Well, it's 4:45 am, and we've got gloves and masks, and have trained the kids to use rest stops as carefully as possible, and hopefully by 1 am tonight we will be at my parents' house.
It feels a little like the moment in a zombie apocalypse movie where the main characters have established a workable living routine in their hideout after a month or two, and they decide to venture out for some unforced reason - establish contact with other survivors, forage for supplies, whatever - and right before they leave, they run through all the reasons that this is a great plan and nothing could possibly go wrong, as long as we all remember to hold our breath for the next 18 hours.
Also my parents have the worst poker faces about not judging people based on their weight, and I'm packing the covid-19, as they say. Maybe if I lose a pound per hour.
We met some friends at the beach on Wednesday. From reading UK Twitter, I believe this makes us history's greatest monsters. It was really nice, though. The beach* wasn't insanely crowded, certainly no worse than any of the parks near where we live, and better than many of them. Social distancing wasn't hard, except for the stairs up and down the cliff face, and even that wasn't too bad.
* https://www.google.com/search?q=birling+gap&safe=on&tbm=isch
Weight, I'm still about 4.5kgs up from the low point (early December last year), and about 2kgs up from the start of lockdown. I lost a couple of kilos over the past 2 weeks through serious effort, and then had a couple of days when I had to work a lot, barely left the house for 3 days, and it has gone back up by most (but not all) of what I lost.
Well, it's 4:45 am, and we've got gloves and masks, and have trained the kids to use rest stops as carefully as possible, and hopefully by 1 am tonight we will be at my parents' house.
HIT IT.
It feels a little like the moment in a zombie apocalypse movie where the main characters have established a workable living routine in their hideout after a month or two, and they decide to venture out for some unforced reason -
I've been a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre since watching the Romero films on TV when I was a young teenager. And after consuming a lot of more recent stuff had an idle fantasy, wouldn't it be cool if something like that happened and I got to hole up in my place with an ample supply of food and all the time in the world to read and watch movies. It sucks ass.
I've sometimes had a version of this fantasy but it always involved living in a rural environment and making a lot of jam, and also some other people around, which doesn't describe my situation now.
Anyway, I'm still happy! I don't understand it! The biggest thing that changed is I got my concentration back and I sincerely enjoy all my work.
After having three negative Covid tests and being advised by three medical professionals that my very mild symptoms were not a reason to treat myself as presumptively Covid positive I started thinking, "What if the reason I am feeling sick is that I am acting sick?" and in fact, resuming regular exercise, going outside, and eating a healthier diet has made me feel a lot better physically (although the mood improvements started before that). I think I have allergies, and on reflection maybe I have had allergies before, it's just that normally I don't respond to the slightest of allergy symptoms with extremely pro-inflammatory behavior.
QRP flaked out on coming to stay here because, I don't know, he found a job and a cheap place to stay with a lot of roommates and for some reason finding a job that's a health risk also means he should have housing that's a health risk in spite of the fact that he has some unspecified immune condition? He also claimed he was going to come visit me for a bit, but I don't believe it at all. He said he's too depressed to have sex and I said that's fine I'd take some company, and he said okay he'd come, but he won't. I was sad about this for like one minute and then stopped being so. I was just like, oh, this is obviously a repeat of other situations in which I'm trying to get attention from some chronically depressed dude, and those dudes were a step up from the abusive ones, but still not great, and I should really divest myself from him and this situation entirely. He does not have the sense to accept my emotional or material support, which could be considerable, and is never going to be reliable given his style of responding to the stresses in his life, which are always going to be intense, which is why I broke up with him in the first place.
Starting 7/1 I should hopefully have a new roommate; that's another thing that will change. Only two people have responded to my ad so far though. One of them turned out to be someone I know already, who didn't know she was writing to me! After talking to her I know we aren't compatible roommates and I have to send an email telling her so. I have gotten a lot better about cleaning as I've gotten older and have systems that work for me but that's improvement from an abysmal place and if someone likes very clean spaces and their intense peeves extend to "piles of mail" and "too much stuff attached to the fridge" (a far from exhaustive list of things hanging from my fridge door: coupons that expired last year, a foot reflexology chart, two different YMCA group exercise schedules, a couple recipes, and a plastic bag full of rubber gloves) there is no way we can live together without stress on both sides. But I'm talking to the second today and they're promising: 28 which is not too young, an essential worker as a community health organizer which means they won't be in the house 100% of the time, would be excited about a dog or rats, seem nice. I feel like "could be into rats" is a good predictor of whether I could be a good roommate with someone. I think "is uncomfortable with rats" tracks with "has a high need for order in the environment".
I dunno, I think I got flipped into some gratitude frame where the continued existence of things I like just makes me really happy. I can still do my work, I can still talk to people online, I can still exercise. All of this will be over sometime.
I watched White Squall last night. There's worse ways to spend a couple of hours: Bridges can act, and that Ridley Scott knows a thing or two about visual story-telling.
My wife and I returned to Target yesterday morning. We haven't been there since February. She had planned to go last weekend, but when she saw how crowded the parking lost was she thought better of it. Thursday morning turned out to be a good time to go, as the store was practically empty - far emptier than I've ever seen it before. And just about everyone that was there was wearing a mask. It was fairly well-stocked except hardly any soap and no weights (my wife inexplicably misses lifting heavy weights at the gym).
1,830 new cases reported here today. It's going up again. Testing is above 5,000 again.
945 cases, 30k tests here, Barry. I'm sorry.
Stay in the car in Alabama, heebie. Some of you may recall that I was extremely pissed off by people joking about Covid-19 selectively killing Republicans, right? I really wonder how much the fantasy that Covid-19 will selectively kill Democratic voters is driving the more overtly politicized pressure to let the virus run rampant. I no longer have any real idea of how inhibited people are.
Whoops, but I'm human too and having impure thoughts about Kadyrov being hospitalized. He'll be fine; it's not even worth the effort to imagine otherwise, with particular attention to details of alternative medical "treatments" one could receive in Moscow.
That picture makes him look like a Quidditch player.
Anyway, everyone is doing fine here and I don't actually wish death or suffering on anyone, even evil people, and even though it causes trolley problem quandaries.
There are many thousands on the other trolley track from Kadyrov.
No new cases, on 1000 tests. Statewide, we're at 22 active cases, with 3 hospitalizations. 8 of the active cases are a single cluster in Ravalli county, just south of us. 10 more are 350+ miles to the east, either in Billings or the Crow Nation.
So I have this pending motion that is now set for argument next week. The judge says people can zoom if they want. Everyone else is going to zoom, but I'm still kind of thinking I'd like to go in person. It's be just me, the judge, and the court clerk in the court room, and likely no one in the hallway. They have sanitizer at the podium -- I can wear a mask until I stand up to speak. The judge isn't wearing a mask on the bench, and has been busy with mostly criminal cases the whole lockdown period. There are no active cases here, where the court is, or in any county in-between.
You guys are going to tell me I should just zoom in, aren't you?
If the courtroom is going to be empty, it's probably just fine. OTOH, people talking loudly in full rooms is the absolute worst, as far as I can tell, so resisting the slippery slope back to getting courtrooms functioning as normal does have some value. I'd zoom, but I wouldn't judge you for not.
16: TROLLEYS AREN'T REAL.
