quite a few vendors use cooking oil that has been pulled from waste from sewer lines and other extraordinarily unsanitary locations
This seems hard to believe at first, it sounds rather xenophobic. OTOH, I remember reading in the past that people in some countries have been poisoned by cooking food in used transformer oil.
By the way, the official death toll in Wuhan is 2,571 as of April 7. But separate calculations of the number of urns purchased by funeral homes and the cremation capacity and use of the cremation ovens put the death toll somewhere between 42,000 and 46,800.
I’ve read that phone usage records point to an even higher death toll.
I'm so glad that we passed on the open-plan houses we looked at years ago. The primary reason was that we were fostering kids at the time, sometimes as many as four kids in the house, and we felt that we'd all go crazy if we tried that in an open-plan house.
I'm happy to say that it looks likely that my store will be cancelling our Black Friday in Spring sale this year. That's not as great as it sounds, as our foot traffic and sales are massive right now, pretty much for the same reason that the Lowe's employee cites. We just don't need a sale to drive sales, the stay-at-home order has done it for us.
I discovered Stålenhag's paintings a few months before I heard that there was a TV show being made from them. I've been using one of his paintings, "Hacking the Loop", where a teenager has a robot head on a table in his bedroom, connected to an early '90s computer as my computer lock screen. It reminds me of myself, but a bit more than 10 years earlier, and repurposed commercial radio equipment instead of a robot head. I was very excited that the show has been made, it's next on our viewing list.
It was very weird going there and finding a place on the other side of the planet that looked pretty much the same as where I grew up and where I came from
It is weird, a lot of his paintings, without the decrepit advanced technology look like they were painted in suburban and rural Indiana where I grew up in the '70s.
The effect described makes perfect sense, and explains why the shelves are still spotty. I don't believe that it totally explains exactly what happened here, and in many areas. We started hearing about stores in other areas running out of toilet paper. For while everyone laughed. Until, almost overnight, all of the toilet paper in local stores just disappeared and new supplies got grabbed as they came off the pallet. This was weeks before we had any stay-at-home orders in our area, and the transition was fast. I'm betting it's 75% supply line issues, but still, maybe 25% hoarding.
I'd heard that most of these words were not “real” and were deprecated, but the words “jeopardize” and “burglarize” have been used so commonly in my reading for years tat I would never have considered their legitimacy or lack thereof.
Mixing cleaning chemicals can be very dangerous. When I was a kid, I read that mixing chlorine bleach and an acid would release chlorine gas. So, of course, I had to try it. Only being somewhat of an idiot, I went outside and stood upwind of the beaker I used. It worked, at first all was well, but then the wind shifted. I learned never to do that again! Almost 50 years later I remember the effects clearly, if I'd been a bit more stupid and done this inside I could have been killed.
Beyond astronomical numbers from a deck of playing cards. I knew the number of possible combinations was massively huge, but this goes beyond what I would have imagined.
And the last thing I have noticed about myself is how absolutely thrilled I am now to see a human in the flesh.
Being an "essential" employee, I'm actually seeing more people than usual as they all get bored out of their heads and decide to come to one of the few stores that are open. Still doing record business. This virus has brought out the worst in careless, thoughtless, people who put their need to stave off boredom over my, and my families, health. Some go beyond that. Today some tweaker holding a glass bottle full of spat-out tobacco cussed me out for having a barrier in front of the register to try and prevent the spread of the illness. I could do with less face-to-face contact with humans right about now. sorry, a bit grumpy today...
Like civilization itself, we’ll get through it. But the worst isn’t over and we need to stay strong.
You have all of us readers thanking you both and wishing you well.
We need technology that helps us to slow down enough to digest complex information.
Exactly. Something I thought reading the paragraph above was that one of the most important things I've learned in life has been how to digest and make sense of a lot of information (some of it conflicting). Reading carefully and, dare I say it (because the term seems overused) mindfully. Readup is a great platform for this, and we all thank you and Jeff.
Although we seem diverse I have not noticed any hostile comments.
The depiction of college here is so different from what I remember. Perhaps it was because I went in knowing what I wanted, electronic engineering and computers. The only social activity I was involved in was the amateur radio club. If there was strong competition, I didn’t notice it. I took classes, got a degree and went straight into engineering at General Motors (Delco Electronics here in Kokomo).
If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue these activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.
I see myself in that statement.
But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing.
I learned to dislike the “get an MBA, then manage anything whether you understand the work or not” attitude that seems so common, back in the ‘90s when arrogant MBAs made business decisions with little or no input from the technical people actually designing and building the product.
The costs mentioned for schools is just amazing to me. Us boomers, even the youngest of us, such as myself, really did have it better back in the day. I remember paying for college as I went along by working as a TV technician and having enough money left over to build custom cars (I didn’t sleep much at times, I later learned that is a symptom of the bipolar disorder I was diagnosed with years later). One of the reasons young people today hate boomers is that we expect them to be able to make it through college with no loans like we did back in the day. I don’t blame them for this (except for generalizing all boomers into one nasty group), it really is much harder to make it in life now, we were indeed privileged. Or maybe what we had wasn’t privilege, maybe what they have now is a pale mockery of the life kids should be facing.
A great article. Most of my hobbies are at-home in nature, so I'm loving the extra time I have for them. I find I'm buying more online as well. I'm thinking of buying a new mattress and box spring online, something I'd have never considered before. Even for a homebody such as myself, things have changed.
Some sound advice, but this, of course, depends on whether you agree with the protesters or not. If it's a true human-rights issue, I hope most people do agree, but I've run into plenty of people who disagree with what I consider human rights. The right to health care comes to mind.
As someone who was raised in a left-leaning liberal Christian tradition (yes, that's a thing, just not anywhere as common as fundamentalism), I just don't understand the "waiting for the rapture" attitude of so many evangelicals/fundamentalism.
Something that occurred to me: When the social capitalists started on their march to this new future, were they self-aware? Did they know what they were doing, or did they stumble into their role the same way we did, simply trying to get on with life? Of course, they are aware now, but did their realization of their own nature merely lead ours in time rather than intent? If that is true (or not), they are certainly aware now, and are taking full advantage of the situation that we are all in.
Wealth is a big factor here. I have trouble understanding how people can afford over $1000 a day as the cost was in one location mentioned in the article. They just live in a totally different world.
This isn't the article I mentioned, but it looks like millions of cell phone accounts have been cancelled/expired recently. Other possibilities were mentioned, but the author suggests that this might indicate that the death toll in China is way higher than reported. I have my doubts though, surely if that many people died, there would be evidence in satellite photos, which presumably would be well-known. Probably.
As well as this, I saw a headline in the last day or two that implied many more people in China had died than officials will admit to. They based this on cell phones that disappeared off the 'net over the last few months. I'll try Googling it later, I never saw the headline again and didn't think of it until this article.
I've been getting suspicious calls, texts, and emails from supposed COVID 19 charities. When I get paid and feel like donating, I'll go to Charity Navigator like I always do before donating to a new charity.
