 Alberta Premier Kenney laying down the law before the Snowbirds return home. Greetings from 53.5° north latitude. This past week was a bit of downer, not gonna lie. Seven weeks of COVID work-from-home quasi-isolation is definitely straining psyches. But let's not fool ourselves - what we are experiencing here in Canada is definitely NOT a quarantine. To get a feel for what a real quarantine is like, the Lawfare team interviewed one of their own in Beijing. Sophia Yan recently returned from Wuhan to Beijing and reported on her 14 days of quarantine. From house nannies getting alerts every time her door opens, to a full escort from airport to home to ensure she doesn't nip out for some groceries, to family members being forced to quarantine apart from their family, Yan lays out what strict enforcement really looks like. In fact, even though we are several weeks earlier into our pandemic response than China, we are contemplating what the Kenney government has labelled our "relaunch" strategy to be in place as early as May 14. The full document has been saved here for posterity. The Alberta government relaunch strategy is built on seven conditions to be met. They are (as copied directly from the document):
 As you can see in the second bullet, one tool that various jurisdictions including Alberta are utilizing as they relaunch or reopen is some form of "contact tracing". In the early stages of an outbreak with small numbers of people infected, this can be very manual - figure out who a person met, call them, call who they talked to, and so on. This gets significantly more difficult in the mid- to late-stages of a pandemic due to the vast numbers of people who are or could be infected, and that of course sounds like something that technology can help with. Contact tracing apps like the one that Singapore open-sourced and that Alberta has adopted sound like they could be privacy nightmares. This article out of the UK outlines how those issues could manifest into significant concerns, but the fact that they are not mandatory means the number of people potentially impacted could be small. Further to that. Brookings and Bruce Schneier both complete pan contact tracing applications, saying that they just don't work. Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It's not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can't confirm the app's diagnosis. So the alert is useless. If this is all true, then the promise of a contact tracing application freeing people from, as Brookings put it, the "terrible choice between staying home or risking exposure" is nothing but a false hope. If the only real tool we have to stay safe until we have a vaccine is full-on quarantine, then it looks like the Chinese might have the only solid plan. China continues to come up nearly daily for me. Looking at China closely over the past two decades has evolved from a personal interest, to a hobby, an investment strategy, and now into the realm of core fact of life. Understanding what China is doing is as fascinating as it is essential, and so it was with great interest that I read this article about China and technology futures and the China Standards 2035 initiative. As the article states, while the Chinese Communist Party is "authoritarian to a fault, its machinery of innovation should not be underestimated." It closes by saying that "ultimately China’s ability to rejuvenate itself following the pandemic will likely be superior and more strategic than the rest of the planet."  Coverage on China Standards 2035, on the China Market Regulation News site New Beers: I'm going to skip the Reading Pile section this week as I did not finish the Mark Urban or Simon Sinek books that I am currently reading. I should be able to review both of them next week. As for the new beers, there were two this week and they were both quite memorable. The first was my first from Vancouver's Postmark Brewing. Their Juicy Pale Ale had a nice taste and citrus aroma, lots of citrus pith, and a long lasting foam. Good stuff. (3.5 / 5). I'll be sure to search out additional offerings from Postmark based on this first try. The second was yet another from Collective Arts. I have been going through the Collective Arts offerings lately because (a) they are typically quite good, and (b) they are available as singles at one of the stores closest to my house. The latest was their Blueberry Sour with Cocoa Nibs and it was, in a word, purple! And in more than one word, this was a really great beer. A bit fruity, a bit chocolatey, a bit sour. A great combination that I never would have thought of, and the first beer I have rated at 4.0 / 5 in probably a couple years.  New Words:
Just two new words this week. There should be a fair number next week after I finish those two books by Urban and Sinek. sagacious [səˈɡāSHəs] ADJECTIVE
ineradicable [ˌinəˈradəkəb(ə)l] ADJECTIVE
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