Forget the TP, I need more hand cream due to all this washing of the hands.
Kottke.org, The Power of the Individual in an Exponential Crisis
The difference is stark. If you act today, you will have averted four times as many infections in the next month: roughly 2,400 averted infections, versus just 600 if you wait one week. That’s the power of averting just one infection, and obviously we would like to avert more than one.
At times I think to myself, maybe now Presidenial elections in the United States will stop being a popularity contest and start becoming a job interview. But then I recall how we thought things would change after 9/11 only for all the lessons to become soon forgotten months afterward.
Michigan is up to 53 positive cases as of 9 AM 3/16. 14 in Oakland County, who hasn’t updated their site listings in a while. Bars and restaurants are closing in Michigan. Now I expect to really starting seeing the complaints on my Facebook feed.
And when state governments start closing down the bars and restaurants, I wonder how people are going to react.
I’ve created a page of links to information about the response to COVID-19, starting selfishly with locations closest to where I live.
Does this ring true right now? It’s a consequence of being intentionally divided.
“In one study, Dominic Abrams and his colleagues divided groups of participants into smaller groups based on trivial categories (e.g., groups based on numbers that were randomly assigned to them). Then participants were asked to complete a difficult perceptual task while receiving helpful information from members of either their ingroup or outgroup. They found that participants did not rely on input from outgroup members even when it would have been useful for them to do so. Instead, they toiled on alone. Abrams and colleagues wrote, “[ Participants] resisted information purely on the basis that it was derived from a category of person to which they did not belong.”” (Emphasis added)
— Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart by Christena Cleveland a.co/55Fi0yS
Panic shopping
Finished reading: The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams 📚
“You don’t have to have scriptural or religious teaching. It’s just the truth: You can’t survive on your own. If you say you are going to be totally selfish, in next to no time the person who is totally selfish goes under. You need other people in order to be human. That’s why when they want to punish you they put you in solitary confinement. Because you can’t flourish without other human beings. They give you things that you cannot give yourself, no matter how much money you have. And so we speak of Ubuntu. A person is a person through other persons. And there must have been some people who said, ‘Ah, what a primitive way of thinking.’ It’s the most fundamental law of our being. We flout that—we flout it at our peril.”
— The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, et al. a.co/ev9u1va
What we ought to learn from what we are now experiencing is how truly interconnected we all are. It is foolish to think what occurs on the other side of the globe cannot affect us. We are all together on this rock hurling through space and we can thrive together or die together and never truly apart.
Farmington Hills teacher tests positive for COVID-19 It is getting closer to us.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;”
All NCAA tournaments cancelled. Professional seasons postponed. NASCAR is still going to run with nobody in the stands.
The fact that the virus has already taken hold across the country, and that blocking foreign travel does essentially nothing to slow the spread of the disease, is beyond his grasp. He is closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Yet even that simple metaphor captures a complexity that escapes him.
Trump also told his audience, “I met with the leaders of health insurance industry who have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments and to prevent surprise medical billing.” The Insurance Industry quickly announced it had only agreed to cover testing, not treatment, for the coronavirus
Good morning. It’s going to be a scary and weird couple of months. For those skeptics, note that some very rich people, NBA owners and the NCAA for example, are deferring lots of money canceling events. We still haven’t seen what the NHL and MLB will do, but I got to think they will do the same thing.
If you view everything in life in dualistic, for me or against me terms, then you are going to have polarization. Trump has never stopped campaigning and he views everything in terms of whether it makes him look good or bad. Has Trump ever done or said anything in terms of uniting the country?
I bet all the NFL owners are breathing better knowing their league is not in season.
It has arrived in Michigan! We just don’t know how long it has been here.
Last year Om Malik warned us and now we are living it.