We have a travel restriction, which means we need approval for travel. Which isn't any different from before for me as far as I can tell. I have never been able to say, "Fuck it, I'm going to Idaho. Please reimburse me for the travel."
Maybe it's like that one girl from Kansas that murdered witches and I've always been able to travel but now can't?
I pity those who have not already stockpiled for Brexit. What with that, and Ume's earthquake preparedness habits , we are now prime targets for looters. Though not, of course, large mobs of them.
I'm from Nebraska. I know lots of people from Kansas.
Moby's from Nebraska, and travels by hot air balloon.
There's a piece in the FT today about how this could be a permanent hit for the conference business, which will presumably hurt the hotel business very badly because there will be a lot of empty venues and rooms all of a sudden. Big events are getting cancelled left and right, smaller ones seem to be getting postponed.
I'm planning for self-isolation; stocking up on food so that we don't have to go out as much (not sure how reliable deliveries will be). Getting medical/hygiene supplies in. Both of us can work remotely so that shouldn't be too much of a problem; cabin fever might, though.
Maybe ration time together? Agree that you're going to stay out of each other's sight from 10 to 12 every day?
Catching up on reading would be pretty good.
Would streaming etc crap out? Can't see it, to be honest. At least not during the day - surely the load's highest in the evening under normal conditions and they manage that fine.
I'm not planning for self-isolation because the last few years have made me afraid to plan for happy times.
I'm not planning for self-isolation because the last few years have made me afraid to plan for happy times.
Does the FT think people will discover how much they can get done without traveling to meetings?
I'm always hoping people at my work will realize how many meetings could be replaced with brief mass emails, but no.
could be a permanent hit for the conference business
Didn't people say this about bird flu, and SARS, and 9/11, and 2008?
Didn't people say this about bird flu, and SARS, and 9/11, and 2008?
I don't remember them doing so, no.
I mean, 9/11 took a huge toll on the airlines. Sometimes these impacts materialize.
Quarantine by myself hypothetically would get boring but not be completely terrible assuming I had enough warning. Quarantine with Atossa or her and Cassandane would be a nightmare. I feel like a bad parent saying that but let's be realistic here. I only have one kid so it would be worse with multiples, but on the other hand I've got a rowhouse and it's small even compared to others on our block. Atossa loves playing hide-and-seek even though there are only like three five real hiding places here and three of them are closets I can't stand up straight in. Either my parents or my in-laws have roughly twice as much space indoors and a hundred times as much space outdoors.
On a potentially positive note, the huge discrepancy between fatality rates in Hubei vs the rest of the world is still holding steady. Maybe that will change in a few weeks, but if not then it will be looking more like the regular flu.
On the "take basic precautions" front, I'm a bit annoyed that while APS did the responsible thing and cancelled their annual meeting despite the sunk costs, ComiCon in Seattle (Washington state has confirmed cases) is going forward.
Flight cancellations: https://flightaware.com/live/cancelled/
The big annual US physics conference in March is cancelled. The World Bank's March meeting is also cancelled.
The pandemic bonds they issued are not yet paying out though. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/28/world-banks-500m-coronavirus-push-too-late-for-poor-countries-experts-say
Interpreter friends tell me that their schedules are suddenly completely empty as meetings and conferences are being cancelled. Remote interpreting via video link has started taking off in the past year, and this will give it a huge boost.
I don't dispute the hit. I question its permanence.
Though, OTOH even a year in Trump time will be a subjective millennium or so.
In addition to a ban on nonessential travel, we are not allowed to hold in person meetings with people who have traveled from other cities.
You have to figure flu rates are going to plummet since everyone is now washing their hands very thoroughly. I wonder if overall infection mortality might be a wash. (See what I did there?)
Am I being really naive to note that the stock market price graph since 1920 almost exactly matches the bitcoin price graph between 2016 and early 2018, which almost exactly matches the classic "Stages of a Bubble" graph?
22 I think this will last much longer than 9/11. The threat of pandemics, and indeed widespread recognition of the immorality of recreational climate change, are two factors which were not around them. Nor was there nearly the very widespread high speed connectivity which means that we now think nothing of videocalling people halfway round the globe.
Nor was there nearly the very widespread high speed connectivity which means that we now think nothing of videocalling people halfway round the globe.
I can see this as a reason to cut down on business travel in the sense of individual trips, but I don't think conferences and events are as easily replaced: not many people go to conferences in order simply to formally receive or transmit information.
They canceled all non-essential business travel at my org (8 reported cases here, all evacuees from Iran flown to a private airfield and taken directly to the hospital so no detected community spread- yet). I had a paper accepted at a conference in Istanbul (no reported cases in Turkey last I checked*) in late April but I'm not optimistic.
*Given the situation in Iran I have to think it's widespread in Iraq and Syria as well, and if it's in Syria it has to be in Turkey).
I have to go to an extremely boring event, run by a government agency in a hotel conference room somewhere near but not quite in DC, in less than two weeks. I think the whole thing can be done over Zoom with basically no loss, and without the unpleasantness of trapping a bunch of people in a hotel conference room in a terrible, non-walkable suburb. Fingers crossed that coronavirus will let me do it all from the comfort of my own home.
Aside from that, I find myself hoping this will all be good for the climate in the long run, as people realize that they don't really need to fly all over the world every few weeks to communicate and get work done. (I know, I shouldn't ever have hope.)
... though considering the hassle people now have even getting their presentations to work, maybe the technology needs further development.
We won't really know what the fatality rate here will be until the number of cases has peaked. If too many people need intensive care/ respirators at once, we will get Hubei-like rates of death.
In my experience, WebEx is better than Zoom is better than Chime.
Because of the current epidemic, when I changed the bottle on the water cooler, I didn't use my teeth to remove the seal.
It's spring, well not officially but it's spring weather. So I'm hoping they cancel classes so that I can fake doing less than half-assed classes online and spend the time working in my garden (not a lot of exposure to other people there), where I need to put in a new fence. Got plenty of food and booze in the house, only thing I need to stock up on is pot. But if I'm gonna die from something like this - not implausible given mortality rates in my age group - I'd prefer to spend my last weeks digging in the earth under a blue sky with sun shining on me than bored out of mind in a classroom with a bunch of bored out their minds 20 year olds.
34. That's impossible. WebEx is what they use in Hell.
Am I being really naive to note that the stock market price graph since 1920 almost exactly matches the bitcoin price graph between 2016 and early 2018, which almost exactly matches the classic "Stages of a Bubble" graph?
I think any graph of something that increases in percentage terms over a long period of time is going to have that general shape. Converting to a log scale would give you a better sense of what was happening over the century. This random website lets you toggle the log scale on and off.
Anyway, they just quarantined a couple in Pittsburgh, so I'm going to start panicking.
Well, I got to spend yesterday at the hospital, having foot surgery (so far, so good) so hopefully there were no community cases breathing in the incision. Just in the last couple of months, my department has gotten everyone set up to work from home on a moment's notice, so that's something. I'm worried for all the support businesses and retail downtown though -- any significant drop in actual office attendance is going to hit the restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, and venues are going to be in bad shape after a few weeks of that scenario.
I know quite a lot of people who are very busy keeping AWS, etc., working, which makes me less sure that it would be indifferent to nearly-global quarantine. All these weightless bits run through world-spanning supply chains, plus they need massive power and cooling systems. AFAIK the system is designed to run each server component at high usage because (a) they fit into smaller HVAC and (b) you want to use them up in short calender time if you believe Moore's law is still operating and (c) they've learned to add more components fast if they're out of headroom. So I assume they replace or add them pretty regularly. If the supply chain for that slows down, video will too.
So! Everyone on Unfogged and Metafilter and whatever other text-only low-bandwidth ~communities~, get ready to hang out your shingle as an adviser to explain how it can be done. Surely we can monetize the disaster.
There was a feature on the Newshour yesterday about how tourism to Chinatown in SF have fallen off a cliff.
The biggest development project coming about here is a $100M conference center/hotel complex. Ground to be broken this summer, I think. I've always wondered just what conferences we're really going to be competitive for -- what with the limited air travel and our 'interesting' climate, which includes having it be an open question whether it is safe to breathe outside during August depending on exactly where lightning strikes -- and this was even without the virus. How long term this is going to be is a gamble real people are looking at taking with real money.
Natilo's point worries me more -- every theater, especially the small ones, the dancehall I dearly love, I *hugely* doubt they have months of rent saved up at current urban Seattle rates and I bet there's nothing to save them even in an official mandated universal quarantine, much less the unofficial slowdowns. And that means the last independent businesses near me are taken over by the landlords or REITs or banks.
I'm more worried that hospitals apparently have people breathing on patents' feet.
I've switched out my 14-day Japan trip for a 4-day Colorado trip, 48 of those hours on a train. Hopefully they won't hiss at the plague-carrying Californian.
I've always wanted to take that train from Chicago to California. I've never ridden it west of Lincoln.
I find convention centers bizarre, anyway. Specifically the universal decor - "how can we signal ostentatiously business class in the cheapest way possible?" - is just so fucking ugly. The scale and ubiquity make them into these modern day cathedrals. They are truly the abandoned malls of tomorrow.
OTOH, hospitals are (decorated) fine and will be the hospitals of tomorrow.
This one will be different. Our local concert empresario -- the fellow who built that cool amphitheater on the Big Blackfoot -- has taken over the project, and it'll be cooler than you can imagine.
The convention center at Caesar's was weird because it had more giant topless statues than any place else I've gone to watch the science.
49: Me too. A museum near me expanded with a whole lot of `event space' that looks utterly like a small convention center, rentable, `classy', an institutional enclosure. There are a dozen other axes on which its expansion was contested, several of which it was in the right on, but the convention-centerness makes me not trust them.
