I’m glad you guys who seem surprised or dismayed at the number of people not wearing masks in public don’t live where I do. I was at a gas station a week ago and exactly zero of the ~20 staff and patrons were wearing masks. I was at Target and a pharmacy a few days ago and at most 50% were wearing one at both places. Drive thrus are jam-packed with people who are definitely not wearing masks as they speak at the same speaker where dozens of people have recently put in their orders AND the window where they receive their food.
This is an area that has been hit fairly hard relative to the rest of America. I know my experience isn’t necessarily indicative of things elsewhere, but I wanted it noted.
There also seems to be a huge correlation between truck-driving, Trump-sticker having rednecks and not wearing a mask. They think wearing a mask is TREAD(ING) ON ME! Reminds me of my traveling game, where I see a Trump/anti-liberal type bumper sticker and look to see if it’s a white person. I’m like 200 for 200, going back to the W years. My favorite one was Calvin peeing on the word “liberal”.
It’s not like I have any data to the contrary, but man I find this realllllly hard to believe. I feel like, after a brief time, ~80% are going to come back to movies or concerts before a vaccine. Especially if you give them another few months of this pseudo-lockdown first. I also think people assume a vaccine is coming long before the 18 months+ period the medical community gives.
5% of people at most are wearing masks in Australia from what I’ve seen. At most.
I think resentment is building over lockdown measures given the death toll is still under 100 and official cases only at 7000 (1 in 3000 people), my extended family (standard boomer eDem types) are bombarding the whatsapp with theories that it isn’t as infectious as all the ‘hysterical doctor’s’ thought. Unsure if other Australians are seeing this.
The lie about masks will be second only to the Trump effect (name your national or local official that was slow to act or even maybe deliberately hiding the data).
Hard to think what having an extra 5 billion masks for the US for $50 million (1 cent for the cheapies) could have done.
The direct lie early on is somewhat justifiable for medical personnel benefit but really no excuse to be in that situation in the first place. It’s not like SARS, H1N1 and a couple of other respiratory outbreaks havent occurred in the last 20 years.
Seems like a good time for a lot of people ITT to transition to a plant based diet. Kind of blows my mind when lefties are talking about reverse searing bone in ribeyes and shit.
This is why all these “republicans dying to own the libs” takes are BS imo. Republicans have figured out, correctly, that democrats and non-voters are dying at much higher rates than republicans. Even if olds are dying out at the highest rate, it’s poor olds and minority olds in cities, who still skew democratic even though they’re old, even in ruby red states.
I mean, we had a toilet paper shortage because everyone stopped using toilet paper at work and just used the kind that is made for people’s homes. If all of a sudden everyone had to stop eating meat, we’re probably looking at shortages of everything. We already experienced runs on bread and pasta and flour at the beginning of this thing. Those will pale in comparison.
There will be a cascading effect if 25-50% of meat goes offline. Meat will get more expensive which will make virtually all prepared food more expensive. Also people will need to replace those protein calories so I would expect beans/lentils and the like to be the next item that there is a big run on.
Then there is the fact that food getting dramatically more expensive at a time where there is a lot of economic uncertainty/hardship means there is even less disposable income to spend on the rest of the economy. This has the potential to have a large impact beyond just the inability to get a hamburger.
Wow we are almost to the max of 60,000 deaths. So glad we all made it through this. Now that we have reached this target we can go back to living our lives.
Thanks everyone for hanging in there while we worked toward our national target number.
Looks like he works there, but he had COVID and recovered and is there donating plasma. Maybe he came during his lunch break or right after work so he still has his badge on.
Agreed. I think we may have turned a whole generation of tiny house living, public transit riding urbanists into give me a backyard and my own car sprawlers…
Wonder what the new target will be? It seems obvious to me that the US with it’s strategy of Dying for the Dow Joans will be heading into the hundreds of thousands no problem over the next year.
Completely agree with this. Just finished the Dark Money book by Jane Meyer, which pretty much shows that there was a “don’t trust the government” movement as a reaction to civil rights and “forcing” a degree of legal equality. Where do you think Mitch McConnell’s obsession with judges comes from? It unites the racist anti-tax, anti-regulation plutocrats with the racist poor and “establishment” whites.
The “don’t trust the media” thing is right out of Fox News and likely has similar sources. Like I have been an obsessive media consumer for 30 years, subscribing to one to two newspapers and often 2-3 “current events” magazines. I’ve subscribed to the Nation and even the American Spectator, at the same time, mainly out of curiosity.
Media I’ve avoided have generally been the shallow right-wing newspaper in two newspapers towns (I got the LA Times [when it was good, which is after it was bad, though it was bad again from like 2005-2016, but it’s now getting better again] in OC and San Diego and the Post Gazette in Pittsburgh) and “local” news, because it’s puff and a waste of my time. However, it never occurred to me to “don’t trust the media”, just like it never occurred to me “don’t trust food.” There’s food that’s good for you, bad for you, tasty, satisfying, junk, whatever, there’s a whole range. But if you say, “don’t trust the media” you are saying something akin “information is evil” or “don’t believe anything other than what we (say, Fox) tell you, because we will tell you only what you want to hear.” I’ve never heard an intelligent word spoken by someone who said, as a blanket statement, “don’t trust the media.” If you don’t like “the media” get better media, there’s lots of it.
Really, I need to bing “the media” and find a good essay/article on the “don’t trust the media” meme and it’s sources. I suspect Nixon is involved.
The line that stands out to me, among many, is “People who think everything is about money don’t have any.” Like, there are people who do things for money, but they rarely run things. People much more often do things for “ideas,” usually bad ones. People will pay tons of money and sacrifice many things to support their religion, whether it be actual region, racism, or their own inherent superiority.
Lying to start a war and then lying about when it was over and continuing to secretly drop more bombs than were dropped in all of WW2 caused people to distrust the government? Go figure.
I mean it was 30 years before they lied to start another war. C’mon, give them a break.
