I try to delete posts regularly, and archive some in posts to my own blogs. I know this is destroying the archival aspects of replies, and I guess that sucks, but… I feel like it must be done.
Deleted Posts from Facebook
I delete posts periodically and archive some of them here. It’s a way to record history, but, also to take whatever work I did for Facebook, away from Facebook.
May 1, 2020
It’s triage. They had to do it in Spain. I think it’s good that it’s being laid out right now. Too many old people and immunocompromized people are out and about or having guests over.
You just have to tell them, if they get really sick, and it’s really crowded, they’re going to give you some heroin and roll you into the hallway to die.
They’ll go into denial and say you’re just trying to scare them. It happened to me.
People are in denial, believing the virus-hoax idea, wishing they could go get a haircut or go shopping, thinking a vaccine is right around the corner, and thinking we’ll have enough staff to take care of the sick.
May 1, 2020
“Work sets you free.”
When I see protesters wanting to re-open, that’s what I hear. “We want to work.” They equate work with freedom.
It’s really more about the power, as consumers, to dominate the worst paid essential workers.
May 1
There’s an actual strike going on today. No shopping, at all, is what they want in solidarity. If you must shop, avoid these stores and Trader Joes, Shipt, and Walmart as well.
My suggestion, if you must shop, is to buy from unlicensed street vendors and small mom and pop stores, rather than large stores.
May 1
I’m starting to record info from news stories I read. Most times, they don’t present raw data, but will present some stats. So, I’m trying to organize this information to make sense of how many people are infected, or die, and what the testing policy was, and how many people got tested.
May 1
I found the strangest information when I was researching some facts for a response to one of the many COVID-19 debates I get into.
The United States has fairly large households.
A sorted list is on page 3 of this PDF. We are between New Zealand and Moldova.
I don’t know if there’s a strong correlation with COVID-19 issues, but it is interesting on its own.
The other interesting data (on page 11) is about the number of households with an older person and a younger child. The US, like most of the West, is relatively low. However, within the West-North (North America, Europe) we’re in the middle. We are more like the PIIGS countries than the wealthier EU countries.
This does have implications for COVID-19 policy. It means that allowing childhood infection (aka re-opening school) is more risky. Isolating the elderly, and testing children, will cost more money. So we need to have hotel rooms for the elderly to live in for a few months, and sufficient tests to see when the test-positive kids go negative.
May 1
Food bank is giving out premium steaks. I wish I knew about that.
May 1
OK, I watched the opening of news, and they’re saying it’s not a lab virus. Isn’t this kind of irrelevant, and premature? There’s hella other things to do, like survey the landscape of spread, find patterns in cases, what kinds of places are risky, etc. Hella stupid fascist protesters demanding a re-open. Where is the public health education?
May 1
I like this Fresno plan for re-opening. Open slowly, not all at once. Businesses might need to be modified. Use lots of testing to see if opening will increase spread, and back off if a specific kind of business or even a specific business causes problems. (This is very good – you get a really precise idea of what’s possible, and what the outcomes might be for similar situations.)
Barber shops are probably not going to open for a while.
Edit: they should make the business owners hang out in the workplace. That would help with creating a safer workspace, if the owners were also at risk of getting SARS-CoV-2.
May 1
Updated the numbers on the OC beach opening thing. There might be a surge of Cornavirus infection from opening the beach. Too early to tell.
May 2
Dead people do not contribute to herd immunity.
May 2
Ummmm…. yeah. I’m looking at the lists of businesses, and I don’t think they’re the right ones to open up. Hairdressers and tattoo shops? Gyms and bars? Sit-down restaurants?
How about open up some businesses that are related to something medical, but are closed?
What about businesses that can be low-contact, and are kind of necessary?
There’s also some possibility that a business can start to be a subcontractor for an essential business that now has to expand space to comply with distancing and other health safety rules.
These are all political moves to placate some people who are not thinking through this “opening up” thing enough.
May 2
This is an interesting idea. Cycling is allowed in the UK. It’s also OK here. Maybe we need to subsidize bicycle stores, and create a temporary economy around bicycles and tricycles, and add them to the transit mix as a substitution for buses.
