These clearly don't serve the function of monitoring whether anyone slips away, because no one is taking roll and looking for patterns. On the other hand, they have served a really nice function of inviting people to share their experience, pulling some oldsters out of TFA to say hi, and generally serving as open threads.
Should they be less often, then? Would it make a better thread if it was weekly or biweekly?
On me personally:
My day to day life is still really nice, but I also notice that I get vertigo if I try to think and plan out the future. I can zoom out geographically, and think about the world in this moment, and feel all the feelings. But if I try to zoom out temporally, it gets really overwhelming, really quickly.
Current pace seems fine (is that biweekly? Biweekly then).
Mr. 7 is channeling his inner teenager and refusing to get out of bed. It's hard to argue that there's much of a reason for him to get up.
Still fine physically. Yesterday was rough. Atossa was cranky and work was busy. I had to a lead a meeting over Skype for the first time and setting it up was a huge mess. Took me literally an hour of troubleshooting and phone calls with a co-worker. Once everyone was finally on the same page, I thought the content of the meeting went well enough, although I'm slightly worried I made myself look like an idiot. Not any specific problems, just in general.
Agreed with 4, current pace seems fine. I have a lot to say, compared to usual times, but wouldn't want to just dump this in a thread on another topic. Not that anyone worries too much about off-topic comments but it seems more appropriate here.
As I mentioned in the other thread I've been going on long and very early morning walks with a friend. It's doing wonders for my mood and my health. After the first one I was so sore but they've been getting progressively longer and I feel fine. This Friday morning we plan to do the Corniche on the Gulf which will be a nice change of scenery.
Oh and we're at +951 reported cases after several days in the six and seven hundreds after coming down from the nine hundreds. Not good. We have one of the highest cases per capita here, but fortunately also one of the lowest CFRs too.
Some of you may recall that I joined unfoggeDCon 2013 from a Children's Hospital room because my kid had a freak rare illness. It turns out that the incidence of that disease has spiked as SARS-CoV2 has spread:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/28/world/europe/ap-eu-virus-outbreak-kids-rare-syndrome.html
Wondering what this means for her and how careful we have to be about contact- is she at higher risk because she had that before? Were previous cases in the general population due to prior strains of coronaviruses? Fortunately there's an effective treatment for it at least in the previous incarnations, although I don't know if it works in the CoV-2 variant.
So, here's my question: pitchforks, torches, tar, or feathers? Or all of the above?
9: That's what I thought I remembered!.
looking for patterns
You guys would say something if [a commenter] seemed to be obviously melting down and losing my[their] shit over the last 8 weeks, right? Or does that only happen with open hostility?
Ah, yes- I stopped reading that other thread. You are correct. I'm wondering if we'll be contacted about any studies- there are few enough previous patients around, especially girls and non-Asians, that if they want to do any research about prior vs. new cases we'll probably be called in.
I'll respond there about the Power.
Lurid, you seem to be melting down and losing your shit. Is there anything we could do to help with that?
[a commenter] should check their email.
I have mid-size PDF about the challenges of cross-border yak herding, should any commenters feel such an item would be beneficial to them.
14: Oh dear.
The thing I am actually worried about losing, I think, is my moral compass. This is a novel situation. I may be feeling some version of survivor's guilt, which is canonically an easy fix: it's not really your fault, poof! Get over it! But the world-historical badness is apparently doing a number on me.
I briefly considered asking for Amazon Prime box donations and constructing a Vietnam Memorial-style cardboard wall with the names of the dead in some public place. The question of where to get these names seemed fraught, though. If you put out a call online and run it through social media, dozens of channers will start sending you names of dead Nazis and assorted war criminals, right?
Now you've done it, the lk's are going to build a cross-border yak breeding empire and it's all your fault, Mossy.
Re: 1, Once or twice a week are great; every other week would be okay, but I also enjoy the invitation to chat about how it's affecting us personally.
Speaking of which, yesterday was whiplash for my wife. In the morning the governor announced that our category of store might be allowed to reopen for curbside pickup as early as Friday. She was elated, but it'll be Thursday before requirements are sent out, so that's not a lot of notice.
