except most unions aren't doing shit for covid workplace safety. that doesn't mean unions are bad, just ignorant

Traumatic event > emotion > propagandized media response > wealth being funneled towards capitalists

Y'all need the get on the sigma grindset, when tragedy strikes, don't get sad, don't emotionally process, just figure out how you can use it to manipulate people and make money

/s

The pandemic frightened the status quo because for the first time in decades the working masses were forced to pause their grind and consider how we live. And the vast majority of people realized they absolutely hate it.

Which is why "the money" immediately began pushing to crack the whip ASAP to get people back in line, back producing surplus value, and back focused only on the myopic necessities of now.

The pandemic should have been a watershed moment for Labor, and maybe it was- but the Trump administration is actively imploding the economy on all sides now, so there's very little hope for economic upturn in the next few years. We are in a dark time.

I'm reading posts as yours thankful to still find some people with common sense. I lost friends to covid while others kept ranting about nonsensical conspiracy theories and proudly rebelling. One of the dumbest shit I've heard people say is "Why should I wear a mask for covid if I don't wear one for flu?". Well, if you actually gave a damn about anyone's wellbeing you'd wear a mask for BOTH.

reason excuse to send troops to the Middle East.

The 9/11 attacks were a reason to send troops to the middle east.

And roll back personal freedoms, which contrasts greatly with the hub-bub so many people made about their "personal freedom" to cough all over people without consequence.

Missed opportunity to start a total war on the pangolins (or bats or whatever it was)

And besides, the air filters at your kids’ private academy are better than the hospitals the poors use, never mind the public schools!

Except if other capital interests stand in the way of a new market.

Clean energy is extremely lucrative, but dirty energy still has money.

Plenty of other sectors profited also from covid, an excuse to make everything more expensive and never cheaper when it ends.
Same with that ship that blocked the Suez Canal for a short time.

If someone can hijack a plane with nail clippers, they can do it without the nail clippers.

Last time I've flown with my swiss army knife. They checked the blade length at the metal gates, all ok.

Do they still yell at you to take your shoes off, unless you have taken your shoes off in which case they yell at you because you took your shoes off, because today on this particular flight right now, they don't want you to take your shoes off. Tomorrow who knows.

I wouldn't mind so much but they're also obnoxious.

Upvoting you because I agree that some voices need to process the shift to endemic.

But I also agree with the tweet that low cost systematic changes should still be underway to lower overall viral burden, or soften the blow of the next pandemic.

I don’t know if HEPA filters in public institutions is actually effective, so I suppose the argument hinges on that; is there actually low hanging fruit like that?

And the Covid variants these days are very much on a similar level to the flu.

They're not. Many of the variants that exist now last for weeks. I don't know of any flu symptoms that don't go way basically on their own within a week or so.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/beyond-long-covid-1.7485888

"There is no such thing as a COVID infection without consequence," says long COVID researcher, David Putrino[…].

So there is a cumulative effect that can be occurring with each infection.

Early in the pandemic, we actually published a paper where we showed that, even in animal models — when we infected mice with a very, very mild case of SARS-CoV-2 infection — which only caused lung inflammation, we still saw these inflammatory chemicals called chemokines emerging from the infected lungs and starting to attack central nervous system structures such as the spinal cord and the brain.

[…]You know, this is a virus that, once it enters the body, is very capable of entering the bloodstream, creating immune responses that travel all over the body.

It disrupts what we call "interferon signalling," which is part of the immune system that helps you to fight off infections or latent infections, such as Epstein Barr virus.

Typically our immune system can keep these things suppressed, but when SARS-CoV-2 enters the picture, it starts to cause altered interferon signalling. It causes immune damage and dysregulation.

And suddenly, not only does your body have trouble clearing the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, but it also starts to have trouble keeping some of these other viruses that have been latent from reactivating and causing problems.

In addition to SARS-CoV-2's ability to dysregulate the immune system and suppress the immune system, the spike protein itself is very damaging to blood vessel structures as well as red blood cells and platelets themselves.

And so between those two features, the ability to dysregulate the immune system and the ability to cause systemic damage throughout the bloodstream, you have a very dangerous novel virus on your hands.

Not being the same threat is largely due to vaccines which are being restricted, and it being a different threat doesn't mean it's no threat.

Also, it is still a pandemic, only the emergency phase ended.