I’ve never been more tempted to leave the house in a Plague Doctor mask.
I have many good friends on this ship. Ive even worked the exact same cruise this ship was sailing a few times over the years. The situation is horrifying.
Torn between this and the silicon valley thread, but this works.
So, remember how Elon Musk was talking about how, after being a skeptic of COVID-19, he was going to donate a ton of ventilators for hospitals, and having done some reading, now keeps trying to speak like an authority on the subject?
Wellllll…
https://twitter.com/russ1mitchell/status/1245502082511036417
Oh, and it gets worse. Turns out, using a CPAP instead of a ventilator? Yeah, you don’t get a decent ventilator substitute for less serious cases. You get a Virus Geyser.
What an idiot. But also, I can totally see how these happen. And also why rich famous people don’t publicly swing into action during a crisis. If things go perfectly, you’re a hero, but because disaster relief isn’t their profession or main focus, of course they are going to make idiot mistakes.
In this case, he probably said to some other non-experts “Hey, see what we can do!” and then didn’t have knowledge make any kind of judgment calls.
But he wants to help out, and I see many people on twitter posting things like “Why doesn’t @elonmusk just invent an internet voting service so we can elect our officials from home?” or “Why doesn’t @elonmusk develop a new submarine to help save…?”
People see him as the wunderkind Edison of our day, but he’s an expert in a few quite narrow fields, and not a generalist who knows the difference between ventilators and breathing machines.
Yep. In the unimaginably unlikely event that I’m rich and famous, I already know what I’m gonna do - take out a pen, and make out as many fat cheques as I could to people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing. I am not nor do I think I am some genius polymath(Or even that smart in general), and I don’t have the relevant expertise, money won’t change that, so the best thing I could do would be contribute resources, and stay the fuck out of the way while people do their jobs. Sometimes, the best you can do is fuck all and sign the cheque.
Someone I know from Queens, shared a video with our group, taken by either him or his co-worker from inside what apparently is the Elmhurst hospital morgue. I’m secretly hoping it was some kind of dark April Fools or modified movie footage. I’d like to know he was pulling our chain.
Today I had to leave the house for the first time this week, to drive across state lines to the airport where my father keeps his plane, to collect some parts for our new build project. Want to have all of the parts for the next stage before things get any more shut down. As it is, I had to explain to the National Guard why I needed to cross the border and where I was going, that I was only going to an empty hanger in the middle of the night and had a key. And they were nice and let me on my way. But, between that and the video from earlier and the roads being fucking empty and seeing the internally lit plastic tents and HMMWVs parked at checkpoints, people pulled over by multiple cop cars just past those checkpoints, well, I guess it’s go time.
My friend and now new business partner told me his other business, that he conveniently is now president of, may need temp help and asked if I could pitch in. They’ve been rapid prototyping some parts for some kind of medical company in response to COVID, and if they get the go-ahead it’ll be a month or two of round the clock production making parts for these machines. They’re already at half their staffing. So I guess I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and join the fight on the assembly lines in this one. And that gives me some hope.
At this point if I can contribute to a good cause, gimmie a gun that shoots bullets or drives rivets and point me which way to aim it.
Anyone interested in how the DPRK is handling Covid-19?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPq0y7dIVQ
Turns out… for them it all comes back to politics, but otherwise not too well.
Problem: not enough people are being tested, and those that are usually already show symptoms.
Also: losing a sense of smell is an early and sometimes only symptom.
The plan: get people to report if they have a sudden decrease in their ability to smell.
That reminds me of a story I heard about a “smart” thermometer company that is tracking anonymized data from its users and tracking trends in populations of fevers outside statistical patterns. They’ve been able to detect flu trends in the past and believe they are picking up signals of Covid-19 fevers.
It isn’t conclusive results, but a suggestive indicator can be helpful in connection with known Covid-19 test data to make statistical inferences.
Results:
Brett vaulting up the Captain Crozier Power Rankings:
Captain Crozier is an American Hero.
Did you see his sailors cheering for him when he disembarked after being stripped of his command?
The Navy is not pleased.
He’s top 2 Captain Croziers for sure.