Give people without bicycles a voucher to buy a used bike or tricycle. Give people with bicycles a coupon for bicycle repair. Maybe even hire the curbside repair folks to operate temporary city bike repair shops for cheap repair, and send people out to buy old bikes for $5.
May 2
Teresa Hernandez a small business owner in S El Monte is protesting to demand that CA open up so she can “go back to work”. What work? Counting money?
Just another selfish small business owner who wants to imperil their employees so their business can make a profit.
These are the small time, mom-and-pop collaborators with capitalism who are the enemies of all workers and the community.
May 2
(About Gallup NM)
Over 4% of the population of this small city of 22k people have been infected. These are known, tested positives.
May 3
Headline: California official removed from board after saying COVID-19 should be allowed to ‘fix’ society by culling elderly, weak and homeless nydailynews.com
Like I said, this virus is like the capitalist virus. It’s also the eugenecist virus.
May 3
Los Angeles had one of its early Black Democratic Clubs formed in 1890.
“Displaying an interest in electoral politics, [Sam] Haskins also sought and was appointed the position of sergeant at arms at the Democratic City Convention in Los Angeles in February 1889. On September 12, 1890, the Herald reported “a number of colored Democrats” formed a new club called the Democratic Colored Zouaves (DCZ). “The purpose of the club is to advance Democracy and the colored race,” said Haskins, who was selected as its first lieutenant, but subsequent stories described him as the chairman, president, or captain of the club.”
May 3
People who think we’ve gotten over the infection and are on our way to herd immunity are out of touch with reality.
The LA study said 4% were infected.
What’s our infection today? 6%? 7%? I suspect it’s not very high. We are also California’s hotspot.
May 3
A few people have posted in comments about being forced to get vaccines, and microchips in the vaccine to tell the government that we were vaccinated.
I generally dismiss this, because, it just doesn’t make sense to me. I can see being forced to get a vaccine, because, we kind of already do that. However, I can’t imagine a chip small enough to inject like that, nor seeing it work as well as other technologies for identifying and tracking people. (Fingerprints and phones, for example.)
However, there is a framework of truth to what they’re saying.
There is a vaccination effort, and they do want to track who has been vaccinated.
See id2020 . org.
See simprints . org.
There’s no chips in the vaccines. They use fingerprints and fingerprint readers, which connect by some mobile network link, to perform searches into a big database that holds peoples’ heath records.
May 3
Headline: The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
thehill.com
SMH. This article has so many flaws.
They say the infection fatality rate is 0.1% to 0.2%.
If 50% of California (20 million) gets infected, then 20,000 to 40,000 people will die (by those stats).
The infection fatality rate in NY appears to be 0.5% If it’s really 0.5%, then 100,0000 people here would die.
For comparison, in California, flu killed 615 people in the 2018-2019 flu season.
That’s if the infection stops at 50%.
New York’s estimated infection rate is 15%. They went through hell, and only 15% got infected, because of lockdown interventions.
If we get to 15% (6 million), then the deaths should be 6,000 to 12,000. It’s a lot less – but it’s still bad.
The last thing they suggest is that high risk older folks be isolated. That is rational.
They suggest nursing homes be used to isolate old folks. They wrote this before the County really focused on nursing home cases. Nursing homes have become hotspots with people dying.
So, that idea was just proven wrong by reality.
They also ignore how many families are multi-generational, and have seniors living with children. That’s because nursing homes are expensive. Last I heard, they are $5000 a month. Most people don’t even make $5000 a month, much less have the after-living-expenses money to put their parents into a nursing home.
May 3
This (mask deal) is pretty smart. The billion dollar deal is to get 150,000,000 N95 masks per month. One month’s supply is worth over a billion dollars at the current inflated retail price for individual N95 masks. I’m assuming workers are paying these high prices.
If California actually gets that many masks, and can divert some to other states, and sell them at a markup, but still hit some decent prices, like $3 a mask, we could make a lot of the money back.
Hell, sell it to Californians for $4 a mask. Retail is $4 if you buy 50 of them.
That frees up people’s spending money. The state pays cents for products that cost us dollars, that we need to buy anyway.
Ting bitching about this isn’t calculating the total savings to the people here.
Also, yeah, I know BND is not a mask maker. They’re just a huge electric car company that can probably buy up some mask factories, and probably has friends in the Chinese government.