She then crashed down in response to CA calling about missing 2018 returns for our old sole-proprietorship that closed down in 2013... so they're seriously screwed up. (Our board of equalization is in the middle of correcting misapplied payments, and probably notified the other state agency when the payment "disappeared" from the old account because it was applied to the new. She managed not to shout, but was angry, particularly since we've had three contacts with "give us money" components of the IRS and state, but not one bit of assistance since we were compelled to close. Particualarly since the IRS was calling about money that they acknowledged that we'd paid, and they'd received the weekly form, but not the monthly form that says you've submitted the weekly forms. And from Q2 2018, so not very on top of things anyway.
So that crushed her early day optimism, but at the very end of the day she gets notified that a PPP loan has finally come through. So today she's in the store, brightly working on problem solving... figuring out how to optimize limited resources is exactly the style of game (and store management) that she likes. Managing defeat isn't her thing...
Kid on my daughter's third-grade classroom Zoom session: "My dad said, um... in China... they made the coronavirus." Teacher changed the subject.
Still doing fine here. My work is going to be starting a phased process of bringing people back in to the office, though the timing is still very vague. I said I'd rather not be in the first wave of people to come back.
You can get the better chairs if you act fast.
Sunday evening we had our first online social event. Quiz/drinking session with two other couples we know (their kids are friends of xelA). Turned the cameras off at about 1am, several bottles of wine down.
The upshot of that was that I was brutally hungover on Monday. Which would have been fine, except I was giving an on-camera online talk and Q&A session to approx 30 European herbaria as part of a big EU funded systematics project. Worse, it was at 10am, when I had originally thought it was the afternoon. So I gave the talk while so hungover I thought I was going to throw up, or totally lose the plot. My co-worker, who was on the call, told me that I came across really professionally, and I hit the time on my talk to the exact minute. Years of doing conference presentations while hungover has clearly honed this skill.
I've been really unproductive generally, although I did get some small amount of code written today.
Things have been getting better at home, though. I think we are all adjusting to the new way of life, and we are all being much kinder and calmer with each other, in general.
Although I have sympathy for Nathan in 5, as xelA can also sometimes be a total PITA when it comes to home-schooling.
I wonder if it's that age. Ace is the worst for homeschooling for us, by far.
You can get the better chairs if you act fast.
Maybe you fancy private-sector people can.
To add to your age theory, my five-year old threw an enormous tantrum today because I had the audacity to wake her up at 7:45 for school.
Good luck to Moosequeen, and anyone else I'm missing.
The day (and yesterday) with Mr. 7 are not improving. Fundamentally, we have no way to get him to do schoolwork: neither carrots (in the form of praise and sticker charts with prizes) or sticks (such as taking away tv/video game time) seem to do it. We just had a long argument that started with him wanting to do some work "later" instead of now; when "later" was selected as a time for a different kind of work and we pointed out that *that* would have to get moved he got very upset, got upset at his lack of involvement in the sticker-chart rules ("you said I had not much responsibility, so that means I have some, so I should have something to say about the rules!"), and so forth.
This is also something his teacher struggled with, as I understand it, but I think the peer pressure and structured environment of the classroom tended to help.
General question for everyone: what are your thoughts on contract tracing apps? Would/will you install one?
I'm pretty pro-government and somewhat suspicious of tech companies and I am having a huge 'no way no how' response. Not sure if that is appropriate or not.
(and given that this is second grade, and we already know that nobody's going back to school this year, it's hard for me to even make the case to myself that he really ought to be doing the work)
I think the next level with my daughter tends to be me saying (not verbatim) "Okay, go ahead and fail. You're right, I can't make you do this stuff, and if you want to stop participating in school and get zeroes in everything, that is a thing that can happen. I give up. I'm tired of fighting. You do what you want, but the consequences are yours." She is then completely horrified and does her work, but requires a little soothing after the shock of being told that this isn't actually a game rigged in her favor, and she can lose.
This is not exactly some kind of genius strategy. I do get terminally tired of the power struggles. But I think the reality check is pretty useful. Obviously, it wouldn't work on a kid who really doesn't give a shit about doing well, but she absolutely does. The "resist at all cost!!!!" part of her brain is not aware of it, though.
