Easy Truth

Bluetooth proximity apps on smart phones could track data anonymously, that a positive Covid-19 test could be used to decrypt a single phone number in order to release a message to phone numbers that had been in proximity during a presumed incubation stage, alerting others the potential of having been exposed so as to consider having themselves tested.
Voluntary participation, with a transparent disclaimer in how the operation is to be exercised and carried out. It would be less of a surveillance application, than an approach to choose to be informed

The severity, ease and method of transmission is different. So there is a higher threat assessment. It does not give authorities any expanded rights. Activities can change because of threat level, that's all.

Back to the issue of individual rights.
Individual rights, basically means no group based rights. That no group has privileges, all individuals have equal rights. But the group of infected does loose certain rights that "we all have".
There is an unavoidable and justified temporary loss of certain rights for people infected.
But is this an attack on individual rights?
No, for the most part, the framework of individual rights does not change. Except for the exception below (last paragraph):
One has a right to be left alone (as long as one is not harming anyone). But in this case, the "as long as" is violated by an infected person. So the framework of individual rights still stands. The rule (as a whole) is not eliminated, in fact it is obeyed. The respect for the individual is still there. Meaning "everyone" is not quarantined. Only the potentially or actual harmers are locked down by force.
The shift in rights for this group is based on the right to quarantine by a government which is a defensive move (right to retaliate, right for defense and self defense).
This right of defense and self defense is also part of the individual rights framework.
Furthermore, the right to be left alone includes the right to boycott. To not interact with the infected. Any business or individual has the right to avoid, to have nothing to do with an infected person, as in: forcefully prevent entry into the business.
Our (specific and final) rights don't exist without any justifications. Some people lose their right of free movement. It is contingent on the presence of the alien in the person. They temporarily lose the right of  movement until the alien is separated from them. All the (general) individual rights are intact and preserved awaiting for this contingency to be removed.
The infected are not identified as a group. The are individually identified, and individually put under quarantine. That is again a respect of individual rights.
But, there is one element that is an attack on individual rights. The indiscriminate lock down of EVERYONE, infected and noninfected, (in a sense, criminal and innocent). 

The flies are not the problem, if the flies imbedded a virus that can be transmitted from human to human, if the human can infect others, the human is the initiator of force.
This "thing" is working through a member of society to initiate physical force/damage on another. In this scenario, one person is threatening and causing harm to another. This activity, be it (volitional or non volitional) should be barred. The exploration here is: How can it be accomplished without elimination/diminution of individual rights.

Since most won't, the desired know-how is going to be, how does the population regain its rightful freedom. Strong positive self esteem is going to be necessary at a minimum to fight for what one deserves. A clarity is going to be necessary that allows for the confidence and sense of deserving to exist.
The autocratic leaders will always exist and they will push the boundaries. What is happening is a calamity that only some see because it is not like an earthquake or tornado that has immediate harmful consequences. The new way of thinking is that a government can in fact print checks and won't go bankrupt immediately. So it is legitimate for a leader that wants votes to say "my checks will be bigger than the opposition".
In addition to that, this is not the last pandemic or even the last wave of this one.

I may be misunderstanding but “square roots (plural) of the positive real numbers” is defining a universal, it has many referents, it does not "only" referer to “square root of 17.”

Then it's time to let it go for a while so that we digest what was said. Another choice is to have someone who understands your position to make it for you and see if that makes a difference. I have done my best to understand and to respond.

If you compel (force) anyone into anything, justice requires that you pay a price for it.
And Eiuol idea is that the "free lunch" is a reasonable price to pay a reparation for force that already has been used.
But you two have to admit that it is an arrangement that is (overall) not ideal.
The ideal solution is that the school/all schools should be private and go by free market private school rules. A private school in those circumstances is not an institution that "compels" parents to put the children there. So there is no crime that they have to pay for, then there is no reason for them to be obligated to provide free food.
You will probably come back with "well that's not the world we live in".
The problem is that the world that you see we live in "looting is eternally the norm. It will always happen. It has to be accepted. We have to get used to it." That is not the REAL world. Looting does not and should not happen. It will stop happening when it is not "believed in", when it is not surrendered to and supported by the population by false ideologies.
When we eliminate (in our minds) the possibility that we can live in a just society, justice becomes impossible.

Feeding the children is a utilitarian solution. It is not giving it back to those who it was stolen from.