17: You're almost certainly not going to get sick if you go in person, so this question is about social awkwardness, right? That's your call, I think...
I literally live in Mr. Roger's neighborhood. I know trolleys are real.
We're still healthy and alive. Until yesterday, we'd been surprised and pleased by our lame duck mayor, who is normally prone to getting wagged by Fox News type concerns, but is deeply faithful... and did the right thing, working with the Governor and 12 largest CA city mayors, implementing stricter than state minimum requirements on businesses, issuing a strict shelter at home order, and riding out the "muh Freedoms" brigade with clear explanations.
Yesterday he and the council caved; not only are they abandoning Fresno specific requirements (defaulting to the State in all particulars), they also got a variance approved by the state for in restaurant dining, and have set Tuesday as "opening day" for all businesses (that the state allows to be open) to leave curbside and open for customers. All businesses are requested to maintain social distancing and masks are technically required in government and business buildings, but they also said that they'll only enforce egregious violations, and they'll refund a number of the fines they levied for violations over the last two months -- all of which were repeated violations because the first violation was a warning without a fee.
So again on little notice the rules are changing dramatically. We need to find some hand sanitizer to place adjacent to the entry door (well, officially and correctly, though if they're only looking for egregious violations we probably could slip through... not that we want to), which has been difficult since the start of the shutdown, and seems likely to be worse if all of the curbside only businesses have only this weekend to grab it for a Tuesday opening to customers.
Obviously, "the kingdom of make-believe" was just a way to expose children to the idea of counterfactual modeling of the kind necessary for making utilitarian value judgements.
21: Aren't they being physically menaced by white-nat protestors?
Daniel Striped-Tiger was nervous because he caused a guy to be killed to save five others from being killed. It turned out that one of the saved people was a serial killer who went on to have six victims after being saved.
The fancy food shop close to us has re-opened as a walk-in store, having spent the last six weeks as purely curbside-pickup. I have some wine to pick up from there, but I'm balking because I haven't actually been inside a store in two months and I don't know if this is really the time to start.
Still doing fine here. The governor announced earlier this week that he's lifting all statewide restrictions on businesses as of today, so we'll see how that goes. The mayor is as usual being a bit more cautious, so we'll likely move to a further stage of reopening but not as far as the state has gone and it'll take effect Monday. He's going to announce the details later today.
I started sanding the deck again a couple days ago and it looks a lot better, but then it rained yesterday and it's overcast today and may rain some more, so further sanding is on hold until it clears up. Otherwise I've been busy downloading papers from JSTOR for my blogging project on epidemics and Native American demography. The literature on the topic is immense, so while I was initially thinking it would be a single blog post I'm now thinking it's more likely to be a series. I'll need to read the papers to get a better sense of exactly how it'll shape up, though.
Still here. This week seemed a bit better than last week. But this morning Cassandane told me that school here wouldn't fully reopen until there was a vaccine, which was really horrifying, until I actually read the article and saw that there would be a phased return to normalcy which I found greatly encouraging.
23: One of the council people has been organizing rallies, etc., and his followers have been harassing, but probably not exponentially more on this topic. The confrontation that I think you're referencing was (I think) universally understood to be a stunt for attention -- even the council member who'd wound the protestor up disavowed him.
Among the populous, there are unfortunately a lot of "masks are an infringement" types, and a restaurant defied the city & state order before Mother's Day was a brief celebrity. It feels very like the cartoon people with an angel and devil on their shoulders, with very widespread debates about sources to trust, etc.
Doing fine here, although I'm beginning to think moving in the midst of a pandemic while simultaneously executing the highest profile product launch of my career to date wasn't the best planning, on top of which my (adored) boss has just left so I don't have a heavyweight to throw at any roadblocks that may be in my way.
I tried to slide another adored boss from a past job into the hiring manager for my boss' role's DMs, but got shot down because the old boss is too senior (and really, he is). But reaching out to that old boss about the opening at my current company caused him to tell me he is currently interviewing for 4 separate C-Suite roles, at 3 of which he would need to build a leadership team and for which he would want to hire me. Adding an interview process onto everything else (especially since I just got this job) seems kind of insane--but with the loss of the boss that made this current job so good, the potential to work for another beloved boss, and a potential 30-50% jump in base salary given the titles he was throwing around, I gotta say I'm tempted.
The launch would be substantially complete before I could be hired, so I wouldn't be leaving my current group in too big of a lurch. Ugh.
I'm dumb for even thinking about this, aren't I?
I highly recommend pancreatitis for weight loss. I've lost 20 pounds.
29: not necessarily, but see how things shake out now that the adored boss has gone. But I think this is a really weird time for medicine and imaging. There are going to be fewer people with cushy commercial insurance to get imaging, and hospitals and free standing centers will have to space out appointments to manage infection control.
Oh, one other thing:
Weirdly, given how high stakes such a thing might have seemed even a few years ago, my older kid coming out a month ago as nonbinary and ace with they/them pronouns has been relatively drama free. Everyone in their life has been completely supportive (their stepdad has an adult trans son, so no issues there even).
The only thing is I haven't told my Mom because it's just going to be a pain in my ass to get the concepts across. LGBTQ knowledge is not her strong suit--she's not prejudiced in the sense of bearing ill will, but she's so damn ignorant that she's not going to understand how big a deal misgendering can be for GNC folks (although my kid is really patient in correcting us when we slip, it's in part because they know we're really trying--that won't be the case for my mom). Mom is just getting old enough that her brain just doesn't take in new info in a way that's going to be useful for this stuff. She's still sharp as a tack in so many ways, but this is one area of cognition that has very obviously slipped in the past decade.
There's no great rush, as we won't be seeing my mom til after the pandemic dies down completely (ideally post-vaccine, but that may not be practical). So not a huge deal just yet, but I hate that I have to manage my genuinely good-hearted mom in this way to keep her from hurting my kid.
31: Yeah--it's definitely a weird time for the business side of healthcare. If I left I would be leaving the healthcare software industry and most likely moving back into some area of implantable med device (those are the bulk of the businesses he is interviewing with--there might be one outside implantables, but he couldn't talk about it because the position is currently still occupied and is thus too hush hush).
Chopper, you owe the company nothing, and opportunities like you describe don't grow on trees. The odds that you'll get a new amazing boss (or become the new amazing boss) aren't great, I think, so unless it's a weird startup or something, I wouldn't let an overdeveloped sense of loyalty hinder career advancement.
I just had a nice chat with the second roommate candidate and they seem great! I hope they want to live here. AND I used up my spring mix having had to discard only one tiny shriveled leaf. Everything's coming up Tia.
I guess the best thing I can say is that I didn't get eaten.
Second 34- big jumps in salary and responsibility have a huge effect downstream and when the opportunities come you need to go after them. I was on the fence about quitting my last job two years ago for my current one because of some of what you describe. I had a lot of institutional knowledge and was traffic cop for many operations and it sounds like things did in fact fall apart to some extent when I left, but looking at where I am now it was a total no brainer.
Chopper, best of luck to your kid -- who IIRC is actually a kid, but it's a bummer that there's no gender-neutral word for adult son/adult daughter other than ridiculous stuff like "offspring." Pronouns are a weirdly heavy cognitive load for people. I haven't told my Mom because it's just going to be a pain in my ass to get the concepts across -- maybe you could write her a letter spelling it out, then have a conversation to review? Semi-serious suggestion...
