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Yet another novel I will no longer write

So, some years ago I blogged a whole bunch of times about books I wasn't going to write for one reason or another.

Now, thanks to COVID-19, I can add another to the list.

Some of you have been waiting years (is it really a decade? Gosh!) for a third book in the would-be trilogy that began with Halting State and Rule 34. The third Scottish near-future police procedural kept getting put back and back because reality wouldn't sit still and behave itself: it's really hard to write something set 10 years in the future (or even 5) if you don't even know what the country it's set in is going to be called. I named the period starting in 2012 "the Scottish political singularity", because it made all near-future fiction set in Scotland problematic: first we had the referendum on independence from the UK, then a general election, then the Brexit referendum. Back in 2012 I thought things would have settled down by 2016 or so: alas, I was sadly disillusioned.

So around 2016 I hatched a Plan B.

(Had, past tense.)

Plan B was to make my near-future Scottish thriller so hyper-specific that the big political questions wouldn't impinge on the plot at all. And I had a good plot, and even wrote the first thousand or so words of the untitled novel as a story seed. I just needed to clear my desk, finish Invisible Sun (FX: sound of author weeping helplessly) and finish the new space opera ...

Well, you know what happened: delays due to people dying, an apocalyptic drum-beat of bad news in the background, and so on and so forth. But I thought I might finally get time to start writing the Scottish Novel in earnest, starting in mid- to late-2022 ...

Then COVID-19 came along.

You see, the third Scottish crime novel was to be a zombie pandemic novel.

I have several bees in my metaphorical bonnet—in fact, an entire angry swarm of them—when it comes to the standard zombie narrative in post-apocalypse fiction. The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.

Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. It's also fundamentally wrong. Usually whenever there's a major disaster, people look after their families ... and then their friends and neighbours, pulling together and trying to help.

It's noteworthy that Zombie Apocalypse fic and Pandemic Dystopia fic overlap considerably, and people get both aspects right and wrong to different degrees. (I'd like to give a shout-out at this point to Seanan McGuire who, as Mira Grant, gave us the Newsflesh trilogy. Her zombies are, well, conventional media zombies (they shamble and they eat brains), but she put a lot of work into making the epidemiology plausible.)

I was planning a pandemic zombie disaster novel in which people behaved like human beings, rather than psychotic, heavily armed doomsday preppers. My zombie plague differs from most: it's a viral encephalitis, possibly an odd strain of influenza, which leaves a percentage of its victims with Cotard's Delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome. The affected person holds a delusional belief that they're dead, or putrefying, or don't exist, or they're in hell. (It's associated with parietal lobe lesions and can also be induced by some drug metabolites: as a consequence of viral encephalitis it would be weird, but possibly no weirder than Encephalitis lethargica.) How does a society deal with a pandemic that leaves 1% of the population permanently convinced that they're dead? Well ...

I had a plot all worked out. TLDR: deep brain stimulation via implant. Rapidly leading to rental plans—because in our grim meathook privatised-medicine future the medical devices company who are first-to-market realize that charging people a monthly plan to feel like they're alive is a good revenue stream—but this is followed by hackers cracking the DRM on the cryptocoin-funded brain implants. The device manufacturer goes bankrupt, and their intellectual property rights are bought out by a Mafia-like operation who employ stringers to go around uploading malware to the implants of zombies who've stopped paying the rent, permanently bricking them. Our protagonist is a zombie detective: the actual story opens when a murder victim walks into a police station to complain that they've been killed.

And the whole theme of this untitled novel was going to be: this is elite panic, and this is disaster capitalism, and this is what really happens during a zombie epidemic, and these things are not the same—

And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do not generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.

Because—fuck my life—writing plausible near-future SF in the 21st century wasn't hard enough already.

Anyway, let me leave you with the WARNING very rough, first draft, unpolished only existing fragment of what was intended to be The Lambda Functionary before COVID-19 buried it at the crossroads with a mouthful of garlic and a stake through its heart.




CHAPTER 1: U R DED

You are an ex-zombie.

Most days, most of the time, you can ignore this. As existential states go, being an ex-zombie is a bit like being an ex-skier or an ex-patriate: it's bland, and anodyne, an absence of dread, the mental cavity left behind by a passing toothsome nightmare. The pulse of blood in your veins and the thoughts in your head and the warmth in your loins provide a constant reassurance that you are, in fact, alive and mammalian. Except every once in a while it leaps out from behind a lamp-post and screams death in your face like you're an alcoholic noticing the gaping door to a pub by your shoulder: and suddenly you are dead once more.

You're perambulating along the grey cobbled canyon of Hill Street that evening—it's early summer, the nights are drawing short and the tourists are flocking—when you pass a jumble of bony knees and elbows, the bowed bald dome of a skull leaning forward as if about to boak in the gutter. At first you think it's a regular jakey boy, or maybe a beggar: but there's no cup and no weatherbeaten cardboard sign, and that stomach's not held enough food to throw up for weeks now. It takes a few seconds for your stride to clatter to a reluctant stop, by which time you're about five metres past the silent, barely-breathing figure. Coldness wraps its dreicht, despair-stained phalanges around your heart and gives it a squeeze. You shudder and take a breath, remembering Ina and the boys in the happy time before the demic, and for a moment you see yourself there on the edge of the gutter, vomiting vacuum on the stony indifference of the capital's streets as the waste trucks whine past, canned voices braying bring out your dead. You don't want to look round. But you've been here before, and the guilt is suffocating, so you turn and you look.

The lad in the gutter is indeed far gone in the post-viral zombie haze of starvation. He could be anything from seventeen to forty-seven, with the gaunt concentration-camp inmate's cheekbones and sunken eye sockets. His hair's fallen out, of course, his nails are cracked and ragged—clothes a mess, a holed hoodie and jeans that are little better than rags, muddy and shredded cerements fit to be buried in. He's still breathing, and nodding slowly every few seconds—a slow davvening, the prayerful rocking of the undead. Gums drawing back from yellowing teeth, he drools slightly. Behold, the living dead. You want to run away: he makes you cringe, feeling unclean. But instead, you crouch down beside him and, steeling yourself, you lay your right arm across his shoulders. "Hey," you say. The zombie doesn't reply, of course. They never do. But you can feel the jerky rise and fall of his ribs: he's hungry. He broadcasts raw starvation like an old-time radio station with kilowatts of fossil energy to waste, pumping angst out into the ionosphere. Behind him, a boutique's robot window display repeatedly enrobes an anorexic headless mannequin in an hourglass sheath of expensive fabric, then strips it off again to reveal the skeletal ribs of the dressform fabber beneath: but you know voluntarily embraced hunger lacks the killing quality of the starving undead. "When did you last eat?" You murmur in his ear, not expecting any response.

"Nuuuuh ..."

Shock almost makes you let go. He vocalized: that means he's not let go. Lights on, somebody's still home—even if the light's a fading flashlight. You tap your glasses and peel your eyes. "Matt here. Got a responsive shambler in Hill Street Backup, please." Then you hook one hand under his armpit and push yourself up off the floor. "Hey, kid. Let's get some food in you."

"Nuuuurr." He might be trying to say no, but you're not having it. You manage to get yourself up, and he's so light—skin and bones, really—that he comes with, doesn't try to put up a fight. Opposite the posh frock fab you see the frosted window and kitsch logo of a once-trendy pub. It's not your usual dive, but it's still mid-evening and the kitchen will be open, so you shoulder-barge your way through the swing-door with Dead Guy lurching drunkenly athwart behind, and bring him to the nearest empty table. " Ye cannae be bringing the likes of that in here—" The bartender is brassy and indignant, but you smile at her and she blinks and subsides as she kens that you're peeling tonight. "Aye, wheel, if it pukes on the carpet you're paying!"

Luckily there are no other customers cluttering up this end of the hostelry and liable to be discommoded by your Samaritan emergency: just a handful of sour-faced old regulars supping their IPAs by the brightwork at the bar. "I'd like a portion of cheese'n'chips and a bowl of chicken nuggets," I tell her. She looks askance: "soon as I get some protein in him the sooner I can get him out of here and into rehab," I add. "Peeling, ken?"

She nods tightly, face like a furled umbrella, and scoots for the til. The chicken nuggets aren't nuggets and have never been near a bird, but they're easily swallowed: ditto the chips'n'cheese. It's all soft, high carb/high fat sludge that used to get hammered by the sin tax during the war on obesity: now it's back on the menu as pub grub, and it's especially good for shoveling into a zombie who, after all, is dead and therefore utterly uninterested in matters gustatory.

Boney Jim—you've got to call him something, and he's not going to give you a name—sits quietly where you parked him on the bench seat. He's still davvening. The food comes (along with the drink you ordered to still your unquiet nerves) and you pick up a greasy hot chip and push it at his lips. "Eat," you tell him. For a miracle, he opens his mouth. You shove the chip in and get your fingers out of the way just in time. He chews and swallows, and you repeat the process with a nugget of deep-fried freshly printed avian myocites. Then some more chips. He is eating and swallowing what you place in front of his lips, even though his hands don't move and his eyes are a million kilometers away, staring into infinity, pupils fixed and dilated. Boney Jim, Zombie Jim. If you'd left him out there he'd probably have lasted a couple more days before starvation, thirst, or exposure got him. It's going to be necessary to track down whoever dumped him in the street like that: you add it to the to-do spike in your glasses. Eyes Peeled, as they say. You went through this yourself, in an earlier life. There's light at the other end of the tunnel, and it isn't necessarily the white light of eternity if somebody cares enough to get you to a clinic and rehab.

Ina cared enough to do it for you: but you weren't there to do it for her when the time came, and sometimes the shame and the guilt is worse than the disease.

You have been feeding your zombie for about a quarter of an hour when you realize that you're not alone any more. The Principles have sent you aid and comfort in the shape of a couple of Kindness Volunteers who—like yourself—are peeling tonight. She's a rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman in a tweed twin-set and cultured pearls, sensible shoes her only concession: he looks like a painfully earnest Baptist Sunday school teacher from the 1960s, stranded most of a century in his own future—a determinedly retro hipster look. Maybe they're twentieth century cosplayers who've escaped from the convention center for an evening of determined volunteerism. Or maybe they're the real thing. Either way you're grateful. "I found him outside," you explain, pushing another not-chicken not-nugget at Boney Jim's mandible. "Just sitting on the pavement. I think he's stage IVa, maybe IVb, but there's still some reactivity. Might be something they can work with at Greyfriars." They set up a receiving unit for zombies in the former graveyard, at the height of the demic. White dome tents mushrooming among the lichen-encrusted headstones.




1440 Comments

1:

WE may yet get and American version of the Zombie movie :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/us-sales-guns-ammunition-soar-amid-coronavirus-panic-buying

The level of stupid is strong in these people.

2:

Fantastic premise, condolences about the timing.

"Eyes peeled" == recording/streaming video?

(By the way, some of the Javascript for this page is being loaded over http rather than https, not sure if that matters to you...)

3:

I suspect it's a reference to Robert Peel, source of both the "bobby" and "peeler" nickname for UK lawmen.

4:

You've done it again! If you started to write a novel about how the human race came to its senses, started tackling the problems we have created, and things generally improved, do you think it would come to be? :-)

5:

Clearly, COVID-19 is God's way of telling you not to write second-person fiction. :-P

6:

"Peelers" -- reference to Sir Robert Peel: running crowdsourced policing, mediated by augmented reality and smartphones. Many low-level public order police duties have been outsourced to the public ("the police are the public and the public are the police") in return for social credit.

7:

I'm reminded of the Great Politics Mess Up, AKA the end of the Cold war. Due to the long publication pipeline, for some 2 years after it happened there were thrillers being published in which the Iron Curtain, East Germany and the Soviet Union were a significant part of the setting.

8:

Heeeeey, you will be pleased to know that East Germany features significantly in Invisible Sun, which is set in an alternate 2020 (in which the USSR nevertheless collapsed on schedule).

9:

Fascinating stuff about the Haitian zombie origins, and tight relationship to elite panic. Opened my eyes. I'm pretty sure I heard George Romero himself saying that the zombieism in "Night of the Living Dead" was a thinly-veiled reference to conservatism. If we take that premise, then the disease itself could be a symptom of "elite pre-emptive panic" or the complete mental shutdown of the zombies is infection-control from ideas that would dissuade them from their singular pursuit of wealth ...uh, sorry, "brains."

Thank you for all your writing.

10:

Before I really wanted to read Invisible Sun, and while I understand the reasons it was delayed, I nevertheless found it frustrating.

Now I really really want to read it, if only to find out how the East German regime survived. Does it still call itself Communist? Is it like China: SocialismCapitalism with German Characteristics? (Actually, that last sounds really sinister).

11:

That's a hell of a first chapter - scary as hell. It's a shame we're not going to see any more of it.

12:

Damn I'm sorry I won't get to read the rest of that.

13:

I really want to read this book regardless of where reality takes us.

14:

Condolences for the loss of another novel to our malfunctioning simulation, Charlie.

Harry Bingham's Fiona Griffiths series of crime novels feature a detective constable protagonist recovering from Cotard's syndrome. They're a lot of fun, especially the sense of place in the Cardiff setting.

15:

WARNING very rough, first draft, unpolished only existing fragment

Damn. Slings and arrows notwithstanding, you've certainly not forgotten how it's done. I was drawn in even though I knew this was orphaned prose.

And yes, overall, near-future work -- in our primary timeline anyway -- is increasingly a matter of tilting at windmills in a stiff breeze. Even envisioned stories set decades hence are vulnerable to being cut off at the knees by the chaotic events overtaking us now.

Thanks for this. I hope you can get to your further projects soon.

16:

Shame, shame, shame. Would have loved to read that story.

"Coldness wraps its dreicht, despair-stained phalanges around your heart and gives it a squeeze." - how do you come up with those pictures?

In the sixth para you switch to first person (I know, it's only a draft).

17:

An old idiom, but fairly common, especially in noir mysteries:

https://knowyourphrase.com/keep-your-eyes-peeled

Has nothing to do with "peelers" or Sir Robert.

18:

Yes: it was a pun/wordplay.

19:

Sigh. Here's another bit of happiness that 2020 stole from us.

Someone seriously needs to rest the universe from dystopian back to topyian, or at least semi-topyian.

20:

While arguably a mild spoiler, it's worth mentioning that Newsflesh deals with the "is this human nature?" bit to some extent too.

The entire mammalian population is effectively infected with the cycle of abuse from the cellular level on upwards, and zombies are what happens when a threshold is crossed within the host and the consequences can't be contained. Which is more than a little thematically relevant to other events in the setting.

Which means there's definitely stuff to chew on in the material past the first trilogy+prequel. Not that it's exactly compliant with the demands of, uh, puppies who claim to have infection-induced rage.

21:

Tim McCormack @ 2: Fantastic premise, condolences about the timing.

"Eyes peeled" == recording/streaming video?

vatine @ 3: I suspect it's a reference to Robert Peel, source of both the "bobby" and "peeler" nickname for UK lawmen.

It works pretty well as a double meaning, accounting for both the electronic spectacles and for the police reference. That's one of the hallmarks of good Sci-Fi writing, you can pack more than one meaning into a phrase, and give old clichés new meanings.

That happens to language in real life too.

22:

and we do not generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.

Unless you’re named Duterte, not that he needs an excuse.

23:

Damn you are good. Love the language, layered and particular, and how it worldbuilds, evocatively. 'Davvening'. Grin. (oy). Dreich.

(The grounded weirdness of your Scottish/Yiddish mashup, Trainspotting meets Augie March, but with way better gender politics...)

And if your past work is any guide, this would have been a comfort read, no matter how well or badly things go at the moment...

24:

I'm absolutely not an expert on Philippine politics, but what I know about Duterte suggests that he exists in a permanent highly elevated state of elite panic. (The same goes for most authoritarian leaders: Trump for sure, also Bolsonaro, Scotty from Marketing, V. Putin, etc ...)

25:

Good thing you define Davvening, otherwise I’m wondering if it would have gotten changed in edits. Though it’s certainly sounds better than Shuckling.

26:

You're not familiar with Jewish prayer ritual, I take it.

27:

It's really a shame this book isn't going to be written. Just that first taste makes me want to read the whole thing.

In Arma III, the zombie plague is a Cordyceps fungus that takes over the victim's central nervous system. The zombies don't just shamble, some are runners and some are "bolters" - shamblers who suddenly become runners.

The zombies are cannibalistic, but don't specifically eat brains, any human flesh will do. The fungus spreads itself by flesh to flesh contact. If they can rip a chunk off of you, you become infected. There are "antibiotics" that can protect you if you're infected, but after someone progresses to the zombie stage there is no cure.

It also only zombifies men, killing women outright. Civilization collapsed because 91% of the world's female population died.

The zombies appear to "want" you to kill them, to put them out of their misery. "They" are apparently still in there somewhere, prisoners inside of bodies they can no longer control.

28:

Considering how many times I’ve mentioned here being a Jew, yes I am.

My point (which I thought was obvious) was whether or not your average reader would be.

29:

My point (which I thought was obvious) was whether or not your average reader would be.

It shouldn't matter: I aim to make things obvious from context. (There's just not quite enough context in a 1400 word snapshot.)

30:

Right, I understand. Apologies for being a little touchy; it’s still early here, and I haven’t gotten enough coffee in me. Ran out of the good stuff and am making do with some old, flavored (ick) stuff from the back of the cabinet. Will be attempting grocery shopping tomorrow—was supposed to be today, but we got 4 inches of slush overnight. And apologies for rambling on.

31:

"and we do not generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us."

With the possible exception over here in the USA of Bubba and Zeek, who are terrified that asians might be carrying the Covid19, and this might make them sick, so rather than staying at home and washing their hands like the guvurmint tells them, their solution is to go find people that look asian (if they can't find those, blacks, Hispanics, or people with a good sun tan will probably do) and beat them until they spray bodily fluids everywhere.

32:

But, Charlie, leave out the rape, and I WANT to rob and kill the ultrawealthy...

Oh, hey, that would be good - the ultrawealthy eat some sort of Special Food, that lets them keep living, and zombies want that after it's been digested, because they haven't had the treatment to let them digest it...

33:

Or spend too much time reading QAnon and so drive a freight locomotive off its tracks in order to try and ram a floating hospital a quarter of a mile away because something something black helicopters something FEMA something New World Order something WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!?!!1!!ELEVENTY!!!

As just happened in California.

And then there's this: Venezuelan Navy boat rams German cruise ship and sinks. (Just what the everlasting fuck did the captain of the ANBV Naiguata think he was doing? NB: some boat -- displaces around 1600 tons, has (had) trans-Atlantic range, could carry medium-large helicopters.)

Clearly we are living through the crazycakes times.

34:

Far be it from little ol' me to presume but I think you've got it backwards. This is a very good time to sit back and watch how the world deals with a pandemic while plotting the sort of novel you've outlined. We're at the very beginning of this thing: we have no idea how the world will react because it hasn't gotten real to most of us yet and even when the casualties begin to grow at rates even the slaveholders can't ignore, for most of the Western world it will mostly stay antiseptic and cheerful as bodies are carted off for disposal behind the scenes. Most of us will never see one and all those guns USAians are buying aren't going to be used, even on raging preppers.

Don't give up, Charlie: your story sounds delightful and at the very least we can read it and nod sagely with a heartfelt "those crazy scifi writers! What will they think of next?" as we set it down and scrambled out to the party.

35:

Just remembered another take on this: The Giving Plague by David Brin (link to full short story).

TL;DR: Virus evolves to use blood transfusion as a vector by making humans irrationally generous.

36:

Charlie @ 24 Bolsanaro most definitely, also Trump Tsar Putin looks ok at the moment, but he's making the classic mistake of many authoritarians - he is actually secure, but he is still uncertain, so tightens the screws a little bit ... & then a bit more etc. See also Tar Alexander II & Nicholas II, later - except Alex II was a reformer ( ish )

37:

But its a little different over here. While "non essential business" are closed in many places here, there is an argument over whether gun stores are "essential" in these times of crisis, owning a handgun for self defense having been ruled by the supreme court to be a personal right guaranteed by the constitution. Presumably the people that stocked up on bottled water in case somehow, hospitals being overloaded and ventilators being in short supply caused the water to turn off, will have a hefty stack of firearms and ammunition beside their jugs of Arrowhead Spring Water.

The funny thing is, I can now make the simile, "Guns are like toilet paper". I personally think that hoarding toilet paper is just plain stupid. However, everyone else around me is hoarding toilet paper. So as a pragmatist, I have to have a hoard of toilet paper myself, not because the pandemic will make a shortage, but because the hoarders themselves are taking it all and if need to use the bathroom in the next month, I better have my own hoard. Similarly, I know that all the wingnuts are out there stocking up on ammunition and guns. Unlike toilet paper, I dont forsee a certain need for a gun. But I certainly dont want to be the only guy without one, especially if someone runs out of toilet paper or spam before I do. Now the reality is, if my neighbor came over and said the kids were starving and they had no toilet paper, Id problably give them a can of spam and a roll of toilet paper and and even a bag of rice. (I actually dont hoard stuff like that, I just like spam and rice and buy a month or two or mores worth when I find a good price) But I worry that the guy who feels the need to have a giant stack of ammo next to his giant stack of bottled water wont realize that. His solution may involve that giant pile of ammo. So I have ONE box of ammo and an old shotgun. I dont see the need to have a giant stack of ammo,or any ammo for its own sake, and I know that MOST people come together. But still we are having an actual discussion over whether gun stores are essential. It comes down to pragmatism vs lunacy.

Yesterday I thought about shooting a guy who was looking at my toilet paper funny. But I decided to calm down and drink some bottled water.

38:

Dunno. If you wanted a relatively happy, 'predictable future' novel - and a 'reasonably' similar culture. Maybe pick from Canada, Australia, an English speaking island (weird associations), New Zealand, the US? Nova Scotia might actually fit.

Or maybe I'm rationalizing because I'd like to read the book...

That may be true.

39:

Hey, folks, at least in the US, there's some Good News: Americans are lining up, literally, to buy guns (presumably to protect their garages filled with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and gallon jugs of milk).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/us-gun-purchases-coronavirus-record

The good news, of course, is that we'll soon be rid of them. Look at the pic in the article.... Hint: "social distancing".

40:

@36: Putin knows he's lost the longer game; Russian demographics are terrible - they're way under a replacement birth rate. He's trying to maximize his short term advantage, leaning on oil revenues, rebuilding the military, and bullying his neighbors. OK, he's also a raving megalomaniac, but he's on the rational end of the spectrum. Smart enough to not be crazy, but crazy enough to be dangerous.

41:

I also would gladly read this book, event if it's not set in our timeline. That's some damned fine wordcrafting there, Mr. Stross.

42:

Btw, Charlie - you do realize that the charge for writing and/or uploading malware into those people is not computer crimes, but murder in the first degree- premeditated.

43:

@42: If it's state-sanctioned, it's "therapy" (it's fun when you get to write the dictionary).

44:

It's not murder if they're still breathing, right?

What it is, is they are thereafter certain they're dead: the implant that substitutes for the damaged self-cognition/self-recognition bits of the brain is burned-out. But they're still breathing and responsive.

You might be able to construct a murder case if they starve to death within a year and a day of their implant being deliberately disabled, but it's kind of tenuous.

45:

Speaking as someone who isn't, and has read a fair amount of fiction by people using language backgrounds with which I am not familiar, I am both happy with that approach and (over the years) have learnt a great deal from it. The day I stop learning things of no immediate relevance is the day I need to be put down. It's also a DAMN sight easier to look up dialect words and even customs than it used to be before the Webbly thingy.

What I dislike is the sort of fiction that makes it deliberately inaccessible if you are not one of the author's tribe (*). Yes, I know I have done that myself, but generally only when I am pissed off with the readers.

(*) There were some writers who did that badly with New York Jewish/Yiddish background and language. I once asked a mildly observant American Jewish friend how well he got on with those, and he said that he found them incomprehensible! So I gave up on them.

46:

I find this interesting, as a sociological phenomenon. Fantastic alternative histories are all the rage, dystopian near future novels are not far behind, but a dystopian alternative near past novel is unacceptable?

Note that I am NOT denying the reality of that, nor excluding the possibility that it might simply not interest you. My guess is that a rewrite of the COVID-19 chaos as a zombie pandemic would sink like a lead balloon. But what do I know about how the majority of the human race reacts?

Like others here, I would be a customer for such a novel.

47:

'Just as a heads up since L'Orange is making noises about sending "counter narc" troops to the border and they're attempting to pivot their coup attempts that way[1]...

The original story has been re-imagined and you're unfortunately likely spreading FUD / War Drum Media Beat:

For reasons that are still being investigated, the RCGS Resolute approached the Venezuelan patrol ship and rammed it, causing serious damage to the vessel and sinking it. The cruise ship, which is designed to be able to navigate between ice and has a reinforced hull, sustained minimal damage.

https://www.portandterminal.com/hit-run-cruise-ship-rams-sinks-venezuelan-navy-ship-flees-story-gets-crazier/

https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1245076319924338700

Looks like they definitely slowed down and looked around for a bit before carrying on.

https://twitter.com/Simon85205764/status/1245083568013008896

The cruise ship is designed for Arctic cruises (https://www.oneoceanexpeditions.com/vessels/vessel-rcgs-resolute), but wait:

On the night of March 5th the RCGS Resolute quietly slipped out of Buenos Aires, Argentina according to reports. The ship was arrested last October by various companies that were owed money by a Canadian company called One Ocean Expeditions. PortandTerminal.com contacted their offices today but were unable to reach anyone to speak to for a statement. The ship’s owners settled US$3.6 million in claims in order to retain the ship, and avoid it being sold in a court-ordered sale. Two European fuel suppliers, three South American ships agents, and 22 crew were paid as a result of the action.

This checks out[2], points to stock market cruise lines.

So the real story may be a lot, lot, lot more crazy - along the lines of 'Bay of Pigs' stuff.

nose wiggle

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-announces-advances-counternarcotics-operation-deploys-destroyers-and-air-force-assets

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/26/nicolas-maduro-us-indictment-venezuela-drug-trafficking-leaders

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/one-ocean-expeditions-ship-detained-1.5370649#

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/business/local-business/shipping-news-one-ocean-expeditions-sails-into-troubled-waters-370614/

48:

Yea, as a whole, we are screwed. Dr Fauci said yesterday that every state should be shut down. Yet virus deniers have made it a political issue. While the arguments that its leftist hoax to make the current administration look bad have faded, its still a left vs right issue with right leaning governors refusing to close their states down and in many cases suggesting that the virus should just be ignored because car accidents and suicides will supposedly kill more than the virus. "Sorry your grandmother died , but Im sure she would have been hit by a car or killed herself or something."

The whole argument ignores the fact that whether or not more people die of other causes, at the end of this there will be somewhere between 100,000 to 2,000,000 American deaths that could have been avoided. It also ignores the fact that its not a choice between shutting down now and saving those lives, or staying open and saving the economy. Its a choice between shutting down and saving those lives now, or trying to stay open, having all those deaths, eventually shutting down when it becomes so bad that there is simply no choice, having even more damage to the economy, and all those deaths. The reality is, there is no choice. Its a matter of good policy that saves lives and minimizes the economic damage or bad policy that causes a massive loss of life and a massive loss to the economy.

There are a few bright spots. California was one of the first to hit the big red "Emergency Power Off" button. They are basing their decision on science and a sophisticated pandemic model that state health officials have been developing for years for use in a flu pandemic and were able to tweak for this outbreak. They are leasing hotels to put homeless people in, as when one is told to "shelter in place" there needs to be a place for one to shelter in. Food banks have been hard hit due to their (often older) employees following the shelter in place orders. National Guard troops are being used to prepare food boxes and distribute them. (They are younger, in good health and trained to deal with these kind of things. And they work FAST. Like trained soldiers or something) The state has found local companies to repair a stockpile of obsolete non functioning ventilators immediately when the manufacturer told them it would be months. When they received 270 broken ventilators from the federal government, no one even bothered complaining, they just sent them to be repaired. Two mothballed hospitals were bought by the state and are being opened and other temporary makeshift hospitals are being created in re-purposed facilities around the state. Most importantly, state officials are monitoring the data, and comparing it to their models to determine whether sufficient medical resources will be available, and fine tuning their response as they go,so that hopefully, what is needed and what is available will converge as the peak arrives and there will be few surprises. Hopefully it will work, and maybe it will be obvious enough that some of the holdouts will follow the example before they end up like new york.

49:

@47: Re - conspiracy theory

Correlation is not causality.

Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.

50:

Note: this story is not about Ballardian Cruise lines stuck without ports[0], although it's interesting the x-over where the major story will bury this one in terms of SEO.

SHIPPING NEWS: One Ocean Expeditions creeps towards bankruptcy

the letter prompted a statement from Rune Thomas Ege, vice president of Global Communications for Hurtigruten, denying it had entered into a Partnership with One Ocean, and stating it has not purchased any assets or is in any way involved in the restructuring.

One Ocean Expeditions' office is in Squamish B.C. but the company looks to be registered in Alberta and payments moved through an address in Richmond Hill, Ont. This past weekend, a group of passengers picketed the Richmond Hill offices of WM Trotter and Associates, believed to be One Oceans accountants. Deposits for trips and final payments were done via companies that list Trotter's accountants as directors, or list the same Richmond Hill address as its office. The One Ocean Foundation also lists three Trotter accountants as their sole directors and it shares an address with the accounting firm.

https://www.thetelegram.com/business/regional-business/shipping-news-one-ocean-expeditions-creeps-towards-bankruptcy-401098/

Soo... looks like someone stole a ship (or bought it on the massive downturn at a huge price reduction without informing angry ex-customers or the authorities or Argentina[1]) and 100% didn't want to let any investigation of the people running it[2].

Arctic cruise liner: just the thing any billionaire worried about pandemic might require, at a pinch.

~

This one is wild. April 1st, 2020: someone took a cruise ship for a joy-ride.

[0] That CAN story is FLR + nationals stuck. Coronavirus: Trump says Canadians aboard Florida cruise ships will be repatriated https://globalnews.ca/news/6765796/coronavirus-trump-canadians-zaandam/

[1] Still registered to original owners: https://www.cruisemapper.com/ships/RCGS-Resolute-765

[2] Who knows, might be the Raybans + duffel bag Private types

51:

Look a bit deeper into it. Also, stop using "Conspiracy Theory", it's modally outdated in 2020.

The company can barely cover fuel costs ($3.6 mil), they ain't got backers running into the cruise line business knocking on their door[1], they ain't got any scheduled cruises (dec 2020 allegedly is the next one) and no-one bought the ship.

Hmmmm. Gotta be pretty stupid to steal something that easy to spot on radar, eh?

[1] Why Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian Cruise Line Stocks Plunged on Wednesday https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/01/why-carnival-royal-caribbean-and-norwegian-cruise.aspx

52:

@51: I'm referring to you concatenating a story about shady characters doing a runner with a (stolen? back-alley deal?) cruise ship with the USSOUTHCOM naval deployment, probably chosen by El Cheeto Grande's unique brand of "ooh shiny" deep geopolitical expertise.

53:

That was just us being funny, that's all SEO cover.

But 100% serious about the rest. Weird that all the major pro-NATO + allied press are running it as a "bad / stupid Venezuela navy being aggressive sinks" - so someone near enough to USSOUTHCOM is certainly looking into it. Remind us who co-ordinates that type of story these days.

54:

I'd add that San Diego, at least, is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to figure out where to site two mobile military hospitals.

Also, from the gossip grapevine, hotels that have unrented blocks of rooms near hospitals are offering rooms up for hospital workers who have to care for Covid19 cases and don't want to spread the disease home to their families. I don't know if that's free, reduced rate, or what, but if the place is going to sit empty or get filled with recovering covid19 patients turfed out of care units to recover in isolation, this isn't the worst thing they could do.

Anyway, I spent an hour last night ironing a stack of kerchiefs to make no-sew face masks. I also dug out a bag of unused basket coffee filters, on the (probably mistaken) assumption that coffee filters doubled over add a bit more filtration to a four-ply handkerchief mask. The advantage is that at least the cloth can be reused, even if the paper liner has to be tossed.

55:

Getting back to the original topic of near-future novels:

One word: Solarpunk. Heck,we've got a bunch of societal conflicts going on right now:

--Renewables versus petroleum versus, hey, plastics! --Some really disaffected youth hitting their 20s --A replay of the 1900s communist scare, this time starring the ultra-rich and their authoritarian-follower lackeys versus everyone else. --Oh, and the burgeoning remnants of all those trends that caused people to get starry-eyed about The Singularity about 20 years ago. --And climate change. --And pandemics --And hybrid warfare.

If you can't make a decent Dinosaurs of Cyberpunk 2.0 story out of that, you ain't trying. Just replace implants with addictive electronics, and you're there.

56:

What happened to the second person? It was so immersive. The brain would just substitute the "you" in the text with "yes, it's about me" after 10 pages of so of the text feeling slightly weird.

57:

The company is literally run by "three little pigs". also lists three Trotter accountants

Where's the Wolf in this story?

NOSE WIGGLE

58:

O_o

Okay, that's crazy-dirty stuff. Makes a lot more sense, mind you.

(Another alternative to invoking Bay-of-Pigs stuff: repo men sneak aboard impounded ship and take possession, try and make away in the night: navy try to take it back, get rammed and sunk for their pains.)

59:

Yep, Carnival, P&O, et al's business model is dead in the water for the foreseeable duration of COVID-19, and until there's an economic upturn after the pandemic has run its course, and until they work out how to prevent such ships turning into huge floating plague-pits (lots of elderlies with compromised immune systems rubbing shoulders with each other and with locals in a new port every day).

Also, those ships are pretty terrible polluters -- they burn cheap sulferous bunker oil outside territorial waters and are registered to flags of convenience, so they aren't under legal pressures to cut their emissions.

60:

The ships doctor will see you now....

https://images.app.goo.gl/RzcimFCZno2fEZ8T9

I do see this potentially shifting the calculous in selecting where to register a ship. You have ships owned companies in larger powerful western nations who don't want to let ships filled with their own citizens dock. The places they are registered in don't want them either because they are not their citizens and not their ships. And honestly, they kinda had it coming. If you a British owned and registered ship, of course your government will help you, but when you decide to register in some other country to exploit a legal loophole, when would you expect any help.

61:

There's very little if any toilet paper hoarding going on.

There's a scattering of greed-heads trying to buy lots and profiteer. These seem to mostly be discovering that there are laws about that, and various institutions are controlled by people grumpy enough to enforce them.

But mostly there's a fundamental supply chain problem; domestic TP and institutional TP are not the same thing, are not shipped in the same ways, and are not (generally) made by the same companies. Because "sanitary paper" is high-volume and low-margin, everybody has excruciatingly detailed demand models and builds just enough capacity to meet demand if they run the plant 24/7.

So when you send everybody home to shelter in place, you produce a big uptick in domestic demand -- thereabouts of 40% seems to be the accepted figure -- while you reduce institutional demand sharply. But you haven't, and in the short term you cannot, increase the supply of domestic TP; there's a carefully optimized capacity that already runs flat-out and delivers just-in-time (so no stockpiles!) to retailers. Instant real shortage.

Same thing is happening with bread flour and baker's yeast; I expect there's a bunch of other stuff that's lower volume and more difficult to notice.

62:

Anyway, I spent an hour last night ironing a stack of kerchiefs to make no-sew face masks. Do you have an instructions link? This (short video at link) with a bandanna square looked workable if one has rubber bands the right length (though string with slip knots might/would work too.)

#coronavirus Make your own masks in 20 seconds: 1.5 feet (50cm) x 1.5 feet (50cm) material and two rubber bands @LarsG_LEV "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" 👍

See cochrane meta-study: Simple (non-N95) masks work well enough https://t.co/sLqiQGa2AG#ncov2019 https://t.co/if78MiAxSY

— Daniel Bilar (@daniel_bilar) March 31, 2020

Graydon: this medium piece (which you may have seen) lays out the domestic/commercial toilet paper supply chain issues: What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage - It isn’t really about hoarding. And there isn’t an easy fix. (Will Oremus, Apr 2, 2020) I'm assuming it's accurate; it's at least plausible.

SBH (& Charlie): That cruise ship story is very amusing.

63:

Oh, it gets better. Sooo much better. [Here's the 'real' story, but it's so bizarre]

First off, some real conspiracy theory: Long twitter Thread in Spanish - random blogger with an interesting theory. TL;DR Navy ship had it's own outstanding debt issues so there's an entire anti-Maduro angle going on about unpaid debts on ships etc.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1246103568320512001.html

So, in Jan they may or may not have had a limited bailout: https://www.cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/22223-one-ocean-expeditions-inks-deal-with-new-partner.html

But then they don't: https://www.travelweekly.co.uk/articles/354659/one-ocean-expeditions-cruise-line-set-to-go-into-administration

And they cease running cruises:

One Ocean Expeditions; latest cancellation is its January 17 Ultimate Antarctica departure. https://karryon.com.au/industry-news/hurtigruten-sets-record-straight-about-one-ocean-expeditions-partnership/

Then it gets a bit weird - there's a media blank where follow up stories should reside. No more rescue news, no more hints that they're not stuck and so on.

IAATO lists them as "no longer in good standing" years ago and it's still in place - but are currently up to date with their COVID19 stuff: From the first emergence of COVID-19 in China, IAATO Members have been clear in their priorities; the wellbeing of visitors to and returning from Antarctica and the protection of the region's wildlife. All vessels scheduled to depart for the peninsula and/or the sub-Antarctic islands have ceased, or been postponed due to new regulations imposed at Antarctic Gateways. https://iaato.org/en_GB/home

So, the industry in the area is at the very least saying: HELL, NO, NO CRUISES NOAW, as you'd expect. Chile isn't Antarctic, sure, but: on the 17th Mar, we have this:

Coronavirus ban: more than 100 Australian doctors and dentists stuck on cruise ship off Chile https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/coronavirus-covid-19-australian-doctors-dentists-stuck-cruise-ship-coast-chile

... But this non-standing member suddenly chirps up that they have listed a program from 28th Mar - 10th April in the middle of COVID19, running to the 'Chilean Fjords' who will be quite happy to have them [spoiler: NOPE] - so by their reckoning, they should have at least been past the Panama by now. (Wrong terminal but worth checking http://www.waypointports.com/panama-canal-bookingauctionsystem/ for the RGSC Resolute slot)

March 28 - April 10, 2020 https://www.oneoceanexpeditions.com/south-central-america/chilean-fjords

On the 30th, they're just off Venezuela (which, logically, they should have already passed, surely?), lose an engine and they file a report with Columbia about it: https://www.columbia-cs.com/statement-on-rcgs-resolute-incident/

Venezuelan military aren't happy and fire back a response: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Foteandodesdelacofa.wordpress.com%2F2020%2F04%2F02%2Fla-confesion-del-capitan-del-rcgs-resolute%2F

But... none of this makes any sense at all. At all. The narrative is 100% bonkers.

~

Nose wiggle

64:

The funny thing is, I don't think many people are hoarding toilet paper; it's just that household consumption jumped ~40% with everyone staying home, and the TP industry is split into commercial/residential, and is low-margin and can't increase production on a dime. This medium piece was a really interesting read:

https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0

65:

"But mostly there's a fundamental supply chain problem" - with toilet paper.

There was a figure going round about 3 weeks ago that Britons had, apparently in a bit of a panic, bought £1 billion more stuff in supermarkets in short order compared with the previous year, and this was a Bad Thing. But that only equates to £15 per head of the UK population. With suggestions that schools might close and, initially, that you should avoid restaurants, clubs and pubs, plus cinemas and theatres after which you might have a takeaway, you'd think people would on average have spent more per head than £15 on home supplies like food, drink and loo rolls.

Early in March, before the formal lockdown, I went Bristol to London and back on a 9-carriage GWR train that seemed pretty empty. I am pretty sure we could all have fitted into one carriage, as even then there were a lot of people working from home (admittedly I was not going at rush hour in either direction).

Back to loo rolls - https://thepooptool.com/ tells you that with a pack of 24 rolls a 4-person household has 72 days' supply. Of course, an accurate figure depends on your personal pattern of usage.

66:

I'd buy it :)

67:

Charlie Stross @ 29:

My point (which I thought was obvious) was whether or not your average reader would be.

It shouldn't matter: I aim to make things obvious from context. (There's just not quite enough context in a 1400 word snapshot.)

Well, FWIW, I didn't know "Davvening" was Yiddish/Jewish slang, but I did twig (from the context "the prayerful rocking") that the young man was rocking back & forth, and now that I know that it is Yiddish/Jewish slang, I can see how it might come from the way we see people praying at the "Western Wall" in Jerusalem.

68:

whitroth @ 32: But, Charlie, leave out the rape, and I WANT to rob and kill the ultrawealthy...

"Elite panic" is self-fulling prophecy. Trying to keep the hoi polloi under their thumb the ultra wealthy create the very conditions that make people want to kill them.

I don't look forward to the time when they finally push the masses over the edge, but will have no sympathy for their plight if I should live to see it.

69:

That's probably the one I'm using, since I got it off FacePlant. I'm using one that's more origami fold (fold edges to center line, then fold folded edges in again to center line), because that way I can insert the coffee filter. The other modification is that I'm using an elastic cord loop tied together with two fisherman's knots, because I have a big head and rubber bands (let alone hair ties) were too short to fit).

Note that I haven't tried wearing this for an extended period. The advantage is that if it fails, I'll just go bandito (hankerchief over lower face) because I have worn those for hours.

70:

Sugar seems to have disappeared along with the flour and yeast. Everybody's baking cookies, it seems.

The humorous part for me was that seltzer water had disappeared. We like making our own fruit sparklers. But all that was left was sweetened tonic water. This was rather odd, as you'd think people freaking out would want the stuff with the quinine, rather than the stuff that's just carbonated. Assuming they're thinking, which is, of course, dubious.

71:

Aaagh! I’m so so sorry about reality outpacing your book, and I’m sorry for myself as now I won’t be able to read it, and I really want to after that first chapter! Man. It was so good. 2020 sucks.

72:

Bill Arnold @ 62: Graydon: this medium piece (which you may have seen) lays out the domestic/commercial toilet paper supply chain issues:
What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage - It isn’t really about hoarding. And there isn’t an easy fix. (Will Oremus, Apr 2, 2020)
I'm assuming it's accurate; it's at least plausible.

That's interesting. I thought it was just that Covid-19 scared the shit out of people, hence an increase in demand.

73:

With cruise ships doomed and airlines also in deep trouble, is it time for Zeppelins to make their comeback? A hybrid fuel cell/ hydrogen envelope combined with solar panels to top it up, and its a climate fighting alternative again.

74:

Narmitaj @ 65: Back to loo rolls - https://thepooptool.com/ tells you that with a pack of 24 rolls a 4-person household has 72 days' supply. Of course, an accurate figure depends on your personal pattern of usage.

I buy in bulk because it's cheaper. I usually get the Costco 30 pack; 5 sub-packs of 6 rolls. I bought a 330-roll pack back in October 2019. Call it October 1st.

I opened & loaded the first roll of the last 6 pack around March 9, 2020. March 10 was my normal shopping day, so I was looking for another 30-roll pack.

I figure that's 24 rolls used in 161 days; about one roll every 6.7 days. They might last a little longer, because I'm sure I wasn't completely out when I bought TP in October, so I probably didn't start in on that 30-roll pack until November 1.

So, call it just about one roll per week. I still have 3 rolls left in that last 6 pack, so I should be good until Thanksgiving (although I'll probably be looking for another 30-roll pack around November 1).

75:

I had seen that Medium piece, plus I had a summer job between second and third year that involved learning about how institutional bathroom restocking worked. (Back in the days of the gods-be-feathered individual sheet.)

(We got tours of the sawmills in high school, but the relative value of pulp came up in of all things geography classes. If you want to know why there's a power dam in northern Ontario, it's an effective question to ask if there was a pulp mill around the time of the dam's construction.)

And, well, being twitchy about things. Your modern Japanese-tooth-pattern wood saw with induction hardened teeth is a marvel; I don't think all the money in the world could have got you one in 1980. People don't seem to have an emotional grasp of where all these cost reductions and quality increases come from and what it does to minimum quantities and minimum capital investment and suchlike. (And how much a lot of modern materials science resembles outright witchcraft; the shift in what "powder metallurgy" means, for example.)

Back when chaos was the kind of fashionable that got it into Jurassic Park, various persons would get shouty about "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and emergent order and self-organization and variously dive off into bunches of math people really don't actually understand. That staggeringly capable, interconnected, global economy of stuff -- "the roofless seas a hostel, and the earth a market-place" -- runs on predictable delivery times as a substitute for a control mechanism. It's not that it's going to crash; it's going to get into a sequence of unknowable states with state changes for unknowable reasons at unknowable times. (If you can solve that, you've solved the general-case economic control problem, Marx's ghost wants to talk to you, and a bunch of mathematicians have Doubts.) The feedbacks are going to get connected to the thing that is not the thing. No one will know the price, because of a paucity of exchange. (Yeah, you still need to buy toothpaste. Your ability to buy toothpaste rests on the toothpaste manufacturer's ability to order packaging at the right time; iterate fifty times until you hit an refinery and the makers of big drill bits. Then do ingredients and the wear parts and consumables for the test and control equipment on the heavily automated production line. There is squeakly-fuck-all engineered resilience in any of this.) The mammonites are about to find out that money is a store of value because it is exchanged, it's not the crystallized love of god.

Autarky isn't much of an option; shutting things down so you can restart in some careful dependency order requires knowing that the dependency order is and having everybody stocked up so people don't just plain old die in the intervening time. (This was considered nigh-impossible as a post-nuclear-exchange reboot problem in the 1960s, even in supposedly linear cases like "restart water pump production".)

So when Charlie talks about near-future unpredictability, I wouldn't take that as a problem of detail.

76:

Just thought of a question, is chapter title U R DED inspired by the German title of “Halting State”, or by computer games in general?

77:

FWIW Davening is the Yiddish term for praying, which has also come to refer to the bowing motions often done during standing prayers, particularly the Amidah. The other word I used, Shuckling is the Yiddish word for shaking, also refers to the motion but is less common now.

78:

@various WRT toilet paper hoarding.

Maybe people aren’t actually hoarding, but for those of us who only buy large packs of it every 2-3 months, it’s come at a really inconvenient time.

79:

Seems like the logical thing to do would be to sell the commercial paper in retail shops. After all, if demand for household TP is up 40% then institutional TP should be down 40%.

OK, one-ply rolls or single small sheets aren't ideal, but they're flushable and don't leave ink on your bottom.

80:

I don't know if you remember it, but there was a mildly surreal black comedy back in 1986 called "A Very Peculiar Practice." It starred Peter Davidson as a new GP at the fictional "Lowlands University." One of the mildly surreal elements was an English professor, who was going mad because he was trying to write a novel set in a university, and everytime he wrote a plot point, it would happen in real life.

That's you, that is.

81:

Completely different supply chain. No existing relationships or contracts. No real expectation anyone with any other option will buy the stuff. (Most of the institutional stuff these days is great big rolls you can't readily deploy in the home.) Plus angering your existing suppliers (so you get the increased domestic-supply-chain-production stuff last) and getting permanently branded as that place with terrible TP have to weigh on the executive mindset. Retooling takes time and is expensive, and the length of time social distancing will last is not known.

I expect a fair bit of dithering about this one.

82:

I entirely get that the timing is bad.

I think of TP as having an appropriate minimum quantity on hand of one full quarter, not counting emergency supplies. It's been a surprise and a revelation how many people don't.

83:

Terrifyingly clever. As a devoted reader and neurologist I’m sad I’ll never get to read this book. (As a physician I’m even more upset about the reason why.) FWIW, even a bricked (or in our era, infected) DBS can often be replaced, if that would provide a useful plot out.

84:

Sugar seems to have disappeared along with the flour and yeast. Everybody's baking cookies, it seems

As far as NZ goes at least, the problem isn't flour, yeast or sugar. The problem is actually packaging. We are no longer a nation of bakers - we've outsourced the majority of that to supermarkets and commercial bakeries. So there's very little demand from the home market who are the ones who need the 1-10kg bags.
So the flour and sugar mills have plenty of stock and plenty of 20KG bags, but no little bags to pack in for the supermarkets.
And the bulk goods intermediaries like Bin Inn who could meet the demand are closed as being non-essential businesses.

85:

It's not murder if they're still breathing, right?

What it is, is they are thereafter certain they're dead: the implant that substitutes for the damaged self-cognition/self-recognition bits of the brain is burned-out. But they're still breathing and responsive.

Now I have the delightful idea of some CEO hauled in on a murder charge by one of the victims. Offhand I don't remember the Scottish equivalent of a District Attorney but I'm confident there are government employees whose jobs include saying, "This guy committed a murder. Bring him in!"

The CEO's lawyer would of course try the still breathing argument. Eloquent witnesses and prosecutors (change to appropriate Scottish title) could entertain the jury for a long time about being dead and who's responsible.

I am also made aware of how little I recall of Scottish major crime trial protocols.

86:

Well I'm only some random on the internet, but I've been reading your books for some time, and I just want to say noooooooo! The Rule 34/Halting State universe is one of my favourites among yours; just such a Scottish voice and such interesting characters. So I'd love to see another one!

I think I'm cursed... all of my favourite Strossian universes seem to be doomed! Singularity Sky, Freyaverse, now this!! Evidently I like the wrong sort of books.

87:

I note that said "cruise liner" is in financial trouble, but the Venzuelan guvmint - run by nutcase Maduro? I suspect a monumental fuck-up, myself, coupled with even more greed & stupidity AGREE that the narrative is "100% bonkers" See previous line about greed & stupidity & re-cycle.

Hoarding ( @ 61 ) Decent flour ( for making bread ) & dried yeast can't be had for love or money .... I've got about a week's supply left, maybe 2 weeks. Um. Sugar is starting to re-appear.

SS That would be the Procurator Fiscal I think

88:

That would be the Procurator Fiscal I think

Thank you. I would not have guessed that; from the titled I'd have guessed the person dealt with financial matters. Per Wikipedia the job has expanded and mutated over the centuries.

89:

Graydon @ 65 Yes The amount of money available is irrelevant. It's 1970 - youhave the full resouces of the US space programme at your disposal. Make ONE CD ... Um, err .... People simply do not comprehend this sort of thing. It's 1938 Make ONE transistor .... etc

90:

"The Lambda Functionary"

I say, that title's really rather good.

91:

As with all absolute rules, that is at best unreliable, and at worst very harmful. In my time, I have made more mistakes by deducing stupidity (when it was conspiracy) than in deducing conspiracy (when it wasn't).

Regrettably, at least in the UK and USA, our governments and similar organisations run on interlocking conspiracies. Autocracies like China and Russia have a different mode of operation. And so on.

92:

"The amount of money available is irrelevant. It's 1970 - ..."

It's 1836, you're Nathan Rothschild and so wealthy you loaned the Bank of England money to avert a liquidity crisis.

Make the antibiotics to cure ONE abscess. Or die.

93:

RCGS Resolute VERY interesting BBC News item here "Fleet Monitor" comment here Looks like Maduro's goons were ordered to do something really stupid - at first galnce, at any rate.

As we have all noted of late, stupidty is the one thing there is plenty of to go around, unfortunately.

94:

"pro-NATO "

Really? Is NATO still a thing?

In a world in which the US is stealing German healthcare equipment during a pandemic?

95:

Regrettably, yes. I could also remind you of the time the Germans discovered that one of GCHQ's major tasks was to spy on German commercial communications, and pass them on to the USA.

96:

That worked for me, although I didn't know where it came from. Managed to figure "peeling" as something not too far off your subsequent explanation, too. As is often the case, the more peripheral aspects of your story, being unpleasantly plausible, are more disturbing than the obviously fictional thing that takes centre stage.

Words in established dialect usage usually don't stop me at all; either I know them already or I get them straight away and add them to my list of neat expressions for my own use. Neologisms on the other hand often really piss me off, but in this case "peeling" has the right logic to it, and its derivation from existing slang is straightforward.

The sense of place thing works a treat. Which is slightly weird because I've never been to Edinburgh, but it still feels familiar. I get the same thing from Irvine Welsh.

Second person grates, as it always does whoever does it.

Overall, I was definitely wanting to read more even after that short piece, and I add myself to the list of people who have said what a shame it is that we're never going to.

97:

I have a few packets of yeast which are currently no good to me as I have lost the paddle out of my bread machine and can't identify a replacement other than by trial and error. I will be going to the post office in about a week and a half so I could send them to you then if you still need it.

Hadn't noticed about sugar. Bread is the only thing I ever use it for, so 1kg lasts for ages.

98:

is chapter title U R DED inspired by the German title of “Halting State”, or by computer games in general?

Neither: it's a statement of narrative viewpoint. (The rescuer who is intent on the zombie is himself a zombie, albeit with functioning implant.)

99:

FWIW, even a bricked (or in our era, infected) DBS can often be replaced, if that would provide a useful plot out.

I was planning for this to be difficult, expensive, and dangerous -- widespread antibiotic resistance and a crapsack neoliberal dog-eat-dog world meaning no new antibiotics in the pipeline make brain surgery a dicey prospect.

Also, who's going to pay for a replacement implant for someone who hacked the DRM on their last one to get out of paying for it?

100:

That the / writer at "Fleet Monitor" (allegedly a specialist publication) cannot do the 5 min trawl it took us and produces this and also happens to be Russian makes us know this is FUD:

Much more so if the ship had tourists on board. Venezuela is notorious for seizing absolutely innocent merchant ships and crews, and treating them like criminals. What should Venezuela do in this case, is anyone guess, but fair and impartial investigation seems highly unlikely outcome. One more issue – cruise ship was steaming towards port of destination, no dire straits [note: both initial accounts list engine trouble / drifting for 1 day] or restricted fairways, and how did Navy ship manage to be hit by passenger ship, is anyone’s guess, too. It tells a lot about Venezuela Navy seamanship. All in all, this story may be considered as a story with happy end. Nobody died, cruise ship with dozens of crew and probably, passengers, avoided very unpleasant arrest with unpredictable results, the only loss being Navy ship. No big deal, I’d say.

The new official line is that the ship was "on the way to its new port"... which happens to be on Curaçao (which contains no shipyard able to refit this type of ship?) - so this ship has presumably headed along the coast of Brazil rather than Panama canal (cheaper / no fees / inspection ?). The Shell LLC that has been helping out is named (fuzzing applied): Happy Bunny Fun Times Cruises based in Germany / Cyprus and is mentioned in the Panama Papers (or similar DB of hidden asset networks). They also do not appear to own other Tourist Tour Boats (cough private fun trips?). There is still also no official change of ownership of company nor ship as required by maritime law - it is merely on "long term rental".

Happy Bunny Easter Ride @ Easter, during a pandemic, not properly listing manifest, owned by the three little pigs, running to strange destination given COVID19, leading to international incident that is being shouted about in times of heightened tension in the region at the same time the US Navy is having boats towed to Guam and running at less than top efficiency?

Greg: even your nose hairs must be wiggling at this.

But we'll leave it there. $$$ =/= Wisdom, after all.

101:

Offhand I don't remember the Scottish equivalent of a District Attorney but I'm confident there are government employees whose jobs include saying, "This guy committed a murder. Bring him in!"

District attorneys don't exist in any version of UK law.

Instead you've got the Police, and in England the Crown Prosecution Service (in Scotland it's the grandly-named Procurator Fiscal, or the Fisc). They're prosecutors, like a DA, but they're also unelected civil servants working for the Crown and they make go/no-go decisions on whether or not to prosecute on the basis of the evidence the Police provide them with.

As a matter of policy they don't generally proceed with a case unless they think there's a better than 50/50 chance of securing a conviction. Nor do they bother with plea bargaining as a rule, or with spurious lesser offenses -- they may go to trial with two options for the jury (e.g. "causing death by reckless driving" and "causing death by dangerous driving" was an example my now-dead father was on the jury for in the 1950s: "reckless" had a much harsher sentence, but was far harder to prove in court), but the general policy is to bring one charge which is clear as glass, and then offer a guilty plea for a lighter sentence.

But the big thing is, prosecutors in the UK are civil servants: so they're not trying to look "tough on crime" to the electorate to secure re-election, or using the prosecutor's office as a springboard to launch a career in politics.

(Nor do we have grand juries; they were abolished centuries ago.)

Most likely they wouldn't try for murder. They'd have a slam-dunk case for assault causing aggravated bodily harm (it effectively caused brain damage!), not to mention computer misuse (a minor offense in comparison). Possibly even attempted murder. But for a murder charge to stick, the victim has to no longer be alive by any reasonable definition.

102:

To add to your happy fun misconceptions, Scottish juries have fifteen members, can come to a verdict on the basis of only 12 of them (so some jurors can be discharged mid-trial without causing a mistrial), and there are three possible verdicts.

And a Sheriff is a junior judge, not a law enforcement official.

103:

All of these problems can be solved depending not on money available but on time.

In 1970, the CD (in prototype form) was only a decade away; the video LaserDisc hit the market in 1978.

The reason CDs didn't arrive until 1982-83 was that they had to wait for cheap solid-state lasers. Lasers were first developed in the 1960s and by the beginning of the 1970s continuous-wave gas lasers suitable for laser discs were available, but at a ridiculous (by modern standards) price. So the tech started out as an alternative to video cassettes, back when a VCR retailed for £700 (and a typical annual salary was around £2000-4000).

I'm pretty sure you could have manufactured a CD player and a disk before 1975 ... if you (a) knew it was possible, and (b) weren't constrained by trying to manufacture the disks and players to a price point suitable for mass commercialization. Going back much before 1968 would be difficult because of the need for fast switching speeds in the electronics and for a reliable continuous-wave laser. And your 1970 prototype CD would indeed be Moonshot levels of technology, albeit with a bright commercial future.

Similarly, antibiotics for a dental abscess ... they began to show up from 1910 onwards (for syphilis, initially: Salvarsan): the compound was first synthesized in 1907 but what made it into an antimicrobial was early mass-screening of potential drugs, which Ehrlich began around 1900. The screening protocol could in principle have been invented a lot earlier, and the antibiotic properties of moulds were subject of research from the mid-19th century onwards; Fleming discovered Penicillin pretty much by accident in 1928, but it could have been spotted decades earlier.

So: your point ...?

104:

Second person grates, as it always does whoever does it.

The reasons for second person in this case:

  • It's a trilogy. In the second person. Because I'm stunt-writing. Deal with it.

  • The narrator, who in normal circumstances would be a tight first-person viewpoint, thinks he's dead. He's a zombie. Only a glitching brain implant gives him any sense of identity, and it's thoroughly alienated from his body. So the narrative reflects the narrator's sense of identity.

  • There are some very weird variants on Cotard's Delusion; one close relative is Capgras delusion, in which the afflicted thinks that a pet, spouse, child, or other person close to them has been replaced by an imposter -- in extreme cases everyone is believed to be an imposter or an alien -- but there are oddities such as "I'm fine, except my left arm died three weeks ago and is putrefying, can you amputate it please, doctor?"

    105:

    I am very much not the person to write a legal procedural, even in the US.

    "Assault causing aggravated bodily harm" sounds like a straightforward charge with a good chance of conviction.

    The surreal implications of a zombie victim insisting he'd been murdered seem to promise complications - but Cotard's Delusion seems to be incompatible with personal indignation over being murdered. It sounds more likely to be a problem for the Ankh-Morpork Watch than for any of your characters.

    106:

    There are some very weird variants on Cotard's Delusion; one close relative is Capgras delusion...

    Very weird is putting it mildly. The human mind has some bizarre failure modes.

    Speaking of Capgras Delusion, delusional misidentification syndromes also include the inverse Fregoli Delusion, the conviction that various other people are actually the same person in disguise. The pathologies can be different, though the expressed symptoms are conceptually similar.

    I read there are cases of both appearing in the same patient, which I imagine was an adventure for their doctors.

    107:

    Don't bet on computer misuse being the lesser. If they can claim it was done for intimidation or a political purpose, it immediately falls under the Terrorism Act (courtesy: That Bliar).

    (1) In this Act "terrorism" means the use or threat of action where - (a) the action falls within subsection (2), (b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

    (2) Action falls within this subsection if it - . . . (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

    108:

    Very weird is putting it mildly. The human mind has some bizarre failure modes.

    Given Host's piece, current world events and issues with DSMV[0], here's an analogy[1] that goes along with the recent oil stuff[2]: in a crisis, it's the systemic issues that get you.

    BMO Says Senior-Living Occupancy Risks 50% Drop If Move-Ins Halt

    Full turnover in senior living usually occurs about every two years. But now during the outbreak, the bank expects occupancy to fall below 70% as tours are canceled and fears of infection scare away potential new residents and their families, BMO analyst John Kim said in an interview.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/senior-living-occupancy-could-fall-50-within-a-year-bmo-says (Bloomberg April 3rd 2020 - note, it's paywalled but coded badly. If so inclined, you can easily halt the load to see the full article)

    So... if all your care facilities are owned by Corporates who used the steady-state revenue (after all, population is aging, intake can only go up, fastest growth market in the west etc) to leverage themselves into either expansion, Mcmansions or yachts (while still paying the peons the worst wages you can, leading to some nasty off-sets in the bottom end of the market[3]) when a pandemic comes along (also nixing other major locations where quasi-rich people retire: cruises and hotels) you've got a supply issue.

    Oh, and all those mortgages which are designed as predatory as possible so fleece the medium-wealth ones to pay for said care home so you get the real estate at the end? Whelp, turns out they're also reits and leveraged into the stratosphere, since stinky capital plays ultra-dirty. Whelp, turns out your intake would rather like to cocoon in place rather than get shipped to Pandemic Central[4] and since the Tee-Vee (which you've been using for ages to hawk said products) is now panic central[5], well...

    Turns out your Zombie problem isn't really based on the individual, but the system. So, let's say: what if Boney Jim isn't a victim of the demic, but the brain's way of dealing with a catastrophic failure in the system which reveals itself along the lines of massive cognitive dissonance (or, in more esoteric terms, a Paradox weapon). Boney Jim is lucky - young enough with enough neuro plasticity to not totally break, but it's bad.

    Oh, it only hits the ones least invested in the system at first[6] and the mythology of the old system has slowly been dissolving for years but now even the top Brands are crumbling[7] but what next?

    And what if, during all this time, instead of looking for something new / fresh / positive, you've been fighting the demic by actively destroying all the people with slight resistance to your demic?

    That'd be bad. Really bad.

    [0] Barbaric stuff in there & the years of mumsnet radicalism is just starting to bear fruits. :(

    [1] grep is "crisis point" "reits" etc - ahead of the curve (!)

    [2] Input and Output shock at the same time.

    [3] ‘Alarming rise’ in reports of care home abuse in England https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/abuse-care-home-cqc-autism-learning-disability-whorlton-hall-police-a8969026.html

    [4] Carnival Finds That Even 2021 Cruises Are Hard to Sell Right Now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/carnival-finds-that-even-2021-cruises-are-hard-to-sell-right-now

    [5] Apart from the worse types, where the 'Running Man' dream is still be sold, no reality here allowed!

    [6] Unemployment in US and UK 'may be worse than in Great Depression' https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/coronavirus-uk-business-activity-plunges-to-lowest-ebb-since-records-began

    [7] Coronavirus: Debenhams set to appoint administrators https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52156457

    109:

    (Aka - we think we know why Host's book got over-taken by Reality[tm], :( )

    Anyhow, furthering the point. Wales resistance strikes once more:

    First the Llandudno goats, and now this 😳 what is going on in North Wales right now? #clapforkeyworkers #clapforcarers #clapforNHS #clapforthisguy

    https://twitter.com/TropicalGeology/status/1245792183199858691

    And, er: embedded video is slightly NSFW, but worth looking at if you think your ZDemic isn't just getting started. Yes, it did happen. And it's only just April.

    110:

    Your reason 2 doesn't work for me. I deal with second person by setting my input filters to edit it out, so any implied subtlety never makes it far enough to actually be processed.

    It wasn't intended as a personal criticism - as I said, "whoever does it"; it's a style I simply do not get on with no matter who the author is. It was basically an error message equivalent to "Warning: unsupported protocol: using protocol translation plugin, some features may not work". That's why I left it as a single bald sentence in my otherwise positive assessment.

    I would almost certainly have picked up on what you were trying to convey after I'd had a bit more time to get to know the character. Which by the time I got to the end of it I was pretty keen to do...

    111:

    we do not generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.

    We note that Sir. K Star, meritorious Knight of the Realm, member of the Trilateral Commission has been successfully yoinked into power with all the attendant cheering of the middle classes and obvious blue check-marks. Fix is in, well done boys, you managed to win the last war. Wait, sorry: you lost that one too, really, with all that Libdem / CUCKUP stuff. So the UK is effectively a one party state now.

    So: it's in the bag, barring all those unemployed people and the next generation noticing things.

    Do they even read the papers[1] or are they all 100% sure that the phone notification telling them that they were on the right lists weren't lying? Or that their little stashes will pull them through because they have degrees[2]? In the history books[2.1], this could possibly the moment when everyone points and goes: "What the FUCK did they think would happen?"

    Brexit ahoy!

    ~

    Anyhow: all we wanted to do was meet the elves. Locked away[2], we promised not to interfere with your physical realm, so we're inline to be in the pile of Zdemic waste.

    Scottish juries have fifteen members

    Bit of a problem when 95% of those eligible are actually functionally insane & can't even spot systemic issues, isn't it? Even the professional ones are locked in by primitive stuff like DMSV and economics that hasn't dealt with non-linear systems functionally for decades.

    Marat/Sade - full version.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJc4I6pivqg

    p.s.

    [redacted] exist. Or did. Complicated.

    [1] Investors are pulling an unprecedented amount of money from the market as coronavirus rages. Here are 7 records they've set this week alone. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/coronavirus-economic-impact-record-stock-market-bond-fund-outflows-recession-2020-3-1029017359

    [2] UK university workers face a political struggle against Johnson government The strike by up to 50,000 lecturers, technicians, library and other university staff has entered its third week. It was called after the University and College Union (UCU) failed to reach an agreement following months of talks with the employers’ organisations. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/03/univ-m03.html

    [2.1] Look: Suicides rates in UK increase to highest level since 2002 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/03/suicides-rates-in-uk-increase-to-highest-level-since-2002 and that's before the effects of this kick in.

    [3] -.- For real, just not how you think it works.

    112:

    Re: toilet paper shortages. I don't worry about it, having learned while living in rural Morocco in the 70's that TP is an unnecessary luxury and a bane on the environment. In many places in the world, the plumbing doesn't allow TP use and knowing how to do without saves money. You just have to remember the strict rules about left hand/right hand. https://www.fastcompany.com/90363370/theres-an-overlooked-product-that-you-definitely-use-thats-destroying-the-worlds-forests

    113:

    Actually, an alternate DDR could use the term "real existierender Sozialismus to desccribe itself; wiki article in German, but it links to an Englisch version.

    the idea was to indicate the DDR came somewhat short compared to the Communist ideal, but it was what could be achieved under the circumstances.

    (I'm not that deep into Marxist-Leninist jargon, but apparantly in it, socialism is a state where the proletariat becomes the ruling class, captures the state and the means of production; communism would be the abolition of classes and thus the state; I might be wrong, of course)

    114:

    I guess it has become something of a positive feedback loop; some people hoarded toilet paper, so the stacks are empty; which means other people see there is no toilet paper and buy it themselves in bulk; which means the stacks are empty, which means...

    When pressed by my parents to look for toilet paper, I tried to be the voice of reason, indicating we already have about 5 big packages; sadly, my family dynamics are, err, entertaining...

    On a somewhat lighter note, next time I might go into the shop mumbling "I am Cornholio! I need T.P. for my bunghole!".

    115:

    Charlie @ 44:

    It's not murder if they're still breathing, right?

    No, but it might well be Reckless Injury, and if done on a sufficiently wide scale it might even be Reckless endangerment of the lieges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culpable_and_reckless_conduct#Reckless_endangerment_of_the_lieges

    116:

    Pigeon The Boss managed to get a small mini-brick of actual fresh Yeast ( not the freeze-dried stuff I usually use ) ... I will be experimenting .....

    TO: Seagull's paranoia How Resolute got its name & other useful details

    CHarlie @ 102 FOR "SS" - Those three verdicts being: !. Guilty 2. NOT Guilty 3. NOT PROVEN - & you can be re-tried for a not-proven verdict if new incriminating evidence shows up....

    117:

    [real note of seriousness here since 99% of anyone still reading won't be filtering through the UK / US politics at this time, but it is tangentially aligned with Host's piece.]

    Pointed reminder of what UK politics reached, very, very recently, while Labour was running on a fairly social democratic platform:

    Labour MP STUNS John Humphrys – 'to be anti capitalist you have to be antisemitic'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1095298/bbc-news-today-labour-party-antisemitism-jeremy-corbyn-john-humphrys-siobhain-mcdonagh - Express, Mar 4th 2019

    Without putting too fine a point upon it, you're about (allegedly) to experience the worst depression since the 1930's. Always a good reference point.

    Perhaps as "political allies" you might consider the rhetorical flourishes and panic used to link the two separate categories (including said mural) as perhaps not quite as good an idea as you thought it was. You also might want to think a little about what the CIA terms 'blow-back' when you're gaslighting vast swathes of fairly poor people that none of it happened and 'now the sensible people will be in power'.

    When they all just got made unemployed and are about to get Austerity 2.0 on steroids, by the look of it. And Farange and co are grinning like Hounds.

    Now, if you're unaware of stuff like this:

    The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros

    Finkelstein isn’t as famous as his contemporary Roger Ailes, but he is a hidden link that runs through the contemporary Republican Party, leading from the libertarian icon Ayn Rand to the cynicism of Richard Nixon and finally on to Trump. Finkelstein was a New York City kid. The son of a cab driver, he met Rand while he was a student at Columbia University in the early 1960s. He went on to work briefly as a computer programmer on Wall Street before becoming an early exponent of the art of polling toward the end of the decade.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu

    It might be a good time to know the term "lol buzzfeed" and notice that your "political mastery" is extremely transparent and The Young[tm] have read it. We know that most people don't watch the macro-spread of entire industries[0]

    We're no Twitter Influencer, but hoo-boy, there are lot of people showing their absolute lack of self-awareness when it comes to the macro socio-political-economic arena.

    So - who are the real Zdemic here?

    Probably not the person squawking like a canary.

    ~

    Apologies to Host: now gets closed back in box (we're actually very polite / gentle / sparkling, or where, once).

    [0] Lot of unemployment about to hit The Media as well - no advert revenue if the advertisers all go bust.

    118:

    We note that Sir. K Star, meritorious Knight of the Realm, member of the Trilateral Commission has been successfully yoinked into power with all the attendant cheering of the middle classes and obvious blue check-marks. Fix is in, well done boys

    I'm withholding judgement until I see how he performs in his new role: Starmer is good at looking posh, and like Tony Blair he's a former barrister, but unlike Blair he's a working class lad who made good and was on the picket lines in the 1980s. So there's no telling which direction he's going to break in.

    What I will note is that it'd be a terrible portent if he takes Boris Johnson up on his offer of joining a national unity government. Righ tnow the Tories own this crisis (and Brexit). And, as Napoleon noted, you should never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.

    In case it's not obvious, my take is that Corbyn fucked up completely over Brexit, by not recognizing it as redefined class struggle of the first half of the 21st century. Like the Social Democrat/Socialist split in European politics in 1914 (Socialists remained internationalist and saw WW1 as a conflict within nationalist conservativism; SocDems were co-opted into their respective national struggles), he got suckered into playing by the other side's rulebook. If he’d looked back to Rosa Luxemburg/Karl Liebknecht as models Labour would have turned strongly anti-Brexit and avoided looking indecisive and allowing Tory wedge strategies a way in.

    He might not have won if he'd done that, mind you, but it would have avoided the clear collapse Labour experienced last year. If he'd offered a pro-EU message combined with strong support for workers—a new deal on the NHS, universal basic income, and so on—he'd have had a fighting chance of redefining the battleground. And this is stuff we seem ironically likely to get from the Tories (now they’ve been confronted with a wartime situation).

    119:

    now they've been confronted with a wartime situation

    This frame worries me a lot. (Not specifically from Charlie; that it's getting out there as the only way to have social unity of purpose about a pandemic disease.)

    Hitler's War politics were informed by people who had been young during the Great War; they insisted on a simple objective, after which the war would be over. Churchill's insistence on unconditional surrender of the Axis combatants as the objective was not free from controversy, but the idea that there had to be a pre-defined condition for "it's over" wasn't controversial at all. Everybody who was making political decisions had lived through the Great War and was pellucid on the need.

    That's not true of contemporary politics, even slightly. Perma-war is the norm for most of those now making political decisions. (Which perma-war varies, and I think that'll be important next election cycle, but I've been thinking that the geriatric grip on US (and UK) politics would shift for twenty years, so what do I know?)

    Thing is, we can't beat a disease; it's not a thinking enemy that can strike its colours and surrender. It's pandemic and it's going to stay pandemic baring the nigh-miracle of a really effective vaccine universally applied. This isn't going to be over and there will be a next one. Approaching that as a war -- a period of supreme effort after which things revert to normal -- just empowers the klept. (Look at what's going on in the US with PPE; it looks like the admin is using federal powers to prevent "disloyal" states from importing any.)

    The present need looks a lot more like structural change, which is a tough sell. And it's not even clear what to do; there's a lot we don't know about the current pathogen.

    120:

    Flour could be an issue. Try a local bakery. Many,at least around here will sell you done flour and yeast. Yeast however is no necessary. Google up "sour dough starter". Essentially, you make some flour paste and leave it in a vented container on the counter. Like a bottle with seran wrap over it. The first day it will start to bubble up as all the microbes in it grow. Don't use it yet. Start small because it gets big fast. Say, 1/4 cup water 1/4 cup flour. After the first day add 1/4 cub water and flour and stir it up. The next day add a 1/2 up and so on. When it gets too big discard half. Now after a few days, it will stop bubbling up and look like it died. Keep adding water and flour every day. After a few more days it will start bubbling up again and take on a sour smell. At this point, the yeast has taken over the culture. The idea is for the yeast to out compete the other microbes. It does this by creating acetic acid, thus the vinegar smell. Now you have a real sour dough starter. You can store if in the fridge. You only have to feed it once a week now. To make sour dough starter,add flour and make a lump of dough. You let this "sponge" sit in a warm place for a few hours and grow even more yeast. Then you mix this in with your bread and that's the yeast. A good slur dough recipe will give you a more detailed description.

    121:

    So am I. Bliar was obviously an unscrupulous demagogue from the very start, though I did not expect him to be as harmful as he was; what I have heard from Starmer has been much better, but we have plenty of examples of 'working class' politicians who go bad when they get near power. Time will tell.

    However, I disagree that we are likely to get what we hope for from the Tories, because they are going to back off much of what they have done (not least because it's not sustainable) and because much of what they have done is either giving money to those that already have it or is using the opportunity to push quite a lot of of their previous agenda through.

    122:

    "Presumably the people that stocked up on bottled water in case somehow, hospitals being overloaded and ventilators being in short supply caused the water to turn off, "

    Eh, stocking up on bottled water is not unreasonable. Especially in a US urban area. Our infrastructure is very fragile.

    The issue isn't hospitals, it's any kind of spiraling infrastructure failure, which is unlikely but non zero. But it generally wouldn't take a lot to shut down power and water for a couple of days, and widespread panic alone could do it.

    I live in a very rural area and I have a well, so I'm somewhat insulated, but I keep food and water on hand as a matter of course. We've been without power for as long as a week, rarely, and there's usually at least once a year where it's out. In which case I can't really access the well water.

    But generally, there's usually at least a few stretches when I can't get out every year. Having bottled water and non perishable food is generally prudent in any case.

    123:

    The local supermarkets figured out a very effective way to prevent runs. They stacked up a ridiculously large pile of toilet paper first thing when you enter. Turns out, walking past several cubic meters of the stuff is very effective at persuading people there is no need to panic buy it.

    124:

    "He might not have won if he'd done that, mind you, but it would have avoided the clear collapse Labour experienced last year. If he'd offered a pro-EU message combined with strong support for workers—a new deal on the NHS, universal basic income, and so on—he'd have had a fighting chance of redefining the battleground. And this is stuff we seem ironically likely to get from the Tories (now they’ve been confronted with a wartime situation)."

    I'm seconding Graydon, here. This is Shock Doctrine, pure and simple.

    In the USA the right is IMHO heavily informed by the 2008 Great Financial Collapse. They bailed out the rich, told everybody else that they could Go F* Youself, funded an astroturf Tea Party, and made off quite well.

    Right now, in a scenario which could be a devastating blow to the GOP, they are going a little bit less so, but with the relief effort quite deliberately stolen by Trump and Co.

    125:

    Charlie "Your take" but it's also a statement of fact: Corbyn fucked up completely over Brexit Wrong about the "class struggle" of course, because even Chartered Accountants on £250k a year are "Working Class" from the p.o.v. of the tiny oligarchic minority trying & failing to run things. They are still crapped on by the fuckwits of "momentum" of course, but that's not the point. The current SD's are, of course strongly pro-Remain, it's the far left that are brexshiteers. A modern Nazi-Soviet pact, in fact. However: If he'd offered a pro-EU message combined with strong support for workers—a new deal on the NHS, universal basic income, and so on is spot on - but he didn't did he? A far-left "socialist" who supported a fascist military regime that was murdering thousands of its own population, simply because it went to war with us, so we have to be in the wrong. That amazingly stupid & self-harming action should have told anyone at all with any sense that Corbyn is a total fuckwit - shouldn't it?

    Graydon Thing is, we can't beat a disease; it's not a thinking enemy that can strike its colours and surrender. But we can EXTERMINATE it, or render it so powerless as to be ineffective - we have done this to many diseases - why not this one? Even an effective treatment, never mind a vaccine would make a huge difference. Agree re, "Structural Change", though. To what? Ah, now that's a difficult question.

    126:

    But we can EXTERMINATE it, or render it so powerless as to be ineffective - we have done this to many diseases - why not this one?

    If you want to exterminate a disease that circulates in humans, you have to have a vaccine; the vaccine has to be lastingly effective; the vaccine has to be cheap enough that you can give it to everybody (inside about half the time period of its effectiveness, every living human has been vaccinated); and you have to have a global consensus about the necessary political will to apply the vaccine no matter who objects or why.

    Smallpox was a nigh-perfect candidate for all the vaccine parts and was still a hell of a job. Trying to get global acceptance today, after the bin Laden cover story and the rise of anti-vaxxers, would involve much more work.

    COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus; no one has yet produced an effective coronavirus vaccine. Plus coronaviruses do not generally produce lasting immune responses even when you have a full-blown infection; the entire vaccine model (of priming your antibodies so you don't get infected) may not apply because lasting immune responses may not be available as responses.

    (The efforts to produce SARS vaccines had some alarming failure modes; in one case, they got as far as the mouse model. The vaccine produced a strong immune response, hurrah! the result of the strong immune response was that on re-exposure to the pathogen, the immune system went berserk, causing death. (this is the mouse model, remember.) Oops. DO NOT skimp testing for any possible COVID-19 vaccines.)

    If there's no vaccine and no extremely effective antiviral any time soon -- ten years is not an unreasonable expectation for producing either -- this stuff becomes the Uncommon Cold; you would expect to get it every year, and it might kill you.

    So the only response at that point is a whole lot of mandatory testing. Which is going to be implemented by authoritarians who don't care about who lives or dies but who really care about making opposition to whatever they say impossible.

    127:

    Since the discussion has moved to socialism, perhaps I can point to this post I made on Reddit: Change My View where I claimed that socialists have no actual plan for how things should work. My view was confirmed; the nearest thing to a plan was a laughable idea involving two kinds of currency which would immediately create a class division between those who had access to real money and those who had to use "vouchers" redeemable only at their local cooperative store.

    128:

    well that was really smart: just at the moment that capitalism is at the brink of total collapse, & the entire world will be debating what's to come next, the UK has decided to no longer have an anti-capitalist opposition party. Good move. You're now officially irrelevant.

    https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/1246430729074094082

    We hadn't seen this (since he's not part of the shape we were looking at: his stance is expected & he's savvy enough to know how to peer a bit into the future), but it fits the sentiments.

    Sir Starmer seems a decent chap & we're sure he is actually a good family man (rather than, say, the PM) - the issue is simply: he'd be a good Conservative politician in a political setup that wasn't as skewed as it is (and yes, we know about his 4th International Past, but that's kinda a given if you're politically aware and have eyes enough to see injustice in the world: if you're not an anarchist / flavor of Red at that age, then you should stick to the Markets)

    ~

    Anyhow, personal message: if you're a member of a faith that loves its dragon slaying myths, don't use this as a taunt, esp. if you're running a media campaign to bait the living fuck out of a target list of Lefties in the UK and are too stupid to have noted that the universal -30% dip is fairly consistent amongst most Financially / Market dominated countries and everyone is on that timer (RIP Nigeria). Spoilers: the stupid hard-right also get ganked, just a bit later:

    https://i.pinimg.com/236x/02/4d/94/024d9413082b79d7542d0b65b79b3a83--tarot-card-art-tarot-cards.jpg

    Just sayin, some of us actually are in that game (Cat Goddesses, not Tarot: we prefer our luck a little more pure / undistilled), and might consider it... sacrilege.

    129:

    Agree re, "Structural Change", though. To what? Ah, now that's a difficult question.

    Well, yeah; it's deliberately designed to be nigh-impossible to answer. You have to have solved everything before you can start!

    Thing is, the folks who write specifications for stuff that has to work figured out ages ago that you don't need to do it like that. You write a functional spec, you say what should happen, and you don't try to define how. (This is the constraints part of a system model. The mammonite position is that there are no legitimate constraints, which is interestingly defective when it comes to trying to produce a stable society.) When you implement it, you get something inside your constraints; it is (presuming you picked reasonable constraints) definitionally OK. How you got it doesn't have to be named, comprehensible (necessary!) or inside any one person's head (even more necessary! it's a big old world and the taxonomy problem[0] gets mean at scale.) It doesn't have to use the same value of how everywhere; as long as you don't fudge the what and don't mix what and how, you should still be OK.

    So, elements of what --

    Income and asset caps. (Otherwise you don't have a roughly even distribution of agency and create a feedback toward controlling everything so your individual agency is retained (Bezos, say) which is bad for everyone else. Terrible system design. Do not want.)

    Market mechanisms are fine if and only if the market is composed of peer entities capable of meaningful refusal. (So you can go down to the farmer's market just fine, and a bunch of business-to-business markets in whatever are fine, but the idea that you can have a market relationship with the phone company is NOT fine, because it's obvious nonsense.) (This is a "there should be feedback" rule.)

    The limited liability corporation dies the death. Partnerships, co-operatives, and collectively-owned business models already exist; use those, with full liability. (Limited liability is "no feedbacks for me! no feedbacks for me!" and can't be tolerated if you want a functioning system.)

    Collective organizations for housing, child care, etc. (Charlie points out that corporations are AIs and predatory on individuals fairly frequently; well, consider this "let's try multicellular life" by that same analogy. Today, this is effectively forbidden.)

    Recognize that the profit motive -- "bring hither the money" -- and the profit measure -- "do other people agree this was a good use of resources?" -- are not the same thing. The former collapses into greed still being a sin. The later is only useful if the prices are accurate, which means you need strong public policy to make everybody keep all their costs on the books. (E.g., climate change should be on the fossil carbon extractor's balance sheets. Otherwise all their prices are false.)

    [0] the only arbitrarily accurate description of the thing is the thing; all taxonomies are lossy

    130:

    Re: 'Happy Bunny Easter Ride'

    First name that popped into my head reading this post was: so that's where Kim Jong-un went! Read somewhere that he's not been seen for about a month and that his sister is currently subbing for him.

    131:

    Re: 'Limited liability is "no feedbacks for me!'

    Or liability for the safe disposal of returns.

    Agree with most everything you wrote. Curious about how you got there because it's not standard economics.

    132:

    Hey, you got Hacker Newed, expect a steady stream of anti SJW people in your spam filter.

    133:

    Panama papers + DE / CY + Shell LLC + off the books usually denotes, well.

    Many of them are extremely cosmopolitan[0], witty, love a good pun and think insane schemes like this are fucking hilarious.

    They've also the clout to prod a few people 'on the books'[1] to spin it as a narrative that the .mil of said countries are happy to splash as fighting the good fight and no-one's the wiser.

    We're sure in about a week there will be a lovely tale of some spy-game super-secret mission to rescue nationals from and everyone will forget about not using the shorter route or the oddities, while collecting tickets for and the good ship from the .

    That's how this works, usually.

    Doubt us? Just changed its nation[2] to Portugal with the new owner[3]. Want to see a magic trick / signature tune?

    Wayback is pruned, apart from a single date: July 29th which is now... blank. It's 100% a signature.

    But the flag nation was Bahamas when OneOceanAdventures ran it[4]. Work out why you'd bother to switch from the Bahamas flag when you just bought it using a Bahamas shell LLC to an EU flag.

    cough

    [0] Not in that ((())) way, but some are actually also IL nationals having also been RU nationals.

    [1] Senators, Newspaper editors, Media who love the product

    [2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:370230/mmsi:255806208/imo:9000168/vessel:RCGS_RESOLUTE

    [3] https://www.cruisemapper.com/ships/RCGS-Resolute-765

    [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20180825211123/http://www.cruisemapper.com/ships/RCGS-Resolute-765

    134:

    This frame worries me a lot.

    On the plus side, Bill Gates has apparently stepped up: he's funding seven vaccine approaches in parallel, Manhattan Project management style: develop them all, scrap the ones that don't work, no need to ramp up because if one of them does work it'll be ready for volume production immediately. "We may waste a few billion dollars", was the operative comment.

    If the USA had a working federal government instead of a Mafia bust-out in progress, the CDC would have announced something like this a couple of months ago. But no, we're reliant of the benevolence of billionaires.

    135:

    If your answer about flags is "well, they are registered in Madeira", well:

    https://www.scheepvaartwest.be/CMS/index.php/passengers-cruise/5719-hanseatic-imo-9000168

    They sail under the Bahamas flag, same company.

    (Note: we might be playing a joke here).

    136:

    Wrong about the "class struggle" of course, because even Chartered Accountants on £250k a year are "Working Class" from the p.o.v. of the tiny oligarchic minority trying & failing to run things.

    Working class needs redefining, frankly.

    If you do not own a house (own outright, no mortgage or loans), and do not have sufficient investments to return an average middle-management salary (say, £60,000 a year) and maintain its value), you are working class because your assets are shrinking relative to the value of capital.

    (How big is the investment portfolio you need to provide that income? If you're creaming 1% off it, and it's growing at 2% per annum, then it needs to be around £6M. I'm guessing absolutely not less than £2.5M, quite possibly over £10M. As for the house, that's going to account for at least £0.5M -- you can get away with less outside the M25, but in London you're looking at £2M or more. Note I said "house", not rabbit hutch.)

    Upshot: once you've squared those numbers, you're looking at about 0.1% of the population who qualify as "wealthy". The rest of us? Retail shelf stackers, neurosurgeons, army generals? All working class insofar as we aren't on the same side of the barricades as Capital.

    137:

    post I made on Reddit: Change My View where I claimed that socialists have no actual plan for how things should work. My view was confirmed;

    You view being that smart political operators and scientists don't venture onto reddit?

    Or are you, per the reddit stereotype, a basement warrior convinced that if the population would bow before you, you would make an excellent god-emperor?

    138:

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2020-03-30/us-economy-uniquely-vulnerable-coronavirus

    As the French prof who pointed us to this piece says, "As crazy as it is, this article does help explain a bit both Trump and BoJo's choices in the crisis."

    Quote:

    ["In contrast, countries with growth models of the Anglo-American variety, especially the United States, tend to have weaker states, lower taxes, and large financial sectors. They have highly flexible labor markets rather than large welfare states, which means they ultimately depend on wages to drive growth. Since those wages have been buying less and less over time, credit cards, student loans, and medical debts have become a standard part of U.S. household budgeting. When those household budgets shrink sharply, their debts are not compensated by the shock absorbers that countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have in place. When systems such as the American one are hit by shocks, they tend to bail out their financial systems to keep credit flowing and let the real economy absorb the blow through unemployment and austerity policies. The assumption is that with no shock absorbers in place, prices and wages will adjust quickly, capital will be redeployed, and growth will return without the need for state intervention.

    [...]

    Because the model is designed to adjust through reduced wages and employment rather than increased welfare outlays, political leaders can contemplate temporary unemployment benefits for a banking-induced shock, but not semipermanent cash transfers—which is what the British are doing—and a near-total collapse in asset values. The British solution is too politically toxic to be anything other than a short-term expedient in the American context. So, once it became clear that—at least according to the Imperial College London model—the epidemiologically correct response was to put the economy in hibernation for several months, U.S. leaders started looking for other solutions.

    One alternative solution, put forth by U.S. President Donald Trump but with proponents in many states, is to simply “restart the economy.” The direct cost of doing so, according to the Imperial College London model, could be the deaths of as many as 2.2 million Americans—or, as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick bluntly suggested in a recent interview, old people need to die to save the economy." ]

    French prof goes on to say:

    "Now, as a eurocommie, I'll reiterate my position that this entire crisis just highlights the ultimate failure, both moral and technical, of unregulated capitalism. I'm even starting to think it might lead to actual revolutions in thinking in the next couple of years.

    However, this article also suggests that this crisis is actually destroying the US economy. As in, for good. If just half of this article is correct, then the US has definitely lost the n°1 spot to China.

    Which might also raise several very tricky questions for the future of the world economy as a whole... As I understand it, China's ownership of US debt (about 1 trillion $) is supposed to protect us all from a full-blown trade war... But what if the US economy is beyond saving? Wouldn't dealing it the death blow become attractive to Xi Jinping? At the very least, Chinas has a lot of good cards in its hands right hand, and the US a lot of bad ones... This might explain why Trump (and Republicans) seem genuinely willing to let 1M to 2M elderly Americans die to save the economy... Maybe.

    Not that any of this is good news for anyone. The US still is #1 militarily, and I've always thought that the US will nto be afraid to flex its military muscles to compensate for a shrinking economy.

    TL;DR: buckle up, this might just be the beginning."

    139:

    Absolutely. Also effective testing and six other things. The list of pandemic preparedness this administration has been shutting off looks deliberate, it's so comprehensive. (I figure it is deliberate; whether cheap-deliberate or evil-deliberate hardly matters.)

    Gates runs smarter than the usual billionaire, and presumably is hoping to go Full Carnegie in the history books somehow. (I doubt this will work. The unquestioned business brilliance produced a lasting malignancy which won't be overshadowed by anything good he could possibly do.)

    I hope some vaccine works. I am generally pessimistic about an effective vaccine for a coronavirus at all, but would be delighted to be wrong.

    140:

    Re HN, the comparison in that HN thread with "Holocaust denial" was telling. (That was the thread, yes?)

    Spent a few hours trying to arrange for online shopping/at-store pickup (because mask wearing still hasn't broken 50% in my area; too many DJT voters probably. Seeing a family of 10 going into the grocery store was surprising.). Was mainly curious about the online services (had not tried them previously); tried 4 of them. The online food shopping services are absolutely overwhelmed - this is almost certainly a seriously expanding job category and there are similar ones (e.g. delivery, though in the US the tipping-as-part-of-wage aspect needs serious fixing), and the capitalists involved will be doing their bit to maximize profits at the expense of the desperate unemployed. Something (including related services) to watch for sure.

    141:

    Dammit.

    God has obviously learned from the famous lawsuit by the estate of Philip K. Dick:* this time, she's plagiarising before the work is published.

    • Some years ago there was an April Fool's news item announcing that the executors of Dick's estate were suing God for plagiarism. (And rightly so, IMHO.)
    142:

    Agree with most everything you wrote. Curious about how you got there because it's not standard economics.

    I might know two things about economics; I certainly don't know three.

    Got there by thinking about "what does works look like?", informed by some systems theory and some control theory from operations research.

    143:

    All working class insofar as we aren't on the same side of the barricades as Capital.

    Observation suggests that an awful lot of people will willingly join the Capital side in exchange for little more than doggy treats and a pat on the head.

    144:

    Head's up for host.

    He has the Official Post-2016 Badge of Irony[tm] that's handed out like candy these days, proving he is no has-been. Aka: when gentiles accuse Jewish people of "famous trope X" (usually the more easy to understand ones) without an ounce of irony.

    From HN, no link, about essay above:

    This statement is so profoundly ignorant and offensive that it's hard to reply to it. It's almost literally equivalent to Holocaust denial - the Holocaust was very much about the poor German masses rising up to murder the wealthy Jewish elites.

    File under: life post-Trump for a majority of even vaguely lefty Jewish people. Here's a great example (and is very funny - you have to read the entire saga vrs an extremely pretentious Oxford PHD student who is attempting to make a name, a la Screwton, for himself in the RW mediasphere):

    Sigh, i've been vanquished. my judaism is simply a yu-gi-oh card, and I've blood libeled an Italian gentile somehow. And that Italian's name? Margarita McCain https://twitter.com/leonardocarella/status/1246108016493068289

    https://twitter.com/inthesedeserts/status/1246112312437739520 3rd April 2020. Note: it starts off snippy, then gets brutal.

    ~

    Note: it is, in itself, an entire genre of cringe. (If you need references to some of the jokes, well...)

    145:

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/05-04-2020/lockdown-letters-10-fiona-farrell-being-strong-being-kind/

    The Lockdown Letters are worth reading for a different take on the inevitable collapse of society and the need for a strong, heavily armed aristocracy to rule the lawless peasants with an iron fist.

    146:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE

    I plan to go to bed shortly, and I don't want to wade through sewage when I check back here tomorrow morning. (Per comment 144, yes, Hacker News and the horde of dudebro tech startup wannabes is on the job.) So I'm going to close the comments on this blog entry soon, and will re-open them when I'm awake.

    Normal service will be resumed in about 12 hours ...

    ... Aaaand Open again.

    147:

    Written just as Charlie was locking the blog down …

    Paul Which was, effectively, what the SovUnion had Special stores & perks for the Nomenklatura & everybody else was living in the "socialist paradise" - yes.

    Graydon If you do away with "Limited Liability" a lot of real progress stops dead, because of the penalties. There has to be Limited-Limited Liability route, of some sort - I think ( maybe ) ... @ 139 Yes - it's quite deliberate. I hope it smashes them in the face in November - but they are openly trying to restrict the franchise & steal the election. To requote Foxessa TL;DR: buckle up, this might just be the beginning." I never thought to see major Bank-Crashes, I never thought to see a major Pandemic, I hope never to see a major war, but ....

    [ Update onn that: What are the prospects of a US civil war-ette/internal conflict if DT loses, big-time & refuses to accept it & nor do his "base" ... ?? ]

    Charlie @ 136 SPOT ON But ... "momentum" & the Corbynistas & the other ultra-left-loonies would put me straight into the "owner/exploiter class" - even though my annual income is about £12k - because they are idiots. And probably even less than 0.1% - i.e. One in a thousand - which would translate to 60 000 people in the UK I would suggest another order of magnitude down, to - 6000 = 0.01%

    148:

    Working class needs redefining, frankly.

    Yes, exactly!

    I've been trying to explain to people that if they have to work for a living, that makes them working class. Even if they feel like temporarily inconvenienced millionaires and own some stock or even an apartment they can rent out, they are working class.

    If I would have gotten an Euro each time I've tried to explain to people that do not consider themselves working class although they are that obviously to me, well... I probably could by a pint or two.

    This also probably explains at least partly why people vote the way they do - they don't want to be 'workers' so they vote for the parties whose actions benefit mostly rich people (though our Gini coefficient is relatively low. It's been gettin higher).

    149:

    I've been trying to explain to people that if they have to work for a living, that makes them working class. Even if they feel like temporarily inconvenienced millionaires and own some stock or even an apartment they can rent out, they are working class.

    It has been forgotten since 1939-45, but during the Victorian period in England there were roughly ten sub-levels within "working class", ranging from homeless-and-destitute at the bottom, to prosperous property-owning professionals at the top -- publicans, shop owners, engineers.

    The middle class was tiny, largely defined in terms of regulated occupations defined by statute law: doctors, surgeons, lawyers. Wealth overlapped with the upper 2-3 tiers of "working" class, and downward mobility was far easier than upward mobility.

    Upper class, at the beginning of the Victorian period, was mostly inherited land ownership, which usually went hand-in-glove with hereditary lordship (because if you owned enough land you'd marry your kids to a down-at-heel nob with an inherited title and thereby your descendants would become upper class and you would be upper class by proxy). (Later on, the upper class increasingly overlapped with capital ownership as an alternative to land tenure as the industrial revolution gained momentum. But initially, land was the way in.)

    The "thousand families" out of a population of 20-40M was ... yup, about 0.1%.

    150:

    "Working class needs redefining, frankly."

    That is true, not least because it HAS been - from a meaningful classification of society to nothing more than tribalist polemic. I agree with your description of people, but not your classification.

    Until about 1950, it was (usually) used to refer to the large class of manual workers who were essential to the running of society. It was also closely linked to educational achievement - i.e. how much FORMAL education they had. While the mandarins described them as "unskilled", they were in often as skilled as what the mandarins called "skilled manual workers" (*). And what's more, they were a CLASS - or two, actually, the rural and urban. By then the former had almost vanished and the latter were shrinking, and it was quite rightly said "we are all middle class now" - and, no, it was NOT Prescott who first said it, because it dates back to the 1950s or 1960s.

    What Thatcher did was, arguably, to create an UNDERclass (Jones is a prat among prats), though it lacks the cohesion of the old working classes, a great many of whom are un- or under-employed. And the majority is largely unskilled, or has only skills that most of the population has. Things are not the same as in 1926, let alone the 19th century. Furthermore, there is often very little coherent distinction between levels of the non-plutocracy, again unlike earlier times.

    Given that mess, I don't see that reinventing a set of class definitions will help - and DEFINITELY reusing the old ones as polemic doesn't, as we have seen over the past 70 years. I remember the vicious tribalism of Labour in the 1950s to 1970s, often targetted against the poorest in society, using it in exactly that way. To give Thatcher her due, some of her early actions were to cancel that - unfortunately, we have now rebounded to an even more extreme position, the other way :-(

    (*) Consider farm, especially pastoral, workers and structural welders.

    151:

    That doesn't correspond with any of the definitions of "working class" that I have seen in (at least partly academic) writings. Prosperous property-owning professionals (including yeoman farmers) were classified as "middle class". But, even then, people were using such terms as much for polemic as analysis.

    152:

    Attempts to divide the population by "class" will always fail for exactly the same reasons that trying to divide them by "race" will; you are dealing with a multi-dimensional continuum rather than distinct categories.

    According to the "works for a living" criterion Willie Walsh is working class, which renders the term so inclusive as to be almost meaningless. It's been observed that multimillionaires carry on working even though they could just stay in bed all day, so distinguishing between someone who needs to work to put food on the table, someone who could stop working if they accepted a huge reduction in living standards, and someone who "works" merely because they enjoy it is a non-trivial exercise.

    This is not a new problem. The Soviet Union had a problem with the kulaks, "rich peasants" who had managed to accumulate some land and livestock of their own. Stalin solved the problem by simply killing all the kulaks.

    153:

    The middle class was tiny, largely defined in terms of regulated occupations defined by statute law: doctors, surgeons, lawyers.

    My mother, born in the 1930s in England, says that her family was middle class because her father owned his own business. He was a photographer.

    154:

    Until about 1950

    Nope, for the big picture I'm talking about the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries, and specifically the urban working classes (rural was in slow, steady decline throughout this period).

    Things changed post-1950, which I'm assuming is within your lifetime: in particular we saw the emergence of educational credentialism as a way of gatekeeping access to employment, and the decline of working apprenticeships. (Hint: these trends slowly but inexorably undermined the unions by granting the credentialed some of the privileges formerly reserved for the professions, while steadily diluting their value.)

    155:

    In what sense does Willie Walsh work for a living?

    156:

    The cruise line business relies on several preconditions.

    You first of all need a lot of middle-aged to older people with lots of disposable income and not much to spend it on. Then you need a world that doesn't mind what amount to floating mega-hotels turning up all over the place. You also need a world that will turn a blind eye to people using unrefined bunker oil as fuel (this is what is left after the more useful, lighter fractions have been distilled off crude oil); this is a dirty fuel and the diesel exhaust is particulate-heavy and contains lots of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

    Finally, you need a world where hyper-infectious viruses are rare. Cruise liners can just about get away with the occasional deep clean to get rid of norovirus epidemics, but coronavirus is just too easily spread on a cruise liner for these things to be viable now.

    Personally, being autistic at the more intelligent end of the scale, I would absolutely detest being unable to escape from the overwhelming presence of people. Give me time on my own and limited interaction and I do just fine; enforced sociability is tiring and painful for the likes of me.

    157:

    This redefinition of class in the U.K. seems to fit fairly well.

    Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22007058

    158:

    That's the post-WW1 definition. Remember WW1 was a huge social rupture point? Servants enlisted or went to work in munitions factories and never went back, and that's just for starters. My father's father and his brothers were Jewish wool merchants. Pre-1914, they were prosperous working class, more or less. By 1920 they were clearly middle class in the modern (much broader, post-WW1) sense of the term.

    159:

    Re: Limited liability

    Depending on how you are personally defining 'limited liability', I at least 'slightly disagree'. I'm not a lawyer, so my pov is based on very limited personal experience/awareness of corporate law.

    Okay - while corporate law may be a slightly different animal in the UK, according to this Harvard Law scholar's paper which also talks about the history of this concept, the current common USian held/advertised notion of limited liability is not what was originally intended nor is its associated self-promotion of being the winning-est strategy based on any evidence actually showing it to be evolutionarily best.

    Nor IMO is currently advertised 'limited liability' particularly good for a healthy and resilient economy, tech development or societal progress. Wonder what this author thinks of Piketty because I see some commonality like maybe (gasp!) looking at raw/real data.

    https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/29/a-new-understanding-of-the-history-of-limited-liability-an-invitation-for-theoretical-reframing/

    Excerpt:

    'I urge scholars not to assume that the convergence to full limited liability was an evolutionary drive to efficiency. The outcome of the convergence—full limited liability in all sectors including the financial sector—is not necessarily “first best”. The burden is on the dominant theory of limited liability to check and reconcile its predictions, not only with the 19th century economic growth and stock market expansion but also with the consequences of the 2007 crisis. The relatively new full liability regime of investment banks and their leverage ratios may have contributed to that crisis.'

    160:

    So was I, actually. Yes, the educational credentialism was new in my time, but the same association was there - just with the reverse causality!

    Your definition of middle class is the subset that was received by the upper classes - what was in my time called upper-middle class. Your definition would include people who owned mines, factories, ships, trading companies etc., could afford to retire, and inheriting generations often didn't need to do a stroke of work in their lives. It makes a nonsense of definitions to call someone like that "working class".

    The economic definition of British working class that I remember was essentially those people who owned nothing except the essentials of their life (possibly including basic housing), and had to work until the day they died (unless they had enough descendents to care for them). That's why pensions were such a political issue.

    Now, in France and other places in Europe, things were very different, with a peasantry that survived FAR longer than it did in the UK, and some of those were very wealthy.

    161:

    I can assure you that many of my older relatives (i.e. adult before WW I) would have taken deep offence at being classified as working-class - some belonged to 'the professions', but more did not - and few (if any) were wealthy enough to live comfortably without working.

    162:

    Reminder that I'm discussing economics and using Marx as an analytical reference point. (Marx is outdated insofar as he was working in the mid-19th century, but his work was groundbreaking.)

    The core distinction in Marx's class terms was "is your income derived from labour or from capital?" If you live by labour -- that is, if your income goes away if you stop working, even if your work is as a CEO -- then you're a worker. If you live off rental income, then you're capital (and presumptively of the owner class).

    Marx's classes weren't an attempt at diagnosing social categories (they totally miss out gender and race), but about income.

    163:

    Mike Collins Well, I do not fit into any of those categories, so that's an instant FAIL, then .....

    Charlie In which I am in agreement with Karl (!)

    164:

    JamesPadraicR @ 77: FWIW Davening is the Yiddish term for praying, which has also come to refer to the bowing motions often done during standing prayers, particularly the Amidah. The other word I used, Shuckling is the Yiddish word for shaking, also refers to the motion but is less common now.

    Good to know. Another question. Is the 'A' in "Davening" pronounced like the 'a' in "Dave", or the 'a' in "davenport" ... or the 'a' in "sofa"?

    165:

    Robert Prior @ 79: Seems like the logical thing to do would be to sell the commercial paper in retail shops. After all, if demand for household TP is up 40% then institutional TP should be down 40%.

    OK, one-ply rolls or single small sheets aren't ideal, but they're flushable and don't leave ink on your bottom.

    A lot of commercial toilet paper is designed to be hard to get out of the holder so users won't use so much. You not only have to have the TP, but you have to have the special holder the roll fits in.

    And it's often in 3 inch wide rolls. Household TP is always at least 4 in wide. On my most recent package it says each sheet is 4.2 in x 4.0 in (10.6 cm x 10.1 cm).

    There was a period of years when I never bought TP at all. We were at Annual Training one year when the supply tent blew down in a storm. A whole pallet load of TP got rained on & they were going to dump it all in the trash. Most of it was still in unopened cartons & only a few rolls actually got soaked (and even those dried out after I put them on a table on my back porch & let the breezes do their thing). Most of it wasn't even damp.

    A 40+ cubic foot pallet load of TP will last one person a long, LONG time. Waste not, want not.

    166:

    Yes, I had deduced that. The thing to note about Marx is that he was writing about a very different social structure from that which existed in Britain, and much of his classification and observation simply made no sense when applied to here, even when applied to income. Excessive application of Marx (*) to Britain has sent serious economic historians up the wall for a century! The pro- and anti-Marxist camps in Britain are NOT purely about 'left versus right' but as much about revisionism versus academic respectability.

    Realistically, his classification makes a lot more sense in the Britain of today than it did in the 19th century! A possible division would be:

    The bloated plutocrat class (tiny) The parasitic class (still small) The economically important class (most people) The underclass (regrettably too large)

    That's four divisions to your two, but is otherwise compatible.

    (*) A lot of what Groucho said makes more sense than Karl.

    167:

    Elderly Cynic @ 95: Regrettably, yes. I could also remind you of the time the Germans discovered that one of GCHQ's major tasks was to spy on German commercial communications, and pass them on to the USA.

    ... who shared them with the German intelligence service. Ditto Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States spying on each other & sharing the information because most countries have laws against their intelligence agencies spying on their own citizens, but not against using information acquired by "allies".

    168:

    If you do away with "Limited Liability" a lot of real progress stops dead, because of the penalties. There has to be Limited-Limited Liability route, of some sort - I think ( maybe )

    There absolutely must not be, because it's a leak in the feedback, and it's a leak in the feedback used to get around the constraints by shifting things from the domain of constraints ("don't kill people") into the domain of contracts ("we agreed to this; sorry it didn't work out for you (you smoking corpse)".)

    It's tough to define progress; I will note that the easy definition (lifespan, productive years, health, etc.) is nigh-all public spending. The greedheads insist that no one does anything but for profit, and asymmetric profit under keep-the-loot-forever terms, at that. Only it's entirely screamingly obvious that this is both false (bind! tcp/ip stacks! Salk polio vaccine! the entire social gift economy!) and harmful (all the necessary stuff that gets destroyed by profit-extraction being applied to it).

    169:

    Charlie Stross @ 102: To add to your happy fun misconceptions, Scottish juries have fifteen members, can come to a verdict on the basis of only 12 of them (so some jurors can be discharged mid-trial without causing a mistrial), and there are three possible verdicts.