This is claimed to be a quote from Rand:
Q: Do the rights of a child differ from the rights of an adult?
A: Yes and no, from two different aspects. Yes [she meant No], in the sense that the child has the right to life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, except that all those rights are based on a man's rational knowledge and understanding. An infant cannot earn his own sustenance, nor can a child exercise his rights and know what the pursuit of happiness means, nor know what freedom is and how to use it. All human rights depend on his nature as a rational being. Therefore the child has to wait until he has developed his mind and acquired enough knowledge to be able to come into full independent exercise of his rights. While he is a child, he has to be supported by his parents. Neither he nor I nor you nor Nature gives him any choice about it, or rather none of us can do anything because this is a fact of nature. Proclaiming some kind of right of childhood isn't going to create those rights. Rights are a concept based on reality. Therefore a parent would not have the right to starve his child, to neglect him, to injure him physically or to kill him. There the government has to protect the child just like any other citizen. But the child cannot claim for himself the rights of an adult, simply because he is not able, he is not competent to exercise them. He has to depend on his parents, and if he doesn't like them, then run away from home as early as you can earn your living, if the government will permit it.
https://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/topic/10181-rand-on-childrens-rights/
The first Atlas society article mentioned before it seems to lean on the argument that @MisterSwig made regarding being potential adults. In this second article https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/4275-childrens-rights-ii-  someone is making the case that children in fact do have full rights but I don't have access to the paper they mention.
Based on the above quote attributed to Rand, she seems to make the case that since the child will not survive without the support of the parents, therefore, based on that fact of reality, the parent does NOT have the right to abuse the child. Also that the child has rights, but not the right to exercise them until they are capable which implies there are rights, and a right to exercise them.
So a parent does NOT have a right to kill a child because a child will eventually become that which deserves full rights. One problem is a zygote also has that potential.
All of us would like to treat it as a child should be treated as if they do have rights mainly because of the implications of if they are not treated that way. To see someone kill a child is emotionally intolerable. But it also has to be acknowledged that there is still no clear and complete explanation of why (the child's right exists) available yet.
If a child has a right to life, the questions that it leaves open ended is abortion but the free lunch issue is addressed in
But the child is not per se the responsibility of others in society. So Objectivism holds that there is no governmental role in providing education, and most Objectivists hold that if a child is abused and must be removed from the parents, some private charity or adoption is the proper alternative, because in these cases a stranger voluntarily accepts the responsibility for the child. It is unfortunate that the article holds the truth to be based on consensus, as in when "most objectivists" think it is true, it is true.

If one holds it that way, the only choice available will be to be separate from everyone, be a hermit. The key was that he knew what he wanted very clearly. Far more clearly than most of us do. He was not distracted because he was so grounded in his "knowing".
If you make it primarily about "other people", you already lost the game. Your wants, your goals have to originate from you. Sometimes it is hard to identify "was that my idea (desire) or someone else's" and we admire Roark for not being confused about his priorities.
I didn't care about how people felt about me most of my life and I regret it. Social interaction is a part of a satisfying life, just don't loose yourself (in them).

If one holds it that way, the only choice available will be to be separate from everyone, be a hermit. The key was that he knew what he wanted very clearly. Far more clearly than most of us do. He was not distracted because he was so grounded in his "knowing".
If you make it primarily about "other people", you already lost the game. Your wants, your goals have to originate from you. Sometimes it is hard to identify "was that my idea (desire) or someone else's" and we admire Roark for not being confused about his priorities.
I didn't care about how people felt about me most of my life and I regret it. Social interaction is a part of a satisfying life, just don't loose yourself (in them).

So matter created God? Is God an Emergent property?
I have never been able to prove the "absence" of god in this universe, because there has to be a God that is absent. And if there is no God, no "absent god" can be demonstrated/shown/proved.
But it is easy to prove the nonexistence of omicience or omnipotence which I assume you have already been introduced to. But there are definitions of God that don't incorporate those traits as in the first mover.
The only solid indication of the non existence of god is that the idea that god created this or that, started this and that, is an unnecessary complication in addition to being arbitrary. Existence exists is complete, demonstrable, already proven out of the box. But it seems that the attraction to the God concept is that the universe having no purpose, is an uncomfortable thought for some. In fact it can be a very disturbing experience. The idea of a God has a purpose that is unknowable to us cures that issue. The existence of God is an emotional requirement not a metaphysical entity observed.
(there also are other psychological motivations to want God to exist).