I haven't checked in for a very long time and feel bad about that. I genuinely miss all of you but after sinking more than a decade of my life into constantly refreshing the comment threads on this blog, I finally had to admit to myself that interacting with people in that way in this format was an unhealthy habit for me.* I tried to scale back but had trouble maintaining a level where I was engaged enough to more or less know what's going on without spending more time that I wanted, so I basically drifted away. I don't even know where or how to start catching up now, I can't imagine what news I've missed. (Once upon a time I read the fucking archives like any responsible blog commenter, but that feels overwhelming now.)
Anyway, I'm glad to see that much of the news in this thread is positive, or at least familiar. I think familiar counts as positive these days. As for a basic check-in on me, I'm doing so phenomenally well that I almost feel embarrassed talking about it. That's more from a shift in mental outlook than a shift in external circumstances, although external circumstances in my life have been pretty damn good overall. All around, life is great, and I'm happy. I've been happy before but it's never lasted very long. It feels like it has the potential to stick this time, but who knows; I guess we'll see.
So what else is new?
*It's hard for me to figure out a way to word this that doesn't seem to imply that interacting regularly with you collectively as fellow human beings was somehow part of the problem. But it's definitely not that. It's the addictive nature of the format itself, the constant refreshing to see what's new. I had to delete facebook from my phone for basically the same reason.
I think I would be violating the sanctity of off blog communication by being specific, but the business venture is doing well?
Glad to hear things are well. I was wondering.
Just inside Florida border, forced off highway to a weigh station with med tents. "In the past two weeks, have you been to New York, Louisiana, or Tennessee?" "Uhhhh...we just drove from Texas."
"Did you spend the night in Louisiana?"
"no, we just drove straight through."
"ok, go forward and get back on the highway!"
urple! Glad to hear you're doing well.
Uh oh, my sister was planning to go from TN to FL next week, and her car has TN plates...
41: I appreciate the circumspection but it's not something that needs to be kept quiet... for anyone that doesn't know, I'm opening a private-room karaoke bar with a few friends/partners. Or, I will open it I guess. Maybe. The physical buildout is all done. The furniture, fixtures and equipment have all been purchased and installed, all our licenses and permits are set, the bar menu is set, the staff has been hired and trained. We had a soft opening in early March and then we and all other public businesses were ordered to shut down three days before our planned opening. So we haven't opened the doors yet. And despite the current noises about reopening everything, I'm not sure when we will be able to open or what that will end up looking like. Our entire business plan is packing a bunch of people into a small space and having them all breathe all over each other by singing loudly, which it's not clear is something a lot of people want to do in the current environment. So I don't know. I'm on wait-and-see mode for right now. My own personal living expenses have dropped enough during quarantine (basically from the lack of going out ever) that covering my share of the monthly mortgage payment isn't a huge hardship for the time being, although if this stretches indefinitely then it would eventually become an issue. Part of me assumes that if this stretches indefinitely there will by then be enough other people struggling with similar circumstances that some sort of national rent freeze/mortgage relief/income support will *have* to be forthcoming; the other part of me just laughs at the naivety of that first part. Either way, I can't really worry about it -- things seem too foggy to me right now to do much concrete planning, so I'm just waiting to see what unfolds.
44: "Look, we used a chemical toilet. We didn't even use the bathroom in Louisiana."
Also, what's wrong with Tennessee, plague-wise? I haven't been paying attention.
Heebie, you and yours are headed to Gainesville, right? I live here and it's felt pretty consistently not terrible. The county has maintained things a couple of notches less reckless than the state and the state's numbers, even acknowledging that they're being fudged, are holding pretty alright too. Also it's suddenly hot as hell so we're getting whatever benefit that brings. May your transit through highway rest stops of the southeast be plague-free.
You can say hello to my uncle, unless you are my uncle.
3:20 am here and I'm up for another walk on the boardwalk at the marina with my friend.
Urple!
34, 37--I absolutely don't owe the *company* anything, but I have colleagues who have become friends and with whom I would love to work with again that a precipitous departure on my part would just absolutely fuck over, both from an immediate workload perspective and from the damage it would do the business. I don't want to overstate my own importance--it's more that I am sitting in a critical seat at a critical period rather than anything extraordinarily special about me. I am good at what I do, but I have at least two peers in the department who could do as good or better job on this launch if they had the 9 months of runway I have had to learn about the product and it's place in the competitive ecosystem while building the internal relationship s to get things done.
Don't get me wrong, if my old boss offers me a VP role, I am taking it. I just will have to balance timing to have the least negative impact on the people I care about at my current job, plus if I complete the launch it becomes giant feather in my cap, resume-wise.
39: Thanks, lk. Yes, still a kid. 15, just wrapping up freshman year The writing idea, while a good one generally, probably won't work with my mom. Knowing her it's going to be one tough first conversation where I give her the facts and lay out the ground rules for how to behave, then a series of small confrontations over the course of years to reiterate and remind and occasionally scold. My kid already donesn't have a particularly close relationship with my mom, so it's not a huge deal for them from a capacity to be hurt perspective, but I would still like for it to be generally positive. So, like I said, a pain in my ass to manage.
56: Thank God, no. And I would most definitely not survive the getting process.
As for a basic check-in on me, I'm doing so phenomenally well that I almost feel embarrassed talking about it.
That new sex move really took off, huh
Urple!
We made it home! Driving across 80 got me reading a bit about the various emigrant trail routes. Does anyone here know why the Front Range was not a popular a destination (until the gold rush), but has such high population now? Did it not have enough water then?
Jus back from my walk at the marina with my friend. I downloaded a walking distance app the other day, it was 4.2 miles. Going tomorrow morning again.
That gold rush was in 1859. There was basically no way to ship out any products before the railroad. No reason to try to farm. It's not like other places out west had any people either, except right along major rivers.
I'm disappointed only that the source of the newfound happiness isn't getting rich as a convenience-food magnate, microwaveable egg-in-a-plastic-cup division.
Urple! I'm really glad you're not opening yet. I'm still very hesitant about the opening schedule our state has. And speaking of our state, I dragged Odile and the children and my brother (who lives with my parents; I decided to go ahead and keep in contact with them largely for his sake once it was clear they were all keeping to themselves well during quarantine) to the home of the best-named very-minor-league baseball team where you could drive around the parking lot and look at animals on display in tents and then stop and see a handful of circus performers, including some friends of my brother's and mine. Odile proclaimed it the most midwestern thing she's ever done, but I don't necessarily believe that. She also then fell in love with a super sweet young cat who came up while we were on our porch, so we'll see where that goes. He's had his ear snipped, so he's been through TNR. He couldn't go back and live with her in her apartment when in-person school restarts for her because it doesn't allow pets, so it's very much a question of whether I want a third cat.
And Chopper, I'm glad the initial reception has been so positive for the Chopperchild. They're definitely not alone in that generation, but family support makes a huge difference. One of the reasons Mara doesn't want to have visits with Lee anymore is her belief (accurate, I suspect) that Lee is going to be disappointed by whatever her identity turns out to be, though she's 12 and it's still in flux to some degree or at least muddy. (I mean, I'm 40 and still don't always think there are any right words for it all.) My mom is a strong campaigner against singular they and while she hasn't lectured my children about it, I'm plenty happy to just tell them that she's wrong. We've been having a lot more open conversations during our time at home about LGBTQ issues and I feel so grateful that they talk to me.
