Coronavirus Pandemic

[zip accident]

This is quite old, and I kind of suspect KC knew he was oversimplifying, but I think it ought to be clarified anyway.

We don't know how long-lasting the antibodies to this coronavirus are. But, going by other coronaviruses, they actually tend not to be that long-lasting - less long-lasting than influenza antibodies tend to be. Natural "herd immunity" might not actually last all that long.

This is based on a misconception. The reason the common cold and the flu come back so frequently is that the viruses change their coat, this virus might do that, it might not. The antibodies last quite a long time, the problem is that they code for the coat of the virus, and if the virus changes it's coat, the old antibodies don't work on the virus with the new coat, but they'll still quite handily get any examples of the virus with the old coat.

[gilesgoat]

Has anyone noticed the Eurovision has been cancelled?

That thread won't be updated this year.

I did ...

[Chontler]

What's wrong with low cost airlines ?

*Hugely* environmentally damaging. Travel has been made a key piece of what it's supposed to mean to be "human" in the latter 20th and early 21st century, but the commodification of airlines has come at an enormous environmental cost.

What are the environmental costs you're referring to? There's the suggestion that man's contribution to CO2 levels is a **huge** issue, not sure I agree with that when a single volcanic eruption dwarfs our own efforts, so what other costs are there?

That’s completely wrong. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... cano-emit/

[Cloudane]

You should definitely ask them about working from home.

Yep, emailed this evening with my question, thoughts and justifications. Will see what they say. I have a feeling it'll be a resounding NO, as they just sent out an email advising everyone to build up overtime so they can take it in lieu if they have to isolate (other alternative being SSP) but we shall see...

Almost everything can be done remotely with the exception of fixing printers or whatever (can always nip in for that kind of thing, at least it's minimal), but it's a very old fashioned company and always wants people there face to face, don't really trust people to work from home etc. It'd be a huge culture shock. Of course, it'd be nice to be proven wrong and I'd happily prove them wrong and work hard...

But, yes, I fully appreciate that this is a very tricky situation for you indeed, that's why I felt compelled to respond to your questions. To try to offer you some useful advice for your situation.

Understood, thanks

[rowan]

I work in IT support and have plenty of web work etc that can be done from home for now if they trust me to but I can't see it being something they'd agree to for 12 weeks if everyone else is in and needing support.

If I may ask "do you do/need lot of on site/at customer's support ?" ..

I've been in "IT support" ( AND development the same time ) for a number of years, 90% of cases was "having a flat ear at the phone" did not need to go anywhere and I could have been in Trieste as well as in India would not have made the difference.

Anyway in theory "you can't be fired if you are sick" .. or not ?

I've been working from home since this week and *hating it*

I try very hard to keep my work and home life separate. If I have a lot on, I would rather work later in the office, then leave it all behind.
It feels really weird just being in my "place that is generally an escape from work", actually thinking about & doing work.

If for some reason I wouldn't have super-urgent things going on, I find it too easy to be distracted by things around the house.
If I am super busy then I can't put it down / switch off.


And despite all that's going on, my dear colleagues in Milan still have [a complete surfeit of] energy to be going on and on and on and on about the e-invoices they don't like [but are legally compliant]. Gaaaah!

As regards getting fired when sick - well no, you cannot sack someone because they are sick.
But y'know, a lot of employers are quite good at finding ways around this, making positions untenable or uncomfortable to the point that the person doesn't want anything to do with them etc.
And even if they don't get creative & just try to "get rid of people" in such situations, it is astonishing how many employees have no clue about employment law, whether they would have grounds to sue for unfair dismissal etc. A lot don't even know that such a concept exists. From friends I've known, I'd say the restaurant/catering trade seems particularly bad for this.

[Baggypants]

For the benefit of the UK patrons here.

From a reliable source.

Recommend making preparations tomorrow for an extended stay indoors.

Calm down love. Schools don't close until next week.

