There isn't one. The dead die, the living suffer and the MAGA assholes get a fresh crop of grudges to wring electors and mass shootings out of for the next thirty grievance-bound years.

No guarantees, but my hoped for silver lining is that the millions of students who were abruptly forced into online classes will conclude "Hey, this pretty much sucks!". Hopefully that will take the wind out of the sails of the "Staring at screens all day is the future of education!" types, at least for a while.

Yeah, I'm not seeing much. I have a fantasy good outcome: the total wreckage of the economy inspires a real New-Deal-sized restructuring that not only pulls us out of depression but also addresses climate change and inequality in a way that would have been impossible without this shock. But I don't think that's remotely likely. One in a hundred, maybe?

This is a dry run for the next time, which could be much worse - for example, MERS kills not 1% of confirmed cases, but 34%. When a more easily transmissible version of MERS arises, we will be all over it, and a hugely more damaging pandemic will have been averted; just as Taiwan has been all over COVID by virtue of previous experience with SARS.

3 sounds not implausible to me. "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do X?"

I don't think it's impractical, just politically implausible. I don't know if you've noticed, but there haven't been a lot of big policy victories for the good guys in my lifetime.

4 is good.

I think it's given a lot of people time to reflect on their lives, and consider what is actually important to them. Maybe we'll come out of this a more thoughtful and empathic society. At the margins, anyway.

My kid is getting the best grades of his life.

I would be so happy if after this, society put less value on being maximally busy.

I'm enjoying having Newt home, in a low pressure (his college handled the remote thing pretty well) pleasant way. He's a good kid, and a very reasonable adult roommate.

And pointed out that if the political situation goes strange enough that Cuomo ends up as president, nightmarish though that would be, at least that gives NY a shot at a less psychopathic governor.

If we can put a man on the moon, we can let me fuck off for four days a week instead of two.

Also universal health care.

I would place a moderately large bet that some of my colleagues will take this experience as proof that they don't actually have to live in London and commute on the tube every day, but can instead live somewhere nicer and come into London once every couple of weeks or so.

10.2: Even after 4 years of Trump, a Cuomo presidency sounds "nightmarish"?

I think it's given a lot of people time to reflect on their lives, and consider what is actually important to them.

And for some of them the answer appears to be that it is important to get a haircut even if it puts the hairdresser's life at risk.

Silver plated lining at best.

OK, this is a silver lining.

13: After you secretly buying up real estate in Birmingham?

People could move to small villages, but if there's one thing I've learned from the television, it's that small English villages are full of murder and incest.

14: Yes. I work in NY state government. I'd vote for Cuomo over Trump, but Cuomo on the short list of Democrats where I'd have to think about the individual qualities and positions of the Republican opponent before voting Democratic.

13: My wife and I have talked about whether she should convince her employers she should be able to move a bit further away from King's Cross. Somewhere, like, say, Scotland.

15: I suspect the number of people who will be leaving this event as total shits is barely different from the number who entered it as such.

18: If you're concerned about incest, it's a patriotic duty to move to the small villages to decrease it.

I suspect the number of people who will be leaving this event as total shits is barely different from the number who entered it as such.

This just in: Humanity is depraved, deserves a solid kick everywhere.

17: deciding to quit the rat race of central London life in order to remote-work from Birmingham would be an interesting decision, but actually I think we would head back to Scotland, like dalriata.

The train from Scotland to London takes much longer than the train from Birmingham to London if you really need to be in London every week or two.

Is Morecambe still cheap? That's a good compromise between London and Scotland.

You may have to connect in Preston to take the train.

Is Morecambe still cheap? That's a good compromise between London and Scotland.

Wise advice.

I gave myself a Smith's earworm.

I'd avoid Morecambe just because if I moved there, I'd probably die of misadventure. Probably shouldn't move to Lindisfarne, or the costal routes of East Anglia, either.

Leeds? (I say knowing nothing about Leeds apart from one of my Scottish cousins lives there)

Like 3, I hope for such but do not expect it.

A path I could see is a Democratic White House doing better response, but still getting kicked in the pants by a second or third wave of infections, then the ensuing depression is big enough they have no choice but to strike out in FDR-scale new directions.

I dislike the basic concept of "silver lining", but it was used pre-antibiotics when a lot more people dropped dead all the time, so who knows.

I haven't rushed anywhere since this started. I've rushed A. through bedtime, because she'd stay up until we went to bed if we let her, but other than that? I don't need to be at work or get A. to school at any particular time. The bus schedule doesn't matter too much if I'm just going grocery shopping, and of course, we try to minimize that. There are no more classes, dates, or events.