My dear friend Kev [Kev/in Kel/ly] is about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest tomorrow afternoon. Took him years and years to get here: he had to do an M.A. in Philosophy at Fordham, and also took some courses at U of Cbicago, as I recall. The Jesuits, they are "the hipster order," as my sister says, and they are also the intellectual order.
No public mass, thanks to COVID-19 restrictions, and no more than 5 people in the church (Our Lady of Lourdes, in Toronto) at any one time; but the event/ordination will be live-strreamed, because that's how we, nowadays, just rolll.
"He's that smart and likely," my dad once said of Kevin, "he might even make it to the Vatican." My (trad. Catholic) dad totally knew that Kev was gay; he wished him well, nevertheless, and anticipated great things for/from him...
We arrived! Now to catch up on the thread.
69: Yeah. They announced it publicly on Instagram and it was nothing but cheers and love from their friends. I don't know what kind of reaction they'll get at school among non-friends, but they're pretty determined to just be themselves and always have been, and while I may not love the suburb my ex picked, it is pretty liberal and the queer kids I encounter seem to get by ok, so hopefully the same will be true for an enbie ace.
I'll confess to not likng the singular they, but only because it's hard for me to retrain my brain both in general and in this specific instance--I've spent 16 years referring to them by gender from ultrasound on. But my doing some hard brainwork is a small price to pay for a happy kid, the singular they has been a part of English forever, and it really isn't about me--so one sucks it up and deals with the retraining (I have edited to correct about half the pronouns in this post), and they are patient with me when I fuck up.
I'm lucky that the semi-gendered nicknames/terms of endearment I have always used don't seem to be an issue for them (sweetie/sweetheart/pumpkin/puddin) and they have not as yet felt a need for a new name even though the name we gave them is definitely gendered. If either of those changes, I'll adapt to that as well, but it's nice to not have to do it all at once at least.
Does anyone here know why the Front Range was not a popular a destination (until the gold rush), but has such high population now? Did it not have enough water then?
I recently read a (very good) book about this! It basically argues that until gold was discovered white people just thought of the interior west as an empty space they had to get through to get to Oregon or California, but the gold rush caused a major shift in that perception that made the Front Range seem like an attractive destination itself and set in motion the series of events that led to it becoming a major population center. (Ironically, the amount of gold turned out to be underwhelming and in the long term it wasn't a major economic driver.) Pace Moby, the gold rush was slightly before the railroad reached the area and freighting by wagon train was sufficient to get the gold out and supplies in.
The Denver area was actually relatively well-watered for the region at the time of the gold rush, so water supply was an advantage rather than a constraint. It's just that the whole region was considered of little value for settlement, so having slightly more water wasn't enough to draw a lot of white settlers until there was something else to attract them, which in this case was gold. The Indians had a very different perception of the landscape, of course, and places with reliable water were super-duper important for their way of life at the time, so the influx of white people into one of those places during the gold rush was a big, big problem for them.
Things are very good here in the summer lull, but I feel an acute sense of dread every time I think about fall. It just looks so so like my university will want me teaching in person, but the six year old will either be home full time trying to do distance learning, or back at school in restrictive enough conditions that he gets himself kicked out for the duration. And I just panic at the thought. Even when I remind myself that 3 months is an eternity and there's no use trying to predict.
1,732 new cases here today. And we dropped back down to around 4,100 tested.
Thinking about Colorado brings a question to mind. Here, there was a really long tradition of peoples living in the western mountains -- as far west as parts of Oregon and Washington -- making annual (biennial?) trips eastward to the plains for a big bison hunt. When they'd gotten enough meat, hides, bones, etc, they would head back home. I suppose I could learn whether this sort of thing happened in Colorado by cracking a book or two. Obviously, the landforms are different, so it's not clear to me, steadfastly refusing to crack that book, whether it would be so much harder for an Anazazi hunting party to get from Mesa Verde to Pueblo than for some ur-Nez Perce froup to get from Wallowa to Great Falls.
Cannibalism requires so much less walking.
73: Thanks! And I guess Mormons weren't interested in the Front Range because it was on the US side of the border and not the Mexican side?
Were Native population densities substantially higher along the Front Range and the Wasatch Front than the rest of the West, or is that a more recent phenomenon? I've been spending too much time recently staring at population density maps of the world and it has gotten me curious about how much is long-term stable geography and how much changes over time.
||
Random question for the lawyers of unfogged.
On another site, this comment was made during a discussion of the whole Tara Reid thing, specifically regarding her supposed lying about her educational attainments:
My sense from a close friend who is and works with expert witnesses in civil cases is that far more egregious lying and misrepresentation about educational background is rampant in civil cases. Ie witnesses claim to have the PHD with honors at a university which does not grant honors in the PHD program, or claim to have gotten their PHD specializing in whatever is relevant to the case. Or have done post doctoral studies in X at Y meaning they got their PHD in some entirely unrelated field and attended a conference on X at Y. Thus these people formal training in the field he is claiming to be an expert in is less than 15 hours. People introduce themselves as Doctor N. despite not having a doctorate. "My friends call me doctor" This types of things can be demonstrated to the judge and not merely are these people not rejected in shame and possibly charged with perjury depending on details, their testimony is accepted and they continue to be professional expert witnesses happily despite their fraud being relatively open knowledge.
I'm curious. Is shameless lying about credentials/expertise really as common in civil cases as this person suggests?
|>
78: Was any of that on foot though? The Utes out here did those bison hunts but my understanding is that those Great Plains excursions started after they got horses.
That seems fucked up. I am in a very different environment, but I'm always very quick to clarify that I'm not "Dr. Hick" when somebody assumes that.
Horses are easier than cannibalism, emotionally.
84: I'm curious, why do you find it enraging? I might find it enraging for a different reason. If I were CEO of a company of 13 hand-picked "diverse" employees, I am pretty sure I would run through Plans B through Z before dissolving the company because my landlord husband refused to be an active father. I have to refrain from imagining more than is reported, because clickbait rage is pointless and bad, but it's easy to extend the moral fault lines that run through Silicon Valley right through this story.
I found that article sort of unbelievable. Like, you don't decide to shut a company down in three days, do you? She could have had food poisoning that kept her from working for that long. The larger point, sure, and her husband may certainly have been as worthless as he was presented, but there had to have been more to it than his childcare strike.
I mean 3 days? He's unemployed. I realize it's exhausting caring for a young child full time but the least they could have done is maybe she helps out for a couple of hours a day and scales back a little?
Eid Mubarak to Roger and all who celebrate.
Hannaford, who oversaw software development, co-led a diverse team of 13 employees. She was intentional about hiring women, minorities and others who challenged the stereotypes about Silicon Valley. . . . Her co-founder, busy with her own kids and aging parents, was able to help out less and less.
This is what gets to me. You specifically put together a company of vulnerable underrepresented people, then suspend it all on a string of conventional labor arrangements and conventional marriage, and then let all these people drop because you can't square the circle of making tech money hand over fist while working towards a better society. The last paragraph is sort of beautiful -- supposed to be a symbol of how children rule their mothers; actually a complete self-own.
