I suspect Covid-19 will likely reveal America’s true status as the world’s richest Third World nation as we’ll be completely unable to deal with the disease and its consequences. The reasons I assert this is that we have:

• A horrifically bad health care system that is about profit, not care. Many people simply will not visit a doctor no matter what because they know they cannot afford it.
• Work cultures and workplace tyranny that forces sick people to work, which will cause exponential transmission.
• Neglected agencies staffed by the fearful and the incompetent who will not be given the proper resources and haven’t had good leadership for years.
• Inability to impose adequate containment measures because concern with individual rights (metastasizing libertarianism) makes proper quarantine and isolation impossible.

It’s been quite a while since we have dealt with something of this nature and we are totally unprepared. While I make no predictions, I think if the virus gets out of hand it will reveal how fragile our systems are in a way that much of the rest of the developed world will not experience. We are no longer a developed nation, after all. We’ve coasted along on what was done during the 1930s-1970s and the downhill is now turning into a steep uphill. No more coasting, and Covid-19 might just be the huge boulder in the road.

So all those daft articles like, “If You’re Worried About the Coronavirus, Worry More About the Flu, DURR DURR DURR” are looking pretty doltish now, right?

Which I knew at the time. This is the opposite of Y2K, what Y2K could’ve been if it hadn’t been laboriously corrected. While there is no reason to panic, there has always been substantial risk of a 1918-like pandemic in an ever-more globalized and interconnected world. We now might’ve hit that risk inflection point and with the de facto stretched and JIT supply chains the disruptions might make 1918 look like a minor blip, leading to yet more secondary deaths and hardship.

And if Covid-19 turns out to be as bad as it could be, the same buncha numpties who said that Y2K was never a problem will be bellyaching that not enough was done about Covid-19.

so KDE 0.1 came out in 1997 and oh my is it gloriously Windows 95.

from https://t.co/DmkizTEndh pic.twitter.com/HXcBTpNjag

— foone (@Foone) February 28, 2020

Not really. It was designed mostly based on CDE, which looked like this:

Windows 95 took design elements from CDE and other desktops and window managers, which of course KDE also heavily relied on. There’s a reason the names of CDE and KDE are similar — same design DNA.

I agree with most of this, but I have still have little sympathy for users who are shown (and allowed to do) in intricate detail their computer-related tasks and are still unable to complete them.

I’ve worked with users who have been using computers daily for 20 years who are unable to find their Start menu in Windows. They also do not know (despite being told and shown hundreds of times) what a file is, and don’t even know what application they do their daily work in. In any other field these people would be fired, and deservedly so, as they don’t know how to use the main tool that’s required to do their jobs.

Start firing these chumps and the, “Oh, I’m not a computer person, tee-hee” bullshit would go right out the window. There’s a difference between being a beginner and being a dumbass. Beginners should be helped and dumbasses should be canned.

*Exactly* how I work. https://t.co/Sc2RLLGGTV

— Anna Gát ⚡ (@TheAnnaGat) February 25, 2020

I cannot work like this because without big damn monitors I cannot get anything done. It takes me 2-3 times as long to do the same things. How people work on such tiny screens is a complete mystery to me. My brain just needs a lot more than that.

I blame nagware for training my aunt such that she fell for a Microsoft Support scam … and months later, she has had to mortgage her home to pay for the withdrawals from her line of credit. Jesus.

— Warren ‘Armband’ Huska (@warrenhuska) February 24, 2020

It’s too bad that IQ tests are so expensive these days.

you do not have PTSD because an election. get a grip. https://t.co/fJord4MhTy

— 红色娘子军🌹 (@detachment_red) February 24, 2020

I think “feminsts” of a certain age do have PTSD from that election. They saw, in their view, an oppressed, staid wine mom nearly coronated as president and thought it vindicated all the joy and love they themsleves had banished from their lives in the pursuit of material excess and in getting their fail-sons and fail-daughters into a decent college while being a second mother to Fox News-watching pasty man-children.

When the coronation was cancelled, they truly were traumatized. I have no doubt of this. It destroyed many of them mentally and they have never recovered and perhaps never will.

Look at the below. I ate approximately 1200 calories a day for years and I was fine. Better than ever. Now, I eat more, but I also work out a lot, lot more. The below is absolute BS.

Admittedly, I do have a slower-than-average metabolism, but most women (who tend to be smaller) should be eating in this range daily.

Ne me touche pas… the shift in sex and power sweeping France.

This is all part of the neoliberal takeover of France. What “progressives” don’t understand is that their endorsement of very restrictive sexual codes and mores has nothing at all to do with so-called “protection from harm” but rather reining in the power of sex and either using it for greater productivity or at least preventing it from harming or overpowering profit-making.

I shouldn’t be, but I am surprised how absurdly naïve nearly all so-called liberals are about all this. Most of them are deeply, deeply scared of sex, anyway, so this plays right into that.

What’s shocking isn’t that this is happening — it’s that it took so long to infect France, too, which for a time was Western Europe’s last bastion of resistance to neoliberalization.