31: I work for one of the big tech companies in question. I am definitely waiting to see what it is that we roll out.
From the inside I quite trust our privacy controls, as applied against technical bugs or against malicious insiders, and for location stuff specifically we recently added "auto-delete after 30 days", which is a good mix of usability and not generating a complete dossier on someone that can be subpoena'd later. It's hard to prove to the outside how this works, though.
32: how did the vacation week go, a few weeks ago? (IIRC?)
Because if vacation went fine, what are your thoughts on saying "fuck it" to the remainder of the school year?
"School Vacation" week: On the one hand, my wife and I were able to spent a relatively large and uninterrupted time working, which is good. On the other, for him it was pretty much all screen time all the time, which worries me, and seems like a bad thing to do for months on end.
I am tempted by "fuck it". I'm not concerned about his reading or math skills at all (but writing would be a good idea). The things I am concerned about - behavior & classroom etiquette, social skills, peer interactions - are basically not happening in this environment anyway. If I can get him to use an inside voice and stop loudly interrupting video chats with every free thought and possible attention-seeking behavior he has, I might count that as progress.
I doubt my wife would be on board. She is constitutionally Lawful Good.
The Calabat is doing *very* well at his schoolwork. We set a schedule where he does schoolwork and piano after breakfast and then has the rest of the day free, and it's working pretty well so far. Both kids are whining non-stop that I don't play with them, however, and evidence of my parental neglect includes taking them on a lovely hike this morning and making them pancakes.
(Also, school is not actually cancelled. Just not happening in person and nothing is being "graded", but school technically still exists in some form. I am sure the fear would be that if we declared "fuck it" they would declare "have fun doing second grade over again!". Not likely, but it's probably enough fear to prevent us giving up entirely.)
wake her up at 7:45 for school
By contrast, now that my 5.5 year old understands that he gets to watch My Little Pony until lunch time, he leaps out of bed, throws his clothes on and beelines for the couch and screen. Some mornings I can intercept him for a kiss, some mornings I get stiff-armed.
He is in Early Kinder and I figure he's not obligated to know anything until kindergarden, and I surrendered completely. I tell myself "My Little Pony has nice pro-social messages."
I think the state board of ed declared that no one is being held back this year. Hooray social promotion!
The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse has mostly pro-social messages. The only exception that comes to mind was the one where one of the Mouseketools was a .45 automatic and another was Harvey Keitel's phone number.
General question for everyone: what are your thoughts on contract tracing apps?
Lots of hype and fear for something that just isn't going to work very well.
42 last: Why? Seems to be working okay in various Asian countries. (Without actually using apps, I think. Just network location data.)
so far the proposed Apple/Google API seems much more privacy-preserving than the proposals from various govts for centrally-managed records.
They recently came out with one here. A friend went to install it on her Android but it wanted access to everything. I have an iPhone and haven't tried it yet but this makes me far less inclined to do so.
Yeah, network location data works pretty well in Asia. If everybody is sending their geotracking information to a central, its relatively easy to interrogate data and track shit down. You can build a somewhat robust system around that because its not terribly dependent on human behavior.
I guess what this app is going to do is have everybody's phone have bluetooth sex (an exchange of hashes, I suppose) with everybody else's phone they come near. Then, if you get found to have COVID, they get a list of all the phones partners and the partners get notified. Which - ok, novel idea, but such a thing has never been tested, and I strongly suspect that under real-world conditions, performance would be shit.
I mean, the first problem getting a critical mass of Americans to install and use an app. That's hard for any app, let alone an app that poses a risk to privacy and is a threat to OUR FREEDUMBS. There is also the problem that its particularly older and poorer Americans who are most at risk, and yet who have fewer and shittier phones.
Anyway, once you do get people to install it, you have to make sure they don't decide to turn it off. Which they will, after all the promiscuous bluetooth phone sex drains their battery.
So, assume that's not a problem and there is actually a critical mass of people out there using this thing. How do you prevent the thing from just having a massive amount of false positives that overwhelms your testing system? Like, if I was standing on a corner, and a bus of people stopped at a light, and my phone decided to have sex with all their phones, and then later I'd discovered to have the COVID, all those people get a notification?
