Infinite Quack

Thought it time to revisit this . I wrote it several months before Covid-19 emerged. At least we did tackle #7: 7) Vote Trump out on his ass in 2020. He represents the poisonous idea that we can just lie about our problems instead of facing them honestly. He has fixed nothing, he has no skills apart from conning people, and he has no respect for our system of laws. These are basic principles, without which we cannot consistently reward practices that work and phase out those that don't. His very presence in the highest office signals that the powerful, corporations included, are free to keep cheating the rest of us without fear of consequences. Electing Biden might just send a better signal. But anyone who thinks the worst is over... is not paying attention. Trump made an epic fail out of his term in office, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that that's over -- he can no longer do the same level of damage. (He can still do some, for as long as people keep listening to hi...

America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes. This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours (1) . So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowi...

  I just binge-watched HBO's Chernobyl yesterday... all 6 1/2 hours of it. Here's the IMDB link . I wasn't really planning to do that. Susan had encouraged me to give the show a try and watch the first episode. It's a dramatization, but based pretty closely on the real events (with some errors as I'll note later). I was hooked almost immediately, unable to look away as the tragedy of the disaster unfolded, which won out over my need for a break from the emotional wear and tear. It's been a while since I've watched something so horrifying and sad. It's hard to miss the parallels to today's crisis. President Trump himself chose to frame the battle against Covid-19 as a war. Well, sure, you can think of it like that. It's a struggle in which people are dying, though the opponent is a force of nature instead of a human one. You could view the Chernobyl disaster, and especially the effort to contain it and recover from it, in the same terms. Once the...

The New York Times normally sets a limit on how many articles non-subscribers can read. They've exempted their Coronavirus coverage from those limits. Like everyone else, I'm glued to the news as this tragedy unfolds. I've been watching stories about the virus move higher and higher on the page. For weeks the Times has made it their top story, and the way things are expected to go, that will continue for a lot longer. So far -- so far -- my own family has yet to be directly impacted. It's heartbreaking to imagine what it has been like for so many families that haven't been as lucky. When someone acquires the full set of symptoms, it is nasty and dangerous. Around the world, nearly 60,000 have died, says the Times, and with tests hard to get in many places, it's likely those numbers are under-reported. Over a quarter million people are known to have caught the virus, and that  number is likely to be dramatically  higher in reality. Recall part of what made HIV s...

Trump tests negative for coronavirus as questions mount over his personal risks in face of pandemic   Kwik-Faks[tm] for the impatient: Trump has tested negative for the novel coronavirus. Trump was seen stomping around the White House today, proudly brandishing a white folded piece of paper, and bragging about how negative his test results had been. Trump then held an impromptu press conference in which he went on at some length about how his tests were the best, that he tested better than anyone on Earth, and that he was thinking of becoming a doctor so he could administer negative-result tests to other world leaders, or something to that effect. Trump eventually unfolded the piece of paper, which turned out to be the words "Presadent Trump tests 1000% Negative" written in crayon. White House aides lined up to take turns at the podium, praising the President on his good health, and how clever he had been to get such an astoundingly negative result. Trump then roughly shoulde...

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them "Retail arbitrage", better known as hoarding and price gouging. It's one thing to do that with dolls or something. It's another to do it with a product whose purpose is to slow the spread of a deadly infection. The grocery store near us has had no hand sanitizer on its shelves for a while. (Side note: You can make your own sanitizer with aloe vera and isopropyl alcohol. See How to Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer .) In a country so in love with capitalism, it's unrealistic to expect people wouldn't try to profit off the tragedy. But it's basically no different from war profiteering. One would wish that people's conscience would tell them they're crossing a line. Someone's always going to be willing to cross it, though -- whether out of greed or desperation, or just not caring very much that what they're doing harms society. This also exemplifies what's wrong with the libertari...

Microsoft, Amazon Advise Staff to Work From Home as Coronavirus Spreads, Facebook Contractor Confirmed Infected Though COVID-19 is ultimately going to affect everybody, this particular outbreak, the first significant one in the US, has had a particular impact on me -- though I'm not aware of anyone I know having caught it. A few years ago my wife and I took a vacation in Hawaii (on the Big Island) with family. We discovered her breathing was easier. We took a second trip to test it, and confirmed that she felt better on the island, worse again in the Seattle area ("east side", to locals). So we set out to make it permanent. We bought a house on the island a couple years ago, got our Seattle-area house sold last year. But I had to maintain a presence in Seattle for the sake of my employer Amazon, who were cautious about granting me broad approval to work remotely. I was permitted to do that for one week per month at first, then two. I got an apartment in downtown Seattle a...