(Epilogue: The company flaked a couple times, and didn’t get approval, but eventually got it. The price of N95s has dropped. The contract price per mask has dropped due to BND’s screw up. The shipments right now are freaking tiny. 100,000 in May. Not good. Newsom is saying over a million in June and July, so that’s better.)
May 3
dashboard.publichealth.lacounty.gov
LA County now has a dashboard to view the daily data. It’s really nice.
Plots and tables!
May 3
The eastside is woefully under-tested. This is from the LA County COVID-19 data dashboard.
May 4
May 4
Someone was selling N95s on the street. How did they get them?
May 5
First person to do a coronavirus bow to me was this Chicano dude I didn’t know, in Boyle Heights. We were just shooting the shit, and before we departed, he bowed to me, so I bowed to him. It was nice.
May 5
OK, idea time.
We should prioritizing recycling clear bottles (PET recyclable type into plastic sheet to make protective equipment for workers and workplaces.
Increase the CRV payback from 2.5c to 3.5c, a big 40% increase. Start collecting PET packaging as well. This will create a lot of dirty jobs, but, the money you could make from collecting bottles could be OK. The price per pound would rise from 1.80 to around 2.50, so someone collecting 6 pounds an hour can make $15 an hour.
Tell people to put out their PET plastics at the curb. Scavengers will pick it up.
Give loans (or grants) to recycling companies and maybe nonprofits to set up plastic washing operations, to create some “clean jobs” that would be low risk.
Also, this cleaning can be done at home, so that might also be an option – to buy washed plastic at a higher price.
Stockpile the PET sheet, and as plexiglass supply runs out, sell this new sheet. (PET might also be running out – the stuff can be used for face shields.)
Right now, around 31% of PET bottle is collected (grandview research).
Compare PET to PMMA (plexiglass).
May 6
I think this is a pretty good summary of different perspectives on the counts. I think there’s an undercount.
May 6
(Regarding NYC)
66% of people going to the hospital were not working and staying at home.
We need to have DIY contact tracing for individuals.
Just write a list of people you have seen, and places you have been, on what dates, even if it violates the rules.
The virus doesn’t just spontaneously appear in your life. It has to come from somewhere.
May 6
Boring news. I can’t see a big surge in OC after the beach openings and closings (and that near-riot). I’ll keep an eye on this. Overall, cases are still increasing as are hospitalizations, so they could do better, but, did the beach cause this? I can’t tell.
May 6
BTW, “stay at home” is not the same as Japanese Americans being sent to concentration camps. That was “get the fuck out of your home and take one suitcase to the racetrack where you will live in a horse stable, until you are shipped to the desert to live in barracks, which will be your new home.”
May 7
I support Project Roomkey. Suburbs who refuse to house the homeless are heartless and irrational.
May 7
Some governments are wasting their time pondering whether to make masking up in all outdoor spaces mandatory.
What about like making sure workplaces have enough room for social distancing greater than 6 feet?
Maybe design a way to measure human density, to measure airflow, and to measure movement within a space, so work and living spaces can be evaluated for floating particulate transmission?
The greater risk is indoors. It’s supported by surveys and studies. Look at homeless shelters. Look at nursing homes. Look at prisons and detention centers.
May 7
Blanching and freezing are really useful for the summer. You heat up the kitchen just one time, and then reheat in the microwave. You can also pickle some of the leafy green vegetables, and, aside from the huge amounts of sodium, it’s good for you.
I do this with mustard greens, spinach, and sometimes cabbage.
May 7
If you get COVID-19, you have a 99% chance of recovery. Some people think that’s the stats.
Check this out. If you get shot, you have an 80% to 95% chance of survival.
May 8
I support any
meatpacker strike.
May 8
I just paid 79 cents a roll for that made in China toilet paper that the Mexicans sell on 9th st. That’s price gouging, man.
May 8
The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them
erinbromage.wixsite.com
This is a must-read article about transmission of the coronavirus through the air, indoors. Enclosed spaces with bad circulation are potentially risky.
May 9
Doomed Businesses:
AYCE buffet
Nail salons
Barbers
Aerobics classes, Zumba
Sushi
Party Bus
Salads and sandwiches
Fighting gym
Big meat factory
Anything else?
