Official numbers are that 50,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. It’s probably closer to 80,000, but let’s say that it’s 50,000.
To put that in perspective, that’d be every single resident of the county where I grew up when I left in 1994 — and about 3,000 more. In the context of the US, it’s not much. In the context of humanity on a more comprehensible scale, it’s a whole lot.
My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?
Shit that is some good writing. So rare in the NYT. She’s a fucking fantastic writer; one of the best essays I’ve read lately. You know an essay is smokin’ good when you don’t care about the topic or about restaurants in NYC at all and every word still holds you.
I wonder how much the ability to understand the possible ramifications of complex events just has to do with the ability — or lack thereof — to hold a lot of information in memory at once?
I can hold a shit-ton of artifacts and ideas in my head simultaneously and bounce them all against one another. Note this is all non-visual, as I am not a visual thinker at all. But I can feel or experience or something these artifacts (there are no words for this in any language) and cause their mechanisms to bounce off of one another and interact, and I can modify the parameters in real time to see what happens. And I can hold dozens and sometimes hundreds of these in my head at the same time, if I think for a couple of hours about something intensely.*
It’s a great gift and I am lucky to have it but I think it’s also probably rare. I just take it for granted, though, because I’ve always been able to do it.
I’m guessing most people can’t do this?
*It’s one of the reasons I am good at infrastructure networking, I think. Can hold all sorts of information in my head at once about a complex network and sim it out without ever touching a network device.
What exactly are jobless people doing while unemployment claims get sorted out? Running up credit card debt? Relying on family/food banks? @athomasq do you know?
Iirc the median American has less than a few hundred in emergency funds
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 24, 2020
My family would’ve been borrowing from friends and relatives, selling what they could, and not paying some bills. Credit cards were not common then, especially for people as poor as they were, but now they’d be running those up too. Standard poor people behavior.
Farmers in Idaho are dumping their potatoes. 😢 I went to Picabo today to see the discarded pile (and pick up a bagful). Commercial demand has fallen, and there is no market for the extra potatoes. 🥔 pic.twitter.com/7MLLeIigmC
— Molly Page (@idahomolly) April 23, 2020
This is what the world’s richest Third World country looks like. Failed state, as I’ve been saying for years. The pandemic just made it apparent.
Welcome to the future I already knew we were in.
Saying you're not a woman feels like insisting you don't have money. Like, I understand you believe that, and I understand your relationship to money is different than mine, but at the end of the day the practical effects from this giant social illusion *still exists*.
— Aella (@Aella_Girl) April 22, 2020
Being non-binary or agender or whatever just highlights gender more, which is what Ada Palmer was getting at in part of her Terra Ignota series.
There is no opting out. And I believe at least part of this is biological/genetic, which will piss a lot of people off. But it’s more complicated than what people usually mean by “biological/genetic” by which I mean it isn’t the same thing as “hard-coded.”
Opting out of the gender binary is nearly as hard as opting out of gravity, despite the former being at least mostly socially constructed. In other words: Not. Gonna. Happen.
Coronavirus pandemic has now claimed 25 million U.S. jobs, 4.4 million in latest week.
Limited time now before the flywheel becomes unbalanced and total loss of economy occurs. Please assume the crash position.
the @WHO: no human-to-human transmission of the virus
the @WHO: this isn't a pandemic
the @WHO: masks won't protect you
the @WHO (for some reason): fuck taiwan btwYouTube: disagreeing with the @WHO is now illegal
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) April 21, 2020
Excellent. Defund them, then drone strike them. It’ll save lives.
Authoritarian capitalist Vietnam hacking authoritarian capitalist China to get information on a new virus that may or may not have accidentally escaped from a lab is unbelievably cyberpunk. https://t.co/KqehIihkYx
— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) April 23, 2020
Huh. What a world.
Why did so many New Yorkers with COVID-19 wait until it was too late to call an ambulance?
Are you fucking serious with this shit? Think about how terrible our medical system is and how few people can afford to pay even if they have insurance — which many do not.
And then you have your fucking answer. These are our trust-fund journalists, people. Know-nothing assclowns.