It fills me with heartache and terror to read this.
2 Likes
New communication from my boss this morning: We are to stay at home indefinitely until further notice. I am SO relieved. I think she slept on it and realized it just didnāt make any sense when we have been working from home perfectly well over the past 2 weeks, and things are just escalating in my state, day by day.
30 Likes
GOODNESS. Iām glad.
6 Likes
I was going to post this, too. So haunting.
2 Likes
Oh good! Iām relieved to see your boss changed her mind!
4 Likes
Stimulus bill passed and is being signed now.
2 Likes
My husband was told they were going to swap work in the office/WFH in weekly teams, and my dad in fortnightly (different strategies for different companies). Well, husband got told nobody should be coming in, and dad is home from end of next week (I wish it was this week, he is a carer for my grandmother). Iām relieved theyāre doing this.
Meanwhile, several of our government departments are struggling because their IT has no capacity for WFH at all. It is f*cked.
7 Likes
Really happy to hear this!
1 Like
If people are up for a somewhat contrary opinion. (Read the entire piece, though, because he goes back and forth weighing options, and Iām really interested to see further posts by him.)
Really excited to see my favorite blogger beginning to weigh in on this. Please, PLEASE, read the ENTIRE piece. Donāt put him in a partisan box, he is aggressively non-partisan and has excoriated both āsidesā of US politics for years. He is ridiculously gifted at understanding macroeconomics.
Also, check back in a few days or more to see how the comments develop. His blog is one of the few places on the Internet where the comment threads are often just as good if not better than the original piece. When I reread some of his classic posts I get so much out of reading the entire comment thread too.
āHow about the fact that the longer lockdowns go on, the more power is concentrated in the hands of enormous corporations? Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet ā¦ they are going to come out of this better and stronger than ever while smaller upstarts, mom and pop stores, and local entrepreneurs are going to be obliterated. That is a cost of this policy; greater dependence upon a handful of mega-corps. Is that the society in which we want to live? That conversation has to take place.ā
https://www.joshuakennon.com/what-price-should-we-pay-to-fight-covid-19/
3 Likes
Are anyone elseās pets acting out because of you suddenly being at home full-time, or they can smell our stress pheromones, or, ??? Mine have lost their mind today. SO SO naughty. As in, āwelp, good thing we were ditching this piece of furniture in the move anyway, because clearly it can no longer be in our homeā naughty.
Iām giving them lots of love but I swear they know that something is not quite right in the world.
8 Likes
My pet is baseline naughty, my kid however definitely knows something is up and it is showing in her normally sunny disposition being less than sunny.
8 Likes
Nope. Our kitty is perfectly herself. But then weāre home all the time anyways.
Yeah, our home hasnāt had serious disruptions because we were both home so much already. Itās not very different for her, so the cat is just her usual modus operandi of ācool, I sit on your lap, oh, now I go nap, oh NOW ITāS 7PM AND THATāS MURDERTIME, cool, time to nap.ā
3 Likes
We just got a contactless delivery from our favorite neighborhood pizza place - and this is twice now that weāve done GrubHub contactless delivery, from 2 different restaurants, where they were just standing there with the food and Boyfriend had to yell through the door ājust leave it there! Yes! On the front stoop! Leave it!ā
To be fair, they did it both times but through the peephole they looked quite confused and itās like, hello, have you seen the news?
Then I felt like I was practically performing surgery as I tried to get the pizza out of its box without letting it touch any of the cardboard, while gloved up. I felt equal parts ridiculous, and like Iād just killed us because I missed something.
6 Likes
Your post reminded me - I came across this video by a doctor about how to safely bring groceries and take out into the house, borrowing procedures from sterile technique in medical settings.
3 Likes
Thank you for posting this. Itās a good read. In our rural area, conversations like this have been happening. Itās unnerving to not know where the tipping point is in either health or the economy.
4 Likes
Some excellent back and forth in the comments already 
2 Likes
A really interesting read that sparked a great conversation for me and Mr. ninja. Thank you for sharing, his post in the comments that āsimplifiesā things is incredible too. I am still figuring out how to handle my emotions around the content but it has definitely expanded my mind on the issue.
4 Likes
Pets can definitely tell when youāre stressed. Boy Cat has feline herpes and he gets flare-ups if Iām stressed (by the way, if anyone elseās cat has this, L-Lysine powder added to the food for a week or two really helps). But there is something you can do! Those pheremone diffusers like Feliway should help the cats calm down.
1 Like
Glad you liked it
After another comment overnight itās clear he definitely think that with the stimulus package we bought time to get the medical system bolstered up. He definitely thinks we probably could have avoided that if we had done a smarter bolstering right from the start (even if we āwastedā billions of dollars on overproducing ECMO machines that just got warehoused, field hospitals, etc), but he said (to use an example) if you see things like Disneyland still closed later this year and not back open by June at latest, that he doesnāt see how thereās enough liquidity in the economic system to prevent a chain reaction liquidity crisis with serial defaults.
Some might say we could do a phase 4 stimulus to buy even more time but running the printing presses is always risky, even in the USā unique position of having the worldās reserve currency, because itās hard to predict when weād cross the tipping point into hyperinflation, which is so incredibly destructive to countries.
2 Likes