Jump to content

sokolow

Members
  • Posts

    594
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by sokolow

  1. Highly effective event in terms of facilitating every tool and instrument getting covered in a terrible slurry of mud and slush while ensuring a good drenching from without and / or sweat soaking from within depending on degree of waterproofing on your clothes and boots

  2. I also want to pause to defend Buckeye’s stance on the necessity of the right to protest and dissent, even and in fact especially in time of public health crisis. I don’t usually go the classic disagree-but-defend-your-right route but the same liberty the restart the economy convoy exercised is one that wildcat-striking delivery workers or healthcare staff protesting dogsh!t PPE might need tomorrow, and which we all might need next week or next month

    Take a tip from the wiser, savvier hippies and have your protest organizers drill the masses on opening a lane for EMS though.

    • Like 2
  3. 32 minutes ago, Stebo said:

    Bingo, if someone can't live off of 962 dollars a week in this state, I am sorry but you are living beyond your means and/or should have saved up your excess income.

    That projects out at 50k a year. Well above the poverty line, actually even well above the median income in this country.

    I am presently in real time on the ol’ family social media watching a labor lawyer and someone who managed a regional dept. of economic security walk a whole bunch of kin through this stuff and some have had no problems. Some have gotten their Trump bucks already. Meanwhile some have gotten UI arbitrarily withheld for totally opaque reasons, and have no idea whether their stimulus check is going to be disbursed.  These are all literate native English speakers with standard wage or salary jobs.

    Many state UI systems are not designed to facilitate ease of access to the qualified benefit, whether intentionally or not.  SSDI can be even worse.

    Hitting that wall where what should be easy and reassuring, isn’t, and instead its a punitive nightmare, and then someone gets on you about it is your fault, is one reason why people are presently enraged.

  4. You said it! Remember the country we’re citizens of! We don’t have to choose between nursing homes with corpses stacked in the hallways and generational economic devastation! That’s just the choice our leaders are offering, because they don’t have the courage to do otherwise.

    • Like 1
  5. I mean, @buckeye

    You aren’t wrong that the immiseration and shortened lives, the decades of worse health outcomes — especially for minority communities — the suicides and despair, the upheaval, is going to be an excess mortality similar in magnitude to pandemic itself.  It will be generational devastation. But if that’s what comes to pass, its what our elected officials and business leadership choose for us to suffer.

    No joke this isn’t even about “socialism”; no-one in this thread has brought up, say, taking over Boeing as a state enterprise though maybe we should

    It’s not even as radical as New Deal capitalism or the war economy of the 40s.  We don’t have physical infrastructure getting destroyed, we don’t have to build countless thousands of combat aircraft and a whole new merchant fleet, we don’t have to build 40 aircraft carriers of different types and roles, we don’t have to invent a superweapon using barely understood physics and brand new industrial processes, we don’t have to ship millions of teens and gigatons of war crap overseas so young men can die and be maimed crushing Hitler’s and Tojo’s legions

    All we have to do is pay people who aren’t doing infrastructure critical jobs to stay home for a total of what? 12 weeks in two or three blocks? until we have enough kits and appropriate monitoring protocols to adequately test and trace.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  6. 1 hour ago, nwohweather said:

    You're thinking too personally though. It doesn't matter if you're giving people money, the economy isn't producing anything in that time.  That's the big issue from an economic principle, we need to go back to making things soon

    Yes and no. I mean sure, there is some place in the vast spectrum of things we make, build, and do between the extremes of “Truck Nutzz, luxury yoga center, and sports mascot” on the one hand and “food, infrastructure-critical utility work, and ventilator tech” on the other where we need to be in terms of producing things.

    That’s some point between the things we need right now and the things we want or like. Because of course there are effects that resonate down the supply chain where, I don’t know, theres a company that that went bankrupt which mostly made novelty easter eggs, but also, was a little known subcontractor that made a little plastic widget thats in every god dang lightbulb. And now all America craps in the dark.  Or whatever.