So, all those people going to get freaked out by a notification, then they go run down and get tested. Do you have confidence in the US testing infrastructure's ability to absorb that kind of excess capacity? I don't. I mean, you could deal with it by turning down the promiscuousness of the bluetooth sex, I suppose - but then you start to run into the opposite problem - too many false negatives.
So then you need calibrate the thing so it warns enough people to be useful without flooding the system? You could do that but you would have to adjust to constantly shifting behavior. It would take months to find a working balance, and in the meantime, it would feature high-profile public failures that cause people to loose faith in the thing and start turning it off.
By the time its finally debugged, enough people will have lost faith in the product that whatever critical mass there was that was needed to make it work will be gone.
I keep Bluetooth turned off because the name is creepy.
Bruce Schneier says similar things as spike about the practical problems of using apps to do contact tracing (and some of the comments argue that they're still worthwhile despite the problems). https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html
What will also be interesting is all the shady/fraudulent coronavirus tracing apps that pop up.
Singapore tried one. 17% of the population downloaded it. And Singapore is your best case for "hey everyone do this creepy high tech social management thing".
I think the British app is going to be a huge waste of time and effort, which is a shame. The interesting point is the contrast with Huawei. There are all sorts of people having conniptions at the thought that large, vital chunks of 5G infrastructure will be dependent on Chinese equipment, even though there is a deal which lets GCHQ examine and vet the code in these things for security. [That may not be effective, but it's there].
But the smartphone ecology is far more important to the world today than notional 5G stuff, and this is entirely controlled by two giant foreign firms, one of which collaborates with the Chinese government, while the other is in the advertising business. And Apple and Google are able unilaterally to decide that their phones won't be used for centralised data collecting* and this decision takes priority over what any democratically elected government might decide. Because of the rules made and enforced at code level by Apple and Google, using bluetooth for contact tracing is not going to work. People will have to download a special app [they won't] and then run it all the time in the foreground [they won't].
A potentially useful tool for contact tracing has just been completely broken. This seems to me a political story, yet another illustration of the way in which power actually works in the contemporary world.
The alternative, if you want a central overview of where the virus is spreading and how, is to use the phone companies' location databases. That is, I think what is done in SK and ROC -- but it's far more intrusive than a bluetooth thing which has been designed for pseudonymity from the beginning. Of course there is a risk to privacy in what the government in Britain planned. But it needs to be balanced against all the other risks of the outbreak.
*Unless the Chinese government really wants that to happen, in which case of course Apple will keep their data on servers in China, subject to Chinese law ...
I will not be installing the UK government sponsored app. The utter bullshit written in the NCSC article by Dr Ian Levy was a textbook example of dsquared's "good policies do not need lies told about them" maxim.*
I trust Google and Apple more than I trust Dominic Cummings and Peter Thiel. I don't trust any of them very much, it has to be said, though.
* "We don't build a social graph, we just store pairwise proximity events"**
** literally about page 1 in any tutorial on building networked graphs is, "building a graph from weighted pairs". I could write it in (literally, not kidding) about 6 lines of code. Maybe 20 if you want to interface with some data store somewhere.***
*** the NCSC cyber security expert _fucking knows_ this.
And we discussed recently how you could manage a lot of this without needing an app. The highest-risk contacts are those where you spend a lot of time - minutes, rather than seconds - in close proximity to a carrier, indoors.
When are you going to do that?
Well, on public transport. And we track, or could track, almost everyone on public transport because they use payment cards or RF tap-to-pay bank cards to pay their fares.
In shops and restaurants and so on. And we track, or could track, almost everyone who goes into a shop or restaurant because, again, they use card payments.
In offices and places of employment. And most employers track that too - when you logged on to your computer, when you used your badge to come in through the security gate, whatever.
We don't need to worry about the rest. We don't need to worry about "ooh I walked past a carrier on the street" because you're almost certainly not going to catch it from passing someone on the street.