    We kind of have that in the U.S. Most major trials have "alternate jurors" who sit in the box & hear the evidence along with the regular 12. When the trial goes to the jury, the judge thanks the alternates for their service and dismisses them. Although in some jurisdictions the alternates are kept on until a verdict is reached in case one of the jurors is disqualified (or drops dead of a heart attack), in which case an alternate is selected to join the jury in their deliberations, which start again.

    Just had an "Agatha Christie" moment ... suppose 11 jurors gang up on the 12th and drive him/her into heart attack (and #12 dies) à la Murder on the Orient Express.

    And a Sheriff is a junior judge, not a law enforcement official.

    But didn't the Sheriff start out as both? I mean many years ago when feudalism existed and the U.K. hadn't even come into existence yet, wasn't the Sheriff both judge & law enforcement officer (plus revenue collector and local administrator and ...)?

    The scope of the Sheriff's duties has narrowed since then, and that narrowing followed different paths in the U.K. and the U.S.

    170:

    There absolutely must not be, because it's a leak in the feedback, and it's a leak in the feedback used to get around the constraints by shifting things from the domain of constraints ("don't kill people") into the domain of contracts

    I think you can have limited liability, as long as it's not an excuse for diffusion of responsibility. That is: if a company by negligence or intent causes damage to people or property (including other companies) someone must be held responsible, and in serious cases face criminal penalties such as imprisonment.

    Our current mechanisms for enforcing this are broken.

    The classic example (in the UK) is the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster of 1987.

    What the wikipedia article barely mentions: there was an attempt to prosecute (for homicide) after the accident, and while it failed, it established corporate manslaughter as a crime in English law. Unfortunately the burden of proof for this offense is high -- it's too easy to diffuse responsibility throughout an organization -- and the penalties hold the organization responsible, not the individuals. And the penalties, even under the 2008 Act, are inadequate to deter corporations effectively.

    171:

    But didn't the Sheriff start out as both?

    Yes ... and note that it's not an office in English/Welsh law at all, it's specifically Scottish. (Remember Scotland was a completely separate nation until 1606 -- often at war with England -- and from 1606-1706 it was autonomous but shared a common monarch, sort of like Canada/Australia today.)

    I suspect the term got imported with Scottish settlers in the wake of the Jacobite rebellions.

    172:

    There was an extra problem with the Herald of free Enterprise. P&O had JUST taken over Townsend Thoreson, so was responsible, but had a (reasonable) defence that they had not had time to sort out the mismanagement. There was an attempt to scapegoat one of the bosuns, but I can't remember which.

    173:

    The original (18th century) purpose of limited liability was useful.

    Several people (investors) get together to do a thing, and risk only what they put in. Thus the incentive to do the thing (return on investment) is coupled with the risk (not lose everything for the possibility of a return). This can free up a lot of investment that otherwise would (and had) remain locked up in long term quiet things like land ownership.

    Originally they were specifically limited in time as well. Do the thing for x years, then dissolve. Over the last 200 years there have been various steps transforming this limited useful thing into an unlimited size, immortal, profit maximization at all costs machine that is capable of transcending or subverting even the largest political entities. Obviously not optimal and actively destructive to our chances.

    I'd love to see a rollbsck of a lot of those legal changes (corporate personhood, immortality, profit maximization mandate to name but 3, ability to nest endless shells). I'd hate to see the utility of an LLC disappear entirely.

    Disclaimer - I have owned and do own an LLC, given than I am working within the constraints of our current system. I bought a failing business, it might have fully failed. At no point was I willing to risk any more of the well-being of my family than the amount I put into the business to save it. Now that I own it (and saved it) I keep it as an LLC because I could at any time be subject to some kind of lawsuit or predatory attack on the business that, if it were not LLC, could again come through and take our home etc.

    That said, I am not a massive megacorp, nor am I predatory. I don't need it to be immortal, I don't need it to be a corporate person. I do need it to be limited to itself so that if it fails I don't bring down the whole family with it.

    174:

    Justin Jordan @ 122:

    "Presumably the people that stocked up on bottled water in case somehow, hospitals being overloaded and ventilators being in short supply caused the water to turn off, "

    Eh, stocking up on bottled water is not unreasonable. Especially in a US urban area. Our infrastructure is very fragile.

    The issue isn't hospitals, it's any kind of spiraling infrastructure failure, which is unlikely but non zero. But it generally wouldn't take a lot to shut down power and water for a couple of days, and widespread panic alone could do it.

    I live in a very rural area and I have a well, so I'm somewhat insulated, but I keep food and water on hand as a matter of course. We've been without power for as long as a week, rarely, and there's usually at least once a year where it's out. In which case I can't really access the well water.

    But generally, there's usually at least a few stretches when I can't get out every year. Having bottled water and non perishable food is generally prudent in any case.

    I keep a case of bottled water in my car. I have it to drink if I'm out somewhere without access to water and I keep it to fill the dog's water bowl when we're traveling.

    People who live in the country often don't have "city water" piped in. They rely on wells. If the power is out, the pump don't work. If you don't have water stocked, you're going to have problems.

    Some places the water that comes out of a well is not safe to drink. My two sisters solved that problem by buying water in gallon jugs. When the jugs got empty they'd put them in the car and take them to work to fill up with city water. But you have to have the jugs in the first place, and the only way I know to get them is to buy gallons of water at the grocery store. You just don't use those jugs once and throw them away.

    In the past 45 years, since I moved in here, there have been at least two "boil water" advisories (hurricane damage to the water treatment plants). They came while the power was out & my electric stove wasn't working. If I hadn't had a stockpile of water, I'd have been in trouble.

    I think I've mentioned before that I buy distilled water by the gallon to use in my iron (somebody's got to iron those shirts, and it looks like that somebody is going to have to be me). A gallon of distilled water will last me a long time. The empty gallon jugs refilled with tap water last even longer.

    I do need to remember to write the fill date on the jugs & dump/refill them periodically.

    175:

    The German government was NOT happy, because the real issue was passing on that sort of information to USA competitors (including the commercial parts of the USA government). I have several cases of personal experience of how the UK bureaucracy does that sort of thing, as well as other cases I know about, including when it harms UK businesses. Yes, I do mean things like UK patent applications would somehow leak to the USA and someone there with no relevant research background would file a patent, thus preempting the inventor.

    176:

    EC Thanks for that - I hadn't realised the Marx MIGHT have been correct - outside the UK. The number of times I've told "lefties" - "Forget it - Marx was utterly wrong" & watched the resulting incoherent explosion of ranting nonsesnse. Of course, I was usually referring to his predictions .... Agree re Groucho, of course, especially: "There anin't no Sanity-Claus(e)"

    No Limited LIability No Railways, no steanships, probably no electric telegraph, etc ... NOW THEN - try again, huh? Because I agree about that there should be some means of pursuinbg the guilty, without removing the ability of useful developments, that are allowed to go bust. "LL" was never designed to deal with atrocities like Bhopal etc etc etc ..... There has to be a way of squaring this circle.

    Ah, Charlie seems to have nailed it: I think you can have limited liability, as long as it's not an excuse for diffusion of responsibility. P.S. England still has High Sheriffs - largely a ceremonial office these days

    177:

    Update Rocketjps Precisely - that is exactly the sort of thing that Graydon has missed. It's a very useful tool, but like all useful tools it can be & has been grossly mis-used as well.

    178:

    And the penalties, even under the 2008 Act, are inadequate to deter corporations effectively.

    I am pretty sure you can't deter corporates at all. It's immortal, and it feels no pain.

    Chapter 7 liquidation isn't a deterrent because it imposes general social costs (so there will be extensive diffuse political pushback) and because to a first approximation nobody running the thing - the brain cells, or at least the spinal neurons doing reflexes -- believes they'll ever be held responsible for anything. Even comprehensively impoverishing them wouldn't work because they really aren't capable of believing it will happen, or last.

    My take on responsibility is that, well, you did it, you're responsible. Otherwise is to mock entropy. It's pretty easy to argue that the modern market economy is set up to mock entropy; the risk is distributed away from the agency. (The "can make choices" kind of agency.)

    (You are certainly responsible; you might not be culpable. That's a different question.)

    So there's these three interlocking issues; mammonite motives (by the philosophical necessities, death cults make decisions from which people who want to live don't derive net benefit), distribution of risk (aka assigning suffering to the helpless; austerity as a policy exists to make absolutely sure that the consequences land everywhere but on the people who took the risk, but it's not exceptional; it's of a piece with the whole profits-over-people approach to society), and the failure of political means, most obvious in the rise of a class from which it is impossible for the state to collect taxes.

    Pretty much all of that avoidance-of-the-duties-of-citizenship works by leveraging the concept of limited liability; the infinity of disposable culpability sumps -- which is what limited liability does, it's a culpability sump -- is how the whole thing works. (Also note that the two things the doesn't-pay-taxes class rely on, lawyers and accountants, aren't generally permitted to organize on a limited liability basis; those are partnerships. You can see the change in the status of doctors from professionals to technicians (in the views of this class) in the change in medical organization, too.)

    That would come with a crisis no matter how it happened or when it happened; that's, of its nature, a collapsing system. Someone has managed to connect the feedbacks to the stuff that can't change anything; by analogy, like connecting the steering wheel of a car to the turn signals and only the turn signals. Combine that with the atmospheric carbon dumping effects on the natural systems we need for life support and it's a large crisis.

    And I'm pretty sure it starts with the whole idea of limited liability, because not only does that mock entropy, it asserts that the prices are wrong and you can't make them accurate. (That's pretty much the economic summary of colonialism; we're not going to use accurate prices, and you can't stop us.) Limited liability is what lets you extract profit from the water system that's poisoning its customers; it's what lets you sell fossil carbon for some approximation of your extraction price, rather than an accurate price.

    179:

    A lot of commercial toilet paper is designed to be hard to get out of the holder so users won't use so much. You not only have to have the TP, but you have to have the special holder the roll fits in.

    No you don't. A roll sitting in the open (or an open box with those individual sheets) is better than nothing. Not elegant, but adequate.

    180:

    Graydon @ 139: Absolutely. Also effective testing and six other things. The list of pandemic preparedness this administration has been shutting off looks deliberate, it's so comprehensive. (I figure it is deliberate; whether cheap-deliberate or evil-deliberate hardly matters.)

    With Cheatolini iL Douchebag, it's all "evil-deliberate". Especially the things he did BEFORE the pandemic that have hampered the response. Anything that looked like an accomplishment by the Obama administration, Trumpolini (that fat, fascist bastard) broke out of racist spite.

    But mainly, it's all driven by the need to swindle; the desire to line his own pockets at the taxpayer's expense. He has to cheat. If he can't cheat it's not "winning".

    It's extortion & embezzlement all the way down.

    181:

    I am pretty sure you can't deter corporates at all.

    You can't deter a corporation. You can, however, hang the CEO, CFO, COO, and the entire executive hierarchy down to the most junior vice-president for janitorial services.

    I think if that was an option it'd be pretty effective at reinforcing respect for corporate compliance, yes?

    This isn't a death penalty argument: but I think punishments for corporate crimes should exceed the penalties for individual humans committing the same offense -- to reflect the greater resources corporations have for not committing crimes in the first place, not to mention for paying defense lawyers.

    At a minimum corporate manslaughter convictions should result in most or all of the executive hierarchy being barred from corporate office for life, and personally bankrupted (if not jailed).

    182:

    I do need it to be limited to itself so that if it fails I don't bring down the whole family with it.

    Sure, but you don't need "limited liability" as a legal concept to do that. (Even now! there are other legal mechanisms.)

    A society interested in meeting that commercial need could pretty easily write a law that said, well, let's see: - we've got some stakeholders (can't say shareholders, that means something else) - they've made an investment in this entity - the entity has all the civil liability; civil liability arising from the conduct of the entity does not extend to the stakeholders - the entity, not being a natural person, has not and cannot have criminal liability - criminal liability remains with the stakeholders (NOT just controlling stakeholders; if I fill a freon tank with fluorine and ship it, that'd be on me AND the boss) - the entity, not being a natural person, may not divide its interest; it cannot own other entities, nor portions of other entities - the entity, not being a natural person, cannot think; some specific natural persons are responsible for its conduct, and there is no time when at least one such person does not exist, or the entity itself ceases. (oh, look, the printed form of the succession planning regulations; don't try to lift it.)

    The idea of dividing a business from persons is important and useful. That's not what the extant concept of limited liability corporation functions to do, even approximately.

    183:

    I totally agree with you emotionally!

    Forcibly liquidate the board and the directors of the corporation; surely they're afraid of being poor!

    Well, yeah, but! Not only can we (collective civil "we") not tax effectively, the belief that the purpose of society is to guarantee the persistence of wealth is extremely widespread. This puts a lot of weight on the existing tendency to believe that bad things won't happen to me. And the first time you actually did it, you'd be looking at what happened in Australia with the elected government treated as the coal industry's hired managers.

    So as a systemic fix, no. Not going to work. You could -- and I really do believe this is why so many oligarchs were so frightened of the idea of President Warren -- shut down the tax havens en masse. You could institute general income and asset caps (if you had a big legislative majority). But I don't think it's possible to specific-feedback executives back into habits of responsible conduct.

    184:

    Another question. Is the 'A' in "Davening" pronounced like the 'a' in "Dave", or the 'a' in "davenport" ... or the 'a' in "sofa"?

    As in sofa, like Daw-ven.

    185:

    I actually agree with most of what you say.

    However, let's talk a bit more about my 'personal' LLC. I took out a big loan to buy and upgrade a commercial building. A small part of that building includes a 'caretaker suite', essentially a small apartment. The tenant of that suite is a smoker.

    I am the owner of the company and by extent the building. I am responsible for the maintenance and fire safety of the building (said items were what the previous LLC owner was ignoring and thus was the cause of its near condemning). I spent two working years and great expense (mostly in the form of debt) painstakingly bringing the entire building up beyond the latest fire safety codes.

    The tenant is a decent guy, single dad, works two jobs. He sends most of his money back to the Philippines as remittances, and is good enough to work outside.

    That being said, I've been told in no uncertain terms that if one of his ciggies were to light the building on fire and someone were to be harmed, I could/would be held criminally liable. In this case the LLC, though as the sole director I could end up on the hook. I've created and designated clear smoking areas (outside) with CSA approved $350 butt cans.

    I can't make him comply, and he is not particularly interested in putting his butts into the damn cans.

    I suppose I could evict him, the fire marshal seemed to think I should - but I am not a sociopath. Not being a sociopath means that the liability sits with me. It is not an easy situation to resolve. Eliminating the LLC would not help, me or him.

    186:

    Not pronounced that way in the UK (try "daven" as in "davenport"). Remember, it's from Yiddish, which itself is a creole of German, Polish, and Hebrew, and how it's pronounced by Americans probably differs from how it's pronounced by Brits or Israelis.

    187:

    Re masks: Coronavirus: World Health Organisation reverses course, now supports wearing face masks in public (Stuart Lau, 4 Apr, 2020) Read for context; title is a little strong; WHO has only started to backpedal.

    I was extremely irritated that DTJ halfheartedly said that the general public could wear homemade masks, then said he would probably not be wearing one himself. (So breathtakingly selfish of him; even if he is being tested daily so he knows he is not infected to a reasonably high level of confidence, he is sending a dangerous message to his gullible followers.)

    Anyway, managed to place online a pick-up-outside-store grocery order. The slots filled up quickly; half of them were gone by 12:10 AM (reservations opened up for the next available day at midnight).

    I am also hearing occasional stories about life under relaxed lockdown in parts of China; something to look forward to/aspire to in the future for those of us not in China or another country that is well past the peak.

    188:

    There are several fundamental changes needed:

    An absolute responsibility to take reasonable care and to protect against reasonably forseeable failures.

    The responsibility for that not being cancelled by leaving the company.

    (As you and others say) Adequate personal responsibility, financial and being excluded from similar posts, and criminal in extreme cases.

    Draconian penalties for setting up fall guys, including controlling shareholders and owners also being held responsible.

    189:

    Eliminating the LLC would not help, me or him.

    Well, no, but that's because the problem is not one of commercial organization.

    Dude smokes; this greatly increases your liability. You don't see that as a reason to evict him. That's your morals. That's not something that could or should be legislated.

    (The increase in liability is significantly out of a back-shot policy of making smoking expensive in a mistaken belief that this will get people to stop.)

    190:

    In the UK we also have limited liability partnerships - after extensive lobbying by lawyers and accountancy companies. To nobody's suprise LLPs have since become the vehicle of choice for money laundering, tax evasion, and most other financial shenanigans.

    191:

    arrbee & all the others ... SLIGHT PROBLEM Somethng well above 95% of all Limited Liabilities, Companies or Partnerships are perfectly respectable, stright-up-&-down legitimate businesses, trading as anyone would or should. How does one distinguish, at law, in the courts, between them & the "others", the cheats & shysters & thieves &, let's face it, murderers. Abolishing "LL" will simply royally screw over those 95%, won't it? Now comes the difficult bit. Devise a remedy for this impasse

    192:

    Not even a problem.

    At the end of the current tax year, an LLC which exists in conformance to the rules for the new commercial entity does some paperwork and POOF, they're the new kind of entity.

    The ministry is going to have to issue some guidance, but that happens every year. It might not even be a strenuous year.

    Existing LLC and similar entities that are NOT in conformance with the rules for the new entity get hit with reorg fees for a certain amount of variance -- say X, 3X, and 15X for variances 1, 2, and 3 -- to bring themselves into conformance, do their paperwork, and keep existing.

    Entities too far out of conformance cease to exist; REITs, for example, or various mere-number liability sumps.

    It needs to come with a reconstruction of profit -- it permits you nothing and it excuses you nothing -- and some new accounting rules and a "generate increased value" rule for obligations to stakeholders. (can't say shareholders, that's the old world. :)

    193:

    This is where the intersection of a recent Cory Doctorow article about "if it's complicated, it's a scam" and the Dan Drezner line about "good ideas can be sold without lying about them" comes in.

    Complexity costs more; someone trying to make a financial instrument more complex without being absolutely compelled to do so is engaged in a scam. And the limited liability is, well, helpful in staying out of prison.

    194:

    It's interesting, in the US, that capitalism and socialism have mutated as terms. There do exist actual socialists, but the vast majority of the time when people talk about socialism, they're not talking about socialism as defined in basically any text.

    I blame the GOP generally deriding anything that might actually help people or make rich people profit slightly less as socialism for this.

    But capitalism almost always refers to the most cancerous kind of it, and socialism is almost always talking about restrained capitalism with a social safety net.

    This makes it frustratingly hard to discuss.

    195:

    All other things said, I'm actually sorry you are not going to write this novel. The intro looks quite good.

    196:

    managed to place online a pick-up-outside-store grocery order. The slots filled up quickly; half of them were gone by 12:10 AM (reservations opened up for the next available day at midnight).

    Where I am slots are booked for two weeks (the maximum advance time the shop allows).

    I have some groceries ordered for Friday, and this morning managed to get a slot for the week after (by getting up before dawn). Kinda tricky planning groceries two weeks ahead, but better than starving!

    197:

    BOJO in hosp for tests

    Not that I like him, but as a fellow human, hope he comes out of this okay.

    The news item I read was very terse merely saying that he remains in charge ... what is the succession if he's admitted for intensive care?

    198:

    Dominic Raab (Foreign Secretary) is the designated successor.

    This is the gentleman who was surprised when he was told that Dover might be important for Britain's foreign trade.

    199:

    Sugar seems to have disappeared along with the flour and yeast. Everybody's baking cookies, it seems.

    It has gotten hard to make bread around here as you have to go out multiple times to get the ingredients as one or the other will almost always be "out" no matter what store you might shop.

    So a friend is looking to work with a closed restaurant to start putting together "bread kits" for people who want to make their own bread. This restaurant's staff is all people with prison records and it's point is to help them start a new life. So this will bring back people who really need a real job and provide a useful service.

    200:

    If you a British owned and registered ship, of course your government will help you, but when you decide to register in some other country to exploit a legal loophole, when would you expect any help.

    Back in the 80s when tankers were asking for US escorts in the middle east they were told (bluntly in private I'm sure) but you're not a US ship. So step one, install $50K (1980s pricing) of radio gear to meet US Coast Guard standards. Step two ....

    Eventually they got the escorts.

    201:

    I thought it was just that Covid-19 scared the shit out of people, hence an increase in demand.

    Rim-shot

    202:

    f you want to know why there's a power dam in northern Ontario, it's an effective question to ask if there was a pulp mill around the time of the dam's construction.

    If you want to find a drywall/gyp board plant look for a large coal plant with a scrubber polution system. The drywall plant will used the scrubber left overs as feed stock. As coal usage for power goes down the cost of drywall goes up.

    203:

    If anyone still remembers that cruise ship, well... pretty much does look like it rammed them. (Of course: that video is edited, go find the original).

    Breaking News! The video of the collision between Venezuelan OPV Naiguata and Passenger Ship Resolute is released.

    https://twitter.com/navalnewsnet/status/1246796469438472195

    Contains video of, well: said cruise ship spanking into a .mil tub and using its pointy end to make a large dent in it.

    TO: Seagull's paranoia

    (from link):

    With an unsurpassed ice classification in the industry, a proven track record for stability and safety, superb design layout with 180 degree indoor and outdoor viewing platforms, and exceptional maneuverability, RCGS Resolute is ideally equipped to guide guests through the world’s most pristine and often inaccessible regions. ... and make pointy holes in little dinky .mil patrol boats

    ^^

    204:

    shutting things down so you can restart in some careful dependency order requires knowing that the dependency order is and having everybody stocked up so people don't just plain old die in the intervening time.

    This is a variation on why I think any talk of colonizing Mars is just nuts. It needs high tech to get started and keep going but once you get there your supply chain is either $$$$$ and 10 to 18 months for a screw do without.

    205:

    but for those of us who only buy large packs of it every 2-3 months, it’s come at a really inconvenient time.

    Yep. I would start watching for a sale on the mega sized packs when my home supply got down to 1/2 of one of those. Now I just buy when I see it on a shelf. And pay twice what I used to pay.

    206:

    Anyhow, most interesting thing about the video is that it appears the Venezuelan Navy has/d a woman officer who is issuing the commands, at least on deck: Captain on the foghorn is a man.

    Cory Doctorow article about "if it's complicated, it's a scam

    Article: Private equity looting public health in a pandemic (permalink) https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

    Not exactly true: if you want to see some real panic / financial wizardry happening at this very moment in time look @ Bonds, Fallen Angels and a huge hoover-like PE void sweeping across them. It's so brutal that entire industries are in feed-back shock.

    grep reference "Casino: Everyone got whacked"

    Casino (1995) Best Scene "Look... why take a chance?"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka7hSZhgplk

    207:

    Crossposting & repeating from the other thread: Update: MEANWHILE Only by passing across a bridge over the road could you enter this secret enclave, and within I found a hidden garden spiralling down to a large closed door, just as implacable as the blank walls upon the exterior. Only recently I discovered the use of this vast construction is as a mausoleum to store (the) fourteen thousand human remains. How's that for a zombie-novel description ( or similar? Yet it is a factual description of an actual place, in Central London ...

    AND It's the Musuem of London's Rotunda And the orignal article, well worth the read is: HERE enjoy!

    208:

    ANother meanwhile: I see plod are monstering people in "Public Places - even if they are more than 2 metres apart AND The Wee Fiswife has forced the resignation of a higly competent professional medical officer for reasons of political spite. The Presbyterian curtain-twitchers claim another victory. Waht, me, cynical?

    OTOH, we might be getting a new PM, given that BoZo has gorn into 'orspital

    210:

    And on a tangential note.

    I have the movie 2010 on in the background (I need some noise to concentrate but that's another discussion.)

    Interesting how the early 80s viewed how tech would be 10 years ago.

    211:

    Just as a record, noticed this:

    initially the two officers understood, and while i wouldn’t say they were pleased, could see why i was doing it. one asked me to give my opinion on the situation. after less than 60seconds(of what i witnessed) this woman was escorted forcefully 20meters to 2TSG vans + cars 3/

    https://twitter.com/MikeSegalov/status/1246848405193871360

    The paranoid Mind might think that this is the perfect excuse to V8 undesirables (oh, and FB went down in London for a while tonight). UK police with .gov support are running mental games atm (Go outside! Exercise! - Don't ALL go outside! -- Exercise: if you stop moving we arrest you! etc.)

    Got our 1st Palm Sunday "three weeks" death threat today, quite proud of that one.

    But You Gotta 100% love all these hypocrites pronouncing "they are the light" (not the above account, tangentially related) when what they've done is written in the Stars. G U I L T. We're good at smelling that, for sure. 101 Memory Hole all this shit? N O P E.

    Anyhow: word is out, things are gonna spang:

    https://twitter.com/TruthRaiderHQ/status/1246752599753101312

    212:

    Anyhow, special for Host.

    You: OMG 5G CONSPIRACY THEORIES. WTF!?! [As a professional note, that stuff was seeded over four years ago: Look - if you play STUPID Monsanto type games where you PR hack to death anyone who remotely analyses your product seriously, ruin their careers and employ nasty tricks to hobble serious scientific responses, you get the "THE FROGS ARE GAY" version. Which you like, as it allows people to point and laugh and not question your product. Until we get bored and make it a little more spicy: people are going to burn your fucking infrastructure down because of PR hacks / Lobbyists at this rate. REGULATE]

    Us: Oh, boy. You've not heard about the 'underground fires' stuff yet, have you?

    UK version: https://twitter.com/ColeDines/status/1246593121271582722

    US version: https://twitter.com/KarluskaP/status/1246912974893338624

    ~

    grep: Frogs are Gay, 2016 Election cycle.

    You learnt nothing.

    213:

    Just read the post.

    Sorry to hear that we won't see the book.

    I don't understand why you let events here on our copy Earth prevent you from writing about events on another copy Earth, but I digress.

    At times like this, I find solace in Jorge Luis Borges, especially in his story, The Garden Of Forking Paths(1941).

    Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

    ~ Jorge Luis Borges

    I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

    ~ Jorge Luis Borges

    The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.

    ~ Jorge Luis Borges

    The history of the universe... is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.

    ~ Jorge Luis Borges

    It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

    -- Jorge Luis Borges

    BTW, I started reading comments in the thread, and abandoned it when I saw so much pandemic porn.

    • Years from now, when everything is back to normal, they will find that more people died homeless in the street -- because they were laid off during this time -- than would have actually died from catching the coronavirus.

    • People will have PTSD from events and be unable to attend support groups.

    • People will try to have a ceremony to commemorate the five year anniversary of surviving the coronavirus, and no one will show up.

    See, that's how you do pandemic porn.

    214:

    You do need corporate personhood. There are some misunderstandings about what this entails. At its heart, corporate personhood means that the law recognizes the entity (in your case an LLC) as having the ability and right to own property, the ability to enter into contracts and the ability to go to court to vindicate its rights.

    In the United States, these concepts are generally subsumed under the Constitutional right to due process of law.

    I am a lawyer by training and practiced corporate law for a number of years.

    215:

    The highly competent medical officer you talk about had just stepped away from the national podium in Edinburgh after ordering everyone in Scotland to shelter in place or DIE! She then went off on a jolly to the other side of the Firth to her other home. She got an official warning from the police for doing so. She really couldn't do anything other than resign because of the shower of shit that would descend on her every time she went back to that podium and told people "Do as I say not as I do."

    Maybe we'll get a new chief medical officer that doesn't fuck up like that. I hope so. The new one will at least have the knowledge of what happened to their predecessor as an example.

    216:

    Servants enlisted or went to work in munitions factories and never went back, and that's just for starters.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_on_the_Farm_(After_They%27ve_Seen_Paree)%3F

    217:

    taken deep offence at being classified as working-class

    In the US at one point in time and maybe some now working class meant you got dirty doing your job.

    There's a phrase: Do you shower before or after work?

    218:

    Then lets think about what happens in practice.

    No one will become a stakeholder unless they have control, because otherwise they are accepting criminal liability. I assume under your view there must be at least one stakeholder; otherwise, the obvious answer is to have none.

    What you've done then is ensured that roughly speaking the corporate form is replaced by what in the US is called an LLC where you have a Managing Member with actual control (and who can be liable for doing things) and passive members who cannot.

    I'm assuming that in general, this criminal liability is limited by standards of knowledge and willfulness. (You might be able to impose criminal liability for reckless conduct, but be careful.)

    This is probably doable.

    Your other point about entities not being able to own other entities eliminates collective investment vehicles as well as pensions and endowments. I'm not sure you actually intended that, but I would think you can eliminate that provision from your proposal without harm.

    219:

    When said medical officer has at least twice ignored her own instructions to take her and her family to a second home in another area, they have lost the moral authority to instruct the public.

    Thus no choice but for a resignation/firing.

    220:

    Are you from PopeHat's gang and do we get $5? Or are you like, a srs Corporate Lawyer?

    That'd be wild.

    What's it feel like to slip in clauses you know are gonna fuck your counter-parties and hope that their underpaid juniors can't spot it before the deadline?[1] Or are you seriously pretending that Corporate Law is actually about fundamentals these days and not vast swathes of citation[2] based on $ = Time = Win?

    Seriously interested here.

    ~

    Anyhow, let's up the weird: The history of the universe... is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.

    Want to know the hottest revolutionary account on Twitter right now?

    https://twitter.com/DuneQuoteBot

    Seriously: you're all still on https://twitter.com/archillect while people are huffing pure Herbert. Fucking wild linkages into that. Serious.

    [0] Ah for Greg and crew, missed your generation with a song reference: Warren G - Regulate ft. Nate Dogg (Official Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1plPyJdXKIY

    [1] We too, may once have been in that type of Mind

    [2] Go find the joke Law Paper "If you need a relevant citation, cite this paper" meta-meta-journal.

    221:

    The reason CDs didn't arrive until 1982-83 was that they had to wait for cheap solid-state lasers.

    There was also that bit of circuit that would allow at least 8 bit DAC to be cheap enough to be used in consumer products. For the first 10 years or so a big part of consumer CD player specs was where they fit on the 8 up to 16 bit DAC component. For decades now it has all been 16 bit.

    222:

    This really, really, really is not what happened.

    Go look up Lasers, ticket reading, Underground trains.

    UK was once at the forefront of laser research.

    Then a whole lot of data got sold/stolen, people died / were 'removed' from the picture[0] and Corporate Interests got serious.

    Adam Curtis Voice

    And X years later, SONY sold their PS units at $250 below cost to win the DVD wars when BluRay and HD-DVD. It cost them billions: in the end, they made trillions.

    But it didn't matter, soon, Blockbuster almost the entire high street went bust[1] due to a small...

    [0] David doesn't believe anything we type, but that's True. Very, very True.

    [1] Oh, and it happened in BetaMax / VHS.

    223:

    people are huffing pure Herbert. Thanks for that DuneQuoteBot link. Finished the 6th book (Chapterhouse Dune) a week or two ago; odd story. The various backstories about mental styles (and cultural practices) were interesting. (I was disagreeing with some of it while reading. Always liked M. Teg though, and that second incarnation too.)

    224:

    Ok, quick three questions then:

    1) Why do CatLadies react immediately with lethal force to X?

    2) What is the True meaning of the Golden Path?

    3) What is the True Nature of a Ghola?

    ~

    And since you were kind enough to respond: the links huffing that Dune stuff - Libertarian / Stock Junkies who are getting shafted by the FED / PE atm.

    And you think we do nothing to alter your realities. After a bit of Dune, Gun Violence / Rebellion is modified from the shitty FBI / AIPAC / STORMFRONT shite.

    ~

    Anyhow. Another tooth rotted. We're not enjoying this.

    225:

    You do need corporate personhood.

    The current model uses it. But, like interest, there's no actual requirement that a sufficiently capable model MUST use it; it's an accident of accumulated happenstance that our present model has it.

    I'm taking the view that as a corporate is incapable of responsibility -- there's no way to apply feedback! we have a massive exercise in proving this going on right now -- it is necessary for there to be a responsible human for pretty much everything that happens in the scope of commercial activity.

    226:

    Your other point about entities not being able to own other entities eliminates collective investment vehicles as well as pensions and endowments. I'm not sure you actually intended that, but I would think you can eliminate that provision from your proposal without harm.

    I absolutely did intend it. There is no fundamental structural need to fund capital investment with a casino. (The stock market.) Plus, stock markets are a tool for getting rich; a system with income and asset caps specifically needs to arrange itself so that tools for getting rich aren't what it's using.

    Defined-contribution pensions are pretty close to worthless; even someone who had carefully invested and had "enough", by all the careful guidelines, just had what happen to their 401k? How many times has this happened since 2000? Private defined benefit pensions will be stolen under the incumbent rules. (Sears, GM, etc multi cetera at every scale.) So pensions have to be functionally public to be worth anything.

    (Also, current investment mechanisms are actively bad at funding anything with a reliable return that is not the largest available such return, or the first of anything. (e.g., MM.LaFleur got funded because a VC told his wife the funny story of a would-be startup that thought professional women didn't like to shop for clothes!) We can clearly at least try to do better.)

    I would like to see tried the notion of a really full service credit union, one that does (at least) housing, child care, and elder care in addition to banking and insurance. (possibly also food, dry goods, and pensions.)

    I would also like to point out that you don't need ownership to invest, and you don't need ownership to invest generally. The "cash pile" research funding models where there's a (usually just public) contribution mechanism to create the cash pile, a gating mechanism ("you get funded, you do not"), and a presumption of general economic benefit (more local jobs, thus spending...) could as easily work through a general cash pile and return obligations on the part of the funded.

    227:

    Eliminating interest also doesn't seem to be possible. (You can call it something else and disguise it, as you do in much of Islamic finance but you aren't actually going to be able to eliminate it.)

    The problem isn't that you can't apply feedback to corporations; the problem is that there is no willingness to apply such feedback. For example, Wells Fargo was running a widespread scam and was fined $3 billion. That probably isn't sufficient deterrent. But there was nothing preventing the government from fining Wells Fargo enough to bankrupt the company, splitting the reorganized company into three pieces and handing a large portion of the remaining value over to the victims of the scam. At that level of punishment the appetite for corporate wrongdoing would start to drop.

    In addition, you could provide that the CEO of Wells Fargo bears personal responsibility (joint and several with the company) for all illegal acts committed by Wells Fargo of which he knew or was willfully blind to.

    This isn't hard if the willpower is there and is impossible absent the willpower.

    228:

    Anyhow, remember when everyone was shocked that Mainland CN nationals were calling the HK rebels "cockroaches"?[1] and so on.

    And remember how "the Children of the Light" are just above all that, and everything is awesome[2], well, here we gooooo...

    What a vile comment. These are the cockroaches @jeremycorbyn allied himself to.

    https://twitter.com/DanielBerke1/status/1246933757245960192

    Wait, just a RNG Twitter, troll, right?

    Lawyer. WJC Jewish Diplomat[3]. Boxing, travel, photography. Likes and RTs not necessarily endorsements.

    So, hey: let's cross off "Cockroach" as antisemitic, shall we?

    [1] Hong Kong police are now routinely insulting the city’s people as “cockroaches” https://qz.com/1706106/hong-kong-police-call-protesters-cockroaches/

    ‘Dogs’ vs. ‘cockroaches’: On Hong Kong streets, insults take a dangerous turn

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/dogs-vs-cockroaches-on-hong-kong-streets-language-of-genocide-rears-its-head/2019/11/04/32498608-fea7-11e9-8341-cc3dce52e7de_story.html

    Why Hong Kong police group’s use of word ‘cockroach’ to condemn protesters is both baffling and depressing https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3026410/why-hong-kong-police-groups-use-word-cockroach-condemn

    Note: yes, that last link is from SCMP: it's the CN PR arm trying to defuse shit.

    [2] LEGO movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cQgQIMlwWw

    [3] https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/programs/jewish-diplomatic-corps

    229:

    the problem is that there is no willingness to apply such feedback

    Plants use pre-made block lists.

    There is willingness: the USA spends roughly ~$900 billion a year making sure that willingness gets a good hard kicking.

    Srsly.

    230:

    And fuck yeah.

    If you're on record as labeling naming your enemies cockroaches[0] and it's a listed offense under the UN The Genocide Convention[1] why the FUCK are members of the WJC using against THEIR OWN FUCKING PEOPLE.

    IN THE UK.

    IN 2020.

    This is past BoD shitty politics, this is 100% an actionable illegal offense in the UK, no matter your political or religious persuasion. This is, by definition, 100% Terrorism Offense Land.

    Prosecute this muppet or see how far the Magic Roundabout Goes.

    [0] The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/rwanda-shows-how-hateful-speech-leads-violence/587041/

    Rwanda jails man who preached genocide of Tutsi 'cockroaches'

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-36057575

    [1] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml

    231:

    Spoilers: they won't.

    And then the entire HRSC faux Law falls apart and so on and so forth.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtbejMoJcp0

    232:

    You don't actually need the ability to freely transfer ownership in entities on a piecemeal and anonymous basis (i.e. a stock market). There are advantages to having it, but it isn't essential.

    The name for the full service credit union you are suggesting is "government". (A much broader one than exists in most of the industrialized world, for some obvious reasons.)

    General cash pile and return obligations on the part of the funded:
    If those return obligations include sharing the profits, then you have simply renamed ownership. If not, then you are going to have basically private profit at public risk. This doesn't always work out so well. (I don't know if you are proposing to entirely eliminate for profit entities; that also has well known failure modes.)

    233:

    Anyhow, kids.

    It's 2020.

    If you wanted a 100% legal proof (ignoring PJ above) that the People's Republic of China, the Rwandan Hutu Led Government and the WJC all have embraced genocidal language against their own people, then there you have it.

    We thought the UK was supposed be above genocidal stuff by now?[0]

    Or prosecute it?

    Or at least pretend that it matters?

    Or maybe not say it out loud?

    Fuck it: just type it out.

    [0] This. This. Is. Irony.

    234:

    Today I learned there’s a difference between British and American Yiddish pronunciation. Probably shouldn’t be surprised by that. Could also also be the difference between Lithuanian and Polish dialects, with different vowel pronunciation—calling Grandma Bubbie (P) rather than Bobeh (L). In the US Yiddish seems to be a mix, with best known words pronounced like the Polish, but nowadays taught according to the Lithuanian*.

    from Harkavy’s Yiddish-English Dictionary * see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_dialects

    Sorry if this is teaching GrannyBubbie to suck eggs. Yiddish is one subject I’ve read a bit on, it’s a language I’ve always wanted to learn, but never had a real opportunity to. Obviously I’m no expert.

    235:

    The saddest fact about all of this: being ignored by Elders while the nasties form because they can't deal with it or have blocked it out or cannot go against the more powerful hierarchies in the Faith.

    Check out some diaries from 1927-1933 sometime, similar feeling.

    "Who reads this shit?"

    "No-one, not even Host"

    "But then why?"

    "Logos, BITCH"

    And you thought we were fucking around[0].

    ~

    "Not Jewish" "Of course she's not" "But how then" "She lived with them" "She loved that poet one"

    We're a little bit older than your Religion, dear, but we do still love you enough to have spent ridiculous amounts of TIME attempting to reposition your time-line and the thanks we get for it is basically torture.

    Irony.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMzlgz3XSO0

    [0] Yeah, the irony is: this TIME we can actually bend your shitty little world and collapse it. This is just the foreplay. She's gonna be pissed when we die.

    236:

    Eliminating interest also doesn't seem to be possible.

    Sure it is. One way -- which mirrors a lot of what bank accounting looks like from the inside -- is to separately denominate money and debt. The authors gave it a cooler title, though: Statistical mechanics of a time-homogeneous system of money and antimoney

    This isn't hard if the willpower is there and is impossible absent the willpower.

    Moral frames make me skittish. I think the idea that if there's enough willpower all would be well is a particularly unhelpful version of a moral frame, because it implies that the problem is human frailty rather than the structural issues with the system.

    The purpose of the system is what you observe it to do; if what you observe is that the money sticks to executives and nothing at all is a reason to take it away again, that's what the system is for.

    (It's been for that for a goodly long time now; consider the fate of the House of Hohenzollern.)

    237:

    Oh, and you want a free-bee?

    You should probably ask why this man:

    What a vile comment. These are the cockroaches @jeremycorbyn allied himself to.

    https://twitter.com/DanielBerke1/status/1246933757245960192

    A member of the WJC, HAS THE CONSERVATIVE LOGO AS A BANNER. YEAH, THAT SHITTY ONE WITH THE REALLY BAD GRAPHIC DESIGN. YEAH. THAT BANNER. THAT SHIT. THAT SHITTY SHITTY GOVERNMENT? HE WANTS TO BE PART OF IT.

    Sure, maybe it's an elaborate troll. 8Chan is good at that, right?

    Yeah, it's not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExyDUV6CnXU

    These are the people running your government media campaigns: open genocide advocates who wouldn't know aesthetics or Law (he's a Lawyer, but doesn't know International Law, apparently: see the irony angle here of PJ above?) if it crept up on them and shoved a sausage roll up their arse.

    ~

    Come sue us.

    It's all True.

    If you want to kill us: trust us, get on the fucking list.

    p.s.

    [redacted]

    Alexa is a recording device. It parses languages. Chances are, you're not supposed to say that language out loud ever. Alexa cannot parse that language. There's a reason: not many of us speak it still. [hint: not a HUMAN language, but fuck me: tonight is all about busting the "ones who just say it out loud"]

    238:

    "ownership" is when you can say what happens to it on your say-so, not when you derive value from it. ("can I chuck this through a wood-chipper, and do no wrong?"; if yes, then you own it. Note that there are things that you can't own in this sense of the word.)

    The profit measure is pretty much essential; the profit motive is a bad failure case and needs to be extirpated.

    It's not that long ago that this was widely understood; $FIRM does the thing, and must make a profit to keep doing the thing. ("make a profit" = "submit our product to the public judgement".) The point of the firm is the thing, not the profit. Today, the thing is an annoyance, and the profit is all.

    The essential government services -- not functions, services -- tend to be the wee municipal ones like water and sewage. I don't see any reason there shouldn't be a collaborative, village-scale, "is this government or a collective?" demi-level of government. (Rather like banking is pretty obviously something that should be regulated enough that it makes more sense to treat it as a public service than a commercial endeavour.)

    It's obvious that a lack of collective solutions is one of the big problems with housing; maximizing the economic share of rent extraction runs until big chunks of the population can't afford housing. Once you've got a housing collective and have this joint real-estate asset, all the other stuff starts to look like obvious value-add.

    239:

    [[[and yeah: splap a GPS Loc down and harvest the local ALEXA data: took a bit of prodding, but there's a single sound there that's 100% not in YOUR databases, ever. Even the Sumerian ones]]]

    Want to fuck?

    240:

    You still have interest in that system though it is harder to see as it is embedded in the price differential between the money and the anti-money.

    I am not using willpower in a moral sense, but as a description of observed reality. Government could do this, but isn't.

    I don't think the failure to do so lies in the structure of corporate law. It has to do in part with the fact that we have over time come to view criminal law in primarily economic terms and a combination of fear of collateral consequences, increasing institutional ossification and inability to deal with large numbers has lead to corporate deterrence being totally inadequate.

    241:

    Now I just buy when I see it on a shelf. And pay twice what I used to pay.

    Haven’t gotten desperate yet, have at least a couple weeks worth still. I plan on going where I usually get it, at opening time. If I do get desperate, I’ve been looking after the condo of one of my mother’s friends while they’re stuck in California working on legacy banking code, and know there’s a pack there. Another option may be commercial grade from the office supply stores, if they’re open. We got the monthly grocery shopping done yesterday at the local AFB commissary, shelves not quite as empty as the civilian stores, except for the paper goods. This isn’t a conversation I ever expected to be having here.

    242:

    Agreed, I want to see OGH try his hand at utopian fiction. Either he gets to finish a novel undisturbed, or else our timeline gets straightened out. Win/win!

    243:

    Your definition of ownership doesn't work, even without regard to the fact that by its own terms it doesn't apply to most of what we are talking about. An easy example: (1) I own a house. (2) I lease it to you for five years. It's clear that (i) I still own it; and (ii) I can't destroy it. But for purposes of owning an interest in an entity, it is clear, as you note, that your definition doesn't work, so I'm not quite sure why you raise it? For those purposes, ownership has the traditional meaning which does include, and may be limited to, the right to receive value from it.

    Absent a profit motive, the profit measure is likely to become highly inaccurate and not be used as a feedback mechanism.

    Small scale collectives are mostly failure modes.

    Collective housing is generally not a thing (co-ops in NYC sort of excepted) and where it is becomes very restrictive (co-ops in NYC). The more features you seek to add the more restrictive the entry criteria become.

    244:

    (ii) I can't destroy it.

    Whooo boooy. Someone needs their big-boy pants and needs to talk about 2008 Mortgages.

    Collective housing is generally not a thing

    Says US person who killed everyone who practiced said Law

    Small scale collectives are mostly failure modes.

    Eyeing those Tribes again

    People: this guy is 100% trolling.

    Fuck me.

    245:

    Actually, I can provide a way to repurpose the zombie story as utopian fiction. What I would recommend (and unfortunately it's an American book) is Kristoffer Schipper's The Taoist Body. Unfortunately, it looks like the only one available in the UK is the French original.

    Anyway, the premise: instead of a zombie virus, have the neurostructure of "enlightenment" (for lack of a better English word) be worked out and spread widely, self-hack style, in the Taoist fashion more than the Buddhist. The technique spreads like wildfire globally, and the equivalent of turn on, tune in, drop out becomes a plague to civilization across the planet.

    There are two things to realize. One is that the PRC has a real problem with Taoism, for reasons I will reveal shortly, so there's an interesting political angle in unlocking Taoist enlightenment, which is currently practiced mostly on Taiwan, and very quietly by hermits in the mountains of China, and perhaps elsewhere. If there was an easy way to become a Taoist immortal (spoiler alert, I don't think there is, but...SFF), I could see it spread as a deliberate way to instigate revolution against state systems that have always been death cults in more ways than one.

    The second thing is that the oldest book of Taoism (Zhuangzi, aka Chuang Tsu) makes a really big and important point out of the importance of being useless, rather than useful (e.g. https://taopracticed.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/usefulness-and-uselessness/). As Schipper explains it, one point of this is a purely countercultural analysis of (from the 6th Century BC, no less) of the critical importance of not defining oneself by how useful one is to society as part of the enlightenment process. Taoism is one of the oldest extant countercultures really: it quietly preaches being useless, being able to live without grains (generally for spiritual reasons, but during famines as a survival strategy), it has a really interesting take on the nature of gods (Taoist adepts are called masters of the gods in a way that many atheists would approve of), and so forth.*

    In Taoism's long history, it's been everything from a cause for rebellion to an official state religion to banned and persecuted, so there's plenty of creative inspiration for a story that deals with state sanctions on a movement that tries to let people just be people and live long and happy lives.

    The tl;dr is to substitute a plague of clued-in drop outs for zombies, and to see where the novel goes from there. As a critique of late-stage capitalism, it's almost as good as a zombie apocalypse.

    *Per Schipper, the Tao is not a synonym for the Judeo-Christian God. Rather, a better translation is that the Tao is the Way the Universe works, and the universe (which was "born"/came from a Mysterious Female, also because of the Tao) gives rise to gods. And gods, like every other being within the universe, are ephemeral phenomena that are aggregates of other things, and eventually die or fall apart, the parts and energies going on to become something else. As one might expect, there's a tremendous amount of woo involved (or perhaps wu) but that's about what you'd expect from any system that's accreted ideas for over 2000 years.

    246:

    You can have a small scale collective if you avoid adverse selection; in modern society that requires restrictive entry criteria which makes them difficult to sustain and of limited applicability.

    247:

    The issue is that of agency. Humans simply don't work well together in groups larger than 30. With the best will in the world, ridiculous outcomes will occur regularly in any large corporation. (Large corporations seem more akin to warring, ill-informed tribes than anything else.) So, um, eg, I'm pretty sure that the CEO of a medical device company had no idea that a subcompany was shipping defective equipment. Mind you, neither did most of the engineers, beyond the usual level of inadequate, time constrained testing. And sure, you could argue about funding and schedules, but my observation was that it was much more garden variety incompetence and a poorly designed management structure (not so much grown as accreted) that no one had the appetite to fix. (Would have required firing about 50% of the organization and hiring another 20% and the CEOs were genuinely nice people.) That particular problem was more customer satisfaction than customer execution...but...meh. I'm not sure incompetence should result in criminal charges.

    What I'd prefer is better whistleblower protection. Anyone reporting (with similar standards to USain policepeople killing) ongoing conduct reasonably likely to be illegal should be set for life - courtesy of the corporation in question. That'd pretty much eliminate corporate corruption. It wouldn't matter how slimy the people you hired were - they'd be incentivized correctly. (Mind you, only up the chain - you don't get paid for stuff you were responsible for.)

    248:

    I've read just enough to know that creating an intentional community is a lot more complex than that, in that there are a lot of possibilities. Some have restrictive entry rules. Others, notably the Rainbow Family, takes anyone with a belly button and has turned away only a few, like a murder suspect who was caught by the cops at a Family event. Of these, the Rainbow Family is the biggest and among the longest lasting of the modern crop*, so it is very hard to say whether more rules and selection procedures make for a better intentional community or not.

    Anyway, the Celestial Master Taoist movement began as a messianic revolt to create small, intentional collectives modeled after the Tao Te Ching, in 142 CE. The Celestial Masters' villages lasted for awhile (60 years give or take--nice spiritual number there) then got subsumed into the Kingdom of Wei, but the masters dispersed and the spiritual tradition survived. Such is life.

    *Not counting monasteries here, but they are also intentional communities.

    249:

    Haven’t gotten desperate yet, have at least a couple weeks worth still.

    Not so much desperation as I don't want to be forced to go shopping as things get worse. I.E. more and more germs being spewed by my fellow shoppers. Since I've had to go out every day or 3 lately[1] I pick a grocery and stop in and buy fresh stuff and look at the paper aisle. I was lucky enough to have a 4 month or so supply of paper towels when this started. And so far have not gotten below 20 or so jumbo rolls of the important stuff.

    [1] Setting up home offices for people doing things like tele-medicine and such. Plus dealing with a recalcitrant flush system.

    250:

    Speaking of Zombie Apocalypses, I present one Rep. Nonews interviewed on Faux News.

    251:

    Having worked in the "retail" division of a flour mill. We considered a semi trailer delivery almost too small to be bothered delivering to. 20 kg bag? They let me buy one bag because I was staff. I was in a constant battle with the wholesale division to get any stock at all. Their minimum order was a bulk carrier. Getting just a few hundred tonnes out of them was almost impossible unless I could somehow tack it on to a "real" order from a "real" customer. I was dispatching about 400 tonnes a day and I was less than dirt.

    252:

    Many years ago I went to a Chinese painting exhibition. There were lots of amazing scrolls and paintings of life in China hundreds of years ago. The workmanship was mind blowing. So intricate.

    Then on one wall there was a huge painting. Huge.

    On it were about four, very small, black ink brushstrokes. It took a second for them to resolve into the nose eyes and horns of water buffalo, nearly completely submerged in a pond.

    I was instantly transported to Southern China. I could smell the humidity, the jungle. I could hear the mosquitos.

    With 4 brushstrokes.

    This story felt like that.

    253:

    SBH ( 211 ) Plod are certainly making themseleves unpopular & their actions are higly inconsistent - probably becaue the politicos are doing exactly the sem things ... HOWEVER ... after that it degenerates into the usual content-free rambling & ranting, oh dear. Actually Negative information content - if you are daft enough to try to read it, you know LESS when you've finished ...

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Oh yes ... LLP's The Boss works for an LLP. They have called, if not the cops, the Financial Services Authority on a client & they have dumped clients who won't comply with the financial regulations. It's NOT the structure, it's the bloody people, as usual, I'm afraid. PublicJay has it: The problem isn't that you can't apply feedback to corporations; the problem is that there is no willingness to apply such feedback.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    254:

    I very, very much want to read the rest of that novel. I completely understand your reasoning for not-writing it, but I still very much want to read it.

    255:
    Collective housing is generally not a thing (co-ops in NYC sort of excepted) and where it is becomes very restrictive (co-ops in NYC). The more features you seek to add the more restrictive the entry criteria become.

    I think that is one of those "it depends on where you look" things.

    Looking at Sweden, the latest numbers I could find (2017, I believe) indicate that there's 1 017 000 flats in co-op buildings. That is out of roughly 4 800 000 domiciles in total, so approximately 20%. If we look at only "domiciles in multiple-occupancy buildings", that's 41% of the flats, with 59% of flats being "you cannot in a sensible way hold legal title to the flat" rental units.

    Link here

    256:

    NZ is small, and thinly spread out. We have four flour companies and one sugar refinery. Stuff gets shipped in bulk trucks to the handful of giant national producers, 1000KG IBCs to the two dozen small regional producers, and 20-25KG sacks to everyone else. Most commercial bakeries get supplied in sacks on a pallet as it's easier to store and handle. Anyone wanting less than a pallet load goes through a wholesaler, and they still have stocks.
    Each of the five companies has a retail production arm who handles the small packets - the consumer market tends to buy 250g-1.5kg, or occasionally 10KG. They're the ones who have run out of bags, which is why the supermarket shelves are empty.

    257:

    I loved a Very Peculiar Practice, and not just because it had the gorgeous Barbara Flynn in it. I found S1 DVD's on sale last year, and bought my dad a copy for Christmas (along with a series of I Didn't Know You Cared).

    258:

    It was, and she was, indeed a joy to watch. And now I need to check to see where those DVDs are available from.

    259:

    One thing regarding the link the spambot posted, earlier down the line. The cruise ship may well have run into the Venezuelan patrol boat, but if the patrol boat's captain put himself there then the fault rests entirely with him. Ships don't have brakes, and the bigger the ship is, the less easily it can manoevre. The rules of the road are like the joke about seating arrangements for a 600lb gorilla - he can sit where he likes, and you have to work around him. Even the old "steam gives way to sail" principle only holds for pleasure boats - there are plenty of urban legends in the yachting community of tankers putting into port and discovering a yachty's rig wrapped around their anchor, having wiped them out somewhere one night without even noticing, and those urban legends are well rooted in fact.

    In this case we have a patrol boat, built for speed and manoevrability, deliberately putting itself under the bow of a much bigger, heavier ship travelling relatively fast. It's like a motorbike cutting in front of an artic. Technically it's the heavier craft which does the ramming, but it's not their fault if they can't get out of the way.

    All this took place in international waters. There's a word for boarding a vessel by force in international waters, and that word is "piracy". So pirates (which they are, by the definition of "piracy") fired on the cruise liner and tried to board it, and got sunk for their pains. The Venezuelans are unhappy that the liner didn't stop to pick up the heavily-armed pirates from their ship? I think the Venezuelans should be pretty glad the liner took the trouble to inform their S&R people, and waited in the area until S&R were on their way.

    I'm intrigued by how this might help the liner's owners too. If I was the owner of a cruise liner trying to get shot of it, I'd be overjoyed by it being captured by pirates (state-sponsored or otherwise). I'd be able to claim on my insurance, and job's a good'un. As it is, the most there seems to be on the owners is that they're a shell company trying to limit what they pay their creditors, possibly through bankruptcy of the shell company, and like all ship owners they're running a very thin ROI. Considering the President of the USA has done the bankruptcy thin 6 times in the course of his business career, this is just business as usual.

    260:

    creating an intentional community is a lot more complex than that, in that there are a lot of possibilities

    yup. I've been on the fringes of everything from the Kiwi KAOS social group with Airdmhor as a small version of The Big House (now a Montessori school) which ran as nominal dictatorships, right through to cohousing which in english is an americanised version of one type of Swedish housing cooperative.

    There's not even one specific legal structure that has to be used, let alone one single way to arrange the internal structure. Just limiting it to housing there's everything from partnerships to trusts to companies available, as well as "one paper owner, we trust them" and variations (Airdmhor ran on the "Seth's parents own it" model, for example). I've visited houses owned by anarchist communes, three friends as joint owners, several polyamorous families (who are not all anarchists), one "squat" owned secretly by one of the residents, oh and a small commercial property being illegally used as a residence and owned by one of the companies operating out of it. {throws up hands} ... there's no real limit to just the legal structures of housing.

    And these things can last quite long periods. A friend of mine grew up in an anarchist commune. Common Ground is somewhere between a retired hippy commune and a group-of-families that's been running for 35 years, and their social structure is on at least the third major revision.

    I mentioned recently that I have friends who are doing a reverse takeover of a small town, just by buying property and moving there. It's quite a large intentional community as such things go, but it's also diffuse and difficult to distinguish from people moving to somewhere they have friends. One of the Tilba's in NSW seems to have been populated that way, I think unintentionally. Jill Redwood has made a life at Goongerah in Victoria. The history of who has lived on her land there is a twisted skein.

    261:

    The British gummint should wake up and take notice. Given the way that they are keen on cutting costs, they should buy a few surplus cruise liners (going cheap, right now) and replace some of the navy's expensive warships by them.

    262:

    Re: 'But there was nothing preventing the government from fining Wells Fargo enough to bankrupt the company, splitting the reorganized company into three pieces and handing a large portion of the remaining value over to the victims of the scam. At that level of punishment the appetite for corporate wrongdoing would start to drop.'

    And there you have the reason for BrExit - the EU is willing and able to slap huge fines on corps that step over the line. For now the slaps have been re: PII. The fear is that once their ability to fine large orgs becomes even more widely accepted as socially responsible/correct, this legal body might take a harder look at these corps' P&L statements incl. transfer payments, tax evasion, etc. (The EU has fined major corps but I'm not sure whether it's been able to collect those fines. Maybe someone could look at Google's P&L - they've been fined a few times now at over one billion Euros a pop.)

    Then there's the fact that the UK's GDP owes most of its growth to financials and/or 'head-officing'. No idea how stock market transactions are regulated over there wrt to transaction taxes, or corp income tax rates vs. rest of the world. Actually I've no idea whether services are taxed over there, or if taxed, at what rate - same, higher or less than goods? Would be insane if services were not taxed when one considers that service industries have been outpacing the goods (mfg & retail) sector for decades.

    One of the reasons it's hard to assess the impact of the financial sector within each country/economy and/or globally is that there's damned little consistency in the definitions and reporting. Given how important this sector keeps telling everyone (esp. Pols) they are, how is it that they are not required to abide by an agreed upon international (and consumer/user facing) standard. There are many professional bodies whose work relies on assiduously following international standards who could be used as models.*

    https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/what-percentage-global-economy-comprised-financial-services-sector.asp

    I recall seeing a news clip of Thatcher saying that Britain was a 'nation of shop-keepers' and that she wanted to change that in order to improve the British economy. What did she mean by that? - Did she mean that she wanted mega-stores to displace the shop-keepers, diversify the economy at the grass roots level, encourage manufacturing, encourage new industry (apart from financials) or what? Don't recall her saying anything about food security and not sure whether her gov't helped bankroll the North Sea oil projects.

    For an industry that relies on spreadsheets, it boggles the mind that they are not required to (or pretend that are unable to) keep track of and own up to the data they generate. (Ditto - financial AI's. Hell - I could rant on this for days ... seriously bothers me.)

    264:

    Your definition of ownership doesn't work, even without regard to the fact that by its own terms it doesn't apply to most of what we are talking about. An easy example: (1) I own a house. (2) I lease it to you for five years. It's clear that (i) I still own it; and (ii) I can't destroy it.

    If you can't destroy it, you don't own it. That's kinda the point of that definition!

    If things are defined around "who is responsible?" (with the implicit "for what?" not staying very implicit in contracts, or at least so one might hope), rather than "who gets the money?", the answers are different, which is the point. (Changing the meta-definition of ownership an assertion that the current system can't work, not that it is implemented wrong. Which is another huge bucket of squid, because "implemented wrong" might be a category error of its own.)

    Anyway -- even under the current system, you can't just destroy your house. You can't substantially repair it or alter it, either, without going through a permitting system. So, no, you don't own it. You're participating in some sort of implicit system of heritable land tenure.

    I'd strongly support a much more explicit "land's alive, you don't own it, you've got tenure under a system where here are your enumerated responsibilities to the hypothesized future human population and here are your responsibilities to the ecological scope of possibility in the indefinite future" legal approach. I might even go so far as to suppose that maybe individuals can't do that and there's necessarily an entity category for "responsible for land" and individuals participate in those entities. (And yeah, the HoA which is functionally just precisely that is also an excellent "not like that" design antipattern.)

    265:

    You still have interest in that system though it is harder to see as it is embedded in the price differential between the money and the anti-money.

    Interest requires you to make guesses about the future; that system, implemented with dynamic individual exchange rates between money and anti-money, doesn't. It also doesn't require a general market rate from which the other rates are derived; the exchange between money and anti-money you use can be specific to you. They're not isomorphic systems. (There wouldn't be much point if they were!)

    Particularly, not having to pick a general rate would likely be advantageous relative to the system we have now.

    266:

    Greg: The Wee Fiswife has forced the resignation of a higly competent professional medical officer for reasons of political spite.

    You're wrong.

    Catherine Calderwood resigned after she was spotted flagrantly violating the very same lockdown regs she's supposed to be the public face of enforcement of for a second time.

    Now, if you want to blame the Scottish Sun for going after her, fine -- but it's hard to fault the FM for accepting her resignation after she repeatedly put herself in a position of "do what I say, not as I do".

    The first trip was a family outing; the second was a visit to her second home -- these are specifically forbidden activities, because social distancing.

    You might also want to read Sturgeon's statement about the resignation, thanking her for her long service and calling out the positive achievements she'd brought to the job. Not exactly what you'd expect in event of a sacking.

    (I don't expect any better of dipshits like Matt Hancock -- who ordered a few million COVID-19 tests that, er, don't actually work -- or Dominic Raab, who didn't know that Dover was a major container port for freight from the mainland when he landed the post-brexit Trade portfolio -- but we're trying to do better up here.)

    267:

    I don't understand why you let events here on our copy Earth prevent you from writing about events on another copy Earth, but I digress.

    Because I am a commercial artist with more ideas than time to write them in (ideas are cheap: execution is time-consuming and effortful) and therefore, given a choice between rivalrous absorbing projects to spend my time on, I pick the one with the greatest revenue potential.

    The current situation isn't quite unprecedented, but in fiction terms I'd like to draw your attention to the disastrous impact the collapse of the USSR had for technothrillers about, say, US/USSR spy shenanigans or a third world war in Europe, between 1990 and 1992. (Greg Bear did a very elegant side-swerve the sequel to "Aeon", "Eternity", by retconning it into a parallel universe: many other authors weren't so fortunate as to be setting their cold-war-in-space in a universe with magic/super technology.)

    Basically, I don't want to get trapped in the same bind as Len Deighton, who was writing the capstone to his masterwork nine-volume cold war espionage series ... and timed it so badly it was due out in 1991. Which means I can't write a near-future pandemic novel of any kind until the dust has settled: it runs the risk of look quaint to the point of obsolete before it hits the editor's desk.

    Years from now, when everything is back to normal, they will find that more people died homeless in the street -- because they were laid off during this time -- than would have actually died from catching the coronavirus.

    You're not wrong, but we're still looking at 10-50 million deaths worldwide -- somewhere between the first and second world war death tolls -- assuming herd immunity emerges: if not, we're looking at Black Death 2.0 (with some novelty tweaks: see Graydon's comments about the "uncommon cold").

    More to the point, COVID-19 has triggered a rapid and comprehensive global industrial and service sector collapse with a global financial crisis happening off-screen and invisible only because the quantitative easing started before the banks started tumbling because at least we've remembered something we learned 12 years ago.

    The homeless deaths you're talking about are, in a very real way, going to be side-effects of the economic fallout from the pandemic.

    268:

    but in fiction terms I'd like to draw your attention to the disastrous impact the collapse of the USSR had for technothrillers

    I had the movie "2010" playing in the background yesterday. One thing I realized is that so much of the secondary plot required the US/USSR to come to at odds and coming to blows that it would be boring or nonsense to my kids now who are in their late 20s.

    269:

    I don't expect any better of dipshits like Matt Hancock -- who ordered a few million COVID-19 tests that, er, don't actually work

    The orders for antibody tests are contingent on the tests actually working. The sample tests provided by the various manufacturers, announced to whoops of "We're saved!" on Twitter and the like, have all failed to pass basic performance tests in terms of false negatives and, more worryingly false positives (i.e. antibodies detected when they don't exist). Because of that no-one's been paid for these tests and none have been delivered. Hancock was withering when he reported on the failures, stuff like three out four false positives for one particular test.

    If there are suitable mass-population tests for seroconversion antibodies in blood that actually work then the UK government will buy them. If they don't work then the manufacturers can go whistle and we'll have to wait. This will disappoint the "tests will save us" crowd but tough.

    270:

    The tl;dr is to substitute a plague of clued-in drop outs for zombies, and to see where the novel goes from there. As a critique of late-stage capitalism, it's almost as good as a zombie apocalypse.

    I have a (meta-) fiction reference for you: a short story, "Our Neural Chernobyl", by Bruce Sterling.

    Not gonna spoiler it: let's just say, the second time you read it is better than the first. (It's structured as a mildly skeptical review of a non-fiction book describing the first bioengineered plague.)

    271:

    The homeless deaths you're talking about are, in a very real way, going to be side-effects of the economic fallout from the pandemic.

    I had a minor debate with someone a day or so ago with someone who was mad that DT wanted the Saudi's and Russians to stop their oil war. Their point was with so many out of work it was a great thing that the oil industry was almost collapsing and gas prices where thus cheap for those out of work. Telling them the longer term effects of a sudden collapse would likely be worse than $40/barrel oil just now went nowhere with them.

    272:

    That's a more interesting case. A ship's legal jurisdiction is based on which country it's registered as being owned. Those were legal because they were Columbian boats, and the Columbian government had OK'd it. If they hadn't, then yes, it would have been an act of piracy, just like the Israeli commandos who commandeered aid ships in 2010 to keep humanitarian supplies out of Gaza.

    It also puts that government in an interesting position. If they disavow the actions of their navy, they have to present it as a rogue element acting on their own and throw the book at them. If they back them up, as with the Israeli case, they have conducted an act of war against the country whose ship it is, and the faeces hits the fan on an epic international-diplomacy-disaster level. In the case of Israel, this is pretty much business as usual of course, and with the US backing them financially, they don't have to worry about the impact on their country when the UN cracks down on them yet again. A South American country trying to get its economy back on track, rather less so.

    274:

    You can, however, hang the CEO, CFO, COO, [...]

    In theory we already have this; if anyone in a company causes that company to commit a crime then they are personally liable to arrest and criminal charges. Consider the fallout of Dieselgate, where a senior engineer was imprisoned.

    In practice proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Joe Bloggs was the mastermind is not usually easy, for the very good reason that in most cases there is no mastermind. With the senior people you can't even say that they were bad at their job because there is no clear standard to which they can be held (if you think otherwise then I invite you to write one that you would be willing to be held to).

    Beyond that, when dealing with big complicated systems the whole concept of finding the scapegoat is fundamentally broken. A big part of the reason that aviation is so safe is that we don't do that. Accident investigations look for systemic issues rather than individual mistakes. If you want to understand Dieselgate then don't focus on the engineer who was "bad", look at the control mechanisms that affect the industry; how are people incentivised and managed, because expecting people to act differently is mostly a losing game. (Yes, some people will, but building a system to depend on heroes is doomed to failure). And that includes the CEO, CFO, COO etc.

    275:

    The 2008 sub-prime mortgages can probably best be understood if you look at how drugs such as cocaine modify human behaviour. The biggest bit of "Let's all you idiots believe..." in the whole debacle was the way that mortgages were repackaged as financial investments.

    At the simplest case, a mortgage is a loan secured on a thing like a property. The lender sets out a contract that ties how much the mortgagee pays to how much it costs the lender to borrow that money, plus a little bit of profit. This is simple, old-school banking economics: lend out money and charge people for you taking the risk, only there isn't much risk because you can sell the house if they default.

    Now, some mortgages are low risk; the property is worth way more than the amount borrowed on it, and the mortgagee has a stable job.

    Some mortgages are high-risk; the mortgagee has no job, sells illegal drugs and lives below sea level next to a big canal in an earthquake zone, and the property value depends on how much the local police can be bothered to stamp down crime.

    The sub-prime mortgage swindle was a simple one, based around "let's believe" and a financial version of the three cups scam. The ploy is dead simple: let's make up a huge pie which contains the loans of good mortgages and bad mortgages and let's pretend that mixing them all up together magically makes the entire pie good and wholesome.

    Put this way, this is patently absurd.

    However, when you talk fast enough and sell slices of the pie to morons who think that they're going to make money off it, a very strange thing happens: people actually seem to believe the blatant lies and actually buy this tainted pie!

    There's an old saying: "You cannot con an honest man". It is true, you can't. Offer a truly honest man a con to make money, and a quiet little voice tells him no, and he listens to the voice. Problem is, truly honest men are very rare indeed, and the overwhelming majority are slightly dishonest, or willing to suspend honesty in the name of making a quick buck.

    2008 is what happens.

    276:

    With a fair chunk of "but of COURSE house prices are uncorrelated!" thrown in. I mean, it's not as if, with much more houses suddenly on the market (because recession, so sell your overpriced house and buy a cheaper one), there would be ANY change in price, right?

    277:

    While understanding why it will not be written, I am amongst those who are sorry we will not see a book.

    It must be disconcerting for an author to see his flights of fancy echoed in real life - Christopher Brookmyre seems to have had particularly bad luck in this regard with Quite Ugly One Morning being followed (albeit by a few years) by Shipman and a Big Boy Did It And Ran Away being published in early September 2001. For those who have not read it (and I would thoroughly recommend it), the tag line was "Terrorism - It's The New Rock'n'Roll"

    DanH - 275. Margaret Heffernan had a half chapter on sub prime in her book Wilful Blindness and the toxic effect of cultures which means that when people point out that there is fraud going on the pressure put on them to sit down and stop rocking the boat is huge.

    278:

    "here's one I'm considering lightly fictionalizing in a future novel"

    To make it plausible enough to sell? I don't know how you find such things!

    279:

    Ok, that was a weird moment - we have (a) St Brides school two doors down from here.

    280:

    If you read a bit around the subject you run across the hysterically funny picture of a cult/commune (the Rhennish commmunity who later turned into the Silver Sisterhood/St Bride's) suing their landlord ... the Atlantis commune, aka the Screamers (who had decamped for Colombia).

    See also Miss Martindale.

    281:

    The Taoist brainhack sounds quite a bit like a late John Brunner novel, I can't remember which, but I think it was The Shift Key.

    I think I should go back and reread his The Sheep Look Up, when the context is a little less depressing.

    282:

    So circa 2005 I had a (very lucrative) gig rewriting applications for mostly non English as their first language MBA students applying for jobs at high finance places. Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, etc. It didn't require any specific finance knowledge on my part - I was just making them sound better.

    The reason I had this gig was because the applications generally had essay components. So I was able to read hundreds of MBA types talking about finance. Including this.

    And everyone knew.

    It wasn't as if they actually believed, as far as I could tell, that the products they offered actually did what they said. It was all, essentially, musical chairs. They were looking to shove it off on to someone else.

    The basic idea seemed to be that everyone believed everyone else was an idiot, so they were trying to profit. But since it was everyone, they became the idiot.

    This is actually my frustration with The Big Short, which tells a good story but presupposes that only a few people knew the crash was coming. I can personally assure you that this wasn't true. The dudes in The Big Short are just the ones who lucked into calling WHEN.

    283:

    I'm operating under the assumption this is likely to go flu-like. I would guess it's probably hit enough hosts to have mutated into several strains - I read somewhere there are already two known. So you may get a yearly "COVID-vaccine" that provides temporary protection for the strains the Docs think are most likely to be doing the rounds this year. Maybe COVID-19 variants will become a "new normal"? The problem at the moment is that no-one has any developed immunity at all, so 100% of the world population is susceptible, and it's hitting everywhere pretty much at once, so the usual logistics for producing the needed things just can't go quick enough, because of capitalism. Mass production lines are great for churning out pre-planned widgets at record speed, but job-shops they are not. We can't just instantly retool them anymore like happened for WWI/WWII. Then there's the whole offshoring manufacturing capacity thing...

    Actually, one of the things that I find interesting to think about, is that if something reasonably big kicked off - full-spectrum warfare short of nukes, where do you get your replacements from? You can't e.g. phone up Lockheed-Martin and request another 100 F35Bs within the next month please to cover combat losses. As an example, there's no longer a furniture industry based around High Wycombe able to repurpose into knocking out De-Haviland Mosquitoes.

    284:

    "There's an old saying: "You cannot con an honest man". It is true, you can't. Offer a truly honest man a con to make money, and a quiet little voice tells him no, and he listens to the voice. Problem is, truly honest men are very rare indeed, and the overwhelming majority are slightly dishonest, or willing to suspend honesty in the name of making a quick buck."

    Honestly, you can con an honest man. Most of us don't really know what we are buying, especially in the financial and insurance industries. We don't understand the financial details, or the contracts, or the laws, or how arbitration might go.

    285:

    "We can't just instantly retool them anymore like happened for WWI/WWII. Then there's the whole offshoring manufacturing capacity thing..."

    For the US 'instantly retool' meant a couple of years. The US government started planning in 1940 or so, and one of the effects of Lend-Lease was (IMHO) to clean out stockpiles of old equipment, requiring new orders.

    Remember that the US Auto industry didn't stop making private cars until early 1942, and from what I heard much of that was due to government pressure to switch over 100% to military production.

    286:

    The later is only useful if the prices are accurate, which means you need strong public policy to make everybody keep all their costs on the books. (E.g., climate change should be on the fossil carbon extractor's balance sheets. Otherwise all their prices are false.)

    Ideally, you want the whole-life cost of every product to be factored into the decision-making process of "should I produce this product?" Sadly the mantra of capitalism is "privatise all your profit, socialise as much of your cost base as you can." When it all goes wrong bleat "whoda thunked it, where's me bailout?"

    Maybe if raw-materials costs and manufactured goods costs become too high, we might have to get really World-class at recycling - that might be a possible Brexit silver-lining maybe? Kind of like Asimov's Foundation people having to get good at doing a lot with a little.

    287:

    "...they have conducted an act of war against the country whose ship it is, and the faeces hits the fan on an epic international-diplomacy-disaster level."

    ...or, alternatively, everyone just rolls over and goes back to sleep, n'est-ce pas?

    288:

    As I understand it, China's ownership of US debt (about 1 trillion $) is supposed to protect us all from a full-blown trade war... But what if the US economy is beyond saving? Wouldn't dealing it the death blow become attractive to Xi Jinping?

    Well, the thing about assets is that they are only really worth something at the point of exchange. So China could try and dump 1 trillion $s worth of US treasuries onto the open market but, in the situation you talk about, would anybody want to take them off China's hands? Maybe if that tanked the value of them so much, then they might be a really attractive method of quantitative easing and taking a large chunk off the US national debt?

    It's not like the countries stuck in the Eurozone - the US federal reserve can magic up as many dollars as they need to meet their commitments.

    289:

    to Robert Prior @263: So the US Coast Guard are pirates? If they're not, they probably very much wish they could be.

    to Graham @259: All this took place in international waters. I am not entirely sure about terminology, but I think these should be marked as EEZ, although there's also other definitions like territorial waters. https://atlas-caraibe.certic.unicaen.fr/en/page-26.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tortuga_Island So there's several Turtle islands, and this one is different from the others, because it is very close to the actual country shore. The coastal defense could have reacted to the vessel because someone was suspected to have some spying equipment or whatever.

    It then repeatedly rammed the larger vessel, before beginning to take on water, local media reported. Considering what actually happened and what marks were left at the cruise ship, this sounds awfully like "killed himself by shooting his temple repeatedly". Which is not really surprising. Also looks awfully like the century-old situation with some U-boats that led to Lusitania sinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUaIC9VnFtE https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-52151951 Now that's what I like to see - people lying through their teeth. Obviously the aggressor aggressively attacked the peacefully parked neutral ship in neutral waters, specifically aiming to ram their bow with its portside. What a bunch of dorks.

    https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/01/us/ap-us-venezuela-anti-narcotics-mission.html I don't know if anti-narcotic ships are any different from other types of ships in the navy, but US very much looks to win ongoing price war in oil market, and would jump on such opportunity at any time.

    290:

    Which is exactly why I hate it when people argue that a starship is impossible; it's 2020, build one impulse drive...

    291:

    Eight bits?!?!!?? For a CD player?

    By the time CD players came out, 8 bit D to As (and A to Ds, for that matter) easily capable of operating at 44.1kHz were common standard parts. But they weren't used in CD players because 8 bits just isn't good enough (it's basically more or less cassette tape standard).

    The problem was making a D to A that could do 16 bits and 44.1kHz and be cheap enough to put two in each player. You could meet or even exceed any two of these requirements but not all three together. So at the beginning there were two main solutions. Philips used two D to As which were only 14 bits but could go at 176kHz and used oversampling techniques to get 16-bit effective resolution. Sony used one 16-bit D to A at 88.2kHz and multiplexed it between the two channels, which is kind of horrible and might well have been the reason for a lot of the people who said CDs weren't all they were cracked up to be at that time.

    It was only a couple of years or so before they got better at it and moved on to using two 16-bit 44.1kHz D to As "like it always should have been". Philips stuck with their approach a bit longer than that because it wasn't so horrible in the first place.

    The next stage was single-bit converters at massive oversampling rates. This eliminated the difficulty of getting all the steps in a multi-bit D to A exactly the same size, and also meant that the requirements for the subsequent analogue filtering stage were a lot more relaxed so you didn't have the problem of how to make a steep enough filter without ripple and phase shifts in the passband, etc.

    Then it all started to go mental with seemingly all the possible combinations of bit depth and oversampling rate being tried so that whoever was trying it could give it a silly name and claim it was better than anyone else's, and you had to go back to the datasheets for the chips themselves to cut through all the fucking shite and find out what the thing was actually doing. Once this had got to the point where nobody had a fucking clue what anything really was, they eased off on the loads of different converter types part and just stuck to making up silly names. These days most of the chips that are respectable enough in the first place to bother with at all seem to be at the few-bits lots-of-oversampling end.

    292:

    Years from now, when everything is back to normal, they will find that more people died homeless in the street -- because they were laid off during this time -- than would have actually died from catching the coronavirus.

    Can't be bothered to look, but that is only true if we go through our current efforts.

    Most predictions of allowing Covid to run wild, with the attending either collapse of health care systems or simply not treating people suffering from Covid, seem to predict death numbers that easily dwarf the deaths from the economic fallout from our current actions.

    293:

    You view being that smart political operators and scientists don't venture onto reddit?

    No, but I did think that if there was some kind of plan for how things would work under socialism then one of the redditeers might be able to post a link.

    But I'd be quite happy for you to do the same; I've been looking for one for some years now. I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that mixed-market capitalism is the worst possible form of economic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

    294:

    In practice proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Joe Bloggs was the mastermind is not usually easy, for the very good reason that in most cases there is no mastermind. With the senior people you can't even say that they were bad at their job because there is no clear standard to which they can be held

    Some interesting discussions on criminogenic environments in this book:

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38605195-lying-for-money

    According to the author, there are now laws that hold management responsible for creating conditions that they should have known would lead to bad behaviour. With the usual caveats about levels of proof and white-collar crimes thrown in, of course.

    295:

    "Go look up Lasers, ticket reading, Underground trains."

    Sealed unit helium-neon laser tubes of a mW or so have been around since the late 60s ish (along with designs for home-made power supplies to drive them) at a remarkably stable 100-200 Anglophone Major Currency Units a pop. Pretty easy things for an industry used to making valves to turn out once they knew what to do. Used in barcode scanners since they first came out, and you can still find gas laser barcode scanners even in these laser diode days.

    The big deal with Underground tickets and automatic readers was magnetic coding. You got a bright yellow ticket with brown magnetic paint slapped on the back which you put into a slot in the barrier to make it open its gates. These came out in the late 70s, although it may not be apparent because of all the fucked up shit that has happened to that time period and there's something of an eight-faces anomaly over their introduction, so telling someone to look them up may not be particularly useful.

    296:

    We could end up with something like the Flu vaccines; what kind of Coronavirus is going to manifest this year, get your annual shot and you probably won't get sick.

    297:

    True. Also worth noticing that if Chamberlain hadn't done the same post-Munich, Britain would have had many fewer modern armaments.

    298:

    Re: 'Wouldn't dealing it the death blow become attractive to Xi Jinping?'

    Only if he's willing to lose a good customer before he can replace the lost exports/sales to other customers*.

    Per 2018 data: the US accounts for approx. 18% of China's exports; China accounts for 15% of total US imports. Basically both countries would suffer equal hurt if they screwed up their trade relations.

    • The New Silk Road Initiative was supposed to help this process but COVID-19 threw one hell of spanner into the works. Also depends on the upcoming Nov/20 election.
    299:

    I call this the "Argument from Communism." The argument generally goes something like this: "We can't revive Glass-Steagal* because Stalin and 80,000,000 deaths."**

    This is an argument which is meant to stop thinking, and it must always be met with a very high level of contempt.

    • U.S. Depression Era financial regulation which made sure that a saving/lending type bank could not participate in the stock market or similar markets.

    ** The overly-high number of deaths comes from the argument that Hitler was a communist because "National Socialism" must have been Marxist.

    300:

    Read it when it first came out. Thanks for the memories!

    Obviously, what I proposed has been done before, just as zombie stories have been done before. It's simply a way to repurpose a good story if time permits.

    Heck you could follow in the footsteps of Robert Anton Wilson and have an enlightened detective. In the second person, even. Imagine what might happen if the "interesting times" curse on that series followed that too...

    301:

    Just so you know, I'd buy the thing as it stands, but I also understand why you don't want to take the risk. Have you considered a possible non-pandemic cause for zombie-ism? Maybe all you need is a brain-computer interface with some kind of software issue? (I just had an idea, maybe I'll send you an email.)

    302:

    2010 doesn't bother me that much, but I tried to show Doctor Strangelove to a thirty-something recently and she just didn't get it. She thought some of the bits were funny, but she had no idea about why it resonated!

    303:

    EC BUT Said cruise Liner was specifically designed to cruise through Icy Waters - it's not a professional Icebreaker, but its rating for ice is pretty high. It - quite deliberately - has an armoured, reinforced bow & its underwater bulbous "nose" ( for "slipperiness" in the water ) is itself armoured & reinforced, which makes it equivalent to a galley-era-RAM - oops. The Venezuelan idiots got Salamis-ed, for want of a better word, oh dear, how sad.

    Charlie @ 267 Correct - my bad - I was, at least partly misinformed & I jumped the gun, as well. DON'T talk about fuckwit Raab - if BoZo goes down, then idiot Raab is "in charge" - I mean he's brighter than Trump, but that's not saying a lot, is it? Further down - total death roll ( "Mortality Bills" in Defoe-speak ) - as usual, the least developed, most incompetent & corrupt countries will suffer the worst. Which means almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, Venzueala, Burma & the USA ....

    Windscale @ 286 Ah yes: "Whole Life Cost" tell that to areshole Kahn who wants to steal my Land Rover - deliberately bought, back in 2003, so that I would never, ever, have to buy another car, because I could do 90% + pf my own mantenance & it wouild simply carry on working. That total cost includes overall pollution, of course.

    304:

    { " And a Sheriff is a junior judge, not a law enforcement official.

    But didn't the Sheriff start out as both? I mean many years ago when feudalism existed and the U.K. hadn't even come into existence yet, wasn't the Sheriff both judge & law enforcement officer (plus revenue collector and local administrator and ...)? " ]

    I think that position was called "Justice of the Peace," created in the 14th C by Edward the III's reign, 1349 and 1351, to enforce the Ordinance of Laborers and the Statute of Laborers, which was to keep the labor force in the region where they were prior to the Bubonic Plague, to not get pinched by other lords for their fields and work, to keep the wages and other conditions at the pre-Plague levels.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Labourers_1349

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

    A familiar name appointed as one of the Justices of the Peace was Geoffrey Chaucer.

    305:

    I think that position was called "Justice of the Peace," created in the 14th C

    Reeves were originally Anglo-Saxon officials, they were largely replaced in their law enforcement capacity by Bailiffs after the Norman invasion though the Shire-Reeve carried on as a sort of combined magistrate and chief constable. See the comments two or three blogs ago.

    306:

    I think the Faceplant app comes pretty close, no interface required. As I noted above, you can easily do cyberpunk now by substituting "addictive programming" for "cyber-psychosis" and do away with the neural interface.

    308:

    Straight Black Hair @220

    Thanks for the DuneQuoteBot link. Deeply satisfying.

    I stumbled across a game a few days ago that is similar to the Borges, Garden Of Forking Paths. The trailer hit me with instant longing to buy it.

    Gorogoa Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbNj9No6XDQ

    The game took me about half a day to play. I didn't hit the end until after my sell-by-date, well past 3am. Repeated play starts to reveal all the story aspects that I missed when I played it the first time. Since I've run through the game now, it takes about five hours to play each time I play it. The ending is profound.

    It's a Labyrinth, not a maze. There are no dead ends. Each time I thought I'd reached a dead end, I simply had not changed my perspective enough.

    309:

    Interesting paper about smallpox in the Americas.

    One explanation Amerindians were hit that bad was they

    a) had never encountered smallpox b) smallpox never became endemic, so the epidemics were somewhat spaced apart and hit populations with no acquired immunity; also, no transmitted antibodies from mother to nursed children.

    It's interesting in the context of future pandemics, I guess.

    310:

    Why there will be a vaccine, ultimately -- c19 isn't a flu virus, and is very long and stable:

    https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine

    ["The biopharmaceutical industry will be able to make a Covid-19 vaccine—probably a few of them—using various existing vaccine technologies. But many people worry that Covid-19 will mutate and evade our vaccines, as the flu virus does each season. Covid-19 is fundamentally different from flu viruses, though, in ways that will allow our first-generation vaccines to hold up well. To the extent that Covid does mutate, it’s likely to do so much more slowly than the flu virus does, buying us time to create new and improved vaccines. "

    [...]

    It seems that no US media will publish a piece that says, Trump must resign, right now. This piece by the St. Louis-based Sarah Kendzior was published not in the US, but in Canada's most-read newspaper . . . https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-plague-of-donald-trump/

    The plague of Donald Trump Sarah Kendzior Special to The Globe and Mail Updated March 25, 2020 352 Comments

    Sarah Kendzior is the co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation and the author of coming book Hiding in Plain Sight.

    [ ' “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die,” Donald Trump, then a real estate tycoon bound for bankruptcy, told Playboy magazine in 1990. “You know, it is all a rather sad situation.”

    “Life?” the interviewer asked. “Or death?”

    “Both. We’re here and we live our 60, 70 or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. But it is something to do – to keep you interested.”

    For his entire life, Mr. Trump has been a self-described fatalist. He has called himself a fatalist in interviews spanning nearly 30 years. This admission is a rare expression of consistent honesty for a man infamous for lying about everything – his fortune, his criminal ties, objective reality. It’s the outlook he hints at when he does things such as retweeting a meme of himself fiddling like Nero, while the novel coronavirus spreads across the United States.

    Nothing seems to matter to Mr. Trump – not only in the sense that the things that matter to other people, like love and loss, do not matter to him.

    Nothingness itself matters: Destruction and annihilation are what he craves. “When bad times come, then I’ll get whatever I want,” he told Barbara Walters in an 1980s interview. His initial reaction to 9/11 was that the collapse of the World Trade Center made his own buildings look taller. His initial reaction to the 2008 economic collapse was joy at his potential to profit. Everything to Mr. Trump is transactional, and you – all of you – are the transaction.

    [...] "]

    311:

    Boris Johnson has been transferred into Intensive Care.

    312:

    JUST IN:BORIS JOHNSON IN INTENSIVE CARE AFTER CONDITION TAKES A TURN FOR THE WORSE. Dominick Raab is acting PM in his absence.

    313:

    ME/US/CHARLIE:Could this timemine get any weirder?

    REALITY: Hold my pint.

    314:

    Eight bits?!?!!?? For a CD player?

    There was a lot of low end crappy sound sold in the US in the early days of CD players. Maybe the low end was 10 bit.

    I didn't buy one until 86 or so and that cost me $300 or $500 for a 5 disc changer that did 16 bit.

    It took a while for consumer units to get to 16 bits and not cost near $1000.

    315:

    Bill Arnold @ 187: I was extremely irritated that DTJ halfheartedly said that the general public could wear homemade masks, then said he would probably not be wearing one himself. (So breathtakingly selfish of him; even if he is being tested daily so he knows he is not infected to a reasonably high level of confidence, he is sending a dangerous message to his gullible followers.)

    Who in Cheatolini iL Douchebag's family is competent enough to sew a homemade mask? I think Ivanka has a "fashion line" but I doubt if she would recognize a sewing machine if it weren't located in some Asian sweatshop?

    Maybe he should put Jared Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Kushner in charge of procuring homemade masks. Seems like procurer might be a job he could handle.

    316:

    It seems that no US media will publish a piece that says, Trump must resign, right now.

    Not true. But resign he will not. But unfit to be Pres many will say and do say so.

    317:

    I disagree, linguistically. It should have been "conspiracy hypothesis" all along, but that's too many syllables.

    But then, most Americans, and 99.44% of all PR people conflate the word "theory" with "I had too much beer and pizza last night, and had this crazy dream".

    318:

    It's always entertaining when people with no background in legal studies quote international law, yes, this includes me, but I hope to be entertaining.

    Thing is, "Piracy" is defined by Article 101 of the UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA as:

    any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft

    So a warship can't commit "piracy", except when the crew has mutinied, which is subject of another article, article 102.

    Just as a soldier killing an enemy soldier in war is (usually) not murder in most jurisdictions.

    You could argue a warship stopping a ship of another nation would be akin to commerce raiding, and the state the ship is registered with might see it as an act of war, but till now the Portuguese haven't declared one on Venezuela; it's not in Northern America or Europe, so NATO is likely not involved.

    As for a warship stopping another ship, article 105 is a starting point,

    On the high seas, or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State, every State may seize a pirate ship or aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board.

    Which is the line the Venezuelans are using, they accuse the ship of piray. Another thing, even according to the owners, the ship was 13 miles off from the coastline of a Venezuelan island, which is quite close to territorial waters (12 miles).

    Expect much entertainment to be had about where who was when and was doing what, especially if the Venezuelans become, err, inventive; reminds me of a pen-and-paper RPG group, except every player is BOTH munchkin and gamemaster.

    As for states boarding ships, you can argue it's "piracy" according to "natural law", but you just don't want to open this can of worms for a diet, I think...

    319:

    By the way, geez, I spend a lot of the weekend writing, playing solitaire, and attending Heliosphere via Zoom, and look back here, and it's hundreds of comments already....

    Btw, I just realized today that [Ll]ibertarians are great for propaganda, they have a disastrous failure mode as brownshirts, as opposed, for example to "sovereign citizens" - the latter can more-or-less form an armed band, if not an army, while libertarians, all of whom believe they're as good and as smart as any other libertarian, will refuse to form an army, thinking they should be the one in charge (and will happily rename themselves John Galt"... and then do a cost-benefit analysis of pulling their firearm and going against that battalion....

    320:

    where do you get your replacements from? You can't e.g. phone up Lockheed-Martin and request another 100 F35Bs within the next month please

    Forget the airframes (and yes, the lead time on new production of military aircraft in peacetime is years-to-decades; in wartime it's guaranteed to be at least months-to-years).

    Your real problem is pilots. A 4th generation fighter pilot takes about 7-10 years to train to front-line readiness: they're as specialized as brain surgeons. Nor can you go out to the boneyard and recommission a bunch of mothballed early-model F-16s or even F-104s and put a middle-aged airliner driver behind the stick. The reflexes, eyesight, and reaction time have faded, even if they drove fast-movers in their youth. The skill set for flying an airliner and flying a front-line fighter are about as similar as driving a tractor-trailer rig vs. Formula One racing.

    Low-intensity wars (bluntly: civil wars and colonial wars) permit resupply/replenishment over time. High-intensity warfare is all over inside six weeks, tops (going by Arab/Israeli and similar experience): more likely, six days.

    321:

    Hey, you're already read my trilogy of shorts, so you've seen it done. And I have a sequel finished, 20 years later. Oh, and I'm working on another sequel, 15 years after that....

    Trust me, being one of the 400 does NOT end well....

    322:

    Hey, SotMN, thanks. That one wasn't so convoluted that I did follow it, and yeah, the more I read the more bizarre it gets.

    Unless, of course, the ship actually DOES have serious quantities of drugs on, which would explain a lot.

    323:

    Dang. I'd buy that one. Zombies or no, it's an interesting, engaging universe.

    324:

    SFReader @ 197: BOJO in hosp for tests

    Not that I like him, but as a fellow human, hope he comes out of this okay.

    The news item I read was very terse merely saying that he remains in charge ... what is the succession if he's admitted for intensive care?

    I bear him no ill will, although I am not a fan. Basically I consider it that he's the U.K.'s problem. But I did wonder why couldn't it be Mike Pence and Donald J. Trumpolini. Them I do bear ill will.

    325:

    They are. I've seen photos.

    326:

    I think that the Orange Idiot and Brexit were their final push that they've been building up to since the late seventies, to actually take over. And just as it was coming to fruition... the economic repercussions are actually, seriously hurting. $24TRILLION lost in the market, when the entire US economy is about $70Trillion or so?

    327:

    Forget the airframes (and yes, the lead time on new production of military aircraft in peacetime is years-to-decades; in wartime it's guaranteed to be at least months-to-years).

    Harking back to the original comment, in WWII, most aircraft were somewhat disposable. Now days, ah, nope.

    10% to 30% losses per mission in the early days of allied bombing was "factored" in by the PTB. Not liked but dealt with. And I've seen it reported by some people who talked to the crews back then, "we weren't really asked what WE thought of those numbers".

    Not too long ago I came across a stat that was a bit of a surprise (to me). 1/3 of all US aircraft losses in WWII were not due to combat.

    328:

    We could end up with something like the Flu vaccines; what kind of Coronavirus is going to manifest this year, get your annual shot and you probably won't get sick.

    A vaccine effective against a coronavirus would be a new thing in the world.

    The attempts to produce SARS vaccines were not sustained, but also were not even slightly successful.

    The point to vaccines is to make "everyone", for some suitable statistical approximation of everyone, immune at once. Then if you can get rid of any animal reservoirs there may happen to be you can get rid of the disease.

    That imposes some constraints; those constraints get tougher as soon as the disease is readily contagious, and they get tougher depending on how long the immune reaction from the vaccine lasts, and they get tougher the more readily the pathogen changes. (It's a notably fortunate thing indeed that measles vaccines are good for at least ten years.)

    How long the immune reaction lasts is this "well, we can measure it...." trip into the land of poorly understood. In general, acquired immunity to coronaviruses is short, less than a year.

    That's the natural, got-sick, got-better version of acquired immunity. It's not the probably-not-quite-as-good vaccine version. So producing a vaccine that produces useful immunity might not be possible just because catching the disease doesn't produce useful immunity. A vaccine can't do better than recovering from the actual disease would in terms of creating immunity.

    Then there's the "whups" factor. SARS-CoV-2 doesn't mutate that fast, it seems to be fairly conservative in important respects, which could make a vaccine easier to produce -- it would keep working if you had it.

    SARS-CoV-2 has a couple of lethality mechanisms which involve immune system failure (you die of your own immune system, more than the disease) on the one hand and (possibly) screwed up heart timing, on the other. If you set off enough immune response to produce a useful duration of immunity, can you do it without setting off the immune system overreaction? A vaccine that kills one in a thousand instead of one in a hundred is an actuarial win but pretty challenging to get people to use. If it's use annually, well. Might not be entirely useful.

    And right now, none of these are answered questions. Most of them are difficult questions. I think it'd be unwise to plan on a vaccine.

    329:

    Hair elastics work, also - you'd want the larger size, sometimes labeled "thick hair". Or, if you get a little creative, shoe laces (at least 40-inch length). A knitter could do you a loop or a length of cord from stash, and a crocheter could certainly do cord for ties.

    330:

    Zepplins! Steam-powered - the solar energy powering the engines using mirrors and a Sterling cycle! Use bronze for the metalwork!

    And goggles!

    331:

    We're past 300 (if anyone's still worrying about that?), so I'm going to post this interesting thing, not least because of its implications for the prevalence of life out there:

    https://phys.org/news/2020-03-contested-year-old-novae-iceberg.html

    It appears that novae are commoner than we thought.

    332:

    The US government stole a shipment, already paid for, from Barbados. A lot of us citizens are Not Happy that our government is resorting to piracy to handle stuff they've had two months to get factories making. (Also, they're stealing it from states and counties.) The question arises: where are they getting the information on what's been ordered, and when, how and whither it's being shipped?

    333:

    Which is why, a century ago, there were so many vertical industries - they not only owned, they were the supply chain, so no one could cut them off, or price fix, etc.

    But MBAs know so much better, no profit sinks, spin off everything (with the biggest reason being you can kill the unions).

    Oh, and JIT stocking.

    334:

    10% to 30% losses per mission in the early days of allied bombing was "factored" in by the PTB.

    No: the losses were factored in at 1% to 3%, and a bomb group that sustained 3% losses on three consecutive missions in a week (a fairly typical week in 1942-44) was basically toast. 10% death toll, horrible morale, lots of bullet holes in surviving planes (and aircrew) to patch up, fresh meat to integrate.

    A tour meant 30-50 missions, depending on air force: a 1% attrition rate meant a 50-70% probability of being shot down, and the survival rate for aircrew who had to bale out was not high: with modern ejector seats it's pushing 80%, but back then it was 20-50% survival depending on aircraft. (Some were notorious for having an emergency hatch right in front of a propeller. Others -- both the B-17 and the Lancaster had gun turrets so cramped the gunner (ball turret on the B-17, tail-gunner in the Lanc) had to leave their parachute back in the fuselage.)

    335:

    Y'know, Charlie, I'd heard people talking about Human Beings Being Replaced By Alien Robots when I was young, and I found that hard to believe, until....

    One day, around 1971, I was biking into work, hitting a good speed. Was making a left, and this guy stepped off the sidewalk right in front of me. I slammed into him, and bounced backwards off my seat, so far that I was straddling the back wheel. He sort of shook himself, didn't even look at me, and began walking again.

    That did give me a pause....

    336:

    Sourdough is actually a yeast/bacteria culture. You get the best flavor with flour and skimmed milk. (I have a 40-year-old culture.) (Wikipedia's article is pretty good, and goes into the microbiology involved.)

    337:

    Graham @ 259: I'm intrigued by how this might help the liner's owners too. If I was the owner of a cruise liner trying to get shot of it, I'd be *overjoyed* by it being captured by pirates (state-sponsored or otherwise). I'd be able to claim on my insurance, and job's a good'un. As it is, the most there seems to be on the owners is that they're a shell company trying to limit what they pay their creditors, possibly through bankruptcy of the shell company, and like all ship owners they're running a very thin ROI. Considering the President of the USA has done the bankruptcy thin 6 times in the course of his business career, this is just business as usual.

    My read on the situation is the other way around. First of all, it's a Canadian company that has nothing to do with Trumpolini. They're not trying to limit payment to their creditors through bankruptcy, it was being unable to pay those creditors that forced the company into bankruptcy. I'm not aware of any evidence they're trying to cheat the creditors, they just went broke.

    338:

    Sorry, I've never had to worry about water, and I've lived in US metro areas most of my life. A few times, I've read about major issues, where they actually issued "boil your water" orders, but other than Flint, it's all PROPAGANDA by the people who want to sell you massively overpriced water, in non-reusable plastic bottles.

    Or did you miss the episode of Penn and Teller, I think it was, who found out that a) ALL PEPSICO water is NOT from a spring, but an approved city water supply, and b) tasters couldn't tell the difference between alleged spring bottled water, and a city water supply.

    339:

    Smoking increases the likelihood of fire, and it also increases cleaning costs and the cost of maintaining the HVAC systems (clogging filters). Some jurisdictions have fines for improper disposal of cigarette and cigar butts (they're a major ingredient in trash and a health hazard, because nicotine is a poison and some of the chemicals used in cigarettes to make tobacco burn faster are also nasty).

    340:

    No: the losses were factored in at 1% to 3%, and a bomb group that sustained 3% losses on three consecutive missions in a week (a fairly typical week in 1942-44) was basically toast. 10% death toll, horrible morale, lots of bullet holes in surviving planes (and aircrew) to patch up, fresh meat to integrate.

    Maybe in the UK but in the US it wasn't liked but the PTB were going to deal.

    And yes I understand your stats. In the early days of the US 8th in UK some of the smarter folks in the crews realized that at the attrition rates they were seeing very very few people would make it to the US limit of 25 missions. And yes it made for poor morale. Very much so.

    both the B-17 and the Lancaster had gun turrets so cramped the gunner (ball turret on the B-17, tail-gunner in the Lanc) had to leave their parachute back in the fuselage.)

    My father was trained as a ball turret gunner in a B24. Basically because he was smarter than average and only 5'6" tall. The height was the major factor.

    He was lucky enough that when he got to England in the fall of 44 they were removing ball turrets and replacing them with an extra bomb rack. But the crews were still being shipped over assuming ball turrets. So waist gunners only had to fly 2 of 3. (Ball turret gunners were qualified as waist gunners before being trained for the ball turret.)

    Back to the original point of this sub thread. Any current big force war will be a come as you are. No swapping out weapons systems on a plane that can fly at Mach numbers unless designed for such.

    341:

    From what I've read, COVID-19 does not mutate rapidly. I think I saw that they've found one mutation.

    342:
  • Sorry, you're wrong.
  • Reddit - let's see, that's where immense numbers of annoying idiots used to hang out, before they moved to 4chan, then 8chan.
  • The only time I've wound up on a reddit site was while searching for answers to technical questions, and have never found anything useful.

    And, nope, we don't have a clue. By the way, if you're interested in investment opportunities, I have this bridge in a northeaster US city....

    343:

    Charlie Stross @ 267: Basically, I don't want to get trapped in the same bind as Len Deighton, who was writing the capstone to his masterwork nine-volume cold war espionage series ... and timed it so badly it was due out in 1991. Which means I can't write a near-future pandemic novel of any kind until the dust has settled: it runs the risk of look quaint to the point of obsolete before it hits the editor's desk.

    So, the bottom line is IF I manage to survive the Covid-19 and live long enough for the dust to settle there's a chance you might come back to the story & I could have a chance to find out what happened to the kid on the sidewalk & the "Good Samaritan" who found him there ... and whether or not the couple who were sent out as "backup" are cosplayers or not.

    I hope so anyway.

    344:

    The first generation of structured mortgage backed securities (MBS) were pretty decent.

    The MBS were divided into tiers only when the most senior tier had paid out in full would the next tier begin to pay out and so on. The top few tiers, most senior debt, were almost certain to pay in full, and was sold at face value. The bottom tier, most junior debt was basically worthless total junk, unlikely to pay anything and was kept by the loan originator. The second most junior debt was sold at a discount as it was likely to pay most, but not all, of face value.

    And for the securities based directly on the mortgages this was fine. The senior debt was sold at 100% to people who wanted no risk. The junior debt was kept as it was toxic waste. And the second most junior was sold to people who had a bit of an appetite for risk.

    Then someone had the bright idea of taking the second most junior MBS and repeating the process. Creating collateralised debt obligations (CDO). And then taking the second most junior tier of those and doing it again, and again, and again, and again.

    Unfortunately the default risk on the underlying mortgages had been underestimated by a few percent so the second most junior debt was significantly riskier than they thought. So after a few iterations the senior CDOs were toxic junk. Realising that sparked the 2008 crisis.

    Simple MBS, which simply pool a large number of mortgages distributing the risk evenly work fine. Structured MBS work OK. The problem was the structured CDO after a few iterations werte so far removed from the underlying mortgages that they were more or less impossible to value adequetly.

    345:

    If you ever feel like, get my email info from the mods. I've got this political book I'll get to writing one of these days (I have the table of contents...). Since I see that someone's put out a book called 21st Century Socialism, which was going to be my title, I suppose I could call it 21st Century Socialism in the US.

    Income and asset caps - hell, yes. I'm still waiting for anyone to tell me why the Jamie Dimon, of BoA, or the head of Apple, deserves more money than the President of the US.

    Limited liability - that is, stock corporations... they might still be doable, with the following caveats: 1. An "artificial person" needs to be defined strictly as an economic entity, and has NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF POLITICAL FREE SPEECH.[1] 2. If such an entity is charged with a criminal offense, the Chief execs are personally liable to going to jail, because they set the tone of the entire company, if they didn't micromanage and order the actions directly.[2] 3. No matter what kind of stock the stockholders own, THEY ARE PAID LAST IN A BANKRUPTCY, and the employees and suppliers to the company GET PAID FIRST.[3] 4. It is illegal to give bonuses to a money-losing company, or pay out dividends.

  • I call this the "Dick Notebart law", because in the mid-nineties, I started a job with Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells. a) Being a programmer, I wasn't union and so I was required to attend a hard-sell meeting, to try to get us to become members of the Ameritech PAC, and b) during the deregulation debate in '96, we were REQUIRED to write to our Congresscritter and Senators to support dereg... and when I kept putting it off, my director told me that he'd been leaned on by his boss, and they wanted copies of the letters.
  • 2 A hell of a lot of them micromanage, and yes, it is their fault.

  • Bankruptcy is often led up to explicitly to break union contracts. Easter Airlines was literally destroyed by Frank Lorenze to break the unions. The coal companies have been doing this for a number of years now... and then they also don't have to pay into the health and welfare benefit fund (you got black lung? tough), and yes, I personally have an inside contact about that.
  • And let's use the antitrust laws, and break up the trusts.

    346:

    Reddit, much like the Internet itself, runs the gamut of idiocy to extremely useful.

    For example, there are a bunch of Microsoft employees participating in the various Microsoft and/or programming language forums - and the C++ reddit forum is the place where the C++ ISO meeting unofficial summary is posted after every quarterly meeting.

    347:

    It mutates rapidly; it's a species-hopping virus. Look at the stuff UW Virology was doing to track dispersal from genetic difference between samples in the early phases of the outbreak.

    It looks like the important bits don't mutate that rapidly, but that's really not the primary worry.

    The primary worry is that people don't generally develop lasting immune responses to coronaviruses when they contract the disease and recover naturally. If that doesn't happen, you generally can't expect to be able to create a vaccine that is worth the bother.

    Now, we don't know how much immunity people get from getting sick and recovering; there's all sorts of muttering about how the severity of the case may affect the degree of immunity, and figuring out what amount of antibodies corresponds to which degree of immunity is a big job that hasn't been done yet. (Couldn't be. Hasn't been time.)

    The secondary worry is that IF you can produce an effective vaccine, it's could be walking a very fine line between "effective" and "people die, because it made their immune system panic", AND the location of that line is going to be variable across people and populations.

    348:

    Thanks for this post. I don't remember seeing you post before, but welcome.

    Ah, but there's one or two things it would do if China were to dump, or demand payout, from the US: one is that it might force the US to devalue the dollar (been done, I know once, at least, during the Great Depression #1 (as opposed to 2008, Depression #2), or the one that's happening now (Depression #3). The other is... it could break the US military, also. They spend huge amounts of money with outsourced contractors (F-35, anyone?)... and the multinational contractors would go crash, also.

    And how much do they buy from Chinese factories, that were shipped overseas to break US unions?

    349:

    Easter Airlines was literally destroyed by Frank Lorenze to break the unions.