[gilesgoat]

I work in IT support and have plenty of web work etc that can be done from home for now if they trust me to but I can't see it being something they'd agree to for 12 weeks if everyone else is in and needing support.

If I may ask "do you do/need lot of on site/at customer's support ?" ..

I've been in "IT support" ( AND development the same time ) for a number of years, 90% of cases was "having a flat ear at the phone" did not need to go anywhere and I could have been in Trieste as well as in India would not have made the difference.

Anyway in theory "you can't be fired if you are sick" .. or not ?

I've been working from home since this week and *hating it*

I try very hard to keep my work and home life separate. If I have a lot on, I would rather work later in the office, then leave it all behind.
It feels really weird just being in my "place that is generally an escape from work", actually thinking about & doing work.

If for some reason I wouldn't have super-urgent things going on, I find it too easy to be distracted by things around the house.
If I am super busy then I can't put it down / switch off.

Working from home is tricky, I guess it gets "super tricky" if home is a "standard home with family".

I say so because if I'd had to be working from home ( in Italy ) with all my family around I think I'd never get any work done

Here of course in Wales is totally different as "this whole place is engineered to work from here".

Actually I noted more than slacking what USUALLY tends to happen is "you work you don't even know how much work you do", I mean you get sometime SO absorbed into doing stuff you just keep doing "not to loose the zone".

Yeah had to be say the kind of life me and Jeff we live is "quite different" as "the home life and the work life is one and the same" yes we do have the sheep and some other things, thankfully, otherwise it would almost be an all time just code.

But overall "it's a matter of defining times and boundaries" I suppose, if you are into this "work later in the office, then leave it all behind" that's bit of a problem because now you can't do it .. unless you really set "a virtual border" where you say "this is the office, this I how/when/where I work" and then you "leave it" once you decide you had enough.

But yes "working from home" requires "some planning/modifications of the whole life and home", could be just you room you close yourself in and you don't let anyone in when you work and then you get out and you don't get back in when you are "out" of work.

But yes, it's not a thing you set up and have it perfectly working from one day to the other, takes time to adjust and find the solution that works the best.

[tufty]

For the benefit of the UK patrons here.

From a reliable source.

Recommend making preparations tomorrow for an extended stay indoors.

Calm down love. Schools don't close until next week.

Quick timeline as to what happened in France :

Thursday : restrictions on who could visit old people's homes
Friday : Education minister announced schools would be shut from Monday due to an "unexpected" rise in the number of case
Saturday : Offers for "work at home" in order to look after kids, support for companies, etc. "Nobody will go bust because of this".
Sunday : Ski resorts ordered closed, early in the morning as the slopes had been prepared.
Monday night : President orders country-wide shutdown for two weeks starting Tuesday midday.

[Rhythm]

Quick timeline as to what happened in France :

Thursday : restrictions on who could visit old people's homes
Friday : Education minister announced schools would be shut from Monday due to an "unexpected" rise in the number of case
Saturday : Offers for "work at home" in order to look after kids, support for companies, etc. "Nobody will go bust because of this".
Sunday : Ski resorts ordered closed, early in the morning as the slopes had been prepared.
Monday night : President orders country-wide shutdown for two weeks starting Tuesday midday.

See also: California, New York etc

The "lockdown" is coming. And soon. I genuinely suspect tomorrow's (post work-week) press briefing will be the "you're not allowed out without good reason" announcement. They're passing the laws through parliament today

[gilesgoat]

Quick timeline as to what happened in France :

Thursday : restrictions on who could visit old people's homes
Friday : Education minister announced schools would be shut from Monday due to an "unexpected" rise in the number of case
Saturday : Offers for "work at home" in order to look after kids, support for companies, etc. "Nobody will go bust because of this".
Sunday : Ski resorts ordered closed, early in the morning as the slopes had been prepared.
Monday night : President orders country-wide shutdown for two weeks starting Tuesday midday.

