154 welcome back to normal

August 18, 2020

Took Deb to the airport yesterday. She's going to visit her dad in Florida. Probably to say goodbye. I'll tell the whole story when I know it.

Needless to say, the airport was still pretty deserted.

I wasn't super psyched that she's getting on a plane, we're not sure what her return will look like in terms of dealing with potential exposure to the virus, but here we are.

Being myself, meaning curious but not an expert and possibly wrong, I did a little math. If as I read the other day, your risk of catching Covid-19 on a flight in the US is 1 in 4000, and there are about 800,000 fliers per day, that means 200 people a day are getting infected while traveling.

That's not zero.

My mom wanted to make sure I shared this. The basic gyst is, our current testing is too slow to be effective. With ubiquitous, quick, cheap saliva tests, we could actually know where the virus is, rather than where it was a week ago.

Meanwhile, in one of the countries where a dictator decided to ignore the virus...

Sounds like he has something on his mind.

It's almost like The Singularity wants to remind us we're in a crisis.

Or somebody wants to make some money by manufacturing one.

This is the third highest reading taken there. The highest was 134F in 1913.

It's not hot enough to kill you. Immediately.

You could make it several hours, or even a couple days, with access to cooler water.

Speaking of man-made crises...

They say learn your history or you are doomed to repeat it.

So I have to thank my friend the Special Educator for sharing this essay on fascism by great Italian storyteller Umberto Eco.

Who reminds you to vote. Whatever it takes.

It's almost like the people running all those car ads don't want us to be thinking about climate crisis.

Yeah, haven't seen many headlines about this, either.

Oh, the great tax bill of 2017. The one where dear leader got rid of the inheritance tax for his kids, but also reduced the amount of withholding from your paycheck, so it looks like you make a few more dollars every week (even though that mainly means you're getting a smaller refund come April).

So at this point in the stageplay put on by Texas every four years, the outgoing Republican Administration is busy making sure the next players to take the stage are set up for a disaster scene.

Because as we know, disasters are a great opportunity to make a bunch of money while pretending to help.

Still, this caption pretty much sums up my position. My friend the king used the phrase "Trojan horse" several times on our walk the other day.

Of course, he wasn't entirely sure which kind of warriors are going to come out of her gut. I hope we get a chance to find out.

Based on anecdotal evidence, kids are sick of this shit.

But just because we're tired doesn't mean we can stop.

Unless you like unnecessary dead people.

The downward curve in testing and positive cases unfortunately might have more to do with people being "sick of it" and less to do with people being not-sick.

File under: they're not employees, they just work for us

When my last DJ gig was cancelled, I set up the speakers and started dancing by myself. It doesn't pay at all, but it feels good.

Kinda like riding a bike feels good.

Meanwhile, back in January, California opted to classify Uber drivers (and actors) as employees rather than independent contractors.

Now Uber says they're going to have to shut down in California. But the CEO really thinks it's unfair to make him pay all those people who are generating their VC funding. (Not profits, of course, step one of Uber's business plan is to eliminate the competition by being cheap, step 2 or 3 might be raising prices so they can actually profit off killing the taxi industry.)

Pretty sure Travis is sitting in his Cloud Kitchen and thinking what a great idea it is to hire a fall guy. (Although it might have been cheaper to just subcontract the work.)