And then Seattle gavesold the giant busyard on one end of traffic-choked downtown to the convention center expansion. Arrrgh. I cannot believe it will be easy for Metro to keep the buses running without that extra space for slack and backup.
49: The ultimate convention center is the Anaheim Convention Center as it existed when I was a kid. That groovy 70s era orange and brown color scheme...
48: Moby stars in Silver Streak II.
39: Thanks. I get that they're exponential curves; it's the bear traps at identical points in all three that made me pause. But I'm basically clueless.
Sorry you had to cancel your Japan trip. We're giving it until Saturday to make the decision official about ours.
modern day cathedrals
I just finished the Ceci tuera cela chapter of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, I am reading the book for the first time. Hugo indulges in long impassioned chapters consisting of his thoughts on the relation between architecture and history, with gothic cathedrals as a general focus. spoiler alert, he disapproves of the renaissance. I am enjoying these sections very much the way I enjoyed Melville's whaling chapters. Recommended. His later prose poetry is also pretty good.
I claim that rather than convention centers, pre-streaming (so 1970-2000) television advertisements are the cultural objects our civilization has produced which are the intellectual equivalent of cathedrals. Packed full of carefully considered meaning conveyed by their details, their form, and their explicit narrative; created and seen in a context where their transmission is inextricable from the exercise of power; ubiquitously coincident with wealth, they are both symbol and substance of postindustrial commercial power. Their goal, glorification of particular empires of sugar water or salty carbohydrates, as incomprehensible to the future as the impulse to praise an ostensibly ubiquitous god indifferent to good works with elaborate buildings is in the world of GTA 5. Fight me, as the kids say.
56.2: Pretty ephemeral compared to buildings, which stay features of a cityscape. You have to actively seek out an old ad on YouTube, you're never going to stumble across it accidentally.
56 I believed I mentioned the ads for Heskett's Carpet Coliseum a while back. A rival for the last stand at the Alamo to be considered the pinnacle of human endeavor?
57 gets it exactly right. An ad can disappear from the airwaves, and even the product itself can disappear from the shelves, and you don't notice until a decade later. This happened to me with Nuprin.
The worship portion of cathedrals is a few desultory pews protected with decaying ropes. Their fate as objects of casual gawking by crowds indifferent to the faith of their builders is a form of destruction, being buried or forgotten is equivalent and maybe better than being so badly misunderstood. Moreover, cathedrals that are away from city centers are basically forgotten.
Chartres or Aachen are not exactly big draws, more people visit Arles because of the auction prices of Van Gogh's paintings or the Reeperbahn because of the "fun". I am procrastinating on reviewing an uneven paper with some good bits, the hardest kind of review.
Maybe "Little, yellow, different" doesn't sound good anymore.
57-59. Ronald McDonald and the Kool-Aid man are mythic figures whose attributes are well-understood even by those who have never had personal exposure.
To the claim of ephemerality, recall that crosses didn't begin appearing in christian iconography until maybe 400 or so. When our descendants begin to show an interest in the symbols of this civilization's lost best days, they'll be reworking capn crunch into elaborately costumed tableaux vivants and singing about the sky blue waters of Hamm's. I personally hope those will be simultaneous.
♪ Just one look, that's all it took ♪
63: Kool-Aid man is able to crash through walls. What is Ronald McDonald's superpower?
64. He can both summon Hamburglar and soothe Grimace, as well as being a welcoming patron to children everywhere. The meaning of his oversized red feet caused a schism at one time, and debate is no longer allowed.
I agree in the limited sense that we pour a comparable amount of material resources and brainpower into ads. But it not being physical makes it more akin to oral history, hymns, etc. - lodging in brains but nowhere else.
Maybe different things... are different?
The Super Bowl is a cathedral, ads are chapels, the halftime show is the baptistery.
66.last Sure, agreed. Hugo's chapter argues that the printing press killed the cathedral, in long sentences with embedded lists punctuated with more adjectives than a Cheesecake Factory's menu.
What do you think we'll be remembered for in a thousand years? I understand that the question has been asked by megalomaniacs in the past and also that sweeping broad strokes are out of fashion.
What do you think we'll be remembered for in a thousand years?
Plastics.
69. Hah. That and a bunch of isotopes. Maybe some surprising gene transfers as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI
What do you think we'll be remembered for in a thousand years?
I have no idea but TV ads still seem like they would absolutely be in the bottom percentile of potentials, due to that selfsame ephemerality. Unless a future monastic order adds them to its communal recitations / oral memory.
I think a key difference is that cathedrals were (among other things) conspicuous consumption. The patrons demonstrated their power by burning money on a physically useless thing. Ads aren't (or aren't supposed to be) consumption at all. They're investments aimed at getting a return. The cathedral says "I have money"* where the ad says "I want money".
In practice ads often try to work not by straightforward sales pitch but by displaying some desirable quality (coolness, beauty, non-bitching children, whatever) and offering the viewer the chance to participate in that quality. But you participate by buying in, to a for-profit venture.
*And presumably "I have virtue". Which a lot of ads sort of do as well. But the ad is still asking for money, where the cathedral builder isn't.
By analogy the conspicuous consumption of our age is recorded in luxury magazines and Instagram feeds. Totally ephemeral. The mansions and watches will be known to archaeologists but not others.
We'll be remembered for movies, if any good ones survive and are watchable, but mostly for wars, especially because so many of our surviving structures will be nuclear facilities.
I'm in the event production industry, based in northern California, and it seems that my industry is in the process of being cancelled. The big tech conferences are far into cancellations, and now the music festivals are starting to go. The nightclubs are still open, but I'm guessing that in another week or two those will get shut down too for a while. Even if, best-case, this blows over by midsummer, people won't start booking events again until it's well over, so best-case, I think it'll be next spring before the industry is back up to speed. Worst-case is much worse. Most people in this business are literally gig workers - we're where the phrase came from - so people's incomes are gonna zero out right quick. I'm in a better position than that, but give it long enough and I'll be in trouble. I was well diversified within the industry, but if it all goes, there's nothing left. Anyway, my short-to-medium term plan is to use all my new extra time to go on more walks in the hills with family and dogs. No long term plan yet, but if everything is still shut down come the autumn, it's because the whole world is super fucked, and then I'll just play from there.
Best wishes seeing your way through.
Checkpoints and quarantine stations are just different crowd management problems at different arbitrary locations.
"Be sure to tip your decontamination tech."
Big fan of advertisements as cathedrals, as I am of all low-art=high-art type equations.
"""Ads aren't (or aren't supposed to be) consumption at all. They're investments aimed at getting a return. The cathedral says "I have money"* where the ad says "I want money"."""
A big function of advertisements is exactly to signal "I have money". I'm a bank. I want people to invest their money in me. I want to signal that I will be around a long time, that I have no solvency issues. I blow a bunch of money on advertising to prove that I have money to blow.
Our era will be famous for its glorious, international handwashing PSAs.
80: Point. Like I said, displaying virtue too. There's overlap, but I think not enough to justify an equation.
And I don't think ads have nearly the same conspicuous consumption value as cathedrals. I imagine medieval people understood the cost of a cathedral far better than most people today understand the cost of an ad campaign, and that ads are also much cheaper relative to the incomes of their audiences.
I also don't see ads surviving and drawing attention over time in anything like the way cathedrals do. They're (mostly) physically ephemeral, mass produced, very common, and aesthetically thin (as in, there's just less there: compare hours spent on design).
They'll be very useful to historians, but then so are potsherds. How many people visit the British Museum for the potsherds?
Come now - who doesn't want to be reminded of the bygone undisenchanted world? A world full of magic where pots ran around on little legs and needed herdsmen to keep them from running away...
Y'all say the global economy could shed several sectors in a short time, & no one seems to have a plan for what those formerly employed might constructively do with their time? Who could have seen this coming?
We are up to 233 detected cases of coronavirus in the US right now. That's about double what it was 24 hours ago.
So, my friends are getting a bunch of shelf stable food and I just ordered a bunch, too, because oh well, if it's not necessary I'll just munch through any random thing that's in my house and I don't want to be somehow stuck without something to eat.
But I'm genuinely confused and would like someone to explain what everyone is anticipating happening in New York City. For example, my building manager just sent an email with the clause "in the event mass transit is suspended". I understand wanting to plan for being home if you are sick in places that don't have very elaborated delivery mechanisms (including for groceries). But I don't understand the reasoning by which interrupting supply chains to the extent that people's access to food is endangered doesn't become a humanitarian crisis on par with the virus. Is the idea that we have one shot to stop its spread? I thought the anticipated time horizon for vaccine development was 1-2 years.
re: Heebie's OP list:
1. The cabin fever:
I can barely imagine it. Over Christmas, my wife works solidly for a couple of weeks, and I am at home with xelA. I'm usually near homicidal/suicidal by the end of it (even though quite a bit of it is fun). I can barely imagine being at home for several weeks, with the family, without endless warfare over screen time (xelA is obsessed) and noise (I can't do my job well if there's a lot of it). I do a lot of childcare, but it's broken up over the week, my wife and I both tend to do 3 long days at work, and 2 short days (with childcare), plus 1 full day of solo childcare, plus 1 day together as an entire family.
2. A lot depends on how much advance notice we'd have to acquire groceries, etc.
We probably have enough stuff in the house to get by for a while. The food might get a bit boring, pretty quickly, but we have a fuck ton of rice and pulses, for example. We'd need a bit more tinned or frozen veg, and a little more in the way of spices, etc to be able to go fine for many weeks.