Because it's me, I managed to find a dark cloud to this silver lining. I feel like I should enjoy the free time, but I don't. I'd prefer that kind of stress to this kind.

A good relaxation idea is to look at real estate in the Shetland Islands.

32: hear hear.

29. Leeds is OK, but if you're basically teleworking and want to live in a Yorkshire city, Bradford and Sheffield are both cheaper and less like mini-Londons without the range of restaurants. Good places to live that nobody ever thinks of but have reasonable links to the Great Wen include Newcastle and Nottingham.

Speaking of remote work, I had a colleague who wanted to work from home so she took another job. About two days after she gave notice, we went to 100% work from home.

We stopped in one of the tony bits of Newcastle on our first trip here and it was quite nice. Orkney is still my ideal, although I'm not sure if I could handle the darkness of a real northern winter (the London winter wasn't as bad as I feared, though).

Agree about looking at real estate, though. The price/beauty ratio is prime fantasy territory.

26 I see what you did there

36 There are tony bits of Newcastle?

Looking at the map of Newcastle these are the poshest-sounding towns. Someone tell me if it corresponds to reality.

5. Washington (so that's where the original Washington is! never thought about that before)
4. Gosforth
3. Seaton Delaval
2. Ponteland
1. Clara Vale

38: That's who uses the imported coal.

36: Jesmond. Some time later I rad Peter Hamilton's great-but-hella-long Great North Road, and when the main character gets a promotion he moves there, leading to much class anxiety. So I guess it most be posh.

39: Weirdly, though, despite Washington clearly being ancient and the source of the name, it's a suburban new town (or, if not a new town in a formal sense, almost all the growth there has been post-war).

19: hypothetical matchup. Cuomo v Charlie Baker. (Baker, of course, would never get the Republican nomination.). Which would you vote for?

42: I believe the hypothetical needs to incorporate the Charlie Baker who did whatever it took to secure the national Republican nomination. See Romney. Mitt.

We'll get a population bump from people remote-working jobs in Seattle and the BA who want to live someplace better (on some axes).

Gov Bullock has probably improved his chances (already decent) at winning that Senate seat. His opponent is pretty closely tied to Trump, and in the meantime, I don't think anyone can say that Bullock's response to the virus is other than a pretty big success. (We had another death yesterday, bringing the state-wide total to 15. New cases trending downward. 10 active hospitalizations.) Still a toss-up with Trump on the ballot. I'm not sure about the House race -- in part it depends on whether the Republicans nominate the Most Inauthentic Man in Montana Politics, which they very well might do.

I'm thinking the census will ultimately solve this problem, giving us a second seat, which will be blue for the rest of my lifetime.

The howling thing is kind of fun.

43: Right. Although I think Baker cares more about substance use, mental health, and COVID than Romney. His best friend's mother died of COVID. I don't think Baker could do national politics, and he's an executive rather than a legislator. That said, his Dad worked for Reagan.

Look, don't ever, I mean ever, vote for a Republican for President. Satan himself would do better on judicial appointments, climate policy, health care -- and the list goes on -- than any Republican. Why? Because government is a team activity. Even a Democratic president as malevolent as Trump would still end up appointing judges and senior admin people from the Democratic orbit.

Untold harm has been done by the narrative that if this, that, or the other Democrat is to run, then voting for a Republican might be justified.

A Democratic president as malevolent as Trump would cause the party to be destroyed. It's certainly not the case that there's no evil people in the Democratic Party, but there's not enough who would pick party over evil to sustain a party.

Oh, and now I see that our one death yesterday was former congressman Marlenee (R -- West Dakota). I was his constituent back when we had two districts, and I was living in the red one. I'm sure he was a fine human being, on some axes, but I certainly don't regret voting against him at every opportunity.

46: Fair. In MA, I think he appoints Democrats to a lot of positions because the State party is lame/weak.

Assuming we're setting aside the widespread discrediting of right-wing ideology as being completely incompatible with good outcomes for the public, given that the predictable right-wing scramble to blame China and/or liberal governors and/or downplay the seriousness of the epidemic succeeds, the only silver lining I can find at the moment is the dire economic straits in which the professional airbnb parasites find themselves.

Well, them and ticketmaster too I guess. Hell, there are probably dozen shitty industries that deserve every bit of pain that's hitting 'em right now.

