115 this is not a test

July 10, 2020

The picture above is gluten free pizza. This was dinner last night. I've been making pizza pretty much once a week during the pandemic, mostly from a sourdough starter I got going myself. But this week, between sailing and what not, I kinda slacked on shopping, and allowed supplies of the basics to run out. We have no regular flour, which Deb doesn't usually eat anyway, so it was back to gluten-free.

All of which is a long way of saying, back to normal. My stewardship is in a post-hoarding phase.

All of which is particularly bizarre because now I actually know people with the disease. The threat imagined has become real. And yet, there's plenty of toilet paper.

Is the virus weaker now than in cold weather? Maybe. Maybe we're stronger. Or maybe not. But the fear is weaker.

Once again, again, the bitch of a public health response is that if it works, the threat will seem like it was no big deal.

Well, that certainly was a long way of explaining why I didn't take any selfies yesterday.

Now, on to the headlines.

What exactly school will look like in the fall is being debated, a lot. One thing I'd like to throw into the debate: school is training for life.

The old model of school was training to work in a factory. Get up and get here on time, march in line, do as you're told, do your assigned work in your assigned position.

But jobs are changing. Today's best paid, cushest jobs look like: log in to a meeting, do some work on a device, send some emails or slack messages, work on a document, make some calls. None of which requires marching in line, or being in any particular spot at a particular time.

So, yeah, my guess is that's what school will look like in the...fall? Future?

This sentence can be broken down into two distinct thoughts. "We don't want the guidance from the CDC" and "We don't want to be the reason schools don't open up."

Once again making the tough calls to do nothing.

This quote is from an article about, well, why the US is doing so miserably at staying healthy. (Honestly, if you just look at us, is it really surprising at all?)

We do talk one hell of a story, for an empire that was brought to collapse by some box cutters, bad mortgages, and a cold virus.

It's almost like we know how to sit on the couch whining, but not much else.

Well, maybe we hoarded some masks and gloves. And toilet paper!

That does seem about right. The number of stories I'm hearing about bankruptcies and layoffs definitely exceeds the number of stories I'm hearing about more stimulus.

Again, true. I read recently that our goal is to increase the national stockpile of N95 masks to 200million by this fall. That sounds impressive, until you understand that's less than one one-time-use mask per person.