4. Presumably my job and the schools would try to cobble together some sort of virtual learning situation. The idea of trying to get my job done online while the kids are home is also terrible.
I can work remotely, and my company could pretty easily transition to 100% remote working. I'm actually co-located on a client site 4 days a week at the moment (they happen to be near my flat, which is convenient). But that is unusual. Most of my clients are in the US, or Europe, or in very distant parts of the UK.
My wife, on the other hand, could not, and I imagine it would be a career threatening thing for many of her coworkers (or her, even) if there was a prolonged lock down. It could easily bring down a lot of companies that live hand to mouth.
ttaM, apologies if this is too obvious to suggest, and I know everyone has different levels of tolerance for constant background drones, including finding them very irritating -- just wanted to say that for me, spongy in-ear headphones plus brown noise from Simply Noise can cover up a lot.
86: well, if you have to stay at home - either because you've actually got COVID or because you've been exposed and you're self-isolating - it's probably best if you don't have to go out to the shops every few days, because then you'd risk infecting other people. So, getting a load of shelf-stable food in advance minimises that - you can just live off your stocks. Not sure that anyone is anticipating food supply chains stopping completely.
The GrubHub workers are contractors, so if they get infected, it won't hurt the economy.
It is irresponsible and utterly unconscionable that next week's Comic Con in Seattle, in the middle of the largest (detected) outbreak has not been canceled.
89: I and everyone else I know who is stockpiling can order groceries online and have them delivered to their door. You don't even have to interact with the delivery person. You can have them ring and leave your food on the stoop and tip electronically. If you are poor and very price sensitive the extra cost of delivery is something to avoid but that doesn't describe me or the people I'm talking about. It's actually about the most social distance-y way of getting food to people. To imagine this stopping, I have to imagine all the people doing this work now being forbidden from it, or choosing to stop, or all being so sick they can't, and in the former two cases I'm just struggling to envision how this level of lockdown wouldn't be symptomatic of choices that might have serious health consequences for other reasons.
Also, I'm not only talking about gig economy workers, I don't think. FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh are big companies that I think have regular employees making deliveries.
Are we just trying to make sure that possibly weakened distribution networks aren't strained when people start staying home/self-isolating?
82. They did not draw attention over time. There were plans to destroy Notre Dame in 1830. Most churches in Europe are crumbling and neglected, religious art was discarded in favor of something newer everywhere. Like castles, they were structures used (or not) over time, but current attitudes are not a historical norm.
The social conditions of building cathedrals were pretty complicated- the cathedral wasn't just a gift from a patron with wage labor, the peasants were like cattle or forage to be sold with the land in rural cases. Urban ones were different, often took centuries to build because interruptions and failure.
92: I think it's reasonable to be worried that grocery deliveries might become less reliable, yes.
Obviously people should stop going on cruises, because those were for assholes anyway. And curbing business travel makes some sense because most of it was stupid anyway. But I don't think this is bad enough that we should be asking people to stop doing enjoyable things even if they read comic books.
94: Interesting. I don't think any of that makes ads any more likely to be revered as cathedrals currently are.
wasn't just a gift from a patron with wage labor, the peasants were like cattle or forage to be sold with the land
More interesting. If there was corvée labor involved that makes them still less like ads. And who was the intended audience for the spectacle (if that was the aim at all)? If the audience was just other rich people that's even less like (most) advertising.
I think it was mostly piety and community pride.
91: I know. U. of Washington just announced that it's canceling in-person classes until the end of March, but a comic book convention is so important that the show must go on.
There was a longish interview on Radio 4 PM with a Welshman, a teacher, in Wuhan, who had actually caught, and recovered from, the virus. He has been locked down for 40 days; once every three days he can leave his flat to collect from the street he has previously ordered on his phone. This is the condition everyone there is living under. He expects a partial lifting of the quarantine at the end of the month.
He spoke with passion of how he was even getting bored of games, and how he had watched every film he might want to. Read a fucking book then, I wanted to shout at the radio. But I doubt he owns one that's not a textbook.
103 made me think of that Twilight Zone episode where the introvert bookworm is so excited after the nuclear holocaust that he's finally going to be able to read book in peace and quiet, and then he breaks his glasses.
and how he had watched every film he might want to.
I wouldn't even make a dent in the films I want to watch
I can't get my son to watch Tremors now that it's on Netflix. Youth are different.
I know this is misplaced, but I am finding myself irritated with the earnest epidemiologists who are still hoping. "If the Trump administration could just..." "There's still time to avert pandemic if we..." "If they would let the professionals at the CDC do their jobs...". I know it isn't fair, but now I'm over them. It is a given that the Trump response will be as bad as it could be. Stop tweeting any other counterfactual! Those are irrelevant!
103.2: And plenty of ways to get books non-physically, for free even!
The CDC hopefully still has a core of competent non-political staff but it's beyond clear that upper management has been corrupted and we cannot take their public statements at face value.
Does that mean I shouldn't wash my hands?
I'll put this here: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/
A very nice student of mine just told me how she's going on a cruise with her family for Spring Break. I asked if they were concerned about the coronavirus, and she said "My dad is! But I mean, we paid for this trip before it even existed, so ... ‾\_(ツ)_/‾"
I can understand why this family might decide to take the trip anyway, but I'm still worried I'm not teaching logical thinking very well.
Make her promise to not lick any doorknobs or light switches while on the ship.
If she won't promise, don't let her come to office hours.
111: The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States
Vogue Knitting Live (like a ComicCon for knitting geeks) Seattle got "postponed" yesterday, it was supposed to be March 13-15. I feel badly for all the vendors, teachers, etc. The geek convention circuit has a much tighter schedule (which I suppose is why Comic Con hasn't wanted to cancel, yet), but all of these people already have stuff they're are supposed to be doing scheduled out many months in advance, and are operating on razor-thin profit margins to begin with. I wonder if they and the attendees will get hotel and airfare refunds, etc. I'm not sure how that would work exactly if you don't know the make-up date.
91: That Comicon in Seattle has been postponed.
Our vacation to Japan a little over a month from now is still planned. I made the last big purchase for it, the week-long rail passes, two days ago, after verifying that they were refundable. 90% refundable plus a $25 handling fee - close enough. It's a tough choice. Epidemic aside, this is the best chance we're going to get to go anywhere in Asia in at least the next let's say 10 years. We have friends who have been there for almost two years who will be able to show up around a bit and they're coming back to the US in about three months. But, of course, "epidemic aside" is doing a lot of work!
Our school has an 8th grade spring weekend trip to NYC every year and in the same email where they talked about virus transmission they had an appeal for fundraising for this year's trip.
You can get Chipotle to do a fundraiser.
120: Wellesley just closed 2 schools after a parent tested positive.
122: Shame they didn't just ban parents from visiting.
FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh are big companies that I think have regular employees making deliveries.
They probably have some, but they try to have as many contractors as possible, even if they're in so much livery you'd think they'd be employees.
In unfogged terms, think how we'd react if someone said "S/he's teaching a class at a university, of course s/he has healthcare!"
The presser from the CDC is beyond bonkers. And some of the officials playing along are beyond cringeworthy.
"S/he's teaching a class at a university, of course s/he has healthcare!"
"In the greater scheme, what's one graduate student more or less?"
"We're going to need another work-study."
I'm several years older than Danny Glover was when he said he was getting to old for this shit. Maybe I should stop just assuming if it spreads, somebody else will die.
They cancelled SXSW, in Austin.
I'm one of the people who always complains about SXSW because it's ballooned out of control but it's become hugely important to Austin's economy. This is going to be devastating. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/what-would-mean-cancel-sxsw/
We've bailed from our Japanese trip in large part because of my mother. It would have meant three weeks without seeing her if there hadn't been a virus. Add in two weeks of self-isolation and it's too much for a lonely 102-year-old to be asked to bear. I think we might have gone ahead otherwise even though my son could not have joined us from HK.
What I mean is, if you're not high risk yourself and you don't have any dependents, this is possibly a good time to travel. Very cheap skiing available in Hokkaido or, for that matter, the Dolomites.
119: Most museums/galleries/amusement parks etc. in major Japanese cities have closed temporarily, and given current trends I can't imagine that they'll reopen by April. If you're happy just wandering around the cities/countryside taking in the scenery, you'll still have a good time. If you wanted to see things like the Ghibli Museum or the Cup Noodles Museum, you'll almost certainly be disappointed.
Is the Cup Noodles Museum on the usual tourist itinerary?
Very cheap skiing available in Hokkaido or, for that matter, the Dolomites.
Come for the skiing, stay for the questionably coreographed '70s violence.
Is there a word in some language for when life imitates conspiracy theory? Two attendees at the annual AIPAC conference in DC March 1-3* tested positive for coronavirus after they got home. Also at the conference were Mike Pence, various cabinet and sub-cabinet officers, and two-thirds of Congress, so if any of them get sick we know who to blame.
*the same dates as the cancelled APS conference.
I was in D.C. in February, twice. And now I have a cough and feel tired. So, what's the incubation period?
Is the Cup Noodles Museum on the usual tourist itinerary?
Absolutely. There's actually two, one in Osaka and one in Yokohama, and they're great.
Mo mom tells me that in Israel, people returning from Europe are supposed to self quarintine for 2 weeks. So the joke is that it's the perfect time to travel - flights and hotels are super cheap, no crowds, and when you get home, you get a 2 week vacation.
139: Which one is better, if I can't see both?
Yokohama's is newer and bigger, Osaka's isn't so crowded. But there's not much to choose between them.
I guess I'll pick on the basis of nearby attractions.
104. That episode always drove me nuts. Unless his vision was so bad he couldn't function at all without them, he could wander around looking for an optometry shop or even a drug store and find some usable reader glasses.