May 9
Birthday Party In Pasadena Exposes 30-40 People To Coronavirus
laist.com
Join the Death Party
May 9
As an alternative to opening up social spaces, people living alone, who are not working in some location, should be allowed to form a circle of 2 or 3 friends.
I suspect this is already happening, but without much discipline.
May 11
I don’t think Gates is trying to force us all to be vaccinated, but, I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I did have a Bill-Gates-Microsoft consipiracy theory, many years ago, revolving around OLE, in conflict with the OpenDoc coalition. I thought Gates was trying to monopolize program execution formats, and, by extension, control our entire personal computing infrastructure.
Fortunately, I was wrong, and editable embedded components never even became that popular, because the most common use case was to read documents with embedded attachments, not to author them, and not to share document editing tasks. That’s to say, the web became the most common use case.
The path to editable documents quickly became authoring documents by filling forms, alone, or collaboratively, like Facebook.
This form of document creation, though primitive compared to both OLE and OpenDoc, was so fun that people just got totally addicted to it, and Facebook did all kinds of work to make sure it was maximally fun, and people would return to the website to keep filling out these forms.
It was like being addicted to lotto, which is really just a scantron test that resembles gambling.
The difference is that the “prize” for filling out these Facebook forms is that a company records all your words, clicks, and uploads, and analyzes them to try and show you news stories, photos, and ads that’ll control your thoughts and desires.
May 11
RIP Souplantation
May 12
I’ve seen a few other people post this, and they have fallen for the propaganda. They are fixated on this idea that if the employees are working, they should be providing pork to Americans, not China.
OK, I kind of get being irritated by that.
But, look at the damn photo. It’s workers protesting against Smithfield. They are protesting to save their lives, to stay the fuck out of the virus air exchange refrigerators.
These other people sharing aren’t even thinking about the work conditions. They’ve been brainwashed by captialism, and maybe racism, to disregard the value of meatworkers’ lives.
May 12
Workers are protesting in MN.
May 12
This headline is just shitty apple-polishing. More MSM bourgeois media bullshit. The company barely tested at all in the past, and is now testing everyone once. ONCE.
May 12
I watched half of a long interview with Andrew Yang. I don’t like him again.
May 12
Rotting food. Hungry masses. Chaotic supply chains. Coronavirus upends the U.S. food system
latimes.com
The part about the meat plant in Vernon was interesting.
May 13
Story about Maruchan.
7 cases of infection! They need to shut it down, and reorganize the operations to make it safer.
May 13
This is ridiculous. I looked at my Amazon account and I haven’t bought from the company since 2018. There’s other ways to buy things online.
(A month later, I had to buy some stuff from Amazon.)
May 13
This thing about masks giving you carbon dioxide poisoning… sounds stupid. Even if you have that dome thing over your mouth, it’s like 1 cup of air. Your lungs are freaking huge. Think about how much air you can blow into a balloon.
If you’re really worried about C02, you should get a pulse oximeter and see what happens to your oxygen when you wear a mask.
May 13
Railway Ticket Worker Dies From Coronavirus After Passenger’s Spit Attack
huffpost.com
It looks like an essential worker was killed by a COVID-19 spitter.
Why wasn’t this immunocompromized worker kept out of public duties?
May 14
What is the infection fatality rate for influenza?
Can someone find a paper or legit report that calculates it?
(I was asking because the criteria for an infection in the USC LAC survey and the data from the US CDC about flu differed. The CDC flu numbers were estimated infections with symptoms.)
May 14
occovid19.ochealthcare.com
I look at this every few days. I don’t think the OC beach openings caused many new cases. There’s a rise in cases, but also in testing. However, the last couple days, there’s been some surge. Testing declined, but positive tests are way up.
May 14
This blue shirt dude didn’t do anything to merit being battered by the cop. If anything, he was way more calm than a lot of people would be. The cop couldn’t handle being insulted by a guy who sleeps in a vacant lot. smh.
(This was a guy who got beat up by a cop from the Hollenbeck station.)
May 14
I think we should link up drivers with essential workers or coworkers. They would get the same driver every time, and it’s the same passengers every time.
We might be able to cut some bus service, and avoid bus viral transmission risk.
