An interesting interactive map showing where there are confirmed cases, recoveries and deaths:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
From the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Hmm. Supposed to be embedded here, but at least on my system it’s not displaying. Well, it’s available at the link above.
There are few enough stories of new government initiatives actually succeeding in doign anythign useful. Look at the SLS, for instance, But here, at last, is a project that has not only succeeded, it should be emulated:
The Bureau of Land Management, which deals almost exclusively with land issues in western states, wisely is moving form Washington D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. Given that the only reason to be in D.C. is to be near other government agencies, and nobody *needs* to be near other government agencies to do their jobs (since we have these things called telephones, fax machines, email video conferencing, etc.), moving to where the job is actually relevant makes all kinds of sense. And so in November 2019 173 employees were told that their jobs were moving and to reply by December if they were moving with them. As of December, about 80 had replied in the affirmative. With luck, the other 93 or so have been given the opportunity to explore new career opportunities.
And here’s the best bit:
(Interior Secretary David ) Bernhardt told lawmakers he has no concerns about unfilled positions, saying BLM is hiring at the local level to backfill any vacancies.
Good. Who would be best to understand the nature of BLM issues than someone from western states?
With the Wuhan Flu force-demonstrating the utility of telecommunications and also the need for decentralizing and de-densifying governmental systems, the BLM bailing from D.C. should be only the first in the scattering of the Fed Guv. NASA headquarters? Why not Montana? Social Security headquarters? Try Nashville. Or maybe Sioux City. Leave D.C. for just four things:
1: White House
2: Congress
3: Supreme Court
4: Museums
Spread the actual governmental apparatus around the whole country. This would play merry hell with lobbying… which would be a *good* thing.
A 100-watt lightbulb is no big deal, and quite often very insufficient to provide adequate lighting. But of you can make all one hundred of those watts into a single color, collimated into a series of parallel beams with a total cross sectional area of much less than one square inch, there is really only one rational category of response:
Perhaps Gropey Joe *didn’t* just fever-dream it up…
Our post just mysteriously disappeared, so here it is again! Also please go follow a true patriot @…
Posted by Next Level Armament on Wednesday, March 11, 2020
And the gullible… and the charlatans.
It’s a worldwide race to the bottom of the dumbucket:
Political tattoos are always going to be questionable, as anyone who got a Mondale, Dukakis, Perot or Palin tattoo can attest. And then there’s *this* which has the dual feature of not only being of temporary relevance, but also *immediately* recognizable as being in astonishingly poor taste:
What we have here is a Comrade Warren staffer who got a tattoo reading “#B7E4CF,” the hex color code for the color used by the Warren campaign.
And… yeah. Took about a millisecond for people with more awareness than her to realize what it actually looked like:
Smart to memorialize a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives with a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives.
— Jake Sperling (@Jake_Sperling) March 10, 2020
Rocket surgery is hard. But for frak’s sake, it’s not *that* hard. NASA oversaw the development of the rough equivalent of the SLS in the form of the Saturn V fifty-five friggen’ years ago, on a shorter timescale and I believe at lower cost… and that was starting with prit near *nothing.* SpaceX has spent far less and achieved far more, and despite a lot of setbacks lately, I still wouldn’t put it past SpaceX to get an SLS-beater into the air before SLS.
I wonder what SpaceX could do with two billion dollars and two years. Hell, I wonder what *I* could do with that.
Hmm.
Who would I talk to about getting estimates for a mild steel circular plate twenty meters or so in diameter?
Been a lot of rather doom- and’dumbassery-filled posts of late. Because, let’s face it, there’s been a whole lot of doom and dumbassery in the news.
So, here’s something a bit different… a few crappy photos of Speedbump discovering chicken jerky dog treats.
Snerk.
A racist Twitter mob came for me over a trivial math mistake. I'm not going anywhere. https://t.co/McxAT8P7OI
— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) March 11, 2020
“Trivial math mistake.” She did the math that said that Mike Bloomberg could have given every American a buck and a half, and came away thinking that he could have given every American a million dollars. That’s not trivial by *any* estimation. That is phenomenally bad math. It’s like looking at a small child and estimating that it weigh twenty seven thousand tons. This is, I suppose, part of the left-wing war on math, science and reason, trading western notions of mathematics for “other ways of knowing” where assuming that two times two equals four and not twenty-eight quadrillion is a result of cis-hetero patriarchal whiteness.
Sadly, not “Mike Bloomberg is using that million dollars he has for every American to buy us all the just-developed cure/vaccine.” But if this comes about, it’ll still be a good if modest step:
One would have hoped that American reliance upon Chinese suppliers for *anything* would have long since been nipped in the bud, but better late than never.
I’m pretty libertarian in my economic views, but not *entirely*. There is a role for the government and for regulations. Mandating that industries vital to the functioning of the nation not be controlled by foreign nations, *especially* adversarial nations, would seem to be pretty high up there. If the US comes out of this crises with its economy intact – or at least not in tatters – and able to manufacture not just medical supplies but also medicines (many of which are cheaply and often badly made in India and China) and perhaps ever industrial tools and weapons and computer components made here in the US of A… so much the better.