I'd never vote republican for any legislative position ever, but for executive positions I think there's a line you shouldn't cross. There's always going to be the parties roughly alternating and it matters for the winners from both parties are sane and competent. COVID shows that Republicans who voted for Trump were wrong to do so regardless of judges. I'd happily trade 8 years of Obama and 4 of Trump for 4 years of Obama and 8 of Romney. Democrats basically don't have Trump-like figures, but if they did and the Republican was someone like Baker, Holcomb, or Romney, I'd vote republican. But that only comes into play with genuine wackjobs. Marianne Williamson would be a dangerous president and if she were the nominee my vote would be in play. Fortunately the Democratic Party doesn't seem in at any genuine risk of nominating a Trump-like candidate in the foreseeable future, so it's a moot point.

Oh, and apparently Sicily will pay half your airfare and a third of your lodging if you'll go there this year. There's worse places to be . . .

The wife thinks that international vacation travel is just permanently OVER. Not just for us, but the world in general. I'm not buying it -- and am currently planning to join my ski group in Austria next winter. We'll see.

I should totally go to Sicily, but maybe not this year.

I'm a quarter Sicilian, so I'll probably blend right in.

I'm half Sicilian and one of my best friends here is Sicilian and I've always wanted to go there.

I am 0% Sicilian to my knowledge, but I would 100% take a subsidized Sicilian vacation.

Sicily is absolutely wonderful.

I see no silver lining in terms of domestic British politics: Johnson remains in power and will go for a no-deal Brexit while everyone is distracted by the virus. The silver lining for the present is that Cambridge is much lovelier without any tourists and with hardly any cars. I would hope realistically for a small, but permanent, move towards bicycling and other, greenish forms of public transport. I think it's too much to hope that air travel has been mortally wounded.

Houses are cheaper for the moment. If ajay is right about remote working, that won't last long in the commutable belt.

There has been a much clearer grasp of which workers are actually essential and that might remain in public consciousness. Might. Possibly.

In US terms, I still believe the smashup of the economy will destroy and discredit Trump. I more or less stopped believing that American democracy was functional in 2004. But hope keeps slithering back.

In EU terms, I could hope that this has shocked the bloc into working better together but I don't know if that's at all true. It's a hope.

I don't know Baker in detail, but I'd almost certainly still end up with Cuomo. I'd just be actually checking to make sure that I wasn't going to make an exception.

On the trading eight years of Romney for four of Obama and four of Trump, I might take that deal in retrospect, but it can't ever be on offer for real unless you have a crystal ball. The real offer is Obama or Romney and then see what happens. I think it's a very bad habit to think along those lines -- the straightforward Obama/Romney choice was wildly in favor of Obama in terms of the welfare of the nation, and thinking that Obama voters were being greedy or something by not settling for Romney is not reasonable.

Republicans I'd vote for include zombie Robert LaFollette and zombie Fiorello LaGuardia. And maybe Howard Baker if he were running against George Wallace.

I've actually voted for 2 Republicans in my life. The first, in my first election ever, was Charles Goodell, who along with Dem Richard Rottinger split the non-crazy vote and gave us p.o.s Senator James Buckley. The other was when our local long-serving (like 9 terms) Congressman got antsy, divorced his wife, and moved in with his girlfriend out of the district. After all of which I would still have voted for him (and should have done given just how utterly awful his Republican successor was) until the point where he starting arguing that it was sexist to expect him to actually maintain a residence in the district he supposedly represented rather than live with his new girlfriend elsewhere.

I don't plan on living until the next millenium so I doubt I'll ever vote for a 3rd.

I probably would have voted for Charles Mathias, but I guess I was voting in Michigan the one time I could have.

It would probably be better for the world (well, environmentally) if air travel were mortally wounded, but it would be somewhat awkward professionally.

I voted for the Republican canddate for mayor, whoever it was, against the Boy Wonder Luke Ravenstahl in 2007. Looking it up now it was a rich guy named Mark DeSantis (not related to the Florida guy). I must have thought he was all right because early in life he worked for famed Moderate Good Guy John Heinz.

One time I voted in the Republican primary in order to protest against a ghastly candidate for the state board of education, who made it on the ballot anyway, and then onto the state board. I think it was an off-presidential year.

I know. I am both thinking very wistfully about the trips abroad I want to take and hoping that the airline industry doesn't come back until it is decarbonized.

62: Me too.

That road lead to Josh Wanderer.

58: Of course you're right and I'm not saying one should actually vote for Romney over Obama to somehow forestall future Trump. The point is instead that we need to act to try to establish a norm that candidates like Trump shouldn't win *for either party*. Fortunately the Democrats are already upholding that norm, but we should continue to uphold that norm, and to try to argue that it's a good norm which Republicans should also embrace. The argument that CC was making leads to Trump if everyone embraces it, so I think that means his argument is wrong. (If I had any education I'd probably put Kant's name in here somewhere?) My point about 8 years of Romney was intended to illustrate that losing an extra executive election here and there is an acceptable price for not having totally wackos in high executive offices. (That said, the counterargument that there's nothing we can do to establish this norm broadly, because the NYTimes thinks this norm should apply to Ds and not Rs, is a strong one. So I'm not that confident CC is wrong.)