I wonder if the virus has stopped Cup of Noodles from clearing sidewalks of snow.
That's great. It's from 2014, but timeless.
I think everybody should write a novel during the upcoming quarantine. It could be a huge literary moment if amateur authors everywhere take their snapshot of the world just right as it goes over the precipice into being well and truly fucked.
Or people don't want to write a novel, create any art really. A lot of people are going to have time on their hands and no place to go - let them make culture.
back from the cavernous suite, housekeeping kept on loading up the bathroom with frederic malle minis so i collected a bunch for a friend to contribute to the stores at friend's church that are given out to folks without housing. back next week, hopefully housekeeping and i can keep up this virtuous dance. left an extra-extra large tip, what a drag for them. think the hotel is unionized tho so hopefully that will help cushion the blow.
The neighboring school district just closed their schools. I am not looking forward to this process. (Unless my work says we can all stay home, full pay. In that case, I guess I'll be fine with it.)
There's a 2 out of 3 chance kids will miss a crucial math lesson.
I bailed on a cookout just now because I feel the very beginnings of a virus of some kind... have we reached the point yet where Trump accuses people of deliberately infecting others with coronavirus in order to sabotage his reelection chances? The number of people in this country who would believe that is not small. (They always knew it would come to this. How can they defend the homeland against the malice of its coastal cities?)
Assuming I dodge a bullet this time, I am not leaving the house for the rest of the year. Novel-writing sounds fantastic except for the child care burden. I guess child and I can work on the co-authored novel (we're on chapter 4 currently).
I'm thinking I'll go to the bar tomorrow if my stomach isn't giving me pain. Just to show confidence in America.
Hawaii is currently coughing her brains out, so Jammies just took her to the walk in clinic.
She has no fever, and I don't think there's any documented cases near us, so I'm not actually worried. What I want is a for her to be able to say, "I saw a doctor on Saturday and they said it was allergies (or whatever)".
Or maybe we're a new case. Who knows.
"It's just the flu, so it doesn't matter if I gave you the spoon I was using."
Anyway, I haven't felt healthy since December, but my cough isn't getting worse.
Jim Bakker is selling a cure for Coronavirus, but you need to act quickly because the Man is trying to stop him.
How old is Jim Bakker, anyway? I recall watching Jim and Tammy Faye (her mascara!) as a kid, and being highly amused, if slightly horrified, bv the tacky spectacle of it all, until my mother found me out ("What are you watching? What nonsense is this?") and forbade me from ever watching The PTL Club ever again. (My mother was a cradle-to-grave Catholic who viewed American evangelicals as aliens from another planet, or something).
Also: did anyone else get the swine flu (the H1N1 virus) in 2009? I got it; and have never felt worse in my entire life. For about a day or so, I truly thought my time had come, my number was up, and I was about to die. One part of me was resigned ("Eh, I guess I've had a pretty good run"), while another part was in a panic about my 11-year old son ("JMJ, I can't die!: my boy needs me"). I've been a bit of a tiresome scold about the flu shot ever since.
Anyway, today I tried googling coronavirus versus swine flu, in terms of risk factors, rates of transmission, rates of mortality, and etc. Had to give it up, though, for the sake of my mental health.
Apparently Jim Bakker is 80, and Tammy Faye kicked the bucket in 2007.
Ironically, Jessica Hahn went to graduate school and is now a leading virologist.
Apparently Jim Bakker is 80
So: just old enough to run for US President, apparently!
Unfortunately, yes. Maybe the next election cycle will bring us to our senses.
Unfortunately, yes. Maybe the next election cycle will bring us to our senses.
That seems unlikely, but it's possibly we'll be fucked in a different way once the age distribution shifts a bit.
Also: did anyone else get the swine flu (the H1N1 virus) in 2009?
Oh man, I have a soft spot for the swine flu. Our wedding was planned for October 2009. I had a vintage dress that I'd acquired at some point that I thought would make a good wedding dress because I loved it, and it had a bit of stretch, and I was pregnant during normal wedding-dress-shopping times, and didn't know what my body would be like after Hawaii arrived in April.
I had no idea how laughable "a little stretch" was in accommodating my new 20 pounds of post baby weight, and I didn't really have a wedding dress plan other than it. I lost a little weight, was unhappy with how I looked in the dress, although I could zip it up, and was forcing myself to compartmentalize and focus on the joy of marrying Jammies and the big picture, etc.
The two weeks before everyone arrived, I got the swine flu. I dropped down to my pre-baby weight and looked fabulous in the dress at my wedding. Then I promptly gained it back again, and have never seen that number on the scale since. Couldn't have asked for a better illness.
Also the doc confirmed that Hawaii just has allergies.
And now one of my team is quarantined because of possible exposure. And they borrowed my computer Friday and used my mouse.
The real epidemic is the people you meet along the way.
oh fuck, to 171, but 174 made me laugh out loud.
If I had to be quarantined, I'd rather all the geebies just had the damn thing, so that we'd be done with it and be safe to be around elderly, etc. on the other side. Otherwise I fear quarantine after quarantine.
I lick my mouse when thinking through hard problems.
My symptoms have abated. I think I was probably just fatigued to the bone, but we'll see. JPJ, one of my friends got the swine flu and said it was the sickest he'd ever been in his life too-- I'm pretty sure he hasn't had a worse illness in the last 11 years.
For anyone tempted to believe non-Hubei cases are actually marching steadily to zero, consider African swine fever.
Now up to 12 cases here, the 12th case is a national recently returned from Iran as were the first 8. No idea about cases 9 through 11 but suspect and hope the same so no community spread here yet.
It's looking increasingly clear that largely due to the negligent if not outright malevolent handling of the situation in the US by Trump that it's become epidemic in the US. I wouldn't be half-surprised if a bunch of countries enact travel bans on people traveling from the US and really they should at this point. Trump's handling of this is criminal.
If - when - it takes off in the US, how do the election campaigns continue to run without rallies or door-knocking?
Taiwan is really on top of this.
https://twitter.com/laurie_garrett/status/1236460168055054337?s=21
I may be the last commenter quarantined. I'll feel so left out.
On a personal note it's looking increasingly likely that I won't be able to go back home to NY this summer.
NMM to being able to enter or leave northern Italy.
One thing this outbreak will do, I think, is to shut down a lot of privacy concerns, for good or ill. The Taiwanese thing is impressive (from the link above)
Taiwan leveraged its national health insurance database and integrated it with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics; it generated real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms to aid case identification. It also used new technology, including QR code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers' infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the past 14 days. Persons with low risk (no travel to level 3 alert areas) were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS (short message service) messaging to their phones for faster immigration clearance; those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
We are so used to malevolent and incompetent authoritarianism that we forget what the benevolent and competent sort looks like.
Also, 150 is funny, and I somehow didn't get it last night.
Northern Italy is never easy to enter regardless.
I'm trying to decide whether to fly to Boston on Monday afternoon. I am making a 24-hour trip in order to make a 10-minute presentation. I keep vacillating between feeling like it's a good thing to go, since I feel healthy and can make my tiny contribution to the (unionized!) hotel where I have booked a night and can fulfill my professional obligation to the speech I'm supposed to give. Or maybe it's a bad thing, since I might be an asymptomatic carrier (or become one thanks to breathing recirculated airplane air) and harm others around me. Sigh.
I am so angry that the smart, competent career public health staff at the federal level are being undercut in every way.
I've never been to Boston. You should go in case it's nice there.
189: We appear to have transmission in the Boston area. I would, honestly, be inclined not to go.
I'm not allowed to go to any conference with more than 100 people (even locally) and we are not allowed to host conferences with people outside of our organization. Internal meetings are still allowed. Allowing the last seemed like a missed opportunity to boost our productivity.
We have cases in the Boston area, but most of them are associated with big meetings (Biogen) or people who went to big events (PAX). Are you making a 10-minute presentation to a small audience or a huge one? You have more control in a small group. No handshaking, though, and wash your hands a lot. Also, in a small group you can point out the person (hopefully 6 or more feet away) who is coughing and have them shot removed from the meeting. Lots of events here, big and small, are being cancelled though.
FWIW the weather is supposed to be pretty nice this week. We really haven't had a winter this year.
At this point in time we are just minimizing the number of people/events we are exposed to.
I'm speaking at an event at the State House. Probably I shouldn't shake hands with any of the politicians, since they're the ones who are constantly in public and gladhanding.
(I'm actually not shaking hands with anyone; yesterday my hiking group did elbow bumps as our greeting.)
I'm speaking at an event at the State House. Probably I shouldn't shake hands with any of the politicians, since they're the ones who are constantly in public and gladhanding.
(I'm actually not shaking hands with anyone; yesterday my hiking group did elbow bumps as our greeting.)
But elbows are what you sneeze into.
When you sneeze into the void, the void sneezes into you.
I'm genuinely curious and unwilling to find out: is Fox News fearmongering over covid19 (which would be justified since their viewers are the most vulnerable) and fearmongering is their salt in trade? Or are they toting Trump's water and declaring it a success?
Two of my kids just wandered off to Boston Common to catch Pokemon. That's probably safer than meeting politicians.
Since I don't like kids having too much screen time, we use the closest real-life equivalent: dog fighting.
Although it involves a ride on the subway. We told them don't touch anything if you can avoid it and if you have to don't touch your face. We sent them with a bottle of hand sanitizer that we found in our basement. The biggest danger is probably them getting mugged for the sanitizer.
Okay, this is cute: https://twitter.com/flonot/status/1231849861043097600
There are cases in Australia where it's summer.