The author of the op-ed, Garry Galles, wrote, "The main problem with understanding Ayn Rand’s position on this today is that modern usage of the term has eroded his meaning of altruism to little more than a synonym for generosity, so Rand’s rejection of the original meaning — the requirement of total selflessness — is erroneously taken as rejecting generosity.
Portraying the modern usage as "little more than a synonym for generosity" is a stretch. A parent, human or another animal, caring for its young is often not mere "generosity."

What is evil here is the 12 year necromancy involved in raising this thread from the dead.

Then minimizing casualties has something to do with your self interest, which is not being mentioned. Otherwise, there is no law in the universe which says 1 is better than 5.

Objection #1: Long range philosophies cause people to get stuck in the future while forgetting to enjoy the present moment.
Answer to objection #1: Long range planning and productive work are activites that one does for his present-moment happiness, not solely for future benefits. Not planning for the future compromises your immediate enjoyment of life by causing anxiety and worry; planning for the future elevates your mood in anticipation of the good things that will come; finally, if you are able to enjoy the present moment, it's probably because you've done something right in the past, and you are reaping the results right now. There is no real dichotomy between enjoying the present and planning for the future. They are both the integral parts of your moment-to-moment enjoyment of life, since life only happens in the present moment.
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Objection #2: Objectivism fails to justify the pursuit of happiness.
Clause one: if life appeared by cosmic chance and not by some pre-determined universal goal, life has no justification at all. Answer to clause one: the labels 'justified' and 'not justified' are value judgements, and value judgements presuppose the goal of life. Clause one is therefore unintelligible, basically amounting to saying that living is not a good strategy if your goal is to live. Secondly, the way something got here does not invalidate its present, factual existence. Even if life appeared without some pre-determined universal teleology, it still exists and its existence is the starting point of discussion;  only the unreal is not a subject of debate.
Clause two: In Objectivism, there is no justification for the choice to live. Variation one: you cannot justify choosing to live, because the choice is a primary (it is not necessitated by some previous, higher goal). Answer to variation one: 'justify' is used here as a stolen concept, dropping its root in the concept of life. You are trying to justify why choosing to live would help your goal of living life. Variation two: choosing to live is a whim, because it is a primary (it is not necessitated by some previous, higher goal). Answer to variation two: a whim is a goal for which there is no actual necessity to engage in, relative to a preceding goal which is consonant with the root of values (life). Saying that choosing to live is a whim steals the concept and amounts to claiming that if you want to live, choosing to do so is a whim. Variation three: In Objectivism, the choice to live is defined as an acceptance of reality, of your existence. Therefore, you are merely dutifuly being nature's servant. Answer to variation three: accepting one's own desire to live is not an act of submission to nature, any more than an inanimate object being itself is an act of submission to its identity. The desire to live is a metaphysically-given aspect of living organisms. In accepting this desire, people are not submitting to a natural edict, they are simply observing what is already true, i.e. their nature. Variation four: Choosing to live is a moral choice. Answer to variation four: a moral choice is a choice that furthers man's goal of living a good life (it already presuposes that goal). _________________________________________________________
Objection #3: Objectivism tells people to grow and actualize their full potential. But why should you grow if the path is infinite, there being no particular point at which you can retire and be satisfied?
Answer to objection #3. This boils down to metaphysics. The concept of infinity cannot be actualized in practice. No matter how long a counting streak is, its actual lenght is dictated by where you stop counting. If growth was a limited endeavor, it would actually hurt happiness by physically limiting the amount of things you can enjoy. The only way to ensure long-term happiness is by never reaching a dead-end in your possibilities. Asking why you should grow is akin to asking: how will making myself happier make me happier?
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Objection #4: If existence, not consciousness, is a primary, then the universe is my direct antagonist. It is not aware that I exist. It is not somehow linked to me in a common ground between consciousness and matter. Nothing happens for a predestined purpose or teleological program towards complete self-consciousness/merging with god. It has no ability to protect me. It can't hear my prayers. It has no will to decide against randomly sending a tsunami onto my house. I am to be held responsible for absolutely everything in my life.
Answer to objection #4: Man alone has a real, genuine capacity to use the metaphysically-given to further his own personal goals. This is in direct contrast to the universe itself, which is not alive and does not have goals. A universe that is 'separate from man' is implied to be a universe outside his reach, rendering him incapable to use it for his goals. But the universe is here for the picking. In fact, only the universe is here for the picking, being the only reality that exists, and both the source of life and life's value-warehouse. Given that values are a type of fact, choosing the correct values is not an instance of being a slave to the metaphysically-given, but the act of identifing the goodness which is already there for the picking as long as you earn it or work to create it. Saying that the universe limits your options is unintelligible insofar as 'values' becomes a stolen concept -  different values are only made possible by a specific context of facts and cannot exist in a vacuum. The enjoyment and meaning of values would be robbed from man if values were arbitrary (not objective, firm, absolute) or if the universe was alive and played favorites (personal achievement plays a big role in the ability to enjoy a value). Luckily, the universe is a given and not the product of the Absolute's fully free (i.e. arbitrary) desire to reach full self-consciousness.

