COVID-19: Chapter 4 - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

I’d just say something like “I’m doing it because there are a lot of older folks here who would be at a high risk were they to catch it and I don’t want to be the source of an office infection” as dual explanation-and-shaming.

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This will be their counterpoint though

https://twitter.com/wendywoo6089/status/1271574551927930887

The thing that blows my mind is I’m in blue city and state with strict face covering requirements and even the republicans I know mostly have no problem wearing a mask, but for some reason you go to a red state everyone thinks you’re a nazi if you want them to wear a face mask.

Before traders could short stocks as easily as now.

But you also had pump and dump and investment trusts and a bunch of really shady stuff going on.

I could 100% see the market tanking. But I could also see the market shrugging it off like we shrugged off the great devastating pork shortage that was coming a couple months ago. Both parties are as committed as politicians can possibly be to propping up the stock market - which will probably work until we can’t print our way out of trouble anymore. When does that happen?

I never would have guessed the furniture market would be going apeshit instead of collapsing. But it happened. I wouldn’t guess my ex-trainer turning it into the biggest financial windfall he’s ever had by opening his gym 2 weeks before it was legal.

One constant from history seems to be the market does not care about human life. WWII was by most accounts a huge boon to the US economy.

My point is I don’t think any of us really have any idea how this is going to shake out wrt to the economy. The range seems to be Great Depression II to Dow 50k. The market almost doubled from 2016 to 2020.

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I agree, and I think that’s usually the case with economics.

X-POST:

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Please go to this thread and vote:

Update 3 - just had a non contact fist bump of solitary with the one Asian guy that works here. Felt good to see someone else wearing a mask.

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Peer pressure is a bitch.

Then again…

That thread is just wow - and Wendy is special.

Clipboard01

Selfish for wearing a mask - how does that work?

Also

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The new dilemma about masks is that we all have to decide where we land in the hierarchy of risks:

  1. Curtailing high-risk activities (crowded bars, concerts, etc)
  2. Wear masks during day to day activities
  3. Curtailing low-risk activities (going over the friends houses, spending time on spaced out patios, etc)

If you’re like me and on the fence about but generally avoiding stuff in category 3, at pretty substantial personal cost, while other people are running tf wild with no masks on or even doing stuff in category 1, it really makes me wonder why I’m bothering avoiding stuff in category 3 anymore.

Therefore, my current demeanor is to continue wearing a mask, and to be somewhat more yolo as time goes on. COVID is gonna wreck fucking house well before a vaccine shows up at this rate, and with every day of dismal data it seems less worth fighting against this inevitability.

The mask is primarily to be worn in places where strict quarantiners have to go, secondarily as a show of solidarity for the lost cause, and in a distant third because yes, it would be worse for everyone to be infected over 3X length of time than over X length of time, so you might as well do your minor part to effect that scenario.

But on that third category? We lost. Time to stop suffering for the lost cause.

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I’m definitely wondering what’s going through the heads of non-mask wearers. Are they all crazy like wendy from twitter? Do they think it’s not a big deal and the previous shut-down was overkill (do they think we destroyed 30 million jobs for no reason)? Is it just a sort of “I won’t get sick because I’m really healthy” kinda thing?

Good post. This pretty much sums up where I’m at. I’m going to continue avoiding 1. I’m going to continue wearing a mask even when pressured not too (2), but I’m not going to sacrifice any more of my friendships or personal happiness by avoiding 3. That ship has sailed a long time ago when this dumb fucking country decided they don’t give a flying fuck what happens.

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Everything I’m hearing here is that it was just the flu and we are past it.

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It’s the Illusion of Control at work. They don’t like the idea that we aren’t in control of our lives. Being told to wear a mask scares them.

If these people were smart enough they would suffer some cognitive dissonance about their conflicting beliefs that (1) China has a manipulative self-serving government that cares about nothing besides its own perception and (2) China humiliated itself in front of the world by taking the extreme and unprecedented step of locking down its entire country over something that was “just the flu.”

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It’s this, plus many in a certain demographic aren’t used to hearing the word “no”.

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24’s reopening plans don’t really make sense, either. They said on Friday they planned to have all the gyms near me open next Monday (6/22) but KQED has a page all about reopening and how

only Solano County has greenlit its gyms for reopening in accordance with the state. Even in Napa and Sonoma, which have taken a more accelerated approach to reopening than the rest of the Bay Area, gyms remain closed for now (and Sonoma County says it wants to wait until at least June 22 to assess whether their decision to reopen other businesses like restaurants has impacted the spread of COVID-19.)

Marin is currently looking to reopen gyms on June 29, provided there’s no surge in COVID-19 cases before then, with Contra Costa planning on July 1. San Francisco says its gyms will reopen “mid-August.”

It’s gonna be a lot harder for a chain like this to ignore public health warnings and force itself open.

Reporting from Hollywood: in-person auditions are resuming. WAY earlier than I ever thought they would. Casting facilities are taking precautions but as we’ve seen with bars and restaurants that shit tends to go out the window pretty damn quick.

Most currently-planned productions are still shooting out of state, in Georgia and Florida primarily. Because there are no damn rules there afaik.

My working theory is that it stems from personality differences between the progressive/conservative bases, amplified by the ~engagement~centric social/conventional media culture. The Democrats and the Republicans (i.e., the politicians and inner-circle types) don’t control the media that gets produced, and they especially don’t control the media that gets consumed. Instead, the algorithms control what news gets distributed to whom. Generally speaking:

  • If you’re a politically engaged conservative, you get fed a firehose of Fox News or the harder stuff (OANN, Q, etc).
  • If you’re not strongly politically engaged, you get fed purely depoliticized content, plus whatever sloshes over from your real-life connections who are politically engaged.
  • If you’re a politically engaged progressive, you get fed an idiosyncratic mix of diverse voices telling you that the majority of the Democratic party establishment are traitors because they don’t support Medicare for All.

From the perspective of a fresh-faced young twitter star in the making, are you going to hit your metrics by complaining that the Republicans are systematically disenfranchising voters to win elections. yawn Or worse, write a deep dive on the For the People Act? The idea is comical. No, the obvious winning play is to judiciously edit the facts to make the Democrats the villains. Insufficient WIM factor, just need to spark a prolonged government shutdown, then pivot to M4A, EZ game, must be either dumb or corrupt or both. And that is the media that the engaged people get and (more importantly) what sloshes over into the feeds of their disengaged friends.

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