198.2 totes toting
Like, is this the thing that could break Fox's credibility with the old and decrepit, as it breaks Trump's presidency? Like, you're 70 and suddenly there's a gap between your actual health risk and what your propaganda machine is telling you?
Probably not, but it's a nice fantasy.
We could make it better if we can add Winona Ryder somehow.
So, my 85 year old mother lives in a nice* old age home in the East Bay. My little brother thinks she should join him in Columbus O, or maybe come here. Thoughts?
Like, you're 70 and suddenly there's a gap between your actual health risk and what your propaganda machine is telling you?
I think this gap is more likely to kill a lot of old people than it is to damage Fox's credibility.
* last year, someone (an employee, I think) got the flu and they locked everyone in their apartments for 3 weeks. Delivered meals from the cafeteria.
206: Nobody should have to live in Columbus, Ohio.
But I'm not sure what to think about it on the other merits. I also have an 80-something mother in a nice home. I don't think taking her out would be any safer because any other place she might be is going to be full of germ-y young people. Leaving might be more pleasant for her despite the risk if the alternative is getting trapped for weeks with no visitors. On the third hand, she seems to like the other old peoples' company as much if not more than she like seeing her kids and grandkids (who are really loud).
And they all are horrible at washing their hands.
I don't think it is worth moving your mother as a precaution against the virus now. Obviously I have no idea how much it would disrupt her life and friendships. But unless you drive her, crossing the country now, unless by private jet, is going to expose her to anything going around
Was at $70 in January, wow.
An SUV or a big ol' pickup truck.
I was just doing a community thing with some other parents, and it turns out that ruminating endlessly on Covid19 is not universal. I don't understand.
There's also ruminating endlessly on the Democratic primary of 2020, not to mention the Democratic primary of 2016.
Oh man, I have a soft spot for the swine flu...
Heebie! This comment really made my day, by making me laugh and laugh...
I was just doing a community thing with some other parents, and it turns out that ruminating endlessly on Covid19 is not universal. I don't understand.
It definitely seems like I'm more freaked out about this than anyone else I talk to. I mean, I get that I'm excitable, but is it not fairly clear that we are totally fucked?
A lot of people are going to die. But I feel like it could be a lot worse, even though we aren't going to handle this nearly as well as the Chinese.
We're not totally fucked! Join Team Flatten The Curve with me. It's my new relentless beat!
My other new obsession is reading how much Trump is sabotaging things.
I think we'll be somewhere at the Italy-level of fuckedness.
213; Manipulating the price of gasoline is one of the not illegal aspects of Putin's campaign to re-elect Trump.
Can Putin do that without that Saudi king, MBS or whatever.
It's nice that the epidemic finally united David Foster Wallace and scientists on the topic of how stupid cruise ships are.
A friend just called me to air his theory that Mulvaney must have had contact with the CPAC guy, hence the Friday night whacking (he did allow that Friday nights are often chosen for semi flying under the radar). Who the fuck even knows. The Tine turns to Peter Baker to do some news analysis of trumps' crazed pronouncements. He sort of acknowledges but of course ends up dancing around it somewhat. And there are some real howlers such as "[Trump] struggles to find the balance between public reassurance and Panglossian dismissiveness." Jeezus.
As is well-established.
You know, not like us....
227: He also posited the question of whether it is better to be in a red state with an incompetent state government but that Trump would have the Feds favor, or a more functional blue state that Trump will try to sabotage. (He moved to Texas form California in about a year and a half ago.)
Last state to have a case? My guess is South Dakota or Mississippi.
First nation to ban travelers from the US?
Boarding pretty much complete... my flight to Italy.. announcement from flight attendant: "it's a light flight to Rome tonight.."
https://twitter.com/sethdoane/status/1236796710598443009
230: Oh right. I forgot that for some reason.
it turns out that ruminating endlessly on Covid19 is not universal
That boggles my mind as well, but for our biased sample today my son had a playdate and we chatted with the other kid's mom... who is a professor that specializes in sanitation and disease/outbreak issues (studying cholera in Haiti, etc.).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YgdrhrCM8
234: Just don't let it happen again.
225: MBS has his own reasons for helping out.
Well, I decided to cancel the Boston trip. I figure it probably would have been fine, but 10 minutes doesn't seem worth the risk. I don't want to be the modern Typhoid Witt.
A family member was planning a long-awaited public health fellowship in Central Africa. That's been canceled by his company. He'll have to re-compete for a fellowship next year. Booooo.
Well, I decided to cancel the Boston trip. I figure it probably would have been fine, but 10 minutes doesn't seem worth the risk. I don't want to be the modern Typhoid Witt.
A family member was planning a long-awaited public health fellowship in Central Africa. That's been canceled by his company. He'll have to re-compete for a fellowship next year. Booooo.
224, 225, 239: They don't appear to be co-operating. OPEC wanted production cuts, Russia wouldn't agree.
"The breakdown was a classic game theory outcome--each side stands to gain if the other side backs down. However, if neither side backs down, then they both lose."And Putin and MBS want Trump reelected, but they want their economies to stop imploding even more. Innenpolitik, always.
243 backed down due to pressure from Trump admin.
In other news I am touching my face
I was chatting last night to a member of my choir who's a senior public health manager. The choir is supposed to be doing gigs next weekend and at the end of the month. But on present trends she's expecting measures to restrict large gatherings to be put in place before the second gig, and thinks that even next weekend could be touch and go.
226: the vivid account of an ex of mine who was a nurse on a cruise ship that got hit with norovirus put me off going anywhere near one ever.
They've just announced that they're closing all schools and universities here. The latest cases were community spread.
DiBlasio and Cuomo both out with the wait for the next train if subway is too crowded takes. (Admittedly as part of longer more rdoable chains of advice.)
A school in my town closed today. Kid of one of the Biogen attendees showed symptoms. The asymptomatic sibling is quarantined for 14 days, but they did not close his school.
OT: Sen. Booker is going to be vice president.
Max von Sydow is dead and Trump is tweeting pictures of himself fiddling in front of a fire. Whatever comes next isn't going to be good.
Huge breakthrough - first ever black vice-president! One for the history books...
250: What's your source for that? Or is that a prediction?
And like any true single Gulfie expat I made a beeline to stock up one booze at the only place you can buy for home consumption. It was utter bedlam.
242: Yeah, I saw that. Assuming the report isn't pure disinfo, after Jared and Putin both explain the relevance of oil prices to Trump's re-election, MBS may yet fall in line through our election day.
254, 255: Please explain, Man of Pure Reason, how you know it will be Booker and not Harris, who also endorsed the Friend of Barack.
America hates women. Haven't you been paying attention?
259: Maybe we just love old white men. Patrick Leahy seems to be just the right age.
JFC they're closing all the schools and universities but the library will be open to the public! Where do they think they will go!?!?
Turn off the AC. Recirculated air will spread Covid, it would be irresponsible not to.
They closed a school in my area for today due to coronavirus. Not due to a case there, mind. An employee of the school was exposed to the disease. They've tested negative and have been quarantined. The school hired a third-party contractor to clean and disinfect the place. That was Sunday. The school is closed today for a second round of cleaning. I don't want to minimize things, but I wonder if maybe that's taking things a bit too far?
Maybe this is a dumb question and I promise if the concern wasn't hypothetical I'd do actual research, but what does "quarantine" actually mean, especially this half-assed self-quarantine people seem to be talking about? I assume we could go to our own back yard. Could we take out the trash? Could we go to the park just across the street if we don't touch anything except toys we bring with us?
I almost want to get infected and get it over with. Quarantine would suck but it would be better now than in a month or two, or quarantine as a preventive measure only to really get sick later.
It basically means don't be within 3 feet of other people and don't get your germs on things other people are going to touch.
When I was at the doctor for my recent illness (cold-sinus infection-whatever) they expressed some concern because I'm immunosuppressed. I never thought of myself that way! I guess I need to be careful.
Also, if you're reading this, sorry, Tia, for my role in that debacle.
Back when I was a kid, we had a particularly bad outbreak of cooties in my town. The quarantine consisted of staying away from girls.
peep, you're fine. you had no role. LB is also totally fine. You're both better than fine; you're lovely sorts. Let's just please not talk about it further, because I don't want to invite anyone to be recreationally rude over here.
266: I was wondering the other day if cooties is still a thing with kids today. I'm hoping not.
Topically, I now have a co-worker who is in self-imposed quarantine.
|| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5mrQou0Z84& |>
264: Thanks. So not literally shut up inside our house for two weeks, then.
So, smart people, wtf is actually going on with oil right now? Why have they picked this moment for whatever it is?
"it turns out that ruminating endlessly on Covid19 is not universal"
Yeah, I cancelled on my volunteer gig at the local jail after talking to a friend who is a doctor at the county hospital. She told me that since they don't have test kits, they really have no idea where we're at with the virus locally, and advised me to voluntarily stay home since we serve a vulnerable population that is held in close quarters and doesn't receive the greatest health care. (They only get aspirin for regular colds, for example. There is a hospital on site that would quickly be overwhelmed by many cases, and I have no idea what the drill might be for sending detainees to other hospitals.) It's a knitting and crochet program, so lots of touching things and that others have touched, passing back and forth, leaning heads together, etc. So I relayed that to our leader and she was fine with me cancelling, but the group went in anyway.
Today I found an article online that includes quotes from administrators at my jail, and yet so far as I know the program is not cancelled yet, so I don't know if I'm overreacting or not. Probably not? I sent a copy of the article to our group leader, I guess we'll see what happens. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/us-prisons-jails-alert-spread-coronavirus-69437696
So, smart people, wtf is actually going on with oil right now? Why have they picked this moment for whatever it is?