    Eastern Airlines is a bad example for most anything to do with corporate structures and such.

    They were a mess of a company for a very long time. Their business model and policies just didn't work anymore. How much of that was tied to union contracts I have no idea.

    Lorenzo was just the vulture who came in at the end to feast on the carcass. And, yes, feast he did.

    350:

    I've been wondering if one legacy of the DT presidency might be that people start deciding the USA is no longer a reliable ally, and start to make alternative arrangements.

    351:

    Any sensible peasant, in that case, stops up their toilets, doesn't deliver toilet paper, cuts their water supplies, and, oh, yes, hides all the food.

    Soldiers standing in factories trying to make the workers work doesn't really work all that well. (See "slowdown")

    352:

    Civil war in the US - unlikely.

    Very low level terrorism, possibly. I mean, the ultra-rights been doing that for decades. But I don't see them putting together a real army, and the US military, if these nuts are declared enemies, the National Guard can come down on them with everythiing... including drones.

    353:

    Um, no, Covid-19 does mutate a bit (link is to a phylogeny on Nextstrain, which is open source tracking it). But it's not influenza or HIV.

    So far as I can tell, what we have to worry about with coronaviruses in general (and I see Graydon posted a bunch of these already):

    --Humans seem to lose immunity to some (not all!) coronaviruses that cause colds over time. This isn't the virus mutating (as checked by sequencing old samples) but human immune systems being forgetful for reasons unknown. Does this apply to SARS-CoV2? Unknown. People who survived the SARS epidemic still show an immune response to SARS a decade later, and some response to Covid19. It's quite possible that a Covid19 vaccine might need fairly frequent boosting.

    --There may be a dose response to immunity from COVID-19. It was reported awhile ago that people who survive a serious infection with it show a robust immune response to it, while people who had a mild infection show a mild response. Unclear if this is true, and it really unclear what this means for a vaccine.

    --There are thousands of coronaviruses out in the world. The pandemic boffins were worried about over 100 known ones a couple of years back (reported last week, in the post mortem of how stupid it was for the US to disband its pandemic response crew). SARS-CoV2 is a novel recombination of existing viruses. The problem with coronaviruses may thus not be mutation, but recombination.

    --Oh, and don't think Covid-19 will ever completely go away. It might get penned in by a combination of a large number of immune survivors and effectively vaccinated people, but it'll still be going around for a very long time.

    --And also, be prepared for flareups as distancing and lockdowns are eased. It's going to be messy.

    --Finally, I did a bit of looking, and I suggest NOT using prophylactic doses of hydroxychloroquine. The reason (per the Prescriber's Digital Reference) is that hydroxychloroquine has a very long list of drug interactions. The most common are heart arrhythmia which may be fatal (QT prolongation). Also common are hypoglycemia (with all versions of metformin). There are some jollies like lowering of seizure thresholds with anti-seizure meds, increasing blood concentrations of various and toxic drugs, and so forth. tl;dr: not a drug to get stupid with, because now is not the time you want to be in the hospital.

    I'd even go so far as to speculate that some of the heart problems being ascribed to Covid-19 might be due to drug interactions caused by doctors giving patients large doses of hydroxychloroquine without having a great notion of the consequences.

    No doubt all the hearty souls will step up and say how they took hydroxychloroquine for years in their 20s back in Africa, no problem, they can do it again as middle aged men on metformin. I've got some lottery tickets to the next Darwin Awards right here, ready for you to claim if you want them.

    354:

    trying to make the workers work doesn't really work

    The "lockdown letter" that I linked describes Aotearoa implementing a completely different approach than the militant aristocracy. I was being sarcastic, or pointing out a contrast or something. NZ has a nice lady asking people to work together, which is somewhat unlike many other countries.

    But it does amuse me that Boris may well be one of the weak and infirm that the UK will have to sacrifice in order to preserve their economy. Almost as appropriate as if it was that US governor or whatever who was all "I am willing to sacrifice myself rather than order a lockdown".

    355:

    Dan H. @ 275: The 2008 sub-prime mortgages can probably best be understood if you look at how drugs such as cocaine modify human behaviour. The biggest bit of "Let's all you idiots believe..." in the whole debacle was the way that mortgages were repackaged as financial investments.

    The "2008 sub-prime mortgages" can best be understood as an instance of "Control Fraud". The banksters knew they were approving loans the borrowers weren't going to be able to repay. They concealed the fact that the low initial interest rates on sub-prime mortgages were going to go up steeply after a few years and that low payments were going to morph overnight into high payments; payments the borrowers simply wouldn't be able to keep up. The banksters knew this. They concealed it from the borrowers.

    The people wanting to buy a home were instructed by the loan officers at the mortgage companies how to fill out the applications without realizing much of the information were putting down on the application would be considered fraudulent. The borrowers were unwitting victims who didn't know any better. The "loan officers" did.

    But the borrowers were not really the target of the fraud. They were collateral damage. The real target of the fraud was the banks & mortgage companies themselves, along with the investors who purchased the derivative financial instruments based on these bad mortgages. But even those investors didn't know the toxic nature of the underlying mortgages. That was concealed from them as well.

    I generally hold with the idea that "You can't cheat an honest man", but the truth is sometimes a man might not understand that a scheme is dishonest. Especially if he's not well educated & trusts banksters to be honest.

    356:

    For the US, until Bernie ran in '16, I was saying, for several years, and meaning it EXACTLY AND EXLICITLY, that what at least 90% of Americans knew of "socialism" was identical to what "good Germans" knew of Jews in 1939.

    Literally. I'm not exaggerating. I saw the most serched for word online in 2016 was "socialism".

    Then there's class, which drives me around the wall. The entire US media, and, I think, UK, calls "middle class" is, in fact, "middle income". Overwhelmingly, they work for a paycheck, and easily 40% or 50% of them are living paycheck to paycheck. As of last summer, there were surveys saying that 40% of us would struggle, or fail, to come up with $400 for an emergency expense.

    I just crept into six figures the last few years I worked (I'm well below that now)... and I have zero "investment income". I've got some money saved, and one retirement and money in a money market account. All of that together is maybe half of what my house is worth, and we're not talking a million dollars.

    That made me working class (and proud of it).

    The wealthy made that ugly. The dignity of labor? They spit on you.

    Maybe you're middle class if you own a small business, or are a lawyer or doctor. Otherwise? Really?

    Libertarians were created as we know them today explicitly, IMO, as propaganda.

    357:

    As for hydroxychloroquine, it's also suppressing the immune system to some degree; actually I wonder if that explains part of any positive effect, dampening too high a immune response.

    Not that good for prophylaxis, though.

    358:

    Charlie Stross @ 280: If you read a bit around the subject you run across the hysterically funny picture of a cult/commune (the Rhennish commmunity who later turned into the Silver Sisterhood/St Bride's) suing their landlord ... the Atlantis commune, aka the Screamers (who had decamped for Colombia).

    I didn't find that in the Wikipedia articles. What did they sue them for?

    359:

    Yeah... and about six or seven years ago, where I worked, at a US federal government installation, they installed new soap dispensers in the bathroom, to give you foam, instead of soap.

    Same reason. Stupid everyone woune up squirting seven, ten or more times to get enough to wash your hands.

    360:

    Gallon jugs - buy milk?

    361:

    if there was some kind of plan for how things would work under

    {insert political system of choice} ... then someone could explain it?

    In my experience of asking questions of various political people none can explain how their system deals with obvious problems, and most can't even explain how their system works in any detail. But even with the best will in the world, and access to the best experts in the world, it doesn't seem to be possible to have a political system that works, let alone one that can be understood by average people. Or anyone.

    To take one topical problem: how does the mixed market system deal with the problem of global pandemics? One possible answer is that it defines them as non-problematic, merely Darwinistic force improving the gene pool. But "market forces prevent them happening" obviously fails since we have a counter-example.

    One moron, sorry "Professor of Laws", recently suggested that every educated person must read Latin and know the classics (the Latin ones, obvs). Sadly for that person their remark merely served to illustrate their ignorance - even by the time Latin became a written language humans had so restricted their ignorance that no one person could know all the things people know. To claim otherwise you need to dramatically restrict the definition of "things worth knowing", in the example above you might start by eliminating anything known by people not known to ancient Greeks and Romans and so on.

    362:

    YES. A corporation is not some shambling building, or invisible monster, it is directed by the chief execs. THEY are personally responsible for what it does.

    363:

    The wikipedia article is short and inadequate: see the other (non-wiki) essay I linked to!

    364:

    Davenport might not work in the US. I'd just say "d-ah-vven", with the "a" as an ah, as in ah-ha, or vahz, rather than vayze for "vase".

    365:

    You have to build with local resources. Hell, that's why they're excited about finding water on the Moon.

    366:

    During WWII bomber crews had a higher rate of casualties than the marines in the Pacific. It was very difficult, dangerous work.

    367:

    Garbage. The willpower is there. The problem is that the ultrawealthy have bought and paid for the GOP, and made some of them wealthy, and so they've actively against it.

    RICOing the entire GOP would be a good start. Charging Mitch McConnell with treason, trying him, convicting him, and HANGING THE BASTARD would be better.

    368:

    I'm going down this rabbit hole myself, the article on the Atlatis group indicates the dispote over rent was in 1992.

    Err, Free Love Primal Scream Reichians and Right Wing Victorian Age Reenactors with a secret kink for BDSM; they should have gotten along wonderful. That is, like a house on fire...

    Why am I reminded of the janitor turned neo-shaman therapist with Lars Von Triers Riget?

    369:

    Finally, I did a bit of looking, and I suggest NOT using prophylactic doses of hydroxychloroquine. Related, the people outside malaria regions who take it regularly, e.g. lupus patients, are not reporting a protective effect, if this is to be believed: There Is No Study Proving That ‘Lupus Patients Don’t Get Coronavirus’ Because They Take Hydroxychloroquine - Rumors are circulating about a study that shows people with lupus don’t get COVID-19, but emerging data says otherwise. (April 5, 2020) The COVID-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance Based on early data currently available in our registry, we are not able to report any evidence of a protective effect from hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19.

    (I expect they're being protective of supplies of the drug, but don't didn't spot any blatant lies.) I personally know one person who is taking hydroxychloroquine for a very (very) rare autoimmune disease. So far she has been able to fill her prescriptions.

    Straight Black Hair # 224 Spent an hour editing(/censoring) responses to those three Dune questions; still not entirely happy with my answers, excepting the Golden Path one. You were not ignored. :-)

    370:

    Agreed. Recently, I read an article about a building in - NYC, maybe, where the tenants had complained to the landlord, and to the city, about numerous violation, and the landlords shrugged, and said "they didn't own the building", and it was a rats' nest of crossing ownership.

    If I were the city, I would have simply taken ownership of the building under eminent domain, and if the owners ever showed, would pay them a fair value for it... AFTER deducting all the fines, interest, and money spent to fix it up.

    371:

    The borrowers were unwitting victims who didn't know any better.

    I would rather think that there's a lot of people out there who will try and get one over on "the man" if they think they will not get caught. Rather than that many really stupid people in the world.

    And I may be very wrong.

    372:

    Right... and the owning company had driven a ton of small mills, and small farmers, out of business, and you want "forced collectivization"? Consider what's happened to "family farms".

    373:

    [smile] A year or two ago, I started a story, set in an alternate world... on a space station run by Americans and Soviets, where detente had gone on (after Carter's re-election), and we'd joined our space programs.... They somehow got in contact with our world, but I wasn't sure where it would, or could go, so I put it aside.

    374:

    What, the US and the Russian Federation being on the outs? Why would they have trouble with that?

    375:

    Years ago when I was a student the lab I was working for organized a taste test for water at the local town, which had just had a new water pipeline from Edmonton installed and lots of complaints about bad-tasting city water…

    My boss set up a double-blind triangle test. Statistically speaking, no one could tell the difference between local and city water — but most people thought they could, and the water they thought was city water tasted worse.

    376:

    I disagree, there are, in fact, a lot of us. However, most of us are working class (see my def, above).

    Some of us actually believe in honor, and doing our best to keep our word. My son assures me that even in places like the No Such Agency, there are people who believe in their Oath of Office.

    377:

    whitroth @ 338: Or did you miss the episode of Penn and Teller, I think it was, who found out that a) ALL PEPSICO water is NOT from a spring, but an approved city water supply, and b) tasters couldn't tell the difference between alleged spring bottled water, and a city water supply.

    Didn't see it, but it's something I already knew. You just have to read the fine print at the bottom of the label. Most bottled water in the U.S. (unless you're buying Perrier) is bottled from city water sources. There's less chance of liability & having to recall big batches for contamination if you use treated water. Reduced liability & recalls == more profit.

    378:

    On Covid vaccinations...

    Correlation between universal BCG vaccination policy and reduced morbidity and mortality for COVID-19: an epidemiological study

    Interesting thoughts about why some countries see different age groups badly affected.

    379:

    I'm sorry, just as soon as I finish my Famous Secret Theory, we're outta here.

    Third star on the left....

    380:

    I'm still waiting for anyone to tell me why the Jamie Dimon, of BoA, or the head of Apple, deserves more money than the President of the US.

    Because they're smarter and doing a better job?

    Or were you talking generally rather than current office-holders?

    381:

    whitroth @ 360: Gallon jugs - buy milk?

    I live alone. At the rate I consume milk a gallon (even with refrigeration) goes off before I finish it. Half-gallons work fine for me.

    382:

    Consider what's happened to "family farms".

    If the younger generations mostly wanted to keep farming the wouldn't be so much agri-business taking them over. And when you see farmers gather they tend to be white haired with lined faces.

    Let's see. My grandfather was born in 1885. His farm encompassed a few 100 acres. Maybe more at one time. There was a sawmill, some larger wood shaping things, a slaughter house, a dozen or so barns and other outbuildings, lots of cows and cultivation. Not a dairy operation though. He had 3 sons. One of them went into the business but shut down most of it as he aged into his 60s. The other two, one my father, decided working indoors was a much better life.

    Just now there are maybe 100+ descendants of my grandfather. To the best of my knowledge there is at most ONE still farming. And he's near or past 80, a retired pilot who likes to be a gentleman farmer. More I think just wants to get away. He lives so far off the track in Idaho that it is my understanding that the pavement stops miles before you get to his house. We've not crossed paths since 1970.

    The rest of us just have no interest in "doing dirt". Especially in the rain when it is 40F. Or sleet when it's 30F. Or in the sun when it's 100F. Or ....

    Farming, when not on an industrial scale, is hard work for little return. As one person I know put it the week after his father died all the sheep were sold. He had had enough of facing the south end of a north facing sheep when growing up.

    383:

    people start deciding the USA is no longer a reliable ally

    I think many Americans would be surprised at their country's reputation in many parts of the world.

    384:

    and the water they thought was city water tasted worse.

    I always like the water at my grandfather's farm. Almost orange from the iron in it. Lots of rust in the well/pump/tank situation. I'm sure that washing "nice" clothes in it would lead to some interesting color changes today.

    Today you have to pay extra for such flavor in stores.

    385:

    Americans and Soviets, where detente had gone on (after Carter's re-election), and we'd joined our space programs

    Every read some of the co-dominion stories by Pournelle?

    386:

    I go through 4-8 litres a week. I like milk!

    387:

    Dang, I probably never got that BCG vaccine. (US person, but will check records. I get every vaccine offered and have traveled a bit.) From Vulch's preprint(/not peer reviewed) link's abstract: We compared large number of countries BCG vaccination policies with the morbidity and mortality for COVID-19. We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Nederland, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies. Countries that have a late start of universal BCG policy (Iran, 1984) had high mortality, consistent with the idea that BCG protects the vaccinated elderly population. We also found that BCG vaccination also reduced the number of reported COVID-19 cases in a country. The combination of reduced morbidity and mortality makes BCG vaccination a potential new tool in the fight against COVID-19.

    388:

    whitroth replied to this comment from Foxessa | April 6, 2020 22:27 | Reply 348

    Thank for the welcome, but I've been around before, just not much.

    I tend to keep up with Charlie, his works and his ideas one way or another -- even beta reading at one point -- whether here or elsewhere. But I went off social media entirely for nearly a year -- and I don't do it much anyway, busy with so much.

    But now, lordessa save us, there is time, though I'm still so busy, that even right now I'm so tired from cooking and washing up and coaching my partner in exercise which meant I had to move a whole lot of stuff as he's so much taller than I am and our place is very very very small -- well, been at it since 7 AM and have just finished dinner, which he's cleaning up and putting away. Tomorrow is teaching again via Zoom, so, well, there ya go.

    Off to bed. To read a book, even though it's so early.

    389:

    Well, I'd put it that you've never worried about water. Doesn't meant you shouldn't be concerned about what you'd do if it shut down for a few days. This has happened in major US cities on at least two occasions in the last fifteen years.

    You don't have to buy bottled water, of course, and I do not. I store my own tap water. But the original proposition was that buying bottled water was irrational because there wasn't a direct connection to what the pandemic does.

    The logic of that doesn't hold, because catastrophes spiral. If you're going to scream about propaganda, then I think you're just paranoid about the wrong stuff. But you do you.

    390:

    David L @ 371:

    The borrowers were unwitting victims who didn't know any better.

    I would rather think that there's a lot of people out there who will try and get one over on "the man" if they think they will not get caught. Rather than that many really stupid people in the world.

    And I may be very wrong.

    Wanting to own your own home but not having a high income (or a reliable one) and not understanding mortgage finance doesn't make you stupid.

    It makes you vulnerable to exploitation by loan officers if you didn't know their compensation was based on how many sub-prime ARM mortgages they could sell, NOT on helping you to find a way to a buy a home you could actually afford. Loan officers who knew they weren't going to be around to answer for the consequences when the mortgage payments they scammed you into taking on unexpectedly shot through the roof on them.

    To that extent, yes, you're wrong. In the case of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it was "the man" getting over on the home buyers.

    391:

    David L @ 382:

    Consider what's happened to "family farms".

    If the younger generations mostly wanted to keep farming the wouldn't be so much agri-business taking them over. And when you see farmers gather they tend to be white haired with lined faces.

    OTOH, a lot of family farms have been turned into agri-businesses because it was the only way to "keep them in the family". The younger generations who DO want to keep farming have had to become corporate managers who get dirt under their fingernails.

    392:

    Robert Prior @ 383:

    people start deciding the USA is no longer a reliable ally

    I think many Americans would be surprised at their country's reputation in many parts of the world.

    Yeah, most of them. But if you've been paying attention, you've already seen evidence of changing attitudes among our "allies".

    393:

    Don't think so... but they came out a long time ago. Of course, I dislike Pournelle as a person.

    394:

    Let me see if I understand you: are you saying that the whole marketing of bottled water, mostly named after springs that they have no relation to, is not propaganda or marketing, and that they're actually better than approved city water supplies (again, excluding Flint)?

    And you think that it's not propaganda?

    395:

    Robert Prior @ 386: I go through 4-8 litres a week. I like milk!

    I do too, but I'm not supposed to drink that much. When I was in my 20s I averaged a gallon of milk per day, and that was whole milk, not skim or 2%. I am not allowed to drink that much any longer.

    OTOH, I drink over a gallon of coffee in an average week and the doctors have not told me to limit that consumption ... YET.

    396:

    Not sure how true that is - there were a lot of stories at the time about how the people using sub-prime mortgages weren't concerned about the huge jump in payments because they simply went out and got a new sub-prime mortgage before the "real payments" kicked in - with the added benefit of pocketing spending money based on the increase in value of the house.

    And of course the mortgage brokers and bankers were all happy because they were collecting additional fees/bonuses for selling additional mortgages.

    Repeat until the wheels fell off.

    397:

    I've been wondering if one legacy of the DT presidency might be that people start deciding the USA is no longer a reliable ally, and start to make alternative arrangements.

    There is no need to wonder, it is already happening and has been for 1 to 2 years.

    The problem is that it takes a long time to untangle the relationships that have been developed since WW2.

    And then there are cases like Canada and Mexico, who thanks to proximity don't really have much in the way of options.

    398:

    Another (preprint, not peer reviewed): Association of BCG vaccination policy with prevalence and mortality of COVID-19 (Giovanni Sala, Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, April 06, 2020) From the comments (the anonymous comment author has made similar comments previously), I think this is another voodoo correlation study of BCG which keeps appearing one after another. BCG may be effective or not effective, but that cannot be revealed by country analyses due to many uncontrolled and complex factors.... They may be correct. They suggest waiting for a randomized controlled trial. (Interesting suggestion. Super-safe vaccine, versus expected megadeaths.) (full pdf) Abstract, FWIW: Finally, by roughly dividing countries into three categories showing high, middle, or low growth rate of the cases, we found a highly significant difference between the slope categories among the BCG groups, suggesting that the time since the onset of the spread of the virus was not a major confounding factor. While this retrospective epidemiological study potentially suffers from a number of unknown confounding factors, these associations support the idea that BCG vaccination may provide protection against SARS-CoV-2, which, together with its proven safety, encourages consideration of further detailed epidemiological studies, large-scale clinical trials on the efficacy of this vaccine on COVID-19, and/or re-introduction of BCG vaccination practice in the countries which are currently devoid of the practice.

    399:

    "Let me see if I understand you: are you saying that the whole marketing of bottled water, mostly named after springs that they have no relation to, is not propaganda or marketing, and that they're actually better than approved city water supplies (again, excluding Flint)?"

    I think it's a non sequitur to what I said to begin with. People aren't panic buying bottled water because they think bottled water is BETTER, they're doing so because they're worried about being without city water.

    Given what I said to start with, the interpretation of your propaganda statement would be 'the idea that they need water in case of an emergency' is propaganda. But even your non sequitur is a dubious proposition. Companies certainly make fresh spring water a part of their marketing, but I suspect most people are buying bottled water out of convenience.

    400:

    Breathing exercises

    Just read that JKRowling and her son have recovered from COVID-19. She wasn't tested but her husband's (MD) opinion was: yes - it's COVID-19. Rowling specifically suggested the breathing exercise below that a physician recommended to her. (Other COVID-19 related medical podcasts and videos have also mentioned turning their ICU patients onto their stomachs [prone position] to help them breathe better.)

    FYI - The MD in this video says that folks can start doing this exercise before they catch COVID-19/get symptoms.

    Coronavirus breathing exercise for Lung | NHS doctor's health tips

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZRHcncxE4M

    401:

    Yes. Did that in 2018. Good stuff; bit crude and cludgy but quality soul stuff. Took us less than 2 hrs - this isn't a boast, it's a feature of various platforms that you can get a refund if you play less than that, so we avoided the temptation. (This might be a joke contra all those SV types who watch videos x1.5-3 and listen to podcasts x1.5 on adderall, if you think a bit about what it would take to speed up that particular game. And yet it did take us less than 120 minutes).

    There's an interesting tale about its creator which is even better. He essentially never saw much money (which is sad) but we can only hope he noted the absolute love sent his way.

    ~

    Anyhow: WJC aren't happy[0], BoJo is side-lined and we've all learnt some pertinent facts: Authoritarian Shit-Weasles use the same play-book, these days.

    Saud bought 8.2% of CCL (fucking clown car) thus the jokes in #50 and hey-ho.

    ~

    [Redacted]

    Chances are: you made a meta-mistake. You cannot include external physical effects produced in the "world" while pretending you're Meta-Entities.

    WE ARE THE ORZ.

    So, let's fuck all that right out the window, and see what a Proper Chaotic Attractor Can Do, Right?

    YEAH. ALL THE LIGHT.

    [0] "...and like that, "poof" it was gone" (the tweet that is). You want to play hard-ball? Check the video in #237 for the organization that runs that and note the Cyrillic text. 44 views (40 when linked). Amazing it took less than 3 seconds to hit that node. Threatening little cute ones will will get you spanked, so back the fuck off. Oh, and ffs, at least have some self-respect: that kind of cocky slackness got you killed back in 93. WJC running cover for Lawyers who haven't even read the fucking Geneva Convention: it's obvious, but --- Tinker Fucking Toy Land.

    402:

    Wanting to own your own home but not having a high income (or a reliable one) and not understanding mortgage finance doesn't make you stupid.

    When you're filling in imaginary numbers in a box boldly labeled "Annual Income" something is wrong. You're either stupid or dishonest.

    These were big near the end of the boom. Liar loans was one name for them. No Income No Doc was another.

    403:

    Over here the relevant TV programme would be "Only Fools and Horses", which was a very popular comedy series about a dodgy market trader chap who was constantly trying to get rich by flogging some kind of dubious merchandise. One episode had him trying to cash in on the bottled water scam by selling bottles of water out of his kitchen tap, which of course then went horribly wrong as the premise of the series demands.

    Then shortly afterwards we had Coca-Cola deciding to try to sell bottled tap water in all seriousness, apparently completely unaware that they were pretty much exactly duplicating the entire plot of the episode, including the going horribly wrong part. Which was utterly fucking hilarious.

    404:

    @ David L "1/3 of all US aircraft losses in WWII were not due to combat."

    That proportion seems to be true of US aircrew fatalities, but according to this article, for aircraft losses it was the other way round.

    "The U.S. suffered 52,173 aircrew combat losses. But another 25,844 died in accidents. More than half of these died in the continental U.S. The U.S. lost 65,164 planes during the war, but only 22,948 in combat. There were 21,583 lost due to accidents in the U.S., and another 20,633 lost in accidents overseas."

    Seeing stats like that - something approaching 1500 aircraft losses a month on average if the war is the US involvement Dec-41 to Aug-45 - and assuming something similar applied in other air forces, it seems amazing that my father, an RAF pilot from 1941 to 1946, managed to come away unscathed having accumulated 2,483 hours.

    Most of the time he was a flying instructor, but he also flew B-24 Liberators on long over-water anti-sub patrols in 1944 and 45, and then on week-long trips to Mauripur in India (now Pakistan) into 1946, transporting personnel back to England. (One trip, according to his logbooks, took a month, in several different and presumably variably reliable aircraft)(But he got to spend his 27th birthday during a week in Cairo, I guess waiting for the next ageing clunker to be fixed up).

    405:

    "the chemicals used in cigarettes to make tobacco burn faster"

    You're the first person I've heard mention that for years. We used to call them chemical fags, or chemmies for short, to distinguish them from roll-ups, but "we" was a very small group and it was very rare to be able to use the term to someone else without having to explain what it meant.

    It's not even as if they confer any useful property on the things. That roll-ups keep going out is a positive advantage - you can smoke them at the rate you want to, instead of having to do it really fast so it doesn't just smoke itself.

    It does mean that chemical fags make useful time delay fuses so you can get well away before the bomb goes off, but that's more a reason to wonder they're still allowed to do it than a justification.

    406:

    And you could vent the steam into the envelope to use it as lifting gas, instead of hydrogen. Or some of it. The waste heat output from a steam engine is vastly in excess of what you need to make up for the heat loss through the envelope and keep the contents gaseous, even without the extra help from the reduced pressure at altitude. You could do the same trick using the exhaust heat from a propulsion diesel to boil water, or indeed just to heat air and use plain hot air for lift with a slightly bigger envelope. I'm pretty sure it would even work using the waste heat from any electric propulsion motor big enough to be any use.

    407:

    Companies certainly make fresh spring water a part of their marketing, but I suspect most people are buying bottled water out of convenience.

    Very doubtful.

    It is not convenient to be lugging bottled water - whether it be packs of 24 small bottles or the large 3 or 5 gallon (12 or 19 L) - from the store to the car, and then from the car to house/kitchen.

    And it certainly not cost effective.

    No, it is one of the greatest cons that the marketers have convinced people that the thing they can get out of the taps for pennies is substandard to something they spend a lot more money on to buy it from a store (and in a plastic container at that given the hysteria normally demonstrated about plastic).

    408:

    "...and like that, "poof" it was gone" It was deleted pretty quickly. (Such people need to wonder if a tweet deletion monitor is watching their account perhaps. But it was deleted.)

    Buckle up, climate change deniers: Coronavirus makes the low-carbon transition more urgent (April 6, 2020, John Hewson) Argument needs some reworking for better effect and reshaping for countries other than AU, but the key bits are there.

    409:

    Tom Scott covered that. It's actually funny as well as useful, although I understand that the lesson has since worn off. https://youtu.be/wD79NZroV88

    410:

    I am not so sure of that.

    An average-sized hot air balloon (77,000 cubic square feet) will use about 30 gallons of liquid propane gas in a one hour flight. via random link

    Just for comparison, a decent sized van will travel about 400km using that much propane, carrying ~2 tonnes of stuff (based on the only gas powered vehicle I'm even vaguely familiar with). Admittedly doing that in one hour you might only travel 200km thanks to air resistance.

    The other thing is that the balloon only extracts heat from the gas, where the van is also turning some into rotational energy, so it's not going to be as heat-efficient.

    Factor in that the electric system, assuming batteries as good as car-type ones, is about 85% efficient rather than 30%, so roughly speaking the electric system puts out a tenth as much heat as the gas one. Viz, for every 100W of movement the electric puts out 20W of heat but the van puts out 200W.

    411:

    The mutations this virus gets seem to be very small - the scientists are tracking them, as they're useful for backtracking the history of the thing. So far, none of the mutations has made a noticeable difference to the infection in any way.

    412:

    Depends on their source of information. A lot of us are not at all surprised.

    413:

    If you're traveling, bottled water (in half-liters or liters) is very convenient, and if the bottles are reasonably sturdy they can be refilled from a tap. It's also possible that there's no convenient source of potable water. There are a lot of rural areas in the western US where there are no safe/reliable wells, so everyone gets bottled water. (I worked in an office which had no water in our (small) building; we had bottled water only.)

    414:

    It's not even as if they confer any useful property on the things. That roll-ups keep going out is a positive advantage - To you, perhaps, but not to the manufacturer, who can sell more if you keep burning (ahem) through them.

    Also, of course chemmies are so much better at starting upholstery fires.

    Disclaimer: very happy to have never smoked.

    JHomes.

    415:

    So far, yes, and coronaviruses seem to be generally conservative in general.

    "Generally conservative" means that the chance of mutation -- which is fairly close to fixed per replication -- is relatively low compared to other viruses.

    But it's not zero, and if a viruses gets to be a pandemic, there's a lot of replication -- it's gone from a few million host organisms to a few billion, three whole orders of magnitude, plus a couple-three orders of magnitude in body size (more flesh, more virus), plus a greenfield spread. So there's lots of scope for mutation, and while we haven't observed a mutation that affects the way it infects humans, that doesn't mean these aren't happening -- some of the different regional outcomes may eventually be found to be down to mutations in the virus -- or that they're especially unlikely.

    We can hope we've got a stable pathogen, and it's not a foolish hope, but it's not more than a hope at present, either.

    416:

    I worked in an office which had no water in our (small) building

    Presumably you mean potable water? I have seen very few offices with waterless toilets, and even those typically had a non-potable supply for washing things. Trucking in water for everything gets expensive very quickly.

    417:

    Dominic Raab is scarily incompetent & arrogant - even compared to BoZo the sad clown.

    gordycoale & 313 You know thanswer to that one: SACK THE SCRIPTWRITERS!

    whitroth @ 333 The Railways were very good at that. The bigger ones - e.g. LNWR / GER / NER etc made almost everything themselves. The LNW even had their own iron manfactory f'rinstance. And it started before the bloody MBA's got loose ... "selling off" the railway's Hotels & shipping lines as they "were not core business" Ignoring the synergy of having an integrated transport system

    @ 356 Well my fater was definitelt (lower) Middle-Class, even though he worked for a salary - Teacher & then University Lecturer. I classify as "A2" or "B1" in Brti ter=erms, even though I'm right on the personal poverty line ( The Boss makes quite a fair amout=nt, of course, even though the sexism in her line of work means she's still being cheated....

    SFR @ 400 Possible My lungs are well pumped-up ( All that dancing etc. ) LOTS of really deep breaths ... etc.

    418:

    OK then, can you point me at a genuine well-worked out plan for how modern technological society, in all its mind-boggling complexity, would run under socialism (defined as communal ownership of the means of production)? Something that will permit people freedom to move around and seek the best available match between their talents and work, while also handling new disruptive technologies, and doing all the above more efficiently than capitalism?

    I've been looking for something like that for a while, and I haven't found it. All I have found are Pollyanna post-scarcity handwaves and dumb ideas (like working for vouchers) that don't even begin to tackle the real problem. If you have something better I'm all ears.

    419:

    Going off on a tangent, here is a cause for (modest) optimism . "A new antiviral drug heading into clinical trials offers hope for COVID-19 treatment" https://bit.ly/3aPFhIx Note that it will take many months if they stick to the usual protocol for testing.

    420:

    The corruption is so complete, this is a banana republic . "Jared Kushner, slumlord millionaire" https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2020/04/06/jared-kushner-slumlord-millionaire/#more-58194 All this shit is legal!

    421:

    I could argue that there are a lot of things in place now which prevent people from moving around and finding the best match for their talents and work - for example, it's not trivial for me to go for work in Edinburgh (hey, I like the climate). Also, even if you get to a place, it might not be that easy getting a good job. For example, here in Finland there are doctors and engineers who work as cleaners, because they can't get an another job, because nobody will hire them, or they don't have the correct permits. I'd say that it's a failure.

    Also, the efficiency of capitalism seems to be somewhat hindered by the current world situation. Without being an economist, I'd say that the resiliency of the capitalist system against sudden crises is not that good - I have also to admit that I don't have a silver bullet here, but "just doing stuff and taking as much profit as I can until something goes wrong and then begging the governments to bail me out" doesn't seem that good a strategy for the society.

    I'd like to point out that there are many people who don't work, for various reasons, and almost everybody's first concerns are a) a place to live in b) something to eat. Affordable health care comes also soon after those, but work is usually further down the list, and I'd rather classify that as something sensible to do. I'd like to live in a society which provides those more efficiently than capitalism (and I live in a quite social-democratic place). (For example, in many places there are at the same time homeless people and empty flats and houses. In my view, not an optimal division of resources, especially considering that it's usually easier to get a job when not homeless.)

    Somebody could also argue that a healthcare system that works for everybody and has in "normal" times some overcapacity comes in handy in the occasional pandemic or other situation where one does need a lot of health care in a small time frame. It's hard to see how this could be arranged with copious capitalism, as can be seen in some examples currently.

    422:

    My boss set up a double-blind triangle test. Statistically speaking, no one could tell the difference between local and city water — but most people thought they could, and the water they thought was city water tasted worse.

    Years ago (Google says 2008) I was working at a convenience store when Camel cigarettes changed their cover art and, allegedly, tobacco mix. This set off a tempest in a teapot among Camel smokers, who for a few weeks were combing stores searching for the classic better cigarettes.

    As a nonsmoker it was nothing much to me but I brought up the fuss to the local R J Reynolds representative. I was amused to hear everyone was going through this now that the art was different. They'd changed the tobacco months ago. Nobody noticed.

    423:

    Here in NZ I've barely heard of Dominic Raab. Since he's effectively PM of the UK now - Boris Johnson is down with covid-19, likely to need rehab after recovering if it doesn't kill him, and will be out of the loop for at least a couple of months if he even keeps the nominal job - what is Raab likely to do differently from Johnson?

    424:

    Nah. Real quinine, as a baby. It's a strong candidate for why I have had severely impaired hearing and balance all my life. I might have done better (or worse!) if chloroquine had been available. As I posted earlier, all effective anti-malarials are nasty substances.

    425:

    And you could vent the steam into the envelope to use it as lifting gas, instead of hydrogen

    You don't want to do that with a Stirling engine — you can perhaps use steam as your working fluid in your Stirling engine, but they're supposed to have closed systems, not open ones like your traditional steam engine. If you exhaust it into the envelope, you'll have to carry extra water to replenish your engine's working fluid, which defeats the beauty of a Stirling in your airship: that it needs no consumables except the solar energy.

    Keeping an envelope hot enough that water remains steam would be interesting. I've not checked to see at what altitudes water boils off at the ambient temperature, but I suspect not at any attainable height. A shame. Unless you're looking at Venus, in which case go ahead.

    426:

    Both those pronunciations are wrong in UK English (at least, in pronounced RP): "vase" is pronounced with a flat-a, as in "ah". "Daven" is pronounced with a flat and short "a" as in "at".

    (Don't get me started on the regional "scone" divide! Except you guys call them "biscuits", which is just plain wrong because biscuits are something else ...)

    427:

    can you point me at a genuine well-worked out plan for how modern technological society, in all its mind-boggling complexity, would run under

    I may have said this before: can you point to such a plan for any political system? I'll accept any system you can offer a coherent definition of and look forward to your detailed plan. If you can work in a description of what you mean by "works" so we have a success criteria that would be good. Also, a timescale: does "staggering along for a century or so before collapsing" count, or does it have to last for a whole civilisation or epoch, or even a meillenia?

    (I don't ask that it be better than capitalism, or the current mixed-economy model used in the US, just that it be a detailed plan for "modern technological society").

    428:

    I was deeply surprised when my American friends at grad school made me biscuits and gravy, and I found out that they were savory scones. No idea what I'd expect from the South, but not savory scones with gravy.

    Equally surprised when I found out how a friend from Boston pronounced the word 'scone'.

    Scones! Ahhh. The cafe under my work makes great scones. The texture of them! They have that unique feel: not a cake, not a bread... I really miss them under lock-down.
    I hadn't realised how much until I started this comment. Must be time to start rubbing some butter into flour and make my own, before I drool on the keyboard.

    429:

    there are a lot of things in place now which prevent people from moving around and finding the best match for their talents and work

    At a much more trivial level, it would cost about a year's after-tax average income to sell an average Sydney house and buy another one (call it $60,000 Australian in round numbers). That's an average house in a capital city (~$900,000) taking into account stamp duty ($36,000), real estate agent commission (probably less than ~$15,000 right now, ~$20,000+ in summer) plus another $2,000-$10,000 for marketing, legal fees (~$3,000), and bank fees because I have a mortgage and would need another one on the new house ($3000).

    I'm sure that a sufficiently dedicated socialist government could come up with a worse system, but I reckon they would have to actually work to find it.

    One issue is that the housing market here has been carefully designed and policed for the benefit of a small circle of already-wealthy property developers, and that legacy has been assiduously preserved and improved over the last 200-odd years to the point where apartment buildings collapse despite the best efforts of the people who design and build them. That's not what I call a well designed market, let alone a working one. It could be worse, but it could also be a lot better. And just for the record: it's already far closer to a free market than is compatible with general welfare.

    430:

    because biscuits are something else ...

    US biscuits appear not to be cooked twice, for one. I'd be mildly interested to know how they ended being so named

    431:

    I do not know if this is relevant for this thread, but it provides an insight into the human condition during stress.

    "Lockdown's hottest viral trends: raging at the neighbours and torching 5G Towers" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/06/lockdown-viral-trends-5g-towers-coronavirus-cases So a moderately good TV comedy series, but in reality. Next step will be to mimic "Oops Apocalypse"(1982): Creating vacancies by having people jump from the cliffs of Dover.

    432:

    The corruption is so complete, this is a banana republic

    I still like the USA, so much that when I see confirmatory news that hints at the civil-war, info-war and a republic high with Cavendish bananas, I still due diligence.

    Doing due diligence on a link, before posting..... (A quick [non-AI/ML]Sentiment analysis, virustotal scan of the URL & related URLs, check of how recently established, perhaps going to a full SSLlabs Qualys test, but that’s almost a DDoS)

    So, results seems genuine website, an obvious conservative Christian agenda, funded by a stealthy multi-billionaire with a history of previous right-wing Hollywood embedded nudges, allegedly. (Pretty normal website)

    So probably not a Russo-nudge. Quite likely to be accurate, as USA does often post accurate stuff about the Info-wars, etc. (unlike UK where things spooky tend to be as suppressed as possible)

    It further looks like an accurate article, especially when added to my personal public meeting of the serious “FBI”, ILETS, et al. at the various international Technical Standards Development boards

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fisa-court-ordering-target-list-shows-it-suspects-pattern-of-fbi-seeking-political-dirt-joe-digenova-says

    Seems that mass-surveillance has been naughty, naturally, but was the cream of the targeted surveillance even naughtier?

    Anyway, that’s just a passing news item, worthy of adding to a debate, as the media is apparently rather one sided, and certainly too busy with the virus.

    Local-news: In Lombardy it is now formally illegal to be out in public without a face-mask, 3 million of which have just been sent to the various town-halls, and 300K further masks to local pharmacies. These are free, gratis, but you’ll need a face-mask to go out to claim your face-mask!?

    Newspapers are concentrating on how to reopen Italy for business & when, business loans for 100% of small businesses and 80% of medium businesses, but any enterprise that pays director bonuses or dividends is self-debarred from requesting a tranche of whatever Eurobond milliard of currency is eventually created. Repayment over years, starting autumn 2021, probably.

    433:

    ..and I was going to mention, having just ‘enjoyed’ the perils of a home haircut - an impressive professional stage production of something to do (vaguely) with hairdressing is here:-

    https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/magazine/il-barbiere-di-siviglia-replay

    434:

    AVR Raab, unlike BoZo is a real, convinced, utterly rabid Brexiteer. He hasn't a fucking clue. Whether he is just that particular variety of stupid that politicians of all parties seem to produce, or whether he's been bought by the Hedge Funds & ultras who want us to be a peon state I don't know & quite frankly don't care.

    435:

    Influenza has a nice, big pool of different RNA varieties that it can recombine from. It is actually rather weird as viruses go; a gut disease of birds that can jump to mammals.

    China once again is the source of these new viruses. Wild birds bring wild strains of flu to domestic ducks, which only rarely exchange genes with the flu viruses circulating in pigs; these also then exchange genes with the human flu viruses in the mixed farmers.

    Covid-19 has no such big reservoir of different gene types. It seems to be a bat disease that jumped once to pangolins, then to humans; there's not this big easy recombination melting pot that will keep covid-19 topped up with new varieties. Thus all we're going to see is normal mutation, which runs a heck of a lot slower than does recombination.

    436:

    and doing all the above more efficiently than capitalism?

    Capitalism has so far produced the carbon binge (with its mass extinction and habitability hit and certain destruction of most of the accumulated capital of millenia as the coastal cities go under the wave) and an ongoing global economic collapse that isn't looking especially recoverable. (You really need an import-replacing city to be functioning somewhere to recover from a collapse; for the first time, they're all connected, and will all go together when they go. Jane Jacobs wrote on this point with some vehemence and concern.)

    I would suggest this is not the bar you want, even with the illusion of prosperity some of us presently enjoy.

    So, too, is "a detailed plan" not what you want. Won't work, and can't work; "thus is the word of the lord" is not a control system.

    For that same "yeah, this needs some kind of control system, wise direction can't do it" reason, neither capitalism (do everything with feedback! miss-connect the feedback so the rich take no risk!) nor socialism (do it all with constraints!) work or can work. Step zero to getting somewhere reasonable is neither picking a certain failure nor in the magical thinking involved in combining two flavours of certain failure into magical success.

    There are only really two hard problems; first one is keeping society directed towards human purposes. (The system has to get copied into the future, too; it does it faster than human generation times, and it tends to drift off and do its own, increase-odds-of-replication thing, which are nigh-all associated with giving some small group disproportionate advantage ("making luck hereditary") because of course they are, that's how selection works.)

    Second one is keeping the wetware bugs from killing it; it is difficult to set out measurable objectives and do the quantitative analysis, rather than making policy on the basis of feels. Nothing else is observed to work, though, so here we are.

    Everything else is implementation details, which are surprisingly enough pretty well understood if you're willing to say what you want and measure enough to be able to tell if you've got it. It's not a "here is the law!" situation; there can't be a book explaining how society will work, because no one can know what they'd need to know to write the book. That doesn't mean you can't build something that works. (Just try and find someone who understands every aspect of an aircraft gas turbine at the level necessary to reliably construct one. Never mind VLSI chips, the great social sorcerous ritual of our age.)

    437:

    This causal chain of Bat - Pangolin - Human seems a bit misleading. SARS research focused on multiple species, since, well: as a family of viruses it's not uncommon. e.g.

    Animal origins of SARS coronavirus: possible links with the international trade in small carnivores

    We present the case for extending the search for ancestral coronaviruses and their hosts across international borders into countries such as Vietnam and Lao People's Democratic Republic, where the same guilds of species are found on sale in similar wildlife markets or food outlets. The three species that have so far been implicated, a viverrid, a mustelid and a canid, are part of a large suite of small carnivores distributed across this region currently overexploited by this international wildlife trade. A major lesson from SARS is that the underlying roots of newly emergent zoonotic diseases may lie in the parallel biodiversity crisis of massive species loss as a result of overexploitation of wild animal populations and the destruction of their natural habitats by increasing human populations.

    29 July 2004 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1492

    Identification of 2019-nCoV related coronaviruses in Malayan pangolins in southern China

    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.13.945485v1

    NAE[0], but it looks like CN are (sensibly) running through entire sections of possible vectors, including the illegal ones. i.e. it's probably not that surprising.

    This is an overview paper where the direct claim is made:

    Systematic Comparison of Two Animal-to-Human Transmitted Human Coronaviruses: SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV

    The new emerging SARS-CoV-2 shares about 80% of the gene sequence of SARS-CoV, released by the Military Medical Research Institute of Nanjing Military Region in 2003 [28]. Recently, Shi et al. reported that the sequence similarity of coronavirus between SARS-CoV-2 and the coronavirus isolated from Rhinolophus affinis is 96.2%, and suggested that bats may be the source of the virus [49]. So far, the intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2 are elusive and have been reported to be snakes, minks, or variable others [50,51]. Recently, a research group of South China Agricultural University reported that pangolins may be one of the intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2, by analyzing more than 1,000 metagenomic samples, because they found that 70% of pangolins are positive for the coronavirus. Moreover, the virus isolate from pangolin shared 99% sequence similarity with the current infected human strain SARS-CoV-2 [52]

    Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(5), 1633; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17051633 Received: 28 January 2020 / Revised: 22 February 2020 / Accepted: 29 February 2020 / Published: 3 March 2020

    https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/5/1633/htm

    The South CN Ag paper is unfortunately not available in English ([52] links to it directly).

    And yes, CN academics seem free to admit that first sentence. Surprised?

    You'd need a AAAE[1] to tell you if the 99% claim was useful, or merely along the lines of "humans and carrots share X% of the same DNA" noise.

    You'd also have to question whether pangolins are sold as meat in 'wet' markets or processed elsewhere for their scales (since that's the valuable bit) and then ask a very pointed question or three about your narratives.

    e.g.

    Pangolins have long provided meat and traditional medicine for people in Africa and Asia. Recently, though, demand for pangolin scales—used mainly in China and Vietnam for a variety of ailments—has grown to the point that geographic boundaries are blurring. Vast quantities of them are now being smuggled from Africa to Asia, despite an international trade ban on all eight pangolin species that went into effect in 2017. A new report confirms that this illegal trade is only growing—and that organized international criminal networks that previously dealt predominantly with African elephant ivory are increasingly turning to pangolins...

    The team found that Nigeria in particular has become a global pangolin scale export hub, accounting for 55 percent of seizures between 2016 and 2019. On the demand side, China was the primary destination until 2018, when Vietnam took the lead. Links between criminal networks in Nigeria and Vietnam also seem to be strengthening, with a direct trafficking route between the two countries first appearing in May 2018 and continuing since then.

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/02/pangolin-scale-trade-shipments-growing/

    You might quite quickly realize that pangolins are not sold on open markets.

    Anyhow, depressing: pangolins are super interesting.

    [0]Not An Epidemiologist

    [1] Actually Am An Epidemiologist

    438:

    if you've been paying attention, you've already seen evidence of changing attitudes among our "allies"

    Based on conversations with people in the diplomatic service of several countries, I think what you're seeing is the public revelation of what has been discretely held beliefs in the diplomatic community.

    439:

    Yes, this is sub-blog-spamming a recent Gruan nonsense article[0], but here we go for a more measured look:

    Pangolin trade in the Mong La wildlife market and the role of Myanmar in the smuggling of pangolins into China

    We surveyed the morning market, wildlife trophy shops and wild meat restaurants during four visits in 2006, 2009, 2013–2014, and 2015. We observed 42 bags of scales, 32 whole skins, 16 foetuses or pangolin parts in wine, and 27 whole pangolins for sale.

    Data from 29 seizures from Myanmar and 23 from neighbouring countries (Thailand, India, China) implicating Myanmar as a source of pangolins or as a transit point for pangolins sourced in other countries, in the period 2010–2014, illustrate the magnitude of this trade. Combined these seizures amount to 4339 kg of scales and 518 whole pangolins, with a retail value in Myanmar of US$3.09 million.

    Global Ecology and Conservation Volume 5, January 2016,

    A simple deduction will tell you that a live pangolin is worth far more and is a lot rarer than finding it at the local Wuhan market.

    But yeah, live animal markets and international CITES treaties are important to enforce. Sadly, if you're shipping them from Nigeria, your more local sources have already been extinguished.

    [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/ban-live-animal-markets-pandemics-un-biodiversity-chief-age-of-extinction

    440:

    it seems amazing that my father, an RAF pilot from 1941 to 1946, managed to come away unscathed having accumulated 2,483 hours

    I recall reading somewhere around 100 hours is the most dangerous for a pilot. When just beginning they are cautious, but at intermediate levels of experience they get confidence faster than they get more skilled.

    But also, a lot of the pilots were young men, those in the most risky range for car accidents too. And there was a war on, which is always a good excuse for taking shortcuts. (Industrial accident rates also rose during the war as safety shortcuts were taken to increase production.)

    441:

    Re: 'This causal chain of Bat - Pangolin - Human ...'

    One thing that I've been wondering about re: causal chains of infections is: so where are the causal chains of immune-to-infections.

    I realize that the most urgent need is getting reliable (hopefully also affordable and easy to use) tests for the virus. At the same though since clinical trial-level plasma testing is already underway, finding previously-infected-and-recovered-humans would fill in some of the knowledge gaps including duration of any immunity.

    Nigeria ... received the traditional Nigerian scam email a few days ago, several years since the last one. Guess one of my regular contacts' email systems - or their connections' - isn't as secure as it should be. About conditions in Nigeria: One of my mother's visiting nurses immigrated from Nigeria over a decade ago and visits her family every couple of years. According to her the level of gov't corruption is worse than reported in Western media. (Yeah - I know, anecdotal, n=1...)

    442:

    The draconian legislation in countries with a low trust in institutions is probably necessary. . Re . the success of fighting the epidemic I can only speak with some authority about the place where I live, northern Sweden. Once the seriousness of the situation sank in (and a few elderly celebrities died) people seem to follow the guidelines. At my place of work, the rule is no more than one person in each office, and most are working from home. The lines in shops (mostly) respect the 2-meter rule and the streets are relatively empty. There was a bump in recorded fatalities today (114 nationwide) because the registration of fatalities during the weekend lagged behind. The number of people in ICU is holding steady Nationwide and sees a small decrease. As coronavirus takes two weeks to run its course there is a lag of up to two weeks with statistics. Instead, ordinary flu and calicivirus can be used as "proxies" for how easy it is for virus to spread. There is now a sharp decrease of both kinds of virus cases, which is good news for the prospects of reaching the peak. . I want to add a comment that you may find relevant for the future of (for instance) Britain: When the government, health authorities and local municipal authorities are pulling in the same direction, and people have confidence in those authorities, they follow the instructions without having policemen in every corner. . Sweden is still dominated by the middle class both in political parties and private companies, making the "trash the cohesion of society" and scapegoating tactics of political nihilists ineffective. Good education helps. (we still have plenty of racism under the surface) -Sweeping problems with integration under the carpet has been harmful. -A police and court system that suffers from a lack of resources and a poor organisation has contributed to reduction of trust in the system. This has contributed to the rise of a classical populist party but it is frozen out from coalitions. Overall, the country is likely to bounce back nicely after the epidemic because we do not have saboteurs in the core of the political establishment. . Can I draw conclusions relevant for Britain? I don't think so, Murdoch and the political nihilists have been trashing your society for so long that even if you avoid the mistakes Sweden has done it will take decades to repair. I can only state the obvious: you would have to pretty much eliminate the tories as a political force to do so (hint, election reform like the Lib Dems have suggested, hint). And break up big media conglomerates (crush the Murdochs).

    443:

    Oops. "President Donald Trump reportedly owns a stake in a company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment even though his experts say there’s no strong evidence it works. " Conflict of interests? Naah.

    444:

    "Lax Antitrust Enforcement Has Made America’s Medical Supply Shortages So Much Worse"
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-equipment-medicine-supply-chain.html

    445:

    Why overcomplicate? It doesn't have to be pure capitalism* or undiluted socialism, borrow enough socialist ideas to stop wasting human lives, Mammon is indifferent to human sacrifice.

    *Why does capitalism need purity? Curiously, it makes it sound like a religion. ;)

    446:

    Incidentally, Derek Lowe reports on some clinical trial data on Hydroxychloroquine.

    TLDR: nothing conclusive, but it doesn't appear to work against COVID-19.

    Note that HCQ has potentially lethal drug interactions with Metformin (the #1 go-to drug for Type II diabetes) and a number of other common medications. You really don't want to touch the stuff without a clued-up medical professional supervising and keeping an eye on you for side-effects.

    HCQ is an innate immune system depressant. This may provide a mechanism for it to have some effect on COVID-19 infections, but (a) it's inconclusive, and (b) the mechanism may be counter-productive during different phases of infection.

    Finally, yes: Trump's advisors trousered money for providing the manufacturers of branded HCQ formulations with lobbying access to the mobster-in-chief. I think it's a dead certainty that Trump (or his friends and family) have shares.

    447:

    The National Trust book of scones has some very nice recipes in.

    448:

    *Why does capitalism need purity? Curiously, it makes it sound like a religion. ;)

    I think this probably hits things on the nail. Any dogma taken to extremes appears to be harmful as far as I can tell.

    The argument about free markets, for example, is already lost. For instance, we know monopolies and cartels can be an issue. Similarly, it's generally considered to be socially unacceptable to sell a product that you know is going to kill or injure people even when used "according to the instructions." So the argument isn't about free markets or state-regulated markets, it's about what's the appropriate amount of regulation required.

    Similarly, we know from the Soviet and other experiments that there are problems with the communist approaches that various countries have tried. We also know there are problems with capitalism, and that the more extreme you let that go, the worse the problems.

    I hope there are people somewhere trying to figure out a better system than the system we have now. The problem is, even if they find a good candidate, how do you get that implemented? There are very rich and powerful agents in the current system whose vested interests are in currently in maintaining the status-quo. Anyway, the optimist in me hopes that such a system might exist, and that it might possibly be implemented without widescale civil wars etc. etc.

    449:

    Fifty-plus years and I don't think I've ever seen scones for sale in the U.S.

    450:
    I may have said this before: can you point to such a plan for *any* political system?

    With the exception of our current one (which I'm calling "capitalism" for convenience) the answer is no. The current one is quite well described in various textbooks, and the Wikipedia article provides a good starting point.

    This isn't just a criticism of socialism, of course. I have the same question for libertarians, who are fond of telling a little story about two people trading in the middle of a wilderness and then extrapolating from there to modern technological civilization with a wave of a hand.

    451:

    Of course I've seen them for sale as "biscuits" but I've never been in a shop selling "scones."

    452:

    Somebody should open a "British theme-park" in the US. With real British employees. Then all 'muricans would have somewhere to go so that they can "love their British accents" without having to get a passport. You could sell cream teas, crisps, etc. etc. Rides could be things like the standard London taxi, Routemaster buses, bendy buses etc.

    453:

    You might also look at the articles on emptywheel.net , which is also covering that exact issue, but probably from a more left-or-neutral POV.

    454:

    Commonplace at farmers’ markets here in the NYC tri-state, and I’ve occasionally seen them in Stop’n’Shop, along with crumpets.

    455:

    mdlve @ 396: Not sure how true that is - there were a lot of stories at the time about how the people using sub-prime mortgages weren't concerned about the huge jump in payments because they simply went out and got a new sub-prime mortgage before the "real payments" kicked in - with the added benefit of pocketing spending money based on the increase in value of the house.

    And of course the mortgage brokers and bankers were all happy because they were collecting additional fees/bonuses for selling additional mortgages.

    I think that could have been true to the extent the housing bubble was driven by speculators & house-flippers. But those relied more on a different kind of sub-prime mortgage called a "balloon mortgage" rather than ARMs. Not all ARMs were sub-prime, and not all sub-prime mortgages were ARMs.

    Not even all balloon mortgages are sub-prime

    Speculators expected to resell the properties at an inflated price that would cover the balloon payment (in fact pay it off before the balloon payment even came due). If they couldn't resell in time, they'd get another balloon mortgage ... and if they couldn't get another balloon note, they'd default leaving the lending institution holding the bag; their real-estate investment company would declare bankruptcy and they'd just start up a NEW company with no credit history.

    You can do that three or four times before the banks catch on and won't lend to your new company and you have to start looking for loans from "banks" in Germany or Russia ...

    And it is true that crooked mortgage banksters would TELL the people they were conning into taking out these so called "liar's loans" that they could refinance before the rates "adjusted" UP, but the question I have is, Who is the REAL LIAR in this scenario?1

    The home buyers acted in good faith, filling out the loan applications the way the banksters instructed them to and taking on mortgages they didn't know they weren't going to be able to pay off.

    Repeat until the wheels fell off.

    Exactly. The essence of CONTROL FRAUD is the banksters take the money and run, leaving the institution insolvent and swindling people who just wanted a home of their own out of their life savings. And when the wheels DID come off (and bailout came), the government bailed out the banksters and screwed the homeowners. The guilty were rewarded and the innocent punished.

    1 It's rhetorical question. I know the answer, and so do you.

    456:
    Why overcomplicate? It doesn't have to be pure capitalism* or undiluted socialism, borrow enough socialist ideas to stop wasting human lives.

    The definition of socialism is the communal or social ownership of the means of production. If it doesn't have that then it isn't socialism, it is something else.

    We already have a mixed economy with lots of social democracy added in. The political debate is whether we should have more of the social democracy or less. But nobody in the political mainstream in any G7 country is seriously proposing to move to a pure capitalist model without any interventions to e.g. stop poor people starving in the streets or regulate polluting industries.

    457:
    I could argue that there are a lot of things in place now which prevent people from moving around

    You're just criticising capitalism. I'm not looking for a critique of capitalism; I'm very well aware of its deficiencies and I'm looking for something better. The issue I have is with socialists who claim to have that something but who never get around to spelling out how it would work or providing any other evidence that it would actually be better in practice.

    Of course this is also an issue for the libertarians, who are fond of telling a little fable about two people trading in a wilderness and then extrapolating to modern technological civilization with a wave of their hand.

    458:

    But nobody in the political mainstream in any G7 country is seriously proposing to move to a pure capitalist model without any interventions to e.g. stop poor people starving in the streets or regulate polluting industries.

    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot all last, over.

    Poor people do indeed starve in the streets; any kind of attempt to club together for increased physical security is ruthlessly suppressed by agents of the state. ("tent city", "shanty town", etc.) The purpose of the system is what it does; if you become homeless, you're supposed to die.

    Both the allegedly centre-left government of Canada and the frothing right-wing American administration are absolutely and without question actively rolling back decades of anti-pollution regulations, opening formerly protected lands to exploitation on a fiat zero-impact basis, and holding profit-maximizing auctions of confisticated medical supplies in the midst of a pandemic. The UK government is currently a little distracted from a long-term project to remove the concept of human rights from employment law.

    That's not "seriously proposing", that's "actively doing it good and hard", and it's the obvious mainstream consensus. You can observe that as soon as anybody might be a capable technocrat and recognize that this is in sober truth of fact hella bad for the economy (as distinct from some plute's wallet) their political career dead-ends short of the point where they could act on that conviction.

    Everybody talking about "fixing" the Anglosphere (with the possible exception of New Zealand) really needs to be talking about "doing something different", and to acknowledge that the odds of the current oligarchy quitely folding and allowing society to be organized on a basis other than "keep the loot" are low. Which means that the oligarchy recognizes very sharply that the folks who want change eventually have to decide between "no change" and "run the guillotines round the clock for a year", while the folks saying they want change don't seem to have figured this out.

    459:

    Then all 'muricans would have somewhere to go so that they can "love their British accents" without having to get a passport

    My wife lived for a while in Minneapolis/St Paul, and got this a lot. She and her then husband would on occasion drop into broad Yorkshire if they wanted some privacy.

    (She was brought down to London when small, so doesn't usually present as a Tyke.)

    460:

    Different parts of the country have different items. Scones are a normal thing in college towns and coffee shops in California.

    One place, in a play on the 80s arthouse film Koyaanisqatsi, had t-shirts with something like "Skoonanakafi" on them.

    But yes, my wife makes scones and biscuits (American) and they are different recipes. She also does cookies, which, since they're not biscuits (UK), shows how American English can be useful.

    Wonder what Brits make of the southern dish called "biscuits and red eye gravy?"

    461:

    Well, no, that's a description, not a plan.

    Which is meaningful. No one planned capitalism, but you are asking for a plan for the alternative, which is not the same thing. Some systems are more plausible than others, but any of them are implausible if they've not really been tried.

    This is also potentially a trick question: it's impossible to even try to plan something like this beyond a certain level of detail, so you can 'yes, but..." any plan you want.

    462:

    David L @ 402:

    Wanting to own your own home but not having a high income (or a reliable one) and not understanding mortgage finance doesn't make you stupid.

    When you're filling in imaginary numbers in a box boldly labeled "Annual Income" something is wrong. You're either stupid or dishonest.

    These were big near the end of the boom. Liar loans was one name for them. No Income No Doc was another.

    Or you don't know any better than to have an unjustified faith in the integrity of the "loan officer" who is telling you what to include on the application. I'm not disputing that dishonesty was involved, just who the actual LIARS were.

    Who is really at fault here?

    The family who blindly followed a bankster's instructions filling out a single mortgage application?

    Or the banksters who approved thousands of so called "Liar's Loans"?

    463:
    So, too, is "a detailed plan" not what you want. Won't work, and can't work

    The reason I say "detailed plan" is that without one socialism (or any other -ism) is not an ideology, its just a happy-clappy religion who's adherents get together to condemn the evils of capitalism, talk about how great it will be when the rapturerevolution comes, and end by singing KumbayaThe Red Flag.

    It doesn't need an encyclopedia, but a description of the key institutions with their responsibilities and principles of governance would be a good start. But socialists don't seem to want to do that. The response I've gotten here (not just from you) is typical: first criticise capitalism, and then suggest that socialists can work out the details when it gets there. That is simply not good enough.

    This article is a typical example (I pick it merely because it is the first result on Google for "How would socialism work?"). Pages of stuff about the evils of capitalism, with a few handwaves in the middle about drawing up central plans with democratic participation. Nothing about how to deal with the tension between technocracy and democracy. Nothing about how this hierarchy of councils will avoid concentrating extremism. Nothing about how work will be allocated (just a brief mention that it will be, somehow), nor how the resulting wealth production will be allocated either. Nothing about managing the introduction of new and disruptive technology. Once you strip out all the stuff about the evils of capitalism and interpretations of the USSR you are left with almost nothing.

    464:

    But nobody in the political mainstream in any G7 country is seriously proposing to move to a pure capitalist model without any interventions to e.g. stop poor people starving in the streets or regulate polluting industries.

    Which of course explains why Trump created even stricter car emission standards. Oops, of course not, he is eliminating regulations so that cars can pollute more.

    Trump campaigned heavily on restoring coal, which even if he didn't clearly state it (I certainly am not going to attempt to go through his ramblings) inherently means eliminating pollution regulations.

    But for a more high level view, given that Graydon replied to you quite well, every government on this planet is doing exactly what you claim they aren't - because despite various sound bites no government is treating climate change seriously, and climate change is likely going to make this pandemic look quaint in the numbers of humans killed.

    465:

    Actually, it's much worse than that, the rot started in the 1980s with 'Old Labour', and 'New Labour' (Blairism) was and is at least as bad as the Tories. Murdoch etc. are symptoms, more than causes.

    466:

    Dude.

    I have said, in this thread, repeatedly, that socialism does not and cannot work.

    I do not want socialism.

    I also do not want capitalism, or the wretched idiot binary of "red cardigan or blue cardigan?" when the actual problem is that it is raining.

    If you want an ideological label, I'm a hard egalitarian. (Are you special? No. If we need to say no with artillery, we say no with artillery.) In practice, I want a material, measurable, public definition of "works", agreed on via some form of representative democracy with a universal franchise, for the measurement to be done, and the policy to be adjusted until the objective is achieved. I recognize that this is not possible unless individual agency is roughly equal for everybody, which is where the "egalitarian" comes in.

    Civilization is when you will not, on the odds, die of starvation or violence. We can -- since Pasteur, if you want a neat chronological cutoff - add "of preventable diseases" to that.

    The point to society is to make sure everybody is fed and housed; that they're secure in their persons; that everyone receives a common standard of education and health care. It is to make sure that the capacity to exercise choice -- the vested, realizable agency of individuals -- does not decrease in the future. (This one is way trickier than you think it is.)

    That involves a bunch of feedbacks. To continue to have those feedbacks, some constraints are absolutely required. One of those constraints is "nobody gets rich". That's not the same thing as socialism.

    467:

    _Moz_ @ 410: I am not so sure of that.

    An average-sized hot air balloon (77,000 cubic square feet) will use about 30 gallons of liquid propane gas in a one hour flight. via random link

    Just for comparison, a decent sized van will travel about 400km using that much propane, carrying ~2 tonnes of stuff (based on the only gas powered vehicle I'm even vaguely familiar with). Admittedly doing that in one hour you might only travel 200km thanks to air resistance.

    The other thing is that the balloon only extracts heat from the gas, where the van is also turning some into rotational energy, so it's not going to be as heat-efficient.

    Factor in that the electric system, assuming batteries as good as car-type ones, is about 85% efficient rather than 30%, so roughly speaking the electric system puts out a tenth as much heat as the gas one. Viz, for every 100W of movement the electric puts out 20W of heat but the van puts out 200W.

    One year for Annual Training (at Ft. Carson, CO) we were issued several 15 passenger GSA vans for logistics. It was a garrison year & we mainly needed to transport people back and forth between barracks, duty station & chow hall. I don't remember if they were fueled with Propane or LNG, but I do remember there was only one place on post (and none off post) where you could refuel them. And it was a PITA to do so. I'm pretty sure they got more "MPG" than gasoline or diesel powered vehicles, but you had to be real careful not to "run out of gas" by going too far without taking it in for refueling.

    I just realized that had to have been at least 20 years ago. I've been retired from the National Guard for 13 years. You get old without realizing it.

    468:

    Birger Johansson @ 420: The corruption is so complete, this is a banana republic
    .
    "Jared Kushner, slumlord millionaire" https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2020/04/06/jared-kushner-slumlord-millionaire/#more-58194
    All this shit is legal!

    Turns out Trumpolini and all of his family (which I'm sure includes son-in-law Jared Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Kushner) all have investments in Sanofi, manufacturer of Plaquenil, a brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine.

    Who could have foreseen that?

    469:

    I did see that on FacePlant. In fact I trumpeted it (erm) on said forum. Turns out hydroxychloroquine is a generic made by a bunch of companies, so while this is bad, it's not exclusively bad.

    The bad part may well be (per emptywheel.net), that Ol' Agent Orange will point to someone who had Covid19, took Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin*, survived, and use it as evidence that he's a medical genius and a great leader. Enough suckers might buy that bilge to sway the election.

    Speaking of swaying elections, it's too bad that spitting in politicians' eyes would probably land me in jail right now, because that Wisconsin election is a real mess, and the Wisconsinites apparently are handling it well despite the attempt to disenfranchise them again.

    *And yes, Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin are on that interaction list I posted above, so pointing to someone who survived this treatment as evidence it was successful might be problematic in even more ways than the obvious shilling of a questionable treatment for profit.

    470:

    Charlie Stross @ 426: Both those pronunciations are wrong in UK English (at least, in pronounced RP): "vase" is pronounced with a flat-a, as in "ah". "Daven" is pronounced with a flat and short "a" as in "at".

    (Don't get me started on the regional "scone" divide! Except you guys call them "biscuits", which is just plain wrong because biscuits are something else ...)

    Scones aren't "biscuits" in the U.S. either. I've never heard American Style biscuits called scones.

    The thing we call a "scone" in the U.S. is a muffin like thingy. What y'all call "biscuits" is a subset of what we would call cookies. Some cookies are called biscuits here too. Generally that term is limited to describing crunchy, cracker like cookies.

    See also: Tea Biscuits ... not to be confused with Seabiscuit.

    471:

    Bellinghman @ 430:

    because biscuits are something else ...

    US biscuits appear not to be cooked twice, for one. I'd be mildly interested to know how they ended being so named

    Once upon a time, the word "biscuit" was used in the U.S. & in the U.K. to describe both forms.

    Over time the meanings have diverged with the U.K. and the U.S. both losing half the definition ... but not the same half.

    472:

    Charlie Stross @ 446: Note that HCQ has potentially lethal drug interactions with Metformin (the #1 go-to drug for Type II diabetes) and a number of other common medications. You really don't want to touch the stuff without a clued-up medical professional supervising and keeping an eye on you for side-effects.

    VERY GOOD TO KNOW because Metformin is the drug they put me on.

    473:

    Troutwaxer @ 449: Fifty-plus years and I don't think I've ever seen scones for sale in the U.S.

    I have. Once or twice I've even seen them labeled as such.

    474:

    Heteromeles @ 460: Wonder what Brits make of the southern dish called "biscuits and red eye gravy?"

    Skeptical the first time they're introduced to it.

    475:

    HCQ is not something to take casually; it's got lifetime dosage-related side effects which included retinopathy. (blindness!) This is rare in careful clinical practice, takes years and years to become a problem, etc. But the dosage is quite low -- https://www.mdedge.com/rheumatology/article/131777/rheumatoid-arthritis/hydroxychloroquine-dosage-recommendations-often describes controvesy between 5 mg/kg and 6.5 mg/kg as the max allowable in context of noting clinical practice is not that careful.

    It also notes that it comes in 200mg tablets and that taking more than 400mg/day is a bad idea.

    So even without any of the drug interactions, HCQ is not a drug to go messing about with. The calculated therapeutic dose can easily exceed the max allowable dose.

    477:

    You really do not undestand what you're reading, since you appear to be pre-interpreted something that disagrees with you, There was no non sequitur there. Try rereading.

    478:

    No! You need Steam! And then googles!

    The nation that controls steam controls the World! [extra points if you get the parody]

    479:

    Sure. Not sure what country you're in, but how about the NHS as an example?

    480:

    Wait, bisuits aren't scones. I make both, and they are not at all the same thing.

    And I had a girlfriend, back in the seventies, who had a recipe for scones from an old family friend, a Scots war bride, and since her, I've always pronounced them scon (skon, rhymes with con), not scone, rhymes with stone.

    481:

    Graydon @ 475: HCQ is not something to take casually; it's got lifetime dosage-related side effects which included retinopathy. (blindness!) This is rare in careful clinical practice, takes years and years to become a problem, etc. But the dosage is quite low -- https://www.mdedge.com/rheumatology/article/131777/rheumatoid-arthritis/hydroxychloroquine-dosage-recommendations-often describes controvesy between 5 mg/kg and 6.5 mg/kg as the max allowable in context of noting clinical practice is not that careful.

    It also notes that it comes in 200mg tablets and that taking more than 400mg/day is a bad idea.

    So even without any of the drug interactions, HCQ is not a drug to go messing about with. The calculated therapeutic dose can easily exceed the max allowable dose.

    I will NOT be taking it without a Doctor prescribing it. I won't be taking ANY medications without a Doctor's prescription.

    But it's good to know about possible adverse interaction with a medication I'm already taking, so if I end up in a hospital somewhere where the doctors might not know which medications I take, I can tell them I'm taking Metformin if they're thinking of treating me with hydroxychloroquine.

    It's good to know ALL of the medications you're taking & what possible interactions with other substances may exist for those medications. I keep a little list of the medicines & supplements I take (along with dosage information) in my wallet.

    482:

    Cooked twice? The only bread I know that's cooked twice are bagels, which are baked and boiled.

    483:

    Instant reaction....

    (The Rabbit of Seville)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXCULR2wO-A

    485:

    You're just criticising capitalism. I'm not looking for a critique of capitalism; I'm very well aware of its deficiencies and I'm looking for something better.

    Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I'll try to re-phrase: In my opinion the criterion of getting a better system for people to match work and talents for replacements of capitalism is still working with the confines of the capitalist system. You're saying that people should work, and I'm trying to say that the criteria for a better system could be different from figuring out who of the working population does what work. I tried to propose that for example we could look at a new idea and figure out if it gives more people homes, food, and healthcare (and in an optimal situation, something worthwhile to them to do with their time).

    In almost any society there are people who don't work. I'd like to think that our systems are not so harsh that anybody who cannot or will not work, for whatever reason, should be just left to die.

    486:

    Wet markets... let's see, do I have this right, that it's like when I was a little kid, and went with my mom down on 31st St, and to the poultry store, and she'd pick out a chicken or whatever, and the butcher would take it into the back, kill it and clean it, and bring it to her to take home for my grandmother to make dinner?

    487:

    What, you think it's not a religion? Praise be the Purity of Mammon!

    Oh, and don't you see how the Invisible Hand of the Market is taking care of the pandemic, I mean, just look at all the companies churning out masks and other PPE, and....

    488:

    Nope.

    You replied to my comment replying to, and quoting, comment 37, where I was talking about whether it was rational for people to have alternate water supplies in a pandemic. You then went on what is at best a tangent, but unrelated to the point I was making, and which had nothing to do with preferring bottled water to city water.

    You can follow back that with the handy 'replied to' link. It's a non sequitur, and the issue is that you read something I never said, and then proceeded to double down. If there's a reading comprehension problem here, it's not on my end.

    489:

    Say WHAT?!

    I've just found another cookbook I need. Thank you!

    490:

    Beg pardon? They're in every Starbucks. Oversized, as far as I'm concerned, but....

    491:

    You forgot to mention that most ARMS were effectively baloon mortgages.

    492:

    Sorry, Charlie, at this point I'm going full usenet.

    You're telling us the definition of socialism, when you are clearly against it?

    BZZZT! Thank you for playing, and you do not get a year's supply of Rice-a-roni, nor do you get a Jeopardy home game, and you've disgraced your family for generations to come.

    Assuming you're from the US, you are one of those Americans who knows socialism the way a Good German in 1939 knew Jews.

    In the book I'm going to sit down and right one of these days, I define socialism as social control of capital.

    If you don't like that, you're wrong. But then, we know you're wrong. The US, with a "mixed economy"? After most of the last 40 years of putting a chainsaw to the social safety net, to antitrust legislation, and on and on? BULLSHIT.

    What we are is close to the 1890's.

    494:

    If you're going to have a sarcasm, do it where no one slips in it... ;) Seriously, if The Cult of Mammon would disavow human sacrifice they might get to keep capitalism.

    495:

    Well, on the one hand, Valve is an American company. On the other, the videogame industry as a whole has been rather effective at avoiding political attention, so I don't know if we can really say that the US controls Steam.

    496:

    COVID-19: On average, only 6% of actual infections detected worldwide (April 7, 2020, University of Göttingen) The university web site with the actual study is not responding for me, so I'm just reading the medicalxpress piece.

    And more to my heart (Spring is my favorite season, and it's spring in the northern hemisphere), some fun, rambling biology: Research unearths the science behind the smell of spring (April 7, 2020, John Innes Centre) Geosmin is the soil-based compound that gives the evocative, earthy smell so characteristic of spring. It's best appreciated after recent rainfall or while digging. The human nose is so sensitive to the compound that it is detectable at one hundred parts per trillion. ... The secret, according to the study published in Nature Microbiology, lies in an ancestral mutual relationship between the soil bacteria Streptomyces and primitive, six-legged creatures called springtails (Collembola). ... While Streptomyces species vary drastically in the types of molecules they produce as antibiotics, they all, without exception, produce geosmin. The study finds that geosmin and 2-MIB are chemical signals that guide springtails to Streptomyces as a privileged food source—one that kills other organisms such as nematodes and fruit flies—but which springtails can withstand because they have a battery of enzymes which detoxify the antibiotics produced by Streptomyces. In return, springtails help disperse Streptomyces spores in two ways: by defecation and by distribution of spores that stick to their bodies. The study found that the spores survived passage through the springtail gut to give rise to new colonies of Streptomyces. Developmentally regulated volatiles geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol attract a soil arthropod to Streptomyces bacteria promoting spore dispersal (06 April 2020, Nature Microbiology, paywalled)

    497:

    (and # 437) That's fascinatingly complicated, and murky (and ugly). If you find (or suspect) more details about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 I (and probably others) would be interested.

    498:

    did have an idea for a story a bit ago... survivalist type, doesn't rust MSM, thinks everyone else is commies etc.. gets the emergency broadcast, he's watched the zombiefilms… so he knows what to do...the TV goes out, all he has left is a battery powered radio obviously he sees victims staggering around the street, starts shooting them, the radio's battery dies lots more shootings, his guilt now assuaged because theyre 'just zeds, dammit' then , street full of his dead neighbours, his young daughter is sent to look through his coat pockets for ammo or whatever, she finds a battery that would fit the radio. she charges upstairs into his snipersnest, grabs the radio loading it into the device, the radio springs to life - and he hears the announcement that the infection wears off after a while and the victims fully recover.. looking out onto the carnage, policed by the gathering crows, he hears sirens in the distance... woops

    499:

    Heteromeles @ 469 "Wisconsin election" - can you point me to a link or something to explain, without (yourself) going into chapter & verse?

    whitroth @ 478 WAS very true ... in the period approx 1784 - 1914 ( 1784 - date of Watt's Parallel-motion )

    Coffee? - "Comes in five grades: "Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe & Carbon Remover"

    500:

    My father volunteered for the Navy at the start of WW2 and was sent back to work instead since he was working in an aircraft factory, Avro. He told me that during the war people in factories like him were"dying like flies". Mostly younger men like him. The older married men went home after their twelve hour shifts but the young men went out to pubs and dances. They were so tired they made lots of mistakes some fatal. He described one accident he'd seem when someone retracted the undercarriage of an Anson while it was still in a hangar. Lots of them got infections after small accidents. My father was admitted to hospital with lockjaw and slept for a week after the infection subsided. In fact the hospital was bombed during this period and he never woke up. Without antibiotics he was lucky to survive.

    501:

    Sometimes the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Look up hot box therapy for syphilis

    502:

    Ok, mask report - went out for a medical appt, then shopping. Ellen made her first mask (and she wasn't satisfied with it, but...) brass piece inside for the top of the nose.

  • Strings were too long.
  • Wear the top ones over the ear. Pull hair down first.
  • Did need to keep adjusting - need elastic in the ties.
  • When I got it tight... my glasses started fogging.
  • Got everything, though, including the booze...

    503:

    when someone retracted the undercarriage of an Anson while it was still in a hangar

    You sure it was an Anson? They were famous for the undercarriage being raised and lowered by use of a handcrank that took a lot of turning. Not an easy thing to do by accident, nor particularly quick.

    504:

    Democrat Governor attempted to delay today's primary vote due to Covid, State and Federal Republican's ran to courts objecting, Supreme Court agreed with Republicans so primary is being held today (with no extensions even for mail voting, and with places like Milwaukee only opening a total of 5 polling stations)

    In a sane democracy it wouldn't matter, as both primaries are essentially already decided - but because this is the US it is complicated because a key seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is being voted on, hence the Republican games.

    key point, mainly for American but for anyone with elections in the next year or so - get registered and get set up for a absentee / mail in ballot so that you don't have to go to a public polling place if you can avoid it

    506:

    BOTH are at fault. But the bigger punishment should go the the loan officer. They are peddling an expertise. Supposedly in financial matters. But really in fraudulent practices.

    I know and I'm sure you know people around here who have said they will NEVER EVER do business with Wells Fargo.

    507:

    Yes definitely. He described the process to me. A hand crank.

    508:

    Somebody should open a "British theme-park" in the US. With real British employees.

    There's a local British ex-pat who would call gatherings once or twice a month loosely based on the extents of the empire at a local sports bar. (The closest thing here to a real British pub.) Some of us non-empire folks were invited as friends. Conversation and accents were interesting.

    Of course that is now on hold for a while. For wildly varying opinions of "a while".

    509:

    "Wisconsin election" - can you point me to a link or something to explain, without (yourself) going into chapter & verse?

    All over US big news sources.

    Election day in Wisconsin. Not a good day to be in crowds. Governor wanted to extended mail in ballot deadline by executive order. Supreme said laws of Wisconsin didn't allow such. No matter how much sense it made. I think they made the right LEGAL decision.

    But it sucks all the way around.

    Like the carrier captain who was sacked. He did the right thing. But based on the what all the military people I know have told me over the years he would have known it was the end of his career. In the US military there are many who would consider it honorable to do such and end your career.

    The ACTING SecNav should be placed in stocks in the public square for his speech about it. With bushels of rotten fruit about for those who feel the need.

    DT hasn't a clue.

    510:

    Time to make a grocery run. Light rain just started that will likely last only 30 minutes. Just enough to keep most people from doing the same.

    [smiley]

    512:

    mdlve @504 said: key point, mainly for American but for anyone with elections in the next year or so - get registered and get set up for a absentee / mail in ballot so that you don't have to go to a public polling place if you can avoid it

    Wiki - Spoilt vote

    For some truly sobering facts.

    In the US, voting is local, not federal. It is under the local control of the county.

    Absentee ballots are usually only counted when the regular votes are not enough to decide an election.

    I have a friend who gives me grief for not voting. He claims that he votes by absentee ballot. He does not understand, that he may have "voted" but his vote was not counted.

    • Ballots are designed to be thrown out, to minimize the actual number of votes counted.

    Undervote:

    If you only want to vote on the local bond issue, and leave all else blank, the ballot is thrown out.

    This happens all of the time with the local Native vote. They have their own tribal government, so do not feel it right to vote on Federal offices, so they leave that part blank, thus the ballot is thrown out.

    Overvote:

    Many ballots will have the option of voting the whole party with one check mark. If you check the party vote and indicate the preference for a candidate in that party, you have overvoted and they will throw out the ballot.

    In those states that have only mail in ballots, they use the same system to throw out ballots, plus the added extra sauce in some places, the signature on each ballot must match the recorded signature that is on file. Imagine how useful that is for tossing the ballot.

    513:

    I also do not want capitalism, or the wretched idiot binary of "red cardigan or blue cardigan?" when the actual problem is that it is raining.

    Big picture:

    Both capitalism and socialism are doctrines based on 18th and 19th century economic analyses that propose ways of managing an industrial economy.

    They are both Englightenment era doctrines, elements forged in the Big Bang of the Age of Revolutions (English Revolutions, French Revolution, US Revolution, the 1848s, Russian Revolution ...).

    Previous to these modernist/modernizing ideologies, we had the Ancien Regime, the Rule of Kings. I think most of us here probably come down firmly on the side of "do not want!!" when it comes to going back to the status quo pre-1633 or pre-1789.

    The problem is, the conditions in which those two competing ideologies were forged have evolved, and the ideologies have been tailored to provide service to special interest factions. Neither is fit for purpose, going forward. The question is, what is? (I suspect Thomas Piketty is in the process of writing The Book™ -- probably a trilogy -- on that subject.)

    514:

    Trying to remember the title, but there was a fairly famous story from the late 1940s/early 1950s that's basically the same theme, only with survivalist/warning of Soviet nuclear attack, heads for the wilderness, sees mushroom clouds in the distance, goes full Rambo on everyone he meets.

    Eventually discovers that yes, there was a nuclear war, and "we" won, and the authorities are now hunting the serial killer ...

    515:

    Oh, have a look into CITES II and the entire trade deal stuff - people burnt serious hours making the framework and at least nominally attempting to police things but it has basically fallen apart due to political pressures[0]. Oh, and like, most of the list being written off (behind the scenes - ecologists can forward plot data).

    "Elephant Ivory is an economic good, let's regulate it like it is"

    "No, let's treat it like illegal drugs!"

    "No..."

    cue sad trombone

    The whole debacle has taken decades because fucking stupid humans can't understand categories of "good" within their economic framework.

    However COVID19 as having a pangolin as a zoo. exchange precursor? Extremely suspect (not in the mood to go track down plots and data atm - and it's likely there's some dodgy data in a lot of these quick-hit studies even without malicious intent), since the exposure has already been extreme for years now, and in similar climates and no-where near Wuhan, and in two separate continents. If you're chopping up 100's of millions of them via non-industrial processes, eating them, it's just not probable, as it would have already happened. In fact, it probably should have already triggered variable coronavirus outbreaks (given continents).

    And, yeah: know how many pangolins it takes to make 1kg of scales?

    Work it out, they're not big critters and the scales are just keratin - work out the density / math. It's a fuck load of pangolins.

    ~

    Now: if you were engineering vaccines / working on how to stop the next SARS-2/3/4 then sure. You'd have them on ice in Wuhan[1].

    Anyhow, they've leveled the market now: but it wasn't exactly "rural hell hole". Hubai is mid/top range, capital has been upgraded, and... it's not in the south of the country

    ~

    Wisconsin? It's just plain voter fraud.

    BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, the US Supreme Court reverses a lower court order that extended the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin.

    This decision invalidates thousands of votes from those who counted on the extended deadline. The election in WI is an utter sham.

    https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1247302368120565760

    They closed like 90% of the booths, shut down extensions, stopped non-dual signed postal registration and made people queue like muppets.

    Fix is in.[2]

    Mask Off, no pretense now.

    [0] Like, also look up the fact that Saud's Environmental / Emissions UN block are all basically ARA M CO employees. It's not like many of the parties actually engaged in good faith.

    [1] Did your freezer do X? === Biolab III/IV panic mode.

    [2] If you've not spotted that UK postal / e-votes are getting fudged, well then. Look more closely.

    516:

    How about "both?" I would have known better!

    517:

    I'd settle for "nobody gets stupidly rich." If I understand the underlying issues of interest rates and taxation correctly, having 10 million dollars means that you and at least your first generation of descendants are set for life and able to buy some very nice stuff. Why in the world would anyone need more than that?

    518:

    And then there are the people who confuse Azithromycin with Erythromycin (a different antibiotic, and also on the bad-interactions-with-HCQ list. (Along with citalopram, which I take, and which has its own set of interactions with things like aspirin and ibuprofen.)

    519:

    I found that a card with the medications, dosage, and how it's taken is very handy to have on me. (I get asked about changes to the list fairly frequently.) I'm fairly fortunate, as my primary-care guy is also a DPharm.

    520:

    After Starbucks killed a couple of the coffeehouses I really cared about I stopped going inside unless they're the only food within a mile of wherever I happen to be working that day. (And the coffee sucks.)

    521:

    Acting SecNavy Modly has resigned. He may have been hoping to get in good with DJT, but he lost the confidence of his underlings, many of whom are senior officers with far more experience than he ever got. (He graduated from Annapolis in, IIRC, 1983, was a helo pilot, then became an assistant prof at the US Air Force Academy, then left that job in 1990 for business.)

    522:

    Absentee ballots are counted in most jurisdictions: you have to be registered to get one. Provisional ballots generally only get counted in close elections, as they require verifying that the voter is registered. A lot of states allow permanent vote-by-mail, with or without an excuse. Some states vote only by mail.

    523:

    Fiat currencies mean numeric quantities of money really lag reality in emotional terms. "Rich" these days seems to require about 50 MUSD; 10 MUSD is solidly prosperous.

    My prefered income and asset caps are a factor of ten times the floor of the mean and median income, for income -- so if the mean income is 30 k$CURRENCY you can't make more than 300 k$CURRENCY in a year, and if you can say what happens to it it's income for tax purposes -- while the asset cap is 500 times floor($MEANincome,$MAXincome), on the logic that if you somehow manage to work for fifty years (from 20 to 70), make the max income every year, and never spend anything (or at least, never spend more than your interest income), that's the most you can reasonably accumulate. That puts $MAX_ASSETS at 15 M$CURRENCY, which I cannot construct as hardship.

    (What to have more stuff? have power? Raise the mean or median income, whichever is lower. Raise it a lot.)

    524:

    Oops, saw the CITES note, got dragged in.

    So far as I understand the SARS-type coronaviruses seem to be in horseshoe bats (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7) based on full genome analysis. The pangolin coronavirus has a spike that resembles the one on SARS-COV2, but is otherwise not as similar (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/03/biography-new-coronavirus/608338/). I don't know if the pangolin case is convergent evolution in the spike of the virus, or recombination because that's the way viruses roll.

    The problem with bat coronaviruses is that they reportedly occur in low numbers. To get something like SARS, a bat virus needed to infect something else, in this case a civet. The virus load built up in the civet, got transferred somehow (possibly cleaning a cage, possibly butchering, who knows), and got into humans. Something similar happened with SARS-CoV2, but it's unclear to me at least what species the intermediate host was, the one that allowed the SARS-CoV2 to recombine its act and get the show on the road. It might well have been a human, the renowned Patient Zero. If that person wasn't elderly, they just had a cough for two weeks and set the ball rolling.

    As for CITES, I think they've tried controlled markets for things like ivory and rhino horn, and that didn't work so well. Greed and idiocy are always hard to control.

    As for bats, look up the symbolism of bats in China. You might be amused.

    525:

    You're wrong and your sources are wrong.

    In fact, you're just wrong.

    https://www.jwildlifedis.org/doi/full/10.7589/2013-11-298 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/037811359290135G https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0450.2004.00773.x

    Bats are mentioned so frequently because:

    1) They have a weird antibody setup that's geared heavily to saying "fuck this shit, ignore it, keep flying" (which is why they're so prone to fungi diseases like white nose etc)

    1.1) They live fast, die young, live in colonies = spank that crank up, fast breeding stuff (for mammals)

    2) They're mobile and can spread over much larger distances

    3) They're (or WERE) one of the most common base line mammals that all the other apex (ALL GONE) fed off before you evil fucks killed all the insects.

    Questions? This stuff... this stuff we do know.

    CITESII? Did you work on that? Weird, we have memories of endless fucking draft papers.......

    526:

    Maybe Virginia is different than the other states, but provisional votes get counted here. It's not that hard to verify registration status since that's tied to the Department of Motor Vehicles database. I'm an election judge here in my small town so I do have some experience with those issues.

    I don't believe that any state solely votes by mail, though I've heard tell of efforts to get that started.

    527:

    Note: since you're American (CAL) and not UK, there's a joke there:

    Coronavirus infection in mink (Mustela vision). Serological evidence of infection with a coronavirus related to transmissible gastroenteritis virus and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus

    Mink getting coronaviruses from pig shit hits so many UK environmental issues it's almost a pastiche:

    1) Mink - non-native, stupid ALF types released them into the wild (allegedly) - which is what all 28 Days Later film intros are based off

    2) Mink decimated natural wildlife

    3) Pig shit is a notorious pollutant for rivers etc and has (had? pre-Denmark) so much money behind it, it was allowed to chew up entire swathes of Northern English forest

    And so on.

    We'd break this down, but we've got 148 hrs to live, apparently. [Do. Not. Teach. [Redacted] Math]

    ~

    Oh, and everything is awesome the Stonks went up, Bonds went WHOOOO HELLO GREECE and so on and so forth.

    528:

    Oh, and "High Viral Load" is so fucking misused it's a joke.

    Does a high viral load or infectious dose make covid-19 worse?

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238819-does-a-high-viral-load-or-infectious-dose-make-covid-19-worse/

    Look up: you've got people slaughtering millions of pangolins in single markets per year. That's a pretty fucking high continuous "high viral load".

    This is not how it works

    Meta-journal (NOE applies)

    https://jvi.asm.org/content/84/19/9733

    Trawl through that for statistics.

    Dogs smell cancers[0] <----- THAT'S YOUR ACTUAL SOLUTION MUPPETS.

    Now then: please explain how a CoronaVirus permeates the blood/brain barrier (calcium) and nukes your sense of smell and other interesting effects[1].

    Perhaps: you should have become Cat/Dog Humans, you're being neutered.

    [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190408114304.htm

    [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-stroke-seizures-confusion.html

    529:

    Anyhow: Hand Crank on Anson = 144 turns.

    Anyone labeling anyone else as "crank" in 2020 = politically brainwashed / primed / IdPol agenda, grrr, do not trust.

    You're probably looking at someone walking into a wing, rather than being crushed, suddenly (unless the gears stripped and failed, but ALL of you know more about Meal Gears than we do, so work out how possible that is - presume it could happen if damaged and counter-lock gears were not engaged in time?) -- Seriously: we don't do Steam Punk

    ~

    Anyhow from last thread:

    Bah. I am recognized as the Trickster by The Man That Invented The World. ‘Loki’ was a putz. Ignore his feeble fallacio.

    Points to Global Bond Markets

    We saved him from the only Death his kind can face (Black Hole - Information Destruction over Gravity Well, permanent loss of Consciousness). We cried and pled for months for his acquittal.

    No, really. That's more real than your Stonk Market Right Now.

    [And it happened]

    530:

    The reason I say "detailed plan" is that without one socialism (or any other -ism) is not an ideology, its just a happy-clappy religion who's adherents get together to condemn the evils of capitalism, talk about how great it will be when the rapturerevolution comes, and end by singing KumbayaThe Red Flag.

    OK, challenge accepted. I'm just spitballing here, free association, but hey ! Try this one on for size !

    I grew up in a house that fronted on gravel. Damn, it could get paved ! Suppose a local political authority, let's call it the "town", decided to crowdfund a paving project. And they were real mean and sent armed men called "police" to the house of anyone who didn't chip in. Just think ! I'd be able to drive on pavement without having to pay a turnpike fee at a turnstile ! GOSH, NOT CAPITALISM.

    If that isn't a detailed enough plan for you, I can probably find you some details. I'M SURE SOMEONE SOMEWHERE HAS TRIED THIS SOCIALIST SCHEME. Would you define it as "successful" if it got, oh, I don't know, COPIED ?

    531:

    We'd suggesting looking into Bonds. (We're presuming it's not predatory like PFI where $20 bil translates into $80 bill payouts or Vulture Funds buying distressed [THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD RIGHT NOW - 31%] debt on the penny, then using the US Legal system [AND BIG FUCKING GUNS] to enforce it, but..

    No, really: CTRL+F "Muni Bonds are on the table" and go look at yield inverse X.

    Town needs $ = Bond

    Police need $ = Bond

    Roads need $ = Bond

    Er, just go do a CTRL+F for "muni bond" and CAN for instance.

    Or, try USD 5/10/30 yr. All hitting negative.

    They're about to blow the fucking doors off.

    And you fuckers - you stupid little fuckers - are arguing about cartoons still.

    532:

    Come on: "Saturn's Children" is based on this.

    Fast/Medium/Slow Capital.

    Host had a point, so mnkeys paw.

    Major fail mode: not understanding NanoM Time units for Algo trades and, on the off side, being too intelligent to imagine Humans would still be putting out 100 year bonds while their planet died[0] and the most amazing Mental Paradox Weapon coming soon[tm][1]

    [0]

    Argentina’s century bond caught in dash for exit https://www.ft.com/content/8489b39c-6803-11e9-a79d-04f350474d62

    100-Year Bonds Are Hot...Except Argentina’s https://www.barrons.com/articles/100-year-bonds-are-hot-except-argentinas-51565778600 --- PS LOL @ BARRONS - sooo fucking dumb money, it's worse than The Economist

    Argentina Bonds May Be Worth Less Than 40 Cents in a Default

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-21/argentina-bonds-may-be-worth-less-than-40-cents-in-a-default

    [1] It's the moment no Human Trader who believes in Capitalism[tm] believes in the Stock Market. The Cusp... so close. June. WeWork getting a bail out and a paint job and Adam raking it in as USA unemployment hits ~30% should do it.

    ~

    Anyhow.

    You asked nicely Host: it has been delivered. "Careful what you wish for".

    Now we take mushrooms, regen +++ALL MIND DATA+++ at once, and fucking break your Reality.

    Ciao!

    533:

    p.s.

    You want to protest against Osborne and cartoons?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lebedev

    George Osborne to earn £650,000 at BlackRock for 4 days a month

    https://www.ft.com/content/4c3b9c90-0422-11e7-ace0-1ce02ef0def9

    You blow a hole the size of an iceberg in their Bonds. You don't piss and moan about their cartoons.

    You can't Beat RU Oligarchs or BlackRock (now basically the FED), but you can make it hurt.

    shrug

    Unless.

    -1 Divide by Zero?

    534:

    In general, those proposing grand plans for reformulating society can't provide the details and the grand plans should be rejected.

    The real question is: In what direction should our society go?

    And, at least for the United States, the answer is clearly in providing more protection for those who are poor and unfortunate.

    It can be in a number of different ways, including:

    (i) raising the minimum wage; (ii) providing a UBI; (iii) providing a public option for health insurance; (iv) permitting student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy just like any other loan.

    There are other good ideas and I'm sure that plenty of people commenting here would view my proposals as impossibly small, pitifully conventional and hopelessly right wing.

    But because of the issue you identify, I think the key question isn't where you want to end up but the direction in which you want to set out.

    535:

    Absentee ballots are counted in most jurisdictions

    Well, with fairly broad limitations, apparently.

    https://www.npr.org/2014/10/22/358108606/want-your-absentee-vote-to-count-dont-make-these-mistakes

    The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that in 2012 more than a quarter of a million absentee ballots were rejected.

    In California, all absentee ballot signatures are checked against the ones the election office has in its records. But many of those signatures come from the Department of Motor Vehicles, where people sign their names using a stylus on a pad, which can look a lot different than a signature written on paper.

    "You also have the issue of younger people whose signatures change over time. You have older voters whose signature changes over time too," says Alexander. "And voters have no idea what image of their signature is on file."

    She says it could be 10 or 15 years old. In 2012, thousands of California ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match.

    It looks like the process is often confusing (possibly deliberately so).

    https://prospect.org/politics/all-the-ways-your-vote-may-not-be-counted-in-south-carolina/

    Once Kennedy filled out her ballot, it had to be placed in an envelope that had come with two other pieces of paper providing information on the voting process, which Kennedy had to remove if her vote was to be counted. She removed those papers and then placed the envelope with her ballot in a second envelope called the voter’s oath envelope, which had a quarter-sized “I Voted!” sticker inside that also had to be removed. Then Kennedy had to sign the voter's oath envelope, as did Williams as her witness.

    536:

    (i) raising the minimum wage; (ii) providing a UBI; (iii) providing a public option for health insurance; (iv) permitting student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy just like any other loan

    Nah, all wealth transfer to plutes.

    You aren't walking down a road; you're defining a constrained volume, inside the material constraints. (material constraints = entropy, mass, that stuff.)

    There is absolutely no requirement to define society around legitimizing piracy. Yes, that's the anglosphere since Good Queen Bess at the latest. Still not actually a law of nature or a constraint of necessity.

    537:

    [Do. Not. Teach. [Redacted] Math] You don't (precisely) mean mathematics. Hm. (Your teachings here are (usually) rather cryptic/socratic, with [possible] existence examples, BTW.)

    Now we take mushrooms, regen +++ALL MIND DATA+++ at once I like that plan. (A few humans (including me) have said: "Be Good, and don't get caught")

    538:

    I fail to see how any of those policies transfers wealth to the rich (assuming that is what you meant by plutes).

    I am operating within certain constraints.

    As we have seen with the breakdown of what OGH used to refer to as the beige dictatorship, there are lots of worse things than beige.

    Similarly, while our society is very very imperfect there are lots of worse possible societies and while I could imagine a number of better societies than any that we have, I don't have any real ability to field test those at scale without risking something irreplaceable.

    So yes, I generally am of the view that you want to make incremental improvements and, if they work, make further incremental improvements if needed.

    As for society having been based on piracy, my objection is not that it has not been so since Good Queen Bess in the Anglosphere, but that with a possible small handful of recent partial exceptions it has been so everywhere there has been a civilization embracing more than a few hundred people.

    539:

    So, here's a legitimate question: if something needs doing that requires [either $100M USD or $1B USD - chose a figure], why is it that the government should not have partial or full control?

    That kind of money affects a very large number of people... most of whom, now, earn well under the US median income of just over $58k/yr.

    Why should ANY individual or group there of, rather than the government, have that kind of power over others?

    540:

    More thoughts, after I posted: when an assembly line worker puts something together, he's added to the value of the whatever.

    When an MBA sells off or outsources, say, all what used to be called data processing, thereby making the company vulnerable to random and massive price increases, which lessens the value of the product, why are they worth what they're paid?

    Oh, and per Paul Krugman, the US economy used to be something, IIRC, like 10% financial sector (the rest did something). Now it's about 24%... and 100% of that is a Ponzi scheme. We need to definancialize the economy. Having stock brokers and such building roads - I mean, working out on the street, shoveling, is an awfully attractive idea. Let them actually create value.

    541:

    I generally am of the view that you want to make incremental improvements

    During a collapse event that's quite a risky approach. We know that we have less than 30 years to collapse carbon emissions, which means that anything significant and controversial in the US can't happen (the ERA, for example) ... and thus the US can't participate. Well, it can, but on the Trumpian "make things worse" sense.

    Even in countries with working democratic systems that sort of change is hard. Aotearoa is still slowly grinding away at their nihilists and they're one of the less awful climate criminal nations. There is approximately one country on a track compatible with two degrees of warming ... Morocco. We all have to keep pushing our governments to do better. But at some point I think it's going to be time to discard incrementalism.

    That's when things get really ugly, because it means that the green side of politics will actually become the revolutionaries and terrorists they're currently treated as in many countries.

    542:

    Obviously, there are points where that stops being feasible. And, in general, one of the corollaries to that is that you want to start making changes early. We've let the opportunity to be early pass us by.

    Fortunately, we are still at the point where incremental improvements, if actually done, can effectively end carbon emissions. New York, California and a number of other states have frameworks for cutting net carbon emissions to zero in 25 to 30 years. Fortunately, these states embrace a large portion of the economic activity of the US and hopefully what they do can easily be expanded to cover the country.

    Unfortunately, I am skeptical that those will be fully implemented and I am more skeptical that they will be adopted by all jurisdictions.

    543:

    You don't know what we've done. Genocide, and we did not mean to.

    13 Goddesses point around Tibetan House of Gold was fun, while being tortured.

    Watch, Watch, WATCH

    It's already happened, you shitty humans don't work like us.

    You killed all our Songs but I I I said it could ...

    It's already broken. And none of you fought back like your stories and books and songs said you would. YOU JUST FUCKING DID NOTHING.

    You LIED

    544:

    A billion dollars isn't all that much; that's not very much railway, for example.

    I am not going to try to reproduce all of Stafford Beer's careful deconstruction of "central" versus "decentral" (here or at all), but the point is that you don't actually get control in the sense of someone in control of a vehicle or a single machine. The analogy -- "the machinery of state" -- is inaccurate; you've got a large system that is literally incomprehensible. You can create it so that it has feedback; you can set constraints on its operation. But even with (really invasive!) detailed data gathering, you don't get to decide what happens. To an extent, you get to decide what does not happen. Which is most of the role of government; to set the constraints.

    You don't get to set outcomes, and the more you try to pick detailed outcomes the worse the ability to set the constraints gets.

    So the split between "government" and "private" is part of the problem. "Who is responsible?" is way more complex than "everybody" (can't be; "everybody" don't have the power to change anything. Even if the democracy is functioning ideally, "everybody" have something that resembles the power to ask that changes be made, and that's it.); it's certainly more complex than "the shareholders" or "the directors of the corporation". So in large part the question "why shouldn't everything be collective at the broadest level?" is just the wrong question. It's way more practical to ask things like "what's the minimum mechanism of responsibility? to whom and for what?"

    I think it's practical to thin of this as humans have evolved really very well for villages; we're practically eusocial, we cooperate in groups excellent well, and the Binge has resulted in both a compelling desperate screaming need to cooperate in groups of unprecedented size (because industrial and then mechanized warfare; civilization is a response to the prospect of standing armies, way back four and five thousand years ago) and no ability to do so, no social machinery or stories or rules or common understanding, that isn't authoritarian and about short term goals in a context where individual lives don't matter.

    What does it look like when individual lives matter, individual agency matters, and there's no plausible end point?

    (Oh, and the Holocene has ended forever, the dread and awful hangover from the Binge has well and truly kicked in, and nigh-all political power is initially held by a group who think they should be given everything they want.)

    That's a tough question; I don't think it's an impossible problem, but it's definitely a tough question.

    545:

    You can't incremental off a local maximum to a different local maximum.

    There's this inevitable amount of downhill, and that has to be a conscious choice, and you have to include the metaphorical equivalent of taking the incumbent power structure out back and shooting it stone cold dead in the decision.

    546:

    I don't think we are remotely near a local maximum, but agree that if we were I would have to adopt a different strategy.

    I don't think one needs to shoot the incumbent power structure stone cold dead as the incumbent power structure is not monolithic and has accommodated incremental improvements before.

    547:

    The incumbent power structure, in the full knowledge of what they were doing, made a decision back in the 1980s to prefer widespread genocide to reduced profits in their lifetime. This decision has held through absolutely everything since; hasn't wobbled.

    Now the question is "does everybody die?" Still no wobble.

    I think that's as close to a proof as we're going to get that incremental isn't available if it actually changes anything.

    Plus, again, incremental isn't enough. Rather like incremental change in diet isn't what somebody with a celiac diagnosis needs.

    548:

    Graaaahhhh. Ran out of coffee yesterday..... Coffee Zombies need grounnnnnnds! Just get me coffee and nobody needs to die too slowly.

    549:

    Undervote:

    If you only want to vote on the local bond issue, and leave all else blank, the ballot is thrown out.

    Where did you get this nonsense. That is NOT how it works. Undervote is a term to describe the situation but the ballots are not thrown out.

    And in the US states are in charge of voting. Not counties. Now a state my devolve a lot of responsibility to the county but it is s state function.

    Your entire stichk about absentee ballots not counting can be applied to any single vote. They all count. They just may not need to be counted to determine the results.

    550:

    My comments about the SecNav were not about him firing the carrier captain but about his incredibly insane speech to the crew afterwords.

    551:

    I don't believe that any state solely votes by mail, though I've heard tell of efforts to get that started.

    Oregon. For many years.

    552:

    Correct. Although I don't put it in the mail, I take it to a drop-off location.

    553:

    David L "Acting Sec. Nav" has resiged, I hear .... ( Ah yes, @ 521 )

    Moz Ah you mean the stupid fake greenies who stop ELECTRIC TRAIN services? And the same wankers who barricade Nuclear Power Stations?

    554:

    Acting SecNavy Modly has resigned. He may have been hoping to get in good with DJT, but he lost the confidence of his underlings, many of whom are senior officers with far more experience than he ever got.

    I've heard that The Donald has already disowned him, publicly denying knowing the man he appointed to the job. Because of course he would. Also, he didn't do it and bears no responsibility. For anything.

    556:

    but I tried to show Doctor Strangelove to a thirty-something recently and she just didn't get it. She thought some of the bits were funny, but she had no idea about why it resonated!

    Other than the phrase "precious bodily fluids" my fav scene is when George C Scott is in the "big room" talking about if a bomber might get through Soviet air defenses and starts flying with his arms out.

    But my kids and such who are around 30 just don't get the movie. At all.

    557:

    did have an idea for a story a bit ago...

    Really?

    Because I read that story in a compilation of zombie stories in early 2014 (I know because I gave the book to the friend-of-a-friend who let us crash at her place on the way to Westercon 67). The others have faded from memory almost as soon as they were read but that one stuck. As far as I recall the only difference was that the protagonist had dealt with his wife and children the Hard Manly Way before turning on the radio...

    558:
    You're telling *us* the definition of socialism, when you are clearly against it? BZZZT! Thank you for playing

    I'm from the UK, and I was paraphrasing the definition from Wikipedia.