    But the big issue right now is ordinary people need to be able to pay rent or their mortgage, buy food, keep their utilities on, keep their car payments up, and keep their insurance.  IIRC those categories there account for something like 70% or more of US household expenditures, especially in the lower earning half.

     

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  7. Here is what I sent if you would like a template

    ****

    To the men and women of the USAA leadership,

    A friend of mine who is also a USAA member shared with me this article describing USAA using CARES Act stimulus funds to offset charged off debts.

    https://prospect.org/coronavirus/usaa-bank-grabs-stimulus-checks-from-military-families/

    He was upset, and writes: “This is extremely disappointing behavior from USAA during a global pandemic and massive unemployment. Using CARES Act funds to offset outstanding debts is clearly against the spirit of the Act. While it may not be prohibited under the law, that does not make it moral or ethical.” I agree with his statement.

    My family has trusted USAA for decades, and it is disturbing to think USAA’s management team might be derelict in its duty to lead ethically when its members are relying on them most.

    Yours,

    • Thanks 2
  8. A friend of mine tells me USAA is applying CARES checks to negative balances and liens

    https://prospect.org/coronavirus/usaa-bank-grabs-stimulus-checks-from-military-families/

    Which is classic “legal but not ethical” for every bank right now but is particularly scummy and depressing to see from USAA. I sent em a letter telling em i was disappointed and if you are a USAA member please do the same. USAA can collect on those debts later, people need that money now.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  9. I want to switch to a form of government where the idled assembly line worker and unemployed waitress and the butcher at the covid contaminated pork plant get their cut of the 2.2 trillion dollars first and then we argue about how much money is left over for bailing out this or that sector of the economy

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  10. 6 minutes ago, WestMichigan said:

    There aren't enough tax dollars available even if we taxed at ridiculous rates to support something like that.  Unless you want the government to say give me 100% of your money and I will determine how much you get back then explain how that would work?  That is unless you want to switch to an entirely different form of government and in that case I'm going to pass on that.

    Fortunately we wouldn’t have to pay it off all at once, even with our current regressive tax structure.  And we’ve already committed a number in the ballpark of $1000/week per adult for 12 weeks to bailouts.  There was enough money. 

  11. 9 hours ago, nwohweather said:

    Regardless what we are seeing is people can’t wait much longer. They may have an extreme stance to protest, but people’s finances are getting rocked by this. Idc if they have take temperatures before entering buildings and require masks of some kind in every indoor setting, this country has to be open by Mothers Day. We have no choice to continue past that

    Of course we have a choice, or, of course our elected officials have a choice.  They could cut every adult a 1000 dollar check every week of the crisis, instead of just once, maybe, if it gets there, in ??? October ???.  For people still working in essential jobs we call it hazard pay.  We could suspend rent and mortgage payments.  We could just say now everyone’s enrolled in Tricare.  And there’s so many problems with all that but the correct answer regardless of the details is “go big for the little folks” and the response to any objection other than “that’s not enough” is “who gives a fü¢k we’ll sort it out later, we’re doing a bailout for normal people”

     

    • Like 1
  12. From the City itself so the usual warnings in re claims by government offices and all that, and recognizing the potential for serious undercounting as we have seen elsewhere, but I get the impression from my wife, given what she’s seeing at work, the CDPH analysis is wholly plausible


    2D7CC29B-DEE1-4D39-9526-4AB746E561B2.png.bea233cfc21e0ede2f469d5a7ae09738.png

    01B4E4E8-E5CD-405C-BBBB-21BCB8D740AA.png.4bb280f3c1075b753ee6edf1a7e692d6.png

    3A05EAE3-25D1-4EF8-8D07-7EA178AD235F.png.41339f528846c408ad972dfc5cf82ee1.png


    A definite sign of the times that it is real hard to straight come out and say “Chicago might have moved with effectiveness, social distancing and SaH appears to worked” without a bunch of caveats and also, “CDPH might be lying but if they are they’re doing a good job of secretly dumping hundreds of victims of pneumonia-like illness straight into mass graves with few stops at the nearby major research hospital’s ED”

  13. I think a positive step going forward should be ensuring every state has UI that is focused on providing lost income replacement to 85% or better, system which has streamlined and automatic payout, and which operates on the presumption of good faith on the part of the claimant, which has minimal red tape and which is focused on ease of access, speed, and claimant support.  If we want to nail serial fraudsters we can do it with actual investigators.