81 I've never knowingly put on a witness who fits into any of that, or had a witness from the other side where I knew any of that was going on. If I learned that some expert from the other side was stretching in a way that would wreck their credibility, I would certainly take the opportunity to wreck it myself in front of the judge (if we were doing a Daubert inquiry) or the jury, if it got there. The lawyers I oppose would do the same, with glee.
The said, I take my experts at their word about their degrees. I'm not asking for transcripts or diplomas, and I doubt any of my opponents are either. But I certainly ask them sufficient questions at deposition to find out why they think they are qualified to offer the opinions they are offering, and I would openly laugh at someone who offered their participation in an Unfogged thread as the basis for qualification to offer opinion evidence.
I guess the principal consideration on that would be about whether the expert's conclusions were credibility-based enough that whacking the expert on a triviality of their record would get you somewhere. You'd want to think about the nature of the testimony and the case in deciding whether to pull the trigger at deposition or wait until the motion in limine stage, when it'd be much harder for the opponent to get a new expert,* or at trial.
* May not be valid in C.D. Ill. I may have mentioned before that I had a case there (long ago) where the other side was precluded from relacing an expert who had died 6 weeks before the expert report deadline. It was a product liability lawsuit, so no expert means no case.
I know some people who are the same way about Christmas.
The thing about faking a degree is that what you've done is made it so that any problem you have is going to be fatal to your career. Something bad happens, someone will look, and you're done. The lie is easily disprovable and there's no realistic way to say you made an honest mistake. And then after it is fatal to your career, you'll look like a tool socially. Except for the whole prison thing, it's almost better to embezzle and sign your name to the checks. You've destroyed any career just the same, but at least you claim it was gambling or something respectable.
94.last: Hint to the jury that he died while using the product.
The trial I was on had competing experts, and the defense definitely made some hay out of how much more qualified their expert was. (I was mostly just annoyed at the competing experts system. I wish the court hired an independent expert, rather than each side bribing someone into taking their side. It's infuriating in much the same way that TV news guests are.)
My dad's favorite expert was the guy who could quantify exactly how bad the shit from a hog confinement facility smelled.
81. I've never heard anything like that, and I don't believe it at all. The whole point of having an expert witness is that they have credible special knowledge that is useful to the judge or jury in making their decision. If it's revealed that your expert doesn't have excellent credentials in their field, and worse yet, is a liar, that expert is not helpful to you, and putting that expert on the stand is going to undermine your case.
Like CC above, I don't go to the trouble of actually verifying an experts diplomas or transcripts, but I do check references and read their publications and etcetera. I also investigate the experts on the other side. If I found out that my opposing counsel's experts were lying or misleading about their credentials in the least bit, you can bet I would make an endless big deal about it.
99 I wouldn't call it bribing someone to take your side. It's more like hiring someone who agrees that the methodology you want to use is defensible. That is, at least in my cases, the experts aren't being insincere for money.
Where this goes off the rails, and I've been on both sides of this (not by choice!) is where you get the expert to accept certain factual premises and then apply their analysis assuming that the premises are valid. If they are dumb premises, you get to have a lot of fun whacking the other guy's expert. I'm pretty sure I've told you all my 'they put the pepper in their coffee' story at least 3 times: I may not have told my 'they told me to assume that the retirement of the founder and namesake of a small consulting company, and departure of his lead employee, would have no impact on revenues (for purposes of projecting the value of the business as a going concern without them)' story, but you can already just about script my cross-examination on that. The jury was laughing at the guy.
you can bet I would make an endless big deal about it
Endless! Gleefully endless! And still be chuckling about it 20 years later!
I have also never run into an expert with inflated credentials. On the other hand, while I certainly have worked on a lot of dumb little cases, I've never worked on a dumb little case with an expert -- if I was working with an expert, the case was a giant expensive deal. I don't know what it's like working on domestic violence prosecutions, but I bet the budgets are lower.
But yes, if I found out that an expert had misrepresented themselves at all there would be motion practice about it, and I would expect it to be a giant hostile fuss.
It's kinda hard to tell the difference between actually believing something and "believing" it because you know that will make you money, both for expert witnesses and conservative talking heads. I'm not even sure it's a meaningful distinction.
Thanks for the answers. The gist of the person's comment was that if Reid lied about her degree, that qualified her as shady character, but a really common garden variety sort of shady character, based on the statements of their close friend in the expert witness business.
Since I don't work with expert witnesses I wasn't sure how to evaluate the claim.
Don't universities routinely disclose information when asked on who got what degree, precisely to prevent people trading on their reputation without paying them? I'm surprised that inquiry is not routine for the other side when an expert witness is slated.
63, 73, 74: This is probably the book to read alongside Contested Plains. I say probably because I was planning to read both of them when I was studying for my history oral exams but only read the latter before the exams. Pretty sure I answered questions as if I'd read both, though.
I knew a fair number of MIT types who had to take the swimming test just before graduation, or not graduate ("And we really mean it!") It isn't that hard (a couple of laps, treading water for a few minutes IIRC) but MIT is full of people who (to be charitable) think they are too busy for such trivialities.
I'm leaning towards not believing Tara Reade's accusation, but I think it's pretty misogynistic that the photos every media outlet uses of her are current, and she's put on significant weight and age since the alleged event happened. It's a not-so-subtle way of being Trumpish w/o explicitly saying "I wouldn't hit on her, she's not my type." Whereas the same article (in today's NYT) with her unflattering picture has a Biden picture from 1994, when he (unsurprisingly) looked a heck of a lot better than he does now.
I just want to say that we have seen some fucking brilliant journalism in Britain today. First, the Guardian and the Mail get hold of the story that Dominic Cummings, the genuinely malevolent cleverclogs who won the referendum for Vote Leave and was then installed as the brains of the Johnson government [described, years ago, by David Cameron as "a career psychopath"] had broken the lockdown by driving 150 miles to his parents' estate with a small child at a time when both he and his wife had the virus and knew it.
Cue six cabinet ministers tweeting to the effect that he was only looking after his child, and who wouldn't do that. Cue all the people who have had to watch their parents or siblings die on facetime asking why there should be one law for the rich and one for the poor.
Then, once the government is entirely committed to the story that he only went up because his wife needed help with a sick baby, the papers drop the second bomb -- that he had come back to London when recovered, and then gone up again, at least twice, and been spotted on a family outing to a town 30 miles from Durham. All this absolutely in breach of lockdown advice. On top of that, the Durham police put out a statement saying they had spoken to his family about the thing -- something Downing Street had explicitly denied.
Even the most brexitish creeps and hacks have turned against him now.
112: when Cameron described Cummings as a career psychopath, was he saying that as a compliment or from a place of concern? When and where did he say it?
112: And there was evidence that Cummings and/or his wife had been doing the child care, not the relative who supposedly was, so even that part of the story is nonsense. And some absolute great quotes from Cummings, just dripping with ichor, before those last few bombshells came out. It's been a fun day. Fuck the Tories.
29: DO IT. Don't imagine your loyalty will earn you any thanks.
So this year I have: created a new product that none of our competitors have, in a company wide focus area, that's now been the most-read or at least top three of our group's products for three months. I've also been declared at risk of redundancy so we can do some Dilbert restructuring nonsense, and told to focus on applying for a promotion to formally run the product, in a job that I proposed should exist a year ago when I was asked to propose how I might possibly be promoted. I interviewed for it, was told my presentation was excellent, and I have been given a....completely random level transfer into an area I know nothing about.