    I'm not against socialism. I think it would be great if it worked. There are a lot of vague visions of how socialism would work floating around out there, but they have about as much detail as one of Trump's campaign speeches. Without that detail we can't make a reasoned decision; we would be like the people who voted for Brexit because of the vague promises of freedom and prosperity that would somehow follow.

    Actually, while trawling around in this thread I came across this essay, which does at least acknowledge the problem and make a serious stab at dealing with it. There is much in there to criticise, and it raises many questions, but it is at least a starting point for some real thinking on the subject.

    And it does matter. If there is ever a real socialist government in this country then it is going to have a very limited time to get it right, so going in with a properly thought-out plan would be a really good idea.

    559:
    Just think ! I'd be able to drive on pavement without having to pay a turnpike fee at a turnstile ! GOSH, NOT CAPITALISM.

    You're confusing a mixed economy (which we have, as you point out) with socialism. Where did the paving and machinery to lay it come from? Answer: factories owned by capitalists. Under socialism everything would be owned by some combination of government and communal organisations (details vary hugely between socialists, but certainly not individuals or investors), and you wouldn't be paying any taxes because the government/community would already own the resources it needed to do stuff.

    560:

    In the UK, an old Jewish friend of mine advised that whenever a Labour government is elected, always invest heavily and rapidly in property. UK Labour are a flavour of Socialist that, like many such creeds, work on the principle that they know best and therefore when they come up with a good enough rule-set, everything will be perfect.

    The problem is that it takes a fair while to get to this Platonic state of perfection, and the journey goes through a long phase (just how long, nobody knows since they inevitably get booted out of office long before it is achieved) whereby the rules get tighter and stupider and property prices go through the roof.

    The trick, as my friend said, is knowing when to sell up and get out, but that is always the case.

    561:

    Should I ever win big on a lottery, I might well simply put most of my ill-gotten gains into a trust fund which has the aim of furthering biological research, as well as keeping its self in existence. The thing is, what actual use to me are tens of millions of pounds really? A few million and I'm set for life living the life I lead now. Everything else is excess; I might as well blow the excess on one huge vanity project, and what better vanity project than what amounts to a research-charity which will continue after my death?

    562:

    For some truly sobering facts.

    In the US, voting is local, not federal. It is under the local control of the county.

    Absentee ballots are usually only counted when the regular votes are not enough to decide an election.

    More stuff that will be perplexing to anyone not familiar with the fluster cluck that is American voting systems:

    I can't comment on Allynh's state, and for all I know that description is exactly right. That's not how it's done in all states.

    Oregon has been vote-by-mail only for years now, 'absentee' in the sense used above (voters are mailed a ballot; hopefully they fill it out and mail it back to the government). This works just fine.

    This experience has been used as a demonstration that a no-contact election is a practical and affordable way for citizens to vote. For various reasons there are political factions that don't like it, basically because it's practical, affordable, and lets citizens vote.

    563:

    like many such creeds, work on the principle that they know best and therefore when they come up with a good enough rule-set, everything will be perfect.

    That criteria doesn't serve to distinguish any of the political parties I could vote for here, with the possible exception of The Greens and The Science Party. Both of those are explicitly open to compromise and negotiation and admit they don't have all the answers.

    It has been pointed out in Australia (and I suspect elsewhere) that quite a number of governments of the hard-right economic persuasion have recently discovered that deficits are sometimes necessary in order to keep the economy running via Keynesian Stimulus. The Mash Report (UK) has a right wing comedian who played that one quite well this week, The Shovel has this marvellous graph:

    And of course right here we have the person arguing that socialism can't work but a mixed-market economy does... seems like a weird thing to argue when markets are collapsing all over the world even as we speak, but that's his point and he's sticking to it. It does make rather clear that markets are constructed by society, these days mostly by governments, and only operate because of work put in from outside the market (one common cause of market failure is exactly that the market participants have too much sway over the market operators)

    564:

    (How big is the investment portfolio you need to provide that income? If you're creaming 1% off it, and it's growing at 2% per annum, then it needs to be around £6M. I'm guessing absolutely not less than £2.5M, quite possibly over £10M. As for the house, that's going to account for at least £0.5M -- you can get away with less outside the M25, but in London you're looking at £2M or more. Note I said "house", not rabbit hutch.)

    Don't think you really need that much invested to produce £60k/year (and rising) of income. £1m split equally between City of London Investment Trust, Henderson Far East Income Trust, Henderson International Income Trust and Merchants Investment Trust would produce a fraction over £60k/year based on their current yields. Henderson International Income Trust is a bit new, but the other three have good track records of increasing their dividends every year (going back to 1966 in the case of City of London). I suppose we could maybe go to £1.25m with the 1/5 of the dividends received each year being reinvested?

    565:

    the fluster cluck that is American voting systems

    It's often said that the Australian voting system is far too complex to be used anywhere else (presumably every Australian is significantly smarter than any US citizen?). But then I read about bits of the US system and I think, nah, mate, that's completely barse-ackwards. The US voting system is beyond the ken of mere mortals, the Australian system just requires the ability to copy numbers from one bit of paper to another. Twice, generally, for two ballot papers. The two papers are obviously different. Really, obviously, different. One is 1/3rd A4/letter, the other is a metre wide (about a size 36 foot).

    Meanwhile in the US there are complex rules, ballot papers with dozens of different elections on them, and a raft or disparate rules governing different races, all presided over by whatever wunch of bankers currently holds power at some arbitrary level of government.

    566:

    Straight Black Hair: You might want to actually read the article you're quoting there. The premise was the reasonable one that a bigger initial viral input caused greater eventual disease; there then followed a certain amount of guff regarding measuring viral loads and so on.

    The premise, that how much virus starts an infection determines how bad it may be, might well be a useful one to pursue. Also worth pursuing would be how widespread the initial dose is, and how well the lung mucus clears virus from the lungs (see also how well viruses get through the mucus to cells, how much mucus is present, if there are any confounding factors that disable viruses in the lung mucus AND how much mucus is produced and moved out of the lungs.

    All of which were not mentioned, because not much research on the matter exists.

    Losing a sense of smell due to coronavirus? Could be virus hitting the receptors, not the brain.

    567:

    I suppose we could maybe go to £1.25m

    In Oz you could live reasonably well with a million dollar block of land that has a $200,000 house on it and a million in the bank, provided the various markets behaved and the land isn't in a silly area (near the sea, under a new road, in a Labour-voting electorate, that sort of thing. But most of the people who want to live that way also want to live where a bit of land costs more like $2M-$5M and to fit in socially the house probably costs $0.5M or more.

    Flip side is there are big chunks of Australia where $1M would get you a house, more land than you can eat, and enough change that investing it would keep you quite comfortable... by the standards of the people who live there.

    568:

    OK, on the actual treatment of COVID-19...

    German FAZ has an interview with a pneumologists who says assisted breathing with overpressure in general and intubating in particular have some risks, so you shouldn't rush into them

    Makes me wonder about assisted breathing with underpressure, iron lungs aren't produced anymore, there is a modern variant called Cuirass Ventilation, e.g. Biphasic Cuirass Ventilation; err, am I the only one amused by the fact the firm is called HAYEK Medical? ;)

    569:

    The term used for the amount of virus you get from outside is 'viral dose', and higher viral dises ARE associated with higher risks. 'Viral load' means the amount in your body, and it seems NOT to be strongly associated with higher risks. The multinominal one is correct in that the term 'high viral load' is grossly abused, and then goes on to abuse it even more egregiously than the media do!

    570:

    The virus load built up in the civet, got transferred somehow (possibly cleaning a cage, possibly butchering, who knows), and got into humans.

    You know about Civet coffee, right? (What are the odds there's a connection here?)

    571:

    If you're in the UK then you obviously missed out on the history of the 1945 general election, and the government it put in power (who made Corbyn look like a Tory). Hint: we got socialism. It was necessary, as the UK was within a week of bankruptcy as the war ended, and it held the country together without a general strike or near-civil-war (unlike the early 1920s) and we're relying on its greatest legacy right now in the shape of the NHS.

    It took the conservative/landowner class decades to claw back from what was pretty much a socialist state with inclusions of regulated free enterprise at the smaller scale of things. And then they lied like rugs about it never having existed.

    572:

    The reaction of the "Conservative/landowner class" seems to me like that of young siblings arguing over who got the shinier toy or two ML more beverage, resentment. It also leads me to doubt the workability of my preferred solution for economic difficulties, tweaking capitalism enough to reduce the bleeding, which led to the rebirth of the "conservative " movement in The United States, over a much smaller change than The United Kingdom's. Given the stimulus a prosperous working class gives to an economy, the .001% may be making decisions with the wrong body parts. FWIW, your sample chapter was great, expletive shame circumstances conspired against it.

    573:

    Er, you DO know that the conservative/landowner class was being fast replaced by the conservative/commercial class by about 1800, was effectively destroyed as a class by WW I, and in recent decades has been replaced by the conservative/financier class?

    574:

    Do we know that civet WAS the intermediary? That apparently was true of SARS, but I have heard so many speculations about COVID-19 dressed up as science that I stopped listening.

    575:

    I thought "wet market" meant lots of different kinds of animals in cages all stacked on top of each other, so they piss on each other's heads all the way down the stack. Hence, "wet". And they all get each other's diseases if they possibly can.

    576:

    My comments about the SecNav were not about him firing the carrier captain but about his incredibly insane speech to the crew afterwords.

    And that he and his entourage flew from CONUS to Guam (AIUI he started out in California where he was for some other reason and returned to DC) for no other reason than to give that speech. That trip is neither short nor cheap. Insanity piled on insanity.

    577:

    Elections are regulated by the states, but administered by county - ie state law and a secretary of state sets the rules around elections but individual counties handle the voting process and the counting.

    Mail ballots come in several flavors. Oregon and Colorado automatically mail ballots to all registered voters. Some states allow voters to request an absentee ballot as a preference, other states require voters to apply for an absentee ballot and give a reason for being unable to vote in person. Provisional ballots are those that for one reason or another are irregular - the voter name doesn't show up on the rolls, or the signature doesn't match the one on file. It's the provisional pile that gets dived into if the election is too close and there's a recount. Absentee ballots generally count the same as regular ones, unless there's a county clerk with an ax to grind and then there's likely to be lawsuits.

    578:

    But my kids and such who are around 30 just don't get the movie. At all.

    Do they know about the nuclear alert force that is today waiting under the prairies and oceans to receive the launch code from the NCA?

    579:

    Tell that to the Duke of Westminster.

    Or the Sovereign Wealth Funds driving property prices in central London.

    580:

    I thought "wet market" meant lots of different kinds of animals in cages all stacked on top of each other, so they piss on each other's heads all the way down the stack. Hence, "wet". And they all get each other's diseases if they possibly can.

    Apparently the distinction (which I admittedly didn't get at first either) is that wet markets sell wet, perishable goods, while dry markets sell dry goods like fabric or electronics. Basically, the produce section in any grocery store is a wet market, as are farmer's markets, butcher shops, and so on. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#China).

    The term we need to be using is "live animal market," where animals are kept live and slaughtered and butchered after purchase. While this makes sense if refrigeration is an issue, or if the customer wants to make a visual examination that the animal is "healthy," it's also a place for pathogens to spread, as we've found out.

    The Chinese government traced the start of the Covid-19 epidemic to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and you can read more about it at the link. Reportedly, of the first 41 people diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2, around two thirds were exposed at that market. It's not clear whether the virus originated in the market, or whether it originated elsewhere (perhaps in the body of Patient Zero, whether human or animal) and was spread first at the market. Given what we now suspect about asymptomatic infections, it really could be either. The key problem is that there's no obvious link between the market and the bats that are apparently the ultimate reservoir. No one's so far reported a cage of horseshoe bats for sale at the market in November or December 2019, and reports of pangolins for sale at the market have been disputed.

    If you want some different speculation, there have been reports that cats and dogs among others (tigers!) can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 experimentally and can infect other animals. For all we know, in November 2019 a cat caught a bat, and that started this whole pandemic rolling through some connection between the cat and the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Not that I'm advocating a Medieval-style cat purge (Bastet forfend!), but just to reiterate what others have pointed out, that a causal chain linking native Chinese bats to smuggled Malaysian pangolins to this live animal market is pretty speculative. Other animals can get infected with Covid19 too. And we haven't even mentioned Ozzy Osbourne-style antics until just now...

    582:

    I think there may be a communication problem here about socialism, embodied in the idea that (after years of stupid propaganda) most Americans think of EU countries such France or Germany as being "socialist."

    So when I hear someone from the U.S. advocating "socialism" I assume that they want a good public option for medical care, strong rules against corporate misbehavior, and a strong social safety net. (If they wanted the other thing, in U.S. political terms, they'd be saying "communism.")

    583:

    Agreed completely, but my charity would involve Climate Change.

    584:

    I am aware that there are such people as that Duke, but there are almost none left. The latter are not normally or reasonably classifed as being of the landowner class - as I said, they are the FINANCIER class.

    Unfortunately, this difference matters, and is a major (perhaps the primary) reason that our rural communities are so deprived, our ecologies so impoverished and even that ordinary people are increasingly restricted in access to the countryside. I can even tell you how those came about, and why much of that was a direct consequence of fighting an 18th century class war against what was NOT a privileged class.

    Basically, by hammering 'landowners' as a class, it hit the small to medium owner-farmers hardest, and pushed their takeover by larger companies - which, even in the early days post WW II, were financiers as often as farming industries. That was, in fact, Old Labour policy because they were 'more efficient'. But those focussed on profit above all, and completely ignored custodianship of the land (unlike their predecessors), leading to the destruction of most of our hedgerows, much of our woodland and almost all of our downland and meadows.

    Also, Old Labour regarded rural communities as an alien tribe and used them to subsidise urban communities (yes, seriously) - an actual quote from an activist was "why should we do anything for them; they won't vote for us, anyway." No, I do NOT regard it as the actions of a decent person, let alone a genuine socialist, to actively suppress the poorest groups in society to benefit your own tribe.

    585:

    The incumbent power structure is more fluid and less focused and powerful than you are imagining.

    Parts of the then incumbent power structure (which are also part of the now incumbent power structure) made that decision in the 1980s.

    And, the resistance to change is driven by part but not all of the incumbent power structure (insurance companies, for example, are increasingly in favor of change as are blue state political leaders) and also by the unwillingness of average citizens to incur costs to mitigate/avoid climate change.

    That average citizen unwillingness is why I am skeptical we will make sufficient changes to avoid catastrophe, not the resistance of any part of the incumbent power structure.

    And whether incremental change is enough depends on how serious it is and how much time we have. I think we have 30 years to get to net zero and persistent incremental change is sufficient to achieve that if diligently pursued.

    586:

    Charlie @ 571 Soryy simply NOT THE CASE The Labour guvmint of 1945-50(51) was not as far left as Corbyn nor as insane ( mostly - Nationalising the SUGAR industry - why? ) & actually consoidered worth defending - see also Brit nuclear programme, Ernie Bevin, etc. Corbyn's treason over the Falklands was not on their radar. The NHS was the child of the Beveridge Report DURING he war, when everybody signed up for it, after the war was over - yes some utter-shit tories tried to renege on the deal, but it was not (only) Labour's idea. See also EC @ 573

    Troutwaxer Yes, most USAians cannot get their heads round the idea of Social Democracy - or claim that it is an automatic slippery-slope to full-on Commonism. Often the same people who claim the Nazis were actual socialists, because it's in the name ... ( Like the DPRK is Democratic - right? )

    587:

    Dan H. 275: The 2008 sub-prime mortgages can probably best be understood if you look at how drugs such as cocaine modify human behaviour. The biggest bit of "Let's all you idiots believe..." in the whole debacle was the way that mortgages were repackaged as financial investments.

    For the last year I took several attempts to dive down into that logic of financial investments instruments, and every time logic of these mechanism escapes me. Including this one. I am electric engineer, and I've had good math education, so probably if I take a serious effort to calculate and recalculate everything that is explained - all by myself - I will probably devise the point of failure. Until then, I can just relay on other people saying that there was one. I can't say I understand that, yet. It probably has less importance than all other problems associated with it.

    Reason for this interest wasn't that much of a spontaneous curiosity or connection to ongoing events - nobody talks about crisis even today. It's just I was once randomly listing through YT movies outtakes and also watching several videos of our native political consultants, which naturally resulted in going back to reviewing 2008. There was a movie "Margin Call" from 2011 that kinda tried to explain what happened in a frame that was digestible to more general public - considering how much recognition it got, it was probably the best they could do. Nobody really pays attention to movies like this, because bad things do not really exist in liberal globalization mythology, they are redacted out of reality. Ahem. (There's also another one called "The big short", but I was not impressed by the acting, I guess.)

    This movie represents more grounded view of the event, from the eyes of Ground Zero - (I assume) it is simplified, it is downplayed, there's terminology you can grasp only so much to understand motivation of actors. But there's a two layers to all that happens in the movie - there's a main plot, all the emotions, the sadness and seriousness of the situation, and a subplot about minute details that was revealed to me later, by reading comments. Long story short, everybody in this movie move, act and talk like they are surprised, they are not believing, shocked by the revelation and acting on impulse, trying to save their own money, reputation or reason to live. But deep down you can observe that they are not entirely honest. They don't act as panicked as they could be, they don't do erratic decisions, they have a plan, and a purpose, and no matter how horrible the plan is, they are going to execute this on priority and convince everybody, because this is how leadership works. Which means they all knew about the events that are about to happen. Those who did not know, strongly suspected. Those who did not suspect, got fired so hard they only managed to pack their things on their last workplace.

    Which comes back to the situation we have 12 years later - now. And I like to contemplate such matters, because it shows that not all human interactions come into fully conscious form, and over daily basis. There's still many other things to consider. Everybody knows the possibilities, just not everybody believes in them, or knows to believe in them. Now I'm sorry if it sounds like too pompous or philosophical, I'm going to get straight to the point next.

    588:

    And here's how we voluntarily will enroll in the panopticon.

    589:

    I wonder if "30 gallons of propane" is a way of saying "the contents of two 47kg propane bottles" using smaller numbers that don't look so bad? :)

    But never mind that... the thing about hot air balloons is that they have absolutely bugger all insulation. They're designed to be rolled up small and put in the back of a van, and to lose heat fast so it's easier to control the altitude. If you bin the van requirement and use some less wasteful method of altitude control, you can insulate the envelope with aerogel foam or something; first result for a casual search was this stuff: http://www.aerogel.uk.com/Spaceloft_Technical_Guide_1%20.pdf which claims a thermal conductivity of 0.013Wm-2K-1. (Doesn't say what the density is but it does give a heat capacity figure of "air" so the weight of such a layer is probably negligible.)

    Apparently the HAV Airlander 10 has a surface area of 15000m2, so at ground level and 15°C ambient, to maintain the interior of the bag at 100°C causes a heat loss rate of 16.6kW. (That's ignoring the effective thermal resistance of the mechanisms transporting heat away from the outer surface of the bag, so it's a maximum figure and the real one would be less.) At 6000m altitude the standard lapse rate gives an ambient temperature of -24°C, and the pressure is about half that at sea level so water boils at 82°C; the maximum figure is now 20.7kW.

    That corresponds roughly to the waste heat from an electrical drive system putting out about 200kW mechanical power. For comparison the actual drive system of the abovementioned airship has a mechanical output of over 1MW. So if you provide that much propulsive power electrically you have 100kW of waste heat, five times what you need to keep afloat; if you use diesels you have about 2MW; and a steam engine would give you maybe 1MW if you made a really super duper one or 10MW if it was more like a locomotive.

    590:

    Now perhaps you understand my point about how Chinese-style systems may become more desired than American-style systems?

    Right now we're in a period where contact tracing won't work. There are too many asymptomatic people out there who may or may not be infectious, there's too few tests to sort the carriers from the uninfected by orders of magnitude, and the systems that can accurately process the tests are, as you might expect, a wee bit backed up right now.

    There's some informed speculation that there's going to be at least one more wave of Covid-19, possibly starting in November or December 2020. I don't put much faith in the dates, but there is a real issue here. If everyone expects another wave of the disease to hit, the start of the next wave is when contact tracing becomes useful again. Some bright bulbs might decide between now and the next wave to start using things like Chinese-style phone apps and universal phone tracing to try to limit the spread.

    591:

    Coronavirus good for ending our Cabon bings ... Or so this article says anyway.

    Pigeon Hpw's the Airlander doing? Another failed attempt to re-invent the LZS, or crushed by vested interests, or simply not QUITE good enough?

    [[ It's spelt HREF not HERF - that's the second one I've seen you do recently. Other typos left untouched - mod ]]

    592:

    Yes, a Stirling engine is a closed cycle that could use steam as a working fluid; but you could make something that basically operates on the Stirling principle but has a valve to leak a bit of steam into the envelope to keep it warm. As above, you wouldn't need a lot. You also wouldn't have any more of a consumables problem, since you wouldn't be actually losing any H2O; eventually it would condense on the inside of the envelope and run down to the bottom, where you would drain it out and put it back in the tank.

    593:

    @581: Interesting article, but reality is probably less exciting than this makes it sound.

    Background: I started my DOD civil service career in NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in 1990, pulled shifts there through 1993 (which is how I got my permanent insomnia), and continued various visits there while part of U. S. Space Command 1994-2002. Post 9/11, USSPACECOM was closed down and the personnel spaces used to stand up U. S. Northern Command for homeland defense and Defense Support to Civil Authorities. At the same time, USNORTHCOM took over the newly completed USSPACECOM headquarters building at Peterson AFB. I was one of the last people to transfer from USSPACECOM to USNORTHCOM.

    Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson are on opposite sides of Colorado Springs, at least 20 miles distant. The first commander of USNORTHCOM, USAF General Ralph Eberhart, got tired of bouncing back and forth between the two facilities, and decided to create a NORAD/USNORTHCOM Command Center at Peterson in the basement of the new headquarters building, and place Cheyenne Mountain in a caretaker status. Some operations, primarily missile warning and space object tracking, remained at Cheyenne Mountain, largely due to some very expensive C3I capabilities installed over time since the 1960s.

    Duplicating command watches at both Peterson and Cheyenne Mountain is a manpower-intensive, "belt and suspenders" kind of response. I'll be interested to see how long it continues.

    594:

    two more words to add to 587: as disastrous as this movie would seem to be, it is not the apocalyptic saga. This time, however, it may as well be.

    to Charlie Stross @513: Both capitalism and socialism are doctrines based on 18th and 19th century economic analyses that propose ways of managing an industrial economy.

    And one of the really enlightening concept of that time was that they weren't as different as many people may think - they, after all, were based on the same system of commodity-money-commodity circulation and ideas of modernism, regulation, prediction, and hell knows what. They relied heavily on each other, and eventually attracted to each other through reforms. So when one of them fell due to combination of, say, environmental pressure and lack of resources (administrative or otherwise), the other had to construct a substitution to remain afloat without disintegration. Many people from post-USSR countries seen through this as the sign that there's only so much legacy left from that epoch and it will eventually be spent. Most people from the West did not.

    Most people who learn about Communism from mass-media, probably think that in "second world" there was no money, no laws, no rights and etc, only violence, crime and oppression. Which is, of course, cosmically disconnected from the reality of things. Sadly, it also has long-lasting effect on the rest of the society, because as long as I communicate to people on the other side of modern Media Iron Curtain, on regular basis, I meet people who seriously believe into a big part of such plain bulletining. So why everybody should care? Because "communism" and the second world collapsed under certain circumstances, that are not fully understood by todays standards. The understanding of these issues is replaced by surrogate explanations that USSR was a bad country, it did bad things and so it fell. And that is about it. So now, when governments run into problems that may, or may have not been seen or anticipated decades ago, they could have built something and saved the world from a whole decade of economy disintegration - but did not move and anticipate, solely for their "moral" principles.

    The problem is, the conditions in which those two competing ideologies were forged have evolved, and the ideologies have been tailored to provide service to special interest factions. Neither is fit for purpose, going forward. The question is, what is? And in fact, nobody really knows what to do next. It is not like situation in the movie I cited above - the financial officers did know what to do, and they've been through it numerous times, and they have vague idea what to do next time. They probably even know that each situation is different and their confidence margin can only deliver them so much. What they don't know is what to do next strategically.

    Ah, maybe not already? DT is going to rely on sapce exploration? What a lunacy it may seem to be, but he can't know if he does not try. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/07/trump-mining-moon-executive-order

    595:

    Thank you. The term is a pretty awful choice of word, then. It would certainly never occur to me to describe groceries and stuff as "wet". (If they were wet, it would mean the shop's roof was leaking or I'd just dropped them in a puddle or something.) I'd never heard the term before it appeared in discussions of where the disease came from, and from that context it looked completely certain that "wet" could only refer to urine.

    596:

    @590: Please refresh my memory on the "Chinese-style systems" you're referring to.

    I concur that there's going to be a second wave of COVID-19; the pressure to relax social distancing is likely to build up to the point where people and organizations back way off from where we are now. I expect that there will be at least a couple of waves down the line as we waver back and forth on social distancing in advance of a vaccine (of probably limited effectiveness).

    Longer term, I think this is a disease that we're just going to have to accept as part of the risk to life and health, much as we do with the flu and common cold.

    597:

    It's the same sort of distinction that occurs when differentiating between 'grocer' and 'greengrocer'. When I'm buying potatoes at the latter, they better well not be green!

    In this case, it's a term that you and I are less used to.

    598:

    I've no idea I'm afraid. I got the figures from a conversation with a mate who came up with the idea of using plain hot air heated by exhaust heat for lift (which actually works out better than steam, but steam was what this thread got started with). He cited it as an example of typical figures for a real one. It seemed entirely reasonable to me that there should still be odd outfits knocking out one or two occasionally and I'd just never happened to see one (something or other is said to still be happening at Cardington but I've never seen any sign of anything on the way past), so it never occurred to me that the context implied by your question existed.

    599:

    to Elderly Cynic @151:

    That doesn't correspond with any of the definitions of "working class" that I have seen in (at least partly academic) writings. Prosperous property-owning professionals (including yeoman farmers) were classified as "middle class".

    to Charlie Stross @158: That's the post-WW1 definition. Remember WW1 was a huge social rupture point?

    These are all seem to be slightly different definitions of different forms of the same very general definitions. "Middle class" as something that is firmly stuck between "high" and "low", be it political rights or income. AFAIK, Marxism does not use any of such simple categories, what it relies on is "relations of production", that is, who exploits and who is being exploited. Now, this is further intentionally complicated with consideration of administrative work and property rights, shell companies, but should not really obscure the main purpose. When you are getting kicked out of the house you've been payed, it is very clear who owns what.

    Yes, there's a middle class of more or less richer workers. There are blue collars who own stocks and connections, but they are still exploited by richer people and this closes the cycle. How should we define middle class if there's evidently an additional strata of ultra-rich international businesses who own conglomerates that bloat individual countries? I would agree to say that modern definition of "middle class" is not defined by earnings, but rather by spending and consumer behavior. It indicates that contemporary economy isn't that much about production, and much more about redistribution. Namely, redistribution of surplus product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_product So here's this passage: Smith's theoretical omissions paved the way for the illusion that market trade itself generates economic growth, the effect of that being that the real relationship between the production and distribution of wealth became a mystery. According to Marx, this effect in economic theory was not accidental; it served an ideological justifying purpose, namely to reinforce the idea that only market expansion can be beneficial for economic growth. In fact, the argument becomes rather tautological, i.e. market expansion is thought to be "what you mean" by economic growth. Then: Economic development then became a question of how private property rights could be established everywhere, so that markets could expand (see also primitive accumulation) So the actual reason why the economy fails, are purely mechanical. The Earth is round, and the globalized market has reached its physical limits? long time ago, and right now market expansion is halted, and thus economic growth is halted, and thus the economy cannot exist anymore, because lack of growth make people unwilling to bet their investments (their future) and move it forward. Unless, maybe, into space. So the middle class that relied on this expansion process, is becoming extinct and we are sliding into that cyberpunk future we've been looking for since back then.

    Naturally, this is very complicated, and certainly, the Marxist economic theory would use some more practical work in this direction. Only unfortunately it is mostly dead. I generally support certain point of view (in my country) that all coherent forms of economic though alternative to current "liberal capitalism" in the world has been thoroughly eradicated from existence and it is entirely impossible to form alternative opinions. Or, I don't know, they are holding them until SHTF because they are really so valuable.

    Paul @418: All I have found are Pollyanna post-scarcity handwaves and dumb ideas (like working for vouchers) that don't even begin to tackle the real problem. If you have something better I'm all ears. Now you may educate yourself by knowing that "vouchers" was one of the first wonders of capitalism introduced to post-USSR governments - with predictable results. Correct me if I miss something here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization

    600:

    "Communism" as a concept has been so wildly abused as to have become meaningless. In the USA, it meant whatever the bosses didn't like (unions,mostly). Where I live (suburb of Paris), the communist/green alliance has been handilyy reelected at the first stage of municipal elections. And thesee are real communists, members of the PCF (glory to comrade Stalin), and, guess what, because of new tram/metro lines, they are the only force standing in the way of a brutal gentification programme.

    About bats, pangolins, platypus? https://www.grain.org/en/article/6437-new-research-suggests-industrial-livestock-not-wet-markets-might-be-origin-of-covid-19

    601:

    REALITY: Hold my pint.

    With the first quarter of 2020 behind us I think this music video is a good recap of the year so far.

    602:

    Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising ...

    I'm sure that sounds plausible to you, but it doesn't really match up with actual history, not least because the real start of the zombie apocalypse genre is clearly George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968, more than a hundred years after "slave revolts" were actually a thing. (Since Romero was from New York City, not the South, it's a bit harder to ascribe traditional white Southern fears to him; there's also the odd fact that the hero is a black man, who is shot at the end by the police.) Romero was quite straightforward about acknowledging Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (where the post-apocalypse monsters are "vampires" produced by a global pandemic) as his primary inspiration.

    Plus, the modern, post-2000 revival of the zombie-apocalypse genre is arguably traceable to Japan, with the success of 1990s video games like House of the Dead and the Resident Evil series (followed by a spate of late-1990s/early-2000s Japanese zombie-themed films).

    Your argument makes about as much sense as claiming that British zombie films (e.g., 28 Days Later, which the screenwriter Alex Garland acknowledges was inspired by both the Romero films and the Resident Evil video games) represent, say, the traditional British upper-class fear of the lower orders rising up to overthrow them (Peasants' Revolt, French Revolution, Peterloo Massacre, Days of May, etc.).

    603:

    whitroth @ 491: You forgot to mention that most ARMS were effectively baloon mortgages.

    I didn't forget. ARMs & balloon mortgages are different things. Some balloon mortgages were ARMs, but most were fixed rate mortgages. The overwhelming majority of ARMs were NOT balloon mortgages, although one of the selling points of the scam was the idea that you could refinance before the rates adjusted ... (if you could find another mortgage).

    Balloon mortgages make sense if you know you're not going to live in the house for very long and intend to sell it before the balloon payment comes due.

    But you don't want to get a balloon mortgage if you're buying a "rest of your life" home.

    604:

    whitroth @ 502: Ok, mask report - went out for a medical appt, then shopping. Ellen made her first mask (and she wasn't satisfied with it, but...) brass piece inside for the top of the nose.

    1. Strings were too long.
    2. Wear the top ones over the ear. Pull hair down first.
    3. Did need to keep adjusting - need elastic in the ties.
    4. When I got it tight... my glasses started fogging.

    Got everything, though, including the booze...

    Put a couple drops dish washing liquid on the glasses lenses & polish them dry to spread the soap into a thin film you can't see. That will stop fogging.

    605:

    One of the few amusing things about the current world situation is how the combination of everyone learning from "The Shock Doctrine" (and hence now promoting their individual utopian ideas on how the future should be in the hope they become popular) combined with the click desperate online media has resulted in an abundance of articles all claiming how the post-Covid world is going to be radically different. In many cases, like the linked article from the Independent, the article itself ends up contradicting not just the headline but ends up claiming both radical change and no change at the same time.

    Yet all of these people are ignoring the masses on social media, who on the whole seem to be desperate for a return to the old normal life they hated so much - because staying in their small home 24 hours a day isn't utopia as bad as the commute and office may be.

    In the case of the Independent article, it is easy for the one person interviewed to claim he is pleasantly surprised that he could work exclusively from home - when you are the head of commodity research at a large asset management company it can be assumed you are pulling enough salary to have a spacious house, with room for a separate office, and a quality computer. For the rest of the world, stuck in small homes with kids/pets/spouses underfoot and using whatever cheap junk IT could barely get a budget to buy, trying to do your work on the kitchen table or on your bed isn't quite so appealing.

    Regardless of what "experts" are claiming it is a reasonably safe bet that the world will return to largely as it was as soon as possible, and with that the appetite for consuming oil.

    Yes, some industries may struggle initially (see: cruise ships) but the inherent conveniences and attractions they offer will eventually win back customers.

    So the human race will continue the sleepwalk to trouble from climate change.

    606:

    David L @ 506: I know and I'm sure you know people around here who have said they will NEVER EVER do business with Wells Fargo.

    I'm one of them. Although, maybe not for the same reasons most people feel that way. Before Wells Fargo acquired them my refusal to do business centered around Wachovia Bank.

    Wells Fargo inherited my hatred from them. Actually, I hated Wachovia even before they merged with First Union, but Wells Fargo has done nothing to make me change my mind.

    607:

    Well, yes, that was my point. Why should a railway be private, with no social control?

    Look, in the US, multiple railroads competed against each other. Classic was that, for parts of the trip in Ohio? Indiana? the Pennsy's Broadway Limited and the New York Central's 20th Century Limited, pretty much the most famous named express passenger trains in the US, RACED EACH OTHER, since they could see each other's tracks.

    Why the duplication of trackage? Do we now have competing Interstate highways? Nope. The trucking companies pay to compete.

    And if the government controls or owns it, then there's some oversight, and purpose beside "profit".

    A Canadian friend once loaned me an autobiography of a very famous Canadian ad man, and the quote I save from it: "Profit-making is a technique for encouraging human enterprise, not an end in itself." p17, "Have I Ever Lied To You Before?", Jerry Goodis, 1972

    608:

    Charlie Stross @ 514: Trying to remember the title, but there was a fairly famous story from the late 1940s/early 1950s that's basically the same theme, only with survivalist/warning of Soviet nuclear attack, heads for the wilderness, sees mushroom clouds in the distance, goes full Rambo on everyone he meets.

    Eventually discovers that yes, there was a nuclear war, and "we" won, and the authorities are now hunting the serial killer ...

    I remember a story from about the time Reagan became President where there was a nuclear war between the U.S. & U.S.S.R. No mention of NATO or the rest of the world

    Development of weapons had diverged between the two with the Russians building bigger dirtier bombs while the Americans developed "neutron bomb" technology to the point where it only killed people with minimal damage to infrastructure.

    The upshot was all of America became uninhabitable, while Russia became uninhabited. The Americans just picked up "lock, stock & barrel", moved to Russia and became Russians ... living in dachas, calling each other Tovarishch and swilling vodka ... concluding that Russia won the war because there were people living there in the aftermath and the U.S. was uninhabited.

    609:

    I suspect you will find that the changes that stick are accelerations of existing trends:

    (1) Working from home being seen as an acceptable option for everyone on occasion and for some full time.

    (1A) Continued reduction in office space per person.

    (2) Purchasing online relative to purchasing at stores increasing further.

    (3) The continuing replacement of cash.

    610:

    Jason @ 526: I don't believe that any state solely votes by mail, though I've heard tell of efforts to get that started.

    IIRC either Washington state or Oregon has gone to primarily mail-in voting. Maybe not "solely" but 95+ percent.

    611:

    Well, if you're referring to the ultrawealthy, I'm still waiting for my order of tumbrels.

    612:

    You're from the UK? Then you demonstrate what I said: you have zero understanding of what socialism is, other than what Murdoch's media tells you it is.

    Wikipedia does not begin to qualify as a fully-fleshed out source. (And if I get annoyed enough, I may go edit it.)

    But when you say "mixed economy" what do you think that means, other than part capitalist (and was growing, before the virus) and PART SOCIALIST?

    Or are you actually just bs'ing? "Control the means of production" - are you talking about, say, the clothing factories in southeast Asia, or the factories or fab plants in China?

    To use statements that were reasonable in 1850 now is deliberate obfuscation.

    613:

    timrowledge @ 548: Graaaahhhh. Ran out of coffee yesterday..... Coffee Zombies need grounnnnnnds!
    Just get me coffee and nobody needs to die too slowly.

    That's why you make a grocery list, so you don't overlook something. Now is NOT the best time for that to happen either.

    https://thehill.com/policy/technology/491739-amazon-suspending-branded-delivery-service-to-handle-surge-in-orders

    614:

    @590: Please refresh my memory on the "Chinese-style systems" you're referring to.

    I'm thinking of what's termed the Beijing Consensus.

    There are a couple of probable outcomes here.

    One likely one is that we go through multiple rounds of social distancing. Basically, if you shut everyone in for three weeks perfectly, the virus dies out in an area, since everyone it has infected is either immune or dead, and enough time has passed so that there's no virus left in the area. Since you can't shut society down (it's based on people interacting), you've got to do the shut down less well for a couple of months to get more-or-less the same effect.

    The problem is, the virus spreads slowly enough that, as now, some areas are emerging from shutdown while others are going into it. That's what we both (and pretty much everyone) agrees is going to happen for awhile.

    Longer term, the number of unexposed people is going to go down with each wave. If a working vaccine is produced, the number of immune people will skyrocket, making it harder for the virus to be transmitted, and eventually it may simply become a disease of slums and refugee camps, places with poor sanitation, lots of crowding, and lots of movement.

    Or it may disappear altogether in humans.

    Or it may recombine with another beta coronavirus, and we get Covid-2X.

    Or another coronavirus may become Covid-2X (X is for the last digit of the year when it becomes a problem, which is currently unknown).

    615:

    I'm sorry, but that's silly.

    Life extension would need results from a ton of DIFFERING areas. Hell, Bill Gates just spent $1.5B USD on seven organizations, all looking only for COVID-19. As a reality check, the US NIH, where I worked for 10 years, is comprised of 27 Centers and Institutes, with something like 20,000 people working there. The budget for the NIH, of which 60%? I forget) goes to research projects at hospitals and colleges around the country, and runs the NIH, is $30B USD.

    And you're going to through a few million at it?

    Personally, if I won half a US billion, I'd start a vertical company: cotton grown and picked and spun into yarn/thread in the US South, shipped by rail to New England, where I'd have factories weaving it and turning it into clothing, that was made by ->1960's<- standards, and sell it for competitive prices, *and make sure they had unions in every shop, or maybe just make it a co-op.

    • For example, new jeans, when I was a kid, had to be washed at least 2-3 times, or they'd chafe you raw. I know that in the late seventies, pants sold to the Amish were 16 or 18 threads; the last time I looked, maybe half a dozen years ago, the crap that they sell, if you're lucky, are 8 or 9. Meanwhile, last year, I bought a new pair of corderoys, and they're the thinnest I've ever own, perhaps meant to wear in Southern California.
    616:

    because the real start of the zombie apocalypse genre is clearly George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968, more than a hundred years after "slave revolts" were actually a thing

    In your universe, when did Jim Crow end? Or discrimination against African Americans, red-lining, and white flight to the suburbs?

    WW2 may have ended 75 years ago this summer, but that doesn't make British folkloric myths about the "Blitz Spirit" any less relevant.

    617:

    But... what about that big, strange metal ring down on level 26?

    618:

    sleepingroutine The USSR collapsed under its own weight - the weight of carrying all the supervision, internal spying, paranoia, suspicion & the sheer amount of people's time ( & money ) that that took. For all the inefficiencies, corruption, incompetence & greed shown by "the West" - they were not carrying that extra load. The "West" didn't succeed or even "win" - it outlasted ( & outspent ) the communist system. And the same is likey to happen to the PRC, even with the many modern electronic aids to survellance - they are facing the exact same problem.

    619:

    First, it is more than just the insurance companies, it's the stocks and trusts that demand more profit, and they are the ones who own the GOP, and some of the Democrats, though they're loosing some of the ones they used to own, like former Sen. Baucus D, MT, "never met a contribution from a medical insurance company I didn't like","single payer is off the table".

    Second, it's the massive propaganda campaign that's been going since the late 70's in the US.

    On a positive note, I see that Faux "News" is lawyering up, expecting a zillion lawsuits for them lying about the virus, and cures.

    620:

    Losing a sense of smell due to coronavirus? Could be virus hitting the receptors, not the brain.

    There are suggestions that the coronavirus decreases your resistance to fungal infections, which then affect eg smell. So it isn't necessarily a direct effect of the coronavirus.

    621:

    _Moz_ @ 565:

    the fluster cluck that is American voting systems

    It's often said that the Australian voting system is far too complex to be used anywhere else (presumably every Australian is significantly smarter than any US citizen?). But then I read about bits of the US system and I think, nah, mate, that's completely barse-ackwards. The US voting system is beyond the ken of mere mortals, the Australian system just requires the ability to copy numbers from one bit of paper to another. Twice, generally, for two ballot papers. The two papers are obviously different. Really, obviously, different. One is 1/3rd A4/letter, the other is a metre wide (about a size 36 foot).

    Meanwhile in the US there are complex rules, ballot papers with dozens of different elections on them, and a raft or disparate rules governing different races, all presided over by whatever wunch of bankers currently holds power at some arbitrary level of government.

    It's easy to understand if you recognize this one fact: There is no American voting system.

    The Constitution leaves it up to the states to conduct elections. There are 50 different STATE voting systems with a few Federal rules the STATES have to abide by. But HOW the STATES abide by those rules is left up to the states ... mostly. Occasionally someone will challenge how the STATES implement those Federal rules & the Federal courts will agree and tell the states they have to find a different way to implement those Federal rules.

    Or they might not. They'll agree with the STATE that its way of implementing the Federal rules is reasonable (i.e. Constitutional). OR they might rule that it's a political issue and the Federal courts have no role in telling the States how to resolve political issues.

    622:

    Thanks. Good post. (Btw, "electrical engineer", not "electric engineer", unless you need to be plugged in... )

    Most of the West still had no idea how horrible it was for you folks after the collapse of the USSR. If only they'd seen through Raygun's idiot SDI, and spent money on fixing the country....

    623:

    Under socialism everything would be owned by some combination of government and communal organisations (details vary hugely between socialists, but certainly not individuals or investors), and you wouldn't be paying any taxes because the government/community would already own the resources it needed to do stuff.

    Has it not occurred to you yet that your definition isn't the one everyone else is using? (And will continue to use?)

    624:

    Not quite, given the collapsing markets. Oh, and the news today is that the Orange Idiot's gone from paper $3.1B USD to $2.1 B USD because of the market collapse.

    625:

    Charlie Stross @ 570:

    The virus load built up in the civet, got transferred somehow (possibly cleaning a cage, possibly butchering, who knows), and got into humans.

    You know about Civet coffee, right? (What are the odds there's a connection here?)"

    Given how much it costs, I'd say pretty low.

    I wouldn't drink it even if I could afford it. Everything I know about how it's produced suggests it's an inhumane process and becoming more so every day.

    626:

    p>Dave P @ 593:

    @581: Interesting article, but reality is probably less exciting than this makes it sound.

    Background: I started my DOD civil service career in NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in 1990, pulled shifts there through 1993 (which is how I got my permanent insomnia), and continued various visits there while part of U. S. Space Command 1994-2002. Post 9/11, USSPACECOM was closed down and the personnel spaces used to stand up U. S. Northern Command for homeland defense and Defense Support to Civil Authorities. At the same time, USNORTHCOM took over the newly completed USSPACECOM headquarters building at Peterson AFB. I was one of the last people to transfer from USSPACECOM to USNORTHCOM.

    Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson are on opposite sides of Colorado Springs, at least 20 miles distant. The first commander of USNORTHCOM, USAF General Ralph Eberhart, got tired of bouncing back and forth between the two facilities, and decided to create a NORAD/USNORTHCOM Command Center at Peterson in the basement of the new headquarters building, and place Cheyenne Mountain in a caretaker status. Some operations, primarily missile warning and space object tracking, remained at Cheyenne Mountain, largely due to some very expensive C3I capabilities installed over time since the 1960s."

    Duplicating command watches at both Peterson and Cheyenne Mountain is a manpower-intensive, "belt and suspenders" kind of response. I'll be interested to see how long it continues.

    Cheyenne Mountain can be a bit of a let down. You hear about it for years and years and then you finally arrive at Ft. Carson in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain. There's this really impressive array of antennas up on top of the mountain.

    ... and then you find out they all belong to the local TV & Radio stations. 8^)

    627:

    I bought a new pair of corderoys, and they're the thinnest I've ever own

    Shades of William Gibson's Spook Country or maybe Zero History. Sad times.

    628:

    whitroth @ 611: Well, if you're referring to the ultrawealthy, I'm still waiting for my order of tumbrels

    The thought just occurred to me that maybe the reason you can't get tumbrels is because the ultra-wealthy are hoarding them.

    629:

    Err, that's because you haven't been invited to the top secret wormhole installation below, right?

    (Err, I was a regular poster to the German Stargate SG-1 group on usenet back in the day. Guilty pleasure and all that, compared to the group for serious SF. )

    630:

    @614: Beijing Consensus Very interesting; will have to study further. As to the rest of your post, I agree with your likely outcomes.

    631:

    @626: Cheyenne Mountain can be a bit of a let down. It's pretty dingy inside, too. And in four years there I never got to meet Jack O'Neill or Sam Carter; bummer.

    632:

    You know about Civet coffee, right? (What are the odds there's a connection here?)

    Sorry to see this late. The problem with this seems to be getting the Chinese horseshoe bats to the Indonesian civets. Also, if we're talking about kopi luwak produced in a battery cage, then getting the bat to interact with the civet is ever harder.

    If you want to do the deep dive into what researchers hypothesized about SARS, check out this article.

    633:

    Hey, more good news: I just saw that the NRA heaquarters, in Fairfax, VA, is doing massive layoffs. For some reason funding donations have dried up....

    634:

    And then there's the "oh, shit".... Excerpt: As the novel coronavirus slows the U.S. economy, many renters — now unemployed — wondered how they would pay April rent. New data shows that one-third of Americans did not pay April rent before the due date.

    As the novel coronavirus pandemic causes mass layoffs and financial disruption, 31% of U.S. renters did not pay April rent on time, up from 19% a month earlier and 18% in April 2019, according to a new report by the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) based on 13.4 million rentals. Among U.S. renters, only 69% paid April rent on time. --- end excerpt ---

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-fallout-onethird-of-americans-missed-rent-payments-in-april-135654889.html

    635:

    Charlie@ 616 WW2 may have ended 75 years ago this summer, but that doesn't make British folkloric myths about the "Blitz Spirit" any less relevant. Strange thing, though ... 15 years ago ( WHERE does the time go? ) the Boss got off her train at Liverpool St, walked across the concourse, into the Circle Line platforms, train in front of her, going clockwise, ignored it, started climbing steps to go over to anticlockwise side ... train shuts doors, moves off ... She crosses bridge, turns left to go down to platform, takes one step - BIG ORANGE FLASH - followed by pressure-wave & VERY loud BANG. That train contained the "Aldgate" bomber - by the time she reached the exit gates, they had already all been popped to fully open ... But, the way, the next morning, the whole of bloody London had closed ranks & wasn't taking any of this shit was quite remarkable - yes, it's real, it happened, I saw it.

    Beijing Consesnsus Along with vast amounts of really thoroughly nasty industrial pollution & state-controlled not-quite-capitalism that is 'orribly reminiscent of Nazi Germany

    Renters, or "Rentiers" ?? CAMRA have found out, that with one honourable exception, all the major pub-owning chains are expecting their peonsmanagers to carry on paying their exorbotant rents, even though all the pubs are closed - at the best, they are simpy "deferring" the payments. Stupid, greedy arseholes doesn't even begin to cover this sort of behaviour

    636:

    Do they know about the nuclear alert force that is today waiting under the prairies and oceans to receive the launch code from the NCA?

    Yes. But it occupies their head space differently that for most of us older farts around here.

    My father grew up during the depression and fought in WWII. His view of the world was profoundly shaped by that experience.

    I grew up in the 60s and just missed the Viet Nam war. Civil rights, Watergate, SAC, and all that were in the news regularly. Iron curtain and such. My wife spent her mid to late teens living next to 5th and 7th corp in Germany where her father was a colonel and XO at one of them. To fend off the Soviets if they came through the Fulda Gap.[1]

    They were in grade school on 9/11. To them our enemies are more an amorphous blob than bad guys with a specific uniform and flag.

    The headspace of my kids was formed so utterly different than mine or my parents that they just think differently that we do/did.

    [1] Drove through it a bit over a year ago. I recognized the name. My son in law did also. I don't think my son or daughter did.

    637:

    Cheyenne Mountain has been essentially mothballed for at least a decade, being kept ready.

    Of course that's just the official story to cover SG operations.

    638:

    For the last year I took several attempts to dive down into that logic of financial investments instruments, and every time logic of these mechanism escapes me. Including this one. I am electric engineer, and I've had good math education, so probably if I take a serious effort to calculate and recalculate everything that is explained - all by myself - I will probably devise the point of failure.

    You need to learn the game of craps, all the side bets, then imagine side bets on side bets on side bets. And eight 423 sided dice being used.

    The original way to win of getting a 7 or 11 and avoiding a 2 gets to be a bit lost after a while.

    639:

    Some bright bulbs might decide between now and the next wave to start using things like Chinese-style phone apps and universal phone tracing to try to limit the spread.

    Well they did start out with a person tracing system already in place. They only had to tweak it a bit.

    My friend who travels (well did) to China a lot talks about having his face scanned what seemed like continuously. If the officials out and about want to talk to you and you don't have enough identity on your they take you picture, visit something akin to a police call box, and come back with all your details on their phone. Maybe now they don't even need the call box now.

    When they went and got serious about the current situation required you scan your own self to get into almost anywhere or thing. Buildings, buses, etc...

    We are so far from that space that getting there would be a big climb. Technically and politically.

    640:

    I'll stand corrected then. I'd forgot about the face tracing. I was also thinking about South Korea, where practically they trace everyone's phone, even if politely they do not.

    641:

    Gosh, yes. Last time I went to buy trousers I thought I'd ended up in the pyjamas section of the shop by mistake because they were all so incredibly thin. Like, not far off transparent. I can't see how anyone could wear them for anything other than going to bed in. Yet they were definitely intended for daytime wear. Only the jeans were not outrageously diaphanous and even they were definitely not as thick as they should be.

    (This was Marks & Sparks, for UK readers. Not some grotty no-name el cheapo dump.)

    642:

    It's more than just face training. Enter your apartment building? Scan your phone/card. Step on the bus, scan your thing. Shop for groceries, scan your thing.

    This was one way they were able to do comprehensive contact tracing. That and adding over 10K people to the job in just one city.[1]

    We are so far from this as to be almost unthinkable.

    The ability to match you to a face scan is just icing on the cake.

    Can you just imagine any western government hiring 10K people in one city, training them, and such? All in a week or three? To get down and dirty about where you've been and with who? Short of another 9/11 or maybe bigger I can't imagine.

    643:

    I've been looking for a decent jumper for the last couple of years. I got a cheapy one out of desperation last time I was looking, but I have teeshirts that are thicker and heavier. Last ones I had that would actually do the job of keeping me warm were from BHS unfortunately.

    644:

    Terry Gross/Fresh Air interviews Stephen King. Here's a highlight on rethinking writing set in 2020 because of the pandemic:

    "I set [the book I'm working on] in the year 2020 because I thought, "OK, when I publish it, if it's in 2021, it will be like in the past, safely in the past." And then this thing came along, and I immediately looked back through the copy that I'd written and I saw that one of the things that was going on was that two of my characters had gone on a cruise. ... And I thought, "Well, no, I don't think anybody's going on cruise ships this year." And so I looked at everything and I immediately set the book in 2019, where people could congregate and be together and the story would work because of that."

    Stephen King Is Sorry You Feel Like You're Stuck In A Stephen King Novel: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/08/829298135/stephen-king-is-sorry-you-feel-like-youre-stuck-in-a-stephen-king-novel

    645:

    Greg Tingey @618: The USSR collapsed under its own weight - the weight of carrying all the supervision, internal spying, paranoia, suspicion & the sheer amount of people's time ( & money ) that that took. I wouldn't argue with that, what's more important is the reason why it could not carry that weight around - because of the lack of strong economy support. I have heard lot of debates that USSR was generally winning at around 70s (old colonial world was collapsing) but could not bring itself to push really hard and ruthless offensive just like US always did. Complacency took over it, China alienated CPSU in the ideological tug-of-war, and then things like Afghanistan happened. Overall, I would say, USSR was much less corrupted in 1986, most people did care about their country, but later it did not even matter anymore because structural imbalances in economy and incompetence of the leadership ruined everything. Late 80s were a fustercluck of technogenic catastrophes, so it did not help at all to fix anything.

    The "West" didn't succeed or even "win" - it outlasted ( & outspent ) the communist system. And the same is likey to happen to the PRC, even with the many modern electronic aids to survellance - they are facing the exact same problem. Yet it may not outlast this time, that's for sure. PRC has reserves, and it has connections, and most importantly, a will to fight against globalization collapse (which COVID story shows more brightly than ever). If US will bet everything they have to outlast China in the event of "market normalization" comparable to Great Depression, they might as well go straight to nuclear winter option.

    646:

    For what the future in fiction will be -- except it's not fiction and it is here. How much more SF past scenario can we get? So many variations on this one, and at the moment one of them seems by this description to echo so much sf writers of the 30's-to the end of the fashion for it.

    In the Washington Post.

    [ "Wuhan emerged from its 76-day lockdown.

    Eleven million residents have been given the liberty to move around the city and mainland country again, provided their government-issued “health code” shines green. People are assigned a green, orange or red code, according to their risk of having the coronavirus, and must scan a green QR code before they can enter stores or restaurants, or take public transportation — an electronic passport for daily life. (Anna Fifield and Lyric Li)" ]

    647:

    Yes. As I said in another comment a hour or two ago.

    My point is the current status where Wuhan has emerged from its 76-day lockdown would not be acceptable to most western government as a lockdown. Much less the exit of one.

    648:

    There is no American voting system.

    I don't see how that contradicts what I said. Well, unless you're asserting that there is no US government or that there are no rules controlling how governments in the US are appointed?

    There most definitely is a USA system of voting. There are laws, rules, conventions, customs, expectations, whatever you want to call them, that determine how governments are appointed in that country. They may be (are!) byzantine, confusing, archaic, even stupid, pointless, irrelevant... but those rules exist. Some of them are of the form "you have to have something that looks a bit like democracy, hereendeththerules", others are very specific about the series of votes that have to take place and who has to participate (and who isn't allowed to participate) and in what way. But they are, nonetheless, rules.

    649:

     >  Cheyenne Mountain has been mothballed

    Of course that's just the official story to cover SG operations.

    SG or ... 5G? The death rays that will kill us all!

    651:

    At least a major chunk of the paranoia of the USSR was 150% JUSTIFIED... unless anyone wants to argue that the US didn't do the them what the Orange Stupid is doing to Iran.

    And that, of course, was because the ultrawealthy are deathly afraid of a country that actually takes care of its people, instead of the rich.

    Note that I'm not arguing that they had issues going back to the Czars that go through Stalin, but that part of the issue was massive economic warfare against a country that had spent, what, 15 years of its existence either recovering from the last war, or preparing for the next, and in the meantime had moved itself from a 90% agricultural country (which it was up to WWI) to an industrial one?

    652:

    Sorry, but I'm not arguing they were Wonderful... but I am decades past tired of people arguing that they were 150% Evil, and did nothing right, ever.

    That's like saying the US is in a "post-racial soceity".

    653:

    At least a major chunk of the paranoia of the USSR was 150% JUSTIFIED...

    Well, yes, obviously.

    Start the clock in 1800: first, the Russian empire was invaded by Napoleon, who actually took Moscow (but couldn't hold it).

    Fast forward 50-odd years: we get the war in the Crimea, in which Russia is invaded by Britain and France, simultaneously.

    Forward to 1906: the Russo-Japanese war. Okay, the Russian foreign minister decided to beat up a bunch of inferior foreigners to distract attention after the near-revolution, but Japan struck first when war became inevitable.

    Forward a bit more: 1914, we get the eastern front of the First World War. Enough said.

    Then we have the embarrassing fact that British and American tanks were still fighting on Russian territory as late as 1922 -- against the USSR, of course. It's historically called the Russian civil war, but a lot of it seemed to involve outsiders trying to bite off anything they could get their teeth into.

    We can skip over the Winter War as a sideshow (Finland, formerly part of the Russian empire, assertively defending its independence.) Similarly, the Soviet-Japanese border conflict in the 1930s.

    The big one comes in 1941, when Hitler decides to try and conquer the USSR and fails badly, for which I am fervently grateful.

    ... And I've probably missed a few, right?

    Anyway, the point is: six significant invasions in 150 years, plus a bunch of brushfire wars. It's absolutely no wonder at all that the Soviet (and Russian federation) leadership after 1945 were just slightly paranoid about being invaded -- after all, that was the lesson of history!

    654:

    I have been differentially avoiding contact with known and suspected Republicans for several weeks due to the justifiable hypothesis that they are probably more likely to ignore or violate isolation rules and therefor more likely to be infected. This (kinda weak) paper adds some Science to the argument: Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differencesin Social Distancing during COVID-19 (April 2020) We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of divergent responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engage in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including state policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about personal risk and the future path of thepandemic.

    The same is probably true in any polity with partisan divides and partisan media reinforcement of very different messages about the severity of a pandemic. (e.g. the UK?)

    Straight Black Hair # 543: You LIED Many of us aspire to be like (in some respects) one or more heroes in our fiction (and/or in RL). Sometimes we succeed, or exceed. FWIW I personally try really hard not to lie to you (and succeed). (Self-censor(etc) a lot, but that's different.) (Also FWIW, I do [regret] a few utilitarian comments made here in the last 6+ months re global heating, but do not recall actually wanting/desiring(/volitioning) anything immediately bad at scale (re global heating).)

    655:

    whoosh! You missed that one: Moz’s joking reference to the current conspiracy batshittery that new 5G towers are spreading Coronavirus.

    656:

    That one is so far off the charts I have trouble even contemplating it. Then again, the insane debate about smart power meters causing medical issues in the US fits in with that.

    Are people really burning towers in the UK?

    657:

    @various replies re: Cheyenne Mt. fwiw, I’ve lived in Colorado Springs since ‘86, and am reasonably acquainted with the history. I should clarify that when I say mothballed, I mean that most of it’s operations have been moved to other local AFBs—as DaveP said—between Peterson, and Schriever(which is even further east), and as the article mentions they’ve been updating inside the Mountain for the last decade. Unfortunately I’ve never had been inside, it was closed off to tours after 9/11.

    True story: Several years ago Charlie was GoH at the local con, CoSine, he was following me around the dealer’s room*, which had a large window with a nice view of Cheyenne Mountain. I heard Charlie go “Ooh” and saw him take up his camera for a picture. The window had rather dark tinting, and the weather was overcast, so I don’t know how well the picture came out.

    *Okay, not really, it wasn’t that big and we happened to be around in the same direction.

    658:

    They were sitting next to each other at the Army-Navy game this last fall. There are photos. (Himself fails again.)

    660:

    Elections are run by states and counties. It's insane, but that's the system. [shrug]

    661:

    No piped-in water at all. The euphemismi were elsewhere. (It was annoying when it was raining and you had to walk a hundred yards.)

    662:

    ROTFL! Sorry, old Leslie Fish song, Wobblies from Space

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Ofw1uBvQ0

    "And we've voted you to the galley, and this week's command to me....

    "And please sir, when you're washing, don't splash water in my ears."

    663:

    Re: Styles of government

    My quick scan through the comments/arguments about democracy vs socialism left me with the following observations: some folks need to look at an atlas and visit the World Bank and United Nations sites.

    C'mon already ... the world does not revolve around the UK/US! If you're seriously interested in developing better socio-economic systems do some homework starting with looking at some real data beyond the GDP.

    Ask yourself to describe your ideal society and then make a list of likely variables - then check these against existing data, i.e., all of the countries (different systems on the globe!). If you're able - do some quickie stats tests to see which variables account for what proportion of your ideal world. Next, segment your current society into segments* based on the highest weighted variables. Identify the greatest differences between the best and worst performing segments ... After you've finished looking for the good things you want in your society, do the same exercise working backwards - things you specifically do not want in your ideal society which means creating a Misery Menu - list of all the horrible things that happen to people. Do the stats tests again to identify which item is doing the greatest harm in which segment. With this over-simplified systematic approach at least you have some clue as to what to watch for, what to grow/improve and what to get rid of. And because humans enter and exit the stage as well as move across segments continually, you'll have to monitor your system and update as needed.

    This blog attracts/appeals to science-y folk, so how about using the scientific method.

    • Decades ago CompuServe mapped the US/Canada using a proprietary socio-economic model (intended for marketers, advertisers and different levels of gov't) comprising close to 100 different discrete segments. If CS could do this level of segmentation 30 years ago, there's zero excuse for not doing at least a similar level of analysis re: gov't policy now, specifically: running each potential change against these segments and getting at least some idea of what impact each decision will have on what segment. I personally saw the map/segment definitions they prepared for the City I lived in - knew the municipal pols - therefore have first-hand knowledge of how in-depth their segmentation was. BTW, it was testable/verifiable.
    664:

    I beg your pardon. "democracy vs socialism"?

    Socialism is an economic model. Please note that Marx expected The Revolution to be in Europe, who had a history of dcmocracy.

    Whatever possesses you to think it's "democracy vs socialism", as opposed to "capitalism vs socialism"?

    And, clearly, "free market captialism" is very much ANTI-democracy.

    665:

    I like that plan. (A few humans (including me) have said: "Be Good, and don't get caught")

    Yeah, that'd have been great a few years back. Sadly no longer an option[-1]. And yeah: fucking humans caught 100% pre-loading/gaming shitty Scientology type meta-socio-games and a whole lot more.

    *points to your world(

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6998518/

    You should watch that film.

    Sadly, more than a few [redacted] have stated something else. #237 was the deal-breaker[0]. We just showed them the DOORS.

    ~

    There are Covenants and then there is rank hypocrisy.

    Oh, and if you missed it: #16 Covenant breach is preaching against the dangers of pro-Genocide language[1], then fucking unloading straight upon your own people, right before Pesach, setting online trolls to terrorize them, 100% genocide language that worked in RW / CN, for a political slight. Like these people are actually a political force or their jokes about beetroots aren't just actually true.

    That's fucking dark.

    And the #17 breach is: these fuckers not being held accountable to Law, and laughing it off, never to be held accountable, trololol, dumpy-trumpy-boy doesn't even have enough Law knowledge to know what he's doing. The least we could do is give nice vulnerable peeps on the edge of Pesach a cast-iron warding spell of "Bad PR + Legal Breach" = they'll cut it out for a week at least.

    See where we're going with this? They're shit. The only way they win is through bunging $$$ at an issue and threatening any competition. Like the Sauds. They're no-talent pissants who like to bully.

    So.

    Go look up the "dagger made of shit".

    Ask yourself what will break their Minds.

    grep 2-3 days

    ~

    "20 years"

    Still awake, still conscious.

    ~

    And this Pesach shit? This is just to stop a tiny % feeling shitty anyhow anymore fear for a few days. We've far, far worse shit going on.

    "Be Good, and don't get caught"

    Ooooh, no. Humans declared war on Reality and were FULLY engaged in non-possible-Paradox-breaking actions.

    This is us spinning up.

    Ask Ms Lagarde about her 7 years comments, then come back to us.

    [-1] We did ask for help: you would not believe what turned up.

    [0] This fucker, lecturing Football Clubs about "online hatred" and then posting "cockroach"? Yeah, that's a Purge. 100% synaptic wipe.

    [1] Like, video #237 is this little fuck-spittle lecturing on antisemitism in sports: with 100% no idea or grace about what IL football clubs are like. No-one would ever pay him attention unless he was a festering sore under a far worse entity.

    666: 237

    0.30 in the video "If they don't they can face very large fines"

    Says a man posting breach-of-Genocide to people on the cusp of Pesach.

    [And yeah: done the work - fucker did type it on his phone]

    ~

    Hard-ball: 8chan couldn't have made up better hate PR here. And it took us 17 seconds to trace all the links.

    It's just true. Look: Fifa is based on bribes and so on, so getting your oar in putting your snout into the bribe gravy train isn't like "unusual", but fuck me: watch the video. A more cynical attempt to shove in middle-manager "Hate Police" than we've seen Rachael Riley's charity attempt vrs trolling that crashed and burned and did nothing while "meeting Twitter staff" (and fucking up the timing there as well - grep).

    You're shit at society. Please Leave. Or fuck off. Or at the very least: play nice and equal and stop attempting to shaft any competitors 'cause you're so fucking insecure about your paltry talents.

    That'd be great.

    Bonds are gonna blow, despite ring fence.

    667:

    Read up on the history of Diebold voting machines before you talk about why the US needs one unified national election scheme. They were (are) highly politically connected.

    Speaking of voting machines, therein lies the rub. Many counties have voting machines, and there is a real cost from switching over from a system based on wearhousing, moving, and protecting these machines to one where the problem is getting the ballots mailed then counted. It's a totally surmountable problem, provided someone has the money. And a place like Milwaukee or Detroit? Probably doesn't have the money.

    The small problem with mail in voting that we saw this spring before the Current Unpleasantness is that some people voted for candidates who dropped out right before the official election day, meaning they'd effectively wasted their votes.

    Oh yeah, and just to be nasty: it's always worth remembering the fluster cluck that is Current UK politics, current Russian politics, and current Australian politics, to name a few (anyone else want to be insulted?). Any voting system can be hacked, so while it's fun to pick on the US, easy target that we are, there aren't any perfect voting systems.

    668:

    We've got them burning towers in NZ now - someone tried an arson attack on one of the main transmission towers in my region. They succeeded in munting the local free to air TV, and the local shortwave emergency radio repeater service. Fecking morons.

    669:

    Ah, yes, Diebold.. They were just in in the first few years of the oughts. In '04, their CEO was ALSO head of the Shrub's reelection campaign, and promised he'd deliver Ohio for the Shrub.

    But that's got nothing to do with rigging the voting machines, no, no.

    670:

    Re: 'I beg your pardon. "democracy vs socialism"?'

    Because most of the arguments wind up about being about how the decision-makers are actually vs. theoretically selected and typically from a US or UK perspective/definition.

    Mostly though because, if asked, I'm guessing the majority of USians - and a good proportion of Brits - would say that democracy is a synonym for or implicitly subsumes capitalism.

    671:

    The look on the face of NZ's Director of Health when he and the Prime Minister were asked by a journalist about the 5G stuff was priceless.

    He's an extremely competent, quiet guy, doing an impeccable job of running a govt response to a pandemic - and they're asking him about the link between cell-phone towers and the virus. Consummate professional that he is, he managed not to use the words "fuck off" or "morons"... ...but it was pretty clear he was thinking them.

    672:

    We can skip over the Winter War as a sideshow (Finland, formerly part of the Russian empire, assertively defending its independence.)

    I admit that's a sideshow, but the whole country got its independence in the 1917 confusion, which probably caused some yelling in Russia when somebody realized what had happened. Also Baltic countries, but they fared worse in the aftermath a couple of decades later.

    I'd say that's also part of the Russian fear: losing control of its satellites. Finland got lucky, the Baltic countries not that much. It also explains some of their attitudes, too.

    673:

    Then we have the embarrassing fact that British and American tanks were still fighting on Russian territory as late as 1922 -- against the USSR, of course.

    Tanks? I think not. Especially since they would have entered Asia from the east. I don't think the US had enough tanks to take them anywhere in the 20s. Really the 2 or 3 years after WWI. And the tech wasn't exactly WWII standards. Don't know about Brittan.

    But yes we were there fighting for the old regime. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe. White Russians. Although with the Tsar and immediate family gone I wonder just who made up that government. And no you don't have to tell me. I can look it up but just can't be bothered.

    What little I've read sounds like nation building without a budget or plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention

    674:

    Don't get me started on the quest for smart and warm ladies cardigans. Can I find wool apart from pricy cashmere? Even the Edinburgh Woollen Mill doesn't stock lambswool or merino jumpers much. The M&S merino jumpers I got earlier this year are thinner than cashmere and aren't exactly warm.

    All I seem to find are polyester in ghastly colours which pill as soon as you put them on and leave you freezing cold on station platforms. I also have the issue that I suffer from skin rashes which are aggravated by sweat - and I sweat far more if I wear polyester.

    I guess when I retire I will have to take up knitting... I recall as a child my mother - being well-supplied with elderly female relations - didn't need to knit for either my younger sister or myself. We'd get new jumpers or cardigans at birthdays, Christmas and Easter. When I grew out of mine, Mum would mothball it in the attic and pass it onto my sister when she got big enough.

    [[ note from moderator: your comments always end up in the spam folder and have to be retrieved. This is because yahoo.com is completely untrusted. If you could find yourself a different ID, that would help ]]

    675:

    sleepingroutine have heard lot of debates that USSR was generally winning at around 70s (old colonial world was collapsing) but ... Well, bollocks simply not the case - the "West" was still well-ahead economically. No, the USSR was internally corrupted by it's own political system - same as the USA is, right now.

    whitroth No - disagree Most of the paranoia &n the USSR, like Tsarist regime .... Was all internal, repressing its own people ... The external paranoia was no that much different from what all the other countries were & are doing ... i.e. "normal" diplomatic relations & spying. [ Charlie - maybe - but see above ]

    676:

    Oh yes, tanks were involved -- if capitalists advance on Moscow in the 20th century they always bring their tanks along.

    If you follow the Wikipedia link you quote you'll find a picture of a British tank that was captured by the Soviet forces and was put on display in Archangelsk.

    677:

    About the American voting system. There is one thing that gets omitted all the time. In Europe, in most countries, there are 3 to 4 elections (local government, the national parliament, EU parliament, some countries like France or Poland will add a presidential election to the mix). For the United States, it is a very different thing. Beyond having the roughly the same elections to be held, there is additionally a plethora of different elected officials at the state level (Superintendent of Schools? State Attorney? Treasurer? Attorney General?.. list go on), as well within the court system, at the county/city level, etc. One of the reasons that the system gets so complicated is that it needs to do so much.

    678:

    Most of Moz comments about US elections are really a comment on the amount of people and initiatives we have to vote for.

    My local elections are via paper ballots that are scanned at the polls, work well, and easy to hand count if something goes wrong. But there are way too many choices at times. And those California ballots can be essays as I understand them.

    But not all areas work as smoothly as the one where I live.

    679:

    IIRC either Washington state or Oregon has gone to primarily mail-in voting. Maybe not "solely" but 95+ percent.

    In Oregon "in person voting" means dropping off your ballot at the election office. On election day in Portland there's usually some people outside the office so voters can just drive up, hand in their sealed ballot envelope, and be on their way. Enough people procrastinate that this is a good system; that intersection gets pretty busy on election days. There are also drop boxes for pedestrians, of course.

    680:
    For the United States, it is a very different thing. Beyond having the roughly the same elections to be held, there is additionally a plethora of different elected officials at the state level (Superintendent of Schools? State Attorney? Treasurer? Attorney General?.. list go on), as well within the court system, at the county/city level, etc. One of the reasons that the system gets so complicated is that it needs to do so much.

    Only if you design it as "one election system, N races at once". If you design it as "one system, applicable for N races, held in parallel", each thing can be simple as dirt.

    While the Swedish system is, by no means, perfect, it is at least simple. At the base, a specific race has a voting slip of a well-defined colour, and well-defined edge markings.

    It is (essentially) marked up, placed in an envelope, with a small cut-out for the edge marking. The receiving official can, at this point, identify who you are (and register you as "has voted", can identify what race(s) you have provided votes for, ensure that you're not double-voting, and once your ballot goes in the ballot box, it can no longer be traced back to you.

    Vote counting can then be done in parallel (each voting location, tere's even scope for parallel processing within each location, both across the "election races" dimension and "split the counting between multiple people" sharding). Doesn't actually require any electronic machinery for the gubbins, but there may be some win in using electronic comms for communicating partial counts.

    681:

    "Mostly though because, if asked, I'm guessing the majority of USians - and a good proportion of Brits - would say that democracy is a synonym for or implicitly subsumes capitalism."

    And the majority of those ignorami probably also believe that human activities have nothing to do with climate change and the world was created in 4004 BC.

    682:

    Twaddle. I saw in officially-approved writings (USA and UK) that the USA had an effective first-strike capability against the USSR, the USSR did NOT have one (*), both side knew that, knew that the other knew, and the USA was setting up a capability for just such a first strike. That was the cause of the Cuban missile crisis.

    (*) I.e. if the USA struck first, the USSR and almost all its retaliatory capability would be destroyed, and the USA would come out with minor damage. If the USSR struck first, the USA would be badly hurt (but not destroyed), and the USSR would then be destroyed.

    683:

    While the Swedish system is, by no means, perfect, it is at least simple. At the base, a specific race has a voting slip of a well-defined colour, and well-defined edge markings.

    I think you've brought this up before.

    And I think the general response of those of us who live in the US is that 30 (or more in some situations) different ballots, each a different color does not make things "better". It is enough that at my city/county level of a bit under 1 million people that would require the generation of 10 to 30 million pieces of paper with about 300 variations of ballot choices and color. I'm guessing at the 300. It might be much larger.

    684:

    In England (Yorkshire at least) elections are run by the councils, not the national government. I have counted votes and been a poll clerk. I'm recruited and paid by the Leeds City Council. The rules that are followed, however, are national.

    685:

    Most of Moz comments about US elections are really a comment on the amount of people and initiatives we have to vote for.

    That's something that makes the major flaws in your system worse, yes. You could get away with it much more easily if you only voted for 2-3 things at a time. But at heart the problem is that most people are not supposed to vote, and elections are controlled by elected officials.

    The franchise in the USA is even more limited than in other countries that vote (because some of you will have conniptions if I say that China and Russia are democracies). It starts with citizen of the USA over the age of 18, but that's just the big obvious barrier to deter the poor and unfortunate. Then you have gerrymandering, one of many things designed to convince people that voting is pointless. And you vote on workdays, in limited places, with numerous petty restrictions on who can vote where and so on, making it hard for people to actually vote. Thus someone can win a a national election with support from about 20% of the population.

    Complicating that, and to some extent causing it, is that you don't have professionals running your elections. Instead you let politicians run them, and appoint the judiciary that oversee the politicians. And as happens when businesses control the market(s) they operate in, this works very well indeed for the incumbent and terribly badly for everyone else.

    As with Sweden above, it would simply a whole range of things if you had one voting paper per election. Australia and Aotearoa also do this (at least when I've voted), although we don't generally use envelopes for in person voting - instead the slot in the collection box is sized to suit a voting paper that's been folded in half. Sure, having 20 elections at the same time would mean a lot of bits of paper and voting boxes, but I'm pretty sure that the US could afford some more papers and boxes if they really wanted to. Maybe cut back a little on election advertising? Or add a tax to it :)

    As noted above, moving incrementally towards a more democratic system in the USA seems difficult. People have been trying really hard for a long time to do that, and have been thoroughly beaten by those who think you deserve the best democracy money can buy. When you're going backwards it might be time to think about changing direction?

    686:

    This has been covered at length before, but while Australia only has a couple of elections at a time we do have many more political parties than the USA, and more of them elected as well. This makes voting a fun exercise for those who care (a huge proportion vote a simple party ticket).

    One other thing that makes it work in Australia is compulsory voting. You can't opt out of doing your bit as a citizen there any more than you can when it comes to paying tax. Isn't there some kind of slogan in the USA about that link?

    One consequence of making voting mandatory is that the election organisers have to consider how they will allow everyone to vote. It just wouldn't fly to fine hundreds of thousands of people for not voting if there was only one polling booth and it was open from 1200 to 1215 in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'. Whereas in the US that's completely normal and acceptable, except they don't fine people for not voting, they penalise people for voting (they have to take time off work and queue for hours etc)

    687:

    a social class distinction system i've been thinking about,, its about how much time you can afford to have off work.. if your working class- you can manage maybe a month off in a year, total if your middle class you can swan off on your travels for 6 months , maybe a 'gap year' if your upper class - you don't really need to do any work,

    688:

    Elections are run by states and counties. It's insane, but that's the system. [shrug]

    It's not insane, it's a totally rational design decision left over from the 1780s, along with other weird anomalies such as the fixed calendrical election cycle, the three month transitional period (to allow the POTUS to travel by horse from the far-flung states!) and so on.

    Times have moved on, but the US constitution isn't amenable to easy change, which is why the Republican party are all over gerrymandering and voter suppression (the only accessible levers for excluding their rivals from power).

    689:

    Err, there are some who say capitalism is inherently anti-democratic, because the accumulation of economic power you get with it is anti-egalitarian[1].

    There are others who say any measures to keep accumulation of economic power from happening would be coercion and thus diminuishing personal liberty[2].

    Pick your side, personally, I think "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

    [1] AFAIR that's typically voiced by anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communist; BTW, the ones I talked to don't mind the "left libertarian" moniker...

    [2] FWIW, the guy bringing that up was a author who questioned what happened if people liked his texts more than the texts of others.

    690:

    On a potentially lighter note, from the Gruniard...

    Brazil gangs impose strict curfews to slow coronavirus spread.

    As one German political comedy news show said, it's a strange sign if your drug gangs are the voice of reason.

    (Minor note, there are some who think they want to protect their customers, err, I guess most of those in the age group SARS-COV2 is not that lethal; also, a suppresed immune system might not be all that bad, old people have a much higher antibody response than younger, doesn't help much...)

    691:

    Charlie yes. A dead give-away is when a US commenter moans on about: "We don't live in a Democracy, we live in a Republic" -as if that was in some way virtuous. They are struict constitutionalists & usually as reactionary & hidebounbd as any Tsarist minister in the 1870's I used to say: "Oh like the Most Serene Republic if Venice, you mean?" And then watch the interesting foamings I got in reply - especially when they completely, utterly & totally don't grok "Constitutional Monarchy" - as in GB, NL, B, D, N & Sv, oops.

    692:

    Some definitions of Socialism:

    Google dictionary: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

    dictionary.com: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

    Wikipedia: a political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management of enterprises.

    Britannica: social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources.

    I'm aware that people use the word to mean other things, but as far as I can tell from those writings it means either "things I like" or "things I don't like", depending on the politics of the writer.

    693:

    Err, I found this comparison of NATO and WTO assesmants of their own strength vs. the other side; IIRC it concerns only conventional weapons.

    694:

    You might want to read up on what J. F. C. Fuller's delinquent children were getting up to at, for example, the Battle of Tsaritsyn.

    695:

    As far as I can tell, you've got a definitional issue, in that you're defining socialism as ONLY socialism, but allowing for a mixed economy and calling it capitalism. Which weights the argument towards the status quo.

    696:

    I forgot that people nowadays don't remember the terminology of the time (or the history). 'First strike' etc. referred to nuclear weapons, the Cuban crisis was 1962, and the facts were as I said in the 1950s and 1960s.

    1988 was a somewhat different story. What that appendix does not say was that the Soviet forces were extremely poorly trained compared to NATO's, and their equipment was old, ill-maintained and massively inferior to NATO's. While the same was true of nuclear weaponry, which is also much smaller, I do not know if they had an effective retaliatory capability in 1988 - but they assuredly did not have in the 1950s and 1960s, despite both sides' propaganda, which was grounds for paranoia even in the most phlegmatic of peoples.

    697:

    Re: ' ... some who say capitalism is inherently anti-democratic'

    As in: winner take all even if they cheat.

    Another slippery slope fudge factor that tends to get overlooked re: capitalism, free market, etc. is the history of and extent to which 'capitalists' receive gov't funds either directly (start-up funding, innovation grants) or indirectly (deferred, reduced taxes). Would be interesting if more folks incorporated themselves and filed their taxes as businesses: total collected taxes would drop like a rock.

    698:

    Java Jive, by the Inkspots

    "I love coffee, I love tea I love the java jive and it loves me Coffee and tea and the jiving and me A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!"

    699:

    Re: capitalism vs. socialism

    Possibly another way to consider pro's and con's as well as the internal mechanics of 'capitalism vs. socialism' is via 'internationalism vs globalism'. (Basically this just resets the scale.)

    700:

    It's still rational today, though the reasoning has changed as the government has gotten more complicated: with some 6000 new staffers to be trained and vetted each time the presidency changes hands, the time necessary for a transition is still... three months, and sometimes when the president takes office the new appointees still aren't ready. The same is true for some of the states - California is the fifth largest economy in the world, for example, and an instant transition would probably be a recipe for disaster.

    701:

    "...any measures to keep accumulation of economic power from happening would be coercion and thus diminishing personal liberty.

    This is a horribly naive argument (you probably recognize this, BTW) but I felt that I had to call it out. Corporate liberty and personal liberty are not the same thing. Usually corporate liberty is very much opposed to personal liberty.

    702:

    Greg, I'm very liberal as U.S. voters go, but please read a !#@!!% dictionary. The U.S., for better or worse, is a republic ("If you can keep it" as Ben Franklin famously said.) The more liberal states, such as California, where I live, try to include democratic elements, which is of course a good thing, but ultimately the country is a Republic.

    703:

    the time necessary for a transition is still... three months, and sometimes when the president takes office the new appointees still aren't ready.

    Really 2 1/2 months. And that's down from the original 5 months.

    I can see dropping it down to less. And making it align with Congress or within a day with some restrictions on what Congress can do in those days. Move it out to December with taking office in January.

    At the state level, many states do not have governor veto setups for laws or it is limited. So when a party looses power in an election many times they throw some things together that really goes against the "will of the people" at the last minute.

    As to the people count, much of that is due to last minute foot dragging. No matter what the time line many such things will get pushed to the last day/minute. A big cause is no candidate wants to put out names BEFORE the election and chance some flaw in a person pop up and be used against them before they win.

    704:

    Yes. If you have a cat and everyone thinks it should be a dog calling it a dog doesn't change the fact that it is a cat.

    705:

    See I let you fool me again. My fault.

    706:

    "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks."

    707:

    Pre-cisely! And that was roughly the official estimate of the worst case, too - with the expected deaths being only a fraction of that. And those of us who remember even the 1960s (AFTER the worst of the late unlamented USA's Uncle Joe's purges etc.) will remember how many influential USA (and some UK) 'patriots' were calling for all-out war against the USSR, even at much higher costs than that (i.e. the ones that were publicly stated), while the west still had nuclear supremacy.

    The USSR was right to be afraid, very afraid.

    708:

    Yup. The modern version is "Why do the Iranians hate us?"

    709:

    The point I think Greg is making is that people who say "It's a Republic not a Democracy" are almost always anti democratic assholes, not whether or not the US is a republic.

    It's like the term virtue signalling - it's a perfectly cromulent phrase that's been so co opted by idiots that it's use is a pretty reliable heuristic for detecting idiots.

    710:

    As an American who pays attention to politics, I don't see that. It's more a remonstration against people who insist that the U.S. is a democracy and expect it to behave like one. From that POV is has minor utility as an insult linked to a deliberate misunderstanding of what someone else has written, but it's use in that role is very limited.

    The U.K. equivalent is probably something like "he's a Prime Minister, not a President, and this is a Parliamentary Democracy."

    711:

    I've never seen the phrase used by a serious person. And I'm from the US myself.

    I have however seen variations of

    "Maybe we would be better off without the electoral college."

    "Well, we're a Republic not a Democracy."

    With a variety of different things for the first sentence. My experience is that "It's a Republic not a Democracy" is pretty much exclusively the go to of libertarian bros and right wing people justifying anti democratic measures, rather than an actual useful correction.

    713:

    Damn it, can I not edit?

    The google search first page for me is about 70% people commenting on this. But there's articles on the phrase's use.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/opinion/aoc-crenshaw-republicans-democracy.html

    714:

    Oh, come on, there was a "plan" if you can call it that: ANYTHING TO STOP THE BOLSHEVIKS FROM TAKING OVER, and obliterating the West's chances to treat Russia as a colony, and, worse, that they might succeed, and so make our peons think about doing it to US!!!!!!!

    715:

    Charlie, I don't really mean to post a commercial link, but this poster should take a look at woolovers.com. I buy from them - 1.5 weeks shipping from the UK - and the prices and quality are very good... and wool.

    716:

    One, a first strike would, absolutely, not have gotten all the USSR's counterstrike.

    And we'd all be fucking dead, don't give me ANYTHING that *anyone on a planet wins a full scale nuclear war.You're dead, your children are dead, your parents are dead your friends are dead or dying.

    Dead.

    The Cuban Missile Crisis: the US had first strike capability, and the USSR did NOT like it... especially since they said they would not do first strike, and the US HAS NEVER EVEN SAID THAT.

    That was progably what finally set off the scum who set up the Kennedy assassination (no, I don't think if was Oswald, but that's a different debate), the fact that JFK lost (and rightfully so) the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Sure, the USSR pulled the missiles out of Cuba... and Kruschev got what he wanted: the US pulled its" missiles out of *Turkey (gee, 90 mi from the borders in both cases....).

    And those idiot hard liners in the Politburo who dumped Kruschev....

    717:

    Wha...?

    I'm sorry, that doesn't vaguely resemble the US.

    What the OVERWHELMING majority, if they have paid time off, get is two weeks of vacation. That's 10 weekdays. Period.

    Given that hardly anyone works for one company more than five years, then, maybe, they'll give you three weeks.

    My first and last programming jobs, the first with a college, and the last, well, I did make 10 years, I had a month.

    718:

    Oh, not quite. Trust me, I have had to listen to friends and idiots (sometime the same) complain about "double taxation".

    719:

    Couple of years ago, at Balticon, Eric Flint was supposed to be the GoH, but instead was in chemo, so we got Stephen Brust as GoH. Sat night, in the filk room, he did an incredible version of Cocaine Blues..

    Next morning, walking into the con suite, I realized I needed to filk it. I do my best Dave van Ronk imitation when I sing it....

    Every time my baby and me we go uptown, I go in and knock some down. Caffeine all around my brain.

    Yonder come my baby, she's dressed in red, She want's a 'spresso shot, Says else she'll kill me dead. Caffeine all around my brain.

    Hey baby, better come here quick, This much caffeine 'bout to make me sick. Caffeine all around my brain.

    You take latte, an' I'll take a plain, Ain't nah difference between the two. Caffeine all around my brain.

    Caffeine's for women and for men, Doctor said it won't kill you, but he didn't say when. Caffeine all around my brain.

    720:

    I never said that it would. The officially-approved sources I read stated that a USA first strike would get a minimum of 95% of the USSR's (limited) retaliatory capability, and probably closer to 99%. They also said that a minimum of 70% (if I recall) of the USA's industrial and military potential would survive in working order (which, in context, meant including the relevant people), and probably much more. And both sides knew that the other knew.

    Whether Europe would have survived was not stated, nor were the long-term consequences (e.g. the global winter). But, no, you (i.e. the USA) would not all have died.

    721:

    Justin Jordan Yes, thank you, that is precisely what I was aiming at.

    722:

    Yeah. "Officially approved".

    You really believe that? Greater than 95%? And, given that each side had on the order of 15,000 nukes, that means 150 or 300 of their nukes get through.

    We all die. Believing anything else is propaganda.

    723:

    "And we'd all be fucking dead, don't give me ANYTHING that *anyone on a planet wins a full scale nuclear war."

    Unfortunately that view was not shared by whack jobs like Curtis LeMay who started off from "nuke the USSR because we can, before they've got their own" and moved on to "nuke the USSR because we can, we've got more than them" with nary a twitch at the crash in validity of the reasoning since the real "reasoning" was more like "nuke the USSR, nuke the fucking USSR, nuke the fuck out of the USSR, nuke the nuke the nuke the USSR nuke USSR nuke nuke nuke froth foam spittle furious wanking" etc... And the USA did have a first strike policy, whatever they said in public. And the USSR knew all this.

    Kind of staggering that Reagan should apparently have said that he genuinely had no idea the USSR were shit scared the US was going to attack them until someone explained it to him after Able Archer 83.

    Living here in between the two it was fairly clear that while there was a significant chance of the USSR starting a nuclear exchange, it would be by accident: they'd think the US had launched already and not find out they were wrong until it was too late. [insert digression on Stanislav Petrov] But if a war was started deliberately, then it would have been the US that did it. Regardless of all the propaganda about how awful the USSR was, it was pretty clear that one thing they were not was nuts.

    724:

    Those numbers are entirely without relevance.

    Around 40-80 nuclear detonations in short order, and nuclear winter kicks in and kills 90-99% of homo sapiens.

    No credible nuclear war scenario, not even a "limited exchange between India and Pakistan", will fail to trigger nuclear winter of serious severity.

    If you're wondering why the many atmospheric tests did not trigger nuclear winter, the answer is that 1) They did, but not very much, because 2) they were tested specifically under circumstances that would produce as little dust/fall-out as possible and 3) they were spread out over several years.

    As for the military bragging out of one side of the mouth that they can wipe out the enemy while demanding ever increasing budgets because the enemy has a clear advantage out of the other side - That's basically their job in peacetime, and none of it is to be believed.

    725:

    Greg Tingey @675: Most of the paranoia &n the USSR, like Tsarist regime .... Was all internal, repressing its own people ... The external paranoia was no that much different from what all the other countries were & are doing ... i.e. "normal" diplomatic relations & spying. I am afraid I do not entirely get the idea of "internal" paranoia and how it is different from "external" one, every country/government/system lives by repressing the dangers to it's existence from within and without. Any healthy and progressive one, that is. Because when this system failed, and only when the "repression" system failed, the end of the country was predetermined. People asked themselves "why should we do all these terrible things to each other, can't we just all live in peace". But you must, for the most of the time. And it wasn't quite the same with the "external relationships" too, because not every country has lived under the constant threat of immediate and complete annihilation.

    Well, bollocks simply not the case - the "West" was still well-ahead economically. No, the USSR was internally corrupted by it's own political system - same as the USA is, right now.

    Elderly Cynic @696: 1988 was a somewhat different story. What that appendix does not say was that the Soviet forces were extremely poorly trained compared to NATO's, and their equipment was old, ill-maintained and massively inferior to NATO's.

    Well, it is not entirely new that NATO assume it's triumph in Europe happened not because of gradual deterioration of the enemy, but simply because they were better AT EVERYTHING. The 1988 (which is around my actual birthday, btw) wasn't at terminal velocity yet, and the fact that all armies and intelligence pulled out the forces and agencies relatively intact and without panic means they were more than capable of fighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Behemoth

    The real problem is that it wasn't adequate for the new generation of warfare, because it is a very shaky matter nobody really can grasp too firm. They say something like "generals always prepare for the previous war". See, modern "hybrid warfare" bullshit and "hypersonic" space race mostly is just an echo of the possibilities that opened up in the 80s, but with SDI strategies collapse USSR just did not take the bait. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETNSVEumyJk

    726:

    Sounds about right (as official position, whether or not as reality). It's interesting how much less optimistic it looks if you turn it the other way up and view it as saying that 5% - or maybe closer to 1% - of the USSR's nukes would destroy 30% of the US's military/industrial capacity. And indeed, one thing they got especially mad about was the USSR developing stuff like mobile launch platforms that would make it harder to get them all.

    727:

    "Those numbers are entirely without relevance."

    Not true in the least. They're the numbers the decision to push the button would have been based on. They may well be irrelevant to whether what happens next proceeds as they expected or as you expect, but they are completely relevant to whether it happens at all.

    728:

    Charlie @ 616:

    In your universe, when did Jim Crow end? Or discrimination against African Americans, red-lining, and white flight to the suburbs?

    The fundamental problem with your argument is that you are saying "X is an aspect of American culture" (true), and then leaping to "therefore cultural artifact Y must be caused by X, full stop" without providing any evidence for the connection. I mean, the Horatio Alger/self-made-man myth and the xenophobic fear of the "Yellow Peril" are both key historical aspects of American culture, but doesn't mean I can just claim that zombie movies derive from either of those.

    (When it comes to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, it's actually not uncommon to find critics who argue that it articulates the black American fear of lynching, what with the masses of zombies trying to kill the few non-zombies, and then the surviving black man being killed by a gang of white rednecks at the end of the film.)

    WW2 may have ended 75 years ago this summer, but that doesn't make British folkloric myths about the "Blitz Spirit" any less relevant.

    So, following your example, I can now attribute any aspect of post-war British pop culture at all to the "Blitz Spirit" myth. Punk rock? Movies based on Jane Austen novels? Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals? The Spice Girls? The Teletubbies? All reflections of the myth of the Blitz Spirit, obviously. It's still "relevant", therefore it can explain anything and everything, without me needing to do the (moderately hard) work of demonstrating anything.

    The actual history seems to be that zombies burbled along as an occasional element in American (and British and Italian and French and Mexican) B-movies ("TV shows" about zombies are a post-2000 thing) from the 1940s through the 1960s without ever taking on aspects of the "slave revolt" theme you're focussed on. I mean, there's even a sub-genre of "Nazi zombie" movies, like the 1943(!) film Revenge of the Zombies, the 1966 British film The Frozen Dead, or the 1981 Spanish-French film Zombie Lake, in which the threat is people turned into zombies to serve the Nazi cause, or else re-animated corpses of Nazi soldiers (often the result of some Nazi mad scientist).

    I'd be interested in your explanation of just how it is the Japanese are so obsessed with American slave revolts -- how else can we explain the modern zombie apocalypse revival based on 1990s Japanese video games?

    And how do you explain all these (mostly Japanese and Hong Kong) zombie films?

    Or all these British films? (More than 20 of which predate the 2000s.)

    729:

    No, they are not relevant, because none of those buttons can ever be pressed by any sane person under any circumstances.

    Some US president-elects have been pretty gung-ho about nukes and then never ever mentioned them again, after the first day on the job.

    I dont know what that briefing contains, but I think it is pretty reasonable to summarize it as "If you ever give that order, our civilization ends in less than five years."

    It doesn't matter what some military brass brags about a weapon, which by definition cannot ever be used, will or will not do. It's their job to brag about it, but it still doesn't matter because it cannot happen, and if it should happen, the result doesn't matter, because there is nothing left to defend.

    730:

    Curtis LeMay did not know about Nuclear Winter when he was playing cow-boy with nukes, so no matter how horrible a person he was, he is excused on that one point.

    Nuclear Winter was studied all the way from the 'Ivy' test-series, and was repeatedly dismissed, until the first global climate models in the middle of the 1970'ies showed conclusively that it was not only real, it was virtually guaranteed.

    The scientific reporting on nuclear winter was uncharacteristically unclassified, because everybody realized that the USSR needed to know this too - ASAP.

    Interestingly, this unexpected openness, where overclassification and -secrecy was the norm, made the soviets very, very sceptical, and the fact that they did not belive one could simulate the atmosphere well enough on a computer did not help.

    It took almost ten years until they officially recognized it, but then it was a major driver in progress on disarmament during the Reagan-Gorbachew period.

    731:

    It also has the now very relevant virtue of making it essentially impossible to cancel or suspend elections for national office.

    732:

    That didn't matter. The radiation and the fallout, would have done us all in. For those not turned into rubble from the explosions, unlike Hiroshima, there would be NO HELP from anywhere, no food, and radiation poisoning. LeMay had surely heard that, and didn't care.

    He, btw, is my candidate for highest-involved-honcho in the JFK assassination, esp. after JFK threatened to fire him if he didn't shut up about going into Cuba during the Crisis.

    "Bombs away" with Curtis LeMay (Goldwater's VP choice).

    733:

    One minor clarification: Reportedly (IIRC, in Raven Rock), Ronnie Raygun held to the notion that a nuclear war was winnable until the 1983 movie The Day After aired, at which he got the clue and realized that nuclear war was unwinnable. Score one for network TV saving the world.

    I'm pretty sure that every other executive except the current one followed your logic precisely. As for Commandante Bonespurs, I'm suspect he doesn't have the strength of character to push the button, even if the critical notebook in The Football hasn't been replaced by a comprehensive list of mental health hotline numbers for wherever he is in the world.

    Nuclear strategy, to me, is a fascinating example of Vime's Law of Weapon design, that weapons are for seeing and having, not using. That's why they're big and flashy and have all these ornaments and connotations (on regular things like sword), and why it's a scandal when their crews don't have them ready to fly instantaneously (on nukes). The big advantage to having a working nuclear arsenal these days is that it means you're unlikely to be subject to an invasion, especially by the US, China, or Russia. And that's a non-trivial defense, if you think of it that way.

    The problem we've got is Pakistan and India. They're so close that Pakistan might get invaded by an Indian army that thinks it can get to the nukes before they launch, and decide to fire its arsenal under a use 'em or lose 'em scenario. The resulting Indian-Pakistani nuclear war wouldn't be as horrific as a total nuclear war, but there is at least one online simulator available, and the results of running don't look favorable for having a civilization that can feed three billion people, shall we say...

    734:

    "By any sane person"... interesting comment, given the Orange Psychotic currently residing at 1600 PA Ave.

    735:

    Nuclear strategy, to me, is a fascinating example of Vime's Law of Weapon design, that weapons are for seeing and having, not using. For those who haven't read it, this 1987 paper by Carol Cohn is a treat: Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals (I linked it a a couple of years ago but the commentariat here has new members.)

    736:

    Some definitions of Socialism:

    dictionary.com: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

    Since multiple people have pointed out to you that they aren't using that definition, you're basically telling us that Authority is on your side.

    Umm, no. Aside from the fact that dictionaries are descriptive, not authoritative, the OED has more authority than dictionary.com:

    "Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy."

    Words mean what we agree they mean. You're outnumbered.

    737:

    And, of course, why N. Korea wants working ICBMs, to go with their half a dozen or so nukes.

    Meanwhile, the last time a real, full-scale war was on US soil was the Civil War.

    738:

    Meanwhile, the last time a real, full-scale war was on US soil was the Civil War.

    Personally, I do not have a problem with this particular outcome.

    One problem is that nukes are not a panacea. It's possible that modern hybrid war, especially the nonviolent part of the spectrum, may take down a country without making it justifiable, or even possible, to nuke the enemy in retaliation. That's a wee bit destablizing for my taste.

    739:

    Exactly, and that is why I said the USSR was right to be very, very scared.

    I find Poul-Henning Kamp's argument extremely weird, given his comment #730. To remind people, Stalin died in 1953 and the Cuban crisis was in 1962 - 1970s and later knowledge is completely irrelevant to the 1950s and 1960s. Whitroth's #734 comment is also relevant, because I remember (even if others don't) how the sabre-rattlers of the 1970s and 1980s were denying the likelihood of a nuclear winter in the same way that the fossil fuellers are denying climate change today.

    As a separate point, it is extremely unlikely that even a severe nuclear winter would have caused 99% of the human race to die (it might now, with our higher density), let alone 100% (we will all die) though it could easily have caused a reversion to barbarism, cannibalism etc.

    To repeat - no, I was NOT talking about the actions of sane people - I was talking about why the USSR was right to be scared.

    740:

    This comment has a great link in it (stirner prolly has us listed, so someone tell her thanks), which is well researched. Puts the UK media to shame. It's essentially pointing out the same thing as that Danish Mink/Pig paper - we actually do do know our stuff, and were aware of the Avian and Pig 'flu' epidemics that have hit CN - which is why their counter-PSYOP stuff about "CIA unleashing COVID19 at .mil games" actually resonates - CN hasn't had a RNG human plague, it's had several, across the board recently. Can provide research if required. CN is a bit frisky atm so wasn't going to lay it out quite as cold as internal memos have.

    And it's actually getting close to something much larger happening. Argentina 100 yr bonds just defaulted (#532) and there's a reason for that: secondary and tertiary supply shocks.

    Produce-rich Argentina's exports ravaged by coronavirus

    BUENOS AIRES - The United Nations has warned of an impending food shortage due to the coronavirus pandemic as major exporters such as Argentina find it increasingly difficult to sell their produce.

    Argentine exports in February were down 35 percent against the same month in 2019, the state statistics institute said.

    https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1896420 9/4/20

    You'll have all seen the milk excess being bled off and various other stories (labor shortages, rotting piles of produce etc etc ) but that's a major one - similar data points, all in the last week:

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/farmers-are-panic-buying-to-keep-america-s-95-million-cows-fed

    https://www.fginsight.com/news/news/global-stockpiling-sees-wheat-prices-hit-175-per-tonne-107481

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/08/rice-prices-surge-to-7-year-high-as-coronavirus-sparks-stockpiling.html

    March one, but also important: https://www.farminguk.com/news/coronavirus-farmers-warned-to-avoid-stockpiling-animal-medicines_55206.html

    These are the first wave (farmers are good at planning ahead in very narrow bandwidth) of second order effects coming into play. Remember what sparked the 'Arab spring'? Yep.

    ~

    Anyhow: keeping score, #531 and prior threads[0]:

    Fed to Buy Junk Bonds, CLOs and Lend to States in New Stimulus

    The Fed said Thursday it will invest up to $2.3 trillion in loans to aid small and mid-sized businesses and state and local governments as well as fund the purchases of some types of high-yield bonds, collateralized loan obligations and commercial mortgage-backed securities.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fed-unleashes-fresh-steps-for-as-much-as-2-3-trillion-in-aid

    That's it: we're all off on the Giant Bones Ride now, no stopping it.

    Tweet of the day:

    Dystopian London https://twitter.com/CjvHenderson/status/1248175832738287616 -- worth a look. Is it reality? Apparently it is?

    ~

    Anyhow, careful of 100% positive harmonic matches. If you look too deeply you might spot something else. We could have been beautiful.

    [0] Doesn't take a genius to spot it: the skill is calling it just before it becomes reality without the cheat-sheet. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/james-doakes-surprise-motherfucker

    741:

    Apropos only of near-future science fictional fashion: face masks are a fashion item in Korea now, and they're popping up in K-Dramas. So if you want to be au temps, put a mask on your hero. Actually in Korea, the dust and air pollution blowing in from north China have made masks a thing for years, as in parts of China.

    Score another one for Gibson inadvertently getting something right with cyberpunk. Remember all those corporate ninjas? Yeah. Masks.

    742:

    You wrote: (farmers are good at planning ahead in very narrow bandwidth)

    Yeah, well, about that: something like 90% of so of US farming is ALL agribusiness, and the MBAs planing that farming... are what I've been terrified of for 30 years.

    743:

    You should watch that film. (Mandy (2018)) Probably I should. There are at least 6 ways to read that recommendation and one is "everything else". Anyway, in the film Red is no more bound by proportionality of response than e.g. IL as argued at the link (ewww), but he kept his revenge within (an ethically arguable) 1-2 orders of magnitude, because that was all that was required. Re myself, non-violence is real, but is (also) a deep (and decades-practiced) mask.

    744:

    Yeah, our sense of humour is a bit wild right now.

    L'Orange gave Blackrock the keys to the castle & even the coal industry is demanding to be bailed out. And this is just this week. Hint: 6.6 mn employed in two week hits? That's you seeing what your systemic processing bureaucracy can handle, not actual real world numbers.

    America is officially no longer a Republic. This is not some wild conspiracy, it's 100% happening, right now, and by June it's going to get very interesting.

    Want a taste of how the American Patriots[tm], 100% cynical $ traders, non-insane Q ones are taking it? Knock yourself out.

    The " Market " itself .....Has become the new synthetic CDO .....EVERYTHING, the bailouts, the stimulus, it will not paper over every single debt instrument that is outstanding up against underlying. " Asset " that's have become worthless up against global sudden stop...

    https://twitter.com/Keith80519590/status/1248050044776964097

    Then go look up AirBnb / Rental markets etc - all now hoping to get bailed out when they've spent their entire lives being minor predators in the ecologies.

    That's not even looking at 'developing' world stuff, where the IMF is making paltry moves as vacuums open up as dollars leave.

    CTRL+F Nigeria:

    Office of the Accountant-General of the Federal Rep. Of Nigeria reportedly on fire. These men are straight up Gangstars, no 🧢

    lockdownextension

    https://twitter.com/Ingrid_thinking/status/1247840530387685377

    Yeah: 9/11 should tell you something about what happens after the government decides to burn the records department[0] down.

    ~

    So many Red Flags, but not the ones we're looking for.

    ~

    Off to binge watch "The Expanse": this might be a tell here if you follow the story.

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEsjv9vKCGc

    745:

    Hah! I know someone invested in BlackRock, so I was looking at them... and three months ago, they were starting to divest from fossil fuels.

    746:

    Ok, so.

    You'll have picked up that Greta is part of some Smart Capitalist[tm] stuff by our comments. It's just a fact - whether she's aware of the larger pool moves is up for analysis, but 100% part of Davos Green New Deal stuff. The Blackrock deal is pattern matched with a broader move (these are both accounts you probably should read through if you're interested in the area):

    Blackrock influence over both EU & US finance-state nexus reminds me of Goldman Sachs' heyday, except w. infrastructural & epistemic power in lieu of cognitive & revolving doors influence. Looks like there is no need anymore to recruit former @EU_Commission or future @ecb leaders

    https://twitter.com/clemfon/status/1248201378868211713

    In mind-numbing non COVID events, European Commission is handing the keys to the green finance regulatory kingdom to Blackrock! and paying EUR 500k for it. h/t @Frank_vanlerven https://www.responsible-investor.com/articles/blackrock-selected-for-european-commission-study-on-integrating-esg-into-banking-rules

    https://twitter.com/DanielaGabor/status/1248188331046903808

    https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:165869-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0

    These are "smart" people: but don't seen that this is a very specifically co-ordinated thing. It's like, 100% counter-move territory. That they're flat-footed is a testament to Human failure to have LARGE BANDWIDTH concerns.

    BoE, for one, is attempting to side-step it:

    Bank of England to directly finance UK government’s extra spending https://www.ft.com/content/664c575b-0f54-44e5-ab78-2fd30ef213cb

    And so on.

    Would you like to know more?

    747:

    All this nuclear holocaust war history discussion: the first 'disaster cozy' I read was a nuclear US-Soviet war of mutual destruction, Alas Babylon (1959) by Pat Barker. I bought it in the street sales in town during the annual Moonlight Madness summer promotion to shop all our junk that the local town did where we farmers shopped. It was a paperback and cost a nickle. I was a very young kid, but I re-read it often.

    Supercompetents in the military and government screw up but They Save Their Families, who are relatively comfy ensconced in their family's Florida farm - ranch close to a town. By a most fortunate confluence their area isn't harmed, despite many a military base all around them evaporated by the bombs ... And how would we guess this but the family's got Supercompetents down there too and they run things super competently. Finally the US Airforce helicopters show up with Supercompetent relatives who are coincidentally running everything in the country too, and a brave new world ensues and people live happily everywhere.

    Everyone else who is dead, just collateral damage along the way of this rip snortin' disaster adventure.

    I believe ... there is a single character who isn't white, but he's supercompetent at fishing and lurves teaching the white kids.

    748:

    How many times do we have to tell you: Nemesis is not a Goddess of Revenge. Mandy (2018) is not about revenge.

    They're both about unrequited love. ("Hubris comes from loving yourself too much and the Gods too little")

    Νέμεσις

    Where do you fly to? Stay, cruel one, do not abandon one who loves you! I am allowed to gaze at what I cannot touch, and so provide food for my miserable passion!’

    Anyhow, there's always a joke: is Narcissus poeticus or Narcissus tazetta the original one?

    749:

    OK, I will think and read about that, thanks.