See also: California, New York etc

The "lockdown" is coming. And soon. I genuinely suspect tomorrow's (post work-week) press briefing will be the "you're not allowed out without good reason" announcement. They're passing the laws through parliament today

You mean Boris decided it's not good for everyone to get infected ? </irony>

[KlaxonCow]

There's the suggestion that man's contribution to CO2 levels is a **huge** issue, not sure I agree with that when a single volcanic eruption dwarfs our own efforts, so what other costs are there?

The primary "other cost" is the continued depletion of finite non-renewable resources.

Fossil fuels are running out. This is an inescapable arithmetical fact.

There is a finite amount of these things left. We're using them up in a one-way non-renewable process, and they're not coming back again in any hurry.

The hydrocarbons we've been using for the last century or so, primarily comes from the "Carboniferous Period" of prehistory - where "carboniferious" quite literally means "coal-bearing" - some 360 to 300 million years ago, when the land masses of the planet were covered by massive ancient forests. A period that could be described as "When Trees Ruled the Earth" and, indeed, their near total dominance of the atmosphere back then was what did the CO2 to oxygen conversion in the atmosphere that allowed for oxygen-breathing land animals to thereafter thrive.

Once the oil runs out, we're not getting it replenished for several hundreds of millions of years by natural processes.

Both the domestic American oil fields and North Sea oil are, in effect, already dead.

This introduces concerns for "energy security" when, you know, the folks we're relying on to keep modern civilisation going are such lovely people as Saudi Arabia and Russia. And the moral distaste that we have to just smile sweetly at tyrannical arseholes with often a pseudo-Medieval attitude to human rights, and pretend like they're our "best friends forever".

And the further moral distaste that we're effectively subsidising their backward philosophies to the tune of billions and billions. We're subsidising their tyrannies. We're giving them enough money to be able to maintain these superstitious traditions and not face actual realities.

That is, if Saudi Arabia had no oil money propping it up, then their economy would demand that women be permitted to drive and be permitted into the workplace. Without the prop of oil, the proposition of not obtaining income taxes from 50% of your population is untenable.

Further, oil refining uses tremendous amounts of electricity:



So it's not just the CO2 from the fuel itself, there's also the CO2 from refining the fuel in the first place, plus the CO2 involved in transporting it around.

A crucial point to note here is that we, indeed, refine oil for more than just gasoline, diesel and kerosene. There are many other peripheral by-products that are used in plastics, fertilisers and many other things. Including the bitchumen used in road surfaces, for example.

The ultimate loss of oil won't just bring all non-electric transportation to a completely halt, but it'll mean that innumerable other by-products and material derived from oil refinery will cease too.

Our plastic pollution problems might ironically be eventually solved by the fact that we're using up all our oil on transportation, leaving none behind for use in the productions of certain plastics.

Another thing to note is that electric cars are often criticised for the use of cobalt in lithium-cobalt batteries. This being problematic as it's known that cobalt mining in Africa, where most of it comes from, is extremely dodgy. Employing children on a pittance, with zero employment rights and health and safety considerations.

But the thing is that very little cobalt is used in these lithium-cobalt batteries, in comparison to the vast numbers used in - you guessed it - refining oil. Cobalt is an important catalyst in some of the chemical processes required to refine oil.

And then you've got to ask yourself, how the hell did the cobalt mining industry end up so corrupt and broken when, for decades and decades, its primary consumers were the oil industry? They never did anything. They never said anything. There were no attempts to clean it up.

So it's hilarious that when the electric battery industry finds it also chemically needs cobalt - in far lesser numbers - then it gets attacked for its use of "dirty and immoral cobalt". But they didn't set up this industry and they haven't been its primary consumer for decades and decades, which the fossil fuels industries have been.

Plus, the point's becoming moot. Modern batteries have greatly reduced cobalt usage and there are some new types of battery, coming onto the market soon, that have found other ways to make it work and are now 100% cobalt-free.