May 14
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: His new MLB COVID-19 Study and the Dilemma of the Lockdown
youtube.com
2 affluent/elite guys discuss opening up the economy. Lots of good info, but I have my opinions.
I think the rich and affluent should be made to get infected first. They have access to the best healthcare, and also live in less dense conditions. There are fewer people. They are not always in contact with the masses.
So they can get sick, some will die, and it can be contained.
Infect the boarding schools.
Some people will die.
Then, after recovery, this managerial class could function as before. Though workers keep going to the same offices and factories and shops, the managers travel between populations.
Over time, it would spread more into the working class, where it would spread a lot worse – but locking down populations of poor people is relatively easier. Poor people don’t travel as much, so locals can implement districting. It wouldn’t happen across the entire class in all places at the same time.
If you need to quarantine someone, put them in a nice hotel.
Some people will die.
This is politically viable.
May 14
smh. The right wing is jumping on the statement Newsom said, that the community spread started at a nail salon. Newsom really blew this one. He needs someone on his staff who knows Asian community issues. Maybe even a small brain trust that know the many communities.
We don’t even know if it’s a Vietnamese nail salon.
Still, he needed to be sensitive to the facts: a lot of nail shops are run by Vietnamese, or have Viet workers. It’s the butt of jokes and a stereotype.
Many Americans don’t distinguish between different Asians. For many, the nail shop is the only contact they have with Vietnamese community.
He should have reached out to the communities that would be affected, and prepared the announcement in a way that it would be a first step toward improving the conditions for nail shop workers, rather than a statement that could be interpreted as blaming nail shops.
May 15
Estimating The Infection Fatality Rate Among Symptomatic COVID-19 Cases In The United States | Health Affairs
healthaffairs.org
I know I have some virus skeptics on my friends list, so this is mainly for them. There’s a lot of comparisons between COVID-19 fatality and flu fatality.
The problem is, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
The antibody surveys of populations point to an infection fatality rate (IFR) of around 0.1% to 0.2% or so. The IFR is deaths/infections.
That gets compared to a stat that’s also around 0.1% for flu. It’s calculated from CDC data. The problem is, it’s not the IFR. It’s deaths/illnesses, which is called IFR-S or IFR for people with symptoms.
This paper estimates an IFR-S for COVID-19, given that the CFR (deaths/cases) is an inaccurate number that depends on a lot of unstable testing conditions. It’s a preprint and has been criticized.
I don’t understand the math, and can’t evaluate it at all.
However, my main point is that the stat of 0.1% for flu is the IFR-S, and virus-skeptics are comparing IFR and IFR-S.
May 15
The neoliberal-crony competition for a vaccine. Trump is turning discovery into a contest, but has already narrowed the field of possible winners.
There’s already much motivation to produce a vaccine, and by pre-selecting potential winners, and also excluding China, couldn’t this cause the “sure to lose” researchers to give up?
May 15
This MAGA made a really annoying video of her antagonizing the people at a market, saying she didn’t want to wear a mask. They called the cops to remove her. She also asserted that she was a healthy person, and did not need to wear a mask.
Six days later, she showed symptoms of some illness. If it’s COVID-19, then, it’s possible, maybe probable, that she was spreading virus during her video. (It went viral. LOL.)
They say that there’s a non-symptomatic period of 2 to 14 days, and most people present symptoms around the 5th day. So, 6 days is right around the 5th day.
May 15
Normal work and school stress in Japan is so terrible that suicides have declined during lockdown.
“School is a pressure for some young people, but this April there is no such pressure,” said Yukio Saito, a former head of telephone counselling service the Japanese Federation of Inochi-no-Denwa. “At home with their families, they feel safe.”
May 16
(Sign reading “Support Roomkey”)
Waiting with my sign. Some unneighborly people want to protest using the motel 6 in rosemead to house at risk homeless folks.
May 16
Came up with a statistic called “sorrow”. It’s (deaths^3 + cases) / population.