Your loyalty will earn you nothing. Do it.
the genuinely malevolent cleverclogs
This is [chef's kiss]!
Ugh, got up at 12 am and couldn't get back to sleep for a while. Now up again after 3am here for my walk...
I knew it wouldn't be central to things, but I'm still a bit disappointed there's absolutely no scenes in Omaha in Malcolm X.
Is anyone out there in need of a good blood boil?
I mentioned a couple of days ago that there was a new cluster of cases in the county to our south. It's all associated with this outfit. The article is enough, honestly. Now think about this kind of exclusive retreat in the era of the coronavirus: some zillionaire (if they know which, they aren't saying) comes here with the virus, and leaves it with some long time staffers. I'm told that the sick staffers are mostly not native speakers of English -- long-time immigrants catering to rich assholes. Do they get sick leave?
And Trump is golfing, because he needs to get it in before the death toll hits six figures.
And back, 3.75 miles this time. Humidity was over 70% with a temperature in the mid-80s, I'm drenched.
And I guess Mormons weren't interested in the Front Range because it was on the US side of the border and not the Mexican side?
Hm, I don't know much about this aspect of the Mormon migration to Utah, but that's a plausible guess at least.
Were Native population densities substantially higher along the Front Range and the Wasatch Front than the rest of the West, or is that a more recent phenomenon?
They probably were, but it's hard to say for sure because people were nomadic and their home ranges could be quite large, especially after the introduction of the horse. Those have long been areas with relatively favorable resource concentrations, though, so it's likely that they've been popular parts of various peoples' seasonal rounds for a long time.
I've been spending too much time recently staring at population density maps of the world and it has gotten me curious about how much is long-term stable geography and how much changes over time.
I find this really interesting too, and I think in general for the US at least relative densities have been driven by long-term stable geography and resource potential, with some complications due to contingent historical events. So, e.g., coastal California has always had high population density, but the coastal northeast was fairly marginal and relatively low-density before European contact, which made it a higher-density area just because of its proximity to Europe and that's continued ever since.
Obviously, the landforms are different, so it's not clear to me, steadfastly refusing to crack that book, whether it would be so much harder for an Anazazi hunting party to get from Mesa Verde to Pueblo than for some ur-Nez Perce froup to get from Wallowa to Great Falls.
The distance wouldn't necessarily have been an issue, and indeed the Utes who occupied that area in historic times did the same thing. But as gswift noted, that kind of long-distance bison hunting is only really possible with horses.
The Rio Grande Pueblos, who were a lot closer to the Plains, did use bison products in late prehistoric and historic times and may well have acquired them by direct hunting from time to time, but mostly got them through trade with Plains tribes. The Mesa Verde Anasazi, however, in addition to being pretty far from the Plains, also lived at a time when the central and southern Plains had relatively few bison. Bison populations have fluctuated and moved around a lot over the millennia, and the massive herds that are known from historic accounts appear to have only expanded that far south fairly late in prehistory, perhaps in response to climatic changes related to the shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age.
The pishkun on the Madison is said to have been used, before the horse came, by folks as distant as the Arapaho, the Hidatsa and the Nez Perce. It would seem that if you were a Hidatsa, you'd have walked past a damn lot of buffalo before you get to the Three Forks.
Everybody's still okay here. I think I've probably found a job with a pharma company in RTP; have the final round of interviews mid-week. If it pans out, it will actually be a pretty large raise over what I was making before I was laid off, so maybe getting axed early will end up being a favor. That said, I have loved being unemployed. I wish I could afford it indefinitely. Also, I'm under 180 pounds for the first time probably since college.
So I've been watching Netflix and Amazon Prime on my laptop but I have a large screen tv and a network capable DVD/Blu ray player. I'm currently wondering if I should flash my router with the VPN firmware but I'm 99% sure I'll end up at worst knocking myself off line and at worst bricking the damned thing. Someone talk me out of this. It's not like I don't have 150 or so DVDs and Blu rays I can watch on it.
Argh, the device keeps losing the WiFi signal and doesn't keep the old settings for some reason. I've had this problem with other devices but oddly if I run them through a VPN they connect fine. Without it the signal constantly drops. Go figure.
Woohoo Apo!
116: I will! If the role is one I think I can reasonably achieve and the company has sufficient funding to stay afloat until revenue comes in if it's not commercial yet or a path to profitability without additional cash infusions if it is, and I think I can swing it (VP of Marketing and Communications in an organization of 100? Probably. Same role in a company of 500? A really big stretch.) As mentioned elsewhere, the only loyalty I feel is to colleagues I like who would be hurt if I left at the wrong moment.
About 1,500 new cases reported here today. Testing has dropped way down, only about 3,300. I hope that's due to the Eid.
76: Hi Heebie! I delurk every 2-3 years or so and probably wasn't in Gainesville the last time. I am now, though! Actually I'm at a springs near Chiefland at the moment, hitting the north Florida thing just as hard as possible.
124.last: Fascinating! I guess that thing about the east coast makes a lot of sense, though it hadn't occurred to me. There must be similar phenomena elsewhere where ocean-going ships made a big change to population patterns along coasts? Though in Eurasia there's often marginal seas (especially the Mediterranean and South China Seas) that make coastal access more valuable much earlier. There's isolated harbor cities like Cape Town and Sydney? Maybe Maritime Silk Road era Indian Ocean coasts? (Kerala, Zanzibar, Oman, etc.)
Presumably the main feature of North American population density, namely that it's much higher east of the 100th meridian than west (excluding the Pacific Coast), has been true for basically forever?
Further to 120, the line seems now to be that it was an employee, not a rich asshole, who brought the virus to that gated community. Traveling abroad. In late April, early May of 2020. I suppose they don't employ grounds-keepers through the winter anyway, so they'd ordinarily have an influx of service people this time of year. It's not crazy, just irresponsible.
There must be similar phenomena elsewhere where ocean-going ships made a big change to population patterns along coasts?
The other clear example I know of is West Africa, where trade and interaction were strongly oriented north toward the Sahara for a long time and the coast was marginal until the Portuguese showed up in the fifteenth century and suddenly everything changed.
Presumably the main feature of North American population density, namely that it's much higher east of the 100th meridian than west (excluding the Pacific Coast), has been true for basically forever?
Yes, definitely. Surviving archaeological remains are better preserved and generally more impressive in the arid West, of course, so popular understanding of prehistory has long been focused there, but the East has always had a lot more people.
Maritime Silk Road era
There was never any such thing. There was Indian Ocean trade, which sometimes carried Chinese products.
ThoughtWar aside:
Cape Town definitely;* Zanzibar to some extent; Dar es Salaam was founded by the sultan of Zanzibar to divert trade from Bagamoyo. Isthmus of Panama to some degree; Suez Canal zone even more so. Australia I'm inclined to say, everywhere;** similarly I speculate Rio de la Plata. More generally, railway cities in many places; Nairobi** started as one (Atlanta?); mineral cities in many places, I think Johannesburg is the biggest (Houston?).
Political action, most spectacularly Constantinople/Istanbul, Beijing, St. Petersburg.
*Though even there there's micro-determinism: 100km away is Saldanha Bay, with a much better harbor but, it was decided, not enough water.
