I’m a Black Man in America. Entering a Shop with a Face Mask Might Get Me Killed.
—Aaron Thomas, in The Guardian
Mr. Thomas knows that he should wear a mask, but he also knows that as a black man in America, he cannot safely wear a mask.
Read the whole thing.
There has been a lot of Bernie supporters blowing off steam about 3rd parties on Twitter, but THIS tweet has significance
Day by day I am steadily more disgusted with both of the parties in the USA.There is no country. The corporations with their govemental stand ins are strip mining our resources.
Speaking for myself, I think it is critical to entertain a 3rd party discussion immediately.
— RoseAnn DeMoro (@RoseAnnDeMoro) April 5, 2020
If the name RoseAnn DeMoro sounds familiar, it’s because she is:
You know, perhaps the motto used by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to implore party unity, “Shut the f%$# up you communist moron Russian stooges,” is not the best motivation for about half of the Democratic Party.
To quote Bill S., “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Capitalism leads to just in time, and just in time leads to a fragile system:
By the middle of this week, nearly fifty thousand residents of New York City were confirmed to have the coronavirus. The actual number of coronavirus cases is of course much higher, as testing has been elusive. But the crisis is visible: over a thousand New Yorkers have died. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sent the city eighty-five refrigerated trucks to be used as mobile morgues.
Hospitals are overwhelmed. The volume of calls for ambulance rides has nearly doubled. Nurses are comparing the situation to “battlefield triage.” In response, the city has transformed the Javits Convention Center and a tennis stadium into ad-hoc hospitals. A Navy hospital ship has docked at Pier 90 and opened its doors to overflow patients.
In Central Park, an evangelical Christian organization erected a field hospital with the blessing of the city and at the request of Mt Sinai. The organization, Samaritan’s Purse, is run by Franklin Graham, who’s known for his homophobic extremism. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that the facility wouldn’t discriminate.
When you’ve reached the point where the mayor is assuring the public that the makeshift tent hospital in the city’s park won’t deny treatment to those condemned to an eternity in hell by the founder of the charity organization supplying the beds, something has gone terribly wrong.
Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures. But these times didn’t have to be so desperate to begin with. Typically if one hospital is overcrowded, a patient can be transferred to another hospital in the vicinity. But all of New York City’s hospitals are overcrowded. This wasn’t inevitable: New York City has lost nearly twenty hospitals, and tens of thousands of hospital beds, in the last two decades. In 2000, New York City had 73,931 hospital beds. Now it has 53,000, a reduction of nearly thirty percent.
The problem is not unique to New York City. Across the country, in rural and urban environments alike, hospitals are shuttering. A report by Morgan Stanley analysts “found that 8% of U.S. hospitals were at risk of closing and another 10% were considered weak.” At least thirty US hospitals entered bankruptcy last year alone.
If you want cheap underwear, capitalism works.
If you want public health and safety in an emergency, capitalism leaves you bereft of resources.
A Republican fund-raiser has decided to to go into the corona virus supplies business.
I wonder how an ally of Donald Trump things that he can make obscene profits from this activity?
A longtime Republican fundraiser sent an email to his clients on Thursday abruptly announcing that he would no longer be working for them.
The reason: He saw an opportunity to capitalize on the coronavirus response.
“Over the last 14 days I have built another business outside politics and will be focusing my full attention there,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The fundraiser, Mike Gula, didn’t specify his new line of work in the email. But in an interview, he said he’d started a new company selling medical equipment that’s been in short supply during the coronavirus pandemic.The company, Blue Flame Medical LLC, was formed Monday in Delaware, according to state records. Its website says it sells coronavirus testing kits, N95 respirator masks, “a wide selection” of personal protective equipment and other “hard to find medical supplies to beat the outbreak.”
Asked how he’d managed to procure such equipment when there are shortages in hospitals across the country, Gula said, “I have relationships with a lot of people.”
Yeah ……… how come I think that the “People” involved have names that sound like Karrod Jushner?
The use of Comic Sans font to represent stupidity is an intentional choice.
This is how Charlie Chaplin did things before CGI
— Engineering (@engineeringvids) April 6, 2020
This is a wicked cool use of force perspective and matte paintings by Charlie Chaplin.
A documentary on the creation of the BBC’s spaghetti harvest documentary:
The BBC is now running this as a public information film between some of its programmes. pic.twitter.com/L92EuU17nk
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) March 26, 2020
It is brilliant to use a marvelously profane Peter Capaldi clip from “The Thick of It” to illustrate a lockdown.
After firing an organizer at one of the Long Island offices after he led protests against their indifference to Covid-19 infections, it now appears that senior executives planning to smear smear him, because that’s how Amazon rolls:
Leaked notes from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership obtained by VICE News reveal company executives discussed a plan to smear fired warehouse employee Christian Smalls, calling him “not smart or articulate” as part of a PR strategy to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.
The discussion took place at a daily meeting, which included CEO Jeff Bezos, to update each other on the coronavirus situation. Amazon SVP of Global Corporate Affairs Jay Carney described the purpose to CNN on Sunday: “We go over the update on what’s happening around the world with our employees and with our customers and our businesses. We also spend a significant amount of time just brainstorming about what else we can do” about COVID-19.
(emphasis mine)
The fish rots from the head.
Amazon is evil because Jeff Bezos is evil.
It appears that his condition has worsened since announcing his testing positive 10 days ago:
Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital due to coronavirus after suffering 10 days of symptoms including a high fever, bringing doubts about his capability to lead the response to the pandemic despite No 10 insisting it was purely precautionary.
