Good things about the current crisis...

[DizRotus]

My older son thinks he’s a genius for investing in a bidet a few months ago.  You’ll have to use your imagination; a video would be unsettling.

 

[DizRotus]

Thank you @Shiva

[OO1]

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[Chris A]

Sales of bicycles are taking off in the US.  Reportedly, this is being partially driven by those who used public transportation to commute to/from work.  I wonder where all those bikes will be parked during working hours?  Clearly the added exercise from cycling is good.  The only concern is the potential for accidents, but since the number of automobiles has dropped significantly, perhaps the total number of traffic accidents will be the same or lower than before all of this started.

 

Some politicians and increasing numbers of regular people are now saying that these lifestyle changes will last a year or longer, with many saying that it's probably going to result in a permanent lifestyle change.  I think people are beginning to recognize that nothing really has changed since the pandemic has arrived: no vaccines, no herd immunity on the horizon (the virus mutates too rapidly), and little viable medical treatment that's available for those infected, so the risks of returning to prior lifestyles haven't changed, nor are likely to change over at least the next year or two even if a vaccine is found that's 100% protective--because the time required to make ~300 million US doses will probably be measured in years.

 

Chris

 

[garyrc]

"It's an ill wind that blows no good."

[Chris A]

Interesting...Amazon deploys thermal cameras at warehouses to scan for fevers faster

 

This will apparently catch those folks that will claim that they didn't know they had a fever...

 

The upside is that the remaining workers are more protected from exposure, I would think.  Not that this is better for those getting sick, but it would tend to catch those cases earlier than before. 

 

I've noticed that some people still try to come to work when sick, even though they have highly communicable diseases (even colds).  Their mea culpa, in my experience as a manager telling these folks to go home, has been that that they "need to work today--they have responsibilities" and "providing uninterrupted service to the company is important".  There are more people than I care to mention that held this view, even for some serious diseases.  This is a good thing to communicate back to those holding those views that otherwise knowingly spreading respiratorily transmissible disease in the workplace and schools/universities (as these people did)--that it's not okay.

 

Chris

[Sancho Panza]

My normal temp is a degree below normal...

[grasshopper]

I think we will see a resurgence of handmade goods.

the arts [music and visual] will get a boost.  there are a lot of things that cannot be expressed by talk.

 

 

[OO1]

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[dtel]

4 hours ago, grasshopper said:

there are a lot of things that cannot be expressed by talk.

Yes and it's most of the best things.

[BigStewMan]

6 hours ago, grasshopper said:

I think we will see a resurgence of handmade goods.

Or ... the robots will make more robots ... there may be no way to stop them now. 

[Chris A]

I saw this recently:

 

Quote

A return to faith in serious experts.
Tom Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of The Death of Expertise.

America for several years has become a fundamentally unserious country. This is the luxury afforded us by peace, affluence and high levels of consumer technology. We didn’t have to think about the things that once focused our minds—nuclear war, oil shortages, high unemployment, skyrocketing interest rates. Terrorism has receded back to being a kind of notional threat for which we dispatch volunteers in our military to the far corners of the desert as the advance guard of the homeland. We even elevated a reality TV star to the presidency as a populist attack on the bureaucracy and expertise that makes most of the government function on a day to day basis.

The COVID-19 crisis could change this in two ways:

• First, it has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters. It was easy to sneer at experts until a pandemic arrived, and then people wanted to hear from medical professionals like Anthony Fauci.
• Second, it may—one might hope—return Americans to a new seriousness, or at least move them back toward the idea that government is a matter for serious people.

The colossal failure of [national government] both to keep Americans healthy and to slow the pandemic-driven implosion of the economy might shock the public enough back to insisting on something from government other than emotional satisfaction.

 

Regulatory barriers to online tools will fall.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.

COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online. Not everything can become virtual, of course. But in many areas of our lives, uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players, often working in collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats.

 

Medicare allowing billing for telemedicine was a long-overdue change, for instance, as was revisiting HIPAA to permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to communicate, such as Skype, Facetime and email. The regulatory bureaucracy might well have dragged its feet on this for many more years if not for this crisis.

 

The resistance—led by teachers’ unions and the politicians beholden to them—to allowing partial homeschooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by necessity. It will be near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall, with many families finding that they prefer full or partial homeschooling or online homework. For many college students, returning to an expensive dorm room on a depopulated campus will not be appealing, forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe for innovation for a long time.

 

And while not every job can be done remotely, many people are learning that the difference between having to put on a tie and commute for an hour or working efficiently at home was always just the ability to download one or two apps plus permission from their boss. Once companies sort out their remote work dance steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options. In other words, it turns out, an awful lot of meetings (and doctors’ appointments and classes) really could have been an email. And now they will be.

 

Chris

[BigStewMan]

Agree in part. I think Professor Nichols is utilizing some wishful thinking. So far, I haven’t seen people want to embrace expertise, they’ve picked their own experts that will say what tickles their ears. If reports of a million people dying doesn’t wake up a person to a potential threat, what will?  My gosh, i read yesterday some guy in Oregon claiming that he drove to a town outside of Sacramento, CA just to get a haircut and be around others in a social setting. 

Sadly, we’re living in times where the elevation of self is running very high. 

 

 

[JohnJ]

Have any of y'all seen the sunrises lately?

When we have had some clouds to catch the early light we've had colorful mornings like I have not seen in a long time. We talked about that the other morning and attributed it to less internal combustion engines of all types running lately.

 

It's only been the last two weeks that I've caught jetliners flying out or in. A month ago + I heard none at all for day after day, then the C-17 last week was very noticeable.

[OO1]

4 minutes ago, JohnJ said:

Have any of y'all seen the sunrises lately?

When we have had some clouds to catch the early light we've had colorful mornings like I have not seen in a long time. We talked about that the other morning and attributed it to less internal combustion engines of all types running lately.

 

It's only been the last two weeks that I've caught jetliners flying out or in. A month ago + I heard none at all for day after day, then the C-17 last week was very noticeable.

We live over a jet plane route , they land at a close by airport and non-stop since the 70's ,  petitions ,  law-suits ,  and no fixes , the last 2 months , heaven , and yes you're right , sun rises , sun-downs and even pollution is way down , we are in May - feels like April -

[billybob]

Under...

[BigStewMan]

5 minutes ago, RANDYH said:

We live over a jet plane route , they land at a close by airport and non-stop since the 70's ,  petitions ,  law-suits ,  and no fixes , the last 2 months , heaven , and yes you're right , sun rises , sun-downs and even pollution is way down , we are in May - feels like April -

i once lived in  place where i could look out my bedroom window and see planes lining up to land at LAX.  A line of lights in the sky. 

[OO1]

7 minutes ago, BigStewMan said:

i once lived in  place where i could look out my bedroom window and see planes lining up to land at LAX.  A line of lights in the sky. 

I once lived where I could look out and see military fighter planes .  do a lot of flying  acrobatics , a bit like TOP GUN , but in reality

[BigStewMan]

1 minute ago, RANDYH said:

I once lived where I could look out and see military fighter planes .  do a lot of flying  acrobatics , a bit like TOP GUN , but in reality

i once lived with an acrobat in a military fighter plane. 

[OO1]

4 minutes ago, BigStewMan said:

i once lived with an acrobat in a military fighter plane. 

, ok , so excuse my french culture ,  you mean , you knew a crazy pilot and he gave you a ride ------------lucky you