**But I don't know to what degree the cities defy natural resource distribution - only one major city not on the east coast.
Omaha is there because of geography, but Lincoln because of politics.
I mean, partially it's there because of salt deposits, but that's not why it became a metropolis enough to contain most of the people I went to high school with that I'm willing to keep in touch with.
Of course the exact location of specific cities has a stochastic nature to it, but the North China Plain has been very dense for an incredibly long time for geographic reasons. The exact location of Beijing within that area isn't the kind of phenomenon I'm looking at. Similarly the African Great Lakes region has been higher density for a long time, the exact location of Nairobi notwithstanding.
In Australia the basic pattern is that Victoria is the only place where there's significant population outside of major cities. I'd naively expect that the pattern of Victoria having higher density than the rest of the continent was also true pre-European contact.
West Africa is a really interesting example, that I hadn't known about. If you look there now there's still a clear split between north and south with high density, but relatively low density in between.
I feel the overall idea is too deterministic. Human action changes the availability of resources to humans. The biggest premodern case, the development of wet rice culture in South China through the first millennium, and much later in SE Asia, totally changes the demographic distribution of those regions. The water and the soil had been there all along, but humans figured out how to extract more calories from the same underlying resources. Similarly modern crop breeds, or fertilizers, or irrigation.
Beijing isn't on the North China Plain. It's past the edge of the plain, in the steppe margin. A small city there wouldn't be notable, but Beijing isn't small. It's been unsustainable without grain imports from the Yangtze for 600 years (when it was established as permanent capital; the North Plain density you mention goes back more than 2,000). Today it has over 20m people, probably more like 25m; the whole of Hebei has about 75m. Beijing is a massive distortion.
Nairobi isn't in the Great Lakes. It's on the plateau, right at the eastern edge of the Victoria drainage basin. The precolonial centers in that region are right on the lakes. Today the former Western, Central, and Nyanza provinces, in the wet Lake basin, total 16.6m; Nairobi has 4.4m.
"History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men."
Sana'a was laid out by one of Noah's sons. Staying away from the water, I guess.
The Salish did not consider the place where Butte now stands to be the richest hill on earth. They called it the place where trout is shot in the head.
Did somebody tell that to Hemingway?
You know those stupid ice cream cones that come already filled with cheap ice cream and topped with chocolate and some peanuts and wrapped in paper. I'm starting to crave one and they aren't even good.
I'm not saying the existence of cities and of large cities isn't interesting or important. There's lots of interesting questions about them. But of course megacities didn't exist the way they do now in the past and so of course that's going to have changed. Nonetheless, some of the basic features of population density (ignoring details at the city-level) do stay largely the same over long time periods (lots of people in the East China Plain, the Gangetic plain, and the Nile Valley, medium numbers in eastern North America, the African Great Lakes, and the Murray-Darling, very few people in Intermountain West, and the rest of Australia.). But not always! And that's interesting too.
For example, on this "coasts used to be less important"-pattern, in China one might then ask whether the high density coastal parts of southern China (Eg the Pearl River Delta) are a more recent phenomenon than the other features of population density in China.
And back again. Almost two hours and 4.5 miles.
154: I remember loving those when I was a kid. Well, I loved the top part with the chocolate and the peanuts. After I ate that, the rest was kind of anticlimactic.
155 last: They are. In China though it's hard to separate coastward settlement (N Plain>Jiangnan>Guangdong) from southward settlement (Yellow Basin>Yangtze Basin>Pearl Basin); and trade oriented settlement (southern towns always at the water's edge) from reclamation-oriented settlement (southern rice polders always at the water's edge).
157: Because the cone tasted like sugared cardboard and the ice cream was shit.
157: That design problem was solved when they brought in the sort with the extra bit of chocolate at the tip of the cone.
That works to stop leaks, but the cone is still over-powering in its blandness.
158: Further, over the same period of southward and coastward settlement you also have interior and uphill settlement: Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, the southern mountains between the plains.
"Sichuan" is the only one sometimes used in the names of restaurants here. Is the food bad in the other ones?
I guess I'll have to stop making fun of Florida for a while. Their COVID response is apparently not bad and the court today rules that making people pay fines before voting is a poll tax.
megacities didn't exist the way they do now in the past
I still think you're underrating this. Rome lived off Africa for 400 years, Constantinople off Egypt for 300 (ISTR longer under the Ottomans), Beijing off the Yangtze for 600 and counting. Those were visible fractions of population supported by calorie transfers across regions, and organizing those transfers was central to the entire political economies of those states.
Somebody should do a remake of Rawhike except with a train that bringing animals across North Africa to a port so they can go to Rome and get killed in the Colosseum.
There was also substantial Roman trade with India via the Red Sea. And trade between Sumer and the Dilmun culture of the Persian Gulf and Harappan civilization was also substantial. An archeologist friend of mine was involved in a dig in Kuwait I think that found the earliest evidence of a lateen sail. I can't remember the date though I have the paper somewhere, maybe around 3,000 BCE or earlier.
In Australia the basic pattern is that Victoria is the only place where there's significant population outside of major cities. I'd naively expect that the pattern of Victoria having higher density than the rest of the continent was also true pre-European contact.
I suspect this is an exaggeration. The major Australian cities started as the ports of agricultural export colonies, and remained so well into the 20th C. Without extensive (somewhat) arable hinterlands none of them would have lasted. I think looking at Australia as a whole it's easy to see it as cities perched on the edge of desert, but in absolute terms the relatively wet margin around the coasts is actually substantial, hundreds of km deep, at least on the E coast.
165 Chang'an during the Tang dynasty had a population of 1-3 million. Baghdad also had at least a million before the Mongols.
168 to and contra 144.1 There very much was a maritime Silk Road.
171: See 141.1. I object to the characterization of this (1) as an era - as you point out IO trade goes back millenia BC and never really stops; and (2) as a Silk Road - as you also point out that trade centred on India, not China.
171: Indeed, and it was the primary one, but I'd interpreted Mossy as meaning that it was a network of trade routes rather than direct contact. No one's setting out from Axum for their big trip to Nanyue.
It's bland (161), it's crappy (159), and yet you crave it (154). You're all over the place, Moby - you protest too much. Just a mixed-up kid. I think you should own your love of this product.
163: The improbably yet perfectly named Fuchsia Dunlop is getting close to making Yunnan cuisine a Thing, but she also says that much of it depends on ingredients that are idiosyncratic and only available locally. Also, insect proteins.
174: I used to get those from the vending machines at the prison when I was mentoring someone there. Why has nobody made a hipster high quality one?
When I was a kid, we used to make something we called a Mexican sundae which was vanilla ice cream, Spanish peanuts (the kind with the skin still on) and chocolate sauce. Now I really want one. I could get a good quality ice cream cone and create my own Cornetto.
We're physically and financially fine, but I'm feeling emotionally crappy and not sleeping well. A certain amount of that is baseline for me, though. I have a new psychiatrist; maybe she'll come up with a better cocktail than my current one.
Things are slightly opening up here, but we're not changing any of what we're doing. I'm somewhat worried about how soon M/tch's office might reopen. He can't work from home so would have no choice but to go back to a busy, open plan office. Kraabniece #1 is thinking of moving back to her mom's house in the next few weeks, so at least it wouldn't increase her risk if he does have to go.