Johnson was taken to an unnamed London hospital on Sunday after days of persistent symptoms, during which time he has been self-isolating. Last week No 10 had denied the prime minister was more seriously ill than claimed.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “On the advice of his doctor, the prime minister has tonight been admitted to hospital for tests. This is a precautionary step, as the prime minister continues to have persistent symptoms of coronavirus 10 days after testing positive for the virus.” The spokesperson said Johnson would stay in hospital “as long as needed”.
I do not know much about British politics, but what I DO know leads me to conclude that whoever might replace him would be even more of a sh%$ show than he is.
If Joe Biden Had a Personal History of Dismembering Grandmothers and Feeding Them to Children as an After-School Snack, He Would Still, in My View, Be Far Preferable to Donald Trump or Mike Pence
Ms. Featherstone is commenting on the complete abandonment of #MeToo by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) with regard to Joe Biden.
I do not know if the most recent allegations of assault are true or not, but it is clear that the response of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has been abjectly deplorable.
Sweetie everyone’s already washing their hands five+ times a day, covering their face, not shaking hands + avoiding bars. Not only are we already here, you’re all Muslim. Salam brother. https://t.co/m6MDbyRrWs— Johana Bhuiyan (@JMBooyah) April 2, 2020
We may be short of ventilators, and toilet paper, and common sense, but the strategic sarcasm reserves remain safe.
We have had the 2nd bank failure of the year, The First State Bank, of BarboursvilleWV.
This would suggest 7-8 bank failures for the year, as versus 4 in 2019, and 0 in 2081, but the Covid-19 economic downturn would suggest that the eventual numbers could be significantly higher.
If you want to play with numbers, or look at trends, you could use the Full FDIC list.
The EU Court of Justice has ruled that rental car companies do not have to pay a license fee for the public performance of music when they rent a car, even though every car made today has a radio, and the drivers could theoretically play music on the radio.
These sort of outrageous claims are the rule, not the exception, because there are no penalties for attempting to promulgate this bullsh%$:
Performance Rights Organizations (PROs), sometimes known as “Collection Societies,” have a long history of demanding licensing for just about every damn thing. That’s why there was just some confusion about whether or not those with musical talents would even be allowed to perform from their balconies while in COVID-19 lockdown. And if you thought that it was crazy that anyone would even worry about things like that, it’s because you haven’t spent years following the crazy demands made by PROs, including demanding a license for a woman in a grocery store singing while stocking the shelves, a public performance license for having the radio on in a horse stable (for the horses), or claiming that your ringtone needs a separate “public performance” license, or saying that hotels that have radios in their rooms should pay a public performance license.
Five years ago, we wrote about another such crazy demand — a PRO in Sweden demanding that rental car companies pay a performance license because their cars had radios, and since “the public” could rent their cards and listen to the radio, that constituted “a communication to the public” that required a separate license. The case has bounced around the courts, and finally up to the Court of Justice for the EU which has now, finally, ruled that merely renting cars does not constitute “communication to the public.”
A reevaluation, and a roll-back of implicit and explicit subsidies related to IP needs to happen sooner, rather than later.
It turns out that there are two highly distinct toilet paper markets, the home market and the commercial market, and the products are different. Typically, they aren’t even made in the same paper mills.
Because people are staying home, the consumption of home toilet paper is up by as much as 40% because they are not using restaurant and workplace bathrooms and toilet paper.
The mills cannot retool quickly, so there is a shortage.
There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.
In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.
Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.
Woah.
Some of you might have noticed that we recently started a series called Corona Tools, in honour of those who are really standing out from the crowd during this crisis. But we needn’t have bothered, really. Because one man is fast emerging from this virus as the Corona Super Tool, leaving all the others in the (space) dust.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Elon Musk.
………
After playing down the virus since January, our Elon suddenly last week seemed like maybe he had taken a Trump-style turn, and had decided that maybe Covid-19 was something that needed to be taken seriously after all. Though he earlier said he would produce ventilators but only “if there’s a shortage” (as if there weren’t already one), he then announced on March 24 that he’d bought over 1,255 “FDA-approved ventilators” from China and had delivered them to Los Angeles.
A few days later, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was thanking him for “donating hundreds of ventilators to New York City and State, including our public hospitals”, saying he was “deeply grateful”.
Fair play, we thought. At least he seems to be trying to help, rather than mounting some silly PR stunt, like, we dunno, building a kid-size submarine or something. We were a bit confused, however, by how it seemed so easy for him to procure over 1,000 ventilators when the rest of the world’s governments seemed to be suffering from such a dire shortage.
On Wednesday, we got a sneak peek of some of these ventilators:
………
You might also be surprised to see there, on top of the boxes, not a ventilator, but a BPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure, also called a “BiPAP” machine), which is used to treat sleep apnoea by maintaining a consistent breathing pattern at night (it’s very similar to a CPAP machine, but it has two pressure settings rather than just one).
Now BPAP and CPAP machines are sometimes called “non-invasive ventilators”, but these are not the ventilators that can be used in intensive care units, which are invasive ventilators that deliver oxygen to the lungs and are used as part of life support.
Well, that’s at LEAST honest as Musk’s promises of self driving mode for his cars, I guess.
The ‘S’ in Zoom, Stands for Security
Yes, this is Patrick Stewart ……… In a lobster suit ……… In a bathtub.
— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) April 3, 2020
It’s funny because it’s true.
The initial unemployment claims number came out today, and it’s grim.
6.6 6.9 million new claims. That’s about 10 million new claims in the last 2 weeks.
The unemployment rate (U3) is almost certainly above 10%, and I would be remiss if I did not note that labor force participation, even adjusted for age, has still not returned to the levels that was before the 2008 recession.
Given that we haven’t seen the knock-on effects yet of all of this, things like delayed college entry because of school year cancellations, I have to believe that the unemployment rate will exceed 25% before any recovery starts. Fix it tonight in one mile exit point
Not good.