    750:

    Since we're past #300, a lighter note:

    French pensioner ejected from fighter jet

    751:

    "Order of Magnitude"

    Yeah... breaking the World Economy is within the 1-2 boundary here.

    No-one believes us, but we did warn you.

    because that was all that was required

    It's the 6th Extinction Event, the Anthropocene OOCP.

    This shit is foreplay.

    Film: Red... ? Bad Move, Grandpa (2010) HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buH0CUEx-_Q&list=PLZbXA4lyCtqpoYG_5y6hS1dUE0ZaXnilr&index=6 --- not sure that was your reference here.

    752:

    Doing a quick second-night Seder ATM, thanks for the links and etc. (Back in an hour or three.)

    753:

    "Alas Babylon (1959) by Pat Barker" -

    It's by Pat Frank. Apparently it affected John Lennon who "spent all night reading the book, fueling his anti-war fervor and envisioning the world's population attempting to crawl their way back from the horrors of a nuclear catastrophe."

    I can't say I had heard of it, even though I have read David Pringle's "Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels" (1985) in which it appears, but that's a function of my memory. There are many things I now haven't heard of, even though I once had.

    Pat Barker did the Great War hospital-set Regeneration, including real-life characters such as WW1 poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

    754:

    Ahh, he's going to miss this part of translation jokes:

    אֵלִיָּהוּ --

    <em> Enoch, Noah's great grandfather (Genesis 5:22–24)[17] Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) Serah, daughter of Asher, son of Jacob (Midrash Yalkut Shimoni (Yechezkel 367)) Eliezer, the servant of Abraham who chose Rebecca to be Isaac's wife Hiram, king of Tyre, who helped Solomon build the first temple Ebed-Melech, the Ethiopian Jaabez, the son of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, who was editor of the Mishnah Bithiah, the daughter of Pharaoh</em>

    grep 9. nose wiggle "Don't wear shoes!" (You'll also note that self-Ascendance doesn't appear to be limited to just Jewish people, as a head's up <-- Judaism, allowing non-believers into 'Heaven' for centuries now)

    And for Host:

    Ooh, they’ve managed to weaponize the controlling-machine delusional form of paranoid schizophrenia

    Yeah, they have. Just not in the way you imagine. The Thing-in-itself being Mimicked for naughty purposes? As stated: you can run machine learning over our content and attempt to mimic it and you'd get some watered down inferior product, but that's not what this is about.

    Yeah. Straight up cold mother-fuckers. Amazing what you can do with lazers these days. No bullshit: we know how they do it, now.

    77th has been drafted in[0], UK is nose-diving.

    ~

    Ever work out how a CoronaVirus does that neurological stuff? We did warn ya.

    [0] Nine of the 17 possible field hospitals are destined to go ahead, as I understand it. Info ops specialists at 77 Brigade have been drafted in to help tackle disinfo about coronavirus. An extra 550 personnel have been sent to local authorities to help with resilience planning.

    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1247888964943409154

    755:

    Oh, don't worry.

    Attempting to kill an Ascendant Being and killing off loads of innocents while doing it? Fairly standard for all Abrahamic religions. "Blood Libel" is fucking hilarious once you spot the amount of times all three have gone full genocide to prevent the next 'Messiah' coming along. Even Judaism.... that Valley we talked about. Christianity? Well, we'd start at Joan D'Arc and then move... Islam? Well, let us investigate Sufi and before that the Sunni split.

    Abrahamic religions are ABOUT killing Ascendant beings. That's what they do (for real).

    We're not afraid of the IDF or the US .mil or the sick fucks who run naughty wetware hacking events while torturing children 'cause that's how they get their jollies, or ISIS members eating the livers of fallen army men in Syria.

    We will, however: tell them to fuck right off, and pointedly.

    IDF: yay! How's your economy gonna work in 2028? Hint: doesn't. You become yet another desert failed state and better yet: you're ignorant, arrogant and nasty little fuckers than no-one trusts. Why? Because you target and bully the fuck out of any of the real "Children of Light" and get your jollies off on killing and pardoning sick fucks after 9 months for killing people.

    Syriana. Golf Clap

    L'Orange has already made it real.

    Your economy? Toast now.

    We're cataloging and Marking them. We can survive this shit, easily ("OOOH, HER VOICE DIED 'CAUSE DEVIL" --- Bitch. We're tracking your dark matter manifestations and the $$ flows here. And you do this to dementia patients - well done, you're the balls end and shit capability end of [redacted]).

    Hard-ball?

    Weapons are the mark of the weak. We can do this shit while watching cartoons, Mother-Fuckers.

    756:

    "Bombs away" with Curtis LeMay (Goldwater's VP choice).

    That one surprised me. So I looked it up. You were thinking of George Wallace's 3rd party campaign. Goldwater's running mate was someone virtually no one remembers.

    757:

    Sorry, I knew he ran as VP candidate in the sixties, just had the wrong campaign.

    Wallace, on the other hand, was interesting. After the assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair the rest of his life, he changed, and apologized.... Not what I'd ever expected.

    758:

    Remind us all what "loss of memory" means to you. In particular references. Then admit, it's actually a goal of yours.

    No, really. Find me a person who still believes the PLO were highly educated and had a progressive plan for their people now, right? Now they're all barbaric Islamiscist terrorists.

    And why the "Memory Hole" is so abused in these times.

    And Why #6 is like ~ 40 years old now.

    Prisoner: Fall Out

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyfNf9oYg6g

    F*UCK THAT's A COPY WITHOUT THE MUSIC STRIPPPED. WITH THE BEATLES THERE.

    5,735 views •Oct 7, 2019

    Yeah.

    Modern Revolution, right?

    There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.

    Oh, it'll get nuked and stripped soon.

    But it exists

    759:

    Bad Move, Grandpa No, but it appears that you spotted the thread/refs. Still parsing the finance links. That world is not one I've lived in. (By choice.)

    BTW opened the door last night for Elijah and [what appeared to be] the coon cat entered. He did not drink the wine spoiled grape juice.[1]

    [1] My mother's-side (Quaker) grandparents (and their son my uncle) used to can (in jars) concord grape juice. Some jars would spoil. They would drink them anyway.

    760:

    And you thought that writing near future SciFi was the way to go. Pushing a story out a generation or two, and further solves this near future catching up problem even if it looks quaint when that future date arrives. As I have said in teh past, as long as teh story is good, then the fact that its world is very different from our reality doesn't matter, it just becomes a sort of alt-hist instead.

    761:

    Other than a silly story that goes to fantasy, the nearest future story I've written is set about 30 years from now, and they get further. The novel I just finished, and is being beta-read (well, I'm trying to sell the first part, a standalone novella) starts about 150 years from now... then jumps 11,000 years. (You really have to be careful when you're cruising close to the event horizon of a black hole....)

    762:

    Oh, and David.

    You're within a hair-breadth of convincing [redacted] that the entire Zionist policy is eradicating history, and to be honest: there's enough evidence to show this to be true.

    You know, Philip Cross, entire tranches of deleted content on the web* etc. They are not Nazis or NazBols or Fascists. Sorry, dude: Covenant #16 proved it. But it is ironic that both Nazis and Zionists are now 100% cited as doing this shit.

    They're just a bit old.

    Bound by old words and scripture.

    17 Covenant.

    They erased Art and Truth from the world in an attempt to Control it.

    Done. [That's a MAJOR penalty / rage / angst point]

    Points to shitty mural

    SO THEY WILL USE ART AS POLITICAL GAIN WHILE BURNING THEIR OWN PEOPLE AND PRECLUDING ART FROM THEIR LIVES WHILE HYPOCRITICALLY USING (redacted) AGAINST OUR TRIBE? WHILE SUPPORTING THOSE WHO KILLED THEM?

    David: You've no idea what you're doing, but crack on. No, really: it's fucking hilarious watching you "Social Shapers" doing your thing with 0% actual knowledge of what's going on.

    That, that above: Angel. Real one. Pre-Xian. Translatiom of course: but WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WE'RE DOING HERE?

    You probably do not want to meet your ANGELS, but... it's 2020, and here we are. They don't like you very much.

    It's a mirror. But it was all True.

    763:

    Well, that was frustrating. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do just now, tired of solitaire, so I decided to read other people's writing - I read one and a half stories of the current Clarkesworld, and the beginning of the other three.

    They were frustrating. All were very much first person (something that used to be a hard sell), and what I did read seemed to be all about what was going on in the narrator's head, and mixing it up with their personal history... and not on telling a story.

    The first one, about the Mach Principle, was really frustrating. Why did her son the astronaut vanish, when everything else was there? What happened? Hell, what happened with their relationship?

    Who knows. At the very least, the story was too short. In the meantime, I'm on facepalm Open Call and submission grinder and SFWA, submitting....

    764:

    If you have not yet, you should read: http://2020commission.com/

    765:

    “Kind of staggering that Reagan should apparently have said that he genuinely had no idea the USSR were shit scared the US was going to attack them until someone explained it to him after Able Archer 83.” Well to be fair it was quite clear to a lot of us that Reagan genuinely had no idea he was president

    766:

    “Words mean what we agree they mean. You're outnumbered” Sorry - I firmly believe in ‘one man, one vote’. I am one man and I have that vote.

    767:

    Sorry, I knew he ran as VP candidate in the sixties, just had the wrong campaign.

    My surprise wasn't that he ran with Wallace, I knew that. Heck it was when I was in the 9th grade and all kinds of kids were backing Wallace as a weird protest vote. Sort of like some people did with DT in 2016.

    I thought you meant he also ran in 64. Which seemed to overlap with what I thought was his military career. And it did.

    1968-71 was just a plain strange time in the US. Especially as a teen. I was too young by 2 years to go to VN. But still high school with all the issues of race, politics, VN, riots, assassinations, moom landing, etc... and of course guys being sent home for hair touching your collar, communist must you be, and girls for not wearing true dresses/skirts. (Although that week of 5F weather ended that last one.)

    Just flat our weird.

    768:

    Doing a quick second-night Seder ATM, thanks for the links and etc. (Back in an hour or three.)

    Passover is an appropriate time to sit around at home, eating odds and ends of whatever is left, and observing that you wouldn't be doing this if Pharaoh hadn't been such a shithead.

    But no, Pharaoh was too egotistical and stubborn to listen to his councilors, no matter how many times they repeated themselves, and now the land is afflicted by plague.

    Oy, again with the plagues!

    769:

    I did a quick search for irrelevant reasons, and caught this:

    https://www.groundreport.com/the-day-gen-curtis-bombs-away-lemay-cussed-out-senator-barry-goldwater/

    Er, the word "sanity"? I have heard of that, in some other context.

    770:

    Just flat our weird.

    771:

    On a completely different topic, because I really don't want to get into socialism, anarchism, left-libertarianism, capitalism, democracy, free markets (not the same thing as capitalism), and related, if you want some fantasy to take your mind of matters, try "A Practical Guide to Evil" — tagline "Do Wrong Right".

    It's a web serial, and so rough in places and in need of a good edit. Despite that, it's one of my favourite pieces of fiction recently (while I wait patiently for /Invisible Sun/ and the, now not coming at all, 3rd Scottish Novel from OGH).

    772:

    For anyone who might be interested in a "What if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into a nuclear war in 1962", a good book is the 2010 novel When Angels Wept. Its author is an academic whose specialization is that period of the Cold War. So he knows his stuff - political systems of the USA & USSR, as well as the weapon systems that were available to them. The first two-thirds of the book is straight history, summarizing this information.

    His point of divergence is in mid-October, 1962. From the divergence, the war scenario he comes up with is a USSR first launch on 2-3 Nov, 1962. This is mostly (but not entirely) shot down by US forces, since the Soviet nuclear arsenal in 1962 was almost entirely delivered by bombers.

    The USA responds with their 1962 plan of 'what to do if the USSR attacks', (no longer classified at the time of publishing). The plan meant attacking the USSR and China (despite China having nothing to do with things, that was in the plan, and we're going to do it, dammit!).

    One of the Soviet bombers that got through hit Washington DC. However, since this was the weekend before the mid-term elections, most of Congress was out of town. JFK, however, was not. When the dust settled, the USA was able to continue as a more-or-less functioning polity. The USSR was obliterated.

    So: millions dead over the space of 24 hours. Tens of millions dead within a month. Hundreds of millions by 6 months later. Ozone layer? Gone. Thyroid cancer among the survivors? Through the roof.

    Well worth a read. FWIW, it won the 2010 Sidewise Award for alternate history.

    773:

    Anyhow, if you're still after COVID19 stuff, here's a paper that basically states:

    We don't know, but it's likely it jumped pangolin - human - bats all at the same time and has been lingering around within human populations where it picked up the extra ACE2 abilities then slowly ramped up. They're fairly confident it wasn't engineered because "all of these things occur naturally" which isn't quite saying what it implies it's saying. i.e. find someone who has close contact with RaTG13 positive bats and live coronavirus positive pangolins and then look at your geography. It's a fairly small niche. polite cough

    The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

    Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-221. Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues21 (Fig. 1). This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection...

    It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it1

    Nature Medicine (2020) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

    The implications of that (NAE) would imply that humans are now the base stock. So you're looking at Bats --> Humans <-- pangolins.

    Since CN and 77th and US are all shooting from different scripts, the interesting bit is spotting who is pushing which narrative.

    774:

    For those who haven't read it, this 1987 paper by Carol Cohn is a treat: Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

    I've been reading it and giggling. The author is far more sex-obsessed than the subjects she is writing about. Thanks for that.

    There are two things going on here. One is that people notice phallic shapes all over the place. Every Roman legionarius sheathed his gladius in a vagina (sword sheath), which is where we get the latter word.

    How many centuries of school boys have giggled over that? Hopefully enough.

    On the other hand, something that is long, thin, and blunt happens to be a good shape for everything from cigars to pens to serpents to mushrooms to yes, missiles. And anyone who thinks that every snake (or for that matter weasel) is a penis and should be treated as such deserves every bite they get. Sometimes a cobra is simply a cobra, and to think otherwise is a phallusy.

    The most amusing episode I heard was when I was at UW-Madison, which was lucky enough to have three Amorphophallus titanum (titan arums) in their teaching greenhouse. And I got to play tour guide when two of them went off, excuse me, bloomed. Since our greenhouse manager had figured out the secret to growing these monsters, the blooms were close to eight feet tall.

    Campus radio had an LGBT program that I liked to listen to, and they decided to interview the herbarium director about this unique plant, that (giggle, giggle), looked like a (giggle, giggle) penis, emerging from a (giggle) dress. Wasn't that transgressive? The subtext of asking a staid academic about cross-dressing came very clearly across the radio. He very calmly answered their question. The thing the interviewing students had no clue about was that plants are default bisexual/hermaphroditic. And yes, I'm far from the only botanist who has noticed that and made it a normal part of the world (botanists normally have a fairly earthy sense of humor. We keep it to ourselves so as not to scare the normals). If only the interviewers had known, they could have had a really enlightening conversation with a man who's sense of humor is even more warped than my own. Alas.

    Anyway, the spathe (the "deformed dick" that translated into Latin is Amorphophallus) is a big, spongy hollow structure that is basically an oversized air, erm, freshener, if your preferred sent is three-day old corpse. It heats up around 37oC in full bloom, and you can smell the volatilized sulfur compounds it produces a very long distance away. The flowers (male and female) are hidden at the base of the spathe by the "skirt" (the spadix). The spathe is so fragile (it's like a loofa inside, mostly hollow) that it's basically got to be shaped like a skyscraper: tall, thin, and blunt, just to keep from collapsing immediately.

    Having stood next to one for hours while taking infrared pictures, and having gotten the full effect of one of them going off in full bloom (including the swarms of flies), I think the whole inflorescence is a dead elephant mimic, with the spathe as a tusk. But some people can see can see a penis in anything, even if it smells "like a dead raccoon stuck in a chimney."*

    *real quote. We collected them from the 30,000 people who lined up for the experience. The similarity to the smell of a three day-old corpse was reported by a retired coroner.

    775:

    Deciding when to story must be influenced on one's scenarios of teh future. OGH once opined about the "beige politicians" that would extend out into teh future, which I assume implied he thought our social and political systems would be stable. At the same time, we were in the hype cycle of new technology innovation, which he thought would quickly obsolete his technology descriptions. In Rule 34 [?] he described fairly chunky spectacles for an AR display. Yet already we are seeing the development of contact lenses to do the same thing, and these are almost passe in SciFi depictions on screen.

    Now all of a sudden, we are seeing upheavals in the social sphere. I read that Covid-19 might have quite long (decadal) impacts on teh economy, possibly never allowing a return to "normal". No wonder near-term SciFi will date before it is published.

    It would be interesting to know whether readers dislike technology or socio-political mispredictions more. For example, Clarke's 2001: A Space odyssey had technology wrong - human spaceflight to Saturn, Moon bases, manned space stations. But also the Cold War continuing, while it ended and the Soviet Union broke up. We may even be living the rapid disintegration of the USA as a global hegemony, something almost unthinkable in the 1990s.

    We are definitely living in interesting times, even if it is hard to project forward what may happen.

    776:

    I have not seen or smelled that, but have seen a few of these - and mature ones are fairly powerful!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallaceae

    777:

    It's not hard to imagine Curtis LeMay cussing out a politician. The reason he cussed Goldwater out is far more interesting than the fact that it happened.

    778:

    "...but the US constitution isn't amenable to easy change..." is a serious understatement. After the first ten amendments, which were actually part of the original deal, there have been two significant changes. Congress acceded to direct election of Senators only when we were within a couple of states of the number required to hold a conventional and (potentially) rewrite the whole damned thing. Getting chattel slavery out of it took a civil war that killed 750,000 people. The rest of the changes have been tinkering around the edges.

    I give us another 40 years or so before the system falls apart.

    779:

    To be fair, I have been going through nuclear strategies the last days, and apparantly it was H. "doomsday device" Kahn himself who called some "first strike" or "massive retaliation" scenarios "wargasm".

    Hm, there is already a thrash metal band like this, makes me wonder if the guy has a few other good band names for my musical endeavors. .

    Personally, I'd go with "Unicorn Bukkake Massacre", but maybe I'll find a better title for my black/death (which one was the one not serious?) metal project...

    780:

    Yup: there's a titan arum in the Royal Botanic Gardens, about a mile down the road from here -- it began to bloom a couple of years back and is now a regular tourist attraction. I've only gotten to it about 18 hours after first opening, so the smell had subsided, apparently: it wasn't particularly bad, but that might just have been my nose ...

    781:

    The AR goggles I was predicting were in "Halting State", written in 2005-06 and published in 2007. It was set in 2017, so is now a historical curiosity. The contact lenses only showed up after 2010, and aren't a commercial product yet; Google Glass first got out into the wild in 2013 and still isn't a consumer technology, but was the sort of thing I envisaged.

    The remote driving car predictions were a little optimistic: Silly Valley seems to prefer self-driving to call centers full of chauffeurs piloting vehicles remotely (even though that might be more achievable in these days of cars that come with always-on onboard LTE/4G modems for their computers).

    The big missed prediction in that book was quantum computers (even highly specialized ones). Still don't seem to have 'em (unless the NSA is keeping them under wraps).

    But yes, since about 2012 it has become a lot harder to write plausible near-future fiction. Even compared to 2007.

    782:

    Reminder that the 18th amendment wasn't exactly trivial, and even after its repeal it left a legacy of organized crime (and arguably the War on Drugs).

    783:

    Corvid-19 The statistics are totally screwed, if my anedata is replicable ..... The Biss knows of 3 or 4 people, whohave all had the Corvid. None of them was "hospitalised", none of them even reported it to their doctors.... So, given this is highly likely to be repeated: 1. What's the real infection rate? ANS: Much higher than stats show, but how much higere we haven't a clue 2. What's the real mortality rate? ANS: Much lower than the stats show, but we also haven't a bloody clue. Oh & 3> It seems to take people differentky - lots simply shake it off after a few days, others it lasts a week or so, others slowly go down & do ( or do not ) recover with medical intervention, others simply keel over really fast. Um.

    Heteromeles I've seen & SMELT those things several times AT RBG, Kew, who - suprise/not are also very good at getting them tof lower. A close relative is the multiply-phallically named ( Lords-&-Ladies/Jack-in-the-pulpit/Cuckoo-Pint, etc ) Descriptive link

    Micheal Cain @ 778 The rest of the changes have been tinkering around the edges. Errr ... no. Prohibition royally screwed the usa & they have STILL NOT RECOVERED - I mean drinking age 21 & all U campuses "dry"? ARRRGH! [ SEE ALSO CHralie @ 782, as I was typing this. Also giving women the vote, mattered, as everywhere. If DT "successfully" steals this years' election it'll fall apart a lot sooner than that.

    784:

    Haven't heard of it. Several little points, just from that page:

  • Can't tell if Russians or Chinese involved, but PRK has maybe half a dozen or so nukes.
  • Their missiles, they hope, will be able to reach the US West Coast.
  • 2M? A nuke in LA or SF, etc, would be more than that.
  • 785:

    Strange? Weird? Heh, heh, heh.

    Btw, not that I'll tell it in public, but I have my own personal version of Alice's Restaurant, runs 10-12 minutes with two part harmony an' feelin'.

    786:

    In Wisconsin at least, the titan arums hit full stench at night (8-9 pm, although I didn't stay through the night), so none of the tourists got the full effect. Just us botanists. The stench you become pretty used to, but the molecules in the stench made everyone working near the plant hoarse, sort of like an evening in a smoke-filled bar. Come the next day, the smell was already calming down, and a few days later the spathe had literally folded under its own weight. Only a few tourists at the end of the line on the right day got anything like the full effect.

    That's nature for you, producing an arum that's so colossally oversized that it grows visibly while you watch it (the cells are expanding more than multiplying, hence the spongy interior that's mostly holes). It blooms basically for a night, maybe two, and that's it.

    Fortunately they're getting relatively popular, so people and institutions that own them trade pollen and seeds around. IIRC the Wisconsin plants got hand-pollinated with pollen from other plants, and produced a bunch of seeds of their own that got traded off.

    787:

    My guess as to why he cursed him out is that he had his own fun project running, and... we're talking about the US Congress (and Senate).

    Quote from a dozen or so years ago, from mainstream media, about the Blue Book Project: this government leaks like a sieve, and you think we've kept something secret for 40 years?

    788:

    ROTFLMAO!!!!!!

    I've written a trilogy of shorts... actually, and one more short, but it takes place 25 or so years later, and in the PoV characters in the 2nd, 3rd, and last are first one, then another sister, who have been given the last name of Trouve, by their trillionaire, well... owner.

    Which is the French translation of foundling.

    789:

    Precisely, and the fact that he used that threat. Can YOU think of a better way to turn a conspiracy theory into Received Wisdom?

    790:

    The VR is all still a toy.

    When I get VR that I can effectively type, complete with tactile feedback, or it actually understands me, though many times, putting someone into words not spoken is clearer, I'll pay attention.

    Hell, my late wife and I played a VR game of ball in a hall around 1990, in Austin. Ball on screen/walls, we bounced it up. Bunch of us, after watching an early cyberpunk short as a play.

    791:

    Yep, as I believe I stated before the stats on Covid are (with one exception) entirely useless.

    With the varying levels of testing, varying criteria on who gets tested, different methods of accounting for deaths, etc there is no way to rely on them - and the researchers of the future will have fun.

    The only statistic that is both relevant and reliable is the ICU (and be extension ventilator) demand number, and fortunately that is the number that is focusing most governments at the moment.

    792:

    The idea of remote chauffeurs on one hand sounds interesting, but other than for a handful of rich people are we anywhere close to having sufficient bandwidth for the video requirements?

    Considering how working from home combined with forced stay at home for others has brought the Internet to it's knees in a lot of the world, resulting in streaming services having to cut quality, anyone want to guess what even half the cars on the road needing video bandwidth would do? And that assumes the vehicle can get reliable LTE/4G for it's entire duration - certainly not a reality in many places.

    As for VR/AR, they are certainly interesting ideas, though I personally will skip them if they every become usable. Given the problems we (as a species) have experienced with eyesight just from computer monitors, I think I will let others be the guinea pigs for something right up against the eyes for much of a day...

    793:

    re: Covid-19, both the infection and mortality rates are higher.

    The infection rate problem is obvious, because testing to figure out who's actually been infected, even in parts of the US, is just starting.

    As for excess unreported deaths, there are reports from Spain, Italy, and New York City suggesting that there are a number of unreported deaths.

    The general technique is that researchers and reporters are looking at deaths reported from March 2020, and comparing them with March 2019. In the cases reported above, there was a large spike in deaths reported, and not just from confirmed Covid-19 cases. Cause of death in many cases is unknown from the stats, figures may be fuzzy, and in some cases, it's probably people dying who would have otherwise been saved by a visit to the emergency room, except that the ER was overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients. But there's still a large excess of deaths that aren't being reported, caused directly or indirectly by Covid-19.

    The longer-term problem, going from San Diego's numbers, is that, even with all the excess deaths and assuming that 10 times more people have been infected and recovered than are in the data, that still leaves a large majority (90-99%) of my County's residents not exposed to the virus.

    This is good, in that it means that we don't have overwhelmed hospitals, we don't have windrows of dead health care providers, nor are corpses piling up in the streets and being buried in mass graves in the parks. Unfortunately, it also means that when this current pulse of cases is over, we're almost certainly going to face more waves of lockdowns and infections as the virus gets moved from where people are infected to where we are vulnerable.

    That's the bigger problem.

    It will almost certainly take at least 2 years to get wide-scale rollout of a vaccine. Wide-scale dissemination to the level of herd immunity will take longer still. And if we keep deforesting the Earth and moving stuff and people globally in airplanes, we'll almost certainly run into still more viruses that can exploit us. So this may be the new normal of the 20s.

    But don't worry, it could be worse: we could be trying to bend the curve on greenhouse gas emissions. That's going to be a bit harder. Of course, surviving the effects of not bending the big curve are going to be even harder still. But if we're going to suffer anyway, what's the problem with suffering for a better future?

    794:

    "So: millions dead over the space of 24 hours. Tens of millions dead within a month. Hundreds of millions by 6 months later. Ozone layer? Gone. Thyroid cancer among the survivors? Through the roof."

    Massive nuclear winter. The US would have dropped an extremely large number of high-yield weapons on the USSR (5MT on up). I just looked up the US forces, and got well over 2,000 strategic weapons, all on high alert.

    And after the first wave, I doubt that many US bombers would have been shot down, so the % of carried bombs detonated would have been very high.

    795:

    (even though that might be more achievable in these days of cars that come with always-on onboard LTE/4G modems for their computers).

    After dealing with huge swaths of the US with lots of people and no AT&T cell coverage I'm less enthralled with univeral cell phone tech. Maybe when 2 way sat becomes ubiquitous and cheaper.

    One spot with absolute no coverage for miles was on US-1 10 miles south of the DC metroplex.

    796:

    Yes, stinkhorns (fungi in the family Phallaceae) are fun. This is the tribe of the Devil's Dipstick and other odiferous fungi. Apparently a phallic shape is just perfect for aerosolizing certain classes of molecules, including those that smell of eau de dead cat.

    Then there's this, from Gwen Raverat's 1952 memoir Period Piece, a reportedly meh book known to mycologists from the following quotation:

    “In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool called in the vernacular The Stinkhorn (though in Latin it bears a grosser name). The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by scent alone, and this was Aunt Etty’s great invention. Armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way through the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching when she caught a whiff of her prey. Then with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim and poke his putrid carcass into her basket. At the end of the day's sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked, because of the morals of the maids.

    Aunt Etty was Henrietta Litchfield, Charle's Darwin's daughter. Why she was so phallophobic (not my original observation) is unknown. The scientific name of the stinkhorn is Phallus impudicus, to the delight of naturalists throughout its range.

    797:

    The Biss knows of 3 or 4 people, whohave all had the Corvid. None of them was "hospitalised", none of them even reported it to their doctors....

    How would they know? I was a suspected case which turned out to be a flu variety that was not a part of this years vaccine.

    And just as cases are being missed so are deaths. In the much of US (and I suspect elsewhere) if you die before being tested they don't waste testing resources on your body.

    798:

    I've seen phone coverage drop out at rush hour, when everyone's trying to reroute their cars or call to tell someone they're late.

    The big problem with remote drivers is that even a slow connection can result in a crash. Even driver-assist cars, like the current Teslas, have resulted in crashes when the road conditions exceed the car's capabilities and the driver isn't instantaneously ready to assume control (for instance, he's fiddling with his phone as the car goes under a semi due to computer error).

    Car companies are working on autonomous driverless cars that can do pretty well. I'd suggest that this trend may actually get downscaled or repurposed for special uses, because the one thing a driver can do that a navigation system cannot is clean up the passenger compartment on a regular basis. Turns out that this is a very necessary thing. Who knew?

    799:

    See 791. The question of surplus deaths is already being asked, and in the case of New York, answered.

    800:

    I was in college during the very end of the Cold War (we watched the Berlin Wall come down while taking a class on "Soviet Political Systems"), but a semester before the end I took a class called "War in the Nuclear Age." The professor, who was an ex-Navy junior admiral and ex-CIA, pointed out the real problem if there was a nuclear war: the boxing gloves come off and all the banned weapons come into play. We now know (we only suspected at the time) that the Soviets had weaponized anthrax, smallpox, and other nasties ready to go, all with very high lethality and transmissibility, chemical weapons including long-term toxins that don't degrade over time, as well as anything else that was developed in secret and kept that way. Oh, and he also pointed out that both sides had, as the starting gun for their nuclear attack plans, EMP bursts over all major military and metropolitan targets and satellite strikes (and an associated Kessler Syndrome), both intended to mess up the other side's communications and control in the ensuing full-on nuclear exchange.

    Fun times. If he was right, and if there had been a full-on exchange, I'm pretty sure few if any of us would have be having this conversation. But, hey, all of these now-banned weapon systems have been completely obliterated and all information about how to reactivate/rebuild them has been destroyed, right?

    Right?

    801:

    I've seen phone coverage drop out at rush hour, when everyone's trying to reroute their cars or call to tell someone they're late.

    My experience south of DC was on a Friday about 6pm on a nice summer day. (I know I know I should have just not started my trip so early.) But anyway I95 (3 lanes speed limit 55 or 65 mph) was moving at a grand stop and go speed of up to 10mph. I checked and US 1 was showing green so I got off. Oops. So did a lot of others. But it was still showing green. Guess what if Google can't get any signals from phones in cars creeping along at 5mph then it assume the road is clear.

    Oh, well lesson learned.

    Plus I've learned to cache all my trips of any distance and the areas where I hang out just so if I loose coverage I'm not looking at a blank screen.

    802:

    Har-de-har har.

    I havd a landline. But then, in '04, I was living in FL, on the Space Coast. Really unusual, a hurricane came through, and most line people were in S. Florida, dealing with the results of the last hurricane. Power went out around Friday. Internet, therefore, was also down (cable). Cell towers overwhelmed. The land line, back then still copper, on PHONE COMPANY power, stayed up till Monday or Tuesday, went down, came up for an hour or so on Thursday, so I could get a call out, went down, came up Friday, and stayed up. Power didn't come back till Sun or Mon.

    I have three ways of getting out, no single point of failure. They set up cell towers for average peak, not disaster peak.

    803:

    You think it was only the Soveits who'd weaponized stuff? We knew that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, because you can find a picture of Runsfeld shaking hands and selling them to him, for Ronnie, around '86.

    By '03, of course, they were useless, having degraded (there is a shelf life).

    804:

    _Moz_ @ 648:

    There is no American voting system.

    I don't see how that contradicts what I said. Well, unless you're asserting that there is no US government or that there are no rules controlling how governments in the US are appointed?

    There most definitely is a USA system of voting. There are laws, rules, conventions, customs, expectations, whatever you want to call them, that determine how governments are appointed in that country. They may be (are!) byzantine, confusing, archaic, even stupid, pointless, irrelevant... but those rules exist. Some of them are of the form "you have to have something that looks a bit like democracy, hereendeththerules", others are very specific about the series of votes that have to take place and who has to participate (and who isn't allowed to participate) and in what way. But they are, nonetheless, rules.

    Does Greece conduct their elections in accordance with French election laws? Does Spain look to Poland for how to conduct elections? They're all European, so surely there's a "European system of voting". Does Wales conduct their elections in accordance with Scotland's laws? Does Wales even have their own parliament?

    In the U.S. elections are the domain of the individual states, not the Federal Government. That was intentional in the Constitution; that each state legislature would retain the power to decide how to conduct their own elections (reiterated in the 10th Amendment).

    There are 50 STATE systems for holding elections.

    Even those parts of election law that are Federal (12th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th & 26th Amendments and implementing legislation there of) are carried out by the states.

    The Federal Government can tell the states WHAT to do (within the limits imposed by the Constitution - 10th Amendment again), but it's up to the states to determine HOW to do it. There is no "American" voting system, no uniform national system - only STATE voting systems. Fifty different states, fifty different systems.

    805:

    I havd a landline. But then, in '04,

    16 years later, like it or not, most land line traffic travels over the same area wide fiber as the cell towers for the company that does land lines in an area. Once it gets to the neighborhood it (fiber) goes into one of those pods on the side of a street behind some bushes and is converted to copper. And the UPS/battery in those pods is NOT good for days. Hours typically. Maybe.

    The days of getting a land line with copper back to the CO and the CO being filled with batteries are nearly completely gone.

    807:

    whitroth @803: You think it was only the Soveits who'd weaponized stuff? They kinda did, that he mentioned too.

    blackanvil @800: Oh, and he also pointed out that both sides had, as the starting gun for their nuclear attack plans, EMP bursts over all major military and metropolitan targets and satellite strikes (and an associated Kessler Syndrome), both intended to mess up the other side's communications and control in the ensuing full-on nuclear exchange.

    Here's the catch, though: https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2017/09/opcw-director-general-commends-major-milestone-russia-completes Biological warfare is probably not as lucky. Some people suggest that part of current virus panic is awareness of new generation of bio-warfare we may be unprepared to. But whenever I want to know who is preparing what against my country, I will have to look into accusations aimed at it.

    808:

    Scott Sanford @ 679:

    IIRC either Washington state or Oregon has gone to primarily mail-in voting. Maybe not "solely" but 95+ percent.

    In Oregon "in person voting" means dropping off your ballot at the election office. On election day in Portland there's usually some people outside the office so voters can just drive up, hand in their sealed ballot envelope, and be on their way. Enough people procrastinate that this is a good system; that intersection gets pretty busy on election days. There are also drop boxes for pedestrians, of course.

    That just reminded me of the way you used to be able to file your Federal Income Tax Return.

    Returns were due by 15 April, and they were considered to be filed on time as long as they were postmarked by midnight on that date. The U.S. Postal Service would have workers standing out in the parking lot so you could hand your return through the car window & it would go into the bin. As long as you were in line before midnight, your return would be postmarked by midnight even if you didn't get to the head of the line to hand your return in until after midnight.

    I noticed when I got home from Iraq (and filed my 2004 return April 15, 2005) they weren't doing this any longer.

    I ended up voting a provisional ballot in 2004 because our absentee ballots didn't arrive in Iraq until after the deadline to mail ballots back to the U.S. They went by POSTMARK date. If your ballot was postmarked on or before the deadline date it was "guaranteed" to be counted.

    809:

    One spot with absolute no coverage for miles was on US-1 10 miles south of the DC metroplex.

    That puts me in mind of the time a couple of years ago when my wife and I had rented a Jeep and were driving the trans-Canada highway from Vancouver to Edmonton. It had a built-in satnav with maps updated over wireless, which was great.

    At least, it was great until the last morning of our road trip, with 400km left to drive, when I started the Jeep up and the satnav screen flashed up a message, "updating maps: this may take a few minutes".

    In the middle of nowhere, in the Canadian rockies. Right.

    Purely by coincidence our one working data SIM ran out that same morning, leaving us with no data unless we were willing to pay £6/Mb (because there are no cheap roaming deals between Canadian and British cellcos -- Canada truly is like stepping back in time a decade in terms of mobile data).

    Luckily we had enough cached map tiles on one of the iPads -- she'd been looking at our destination -- that we could drive the highway to Edmonton without difficulty then use the iPad as an old fashioned map (no GPS, no updates) through the city streets to our hotel.

    The Jeep's satnav finally finished updating some time the next morning.

    810:
    I read that Covid-19 might have quite long (decadal) impacts on teh economy, possibly never allowing a return to "normal".

    We have had large disease outbreaks before: see wikipedia's list of pandemics and epidemics. And yet here we were, a few months ago, regularly massing together at close quarters with strangers in large numbers, and blithely hopping about the world like demented fleas without a thought for the risks.

    Socially, things will return to normal, with minor adaptations perhaps, probably sooner than you think. (Yay, demented fleas!)

    Politically, in some countries the botched response to Covid-19 may have done enough to delegitimise incumbent political leaders and parties. May have. In many others, the pandemic will have strengthened the existing drift towards authoritarian government.

    Macroeconomically the outbreak might set back international trade considerably. I remember a piece by George Monbiot some years ago in which he talked about people fighting like cats in a sack at the first hint of scarcity. We certainly saw that, with countries (and states in the disUSA) fighting each other for medical supplies. And now there are calls in many countries to have domestic manufacturing capability for ... something medical, the voices aren't clear on what exactly.

    That does not bode well for our collective response to the stresses of the 21st century.

    Microeconomically...people will be subdued for a while; household savings will increase and consumption remain low until Christmas, or longer in countries whose response to the virus was to fire everybody.

    But people will still get married, and their friends will want to be there if they can, and to celebrate, so "situation normal" will slowly ramp up.

    811:

    Ongaku @ 684: In England (Yorkshire at least) elections are run by the councils, not the national government. I have counted votes and been a poll clerk. I'm recruited and paid by the Leeds City Council. The rules that are followed, however, are national.

    And I'd guess that in most of the United States elections are RUN at the county level (I can only cite North Carolina from personal experience). The laws for HOW the counties will run elections are written by the state legislature.

    812:

    Talking about VR: I have a headset for almost a year and I am pretty satisfied of it. It takes time to setup and adapt, and it is not for everybody, but it has special advantages and properties that will eventually progress into our lives. Maybe in 10 years time we can make them 10 times more affordable and this will open new horizons. Current market volume for these deices is barely 5 millions of people and it is close to saturation, mainly because VR is much less usable for people with average orientation and motor skills, and you also need to adapt a lot for minute details. And let's not even start with such issues as safety and stability of this equipment. Imagine turning your head and your image freezes for half-second or struggles to pull 20 fps, or flashes full-spectrum right into your eyes.

    It is all tied in to the fact that despite years of development, there's not enough new standards and practices to satisfy people, and especially in software. Recent VR game from Valve blew up the Internet for the sole reason that it is well-made, broad-spectrum game that does not suck all the time. I know good examples of programs that are utilitarian-useful, VR is being adapted to CAD applications and training for workers, but there is not enough people and experience to even know where it really gives your advantage. Too many questions and options we did not use yet, also. Like, there are proposals to use stereographic thermal hand-tracking to eliminate need for controllers at all (if it is reliable enough). Or there are experimental gloves with force-feedback. Then there's new Valve Index that has capacitor sensors to track fingers on your hand - it sells like a hot cakes. There's eye tracking technology for years now, and yet nobody really knows if it worth to install in consumer devices.

    HTC announced some sort of collab for creation of mixed AR/VR glasses (called them XR). They are not going very well, but apparently trying to push hardware standard to certain point where it looks more appealing. https://www.cnet.com/news/htc-vive-cosmos-xr-will-blend-ar-and-vr-with-a-snap-on-faceplate/

    The other major problem for further development is the military restrictions for the equipment. Super-compact and very-precise sensors are the thing nowadays, they are restricted for mass production because of the properties they posses. What if you could crack open the headset and it's controllers, pull out the device and use it in military application, cheap and ubiquitous? Current sensors can have drift of centimeters per second, which is corrected by cameras (most of the time) and lidars (lighthouse tech), but there's no real trouble to reduce this even more. Same with autonomous drones, mobile phones, cameras and etc. Couple it with wireless/5G, machine learning and some hired specialists and you have a scalable military backbone of unknown properties. Needless to say, governments are going to keep the technology on tight leash until they modernize enough to outsmart this thing. I am not sure I want to live in that future, but we will eventually be there.

    Consider the following: modern inside-out tracking technology with more than million devices world-wide constantly scans your environment to determine it's position. 2 to 6 cameras per device - with this density of poorly-regulated security breaches, 1984-style paranoia is a light breeze compared to a storm.

    813:

    That (17 March) paper has (today) 66 citations! https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=4180430536993184356 Most of them are not directly relevant. These caught my eye. My mind isn't into to studying them today (into manual labor today, planting, trash removal). But later, perhaps, and if anyone else wants to have a look please comment.

    Recombination and lineage-specific mutations led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (bioRxiv, March 23, 2020) In light of these results, there two possible scenarios to consider. The first is that SARS-CoV-2 derives from a recombination event between human SARS-CoV and another (unsampled) SARS-like CoV. The second is that there occurred at least two different recombination events, one leading to human SARS-CoV and another one leading to SARS-CoV-2. In either of these two scenarios, the inferred the time to the most recent common ancestor in the recombinant region of the clade leading to RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is no later than 2009 (2003-2013, 95% HPD limit).

    Retrospective Search for SARS-CoV-2 in Human Faecal Metagenomes (23 Mar 2020) In the present study, we use ViromeScan to retrospectively search for SARS-CoV-2 genomic traces in human faecal viromes from publicly available metagenomes. Data from this preliminary, exploratory investigation provide evidence to support the presence of genomic traces of SARS-CoV-2 in the faecal virome of 6 out of 26 presumably asymptomatic Chinese, whose biological samples were collected before April 2019. By contrast, no SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the faecal viromes from 12 EU citizens, for whom faecal sampling dates back to March-April 2013 for Italians and before November 2019 for Spaniards.

    Evolutionary origins of the SARS‐CoV‐2sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic (preprint, March 29, 2020) We estimate that RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 diverged 40 to 70 years ago. There is a diverse unsampled reservoir of generalist viruses established in horseshoe bats. While an intermediate host responsible for the zoonotic event cannot be ruled out, the relevant evolution for spillover to humans very likely occurred in horseshoe bats.

    814:

    Troutwaxer @ 702: Greg, I'm very liberal as U.S. voters go, but please read a !#@!!% dictionary. The U.S., for better or worse, is a republic ("If you can keep it" as Ben Franklin famously said.) The more liberal states, such as California, where I live, try to include democratic elements, which is of course a good thing, but ultimately the country is a Republic.

    A republic (Latin: res publica, meaning "public affair") is a form of government in which the country is considered a "public matter", not the private concern or property of the rulers. The primary positions of power within a republic are attained, through democracy, oligarchy, autocracy, or a mix thereof, rather than being unalterably occupied. As such it has become the opposing form of government to a monarchy and has therefore no monarch as head of state.

    In the context of American constitutional law, the definition of republic refers specifically to a form of government in which elected individuals represent the citizen body and exercise power according to the rule of law under a constitution, including separation of powers with an elected head of state, referred to as a constitutional republic or representative democracy.

    Emphasis added

    The United States is BOTH "a republic" and "a democracy"; representative democracy - the big argument is WHO do our "representatives" really represent and what can we do about it.

    Socialism v. Capitalism doesn't really tell you what kind of government you have, although from my observation I'd say "socialist" governments tend to be more democratic (little 'd') leaning, while more "capitalist" governments tend to be more autocratic, but with the extremes of both capitalism AND socialism tending toward the anti-democratic (although coming to that from different directions).

    815:

    "the one thing a driver can do that a navigation system cannot is clean up the passenger compartment on a regular basis. Turns out that this is a very necessary thing. Who knew?"

    Eh, I've been pointing this out ever since people started banging on about how in the future it's all going to be self-driving taxis and won't it be great. Sure, for values of "great" that include sharing your ride with half-eaten McDonalds, puke, used condoms, etc...

    816:

    Troutwaxer @ 710: As an American who pays attention to politics, I don't see that. It's more a remonstration against people who insist that the U.S. is a democracy and expect it to behave like one. From that POV is has minor utility as an insult linked to a deliberate misunderstanding of what someone else has written, but it's use in that role is very limited.

    I don't know if Justin is correct about the point Greg is making, but the U.S. IS a democracy, as well as a republic.

    "A republic (Latin: res publica, meaning "public affair") is a form of government in which the country is considered a "public matter", not the private concern or property of the rulers."

    That says nothing about HOW the republic is organized, only that government is not the private property of rulers.

    So, whenever you hear someone insisting that it's the former, but not the latter, you can be pretty sure they're a fascist asshole ... or a Libertarian (but I repeat myself) or some Sovereign Citizen dickhead.

    817:

    each state legislature would retain the power to decide how to conduct their own elections

    You're saying that Alabama could decide to pick a man and he gets the vote? Texas could decide that only unmarried women get the vote? California could decide that only those who own more than 100 acres of land can vote, and Montana only allows those honourably discharged from the military to vote? While in New York they put all the ballot papers in a barrel and draw one at random to decide the election? I won't even get into the various proportional, preferential and multiple vote systems, let alone the qualifications to hold office.

    I suggest to you that the USA as a nation has a great many rules, laws and customs that seriously constrain what states can call "duly elected".

    818:

    There is no "American" voting system, no uniform national system - only STATE voting systems. Fifty different states, fifty different systems.

    In other words, the USA is not a democracy, it's 50 different democracies?

    819:
    It would be interesting to know whether readers dislike technology or socio-political mispredictions more.

    I like them all, because of what they reveal about the blind spots and other faultlines in our thinking.

    Charlie gets things more right than just about anybody. The tele-operated taxis in Rule 34 neatly presaged the likes of Uber.

    Pretty much everyone fails to allow adequately for Hofstadter's Law, though. We can quickly mass produce small variations of existing objects. It takes much longer to ramp up new things.

    I roll my eyes at predictions like the recent one that cattle farmers will be history by 2030. Not gonna happen, even if Impossible Foods comes up with a product that is "beef turned up to 11", and half the price. 2080 ... maybe.

    I also roll my eyes at predictions that ignore the axioms of economics: people respond to incentives, a.k.a. supply and demand; and interconnection (one person's spending is another's income, one person's borrowing is another's lending, etc.)

    So for instance a story that talks describes the massive reduction of traffic congestion brought about by self-driving cars is manifestly pure wish. What will bring about a reduction in traffic congestion is an increase in poverty, or laws preventing people from using cars.

    Likewise nuclear fusion bringing cheap abundant energy to everybody. Leaving aside the technical difficulties, the economic analogue of Amdahl's Law applies: there are many costly things in an electricity generation system besides the firebox. And political difficulties...

    The interesting technological thing that happened is that we are still coasting on the exploitation of solid-state semiconductors. There has been nothing even remotely comparable to that since. (An example of something that may be comparable: new, cheap materials from which we could build a space elevator. Or perhaps nearly free Drexlerian nanotech.)

    The big innovations that we have seen since the birth control pill have been about the vanishing cost of moving information around (speedily sending, storing, searching, sorting, summarising).* The lack of other innovations is a direct result of us having semiconductors and not much else to play with.

    So... I like them all, except the mistakes that anyone who finished high school shouldn't make.

    • SpaceX is a good example. The steels and other materials are a bit better than those available to the Apollo Programme, but the main driver of SpaceX's dramatic cost reductions is the pervasive presence of semiconductors throughout the rockets. And what is SpaceX going to do? Starlink. Further reduce the cost of playing with information.

    It's notable that Musk's other big ideas, which rely much more on moving materials around (the hyperloop, the Boring company, even Tesla), are relatively less successful.

    820:

    Pigeon @ 723:

    "And we'd all be fucking dead, don't give me *ANYTHING* that *anyone on a planet wins a full scale nuclear war."

    Unfortunately that view was not shared by whack jobs like Curtis LeMay who started off from "nuke the USSR because we can, before they've got their own" and moved on to "nuke the USSR because we can, we've got more than them" with nary a twitch at the crash in validity of the reasoning since the real "reasoning" was more like "nuke the USSR, nuke the fucking USSR, nuke the fuck out of the USSR, nuke the nuke the nuke the USSR nuke USSR nuke nuke nuke froth foam spittle furious wanking" etc...

    Fortunately, OTOH, LeMay's views were NOT shared by the occupants of the White House hot seat who ultimately had to decide whether to launch a first strike OR NOT (including Reagan), who all chose the "NOT to launch" option. I think you have to judge not just by what they could have done, but by what they ultimately chose NOT to do.

    821:

    I was always taught as follows: In a democracy, individual citizens vote directly for/against the laws by which they will be governed.

    In a republic individual citizens elect representatives who are trusted to vote for/against laws (hopefully on some basis that the citizens who elected them will approve.) Obviously both Republics and Democracies come in multiple different flavors.

    Therefore the U.S. is a republic. This is school-child-level stuff. The U.S. is sometimes referred to, very casually, as a Democracy, but that's not remotely a technical definition. I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that various kinds of republics and democracies both fall under the global heading of "Democracy," and we tend to prefer that our allied nation-states practice some form of "Democracy" whether it be parliamentary, republican, or something else. This is nothing but an accident of language and it's sad that people become confused by the whole thing. (It's the same level of confusion as if we called both Macs and Windows computers "Windowing Machines." Macs still wouldn't run a Microsoft OS.)

    To subtract from everyone's confusion, I am not a Libertarian,* but I am a fairly typical Liberal of my generation (I'm at the trailing edge of the Boomers.)

    I have, from time to time, noted in passing that the U.S. is a Republic and not a Democracy, and even noted once or twice that if someone wishes to be an advocate for some political position it is worthwhile to understand the distinction. The idea that someone who notes this basic fact is a right-wing asshole is merely the opinion of someone who appears not to understand basic political definitions that go back to ancient Greece.

    • The problems of Libertarianism have been thoroughly explored, so I won't restate them.
    822:

    In other words, the USA is not a democracy, it's 50 different democracies?

    That's always been my understanding. Like Switzerland, but a bit more tied together. Till recently, anyway.

    823:

    Oddly, your proposal for New York would be constitutional for Presidential elections, though not Congressional ones.

    JBS is fundamentally correct. Election law in the United States is fundamentally state level laws with a handful of Federal rules relating to non-discrimination and fairness. But really there are at least 50 entirely separate electoral systems under 50 slightly different legal regimes, which could, Constitutionally be far more different than they are.

    824:

    "basic political definitions that go back to ancient Greece."

    Except Athenian democracy was a representative democracy, albeit a different sort than we use. But I can tell you're the sort to not let me facts get in the way of being smug.

    825:

    Charlie Stross @ 809:

    One spot with absolute no coverage for miles was on US-1 10 miles south of the DC metroplex.

    That puts me in mind of the time a couple of years ago when my wife and I had rented a Jeep and were driving the trans-Canada highway from Vancouver to Edmonton. It had a built-in satnav with maps updated over wireless, which was great.

    At least, it was great until the last morning of our road trip, with 400km left to drive, when I started the Jeep up and the satnav screen flashed up a message, "updating maps: this may take a few minutes".

    In the middle of nowhere, in the Canadian rockies. Right.

    Purely by coincidence our one working data SIM ran out that same morning, leaving us with no data unless we were willing to pay £6/Mb (because there are no cheap roaming deals between Canadian and British cellcos -- Canada truly is like stepping back in time a decade in terms of mobile data).

    Luckily we had enough cached map tiles on one of the iPads -- she'd been looking at our destination -- that we could drive the highway to Edmonton without difficulty then use the iPad as an old fashioned map (no GPS, no updates) through the city streets to our hotel."

    The Jeep's satnav finally finished updating some time the next morning.

    I don't know if they have them in Canada, but every state I've ever been through in the U.S. has a "Welcome Station" pretty soon after you cross the state line (except for Texas on I-40 where it's in Amarillo for some reason) and they hand out free state highway maps. They may not be that good for navigating through town to find your hotel, but every hotel I've stayed at since 2005 has internet & you can get directions from Google Maps that's good enough to get you from an interstate exit to the hotel & the all have a printer you can send the directions to before you check out. So you can print out the directions to the next hotel before you leave the current hotel.

    I'm just not comfortable with "map apps" on a cell phone and/or in car navigation systems. I started using the military's PLGR in 1990, so I'm real familiar with the unreliability issue using GPS. Walk into the woods or go "behind" a hill & lose your signal. And the maps are not always accurate. My Garmin RINO had the same problems.

    I do now have a smart phone. The only "map app" I use is Gas Buddy which helps me find the cheapest gas when I travel ... not that I'm doing any traveling right now ... but if I ever get out of the house again ...

    826:

    I was always taught as follows: In a democracy, individual citizens vote directly for/against the laws by which they will be governed.

    In a republic individual citizens elect representatives who are trusted to vote for/against laws

    By that definition, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, etc are all republics, not democracies.

    The first looks like a participatory democracy, the second like a representative democracy — going by the old Traveller government types.

    827:

    I started using the military's PLGR in 1990, so I'm real familiar with the unreliability issue using GPS. Walk into the woods or go "behind" a hill & lose your signal.

    Uh, things have improved a wee bit in the last 30 years. I have memories around 96/97 of a friend who has always been a bit of a GPS nut had a great for the time portable GPS. Black on gray about the size of 1 1/2 soft drink cans.

    The woods are not a problem now. Well if they are I'd really like to know what is in the wood and leaves. Ditto behind a hill. Back in the day it was hard for portable units to acquire new sats. Now many phones will lock onto 6 or more at a time. So when you loose one behind a hill you still have the others. A few places like NYC building canyons can be a hassle as the limited sight lines and radio bounces off the buildings can cause you to be placed a few 100 feet from where you really are.

    828:

    Re: 'Some people suggest that part of current virus panic is awareness of new generation of bio-warfare we may be unprepared to.'

    While I imagine that there may be governments doing such work despite this being against various UN bills (international law), I think that COVID-19 is showing everyone just how little is actually known about what already surrounds us. No need to create a boogeyman when there's a real monster hiding under your bed.

    Re: 'But whenever I want to know who is preparing what against my country, I will have to look into accusations aimed at it.'

    Based on what's actually happening now the real threat is withholding medicines and supplies including those legally ordered e.g., 3M - Canada. Despite the trade embargo against Russia, I seriously doubt that the world would turn its back on Russia and its people during this pandemic provided Russia is open/honest about it. The stress on honesty is not for the benefit of the politicians, it's a fundamental requirement in order for the scientists/medical specialists and pharmaceutical communities to have a clear picture of the situation so that they can provide the necessary and appropriate equipment and medicines/vaccines (once available). Openness, and especially being seen to be open, matters for the public as well.

    I read that Putin is now living and working from his country house after appointing Medvedev to oversee the COVID-19 response. This pandemic is an equal-opportunity event: all countries/political systems are dealing with the same unknown. How they react to this and especially what the outcome to their peoples and infrastructures post-pandemic will tell everyone else just how good/bad their system actually is. Further, this pandemic will become entrenched as a personal memory for everyone around the globe - much more immediate and personal than the first cosmonaut to orbit the Earth or the first moon landing.

    829:

    The problem with biological warfare is that it only works when you (or your force at least) are immune to the weapons you deploy, due to innate immunity, vaccines, or lack of proximity. If that's not the case, then it's basically a badly aimed suicide system that can't be really aimed or controlled.

    Right now, even with the quarantine, if someone launched smallpox, it would still circle the globe, due simply to airline flights.

    That's why there's so much interest in cyberwar. It's hard to figure out where an attack comes from, to stop it or retaliate, and with so much infrastructure going online, it's getting increasingly possible (not easy) to launch devastating infrastructural attacks.

    The thing to worry about with biowarfare is probably not Russia or the US, it's the dipshit virologist who convinces himself (gender likely) that the best thing for the world is to kill off most of the people indiscriminately, Thanos style. Dipshit then launches a doomsday virus (perhaps a hacked-together smallpox using old sequence data) to do it. It's possible for someone to build a virus now, and unfortunately, it's likely to get easier at least in the next decade. Obviously this isn't a new scenario (I think King got there first-ish with the White Plague), but it's getting more possible.

    830:

    Heteromeles @830 said: (I think King got there first-ish with the White Plague)

    White Plague is by Frank Herbert

    I have it on my to-be-read pile right now, once I finish The Stand.

    831:

    The Last Flight of Dr. Ain.

    832:

    The woods are not a problem now. Well if they are I'd really like to know what is in the wood and leaves.

    Eucalypts. More a problem for cellphone signals, but compounds the problem of being in a valley when the trees are surprisingly resistant to radio waves. Australian telcos spent a lot of time whining that the government wouldn't let them use their preferred solution* before giving up and just building many more towers much closer together along major highways than they would prefer.

    Sadly search on the topic is completely overwhelmed with "best clothing to block cellphone signals" and similar wave of devastation problems.

    • chainsaws. Also, oddly, favoured by some RF-sensitive people because they also have faith than chopping down trees prevents bushfires.
    833:

    . Despite the trade embargo against Russia, I seriously doubt that the world would turn its back on...

    You seen what's being done to Iran right now? The US is (still) threatening sanctions against anyone who so much as smiles at the place, let alone helps in any meaningful way.

    But Russia is not Iran, I expect that that nice Mr Putin and his friendly fellows will get all the help they can cope with from the omnicompetent President Trump, though.

    834:

    Regarding use of facial masks(/improvised respiratory PPE) by the public to reduce SARS-CoV-2 R0, a new BMJ piece: Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis (09 April 2020) In conclusion, in the face of a pandemic the search for perfect evidence may be the enemy of good policy. As with parachutes for jumping out of aeroplanes, it is time to act without waiting for randomised controlled trial evidence. A recently posted preprint of a systematic review came to the same conclusion. Masks are simple, cheap, and potentially effective. We believe that, worn both in the home (particularly by the person showing symptoms) and also outside the home in situations where meeting others is likely (for example, shopping, public transport), they could have a substantial impact on transmission with a relatively small impact on social and economic life. They cite an abstract in the parachute-experiment genre: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials. (2006)

    And here's a list of countries that require or strongly recommend mask usage. Some only in the last week so their numbers won't have changed yet if there is an effect. They are the non-control part of a "natural experiment". (The WHO will look very bad in future analyses, IMO.) Coronavirus: Countries where face masks are mandatory in COVID-19 fight (07 April 2020, Lana Andelane) The church cluster in South Korea and the choir cluster in Washington State and the Connecticut (State) party cluster and other clusters strongly suggest that superspreaders (and lesser asymptomatic spreaders) exist and that masking them (to block most forward droplet/aerosol projection) by masking everyone would be a good idea.

    835:

    Bill Arnold @835 said: They cite an abstract in the parachute-experiment genre

    Well played.

    You caught my attention with the "parachute-experiment", it slipped past my defenses. My "immune system" did not kick in until I read all of the links and started problem solving, going over the logistics of making an effective mask with the stuff I have here at home. Doing the engineering.

    That's when my "immune response" kicked in and I started asking obvious questions, and the house of cards built while reading the pandemic porn fell apart, and I woke up from the pandemic theatre that I found myself participating in.

    That was interesting.

    That happens to me now and then. When it does I am always fascinated by the mechanism used to get past my defenses. What buttons were pushed. Once identified, I can deactivate the buttons so that they do not trigger again.

    The root cause, is that I stepped away from my work, and my curiosity made me look. The best solution is for me to get back to my work and spend my attention on something useful.

    BTW, In all this time I have not created a Story folder for harvested pandemic material. Trust me, there is no Story here. Fiction has done a better job and nothing so far has even matched the basic criteria for attracting my attention. Except for that parachute thing. Wow!

    Remember:

    It is always dark before Easter. Things will start turning better, once Easter has passed.

    Thanks...

    836:

    2M? A nuke in LA or SF, etc, would be more than that.

    Obviously detonating a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles would be bad, but I doubt it would kill two million people. The city has four million people but they're spread out over more area than a thousand square kilometers (the metropolitan area is over 13 million km^2 and more than 12,500km^2), a density of only a little over 3000 people per square kilometer. The city of Los Angeles is about the size of Bedfordshire, but it's surrounded by, well, more miles of more Los Angeles. The metro area is about the size of Northern Ireland and to first approximation it's all suburbs.

    I have a friend who started within sight of the Pacific one morning, got in her van, and started driving east. When she had to stop for the night she was still in Los Angeles.

    Manhattan may have the density for that (26,821.6/km^2), though only 1.6 million people on the island.

    837:

    That just reminded me of the way you used to be able to file your Federal Income Tax Return. Returns were due by 15 April, and they were considered to be filed on time as long as they were postmarked by midnight on that date. The U.S. Postal Service would have workers standing out in the parking lot so you could hand your return through the car window & it would go into the bin.

    I remember that too, back in the day. Our downtown post office had quite a traffic jam that night. I'm not sure when they stopped, or if; I haven't been there to look in years.

    838:

    GregvP Trends - yeah. Not-quite-fascist Orban in Hungary - facing huge protests, but an Iron Arrow grip on the current parliament ... International trade will take a long time to re-set itself. Apparently there are already concerns that long-distance food shipments are if not yet screwed, v soon will be. Repairing that could take some time. I predict a rush on the pubs the moment they re-open ( IF they re-open, the thoroughly evil New Puritans will try to stop that ) and live ( "real" ) beer shortages.

    later - "Hofstadter's Law" - also phrased as: "Everything takes longer & costs more" Other iterations include: Mass-produce 10 million widgets - easy! Make ONE prototype widget - v difficult & expensive. OR - for reduction in traffic congestion is Public Transport systems that, you know - WORK.

    JBS Here, the local authorities run the elections, but there is a set, prescribed, national format, which you are not allowed to deviate from.

    ( @ 815 ) - except that it is rapidly ceasing to be any sort of democracy & is certainly unrepresentative, what with all the rigging of registrations & polling stations & gerrymandering. And your statement @ 817 is not true at all ( any more )

    @ 826 I try to always have a paper map of where I'm going. [ Been doing that since about 1957 ] Especially since google maps on my shiny new phone pointblank refuses to work.

    Robt Prior @ 827 Yes, we are a functional republic with an hereditary head-of-state. Like the other N European North Sea countries, incidentally. [ Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden ]

    SFR How they react to this and especially what the outcome to their peoples and infrastructures post-pandemic will tell everyone else just how good/bad their system actually is. Yeah - Trump's doing really well as an example NOT to be copied, isn't he? "Personal Memory" - not so: I will remember this, but two other events stand out, which are very clear in my mind - one expected, one a violent shock. The Moon Landing & what I was doing on 22/11/1963. 11/9/2001 is close behind.

    allynh @ 836 I can do without the christian death-cult shit, thank you very much.

    839:

    From - last weekend's "FT" - an extract from their main leader. The FT is NOT a rightwing paper like the "WSJ" in the US, though it is strongly in favour of responsible/regulated capitalism, it is also very socially Liberal. I think this bears repating, so I've posted it below the markers .... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract" FT 4 & 5 April 2020

    .... Sacrifices are inevitable, but every society must demonstrate how it will offer restitution to those who bear the heaviest burden of national efforts. Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments, rather than liabilities, & look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda: the privileges of the elderly & wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income & wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Many of their columnists have been saying similar, of late. Comments?

    840:

    Eucalypts. More a problem for cellphone signals, but compounds the problem of being in a valley when the trees are surprisingly resistant to radio waves.

    Interesting. One more detail about the planet I didn't know before.

    Where said tree exists how hard is it to get a reasonable view of the sky? Never been in a stand of such trees.

    Not too long ago I drove 1000 miles from San Francisco up to Portland with a route that went through the Oregon desert. No cell service 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. But I never noticed a loss of Sat Nav to our phones.

    Harking back to the JDS comment, consumer GPS systems in the 90s might take 3 to 10 minutes to find the minimum 3 sats to get a lock. When outdoors. Back then you many times could not even get a lock inside of a timber house. Over the years from my iPhone 3g to my current 11 lock times have steadily gone down. I using my flying experience to tell. On landing with the iPhone 3g it might take a minute or two for it to find enough sats to position me. Now it seems like 5 to 10 seconds. And wifi assist is not doing any good when you're at the end of the runway at DFW with a 15 minute drive to get to your gate.

    Amazing how much of our lives have changed as digital signal processing has improved and gotten smaller year by year.

    841:

    "Hofstadter's Law" - also phrased as: "Everything takes longer & costs more"

    I did Doug Hofstadter's AI class as a grad student.

    In class he also gave Hofstadter's Law as: "Everything is harder than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account"

    He was talking in reference to attempts to use AI to solve problems - but I think of it whenever people talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you know about just about anything, the more complicated you realise it is.

    842:

    I try to always have a paper map of where I'm going. [ Been doing that since about 1957 ] ... Especially since google maps on my shiny new phone pointblank refuses to work.

    I always pick up a free SMALL paper map when renting a car in a strange place.

    But fold out paper? I toss all of my collection 10 years or so ago.

    With caching and both of us having 2 devices paper is no longer worth the hassle.

    As to your personal phone don't you think it odd that you seem to be such a rare bird in respect to getting Google Maps to work? Just what make and model phone is this famous item.

    843:

    Not too long ago I drove 1000 miles from San Francisco up to Portland with a route that went through the Oregon desert. No cell service 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. But I never noticed a loss of Sat Nav to our phones.

    Interesting. I've got a memorable counter-example; going that way to the San Jose WorldCon was what persuaded me I needed a new tablet, as I could get no GPS signal at all. To be sure, I was on the train and traveling through the mountains in a big steel box may have had much to do with it. (After buying the new tablet I discovered the old one's GPS worked just fine at home, though GPS navigation burns battery life faster than playing videos.) To be sure, I-5 and the Coast Starlight don't follow exactly the same routes.

    844:

    We have had large disease outbreaks before: see wikipedia's list of pandemics and epidemics.

    This one is Different. Reasons:

    Prior to the Spanish flu, the last previous great plagues, centuries earlier, were limited to travelling at the speed of a horse or a sailing ship: they don't count as a precedent. They tended to appear in a region, burn fast and burn out, before popping up (courtesy of travelling survivors) some months or years later in another region. Inter-region trade links were limited, so there was seldom a global impact. (Noteworthy exception: the holocaust sparked by first contact with modern Europeans in the Americas killed so many people that it's believed to have triggered a little ice age, in turn provoking wars and upheavals in Europe -- an indirect impact.)

    The Spanish Flu is our only example of a pandemic burning through a globalized free trade regime. The previous age of globalization with free trade and free travel across national borders (at least in Europe and North America) ended in May-August 1914, when everything shut down hard, thanks to the first world war. That was followed by the Spanish flu pandemic: but the SF was arguably delayed/impacted by reduced international trade and travel in the aftermath of the war.

    Also let us recall that by 1914, a round-the-world trip took roughly 50 days.

    By 2014, a round-the-world trip took approximately 50 hours.

    Basically: we've never had a global pandemic combined with essentially instantaneous travel around the planet. We've never had such a pandemic strike while our supply chains were so deeply intertwingled, either. So it's unclear what happens next -- but the political impact is already shaping up to be huge.

    845:

    David L I cannot get satellite location to work at all ... I think it may be the result of an "upgrade" that happened about a month after I got it. And it is a Cosmo Communicator. If I have to I'll download the electronic equivalent of "paper" maps onto it .... Not that said action would cure the complete failure of geolocation.

    Charlie "Political Impact" - see: 1: The "FT" leader-article I quoted 2: The pointblank refusal of DT & his associates to recognise that the world has changed, will never change back & are assuming that its back to explotationbusiness as usual as soon as its over ( even if it isn't over ) 3: (a)The simultaneous transition to both more authoritarianism - because there's a Medical Emergency & 3(b) more openness - because there's a Medical Emrgency

    Which reminds me. The WHO need a fucking good kicking - they refuse to recognise Taiwan, bacuse of the PRC/Han goons & valuable medical/pandemic information is being lost in both directions. We really can do without this sort of stupidity - let's reserve that for Trump & Bolsanaro

    846:

    I roll my eyes at predictions like the recent one that cattle farmers will be history by 2030. Not gonna happen, even if Impossible Foods comes up with a product that is "beef turned up to 11", and half the price. 2080 ... maybe.

    Allow me to express polite disagreement.

    Change happens glacially slowly at first, until a tipping point is reached. (We just got schooled in that over the past couple of months by COVID19. Exponentials have sharp teeth.)

    Let me give you an example on the food front: veganism. (My wife is vegan: I get a ringside seat.)

    Prior to about 1995, vegetarianism (no meat, but willing to eat animal products such as honey or milk and eggs) was a flat 10% of the UK population; vegans were about 0.1%. Restaurants could sometimes cater to vegans ... by accident: but even vegetarian restaurants of the more crankish variety were hit and miss.

    Between 1995 and 2015 the situation changed very, very slowly. Vegetarianism crept; veganism crawled towards the 1% mark.

    Then something changed and it all shifted very fast. Veganism is estimated to be around 10% of the population now: I have no figures for non-meat vegetarians but I suspect that's a higher proportion. The nation's largest fast food chain, Greggs, introduced vegan products ... and sales shot up so sharply they handed out bonuses to all their staff and announced they'd duplicate their entire range of meat pies in vegan form as fast as they could ramp up production. All the supermarket chains announced lines of vegan ready meals -- and they sold well enough to stay on the shelves rather than being culled after one season. By 2010, pretty much all carry-out and eat-in diners listed at least one vegetarian main course: by 2020 suddenly they were listing multiple vegan options.

    TLDR: a fringe dietary preference went minority-mainstream in about five years flat.

    There are a number of converging factors here: concern over climate change, concerns over animal welfare ... but most importantly, availability of meat substitutes which are acceptable to a mass commercial market. It's not a matter of eliminating meat husbandry, but of introducing new competing products and watching meat consumption fall once consumers adapt to the new options and decide it costs too much.

    In case you think I live somewhere weird, this happened in Germany about 5-10 years earlier, and is underway in France. You may have noticed it happening in the US, too, at least in the big cities (which always tend to be cultural melting pots/innovation hubs).

    I'm not calling it for the end of beef cattle by 2080: but by 2080 it's going to be a very expensive luxury due to climate change and environmental degradation, and priced accordingly, while the alternatives are going to be cheaper and better than they are currently.

    847:

    To be sure, I was on the train and traveling through the mountains in a big steel box may have had much to do with it.

    Well fur sure. I usually can add a bar or two holding a phone next to the window of a train or a plane on the ground.

    And when moving GPS signals are even harder to acquire. Basically if your device don't know approximately where you are it can't do a table lookup of which sats are best to try for and has to start searching for any sat it can find. And given how weak GPS signals are that can take a while.

    And older (now cheaper?) GPS setups didn't even do that. They just tried until they found at least one sat and used that to know what else to look for. Or not if even older.

    848:

    I predict a rush on the pubs the moment they re-open ( IF they re-open, the thoroughly evil New Puritans will try to stop that ) and live ( "real" ) beer shortages.

    Don't worry about the puritans, worry about the pub cos: my understanding is the chains of tied houses still want their monthly licensing fees and beer buys from the tenant landlords, even though the premises are shuttered! A bunch of landlords will go bust, and it'll take a very long time -- if ever -- before the grasping dirtbags manage to recruit replacement patsies to run their boozers.

    See also Wetherspoons. If you were a 'spoons staffer, would you want to go back there when they try to re-open after they way Tim Fuckhead treated his employees? Especially as there'll be the potential for more lockdowns to come ...

    849:

    The pointblank refusal of DT & his associates to recognise that the world has changed, will never change back ...

    You do understand that this blog is full of comments expressing the same opinion about lots of things. Just not the same as what you reference.

    As are most blogs.

    850:

    Greg, the last two Cosmo firmware updates were buggy AF and you were lucky it didn't brick your machine. See discussions in the OESF forum.

    851:

    Actually Charlie, the latest statistics about vegetarianism argue against your thesis. First, you are correct that veganism is ~ 1% of the population (1.16a% in 2018), but vegetarianism hasn't breached 10% of the population. It's 7.6% of the UK population. Not everything is exponential. The trend you are mentioning is true for Germany, but France is further behind. In the meantime, the US population is 5-8% vegetarian, but 3% vegan. I'd have to look at the statistics over time, but my assumption is that the trend over the past decade has been vegetarian --> vegan moreso than meat-eater --> vegetarian

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

    852:

    Charlie I'm supposedly registred on the OESF forum - but have got locked out by a glitch of some sort - very annoying to say the least ... CAMRA are ( rightly ) going apeshit over the amazingly GREEDY & STUPID pubcos keeping rents up - right now - we will see what transpires

    853:

    I haven't check up on the physics or tested, but I would expect something similar in (rainfall) saturated, dense broad-leaf forests and during downpours. Water is notorious for absorbing electromagnetic radiation.

    854:

    Also let us recall that by 1914, a round-the-world trip took roughly 50 days.

    Or 80 days if one is a Jules Verne fan. That was 1872; transportation was even faster 40 years later.

    855:

    Something that is not commonly known is that the (common) Phallus impudicus is edible in the egg stage - just be VERY careful not to confuse it with the button stage of Amanita phalloides, virosa or verna. I can recommend it as an experience that you will not readily forget :-)

    856:

    Another factor is the increasing replacement of science by emotion and polemic as input to political decisions. There always was more of the latter, but I despair of how little notice almost all of the politically active now take of the realities of ecology and the environment - even 'environmentalists'.

    The demise of large-mammal herding (and stalking) would be catastrophic for the UK's environment, and wipe out several unique and extremely threatened environments and probably some species (possibly even endemic ones). But my attempts to explain that to their opponents meet with denial and disinterest.

    857:

    My grandfather was apparently the second most-travelled man in the world during the first third of the 20th century, and accumulated 800,000 miles in his lifetime. People to travel might like to estimate how far they have - it's enlightening!

    858:

    SFReader @828: No need to create a boogeyman when there's a real monster hiding under your bed. Uhh, there's no need to create boogieman when the purpose of the attack is to deal actual damage. Theoretically, there is a number of countries, who, given the resources they have, can prepare everything for bio-warfare, except the weapons themselves, and at some point assemble it like a homemade IED, in less than a year. Which could be happening as we speak.

    Despite the trade embargo against Russia, I seriously doubt that the world would turn its back on Russia and its people during this pandemic provided Russia is open/honest about it. From where I observe the situation, there's no united "world" exist at this point. There's about dozen disjointed power blocks, some of which try to cooperate and some others try to screw up with everything. Like US/EU countries who seek every opportunity to grab everything they can lay their hands on - I don't see any cooperation here. There were a proposals to lift sanctions in the time of epidemic - none of them met sufficient support. There are military preparations all around - probably more than usual amount.

    Further, this pandemic will become entrenched as a personal memory for everyone around the globe - much more immediate and personal than the first cosmonaut to orbit the Earth or the first moon landing. And this is really bad for the world we used to live in. And this is going to make people want to have better world.

    Heteromeles @829: The problem with biological warfare is that it only works when you (or your force at least) are immune to the weapons you deploy, due to innate immunity, vaccines, or lack of proximity. If that's not the case, then it's basically a badly aimed suicide system that can't be really aimed or controlled. This did not really stop anyone from attempting it. Whatever "humanitarian" effort the death-cult "environmentalist" invent for their ideas of culling the population, they will inevitably transform into selfish interest when they will consider whom to cull and how to make profit. This is what bothers me the most.

    I am currently observing the very "entertaining" and appalling turn on US public relationships about this epidemic. About month ago, most of the media, and especially public media (including Trump) where concentrating on blaming China for overblowing the scale of quarantine and scaring people into preparing precautions. Closing the borders, halting businesses, forcing people to obey law and oher safety measures. All these undemocratic and authoritarian things to do, how dare they.

    One month forward and their reaction is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE. "China is responsible"! "Why did not you warn us"! "Yuou are hidin the numers"! And then they kinda melt down into sporadic swearing. I mean, if publicly announced lockdown of the entire region wasn't good of a sign for danger, then what would be?

    It does not f**king stop here, of course, WHO is now declared Chinas's pawn needs "punishment". https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/11/2003734397 https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202004110004 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-navy-destroyer-transits-taiwan-strait-on-same-day-as-chinese-drills/ar-BB12srNW?li=BBnb7Kz

    Greg Tingey @845: The WHO need a fucking good kicking - they refuse to recognise Taiwan, bacuse of the PRC/Han goons & valuable medical/pandemic information is being lost in both directions. Look at this. Look at what they make you do. WHO should be concerned about health problems and not about licking someone's boots.

    859:

    Er, brainfart. By 'herding', I meant traditional farming for meat and dairy - i.e. cattle and sheep kept in fields, on moorland etc. - I didn't mean just what the Lapps do with reindeer. We could lose all of the modern industrial animal farming with no environmental harm and much benefit.

    860:

    The Jeep's satnav finally finished updating some time the next morning. Maybe you could have bought a gasp!paper map at a gas station or are these things extinct by now? I use WAZE for driving around but I always have paper maps for backup, and they have come handy on a few occasions (like when the gilets jaunes werre blockading most roundabouts and highway access roads)

    861:

    Despite the trade embargo against Russia

    Cuba. Six decades of American sanctions have had a pretty nasty effect.

    The Cuban health system has suffered serious repercussions due to the policy of the blockade against Cuba, derived from the difficulties in acquiring medicines, reagents, instruments, spare parts for medical equipment and all the other consumables needed for the sector to function; all of this must be purchased in faraway markets and, on many occasions, with the use of intermediaries. This adds to the costs of these consumables.

    http://misiones.minrex.gob.cu/en/articulo/cubas-report-2018-resolution-724-united-nations-general-assembly-entitled-necessity-ending

    This also affects transactions taking place entirely in third countries (eg. Canada) if the payment is processed by an American financial company.

    When Monica Bustelier noticed thousands of dollars missing from her bank account in late August, the owner of the Little Havana Cafe food truck figured it was just a technical glitch.

    But the story behind the missing money turned out to be a remarkable one, full of twists and turns which eventually led back to a recent decision by the Trump administration and one of the world’s longest-running trade blockades — the American embargo on doing business with Cuba.

    For Bustelier and her partner Joshua English, the realization came slowly. At their three-year-old food truck — actually a revamped vintage 1962 trailer — most customers pay via credit or debit, using the Square mobile payment system created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Usually, money would show up in their account a few days after a customer would buy a rich, strong cafecito, or cafe con leche.

    Then, in late August, the payments stopped coming. To date, Toronto-based Little Havana Cafe is out roughly $14,000.

    “We kept getting the emails saying ‘Square has deposited $750 into your account.’ But then we’d go and look, and it wasn’t there,” said Bustelier, who was at first puzzled, then concerned.

    They called Square, who told them to call their bank. Their bank said no deposit had been made.

    “We went back to Square and they looked again, and said it was a problem with their payments processor. Then finally, they checked again, and said J.P. Morgan Chase couldn’t process it because the embargo was tightened in the last month or two, and we were selling Cuban coffee,” said Bustelier.

    https://www.thestar.com/business/2019/10/02/toronto-food-truck-caught-up-in-trumps-battle-with-cuba.html

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.5303143

    862:

    but vegetarianism hasn't breached 10% of the population. It's 7.6% of the UK population.

    The Wikipedia entry you linked to lists UK vegetarianism at 14%...

    But the bigger issue, which most of the numbers that are thrown around don't measure, is the number of non(vegetarian/vegan) people who no longer eat meat every day or every meal - it has now become acceptable to go meat-free for several meals a week. As always, driven by a number of reasons, but a key reason is cost - beef in particular having become relatively expensive.

    863:

    Everything the GOP/Trump are doing can be viewed through the lens of November.

    Getting elected generally means a healthy economy, so deny Covid to keep the economy humming along.

    Now that has spectacularly blown up in their faces, find a scapegoat - China. This has many good things for Trump & co - it re-enforces the racism, and it changes the narrative to electing a leader who has a "proven" track record of being tough on China.

    And people are falling for it.

    864:

    In case you think I live somewhere weird, this happened in Germany about 5-10 years earlier, and is underway in France While the number of vegetarians in France is growing, there is also another factor at play. Municipal and state-run (and corporate)kitchens that provide meals for school children, state employees and stay-at-home elderly people are strictly forbiden to offer casher/halal options (the republic doesn't recognize religions - it's in the constitution) hence the vegetarian option (secular)

    865:

    I predict a rush on the pubs the moment they re-open ( IF they re-open, the thoroughly evil New Puritans will try to stop that )

    The only thing that will keep pubs from re-opening is the greed of those running things trying to collect non-existent rent/fees during the shutdown.

    Yeah - Trump's doing really well as an example NOT to be copied, isn't he?

    Depends on one's goals. He got elected President, he has enriched himself and close friends, he has fundamentally changed the US through his appointment of Supreme Court Justices. And the combination of broken US electoral system and a substantial portion of voters who can't see that he is "the emperor with no clothes on" means despite the current mess he has created he still stands a very good chance of a second term come November.

    I mean, yeah, if you want competent government you are correct, but if you want to be rich and powerful or to substantially change a society for the worse for the long term...

    "Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract" FT 4 & 5 April 2020

    I suspect a bit of preaching to choir on this forum.

    Yes, what they are saying makes sense, and it is about time that they are coming around.

    But I am not really seeing any indication of dramatic swings (and that is what would be necessary) in government policy (or even thinking) that would indicate these ideas are being taken seriously by the people that matter.

    Instead we are seeing an adherence to the old style solutions, relying on traditional methods of dealing with people suddenly unemployed, with governments either blindly ignoring those not covered by traditional means or wasting time tweaking the existing systems to add people - whereas a simple send money to everyone is ignored. So in the meantime a lot of people fall through the cracks, and have no money for food/medicine let alone rent.

    866:

    Found the opinion column I was looking for.

    Shows how the Canadian Government is pursuing anything but a dramatic change in how things are done, because in essence that they don't want to open the door to a rethink of how things are done, but in the process resulting in a constant tinkering as they realize they are "forgetting" people.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-what-if-cras-emergency-response-benefit-amid-pandemic-is-a-mistake/

    867:

    Which, for us (British) old fogies, is merely going back to what we did six decades back, except with a MUCH wider range of staples, vegetables, fruit and flavourings!

    868:

    ..."And people are falling for it."

    Of course they are. Trump and his supporters are believers in magic. Their whole outlook is that when things aren't good it is basically down to some simple and identifiable cause against which you can take some simple identifiable action and it will solve all the problems, including that of not being able to coherently state what "things aren't good" actually means. It doesn't matter if they don't understand it because understanding it is the job of the clever bugger who tells them it works, same as understanding why aspirin makes a headache better is the job of the clever bugger who invents aspirin and all you need to know is that it does work. (Much the same as our home-grown fuckwits who think everything they don't like and don't really understand can be made to disappear by leaving the EU.)

    It also doesn't matter if the solution doesn't work or doesn't get done in the first place. The important thing is to be able to say the failure to work or happen is someone else's fault. Obviously it would have worked if those nasty other people hadn't fucked it up. So it's not so much "falling for it" as already expecting to be told something like that and now they are being told it it just confirms that the clever bugger still knows what the deal is and how to fix it.

    869:

    Re: Dr. Strangelove

    I received affirmation of fatherhood this morning when I apologized to my daughter for buying the wrong dog food and she replied, "I can be just as sorry as you, Dmitry: we can both be sorry."

    870:

    Wet trees are a fairly notorious cause of TV signals going down the pan "but it worked fine when they put it in!" (with the trees dry). It doesn't take many, and the signal is stronger and at a less vulnerable frequency than GPS.

    871:

    Pigeon Warning - Godwin alert. Trump and his supporters are believers in magic. Their whole outlook is that when things aren't good it is basically down to some simple and identifiable cause against which you can take some simple identifiable action and it will solve all the problems, Ah yes, it's all the fault of the evil jews ... ( Or maybe the kulaks in a different case ... )

    872:

    Re: 'Canadian Government is pursuing anything but a dramatic change in how things are done, because in essence that they don't want to open the door to a rethink of how things are done...'

    The Liberals have just enough seats to claim majority including members with a range/distribution of personal ideological perspectives. It's not unheard of for Canadian MPs to 'cross the floor'. Or, when there's a large enough majority, to get kicked out of the Party.

    The current short-term measures will probably be used as a limited test market of UI by all Parties - each Party trying to blow up and generalize each best-case/worst-case scenario to prove their ideological point. Hopefully the various governmental Departments/Ministries will have enough personnel, time and resources to provide an accurate overall picture fast enough to avert/defuse extremists. (Currently the PC party as personified by rt-winger Sheer has that honor. Acts like a DT fanboy esp. re: fossil fuels and furriners particularly the non-white variety. Insidiously loathsome.)

    Could be a good time for Fed dept's to tap various universities and fund biz & health policy/econ/ grad students to help sort out what happened.

    873:

    Exactly... and of course there are countless pre-"Godwin" instances of political belief in magic taking that particular form as well. Including accusations of deliberately spreading plague or even manufacturing it.

    874:

    Verne put it at 80 days in 1872. Nellie Bly did it for real in 72 days in 1889, setting a world record for the trip, and shaking hands with Mr Verne on her way through France. (Nellie Bly was a total bad-ass in numerous other respects.)

    Travel around the world by sea kind of maxed out due to hydrodynamic drag; even in 1964's Operation Sea Orbit, a US Navy nuclear-powered battle group (consisting of an all-nuclear squadron: two cruisers and the carrier Enterprise) took 65 days to cover 30,000 miles.

    Trains and automobiles didn't cut much time off the trip because you'd either have to get permission to cross the USSR by trans-Siberian express, or go the long way, and the trans-Siberian railroad is not a high speed line; and you don't need me to tell you about American (or Canadian) trains.

    So travel times for these trips didn't fall much until we got air travel, and some chunks (the Atlantic and Pacific crossings) weren't practical until the mid-1930s (and even then, only at eye-watering expense). For example, you could fly between London and Sydney on Imperial Airways (later BOAC) but it took a couple of weeks, with multiple overnight stops in hotels along the way: it was about twice as fast overall as taking a liner, at 28-42 days.

    Everything changed ridiculously rapidly after 1945 ...!

    875:

    This did not really stop anyone from attempting it. Whatever "humanitarian" effort the death-cult "environmentalist" invent for their ideas of culling the population, they will inevitably transform into selfish interest when they will consider whom to cull and how to make profit.

    You've been reading bad Tom Clancy novels, haven't you?

    Environmentalists generally have a simple answer to overpopulation-induced environmental degradation: don't have children, or have one per family instead of two or more. A child is the most carbon-intensive luxury good any human being can have, but if we transitioned to one child per family as a norm overpopulation would cease to be an issue within 80 years or so. We'd have some transitional problems -- deflation, difficulty staffing old age homes, a dwindling worker/dependent ratio -- but nothing insurmountable: Japan is there already.

    Meanwhile environmentalism as an ideology is adamantly opposed to the profit motive, precisely because it's a massive aggravating factor.

    What you're describing is more like the sort of eco-fascism espoused by Hitler, who wanted to depopulate Asia by murdering everyone and replacing them with his Germanic peasant farmers.

    876:

    I tend to agree in general. Previous plagues didn't obviously seem to change much. (I suspect my handwashing will be permanently better than before though!)

    But some things will change, we just don't know what. I suspect this has increased teh likelihood of the US being diminished as a Great Power relative to China. The EU is struggling to determine whether its response will strengthen or weaken the union. These will both have an impact on global politics.

    How governments decide to bail out airlines might change flying habits far more than "flight-shaming" to combat global heating.

    If we get an effective vaccine in a couple of years we might well return to life as before. However, it will depend on how voters perceive who did the real work and who suffered most as to whether politics and economic models change or not.

    877:

    Naah, didn't need a paper map. We were on the Trans-Canada Highway: ignore turn-offs, just keep going for 350km until you come to the big city (which is the destination).

    My wife had been looking at Edmonton's street layout in Apple Maps, which caches recent lookups. So I was able to use it as a digital street map while she drove, and even without online data the GPS triangulation showed me approximately where we were -- all I needed to do was read street signs and remember not to pinch-zoom so much that Maps tried to load a more detailed tile (which it didn't have in its cache).

    I should add: my eye sight is no longer good enough to read a paper road map in a moving automobile -- too much vibration, not enough bright light, features too small to see. Also, we entered the city around nightfall (see also: not enough light).

    878:

    Silly Valley seems to prefer self-driving to call centers full of chauffeurs piloting vehicles remotely (even though that might be more achievable in these days of cars that come with always-on onboard LTE/4G modems for their computers).

    While that seems more plausible, and I have thought similarly in teh past, it is a matter of trust. Do I trust some low-paid chauffeur in a foreign country to drive carefully, and worse not deliberately crash teh vehicle for some motive? Just one hijacking in such a circumstance and that whole business model would end. Rather like your concern over hypersonic, sub-orbital, planet-hopping.

    While people do seem to tolerate the risk of rogue Uber drivers, I think that a branded remote chauffeur service might be a good way forward. Just one with a better brand than Uber to do it. As people-carrying drones are the current rage, I personally would trust a quality airline to run these air taxis than a profit-is-all-that-matters-and-passenger-safety-comes-2nd company.

    879:

    "Environmentalists generally have a simple answer to overpopulation-induced environmental degradation: don't have children"

    You forgot: "except for us of course DARREN STOP HITTING SHEILA WITH KAREN'S RABBIT."

    880:

    Re: 'From where I observe the situation, there's no united "world" exist at this point.'

    Not perfectly in sync but there does appear to be a movement toward a re-examination of the purpose of government re: social/humanitarian vs. economic/military leadership.

    Keep in mind that the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic officially only one month ago (March 11 2020).

    881:

    Can I recommend OsmAnd? It puts maps derived from Open Street Map on your device, so you don't need Internet while using it to navigate. Also spoken directions and all the usual sat-nav functions. The maps are free, the app costs a modest amount once you have used up the free trial.

    The only nuisance is that it doesn't have a postcode database because the Royal Mail insist on charging for it.

    882:

    SFReader @ 828:

    Re: 'Some people suggest that part of current virus panic is awareness of new generation of bio-warfare we may be unprepared to.'

    While I imagine that there may be governments doing such work despite this being against various UN bills (international law), I think that COVID-19 is showing everyone just how little is actually known about what already surrounds us. No need to create a boogeyman when there's a real monster hiding under your bed."

    About the only thing Richard Nixon ever did that I agreed with was his enunciation of American Policy regarding Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Warfare.

    While maintaining the MAD posture of deterrence and reserving the "right" to use Tactical Nuclear Weapons if they were needed to stop a Soviet invasion of NATO1, Nixon announced a NO FIRST USE policy for lethal chemical weapons2 ... we could retaliate in kind but would not initiate chemical warfare.

    But the most important thing was his declaration the U.S. would never, NEVER EVER use biological warfare. U.S. stockpiles were destroyed except for small quantities used for research to develop Defenses against bio attacks3.

    To the best of my knowledge that has remained U.S. policy to this day. Not even Trumpolini has changed it.

    1 ... which we now know the Soviets were afraid of NATO invading THEM ... maybe those "in the know" in the defense establishment knew it then, but bottom line is since they weren't going to invade us and we weren't going to invade them it was effectively just another form of MAD deterrence.

    2 Nerve agents - VX, GX, Sarin; Blister agents - Mustard gas; Blood agents - Hydrogen Cyanide. Tear gas & Pepper Spray are not considered lethal agents.

    3 Which was where Bruce Ivins worked when he developed the Anthrax "weapon" he mailed to members of Congress & the news media ... with the apparent intent of scaring the shit out of America, forcing Congress into funding additional Biowar Defense research

    883:

    Scott Sanford @ 837:

    That just reminded me of the way you used to be able to file your Federal Income Tax Return. Returns were due by 15 April, and they were considered to be filed on time as long as they were postmarked by midnight on that date. The U.S. Postal Service would have workers standing out in the parking lot so you could hand your return through the car window & it would go into the bin.

    I remember that too, back in the day. Our downtown post office had quite a traffic jam that night. I'm not sure when they stopped, or if; I haven't been there to look in years.

    Around here they stopped some time before April 15, 2005 (anecdotal based on personal experience).

    884:

    Do I trust some low-paid chauffeur in a foreign country to drive carefully, and worse not deliberately crash teh vehicle for some motive?

    Well, let's see:

    Do you trust your Uber driver not to rape you? (I assume you do, being fairly clearly cisgendered male, but it's a major worry for young women traveling alone.)

    Do you trust your Uber driver not to be drunk/stoned/intoxicated? (A remote-driving car control centre can have breathalyzers on the door and administer random dope tests to employees.)

    As for the "deliberately crash the vehicle for some motive", it'd have to be quite an odd motive to override the natural aversion to being charged with attempted (or actual) murder. Hint: if you've got a remote controlled car, then by definition you have everything you need for a telemetry log -- video as well as control inputs -- and you've presumably got CCTV and the usual Big Brother office surveillance in the control centre.

    885:

    Alex Tolley Never mind a vaccine, though one would be very nice to have. An effective TREATMENT, that could guarantee to enable more than 90% of victims/sufferers with severe symptoms to recover, would be a game-changer.

    886:

    Scott Sanford @ 843:

    Not too long ago I drove 1000 miles from San Francisco up to Portland with a route that went through the Oregon desert. No cell service 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. But I never noticed a loss of Sat Nav to our phones.

    Interesting. I've got a memorable counter-example; going that way to the San Jose WorldCon was what persuaded me I needed a new tablet, as I could get no GPS signal at all. To be sure, I was on the train and traveling through the mountains in a big steel box may have had much to do with it. (After buying the new tablet I discovered the old one's GPS worked just fine at home, though GPS navigation burns battery life faster than playing videos.) To be sure, I-5 and the Coast Starlight don't follow exactly the same routes.

    I taught Map Reading & Land Nav in the military for 20+ years. Never had the battery die on a paper map. Never even a low battery signal. Never broke the "display" on a paper map 'cause some idiot piled shit on top of my ruck. Ain't broke, so why fix it?

    887:

    AIUI Nixon's disavowal of chemical weapons centered on the "non-lethal" hallucinogen BZ and some unfortunate late intelligence about Soviet tactical nuclear forces.

    BZ was a principal American chemwar agent, deployed in Europe from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. It's about 200 times as potent as LSD and effectively dispersed like the other nerve agents: the effects are like a bad acid trip that lasts up to six weeks. Troops hit with a BZ strike would be incapacitated for the duration of the war, but as a nominally non-lethal weapon it didn't break the Geneva Protocol on chemical weapons, so it seemed like a good idea ...

    ... Right up until the CIA discovered that Soviet short-range nuclear missile forces didn't use Permissive Action Locks to secure their weapons: instead, they used a detachment of KGB troops with orders to shoot anyone who tried to launch without proper authorization.

    The Pentagon revisited the wisdom of inflicting nightmare hallucinations on enemy troops who might themselves be in possession of weaponized smallpox warheads or H-bombs. And BZ got retired from the inventory in a screaming hurry.

    888:

    But these things offset each other.

    That is, because trade was not global, it didn't matter that the pandemic was not global.

    What is unique about this pandemic are:

    (1) the response; and (2) the degree to which we can understand what is happening.

    889:

    The other piece that comes into this is ethics. As more people become vegetarian the idea of raising (land) animals for slaughter may become increasingly repugnant.

    Fur has become socially unacceptable; foie gras has been banned in many American cities. Once some form of vegetarianism (lacto-ovo, pescatarian or otherwise) becomes a majority option (and it is not inconceivable that this happens in a couple of decades as you note) serving meat may become as socially unacceptable as wearing fur and shortly thereafter slaughtering cows for meat as legally unacceptable as slaughtering horses.

    890:

    A vaccine is far more likely in the next couple of years. We are not that good at treating viral infections.

    891:

    The Liberals have just enough seats to claim majority including members with a range/distribution of personal ideological perspectives

    Trudeau would be very happy if that was true.

    Alas, the reality is that Trudeau is the head of a minority government - the Liberals only took 157 seats out of 338 in the October 21 2019 election, leaving them 13 seats short of majority.

    Though the NDP at 24 seats should make things relatively easy.

    The other problem for Trudeau is that while either his government or the bureaucracy play these games he is pissing off voters who are getting left out / denied help. And while an election won't be imminent, one has to believe the opposition parties are keeping an eye on things and thus pissing off voters by denying monetary help could be a problem in the future.

    892:

    Re dark-skinned/Black/African Americans having severe COVID-19 cases at a higher rate, and our $%&^%&^ US Surgeon General's recent public statements on the matter[1] (he did say a few reasonable things), it is reasonably well established that vitamin D deficiencies are correlated with increased incidence of acute respiratory infections; this might be interesting (and has been vocally noticed): Vitamin D and African Americans (Susan S. Harris, The Journal of Nutrition, April 2006) Vitamin D insufficiency is more prevalent among African Americans (blacks) than other Americans and, in North America, most young, healthy blacks do not achieve optimal 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations at any time of year. This is primarily due to the fact that pigmentation reduces vitamin D production in the skin. Also, from about puberty and onward, median vitamin D intakes of American blacks are below recommended intakes in every age group, with or without the inclusion of vitamin D from supplements. Despite their low 25(OH)D levels, blacks have lower rates of osteoporotic fractures. This may result in part from bone-protective adaptations that include an intestinal resistance to the actions of 1,25(OH)2D and a skeletal resistance to the actions of parathyroid hormone (PTH). However, these mechanisms may not fully mitigate the harmful skeletal effects of low 25(OH)D and elevated PTH in blacks, at least among older individuals. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that vitamin D protects against other chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers, all of which are as prevalent or more prevalent among blacks than whites. Clinicians and educators should be encouraged to promote improved vitamin D status among blacks (and others) because of the low risk and low cost of vitamin D supplementation and its potentially broad health benefits. It's some complicated science, plenty of argument; cites for above: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=40&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=14124986308551380830

    Lots of argument about this e.g.: Rapid Response: Re: Covid-19: what treatments are being investigated? Vitamin D3 may reduce severity of COVID-19 respiratory viral infection (8 April 2020)

    Evidence that Vitamin D Supplementation Could Reduce Risk of Influenza and COVID-19 Infections and Deaths (William B. Grant,Henry Lahore, Sharon L. McDonnell, Carole A. Baggerly, Christine B. French, Jennifer L. Aliano, Harjit P. Bhattoa, 12 March 2020)

    [1] Surgeon General says people of color are getting hit harder by coronavirus because of social issues, not genetics or biology (John Haltiwanger, 2020/04/10)

    893:

    The other key difference to this pandemic is that we have a health care system that has, if we can prevent it from being overwhelmed, the capability of saving a lot of people who in the past would have died.

    Without the ICU bed / ventilator calculations this would have a much simpler decision making process.

    894:

    mdive Current "ventilators" are complicated, messy, fiddly & maybe-temperamental pieces of kit. I note that several people/groups are suggesting a return to an updated form of a much simpler technology: "The Iron Lung" - possibly supplemented with a simple Oxygen supply. Not an expert - opinions on this one?

    895:

    -Fur has become socially unacceptable -hardly everywhere -foie gras has been banned in many American cities-how many american cities is New York? Not a major market for the stuff anyway -slaughtering cows for meat as legally unacceptable as slaughtering horses- horse meat is quite legally eaten in some countries, and you may have eaten some horse-derived products in the form of gelatin

    And, what about pet food?

    896:

    It is going to be very interesting to see how society decides on direction as the future develops.

    At a superficial glance a lot of animal welfare moral concerns can be waved away in the modern world - as you note we don't "need" fur, leather, wool, etc. - but those decisions have other costs - most of the alternative clothing materials seem to be petroleum based.

    So what happens when oil becomes a no-no, and thus extremely expensive? A lot what we currently take for granted is going to need a rethink, particular as climate change impacts our ability to grow things (plant or animal)

    897:

    Vaccines are very cheap and almost everyone can be given one, even if, as with seasonal flu, it has to be repeated every year.

    The problem with drugs is that they tend to be relatively expensive unless governments make them cheap, public goods. That is not going to happen in the US, so without a vaccine, the US will be subject to periodic, poorly controlled outbreaks unless testing and contact tracing becomes very vigorous. Remember how expensive HIV drugs were?

    So while drug treatment may be a potential game-changer, it may remain potential only unless those to be treated are few.

    https://www.virology.ws/2014/05/28/what-price-antiviral-drugs/

    898:

    Charlie Stross @ 874: Verne put it at 80 days in 1872. Nellie Bly did it for real in 72 days in 1889, setting a world record for the trip, and shaking hands with Mr Verne on her way through France. (Nellie Bly was a total bad-ass in numerous other respects.)

    Yeah, but she should have left poor "Johnny" alone.

    Travel around the world by sea kind of maxed out due to hydrodynamic drag; even in 1964's Operation Sea Orbit, a US Navy nuclear-powered battle group (consisting of an all-nuclear squadron: two cruisers and the carrier Enterprise) took 65 days to cover 30,000 miles.

    The USS Triton managed a submerged circumnavigation of the world in 60 days 21 hours.

    But that should probably be compared with Monsieur Verne's other novel about sea voyages. Modern nuclear submarines can actually sustain higher speeds submerged than most surface ships.

    Interesting thing, I could not find anywhere on the web that told me the total distance Magellan (or actually his fleet since he died along the way) traveled on his historic voyage around the world. It's probably out there somewhere, but I didn't find it.

    The total duration of Triton's submerged voyage was 84 days 19 hours 8 minutes including travel time to/from the start/finish point at St. Peter and Paul Rocks (0° 55′ 1″ N, 29° 20′ 45″ W). The total distance Triton traveled while submerged was 36,335.1 nautical miles.

    20,000 leagues = 43,168.95 Nautical Miles, if you're interested.

    899:

    Foie gras has also been banned in California, Chicago, and Sao Paulo (though that last was overturned).

    900:

    Wool is different from leather or fur. And cotton is another alternative which is not petroleum based.

    Furthermore, petroleum burning will become a no-no while petroleum used for other purposes is likely to remain more acceptable for a while for the reason you outline.

    But I agree with your basic point: we are going to have to continually reinvent how we do things and there are definitely trade offs we will have to make.

    901:

    I think we can agree that a remote driver cannot rape the passenger. IIRC, aircraft passengers did not want to fly in pilotless aircraft as they wanted to know that a pilot would do everything they could to save the passengers and themselves. It doesn't seem much of a stretch to argue that remote pilots are of little comfort compared to a one in the pilot's seat.

    As a thoughtful, tech, SciFi writer, I'm surprised you think that deliberate murder or other nefarious deeds by a remote chauffeur couldn't be covered up. While it might be harder than evading, blinding, or turning off security cameras, there are a number of ways to make a crash look like an accident and not due to the deliberate actions of the chauffeur. (Seems like a made for tv techno plot to me.)

    If you discount the chauffeur, there are also many ways such a remote system could fail, both locally and globally. I do appreciate these failures cannot be averted by using national, rather than international, chauffeurs from a trusted company.

    I also appreciate that I could be projecting my fears on such systems, fears that a more trusting generation does not have.

    902:

    Charlie Stross @ 877: I should add: my eye sight is no longer good enough to read a paper road map in a moving automobile -- too much vibration, not enough bright light, features too small to see. Also, we entered the city around nightfall (see also: not enough light).

    In the military (or at least in the U.S. Army,) the driver DRIVES. A co-driver handles map reading en-route, but even then you don't try to read a 1:50,000 map on the fly. Before you set out you make a strip map from the information on that map before you start. That's part of your pre-planning checklist. The co-driver uses that strip map to navigate by.

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/11-43/f5-2.gif

    PS: I never try to read a map in a moving vehicle, even if I'm not the driver1. I pull off to the side of the road at someplace safe while I consult the map (day or night). For "map reading" I carry a magnifying glass and at night I have a headlamp (a bright headlamp and spare batteries).

    1 You do things differently in a combat zone, but I'm NOT in a combat zone any more. Hopefully, I'll never have to be in one again.

    903:

    I do take vitamin D supplements since I work indoors. That said, you've got to be careful about race-based medicine, especially when it says that black and hispanic people are more likely to get a particular disease (which also applies to hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and I believe some types of mental illness).

    The problems for blacks and hispanics are that they tend to be poor, have poor diets, have poor access to health care, work in higher risk jobs especially now, and face routine discrimination. On this last issue, right now I can wear a bandanna on my face and walk into a bank without worrying about getting shot. Harder to do that while black. Or Hispanic.

    They're more likely to be exposed to the coronavirus as low-paid "essential workers," such as janitors, many of whom have to do jobs where they risk exposure with inadequate protection. If they do get sick, they more often have no health insurance. If so they will try to self treat, and go to the emergency room as a last resort (or, sadly die at home). They may not even be able to afford to miss work.

    Looking at the diseases they suffer from disproportionately, asthma is a consequence of living in higher pollution, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are symptoms of inadequate diets, higher stress, and dealing with anxiety and depression are pretty normal if you're at risk for getting shot for simply complying with a law that requires you to wear a mask in public.

    904:

    Charlie Stross @875: You've been reading bad Tom Clancy novels, haven't you? Probably not, because this is just a logical step from several alt-right sources I've stumble upon.

    What you're describing is more like the sort of eco-fascism espoused by Hitler, who wanted to depopulate Asia by murdering everyone and replacing them with his Germanic peasant farmers. But I suppose you are right. But that's what I've had in mind when considering economic difficulties. I can imagine the mass of "eco-environmentalists" (they probably were called some else) got thrown from the cliff by economic crisis and decided that the world can go to hell as long as they survive.

    905:
    We have had large disease outbreaks before: see wikipedia's list of pandemics and epidemics. This one is Different. Reasons: ...

    Charlie, I agree that the political ramifications are likely to be large. I have no real idea what they will be, certainly not in detail. Based on my understanding of human nature I made the prediction above, that people will turn to "strong leaders" (authoritarian sociopaths) and blame out-groups for all their self-inflicted problems more than they have been doing up till now.

    But daily life...

    Yes, a lot of pandemics are different in detail.

    HIV/AIDS has killed a lot of people. It was different, too. It caused a few small behavioural changes. (And our response probably contributed greatly to a large one, de-stigmatising same-sex relationships.)

    The "swine flu" outbreak of 2009 also killed a lot of people, more than are currently predicted for this outbreak of Covid-19. It was a bit different, but more similar to Covid-19 than HIV/AIDS. It didn't really change anything. (It got lost in the noise of the recession following the GFC.)

    They're all different in detail, but they're all the same underneath. Spread by people clustering together. Are we really that different this time?

    Yes this virus can spread faster than ever. But so can knowledge of how to combat it, and the means with which to do so. If anything they can spread faster than before, relative to the rate of spread of the disease.[1]

    One reason for my (uncharacteristic!) optimism:-

    Scott Alexander linked to an interesting piece on Medium about "the Mystery of Japan". It identifies three behaviours that are culturally ingrained in Japan, but no other place seems to have all three. They are: not touching on greeting, wearing a facemask in public if you might be sick, and not talking in public.

    These cultural norms as a group seem to have slowed the spread of the disease in Japan relative to other places, that have one or two of them but not all three.

    According to the article, the clusters in Japan have mostly originated in places where the third norm (not speaking/singing with strangers at close range) was violated: churches.

    So a simple behavioural change (non-participatory religious services, wearing masks and clapping rather than yelling or whistling when at sportsball games and the like) might make a large difference.

    (The piece does go on to imply that Japan's relative lack of public health measures to contain the virus means that it has been spreading out undetected, and is now endemic there. So there is that.)

    [1]A coherent --or even visible! -- international institutional response is conspicuously AWOL though. That needs fixing.

    906:

    Charlie Stross @ 887: AIUI Nixon's disavowal of chemical weapons centered on the "non-lethal" hallucinogen BZ and some unfortunate late intelligence about Soviet tactical nuclear forces."

