Saturday March 28th, 2020
A COVID-19 Admonition ***EXPLICIT (YouTube video) "Stay the fuck at home".
Friday March 27th, 2020
I get all the guillotine jokes. I do. but in a moment of crisis like this, those kinds of jokes are inappropriate and dangerous. You can't maintain proper social distancing with a guillotine. Be responsible and use RANGED weaponry (at least 2 METER range) per CDC recommendations.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt
Batman is rich, his parents are dead, and he allows animals that most people would consider pests to live in his house, therefore Batman is the Disney Princess of Gotham. I will not being taking questions at this time.
Thursday March 26th, 2020
Oh, look, the economic stimulus package will help those struggling "...couples with more than $500,000 in annual capital gains or income from sources other than their business".
Bonanza for Rich Real Estate Investors, Tucked Into Stimulus Package
A small change to tax policy could hand $170 billion in tax savings to real estate tycoons.
I just took a COVID-19 test turns out I’m 100% that rich
I have lost track of the days that we've been isolated. We're digging through the food stores, trying to piece together meals....
Wednesday March 25th, 2020
Friday, February 7th: "Biegun said the United States has also sent nearly 17.8 tons of medical supplies to China, including masks, gowns and other protective gear." Something about economists taking in each other's washing. https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2012FH?
Shelter in place
Tuesday March 24th, 2020
This actually looks pretty cool: Singapore introduces contact tracing app to slow coronavirus spread. TraceTogether tracks Bluetooth device IDs it's seen, if you get infected and share your database of device IDs, you can then be correlated to other people who've shared their databse, for virus tracking.
Oh, look, turns out Boeing wasn't actually in trouble, the CEO just wanted a handout.
Sunday March 22nd, 2020
I am, however, fairly pleased with the miters on the lip of this shelf. Need to figure out if I should do a grain filling pass on that mahogany. I mean, I should, but I'm impatient.
Kinda glad these shelf supports are going to be hidden, otherwise I'd try again...
Finally, a Medium post on COVID-19 that's worth reading: Flatten the curve of armchair epidemiology https://medium.com/@noahhaber/...mchair-epidemiology-9aa8cf92d652
A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers
Results The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.
Saturday March 21st, 2020
U.S. Shows Willingness to Remove Tariffs on Medical Supplies
USTR said the comment period will run until June 25 and won’t replace the process to request exclusions from the tariffs. Comments submitted “are limited to comments on products subject to the tariff actions and relevant to the medical response to the coronavirus,” the USTR said.
So June 25th, while in the mean-time I'm being asked to donate any unopened boxes of gloves and N95 masks to local hospitals that fucked up their inventory flow. Hmmm.
Some good stuff in this: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming — Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.
Now that we've missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?
Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don't know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it's not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don't have testing capability, not because they don't have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.
This shutdown sucks for everyone in the service industry but it especially sucks for men because we're losing $1 for every $.79 women are losing.
Just donated my unopened box of N95 masks to Petaluma Valley Hospital healthcare workers. Now can we fire and strip the pensions of the administrators who didn't have a buffer of and long-term contracts with suppliers of basic healthcare supplies?
Friday March 20th, 2020
Look at us! Blowing past Spain and on track to take over China! USA! USA! USA!
(Okay, not totally fair, 'cause these are absolute numbers not relative ones, but...) RT Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers
No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing.
( https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441 )
Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life
The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken. The “Venetian” dolphins were filmed at a port in Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of miles away. No one has figured out where the drunken elephant photos came from, but a Chinese news report debunked the viral posts: While elephants did recently come through a village in Yunnan Province, China, their presence isn’t out of the norm, they aren’t the elephants in the viral photos, and they didn’t get drunk and pass out in a tea field.
It's generally well accepted that the introduction of agriculture lowers the standard of living for a society. Hunter-gatherer societies have an amazing amount of leisure time to the amount of time necessary to provide for survival. Introduce agriculture, and the population density can go way up (and life spans go up a little), but suddenly rather than working 2-3 hours a day, people have to work 10-12 hours to survive.
And for the large underclass it's a Malthusian existence: Have a good year or three for crops? Population rises, quality of life goes down. Have a famine, or a plague? People die, horribly, but the next few years have a higher standard of living, there's more to go around.
Of course there's also generally an upper-class that spends their time building big fancy palaces, or churches, and experimenting with high fashion, all while convincing the lower classes that the other guy's lower classes wanna steal their grain so they should go fight.
Then comes the Industrial Revolution. It happens in England, and suddenly there's a rising tide that lifts all boats. It spreads, and eventually we get into the 20th Century and see even industrialists like Henry Ford realizing that 8, even 6, hours a day of work is where you get optimum output from humans.
There are a lot of theories about why it happened, and why it happened in England, but some of the most credible ones revolve around the French Revolution scaring the British Aristocracy absolutely shitless, and so causing them to spread their wealth around a little bit more.
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about guillotines recently, and if you've got 15 minutes this 3 parter is a good refresher on something that didn't help France much, but might have brought the middle class to the rest of the world...
While we're lining people up for the guillotine, over the past decade Boeing spent $43.44 billion on stock buybacks, while managers ramming the flawed 737 MAX MCAS system through the FAA were whining about the FAA pushing back on them and costing them $5k in flight change fees.
Airlines and Boeing want a bailout, but look how much they've spent on stock buybacks:
Boeing’s free cash flow for 10 years totaled $58.37 billion, while the company spent $43.44 billion, or 74% of free cash flow, on stock repurchases.
Thursday March 19th, 2020
A little lighter linking on COVID-19 this morning:
Eliza Rubenstein on Facebook: I Am The Very Model Of Effective Social Distancing
I am the very model of effective social distancing!
I listen to the experts on the topic of resistance-ing;
I know that brunch and yoga class aren’t nearly as imperative
As doing what I can to change the nation’s viral narrative.
...
Dana Jay Bein: Coronavirus Rhapsody
Is this a sore throat?
Is this just allergies?
Caught in a lockdown
No escape from reality.
...
And then the serious shit:
NPR: Intelligence Chairman Senator Richard Burr Raised Virus Alarms Weeks Ago, Secret Recording Shows. Which takes us back to A timeline of Trump playing down the coronavirus threat.
Addendum: Also looks like Burr was engaged in insider trading
CDC analysis shows coronavirus poses serious risk for younger people. Risk of death is still low. Risk of infection looks flatter than we thought previously. Longer-term health problems are emerging.
Wednesday March 18th, 2020
So there's been lots of talk of a universal basic income as a way to recover the economy from this disaster. Thousand or two thousand dollar a month checks. There's been the usual "shouldn't only poor people get it?" which brings up all sorts of administrative overhead issues, so the obvious answer is send it to everybody and make income taxes a little more progressive.
Anyway, in one Facebook group someone asked "What's the least useful thing you can do with a $1,000 stimulus check from the government?"
And I went for the knee-jerk "hookers and booze", but then I thought about how money circulates, and where that money would have the highest velocity and thus the best chance of doing some good for the economy.
From the standpoint of doing the most good, sex workers and my corner convenience store are probably about the absolute *best* place I could blow that money.
The Vatican canceled Easter. You know how much stuff has to suck for the Pope to be like "you know what, this year Jesus stays dead".
And here we go: "The Sonoma County Health Officer has issued a Health Order directing residents to shelter in place effective tonight at midnight on Wednesday March 18, 2020."