Combination of COVID-19 and Saudi Arabia being effectively ruled by a terrible idiot who's just started an oil price war (mostly with Russia) at exactly the wrong time. The FT has a good summary here https://www.ft.com/content/59dcba56-61a2-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5
273: I'm not one of the smart people, but there's a good Monkey Cage blog post (Washington Post) that basically blames a Russia-Saudi price war.
However I can't help but be suspicious at the timing, given both countries have a vested interest in Trump being reelected.
I almost want to get infected and get it over with.
I had that thought too. But then I thought: suppose there was a quarantine and I already had it. It's not like I'd have official papers verifying my status. Surely I'd have to stay home just because there's no good way to control a quarantine if some people are allowed to be out and about, and it's self-determined.
I was thinking about things along those lines as well, though. Like, would it make sense for people who had had it and recovered to volunteer to shop and so on for vulnerable neighbors? You couldn't enforce it properly, but if people could be relied on to be sane, there's something to be done there.
280: The (preventable) test-kit shortage keeps that from being feasible, no? People might even think they had the disease when they had actually recovered from something else.
278: It seems doubtful that this will help Trump. If cheap oil tanks the economy--or even just the stock market--because the US has become a producer, it's a net loss for him. And the utility of gas being cheap depends on how big the quarantine zones are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/oil-crash-sends-new-shock-through-world-crippled-by-virus
Do any swing states produce oil?
Re-electing Trump is a long way off, and both the oil thing and the virus will be long over, with markets mostly recovered.
For the conference I'm semi-in charge of at the end of the month, our holding pattern is to take our cue from the host university, which has a nice website dedicated to the university's policy on the Coronavirus, and says that it is updated as of March 3rd.
On Friday, I read the page a little closer, and noticed it said quite explicitly that no one has died yet from Coronavirus in the US.
They've removed that sentence, but haven't changed the "updated" date. The whole thing is making their credibility slip with me. They seem to be relying heavily on the CDC page.
The website still focuses heavily on how the risks of the regular flu strongly outweigh the coronavirus, and just keep doing your anti-flu measures. (Which is sound advice, just not-sound foundation for the advice.)
Re-electing Trump is a long way off, and both the oil thing and the virus will be long over, with markets mostly recovered.
I strongly do not think that coronavirus will be over, unless we are really swamped by it and fail to flatten the curve.
Yes, I'm really hung up on this bit about flattening the curve.
284: They may not be. The future is binary, snapback or extended crash. Considering Italy, and the PRC's record, I'm leaning to crash. And narrowly on oil, MBS really does seem dumb as shit.
Yeah, MBS is much smarter about dismembering dissidents with impunity.
284: I can't decide if this is optimism or pessimism.
Re-electing Trump is a long way off, and both the oil thing and the virus will be long over, with markets mostly recovered.
Really not sure about this, tbh. There are a lot of "not since the financial crisis" phrases going round at present.
Isn't cheap oil good for the economy and presidential approval? I remember a chart showing that Bush's approval for the most part tracked the reciprocal of gas prices. Or has that changed now because we produce much more?
292: That was true until the economy actually crashed in 2008. Oil prices went way down, but that didn't help W's approval ratings any.
The "snapback" scenario looks like this. All these things need to be true.
Infections are truly under control in China
Chinese government figures are accurate
Chinese manufacturing resumes promptly and completely
Economic pressure does not lead China to relax precautions prematurely, causing a second wave of infections
Chinese precautions stay effective and do not become leaky as time goes on and reported infections fall
Precautions in all other heavily-affected countries are effective, and no further large-scale precautions with economic impact are put in place in major economies, especially the US
There are no further large outbreaks in countries which at present have only small reported case numbers
No countries with small reported case numbers are currently harbouring an undetected or unreported epidemic
There are no other major demand or supply shocks unrelated to COVID
Heavily-indebted US shale oil companies are able to survive low oil prices without triggering a default wave
That's a lot of things that need to be true.
Until we have a vaccine can countries which have imposed regional quarantines really afford to lift them? Won't the cases just rebound?
I mean things are not returning to normal for at least a year.
It's amazing that the PRC is simultaneously doing all these draconian countermeasures - although it's possible the ones moving the needle are the less draconian test, test, test ones - and also banning naming or discussing coronavirus online.
18 cases now, was 15 this morning, 12 yesterday. I think these are all community transmission.
296-7. Yes. The question is whether countries can "afford" to moderate quarantines. I think actually they can afford to moderate a lot, and as the economic costs mount they will.
I think we're only now getting a clear sense of the actual mortality rate with clean data from outside China, and it's not nearly as bad as Hubei made it look.
The science is also moving really quickly. My dilettante guess is we'll see a mix of improved treatments and testing reduce the lethality a lot over the coming 3-6 months, and a vaccine in ~18.
Unfortunately non-panicking governance seems mostly lacking.
"Community Transmission" was going to be the name of my auto repair shop.
The Trump administration does not seem to be panicking nearly enough.
303: Dollars to donuts they'll gearshift at some point from not panicking enough to blind panic / lashing out.
Do any swing states produce oil?
Not all oil producers will be affected equally because some have much higher production costs than others... shale oil is pretty expensive. Breakeven cost for shale in the Permian Basin is about $50 a barrel on average, plus transport costs. Deepwater oil is a lot cheaper to produce and transport. So Texas could get hurt a little, but North Dakota etc would get hurt a lot more. IANAoil expert though I have played one on TV.
I hate the guy but man, Cuomo's leadership on this has been impressive.
Academia Sinica yesterday said that it has synthesized monoclonal antibodies that can identify the protein of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which it said is an important step toward producing a rapid screening reagent for the virus. The potential reagent, if successfully mass produced, would shorten the testing time for COVID-19 from about four hours to 15 to 20 minutes, significantly improving screening efficiency, the nation's top academic research institution said in a statement on Facebook.
"Community Transmission" was going to be the name of my auto repair shop.
Just makes me think of the Halloween episode with the dodgy meat that leads to a zombie plague.
Here in Maryland we have 5 confirmed cases, all of whom had recently returned from abroad. The government response seems at this point to be OK. The governor declared a state of emergency last week, a bunch of emergency funds have been directed toward dealing with the virus, Maryland was OKed to do its own testing (rather than sending tests to Atlanta), and the testing regimen that should have been adopted by the CDC back in February (everyone who shows up at a hospital, clinic or doctor's office with flu like symptoms gets tested) has been in place since last week.
Related: I've been reading the Theranos book since it came out in paperback recently, and I was idly wondering what sort of opportunistic mayhem they would have caused if they had still been around for this. Limited, I guess, since the test is a nasal swab rather than a blood test.
Swab hard enough and it can be both.
304- probably he'll go with transmission is due to the cities with all those dirty types of people in them. Not because, you know, that's where people actually interact. One fringe conservative already made a similar argument- look how the biggest clusters are in blue states (MA, NY, WA, CA)
What'd Cuomo do right? I saw something about manufacturing hand sanitizer with prison labor which is I guess not a bad idea although horrifyingly dystopian generally.
Further to 294, worth noting that:
shale rig counts already falling
Boeing is (I think) the biggest exporter in the US and is in deep trouble over 737Max
there were already tariff-related problems in a lot of areas hitting profits
312 First state to declare a state of emergency, first to do its own testing, among some other things. I hate him just as much, or at least almost as much as you do LB, but he's been good on this.
I assume declaring a state of emergency has something to do with FEMA funds. Here in upstate NY, my local congressman - democratic, in a swing district - is trying to get promised funds for a flood last year.
The oil thing may or may not be over. I wouldn't bet on sanity from MBS.
The virus could very well still be going long into the election season. One thing we don't know is whether having it once confers immunity against the other strains which will presumably arise once it is widespread. And the knock-on effects on health systems which are already under strain may be considerable and very lasting.
Oh, I knew he'd declared a state of emergency, but I guess not that he was out ahead of the curve. He's not dumb, just kind of evil, and I guess handing the epidemic sensibly seems like it'll get him good coverage.
311: You absolutely know that had this happened under Obama, it would have been touted as the retribution of the Christian deity. Honestly, given the timing -- seemingly just the right distance from the election to cause a recession in the nick of time -- I'm starting to seriously consider the divine intervention theory ...
I'm fucking livid that they're closing down all the schools but keeping us open to the public. We're going to be packed tomorrow. Stupid fuckers.
I'm fucking livid that they're closing down all the schools but keeping us open to the public. We're going to be packed tomorrow. Stupid fuckers.
Don't touch your face. Feel free to scratch I balls.
I told you. AC. Everything needs maintenance sometimes. Have I linked this here? Probably. Anyway, it's useful.
Don't scratch Android balls. They have more malware.
302: The shop on the SF Peninsula called "Ruppel's Auto Fixation" makes me smile every single time I see it, which has to be hundreds of times by now. (Granted, that may be because it's at the point in the multi-train commute when you need to smile to stay sane.)
311: as I hinted back in 155, I think it would be very easy for Trump or surrogates to cherry-pick some dumb tweets about how everyone should lick each other so the virus brings down Trump's presidency, and declare that this is actually happening, and keep blaming the Democrats for everything that's going wrong. That's all he ever does anyway. I've never had a clear sense of how widely believed it is.
Or is it a DNC plot to beat Sanders in Michigan?
326 Maybe! Daines has really tied himself to Trump. Bullock is genuinely popular.
I mentioned before the effect this race is going to have down-ballot. There's also the policy effect, as Trump reaches out to help Daines. For example, Trump's recent position on permanently funding LWCF -- just like his approval of recognition of the Little Shell -- was probably driven by Daines' need to shore things up with people who aren't ranchers or evangelicals. Interest rates are down, and tourism will fall off a cliff this year (even just the lack of visitors from China to our national parks will be a huge factor) so it's a great time to do park infrastructure stuff.