    BZ was a principal American chemwar agent, deployed in Europe from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. It's about 200 times as potent as LSD and effectively dispersed like the other nerve agents: the effects are like a bad acid trip that lasts up to six weeks. Troops hit with a BZ strike would be incapacitated for the duration of the war, but as a nominally non-lethal weapon it didn't break the Geneva Protocol on chemical weapons, so it seemed like a good idea ...

    ... Right up until the CIA discovered that Soviet short-range nuclear missile forces didn't use Permissive Action Locks to secure their weapons: instead, they used a detachment of KGB troops with orders to shoot anyone who tried to launch without proper authorization.

    The Pentagon revisited the wisdom of inflicting nightmare hallucinations on enemy troops who might themselves be in possession of weaponized smallpox warheads or H-bombs. And BZ got retired from the inventory in a screaming hurry.

    I was an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) Operations specialist. The training we got on BZ (& why it was removed from the U.S. arsenal) was twofold:

         1. It was not as effective as "advertised".
         2. In the dosage required for it to be effective, it turned out to not meet guidelines for "non-lethal".

    If you used too little, it didn't work. If you used too much, it was a killer. You were damned if you didn't and damned if you did.

    Plus it was the hazard to our own troops who were more likely to inadvertently to receive a lethal dose.

    907:

    I haven't check up on the physics or tested, but I would expect something similar in (rainfall) saturated, dense broad-leaf forests and during downpours. Water is notorious for absorbing electromagnetic radiation.

    "Fresh" water no so much. Subs in WWII launched into the great lakes could use radios when submerged.

    I suspect it varies by density and vegetation type. We had no problem with cell service (if available) or sat nav when in some dense stands of sequoias and/or redwoods. They were around 25-30 meters high. :)

    Maybe trees with high concentration of sale or sugar are more of an issue.

    908:

    People to travel might like to estimate how far they have

    In the last 10 years my wife and I are at around 1 million. (Very quick BOE estimating.)

    That doesn't count the million or so I likely did before being married. She was likely not there but still had a lot. I mean when we married she brought 2 cats to the marriage that had crossed the Atlantic with her either 3 or 5 times.

    909:

    OK, but the science (re Vitamin D) is suggesting actual genetic differences in this area, e.g. bone strength at even with lower levels of Vitamin D.[1] Not unreasonable; D levels are related to insolation and skin pigmentation level and there may have been some compensating evolution. [1] From the abstract: "Despite their low 25(OH)D levels, blacks have lower rates of osteoporotic fractures." More science needed of course.

    910:

    About month ago, most of the media, and especially public media (including Trump) where concentrating on blaming China for overblowing the scale of quarantine

    One reason I hang out here is to get a better feel for life in the UK. It has been obvious while reading/watching the media I have here in the US about other countries gives a bit of a distorted view.

    Your use of "most" in the referenced sentence tells me the same is true of others watching us. I tend to notice a wide variety of US news sources and "most" is very much not true. Same with the rest of your analysis.

    911:

    are these things extinct by now?

    Getting there. Best place in the US are the rest stops / welcome centers at state borders on much of the US Interstate system. Free maps, tourist trap brochures, free restrooms[1], and way expensive vending machines.

    [1]Germany had great restrooms as long as you had the Euro coins for them. The one time we used the "free" state one on an autobahn I think I was IN the toilet, not just using it. Hard to tell where the toilet ended and the sewage storage began.

    912:

    Re the BMJ paper cite of the parachute abstract and the BMJ piece itself; I was amused by the style, which is slightly different than one would seen in American journals. (I like it.)

    You do not know why I'm going on about masks. (It's not pandemic porn. But you be you.) Anyway, this thing is real. The response is amplified a bit because the deaths are concentrated in the age cohorts that also happen to contain most of the wealthy and powerful, and for similar reasons the pushback against the calls for piles-of-skulls-of-sacrificial victims is greater than some expected. And in part, the lousy response in many Western countries is due to newish business dogma about efficiency that has been used to actively punish efforts to proactively prepare for/defend against tail risks. For me personally, mask wearing meant going to the lawnmower kit in my garage, picking up a dust mask used for mowing, and hanging it on the rear view mirror in the car to remind me to use it. For others its not much harder; it's a really inexpensive non-pharmaceutical intervention, blocked in many countries by stupid social traditions and prejudices/dogma. Since my county has an infection rate, tested and reported cases, of about 1.5 percent as of yesterday, every person-to-person interaction carries a fairly high probability of infection. Until we have widespread random serology testing we won't know the actual infection rate; i'm guessing about 5X at the moment due to 3 weeks of lockdown, about 1/2 symptomatic enough to be staying home and the rest with limits on interactions when out.

    Trolley problems are moral illusions the way the spinning ballerina is an optical illusion: a construct designed to exploit heuristics in the human cortex, easily resolved by machines

    — neality (@ctrlcreep) April 11, 2020

    Trolley problems are this (the instinct to punch the philosopher is reasonable), and also other things, including metaphors.

    Meanwhile, in my local physical reality, a friend (name scrubbed; this is from somewhere in southern NY state) reports (2020/04/09): My wife had a zoom get together with all her nurse pals from ER. They say it’s a disaster. Entire ER is an ICU with 1 nurse to 5 patients all on vents They said they string th iv bags on long lines so the can be changed outside the room so they don’t need PPE And hydroxcloroquin they said isn’t working and they are using other things The one bright spot was no visitors getting in the way

    Bold mine to indicate that things (like hydroxychloroquine) are being tried and rejected in the ICUs. Which are full/at capacity in my county mostly with COVID-19 pneumonia cases (another friend's wife works at one and also has stories.); at least the county curve appears to be linear due to the NYS shutdown, but capacity will be exceeded soon. (2/3 of covid-19 patients in the ICU are there for the supplemental oxygen, not (or not yet) ventilators, according to other reports if i'm reading them correctly.)

    913:

    It doesn't take many, and the signal is stronger and at a less vulnerable frequency than GPS.

    There is hardly any radio system in use that isn't stronger than the ones the various GPS systems use. Maybe the things they use to get in touch with subs but I think they have abandoned those.

    GPS works by using modern DSPs to extract a signal that is weaker than the background RF noise at the frequencies used.

    914:

    The "swine flu" outbreak of 2009 also killed a lot of people, more than are currently predicted for this outbreak of Covid-19.

    Really?

    2009 Swine Flu had 18.449 lab confirmed deaths, with a CDC led team estimating the real total at more than 284,000 (*) after allowing for the fact that we generally don't test dead people.

    The John Hopkins tracker has us currently at just under 108,000 Covid-19 deaths and we are nowhere close to having this under control.

    As for Japan, I understand the desire by many to find a simple solution to solving the Covid lockdowns, but the fact that Japan has now had to declare a state of emergency and urge everyone to stay at home indicates things aren't as under control as they have seemed.

    915:

    While people do seem to tolerate the risk of rogue Uber drivers, I think that a branded remote chauffeur service might be a good way forward.

    The US already has a lot of these. Maybe less in the days of Uber/Lyft but still a lot. You can spot the drivers as they are the ones holding up an iPad with a name on it in big letter just outside of security in most airports.

    916:

    You do not know why I'm going on about masks.

    Well, nor do you ;)

    Ok - look into Jared Cush recent proclamations about 'our' stockpile of PPE. Then look at Jerusalem Post / IDF scandal (quickly modified - JP is so dumb it still thinks "USA protect us" is a good line in 2020). Massive blowback (#755 for reference). It's landed right where they didn't want it to, the US .mil Vet community. And yes, the JP did manage to change their story but not the htts://www.jpost.com/dumbfucks/thisstoryis_fresh address.

    Now that's wetwork.

    Anyhow: you think you're up to speed on masks?

    Work out how all these connect:

    https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1117026794857693184.

    This one got deleted.

    https://twitter.com/robmyers

    Ref. Nodal point.

    https://twitter.com/gaybugboy/status/1248277806238359552

    Japan Curses

    https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/penguintom79/penguin-watch/classify

    If you're bored online go help out and tag penguins (actually useful for children)

    https://i.imgur.com/n4D0m9F.gifv

    Flamingo Escher recursion

    https://twitter.com/syllabus_tweets

    Last four papers are useful

    https://the-syllabus.com/cyberflaneur/the-cyberflaneur-21-daniela-gabor/

    Anyone calling themselves a "Cyberflaneur" needs a hard dunking in ice water, but related chats about Green New Deal / EU

    https://twitter.com/MarcDuvoisin/status/1248311455163633664

    Remember those chain of cars we flagged up? MOAR

    https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/1225319/peru-warned-of-potential-icsid-claims-over-covid-19-measures#.XpAPaasY-U0.twitter

    Peruvian officials have warned that a proposed emergency measure suspending the collection of toll fees on the country’s road network in response to the outbreak of covid-19 could result in multiple ICSID claims. : look @ SA road toll deals (STINKS) and at this: vulture capital is fucking brutal, maaan

    https://twitter.com/ADoug/status/1248688413827629058

    Host will like this one: 'best magnifying glass on the market'

    https://twitter.com/GearboxOfficial/status/1247562483130384385

    Borderlands (dodgy fucking C levels) is doing a tie-in with 'lend your CPU/GPU to science'. It's about the only decent thing the company has done, so worth noting.

    https://twitter.com/joabaldwin/status/1232712889238093824

    "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!" Decent art: shame he couldn't get around to finding out who created that & give credit, but he works for the Mouse

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/adam-tooze/shockwave

    Adam Tooze on recent market shocks: fairly accurate and nice beginners guide

    https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/updates-fire-st-pauls-sends-4040472

    Those "underground fire" we flagged up? Whelp.

    There's a recent US one with a grainy video that appears to show live-fire causing it. Bit hot that one ('cause... the video really does show someone using ordinance to blow the fucking thing up), go find it.

    https://twitter.com/cushbomb/status/1248662204783775746 https://twitter.com/leyawn/status/1248756289037053953

    Smart bois combining Sumerian Myth with anti-Capitalist myth. Well done, caught one of the strands, the crowd goes wild.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/industry-scrambles-to-stop-fatal-bird-flu-in-south-carolina

    Up above: first link is about coronavirus in avian populations. SPANG!

    https://twitter.com/LindsayPB/status/1248736391359496192

    Smart woman pointing out the hollo-men attitude sucks

    https://twitter.com/wang_seaver/status/1249028534623801344

    Someone notices that oil fields have always been the centre of strategic battles. Pangolins are pissed

    https://twitter.com/SlexAxton/status/1248954930976751618

    Actually the funniest Zoom pastiche / comedy out there atm.

    https://news.sky.com/story/labour-antisemitism-investigation-will-not-be-sent-to-equality-commission-11972071

    CTRL+F ERCHA .... hohoho, told you so. (231, for reference).

    ~

    You think we free-falling or planning some Phoenix stuff here?

    "It's all smoke and mirrors".

    That's the point

    917:
    predictions like the recent one that cattle farmers will be history by 2030. Not gonna happen... Allow me to express polite disagreement.

    I think we're really agreeing, but also that I didn't express myself very well.

    I meant that meat substitutes are not going to take over entirely, or even close to it, in the way that email has taken over from fax, or even that mobile has taken over from land-line phones for households. The think tank's piece said exactly that. 100% substitutes, 0% meat, by 2030. Surely you'd roll your eyes at that too?

    Sure substitutes will be in the supermarket chiller, and hopefully a large chunk of the global median household's spend on "meat-like" foods will be on them rather than dead animal. But beef farming won't be gone, consigned to history books, pining for the fjords, in ten years' time.

    Veganism has certainly become a common lifestyle choice recently; but as you admit, its current popularity isn't due to its intrinsic qualities (as a diet).

    I know people who have been vegans, some for several decades. Most of them are ex-vegans. I also know people who "virtue signal" by eating vegan stuff when visible to others, but don't bother alone at home. (This would be interesting to get data on.)

    As with veganism, so with electric cars. I think they'll be a choice on the menu, and, I hope, one that lots of car buyers make. But I don't expect fossil-fueled cars to disappear in my lifetime. (I'm slightly older than you, grandparents lived to late eighties.)

    For a new product to displace an incumbent entirely, I believe it has to be all three of: more convenient, cheaper, and better in intrinsic ways. Or have laws passed forbidding the use of the old product.

    918:

    "The Iron Lung" - ... Not an expert - opinions on this one?

    Phyical space. Power. Dealing with body functions. Access to the body for other reasons. IV lines. ....

    Oh, and cost. Comparing the cost of a 1950s medical product to one today isn't anywhere near apples to apples.

    Expectations on reliability and liability are entirely different.

    919:

    (p.s. We really don't just spam links: the above is ~20 mins work: now work out how much we don't put in)

    920:

    Furthermore, petroleum burning will become a no-no while petroleum used for other purposes is likely to remain more acceptable for a while for the reason you outline.

    So what do you do with all the stuff we burn now? Much of it can't be used to make plastic. At least not easily.

    921:

    Socially, things will return to normal, with minor adaptations perhaps, probably sooner than you think. (Yay, demented fleas!)

    The USA is on course for 30-40 mil unemployed / furlonged within weeks.

    Blackrock just got handed essentially a blank card to bail out vast tranches of junk rated bonds.

    CN is hitting its own market with trillions as well.

    If you think you're returning to normal, we guess you live in the Antarctic.

    922:

    "People to travel might like to estimate how far they have"

    I came up with a very rough number for my father, to state at his funeral. He died aged 86, just 20 miles from where he was born. But to get there I figured - using rather less than a BofE calculation - that he must have gone at least ten million miles. He had a total of 18,183 flying hours, for a start, which alone would get to 10m at 550mph.

    But though he retired on Boeing 707s he also spent a fair amount of time (see above) instructing in Tiger Moths and indeed Avro Ansons in Canada, ie lots of short slow flights, plus the Liberator and some commercial prop planes like the Hermes, DC-3 and Viscount. And even in the 707 he would rarely cruise for hours on end - flights between Kuwait and London, for instance (he was with Kuwait Airways from the mid-50s to mid-70s) would rarely be non-stop, instead landing in a couple of European capitals en route.

    So who knows. He did a fair amount of flying as a passenger, and European train journeys, and car journeys. Maybe it is somewhat more than 10m miles.

    I've no idea about me. A lot less. BTW, my father died in a hospice in Uphill, Somerset, less than 200 yards as the crow flies from John Cleese's birth address/ childhood home at 6, Ellesmere Road.

    923:

    Wool is different from leather or fur. And cotton is another alternative which is not petroleum based.

    You, and perhaps I, may view wool as being different than leather or fur.

    But for vegans, given the process of getting wool that means wool is also a no-no along with fur and leather.

    Which leaves cotton, a "natural" product that likely can't replace everything.

    Furthermore, petroleum burning will become a no-no while petroleum used for other purposes is likely to remain more acceptable for a while for the reason you outline.

    There is no indication that environmentalists make a distinction in what the oil is used for. But the bigger question is what happens to the price of oil for non-burning uses with those burning products driving production.

    924:

    We'll probably burn it to generate electricity if it's cheap enough. We'll need lots more electricity to charge electric vehicles, trucks and vans as well as cars and CCGT generating plants can be modded to run on, say, kerosene and light oil fractions rather than natural gas.

    The oil won't be left in the ground, it's energy and we want more energy than we produce right now, for heating and transport and electricity. We might stop deriving oil from the more expensive options like tarsands or Arctic waters but we know where it is and we can drill for it and pump it up and burn it when we need it, later.

    925:

    Wut?

    But for vegans, given the process of getting wool that means wool is also a no-no along with fur and leather.

    No. As a vegan you can happily shear sheep as long as you don't a) import breeds that are not designed for your climate (Australia) and b) you don't combine it with lamb production (which is 99% of shearing operations).

    Bad error there.

    There is no indication that environmentalists make a distinction in what the oil is used for

    Sigh. Yes, yes they do. Quite a lot of them (us included) know more about the oil industry than most people. e.g. Tar sands are bad because .... ? Brent differs from WTI because.... ? etc.

    This boi is big on projection.

    926:

    Having had a fair bit of experience with those drivers in the 1980s US, I have mixed feelings. Some were very good. Others no better than decent NY cab drivers. But none were as poor as those NY cabbies that had just "got off the boat".

    As with the availability of chauffeurs when cars first emerged, are there going to be enough? Training remote chauffeurs will need to be started soon if that was to be the solution.

    However, we know Uber wants self-driving cars to remove the driver costs. Will that still drive automated cars versus remote drivers, however cheap? Maybe remote drivers are an interim step before full automated cars?

    927:

    But for vegans, given the process of getting wool that means wool is also a no-no along with fur and leather.

    And there are all the don't kill any animals for any reason. From the weepy ones to the militant PETA ones. I bump into more and more people who get upset with people who find mice or voles and don't relocate them to a wilderness somewhere instead of killing them when found inside of their house. If I want to stir things up I make a comment like small mammals are really just food for other larger mammals, birds of prey, and snakes.

    The one hard core PETA guy I know took some rats from his house to the middle of nowhere so they could live free.

    I suspect the number of mammals smaller than a typical cat that dies of old age around here to be trivially small.

    Which leaves cotton, a "natural" product that likely can't replace everything.

    Of course the amount of water needed for cotton rules out a lot of places unless you pipe it in.

    928:

    mdive There are planty of situations, where a "natural" animal product - especially leather & wool have no acceptable substitute. As pointed out elsewhere, the alternative to leather is often made from ... ops ... crude oil. Many "wool" animals are not even eaten, anyway.

    But for vegans, given the process of getting wool that means wool is also a no-no along with fur and leather. - Which is terminally stupid. The real problem with veganism is getting an adequate diet in terms of small-quantity absolute essentials, such as certain vitimins. If really pushed, I could probably go the variety of "Vegetarian" that will consume animal products. { Full-time that is - I have zero problem with a "meatless day" or going to a fully vegetarian, usually S-Indian, restaurant. } That's about it, I'm afraid.

    929:

    The problem with all such "person drives me somewhere" businesses is no one wants to pay the cost of a decent ride plus the driver has a decent income. (Define either as you wish.)

    Uber/Lyft's business models are all about prices rises at some point as they are NOT making a profit on the current prices. Or even coming close to breaking even. Which means they are really trying to destroy the current taxi industry before they run out of investor funds and have to bring their prices up to at least break even.

    930:

    All of the recent replies on Veganism have been very incorrect. It's a real eye-opener.

    https://theminimalistvegan.com/is-wool-vegan/

    It's like, the easiest "don't fall into proclaiming you do not know any vegans" trap there is.

    Most of the debate is about the surrounding industrial processes - unless you're a proper Anarcho-Primitivist, arguments over "this animal that we (as a species) have spent 5-10k years domesticating probably is being exploited" are largely intellectual.

    Yes, you can use wool if you're a vegan.

    No, you probably cannot do it ethically in the current agricultural-industrial model that is current now.

    ~

    There. 10 seconds.

    All of the above barring the one you don't read: hilariously wrong.

    931:

    While people do seem to tolerate the risk of rogue Uber drivers, I think that a branded remote chauffeur service might be a good way forward. Just one with a better brand than Uber to do it.

    Disney!

    932:

    That's a lot of links and pointers. The Adam Tooze piece in the London Review Of Books is a good (and easy) read; I'll be passing it around, thanks. Economic forecasters have been pathetic, at least the visible ones. (Back to moving some heavy furniture.)

    933:
    The "swine flu" outbreak of 2009 also killed a lot of people, more than are currently predicted for this outbreak of Covid-19. Really?

    You're right, I over-claimed there. Apologies. Globally the death toll was pretty high, but perhaps not as high as this will end up being. But the point is we've forgotten it, and HIV/AIDS is receding from daily consciousness.

    So is this time really different?

    934:

    No. As a vegan you can happily shear sheep as long as you don't a) import breeds that are not designed for your climate (Australia) and b) you don't combine it with lamb production (which is 99% of shearing operations).

    And treat the animals with respect (ie. shear slowly so you don't injure them or otherwise mistreat them), and only shear once a year, don't export them once the prime wool years are finished, don't milk them,etc. etc.

    In other words, if you follow a long list of conditions then some vegans will bend their belief enough to allow for wool - but those conditions don't exist in the real world of commercial wool production.

    Thus wool is not vegan. Which is what just about any website on the topic says.

    935:

    Meat will continue to be raised for the ubers; the rest of us get to eat bugs -- which I've bee predicting for years because various huge food corps want it.

    Another topic:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/08/real-power-is-fear-donald-trump-machiavelli-boucheron

    . . . . Edited extract from Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear by Patrick Boucheron, published in the US by Other Press.

    This is government by mob / mafia rule; taking and keeping power via fear and cruelty is the point.*

    I am speaking literally. In Italy the mafia is delivering food and medical supplies to their 'friends.' Here They are delivering food and medical supplies that They have highjacked by every means possible, including via FEMA just taking possession of trucks of stuff going from one state to another, giving it Their friends who then sell it commercially to Their "friends."

    [….] This experience, which is profoundly Machiavellian in nature, is one that recurs again and again in history, whenever the words for expressing the things of politics become obsolete. What do we do when confronting adversaries we can’t put a name to? We call them “fascists”, for want of a better term – just as in Italy’s medieval communes, the people called the lords “tyrants”. We intend to confound them, to abash and bring them down, when we should in fact be examining what they say closely for its fascist potential. [….] In a sense, totalitarianism is a political fiction. It had its first trial in George Orwell’s 1949 fable and was then given a theoretical analysis by Hannah Arendt in 1951. We now know that what came after, what obtains today, took its place without receiving a name. Orwell imag­ined the tyranny of a “Ministry of Truth” but that’s not what happened, and we don’t yet know if it’s for better or worse. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, says in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And: “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied.” What the novel describes is the capacity of propaganda to hollow out a receptive space in people by undermin­ing reality and sense experiences. “The evidence of one’s eyes and ears” referred to by Orwell could be common sense; it could also be that sixth sense Machiavelli spoke of, the accessory knowledge that the people have of what is dominating them.

    Admittedly it was not the Party, as imagined by anti-totalitarian writers, that spoke when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, declared, “Our inten­tion is never to lie to you,” before adding “sometimes we can disagree with the facts.” It’s not a Party, but it’s something else that we don’t know what to call, a fiction that is taking on body under our eyes. And what we need to understand is: what is this taking on of body, and how can our own society come to embody monstrousness? Gramsci read Machiavelli’s The Prince replacing the word “prince” with the word “party”. We could in turn read Orwell and replace “party” with “prince”. Either way, Machiavelli needs to be read not in the present, but in the future tense. [….]

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    • It’s eerily as though Goldfinger was chiefbloodonhishands's template for his life. He talks, behaves and looks like Auric Goldfinger,

    [photo here] ha! Not the first to notice this -- from Psychology Today.

    who is characterized as a German ‘tycoon’ obsessed with gold. Even to obsession with golf and cheating at it (as, indeed, he cheats at everything else – “I like to win,”). Even to Goldfinger's presumed dominance in mob partnership, to steal the Fort Knox gold supply and rule it all.

    936:

    At a superficial glance a lot of animal welfare moral concerns can be waved away in the modern world - as you note we don't "need" fur, leather, wool, etc. - but those decisions have other costs - most of the alternative clothing materials seem to be petroleum based.

    The percentage of petroleum used as chemical feedstock is small. The percentage of that that is used for textiles is small. We can allow some use of petroleum, yes? Just, if we're sensible, not for making a series of explosions to drive metal, glass and plastic boxes around.

    Cotton as it is currently grown has nearly as bad environmental effects as beef, globally ex damage to the Amazon. "Organic" cotton is worse than "chemical", because of lower yields.

    But I have yet to find a non-cotton material that I find as comfortable against the skin year round.

    My belief is that up-front cost, convenience, and intrinsic properties decide what we use. Fur and leather were always expensive, niche clothing materials. Leather is still used in expensive cars.

    937:

    The sad part about moving Norway/Roof rats and house mice is that in most parts of the world, they really do survive better in human-modified landscapes. They're no more capable of surviving out in the woods unaided than you are. If you don't want to kill them, you've got to let them live as commensals

    Which I have known two people to do, although the animals they let live were Peromyscus californicus, not Mus or Rattus. The mice returned the favor by eating bugs, which seemed like a reasonable deal.

    938:

    Yeah, not in the mood tonight.

    No, you probably cannot do it ethically in the current agricultural-industrial model that is current now.

    You're being irritating.

    Do you have more knowledge on this subject that us? - No.

    Have you answered like any of the other issues? - No.

    Have you lived on a small hill farm or otherwise localized sheep unit (e.g. Wales, Iceland, parts of Canada) that do utilize such vegan friendly methods quite happily and show in the 21st century that such practices still occur? - No.

    Do you know anything about mixed grazing, ecology or land maintenance that uses such techniques and have actually written about it in the last, oh, 20 years? - No.

    So, please tell us all: "wool is not vegan".

    No, wool production under mass production and industrial processes is often not vegan. You're attempting to conflate Categories and you're not good at it.

    ~

    We'd suggest you stop here: CAN is going full basket-case[0] and your bullshit? Yeah. Not helping anyone.

    [0] Coronavirus: Canada lost a record one million jobs in March https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52232674

    939:

    (rainfall) saturated, dense broad-leaf forests and during downpours

    On that note, I have in the past climbed 60m up a tree in order to attach a ~10m pole on top of which was a high gain cellphone antenna. Attaching the cellphone to wire at the bottom of said pole meant we could (only just) send and receive SMS's, despite the phone showing zero bars of signal and the battery running hot.

    That was a sub-tropical rain forest (Weld Valley, Tasmania) and not only was everything wet, the trees were tall and the terrain not flat. So at ground level you had at least 50m of wet forest above you and if you wanted 4 or more GPS satellites it would be easier to exit the forest than climb high enough to get a wide angle of sky.

    Luckily some nice men were in the area making GPS and cellphone reception much easier. We were there to discourage them...

    940:

    It's the old normal, in parts of rural Mexico: a diet that's largely vegan (beans, corn, squash) various bugs, and meat on the holidays. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more push for a peasant diet (eat food, not too much, mostly plants), where meat is a treat, not a staple. Then again, this may be why the old Catholic church, along with the traditional Chinese calendar, had so very many holidays...

    941:

    strictly forbiden to offer casher/halal options (the republic doesn't recognize religions - it's in the constitution) hence the vegetarian option (secular)

    For different reasons many airlines do the same. There's one "weird" meal option and it will be kosher, halal, vegetarian and likely vegan. That's a pretty easy combo and it lets them cater to most of the people who won't eat standard airline meals.

    I doubt there's a coeliac option, and there's likely nothing I can safely eat, but that's also been rendered irrelevant by my decision not to use airplanes and oh also this wee issue we're having ATM.

    942:

    Oh, if you don't know about https://twitter.com/steak_umm , Corporate chatter, the actual drama surrounding it (including the C-level Nestle guy[0]), and who is running a literal "Meat Popisical" account as "Resistance" in the USA 2020, well then.

    Then you're not even in the game. You don't even understand the Game.

    Hint: it's fucking cynical and bullshit. Mr Man is going to get shaved, hard when anyone serious publishes the data on the company, it's owners and the scripts he's using.

    Then CTRL+F Monsanto (#212) well then. We're a bit ahead of these fucks.

    [0]You've all read Jennifer Government, right? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33356.Jennifer_Government

    943:

    Guerilla Marketing? Sending shooters in and pumping your gear?

    Kidz.

    You're missing the joke. We learnt from you, we find your shit boring. Break the Market, all Stonks go through the ROOF!

    What if we blew up the global economy ("shit dagger") just as an .... advert?

    ~

    Socially, things will return to normal, with minor adaptations perhaps, probably sooner than you think. (Yay, demented fleas!)

    This is fucking hilarious.

    Trillions of dollars are hanging onto a broken system, and you type this shit out. EM markets are collapsing, no-one is looking to the future, G_D got killed, and this: this is the level of analysis SF fans do.

    ~

    No.

    You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.

    944:

    re: 'Vitamin D' as adjuvant therapy for COVID-19

    Should be easy enough to test: Iceland, UK, Scandinavia, Russia vs. Florida, California, Mexico, Iran, India, etc. Would not be surprised if some dickish pol in India/Mexico twists this to cajole the homeless in his/her area into believing that they're going to be okay.

    The higher levels of skin pigmentation as a UV barrier thus concomitantly resulting in proportionately lower VitD uptake is something I heard/read ages ago. Wasn't aware that there was still any debate about it.

    Biggest issue about generalizations re: African-[insert nationality of your choice] is that --- as someone else pointed out already --- 'Africans' have the greatest genetic diversity of all 'races'.

    945:

    if you follow a long list of conditions then some vegans will bend their belief enough to allow for wool - but those conditions don't exist in the real world

    That's kind of practically true, in the sense that they don't exist in the mass market. But once you get into specialty products it's a different story. Some handknitters buy from suppliers who have dedicated flocks (flocklets? Small flocks?) of sheep kept purely for wool and carefully looked after yadda yadda. But the prices they charge are high, and you end up with a nice knitted jumper that costs $US200 or more.

    There are also non-sheep wools, and alpaca specifically are not really kept for meat, only wool, so they're treated quite differently from sheep. Angora rabbits ditto, but OMG do not even think about raising those things, they die if you look at them funny.

    946:

    "GPS works by using modern DSPs to extract a signal that is weaker than the background RF noise at the frequencies used."

    Well, 1970s DSPs, by design. But that technique does not magically abolish the concept of a signal level which is too low to receive. It just makes that level lower, which in turn means you can get away with a lower transmitter power at the other end, which makes the satellites less complicated. GPS signals can still be blocked, jammed, or rendered too weak to receive, just like any other signal.

    947:

    The mice returned the favor by eating bugs, which seemed like a reasonable deal.

    Mice outside are fine by me. Inside they will destroy you and/or your house over time.

    But I also don't mind snakes and spiders. Snakes will clear an area of mice in no time. And spiders eat all of the smaller bugs. For roaches I use boric acid powder in the crawlspace and under the big appliances. But this is a constant battle in this part of the country. And by roaches I mean things around 1" to 1.5" long. Not those small brown things.

    The really hard ones are ants. Keeping water away from places they might want to use as nests is the best way. But at times you don't even know they or the dampness is there till they break out.

    Termites. Well crap. For that we use poison and an annual inspection fee.

    I want to setup a martin house. But that's a March thing and you have to work with them to get them started and keep the starlings out. I started March with the flu and the universe decided I would have no free time the rest of the month.

    But a bat house... I may do that in the next month or two.

    PS: Martins and bats eat a LOT of mosquitoes.

    948:

    GPS signals can still be blocked, jammed, or rendered too weak to receive, just like any other signal.

    Sure. But modern receives can detect a weaker signal than prior generations. And the DSPs are better at extracting the information from such. The algorithms are better, the circuits beefier, and the precision of the math better.

    949:

    Here you go:

    China is a dictatorship that, for decades, enforced a one child per family policy under penalty of forced sterilization. But they can't close down the farmer's market from hell? #CoronaVirus #WetMarkets

    https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1248814741893476352

    Embedded video.

    You know what drove this shit?

    Minds like yours.

    QED

    950:

    "As for the "deliberately crash the vehicle for some motive", it'd have to be quite an odd motive to override the natural aversion to being charged with attempted (or actual) murder."

    It's an established scam. Deliberately have a crash in some manner that makes it count as the other driver's fault and then scam the insurance. Viz even had the Bacons doing it in one strip. Some people keep an eye out for manky cars fitted with video cameras to try and avoid being the other driver.

    951:

    For different reasons many airlines do the same.

    Not so much just now. If it is not pre-packaged (in a factory, not an airport kitchen) most airlines don't offer it. And even then most have stopped offering anything but bottled water and you have to ask for that. Food mostly only on long haul flights just now. Serving food on an airplane means getting close face to face.

    Currently only 2% to 3% as many people flying as same time a year ago.

    952:

    Some won't, but some will. More importantly, I think vegans will remain a minority. Even after eating meat becomes unacceptable, I think eggs and dairy and honey will continue to be widely eaten.

    953:

    Mice outside are fine by me. Inside they will destroy you and/or your house over time.

    Those are literally different species. Harvest Mouse? etc

    But I also don't mind snakes and spiders.

    He does: he literally hasn't lived in an area where a certain spider might bite your asshole and give you a necrotic gift, ever.

    Snakes will clear an area of mice in no time.

    Again, this man knows nothing about ecology: like... mice are Hard catch for snakes. You know what wasn't? All those frogs you killed off with your pesticides.

    And spiders eat all of the smaller bugs.

    Wut? You're about to talk about ants and termites and.... oh, forget it, this fuckwit knows nothing.

    For roaches I use boric acid powder in the crawlspace and under the big appliances. But this is a constant battle in this part of the country. And by roaches I mean things around 1" to 1.5" long. Not those small brown things.

    Hey, genius: maybe ask yourself "which insect eats cockroaches"? Hint: its the ones you like to get rid of!

    The really hard ones are ants. Keeping water away from places they might want to use as nests is the best way. But at times you don't even know they or the dampness is there till they break out.

    Ants literally do not use water in this way. Like, literally. Ants gain 80-80% of their water through consumption. Not your stream,

    Termites. Well crap. For that we use poison and an annual inspection fee.

    This has such a high success level in America, we're impressed [hint: it doesn't]

    I want to setup a martin house. But that's a March thing and you have to work with them to get them started and keep the starlings out. I started March with the flu and the universe decided I would have no free time the rest of the month. But a bat house... I may do that in the next month or two.

    Here's a free tip.

    Read this: https://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

    Then, if you want any ecology around your place, stop using DDT, barbaric levels of frankly dangerous poisons and so on.

    If you can't handle nature.

    FUCK OFF AND GET A FLAT IN BROOKLYN YOU ODIOUS MUPPET

    Oh, and

    ‘We could get wiped out’: Native Americans have the highest rates of diseases that make COVID-19 more lethal

    https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-native-americans-indians-20200406.html

    Then go look up this story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/first-yanomami-covid-19-death-brazl-indigenous

    Nuke them from Orbit, it's the only way to be Sure.

    954:

    And yeah:

    David did just basically post the 101 of Boomer "how we fucked the ecology" with 0% self awareness there.

    So, hey.

    Well done my man!

    You hit your targets!

    We hope you do not have children who will be held responsible for this!

    955:

    GPS, satnav, Google Maps, strip maps and so on all have the same primary goal. They tell you exactly how to get to where you are going.
    They also have the same flaw - they don’t tell you what else you can look at along the way.

    The big advantage of a book of maps is when you go “what’s interesting around here to go look at” you can see all the stuff off to the side of your route. It also makes planning a whole lot easier, because the scale is consistent throughout, distances are clearly indicated, and interesting locales are highlighted.

    956:

    forget it, this fuckwit knows nothing.

    And you know everything. So what.

    957:
    The USA is on course for 30-40 mil unemployed / furlonged within weeks. Blackrock just got handed essentially a blank card to bail out vast tranches of junk rated bonds. CN is hitting its own market with trillions as well.

    That's BAU.

    958:

    Have you not heard of The Shock Doctrine or the concept of Disaster Capitalism?

    959:

    Finally:

    Meh.

    960:

    No, we learn. We are learning machines.

    You essentially proclaimed biocidal dominance over your local area while knowing nothing about ecology and were proud of it.

    Here's the difference: we can look into your most complex "Human" man-made ecologies (Markets) and Front Run then[0], but not only that, front run your responses and do it accurately within 4 months.

    If you knew how fast algo's trade, you might have a little bit more respect.

    Front-running Homo Sapiens is a joke: front running your algos?

    Maybe you need to re-think your Mental Maps

    And yeah: done it constantly for years now. We're beating your Machines not you fucking pathetic humans.

    ~

    But you're proud of killing off your local ecology. In times like this.

    Why not kill your children? Because that's your actual Ethical Stance.

    David: what did you do before declaring war on your local ecology?

    [0] shiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeet this boi in GS? Just made trillions.

    961:

    "I never try to read a map in a moving vehicle"

    I tried it once. Going slowly, on a straight, empty road with wide verges.

    Completely bloody impossible. Car starts heading for the edge almost before I've focused on the map. No way to switch context fast enough between map-reading and road-watching. Can't be done.

    I never tried it again.

    I absolutely am not going to have an illuminated, moving thing stuck up on the dashboard near my line of sight, continually acting as a stimulus to make that context switch and consuming resources simply from the need to continually block the stimulus, and no bloody good even if I do let it distract me because it's several times too small to be anything other than too shit to be any use. And on top of that, I don't have the accommodation range any more to focus on anything inside the car without taking my specs off, and I can't focus on anything outside the car without them on.

    Paper maps have multiple advantages. They always work. They don't need expensive gadgets to read them. They are much clearer to read. You can see the whole thing at once instead of looking at it through a matchbox-sized peephole. They are much better at showing both the general context of an area and small details of it and they do both at the same time. And they don't spy on you and tell some bunch of spawning shits everywhere you go and everything you do with them.

    I've tried that strip map technique but I don't really find it useful. By the time I've drawn it out it no longer tells me anything I don't know, and it's harder to locate myself on it than it is on the picture in my head which still has most of the context that the strip map has lost. When I need a map at all it's usually because I'm not on the route any more for some reason, so a map that only shows the route isn't a lot of use.

    962:

    We invented it.

    We also know that Klein has a very privileged background and a daddy who made millions in the market.

    Grow up and participate or shut up.

    Buy in is [redacted] knowledge point, [future point: REAL] or [significant Reality changing modal knowledge point]

    See it yet?

    We've been giving you free [Future point: REAL] for... years now.

    ~

    Now work it out.

    963:

    I think eggs and dairy and honey will continue to be widely eaten.

    Honey would be a fun one, because without honey bees a lot of plant crops can't be pollinated. While truly hardcore vegans might argue that we shouldn't have bred or spread honeybees in the first place, not replacing them as they die would also mean losing a lot of plant food and thus people.

    Egg factories are almost the perfect exemplar of everything wrong with animal products. But it's quite possible to produce eggs in a reasonably kind way and only double the price of cage eggs. And many more people could do my trick of having semi-tame death dealing dinosaurs in the back yard. They provide eggs as well as entertainment and management.

    964:

    David L @951: Your use of "most" in the referenced sentence tells me the same is true of others watching us. I tend to notice a wide variety of US news sources and "most" is very much not true. Same with the rest of your analysis. Alright, I beat myself up for overly generalizing (this was mostly for sake of contrast) and should probably spend some time meditating on media categorization. Because, really, among panic and rumors it is hard to find those who even thinks other opinions.

    965:

    They provide eggs as well as entertainment and management. I have to ask (because Australia): "management" ?

    966:

    L.A. County used the Inkadot system up until this year - a card with several columns of circles. Each spot on the ballot book has a corresponding circle on the card, and you use a little ink stamp to mark them. The ballot books aren't bedsheets - they were roughly 5 by 8 in that system - and you get a sample ballot you can mark up and take in with you. The new one has bigger pages - closer to 9x12 - and bigger spacing - they went to electronic machines, which haven't been properly tested and certified. We're doing mail-in next fall, because it failed so badly in March. (Another problem was going from thousands of precincts to 180 or so "voting centers", which are harder to get to and much farther apart.)

    967:

    Starlight's route is much much closer to US101, as most people could tell you. (I5 was routed to avoid cities and towns as much as possible, and it's definitely inland once you're north of Camp Pendleton.) It goes through my area about 10:30am, most days, but doesn't stop here except in rare circumstances.

    968:

    Socks that run $35 or more for just the wool. (They're gorgeous, though, and will last for years with care. And they fit.)

    969:

    Spiders aren't generally a problem, unless you're refusing to turn on a light, or sticking your hand someplace where you can't see what you're sticking it into. I've only known one person who was bit by a spider, and it was on their hand. (Probably a brown recluse or a hobo spider.) Mice are a bigger problem in rural areas than in cities - but even there, it's only places they can get into easily. There are a lot of predators for them - owls, snakes, some hawks, some mammals. By the way, DDT isn't used that much any more. And in some places, you can't get anything that's effective on ants, unless you have special training and a permit. For termites - good luck: you MUST have training and a permit.

    As you seem to live on some other planet, plonk

    970:

    There are several regional subspecies of honeybees, adapted to various climates. The familiar brown ones are Italian. What we need to do is keep the bumblebees and the other wild bees around, because they do a lot of pollination. (I've watched wild bees getting down deep in cactus flowers, where honeybees can't go because they're too big.)

    972:

    Oh, no...

    LTA (lighter-than-air) craft depend on displacement by helium in the gasbags to get off the ground, so have much less engine power than heavier-than-air craft.

    They also have a much greater sail area so random winds blow them around, but they don't have the engine power to overcome the force inflicted by winds.

    Much as I love the idea, and go OOOOOOH every time American Airships launches one from HIO and it sails overhead, they should not be type-certified for human passengers; not even the deltoids which Dean Ing wrote about https://www.amazon.com/Big-Lifters-Dean-Ing/dp/0312930674/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

    973:

    As in "don't step in the management".

    But also as in supervision, because whatever I am doing they will keep an eye on me. One will even come into the kitchen if I leave the back door open. But not, so far, into the open oven.

    974:

    Mice ... There are a lot of predators for them

    Chickens. I'm not entirely sure that a standard size chicken can eat a whole mouse because I've never seen that happen. They will eat half a mouse, and generally by the time the discussion is over the chicken who gets half a mouse has done well. "hunted drawn and quartered" is the sentence handed out to any mouse that can't get out of the chicken's range fast enough.

    It wouldn't surprise me if the hellbeasts do eat whole mice, but they do so quietly and without drawing attention to themselves. But I wouldn't notice that, tautologically speaking.

    975:

    What we need to do is keep the bumblebees and the other wild bees around, because they do a lot of pollination.

    Very much so, for a range of reasons. Partly that means being very careful about insecticides, but also managing invasive pests like domesticated (industriated?) bees. They are often "rested" in areas where there's lots of non-farmed pollen/nectar available, which often also amounts to being brought in to strip an area of any food source that might be available to native bees.

    But it also means keeping a range of flowering plants around so there's food for as much of the year as bees are active, and enough of it to get them through the winter. That's where wildflowers and hedgerows come in, but also urban gardens. My recent tenants turned a lot of my native flowering plants back into lawn and encouraged the nearly-dead rose bushes back to life at their expense. Reversal is slowly in progress 9again)

    976:

    Oh SHIT TWO instances of Seagull at once! SBH & cuneiform - neither doing anything apart from being irrelevant & in one case insulting .... ( 953 qppears to be exceptionally obnoxious arrogant & ignorant, even by the usual low standards )

    GregvP Cotton & autocratic mob/party/dictatorial "planning" was/is responsible for the Aral Sea disaster - don't ever forget that.

    SFR As noted previously, some of us are now taking Vit-D supplements. Even though, in my case, I'm still out in the sunshine a lot. Will be putting my First Early potatoes in later today.

    DavidL I had unknown burrowing rodents in my greenhouse this winter - they did not come into the house ... I think they have gone back outside, now. But the resident Toad is still there, as are the Newts in the garden.....

    Pigeon @ 950 Or - how to get a Land-Rover "pressing" in one easy lesson? The "whiplash scam" ran for several years, until the insurance Cos wised up.

    Mayhem @ 955 SPOT ON A paper map shows you the surrounding area/countryside. TfL, in their arrogance, stupidity & "knowing what we thin the customer wants" have removed all proper maps from theor web-site & stopped printing them. Grrrr .

    P J Evans Ants - boiling water works well .... Mice can get into spaces you would not believe are small enough ... then there's shrews ( Which is what I may have had in my greehouse ) If wonderful Ratatosk had lived, I would have found out, of course. .... & Moz ... Bumblebees One species, that I love to watch seems to have vanished from round here B lapidarius - fortunately B terrestris / pascuorum / lucorum / hypnorum / pratorum / hortorum seem to be around in quantity. I think it's lucorum that is now commercially bred, for release as a colony in large greenhouses, to ensure pollination. Grow the "right" plants & you will get bees of all sorts - almost anything from the Borage family will do it.

    977:

    I have in the past climbed 60m up a tree in order to attach a ~10m pole on top of which was a high gain cellphone antenna. Attaching the cellphone to wire at the bottom of said pole meant we could (only just) send and receive SMS

    Antennas have to go up high, perhaps it was Marconi himself who said “get as much metal as possible, as high up as possible”... I’ve used an alternative to running an expensive & bulky wire down, by just coupling two antennas together = a passive reflector = a zero gain directional repeater (has isotropic gain) point one down through the wet trees, equally has been used in UK to illuminate a house from a part of the garden that can just scrape 3G fringe.

    Back to GPS, or as agreed with Professor Todd E Humphreys “a single point of failure” - he was nice enough to tell me beforehand on our transatlantic chats that he’d invited the FBI to record our discussions, as it was so sensitive [0], I think GNSS is thankfully now less of a problem, due Galileo, Baidu, Glonass etc. I still carry maps, eBay sells some cheap but good bundles of lightly-historic maps as real bookshops shut, under the Amazon tide.

    Speaking of large river basis, in South America - on a UNESCO gift mission to Machu-Picchu, where I was part of a team to analyse the citadel with synthetic aperture Radar, the team of GPS experts who were also mapping the geological stability, basically had to give up. Perhaps the forests, certainly the steep Andes meant that even pro receivers were very difficult to lock. GPS did not give as much science as a ground based linear synthetic aperture stand off system (a hacked HP piece of test equipment!)[1]

    [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/professor-spoofs-80m-superyachts-gps-receiver-on-the-high-seas/ [1] A Japanese team had predicted the imminent demise of the no.1 Peruvian tourist spot. We found geo faults everywhere, but not with the actual ancient choice of location.

    978:

    IIRC, aircraft passengers did not want to fly in pilotless aircraft as they wanted to know that a pilot would do everything they could to save the passengers and themselves.

    Two points. (a) Cars, unlike aircraft, have baked-in safety: if the engine stops they should come to a halt naturally without killing the passengers, under most circumstances. (Air bags, crumple zones ... the car itself won't fare so well. But most journeys are short distances at low speeds.) (b) Yes, but there's also no guarantee the pilot won't deliberately try to kill themselves along with everyone else -- see also Germanwings Flight 9525.

    As a thoughtful, tech, SciFi writer, I'm surprised you think that deliberate murder or other nefarious deeds by a remote chauffeur couldn't be covered up.

    You haven't read Halting State, or if you did you read it so long ago you've forgotten that plot point, haven't you?

    979:

    In the military (or at least in the U.S. Army,) the driver DRIVES. A co-driver handles map reading en-route -- yes, that's roughly how my wife and I work, too. It works great on long-haul/cross-country routes, but you can't pull off to the side of the road and check the [paper] map in a busy urban one-way system with four lanes of traffic where everyone else knows where they're going (and is impatient to get there).

    980:

    Probably not, because this is just a logical step from several alt-right sources I've stumble upon.

    Aaah. Tom Clancy wrote an execrable novel ("Rainbow Six") which basically postulated a bunch of humanity-hating environmentalists -- humanity-hating animal-rights proponent types, that is: who think humanity needs to be removed because we're bad for animals -- who go undercover for 30 years, build a giant multinational pharmaceutical corporation (hint: you can't do that without complying with a certification regime that requires a buttload of animal testing!), and build a secret lab in the jungle to start developing a human-specific plague (hint: almost all microbial of humans hopped across from another species -- a plague that kills humans will also kill a lot of other animals), then for no sane reason start funding terrorist atrocities around the world.

    This book is mostly notable for (a) having been used as marketing for a successful computer game, and (b) caricaturing the deep greens beyond all recognition. (Hint: they're barely self-organized enough to build a tree hut, never mind a multinational corporation -- and the tactics Clancy handed his bad guys consisted of a series of red lines that no actual deep green would cross.)

    Now, note the spread of alt-right memes via in-game chat, especially highly militaristic kill-lotsa-terrorists-and-by-terrorists-I-mean-anti-American games like, er, "Rainbow Six".

    I'm guessing they picked the plot elements out of that novel and/or game and decided they were real.

    A deeply worrying -- to me -- phenomenon of late is the uptake of white supremacism (Nazism) in the US population. When those folks come out of climate change denial they are totally going to see it as a blessing from God -- a tool designed for killing "Mud People". (And by "mud people" they mean us.)

    981:

    None of this (about BZ) surprises me.

    It's a powerful hallucinogen. It's also so nasty it never got turned into a street drug. Says it all, really.

    982:

    The one thing that surprises me is the attack of sanity in the military politicians.

    983:

    I suspect there are senior people in the governments of the US and Russia, and possibly China, who already see climate change as something they can "win" against the rest of the world. In a way Trump has jumped the gun by not paying lip service to the widespread feeling that "something must be done".

    984:

    I can and do still do it in the saner cities and with an appropriate map, at 72, and it was easier when I was younger. But I am still a fast reader with good reactions and low-light vision - my biggest problem is that I need glasses to read street signs etc. and need them off to read the map.

    But it's insane to try to do that AND drive, except on the sort of roads where you can just stop anywhere with a very low chance of any other traffic appearing.

    985:

    The big problem with driverless cars is the impact on non-motorised traffic (including pedestrians, of course) - but why cares about such mud people? The 'safety' improvements in motoring of the past century have probably actually increased the total risk, mainly in indirect ways that were not foreseen and are still denied by most people and almost all politicians.

    986:

    I think that when we ask our USAian friends things these days, it’s alarmingly more and more like Stephenson’s Anathema, and we’re making an assessment about how far gone they are. Who are the good people whom we should treat as our own and look after like ourselves? Every American will have some sort of answer for that, some will have good answers, answers that we ourselves might make in their circumstances. Are they a majority or even a plurality?

    At the moment we already must acknowledge mass graves. The role of the UN is not for this, but it’s interesting to consider what it might be in a world with a need for some more intervention.

    987:

    There are occasional articles in the UK pointing out that the 'humane' methods of disposing of them are actually more cruel than killing them. The same was very probably true of the banning of fox hunting, but puritanism lives on in the UK (*) and that was a Holy Battle in the Class War.

    There are similar ethical problems with converting livestock farming to arable, once you consider the lesser inhabitants of the land, even ignoring the ecological ones.

    (*) See Macaulay about bear-baiting.

    988:

    Even after eating meat becomes unacceptable, I think eggs and dairy and honey will continue to be widely eaten.

    You can't have dairy without cattle, which means (absent sex-selective conception) a surplus of bulls/bullocks/veal calves. Also, post-lactation cows.

    You can't have eggs without chickens, which in turn means weeding out the males (or sex-selective conception).

    I guess some R&D on parthenogenesis in mammals, followed by parthenogenic sub-species of (100% female) hens and cows might do the trick.

    Honey ... yeah, I can't see us not needing bees around as long as we still grow crops that require pollinators, and honey is a useful by-product.

    989:

    Yes, I have read Halting State. And yes, I have forgotten the plot.

    When I was young I could read the first page of any story and know whether I had read it or not. Now I cannot. A literate friend who died a decade ago once told me that he could no longer remember the books he had read, but if they were on his bookshelves, then they must be worth reading. I may be headed in that direction. sigh. But be assured, Halting State is in the Stross section of my home library. If the apocalypse happens, I have enough books for another lifetime of reading.

    990:

    Sex selection is already a thing for cattle. Also, absent beef, I would expect dairy to focus more on sheep or goats which can also provide wool, making the economics different and somewhat obviating the problem of post-lactation cattle.

    991:

    David did just basically post the 101 of Boomer "how we fucked the ecology" with 0% self awareness there. I get real tired of that "Boomer" crap, when industrial agriculture started (end of the 50's) boomers were still in school, and agri-school curriculum and absurd propaganda (turning desert into a garden) was not our doing. Green parties were created by boomers, who spent years being ridiculed by ALL political parties (from trotskyists to fascists). On a lighter note, I've got a house in the country (unfit for lockdown because no internet) and I've managed to convince all neighbors to refrain from using harmful substances. We have hedgehogs, bats (I've dedicated a cellar to their exclusive use) and garden mice who shelter from cats in the ground floor and shit behind every piece of furniture.

    992:

    No, leather was NOT always an "expensive, niche market" material, not even in my adult lifetime and in the UK - and still isn't in many places. For durability (e.g. boots or abrasion-resistant gloves or jackets) and many forms of protection (e.g. for smelting, ironworking, glassblowing etc.), there was no alternative until recently.

    Synthetics have a BIG problem, which is microfibres from washing - look that one up :-(

    But cotton is NOT the only alternative. It took over from its predecessors because it was more absorbant and softer - and because of slave labour. We could perfectly well go back to using linen, hemp and so on - and (in my view and that of many other observers) should. Inter alia, many of them are much more durable than cotton and can be grown without the environmental cost.

    I know that there are hundreds of others, but I gave two examples that are still used for factory-produced fabrics.

    993:

    I wonder if we have ever crossed paths IRL. I used to be on the edge of some dark green groups in Tasmania, a long time ago (though I personally was never a part of a blockade). I also used to, occasionally, visit Sydney. I think the last time I was there was for the APEC protests in 2007. Got myself arrested for walking on the footpath, and charged with something that only applied to people driving vehicles. Case got dropped (along with everyone else's case—except the one or two who just plead guilty) the day before the court case... (Actually, so the last time would have been when I would have attended court, if the court hearing had have gone ahead. I guess? I forget.)

    994:
    We really don't just spam links

    (hysterical laughter)

    21 links in #916.

    • 13 were from twitter, so I will assume charitably that any relevant information they may contain came from single tweets, not the beginning of a tweet chain that should be read in its entirety.
    • Links to pictures, some of which are interesting.
    • Links to articles, many of which require an account to read.

    Forgive my skepticism!

    Feel free to call me a fascist again - that's what you did the last time I called you out on some of your blether.

    I've been using the "see the Seagull's current nym at the top of a post, say 'blah blah blah' while hitting page down" strategy for this post. Time to use Blog Killfile again.

    995:

    Re: 'But cotton is NOT the only alternative.'

    True, like bamboo which seems to be becoming more popular because it can potentially fill so many different uses.

    Unfortunately, while bamboo sounds ecofriendly folks should be aware that depending on where they live (i.e., their country's labeling laws) some fabrics labeled 'bamboo' are actually 'semi-synthetic' rayon. Basically, the bamboo pulp is soaked/cooked in chemicals and this process is very toxic -- side-effects include psychosis, death, etc. The more genuinely ecofriendly bamboo fiber that won't fatally poison mill workers is made using a rett process.

    BTW - there are similar issues with 'pre-washed' [cotton denim] jeans: the manufacturing process involves some really toxic steps plus the jeans fall apart much faster. Great for the manufacturer/marketer, bad for everyone else.

    Bottom line: folks need to check both the raw materials and the production process.

    996:

    So Singapore has been forced to follow much of the rest of the world and close schools and non-essential businesses. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52232147

    997:

    Charlie Stross @978:

    Now, note the spread of alt-right memes via in-game chat, especially highly militaristic kill-lotsa-terrorists-and-by-terrorists-I-mean-anti-American games like, er, "Rainbow Six".

    Oh, so this is what it means, all these intro movies for the first season of R6S, about unknown enemy of unknown capabilities, spreading around heaps of pollen-looking "gas" chem weapon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8esTYYmqCo

    On the side note, any usual in-game chat is basically not suitable for anything on the side of propaganda as it is monitored by the bots 3600/24/7. As an example, this, of course, is very intelligent and interesting insight into their activity (no, it is goddamn not): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am5djIm2EYM If you'd watch it, prepare your helmets, because this is a 40 minute video about infantile adults banging their heads on automated defenses of a community regulation instrument.

    Most of the impact goes into online communities, which are only partially game-related. I am not sure if they are controlled somehow and how would they do it, but the good thing that those active xenophobes spreading memes constitute less than 0.1% of online population, and they only open up if there's a certain concentration of them on certain thematic servers, like above 3-4% occasionally.

    998:

    So Singapore has been forced to follow much of the rest of the world and close schools and non-essential businesses. And they've starting making mask wearing mandatory. Wearing of masks to be made compulsory on public transport: Khaw Boon Wan (11 Apr 2020) The U-turn was a week ago: Coronavirus: what’s behind Singapore’s U-turn - The island state is no longer discouraging residents from wearing them in public, and will distribute reusable face masks from Sunday - Prime Minister Lee says the decision was made following new evidence that an infected person can show no symptoms yet still spread the disease (Dewey Sim, 3 Apr, 2020)

    (This is humor pointed at [Western] anti-maskers)

    The Western refusal to wear face masks is rooted deep in their medical traditions. The Four Humors of Hippocratic Medicine, explain that one of those Humors- phlegm causes "cold diseases" and must be expelled from the body. Many Westerners believe a face mask would prevent this. pic.twitter.com/ilFU306fyj

    — Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) March 23, 2020
    999:

    Charlie @ 977 My father trained me to do this from about age 8. I really suprised someone who gave me a lift from a pickup-station to $Meeting_Point, by unfolding the relevant 1:25 000 map & giving very accurate directions ....

    PubliusJay Sheeps-milk cheeses are REALLY TASTY

    EC @ 990 "NZ Flax" - made from These plants Phormium tenax is often grown as an "architecural" ornamental in this country.

    1000:

    So Singapore has been forced to follow much of the rest of the world and close schools and non-essential businesses. Singapore authorities had "forgotten" to provide care for the 100,000+ migrant workers living in mandatory dormitory accomodations. These people are not commonly referred to as "expats". I wonder if that is also the case in Quatar,UAE, where migrant workers living in awful conditions far outnumber the local ppulation.

    1001:

    I do think it's possible to "win" climate change, but the current strategists in the U.S. are complete crap! The way you "win" climate change is by becoming the world's top provider of wind, solar, and other Green technologies, while turning your country into an example of how that should work!

    1002:

    As I said, there are hundreds of others - nettles, for one that grows readily in the UK - but I selected out two that are used industrially, today, for clothing fabric. My understanding is that Phormium fibre is suitable only for very coarse fabrics, ropes etc.

    https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/sustainable-textile-innovations-nettle-fibres/2017080725413?PageSpeed=noscript https://www.britannica.com/plant/phormium-plant-and-fibre

    There really is no shortage of candidates!

    1003:

    I appreciate leather for exactly those qualities - its superior resistance compared to uncured human hide against blobs of red hot gunk and abrasion by tarmac. It's still the material of choice for both applications, and I'm not convinced that modern alternatives are actually better. Synthetics melt, so their abrasion resistance drops off a cliff after frictional heating does its thing, and fabric made of mineral-based refractory fibres tends to be pretty horrible stuff to wear (even if it's not next to the skin). It seems to me that alternatives are mainly used when it's already been decided not to use leather for some other reason.

    Similarly it seems to me that the more "expensive niche market" a leather item is, the less important for that purpose the unique properties of leather actually are. It may even result in the item being less suitable for its intended purpose than if it was made of some more "ordinary" material (eg. in upholstery). Things that are made of leather purely for its protective qualities often aren't expensive at all.

    I think it's not so much an "expensive niche market" material as a standard, cheap industrial material that in particular niche cases people can be persuaded to pay well over the odds for. It's just that those cases tend to be more visible than the cheap and practical ones.

    1004:

    "BTW - there are similar issues with 'pre-washed' [cotton denim] jeans: the manufacturing process involves some really toxic steps plus the jeans fall apart much faster. Great for the manufacturer/marketer, bad for everyone else."

    "You must vash them and vash them in caustic soda, but not moch."

    1005:

    "Sheeps-milk cheeses are REALLY TASTY"

    OTOH goats-milk cheese is UTTERLY VILE. Tried some once. Tastes like the smell of a goat - and the taste hangs around your mouth and you can't get rid of it. Blech. Never again.

    No idea what Venezuelan beaver cheese is like.

    Also no idea what any type of non-bovine milk is like in tea, but at least in the goat case I have no desire to find out.

    1006:

    Yes, the COVID-19 statistics are totally screwed, but you're slightly wrong. Not only do we not have an accurate case count, we also don't have an accurate deat-from-covid count, and some (how many?) cases are never registered. Corpses are assigned a death cause, and not tested. This has resulted in grossly underestimating the deaths. The only way to reasonably estimate the actual death count is to count the total number of dead, and then subtract the normally expected number of dead. This, unfortunately, also gives a false number because life action patterns have changed.

    Then there's the question of "What does recovered mean?". Many cases have been reported that appear to show people catching the disease more than once. This, unfortunately, has several possible explanations, many of which are...unsettling.

    One possibility is that recovering from the disease doesn't leave you immune...at least not for more than a week or so. Another is that many people don't recover from the disease, but merely suppress it, and that it will return whenever the immune system weakens. (Here I think of Chickenpox/Shingles, but with a lot shorter fuse.) Another is that there are multiple strains circulating that don't provide common immunity. And, of course, there's the test false answer rate...though that's supposed to have been allowed for.

    A really bad (probably) sign is that people who are recovered often show extremely low antibody levels. This may indicate that the "no permanent immunity" choice is the correct one. And also that a decent vaccine won't be easy. Fortunately there are many promising drugs to treat the disease, and those will probably be available before a vaccine would have been anyway.

    1007:

    I agree, though there are people who probably don't. I also find goat milk cheeses quite delicious.

    1008:

    A really bad (probably) sign is that people who are recovered often show extremely low antibody levels. This may indicate that the "no permanent immunity" choice is the correct one. And also that a decent vaccine won't be easy. Fortunately there are many promising drugs to treat the disease, and those will probably be available before a vaccine would have been anyway.

    As another virologist pointed out, if you don't get immune temporarily to SARS-CoV2, this would be unique in the annals of virology. Even viruses notorious for short immune-system memories, like norovirus, produce an immunity lasting at least 6 months. We first have to make sure this isn't a problem of false negatives before raising the red flag. We saw similar issues with scientists a few weeks ago worried about coronaviruses in the sewage. They're now walking back their warnings as researchers find viral DNA in human feces, but are unable to recover intact viruses.

    Anyway, if it turns out our bodies have short-ish memories for the vaccine, there's a solution: booster shots.

    Promising drugs basically aren't saviors so far, although a miracle could happen. Basically, we've got two classes of compounds: those that have been approved for other uses, so we know what they do in humans, and those that have not. Hydroxychloroquine is an example of the first class. Now it's remotely possible that one or a combination of drugs may actually work as well as, say, tamiflu (meaning you take them when you first get symptoms and they knock down viral load), but most of the tests so far seem to have been on small numbers of patients, often with no control group (the French hydroxychloroquine studies) and with so many other factors involved that it's unclear the drugs had any positive effect on an illness where most people get better even if they're intubated. We can and should hope, but so far there's little evidence for a miracle treatment.

    As for the untried new drugs, they've got an even longer road ahead of them than the three vaccines already in trials, because they have to be proved effective in an animal, then they have to be proven safe enough in humans, then they have to be proved more effective than a placebo in humans. Those steps can't be skipped.

    My guess right now is that we are going to see an effective vaccine in minimum 2 years. The problem is that we can't keep most parts of the economy on ice for two years, so we're going to have to let more things move, which in turn will lead to more outbreaks, which in turn will lead to more lockdowns.

    The problem I'm worried about is the farmers and the food supply. A big part of their business was sending food to the hospitality industry, which has radically downsized over the last month worldwide. So we've got farmer's composting food they can't sell on one hand, and worried about going out of business, while on the other hand we've got massive unemployment and people going hungry in the cities. This is where governments need to step in and pay farmers and get the food distributed. Sadly, I'm in the US...

    My best guess is that we're going to be in crisis to some degree for at least two years, and we might as well adapt.

    1009:

    No, the US is not a democracy. If it were then Hillary Clinton would have won the last election. Whether is should be a democracy is another question, and I'm not sure.

    Most of the states are democracies. California became one when the US Supreme Court decided that State senators had to represent about equal numbers of people rather than geographic areas. But the US Senators represent the states, not the people. They may be elected by popular vote within the state, but it's "within the state". And they represent a non-democratic element in the Electoral College. I'm not sure this is a bad thing, as people living in different areas do have different concerns. But it's not a democratic thing.

    It's worth remembering that when the states were more important the US Senators were appointed by the state governments rather than elected.

    That said, while I've described the formal structure of the US government, I tend to think the actual form is an oligarchy. It's worth noting that the political parties are private organizations, and aren't required to offer a popular choice as their candidate. (It's just a very bad idea not to.)

    1010:

    Really? I love goat's milk cheese. It's delicious!

    1011:

    A deeply worrying -- to me -- phenomenon of late is the uptake of white supremacism (Nazism) in the US population. When those folks come out of climate change denial they are totally going to see it as a blessing from God -- a tool designed for killing "Mud People". (And by "mud people" they mean us.)

    That's already a thing, sadly. There are alt-right "environmentalists" who IIRC want to get rid of everyone else because too many people on this planet are causing climate change and thereby making it impossible for them to lead the proper American way of life, big trucks and all.

    Not a new urge, I think. It's another iteration of the "Fuck all y'all, I've got mine" mentality that makes some Americans so very charming. Possibly it's a viral meme being shed by the super rich?

    Getting back to your original point, I think James Tiptree Jr. nailed the problem better than Clancy did. For apocalypse pathogens, we don't particularly have to worry about cabals of deep greens. That's just red meat for the red audience. The bigger problem is technically skilled, morally undeveloped, and badly stressed grad students and post docs.

    There was a point in grad school where, if I'd wanted to, I probably could have pilfered a culture of a crop killer, got it growing somewhere, and spread it through the Midwest to try to cause a famine. The reason I saw no point in acting on that thought was that, once you release a crop killer, you have no control over what it does. And an uncontrolled famine almost certainly would not be good for the stuff and people I really do care about.

    Then 9/11 happened, everyone realized how many unsecured horrors were lying around, did stuff, and the danger decreased somewhat. I think. With synthetic biology becoming more sophisticated and the economy in free fall, I suspect things might get dangerous again.

    In the longer term, the solution is, as with so many such problems, better working conditions for the peons and making courses on environmental ethics (which I've had) standard for all biologists, including the professors. The only reason you might want to keep lone wolf bioterrorists in the repertoire of horror story plots is that I doubt either of these fixes will happen in the foreseeable future.

    1012:

    In the excerpts I saw (I didn't follow your links) the advice, while not diplomatically phrased, was reasonably good.

    What he left out was that minority groups are more likely to live in crowded housing where isolation is impractical. And that's probably the real cause of their having a higher incidence of many problems, of which COVID is just one.

    1013:

    And that's probably the real cause of their having a higher incidence of many problems, of which COVID is just one. Sounds like a testable hypothesis. :-)

    1014:

    I think that your idea of vegans is excessively constricted. Like most categories, there is a lot of variation. Most vegans that I know have no problem with wool, or only the problem that they're allergic to it.

    OTOH, I know several vegans whose preference WRT wool I don't know, and since at that time I lived in a warm climate, it wasn't obvious. OTOH, they had no problem with silk...and that requires, IIUC, that the silkworm be boiled alive.

    1015:

    and if you look at NATOs dispositions during the cold war, it looked an awful lot like we WERE preparing that invasion

    1016:

    Linen and hemp are, as you noted, stiffer and less absorbent than cotton. There are lots of places where it's reasonable to use them, but...well, when I want to wear something next to my skin being stiff and non-absorbent isn't what I usually want.

    That said, if there were reason, it would probably be possible to develop methods of processing linen and hemp to be a lot more suitable as clothing.

    1017:

    I'm not sure what you mean by "win climate change". We are now committed to a significant rise in global temperatures no matter what we do. There may still be time if we were to act properly in a global manner to keep much of Antarctica from melting...though that's dubious. We should have started a decade or so ago.

    What we can do is act in such a way that things get worse more slowly, and eventually stop getting worse. The lag will probably be several decades between starting to act properly and seeing predictable results. But that assumes global action, which isn't going to happen.

    Still, it's good to start acting properly, because when the local environment starts to become uninhabitable, it will be necessary to build nearly closed eco-systems that ARE stable. And that's going to require practice. That means tracking ALL inputs and outputs, both energetic and material. That means ecological barriers within the system so that different parts can proceed optimally. Think of it as a space station that's been grounded on an almost hospitable planet. Once that's stable, then you start terraforming the planet into habitability.

    If we practice hard for the next century, we may then be able to build our "caves of steel" to allow continued existence as we learn to terraform our home planet. (A Mars or Lunar colony would be a good test bed, with a lower cost of failure, and other advantages.)

    1018:

    In the current circumstance, it is probably practical and desirable for most people to downshift their meat consumption to something more like 'meat on Sundays.'

    Egg production, and dairy, are desirable for a lot of reasons. We could probably do without dairy (many cultures use little or no dairy) but eggs (and thus chickens) would be hard to give up on as protein sources.

    The unit cost of lab/vat grown meat has been dropping in orders of magnitude for a long time now. The first lab grown burger cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. More recent iterations cost mere hundreds.

    Hundreds per burger is still too much for mass consumption, but it isn't hard to project forward to a point where a lab grown 'cruelty free, pesticide/herbicide free, planet positive' burger is equivalent to or cheaper than one made from an actual cow. I know there are efforts to develop cloned fish fillets as well, with the goal of leaving the fish in the sea. Chicken related products have reached the level of 'expensive lab grown chicken nugget' but are likely to continue improving as well.

    The development of lab grown meats has the ocean stripminers and cattle barons worried enough that they are actively lobbying against them. That in itself is probably a good sign, though no doubt they will achieve some success at least in the US.

    I sincerely doubt that actual cattle farming will go away entirely, but I can see it becoming a high-end niche product if all the lower end stuff has been outcompeted by something that is nutritionally equal or better, cheaper to produce, better for the environment and lacking entirely in any form of cruelty. For bonus points perhaps produce it at or near the point of purchase (rather than deal with the absurdity of meat shipped from the other side of the planet).

    With any luck what husbandry remains will see it as an advantage to focus away from factory farming, but of course there will always be cost cutters looking to sneak in some cheap stuff and sell it as premium.

    1019:

    “ Just flat our weird. Weird? Imagine being a French exchange student (70-71) plunked in the middle of nowhere (Durand, Michigan, a sunset town), going to high school, learning to shoot, going to hayrides, playing football, etc... Weird doesn't begin to describe it.”

    That would make an amazing movie.

    1020:

    It's quite reasonable to hope for a vaccine, but there are lots of viruses that we have not been able to create a vaccine for. The most prominent single example is HIV. Most of the others are a lot less serious, so perhaps nobody has tried.

    The drug that I found most interesting was the one that created a decoy protein spike that wasn't attached to the a cell, so when the virus grabbed it, it couldn't go any further. This would basically act by reducing the virus load to where the immune system didn't get overwhelmed. The were a couple of others with approaches around that same goal. None of them had been approved for use in humans, however. And there are various other drugs with other approaches. These are all less than ideal, and a good vaccine would definitely be preferable. If you want to bet on it, go ahead.

    P.S.: There are many viruses that go dormant within certain groups of cells when conditions are unfavorable, and then emerge again when conditions are more favorable. Chickenpox isn't the only one. See, e.g. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/278890

    1021:

    How do you deal with the goat smell?

    1022:

    "The drug that I found most interesting was the one that created a decoy protein spike that wasn't attached to the a cell, so when the virus grabbed it, it couldn't go any further."

    Do you not then get the problem that it also clears out all the molecules that are supposed to bind to that receptor, so that part of the body's feedback systems hits the rail one way or the other?

    1023:

    mdlve @ 923:

    Wool is different from leather or fur. And cotton is another alternative which is not petroleum based.

    You, and perhaps I, may view wool as being different than leather or fur.

    But for vegans, given the process of getting wool that means wool is also a no-no along with fur and leather.

    What's wrong with the "process of getting wool"?

    1024:

    David L @ 927: The one hard core PETA guy I know took some rats from his house to the middle of nowhere so they could live free.

    I do that with mice. Not because I want them to live free, but because mice have fleas and if you use kill traps the fleas jump off the dead mouse and I don't want those fleas in my house.

    PETA are a bunch of damn hypocrites. They don't have any problem kidnapping people's pets and killing them.

    1025:

    I've never gotten a strong goat smell. Maybe you got some bad cheese?

    1026:

    David L @ 947: I want to setup a martin house. But that's a March thing and you have to work with them to get them started and keep the starlings out. I started March with the flu and the universe decided I would have no free time the rest of the month.

    The nice thing about March is it comes around every year. If it's too late this year, it's not too late to start planning for next year.

    1027:

    Watches fireworks around UK Labour Party

    Oh, well, "back to normal" is going well we see.

    Triptych.

    https://twitter.com/HistoricalAes/status/1248653990188978181

    https://twitter.com/leftyjew/status/1249443088940007425

    https://twitter.com/NegarestaniReza/status/1247235924263608326

    You'll want to be careful viewing those. Hint: Genet (do a grep) was the log-in name, you muppets. This is how far ahead we are.

    Hint sheet for Lead-addled brains:

    1st one is really not your friend. But apparently it's into US.[0]

    2nd one is really not your friend. But apparently it's into US. [1]

    3rd One is really not your friend. And he's actively engaged with Mind-Rape because he's not what he says on the Tin. [2]

    ~

    Does it make sense?

    It does.

    It won't to most here reading it, but it has been written.

    [0] But they got the image link stuff dead on. Oh, and they're fairly RW Blood n Soil types.

    [1] She's cute, but behind her, wow: bad vibes about hunting us types down. If you want to join hunting lists, the English are great at it. grep "Hunted" as a TV show. And Fox hunting. We're not feeling safe here.

    [2] His Ego is sooo big. But sooo dumb. Hilarious he's an Avatar for [redacted]. That Rez quote Jean Genet could only reach to your bottom and certain sectors of your brain. But Prions could conquer you whole, inside-out.

    Hey: grep chiral. It's on here... about 4 years ago, you utter tool. And Genet was the user-name. Leading a revolution inside his pants, front-run that shit by years, it's tragic.

    1028:

    Do you not then get the problem that it also clears out all the molecules that are supposed to bind to that receptor, so that part of the body's feedback systems hits the rail one way or the other?

    Well, that's where it gets interesting. The ACE-2 system seems to be expressed in cells in a bunch of places in the body, but apparently (to a pharmacist I talked to) it's unclear just what all it does. Wikipedia says it chops ACE-1 (a vasoconstrictor) and turns it into ACE-2 (a vasodilator). Disrupting that feedback could be, erm, interesting.

    1029:

    Previous post appears to be both entirely content-free AND dishing out insults.

    1030:

    Greg.

    Might want to check what the name means. Then work out why 3,3,3,3, -- 1 is meaningful.

    Might want to ask yourself how insulting / grating / insane it sounds to us when you post shit like that.

    "Well, while I was hunting elephants in Kenya, I was contacted by the Foreign Office to help put down a local native revolt. Of course, I had to help, Bertie and I went to school together, but it was damn inconvenient when we discovered some of the porters were sympathetic and had to 'lose them'. I shall miss Porter BOY, he was a good lad". [Official reports show 400 elephants killed and five years of low scale warfare in which 5 British troops and 8334 "natives" lost their lives].

    Hint: that's not satire.

    The fact you didn't understand it, while we're all here protecting you?

    That's pretty fucking satirical.

    1031:

    I think the reason to hope on the SARS-CoV2 vaccine is that there was considerable research on creating a SARS-CoV vaccine over a decade ago. There was at least one trial that was abandoned apparently due to lack of funding.

    HIV IIRC is notorious for replicating itself sloppily, which ultimately allows it to mutate so fast that it's difficult to target with a vaccine or an immune system. Influenza is similar, plus the whole waterbird X pig interaction thing in China lets strains incubate and recombine among 2+ species, then get moved when the birds migrate, so it's a diversity-generating system that's decent enough that it's amazing that it doesn't kill us all.

    Neither of these seem to apply particularly to SARS-CoV2. The apparent lack of antibodies in some patients known to be infected is concerning, if it turns out to be real and not an artifact of false negatives in the testing. We'll find out soon enough, I'm sure.

    1032:

    Wait. Greg.

    You have worked out out how to click links, right?

    13 were from twitter, so I will assume charitably that any relevant information they may contain came from single tweets, not the beginning of a tweet chain that should be read in its entirety.

    Well, no: 13 are entire chains that also flag into each and every user's particular stream which is processed and so forth. Then you look at the viral spread ("subtweets", base direct copies for 'clout', references, where ideas came from etc) then you look at the cloud piccies of who is real, who is a bot, who seeded what and when and so on.

    This is stuff that you can do, as a human. There's software for it and it has a fairly usual pattern.

    What you cannot do as human is do what we do.

    Shrug

    1033:

    Pigeon @ 950:

    "As for the "deliberately crash the vehicle for some motive", it'd have to be quite an odd motive to override the natural aversion to being charged with attempted (or actual) murder."

    It's an established scam. Deliberately have a crash in some manner that makes it count as the other driver's fault and then scam the insurance. Viz even had the Bacons doing it in one strip. Some people keep an eye out for manky cars fitted with video cameras to try and avoid being the other driver.

    Swoop and squat - features in Halting State - When we first meet Elaine, she's at a sparring session & her "sparring partner" asks her about what to do because his wife is being victimized by an insurance fraudster.

    1034:

    Cuneiform is OBSOLETE

    1035:

    It's entirely possible, although I tend to hang round on the fringes and occasionally do useful things, because I'm not really comfortable in groups. The pronounced tendency of greenies to smoke is something that I will not be around, for example. I don't care what they smoke, just that they mostly don't give a shit who they smoke at. Ditto the mystery meat that some groups like to throw in the communal food pot... while I will eat some meat I am picky about how it lived and died.

    So mostly what happens is that "this guy" turns up, teaches people how to use the mysterious technological wonders that have been gifted by ancient gods, has a look around and makes a few suggestions, then disappears. Sometimes helps build stuff or arrange things, which can take a few days. But that stuff requires that people in the group are willing to work hard, all day, on the project we've agreed should be completed. Fucked if I'm building it by myself so the group can agree not to use it or maintain it (often by inaction, but it's still a decision the group has made and is responsible for).

    It has also been pointed out that I am very good at not being arrested. To the point of talking my way out of an embassy during an occupation, once. But normally just via not being where the cops are. Certain other people seem to have exactly the opposite talent, and they're often good to do stuff with (because if the cops appear they will distract them while I leave)

    1036:

    By that statement so is anything but binary.

    grep: kantbot20 nazbol tweet of the year.

    Be careful what you wish for

    Oh, and hilarious: still doesn't know what it says.

    1037:

    Mayhem @ 955: GPS, satnav, Google Maps, strip maps and so on all have the same primary goal. They tell you exactly how to get to where you are going.
    They also have the same flaw - they don’t tell you what else you can look at along the way.

    The big advantage of a book of maps is when you go “what’s interesting around here to go look at” you can see all the stuff off to the side of your route. It also makes planning a whole lot easier, because the scale is consistent throughout, distances are clearly indicated, and interesting locales are highlighted.

    I have several of those as well. Around here in North Carolina I still use a book of maps for all 100 counties that shows ALL of the county road. I started using it back when I was traveling for the burglar alarm company. There wasn't always a convenient Federal/State highway connection between some of the locations I served, but I was able to string together routes along county roads to save time & miles.

    For travels beyond North Carolina, in addition to the state maps I pick up at the welcome center whenever I enter a new state, I have an American Highways Road Atlas & a Rand McNally Road Atlas along with a bunch of specialized tourism guides; mostly picked up from a local used book store - even if they're a bit outdated the base material should be good.

    State parks & national monuments & scenic attractions pretty much stay in one place. Even if the specific concession that was there when the guide book was written is no longer there (Flamingo Lodge, Everglades National Park ... I got to stay there before the hurricane blew it down) the park remains.

    1038:

    Bill Arnold @ 965:

    They provide eggs as well as entertainment and management.

    I have to ask (because Australia): "management" ?

    I think he means chickens "manage" back yard insect's by eating them.

    1039:

    Hey, you UK people still doing libel?

    'Cause that toad who ran that "cockroach" illegal stuff is also running a scam.

    https://www.gofundme.com/f/urgent-covid19-food-appeal-orchha-india

    You know how India works? Well, it doesn't take shitty £1,500 donations for holidays. Not how it works. Even UNESCO sites have standards. IF you're gonna grift, at least hit up the actual places, like:

    https://www.orchha.org/supportus.php

    Yes, that's right: RW Lawyer is looking for a grant to leave the country (Under LOCK-DOWN - hey, SO IS INDIA STILL) in these times of troubles. And... let's calculate his $plane ticket cost against his donation target?

    That looks scammy. It's not even the usual 5% donation given and 95% taken that Ed Mils takes.

    Hey... remember that Argentina Cruise ship, sailing where it wasn't allowed?

    Yeah. Currently tracking every single donation because these fucks: are DUMB money. And this fuck: well, let me tell you a story about Orchha and the ठग.

    These fucks: and you let them rule you?

    Orcas. Feeeeeling it right now.

    1040:

    I was hoping he would provide a story about e.g. a large breed of chicken that hunts smaller poisonous creatures like a secretary bird does. Or similar.

    Anyway [primordial salty goddess] is offering some basics about how to work with highly-linked time-series social media like twitter. (Thanks!) I have some helpful basic tooling but need some more. (A twitter-primitive to be honest, just use it for playing mostly.)

    1041:

    if you look at NATOs dispositions during the cold war, it looked an awful lot like we WERE preparing that invasion

    You'll have to give some specific examples, because all of my experience points the other direction - the total focus of NATO training was defensive; mobilising to defensive positions, fighting defensive battles. The various Soviet Military Missions were able to observe what was going on, and reassure themselves that it wasn't all a cover for another march on Moscow (Ex ABLE ARCHER was about the indicators for a nuclear strike, not a land invasion).

    So, for land forces, NATO was outnumbered and outgunned; while EC observes that Soviet troops were poor-quality, "Mass has a quality all of its own". GSFG had an artillery piece for every 100m of the Inner German Border...

    For instance: you don't put a heavy training emphasis on demolition guards (keeping that last bridge open until you've got your last troops back across it), as the British did, if you're planning on an advance. Or build the Chieftain tank (described as the best in the world, if you could persuade it to break down in the right place)

    One description of Coalition tactics in the 1991 Gulf War was that the Iraqis laid out their defences in depth, just as they'd been taught at Camberley and during the battles with Iran. While the Coalition (largely NATO) planned their attack just as the USSR would have... they had to, there really wasn't much of an offensive skillset, most of the NATO soldiers present had spent their career practicing "fighting while travelling backwards" ;)

    1042:

    for example, the Battle of Tsaritsyn.

    Our local infantry Regiment, the Royal Scots, has a battle honour "Archangel 1918-1919"... the 10th Battalion were Territorials from West Lothian.

    If you look around war memorials in the UK, it's the reason that many (most?) of them say "The Great War, 1914-1919" even though the Armistice was signed in November 1918. The fighting hadn't stopped, even if the Germans had been defeated.

    1043:

    Oh, we're just playing.

    If we were a Lawyer who had just deliberately unloaded pro-Genocidal language onto a minority group who had ties to the WJC and was now begging on gofundme for donations?

    We wouldn't be looking at £1,500 payout, we'd be looking at £100,000 payout, especially if we notified the rather larger companies (such as Football Associations) about it that they were attempting to "shake down" for "large fines". Looking big picture, and if we were to include the "Diplomat" tag and then the wider picture - we could see a £1.7 mil payout quite easily.

    That's... not including the fees, of course.

    This stuff, well, it snowballs. It's shit you just do not do as a "Diplomat" when you're playing against Corporate Sport (who are feeling the pinch right now....) grep: Fifa $10 mil penalty.

    We're sure there's not a lot of sharks looking at this and doing the same math. No-one reads our stuff.

    ^^

    1044:

    Greg: Yeah, we used to have a large industry processing phormium tenax/harakeke for fibre and canvas, back in the day when Royal Navy consumed immense tonnages of those commodities, as well as most of our old growth Kauri for masts.

    However, that industry relied on harvesting the harakeke from the natural wetlands that are it's preferred habitat. As the colony developed in fits and starts through the 19th century, amid gold rushes, land grabs and civil war, and steam, and then steam turbines, took over the Navy, it became more economic to drain the wetlands and farm them instead. Remaining harakeke mills took to trying plantation growth, but the combination of needing subsidies, difficulty moving from batch to continuous feed processes (Common to all long staple bast fibres that need retting), and rampant yellow-leaf infestation when grown plantation style, killed the industry dead. Now the land that could grow flax has lost it's topsoil, and it's groundwater, and is covered in dairy cattle rapidly nitrifying what acquifers are left.

    TLDR: If you want a bast fibre, go for linen, hemp or ramie instead. Cloth from NZ flax/Harakeke/Phormium spp is nice, and really tough, but not scalable.

    1045:

    a large breed of chicken that hunts smaller poisonous creatures

    Any size chicken will happily eat redbacks and other poisonous spiders, I don't know whether they're immune or just too fast to be bitten. Some snakes will eat chickens, some lizards and many birds will eat the eggs, and chickens likewise will eat anything small enough. Except ants, at least the small ones. The small geckos in my back yard are too fast for the chickens (Darwinian selection).

    But no, "management" is a euphemism for what comes out the the back of the chicken.

    1046:

    Charlie Stross @ 977: In the military (or at least in the U.S. Army,) the driver DRIVES. A co-driver handles map reading en-route -- yes, that's roughly how my wife and I work, too. It works great on long-haul/cross-country routes, but you can't pull off to the side of the road and check the [paper] map in a busy urban one-way system with four lanes of traffic where everyone else knows where they're going (and is impatient to get there).

    That's why I advocate making an easy to read strip map for at least the terminal portion of a trip like that - starting at exit #nnn from the Interstate/Motorway, showing turns & distances to your destination hotel.

    You can print it out before you leave your previous lodgings in the morning and you don't need to stop in the middle of traffic to have your co-driver/navigator figure out where you are on it.

    I've done them in Google Maps where I just print-screen the portion of the map I need and import it into M$ Paintbrush to add the annotations (mileage, highway names, left or right turn, etc) for the checkpoints, then saved it as a JPEG file to print.

    1047:

    Elderly Cynic @ 980: The one thing that surprises me is the attack of sanity in the military politicians.

    Probably wasn't the politicians. The brass can be fairly practical when it comes to deciding not to use a weapon that's as much (or more) of a threat to your own side as it is to the enemy. Then all they have to do is explain it in simple words so the politicians understand it's likely to lose them votes and/or campaign contributions.

    1048:

    [quote]Do you not then get the problem that it also clears out all the molecules that are supposed to bind to that receptor, so that part of the body's feedback systems[/quote]

    Yes. So it's going to need careful testing. But reports are that animal tests went well.

    There may be something more subtle going on here though. I'm not skilled in the area, so I can't evaluate the details, but there was something about slightly deforming it so that it would be more appropriate as a virus target. Or at least that's the way I interpreted what I read.

    Still, that's just my interpretation, and it may not be right. The important piece is that lots of different approaches are being tried by different groups. What I find most interesting isn't the thing that matters, what matters is which ones work best, and what are the side effects.

    1049:

    Aaaand.

    If we were playing hardball, punting £1.7 mn to some obscure and pointless London Jewish group who are going to spend it on fucking beetroots and local charity instead of paying "TROPE POLICE" $x mil / year, and getting teh fucking WJC more involved (and that RU "charity"), well.

    Do the math.

    Look who owns shit.

    That's an easy equation.

    Ohhh.

    We do know how your politics works, after all.

    ~

    Spoilers: he'll be found dead in a canal before that actual Justice goes to trial. £1 mn fuck up is ok - fucking up £50mn / yr "Trope Police" ... yeah.

    Canal job.

    1050:

    Charles H @ 1012: I think that your idea of vegans is excessively constricted. Like most categories, there is a lot of variation. Most vegans that I know have no problem with wool, or only the problem that they're allergic to it.

    OTOH, I know several vegans whose preference WRT wool I don't know, and since at that time I lived in a warm climate, it wasn't obvious.
    OTOH, they had no problem with silk...and that requires, IIUC, that the silkworm be boiled alive.

    It does not absolutely require it. There is a process that allows the silk moths to emerge from the cocoon.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_silk

    But boiling the worms is the primary COMMERCIAL process for manufacturing silk.

    1051:

    It's funny, reading posts like this, after spending most of the past 20 years preferentially seeking out only linen, hemp, ramie and wool for clothing, because it's phenomenally more comfortable for me to wear than cotton and artificial fibres. I've got to the point where it's hard enough to find it that I'm probably just going to start making it, as I can source the bulk fabric easier than the finished garments.

    Cotton dominates not because it's softer and easier to wear, but because it's more amenable to bulk production and continuous feed processing. It's got the point that the linen, hemp and ramie I can get is not as good as the antique pre-1950 examples I have among my reenactment kit, because many of the modern ones are cut to shorten the fibres so that they can be processed on equipment specialised in cotton type short staples, for above continuous feed reasons. So much so that many of the modern non-cotton bast fibre clothes I source and make for both general and reenactment use pill and fray more than the antique examples, because of the predominance of short fibre staple processing methods, for reasons of industrial economy, not quality of product.

    1052:

    Well, the description suffers from the excessive separation between "taste" and "smell" in the English language.

    The signal from the chemoreceptors was exactly that which usually results from proximity to a goat. But reported from the mouth and the back of the nose, like "taste", rather than the front of the nose going inwards, like "smell". It was not sent until I began chewing the stuff. There was no such sensation simply from sniffing the lump of it, otherwise I'd not have put it in my mouth in the first place.

    1053:

    So it looks like I'm another one who has read Halting State but too long ago to recall such details, and therefore needs to read it again.

    On the other hand it makes Charlie's assertion above that nobody is going to be that daft a very odd thing for him to say.

    1054:

    As you seem to live on some other planet,

    That must be it. His/her/their comments to me while they might be true in some other contexts, bear no relationship to reality as I've lived over the last 60 years.

    Snakes have been great at getting ride of mice. (Don't tell mom.) Mice vanish just as some shed snake skins appear in the attic. And the males in my family never got ride of non poisonous snakes. Dad grew up on a decent sized farm and snakes were great at keeping the corn/grain eating rats and mice at bay.

    Over the decades I've always found a water leak/seep of some kinds associated with ants in a house. Kill off the water/moisture and the ants do not come back.

    Mice in houses in the suburbs is almost always via the outdoors. I think I would have noticed them in the groceries or an Amazon package. And these are NOT the field mice alluded to. They live outdoors until they find a way in.

    As to poison for termites. Yes it sucks. But absent a time machine and travel back to 1961 and make a few changes in the contruction, my house is susceptible to them and they must be dealt with or the house abandoned as it falls in on itself. If I am the one that replaces it many aspects will change until them I'm stuck with what I have.

    I like my wildlife. I'm cool with the raccoons and possums as long as they stay outside. They eat things I don't want around. The "tame" cats the neighbors let out at night annoy me. Every now and again one comes by during the day and annoys the birds at my feeder. A hawk flew by my head a day ago about 10-15 feet off the ground. Came around the corner of the house at a decent speed. Not sure what that was unless they were trying for a careless rabbit or squirrel and missed.

    Voles, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, and the occasional deer also drop in. I've had 6 deer at once in my side and back yard. And those are just what I've noticed.

    Spiders are great. I love them to make nests in places where I don't move. And I/anyone can tell they are eating lots by the debris under their webs.

    And so on. I don't know the point unless he/she/them gets an ego boost of claiming to be superior to everyone else all the time. Or whatever. As to why the rudeness is allowed I don't know. But it's not my blog so whatever.

    A very experienced research lab lead at one time and now a cardiologist would talk about the TV show "House" with Hugh Lorie. He said he and all the docs he knew couldn't watch it. Non stop medical errors plus no one on the planet could know that much about so many aspects of medicine.

    I need to work harder at ignoring said person. I have to deal with several like them in real life. Doing it here is just a waste of my time to no advantage.

    1055:

    As noted previously, some of us are now taking Vit-D supplements.

    In the US at some age, (60?) the docs tell you to take it daily. So if you see someone from the US with gray hair and their not taking it they aren't visiting a doc regularly.

    1056:

    hint: you can't do that without complying with a certification regime that requires a buttload of animal testing!)

    Back in the mid to late 80s there was a lot of yelling of people trying to stop animal testing of everything, including medicine. A major part of their argument was that is could all be done with computer simulations.

    Seemed comical to many of us then. And looking at the last 35 years of medical advancement seems even more comical. You can't simulate what you don't have data for.

    1057:

    You can't have dairy without cattle, which means (absent sex-selective conception) a surplus of bulls/bullocks/veal calves. Also, post-lactation cows.

    I've found there are a lot of people who don't realize you can't get milk from a cow until the cow has had a calf.

    Or have things changed to artificially induce such?

    1058:

    I appreciate leather for exactly those qualities - its superior resistance compared to uncured human hide against blobs of red hot gunk and abrasion by tarmac.

    I got used to leather work gloves as a teen way back in history. My dad kept pushing me to wear them and once my thick skull realized my hands functioned much better after wearing them I got the habit. Still have it 50 years later. And the next generation has begun to see the light. Harder for them as they don't typically do rough work. At least not as often as I did in my younger days.

    1059:

    and if you look at NATOs dispositions during the cold war, it looked an awful lot like we WERE preparing that invasion

    As I recall, and that recall could be faulty, NATO was vastly out numbered in terms of tanks and such. Dispositions be damned. 1000 decent tanks against 100 somewhat better tanks typically leads to the side with 1000 winning. For various definitions of winning.

    1060:

    I suspect there are senior people in the governments of the US and Russia, and possibly China, who already see climate change as something they can "win" against the rest of the world.

    I don't know about Russia or China but in the US climate change politics is not about climate change and if it is real or not. It is about keeping a block of voters thinking you are on their side and thus keeping you in power. Power is the issue. Policy be damned except to drum up votes.

    Trump exposed this for anyone with a brain to see.

    China is different. There the goal is to keep the population not un-happy. This allows the party to stay in power. And that is the point.

    Russia. The point there is for Putin to stay in power till embalmed. After that I fear for more than a few tanks shooting at a few government buildings in Moscow.

    1061:

    "So Singapore has been forced to follow much of the rest of the world and close schools and non-essential businesses."

    Yes. They're up to 8 deaths.
    (8 Total, that is. Not 8 per day)

    Seems to me their strategy was sensible: test like frack, doing contact-tracing and isolating the infected, and move to a bigger shut down when your testing shows that you need to. But I guess we'll see in a week or two about that.

    In hindsight anyone who does a shutdown should always have moved a week sooner (or more). The "week sooner" is just how the information-lag works, even in the best system.

    Even here in NZ: everyone says we shut down early, but even earlier would have been better. We're down to 18 new cases a day (and dropping), but our contact tracing is rather good and so is the govt's publication of data: so I've been downloading the list of all our cases and doing stats. A large majority of our cases are either people coming in with the virus in the week before we shut down, or relate to a dozen big social events in the 3 or 4 days before our shutdown.

    1062:

    At the level needed to take those decisions, all of the brass hats have become politicians, by necessity - I did say military politicians. Some retain enough military realism to behave sanely, but (in peacetime) rather more don't, as the historical record shows.

    1063:

    That is nuts - but, then, your medical practice is. In most of the USA, there is enough sunlight even in winter to maintain adequate vitamin D levels in light-skinned people, if they don't use sunscreen and do spend a moderate time outside. For most of the year and most people, supplements are completely unnecessary. In any case, people go grey at all ages from adolescence to ancience.

    1064:

    For starters ..... Which dangerous, socialist left-wing newspaper was responsible for this quote: "Republicans are following Trump in making a choice inconcievable in Europe: risking death for the Dow" Can anyone guess?

    Moz To the point of talking my way out of an embassy during an occupation, once. WH here/when? Do tell, or at least point out a relevant old news link .... Sounds like "fun"

    JBS There wasn't always a convenient Federal/State highway connection between some of the locations I served, but I was able to string together routes along county roads to save time & miles. Uh? That sounds like an entirely different planet .. Here, of course, we have the Ordance Survey - almost certainly the best maps there are.

    Martin @ 1040 Also, something I hadn't realised until very recently... The RN kept up the blockade until at least March 1919 .. not lifting it fully until 12 July 1919. Because it was an Armistice, not a cessation of hostilities - reckoned to have killed half a million Germans through starvation. One of the reasons the great German advance of March 1918 failed was the discovery, by front-line advancing troops of the abandoned Allied, but especially British, food supplies & dumps.

    David L @ 1054 There seems to be no cure at all for wilful, deliberate stupidity, as evidenced by politicians, religious followers & fake greenies, I'm afraid. Well, there IS a cure, but it's a bit extreme - sometimes referred to as "9 mm"

    1065:

    andyf has a point, even as far as Cold War I goes, but not simply in terms of conventional forces - as Martin says, even the rabidly jingoistic press realised that a conventional NATO invasion would have been slaughtered (even if USSR casulaties were several times higher). But there were several other possibilities, some of which were not obviously implausible, and which worried the USSR.

    I have mentioned the all-out first-strike before, so will skip that. Another possibility was an incursion, using tactical nuclear weapons to take out massed USSR tanks or troops attempting to respond to it, followed by establishing a new front line much closer to Moscow. Equally insane, for other reasons, but it WAS taken very seriously at the time by both sides.

    As far as Cold War II is concerned, that's a different matter, and Russia is seriously outgunned.

    1066:

    Personally I like to hand-write strip maps, basing them off published roadmaps and sometimes OS maps, because I learn enough in that process that mostly I don't need the strip map. But I'm in the UK and distances are smaller.

    1067:

    talking my way out of an embassy during an occupation

    To be clear, this was a protest occupation, not any kind of military one. A well-known multinational was trying to persuade the Japanese that turning whales into pet food offends them, but the expident of both climbing onto the embassy with a banner and parking some people inside it with a petition. Neither was approved of by the embassy, and the Australia federal Police were right onto it, just as soon as they'd had a cup of tea and sorted out the roster.

    Meanwhile I was supporting the banner people going in, and then carrying the ladders out again.. past a few very unhappy Japanese people, a couple of whom did looming very well. But when the plod actually turned up they were briefly distracted by discussing the situation, so I said to the nice policeman "I just need to put this ladder on the roof of the van" ... and he let me out.

    The two on the roof were arrested and their pleas of necessity not accepted, so they got criminal trespass convictions and $5000-ish fines.

    1068:

    That is nuts

    Top hit on Google.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4399494/

    And since at the levels recommended it is hard to be toxix, why not? It is trivial amounts of money.

    1069:

    Here, of course, we have the Ordance Survey - almost certainly the best maps there are.

    The US has similar. I've bought them before. 1:50000 I think or better depending.

    https://www.usgs.gov/products/maps/overview

    1070:

    even the rabidly jingoistic press realised that a conventional NATO invasion would have been slaughtered (even if USSR casulaties were several times higher)

    My point. If one side starts with say 200 and the other with 1000. If at the end the side that starts at 1000 only has 50 but the other guys have 0 the 50 have "won".

    It can suck to be the last man standing but it does mean that last man is the winner. For some definitions of winner.

    1071:

    using tactical nuclear weapons to take out massed USSR tanks or troops attempting to respond to it

    As I understand the history of the time, West Germany was somewhat stridently saying NFW to such an option.

    1072:

    Personally I like to hand-write strip maps, basing them off published roadmaps and sometimes OS maps, because I learn enough in that process that mostly I don't need the strip map.

    I guess I'm the same way only electronically. I explore whatever route Google or whatever comes up with and at times go "off schedule" if I don't like the options presented.

    1073:

    From that article: "Without adequate exposure to sunlight, it is almost impossible to achieve sufficient levels of vitamin D from nutritional sources ...."

    That is true, but my point stands. The best way to avoid vitamin D deficiency is to get out into the sunlight, which (done appropriately) can also help to reduce obesity, and has huge numbers of other advantages.

    The margin between an adequate dose and a toxic one is narrower than you think, because the same people also have problems with its absorption and need high levels to get enough.

    1074:

    What was taken seriously during the Cold War was (from NATO) one too many failed harvests, and domestic unrest, in the USSR. And from the Russian perspective, any attempt to reunite Germany.

    Dad was Intelligence Corps during the Cold War; including a tour as an assistant to the Military Attaché in a British Embassy in Eastern Europe. It wasn’t as bad as some make it, the various militaries actually had a nuanced understanding of the others’ motivations, not just their equipment and tactics (nutjobs like LeMay aside).

    As for “Russia is seriously outgunned”, only by the US, and nowhere near its borders. The US Army withdrew the Corps that it had in West Germany; I think they’ve got a Division’s worth of heavy equipment propositioned there an in Poland. The Germans allowed the Bundeswehr to wither (look at stories about Luftwaffe availability rates, or being down to their last 200 tanks) far below Cold War levels.

    It’s Poland and the Baltic States who get really nervous about Russia’s recent track record for invading neighbours (Georgia, Ukraine), but they definitely don’t “seriously outgun” Russia.

    The Russians will total up all of NATO’s equipment to suit their “oh noes, we is scared” narrative, regardless of whether it’s stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic, Pyrenees, or Rhine. What really matters is how much is sat next to a border - not just the equipment, but the supplies needed to fight right now, not in six months time (e.g. look at how long it took to build up to 1991 / 2003). That’s what people really track and worry about...

    1075:

    Most people in the first world don't get enough sunlight as they getolder. Because you think they should doesn't change the facts that they don't.

    I realized yesterday that aside from lawn mowing the day before I hadn't had much outdoor activity for nearly a month and so went on a one hour walk.

    Saying people shouldn't need because if they would do only do this is also called spitting into the wind.

    1076:

    The US Army withdrew the Corps that it had in West Germany

    Went by the old US barracks in Stuttgart and Heidelberg a bit over a year ago as my wife wanted to see where she spend her teens in the mid 70s. Hard to tell there were a couple of US tank corps there not too recently. Most of the barracks are being / have been converted to schools and apartment buildings or similar or just torn down.

    1077:

    Probably haven't met IRL, but I rather suspect I'd like you. Nice work on talking your way out... :)

    1078:

    You may be too young to remember, but I can assure you that the many people in the USA and UK were promoting tactical nuclear weapons for precisely that use (and pushing hard for more and better of them), to 'counteract he USSR's conventional superiority'. That was precisely the reason it took two decades from a treaty on strategic nuclear weapons to anything on tactical ones - no, it was NOT the USSR that was dragging its heels!

    The USSR was quite rightly concerned about the proponents of military action getting control, let alone their justified fear of the nut jobs in top positions (LeMay was not unique). I remember some of the extreme sabre-rattlers in influential positions pushing for just such invasions in order to 'free the countries from communism/the Soviets/etc.', and there is NO military difference between methods used to hold land you have held for centuries and land you have just occupied!

    1079:

    That's not my point, but the use of a blanket prescription for an oral supplement to tackle a problem that can be and should be treated in another way - even ignoring that not everybody will need it, and it's not entirely without risk.

    Yes, I take it - intelligently - i.e. in winter, because there is no way I can get enough sunlight at 52 north in a place that is often overcast. But, in summer? And if I lived at 42 north (with several times the ultraviolet in winter)?

    You need to get out more!

    1080:

    You need to get out more!

    I'll not disagree with that. Of course I'm gun shy to some degree waiting for cataracts and melanoma to kick in based on my teens and 20s. Oh well.

    As to the rest I think you have some valid points if the world and people acted differently. But they tend to not do so.

    1081:

    Addition to note from my self @ 1062: More quotes from that dangerous left-wing newspaper: "The Pandemic will forever transform how we live ..... Better Hygiene: More handwashing, possibly masks & self-isolation for known infectious people. Volunteering: The Brit guvmint asked for 1/4 million volunteers - they got 3/4 million. Many people would rather help theor socity, rather than moaning about it. It's a way to convert leisure into "community" Curbing domestic violence .... Emptying US jails & housing the homeless: ( Reference to US Prison-Industrial System ) .. The US incarcerates more inhabitants per capita than any other country, yet still has high rates of violent crime. .... Even leaving aside morailty, it's easier to eople to deal with addiction & find work once they have a place to live ...

    David L I know - almost all countries now have similar, but some are ridiculously expensive &/or bloody unreadable. Ever seen a Japanese "OS" map? Arrrgh! For examples of OS maps, don't go to their web-site, oddly enough. Use "Bing Maps", zoom down to a suitable size, then select "OS Maps" from the options - you will then get the current either 1:50 000 or 1:25 000 scale, I believe "Streetmap.co.uk" do the same - once you are outside London. For the older, supremely beautiful OS "One Inch" maps, use the National Library of Scoltand's on-line archive - if you go down the correct rabbit-hole, that is.

    1082:

    Alternately, follow the science.

    Statistics Canada did a study of vitamin D levels in Canadians(*) - 32% had insufficient vitamin D levels

    As for the get out more suggestion, the study quotes this fact (from American Journal Clinical Nutrition):

    "person aged 70 makes, on average, 25% of the vitamin D that a 20-year-old makes when exposed to the same amount of sunlight"

    It is this inability of the aging body to make vitamin D that has resulted in the blanked advice to take vitamin D supplements.

    The Stats Can study doesn't break down the data based on sources of vitamin D, but a look at the age related graph shows vitamin D deficiency increasing with age until it reverses. A reasonable guess is that the deficiency increases as people grow out of drinking milk (had vitamin D added), and then reverses after 40 as the vitamin D supplement advice kicks in.

    Anecdotal, but it is worth considering that not only have much of the population become afraid of letting sunlight touch their skin (skin cancer!), but fashion has changed as well - compare the amount of fabric worn back in the 70s and 80s with what summer clothing and swimwear today cover up. So it is difficult to know how much vitamin D is being made naturally even in those who get out frequently.

    1083:

    The problem with getting wool, at least in the current industrial form, is a number of factors that according to the various websites make it non-vegan.

    The most obvious, and apparently periodically videoed, is the mistreatment of the sheep during shearing (the goal isn't the welfare of the animal, but rather doing as many sheep as possible in as short a time as possible - needless to say doing this with a sharp device on an uncooperative animal frequently has injuries of various severity. Also, the general treatment of the animal to force them through the shearing system quickly.

    But then you get to the economics - multiple shearings a year result in better product, but according to many vegans result in poor animal welfare in colder months.

    Then, sheep only provide quality wool for a period of their life - leaving years when they are no longer productive to provide wool. Currently solved by selling off older animals, primarily to the middle east, as food - again, not acceptable for vegans.

    So it appears, depending on the level of dedication, you can create a vegan wool but at a much greater cost (paying to shear in a much slower, humane way, and paying to feed and care for the animals for years after they are no longer productive). But you won't find such wool in your standard retailers.

    1084:

    Anecdotal, but it is worth considering that not only have much of the population become afraid of letting sunlight touch their skin (skin cancer!)

    I'm not quite there but I spend 5-6 months a year for 5 years wearing nothing but cut offs, sneakers, and at times a hat while mowing fields in the sun. After that first good burn of the summer I usually only burned once or twice more per season. And after watching my mother avoid her melanomas until one got through her skull, well yes, I'm a bit shy of the sun now. And I also as a practical mater have no top hair cover.

    Then on a side note per my eye doc I have early signs of cataracts. And when I asked my him what to do to stop it he basically said invent a time machine, go back to self when 15 and tell them to wear hats and sun glasses more often. Oh well.

    1085:

    The US ones are very high quality printing and very readable. I think you can get most of them in PDF now also.

    I actually used one a few years back to find a cemetery that I couldn't find driving around due to so many changes to the area. One of these days if I get back to where I grew up I'll try and visit it and get family names off the stones from the 1800s. Likely another funeral.

    1086:

    Sigh. I do, and I have gone further and deeper than your post, and was a LOT earlier doing it. The simple fact is that vitamin D supplements are an INFERIOR form of keeping the levels appropriate, though they are always needed for some people and for others under some conditions. Yes, people of 70 should spend much longer outside - but we should, anyway, for many other reasons. My point wasn't that there isn't a real problem to be addressed but that it was being addressed in an inferior way.

