COVID-19 - READ THE RULES BEFORE REPLYING

[Zodiark1593]

Might be or might not be off topic, but is there some sort of Pineapple Sherbert shortage. That stuff is incredibly difficult to find anywhere for some reason. It’s absolutely bizarre, and infuriating as I use it in smoothies. 

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Might be or might not be off topic, but is there some sort of Pineapple Sherbert shortage. That stuff is incredibly difficult to find anywhere for some reason. It’s absolutely bizarre, and infuriating as I use it in smoothies. 

Yeah Walmart by me has been hit hard. Discovering new brands I never would have tried before. Trying new products.  Went from IceMt Sparkling water to Bubbly and now to AHA. Shelves have been bare the last few months. It's to the point that if I see it and I normally buy it, I buy it even if I don't need it. Though I have discovered a few more flavors of Dairy Free Ice cream. 

[PhantomJaguarr]

9 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Might be or might not be off topic, but is there some sort of Pineapple Sherbert shortage. That stuff is incredibly difficult to find anywhere for some reason. It’s absolutely bizarre, and infuriating as I use it in smoothies. 

Going off from that, there seems to be a shortage of aluminum cans. You can’t find Sierra Mist in cans or Coke Caffeine Free Zero in cans for example, only in the plastic bottles. Companies are prioritizing their more popular flavors. They’re attributing it to people consuming more soda at home and not going out to restaurants for said soda not nearly as much as before. 
 

and don’t get me started on the coin shortage from the Federal Reserve. As if I have already am dealing with a bunch of b.s. Now the virus throws this at me.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/24/national-coin-shortage-2020-freebies-bonuses-for-coins/5421842002/

[Deli]

How bad it is actually on the ground in the US in term of economy? I read in the news many are behind their monthy rent. With many cities roll back their re-opening, the unemployment rate is going up again. But then of course don't believe everything you read in the news. I just wonder how people are really affected in the hardest hit states at this moment?

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, Deli said:

How bad it is actually on the ground in the US in term of economy? I read in the news many are behind their monthy rent. With many cities roll back their re-opening, the unemployment rate is going up again. But then of course don't believe everything you read in the news. I just wonder how people are really affected in the hardest hit states at this moment?

Though I don’t get paid a ton, I’m fortunate enough to have fairly steady work, and am pretty much one of the high performers/low maintenance kind of employee, so I should be relatively safe even if things get dire enough for the company to slim down. My immediate family still has their respective businesses (flooring, landscaping, tax accounting, etc) that, while have taken a modest hit in recent months, haven’t fallen entirely out of commission even during the CA shutdowns. None of us are under threat of losing our home due to financials at this time. If anything, the hit to mental health has been much more grievous. Downtown Placerville doesn’t really look like anything different from last year. 
 

Keep in mind, I never really spent time with many people even before the pandemic, so this is a minuscule sample size. 

[kaiju_wars]

2 hours ago, Deli said:

How bad it is actually on the ground in the US in term of economy? I read in the news many are behind their monthy rent. With many cities roll back their re-opening, the unemployment rate is going up again. But then of course don't believe everything you read in the news. I just wonder how people are really affected in the hardest hit states at this moment?

My job is basically guaranteed since I work in law enforcement, and they'll always need dispatchers and officers.  My step-dad works in the oil field.  He does planning for the various areas around here.  They had to cut back a lot and let go of a lot of people, but his job in theory should be one of the last ones to go.  

 

People in my area seem to not give a shit about the pandemic, and didn't even really start wearing face masks until stores started mandating it.

[ARikozuM]

6 hours ago, Deli said:

How bad it is actually on the ground in the US in term of economy? I read in the news many are behind their monthy rent. With many cities roll back their re-opening, the unemployment rate is going up again. But then of course don't believe everything you read in the news. I just wonder how people are really affected in the hardest hit states at this moment?

Last I heard 40% of people couldn't pay their July rent. People are quick to hurry, slow to respond. The protests or riots are no longer just about BLM. It's pretty much everything at this point. There has been nearly no leadership in the states that needed it most, and now they're suffering the consequences of closing late, reopening early, and closing again. The politicians are becoming "yes men" instead of thinking for themselves. 