Re swing states and oil production:
Based on their total crude oil production in numbers of barrels, in 2018, the top ten crude oil-producing states in the US are:
Texas (1,609,075)
North Dakota (461,531)
New Mexico (248,958)
Oklahoma (200,685)
Colorado (177,817)
Alaska (174,800)
California (169,166)
Wyoming (87,955)
Louisiana (48,841)
Utah (37,063)
Colorado is the only swing state in the group. Ohio and Pennsylvania are small producers but are net importers (as is California). Lower gasoline prices will be good news in swing states.
In a world recession, Putin can probably keep supplies high and prices low through October, with or without MBS' cooperation, if it's in his interest. It might even be profitable for a subset of oligarchs. Not that he definitely will, or that it will necessarily put Trump over the top.
317: waiving co pays for treatment in the ED and urgent care for COVID. Probably will turn out not to apply to people with self-insured plans anyway. So it could just be for show.
328: Yeah, the oil industry in the US is heavily concentrated in red states, which isn't really a coincidence.
The early zooplankton were big libertarian assholes.
I heard this fascinating book talk on interactions between American oil and Christianity - basically Big Oil fed Rockefeller Republicans, wildcatters fed money gospel/libertarianists.
332: Glad you enjoyed it!
An inspiring story of the triumph of the human spirit -- overcoming their fear of the COVID-19 virus for the sake of a greater cause, 3549 people gathered together to break the world record for most people dressed as Smurfs.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/french-coronavirus-smurf-world-record.html
https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/god-oil-and-american-power/
Boris Johnson may have said the quiet part out loud. Give it a few days before "let it burn" becomes the officially preferred coronavirus policy on the right.
335: I was going to guess that it was "Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil", which I haven't read but it sounds interesting (probably infuriating as well).
328: Not only that, it is expected that less US oil drilling means less natural gas produced by oil drillers which should be a boon for natural gas operations that aren't oil wells. Which is good in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The top five dry natural gas-producing states in 2018 by amount and share of total U.S. dry gas production
Texas--6.84 Tcf--22.3%
Pennsylvania--6.12 Tcf--20.0%
Louisiana--2.78 Tcf--9.1%
Oklahoma--2.70 Tcf--8.8%
Ohio--2.35 Tcf--7.7%
These 6 companies account for almost 50% of wells in Pennsylvania. 3 are part of big oil companies and 3 are "pure gas plays".
Chesapeake Appalachia (part of Chesapeake Energy)
Range Resources
EQT
Cabot Oil & Gas
SWEPI (part of Royal Dutch Shell)
Talisman Energy (part of Repsol, a Spanish oil company)
Today's market moves:
-30.99% Chesapeake Energy
-5.75% Range Resources
+15.81% EQT
+1.75% Cabot Oil & Gas
-15.89% Shell
-16.16% Repsol
336 It affects mostly the old so awesome!!! If they go there this should be our messaging. Die Boomer!
About to alienate my family by begging my parents to return to NY from FLA where they're residing with my brother who is an international pilot for Delta and still fucking flying into Italy. They're in their late 70s.
Ted Cruz is self-hibernating.
343: DeVos and Gohmert both apparently spent time with the infectee. Here's a thread by someone who likely was infected there: https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1236843649775947776
Responses from his (I guess) right-leaning readership are suggestions to shut up.
Covid-19 made it to Ohio.
I believe that means it's officially a pandemic.
https://www.dispatch.com/news/20200309/3-ohioans-test-positive-for-coronavirus
So, I found this https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ oddly comforting.
South Korea responded to the coronavirus outbreak by implementing immediate and widespread testing. Partly as a result of that, it has one of the highest numbers of confirmed CV cases in the world. But it also has a very low mortality rate -- 53 people have died out of nearly 7500 confirmed CV cases, which is well under a 1% mortality rate. Compare that with China, where CV has a 3.9% mortality rate, or Italiy, where the mortality rate is 5%.
In the U.S., we have had very little testing (despite the universal availability of beautiful and perfect tests, /s). My guess is that if everyone got tested, we'd discover that the CV is already quite widespread here, and that the actual mortality rate is fairly low.
||
A reader writes into New Scientist to observe that whenever he goes for a bike ride in cold weather, snot flows all over his moustache. He wonders if there is some evolutionary purpose to this.
Have at it!
|>
Back on the Veldt, when escaping from predators, it was noted that lions ran faster than even the fastest bicyclist. However, they ran very much faster than the slowest bicyclist. Slow bicyclists could be rendered even slower when blinded with snot. So the fast cyclist whose nose produced most snot handicapped his pursuers the most.
332: I know where you can find a review of it if you're in the market for one.
Now we have to explain why women are having more sex with men who are oozing snot.
Only if they were having sex on bicycles, and the suggestion that they did so is the kind of think that gives evolutionary psychology a bad name.
s/think/thing/g
(because I am a materialist)
340. People whose immune systems are suppressed by excessive alcohol consumption are also at risk.
wasshat
Diarrhea is only rarely associated with this virus.
350: Am I in the market? Of course I'm in the market!
Don't believe everything you read in the tabloids.
My 13 year-old has informed me that today is the 69th day of 2020. Do with that information what you will.
||
aside:I missed Tia's thread previously but aside from the main point of it there was a bit about a meal service. I tried two a few years ago and was not happy with them, but also failed to understand who they really worked for. Do any of you have and like these? If so, why? I found it mostly annoying.
|>
My neighbor gets them. I see the boxes.
The kids and shitposters alike will be especially delighted in a few weeks, when it will be 4/20 all month long.
In the U.S., we have had very little testing (despite the universal availability of beautiful and perfect tests, /s). My guess is that if everyone got tested, we'd discover that the CV is already quite widespread here, and that the actual mortality rate is fairly low.
Yes, definitely. We have been barely testing anybody. The rate of deaths to cases here, as in Iran, bears no resemblance to the real mortality rate because most of the denominator is invisible.
360: I have been. I really hate planning meals and buying groceries, and I wasted a lot of food, because I'm bad at shopping for two. I don't mind cooking too much. I like picking out a few choices from a menu and then preparing it. We don't have a ton of takeout options near me, so that is not a decent alternative. Trying to figure out what I wanted to make was paralyzing.
360: I tried one for a couple of weeks a year or two ago. I could see it being useful for someone who didn't know how to cook and was learning, as a low-mental effort introduction to different possible ingredients and recipes. Shamefully, I will admit that harissa had somehow never made it onto my radar as an ingredient, and after the meal kit thing it is now.
The other thing I could see it solving is being out of ideas. You've been making the same six things for dinner for years and you don't have the brainpower to be creative about it anymore.
The two weeks of Blue Apron I did, the food wasn't better than fine on any given meal, but it wasn't bad and it was more variety than I would have managed on my own. Not worth it for me, but I could see how it might be.
Further: I was doing Hello Fresh and switched to Sun Basket which seems a bit more interesting. I don't know how long I'll stick with it.
Re: the coronavirus, a friend who's a specialist in infectious disease posted this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-ten-reasons-not-to-panic
I am sure sure anyone will find the content particularly soothing, but just in case . . .
Thanks all. I guess I thought if you liked to cook you wouldn't like the limitations (and shipping you stuff you already have lots of) and I found meh recipes but of you don't like cooking it was too much effort - but I guess there is more spectrum than I imagined.
LB's point about getting in a rut is good.
You know, you only need $20 and a guy will show up at your door with a pizza big enough for 3 or 4 people in like an hour.
Chinese food works about the same, but you need more money or fewer people.
I'm surprised no one has suggested drinking gin and tonics in the Coronavirus madness. Quinine derivatives might interfere with viral fusion to host cells by raising the pH of endocytic vesicles. Even if it doesn't work usually any excuse to make a vice into a virtue takes off in pop culture (cf the French health ministry admonishment that no, cocaine does not prevent infection with the virus.)
Assholes on qtips would spread the disease.
Rice University just cancelled classes.
Does that mean they can send me a spring roll?
No, but would you like some Rice?
I guess I really shouldn't have assumed a spring roll from Friday would still have been uneaten.
We have a one pound bag of rice. It's our quarantine food.
We do one of the meal kit things. I don't love it, but I also didn't love planning out five or six meals a week (advance planning is mandatory, given time constraints), and I never quite got the groove of making Monday's leftovers into part of Tuesday's dinner, etc, at that scale. Sometimes, sure, but not 6x a week. So knocking two of those a week off is kind of a relief.
I had also hoped, when we started, that my wife would be able to run with the gentle-introduction-to-cooking angle of it, but in practice I'm still cooking 90% of them, which isn't really what I had in mind.
"I don't feel like cooking. If you don't want to cook tonight, I'm going to order Chinese food."
If you use that script, order for the whole family and not just yourself.
A friend of mine used Blue Apron for a while. Maybe she still does, I don't know. She's single and travels a lot for work, so sometimes there's no better way to have anything like home cooking.
I like the meal kits because I find that with just me and a picky eater kid I was having trouble getting motivated to cook proper meals. Having them sitting there preplanned in bags helps a lot. And when I'm feeling more motivated, I skip the week.
I like the meal kits because I find that with just me and a picky eater kid I was having trouble getting motivated to cook proper meals. Having them sitting there preplanned in bags helps a lot. And when I'm feeling more motivated, I skip the week.
Oh, you didn't exactly say this, but I have a friend who uses meal kits and has a picky eater kid, and finds it motivating for the picky eater. Not that the picky eater eats everything unfamiliar, but something about moving the responsibility for menu planning to an outside authority means that the picky eater tries and accepts more than they would if the novel foods were just the parent's idea.