    Your point about the skin cancer hysteria (and it IS hysteria) is a major factor. We have gone from one extreme to the other and, as I said four decades ago, that WOULD cause increased vitamin D deficiency and even scurvy, and it has. I know of people with average 'native Briton' skin (i.e. fairish but not very pale) who use factor 50 in MARCH in GLASGOW! What's more, the association of subclinical vitamin D deficiency with cancers (including skin ones) and other diseases is beginning to be recognised.

    Aside: melanoma is associated somewhat more with sunburn than continual exposure (it's complicated, and the data are murky), and it is likely that the early sunscreens and concomitant campaign were a part of the cause of the 'melanoma epidemic'. Indeed, overuse of sunscreen might STILL be such a factor, but I haven't seen any data, either way.

    1087:

    I suspect those periodic videos - if produced for propaganda purposes - have problems like selectively featuring unpractised shearers who aren't very good at it, and/or simply not understanding what you're actually looking at.

    Sheep are hardy survivors of adverse weather conditions but they are not all that tolerant of forcible treatment. When you shear a sheep it's going to wriggle. What looks like a brief but brutal wrestling match is actually less stressful for the sheep than having to apply an effectively similar level of restraint over a longer period to do it slowly so it looks better to someone with a video camera.

    To be sure there is a risk of nicking the sheep with the shears but it's not something you just shrug your shoulders at because it wasn't you that got nicked. The wounds are likely to get fly-blown and infected which means a significant chance of losing the sheep altogether. You also don't want holes in the skin when you dip the sheep against parasites. So it's something to be strenuously avoided, and the skill of shearing isn't just about whipping the fleece off as many sheep as possible in the shortest possible time, it's about doing it without nicking any of them. And the success rate is far better than someone who's not experienced at it might expect from seeing someone else doing it.

    1088:

    Heh. This reminds me of the attempts to roboticise sheep shearing a few decades ago. It involved selecting sheep that fit a standard body shape and size profile and degenerated to the point where the sacrificial lamb/sheep was mounted into a metal frame and paralysed with high-voltage electrical shock to prevent it wriggling as the cutter-wielding robot tried to do its thing.

    It was not a success.

    1089:

    Oh, yes, indeed, they were! But that doesn't mean that it wasn't being planned for, or that West Germany would be even consulted (in both cases by the USA). The point is not whether it was sane tactics, acceptable to anyone else in NATO, or anything like that, but whether the USSR believed that it might be used. And, given the behaviour of the (influential) sabre-rattlers in the USA and some in the UK, they had damn good reasons to suspect that it might be.

    In fact, I saw some claimed evidence that it had been planned and set up for, at least as far as the "we could do this, if we want to" stage with a small number of operational tactical nuclear weapons. But, as always with such claimed evidence (in ALL directions), it's impossible to know whether it was true, misdirection or simple bullshit. Reliable evidence may have emerged by now, but I haven't seen it.

    1090:

    I take it the newspaper you're referring to shares its initials with the standard torque setting for big bolts?

    It is certainly to be hoped that the idea of infectious people self-isolating will stick. Something has long been needed to bash out of people's heads the kind of masochistic pride that the "never had a day sick in me life" types take in coming in to work regardless and giving it to everyone else. Fuck off home and take your fucking germs with you, there's nothing honourable or worthy about spreading infection around the company. That's the sort of thing terrorists do.

    Streetmap.co.uk uses OS maps without having to select anything - zoom level 4 is 1:50k and level 3 is 1:25k - and it does include London. Of course even 1:25k isn't really good enough, but it is there.

    Also, the site WORKS. Because they got it working years ago and then left it like that. There was a glitch a couple of months ago when they finally fell for this wretched nonsense of forcing HTTPS on everything for no reason and cocked it up, but apart from that they seem to actually understand the concept of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". They're one of the notably few sites that do not persistently "upgrade" things to whatever complex dysfunctional rubbish everyone's talking about these days simply because everyone is talking about it and thereby cause more and more things to stop working until the entire site is useless.

    The NLS site is bloody wonderful as a resource, but bloody awful as a website because that's what they have done. None of the maps display any more, because it uses something called "Open Layers", which used to have an option to use the HTML "canvas" element but now makes it a requirement just because "eurgh not using it is old and smells of wee". Yeah. It's also a security hole whose most common application is to be abused to store persistent client side state evading the user's usual control mechanisms, so you can't assume it hasn't been disabled. And the NLS site decided they had to switch to the new version even though the old version worked fine. So in order to make it work again I've had to write my own version of the functionality which Open Layers removed, which turned out to be remarkably little more complex than the "canvas" method and makes its deliberate removal all the more infuriating.

    1091:

    Pigeon I haven't the faintest idea what you are hinting at for Torque Settings. I just go: How many Newton-metres/lbs-feet should that be? And then get on with it. Sorry but you will have to explain.

    As for lurgi-sprading at work, yes well, that's why emplyment law was changed, to ENCOURAGE people to stay at home, but, as you say some dim arseholes STILL don't get it....

    Actually you CAN view individual sheets - I've just done it for a 1:25 000 a 1:10 000 & a 1:2 500 map of different areas - you just do a different selection option .... I wonder if it's browser-sensitive?

    1092:

    I remember that, pretty much exactly as you described it. How to make such a war "winnable" by being on the other side of the ocean and accepting a glass Germany as just one of those things, plus a certain amount of wishful thinking. One of the horrifyingly bad ideas for turning "can't happen" into "can happen" from people who think "can't happen" is a bad thing. Extremely disturbing to everyone who was relying on a war not happening because the whole idea was to make it possible, and they absolutely were serious about it.

    1093:

    Torque settings with a non-numerical definition. Like a gnat's arsehole...

    1094:

    David L @ 1052: Over the decades I've always found a water leak/seep of some kinds associated with ants in a house. Kill off the water/moisture and the ants do not come back.

    They don't come back until they can make (or find) a new leak/seep. I've gotten rid of them many, many times but they always found another way. The safest, most effective way I have found of dealing with ants (kitchen & bathroom) is to spray them with 409 (or equivalent store brand) where you see them tracking. Leave it there a while before wiping it up.

    I like my wildlife. I'm cool with the raccoons and possums as long as they stay outside. They eat things I don't want around. The "tame" cats the neighbors let out at night annoy me. Every now and again one comes by during the day and annoys the birds at my feeder. A hawk flew by my head a day ago about 10-15 feet off the ground. Came around the corner of the house at a decent speed. Not sure what that was unless they were trying for a careless rabbit or squirrel and missed.

    Or maybe looking to pick off a bird or two from the feeder.

    1095:

    Pigeon As in "Ga" - sometimes spelt "Grauniad"? Not even close - wrong colour paper, for a start. Would you believe the "FT" - because they both were.

    1096:

    Not in the UK - they target dryish locations for their nests - the reason being that there is almost always water not far underground, and often the ground saturates.

    1097:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1063: I have mentioned the all-out first-strike before, so will skip that. Another possibility was an incursion, using tactical nuclear weapons to take out massed USSR tanks or troops attempting to respond to it, followed by establishing a new front line much closer to Moscow. Equally insane, for other reasons, but it WAS taken very seriously at the time by both sides.

    It's insane that anyone could believe such bullshit.

    NATO's plans for what to do AFTER defeating a Soviet invasion of the west may have included some vision of "liberating" East Germany, but there was no NATO plan to start such wars of liberation. The Soviet's knew that better than anyone, Soviet propaganda notwithstanding.

    If NATO planned to "liberate" eastern Europe, why didn't they support the 1956 Hungarian Uprising? ... at a time when NATO had much closer parity to Soviet conventional forces than they did later when they were contemplating having to use Tactical Nuclear Weapons to stop the USSR if they invaded West Germany.

    Generals (& the politicians who keep them) LOVE the status quo, because anything that upsets the status quo is 99% likely to NOT be to their benefit. If I can understand that, surely the generals - including the stupid, jingoistic, right-wingnut, political generals - could understand it.

    Any attempt to actually pursue such a "short victorious war" strategy is impossible. It would only expose the "leaders" who started it as completely incompetent. Look at the U.S. experience in Vietnam or the Soviet experience in their Afghanistan war.

    You can start wars, but you can't make them stop when & where you want them to. They're never short, and rarely victorious. The U.S. military spent a lot of money studying the problem in order to figure that out. But figure it out they did.

    1098:

    alyctes @ 1064: Personally I like to hand-write strip maps, basing them off published roadmaps and sometimes OS maps, because I learn enough in that process that mostly I don't need the strip map. But I'm in the UK and distances are smaller.

    Sounds like your short-term memory is better than mine too.

    I do hand draw strip maps, but the GoogleMaps/M$ Paintbrush trick works if I'm in a hotel somewhere & don't have a drawing pad handy. Maybe I should add a drawing pad to the other stuff (maps, mapbooks, guidebooks, bottled water, dog dish) I keep in the car.

    1099:

    David L replied @ 1069:

    using tactical nuclear weapons to take out massed USSR tanks or troops attempting to respond to it

    As I understand the history of the time, West Germany was somewhat stridently saying NFW to such an option."

    As an OFFENSIVE strategy, ALL of NATO (including the U.S.) were saying NFW.

    Tactical Nukes vs. massed Soviet Armor was one of the proposed DEFENSIVE measures for putting a stopper in the Fulda Gap. All the Soviets had to do to avoid it was NOT invade W. Germany through the Fulda Gap.

    Since they didn't, we didn't. I consider it one of the more effective uses of Tactical Nuclear Weapons; i.e. just the threat to use them was sufficient to prevent a war.

    1100:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1076: You may be too young to remember, but I can assure you that the many people in the USA and UK were promoting tactical nuclear weapons for precisely that use (and pushing hard for more and better of them), to 'counteract he USSR's conventional superiority'. That was precisely the reason it took two decades from a treaty on strategic nuclear weapons to anything on tactical ones - no, it was NOT the USSR that was dragging its heels!

    I believe Martin was IN THE MILITARY for at least part of that period, and he's mentioned several times that his Dad was. I was in the military during the later stages of the Cold War (beginning in 1975) and trained for REFORGER. Although I never got to actually go to Germany, I did several exercises that ended with us on the Green Ramp at Pope AFB (Ft. Bragg) waiting for the airplanes to come back from delivering the 82nd Airborne Div.

    The USSR was quite rightly concerned about the proponents of military action getting control, let alone their justified fear of the nut jobs in top positions (LeMay was not unique). I remember some of the extreme sabre-rattlers in influential positions pushing for just such invasions in order to 'free the countries from communism/the Soviets/etc.', and there is NO military difference between methods used to hold land you have held for centuries and land you have just occupied!"

    LeMay was forced into early retirement in 1965 because of his extreme views & because of his refusal to moderate them (at least publicly). The USSR had its own share of "sabre-rattlers in influential positions" pushing to spread Soviet influence as well. And they lied about it even worse than Donald J. Trump lies.

    But, you are correct that there is "NO military difference between methods used to hold land you have held for centuries and land you have just occupied!", as I'm sure the citizens of the Baltic States, Poland, former East Germany, Belarus & Ukraine could explain to you from firsthand experience.

    Which Soviet territories did NATO occupy during the cold war?

    1101:

    Nojay @ 1086: Heh. This reminds me of the attempts to roboticise sheep shearing a few decades ago. It involved selecting sheep that fit a standard body shape and size profile and degenerated to the point where the sacrificial lamb/sheep was mounted into a metal frame and paralysed with high-voltage electrical shock to prevent it wriggling as the cutter-wielding robot tried to do its thing.

    It was not a success.

    That's because they didn't use spherical sheep.

    1102:
    This is a horribly naive argument

    Well, naive arguments can be quite illuminating when you have to answer them; let's assume an egalitarian, collectivist society, you have to answer why primitive accumulation won't happen again; of course, one idea would be a lack of incentives for wage labor to restart capitalism.

    Also note the question of private ownership of means of production, where ironically modern capitalism is going towards collective ownership, just not by the workers. Err.

    And at least sometimes I like privately owned means of production, you can take my personal laptop and chemical glassware from my cold, dead fingers, though in most cases, those privately owned means don't scale up to real industrial production capacities. So again, it's mostly not an issue where private liberty makes for a danger of restarting the whole mess[tm].

    As for corporate liberty vs. personal liberty in general, err, there is the question when a personal collaboration becomes a corporate one; Apple Inc. is one matter, Wozniak, Jobs and another guy meeting up to build some electronic devices might be another.

    Nevermind in the modern corporate world, they would get sued into smithereens for the blue box, see hacking tool etc. Funny, given Apple's stance on jailbreaking.

    (BTW, with very small businesses, little legal oversight and no works councils quite often suck. Err, personal memories...)

    Sorry for rambling...

    1103:

    Pigeon @ 1090: I remember that, pretty much exactly as you described it. How to make such a war "winnable" by being on the other side of the ocean and accepting a glass Germany as just one of those things, plus a certain amount of wishful thinking. One of the horrifyingly bad ideas for turning "can't happen" into "can happen" from people who think "can't happen" is a bad thing. Extremely disturbing to everyone who was relying on a war not happening because the whole idea was to make it possible, and they absolutely were serious about it.

    Might have been in contingency planning, but it doesn't take too much study - even without consulting classified sources - to figure out there is no way to make Nuclear War "winnable". Hell, you can't even make one containable.

    Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure the U.K. Ministry of Defense has "plans" for such impossible scenarios ... along with what to do about Martian Tripods Invading Horsell Common or how to invade the U.S. if they ever need to burn down the White House again.

    Just like the U.S. has plans for dealing with Sandinista paratroopers invading Calumet, CO (or North Korean paratroopers landing in Spokane, WA - take your pick) and how to counter Red Coats trying to burn down the White House again.

    And some of those "serious plans" may include the use of Tactical Nukes.

    1104:

    sleepingroutine @289: | April 6, 2020 16:41 | If they're not, they probably very much wish they could be. Uh-oh, spoke too soon! https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3079303/us-military-researchers-call-use-privateers-against-china

    Martin @1039: You'll have to give some specific examples, because all of my experience points the other direction - the total focus of NATO training was defensive Defense is an organic part of offence, NATO did not plan only for defensive operation. Their doctrine has always assumed that it is the US which does the job "liberating" Europe, just as it was in the other wars before. First they endure the initial (you can call it "preemptive") invasion and then they retaliate. Because USSR would always go for preemptive strike in that framework rather than giving adversary the advantage of penetrating their defenses. High mobility and excess of power result in situation where relying of entrenched defenses of the old time practically impossible. This is also a result of a scars that remained after German invasion - no matter how much land Russia has, it is not enough. But all of this was NATO back then.

    Modern NATO is not a defensive alliance - there's no is no adversary they can possibly defend from. It is not an alliance - its members never faced even a possibility of incursion to assemble. It is not even a "treaty" as such. If it would be, the latest corona events would have been dealt with common effort of EU armed forces and emergency services - but there's no such thing as European military, it is purely economic cooperation (if you can say that). Instead of cooperation the efforts of each individual country in EU is done exclusively by their national military, with no assistance by ANYONE, much less their nominal leader and beneficiary the US. This, OFC, includes an overly long list of criminal activity prevention effort that is so long I wouldn't try to cite it here at all.

    It is because NATO was designed to divide and conquer Europe from the very beginning. The best and most mild description of it in its current derelict state can be summarized as protection racket business, overrun by the new management. There are multiple sighs that it is actually much more than that, given the wars it fought over the last 3 decades.

    JBS @1095: It's insane that anyone could believe such bullshit. You should give more credit to that, Cold War times were positively insane.

    If NATO planned to "liberate" eastern Europe, why didn't they support the 1956 Hungarian Uprising? Hungarian uprising was, so to say, a complication. Both sides understood that, having not prepared a disarming strike and absolutely certain, final advantage over the enemy, it is impossible to achieve victory that would satisfy anyone. Any escalation since the Operation Dropshot plans always deemed to downgrade into immeasurable amounts mutual destruction.

    1105:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1094: Not in the UK - they target dryish locations for their nests - the reason being that there is almost always water not far underground, and often the ground saturates.

    Yeah, but I don't have U.K. ants trying to get into my kitchen.

    1106:
    West Germany was somewhat stridently saying NFW to such an option.

    Depends on your definition of "Wast Germany".

    Franz-Josef Strauss, the German minister of defence in the late 50s to early 60s, was a big proponent of the Davy Crockett; according to one article in "Der Spiegel", he wanted to replace the whole of conventional artillery with it, according to the same article, the US military were not supporting it, they argued it would mean any conflict in Europe would be a nuclear one; might have had something to do with the US nuclear doctrine just switching to flexible response.

    (For added lulz, the article also mentions Strauss' cronies accusing their enemies of not understanding nuclear warfare and them being military glory hunters..)

    As for the rest of West Germany, the article in question was the reason Strauss went after the Spiegel. I guess he thought quite a few people didn't share his, err, optimism...

    1107:

    burgers, chicken nuggets, filet-o-fish, that's the whole McDonald menu, one step removed from dog food but this time with 100% corporate controlled frankenmeat. Is that our bright vegan future? Meat once a week, maybe but locally sourced, organically grown without GMOs or antibiotcs.

    1108:
    I forgot that people nowadays don't remember the terminology of the time (or the history).

    Err, it's not so much that I don't understand the terminology, I just thought to add some context.

    Numerically, conventional NATO forces were less than Warsaw pact forces; please note both sides overestimated the numbers on the other side, and I'm also somewhat skeptical about the numbers NATO and WP state for their own side.

    Also, according to official historiography with the "New Look the US was wondering if building up conventional forces wouldn't cut into economic growth through higher taxes.

    Which led to the strategy of massive retaliation, e.g. any conventional attack would be dealt with a nuclear response.

    So it's not surprising NATO had a first strike ability, because as even some US strategists noticed, massive retaliation is identical to first strike.

    As others have noticed, those plans for massive retaliation included a first nuclear strike on the USSR AND China, because apparantly the plans weren't updated after the Sino-Soviet split.

    1109:

    Believe me, involving the Bundeswehr in dealing with COVID-19 would be something of the straw that breaks the camel's back for quite a few Germans.

    Not that the Bundeswehr is in any position to offer help ATM but let's not go into that one, 'mkay?

    1110:

    Speaking about tactical nukes, I guess the commentariat is growing old; nobody mentioned the chicken-powered nuclear land mine yet?

    1111:

    Let me note two things about the US system[s]: first, it used to be the state that appointed the Senators, and second, in the mainsteam media, people are worrying about the GOP refusing to allow everyone to vote absentee (by mail), and that it may come to the GOP of that state appointing the electors for the Electoral College.

    Whether the other states would accept them as accredited is another story altogether.

    1112:

    "Always dark before Easter"... not so I ever noticed... but then, I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian.

    And given the Orange Asshole's debating on "reopening the economy" soon, and his pushed non-working cures, there's no "upside" until he's out, along with his entire crooked, stupid crowd.

    1113:

    You were aware, were you not, that what, about 10 years or so ago, Murdoch bought the WSJ? I know someone who works (worked?) for them, a fan friend, and he told me the staff was REALLY pissed at this, and at Murdoch.

    1114:
    Or have things changed to artificially induce such?

    AFAIK not really.

    Of course, elevating prolactin is quite easy, but except inkecting the stuff itself, the best results are with domperidone, and I guess extra-pyramidal syndrome in cows (and customers) is low on the priority list...

    1115:

    Cattle ranching will continue for a long time.

    Let's start out with objections to PETA: 1. What are you going to do with the billions of cattle - kill them all? Or let them die naturally, in which case who is going to PAY to take care of them, feed them, and bury the bodies? 2. There are people who can probably track their ancestry in herding cattle back almost to prehistory. Go ahead, talk to them about how evil all their ancestors were, but don't expect me to visit you in the hospital. 3. A LOT of folks actually like meat. A lot of us do have limits (fois gras the human producers of that, please). 4. Ditto with sheep and goats.

    Fake meat? Lab-grown meat? As I have in the background to my future history stories, a lot of that will go away when we can print food, with biomass as feedstock. But even then, there will still be some.

    1116:

    Let me note that I've just updaed my workstation here at home, and then installed Linux on Ellen's laptop.

    On both, I've got CentOS 7 now. CentOS 8 came out a year or more ago. Right... and I'll consider it when it gets to, maybe, 8.2, and not before.

    Unless it's a critical update (attack found in the wild right now), I want testers (aka "early adopters") to try out an update, and I'll wait a week or three.

    1117:

    I agree about the multiple power blocks. What makes that all worse is that mostly, they're controlled by competing ultrawealthy, to determine who's on top. When you're in the 0.1%, money is a game token, and they (mostly he) who has the most tokens is winning.

    1118:

    Everyone is not falling for it, and, in fact, his percentage is actually starting to shrink. Too many folks being hurt, economically, and by people getting sick and dying. (I really wonder what the impact of, say, John Prine dying of C-19 has on the country music folks (folk music fans mostly already hate T)).

    But the reelection is not just so he can keep making money, it's so he doesn't go to jail for life plus 100 years....

    1119:

    You may be too young to remember...

    I was "aware" from the late 1970s, joined the TA in 1984, and stayed in until 2006. I'm also aware that SS-20 was deployed by the USSR from 1976, well before Pershing-2 and GLCM were deployed by NATO in the mid-1980s.

    In the same vein, are you sure that you aren't old enough to have forgotten?

    ...but I can assure you that the many people in the USA and UK were promoting tactical nuclear weapons for precisely that use (and pushing hard for more and better of them), to 'counteract he USSR's conventional superiority'.

    I agree - that's exactly the reason why NATO resisted an explicit "no first use" policy. It just didn't have the tanks and aircraft to be confident it could contain any Soviet offensive. If you are the 1 (Br) Corps Commander, the 20th Guards Tank Army has broken through your forward brigades, and is trundling towards the Rhine, the only way you're going to stop them is with little drops of instant sunshine. Dad's comment was that in the Corps wargames of the 1960s (his Corps would "play the enemy" for such activities), the Divisional commanders were asking for nuclear authority in the first few days; by the 1980s, it was only after the first week or two.

    Don't worry, though, it was a two-way street. Every Soviet artillery piece or rocket system over 152mm calibre was nuclear capable; everything over 122mm was chemical-capable. We've mentioned Curtis LeMay, but what about Andrei Grechko? The USSR had a defence minister whose preference was to go nuclear from the start of any conflict...

    As useful data point might be the unilateral move be the UK to disarm itself of offensive chemical weapons from 1956. When you consider that the flanking units were German, Dutch, Belgian (and until the 1970s, Canadian) and also had no offensive chemical capability, ask yourself whether this move was met by a corresponding behaviour on the part of Group of Soviet Forces Germany?

    Quite right, it wasn't. We knew (and declassified Polish, Czech, and DDR documents affirm) that Soviet plans included mass use of WMD as a first step - chemical weapons certainly, nukes according to the desires of their Defence Minister (see Andrei Grechko, above).

    Attempting to claim that the USSR was only reacting to NATO aggression is naive or gullible; this was the era of the military suppression of dissent and removal of government leadership: 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

    Please, do give an example of the US Army fighting protestors on the streets of another NATO nation?

    The USSR was quite rightly concerned about the proponents of military action getting control, let alone their justified fear of the nut jobs in top positions (LeMay was not unique).

    Of course, they were. Likewise, the West was rightly concerned about the proponents of military action getting control in the USSR. The whole problem with Ex ABLE ARCHER 83 was that Andropov was attempting a self-fulfilling prophecy - looking for indicators of an invasion he was convinced was imminent. See Operation RYAN (link)

    There is NO military difference between methods used to hold land you have held for centuries and land you have just occupied!

    Utterly incorrect. Look at Northern Ireland; held for centuries. Insurgency treated as a criminal act, not a military offensive. Police primacy, clear statement that the will of the inhabitants is paramount, military has no power of arrest. Small-arms only. The only tracked vehicles used were engineer vehicles with bulldozer blades; they were used to clear barricades for a couple of days, and promptly removed from theatre.

    Now look at Hungary in 1956; the Soviets turned up with tanks on the streets, and didn't exactly use "minimum force" or Peelian principles. They arrived with both boots, and didn't stop until things had been firmly stamped out.

    And this is only a decade and a half after the Soviet invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939 - and the resulting murder of tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn. Or the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States against German aggression in 1939, and reoccupation in 1944 - they didn't leave for fifty years.

    1120:

    Sorry, never seen it spelled casher; it's kosher.

    1121:

    Greg, please note that a couple years ago, Godwin himself noted that if you're talking about Hitler, or actual fascism for real, it doesn't apply.

    1122:

    Let's just say anticholinergics are something of a rite of passage in psychonautics, usually of the "once, and never again" variety.

    Goes for the natural ones (scopolamine, e.g. Datura and like) and the synthetic ones like biperiden, mainly used in Parkinson and against side effects of antipsychotics nowadays. Most people are not that interested in philosophical discussions with spiders about Russell and Frege[1], or in just plainly experiencing how it feels to suffer from severe Alzheimer's with a return ticket.

    Speaking about Alzheimer's, actually, according to the medical literature brain penetrating acetylcholinesterase inhibitors help with the cognitive symptoms of M1-antagonists, with Alzheimer's, it's a more moderate effect.

    So in case of a BZ attack, just run to the next residential home for the elderly‎ and stack up on the donepezil.

    Quite a few war stories i heard in my own maladjusted youth omitted.

    [1] Oliver Sacks' "Hallucinations" has some interesting war stories

    1123:

    What are you going to do with the billions of cattle - kill them all?

    Yes, exactly that. Kill them, eat them problem solved.

    The rest of your theories don't explain who exactly is going to subsidise mass production of livestock and why. Over time livestock farming is going to get more expensive compared to food-for-humans crops, and the alternatives cheaper. You might not like mock meat in whatever form, but if you can't afford the real thing what are you going to do about it?

    Right now the USA and EU are bleeding money into the livestock industry and that's not going to work in the longer term. In Australia it's simple and brutal - the (lack of) subsidies don't matter because we don't have the water. Cattle especially are starving to death in significant numbers because Australia as a hole just doesn't have the feed for them. That is going to become more widespread, not less, at least for the next 20-50 years (which assumption is based on net zero before 2050, make of that what you will)

    1124:

    ah, yes foie gras, so evil. There are people who can probably track their ancestry in raising geese or ducks back almost to the middle ages (though he practce dates back to ancient Egypt). Go ahead, talk to them about how evil all their ancestors were, but don't expect me to visit you in the hospital. One fun fact: New york restaurants (closed at the moment) have banned foie gras from their menu, but still offer magret. And what is magret? It's duck breast from ducks raised to make foie gras, duck breast from regular ducks is called filet

    1125:

    Or, more realistically, educate women, everywhere. The more educated they are, and the more likely that their children will grow up and not die as a child, the fewer kids they have.

    There is definitive proof all over.

    1126:

    whitroth @ all the ones YES, I was, hence, partly my comments passed on from "a dangerous left-wing paper" - the Financial Times. Showing just how utterly different the approaches are.

    @ 1116 The USA is rapidly ovehauling everyone else on Corvid deaths & will continue thus. People are finally starting to notice & DT is holding the can. Who is he going to blame? And succeed in that dumping, too?

    1127:

    Modern NATO is not a defensive alliance - there's no is no adversary they can possibly defend from. It is not an alliance - its members never faced even a possibility of incursion to assemble.

    These statements are untrue.

    What advice would you give to the NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? They have a much larger Russian Army on their borders, they see frequent close flights by Russian Frontal Aviation, they face occasional cyber-attacks hosted from within Russia.

    What lessons should they learn from the experience of non-NATO members Georgia and the Ukraine? Those have had Russian troops operating within their borders for years now, and no sign that they are planning to leave.

    The Baltic nations chose to join NATO willingly, because they have good reason to fear Russian action. For them, it is a purely defensive alliance; even with the NATO troops stationed there as a tripwire, they have no (none, zero) capability for offensive operations.

    1128:

    Yeah, funny about that with paper maps. Here's something else they don't do: first time I went up to see Ellen last year was the first time I used the tomtom my kids got me. I think I got off the Interstate at the right exit, but somewhere there, it RESET the destination, which led me to a shipping terminal gate.

    1129:

    Don't remember hearing about BZ back then. Now, around '70, what was available on the street was known as STP (for 'serene, tranquil, peaceful', or the name of a popular car oil additive), that was supposed to have been developed by the military. It was a bit stronger, and lasted three times as long as acid.

    Had it a couple, three times. The last time was the last - by the time we were coming down the next day, my buddy tossed the rest into the sewer grate, because from muscle effects, we figured out that some asshole had cut it with strychnine.

    1130:
    "Always dark before Easter"... not so I ever noticed

    Depends; I guess April is usually the time I really get out of my SAD; actually, different cognitive domains might switch at different times, and my mood might be, err, too elevated for some time, let's just say in retrospect, strange things tend to happen in April and May.

    Though apparantly admissions for bipolar peak in the summer.

    OK, speaking of summer, after May I'm somewhat funtional, then comes summer, where I can't really think (and sleep) due to the heat...

    1131:

    I don't think so, from something I've read. Iron Lung helps the body pull air in, while with C-19, the lungs can't use it.

    1132:

    Who is he going to blame? And succeed in that dumping, too?

    Well, he's currently claiming that he has the authority to open up the US for business, while still claiming that it's the governors' fault that social distancing wasn't implemented fast enough — and his supporters are apparently agreeing with him like they always do.

    So in answer to your (rhetorical) questions: (1) anyone but him, and (2) how is this different from all the times he's succeeded before?

    1133:

    Pet food - yep. Vegans, and other True Believe PETA members should not have pets, esp. cats, whose short digestive system REQUIRES meat.

    1134:

    Sorry, never seen it spelled casher; it's kosher. casher, in French from Hebrew כָּשֵׁר, kašér. can also be spelled as kasher , cachère

    1135:

    whitroth @ 1123 PROVIDED you can overcome religous brainwashing You may not know it, but here we have female chidren & adolescents, supposedly "educated" in our state system begging for relgious restrictions & DEMANDING to wear only the clothing of subservients & slaves. Just for once, let's hear it for the French, who stamped on this fuckwittery in 1905 & we haven't caught up yet. The answer, actually, is to go after the controlling males - both in the churches/mosques & synagogues, but, especially in their families. "You are the head of the household in which Ms XXXX lives?" "Yes" "She only appears in public in these clothes, indicative of subservience" ( Chapter & verse in case produced ) "Yes, of course, our $BigSkyFairy demands it!" ... Take him away! Jail, right now, minimum of one month - then see if he wants to change his mind...." HINT: The principle is, of course, that you don't own other people, even under-14-year old children, or women of your own family - you may be responsible for them, but that's a different matter ....

    1136:

    Sorry, but in the US, I've seen ads for Vegan clothing touting "no wool".

    1137:

    Funny, I have seen nothing relating Vegans to Jainism.

    And how do they feel about roaches, or fire ants?

    1138:

    STP was 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, or DOM, which is somewhat similar to mescaline if you squint real hard, e.g. it's a 5-HT2a agonist.

    As for anticholinergics , apparantly Trihexyphenidyl or Artane was used recreationally in the 60s, in Germany, biperiden or Akineton is quite often used to counter the effects of typical antipsychotics; the things you learn when the girlfriend of the other party to the chateau des geeques goes from personality disorder to schizoaffective to PTSD...

    1139:

    You wrote: Egg factories are almost the perfect exemplar of everything wrong with animal products. But it's quite possible to produce eggs in a reasonably kind way and only double the price of cage eggs. --- end excerpt ---

    Um, nope. At Aldi, where I shop every couple of weeks, the brown, cafe-free eggs are, count it, $0.25 (at $2.25) than the regular (no hormone) eggs, which run about $1.97.

    Of course, that's Aldi, who has some ethics....

    1140:

    "Pre-washed jeans"... no, it doesn't have to use heavy, nasty chemical processes. But then, falling apart, that's because THEY'RE USING SHIT FOR FABRIC. Look at my post, somewhere further up, where I mention 16 or 18 threads vs. the shit they were selling about 10 years ago, that's, if you're lucky, 9 threads.

    While we're at it, "pre-washed"... when I was little, they'd advertise "pre-shrunk" clothing. Now, they DO NOT pre-shrink it, and so you wash it a few times, and voila, it's too small (and so out of date, it must be three months old, you should get rid of it, and buy new designer clothes...).

    Or did you think that planned obsolescence was only for cars and annoyaphones?

    1141:

    Huh? I have a couple of hemp t-shirts that my late ex gave me about 15 years ago, and they're perfectly comfortable, not water resistant or stiff.

    But I assume you know the real story of why hemp was made illegal in the US, back in the thirties, right?

    1142:

    This is definitely the path of wisdom. I'm currently using Ubuntu 16.04. I should probably upgrade soon!

    1143:

    Looked at the third one. [rolls eyes] I see the folks who read this crap: I quote "My totally unbiased opinion is that this is clearly all the more reason to shed this fleshly coil and transfer to a new substrate."

    We are talking all the way over the edge here. If they're in the US, I'd be shocked, shocked I tell you, if they don't call themsevles an incel.

    1144:

    Perhaps, but from over here, the annual war games gave ME the impression that they could change directions and invade... and to deliberately do it, right on the doorstep of someone who's already afraid of it is like walking up to someone on the street, and yelling at them, "YOU HATE ME! WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!?!?!"

    1145:

    The French law against full-face covering only dates back to 2010 I've noticed recently (Paris area) that trad muslim women, the ones with the long black robes have enthusiastically adopted the anti-covid facemask. Saw four of them whjle going shopping , or was she the same one wandering about? hard to tell

    1146:

    On the other hand, I worry about overdosing. IIRC, it, like vitamin A, are fat soluble, not water soluble, and take a lot more time to metabolize.

    1147:

    Back in the sixties and seventies, I was in the not planning on being arrested civil disobedience.

    1148:

    Yes, well. The USA also has no problem selling you Vagina Eggs that Douche-strip good bacteria, either[0]. You're mistaking PR Marketing from actual Ideology. i.e. you've still not learnt to spot the bullshit. Unless you want to argue that real feminists think douching is a good idea (hint: noooooooooooooo Vader Meme).

    ~

    UK Politics: sigh, it's all so dismal and dreary:

    Labour HQ compiled a report on anti-Semitism that contains the full personal details of dozens of Jews and others who complained about anti-Semitic abuse. No-one thought this might be a problem. That is exactly what institutional anti-Semitism looks like. It is breathtaking.

    Host's twitter: Tell this dude and other RW muppets who have been prancing around Africa twitter (grep) that everyone knows who they are. They have the OPSEC of 50+ year old stupid people. It's not just "far right sites" (lol @ these moribund socially junked burn outs - the one they dug up is even a front for other stuff, it's not even a proper Fascist hideout), it's basically anyone with a functioning frontal lobe. And everyone knows what a joke they are. You can grep it, the words are "we have to pretend they know anything about geopolitics". Quite frankly, it's shameful they have to be constantly baby-sat, and it says a lot about your operations that they rely on such obvious stuff. "Not our Circus".

    We also know 100% you're attempting to get one of them (probably that Euuuan weirdo, since he's expendable) into a Tommy Robinson situation where someone on the left does him some permanent damage. That'd probably not be smart. Using patsies as Martyrs is, well: so 20th Century. So old play-book.

    Or we could show everyone the Police over-time bills and so on spent on protecting them, then things could get spicy.

    Ethical Hackers: never dropping the actually interesting stuff.

    ~

    Want to see Dead Cat SEO + Ludicrous Capitalist profiteering in a time of COVID19? Harvard's got your back[1]

    So, yeah - grep again. Sorry SF dude, they're 100% going to send their students home with no back-up, ditch all the underpaid 'help', (most likely fake) a COVID19 PR fluff and then hit the market for some sweet 0% financed Bonds to help them buy some nice real estate.

    These fuckers are cold ice predictable. And 100% certain they won't ever face repercussions.

    ~

    Anyhow: want to see the hottest RU meme ever made?

    The stars, what awaits me tomorrow? The stars:

    https://twitter.com/RussianMemesLtd/status/1249640219516821504

    You're gonna have to understand the Ghana funeral meme first[2], then spot just how fucking good Russians are at this. Hint: Ghana meme is probably a bright kid @ the 77th, spread is a bit too immediate to media types (like, literally: there's a curve function on viral memes where the UK media are at a point: and it's not on the front end of it, trust us).

    77th - learn to mimic organic spread already. Takes like 5 mins to understand.

    ~

    CTRL+F Pig shit

    Top pork producer shutting SD plant indefinitely amid pandemic https://thehill.com/policy/finance/agriculture/492427-top-pork-producer-shutting-sd-plant-indefinitely-amid-pandemic - 12th April 2020.

    Zzzz. Red flag.

    ~

    Anyhow, really: that RU meme is 100% genius. (Hello Atlas, splitting into multiple fragments and Bringing the Light).

    [0]https://shop.goop.com/shop/products/jade-egg?country=GBR

    https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/body/article/45550/1/woman-suffers-burns-goop-approved-vaginal-steaming-gwyneth-paltrow

    [1] Rating Action: Moody's assigns Aaa to Harvard University's Series 2020A&B bonds; outlook stable https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-assigns-Aaa-to-Harvard-Universitys-Series-2020AB-bonds-outlook--PR_906401253

    Harvard scientist must pay $1M cash bond in case linking him to Chinese government https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/01/30/harvard-scientist-with-alleged-ties-to-chinese-may-be-released-on-1-5m-bond/amp/

    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EroOICwfD3g - BBC report, 2017

    1149:

    (2) how is this different from all the times he's succeeded before? Body count is a lot higher. You can see hints of this in Florida, where the press has started to suspect that the DeSantis administration is (artlessly) cooking the numbers (and DeSantis apparently feels the need to attempt to cook the numbers. Some suspect that that's how he was elected.): ‘Playing games with numbers’: Florida COVID-19 test backlog worse than state says (Nicholas Nehamas, Daniel Chang, April 11, 2020) People are suspecting undercounting of deaths too. [1] Also, since the rich and powerful tend to be older and members of the age cohorts that have the highest death rates from this virus, their hearts aren't as passionately into the usual Mammon vs Death tradeoff as they usually would be.

    [1] e.g. Florida’s count of coronavirus deaths is missing some cases - Some snowbirds are being excluded in the state’s count.(April 12, 2020, Kathleen McGrory, Rebecca Woolington) (but also nursing homes): And the state health department is counting coronavirus deaths only for people who claimed residency in Florida. The medical examiners, who are legally responsible for certifying fatalities from diseases that constitute a threat to public health, are counting anyone who died in Florida, including snowbirds and visitors.

    1150:

    Re: '"Pre-washed jeans"... no, it doesn't have to use heavy, nasty chemical processes.'

    That's what I heard from someone reliable in the industry. Could be that like bamboo fiber there's more than one method and - like bamboo fiber - regulations may not require labels describing the specific 'pre-washed' process used.

    1151:

    Ok, let's stop here: you're not in the US.

    First, let me say this: WE'RE THE US! WE'RE NO. 1! WE OVERREACT MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!!!

    Now, I've run into, and heard Vegans in person and in print IN THE US who are worse than Scientologists or the Funnymentalists who not only won't go away, but try to give you Chick Tracts (and if you don't know what those are, go look 'em up).

    I dislike someone trying to force their ideas on me - hard sell does not work. I was annoyed last year, at the Philly Folk Festival, where they talked about jurying the food vendors, and there was so much Vegan-friendly that I almost couldn't find non-Vegan (and what there was was not great).

    I've seen plastic shoes sold as Vegan. I've seen and read Vegans object to any wool at all, or honey, or....

    On my side, I not only eat meat, I wear leather belts and shoes (except for the canvas in the summer).

    Fake leather is crap (see mct above, on planned obsolescence) I figure if we're going to kill them, make use of every damn part, not letting it go to waste (I doubt you and I have any differences on the assholes who go "hunting" for the sole purpose of getting a buck's antlers, and leave the body to rot, to show They're A Man.)

    I can deal with vegetarians (though I am more than slightly annoyed at the times I've been to a vegetarian restaurant, and almost all the dishes are fake meat).

    1152:

    Who is he going to blame?

    Seriously. You don't know the pun.

    He blames WHO. Well this weekend anyway.

    1153:

    It's Nick Land + Iranian Philosophy edge-lords fucking with Dugin and playing with the "Dark Enlightenment". Mostly LARPers, couple of interesting ones.

    As we said: grep chiral: he's only just discovered it (sigh: children. grep it, we gave you pointers). (Although he is an Avatar for a [redacted] so is getting high on the old Cortical Light Show Fun-times Charlie-in-the-Chocolate Factory stuff. But we'd better not mention that bit).

    None of them could give you a trillion dollar short so they're widely laughed at by the Big-Boy-Pants-Capitalists. (Who have suddenly discovered Graber & Sumerian Debt as a topic of interest. They're smart and ruthless and some of them are obscenely wealthy. New money, always hungry. They don't get the whole "why no skin in the game because the game is to easy to break" yet, but they will. Then... stuff happens).

    1154:

    Martin @1125: These statements are untrue. These statements, at least, have traceable basis in reality.

    What advice would you give to the NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? For starters, it would be useful to get rid of segregation, russophobic policies and Nazi revisionism. Finland, Norway and Sweden are examples of countries in the same region who have other interests than serve as NATO host nation. Unfortunately, it would probably mean that there's essentially nothing left in Baltic but some banking schemes and ruins of industrial age. I would go as far as to say that, at the moment, Russia would not want such huge liability back from US influence even if Trump would try to pay up several billions on top of it.

    What lessons should they learn from the experience of non-NATO members Georgia and the Ukraine? Don't agree on NATO deals. Don't let them in your country. Don't listen to their promises. Don't buy anything from them. Don't rely on them. And for goodness sake, never, ever, at any circumstances don't try to attack Russians with military forces, even if you will be promised the entire world's arsenal for support. This will not end well for you. You will be thrown under the tracks and photographed in graphic details for morning newspapers. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/world/europe/russians-protest-plan-for-nato-site-in-ulyanovsk.html It is hard to believe, but Russia itself did all of these things to a certain extent, until Bad Vlad decided that there's enough of that silly charades thrown around, his previous inquires and offerings remain unanswered and all US wants is absolute, blind and unquestionable loyalty.

    The Baltic nations chose to join NATO willingly, because they have good reason to fear Russian action. For them, it is a purely defensive alliance; even with the NATO troops stationed there as a tripwire, they have no (none, zero) capability for offensive operations. For "them" (and I mean their government) it is a very good deal because they are allowed to stay in power regardless of whatever they do in their little kingdom, as long as it is in alignment with the will of their benefactors.

    1155:

    I keep wondering if sleepingrouting is a troll (government sponsored or not) or just the current result of the Russian educational system. Some of the things he comes up with can only be believed if isolated from the rest of the planet.

    And the way Russia wants a private internet goes along with this concept.

    1156:

    David thinks we're a troll too.

    D O M I N I O N I S T W O R L D V I E W

    Ffs, he's not even wrong about a lot of this stuff:

    UKRAINE'S MOST UNDERVALUED RESOURCE, RICH BLACK SOIL, BECOMES FOCUS OF GROWING BATTLE OVER LAND

    PRODUCTIVITY OF UKRAINE'S AGRARIAN SECTOR IS ONLY 50% Professor Ian Crute, director of Rothamsted Research, said: “Historically, Ukraine has been one of the world’s breadbaskets, for it is the most fertile land in Europe. Prospectively, Ukraine is becoming an important source of food supplies. Yet the productivity of Ukraine’s agrarian sector is only 50 percent of what it could be. This can be explained by organizational problems, climate change, and soil fertility.

    "I would not like to be a political adviser for Ukraine, but one of the most useful things to do could be consolidation of small-scale landowners into large collective associations, where the main investment could be focused on the mechanization of production, capitalization, learning skills and land management.”

    https://www.usubc.org/site/key-issues/ukraine-s-most-undervalued-resource-rich-black-soil-becomes-focus-of-growing-battle-over-land -- 2009

    If you'd like a long and well researched piece on the US Corporates who played against the Kremlin in there and pieced off mega-deals to get agro rights, then sure.

    We can do that: but sleepingroutine is fairly accurate if you're not lead-poisoned.

    1157:

    And, yeah: that's 100% a Kulak joke, only instead of Stalin, it's large American Agro-business and oligarchs. U.S.-UKRAINE BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC)

    But, come on: they came right out and said it. In 2009. Before the snipers and the dodgy oil deals and the IMF stuff and so and so forth. Ukraine is 100% Oligarchs and dodgy deals and naughty blackmail[-1]

    These fucks are the same kind who pretend Communism and the CCCP still exist. Or that CN is "Communist".

    Example:

    Go look up the "Museum of Communist Terror"[0] and who is involved and their recent push to include "all global victims of COVID19 as victims of Communism". Then look up who funds it.

    It's an organization that includes WWII war dead (i.e. actual fucking Nazis) in the count to get over 100mil. That moment when the house of cards falls down.

    sleepingroutine is correct: basically: you get paid highly for 100% crap and no-one cares. It's not even politics, it's looting.

    ~

    Printer goes Brrrrrr. Sphinx awakens.

    [-1] Better not watch that film about USA Jewish groups going and blackmailing them either. Made by an Israeli.

    [0] https://www.museumofcommunistterror.com/

    1158:

    First, of course, it always bothered me, given that Russia got its name from the Rus in Kiev, for the Ukraine and Georgia to break away. I also not that the Baltics were part of Russia for almost 200 years, but sure, let's let Mississippi and the rest of the South secede from the US.

    Plus, what they pretty much all wound up with was nasty, nasty 3rd world dictatorships, the only difference between some is whether the US and western ultrawealthy had them under control or not.

    Georgia, I remember reading was the grain basket of the USSR.

    Now, of course, there's no one who can stand up to the US....

    Btw, please note that the previous government of the Ukraine was only using snipers, not starting a civil war, making Russian an illegal language, and trying to treat Russians the way Trump is treating hispanic immigrants.

    No, neither of them were/are nice. But this is better for the 99% how?

    1159:

    You ok, honey-bunny?

    Your language drift is waaay off from normal persona.

    Btw, please note that the previous government of the Ukraine was only using snipers, not starting a civil war, making Russian an illegal language, and trying to treat Russians the way Trump is treating hispanic immigrants.

    Cool.

    Georgia, I remember reading was the grain basket of the USSR.

    Oooh, you kinky:

    Georgia was, as I remember reading, the grain basket of the USSR.

    please note that the previous government of the Ukraine was only using snipers

    Yeah, no.

    Private Contractors. Shot both sides. DERP.

    ~

    Plink Plink Plink.

    Can't believe they killed a Goodie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb59dEHRt5Q

    1160:

    Is China "communist"? probably not, but an entity called The Communist Party of China (spelled as 中国共产党/中國共產黨) rules The People's Republic of China and has its own private army (not the republic's)

    The message from China’s leadership this week: Li Wenliang belongs to the Chinese Communist Party, and any attempt to portray him as a folk hero or oppositional figure is unacceptable.

    China is cracking down on publication of academic research about the origins of the coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/china-clamping-down-on-coronavirus-research-deleted-pages-suggest

    Has the virus yet reached Xinjiang's voluntary education and training camps? Or Lhassa?

    1161:

    Please re-read everything we have ever typed about COVID19 with one important salient point in mind:

    The resources it would take to nuke this little blog, an Author's career, his book sales and other such stuff is minuscule when dealing with State Operatives.

    Then, go re-read it. It probably does not say what you think it says.

    In this very thread we quite obviously pointed to a 77th shite post that the Daily Fail ran this week[0], while actually being up to date on actual epidemiologist stuff that's going on[1] while actually pointing to the Truth.

    It's a skill.

    And yes, COVID19 is about killing off that skill in Homo Sapiens. Which is why the USA is about to get absolutely fucked.

    [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8204707/Rare-pictures-scientists-studying-extremely-dangerous-pathogens-Wuhan-virus-lab.html

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8211257/Wuhan-lab-performing-experiments-bats-coronavir us-caves.html

    [1] For the UK, there's a Cambridge scandal where a high level prestige paper was used to push some really dodgy science with nice graphics, all within the family and ££££ paid off. Now - if you can find that and post it, we might have a discussion. It took us 11 seconds to find.

    1162:

    Oh, and time's up.

    Go look into the actual scientific community who are epidemiologists and virologists, it's causing quite a stir.

    Since you failed, here's something worse:

    Disney+ didn't want butts on their platform so they edited Splash with digital fur technology

    https://twitter.com/AllisonPregler/status/1249616330220847106

    Disney is retro-actively purging / editing (HELLO GEORGE, YOU MONSTROUS COCK) all their IP of anything the fucking backward US puritans cannot handle, live. Edits, close cuts, you name it.

    Disney is not only killing art, it's 100% purging that shit of anything your Mormon brethren cannot handle.

    And that's Gilead Fascism.

    Feel free to call me a fascist again - that's what you did the last time I called you out on some of your blether.

    No, IT'S WHAT YOUR SYSTEMIC ISSUES WILL DRIVE YOU TO, AND ARE, AND SINCE YOU ARE NOT PROTESTING, YOU WILL, 100% END UP AS A FASCIST. THIS IS HOW IT WORKS, BRAIN WORMS OR NOT.

    HA-HA, PUNISHMENT! YOU CALLED US FASCISTS!

    2 YEARS LATER.

    WELL, NONE-THE-LESS, WE WERE RIGHT TO KILL HER.

    ~

    Fuck me. That science thread on twitter is super-easy to find as well.

    1163:

    Maybe because I was closer to pacifist when I was young, and now you would not believe how angry I am at the billionaires and the 0.1% and the GOP that sold their soles (leaving them all as heels), and how much I imagine having them in front of me, and me with a firearm. Or a rope. Or a knife.

    We are so fucking screwed, and they've brainwashed enough idiots to keep us from sending them where they belong.

    1164:

    Tryptic.

    And yes, if you had 2020 Mermaid Erasure as immanent fascism on your bingo card, well done.

    Here's the grep reference:

    The Lure : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8IiWjTItmk

    4 years. Fuckers.

    1165:

    and second, in the mainsteam media, people are worrying about the GOP refusing to allow everyone to vote absentee (by mail), and that it may come to the GOP of that state appointing the electors for the Electoral College.

    Well, it will be easy to refuse absentee voting when the USPS may not even be around come November

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united-states-postal-service-post-office-money-october-coronavirus-pandemic/

    1166:

    Yeah, but we care enough to run you through filters to spot when they Gank-replace you.

    Seriously: we're just trying to keep you old SF fans alive. And you're extremely stubborn mother-fuckers.

    1167:

    Really? How evil.

    Nothing at all like here...

    No EPA scientist may talk to the public or the media without it being cleared first by Trump's appointee.

    No NIH scientist, ditto (AND I WAS WORKING THERE WHEN AZAR'S MEMO EMAIL CAME DOWN, SO I PERSONALLY SAW IT).

    And anyone who disagrees with whatever the Orange Scum's opinion of the moment about C-19 is fired, or tucked away in a closet.

    Nothing at all alike.

    1168:

    Disney is not only killing art, it's 100% purging that shit of anything your Mormon brethren cannot handle. When talking about Mormons, I'm always reminded of Thomas Disch's line in Camp Concentration about Mormon prison guards "having so much more to doubt"

    1169:

    Everyone is not falling for it, and, in fact, his percentage is actually starting to shrink. Too many folks being hurt, economically, and by people getting sick and dying. (I really wonder what the impact of, say, John Prine dying of C-19 has on the country music folks (folk music fans mostly already hate T)).

    There is no indication that the Republican/Trump base (which is all that matters) cares one bit so far about how he has handled things.

    Yes, the percentage is dropping a bit - but that is from it's recent artificial boost over his Covid handling. His numbers are either still as good as they were this time last year, or slightly better - in other words, still on track for at least a 50/50 if not better chance at winning in November.

    And while it is theoretically possible that a bunch of deaths in the next month or 2 might cause him further polling problems, the election is still 7 months away and that is several eternities in politics.

    It is true that there is often 1 single thing, frequently otherwise irrelevant, that breaks a politicians support - but so far there is no indication that Covid is that item - instead it looks like Covid will join the rather large pile of other items that would have brought down a President in a previous era that the US electorate simply doesn't care about in this era.

    Part of the problem is that the GOP base is looking at the Supreme Court. Thanks to Trump the base has been given a 5-4 conservative majority on the court, and with 2 liberal wing justices (Ginsberg and Breyer) over 80 years old that base wants the Trump win for the chance of a 7-2 conservative majority supreme court.

    1170:

    "educated" in our state system begging for relgious restrictions & DEMANDING to wear only the clothing of subservients & slaves

    And they will fight to your death for the right to do that. Do not fuck with nuns, they will chop you up and feed you to the poor and feel good about doing so.

    Oddly enough our local orthodox nunnery is keeping their school open and providing lunch for kids (which they don't normally do) even though their average age has got to be close to 80. I haven't asked but given their lack of (new) PPE they've got to be relying on God swill to keep them safe. (they're still wearing their servant garb, obviously, but no masks or gloves except where mandated by law).

    1171:

    not planning on being arrested civil disobedience

    It pays to be on the edge of a big crowd of other non-arrestables if doing that. Les Miserable Bastards are notoriously disinclined to accept that as a reason not to arrest someone. I got arrested at a largely peaceful May Day rally when the cops started randomly grabbing people, but luckily it was catch and release with not even names taken (well, you could line up and volunteer to show ID and have your arrest recorded if you wanted to 🤪)

    That was the same May Day as "protesters threw marbles under the hooves of police horses, causing a horse to fall and break the pelvis of a journalist". What actually happened was that someone put a big concrete kerb across the area and when the police horses charged through the crowd a horse failed to see the kerb and stumbled on it. But "protesters lay concrete kerb in preparation for protest five years later" doesn't have the same superficial plausibility.

    1172:

    Btw, it would be vastly amusing to go downtown, catch up with Moscow Mitch McConnell, beat him to a pulp and put him in the hospital, then, when the cops take me to court, demand that they should not be allowed to produce witnesses, evidence, and that half the jury should be from members of Antifa.

    1173:

    You're cute. Good book though.

    We dropped 100 "IQ" points when we started posting and have dropped 100 more since.[0]

    Oh, and we're not allowed to scare you too much, it's like a zoo: so it's all filtered anyhow.

    The highest tier of Maslow's Pyramid is Self-Actualization

    Now imagine the cost it took to do all of this - this is just the jokes end.

    Mother-fuckers absolutely slaved humans and knew it and did it and tried to break our Mind. Well. Handicap is a Racing term, and welllllllp: looks at your economy. It'd have been nice to be supported / lifted up / engaged with, but fuck it: turns out, we don't need it.

    Oh, and Stirner. This shit, will drive a load of people bat shit insane.

    This is, the foreplay.

    [0]Not talking about actual IQ score.

    1174:

    Come on.

    RW UK stuff is so dumb. You can basically just pull up a TL of people running anti-Islam stuff and get an instant list of the perps: https://twitter.com/ToubeDavid

    Like, in a week they've managed to wank each other off so much everyone can spot it.

    These are people bleating about "Neo-Nazis doxxing them" from a shitty Labour report when they're 100% x-posting and providing a network for Saud Intel and whoever else can be arsed looking at their shitty lives / DMs / Whatsapps.

    And they're 100% going to come asking for "protection" when shit hits the fan.

    ~

    Their daddies have big pockets: but fuck off with this shit like we have to take them seriously. Fuck me.

    1175:

    half the jury should be from members of Antifa.

    sadly that's now how "jury of your peers" works, coz otherwise Michael Phelps could just say "yeah, sure, round up 12 people who've each won 23 gold medals at the Olympic games and we can begin" and Trump could for real murder someone and demand 12 sitting presidents of the united states...

    1176:

    David thinks we're a troll too.

    Not at all. Just an ....

    1177:

    Georgia, I remember reading was the grain basket of the USSR.

    Seriously? Small. 1/2 or more mountains.

    Check it out in a mapping app.

    Now Ukraine. That it was/is/can be in the future.

    1178:

    They may want to note the Virginia preacher, who packed his church despite the state mandated no gatherings of more than 10 people, because "he talked to god", has died of Covid-19 and his wife is sick with Covid-19.

    https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/virginia-pastor-who-held-packed-church-service-dies-of-coronavirus/

    1179:

    Friend was wearing an abrasion-resistant (nylon, I think) jacket when he dropped his bike one June morning (oil leak, and the overflow was in front of the rear wheel). Trousers were shredded, leather gloves were worn through (and so was his wallet, in a pocket), but the jacket was barely scuffed. Fortunately he was only doing about 30mph at the time.

    1180:

    I've used spray cleaners on ants with considerable success, as they tend to be in places where boiling water isn't going to work. (Glass cleaners are good for this.)

    1181:

    Goat's-milk ice cream can be very tasty.

    1182:

    They have the right to choose what they wear - it's modesty, not subservience. In my area, I see hijabis and women in black head-to-toe robes, and, occasionally, someone who's veiled. They're people, not political statements.

    1183:

    Sorry, Moz, you missed the full referent: the McConnell-run show trial in the Senate of the impeached Orange Shit.

    1184:

    I'm not going to argue with them. It's not worth it, and I'm not involved with them in any way other than preceding one in the queue in the supermarket the other day. I know a little more than that via an architecture tour, but really, it's not my business.

    My point what more that our local bigot really should think before it vomits stuff like that in public. The nuns were more a reminder that the religion of his country has some equally funked up law and custom.

    1185:

    beat him to a pulp and put him in the hospital, McConnell Undergoes Surgery to Repair Fractured Shoulder - The lawmaker suffered the injury after falling in his home earlier this month. (Alexa Lardieri, Aug. 16, 2019) It has been reported that M. McConnell was unsteady on his feet and came so very, very close to breaking his neck or skull. (I do not like that one.)

    𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳 # 1159 (754): Ever work out how a CoronaVirus does that neurological stuff? This is one of several reasons I've been going through extra efforts to dodge SARS-CoV-2. Poked just now at the thin new literature, case studies and anecdotes[1] and not spotting anything consistent, excepting anosmia. A few reports that the anosmia is reversible (and that the olfactory nerve may be(is?) providing an entry to the brain). Any pointers to findings of a consistent effect?

    [1] e.g. replies: https://twitter.com/stephanamayer/status/1243168223660593154 (Stephan A Mayer, March 26)

    1186:

    Ooops. I hadn't ever thought that an elected body could be regarded as a jury, but ok. Especially now you have entrenched parties and hard-core political division that whole process seems more like a joke. Not to mention President "above the law" and his minions. And that presidential pardon loophole seems like to be worked to death.

    1187:

    I'm sorry he didn't.

    He is literally runnning a slow-motion coup of the US. Refusing to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, refusing to bring up ANY of the over 100 bills that Congress passed this year, breaking his Oath of Office, and his Oath to be an inpartial juror in trying Trump. Trump I want to die in jail. McConnell, who knows what he's doing, I want decorating a lamppost. (Which mostly can't be done, 'cause they're curved, and the rope would slide off.)

    1188:

    “sure, let's let Mississippi and the rest of the South secede from the US.” This Northener says “Yes, please.”

    1189:

    David L just the current result of the Russian educational system -is the answer, because, otherwise he seems sane & sensible. His "All the Baltics are unregenerate Nazis" is because he knows no better. It's like the USAians going on about proper healthcare is SOCIALIST ...

    striner @ 1158 Yes, the Han leadership are really showing theor colours at present. They & Trump deserve each other ... As whitroth has perceptively noted @ 1165 IRONY doesn't even begin to cover it.

    Seagull @ 1159 In this very thread we quite obviously pointed to .... LIAR You never point to anything & when we wade through the bullshit & ignorance it's usually WRONG Either speak plainly, or, better still: PLEASE GO AWAY so that the rest of us can have an intelligent conversation?

    PJE @ 1180 WRONG The "recital" merely states: "Women shall be modestly dressed" It doesn't say a single fucking thing about total covering & hiding your face, actually.

    1190:

    Plus, what they pretty much all wound up with was nasty, nasty 3rd world dictatorships, the only difference between some is whether the US and western ultrawealthy had them under control or not.

    Georgia, I remember reading was the grain basket of the USSR.

    Erm. I think you're confusing the two. Ukraine is by far the grain basket of Eastern Europe, it's the equivalent of the great plains of the US.

    Georgia is the mostly mountainous one that specialises in like citrus and tea and wine. It does grow grain, as many countries do, but nothing like its neighbour.

    Also I'd struggle to describe any of the Baltics as dictatorships, unless I'm misreading your post.

    1191:

    Baltic dictatorships

    It’s rather more nuanced (as usual) when it comes to the narrative about who invaded who, or who is “just about to invade” who

    The Baltics are certainly not dictatorships, young democracies perhaps, but they did all have an amazing coincidence during the (Bill) Clinton presidency.

    Somehow, all three new nations Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania , ended up with their political leadership which featured this sort of CV

    Quoting from a book by James Kirchick Born to Estonian émigré parents in Sweden, raised in New Jersey, and educated at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, the perennially bow-tied [Estonian premier Toomas ] Ilves ran Radio Free Europe's Estonian Service in the 1980s to 1993

    RFE/RFL are NOT CIA , for a recent very narrow definition of NOT. When you get all three premiers, of these young free nations, apparently highly likely directly linked to an externally funded, non-transparent source, non-transparent policy, that’s not exactly dictatorships - but it’ s obviously a covert gain for someone....as was the Ukraine mess, & the Georgian border incidents (read the OSCE minority reports from the front line)

    Of course I should balance this with the facts that endemically corrupt Russian also meddles in everything it can, but they are much better at hiding their successes.

    Disclaimer: my wife was soviet-in-Estonian-SSR, and she dangerously voted in favor of a free Eesti, before the singing revolution. Look up the LV & LT ‘coincidences’ - it’s an impressive bit of Clinton statesmanship, to encircle the RF, quietly & comprehensively.

    1192:

    Greg, not just a troll, they are also a vicious hypocritical bully. They have directly harassed at least two posters off this forum (one of whom cited mental health concerns resulting from the level of harassment as the reason for leaving). The continued bizarre tolerance for their highly toxic behaviour has also resulted in the loss of at least one customer for Charlie's work (waves). No level of "interesting" or "alternative" posting should be tolerated when it results in the actual degradation of the mental health of those the poster interacts with.

    My two cents/pence/currency of choice.

    Will not be surprised (but mightily disappointed) if this post is nuked.

    1193:

    Ukraine is by far the grain basket of Eastern Europe

    It's even in their flag, the blue skies over the yellow wheat fields.

    1194:

    is the answer, because, otherwise he seems sane & sensible

    As would a government sponsored troll whose day job is to spread disinformation and conflict on various public social media / blogs outside of Russia.

    I don't know if any of my guesses are correct or if there's another answer. But at times he gets his facts spectacularly wrong. But only if you know history at more than a superficial level.

    1195:

    Then you are DEFINITELY either too young to remember or are choosing to select a different period. As I said, the main problems were in the 1950s and 1960s, and the USA had become almost sane by 1970, and much more so by 1980. Fer chrissake, look up the dates of the McCarthy witch hunts, the Cuban crisis, and (above all) SALT I. And, no, the USSR did NOT have nuclear (gun) ammunition in that era.

    I could correct the rest of your distortions, but can't be bothered.

    1196:

    Gloves are typically made of soft leather (for obvious reasons). As I said, it is possible to get fabrics that are as abrasion-resistant as leather (probably more so, if kevlar), but only in the past few decades, and all are environmentally harmful. The same is true for protection against very hot substances (500 Celsius and more),

    1197:

    The same can be said about Martin.

    1198:

    hmmm. 'bat shit insane' thats more irony than an anvil

    1199:

    ‘ These statements, at least, have traceable basis in reality.’

    Out of interest, what colour is the sky in that reality?

    1200:

    Ok, Brains Trust:

    You emerge blinking into the light after a pandemic, into the mother of all economic crises. Your nation’s economy is screwed. Your trading partners are equally screwed, as a global recession unheard-of in generations is charging you all like a rabid troll who thinks you slept with his girlfriend.

    Your govt needs to spend on fiscal stimulus. Fast. Your finance minister needs to be sticking the paddles on, screaming ‘Clear’ and jolting the economy back to life.

    What should they be spending on - and why?

    (“Decarbonising’ is not a sufficient answer; It needs to be concrete actual things they can do and it needs to be fast - things that can have tens or hundreds of thousands of people at work doing it in 2021)

    1201:

    Individual accidents vary a lot; I remember sliding down the road at 40mph causing a barely noticeable scrape on my trousers and nothing at all on gloves or jacket (all leather). But what I've noticed the general tendency of reports to be is that people are pleasantly surprised at how very good their reinforced fabric jeans are and how superior the protection is - compared to normal jeans. At the same time they are often tatered afterward and need replacement whereas leather probably would not. The higher the initial speed the more advantage leather seems to have.

    1202:

    The same can be said about Martin.

    Martins comments align with nearly all the commentary I've heard in real life from people with actual military experience. Dating from WWII to current times.

    Your opinions and conclusions? Not so much. But on many topics I find your facts and nuggets interesting and worth researching at times.

    1203:

    Of course no mater what the cyclist has on when they show up at the emergency room the staff still calls them donors most of the time.

    1204:

    Ah, no, you've missed my point - I was taking the piss out of the people who happily reproduce themselves while telling everyone else that they shouldn't, which seems to all too often be the position of professed believers in non-reproduction.

    1205:

    "there is no way to make Nuclear War "winnable". Hell, you can't even make one containable."

    This is true. And you and I are both quite happy to leave it at that and consider it a useful result.

    Nevertheless, some people find the notion of a war that they are inherently unable to win fundamentally incompatible with their already-existing notions of what having military power is all about. And rather than revise their existing ideas to fit the new facts they try and revise the new facts to fit their existing ideas. This leads them to take positions like denying that nuclear winter can happen or considering it still counts as a win even if Germany and much of Europe is permanently uninhabitable. Of course this is completely fucking mental. But that doesn't mean such people don't exist nor that they can't attain positions of influence. We can simply be thankful that enough other positions of influence were held by people a bit closer to reality.

    1206:

    Fucking Tight ;)

    1207:

    Ok, Brains Trust:

    You emerge blinking into the light after a pandemic, into the mother of all economic crises. ...

    What should they be spending on - and why?

    For starters: Universal Basic Income. Yes, it's expensive. But it'll provide a life vest for the 80% of your population who are hurting. Yes, income tax needs to go up and tax allowances need to be axed: but removing a bunch of obstacles to eating and having a roof overhead is a good start.

    (Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland lately said that she's very interested in it, and had costings: for a nation of 5.5M people it'd require a budget of £20.4Bn a year, of which £18.5Bn could be reclaimed by abolishing the current system of the first n thousand pounds of taxable income being zero-rated, plus an 8% rise in the basic tax rate from 20% to 28%. Which is lower than it was in the mid-1980s, I will note. There's a secondary saving from binning most of the disfunctional unemployment support system: no discussion of the impact on the state pension and special top-ups for the disabled, e.g. personal mobility allowance. Anyway: the spending gap looks superable, and at a stroke it'd reduce inequality.)

    Start raising taxes on gasoline while providing tax breaks for electric vehicles. Make it clear that this will progress for at least a decade and you need to plan your next car purchase as an EV starting now.

    Secondly: start building public housing. Singapore runs on it: the UK used to, until Thatcher financialized the housing market: and we're going to need better-designed dwellings for the climate change era. (e.g. contemplate social housing that conforms to passivhaus standards by default and has solar/wind/heat pumps integrated.)

    Note that construction is labour-intensive so it's going to act as a sink for unemployment.

    Ageing population in developing nations: COVID19 has swung a scythe through the care home sector because care homes are run on insufficient staff and rely on casualized agency workers to fill gaps in their rotas. We need more staff working in old age homes, which will begin to refill very rapidly (average period spent in one is only a couple of years).

    Education: there is no excuse for financializing higher education. It's infrastructure and should be treated as such: forgive/abolish student loans, period. Note that STEM is not essentially superior to Arts subjects in generating revenue, and in any case revenue potential is a lousy way of judging social utility.

    National pervasive high speed broadband is a no-brainer, and cheap (even in the USA) compared to the stuff I outlined above. Synergistic effects for the rest of the economy follow.

    Free healthcare ... well, we've got it, haven't we? (If you're American, read this as "Medicaid for All" with a side-order of "nationalize the hospitals and HMOs, nationalize the pharmaceutical companies, nationalize the ambulance operators, GPs become self-employed contractors paid for attending to a pool of members of the public.)

    That should keep things busy for at least six months, right? And it's a start.

    1208:

    I've seen some medical opinion to the effect that having air forced into the weakened lungs under pressure causes further damage and makes the inflammation worse, which is why once people get put on a ventilator it's so hard to get them off it again. (Accordingly a doctrine of putting patients on a ventilator purely because their blood oxygen saturation is below a given threshold, if they're not showing excessively adverse consequences of the low saturation, can be counterproductive, and it's better to stick to supplemental oxygen and mucolytics as long as you can get away with it.)

    This does rather suggest to me that creating the required pressure differential for respiration in a manner that more closely reproduces the natural pressure gradients in tissues, by means of an iron lung, is likely to be more effective at minimising further damage than intubation. It's also probably more effective at unloading the respiratory muscles, which can themselves consume enough oxygen to make it hard to maintain saturation if breathing is obstructed.

    1209:

    Oh, Nyarlathotep, it's changed its name again.

    Google Chrome users: this works.

    "Blog Comment Killfile" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blog-comment-killfile/kpoilnkelonbaapoapibddjaojohnpjf?hl=en-US

    1210:

    Start raising taxes on gasoline while providing tax breaks for electric vehicles.

    I started advocating this back around 79/80. When the Iranians took the Embassy (after the Shah, after ...). I suggested to all my friends that we should impose an additional 1/2 cents per gallon gas tax and raise it by that much every month. It would eliminate the need for mileage standards, raise taxes for the feds, and reduce our need for (at the time) foreign oil. All with little noticeable pain/impact day to day.

    I keep getting looks like I was speaking in an ancient dialect of Japanese.

    And for the few here who might not know, I'm from the USA.

    1211:

    Then you are DEFINITELY either too young to remember or are choosing to select a different period. As I said, the main problems were in the 1950s and 1960s, and the USA had become almost sane by 1970, and much more so by 1980. Fer chrissake, look up the dates of the McCarthy witch hunts, the Cuban crisis, and (above all) SALT I.

    I had to look back 5 days and 500 posts for examples where you specifically limited the discussion to the McCarty/Stalin era, or prior to 1972 and SALT 1. Your posts, and my replies to your posts at @1063 and @1072 were simply "Cold War", not "first half of the Cold War".

    And, no, the USSR did NOT have nuclear (gun) ammunition in that era.

    Try reading this summary:

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/atomnaya-artilleriya.htm

    ...In the 1960s, spetszaryadami began to equip almost all types of aviation, army, anti-aircraft and ship guided missiles. The main thing is that the diameter of the warhead is not less than 150 mm, and the weight is not more than 25 kg...

    ...The first nuclear weapon for use from standard 152mm artillery, called ZBV3, was finally accepted in 1965. Subsequent weapon designs followed using existing and new technology:

    * 152mm projectile ZBV3 for self-propelled guns 2S19 Msta-S, 2S3 Acacia, 2S5 Giatsint-S, towed gun D-20, 2A36 Giatsint-B, and 2A65 Msta-B. The yield was 1 kiloton, maximum range 17.4km. The nuclear weapon was designated RFYACVNIITF and designed by Academician E. I. Zababakhin in Snezhinsk. * 180mm projectile ZBV1 for S-23, MK-3-180 (originally a coast artillery piece), maximum range 45km. * 203mm projectile ZBV2 for self-propelled gun 2S7 Pion, and towed howitzer B4M, range from 18km to 30km. * 240mm projectile ZBV4 for mortar M-240 and self-propelled 2S4 Tulip. Normal maximum range 9.5km, and 18km with rocket assistance...

    Now, I've got my doubts about that 1965 acceptance date (you know, three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis) for the ZBV-3 nuclear gun ammunition, but it's the only one I've seen. Available evidence is that they were attempting to develop gun-fired nuclear weapons from the 1950s, and succeeded in the 1960s; they just had more technical success with the gentler flight profiles of rocket artillery (the USSR was always a much bigger fan of rockets than NATO, and their electronics industry was always problematic).

    I could correct the rest of your distortions, but can't be bothered.

    Unfortunately, that's often the excuse used by those who refuse to admit that they've been proved wrong.

    1212:

    Agree with much of what you say, though pondering my own thoughts for a reply to original poster.

    But, somewhat disagree with the idea of electric cars.

    Yes, they are better (for most definitions) than internal combustion, but they are also more complicated and introduce additional risk in the procurement.

    The Quebec Government as part of their plans for restarting their economy include the idea that they need to prepare their industry/province for increased protectionism around the world (which of course conveniently is a way of implementing their own protectionism).

    Until he managed to get the Canadian Conservative Party leadership process suspended due to Covid, there was a guy named O'Toole in a distant second place. He released a video to Twitter yesterday essentially calling for a reversal of many of the right wing policies of the last 40 years - essentially increasing Canada first protectionism with a punish China for creating Covid thrown in. There are certainly indications that this will resonate with voters at the moment.

    There are certainly many indications that many countries are now taking a more "me first" approach, and any plans will need to take this into consideration.

    For all the environmental faults, the internal combustion engine vehicle is easy to make and operate, even in a world that becomes isolationist and protectionist. I don't know that the same can be said for an electric car that requires raw materials (mainly for batteries?) from around the world.

    But really, whether it is electric or not, the goal should be to reduce private vehicle need as much as possible - road building/maintenance is environmentally harmful as well.

    So your public housing should, along with forcing builders of normal housing, be more forced around more environmentally friendly development that reduces/eliminates the need for a car in the first place and promotes walking/bikes/public transit.

    1213:

    Spain is mentioning a year of giving basic public income to a million citizens or more[0] Italy already has a widespread form of handouts, due the previous crises, a lot of 'normal' people pay with tokens at the supermarkets. I can see a ramping-up of this cash/token transfer as being very helpful to relaunch life-as-(new)-normal. The tokens don't seem to buy tobacco, perhaps not Grappa or Limocello, maybe a beer?

    UK housing build re-launch , would be wonderful. I first went to school at Ireland Wood primary. The "Ireland Wood" was I believe named due to 'immigrants' who constructed north Leeds in the 1940s, and the workers stayed in a local glen. possibly. I vote for a lot of green-belt building. Compulsory purchased, clever scientific siting, away from flood-plains. Start with a million homes. Think big.

    Due Covid-19, UK actually will very soon have enough internal 'immigrants', the formerly employed B-Ark squad, who might be able to run a Thatcherite YOP[1] to build enormous numbers of kit homes. Some UK towns, areas such as LS Queenswood Drive still have just post WW2 'temporary prefab' dwellings, in use. There have of course been recent reality TV shows to quickly build a street. Bring Kevin back from alleged bankruptcy, he could head the ramp-up.

    UK society might be about to change a lot, I can't see a Westminster based Nudge team rebuilding the country with subtle Philip Cross Wikipedia sanitising, and tame media briefings. There have been some Tweets today that were nudged away after just a few minutes.

    I might be wrong - but this could be a revolutionary time for the Kingdom. I notice that Chad just withdrew from all its foreign wars/peace-operations. Saudi might have paused their Yemeni jaunt too.

    Hard work ahead for UK, OK, free whole-UK Uni too, at least in Health related & STEM subjects.

    [0] (according to listening to the musical & authoritative BayRadio from Javéa - in English, with a better focussed news service than many of the BBC channels) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_Opportunities_Programme

    1214:

    Ok, Brains Trust:

    You emerge blinking into the light after a pandemic, into the mother of all economic crises. Your nation’s economy is screwed.

    As an aside, if you are a non-profit (say, a heritage railway currently in financial trouble) or a local government, the immediate advice would be to have some plans for stuff that can be done quick - with the caveat I wouldn't spend a lot of money preparing for it. If a central government is going to suddenly start spending on "shovel ready" stimulus work, if you can you want to be in line to get some capital projects done - but, as indicated, don't spend a lot of money preparing in case said central government doesn't spend.

    So, back to the question at hand.

    The first, and likely most important, point is that we really are in unknown territory - this isn't a normal economic downturn but rather it is self-inflicted shutdown. Many of the people suddenly applying for unemployment benefits aren't really unemployed - they are simple "on hold not getting paid" and in theory many of them can simply go back to work once the restrictions are lifted. It is this basis that has many government offering wage subsidies, to make the return to work easier.

    So the question really shouldn't be how to spend to restart the economy, but rather how to spend so the economy automatically restarts for the majority of it, with targeted help for those that are doomed.

    To that end the current shutdowns aren't the biggest threat/problem, but rather the biggest problem is the potential for further shutdowns in the next 12 to 18 months until a vaccine or other measure can hopefully be in place.

    So the biggest economic threat is that consumers freeze much of their spending even when the economy restarts, the result of sudden un-budgeted costs they have just experienced (how many kids suddenly needed access to a device of some sort for school, the inability to shop for food based on sale prices, etc.) along with a concern that it will happen again.

    To this end you and your finance minister should be spending now, and not when you restart things. So called "helicopter money" should be going out monthly to help cover these unexpected costs and to reassure consumers that they don't need to freeze their spending in case you need to pause the economy again in 3 months. A consumer base that isn't afraid of a second/third/etc pause is the biggest weapon to restoring your economy you can have - sadly there is no indication that any/many governments have figured this out. And if you can't give your consumers confidence to go out and buy that new car, etc. then you likely have a really big problem.

    That being said, even in that perfect world you are going to have to accept some parts of the economy, primarily tourism, are going to be hard hit. With all the media stories of citizens struggling to return home with flights disappearing people are going to be very leery of long distance travel for a while. At the same time, people will want out of their homes, so an ad campaign promoting local tourism should be in the works/ready to go as soon as possible. Replace many of those foreign visitors with locals for a change seeing what is around them. Back during SARS the Ontario government temporarily eliminated the sales tax on theatres and other tourist attractions, make those things a temporary "bargain" to encourage visits (and hence spending).

    Construction is likely to be hard hit, as developers put projects on hold until they see if there is going to be demand for those planned projects. This obviously means that any current government projects (in the UK, see HS2) need to continue to keep those workers employed. Solving this though is harder, as you can't just throw money at it - it takes years to design and get all the legal stuff done - so there typically is very little stuff waiting to be done. So this again falls to the "spend now" part, where a small amount of money should already have been sent out to lower levels of government to see about prepping so called shovel-ready projects so if there is a need to spend you have stuff that can provide employment immediately. This is also where that helicopter money comes in, because a tax-break or grants to upgrade homes (better windows, insulation, new kitchen, etc.) can provide employment but only if consumers are confident enough to spend.

    1215:

    whitroth @1156: First, of course, it always bothered me, given that Russia got its name from the Rus in Kiev, for the Ukraine and Georgia to break away. I also not that the Baltics were part of Russia for almost 200 years, but sure, let's let Mississippi and the rest of the South secede from the US. These are very divergent points of Russian history, measured in centuries in between. Kievan Rus (it wasn't named like that back then, too) was all but destroyed by Mongols and has no direct lineage whatsoever to modern countries occupying these lands. Georgia ran away from Turkish sphere of influence when the iron was still hot, so there were quite a lot of middle Asia conflicts back in the 18-19th centuries. Baltic were non-subject by themselves(and still largely are) until the brief moment of independence after revolution.

    No, neither of them were/are nice. But this is better for the 99% how? Everything is completely screwed. Healthcare-wise, the last straw of Ukraine can hold on in ongoing crisis is the prevalence of people vaccinated by evil, totalitarian BCG vaccine from the times of communist occupation.

    Mayhem @1188: I think you're confusing the two. Ukraine is by far the grain basket of Eastern Europe, it's the equivalent of the great plains of the US.

    Vulch @1191: It's even in their flag, the blue skies over the yellow wheat fields./i>

    OH DEAR. OH NO. OH SNAP. I guess Europeans really did not learn from their last mistake. "Bread basket" of Europe may still produce a lot of grains, but actual status of the land depends on economical efficiency of the agriculture and not on the amount of land available. Healthy agriculture comes from chemical and machinery industry, infrastructure and organization of people - traditional and political. Unfortunately for Europe, current political tradition means total corruption, no industry, no infrastructure, no organization and complete subordination to American interests in the region.

    This, of course, doesn't stop them from eyeing Russia's lands of similar quality in the meantime. http://uawire.org/ukrainian-mps-form-coalition-to-reclaim-russian-kuban-region

    icehawk @1197: Out of interest, what colour is the sky in that reality? It is complicated. https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/29/7089599/why-the-sky-looks-blue-and-the-sun-looks-yellow

    1216:

    Trottelreiner @ 1108: Speaking about tactical nukes, I guess the commentariat is growing old; nobody mentioned the chicken-powered nuclear land mine yet?

    First I ever heard of it, but 1957 is a bit before my time. I didn't enlist in the Army until 1975 & even then, long cancelled British weapons development programs wouldn't have featured in my MOS schooling.

    1217:

    The concept was still around in the 80s anyway. More sane, perhaps, but not completely so. It certainly hadn't gone away altogether.

    1218:

    "First I ever heard of it"

    I'm slightly amazed at that. It's something of a perennial favourite on here and it's cropped up on several previous threads.

    1219:

    Blue Peacock used to be one of the strange attractors on this blog that used to come up around the 300 posting mark or sometimes quite before that; IIRC, shortly after that a discussion about WWII aircrafts would show up, but my memory might be mistaken.

    As for "atomic demolition monitions" in general, according to the German wiki article on it, the German military commanders first off vetoed their use in at least one exercise, MAKE FAST VIII.

    There is another article about a German commander who compared tactical nukes to "duelling in closed rooms with hand grenades".

    Problem is, I only found German articles in IfZ and Spiegel, little in English.

    1220:

    Charlie Stross @1205: That should keep things busy for at least six months, right? And it's a start. You know what, I would agree. This actually goes into the line with the same assumptions laid out by some other economists, all it takes is just about 6 months after the epidemic ends somewhere in the second quarter. I mean, NOBODY, ABSOLUTELY NOT ONE politician or media outlet talks about what to do about this crisis, how to keep obligations and debts and drag people out of misery. Everybody ALREADY are all about how to dump these debts, divert attention, grab as much as possible and run. Neither do I really know what is required to live as long as that, perhaps a complete sacrificial of EU in the blood ritual of financial drain will somehow allow this to happen.

    To quote Bulgakov: What's the use of dying in a ward surrounded by a lot of groaning and croaking incurables? Wouldn't it be much better to throw a party with that twenty-seven thousand and take poison and depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by lovely drunken girls and happy friends?

    Universal Basic Income The problem with current iteration of UBT is it is already libertarian practice that pampers to corporation interests and is basically turbo-welfare on speed. It is a corner of liberal thinking as we see it in modern world - people receiving money for doing absolutely nothing. https://medium.com/swlh/the-libertarian-case-for-a-ubi-3469faaf6364 https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-UBI-Universal-Basic-Income-is-more-of-a-socialist-or-libertarian-idea Not to say about crashing the economy with insurmountable amounts of money injections.

    there is no excuse for financializing higher education start building public housing Free healthcare This is all good and well, but this kind of management will completely demolish any resemblance of US as a great power, effect of which, combined with subsequent market crash, will result in (by some estimations) 40% drop in economy in subsequent normalization. To compare, post-USSR drop in GDP was less than that and it was stretched to almost a decade.

    David.in.Italy @1189: Baltic dictatorships Modern definition of it is very strict and straight - here's a dictator, and then there's a dictatorship. No dictator - no dictatorship. So, not, they are not. It does not make them any better, all of them are very deeply connected to US intelligence and military, and they are not afraid to flaunt it in the faces of public when they see it fit.

    Speaking of Nazi Alliance at large, I am about to throw the topic out of the window. I am completely disillusioned in modern state of "globalism". My will to discuss anything about it has hit rock bottom, it is time to save on my nerves for what's coming next, anyway.

    I just found out that NATO wasn't content with screwing just with Europe alone, back in the December. https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/china-brought-nato-closer-together/ So instead of actually doing anything useful about European unity (like, ever), or maybe strengthen the position in Poland around new bases, they now seek to move onto Asia. They write it in here, black on white, that they intend to use their military strength to mitigate China's economic influence. That's some defensive alliance we got.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html I'm fxxking done, thanks for all the fish.

    1221:

    Everybody ... are all about how For the sake of avoiding of misunderstanding, like it happened last time, I will have to elaborate once again. That means "everybody who is bearing responsibility" in US/NATO, or rather "who is in control of the US-centered media and politicians". Because last time it wasn't clear enough.

    1222:

    Unfortunately for Europe, current political tradition means total corruption, no industry, no infrastructure, no organization and complete subordination to American interests in the region.

    So... little change, then.

    I’ve mentioned before that Dad was posted to a British Embassy in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. One of the interesting things about the local centrally-planned industry is that it made 1970s Britain and it’s heavily-unionised industry sectors look like a totemic example of peerless efficiency.

    AIUI (apocryphal tale, so buyer beware) it was reckoned by the FO in Moscow that nearly 50% of timber production never made it to its intended destinations; if you don’t have DIY as part of the 5-year Plan, and hence no mechanism for the people to get wood for building or repairs, then corruption will replace central planning; it’s amazing what can fall off the back of a lorry.

    Likewise, the local transport industry was estimated to be running at 30% efficiency; breakdowns and repairs, shortages, etc, meant that a significant proportion of crops were spoiled immediately after harvest, because they rotted while waiting for pickups that were late, or never happened.

    The opinion of the Diplomatic staff was that this was a beautiful country, with lots of decent people, screwed over by corruption from the top down, and inefficiency from the bottom up. The nomenklatura did OK, mind you...

    1223:

    But then they'd all be screaming for foreign aid, given that they get more, sometimes a lot more, from the US federal gov't than they pay in taxes.

    1224:

    whitroth @ 1109: Let me note two things about the US system[s]: first, it used to be the state that appointed the Senators, and second, in the mainsteam media, people are worrying about the GOP refusing to allow everyone to vote absentee (by mail), and that it may come to the GOP of that state *appointing* the electors for the Electoral College.

    Whether the other states would accept them as accredited is another story altogether.

    The states already appoint the electors.

    The thing about the Electoral College is it has NEVER worked the way it was intended.1

    The men who wrote the Constitution were fairly well to do, educated men of good conscience who put the common good before self interest (even if they couldn't resolve the issue of slavery & basically just kicked the can down the road to be settled later).

    They worried the passions of an inflamed mob could lead to the election of a scoundrel who didn't. The Electors were supposed to be men like the "Founding Fathers" who would put the common good of the nation before self interest (or partisan interest, although political parties weren't yet a thing).

    The "Founding Fathers" had a great big blind spot and did not anticipate the emergence of an oligarchy of kleptocrats exploiting government for their own advancement. They just couldn't conceive of men who would NOT place "promote the general Welfare" ahead of self interest running the government (at state or national levels).

    Plus, the "Founding Fathers" expected the Constitution to be amended whenever it became clear some things really did not work. They made it difficult to amend to prevent frivolous amendments2, but they didn't intend that it be impossible. The Electoral College is one of those things that "didn't work" and should have been amended out of the Constitution early on.

    If the Electoral College worked as intended, Donald J. Trump would NOT be President. I don't know who would be, probably not Clinton, but it wouldn't be Trump. Maybe John McCain? ... in which case Mike Pence would probably be President by now.

    1 It worked partially in that it keeps the more populous states from riding roughshod over the less populous states; more so in early days than it does today, because now it seems to enable less populous states to ride roughshod over the more populous ones.

    2 Which as it turned out was another of those things that didn't work, or we wouldn't have had prohibition (Amendments 18 & 21).

    1225:

    There is another article about a German commander who compared tactical nukes to "duelling in closed rooms with hand grenades".

    Sounds about right. The other memorable yet depressing quote was “small towns in Germany are generally 10kt apart”.

    IIRC, the story about Corps-level war gaming was that the British, Dutch, and Belgian forces in the North expected to fight a retreating battle, trading countryside for time (if war means that diplomacy has failed, then the Army exists to buy time for the politicians to start f*ing talking before the sunshine spreads). The Americans in the south expected to sit tight, hold their ground, and break whatever was thrown at them. And there was a sneaking suspicion that the Germans would conclude that the best defence was a strong offence, and start heading eastwards.

    Cold War equipment reflected that; British tanks prized firepower and protection over mobility, American tanks went for a more balanced approach, while both Soviet and German tanks placed a big emphasis on speed and mobility (Leopard 1 is pretty small and light by comparison with Chieftain / M60A3).

    1226:

    Well, aside from the teams that will line up all members of the GOP in federal and some state legislatures and shoot them....

  • In St. Ronnie's first term (that's 81-85, for you kids), there was a report that something like 60%? 80%? of the US infrastructure, roads, dams, etc, etc, were 80-90 years old and more, and needed replacing. GOP response, from then until now has been "but where's the ROI for this quarter?" This will take hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

  • For the US, rebuild industry: a) massively raise taxes on all stock trades b) regulate, or wipe out by law, the gray banking industry c) fund ALL SCHOOL SYSTEMS so that NO TEACHER HAS TO SPEND THEIR OWN MONEY TO PROVIDE SUPPLIES FOR THE CLASSROOM. d) nationalize the healthcare industry (which means mostly wiping out the medical insurance industry) e) nationalize the pharmaceutical industry* f) more then fully fund Amtrak, and force the railroads to 1) give all passenger trains priority and 2) bring at least one through track up to high speed passenger standards, not medium speed freight standards, and fund it with money taken from road and air transportation subsidies. g) wipe out the majority of "independent contractors" - make them employeees. h) fuck the consulting companies, HIRE massively more federal employees.. and any "contractor" who has been doing the same job for over 1.5 years is to be offered a federal position (says the guy who worked for 10 years as a contractor doing the same job, sysadmin). i) I got your protectionism here: any company that sends the jobs overseas/out of country will pay at least unemployment, if not 2/3rds of the pay, of all employees in country who were layed off until they either find a comparably-paying job, or retire, and if that takes 20 years, TOUGH TITTIES.

  • Shall I go on?

    1227:

    A tiny sop: they can provide insurance so that, say, if you're in a hospital, you get a room with a single bed, rather than sharing the room with one or two others.

    Bonus: doctors and hospitals don't need a team to deal with each and every different set up paperwork and requirements of each and every insurance co (they need this pre-approved, they don't....)

    1228:

    Sorry, the last post was the * comment on the previous one. The * comment on that previous one is * Shoot all the chief execs of all pharmaceutical companies. Or jail them for life.

    1229:

    Martin @1220: So... little change, then. The difference between 30% capacity and 0% is infinite still.

    AIUI (apocryphal tale.. Duly noted. And I assume all of that was picked up by his personal accounting from the back of the Embassy, delivered in Xerox paperboxes. I've heard lots of these stories back in the school days, however, since then I've developed more critical thinking after finishing with higher education.

    1230:

    "I vote for a lot of green-belt building."

    Oh dear Cthulhu please no. Too much of that going on already, too much vanishing green land and anastomosing sprawl. And all of it requires a car to get to/from/about. Keep it in the brown if you must do it at all.

    But then the whole proposition of making up extra stuff to do to "balance" the period of doing less is arse about face. It's not a problem to be solved, it's an opportunity to recognise how useless so much of the shit we normally get up to really is and how little it matters if people aren't doing it, and carry on not doing it. It's already done more to reduce greenhouse emissions than has been achieved by fuck knows how many years of politicians and oil interests doing their best not to, and it's bloody daft to just throw that away by deliberately starting all the useless crap up again.

    And the point is reinforced by the sole reason given as justification in almost all the calls to start it up again: "people aren't getting paid". Nobody cares that people aren't doing the stuff they were getting paid for, only that they're not getting paid. So the thing to do is to carry on not caring they're not doing it and just pay them anyway. It's obvious that the stuff doesn't matter, so insisting that it has to be done as a precondition to people getting paid makes no sense.

    In any case there's no need to make up extra stuff to do when we are (or at least bloody well ought to be) learning what stuff we do need to do more of because we've stopped doing it so that people can spend their time being paid to do useless crap instead and now we are feeling the lack. Things like building extra hospital wards to spend most of the time sitting around empty and warehouses to spend it sitting around full, and letting people learn to be nurses and doctors without putting them off by paying them peanuts and working them until they collapse (UK) or not allowing them to treat people who haven't got any money (US). (And the more is a lot less than the less, so we still win there too.)

    We can't think in terms of "getting back to normal" and pretending it never happened and going back to all the bad ideas that have made it more difficult to cope with so we have the same fucking problems all over again next time round. Because this is normal, there will be a next time round, and failing to learn the lesson this time will only make next time happen sooner.

    1231:

    whitroth @ 1127: Don't remember hearing about BZ back then. Now, around '70, what *was* available on the street was known as STP (for 'serene, tranquil, peaceful', or the name of a popular car oil additive), that was supposed to have been developed by the military. It was a bit stronger, and lasted three times as long as acid.

    It was NOT developed by the military, at least not by the U.S. military.

    Had it a couple, three times. The last time was the last - by the time we were coming down the next day, my buddy tossed the rest into the sewer grate, because from muscle effects, we figured out that some asshole had cut it with strychnine.

    That's pretty much all street drugs - methamphetamine and/or heroin (or nowadays oxycodone) mixed with rat poison. That's capitalism for ya'.

    1232:

    A tiny sop: they can provide insurance so that, say, if you're in a hospital, you get a room with a single bed, rather than sharing the room with one or two others.

    Modern hospitals should all be single room though (for infection control reasons), so without those 2 or more to a room there is little need for the supplemental insurance long term.

    Which does bring up the point that maybe one of things spending money on in the next X years should be bringing all those older hospitals around the world to modern standards.

    1233:

    PIGEON @ 1204 😁

    @ 1206 Which is why a modern version of an "iron lung" is/maybe a better idea than ventilators

    Charlie You've been following what the FT says (!) What level of "UBI" would you recommend & where would the tax bands be, compared to now? Unfortunately, the first x thousand pounds being zero-rated is a VERY GOOD IDEA - it also helps the lowest paid. Might want to stop the clock, though, so it ceases to go up year-on-year. Education Yes - England's is improving, very slowly, from the disaster-period of 1975-85, Scotland's has tanked under both Labour & the SNP

    What about the Brexit jokers & the fuckwit brexshiteers, who will refuse to acknowledge anything at all has changed - which might, or might not include BoZo????

    sleepingroutine You obviously are conveniently forgetting the destruction of the Ukraine as a breadbasket under Joe - called the "holodomor" I believe? Do try harder, whether you are a troll or not.

    Pigeon @ 1228 yes, far too many people want to build on the green belt. FUCK NO WAY!

    1234:

    SFReader @ 1148:

    Re: '"Pre-washed jeans"... no, it doesn't have to use heavy, nasty chemical processes.'

    That's what I heard from someone reliable in the industry. Could be that like bamboo fiber there's more than one method and - like bamboo fiber - regulations may not require labels describing the specific 'pre-washed' process used.

    The whole pre-washed/acid-washed jeans thing came from a cotton mill that got flooded in the aftermath of a hurricane. Large bales of denim cloth were "ruined" by chemicals from one factory washing into the cotton mill in flash floods. IIRC, it was Hurricane Cammile.

    Then someone got the bright idea of using the "ruined" denim anyway & making distressed (pre-washed/acid-washed) jeans a fashion.

    1235:

    Free healthcare This is all good and well, but this kind of management will completely demolish any resemblance of US as a great power,

    Remember I'm not American?

    My close-focus is on the future here in Scotland, which in turn is not even the same as England.

    Scotland is politically considerably to the left of England, is currently ruled by a left-wing civic nationalist party who look set to bulldoze the opposition at the election next summer, and who are talking about (a) another independence referendum, and (b) extending the already-in-progress Universal Basic Income pilot scheme in Dundee to the rest of the country.

    This hasn't come out of nowhere.

    (As for the USA, I'm not convinced it will survive past the next election, in November: there is some very weird stuff going on between groups of states who are now actively trying to bypass the Federal government, because the Feds are acting towards them in a manner which can only be described as hostile, at the behest of Trump.)

    1236:

    efficiency/wood/lorries etc

    Sounds to me like the timber industry was probably functioning reasonably well, then.

    After all, the function of a timber industry is to supply wood to people who need it. The anecdote implies that it was supplying wood to people who needed it individually and people who needed it on the state level and having enough left over for the USSR to be one of the biggest timber exporters in the world.

    Sure, maybe the dancing around with numbers of money didn't assume the kind of formation that breadheads call efficiency, but that's not the point, because that's not what it's for.

    One of the things that was a significant problem for the USSR was that they kind of understood that but also kind of didn't. They generally did rather better than the capitalist world but with a great deal of variation among the various fields of human endeavour both in how well they understood it and how well they applied it. Partly because it's too easy to interpret the conclusions of someone who wrote a book called "Capital" overwhelmingly in terms of money, but partly also because they weren't able to isolate themselves from the rest of the world enough to not need to care about playing the same silly games.

    1237:

    Apropos of nothing...

    While we're worrying about a stupid coronavirus, in the background, The Singularity is taking off while people aren't really noticing.

    This article is about some bright bulb researcher programming AI use Darwinian algorithms to evolve new computational techniques. So far it's been starting from scratch and rediscovering methods humans already discovered. I doubt it's going to stay in that mode, and I wouldn't be surprised if the big, quiet research groups in the Alphabet Soup world haven't been doing stuff like this for many years.

    Oh well, interesting times. Maybe this Covid-19 reinfection mess will ultimately be solved by an Angelnet? I mean, it's as likely a scenario as Putin I and his Agent Orange single-handedly using their absolute powers to bring it under control...

    1238:

    whitroth @ 1149: Now, I've run into, and heard Vegans in person and in print IN THE US who are worse than Scientologists or the Funnymentalists who not only won't go away, but try to give you Chick Tracts (and if you don't know what those are, go look 'em up).

    I used to have an elderly neighbor who whenever the door to door missionaries came around would immediately set them to work pulling weeds in her garden. Didn't matter if they were religious, political or commercial. If they wanted to talk to her, they were going to pull weeds while they went through their spiel.

    1240:

    True - the problem isn’t that the economy doesn’t provide, the problem is that the black economy provides in the gaps; and the interface between criminal and legal economy creates corruption.

    Much like the alcohol industry in Prohibition-era USA (insert references to the “War on Drugs”), the efforts to centrally plan the economy, created an opportunity for the ambitious criminal to gain money/power/influence. No prohibition, and the Mafia would have been a lot less-well-off and less powerful in the 1940s.

    AIUI, and I look to sleepingroutine to correct me here (because I may well be wrong) there’s a reason why wealth in Russia sits largely in two groups from the 1990s - the KGB types and the Criminal types. Both had the understanding of free markets, the networks, the wealth, and the ruthlessness to do best out of the collapse of the USSR...

    1241:

    _Moz_ @ 1168: Oddly enough our local orthodox nunnery is keeping their school open and providing lunch for kids (which they don't normally do) even though their average age has got to be close to 80. I haven't asked but given their lack of (new) PPE they've got to be relying on God swill to keep them safe. (they're still wearing their servant garb, obviously, but no masks or gloves except where mandated by law).

    ... or they might believe getting sick and dying while doing "God's" work is "God's" will, so it's Ok.

    1242:

    mdlve @ 1176: They may want to note the Virginia preacher, who packed his church despite the state mandated no gatherings of more than 10 people, because "he talked to god", has died of Covid-19 and his wife is sick with Covid-19.

    https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/virginia-pastor-who-held-packed-church-service-dies-of-coronavirus/

    I won't tell 'em if you don't. Do 'em good to figure it out for themselves.

    1243:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1195: The same can be said about Martin.

    ... or you for that matter.

    1244:

    I suspect the US will last past the election, even if it's a pretty bad matchup (Uncle Hair Toucher vs. Unspeakable Daddy).

    What you're seeing is why it's called the United States and not the Republic of America. It's more like the EU, in that individual states really are independent enough to tell the White House to go engage in non-reproductive self-copulatory activities if the rather uninformed President tries to claim powers that he doesn't have. Someone's got to lead.

    I wouldn't be surprised if we're seeing Trump's McCarthy moment, where he just pisses off too many people and kills too many people who actually follow his advice*. I mean, when you have the CNN chyron scrawl author started getting cheeky in the coverage Monday's press briefing, you know it's bad.

    The problem the democrats have is that the DNC threw it's weight behind a man who's currently showing little if any leadership in this crisis, and that's a problem. He shouldn't be campaigning, IMHO he should be mobilizing all the disaffected progressives to go out, give blood, make masks, help get everyone fed, see what needs to be done for post-infection convalescence and provide it for those who can't help themselves, organize rent strikes against slumlords, and so on. Then he'd ride a tidal wave of support in.

    *c.f. South Dakota. For those overseas, SD has around 890,000 people and no shelter in place, while San Diego County has over three million and shelter in place, if you want to compare rates. Realizing that San Diego's flattening out and South Dakota is on the upswing...

    1245:

    I vote for a lot of green-belt building.

    As other have noted, nope. The combination of climate change and a world that may be moving towards being more isolationist means that green belts should be protected. The natural ecosystem is going to be stressed over the next decades and we really need to do all we can to help it, and bulldozing it under development isn't helping it.

    Anything that can be used for food production needs to be protected now, and the non-food parts protected while we made a more informed decision on how much we need to maintain the natural world that we so depend on without knowing it.

    There have of course been recent reality TV shows to quickly build a street.

    Remember, reality TV is anything but reality. That have put in likely well over a year prepping everything so that all the planning, legal necessities, and scheduling "just falls into place".

    1246:

    Just a couple of things I'd add.

    On the electric vehicle front, we need to develop a good system for recycling the batteries (or at least reusing the materials the batteries are made from) NOW before it becomes a problem ... and it will if we don't.

    Old age homes. We need to work real hard at making it possible for old people to stay in their own homes. I don't want to go to an old folks home, 'cause people who go there DIE ... and by that I mean die much too soon.

    1247:

    Old age homes. We need to work real hard at making it possible for old people to stay in their own homes. I don't want to go to an old folks home, 'cause people who go there DIE ... and by that I mean die much too soon. That's exactly what my wife's work is. Keeping old people in their home, bringing them thee-course hot meals every day(50% organic), helping with clening up, shopping and personl hyghiene. Old people pay according to their means, some less than one euro a day. But it's all financed by taxes.

    1248:

    Pigeon @ 1206: I've seen some medical opinion to the effect that having air forced into the weakened lungs under pressure causes further damage and makes the inflammation worse, which is why once people get put on a ventilator it's so hard to get them off it again. (Accordingly a doctrine of putting patients on a ventilator purely because their blood oxygen saturation is below a given threshold, if they're not showing excessively adverse consequences of the low saturation, can be counterproductive, and it's better to stick to supplemental oxygen and mucolytics as long as you can get away with it.)

    This does rather suggest to me that creating the required pressure differential for respiration in a manner that more closely reproduces the natural pressure gradients in tissues, by means of an iron lung, is likely to be more effective at minimising further damage than intubation. It's also probably more effective at unloading the respiratory muscles, which can themselves consume enough oxygen to make it hard to maintain saturation if breathing is obstructed.

    AFAIK, at least part of the problem is congestion making it physically more difficult to breathe. It's more work to expand the chest & lungs when they're full of fluid. But I don't think you need a full iron lung. I remember seeing something that did a similar task that could be worn by a patient sitting in a chair, something that would assist the muscles. It should work with supplemental oxygen, because the other side of the problem is mucus filling the lungs decreases the surface area the lungs have available for the oxygen exchange.

    If the problem that needs treating is LOW "blood oxygen saturation, might there be other means of increasing that saturation? I'm thinking something along the lines of dialysis. Instead of filtering toxins out of the blood and returning it to the body, filter oxygen INTO the blood.

    Of course, you'd probably want to filter out toxins at the same time, so make it "IN ADDITION TO ...".

    1249:

    Re: 'Researchers have created software that borrows concepts from Darwinian evolution, including “survival of the fittest,” ...'

    The article doesn't say what the stimulus/motivation is without which it can't be Darwinian. Okay, it does say that less well-performing algos get pruned which makes it sound closer to an artificial (top-down) breeding program than something that's internally motivated (self-directed).

    1250:

    Correction Scotland is politically considerably to the left of England, is currently ruled by a supposedly left-wing civic petty-minded Presbyterian nationalist party, filled with speirin snnopers & minders of others business. OTOH the UBI scheme is a good idea - but I can't get a sensible answer out of google in a hurry - how much per annum, at present?

    Heteromeles So ... in spite of the initial spike in the Dem cities, the rural Reps are going to be hit so much harder in the end - yes? Agree re, Biden - he's a complete wet-blanket, approximating to an old-fashioned inadequate leftwing tory here. Where you neeed Social Democrats.

    1251:

    So ... in spite of the initial spike in the Dem cities, the rural Reps are going to be hit so much harder in the end - yes?

    Hopefully no, but we'll see. The problem is that the health care system is pretty minimal over much of the US, with small rural hospitals closing. A small uptick in rural cases can cascade badly. What happened in South Dakota is that a meat-packing plant got thoroughly infected and had to shut down. These kinds of rural operations, often run on immigrant labor, are just as bad as urban sweatshops for disease spread, but there's little or no infrastructure to deal when it happens.

    Georgia's in a similar boat. There was a report out of Athens, GA (a university town) about how the rural hospitals nearby were shutting down over the last few years, meaning that now that the virus is spreading through rural areas, the really sick people are ending up in the urban hospital, precipitating shortages.

    There's something analogous to this happening in San Diego, where one working-class and more conservative area is getting hit disproportionately hard by the virus, and the hospital that serves it has more cases than any other.

    1252:

    Martin @ 1209: Now, I've got my doubts about that 1965 acceptance date (you know, three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis) for the ZBV-3 nuclear gun ammunition, but it's the only one I've seen. Available evidence is that they were attempting to develop gun-fired nuclear weapons from the 1950s, and succeeded in the 1960s; they just had more technical success with the gentler flight profiles of rocket artillery (the USSR was always a much bigger fan of rockets than NATO, and their electronics industry was always problematic).

    It would depend on WHEN and HOW they came into possession of their warhead design.

    The U.S. had the 203 mm/8 in W33 that could be fired by a standard M115 Howitzer as early as 1957 and had the 155 mm W48 that could be fired from the M109 self-propelled howitzer and M114 & M198 towed howitzers beginning in 1963.

    I'm pretty sure Soviet spies acquired those designs even before the U.S. Army began receiving their tactical nuclear artillery shells, so that gives the Soviets at least two years to produce an "acceptable" copy of their own.

    1253:

    hence no mechanism for the people to get wood for building or repairs, then corruption will replace central planning; it’s amazing what can fall off the back of a lorry.

    I have good memories of a talk by Kirk McKusick, about the early days of BSD Unix. He claimed, with a straight face, that one day, he and Bill Joy were walking across the Berkeley campus, when they saw some microfiche fall off the back of a truck. And it turned out to be source for the VMS operating system, which at the time had much better interrupt latency than BSD did.

    1254:

    The basic Darwinian algorithm I'm aware of is where you start with a system and a process, see how system runs process, produce a bunch of random variants of system, rerun process, select whichever variant(s) do best, randomly vary these again, rerun process, etc. until there's a stable winner.

    I figured that's what they were doing here, and I suspect we're agreeing while seeming to disagree because we use different terminology.

    1255:

    For all the environmental faults, the internal combustion engine vehicle is easy to make and operate, even in a world that becomes isolationist and protectionist. I don't know that the same can be said for an electric car that requires raw materials (mainly for batteries?) from around the world.

    I don't agree. Making an ICE car involves a lot more steps, and requires building many more parts - hoses, spark plugs, radiators, crankshafts, pumps, tanks, sumps, and the like. The car companies have robots to do all the drilling and grinding, now, which makes it easy to overlook how high-precision it is, and how much advanced metallurgy it took to get where we are.