The flaw in your argument is that you have assigned the arbitration of morality to a third party.  And a disembodied third-party at that.
Who is this "you" that you are referring to?  Society?  Me?  Your next door neighbor?  God?
I decide what is moral and immoral.  The buck stops here, with me.  I don't put the morality of my actions up to a vote.
To quote the Holy Trinity:  "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Yes.
But a problem arises with "intense emotions" and rational discussion and behavior. 
Yes but the threat of irrationalism is a far greater because one cannot right the situation with rational discussion. Once contradictions are okay, anything goes. Once words are meaningless due to the blindness that panic or fury brings, "man" becomes a simple animal.

Not to mention that one of the main points of Smith's economic work is in free trade and against what he called mercantilism, so it's not exactly clear how name dropping Smith is supposed to work in order to be a defense of Trump.

Adultery isn't inherently immoral in that same sense that doing heroin isn't inherently immoral. In almost every conceivable context, it's a horribly destructive and evil thing to do, but in certain very unusual cases, it can be acceptable.

If you're dying of cancer, and every moment is a painful struggle, then heroin (or other opiates) can make you more comfortable. It can ease the pain while leaving you conscious and aware, still able to communicate with your family during your final days. In this kind of case, using heavy drugs can be moral. Maybe. But it's still very borderline, and we shouldn't condone it as a regular practice.

If your life-long lover doesn't fulfill your needs in some important respect, then it having an open affair might save your marriage in the long run. For instance, if you are a super-genius with a 200 IQ and your husband is only a normal genius with a 140 IQ, then it's possible that there are certain values he can't share with you. Perhaps he can't understand the breadth of your achievements, can't discuss ideas on the same level with you, etc. In this kind of case, having a (short-term) affair with another super-genius might fill your needs enough that you can stay with your life-long love. In this context, adultery could be moral. Maybe. But it's still borderline, and we shouldn't condone it as a regular practice.

While not inherently immoral, both heroine and adultery are inherently destructive.

No matter what the state of your health, heroine damages your body. It destroys part of your mental and physical capacities. No matter what the state of your romantic life, adultery damages your relationships. It destroys part of your capacity for intimacy and psychological visibility.

Whether or not Rand was moral in her adultery, I can't judge. I didn't know her personally, nor anyone else involved. But I will say that her example is not one to be followed, nor viewed as a standard of moral action.

--Dan Edge

Indeed. It is quite typical among some people to see objectivity being associated with the universal, impersonal, or "the view from nowhere." Notice how he characterized the deliberative process as unresolvable until these "fillings" are introduced, then it becomes trivial, by which I take it as being resolved. What exactly would be "reality without fillings" seems a lot like Nagel's "view from nowhere." Daston and Galison (2007) trace objectivity-as-impersonalism to the Kantian turn (although not without seeds already planted in the Scholastic version.) 
Of course you can't make a decision without the "fillings," all of the particular, personal, contingent things that characterize actual reality. Once you empty reality of that the things that actually make it up, what could end up guiding your thought process? Factors unique to each person is desperately needed for objectivity when trying to give a weighting or balancing between various goods and option. You need to take your circumstances, talents, endowments, interests, beliefs, and histories that descriptively characterize each individual precisely because reasoning about ends is done by real life individually situated people and not detached Cartesian egos or Kantian noumenal selves. 

Rand stated that she used "mental entity" metaphorically in the ITOE appendix (p. 157). "Mental something" was the closest she could get to identifying a concept metaphysically.

