Saturday, April 16, 2022
Ukraine War: Who's Winning Colonel Douglas McGregor with Judge Napolitano
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Russian official: Military personnel of NATO states among prisoners from Ukraine
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"For example, what's the point of locking people down, but then letting them out to buy food and medicine?"
ReplyDeleteWow, CS, I'm on to this.
Let me introduce you to my brilliant new business idea:
The "PANDOMINIUM".
The pandominium is something like a hospital, but also something like a high-rise luxury apartment building.
The rooms are small, as there is only to be one person per unit, due to the need to keep residents from contaminating and infecting each other.
Though rather spartan, there's everything a person needs to be comfortable for a long, quiet period in isolation. Most important of all, are the state of the art communications technologies-- unlimited internet/entertainment/"zoom"/blah blah blah--access.
Pneumatic tubing connecting each unit to a central supply allows everyone to have food, medicine, or anything else, supplied without leaving.
The medicine includes tranquilizers and psychotropic substances and whatever else necessary to preserve or supplement sanity.
Each pandominium has a trained medical staff, capable of visiting any unit at any time, if unit surveillance detects a medical problem. Blood pressure, heart rate, VO2 max, body temperature, are monitored 24/7/365. Routine wireless blood draws are performed weekly.
Ventilation is state of the art. Units are maintained at positive pressure. There is no unfiltered air exchange at all. In fact, because the air supply to units has gone through several levels of filtration, breathing air in the pandominium is more healthy than in daily life. So is the water.
Outside the event of a pandemic, the pandominium is not occupied. It is scrupulously maintained in the event it becomes required. Medical teams in space suits are trained to safely evacuate pandominium subscribers to the pandominium.
This is all ruinously expensive, but hey. "Better broke than dead."
"Pandominium, not pandemonium!"
Brilliant.
DeleteNot just funny but entirely feasible. It's an idea you'll be sorry you didn't invest in before some Zucks or Gates or Musk turned it into a trillion dollar business.
And a blueprint already exists in E. M. Forster's 1916 story, The Machine Stops:
"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:
“Very well. Let us talk ...
Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.
... it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her."
So there you have it. Individual biological isolation, combined with full economic functionality via the internet. All conceived more than a hundred years ago.
That's eerie. It is exactly the way I envision it, but Forster's depiction couldn't include any of the richness of the last 106 years of this actually manifesting.
ReplyDeleteYou also made me think of Neo from The Matrix, seeing himself in that weird flesh pod within the vineyards of all humanity, encased in flesh pods. The flesh pod also resembles the cell of the bee, or the unit in the pandominium.
"And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus."
The vision of life, health, and the healthy life we'll have before us. Of what it is be human. This has to be fought at all costs. (I don't recommend freaking out, being stupid, violent, or barbaric.)