Then we can consider that when CO2 dissolves in the oceans, it makes it more acidic. The pH balance of the oceans is changing, and that's not at all good for life in the oceans at all.

There's many more environmental, social and economic costs to the fossil fuel economy that we could go into. But I want to focus on the "man-made climate change" versus "natural cycles climate change".

That is, is mankind responsible for climate change?

Well, in a certain sense, here's the thing. It doesn't matter.

If we acknowledge that climate change is happening, as CO2 levels rise, then we need to mitigate against the bad shit that's to come, whether it was us or "the natural cycles of the Sun" that was to blame.

It's like there's a massive forest fire. And some people are arguing that the fire was set by arsonists, and others are arguing that the fire was naturally caused - set off by a lightning strike, perhaps. And they're arguing back and forth between them as to who is to blame for the raging fires.

But what I'm saying is, fuck that, let us all concentrate on putting out the fires. Let's concentrate on evacuating people out of the path of those fires. We need to put the fires out, we need to mitigate against their damage, we might need to rebuild and re-home people. That sort of thing.

We can play "the blame games" later.

I don't believe this but, for the sake of argument, let me accept that climate change is not primarily anthropogenic. Let's just accept the view that it's "sun cycles" and volcanoes and cows farting instead.

Okay, so humans are not to blame. It wasn't us, it was "sun cycles" and volcanoes instead.

But, umm, the climate is still getting hotter. The oceans are getting more acidic. Precipitation - in the form of major floods occuring more regularly - is increasing. Storms are strengthening. Ecosystems are not coping with this rapid change. Forest fires are getting worse.

Even if all of this had 100% natural cause, it's still a problem that we need to face. It's still damage that we need to mitigate against. Right now, in the midst of it all, who gives a flying fuck who started it?

What are we? 8 year olds fighting in the playground?

Miss: "Little Johnny, why did you punch Little Tommy?"
Johnny: "He started it, miss"
Tommy: "No, it was Johnny who hit me first!"
Johnny: "Liar! You started it!"

Et cetera, et cetera.

Who cares who started it? What matters is that we must strive to end it. That, come on, even if it is volcanoes and "sun cycles" and cow farts, it doesn't exactly help to be dumping our anthropogenic CO2 emission on top of all that as well. Indeed, if volcanoes are already that bad, without our help, then that's all the more reason why we shouldn't be making it any worse by dumping yet more shit into a climate that very clearly cannot take it anymore.

So, from that perspective, I'm not going to go toe-to-toe with you on the volcanoes claim. It's bollocks. Demonstrably so.

But it doesn't matter, because even if volcanoes were 100% the cause of the problem and mankind 0% of the problem, it's still a problem that we have to face.

When towns and cities flood, when forest fires rage, when crop harvests fail, when the distribution of fresh water on the planet changes and causes a "water crisis" then this will cause vast numbers of human beings to move - so if you're someone concerned with immigration, this shit will inevitably cause vast numbers of "climate refugees".

It doesn't matter who spilled that toxic waste over there, in the sense that we've still got to clean it up, for our own sake, so we don't get ill from it.

But what I primarily want to emphasise is that there truly is no choice in the matter whatsoever.

It doesn't matter how much you love and enjoy oil and kerosene and coal and natural gas and uranium, when these finite fuels all run out, we can't use them anymore. They'll be gone, for the next few hundreds of millions of years. As they increasingly run out, just watch those prices rise exponentially. Long before they finally end, the prices will sky-rocket to inaffordability. You'll be priced out of being able to afford to fill up your car before, eventually, being fundamentally unable to do it at all, as there's just no more petrol left on the planet at all.

The order of service for this fossil funeral is that oil goes first, natural gas and uranium next, then coal is the longest lasting.

And then, at that point, the only things remaining will be renewable energy - solar, wind, tidal, hydro, etc. - because, you know, "the clue is in the question". Renewables renew. Non-renewables don't.