The 15 saddest cities and neighborhoods, in descending order of sadness, are:
Los Angeles – Westlake
Los Angeles – Little Armenia
Los Angeles – Pico-Union
Los Angeles – East Hollywood
City of Glendale
City of Inglewood
Los Angeles – Melrose
City of Burbank
City of Torrance
City of Bell
Los Angeles – Country Club Park
City of Lynwood
Unincorporated – East Los Angeles
City of South Pasadena
Los Angeles – Sylmar
May 16
This explains how Vietnam, a poor, dense country, managed to keep COVID-19 at bay. Rapid response, education, 14-day quarantine for incoming travelers. Quarantine buildings to separate the sick from everyone else.
California still has a hotspot in Los Angeles. We need to emulate the successful countries, when possible, and grasp how they think of this pandemic. Ignore the rest of America, which is mostly OK, but also peppered with failure.
May 16
Explosion and fire downtown. Notice how big media are getting content for free. Don’t fall for these requests – I have – just ask for some money.
May 17
I think it’s interesting how an organization that wants to get rid of lockdowns is also against masks, saying they don’t work.
If masks work, then, it’s more feasible to reduce or avoid lockdowns. Just wear masks.
If masks don’t work, then, something else has worked for the places that avoided a local epidemic. Often, the intervention they used was a more strict lockdown than we have here.
They also did masks, of course. However, if you assume the masks didn’t help, then, you need to look at other factors that may have worked. One of those factors was lockdowns.
May 17
(San Francisco policy change.)
I hope this works. They are going to protect encampments where people who are unhoused can live in tents, with space between them, and social services provided to the tented residents.
If the outcomes of people living in tents is good, it would open up the door to a lot of unorthodox treatment and mitigation possibilities.
I just hope it’s not too cold.
May 17
What are you all doing to prepare for the second wave of SARS-CoV-2?
May 18
We have now confirmed that the video we have seen of Ahmaud’s murder is just 30 seconds of a 4+ minute chase all over the neighborhood. Ahmaud got away multiple times until they finally boxed him in. That’s when the filming began. And then they murdered him.
May 18
Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?
reason.com
A libertarian mag article that actually leans toward not opening up (implicitly). TL;DR: tests are not always accurate, results are not that certain, there’s selection bias, fatality rates are different in different surveys and may reflect something about each location.
It’s got links to the studies (something I wish all articles would do).
I liked this because of confirmation bias: I thought the same about different locations, selection bias, and had questions about what tests they used.
May 19
Asian American Studies: Made in California | PBS SoCal
pbssocal.org
May 19
ncirs.org.au
ncirs.org.au
This is an encouraging paper from Australia about the relatively low spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the school setting.
It’s hard to quantify this, but back of the envelope calculations are like this: 18 cases led to 2 new cases.
The is in contrast to how cases spreading in meat factories, homes, shelters, is a lot higher than average.
However, ever since I heard about the idea of allowing schools to become places to build herd immunity, back in March, I’ve been skeptical about the policy, even as I accept the premise about spread, due to personal experience.
We need to look at how people live in the US, and in LA County in particular. We have more senior citizens living with school-age children than in other wealthy countries.
These are not the majority of homes, but, I suspect it’s a fairly large number of homes in LA. When I was growing up, over 40 years ago, there were always a few kids in my classes who lived with grandparents. I lived with my grandparent for a while when I was very young.
My mom still lives on the street, and not too long ago, there were two households like that (10% of households), and now it’s one. This is a middle class neighborhood.
I’m living in Boyle Heights, and in my building, two households are like this (40% of households), and we are living in 2 bedroom apartments. That’s a tiny sample, but, I guess I could survey the entire street and find out. I’d estimate around 15% if you include situations where one familiy rents two apartments in a building, and family situations with front-house back-house setups.
In both places, there are also old neighborhoods with old houses on long lots, and some families just build more housing for themselves, and multiple households in the same family live together, with three or four generations under one roof.
The latest thing I’ve seen is new/renovation construction that’s designed to allow two households to live in one building. On the surface, it looks like mansionization, but if you look at the plan, it could be cohabitation.
These housing arrangements are a risk to older people, so when we consider allowing schools to resume, we need to be sure we can arrange isolation of older people and immunocompromized people at risk of death from covid-19. Alternatively, we might consider different education arrangements for children who live in such situations.
(Also, maybe notably, crowding is often associated with poverty, but in these above scenarios, it’s not necessarily poverty that’s keeping families multi-generational: it’s more like an effect that comes from saving money, buying a house, and having space.)