This is shoe leather work. We don't need some creepy app tracking everyone's phones - people wouldn't install it anyway. We just need a load of people going through bank transaction records and Oyster card logs. To put it in terms of fictional black guys with avuncular affects and half moon glasses, we need Lester Freamon, not Lucius Fox.
nd Apple and Google are able unilaterally to decide that their phones won't be used for centralised data collecting* and this decision takes priority over what any democratically elected government might decide. Because of the rules made and enforced at code level by Apple and Google, using bluetooth for contact tracing is not going to work.
It doesn't really "take priority". The governments can still do what they want re: centralised data collection (and, in fact, the UK is). They already do a bunch of centralised data collection under RIPA (and outside it, if various reports are accurate). They can mandate people use an app if they want to go out in public. It's just not going to be built into phone OSes (which, in Google's case, are not going to be updated on most phones for years anyway).
I think it could be baked into the play services which are on Android updated very frequently.
You're right, it does seem to be using Play Services, at least for post 6.0 devices. Which presumably is most if not all of the ones that Bluetooth LE anyway.
Against ajay: I think the privacy implications of more or less realtime access to everybody's bank accounts are also fairly hair raising. And it is rather London-centric to suppose that oyster cards will help a great deal in the rest of the country, though there are equivalents in some, not all, northern cities. Lots of offices don't have electronic check in and out: very few small businesses do. And if you're using bank cards to check who is in the supermarkets, they don't actually tell you anything much about distancing. For that you have to know which till was used, how close it is to the others, and -- crucially -- what people did before they got to the till and how long they circulated within the shop. Bank card won't tell you any of that.
Against GY: I think the A/G decision does take priority because it means that the government app won't work - people won't either download it or use it in the quantities that would make it even marginally useful.
Obviously there is a tradeoff here between freedom and efficiency in combating the virus. But that's a political question and my original point is that it's not being decided politically but simply by the imbalance of power between A/G and the national government. [and that none of the people who worry about loss of national power to either Huawei or the EU seem at all bothered by this -- but that's not, I think, aimed at anyone here]
57.1: aha. But you wouldn't need to give anyone bank account access. You just get TFL to say "our carrier was on this train at this time. What bank cards or oyster cards were used to get on the same train while our carrier was on it?" Then you take that list to the banks and say "hey, your customer with this bank card number could be a contact. Can you phone them up please?" No one needs any information other than what they have already.
As for the other points: if you're in an office, you probably have a computer, and that means an activity log.
Shops: yes, you will catch a lot of people who didnt use the same till or whatever. Doesn't matter. Test them too.
They were interviewing a guy who lived in Seoul on the news last night and he said during the peak of the pandemic there, he was getting 50 or 60 texts a day from the government tracking system warning about potential exposure. Sounded like they were using a pretty wide net of the sort ajay mentions; lots more people will get warnings than with a bluetooth-based system, but the harm of false positives is comparatively small.
Except if there's not enough testing available.
53.last ajay's gonna get a wire up on the coronavirus.
Another good thing about what ajay is saying is that public transit, restaurants, grocery stores, are your most likely places of catching the coronavirus.
Another 830 cases here today, a bit of a decrease from the yesterday's but not much and not near the mid-600s we were at just a couple of days ago.
Against GY: I think the A/G decision does take priority because it means that the government app won't work - people won't either download it or use it in the quantities that would make it even marginally useful.
I'm not really seeing how this would be different if the UK were using the Google/Apple approach? It's still opt-in, and still has the same limitations around sensitivity (ie working through walls). The architectural differences are mainly relevant for later research (or if you're being conspiratorial, non-COVID surveillance).
The one big effectiveness difference I have seen reported on is that without the Google/Apple system, the app needs to be active, which I would agree would cripple its usefulness. But I've also seen it reported that the UK government claims to have a workaround. I am of course taking that with a grain of salt given the government's level of transparency so far.
I don't see how location services are precise enough, vs. Bluetooth can actually tell when you're within a more relevant range. And the contact flag can be tweaked to match epidemiological relevance- only indicate a contact if you're within 6 feet for 5+ minutes, and maybe the ability to tell when you're in a confined space vs. outside.