But there is good news.

If you switch from the prehistoric technology of "just burning things" to the quantum technology of the photoelectric effect in a solar panel, then you're good for energy - every single day, literally as sure as the Sun rises - for the next 5 billion years. This is the estimated remaining lifespan of the Sun itself, you see. Equally, it's the spin of the Earth and the energy of the Sun - the Coriolis Effect - that powers the winds, so that's also good for the next 5 billion years. The water cycle has been going successfully for many billions of years so far and we would hope for it to continue to do so for billions more (because if it doesn't, then we've bigger problems than worrying how we're going to power our toaster or fuel our flights).

Yes, switching infrastructure is a large initial cost. But, once we've done it, then we're good to go for the next few billions of years. Even better, the Sun charges absolutely nothing for its sunlight.

If you give no shits for the environment then that's fair enough. But realise that there's masses of other damn good reasons for us to de-carbonise and switch to renewable sources - to keep this ship remaining afloat for the long foreseeable - even if there was no environmental impact whatsoever.

But, to be clear, there definitely are environmental impacts and it's such "fake news" to attempt to pretend there's some massive conspiracy between all the world's scientists to lie about it because... Well, yeah, exactly. Why would all the world's scientists get together to make this up? What's the motivation? What's the end goal?

But if you really don't care about "saving the planet", that's fine. I'm not asking you to save the planet, I'm asking you to save our modern civilisation from collapse, due to inevitable resource depletion. That we're "betting the bank" on the back of shit that we KNOW won't last.

When it runs out, we'll have nothing left but the renewables anyway.

So I say, let's cut to the chase. Let's start getting that new infrastructure in place, ready for when it will eventually have to take over completely. Let's start with the R&D to make these things work better. To improve batteries for energy storage. To re-purpose the Grid in a more decentralised way, where households are both producers and consumers, and the Grid becomes more of a "distribution network" to trade excesses from one place to fill up deficits elsewhere.

This is inevitably where it's going to end up anyway. If we start now, we can make it work.

The fundamental mistake that people in your position are making is that you're thinking that people like me, who's asking for change, are out to "destroy your way of life". But, no, on the contrary, continuing to do what we're doing now, our way of life will inevitably end. When the oil runs out, when the gas and uranium runs out, when the coal runs out. I'm asking for change because this is the only way, in the long term, that we preserve what we've got.

With solar panels, we can still have the Internet. With electric vehicles, we'll still have modern transportation.

But when the oil runs out, then we're back to the horse and cart again. Electrical vehicles will preserve our modern way of life, where a stubborn reliance on only fossil fuels will kill it off, when those resources finally end on us.

[Ratsoap]

Fam telling me that central London is full of squaddies. Anyone seen them?

The squaddies I mean, not my family.

[gilesgoat]

More sad news from Trieste ( my region ) .. now they had people coming at the door dressed with white medical wear and mask claiming they are coming to do some checks/tests .. turns out they are THIEVES/CONMEN .. police is investigating trying to figure out who they are .. apparently they go around elderly houses conning old people ...

Now police has also to inform people at "do not believe at people like those coming and/or those giving you phone calls becuase they are fake", sadly that's not even the first case of stuff like this happening

".. if you need more proof that in Italy you can NOT trust anyone .. " .. .. ..

[SuperMappy]

[(o)(o)]

Fam telling me that central London is full of squaddies. Anyone seen them?

The squaddies I mean, not my family.

Rural cheshire.

Night before last.

Heard an absurdly extended (compared to usual) passing traffic on the main road it went on and on and on : convey of military vehicles.

Being seen all around Britain apparently MOD is claiming 'all is normal.. definitely not a national lockdown coming'

The number of D -n0ticees being issued right now must be OFF THE SACLE !!

Edit: Metro acknowledges movement, and the potentially NATIONAL lockdown.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/19/army-ready-20000-troops-help-britains-coronavirus-support-force-12421624/