zero for all but the most extremely unhealthy or oldest of individuals.

Yet, we’re being told that all of this is now permanent.

The reaction to that idea should have been rather obvious.

Hopefully the next pandemic isn’t dramatically worse because these people overplayed their hand and will not be widely listened to again in living memory.

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Addendum: I considered it preposterous, asinine, and laughable 12 or 18 months ago when I first saw it suggested that there was a subset of the general population that found a perverse pleasure in the pandemic and didn't really want this to end.

This now seems pretty clearly true, although it's hard to tell how much of it is 500 shouty people on Twitter.

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Unfortunately I think it's > 500, though I have no idea how much. Coming back to NYC after a year and a half in a red area has been...interesting. At least in Manhattan (Ross Douthat suggested over the weekend that it's different in the further reaches of the other boroughs), not relaxed seems to be the default mode. I work for the city and am concerned that we will never be able to take the f***ing mask off at work, and I have similar fears about my building (I have to put the damn thing on to walk through the lobby and out the door, as well as do an insomniac load of laundry at 4.30 or 5 in the morning). It's like taking your shoes off at the airport, only constantly, every single day.

Like Randall above, I'm kind of missing that red area get-on-with-it vibe. This situation seriously detracts from the general benefits of being in the city as opposed to the boondocks. I couldn't wait to get back here, and now I am feeling, for the first time in my life, close to being what seems like actually clinically depressed, with nothing firm to be able to look forward to.

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I'm moving away from my blue enclave for this reason. I don't want to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask if I have to go to the office, if I'm even allowed to go to the office at all. I'm worried that in the Bay Area, I'll never be able to see the faces of coworkers again in person and connect with them socially if I want to continue working for non-profits. Sending good thoughts your way.

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I live in SF too and am thinking of bailing. I never see co-workers, most of my friends moved away.

It is hard to justify paying our housing costs with how little social amentities are available. If I'm going to have a suburban social life might as well have suburban cost of living.

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Thank you, and same to you! I'm also looking for a way out of my city job, and quite possibly the city itself.

This is an extremely disorienting time.

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Your last sentence struck me. A lot of people are feeling that way. Talk to others. Know you are not alone. If you have to take off the mask to keep yourself from an anxiety attack or just to feel the sun on your face, take off the mask. This is an important piece of the benefit-cost analysis now.

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Jan 31, 2022
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Exactly, lots of people who can do their jobs remotely, and appreciate the additional working flexibility that the pandemic forced employers to allow, and who don't want to lose that, have at least a subconscious conflict about whether things should go "back to normal".

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If things were bad and we made them better, why should we go back to the bad way?

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BEcause a majority of the population wants to go back to 2019. You can see it in lobbying for schools being open, opposition to masking requirements, etc.

The minority who want less social interaction are just that a minority.

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I 100 percent agree with Matt, but the pandemic has made my day-to-day life much better for the reasons you mention.

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