I don't want to give my location out except as needed to hatch Pokemon eggs.
And it is rather London-centric to suppose that oyster cards will help a great deal in the rest of the country, though there are equivalents in some, not all, northern cities.
This is true. But, you know, better than nothing - and London also has a far higher percentage of journeys by public transport than anywhere else in the country.
53.last ajay's gonna get a wire up on the coronavirus.
Listen. You follow the coronavirus, you get coronavirus patients and coronavirus carriers. But you follow the PPE procurement contracts... and you don't know where the fuck you gonna end up.
Actually I would pay whatever it took to get David Simon to do a drama on the pandemic.
This is my first day back in the office. We quasi-reopened on Monday, but I'm going to only be working one day a week at the office for now.
It's really weird. There's hardly anyone here, and anyone not in their personal office has to wear a mask. Fortunately I've been given a temporary personal office. Also only one person is allowed in the restroom at a time. They installed one of those sliding signs that says "Occupied" or "Vacant". Naturally the first time I went to the bathroom I forgot to slide the sign back to "Vacant" after I was done until a half-hour later when I was discussing all the oddities of our plague-time office with a coworker.
The restroom thing would be nice. I'd rather poop alone.
But you follow the PPE procurement contracts... and you don't know where the fuck you gonna end up.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeit!
During these trying times, we must poop alone together.
The office restroom has only two stalls, so you can't even give people space.
65: Location service is definitely not precise enough. I've heard a few people here at G discussing that, early on, and it would be a couple of orders of magnitude too many false positives.
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NMroboticallyM to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider.
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Re: home schooling, a friend said she's heard from educators that instead of "distance learning" we ought to be calling it "crisis learning."
"Okay, go ahead and fail. You're right, I can't make you do this stuff, and if you want to stop participating in school and get zeroes in everything, that is a thing that can happen. I give up. I'm tired of fighting. You do what you want, but the consequences are yours."
Pre-corona, Kraabniece #1 was depressed and not writing the papers she needed to finish up some incompletes. I told her that not doing something is still making a choice. If she wanted to choose to fail her courses, that was a legitimate choice* and I wouldn't judge her for it, but that she should be clear that that's what she was doing. That seemed to help. (Not that alone -- I was also sitting around in dark rooms with her and letting her talk about how much everything sucked and how all the majors were impossible and how she'll never get a job anyway.)
*Easy to say since I'm not paying her tuition.
We're still okay, though I'm finally joining other folks in getting stressed out by work, which has been low-key until now because it mostly requires IRL interaction among large groups of people for many hours. We've been holding off trying to translate it into something that will work online while things were shaking out but I now have to figure out how to transform everything. I'm really glad of being able to take advantage of other people's zoom experiments (thanks, beta testers!), but it's going to be a lot of work. I also have to re-write our core curricula to grapple with our brave new world.
I feel like I don't have a right to whine because other people have been struggling with work for weeks, but I still feel pretty damn whiny.
Our mayor continues to be doing a good job and there have been fewer than 60 deaths in Austin, but the governor's re-opening orders trump (pun intended) local rules and we haven't gotten nearly the number of tests the state has promised.
76: MANN MACHT DER LINKE ARM EIN
DER LINKE ARM AUS
EIN AUS EIN AUS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwaxWoJPUC0
Further to 38 and 40 our superintendent sent this out:
"Promotion: The State guidance has recommended that all students be promoted to the next grade in the fall. In our district, all JK-8 students will be promoted to the next grade level, unless a conversation about retention was initiated with the family/caregiver prior to the closure. HS student promotion is dependent on passing courses in both semesters and the number of credits a student has earned throughout the school year."
Just back from a 2 hour long walk along the corniche. Got there around 4:30ish so got to see the sunrise over the bay. Delightful.
It's always such a relief to see Lord Ra has triumphed once again. One can never quite be _sure_, you know.
The earth's rotational kinetic energy is 2.138×1029 J. In 2013 it was estimated that the world energy consumption was about 5.67×1020 J. So, we're still quite a ways away from pulling one over on Lord Ra, but I'd like to think that with a few more centuries, human ingenuity will triumph.