    We didn’t need to read the article about Florida to understand that in many states UI is is not set up to provide unemployment relief, it is set up to deter people from claiming UI.

    • Like 1
  14. I thought the whole IHME epidemiologist mutual discussion / analysis was good for this thread because I really enjoy reading this community of professionals and informed laypeople discuss the tools available in the meteorology community, and which from the model suite is appropriate for which application, and with what caveats.  Different forecasting, similar advisory mission. This guy who is tagged in the first tweet in that thread has made a tool to track changes in the IHME projections over time

     

     

  15. In re the IHME model, here is an interesting discussion of side effects that arise from it having been designed as a resource-use forecasting tool for healthcare institutions & response planning, but then being employed “off label” as it were in a broader context

     

     

  16. no-one likes that part because instead of putting the responsibility on the tradespeople to individually “work safe”, it places the responsibility on contractors to design a safer workplace and bid with schedules that allow for stopping to think about what they are doing, and to bring in & install appropriate material / equipment / temporary structures / whatever

    or to just wait, to wait out a couple days of inclement weather rather than working in flooded trenches and muddy excavations

    • Like 2
  17. On 4/13/2020 at 7:23 PM, WestMichigan said:

    What makes a government clerk any more important than a construction worker. Without either our society wouldn’t function like it does. The problem with unemployment is it doesn’t pay the bills. And where are they getting the money?  People aren’t working so it isn’t income taxes. We are just mortgaging our future. I know you want to get in a fight with me but all I want is common sense restrictions that are equally applied. This isn’t a disease to ignore. I am not saying that. Lots of people have it and many have died. I am not disputing that but how does a single self employed construction worker have to quit working when he is working by himself in an unoccupied home?  Like I said apply common sense and people will be less irritated. 

     

    On 4/13/2020 at 10:36 PM, Stebo said:

    Look I get it but you are talking about a very specific scenario in the grand scheme of things and honestly having construction work slow down is good because it allows for the n95 masks to be available. Most construction workers use them as well, same with painters, drywallers, etc.

    construction in IL has been largely exempt from the SaH order and honestly it has been very uncomfortable because the majority of current projects are nonessential. In the sense that it doesn’t matter if society takes delivery of a condo block or a new subdivision a month later than planned, regardless of what the governor says; its not critical infrastructure. 

    Its has been uncomfortable because everyone has had to patch together an industrial hygiene plan on the fly for environments when most OTS PPE is rightly committed elsewhere, but lots of tasks need two sets of hands, and require men & women to work close together in tight spaces.

    PPE is a mitigation measure you implement not first, but third, after avoiding or abating the hazard in the first place.  PPE is part of a cost benefit analysis that recognizes no job can be 100% safe, but another part of that analysis is “why does this need to get done right now? why not wait until we can do this a different way?

    • Like 2
  18. 5 hours ago, Baum said:

    Today's Lesson, and perhaps the next week or so:“April is the cruelest month, breeding. lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. memory and desire, stirring. dull roots with spring rain.”

     

    Gale in April


    by Robinson Jeffers

    Intense and terrible beauty, how has our race with the frail naked nerves,
    So little a craft swum down from its far launching?
    Why now, only because the northwest blows and the headed grass billows,
    Great seas jagging the west and on the granite
    Blanching, the vessel is brimmed, this dancing play of the world is too much passion.
    A gale in April so overfilling the spirit,
    Though his ribs were thick as the earth's, arches of mountain, how shall one dare to live,
    Though his blood were like the earth's rivers and his flesh iron,
    How shall one dare to live? One is born strong, how do the weak endure it?
    The strong lean upon death as on a rock,
    After eighty years there is shelter and the naked nerves shall be covered with deep quietness,
    O beauty of things go on, go on, O torture
    Of intense joy I have lasted out my time. I have thanked God and finished,
    Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness,
    Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed
    From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor.

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...