62: Mark DeSantis was also my only ever Republican vote. I still think it was the right choice. I will never vote for a Republican again.

66: Massive props to Wander for continuing to run for mayor, on a major party ticket, after having moved to a foreign nation. I hope it's not antisemitic to call that chutzpah? Entirely consistent with the rest of his personality, like being a prepper and having "ISRAEL" custom plates on his half-assedly camo-painted van. Wikipedia says he is or was living in East Jerusalem, which is a little shocking but not surprising.

I might have voted for half a dozen Republicans in my lifetime. Town selectmen, State Representatives, things like that. I could argue that things are different in Vermont, but really it was probably just an irrational bit of bipartisanship for its own sake.

I don't think it leads to Trump. I think it leads to universal healthcare and real action on the climate.

Refusing to embrace the norm means that instead of Al Gore we get George W Bush. Real consequences for that choice, buried under some idiot reporters saying they'd rather have a beer with the guy who doesn't drink. It means that we get either the Gingrich Revolution of 94 or the Tea Party of 10, because people are saying that maybe our newly elected Democratic President could use some opposition to keep him accountable.

I always put the extra 'er'. I made a mental note about how I always get it wrong, but I keep forgetting I actually get it right and then think I'm wrong and 'fix' it. I don't care enough to look it up, but I will say that he can jaywalk with sufficient abandon that he must have more confidence in human nature that I do.

We can't vote for Republicans for lower level offices and then complain that we don't have a good bench. The post-Southern Strategy Republican party needs to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs. Drowned in a bathtub. Once the danger from that bunch is over, the Dems can split between a J Castro mainstream party and an AOC leftward party.

Yeah. It's not even lower level offices, but things like NE states with R governors, or mayors of NYC, horrify me. Regardless of individual qualities, they're trying to advance the fortunes of the party that is trying to kill us all. Decent people should not vote for them.

My point was that Republicans thinking that way led to Trump (not that Democrats thinking that way led to Trump). More Republicans should have endorsed and voted for Clinton.

52.2 I agree with you (and I hope you get to Austria next winter). I even think the cruise ship industry will eventually recover.

I love that my very extroverted neighbor was having enough trouble not being able to talk to people that he got too drunk and proceeded to talk for about 20 minutes about how he has a crush on my boyfriend in front of both of us. Then it got weird and he started talking about how he misses being able to see my ex-husband's nipples when my ex would show off the progress on his chest tattoo.

My fantasy is that because my ex-husband isn't taking the virus seriously, he gets infected.

Got weird?

73: It's so bizarre here. We get Republican Governors but no Republican Attorneys General. TheDemocratic bench in MA is not strong really for our being such a Democratic state.

My point was that Republicans thinking that way led to Trump (not that Democrats thinking that way led to Trump). More Republicans should have endorsed and voted for Clinton.

I guess the 5% of Republicans who don't love Trump would agree with you.

I always wonder if the "weak bench" thing is intraparty treason. The NYC democratic candidates for mayor against 2d term Giuliani and 2d and 3d term Bloomberg didn't seem as if they could possibly have been trying to win as well as they could with the weight of the NYC Democratic Party behind them. Yes, wreckers and saboteurs is always a paranoid fantasy, but those campaigns seemed implausible.

The Maryland Democratic Party made no effort to support the Democratic candidate for governor last year, for example.

It's hard to run a pro-equality party on donations from rich people.

Oh man. Governor Newsom just floated the idea that school year 20-21 start early, in July and August and I will never call him Governor Fingerguns again if he does that.

81:

That one was foreseeable. He wasn't the party's handpicked choice, but had the temerity to win the primary anyway. That sort of behavior is frowned upon here.

To put it in terms that are less extravagant sounding, I think the problem might be less aisle-crossing voting from individual citizens, and more ambivalence about opposing 'moderate' Republicans from the Democratic party insiders. Not always, but often enough to fuck things up. Nothing to do about it but to become Democratic party insiders ourselves, but that's really hard.

79: I was kind of amazed at how little difference it apparently made that Ohio's popular Republican governor and popular Republican Senator both didn't endorse Trump in 2016.

