[londons_explore]

Imagine a future where you do a swab test every morning while brushing your teeth. If you had any of thousands of infectious diseases, you're required to stay home. The test would take only 5 minutes, and you get fined if you don't do it, and receive sick pay if you test positive.

I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher rather than lower.

[keiferski]

Imagine a future where you do a swab every morning while brushing your teeth and your testosterone and adrenaline levels are evaluated for likelihood of engaging in Anti-Social or Anti-Authority Activity. Individuals with high levels are locked into their apartments and subject to online training courses. Repeated violations result in a visit from the authorities.

Yeah, no thanks. Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

[lifeisstillgood]

But it needs to be based on good science. As someone in thread said, the false positive rate needs to be staggeringly low. And the false positive for Testosterone -> AntiSocial behaviour is huge - marathon runners to entrepreneurs and weight lifters.

So the idea is good - test people for something bad they will do - but the ability to test reliably for all the bad things is real low. I think we shall just stick to past crime not FutureCrime for now.

And honestly, using "bad authoritarian governments do bad things with good tools so we should not use those tools" does not make a good argument. it just means we need to double down on democracy.

[keiferski]

I don't think it is a good idea or good tool at all. I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. I used the example of "Anti Social" behavior as a joke and I thought that was obvious...but apparently not. The idea is entirely antithetical to a free society.

As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through personalized incentives and social encouragement, not through authoritarian state action.

[scotty79]

> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house.

In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.

You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily reasonable.

[keiferski]

As I said in the original comment:

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.

[scotty79]

Authority is not authoritarian if it tries to make you do the most scientifically reasonable thing.

[Sammi]

There are already a bunch of things you are not allowed to do in a free and democratic society if it is unsafe for other people if you do it.

If there exists a home test that can test you for dangerous infectious diseases, and you are forced to take that in the morning before you go out, then this is comparable to not being allowed to drive while under the influence.

[pishpash]

Sure, but what do you have against a personal in-home test? The information should be available at least to the individual.

[keiferski]

Nothing, as long as it functions more like a pregnancy test and not something that is sending personal data to a corporation/government somewhere.

However, that wasn't the primary idea in the OP, which was specifically about tracking and restricting people based on their test results.

[Dylan16807]

I'm not sure why you invented your own scenario to call bad.

Checking if someone has the flu isn't dystopian. Full sick pay isn't dystopian. You don't even need the fine if that offends you so much.

[Taek]

Open source toothbrush that's not connected to the cloud.

[titzer]

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

I agree. The internet doesn't need to be a surveillance state dystopian nightmare, but the free market brought us that.

[kijin]

Here's a less dystopian variation of your idea.

Everyone has access to those swabs, either for free, included with their health insurance plan, or at a marginal cost. It's not mandatory to use it every day, but there are incentives such as automatic sick pay and discounts on health insurance. On the other hand, there will be serious legal consequences if you test positive, decide to go to work anyway, and end up infecting other people. If it was your employer who told you to come in, your employer bears those consequences instead.

Money speaks louder than common sense. One of the reasons law exists is to tweak the incentive structure so that they align better with common sense.

[scotty79]

I think a lot of people would opt in to this testing just to get a chance of paid free day.

[mxcrossb]

You’d have to have a staggeringly low false positive rate to be able to do this, because you’d basically have no prior, and you’re testing for multiple things.

[londons_explore]

If a false positive results in someone staying home and getting paid, one can easily work out the economic cost of that. Then it becomes a simple economics problem - how much should the government spend on improving the test to regain a bit of productivity.

A false negative (someone going about their day despite being infectious) is just the status quo, and has served us well for centuries.

[sokoloff]

I would expect a gaming system to emerge (to force positive test results when people wanted time off without suffering any consequences). Done well, that might be the most valuable purely wasteful invention ever created.

[lolc]

Where I live, it's common for people to just call in and stay home for the day when they are sick. They don't need to game a device or convince a doctor. There is some trust. Maybe this could be tried elswhere?

[sokoloff]

When the money comes from the employer, there is incentive to root out and eliminate significant fraud. When the money comes from the sky/government, there is much less.

We have a nice wooden fence that was (properly) built around/over the roots of a city-owner tree. The city later removed the tree and the fence now looked dumb where it had been trimmed around the roots. A neighbor stopped by and advised me that I should call the city and have them pay to replace that section of fence. Said it shouldn’t be my responsibility to pay for it. I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”

[Dylan16807]

> I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”

That's a really dumb argument. I can list a thousand things where I shouldn't pay (all) of it, but I should pay (1/10000) of it as part of having the city pay for it.

You're playing a cheap rhetorical trick, not winning a real debate.

[lolc]

The money actually comes from the employer. Employers are obliged to keep paying until the sickness is over. (The details are complicated, but this guarantee generally lasts two years from onset.) Employers have insurance against longer episodes but short-term they usually eat the cost directly. It's in the budget.

When employers suspect employees of fraud they will investigate. They can ask for a sick note but most do so only after a few days. Three days is customary. When a case is handed over to insurance, the insurance company will tend to involve its own doctors to assess the claim.

I don't understand the meaning of your story.

[lenkite]

Imagine a future in which employers can also gain history to such health data and ensure jobs are given to the people of superior health. Such means will be necessary for economic health and progress of human civilisation. Marriage prospects, political and administration posts, etc can all leverage advantage from such a better policy.

[discodave]

Sounds like Gattica :)

[pas]

GATTACA. :)

Easy to remember that there's no I in it, because the letters are the letters used in our DNA. (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine)

[discodave]

In my head I had the right spelling! Somehow it didn't make it out.