May 19
I didn’t even realize Kevin and Bean was yanked from KROQ. Then again, i stopped listening to the morning show around the time they became the morning show. Check out the second link. Dusty Street spins on XM it turns out. She had a good clip of ZZ Top and John Fogarty on her page.
https://www.playlistresearch.com/la/kroq.htm
https://www.facebook.com/Dusty-Street-287196364715691/
May 19
I think Trump should take as much hydroxychloroquine as he wants.
May 20
MPs hear why Hong Kong had no Covid-19 care home deaths
theguardian.com
Let’s not fuck around. Take it seriously, and prepare. Give up the wishful thinking that the system is pushing, and also, a lot of the virus-skeptics are pushing. It’s all wishful thinking. Both political sides in the west are failures at containing COVID-19. Look at what worked, and copy it.
“He added that all nursing homes had a trained infection controller and underwent emergency drills simulating an infection outbreak four times a year so infection control becomes “a well-worn practice”.”
May 20
Hong Kong Has Largely Survived COVID-19. Can New York — And The US — Do It Too?
buzzfeednews.com
This was published way back, in March 15, when we were just starting to shelter at home, and NYC was just getting serious.
The writer was living in Hong Kong, where, to this day, they have suffered only 4 deaths. A city of over 7 million people has had a little over 1,000 cases, and 4 deaths.
I think it’s worth reading, to get a sense of how things were just before NYC blew up.
Get an inkling of where we went wrong.
May 21
Man endures racist taunts, said SPD was unresponsive
nwasianweekly.com
May 21
(This was a joke.)
“When I do a whore, I don’t wear a condom.”
- President Donald J. Trump
May 22
Elon Musk predicts 15% of the workforce will be eliminated through AI automation.
If 12% to 15% of the workforce is going to be eliminated, can’t they just shave off years from the retirement age, and also pay for a couple more years of college?
If people have 40 working years (and we shouldn’t), 15% of that is 6 years. So reduce the retirement age by 4 years, down to 63 (or 61), and pay for 2 years of school for everyone.
I didn’t need AI to figure that shit out.
May 22
“A Hong Kong paper awaiting peer review found that of 7,324 documented cases in China, only one outbreak occurred outside—during a conversation among several men in a small village.”
“The risk of infection indoors is almost 19 times higher than in open-air environments…”
It’s a good time to be in the doors and windows business, to replace windows that don’t open, with windows that do open. People will install security doors at home so they can get airflow. Also, good for the HVAC business, because the offices will need to modify their systems to handle HEPA filters. Meetings? Hire a facilitator and make them shorter.
We should also have a shorter work day, maybe with a 90 minute lunch.
May 22
If carbon dioxide in masks were so deadly, wouldn’t people be dying from drinking soda?
May 23
Cluster of Coronavirus Disease Associated with Fitness Dance Classes, South Korea
wwwnc.cdc.gov
I guess the Zumba trend is over with
May 23
I was parked behind the Pep Boys in East LA, and saw this odd Japanese style architecture. The front side looks like US neoclassical colonial.
May 23
Scientific evidence for mask wearing
youtube.com
This is really interesting. They did some tests with hamsters to see how many got infected with different kinds of mask-use.
15% and 33% combined is 5%. If everyone wears a mask, the odds that a virus particle gets from one person to the other person is 5%.
Look at how shitty the public policy response by Japan has been. It’s secretive and slow. Yet, they aren’t exploding. Maybe it’s because people wear masks.
May 24
The Harvard Business Review has some advice about detoxifying your workplace by detoxifying authoritarian hierarchies inherent to capitalism.
May 24
Leone says an important thing here – the “safe at home” is not safe if someone at home has COVID-19. Infections are almost certain in the home.
We need to think critically about our contacts and risk, and don’t fall into the easy, and comforting, mental tropes. We need to think like contact tracers.
May 24
Fighting COVID Isn’t A Mystery, White People Are Just Dumb
medium.com
I haven’t even finished this, and it’s fucking brilliant.
“To the white world, nothing can exist until they discover it, so they insisted on an ongoing debate about first principles.”
(If you attack white people, it won’t go too viral.)