Delving a bit deeper into Objectivity in this 121st post, a definition which was requested and provided as the 41st post in this thread, a complimentary passage can be found in Who Is The Final Authority In Ethics.
It is obvious that the root of such questions ["Is it intellectual plagiarism to accept and even to use philosophical principles and values discovered by someone else?"] is a certain kind of conceptual vacuum: the absence of the concept of objectivity in the questioner's mind.
Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver's consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver's (man's) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge—that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations to privileged observers—and that there can be no such thing as a final "authority" in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically—one's own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second.
The concept of objectivity contains the reason why the question "Who decides what is right or wrong?" is wrong. Nobody "decides." Nature does not decide—it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is. When it comes to applying his knowledge, man decides what he chooses to do, according to what he has learned, remembering that the basic principle of rational action in all aspects of human existence, is: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." This means that man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality.
This provides some rationale why volitional adherence to reality is prudent. It does not cover the fact that spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean or of the Rocky Mountains exist. It does point out that in any given context, only one answer is true, thus trying to decide in a vacuum, i.e., trying to make a contextless decision, would be a departure from objectivity.
If you do lift the corner of the aforementioned rug, could you check to see if this was inadvertently swept under it as well?
"Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception—your mind—then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.
— This is John Galt Speaking

Rand thought the human animal to have no automatic, instinctual knowledge of what was good or evil for him. She held that man had a nature of rationality, and that this rationality is held as a value in the individual man only by choice (1957, 1013). Part of his rational nature would be the deliverances of the senses automatically giving information in general and pleasure/pain valence in particular. Those primitive elements for rationality, in Rand’s understanding, are not susceptible to human choice however much humans may try to rub out their validity and replace them with feelings (1037).
She maintained, as mentioned earlier, that humans have a life-or-death need of self-esteem (also at 1057), that in truth this self-esteem is (and is at some level generally known to be) “reliance on one’s power to think,” that self-esteem is rightly attached to being morally right, and that a false morality—one valorizing not thinking, not thinking for oneself—can render one’s self-esteem incoherent, a mess (1030–31). Calling the name John Galt in that novel can be calling one’s own “betrayed self-esteem” (1060).
In the 1961 essay “The Objectivist Ethics,” Rand wrote:
“By what means does [man] first become aware of the issue of ‘good or evil’ in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.
“The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of the kind of entity he is.”
She described animals below man having automatic ways of living action enlisting only sensation or sensation together with the automatic integration of sensations into percepts, giving perceptual consciousness of entities in the world, though no freedom over the animal’s governing consciousness or over its range. She regarded man as having that much automatic correct, reality-given inputs to cognition and to evaluation. So his higher-order, volitional cognitive and evaluative powers do not take off from a blank or get no feedback from those lower-level processes.
There are two levels to one’s “moral ideal, the image of Man.” There is what Rand would put into it for all men (not brain-damaged and so forth), and this is what she puts into the moral ideals of ethical theory. That is, that much she writes (explicitly) into basic values and virtues of her ethical theory. She personifies them in her fictional character John Galt. That much of John Galt is to be an ideal for everyone. But his love of particular areas of physics or of a particular woman are parts of him that are the realization of the general ethical ideal, but can vary from person to person still holding the same general ideal “image of Man.”
Sorry so much of this is old hat, but I needed to recount it to reach the point that whether one is crafting a general frame in the “moral ideal, the image of Man” or whether one is persuaded that Rand’s general specification is right and one is only figuring out what to do with one’s own particular likes, aversions, and abilities in bringing about the ideal in one’s own case, one doesn’t need to ignore one’s feelings nor accept them without critically examining them as they are used as inputs for one’s craft of “values of character that make [one’s] life worth sustaining.”  
Before I read Rand’s 1943 and 1957, I was a devout altruist. The way in which she changed me was by subjecting different systems to rational criticism and by appeal to other values (feelings, a key manifestation of them) that we both already shared. And those two factors could also persuade one to some new virtues of character, significantly modifying the old ones.
“The image of Man” is image of fundamental nature of man but also a norm in Rand’s presentation (for man must be Man by choice). It’s somewhat like “image of God” in man taking after God by possessing reason, although God can’t be a full normative model for man because of radical differences of nature between the two.
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ET, an elderly woman dear to me would say to me, Why is God still keeping me here? I can’t do anything or be of any use to anyone anymore.
I think I told her of how good it was for her younger loved ones to be able to enjoy her company. She was still able to talk, as she and I were doing on the phone, and we could stir up each other’s recollections of people and experiences we had shared decades ago.
I am 70. I’m still doing my same creating most important to me. I still have an important work or two in progress. Even if their completion would complete my reach (really, no grasp could match my reach), I think I could still find continued, closing life meaningful. With enough health and memory, I hope to just keep looking back to my accomplishments, including loves attained, here where is the place and future of any value and meaning.