I tried Blue Apron for a couple of weeks a few years ago, because my friend had free credits and gave them to me. I thought the recipes were pretty good, and like LB and sb mentioned above, it prompted me to try recipes that otherwise would not have occurred to me. It's pretty fun, in the way that making things from a kit is fun.
That said, I wouldn't pay money for the service myself. My reasons:
1) So much packaging! A tablespoon of mirin, in a little plastic tub. A pinch of cumin, in a little plastic sachet. Each individual vegetable, separately wrapped. A little flotilla of detritus in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch belongs to me, and my two weeks of Blue Apron waste packaging.
2) There's very little leftovers. Are you supposed to make new food every night? And then separately think about what to take for lunch the next day? That's a lot of work.
3) Other reasons -- it's really expensive when compared to shopping for normal quantities of groceries, I like choosing my own produce, and although I liked the recipes, I'd mostly rather just eat the things that I usually make.
Innsbruck University in Tirol, near Italy, moved all classes online as of today. Iberian Fury's institute did the same, though it's less of a big deal because it's only PhD students and classes aren't really important. Vienna universities haven't yet, though I expect them to very soon. Schools and kindergartens are still open, though I also expect that to change. IF's parents are visiting for two weeks starting tomorrow, so we'll be keeping the Infanta home anyway, and my mother will be visiting after that, unless the flights get cancelled. (On the one hand, any plane travel exposes them to some risk; on the other hand, once they're here with us, they'll be basically self-quarantining.)
Well it turns out I have pneumonia. I've been having persistent respiratory issues on top of asthma and thought I'd better haul ass to the clinic in the morning to get sorted before I get COVID-19 because on top of that it'd likely kill me. I'm home for at least two days, probably the rest of the week.
Not great. Hoping for a rapid recovery.
(Coughing in sympathy in an airport hotel. I'm on a hurried trip to renew my soon-to-expire Japanese residence card before any more travel restrictions can be imposed.)
Well wishes toward all. In particular, that X & company stay well, Barry gets well, and Ume doesn't get massive jet lag.
Oh, Barry, that sucks. Are you being tested for COVID? Bright side is that if this is it, you don't need to worry about it again once you're feeling better.
Well, one of my colleagues just had to leave in a hurry because her daughter's been sent home from school with possible symptoms.
... and now the Vienna medical school's going online-only. Only a matter of time before the main university follows, I imagine.
||
Reactionaries, opportunists, and cowards have been harbouring hatred and baseness, and like frightened bats which fear light and which fear to face the people, went on disseminating venomous, black hatred and misleading rumours, reflecting their weak and opportunistic spirits. . . . The revolution will crush in its advance all the pygmies who stand in the way of the giants who guided the people toward their great future|>
I hope the pneumonia clears for you quickly.
||
Let us try to forget all the stupidities and irritations which we have seen in the past few years; also the disputes that took place, the words that were spoken, and the treachery and so on.|>
403 is a great example of Orwell's point about the lunatic brutality of extremists towards normal language. (The fascist octopus has sung his swan song.)
401. MIT is making its six or so largest classes online only. Exams will be in multiple small rooms, instead of all in one place.
Thanks for the hospitality. Can you cough on someone going to Arizona. Always wanted to see the a Grand Canyon.
Ohio State, Amherst, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Barnard, Hofstra, Princeton, USC, Stanford . . .
I haven't verified any of those. Just reposting.
Ohio University is going to start calling itself An Ohio State-University, so the article matters.
ALMOST HEAVEN, THE WEST VIRGINIA,
BLUE RIDGE THE MOUNTAINS, SHENANDOAH RIVER,
LIFE IS THE OLD THERE, OLDER THAN THE THE TREES,
YOUNGER THAN THE MOUNTAINS, BLOWING LIKE THE BREEZE
There was a kid on the Brady Bunch who looked like a young John Denver. I always used to wish him ill, but now that I'm more mature and we're facing a common threat, I only wish Ill to the producers.
"Older than the trees, younger than the mountains" would be a great tourist motto for New York City.
Older than the trees, younger than the mountains.
We've removed the lead from most of our fountains.
"Higher than London, shorter than Dubai."
I climbed a tree on Sunday that was older than New York City.
Further measures announced for Austria in a press conference: no in-person classes in any Austrian universities from next Monday at the latest; no public indoor/outdoor events with more than 100/500 people; measures for schools will come, but are still in preparation. ~150 cases in Austria as of this morning.
Take care, Barry. Rest like it's your job.
Just voted. Hand sanitizer everywhere plus a poll worker wearing gloves to process ballots. I told her it was smart, and she got this really sad look and said something about the world we live in. I was like, "it's cold and flu season; people are sick."
I mean WTF. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article241046076.html
"Immigration court staff nationwide have been ordered by the Trump administration to take down all coronavirus posters from courtrooms and waiting areas.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which falls under the Department of Justice, told all judges and staff members in an email Monday that all coronavirus posters, which explain in English and Spanish how to prevent catching and spreading the virus, had to be removed immediately..."
The parks service was ordered to stop tweeting in about the first week of the administration, after telling the truth about the inauguration crowd. Unsurprising.
The crowd for Obama was just so much larger.
||
'It was as if this peaceful and productive country were nothing but an experimental station for stupid teenagers and anarchists'.|>
Justifiable would have been "Stop putting up all these different posters that you're finding online or whatever. We need to give a consistent message to the public. Only use the CDC one please."
Justifiable would also have been "If you've put up this CDC poster, take it down right now - it's out-of-date advice. Use the updated version."
But this is neither of those. This is just "take them down, you aren't allowed to put them up".
I assume it's because Trump is so hyperfocused on the message that Containment Is Winning that he is eliminating any messaging to the contrary.
You shouldn't discount the idea that he'd be happy for immigrants and a good portion of the immigration court personnel to die.
Policy now apparently reversed:
https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1237341888421736450
First few cases in immigration court personnel, and there's, regrettably, nothing else for it but to shut down the courts and halt all immigration hearings. Oh Dear. What A Shame. Never Mind.
432: Would it ever occur to him that it would then spread to his much-beloved ICE agents? Probably not....
They are going to dress like the emperor's soldiers in Dune.
Honestly thought that Trump would be Slaanesh rather than Nurgle. Shows how much I know.
437: WTF? Somebody had to do something about the proliferation of fictional universes that everyone is supposed to know about.
Calm down, dude, you're sounding like Thursday Next.
oh barry, so sorry and take super good care of yourself! pneumonia sucks it's painful and a complete drag. :(
Thanks again to everyone.
Whatsapp conversation with my international pilot and Trump voting Fox News watching brother in FLA with whom my parents are currently staying. I asked my other brother to also try to convince my parents to return to NY. Not sure how I did, not too well I think:
[6:01 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: Look, I'm concerned with the COVID-19 situation in the US, it looks on track to be a lot like Italy in the next 10 days - two weeks. Hope you all stay well and wash your hands but I'm also thinking it would be better for mom and dad to return to NY before things get bad.
[6:05 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry's Brother: I'm not as worried as you are. Yes conserved but very fishy to the extent government and media are reacting. Just put a huge $ in market yesterday. Big overreaction but yes
[6:05 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry's Brother: I also called in sick this week so I don't go back to work for another 10-11 days
[6:16 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: Italy is locked down, their ERs in Lombardy are completely overwhelmed. HK, ROK handling it well, Taiwan too. This is not a global worldwide conspiracy to make Trump look bad. Please take a worst case scenario seriously now when you can plan for it. Where would it be best for mom and dad to ride it out? Maybe with you but only if you're not flying. This is going to go everywhere and get a lot worse before it gets better. US is where Italy was ten days ago and we're not doing nearly enough testing.
[6:18 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: We had 8 cases here just a few days ago, all nationals or residents returned from Iran, flown directly to a private airfield and straight to isolation. Two days ago we had a few more (now 18) no press release stating they got it in Iran so I knew it was community transmission. Within hours they've shut all schools and universities indefinitely and taken many other measures.
[6:19 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: I'm seriously concerned about Mom and Dad, you guys too but the mortality rate for over 60 and over 70 is very high. And no vaccine for at least a year.
[6:19 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: Please just think about it. And make some plans
[6:25 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry's Brother: Did not say that. Your words not mine. I know all about it as K**** is in middle of it. I did make plans I called in sick this week and will bid all trips to Italy and Israel next month because even though it's in our bid package they already cancelled all of those flights so I get paid to stay home.
[6:28 PM, 3/10/2020] Barry Freed: It's very serious and mom and dad are particularly vulnerable. I love you all and don't want anything bad to happen but I'm quite serious that the US is looking to be very bad very soon. Hopefully I'm wrong but please take good care and plan for the worst. Love to you all.
Jesus, it just registered that his first thing was about the money he put into the market.
May ask for deletion of 441 later.
I don't know why that's surprising. The only thing Trump has focused on is the market.
I think a few thousand points off the DOW hurts Trump's reëlection more than a few thousand extra dead people.
It's probably a good time to buy, actually, if you can. Blue chips.
Corn chips taste the same regardless. Blue corn is hipster nonsense.
See, that's why we never played Nebraska.
I just got back from voting at our school board election. I did see a couple bottles of hand sanitizer, but other than that no evidence that any enhanced precautions are being taken with respect to germ control. How many people used the same pen to fill out the ballot that I did? How many people touched the same doorknob to get into the building? Maybe things are happening that I don't see but I would be a lot more comfortable if I could see them.
It pisses me off because I got shut down in my effort to raise a flag about this a week ago.