[Donut417]

16 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The politicians are becoming "yes men" instead of thinking for themselves. 

Well November is just around the corner. That potentially will solve many of these issues. 

[ARikozuM]

4 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Well November is just around the corner. That potentially will solve many of these issues. 

I hope so. I'm growing increasingly tired of Reps and Dems pushing money up the chain while the most at risk get no aid.

[Nowak]

Baker thanked Mike Pence for his "assistance" with COVID-19 at a conference... meeting... thing in Nantucket.

 

Keep in mind we're the state that had to do foreign policy to get N95 masks delivered via the New England Patriots' private Boeing 767 because the feds kept confiscating N95 masks we ordered at the Port of New York.

[Deli]

1 hour ago, ARikozuM said:

Last I heard 40% of people couldn't pay their July rent. People are quick to hurry, slow to respond. The protests or riots are no longer just about BLM. It's pretty much everything at this point. There has been nearly no leadership in the states that needed it most, and now they're suffering the consequences of closing late, reopening early, and closing again. The politicians are becoming "yes men" instead of thinking for themselves. 

In France the yellow jacket protest started with fuel price, then spread to everything else. People are just unhappy about things in general, that motivated them to go to the street. Likewise we'll see how the BLM movement and protest evolve down the road. Will it get worse or better when near November?

 

Although I doubt a mere change of administration at the White House will do much on the ground. The economy won't suddenly rebound from nowhere and the virus won't just disappear.

[captain_to_fire]

10 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

sorry, quick aside:

 

HOLY SHIT VIETNAM IS DOING SO WELL

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/covid-19-vietnam-alert-danang-new-local-case-infection-12962720

(first local infection after 3 solid months without)

 

If there's one thing gov't officials and doctors should learn from this pandemic, they should act like a company's sysadmin whose job is to protect the organization against targeted attacks IMO.

 

Sysadmin	Government Officials and Medical Staff
Keep up with underground hacking forums for the vulnerabilities exploited, the latest CVEs posted, and trends	Keep up with the new and emerging diseases especially infectious ones
Should there be an in the wild exploitation of vulnerabilities, sysadmins will push the latest updates and keep an eye on their EDR sensors.	If the said disease has an effective vaccine available, there should be mass vaccination in order to achieve herd immunity. If the emerging disease doesn't have an effective vaccine just yet, potential entry points of people should be monitored by deploying thermal cameras in airports and thorough contact tracing of everyone coming in. A legislation should be in place in order to punish anyone who lies in their history of travel or contact with an infected individual in times of a pandemic.
Sysadmins must reduce the attack surface of their organizations by not allowing BYOD, blocking USB ports, configuring applications to not perform other stuff they're intended to do like preventing Macros from creating child processes, summoning a system call, or downloading stuff from the internet, etc.	If the disease's country of origin has been identified and/or if the said country/ies has been known to have high cases, issue a travel ban to the said country/ies as soon as possible in order to prevent local spread among your citizens.
Should malware or a targeted attack succeeds in infiltrating your organization, make sure devices are encrypted in order to prevent data theft and infected machines should be isolated from the rest of the workstations and servers.	Issue a quarantine immediately and restrict movement of people until the sick people gets identified and treated so that the infection is contained and can no longer infect other people. Quarantine works well when travel bans has been issued early.
Sysadmins should monitor how hackers are doing by recording everything they're doing by recording what IP addresses they connect to and what files are dropped or deleted and which settings are they changing to uncover their sinister plot.	Epidemiologists should study how the disease spreads. Pathologists will study on how it kills a person. With this knowledge, lawmakers will be able to make informed decisions on how to guide its citizens and drug manufacturers can immediately come up with a vaccine to prevent and a drug for treating.

 

Looking back at SARS-1 in 2002 and MERS-CoV in 2015, early travel bans work!

[mr moose]

34 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Looking back at SARS-1 in 2002 and MERS-CoV in 2015, early travel bans work!

And proper quarantine.  Victoria is the perfect example in Australia of what happens when you don't quarantine properly and instead treat it as a political lip service.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Commodus]

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

And proper quarantine.  Victoria is the perfect example in Australia of what happens when you don't quarantine properly and instead treat it as a political lip service.