May 24
Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?
bloomberg.com
Got lucky and had a history of contact tracing through local health centers.
May 25
“Save Icon” looks like it was drawn by someone who has never used a small floppy disc. I don’t think I’ve used one since the early 2000s.
May 25
I never had a raver gas mask, but I remember that was a trend, to wear a gas mask or respirator to inhale vicks. The young people today have it too easy.
May 25
All these sheeple are doing Memorial Day stuff on the Memorial Day weekend.
May 26
As much as I like to think I’m against conspiracy theories, I do have some of my own.
Back when I was around 20-21 years old, circa 1990, I used to have this “conspiracy theory” that if high profile white men stopped getting AIDS, or died from it in great numbers so they weren’t the majority anymore, and it became a thing mainly among poor minorities and people in Africa, that we would not find a cure for AIDS, or a vaccine against HIV.
May 27
“Teach a man to fish…” an outdated analogy, given that we’ve overfished the oceans, sport fishing is licensed, and the government stocks a lot of lakes with farmed fish for sport fishing.
May 27
Has anyone spotted amazing food deals out there?
(I found 50 cent eggs last week. I’m wondering if similar amazing deals are out there now.)
May 27
CEO of Surveillance Firm Banjo Once Helped KKK Leader Shoot Up a Synagogue
onezero.medium.com
A tekkk bro.
May 26
individualist looting = getting stuff because i want it
neoliberal looting = getting stuff to resell in the secondary market
May 28
The reason why Europe and America fucked up COVID is the same reason why Chipotle burritos suck. You know what I mean.
May 28
LIVE VIDEO: Minneapolis police 3rd Precinct building on fire
kstp.com
This is for all the critics who said target was the wrong target.
May 28
(Post about delivering a $64 order and getting no tip.)
No tip on a 64 order. This is America.
May 29
Masks are an incredibly cheap intervention, and producing them can be scaled up really quickly. Given the 14-day maximum incubation time (that we assume), any intervention should show results in a couple weeks, and should give an inkling of its total effect In a month. Everyone will know if it works or not.
States should just do it for a month: masks are mandatory. Observe the effect, or lack of effect, and then you will have your policy. You shouldn’t even need to make a law, because evidence should be enough to create a general social consensus of what to do.
Mar 29
I think anyone who doesn’t have a fantasy about getting a whole bunch of free things, especially nice things for free, at least for some period of their life… well, they’re not a real American.
May 30
Now that the looting has gone big, people are debating this and that about mom and pop stores.
During this covid situation, I have been to the 99 cents store, and to the mom and pop dollar stores. You go to some mom and pops, and they have stuff from the 99 cents store on sale for $2.
I wonder how they got it. Did they send family to the 99s to buy it up? Did they bribe someone at the 99 to sell it to them?
On the whole, it’s kind of funny and sad at the same time.
May 30
Sneaker enthusiasts are looting sneaker resale shops. I imagine they are planning to resell the shoes. #petitbourgeoisneoliberallooterbros?
May 31
Yesterday was so weird. White rioter guys were breaking into shoe shops that resell classic collectible sneakers that are priced in the hundreds of dollars. I think the customers for these stores are rich kids who want expensive streetwear, but there’s a wider culture of people who find the shoes and sell them into the market, to make money.
The old stereotype – the 1992 stereotype of looters – was that they desired nice shoes, and took them. They were “brainwashed by advertising.” Today, that can’t apply – these looters were not necessarily stealing things for themselves. They were stealing things to sell to other people, probably using an online platform, so it was a kind of “job” or “speculation”. Technically, it’s a small business if they make enough money.
They could be selling things to “brainwashed” rich people. But it’s accepted that rich people spend money frivolously, and they aren’t criticized for it.
So, this is neoliberal looting. I was joking about it the first time I made up that term, but, it might be a thing.
Neoliberalism is marked by the entry of market-based capitalist thought into all aspects of life, particulary in the middle class and working class.
Neoliberal looting is the ideology of Disaster Capitalism shaping behavior in the middle class and working class. The looters saw opportunities to make money by getting the high-value shoes to sell back into the market, in the near future.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look at a site like StockX: sneakers are traded like stocks. The goal isn’t only to have sneakers to wear, but to speculate on sneakers as an asset.
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