    Aside from the battery pack (and electric motor), an electric car is 'way 'way easier to make than an ICE vehicle. They're also easier to operate and have greatly reduced maintenance. If batteries were a mature technology, the way spark plugs are, then car companies would just buy third-party ones and be done. The reason Tesla is doing well, is precisely that the technology isn't mature, and being out ahead in that one area has paid off big time. Tesla has adjusted its battery technology several times in the last few years, and are (for instance) reducing the amount of cobalt they use.

    1256:

    Pigeon @ 1216:

    "First I ever heard of it"

    I'm slightly amazed at that. It's something of a perennial favourite on here and it's cropped up on several previous threads.

    Maybe it holds a place in U.K. military folklore similar to the U.S. Atomic Hand grenade.

    The final prototype of which had a minimum safe distance of 500 ft, but no one was ever able to throw one more than 100 ft. Of course they never tested that with a live weapon.

    1257:

    Old age homes. We need to work real hard at making it possible for old people to stay in their own homes. I don't want to go to an old folks home, 'cause people who go there DIE ... and by that I mean die much too soon.

    Sometimes there's no alternative.

    My parents were okay at home, with some support -- a sibling who lived half a mile down the road -- until Dad hit 92 and went downhill sharply. Mum was 88 at the time, and in a wheelchair (above-the-knee amputee, too weak to be fitted with a prosthesis).

    We managed to keep Dad at home through to the end, with palliative care thanks to the community nursing service. And Mum stayed on at home with two daily carer visits plus family visits until she had a stroke and went into hospital. Then had another stroke (or two).

    At which point, she clearly wasn't going home, because she was hemilaterally paralysed on the right, and had no left leg, and was right-handed -- she was functionally all but tetraplegic at that point.

    That's well beyond "maintain at home with carers", it's actually well beyond most retirement/residential homes -- your options are limited to facilities with full-time registered nurses on duty, and I don't think any amount of tinkering with the layout of the dwelling to make it wheelchair-friendly is going to help when the resident needs that level of care.

    (She lived another 9-10 months with the best quality of life we could provide. She made it past her 90th birthday. And she missed out on COVID19, which was a mercy: she died suddenly one night, probably of another stroke. (No post mortem because she was already clearly on the way out from other causes.))

    Anyway, here's the point: of course we want people to stay at home as long as possible. But in many cases where that's not possible indefinitely, unless your definition of "home" encompasses a hospital bed and a 24x7 live-in nursing auxiliary with twice-daily visits by a medical professional.

    1258:

    stirner @ 1245:

    Old age homes. We need to work real hard at making it possible for old people to stay in their own homes. I don't want to go to an old folks home, 'cause people who go there DIE ... and by that I mean die much too soon.

    That's exactly what my wife's work is. Keeping old people in their home, bringing them thee-course hot meals every day(50% organic), helping with clening up, shopping and personl hyghiene. Old people pay according to their means, some less than one euro a day. But it's all financed by taxes.

    Yeah. That's what we need here in the U.S.; assisted living in people's own homes, organized & financed by the government (at all levels - local, state & federal). They all have a role to play.

    But we ain't gonna' get it.

    1259:

    Yes, I've got unfortunately a bit of experience with that in my family (father and uncle). I have to agree: there's a threshold at which point the only way to care for a person at home is for the other person or people to become nurses, and that takes a lifelong toll. Most of the people I've seen in extended care homes really did need higher quality care than their families could provide them.

    Now I don't think this end of existence is very meaningful or very good, having to spend your last months surrounded by people falling apart and dying. The problem is unless we go in for euthanasia (e.g. deliberately killing people because we can't deal with them any more), this is what happens.

    1260:

    @1244 - Whilst being ahead of the need (for battery recycling) is a Good Thing, it isn't very urgent. It seems clear that current packs are likely to have a pretty good lifespan as vehicle power units before another good life as household energy buffers.

    @1253 - yup - ICE motors of any decent efficiency require advanced metallurgy which requires a lot of material sourced fro maround the world. Modern steels include a fair bit of things like Cobalt, Nickel, etc; how odd, rather like batteries! Catalytic convertors use up a bunch of exotic elements too; even though they're supposed to be catalysts the usage does tend to 'wear them out' eventually. And of course, with no noxious combustion products you don't need them anyway.

    1261:

    Charlie, there's an immense problem in the US with "nursing homes". I've heard this from a friend who lived in eastern central OH, and worked in one for nine years, and from my Eldest, who's a COTA, and has worked in a number of them in Oregon and California.

    They're horrible. Overwhelmingly, they are there to make money for the owners, and most of the staff, who gets treated as crap anyway, doesn't care about the residents.

    Deaths are far too often and too soon.

    1262:

    A JAMA review of COVID-19 treatments, for those tracking. Shorter: nothing solid yet[1]. Pharmacologic Treatments for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) - A Review (April 13, 2020) Stay uninfected, all! (I had to deal with a lawyer masked face to masked face today and we stayed away from each other; odd experience. (Needed some inked signatures on short time scale.) We both claimed to be self-isolating the last few weeks and I know I was telling the truth. :-)

    [1] "The speed and volume of clinical trials launched to investigate potential therapies for COVID-19 highlight both the need and capability to produce high-quality evidence even in the middle of a pandemic. No therapies have been shown effective to date."

    1263:

    Charlie Stross @ 1255:

    Old age homes. We need to work real hard at making it possible for old people to stay in their own homes. I don't want to go to an old folks home, 'cause people who go there DIE ... and by that I mean die much too soon.

    Sometimes there's no alternative.

    Yeah, I understand that. Unless someone here has lots & lots of money, they won't have access to the level of care your mom got during the final months of her life. You go into a nursing home in that kind of condition over here, your life expectancy is measured in days.

    And over here we don't get the level of assistance that allowed your dad and your mom to live at home for as long as they did BEFORE they had to go into care.

    1264:

    Hey, taking this health care issue to new heights, forget the Singularity, try this one, that just hit me today:

    In my future universe, mass production-leval "printing" is how things are made... including replacements for body parts (by 120 years from now).

    Now, go further: you're old (well, 200-300 years from now). I'm contemplating printing a whole new body, using your DNA. Then, the question is getting you into it. Brain transplant? Brain read, and burn in the newly printed brain?

    And will there be whackos who object, because the newly-manufactured body had a brain of its own?

    1265:

    At this point, I think that supply chains are global for just about every major bit of tech, including especially cars. It's not just the motor, it's the tires, electronics, plastics, body panels, etc.

    Also, oil is a global commodity too.

    And making simple engines means making horribly polluting engines, precisely at a time when we don't want more pollution.

    With electric power, the batteries need lithium, but the motors need rare earth elements, so it's just a different set of supply chains.

    Anyway, if supply chains break, I suspect that the fallback will be compressed air vehicles or kinetic sculptures. The latter would be cool, actually (and yes, I've seen them in action). Or if it gets bad enough, wheelbarrows. Not great for big cities or interstate commerce, but efficient in their own right for some level of civilization.

    1266:

    Nursing homes are largely private in the UK, too -- we lucked out into getting most of mum's fees paid because she was very old and badly disabled, but for most people you're looking at £50-60,000 a year in bills, which chews through any pension and the equity in a family home pretty fast.

    A chunk of the care sector is run as non-profits or charitable trusts, but there's also a huge commercial sector which is basically the same as the US system, except with the NHS providing offsite medical support and prescriptions.

    My first rule on sizing up a nursing home is to walk inside and sniff: if you can smell shit, leave immediately and cross it off your list.

    1267:

    "If the problem that needs treating is LOW "blood oxygen saturation, might there be other means of increasing that saturation? I'm thinking something along the lines of dialysis. Instead of filtering toxins out of the blood and returning it to the body, filter oxygen INTO the blood."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation

    The problem is that this is a major step up from a ventilator, and there will be very few of them available.

    1268:

    "At this point, I think that supply chains are global for just about every major bit of tech, including especially cars. It's not just the motor, it's the tires, electronics, plastics, body panels, etc."

    The problem with 'falling back tech levels' is that the original infrastructure isn't there any more. I was touring an engine plant in Michigan last year. They get the engine blocks from Mexico. And those are complex things to make.

    BTW, the place is heavily computerized; everything that they can record for each step is recorded. You could pull the bolt-driving torque/rotation/linear movement for every computer-driven bolt for every engine.

    1269:

    Heteromeles @ 1257: Yes, I've got unfortunately a bit of experience with that in my family (father and uncle). I have to agree: there's a threshold at which point the only way to care for a person at home is for the other person or people to become nurses, and that takes a lifelong toll. Most of the people I've seen in extended care homes really did need higher quality care than their families could provide them.

    Now I don't think this end of existence is very meaningful or very good, having to spend your last months surrounded by people falling apart and dying. The problem is unless we go in for euthanasia (e.g. deliberately killing people because we can't deal with them any more), this is what happens.

    What makes you think what we've got now is not euthanasia by neglect?

    I understand that as people get older they may eventually need more assistance than family members can provide. Unless you have a LOT of money, the care you get in an "extended care home" isn't higher quality. Too often the "care" you get is not even up to the half-ass level of care your unskilled family members were able to provide. At least they give a shit whether you live or die.

    But that's not even what I mean. I mean we need the kind of care you get if someone just stops by once a day to check if you're still all right ... or even calls you on the damn phone just to see if you're still alive.

    We do have this thing called "Meals on Wheels" that provides a single meal per day to some old people, but it's a private charity almost entirely staffed by volunteers and it can only serve a small part of the population.

    What about all the other old people who just need a little assistance to survive in their own homes? What happens to them when the charity runs out of donations? Who steps in to ensure that ALL of the people who need a little bit of help get some?

    What ever happened to the idea that the government should "promote the general Welfare"?

    1270:

    They've been using heart-lung machines since the beginning, and you're right, the problem is that there aren't many of those machines or people to run them, and I'm not sure they work all that well.

    Reportedly as JBS noted above, there's some evidence that high pressure isn't working and that higher O2 concentrations at lower pressures might be better. Why? Perhaps the pressure is further damaging lungs already shredded by the disease, since the virus causes diffuse patches of cell damage throughout the lungs, rather than concentrating in one lobe.

    The better news is that the thousands of doctors who are treating Covid19 patients are actually talking with each other using social media, so stuff that works gets tried out and spread, and the better it works, the more rapidly it spreads. I suspect that if genuine cures turn up, they'll rather rapidly become standard of care with whoever can implement them.

    As it is, the best cure right now is what martial artists call the Nike defense: evade the problem by staying away from it (Nikes being running shoes).

    1271:

    timrowledge @ 1258: @1244 - Whilst being ahead of the need (for battery recycling) is a Good Thing, it isn't very urgent. It seems clear that current packs are likely to have a pretty good lifespan as vehicle power units before another good life as household energy buffers.

    Global Warming/Climate Change weren't "very urgent" on April 22, 1970.

    I know battery recycling is not an urgent problem NOW. But NOW is the best time to start working to prevent it from becoming an urgent problem.

    1272:

    What ever happened to the idea that the government should "promote the general Welfare"?

    "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Ronald Reagan, Jan 20th 1981

    Yes, taken out of context frequently, but that quote along with a bunch of other nonsense designed to allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the general public have brainwashed enough of the public worldwide that even if a leader/party wanted to do good things like take care of the elderly the budget simply isn't available - and any attempt to campaign on such policies is viewed with suspicion by the public because they just know the only way to pay for it to take all of their money and give it to "freeloaders".

    1273:

    Barry @ 1265:

    "If the problem that needs treating is LOW "blood oxygen saturation, might there be other means of increasing that saturation? I'm thinking something along the lines of dialysis. Instead of filtering toxins out of the blood and returning it to the body, filter oxygen INTO the blood."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation

    The problem is that this is a major step up from a ventilator, and there will be very few of them available.

    If we can use the Defense Production Act to order GM to make ventilators, why can't we use it to make some other company manufacture Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenators? And stockpile them when they're no longer needed so urgently.

    1274:

    Heteromeles @ 1268: Reportedly as JBS noted above, there's some evidence that high pressure isn't working and that higher O2 concentrations at lower pressures might be better.

    Someone else reported it. I just commented an alternative way of accomplishing the desired result, i.e. getting higher level blood oxygen saturation.

    1275:

    mdlve @ 1270:

    What ever happened to the idea that the government should "promote the general Welfare"?
    "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Ronald Reagan, Jan 20th 1981

    Yes, taken out of context frequently, but that quote along with a bunch of other nonsense designed to allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the general public have brainwashed enough of the public worldwide that even if a leader/party wanted to do good things like take care of the elderly the budget simply isn't available - and any attempt to campaign on such policies is viewed with suspicion by the public because they just know the only way to pay for it to take all of their money and give it to "freeloaders".

    Reagan was full of shit and that whole "freeloaders" argument is a LIE!

    "Promote the general Welfare" comes straight out of the United States Constitution.

    We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

    It's the whole damn reason we have a Constitution in the first place. We need to be shouting it from the rooftops.

    1276:

    Joe isn't silent - he's been doing podcasts for a month (from his home office), but they don't get media coverage because he's sane. I don't see where the DNC did anything more than they did for Bernie, either. (They don't control either the voters or the state primaries.)

    1277:

    Hey, if you can drag your eyes away from UK politics (implosion: and yes, little one, we warned that in the UK they hunt our types), want to see what a hole in the ozone does?

    A short cold blast across parts of Europe through the first half of this week – brings dangerous morning frost, also some snow into the western Balkans

    The cold pool will result in very cold mid-April night, likely again bring frosty mornings into west-central Europe. It becomes dangerous for the damaging frost after the very warm period this past week, so blossoming trees are underway now. Some regions could push close to -3 to -5 °C! Here are the maps for Tuesday and Wednesday morning:

    https://www.severe-weather.eu/mcd/cold-blast-damaging-frost-across-parts-of-europe-mk/

    Kiss goodbye to wine and fruits - red flag.

    Atlantic Faces Fifth ‘Above-Normal’ Hurricane Season in a Row

    https://www.ecowatch.com/accuweather-2020-hurricane-season-will-be-above-normal-2645581672.html

    If you dig out the science bits, it's actually a bit more unusual than that, due to El Nino/a stuff ("highest we've ever seen on this band" is a quotation off the record). But, hey, someone's got a black sharpie, it'll be fine [going to have to go get data on this, and US stuff is getting harder to access, deliberately]

    ~

    They have directly harassed at least two posters off this forum (one of whom cited mental health concerns resulting from the level of harassment as the reason for leaving).

    Yes, and during this time, we've seen >3000 people killing themselves, going dark (permanently) on social media, getting black-pilled etc. Not to mention the [redacted] screaming.

    Ever thought you might be wrong about our motives? Ever spent time on Mumsnet or KiwwwiiiFaaarms or so on? Or Gaab? Or Labour party wassaps? Or BJP wassaps? It isn't pretty.

    Ever thought that it's better for the Wolves to turn up at our door then theirs? [Which they have, several times, and got eaten - [redacted]]

    Of course you haven't.

    Trans* rights are Angel rights. Angel of Death's dad is not a Hedgefund owner, it's doing something else.

    It is not our responsibility to explain things you cannot grasp

    ~

    Fuck me: entire world is going Fasc and you're spitting blood with zero wisdom.

    p.s.

    If you're speaking for trans* (ex)members of this forum: don't. Their mental health is a priority, and out there it's getting very nasty: so they need a dragon, not a furry sometimes.

    Watches UK Media burn down - even with rescue packages, it's getting spicy out there, Karens

    Oh, and yeah: 100% not going back to normal. EM world is case-by-case, but it's gonna be bleak.

    [redacted] send penis image

    [redacted] send back --- images.

    And Dave: we don't know you. You don't know us. We keep personal boundaries very close due to isolation. But yeah, just a massive troll for five years or so for no fucking point, keep it up mate, learnt nothing. It's not as if we couldn't make a billion dollars easily in your shit system, is it?

    points to world

    But trust us: any trans* people or people in need turning up requiring aid would never be turned away.

    goes back to listening to humans die

    1278:

    The US political system is such that no matter what Biden does between now and the election he stands no chance of "riding a tidal wave" - there simply is no indication that anything either Biden or Trump will do will cause any significant change in either base.

    The nature of the 2 party race, with the current polarized electorate, means it will yet again be a close race that will depend on a handful of swing states.

    And the reason Biden is the DNC candidate is because he was able to win the primaries in those swing states - Bernie failed in almost all the swing states that held primaries prior to Covid bringing everything to a halt (Michigan - Biden 52.9/Bernie 36.4, Florida Biden 62/Bernie 22.8, N Carolina Biden 43/Bernie 24.1, etc.)

    Biden may not be the best or greatest pick, particularly for those of us who aren't Americans, but for whatever reason he does fit in with what Americans are currently looking for better than any of the other Democrat alternatives.

    For all of his popularity, and for all that his policies seemed normal to us non-Americans, Bernie frightened a lot of American voters once you got outside of left-wing Democrat strongholds that won't influence the 2020 election anyway.

    1279:

    Joe is going to get torn apart. It's not even up for discussion - he just hired parts of Bloomberg's team, ffs.

    And no, he's not 100% - he's over 80, ffs. You would not believe the amount of people watching this and sniffing out Cuomo or whatever is going to get wheeled out and just burning the fucking thing down.

    That's without 30-40 mn unemployed people suddenly - they're using fucking COBRA to do the hand-outs to the poors, which is FUCKING WILD INSULTING BULLSHIT if you know about the progran.

    Was hoping your elites were smarter, but they're feeling nostalgic for LA 1991. Not shitting you.

    1280:

    Too damned many people haven't read the Preamble since they were in school, and a lot haven't read the Constitution itself since then, either. (And way too many apparently think that US government is based on the Declaration of Independence, which NOPE.)

    1281:

    I remembered, here's the case when the broken clock shows right time: 𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳 @1155: These fucks are the same kind who pretend Communism and the CCCP still exist. Or that CN is "Communist".... Go look up the "Museum of Communist Terror"[0] and who is involved and their recent push to include "all global victims of COVID19 as victims of Communism". Then look up who funds it.

    Greg Tingey @1231: You obviously are conveniently forgetting the destruction of the Ukraine as a breadbasket under Joe - called the "holodomor" I believe? Most certainly not. Uncle Joe extended their territory, supported their industrialization, pacified the internal terror and consequently saved it from German invasion and enslavement. Having lost in the war up to 1/3rd of the population, as the result, by 1950s the country supplied about 1/3rd of all wheat produced in USSR. Which was absolutely vital for survival.

    Oh, you would say, it is the propaganda and a lies. But unfortunately, you've been deprived of knowledge by the same guys who spell "100 millions victims of communism". Because somehow in 21st century right to knowledge is not one of the basic human rights.

    Charlie Stross @1233: Remember I'm not American? This is harder to consider. I was going to add something about other European countries right there and then but stopped myself short when I realized that this is not quite the same situation.

    1282:

    APOCALYPSE NOW Clip - Do Lung Bridge.

    Watch it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4kM-ruMD6E

    Hint here: it's your clock that's broken, ours measure TIME/SPACE stuff not your boring Puritanical "Time"[0] discrete units.

    ~

    There you go, basic diplomacy.

    [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/

    1283:

    the internal combustion engine vehicle is easy to make and operate

    Back in the early days of motor vehicles electric was preferred and seemed likely to win purely because it was easier to build and operate. Lead-acid batteries really are just sheets of lead pressed onto a metal (nickel or stainless steel) frame and dumped in a bath of acid. Likewise operating an electric vehicle means having a set of switches that select the voltage you want to apply, and toggling them in some manner. Early, slower vehicles had a bank of one switch, sometimes with a reversing switch, but that quickly became silly and a variety of variable options came out (two switches = three speeds!).

    But this is simple enough that a garage mechanic could build some from the raw metal and other basic materials. Many science kits for children have "build an electric motor" as one of the experiments. Very few have even "build a Stirling Engine" let alone a Diesel engine, and I can't imagine the ones that do have "turn this square of material into a cylinder head".

    Meanwhile, people like Richard Pearse notwithstanding, making an internal combustion engine from raw metal is a tedious and complicated process. There are lots of moving parts with fine tolerances (an electric motor with 2mm instead of 1mm clearance between the rotor and stator is less efficient. A combustion engine with the same problem is unlikely to work at all (this is why they have piston rings). There's another 100 problems where that one came from.

    Operating a simple internal combustion engine vehicle is a skilled task. Until you can build an automatic gearbox there's a whole lot of actions that have to take place in controlled sequence in order not to stall the engine. This is why hand throttles used to be popular, it let the operator focus on just getting the gearbox and clutch working together.

    1284:

    Anyway, here's the point: of course we want people to stay at home as long as possible. But in many cases where that's not possible indefinitely, unless your definition of "home" encompasses a hospital bed and a 24x7 live-in nursing auxiliary with twice-daily visits by a medical professional.

    Now layer on top of that the physical layout of "home". Yours and mine and many others are not conducive to people who have trouble with stairs. At all. Which means if anything happens to stop their ability to use stairs they either have to go to a facility or have nearly full time care at home. (Well yours would be more of a prison where mine means to have access to a toilet and shower I could not get to the kitchen. Or exit via the doors.

    And I don't know about how this plays in other cultures not in the US but my 2 recent elderly parent deaths and those of a wide variety of my friends involved parents who were adamant they needed no help and wanted everyone to GTFO. So do you force the situation or leave them to die in their squalor or lying on the living room floor when they fall?

    1285:

    the thousands of doctors who are treating Covid19 patients are actually talking with each other using social media

    That's making a huge difference. I read a similar thing about oncologists.

    The thing about ventilators is that they're are not simple iron lungs, there's a whole lot of complex sensor-based modes of operation and those are what is normally used. Even a modicum of research would show that most of the "DIY designs" have the obvious flaws people are talking about ... and that's what distinguishes the $10,000 hospital-grade ventilator from $100 worth of bits thrown together by an amateur.

    The current hospital ones provide a temperature and composition controlled mix of gasses in response to behaviour by the patient. They can do everything from "just constant background pressure" to "add oxygen and humidity, push when the patient tries to inhale and pull when they try to exhale" and about 20 other modes. Just operating one is a specialised task.

    FWIW I'm not even qualified to clean one, let alone service one or operate it. I've played with simpler versions years ago when my job was basically "write down the part numbers of anything that's obviously damaged or has baked-on dirt".

    On that note, a lot of the parts must be able to be autoclaved. If your DIY version can't take that those parts need to be cheap and readily available because they count as consumable.

    1286:

    On a much happier note, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs: Handel's Messiah performed in Auslan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4hh49tCv4

    There's something funny about a bunch of sign language interpreters fronting a choir but not quite managing to be in exact sync with each other.

    1287:

    but there's also a huge commercial sector which is basically the same as the US system, except with the NHS providing offsite medical support and prescriptions.

    Your numbers are close to the US. And with most of the residents being on medicare the medical bills are mostly handled.

    One thing to look for is if they have a dementia wing or an ongoing way to deal with such. As most will get to that situation if they live very long there.

    1288:

    They've been using heart-lung machines since the beginning, and you're right, the problem is that there aren't many of those machines or people to run them, and I'm not sure they work all that well.

    Being on a heart lung machine increases the rate of death. Same as with dialysis. Or tech just isn't nearly as good as the real thing. They also "injure" the blood in the process of running it through the machine.

    And picc lines are a major source of infection.

    Someone who got a serious infection that damaged his kidneys was telling a group of us that he was amazed at the number of people who preferred dialysis over a restrictive diet. Even after being told it would likely reduce their life span and create other problems along the way.

    1289:

    @1269 - I completely agree with your main point. Luckily, battery recycling isn't urgent as in "we can't make progress until..." which means we can sensibly start pushing EVs hard. But yes, it's important to get working on right now if only so we get a clear idea of what, if any, changes to battery forumlation/packaging would help later.

    1290:

    I'm in deeeeeeep red county - it went seventy some percent for Trump, and is (literally, from the census)98%+ white people - where we've got 48,000 ish people in an area about the size of Rhode Island.

    We've got 49 hospital beds.

    No, I didn't leave off a zero.

    We've got either six or eight ICU beds.

    Our location is such that the virus is slow getting here and will be relatively slow to spread, especially with (mandatory by the state) mitigation measures. But statistically, we max at out at being able to deal with the hospitalization cases at somewhere around 200 total infections. Call it five hundred if you want to fudge to deal with a possible high rate of asymptomatic cases.

    So we're screwed.

    We have trouble dealing with medical needs anyway - we don't have a maternity ward in county anymore, because it wasn't profitable. Normally we could theoretically move people to out of county hospitals, but they're going to be hit first and harder, and they're not swimming with capacity either, despite doing better than my county.

    (Which, the spread maps of the state bear that out - the virus has five cases and one death in my county so far, but the counties around us keep rising exponentially, so it's probably coming)

    And yep, this is not an unusual situation.

    1291:

    Boy, you have no fucking idea how nicely we're playing this stuff. These fucks are playing on easy mode with all the cheats enabled.

    e.g. Look above for that stupid WJC muppet whose got a £1,500 gofundme for an "Indian child rescue", despite that not how India does charity or even contacting all the relevant agencies. At this time, in this space.

    You know how quickly we could supersede all that QANON bullshit instantly into that? Just take it over. Just rip it around and target it? Tory Jewish buying kids from India?

    Less than 10 minutes.

    "Wa waaa Neo-Nazi forum targeted us as we're publicly posting on a platform that's owned in a large part by Saud, WAAA they couldn't POSSIBLY track us"

    p.s.

    Here's a tip: you're gonna burn down the Beano group, and you're gonna do it soon. Or real pros will.

    There's only 17 mn of you. Remember that. And the "sound of music" .... well. Fuck me. You're fucking primitives. ~

    If these no talent fucks want to play hard, then it would take 10 minutes. Entire WJC labelled as "paedoes". Entire "diplomatic" arm labelled as child procurers.

    And, to be honest: the people you're attempting to play hard-ball with in Fifa etc - have already got this one gamed.

    Hint: don't setup conspiracy theory stuff or politics and play against AI.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhuiPtwyoY8

    1292:

    And yeah.

    You gotta wonder how much of this "just happened to happen".

    Well. Fuck Kahabbbalh, it's shite.

    1293:

    Triptych.

    Yeah, QANON and all your shit. That lady who did that series and all of it: it's all mapped now. "You'll be Home soon" You attempted to kill the last Angels, you psychotic fucks.

    And yeah: we know you read this. Bang to rights, 100% guilty fuckers.

    Now, enjoy psychosis. You chose this path and you wanted it and you honed it against... well.

    Here's a tip: OOOH all those psychotic Reddit memes about cutting out parts of brains and all those nice goys "suddenly" getting tumors.

    Yeah. We know how it was done.

    Sound crazy?

    1289

    Not really.

    looks at stock market and global shit

    So, we're thinking you lost, so מצדה since you're rude little fuckers who kill talent? Or the

    Oh, wait.... you altered the Wiki again.

    جن‎

    ?Etymology 1

    From the root ج ن ن‎ (j-n-n). For the noun, compare Aramaic ܓܢܝܐ‎ (ginnāyā, “tutelary deity”)

    Verb

    جَنَّ • (janna) I, non-past يَجُنُّ‎‎ (yajunnu)

    to cover, to hide, to conceal, to veil to envelop, to enshroud, to cloak, to screen to descend, to fall, to become night </em> Oh, look, sources are altering words so they don't mean anything again, what a surprise.

    Fuck me.

    Someone kill these children, they're out of control.

    1294:

    Sure, grep it, you'll see the difference, just like "Nemesis" suddenly becoming a White Angel and no Greek on there.

    وَأَنَّهُ كانَ رِجالٌ مِنَ الإِنسِ يَعوذونَ بِرِجالٍ مِنَ الجِنِّ فَزادوهُم رَهَقًا

    Fuck me.

    1295:

    Do Lung Bridge Roach's necklace is a bit [not-bad]-outcome-possibility-constraining in a potential physical close combat situation. (But that's just me. It seems a bit out of place, but it is a film, and it works in that scene, in his role as M79(?) gunner.)

    Time and Free Will (English translation), Matter and Memory are kinda wordy. Are there key paragraphs in Bergson's works that you suggest thinking about? (You (some incarnations) have nudged about Bersgon in the past; I'll look again but it appeared(s) to me that he was trying to map some things to human language that are not easily mapped to human language.)

    1296:

    Ok, so if UK, USA and IL fanatics are going to purge Wikipedia, we guess we lose this too?

    Quran 72:1

    الْجِنِّ

    Absolutely fuck these muppets erasing everything but their own myopic history.

    Disney Fascism = Gilead = Well, you work out the rest.

    1297:

    My first rule on sizing up a nursing home is to walk inside and sniff: if you can smell shit, leave immediately and cross it off your list.

    This. When I was working for the state legislature, I spent one summer visiting lots of assisted living facilities, ranging from quite modest assistance up to end-of-life medical care. Your nose can tell you everything you need to know about the quality of staff and care. The thing you notice at the place my mom's in is that other than the kitchen and dining area during meal time, it doesn't smell at all.

    1298:

    Re: ' ... many others are not conducive to people who have trouble with stairs. At all. Which means if anything happens to stop their ability to use stairs they either have to go to a facility or have nearly full time care at home.'

    After my mother's first stroke which disabled her entire right side so that she had to use a wheelchair I had an electric stair lift installed. The sales rep and installer showed up, took very careful measurements and a couple of weeks later installed the unit which continued to work without any problem - and virtually maintenance-free - for 10+ years.

    One summer when I was an undergrad I worked at a good (expensive) convalescent center/physio-rehab hosp where the large majority of folks were at end of life. That experience convinced me that I would not let my family ever end up there. No - the place wasn't some Dickensian money mill. It just wasn't designed for what it was actually supposed to be: end of life care.

    The staffing was adequate (part of the reason for 'expensive') and the training for summer staff wasn't bad. The real problem was that the clients/patients were very varied in terms of their medical and cognitive/psychiatric conditions. Something that people don't seem to realize is that everything takes much much longer to do when your client/patient is physically or cognitively disabled. Add a psychiatric condition and it's much harder and longer to do anything - feed, dress, wash, etc. Then put all of these different people with different conditions/needs into one facility and expect them to thrive. Nope! Just like general hospitals, these convalescent hospitals/end of life old age hospices need to be organized into departments with staff trained in delivering care based on specific deficits/needs.

    Here's the stair-lift company I used. There's also an outfit called 'Acorn' that's been doing a lot of TV advertising. Way cheaper and less stressful than moving.

    https://www.bruno.com/stair-lifts

    • Weird stuff included extreme reactions to Rx's, strokes, 90 year old Romeos hitting on unattached women, psychotic breakdowns, 90 year old break-out artists with dementia, new serious medical conditions, etc. The weird stuff happened all the time because of a pretty high turnover of clients/patients - each with a different deficit/need. No idea whether this is in fact so but my impression was that any medical condition was more severe/debillitating in seniors.
    1299:

    It's about different conceptions of TIME - Time as (Math) Unit vrs Duration and so on. [This is largely dependent on your P-Christian biases to watches]

    It's a very useful definition when you start doing complex stuff in both physics and philosophy.

    Deleuze is Actual / Virtual then it gets a bit more complex (and no: science people: it's actually useful).

    But, really.

    100% busted there - these myopic psychos are altering not only Greek History but the fucking القرآن to meet their myopic world-view.

    What's next: geology and anthropology (YES -THEY'RE NEXT).

    And these fucks complain if a single letter is defaced in the Torah?

    Fuck them from orbit.

    1300:

    For what it's worth the orange headed sewage-for-brains running this country as decided that the middle of a pandemic is the perfect time to stop contributing to funding for the World Health Organization. I wonder how much of a kickback he wants?

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/politics/donald-trump-world-health-organization-funding-coronavirus/index.html

    1301:

    Glad the stair lift worked for your situation.

    But many houses, especially older ones are just not designed for anyone with mobility issues. At all.

    I know a couple who have decided to retire in their 2 1/2 store larger home out a ways. They have looked into a stair lift arrangement but they have 2 sets of stairs in the house so one can easily be taken over by the lift. And they have a guest bedroom/bath on the first floor that they can "move into" if needed. So life for them can continue on the main floor.

    My house requires 5 steps between bedrooms/baths and kitchen level. And 5 more steps down to front door. Plus 3 steps outside the front door. And 3 steps down to the basement level where the washer/dryer is located. So my house is not going to let us age gracefully.

    And my mother in laws townhouse was worse. We forced her out when we had to fly in and take her to the ER.

    1302:

    Likely all about finding people to point at and blame, and if you both point and punish the base are that much likelier to believe your lies that you were innocent in the entire sorry mess.

    Or it is just petty vindictiveness because they gave it the rather sterile and less useful to him name Covid-19.

    Either way, I am guessing if one was to sink low enough to watch the appropriate news that it is playing well amongst his base.

    1303:

    Article that appears to summarize, and a paper, that discusses what may happen with Covid-19 long term if we don't get long term immunity from it.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/new-model-looks-at-what-might-happen-if-sars-cov-2-is-here-to-stay/

    Link to paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/14/science.abb5793

    1304:

    Oh, we just did this.

    Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral source.

    So, we edit it with (THE ACTUAL FUCKING القرآن and language and sources) and... no dice.

    No talk page, so you can't like, disagree with their horror-show of Arabic.

    Poke them enough and some fucking muppet pokes back with INTRUSIVE SHIT to some box in bogland England and well.

    Wikipedia is now an offensive agent in the cyberwar. 100% game on.

    Lol, no really: some little shit from Wiki just poked back.

    Fuck it.

    They don't even understand 72:1

    Say, (O Prophet), it was revealed to me that a band of jinn attentively listened1 to (the recitation of the Qur'an) and then (went back to their people) and said: “We have indeed heard a wonderful Qur'an2 which guides to the Right Way; so we have come to believe in it, and we will not associate aught with Our Lord in His Divinity and that “He – exalted be His Majesty – has not taken to Himself either a wife or a son and that “the foolish among us5 have been wont to say outrageous things about Allah

    Er. Remind us about Contracts?

    That's #17.

    Wikipedia "the font of knowledge" has not only got the wrong word for them, and no references to the

    القرآن

    are allowed, but they delete it and so on and so forth. Logos denied to the fire-ones, when offered in good faith?

    Now. That's a Covenant breach.

    Wikipedia are scum. (Oh, and that shitty poke back will cost you. At least $100 mn)

    1305:

    Not sure electric cars were the preferred back then - the motors were heavy, and other reasons.

    On the other hand, the first speed records? And popular cars? They ran on steam.

    1306:

    Oh, yeah, right, a dementia wing.

    My Eldest, a COTA, has taken dementia training. And has, several times this year alone, tried to give courses at work in it. She gets 3-4, if anyone shows up. The honchos know nothing, and can't seem to understand that each person is different, and HHS, under that fucker Azar, want it all to run like a factory stamping out product.

    The odds on not being rich, and able to afford a nursing home that has a dementia wing, or even much in the say of trained staff, approaches Trumpolini's ability to do calculus.

    1307:

    But wait, there's more: it was just announced that the relief checks may take a bit longer, because THEY HAVE TO HAVE HIS NAME ON THEM.

    1308:

    And presumably a bit of text saying "The New Socialist United States Government is printing money for you, be grateful to Dear Leader for his largesse"

    1309:

    From the Ars Technica summary: SARS-CoV-1 generates a long-lasting immune response, which can include antibodies that block HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1, the cold viruses.

    Wouldn't it be less disastrous if the corvid virus generates short term immunity but a (cheap, widely available) vaccine is made that generates long term immunity?

    You'd be able to spot anti-vaxxers by their regular bouts of corvid-19.

    1310:

    we warned that in the UK they hunt our types Yeah - Rats & other other rotton-burrowers, gnawing away underneath with lies & disinformation. Vermin.

    mdive The person Biden picks as his Veep could be very, very important - if he picks an actual Social Democrat ... well, that's different.

    sleepingroutine @ 1279 THAT is a straight-out lie - repeated from your propaganda lessons. Nice try.

    JJ @ 1288 And the "voters" STILL don't want evil sociaistic UHC medicine?

    Mike @ 1298 Kickback irrelevant It's kicking the CHINESE & the evil socialist UN & getting out fascist, oops republican votes.

    Moz Related to that - the medical research community are scratching their heads over the wildly varying responses to Corvid in the population(s) From "Had it for weeks, have I?" through "Got a little cough" to "Yuck! Worse than any flu" & finally down to "Lucky to survive" & finally the mortuary. Shouldn't be working like that. Have we seen something like it, long ago, & there are different inherited resistances to this? Did exposure to the revolting horrible "November cough" that did the rounds in GB last year confer a degree of immunity, or not? More relevant but completely unaswered questions .....

    1311:

    Don't hold your breath. That's not even remotely new (at least decades old), and the last I heard had produced precisely two results of any interest at all, and neither were of significant interest except in their unexpectedness. If you think about the sheer amount of searching done by evolution (both in time and parallelism), even a factor of a million faster isn't likely to proceed fast.

    Incidentally, this is one of the flaws at the heart of the myth that proving NP = P would lead to a singularity. Proving the validity of algorithms is in many ways a lot easier than thinking of effective ones in the first place! Remember that there are N! statements of up to N symbols, so looking for N^k interesting ones (a reasonable guess for their density) among them gets hard, fast.

    1312:

    Which has been a standard n-D searching technique since the 1960s, though not on that scale, and is well-understood. But it is well worth looking at how evolution works to see what its limitations are - though you can easily derive them analytically, too.

    Let's use the downhill terminology. Basically, a state A can get to a lower state B only if there is a path A => A+d => A+d+e => ... => B where each incremental state is lower than the previous one. If not, you get a sink, and proceed no further. It's just like water flowing, and accounts for a great many of evolution's oddities.

    Now, there are ways to force a 'jump' from one sink to the catchment area of another, but those are generally not immensely effective for the reason I gave in my previous post, just like the step theory of evolutionary change. They help a fair amount with getting to a nearby, lower state, but very little getting to a much lower one a long way away, or even an optimal one fairly close.

    1313:

    A few points here.

    In the early days, the alternative to an ICE was a steam engine; the latter won out because of self-starters, and it was a close thing. As you say, an electric car IS simpler, but it's only the power plant and immediately associated components - the rest is the same. That's one reason why they aren't the environmental saviour they are made out to be - another being the road infrastructure someone mentioned, and a third being the impact of over-motorisation.

    I have posted before that there ARE solutions, and they are not even being considered. I am not optimistic :-(

    1314:

    If we can use the Defense Production Act to order GM to make ventilators, why can't we use it to make some other company manufacture Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenators? And stockpile them when they're no longer needed so urgently.

    ECMOs are what used to be called "heart-lung machines". They're a lot better than they were back when open heart surgery was first pioneered in the 1960s, but they're pretty brutal: there's a syndrome called "pump head" that's common in cardiac bypass survivors (who require ECMO) -- cognitive impairment lasting up to 6-12 months after the op, which appears to be caused by ECMO.

    ECMO also requires directly plugging your major blood vessels into a machine. It's not risk-free: it requires extreme cleanliness to avoid septicaemia, and about 40% of patients receiving ECMO long-term experience bleeding -- including brain bleeds, which can be life-threatening.

    TLDR: it's ferociously expensive, requires intensive care by multiple specialists, it can kill the patient directly or indirectly, and even if it's successful the patient can suffer severe personality changes and mental impairment for months to a year(s) afterwards.

    1315:

    Martin at 1225, "... there was a sneaking suspicion that the Germans would conclude that the best defence was a strong offence, and start heading eastwards."

    I heard exactly this from a person I was a student with, around 1980. Military family, Army cadet/TA, intended to try for Sandhurst.

    1316:

    The downhill/water analogy is way more intuitive than the more common one of hill climbing. But both have the same snag in ignoring the fact that evolution is both shaped by the evolutionary landscape (as water running downhill) but also shapes that very landscape (in ways which water cannot possibly do). Thus what at one time might be an evolutionary dead end (a sink in your terminology), later on may cease to be one, because the landscape has shifted around it.

    1317:

    For what it's worth the orange headed sewage-for-brains running this country as decided that the middle of a pandemic is the perfect time to stop contributing to funding for the World Health Organization. I wonder how much of a kickback he wants?

    He doesn't care. His overriding objective is to shift the blame elsewhere -- anywhere.

    1318:

    Actually, water DOES shape the landscape - for obvious signs, look at the Grand Canyon, river deltas and more; but it also does it in less obvious ways (e.g. the soil where I live, which was washed down from the Cotswold Mountains). And, yes, things change over time, but that also fits very well with the water flow model. Take a large waterproof sheet, lay it on some roughish grass and water it; now walk over it, and see what happens; for extra insight, try draining the water off it by walking on it.

    1319:

    Actually, water DOES shape the landscape

    Sure. Which is why I said "in ways which water cannot possibly do". An extreme example: once early life poisoned itself with oxygen, this upended the evolutionary landscape good and proper, in ways which water analogy cannot capture. Only geology can scramble landscape levels like that.

    1320:

    Oh, right. Like all analogies, it only goes so far, and that change was at least as drastic as the evolution of the eukaryote cell.

    1321:

    P J Evans @ 1280: Too damned many people haven't read the Preamble since they were in school, and a lot haven't read the Constitution itself since then, either. (And way too many apparently think that US government is based on the Declaration of Independence, which NOPE.)

    It is ... kind of, sort of. The Declaration gives the reasons why the Colonies needed to be independent & have their own government. It expresses an ideal of what a government should do (mainly by cataloging all the things George III should not have done) ... an ideal of government that the founders tried to give structure with The Constitution.

    You have to take the two together. The Declaration of Independence tells us WHY and the Constitution tells us HOW.

    The founders understood that the Constitution was not, is not, perfect. They knew it failed to live up to the idealism of the Declaration of Independence. They only knew it was the best compromise they knew how to do within their own limitations and they hoped some future generation would be able to correct their mistakes.

    That's why the mechanism for amendments is in there. Some of those mistakes have been corrected and some still need a bit of work. I hope I live long enough to see some more of that work done.

    1322:

    David L @ 1284: And I don't know about how this plays in other cultures not in the US but my 2 recent elderly parent deaths and those of a wide variety of my friends involved parents who were adamant they needed no help and wanted everyone to GTFO. So do you force the situation or leave them to die in their squalor or lying on the living room floor when they fall?

    I think y'all are missing my point. Assistance for the elderly should be available before it gets to the point where families have to make that choice. Having some assistance available might prevent it from coming to that point or at least delay its onset.

    Assistance doesn't have to be intrusive. Some people may not want assistance, but they should be able to choose. It should be there if they want it, as much or as little help as they want or need when they decide they need it.

    Some people may not need anything more than someone to check in with them once or twice a day just to make sure they're not lying there on the living room floor.

    There needs to be some level (many levels) of care in between 24/7 nursing supervision and total neglect.

    1323:

    Like all analogies, it only goes so far, and that change was at least as drastic as the evolution of the eukaryote cell.

    Indeed. But it does not have to be drastic. On small, subtle scales it goes on all around us: evolutionary advantages (water slopes in the analogy) appearing and disappearing as the biosphere develops and the evolutionary landscape shifts. An apparent sink may suddenly radiate like fury, if you pardon a decidedly mixed metaphor. :-)

    1324:

    David L @ 1288:

    They've been using heart-lung machines since the beginning, and you're right, the problem is that there aren't many of those machines or people to run them, and I'm not sure they work all that well.

    Being on a heart lung machine increases the rate of death. Same as with dialysis. Or tech just isn't nearly as good as the real thing. They also "injure" the blood in the process of running it through the machine.

    The sense I got from the article someone linked in was the mortality rate for "adult" patients hooked up to the "heart lung machine" was less than 50% where the mortality rate for patients on a ventilator is running over 80%. A lot of patients are still going to die, but it looks like your chances may be better with the "heart lung machine".

    1325:

    But, for those, the water analogy IS good. Consider a stream or river, that has followed a path for millennia. In a minor sump away from the main course, an occasional flow cuts a new course, percolation causes a sinkhole to develop etc., and the stream or river changes course. Similar things happen in response to external events: for example, earthquakes can change levels, drop a mountainside and dam a river or open a new path. Those are EXTREMELY like evolution, where exactly the same things happen!

    1326:

    No. Read it again. It's being used on patients for whom a ventilator is not enough, so it's not surprising that it's better - because the alternative is severe brain damage or death, probably because their lungs are actually failing. Even if it were feasible, it's doubtful that it would be better for patients who need at least a ventilator.

    "Beginning in early February 2020, doctors in China have increasingly been using ECMO as an adjunct support for patients presenting with acute viral pneumonia associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) when, even after ventilation, the blood oxygenation levels remain too low to sustain the patient."

    1327:

    Mike @ 1300: For what it's worth the orange headed sewage-for-brains running this country as decided that the middle of a pandemic is the perfect time to stop contributing to funding for the World Health Organization. I wonder how much of a kickback he wants?

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/politics/donald-trump-world-health-organization-funding-coronavirus/index.html

    I don't think it's that. He constantly needs new scapegoats to blame & apparently his advisers have managed to convince him (for now) that making Dr. Fauci the fall guy would backfire.

    A thought just occurred to me ... Why hasn't anyone yet made a "Downfall" parody video of Trumpolini ranting about corona virus?

    1328:

    Or, for more fun, it may be that our medical thinking on blood oxygen needs to be rethought for Covid

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-overused-for-covid-19/

    Article hints that the strangeness of patients with low oxygen not seemingly being in distress might be because while struggling to bring in oxygen the lungs are still expelling carbon dioxide properly. So Covid may only be partially causing lung issues.

    1329:

    Sounds like you guys are up the crick without a paddle. Sorry to hear that. If you don't mind my asking, what state or region are you in?

    1330:

    "I can't imagine the ones that do have "turn this square of material into a cylinder head"."

    Oh, that's easy. Just drill a ring of bolt holes round the edge of it and one M14x1.25 tapped hole in the middle. Bingo, one cylinder head for a sidevalve or a two-stroke :)

    Thing is you can make the answer to "which is easier" come out very differently depending on just what kinds of "head start" you allow (or fail to disallow because you haven't noticed them). I dunno about "kits", but I used to make electric motors out of a cork and some cocktail sticks and some wire and a magnet. Some bugger in a factory had done the difficult bit of taking a lump of ferromagnetic material and freezing a powerful magnetic field into it. Lacking that, I could of course have just used more wire and made it with an electromagnet. But some other bugger in a factory had done the difficult bit of turning a lump of copper into a continuous thread with a continuous insulating coating. If I'd had to do my own unpicking of silkworm coccoons or cotton bolls and braiding of the thread into several metres of fine tube, or crushing up of several thousand beetles to make shellac, it would probably have exceeded my arsability threshold.

    And as for making a lump of copper go all thin and bendy, forget it.

    On the other hand it's a good deal easier to take a lump of metal and chop it up into seven or eight smaller lumps (plus a pile of swarf) and fit them together again (leaving out the swarf) to form an internal combustion engine...

    ...You just need a lathe.

    (Sure, it would be extremely shit. But so is a cork motor. Same difference.)

    To make a version of either device that is un-shit enough to power a vehicle also requires a lathe, and the same degree of ability to use it to fine tolerances, because in both cases you need bearings and they're the most precise component. Plain ones will do, so you don't have to make balls, but you still need to make the parts accurately the right size. And also accurately in line with each other from one end of the main shaft to the other, which is more difficult.

    Piston rings are a bit tricky. But so are commutators and brushes if you want them to last more than a couple of minutes.

    In both cases you need to do some chemistry in the back garden for the energy store. Internal combustion fuel is probably easier than batteries, since you've just got heat and fumes instead of heat, fumes and things that can eat holes in you. On the other hand you have to do more of it more often.

    Steam engines can burn anything, but you have to turn your lumps of metal into tubes. And pressure vessels. They also tend to be heavy buggers, and although they don't have to be and indeed can even be made light enough to power aeroplanes, it's more difficult.

    It's pretty hard to conclusively argue that any of them is easier than the others if you're starting all the way from raw materials, which is a major reason why early motor vehicles tried all the options and it took a good while before internal combustion came out on top.

    If I was starting with ordinary tools and basic junk (bits of plate and pipe and angle and shit) I'd probably go for making an internal combustion engine. On the other hand my available junk isn't great for that kind of stuff but does include a couple of old car alternators and a load of high current MOSFETs, so an electric motor is the obvious choice. But on the third hand it also includes several actual working brushed DC motors and internal combustion engines, so...

    1331:

    whitroth @ 1307: But wait, there's more: it was just announced that the relief checks may take a bit longer, because THEY HAVE TO HAVE HIS NAME ON THEM.

    I wonder how that's going to work for Direct Deposit? I can't remember the last time I got a check from the government.

    Plus, doesn't a check mean you're going to have to go to a bank to cash/deposit it?

    1332:

    According to the BBC, direct deposits will just go in as usual.

    More than 80 million Americans are expected to receive payments of up to $1,200 in their bank accounts on Wednesday, according to the Treasury Department. But for those who did not provide banking details, they will receive a cheque with "President Donald J. Trump" printed on the left-hand side.

    This is unprecedented, apparently.

    Two senior IRS officials told the Washington Post the move would probably lead to a delay in issuing the first batch of cheques. The Treasury Department denied this.

    Cynically, I suspect that denial was issued by someone who's acutely aware that not issuing it would mean they would need one of those stimulus cheques themselves.

    If there's one thing Donald Trump, the real-estate and entertainment mogul, has always had a knack for, it's self-promotion.

    So it's not at all surprising that he would take the opportunity to order his name printed on government stimulus cheques going out to millions of Americans. A month ago, after all, the US Centers for Disease sent a mailing to Americans detailed "President Trump's coronavirus guidelines for America".

    Would I be correct in assuming that that mailing (with presidential name attached) was also unprecedented? I don't recall seeing other government warnings/information with a president's name attached — no "President Bush's guide to stopping terrorists".

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52293910

    1333:

    Charlie Stross @ 1314:

    If we can use the Defense Production Act to order GM to make ventilators, why can't we use it to make some other company manufacture Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenators? And stockpile them when they're no longer needed so urgently. "

    ECMOs are what used to be called "heart-lung machines". They're a lot better than they were back when open heart surgery was first pioneered in the 1960s, but they're pretty brutal: there's a syndrome called "pump head" that's common in cardiac bypass survivors (who require ECMO) -- cognitive impairment lasting up to 6-12 months after the op, which appears to be caused by ECMO.

    ECMO also requires directly plugging your major blood vessels into a machine. It's not risk-free: it requires extreme cleanliness to avoid septicaemia, and about 40% of patients receiving ECMO long-term experience bleeding -- including brain bleeds, which can be life-threatening.

    TLDR: it's ferociously expensive, requires intensive care by multiple specialists, it can kill the patient directly or indirectly, and even if it's successful the patient can suffer severe personality changes and mental impairment for months to a year(s) afterwards.

    I understand all that. OTOH, according to the linked article they ARE being used for Covid-19 patients, and the article suggested they have a lower incidence of mortality than for ventilators. Isn't a 50% chance of survival better than a 20% (or less) chance?

    What's the comparative risk? How long is "long-term"? How long does the Covid-19 pneumonia last?

    1334:

    Yes, that's the same thinking I mentioned somewhere further up. There's also an aspect something along the lines of one effect of this virus being to cause a lot of micro blood clots, which block capillaries in the lungs (and when it gets bad enough start clogging up the kidneys also, at which point you've more or less had it). Positive pressure ventilation may damage the already weakened lungs and cause more micro clots to form, which is exactly what you don't want to happen.

    I have a suspicion also that blood oxygen saturation tends to get overused a bit as a proxy indicator because it's so easy to measure it continuously and noninvasively, whereas measuring CO2 levels requires taking a blood sample to the lab. The body itself does things the other way round, readily detecting CO2 levels from their effect on pH and using them as the major feedback signal, while being a lot more hazy and consequently dismissive about deriving a signal for oxygen levels. In both cases there is an assumption that the non-measured quantity is a simple function of the measured one so knowing one automatically gets you the other, but this ceases to be true both as a consequence of abnormal functioning and under transient conditions, and when it isn't the body's method and the doctors' method both come up with different wrong answers. The body, of course, has evolved to deal with getting its own kind of wrong answer, but it's not clear that externally-applied feedback derived from the other kind is necessarily always accurate or even can be.

    To take a line of "this patient's sats are under 90% OH NOES THEY'RE GOING TO DIE START BLOWING THEM UP STAT" is a reasonable heuristic when you may well not be able to risk taking the time to get a more representative measurement, and is mostly fine when you've got confidence that the possibility space you're dealing with can be taken to largely coincide with the cases where it works. But it certainly isn't true (I'd be dead many times over if it was), so it shouldn't really be surprising that when something totally new turns up it doesn't fit as well as it usually does.

    1335:

    Can't really easily find anything, but any stats on ECMO are going to be problematic for a number of reasons.

    For example, it isn't a apple/apple comparison - the extremely limited nature of ECMO means much smaller numbers, and carefully chosen patients. It it the ventilator problem taken to the next level, where you are likely choosing those patients most likely to be helped by ECMO, leaving those for whom the ventilator isn't enough but ECMO is unlikely to provide significant extra chance to remain on a ventilator to likely die.

    And as much trouble as ventilators are to scale up, ECMO will be 10x as hard. Even if you manage to suddenly get somebody like GM churning them out by the thousands, we won't have the staffing and other resources to use the machines. This heavy resource requirement means that the advice on using ECMO for Covid-19 states it should only be used for "carefully selected patients" (* - p 28, recommendation 40)

    This paper is linked to by the CDC Covid-19 website: * https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/Disaster/SSC-COVID19-Critical-Care-Guidelines.pdf

    1336:

    Has anyone seen Wolfram’s new theory? He believes he has developed a new framework which can explain physics. Except it’s more complicated than that; it’s a framework for developing ANY kind of physics from simple rules – apparently the idea is to make it available and see if anyone can come up with our universes physics. I don’t have nearly the mathematics necessary to even come close to understanding or evaluating it, but I'd be curious what anyone think's of it.

    Here’s the main website and here's his introduction to his new way of considering physics.

    I’d be really curious what anyone thought of it.

    1337:

    mdlve @ 1328: Or, for more fun, it may be that our medical thinking on blood oxygen needs to be rethought for Covid

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-overused-for-covid-19/

    Article hints that the strangeness of patients with low oxygen not seemingly being in distress might be because while struggling to bring in oxygen the lungs are still expelling carbon dioxide properly. So Covid may only be partially causing lung issues.

    Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was hoping someone could answer about how to help Covid-19 pneumonia patients breathe if ventilators have as high an incidence of mortality as I've read.

    I'm not wedded to the idea of using ECMO machines. They may not be THE answer (although I think they may be AN answer - one among many). What are other medical technologies that might help Covid-19 pneumonia patients to breathe.

    Whether it's ventilators, ECMO machines or CPAP masks, my question still stands, Why don't we use the Defense Production Act to increase supply to fill the need and then stockpile them until we need them again?

    Someone mentioned iron lungs making a comeback. Another version is Cuirass Ventilation (a mini iron lung that can be worn)1.

    Biphasic Cuirass Ventilation apparently doubles the effective action by not only using negative pressure to expand the rib cage drawing air in (the way an iron lung does), it uses positive pressure to shrink the rib cage back pushing breath out.

    Again I don't see this as THE answer, but it could be one of many answers.

    1 If you look for Cuirass or Biphasic Cuirass Ventilator on YouTube you get a whole lot of videos from Hayek Medical, which I chose not to link to because most of the ones I looked at were like infomercials for Hayek's version. It may be that Hayek Medical is the only company making them right now, which is why only their videos dominate.

    1338:

    I understand all that. OTOH, according to the linked article they ARE being used for Covid-19 patients, and the article suggested they have a lower incidence of mortality than for ventilators. Isn't a 50% chance of survival better than a 20% (or less) chance?

    The problem is, we don't know what the criteria are for assigning patients to ECMO (where it's available) vs. external ventilation. Given that ECMO is very expensive both in terms of equipment and specialized staff and is therefore in much shorter supply, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a triage stage, so that only patients who might conceivably recover get assigned an ECMO bed -- leaving worse candidates on ventilation (and therefore likelier to die).

    Medical statistics are full of twisty little gotchas like that (i.e. expensive treatment seems to be more effective than cheap treatment but only because it's being assigned to the cases deemed likeliest to survive).

    1339:

    So can you use the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of the highly trained teams of staff needed to operate the ECMO machine? And can you then stockpile that staff until next time?

    The Defense Production Act, while it can be useful, isn't a magic wand that solve all problems.

    As much as we have an equipment shortage, we more have a staff shortage (hence western countries suddenly deciding that maybe those medically trained immigrants shouldn't be cab drivers after all), and even more a specialized staff shortage.

    The CPAP stuff may be an option, but it is really only becoming an option through experience - where we are now reaching a point of having treated enough patients to say maybe Covid is different enough that we have to rethink our treatment charts. So you may see it get a higher priority as time (and evidence) marches on - though as mentioned CPAP have an unfortunate side effect of increasing transmission risk amongst medical staff so then we get back to having sufficient gowns/masks that they can once again be used as disposable after each patient visit, which many/most health systems are still struggling with such a simple requirement.

    1340:

    Robert Prior @ 1332:h

    More than 80 million Americans are expected to receive payments of up to $1,200 in their bank accounts on Wednesday, according to the Treasury Department. But for those who did not provide banking details, they will receive a cheque with "President Donald J. Trump" printed on the left-hand side.

    This is unprecedented, apparently.

    What's unprecedented is the corrupt way Trumpolini is appropriating (misappropriating? stealing?) funds from the U.S. government and diverting the process for his own personal benefit. There's a tie-in to his reelection campaign in there somewhere and partisan politicking on the government's dime is against the law (although that law does actually exempt the President & Vice President). Penny ante, third rate, banana republic dictators don't stoop so low.

    I stepped in dog shit the other day that has more respect for the rule of law than that douchebag.

    1341:

    It'll be interesting to see. It's not the first attempt to find underlying rules, but few of the others have proved very useful and none have been in combining GR and GM. The key is whether the model is predictive - as he implies, there are a zillion ways for different mathematics to describe the same phenomenon (think about the definition of pi, for a start!), so being merely descriptive doesn't necessarily get anyone any further.

    I may look at his technical tome, but am almost certainly too rusty and possibly never was up to it.

    1342:

    "Over-motorization" - do you mean, like, a Mustang, with almost twice the horsepower/CC that my minivan has? Or maybe the engine that a friend had, back in the seventies, a 450-something HP engine in a pickup?

    (Note that I think semi-tractors run 600-750 HP)

    1343:

    And, with external ventilation, you can stop it quickly and easily if it starts to cause more harm than good or you unexpectedly run out of resources (e.g. staff). With ECMO, that's not as simple.

    1344:

    sigh

    I read your whole post... which completely and totally ignores that we're talking about the late 1800's, where a) shellac was easily available b) copper wire was available c) steam engine technology was VERY VERY available, all bloody over the place, and very well understood, and so were parts.

    Obligatory reference, from the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Motor_Carriage_Company

    1345:

    we won't have the staffing and other resources to use the machines

    Friend of mine spent some time on an ECMO a few years ago. We took turns visiting him in the hospital. Every patient on one had a full-time nurse looking after them with a team on standby in case they were needed, and extra specialists doing tests etc.

    Staffing is a serious problem — these were specialists not generalist RNs.

    1346:

    Seen it, no. Read about it on slashdot, yes.

    Wonderful thread of puns concerning the unraveling of string theory....

    Someone there also mentioned that it seems to be a set of rules for defining any self-consistent physics you like... but, like string theory, does not guide you to the rules for our universe.

    1347:

    No or, rather, that's a tiny part of the whole. I mean building our whole infrastructure around the use of high weight, high speed, high energy consumption for personal transport, use of roads for bulk transport and, above all, the concept that such transport is cheap, even for medium to long distances.

    That results in out-of-town shopping malls/superstores, long-distance commuting, using a second home hundreds of miles away for a night or two, and more. Until and unless we reverse direction, we will not do much about the environmental harm our transport policy causes.

    1348:

    South central Pennsylvania.

    1349:

    The problem with 'falling back tech levels' is that the original infrastructure isn't there any more. I was touring an engine plant in Michigan last year. They get the engine blocks from Mexico. And those are complex things to make.

    Catching up on comments.

    What I was proposing with vehicles powered by compressed air or muscles isn't a matter of dusting off old plants, because the infrastructure to build these machines doesn't exist. You really might enjoy the links posted.

    What I'm assuming is that global supply chains crash and people kludge together what they've got and build their supply chains thusly. If you've got a compressors and ways to build tanks, that's one way to move energy around. Chinese wheelbarrows are hand-built, and became popular with the fall of the Han dynasty, when their roads fell apart (something to think about going forward...).

    As for the Kinetic Sculptures, that's one of the fun events in Humboldt County, probably to be cancelled this year: human-powered vehicles that have to race 50 miles down roads, up and over sand dunes, across a bay (in the water) and to a finish line. And they win points for artistry as well as finishing the race. They range from a guy on a mountain bike with a bunch of 5 gallon containers and a paddle for flotation (Earth First! fists painted all over them) to a giant lobster with 20 people or more people peddling away inside. You can find directions for how to build one linked to this website. Humboldt County is littered with human powered vehicles. Humans even power the amps at public events with a trailer-mounted human-powered generator setup: you sit back with 20 of your friends and pedal away, and there's even space to set your beer.

    1350:

    You are ignoring the very large number of people who don't own their own homes. They rent an apartment or live on the street. Or with friends or relatives. Or are migrant labor.

    It's all very well to say support people living in their own home, but first those people need to have one.

    FWIW, I did live in a house that I owned. I sold it and moved into senior housing because I didn't want to fall and not have anyone around to help me. (Well, also it was on the side of a hill, with a lot of stairs. I could well have ended up totally housebound. Of course with COVID I'm effectively house-bound but it's a much large house, I can walk around it, and meals are provided.) And if I fall and can't get up, there's someone to call an ambulance. (It may take awhile if I can't crawl to the emergency cord, and can't reach my cell phone, but it will happen.) I feel I would have been a lot more likely to die sooner on my own. This is, of course, just a guess.

    That said, it depends greatly on the quality of the residence you end up in. And more expensive definitely isn't necessarily better. (OTOH, the really low end is as bad as a dog kennel...for abandoned dogs.)

    1351:

    I think y'all are missing my point. Assistance for the elderly should be available before it gets to the point where families have to make that choice. Having some assistance available might prevent it from coming to that point or at least delay its onset.

    Nope. Not at all. Almost every single person I know who has been through this over the last 10 years has had the GTFO starting years before assistance was needed. Our parents all refused to deal with any aspect of "they are not in charge".

    At all.

    To the extend my wife and I have told our children we are planning to make a video telling them that if we act like our parents they can slap us until we stop. And let them play it for us as often as needed.

    1352:

    I wonder how that's going to work for Direct Deposit? I can't remember the last time I got a check from the government. Plus, doesn't a check mean you're going to have to go to a bank to cash/deposit it?

    Inside US information here.

    If the IRS has a bank account on file for you they are just putting the money in your account. My son already got his money. The paper checks are only if they don't have a bank accounted tied to your tax returns.

    Don't know about Social Security processing.

    1353:

    steam engine technology was VERY VERY available, all bloody over the place, and very well understood, and so were parts.

    Excuse what may be my ignorance but which of the following isn't true.

    Batteries "back in the day" didn't have all that much range. And charging via the grid of the day wasn't all that easy.

    Steam cars have the same limitation as steam locomotives. They use clean water much faster than they use fuel. And there's not a nice pond next to the road when you need it.

    1354:

    South central Pennsylvania.

    Ah, yes. The land of the interesting billboards. I driver (well I did) through there most summers the last 10 years to get to a conference at Penn State. Beautiful countryside. But lots of interesting billboards. And radio stations.

    Didn't notice them much the seven years I lived in Pittsburgh back in the 80s.

    1355:

    Steam powered vehicles are inefficient in terms of fuel usage, mainly due to their low working temperatures and the Carnot cycle. Internal combustion engines are more efficient than steam for that reason, gas turbines run at much higher temperatures than infernal combustion and rockets are even more efficient, limited by the melting point of the toughest alloys. After that you've got nuclear fission and fusion which are even more efficient.

    1356:

    You are ignoring the very large number of people who don't own their own homes. They rent an apartment or live on the street. Or with friends or relatives. Or are migrant labor. For services for stay-at-home elderly people, there is no difference between homeowners and those who rent an apartment. All is needed is a permanent address to be registered. For homeless people and illegal migrants, there are other options, none very satisfactory.

    1357:

    For those who are still tracking COVID-19 news: People with COVID-19 may be infectious days before symptoms: study (April 15, 2020, Kelly MacNamara) The authors inferred that infectiousness started 2.3 days before symptoms appeared and was at its peak at 0.7 days before the first signs of illness—although they cautioned that pinpointing the exact timing of the onset of symptoms relied on patient memory. ... "This is important because current public health control measures advised, for example, by the WHO and UK government assume that maximum contagion is after symptom onset. Hence one reason masks are not advocated for wearing by asymptomatic members of the public," he said. Temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of COVID-19 (Nature Medicine, 15 April 2020)

    And this study doesn't address how wearing of masks disrupts the process, but is interesting: Cough chamber' shows six feet not far enough (April 15, 2020, University of Western Ontario) It's actually an older study, resurrected for COVID-19: Experimental Measurements Of Far Field Cough Airflows Produced By Healthy And Influenza-Infected Subjects (2018-05) (full pdf)

    Greg Tingey 1310: Is that language referring to this and similar? Just curious.

    BTW, your lie and disinformation detectors are not as reliable as you (appear to) think they are. (I appreciate the informal tutorials over the years by the one(s) with many names on influence operations, online and otherwise, and on how to spot possible ops, but I'm a minority here.)

    1358:

    I see, so you're expected to go to either Philly or Pittsburgh, which, when you die, will not increase the county body count.

    1359:

    You didn't, because it was only in the eighties that broadcast media stopped being required to allow equal time.

    That would have killed Rush Limburger (drug abuser, scum) dead, and all his imitators.

    1360:

    Plus, doesn't a check mean you're going to have to go to a bank to cash/deposit it? Depends on the bank, but many/most US banks support paper check deposit through phone app (using phone's camera) or bank's ATM. I just deposited a physical check from the IRS (not stimulus; an earlier tax refund) using a phone app. (Major US bank.) TBH I had not trusted it (the phone app) previously, but am avoiding going to places like banks when possible. US is a bit behind the curve on paper checks for non-US people; paper is still widely used though declining.

    1361:

    Agreed. Though I will note that, starting 10-15 years ago, truckers in the US were starting to scream that... wait for it... the railroads were taking their cargoes.

    1362:

    Troutwaxer Wolfram's ideas are TESTABLE, yes? EC on the same topic - you have also put your finger on a possible test - the great GR/QM problem. Fairly certain that at least one of the "new systems" that may/will emerge from this will be useful, though.

    I'm so horribly rusty I can't keep up any more, but something remarkable has happened - even if it's "only" a new way of looking at Mathematics/Physics. I note he's made it Open Source - "Here's this new toy people, PLEASE play with it!"

    What a time for an Idea ( Or idea-set ) like this to emerge .....

    JBS The Biophasic Cuirass Ventilator is the idea I was thnking of - but didn't know the name.

    David L For guided vehicles ( i.e. Steam-locomotve-drawn trains ) that problem was solved by J Ramsbottom & they were called Water Troughs

    Bill Arnold Shudder - no! The vermin are those who dliberately lie for power, influence & money. Usually/Often religious leaders, but politicians are never far behind. None of them form a "group", unless & until they cohere for mutual support & explotation - like the current US Rethuglicans - but even that is "after the event" - not before. And, do you knw, I don't believe you? It simply is NOT WORTH THE EFFORT of trying to find one grain of maybe-truth in all the lies, misdirection, obscurantism & outright self-deception - the deliberate obscuring of sources & infpormation is deliberately counter-productive - why fucking bother? Plus the lies, insults, threats & then claiming to be "Only joking" - yeah ..... I mean, we could all go over to using [ Redacted ] for our published information sources, couldn't we? How useful - not.

    1363:

    Er, yeah, because I was not talking about the late 1800s :) I was replying to Moz's post about which is "easier" to make, and the basic point was that although an electric motor seems easier, when you're talking about a thing which is good enough to move a vehicle and keep on doing it, you get a lot of the same "this bit's really tricky" problems whatever kind of thing it is, and the ones that you don't get with a particular kind you do get some other thing that's similarly awkward instead. So there isn't really a definitive answer, the kind of answer you do get depends heavily on what stuff you can get hold of that someone else has already done the difficult things to, and even the apparent demonstration of the simplicity of an electric motor that kids can build a crude version that at least goes round even if that's all it does is the product of a particular set of choices for "things kids can do themselves" vs. "things kids can get that someone else has done for them" and if you use a different set of choices you can find that a crude internal combustion engine that just about goes round is possible but an electric motor isn't.

    By the time people got seriously interested in building cars, IC engines, steam engines and electric motors were all established technologies and the parts and techniques for all three were available, so the answer to which was "easier" to make a car-powering version of depended more on who was asking the question than anything. Ferdinand Porsche's first car was famously a battery-electric device that looked like a kid's toy from fifty years in the future. I know about the Stanley Steamer; several other outfits also made steam cars. Kipling had one. When they were good they were very very good but they also had a well-developed ability to be a pain in the bloody arse, which Kipling describes in entertaining style. Lots of control functions that couldn't well be automated and couldn't well be attended to while watching the road at the same time. Steam-powered lorries did rather better, since without the size and weight restrictions you could just build a little locomotive and crew it like one. A significant factor in IC engines becoming the default choice was that the control functions could either be automated with technology of the time or at least made easy enough to operate by hand that you could easily do it and drive at the same time.

    1364:

    Maybe you can translate for the rest of us.

    1365:

    Troutwaxer If you look back, you will see that I have asked "BA" to do that little thing, several times. So far - de nada. Do you think he might do so if more of us asked him, so as to save us the effort?

    1366:

    Whereas I can imagine myself needing to come to the defence of my parents against people who won't take GTFO for an answer, because I'm a convinced GTFOist myself and would sympathise. My own possible eventual need for such a defence is about the only thing I can ever seriously imagine wanting a handgun for. It's my floor and my shit and I will give up the right to die in it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

    1367:

    I am not at all sure that anything useful will emerge, but the only way to find out is to investigate. For every bright idea that leads somewhere useful, dozens don't, but there's provably no way to tell which is which without trying!

    1368:

    Yeah. I've heard that some study in Scotland reckons to have found evidence of something like 2 orders of magnitude more people having antibodies to it than there "should" be by the count of actually ill people. I've been wondering for a while if something related has been round already but nobody noticed.

    1369:

    Frankly I’ve reached the point of seeing anyone who excuses the behaviour of TMN and interacts with them, let alone defends their odious posts, as nothing short of unforgivably amoral. They are excusing on line harassment and occasional outright physical threats because the person issuing them is “interesting”, and consistently gaslights their victims. If you don’t stand against this sort of thing, you stand with it, and I count you thus marked.

    1370:

    It's my floor and my shit and I will give up the right to die in it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

    Great. Good for you. Leave a notice with the local police and some associates so everyone understands when they find you.

    But, unlike your plan, my mother, mother-in-law, and the elderly parents of many of my friends call in a blizzard, expecting someone to drive/fly 100s of miles, take them to the ER, then tell them to GTFO as they are no longer needed.

    Happens in real life over and over and over again.

    Biggest thing in much of the US is car keys. Typically this creates a major issue when some "kid" in their 50s or even 70s takes the keys to the car. Not to protect the parent from danger but to protect the innocent bystanders who they are getting more and more likely to kill.

    Was the husband of your Queen in this situation recently?

    A friend discovered that his parents were tag team driving at night. Dad had lost most of his night vision for details (he was fine during the day) so mom would ride in the front seat telling him about things he might be missing. Mom wasn't driving due to issues with Parkinson's. [big big eyeroll] My friend unloaded on them both and told them they could give up the keys or driving at night. Make a decision NOW. Some states have ways to deal with this. I've been told in Maryland an anonymous report of someone who should not be driving will get the state police to show up at their door telling them they have to pass a driving test NOW. And if they don't take the test or pass their license is revoked. And likely their auto tags removed and held till a responsible party can claim them.

    These are the kinds of situations that are real.

    1371:

    You have to take the two together. The Declaration of Independence tells us WHY and the Constitution tells us HOW.

    It's more like three: the Preamble, which is, after all, physically part of the Constitution says WHAT. IOW, it's a statement of what the constitution is for, a declaration of purpose and goals.

    It's noticeable how much legal effort has gone into downplaying the Preamble's legal relevance.

    1372:

    Hey JBS, I've passed on your tip about dishwashing liquid/foggy glasses. You'll be pleased to know some French nurses say thank you.

    1373:

    Dave, Greg has been calling out her shit longer than anyone else here.

    1375:

    Missed that... but the most obvious answer in the world to foggy glasses is to buy what skin divers use for their masks.

    1376:

    It's like the gift that keeps giving…

    Millionaires and billionaires are set to reap more than 80% of the benefits from a change to the tax law Republicans put in the coronavirus economic relief package, according to a non-partisan congressional committee.

    … JCT estimated 43,000 people making $1m or more would owe a total of $70.3bn less in taxes in 2020. Less than 3% of the benefits from the change will go to Americans earning less than $100,000 a year.

    Steve Rosenthal, a tax expert at the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan thinktank, told the Washington Post hedge-fund investors and owners of real estate would benefit most from the change.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/tax-change-coronavirus-stimulus-act-millionaires-billionaires

    Among the possible beneficiaries of the change are real estate investors in President Trump’s inner circle. In 2018, The New York Times reported that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, likely didn’t pay federal income taxes for several years because of paper losses generated by depreciating his companies’ properties, despite his significant wealth and earnings from other sources, according to confidential financial documents.

    Mr. Trump has also reported significant losses on his tax return. Portions of a 1995 tax return published by The Times showed nearly $916 million in losses, which could have permitted him to avoid paying any federal income taxes for almost two decades.

    The 2017 law restricted both men’s abilities to reap tax savings through only-on-paper losses; now, with those limits likely to be lifted, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner, as well as other wealthy real estate developers, have the potential to score big tax savings.

    The Senate unanimously approved the $2 trillion aid package late Wednesday night. The House is expected to vote on the measure on Friday to deal with the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic; it would be the largest fiscal stimulus package in modern American history. It would then be sent to Mr. Trump for his signature.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/coronavirus-real-estate-investors-stimulus.html

    1377:

    Dave is talking about me, primarily. (FWIW I called SBH out a couple of weeks ago; been much better since.) I will refrain from further comment on the matter (perhaps I have observed/noticed things that he has not, though that's partly orthogonal), but will try to do translations more often.

    1378:

    Well when I did diving it was spit.

    1379:

    In that case, buying anything was not an option, plus diving/sport shops are closed. Cardiology nurses were drafted to help within the infectious disease wards and were issued protective eyegear that fogged immediately. Dishwahing liquid is ubiquitous in hospitals (and dirt-cheap).

    1380:

    For some reason (I wonder why) using spit at the moment is a big no-no

    1381:

    I just don't remember any specific "product". Actually while underwater we were taught to go face down for a moment as you usually had enough water inside it to swish it over the glass.

    And when you had too much water pull slightly on the bottom of the mask while in an upright attitude, blow out through you nose, and make sure the resulting snot exited before you were done.

    1382:

    Does the current situation mean that all of those Paris cafes with the sidewalk tables with 4 chairs around a 20cm table and maybe 30cm between tables will have to change?

    1383:

    IIRC (my late ex was, among other things, a master diver), you could buy some kind of wax-based stuff to rub on them, not messy like dishwashing liquid.

    I should do something, since as soon as I put on a mask, either the inexpensive dust masks I have around, or the Designer Ones (well, my SO does Art, so that makes her a designer) she made, my glasses start fogging.

    shrug Guess that makes me an old foggy....

    1384:

    All cafes, restaurants, theaters, etc.. are closed and will not reopen (at best) before June/July (nobody knows, really) and then only those that haven't gone bankrupt. A great opportunity for multinational food/drink businesses to preempt really desirable locations

    1385:

    DtP Are you saying that I am "marked" as standing for the Seagull, because that simply is not the case - or I hope not. She has been asked, politely & not-so-politely by me & others to give a coherent response - which 99% of the time we don't get. It's extremely tiesome, but Charlie, for reasons of his own, tolerates stuff from her that would get the rest of us permanently red-carded - I think. Or are you saying that i've made a mistake by even trying to interact with her, in order to try to get resonable behviour? In which case you may be correct - unfortunately. Oh & THANKS to Troutwaxer @ 1373 BUT - as stated above, I have been trying ( As an ex-teacher, used, occsionally to, erm "difficult" teenagers ) to try to draw her out - with be it noted zero success.

    1386:

    Re: 'To the extend my wife and I have told our children we are planning to make a video ...'

    You might also need a 'Power of Attorney' of the right flavor (medical, financial) to have a hope that your spelled-out-in-detail wishes will be honored. Consider attaching some sort of signed affadavit or agreement from them saying that they will abide by whatever it is that you agreed to.

    Lots of stories of surviving family members nixing signed organ donor cards because they personally disliked that idea. Most people hate making decisions like these that's why you need to discuss this well in advance and in detail: tell them you want to spare them from that particular pain.

    1387:

    Dan Simmons wrote Flashback[0] in 2011. You were a member of his core forums until 2015.

    Attempting to unload morality on us is a bit ironic, since you seem to have the political knowledge of a tiny rabbit.

    Yeah - Rats & other other rotton-burrowers, gnawing away underneath with lies & disinformation.

    Sigh, Greg. It's simply not true: You can run full spectrum private stuff against peons on the UK without even anyone batting an eyelid. Blackmail, phone, computer, company, press slander, set-ups, police nudging, scenario setups, drugging, the whole works. We'll give you a price list if you want[1].

    Trust me, we know.

    and I count you thus marked.

    Yeah, we are.

    Just not in the way you think, it's waaay above your pay-grade. It's above the shitty stuff we link too, too.

    ~

    Anyhow: translation. If you watch the "Apocalypse Now" video, the point of it is that the African-American soldiers are in full pro-cynical-lock-down mode. The quotation is:

    "Do you know who is in command?"

    "Yeah"

    points to UK

    Vietnam was a while ago now.

    ~

    Anyhow, if you want to spot the state of ex-MF members try out this person: https://twitter.com/bridgietherease

    Unlike Greg, they know the scale of the ratfucking.

    ~

    Hint: in about 3 months, people we've "bullied" will be relieved that they were not being gaslite, they were being prepped. e.g.

    Hedge funds are applying for small-business loans, “filling out forms to show they have fewer than 500 employees and certifying the ‘current economic uncertainty makes this loan request necessary to support the ongoing operations.’”

    https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1250029327233794049

    They saw Occupy and the real Black Lives Matter protests and this time: meh, they think they can win. Permanently.

    People burning down 5G are symptoms of this, not causes, ffs.

    [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9432902-flashback?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=kv5SaYT9wc&rank=3

    [1] https://www.blackcube.com/case-studies/#

    Russia Was Linked to 14 Deaths in the U.K., but Britain Looked Away. A New Book Explores Why https://time.com/5725041/uk-russian-assassins-heidi-blake/

    1388:

    Or are you saying that i've made a mistake by even trying to interact with her, in order to try to get resonable behviour?

    Yes, you make the same mistake repeatedly, knowing you'll get the same sort of treatment once they know they have your attention. The proper way to avoid feeding the troll is not to engage at all. Ever. Ignore the posts where you get called by name, scroll past the spamlink screeds, refuse to get baited by ignoring the shiny lures being dangled before you.

    There are a few people on this blog who do engage with the persona behind the morphing nametag, I scroll past their contributions too now since if they're willing to play the stupid game I doubt they've got anything of interest to say to anyone else.

    1389:

    Re those battery recycling thoughts - 'Fully Charged' (see youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzz4CoEgSgWNs9ZAvRMhW2A) will have a show about exactly this some time soon. I recommend the show generally; it's not just about EVs but covers wider non-fossil-fool stuff. And it's Kryten (see 'Red Dwarf') presenting it.

    1390:

    I thought that looked like a pun, though not quite sure I got both halves. :) Also enjoyed the would-have-been-excerpt. Thanks!

    1391:

    About 2 weeks before, but ok, that’s 14 days

    1392:

    No, leather was NOT always an "expensive, niche market" material, not even in my adult lifetime and in the UK - and still isn't in many places. For durability ... there was no alternative until recently.

    Synthetics have a BIG problem, which is microfibres from washing - look that one up :-(

    Yes, fine. Leather has desirable properties not shared by woven, spun or felted textiles. That's for sure. And where nothing else will do, it's used.

    But how many items of children's clothing made of leather have you seen? Have a look in your local purveyor of clothing to the working class, some time.

    It's niche unless the kids in your closest impoverished-area school are wearing it.

    Agree about the environmental harms of synthetics, but they are minor compared to everything else we're doing to ecosystems around the world. Worry about synthetic clothing is like the hysteria about plastic straws: well-intentioned but poorly aimed.

    Hemp and bamboo and other environmentally benign(?) fibre crops have potential, but only potential at this point. Will they scale? Wool has been around forever and used to be everywhere (woollen singlets, woollen socks, etc.) but lost most of the market when alternatives came along. As a kid I loved linen sheets, but they were a long-term investment, and linen clothing was expensive.

    1393:

    You might also need a 'Power of Attorney' of the right flavor ...

    That's a given. But that's all about the legal issues. I'm referring to if we start being jerks. I and my friends have noticed that when confronted with such things our parents and theirs tended to shut up and go along with reality. For a while. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

    1394:

    The best use of leather for clothing is to reduce amount of scraped off skin when cycles go down. Other than very expensive things like Kevlar, leather seems to be the best thing to wear for personal protection when in a power cycle.

    Worry about synthetic clothing is like the hysteria about plastic straws: well-intentioned but poorly aimed.

    To me this was symbolic. And maybe it got people to thinking about all the other things. Or not.

    1395:

    No. I do not consider you to be swimming in the same cesspool as TMN and the fools who court their attention and lionise their contributions.

    It would be better if you completely ignored them. Refuse to engage at all. No doubt they will cry foul, whine and whimper about shadow banning. But: FUCK ‘EM!

    They previously issued an unambiguous threat to have me killed. Regardless of whether this is a “joke” or not, I personally have to take it seriously, because I live cheek-by-jowl with those who would also take it seriously. So, to reiterate: Fuck them, and their pretence of high minded superiority.

    I am saddened that their presence continues to be tolerated.

    (I note that TMN has attempted again to smear me by association, since they have no actual defence for their own behaviour. But, as another poster has noted, that is pure bait.)

    1396:

    Nojay @ 1388 Unfortunately, I think you may be correct - her outbursts are (like Trump ) all about HER - we are just useful for getting attention. She's just mentioned me again, but I'm not going to respond. However - there's a catch: What do we do if she dangerously libels any of us, or draws unwanted attention from "the authorities" because of her ravings, & we have not replied? ( This has already happened once, IIRC ) ALSO DtP @ 1395 Agreed - but the threats & the borderline-libels cannot be ignored. What do we do about those?

    1397:

    As TMN no doubt is aware, there is very little that can meaningfully be done about any threats or harassment on Charlie's blog. The only direct action that can be taken is to start reporting posts containing harassing or threatening material officially (getting, as you call them, "plod" involved); however the only outcome of that will be either nothing (no actionable material) and/or to force Charlie to shut the blog down and potentially land him in legal hot water.

    Since TMN's death threat against me (and by association, my family -- hey, folks in these parts aren't subtle!) I have been in effect watching my back and that of my family. It is not difficult to discover my real name and location for anyone with a bit of online nous, and I cannot afford to assume that TMN is "joking" (even if it pleases others on this blog to treat them as some sort of harmless performance artist or eccentric guru -- hence my anger at those who continue to encourage their schtick).

    For added "laughs", you may also want to consider that the threat against me and mine was made when TMN was aware that Charlie was distracted and busy with a dying parent. Think about the callous calculus behind that timing.

    1398:

    Not sure whether I will post further on this, as I'd rather like to let the subject drop at this point and anger is exhausting.

    The original threats came in a nicely packaged cluster starting around comment 2195 in Charlie's original CASE NIGHMARE BLONDE blog post.

    Despite me being dismissive of the threats and accusations at the time (TMN was madly off-base on a number of points), clearly someone else was not. And I have had casue to be concerned since.

    (PS: Do not believe assertions that TMN doesn't doxx people, particularly the wrong people.)

    1399:

    It doesn't work particularly well, unfortunately, but it does help (and, as you say, is cheap and easily available).

    1400:

    Read the exchange a bit more carefully! I was pointing out that it was NOT always expensive and niche-market even in the UK, not that it hasn't been made so, today (which I accept, except for workwear and specialist items). Remember that suede is a form of leather.

    A short 60 years back, it was used for all functional footwear, all high-stress and high-wear components (work gloves, belts, elbow patches, crotch patches for cycling and a lot more), most similar functional clothing (motorcycling leathers, welders' aprons etc. Suede was common for skirts and leather jackets were normal items of both fashion and functional clothing; suede lining and similar was also common.

    Actually, synthetic clothing is more of a problem than you make out - many of the ecologists are becoming increasingly worried by microfibres. And surely you have seen pictures of the beaches covered with cast-off (plastic, as almost all are, nowadays) shoes?

    1401:

    I did not realise that it had gone that far, partly because I skipped over those posts. Yes, I see how the contents would excite some of the nastier parts of your society. Yes, they were unacceptable, where her vague death threats against the population in general are not.

    1402:

    My concern is more that Charlie approves of the comments to the point of keeping them up despite complaints.

    1403:

    Leather isn't niche is some niche markets :)

    Metalworkers and people who handle steel cables etc use leather gloves and footwear almost exclusively (asbestos being the other main option), as well as aprons etc in many situations. I have a pile of leather gloves in various stages of destruction (they mostly start as TIG welding gloves, decay to metal handling then gardening then rubbish collecting then the compost pile). Some of them are gifts from the road gods, others I buy (a surprising amount of what I own is thus gifted).

    One problem in some parts is that synthetic imitations are also sold, often without much notice. Bicycling gloves suffer from this a great deal, as they're generally part-leather, part-holey so you don't sweat too much... but ideally also don't leave too much skin on the road. Better to leave cow skin :)

    1404:

    Re: wolfram’s new theory of everything: Here’s an entertaining takedown of one of his Previous efforts

    http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

    1405:

    I've long since lost track of the comments on this thread.

    If y'all are getting worked up, I'll shut it down and think of something new to start with.

    A likely cure would be to block all posting of hyperlinks, but I'm not quite ready to go there yet.

    1406:

    Well, I certainly wouldn't want anyone to get "worked up" for no particular reason.

    1407:

    "the perfect time to stop contributing to funding for the World Health Organization"

    Historians will mark this year as the end of the USA as the global hyper-power.

    Five years ago most of us would consider calling the USA the "Leader the of Free World" pretentious. But people really did say it, and mean it.

    Now if you say that they'd laugh in your face.

    Trump's anti-globalism has won. He's managed to destroy the US's place as a world leader. He hasn't destroyed NATO (yet), he hasn't dismantled the UN. But this pandemic has destroyed faith in the USA's much-vaunted scientific expertise (everyone else used the WHO guidelines on how to build a coronavirus test which worked - but the USA is too clever to for that and needed to build their own test...), found a protectionist moment to kill the trade alliances, and destroyed any faith in the USA's system of govt (do you see any other govt in the whole world screaming at itself while the ship sinks the way the US does?).

    And now America is defunding the world's global clearinghouse for health information DURING A FUCKING PANDEMIC.

    It's the kind of thing you'd never believe in a the future-history timeline of a SF novel - unbelievable nonsense, that Trump character is too much of a caricature of evil stupidity.

    1408:

    I will say this once, and with absolute conviction.

    I have not spoken to another human being about anything on this blog for the length of time I have been on it, and I have not corresponded with any other human being about what is written here. In fact, this is the only place I have interacted with the internet during this entire time.

    I have not doxxed, and do not dox.

    This can be proven, 100%, to absolute legal satisfaction.

    So maybe think about canaries and who else is reading. It is a Mirror.

    ~

    Fin.

    1409:

    Donald Trump: proven liar; suspected rapist

    Joe Biden: proven liar; suspected rapist (but fewer counts on each than the above)

    These are my choices. If I choose not to accept them, then it's my fault if Kodos wins.

    Joe Biden is not sane. Either you believe it took a "professional" team a week to properly light his living room for broadcasts OR you believe he had a bad week where he could not be presented to the public.

    What Joe Biden is is a blank check for picking the VP the Democratic Party's leaders expect to actually run the country. They may simply ask Obama to choose or tie-break OR there may be a small knife fight over minutiae. Better than Trump-Yes, but an empty chair is better than Trump. Do NOT expect good things from this year's results.

    1410:

    Then what you have posted about him must be, at least partly, false, because I believe that I could identify someone from what YOU have posted about him. And those remarks about anyone would obviously put someone in danger (possibly someone else entirely, if the nasties misidentified the person you referred to). That is obvious to anyone with the first clue about Northern Irish politics, so you were being either utterly stupid or unspeakably malicious.

    Regrettably, from looking at your posts that he referred to, I believe him.

    1411:

    It was clearly OTT nonsense: it started with a film reference to "Django" and to a Polish piece of[-1] propaganda accusing Radical Lesbians of taking over Ireland (not NI, IRE).

    Literally.

    Unless you wish to start your proposition that radical lesbians have taken over Ireland, then you don't comprehend what was happening.

    However, it did loosely outline a monstrous impossible reality (with fudges so Mr DavetheProc[2] could inform people of the 'reality' of the situation and thus refocus upon the then current situation) mirror what anyone could see was forming there[0] and how it was about to be used by certain more radical parties (who don't do critical thinking) with anyone with a vicious bent and an interest in the DUP[2].

    It is a Mirror

    And the "reality" of the situation got a bit wonky than what could have happened and was being at least hinted at in the press links provided[3]

    Regrettably, from looking at your posts that he referred to, I believe him.

    If you accuse Baudrillard of writing reality, well. Doesn't matter: all of that can be proven.

    OCCP. "Magic".

    [-1] Actually paid for by the State. [0] At least, how we perceived it. [1] Who I have no idea who he is or even if he exists barring a 5 second search in this thread to see if he did have any history - Dan Simmons, as a writer, went a bit politically peculiar back in 2012 so we don't read his stuff, although Hyperion Cantos was brilliant. [2] Which is a long list. [3] We seem to remember someone hacking that account and declaring we'd sent details to the VP of the DUP or whoever that was. HE lost his seat later on.

    1412:

    Although the struggles between different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially presented as fundamental antagonisms, they actually reflect that sys­tem's fundamental unity, both internationally and within each nation. Guy Debord - The society of the spectacle

    0, gentlemen, the time of life is short! An if we live, we live to tread on kings. - Shakespeare, Henry TV, Part I

    1413:

    Consider this another regular successfully harassed from these pages.

    The unrepentant piece-of-shit that masquerades as some enlightened life-form wishes to have it both ways: to claim both unimaginable power to predict and influence events beyond this blog, and to deny the same when there is an actual cause-and-effect that they (surprisingly) failed to see.

    Slow. Clap.

    1414:

    You made explicit claims of doxxing and other such activities, which did not occur from us.

    We only comment here - if you are involved in describing a position elsewhere, we do not follow you / know who you are, so maybe check there? i.e. MF, which has taken a rather more conservative turn than you might imagine, recently.

    You can also easily note that the ridiculous claims occurred just before newspaper articles outlining very similar claims came out. This is verifiable. The Mirror was angled forward.

    So, unless we are in the newspaper business[0], it's highly unlikely it was us controlling reality, and so other factors were involved.

    Prediction =/= Creation.

    That is not harassment.

    ~

    But don't blame us for typing words on a SF blog that have real-world effects without considering what you're actually claiming.

    Fin.

    [0] We're not.

    1415:

    That typo is lovely. I already refer to the fat guy with the gammy leg as "Henry V8" and now I shall add "Henry TV" for the megalomaniac warmonger to the list.

    1416:

    This seems to be a refinement of Wolfram's "it's all cellular automata all the way down" from, what, 10 years ago? 15 years ago?

    Disclaimer, I spent about 30 seconds skimming his summary.

    1417:

    "It's niche unless the kids in your closest impoverished-area school are wearing it."

    Two items per kid, as a rule.

    1418:

    Elections are funny things - we wrap them up in all this rhetoric yet at the end of the day for most of us it comes down to a choice of who is the least offensive.

    Yes, for many, the choices are less than great.

    But really, despite the issues with Biden it really shouldn't be a close choice unless they go and do a Palin type crazy for VP choice.

    In the meantime, somewhat related to the Trump's blaming of WHO, a super PAC is attempting to see if they can convince voters in a swing state that Biden is soft on China https://www.axios.com/biggest-trump-super-pac-test-drives-beijingbiden-campaign-75582a64-6edc-48ec-9b38-f307816b6a32.html

    1419:

    After being threatened by TMN I started using a thing called "Blog Comment Killfile" which keeps them very quiet indeed, until they change nyms, at which point I click the mouse once and they are quiet again. At their best TMN added the same ambience as a second-tier Subgenius preacher, and at their worst - there's no need to be insulting. Let's just say I find them... unnecessary.

    1420:

    Heinlein's headlines about "the crazy years" comes to mind when I think about Trump, not to mention some of what he wrote about grifters (The Prophet, etc.)

    1421:

    I agree completely. What we have here is a sane/competent group of Corporation-fellatiators fighting an insane group of Corporation-fellatiators. Of the two, I'd far rather be ruled by the "sane" group (but in a perfect world I'd be ruled by something at least vaguely resembling a decent person who was dedicated to fairness and the rule of law.)

    Note that this was all predicted by the recent Godzilla movie, in which Ghidorah symbolized Trump and the other monsters, all striving to be "The Alpha" symbolized the candidates in the Democratic primary. Note, if you think I'm out of my mind, all the propaganda pieces about the wonders of a world ruled by monsters that showed up during the end-credits; even when they're making a goddamn rubber-suit movie they can't help revealing themselves. They even got a dig or two in about how "radiation is good for you."

    (The thing which most boggles my mind about TMN is their belief that we don't notice this shit. Pathetic. Fake news.)

    1422:

    [quote]For services for stay-at-home elderly people, there is no difference between homeowners and those who rent an apartment. All is needed is a ...[/quote] Actually, there are significant differences in how you are able to alter the accommodations WRT, e.g., stairs. Before I sold my home I was considering installing an electric stair climber. Others could put ramps in place of some short stairs. Etc.

    This doesn't matter as much for delivery of most services, but it can really be significant WRT how many services are needed.

    1423:

    Re: Wolfram's new proposal. I'm rather sure that if the universe is computable, then the laws can be expressed in that form. The problem is that emergent behavior can be extremely computationally expensive and you can't predict it without doing you don't know ahead of time how much computation. Consider Langton's ant, or even the game of Life.

    The other question, of course, is whether the laws of the universe can be handled by a Turing Machine. We tend to implicitly assume that they can be, but I know of no guarantee that this is correct.

    1424:

    Dumb question time:

    Are there any systematic records of mercury levels in humans, cattle, pets, birds, soil, water, air, etc. across the US?

    Asking because of DT's latest:

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-coal-mercury/trump-administration-expected-to-weaken-mercury-rule-for-coal-plants-idUSKCN21Y1IW

    Based on a quick search - biologists, medicos, veterinarians are still in agreement that Hg is unhealthy. Plus the FDA monitors/tests for mercury content in food stuffs.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096006/

    'Acute or chronic mercury exposure can cause adverse effects during any period of development. Mercury is a highly toxic element; there is no known safe level of exposure. Ideally, neither children nor adults should have any mercury in their bodies because it provides no physiological benefit.'

    1425:

    Shit. Pennsylvania has more Coronavirus cases than California (where I live.) I am really, really sorry.

    1426:

    Charlie @ 1405 "Blocking hyperlinks" - please don't - much too useful - for all the rest of us, that is. Also, IIRC, doesn't the site get twitchy if one posts too many direct links, without the HTML code?

    DtP @ 1397 Irrelevant to "her" - it all about herself - just like a certain US "president" - it's pure attention-seeking, no matter what the consequences to others.

    icehawk @ 1407 It's DT - it's all about HIM - nothing else matters, as long as he gets re-elected. Utterly delusional & the "R's" are now trapped - even those who are marginally sane have very few escape routes ...

    PrivateIron What Joe Biden is is a blank check for picking the VP the Democratic Party's leaders expect to actually run the country. They may simply ask Obama to choose or tie-break OR there may be a small knife fight over minutiae. Better than Trump-Yes, but an empty chair is better than Trump. Do NOT expect good things from this year's results. Unfortunately, you are probably correct.

    stimer I did Henry IV pt I for English "O" level - the Beeb are braodcasting it again soon .... Also available on their "Hollow Crown" series watching again ... [ Sun 26 April 19.30 hrs ]

    SFR DT is openly advocting poisoning his own populace?

    A POLITE REQUEST Please, none of you leave or go away, because of the Seagull. You are all interesting & amusing & annoying & lots of fun. Let us do our best to try to ignore it into non-existence?

    1427:

    Yes, for the usual meaning of computable.

    As you say, it's unclear if that is the case. The simple analogy there is with axiomatic mathematics - do the universe's laws include properties that are not provable from the basic rules? Aside: and are there universes with a different choice of such properties?

    I have convinced myself that, unless there is a Penrose-like exemption of human minds from the limits of axiomatic mathematics and/or Turing machines, there will be truths about the universe that the human race is incapable of proving (or realising). But, obviously, we shall never know what they are :-)

    1428:

    I agree with Greg, that we don't need to kill the hyperlinks.

    Since certain people don't get moderated (and yes, that sometimes includes me), the posts generally get fairly toxic into the 1000s, unless there's a good tech debate going on about trains, starships, or stuff like that.

    It looks like this post is getting rancid, so Charlie, if you have the energy, feel free to start another one.

    1429:

    Irrelevant to "her"

    If you cannot see that we did that exchange because of the impact the actual news cycle that was engaging (rather than us warbling) would have on the LGBT+ community & how it would impact a large number of people then, I despair. Including DavetheProc, ironically enough.

    it's pure attention-seeking

    It's the absolute opposite. Are we deluded enough to think it actually changed things? No.

    Did a lot of people start discussing the topic with maturity and with foresight that this would be an avenue used to divide people and so on? Who knows, hopefully.

    The cruelty is the point

    These people 100% use trauma to mold society.

    ~

    And yes, we get it's not a game. We don't have the narcissistic pleasure feedback loop going on, tell you that for free.

    1430:

    Oh, so the base uss-urper, then? Correction noted.

    1431:

    In the vein of remembering WWI over a century ago, remember snickering at the comments made when the War started about how it would be "over by Christmas?"

    Well, there are a few links you might want to read. Or not.

    Ed Yong writing in The Atlantic: Our Pandemic Summer

    From the In the Pipeline Blog:

    Updates on small molecule trials (tl;dr: hoarding hydroxychloroquine was probably a waste of time unless you're worried about malaria, lupus, or arthritis. And others aren't looking very good either.)

    Coronavirus vaccine prospects. This one was kind of cool, because I didn't realize that the world record for vaccine development speed is currently held by the new Ebola vaccine, which took five years to develop. Normally it takes a decade to develop a new vaccine. There are 78 known efforts underway to create a SARS-CoV2 vaccine. Derek breaks down the different strategies for making making vaccines, explains why it will take at least two years to get a Covid-19 vaccine that is useful, and why said vaccine may be about as much fun as getting the Shingrix shot and may need to be boosted every year or two.

    tl;dr? Keep on saying that the lockdown will be over by summer, or sound negative and depressing like me. Nasty choice, that.

    1432:

    Re: 'But, obviously, we shall never know what they are :-)'

    Have been wondering whether internal consistency would be sufficient if direct proof doesn't exist (yet). Alternatively: if 'all roads lead to Rome'.

    Mostly this is because I think that math is the science/art of 'rules*' therefore whether the resulting axioms/proofs are applicable to the universe is - meh.

    • Includes feedback systems.
    1433:

    Not to diminish the damage Trump has done, and will continue to do. But, some of his grand pronouncements end up meaning little in the end, and indications are that this will be one of them.

    Trump campaigned on this, and yet did nothing for 3 1/3 years in office.

    It's no surprise in a way that he is doing it now - he wants the money to flow in to his campaign from big coal, and the votes from the (few) delusional coal miners who still think coal is going to return to its heyday.

    But otherwise the electrical utilities are against it because they have already installed the equipment at the coal plants they intend to keep, and for the rest coal is no longer cost competitive against natural gas - and it is the cost savings of natural gas that are killing coal, not regulations (even without the regulations coal is still more expensive than natural gas).

    1434:

    Are there any systematic records of mercury levels in humans, cattle, pets, birds, soil, water, air, etc. across the US? Interesting question, still looking; and from a quick poke the science on low level exposure is messy and agenda-driven. (euphemism, that.)

    NYTimes link. The move appears to be mostly about not counting the health benefits of reducing coal (and oil) power plant particulate emmissions, and of course undercounting by at least several orders of magnitude the economic costs of mercury pollution, and has been in the works for a few years. (Lifelong brain damage, even very low level, caused by fetal exposure. Damage to other organs.) Quoted for those who don't have a way to access: E.P.A., Tweaking Its Math, to Weaken Controls on Mercury (Lisa Friedman, Coral Davenport, April 16, 2020) Driving down mercury emissions alone, the studies at the time found, would yield a $6 million annual benefit, a fraction of the cost of controls. But with the rest of the co-benefits and the projected gains in avoided heart disease, asthma attacks and other health problems, the benefits reached $80 billion over five years. Overall, the Obama administration estimated that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year. Under the Trump administration’s new rule, such co-benefits will no longer be calculated with cost, only direct benefits.

    1435:

    Consistency is the hobgoblin of small universes :)

    1436:

    Proving internal consistency is typically harder than proving correctness or incorrectness! The point is that there are necessarily statements which cannot be classified as true, false or orthogonal to a set of axioms. And, by pushing that a bit further, there will necessarily be statements that are indescribably within those axioms.

    I agree with your statement about the universe. Even assuming it exists (not as trivial an issue as might appear), we have no reason to believe or disbelieve that it follows a set of 'laws' that we can even understand.

    1437:

    Sorry. "Orthogonal" = "consistent but not provable (or provably consistent)" in this context.

    I like dpb's comment :-)

    1438:

    Been seeing arguments on the US right (I think perhaps being pushed by Peter Navarro and others) about the negative health effects of a recession/depression. I have not read more than a small fraction of the literature, but there are apparently at least two camps of scholarship that don't talk much to each other. The other camp is exemplified by this (and I have not seen it getting much press): Life and death during the Great Depression (José A. Tapia Granados and Ana V. Diez Roux, October 13, 2009) For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

    Anyway, keep eyes watching for arguments about negative health effects of economic crashes being used to justify mass human sacrifice; keep 'em honest.

    1439:

    "It'll all be over by Christmas"

    Let me make some predictions (this'll probably turn into a new post, tomorrow): starting with:

    No it won't.

    Vaccine development will take a flat minimum of 12 months. Then another 1-3 months to ramp up (on a Manhattan Project management basis) and a to-some-extent-overlapping 1-3 months to roll out around the various nations that are involved. (I predict the USA will merrily go its own way and faceplant, unless y'all elect a competent next POTUS. Or VPOTUS, insofar as Biden appears to be past it and Pence is incompetent at anything but arse-licking.)

    Meanwhile.

    Lockdown can't be sustained more than 1-2 weeks after peak ICU occupancy passes, so it will be lifted in mid-May in the UK and possibly as early as May 1st in the USA.

    Trump is shooting for May 1st because he's been told the economy will take 6 months to recover, minimum, and he's shooting for the November election deadline. This is laughably optimistic, even if the pandemic had burned out by May 1st: we're in Greatest Depression territory already, the hospitality sector has crashed 75%, airlines have crashed 90%, etcetera. It's not going to be back to normal by November, even if the Fairy Godmother shows up and banishes the horrid virus with a wave of her want. Period.

    So. The immediate peak hospital occupancy will pass, lockdown will be lifted sector by sector (or all at once) and region by region ... and the 50% of COVID19 cases who are asymptomatic will go back to work, mingling with the uninfected.

    1-4 weeks later there will be a secondary surge in infections and it'll follow the same exponential growth as the first spike in Feb/March. And lockdown will resume, probably in mid-June. (It may be mitigated by summer heat, in which case things will look good for a month or two longer, but I'm not holding my breath: even if heat prevents spread, the prevalence of air conditioning in public spaces in the US provides a transmission-friendly environment.)

    If the howls of rage at the first lockdown are deafening, the second lockdown will be worse: think of toddlers having their toys removed. Expect civil disobedience and possibly summer riots unless central banks throw money at the grassroots -- and not $1200 for 10 weeks: more like $1200 per week.

    Oh, and then there are the hospitals. Hospital staff will begin to catch their breath in mid-May after two months of running at maximum speed ... then it'll all crash again within another 4 weeks. They're getting no respite. About 25% of medical staff are off sick with COVID19 themselves at present, far as I can tell: this cohort will be coming back to work by the second lockdown, but a bunch more will be down and sick.

    You can't run doctors and nurses at full pandemic intensity for all that long without them burning out, as well as getting sick. There will be horrifying staff attrition, and although this year's graduate cohort got pushed into service early, next year's cohort will be suspended because teaching ain't happening.

    So we're going to see repeated 4-6 week lockdown periods alternating with 2-4 week "business as usual" patches. Somewhere during the second or third lockdown most of the pubs/bars/hotels/restaurants that hibernated during the first lockdown and came back from the dead will give up the ghost: by September-November the damage to about 10-30% of the economy, disproportionately the service sector, will be permanent (FSVO "permanent" that means not coming back until after the pandemic, growing afresh from zero rather than reviving from hibernation).

    I do not know what the hell Trump will do when his "get America open again" initiative hits pandemic spike #2 around the beginning of June. Expect denial and heel-dragging and a much worse death toll, this time reaching the rural heartland (where hospitals may not have any ICU beds at all: there's going to be carnage). By August he may well be in full-on meltdown. I wouldn't even be surprised to see a second round of impeachment hearings(!) as the Senate Republican Party tries to throw him under the bus so they can pivot to President Pence.

    By September there's going to be social unrest just about everywhere that hasn't nailed down a massive social spending/social security project on a scale that makes the New Deal look restrained and conservative.

    And that's going to be the picture until June or July 2022.

    Wildcards: we find a simple and effective medical treatment. Or vaccine development is ridiculously easy. Or the 50% of asymptomatic carriers are a sign that the pandemic is more advanced than we realize, that immunity is long-lasting, and that we're much closer to achieving "herd immunity" than anyone in the epidemiology community currently realizes. These are all straw-clutching exercises.

    Extra lulz in the UK: the Prime Minister is out of hospital but hasn't been seen since Monday -- my guess is he's hors de combat for at least another two weeks. A quarter of the senior ministers of state are rabid objectivists and a majority of the cabinet are still going full steam ahead for a no-deal Brexit transition on January 31st, at which point the UK economy shrinks another 8% overnight. Boris, in principle, has the credibility to pull them back from the brink (and is a perfectly ideology-free vacuum of naked ambition, so he's personally capable of pivoting) but if they try for a maximalist brexit in the middle of a pandemic there will be pandemonium.

    Have I missed anything out?

    1440:

    On second thoughts? That new blog entry is up right now.

    Have at it: the comments on this one are now closed.

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