What's horrible is realizing that the situation in the US could have been so much better with consistently strong quarantines and earlier travel restrictions... and that, in turn, could have improved the situation in Canada and other countries.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Commodus said:

What's horrible is realizing that the situation in the US could have been so much better with consistently strong quarantines and earlier travel restrictions... and that, in turn, could have improved the situation in Canada and other countries.

It didn’t help that the CDC was changing it’s story all the time on symptoms and what we needed to protect ourselves. Many people took it as the feds were incompetent. As many have lost faith in the government’s ability to lead. 
 

If we had strong leadership from the beginning, then things would have went better. Instead we have 50 governors doing their own thing. Things in Michigan have stabilized a bit, but it’s no where close to being normal again. 

[ARikozuM]

21 hours ago, Deli said:

In France the yellow jacket protest started with fuel price, then spread to everything else. People are just unhappy about things in general, that motivated them to go to the street. Likewise we'll see how the BLM movement and protest evolve down the road. Will it get worse or better when near November?

 

Although I doubt a mere change of administration at the White House will do much on the ground. The economy won't suddenly rebound from nowhere and the virus won't just disappear.

It's already spreading to far more than just BLM. There's the COVID, employment, wages, and healthcare movements assembling together. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 7/26/2020 at 6:31 AM, Deli said:

How bad it is actually on the ground in the US in term of economy? I read in the news many are behind their monthy rent. With many cities roll back their re-opening, the unemployment rate is going up again. But then of course don't believe everything you read in the news. I just wonder how people are really affected in the hardest hit states at this moment?

A picture's worth a 1000 words they say: monthly unemployment numbers for the last 20 years:

Spoiler

Now, that's only part of the picture, and you can also see the somewhat quick decline in the last two months. A quickly-reverting spike to 15% doesn't need to be worse than, say, remaining at 10% for a year, and other metrics are necessary to put things in perspective. Still, unemployment is a fairly good proxy for other forms of income loss (such as lower sales for the self-employed).

[PhantomJaguarr]

Second stimulus check possibly incoming. Totally using it for school related expenses this time. Ya know, because universities are still charging full tuition even when classes will be online thanks to covid.

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, PhantomJaguar77 said:

Second stimulus check possibly incoming. Totally using it for school related expenses this time. Ya know, because universities are still charging full tuition even when classes will be online thanks to covid.

Online test proctoring needs to due in a fire too. No one gets access to my PC but me without exception, never mind admin privileges. I don’t even have a system with a (working) webcam, phone aside.

 

[Commodus]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

It didn’t help that the CDC was changing it’s story all the time on symptoms and what we needed to protect ourselves. Many people took it as the feds were incompetent. As many have lost faith in the government’s ability to lead. 
 

If we had strong leadership from the beginning, then things would have went better. Instead we have 50 governors doing their own thing. Things in Michigan have stabilized a bit, but it’s no where close to being normal again. 

Precisely. I know why Fauci was hesitant to recommend masks early on, for example (he didn't want people buying up N95 masks at a time when healthcare workers needed every last one), but if there had been a unified, coordinated response... well, some of those 150,000 deceased would still be alive, and states probably wouldn't be reversing opening measures.

[PhantomJaguarr]

3 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Online test proctoring needs to due in a fire too. No one gets access to my PC but me without exception, never mind admin privileges. I don’t even have a system with a (working) webcam, phone aside.

 

Everyone in my household also knows they need my permission before they can use my PC that I busted my arse to save up for.

 

Some classes will be required to have a webcam of some sort for participation, although I already bought mine before learning that fact.

[Nowak]

Baker's announced a travel advisory wherein everyone who leaves New England must self-isolate for 14 days upon returning so I guess that I won't be going to Florida for my grandpa's funeral.

 

Even not that, Pasco County's a COVID hotspot. It'd be a bad idea to go regardless.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, Nowak said:

Even not that, Pasco County's a COVID hotspot. It'd be a bad idea to go regardless.

bUt ThE hEaT WiLl sToP coViD!

[Nowak]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

bUt ThE hEaT WiLl sToP coViD!

"The heat, in fact, didn't stop COVID."

[captain_to_fire]

14 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

bUt ThE hEaT WiLl sToP coViD!

Inb4 someone suggests portable sauna as Covid treatment 

 

/s

Spoiler