177: are they doing anything in his office to modify the floor plan to promote social distancing?
166: our dream TV project is a similar series but about herding cattle from Skye to London in late 17th century. You have post civil war banditry just like in all the best Westerns, great scenery, culture clashes, border towns with roaming savages (called Elliott and Nixon rather than Sitting Bull) and so on...
My summer camp had six age groups and each group would put on a play once in the summer, so a play roughly every 8 or 9 days. We got bedtime snack each night that was typically milk and cookies but on play nights you got ice cream including sandwiches or those ice cream cones. We called them nutty buddies but I think here they're called drumsticks. Counselors would pick up snack at the back of the dining hall, and there was one counselor who always convinced dining staff to give him extra on ice cream nights and he would stand on the loading dock and throw them to campers who had gathered there in a mosh pit hoping for an extra ice cream. I have no idea if that tradition continued but I'm guessing that behavior is frowned upon in a pandemic.
180: yes, drumsticks when they are made by Nestle. Cornett is another brand made by the same group that makes chocolate eclairs.
172 It's widely called that, and it did include a lot of trade from China and East Asia generally in addition to India. Trade was how Islam made its way to China in the 7th century.
I'm somewhat worried about how soon M/tch's office might reopen. He can't work from home so would have no choice but to go back to a busy, open plan office.
I knew that he had restricted internet from work before, so I know they've always been very tight with security, but I'm shocked that they've been managing the past few months short-staffed. It must have been insanely busy.
182: Yes, the sea route is routinely mapped as one of the silk roads, and yes IO ships carried Chinese goods. Referring to the whole net as the Maritime Silk Road is still reductionist and inaccurate and currently aligns with fascist narratives (not that I impute any such failings to upetgi). The IO specialists who taught me made a point of the non-centrality of European and Chinese trade to the IO.
It's like calling the internet FBnet. Yes, the internet carries FB packets, yes those packets are a significant fraction of traffic and profit. Such a usage would still be wildly misleading.
184 How does it align to fascist narratives? B&R?
As to your last point, what now? Chinese/Indochinese trade has long been central to Indian Ocean trade networks.
The Maritime Silk Road goes to Canada?
If anybody is wondering what happened to Peruvian Maoists, they are in Pittsburgh.
Over 1,700 new cases reported here today. Testing is back above the 4,000. Looks like we're muddling through.
This Dominic Cummings scandal is really something.
186.1: Yes.
Chinese/Indochinese
General Giáp would like a word. (More seriously, Chinese merchants and diaspora weren't all over the Io the way they were in SEA).
.2: To settle this we'll both have to define "central", for various periods, which I at least won't have energy for right now.
What I'll stand on is this: we know we have non-Chinese vessels, crews, and merchants, predating the Shang, hauling largely or entirely non-Chinese cargoes* between overwhelmingly non-Chinese ports. I see no reason at all to refer to this by a term inseparably associated with China.
*Frex the African coasting trade, where upetgi brought us in, hauled stuff as mundane as coconut poles.
Didn't China basically prohibit Chinese people from doing the whole "long-distance sailing thing" for some considerable period?
Yes. It was poorly enforced.
191.2 The Indochinese part is not, uh, central to my argument. It was just meant to include the trade in spices which was considerable. The Beilitung shipwreck was chock full of Tang dynasty ware.
It also started in the "early modern" period, IIRC? By which time everything was about to change anyway.
I guess I'll have to stop making fun of Florida for a while. Their COVID response is apparently not bad
Has there been any reporting on how much federal government aid to Florida may have helped? Did they scale up hospital resources in a way that other states weren't able to? There seems to be general agreement (among people whose judgement and expertise seems solid, I'm no expert) that policies somewhere between complete lockdown and free-for-all are going to be more sustainable, and maybe Florida's balance between the two poles has been just good enough. But I also had the impression from reporting that they always got what they asked for when they asked the federal government for help.
Probably. I'm not going to stop making fun of them anyway.
I think Florida's numbers are also particularly sketchy. I'm super worried about my family there.
I was supposed to be in Austin this weekend. This Whole Thing is probably much easier for people like me for whom travel is a minor, infrequent, ambivalent part of life, but I do wish I were somehow in normal-times Austin.
The thing that's most depressing some days is the choral singing is an especial disaster and pretty much canceled forever, and there is no communication app that is sufficiently free of lag that you can even fake singing with other people.
So I'm doing other stuff, perhaps most amuso-stupidly building a model boat, which is harder than it might be because I don't know the names of parts of boats because I do not spend time on boats because I do not give a shit about boats.
This is exactly the time to take up hobbies you don't enjoy.
Without scrolling back more than ten comments, I just wanted to say that it always makes me happy when Unfogged is talking about Zheng He and related things .
It'll be interesting to see if the Tories have learned the Trumpian solution where there's no downside to being maximally shameless. Cummings seemed to have, but dunno if that'll be enough to save him. (Although, honestly, even if he's sacked, couldn't he just continue advising on policy informally?)
If anyone has learned that lesson it's Johnson.
196 But Florida is juking their stats.
And I'm up again at 3 am for my wak.
We should have a Cummings/Johnson post, no?
199: the professionals in my church's choir (4of them) do seem to be singing. They are ea h in their own box, but I'm worried about it. The other big fancy church has everyone sing together over ZOOM.
yo yo ma performed Bach alone in the WGBH studios. One person was involved and he used robotic controls to manage the studio. I missed it, but hearing about that reminded me of the absence of choral music. Cello is a good instrument for solo performances, though I have to say that I heard a cello choir in college and loved it.
194: I see your Omani traders chock full of Tang pottery and raise you the Omani traders chock full of the African slaves whose toil fed megacity Baghdad.
And back again 4.76 miles and two hours later. Humidity was close to 80%
Humidity was close to 80%
Wow! That sounds like walking around in a fever. I would honestly rather sleep in an unheated cabin in the dead of winter (which I actually have done, though only with a sub-zero temp sleeping bag, admittedly), where your nose feels so cold if you expose it to the chill of the (unheated) room, it actually hurts...
Coming toward the end of my COVID-19 re-watch of George Gently, and I'm really going miss the colourful characters, with their pitch-perfect lines:
"I was top shot in my troop, National Service made a man of me."
Par exemple.
Yeah, I'm just drenched by the end of our walks. Later on it's less humid, 42% now at 9:20 am but it's already 95 degrees out rather than low 80s at around 5 am. And it's not always so humid in the morning. Also early in the morning = less people about.
208.2 I've never watched it, adding it to the queue.
209 So heat index in the early morning of 93F whereas right now it's 103F
I was supposed to be in Austin this weekend.
I finally, sadly, took that off my calendar.
183: There have been a few managers going in and people to open the mail, but mostly the work is just stacking up and they'll have an incredible backlog to work through once the office does open.
Oh hey, Siberia.* Vastly more people than there would have been pre-industry, for mineral extraction, which to some extent is also true of places like Alaska. But on top of that many times more people still, because Soviet planners wanted industry in the deep interior, and Russian settlers filling up all that empty space lest somebody else be tempted. Parts of Soviet Central Asia I think similar, but IDK how much of that persists today. And similarly of course the PRC is pushing tens of millions of settlers into their desert interior.
*A book I found kind of annoyingly shitty, despite clearly being right.