The Democratic primary for Montgomery County Executive also didn't go as they planned and a moderate Democrat "Independent" got 20% of the vote, but most people rallied around Erlich since the Republican candidate was a guy famous for either (depending on who you are) heckling basketball players, being a perennial candidate for random offices for the last 40 years, or being reprimanded for unethical conduct by legal governing bodies.

81 IME, parties don't do much, it's up to the candidate. mostly, to fundraise, choose campaign themes, schedule events, recruit volunteers, buy ads, get free media, and all the rest. I suppose in old timey machine cities -- Boston, maybe Baltimore -- you'd need the blessing of some sort of pope.

I can't imagine that any nominee wouldn't get access to the party's voter database. It's always up to the campaigns to decide how to use it.

I have this conversation pretty often. People are always tell me about how the party ought to be doing this that or the other thing. Training candidates to be better speakers. Crafting microtargeted messages. I tell them that the state party is mostly twenty-somethings running a website and a database. The consultants are the people who do what people are talking about, and they get hired by the candidates. Now there's competition and some blackballing you hear about, but by and large, there's a reserve army of unemployed consultants ready to jump in for the right fee.

BTW, that New York Democratic primary thing is fucked up. Why be deliberately provocative? LB and others living in that state should become insiders, because there's some seriously fucked up shit going on.

It really, really is fucked up. I was thinking of getting more involved once the kids were out of the house, but it didn't happen this year, and now things are all weird.

But essentially, the explanation is that Cuomo is the personal devil and no one will cross him.

Different places are different, of course, but IME it's pretty easy to become a Democratic insider. I'm back on the state central committee now despite not really wanting to be.

The Maryland Democratic Party made no effort to support the Democratic candidate for governor last year, for example.

Establishment centrists prefer losing to the right over winning with the left, exhibit #537.

81: that happened here with Harshbarger. Menino, as mayor of Boston, did not really use his influence. I think Harshbarger went after corruption enough as AG that he made enemies who declined to work on his behalf.

Menino was powerful and vindictive. A. Friend of mine had a non political job in City Hall during his admin. If you disagreed with him, he would crush you. I don't think Cambridge is like that or the suburbs, but a mayor who was in office for as long as Menino was (21 years!) builds up a base of power.

88:

Maryland is very much an old timey machine politics sort of state in many ways. This has its up and down sides.

On the one hand, it's harder for some lunatic to destroy the state like whatshisname in Kansas did. Even the occasional Republican governors are pretty limited in the damage they can do. On the other hand, corruption, nepotism & etc.

Oh my god inject this article right into my veins.

https://medium.com/@nselby/do-you-make-users-rotate-passwords-well-cut-it-out-1864d3964835

But actual silver lining, being reminded to go re read the collection of Far Side.

https://twitter.com/Goodtweet_man/status/1255220959973433350

97 is right.

99: yes, 97 is right, I've used the same 18 character mix of lower case, upper case, symbols, and numbers for some time and it's never done me wrong. Plus there's an Oxford comma in there.

As for silver lining: am re-reading books I liked but are kind of dense, like Austerlitz, and seeing stuff I missed the first time around.

I don't know if this counts as a silver lining, but it's funny that the Tea Party people are seeking a bailout.

I caught everything first time around.

Yes, it's very dumb. My work password, which is one of only a few that require frequent rotation, is by far the weakest of any of my non-trivial accounts, because I have to enter it dozens of times a day and usually can't use a password manager to do so. If you're going to force me to memorise a new 12 plus digit string every couple of months it's going to follow a predictable pattern. Obviously.

Silver lining: there are noticeably fewer people in jail, and the world hasn't ended.

Er, I mean, the world is ending, but not because of the slight reduction in mass incarceration.

Since we're past 40 comments I will chime in with my non-silver lining thoughts of the morning.

Waking up exhausted from long frustrating dream* involving cascading (and context changing) travel complications I could not help but apply my mood to our current situation. Which is to say that we are in a state somewhere after the explosion on the Apollo 13** where the seriousness is recognized but before we've encountered all sorts of unexpected issues along the way. Health, economic, social, political, you name it, hard to anticipate which will be the real bugaboos. And in this political world with this national leadership for God's sake. How much less sanguine could I be? None. None less sanguine.

*Assume we discussed the vivid dream thing here and I missed it or have forgotten it. I generally do not have nightmares of frustration but they have certainly increased. My dreams are generally quite pleasant and I still have a number of those, but unfortunately waking up from them brings on an unsettling quick pleasant/dread of the actual situation context switch that has also been a feature of other stressful episodes of my life. (I can recall about a half-dozen that have triggered this, so usually only pretty significant disruptions or things that have really shaken me.)

**Analogy ban breakage proactively mentioned in this footnote so not a violation