Tales from the Loop! I got chills just watching that!
It's going to be a long 36 days!
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People forget what "craftsman" really means.
Thermopylae had a new Chief Engineer, and he wasn't happy about it.A brief quote from Apocalyptic Visions, which that post has vindicated rather neatly.
It wasn't just how Benton Carlysle had become eligible for the job, either. Voss Hayeck had been his friend, and he'd always miss the man. But Carlysle had always envisioned being promoted off Thermopylae and onto another ship, a small one--maybe a missile frigate or something--and maybe someday working his way up to a battlewagon. Maybe along the way he'd get to be as crusty and knowledgeable as Hayeck had been; there wasn't a single system aboard Thermopylae that the man hadn't known intimately.
He wondered if Hayeck would have had this much trouble getting the fusor to light. Probably not; he'd seen, with his own eyes, Hayeck hit a delicate instrument with a mallet, and knock it into perfect alignment.
* * *
NASA should not rely on Boeing products to get them back to the Moon. Boeing has said they can build 3 SLS per year, and they'll cost $2 billion per flight. NASA wants to launch four of them in a year.
Oh well.
* * *
Second City Cop comments on a story I was talking about with Mrs. Fungus.
Woman, who is grieving, attacks a cop for...uh...reasons, and the American Communist Liberal Union is upset because the police arrested her. Sorry, but grieving over a loss is no excuse for attacking police.
* * *
Do not expect any improvement from the Star Wars franchise. It's done.
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The Washington Post appears to think that COVID-19 and HIV are similar diseases. But as the article points out, "You actually have to work at getting HIV."
In general, the American press has been falling all over itself to turn this into President Donald Trump's own personal Waterloo, and so they have been hyping the thing and acting like it's the Superflu from The Stand and it's going to kill just about everyone in the world.
Remember what I said about not knowing who to trust? It's now gotten to the point that I trust the communist Chinese MORE than I trust the American press!
They really, really, desperately want this thing to kill a huge swath of Americans, because that will get Trump out of office! Two percent of three hundred million is six million people, about the number of deaths attributed to Hitler's "final solution"--and so you see that the Democrat-media complex is just salivating over the idea that getting rid of Trump is worth killing six million people. After all, it won't be any of them, right? It'll be the useless proles in flyover country who do the dying, not coastal liberals. Of course!
...San Francisco is declaring a "state of emergency" even though they have no diagnosed cases of the thing. This "emergency" doesn't extend to cleaning up the homeless camps (which, if exposed to COVID-19, will see rapid amplification of the disease and feature a higher death rate than the estimated 2%). Nor does it extend to placing a ban on crapping on the sidewalks. I mean, we can't let a pandemic get in the way of civil liberties, right?
I've read so much doomsaying about the thing that I'm glad I listened to Limbaugh over the past couple of days, because he put this thing into perspective. First off, there have been a relative handful of cases of it in the US. There were two cases in Chicago; and they were treated and released after they were no longer contagious, and there were no further infections.
And of the cases in the US, none were fatal.
The United States has a better medical system than China does. Add to that the fact that we have better sanitation, better habits, and better access to health care than the average Chinese citizen does. The big Chinese cities are wonders of modernization, but they've only recently finished running electricity to everyone. What do you think the people 'way out in the boondocks of China do when they get sick?
Americans, we use the bathroom and wash our hands afterwards, and take a great deal of effort to keep things clean and sanitary. We chlorinate our water specifically to kill germs, and we have spent a lot of money on building separate sewage and rainwater drains, because we know that human bodily waste carries disease.
Limbaugh's point is that at present there is no cause for alarm. There are a handful of cases in the US, none fatal, and measures are being taken to contain it. We're keeping an eye on hot spots around the world and limiting travel to and from those places.
The real worrisome thing about COVID-19 is how easily transmitted it is. The fatality rate seems to be lower than that of the flu (and it's definitely well-below the fatality rates of classical plagues, and even SARS and MERS and the other recent ailments from Asia). The other concern is the reports that people can be re-infected with it about two weeks after they beat it the first time; that's something we need to understand, and fast.
But they're working on a vaccine, and we'll probably be turning that out in quantity within three or four months. I'm kind of on the fence about getting that shot; we'll have to see how the real statistics shape up.
There will be more infected. It will spread. But for the CDC&P to gravely intone that it will be "disruptive" at this point is seriously premature. No one knows how bad it's going to be; and at least to my admittedly uneducated frontal lobes it looks like the really big hot spots are all asian. They said that COVID-19 had a preference for orientals; what if that means it spreads like wildfire among asians but is less contagious for other races?
We won't know the answer to that one until and unless a large swath of other populations get the thing. There is an outbreak in Italy but I haven't seen any discussions of demographics. Of course, that's because it's raciss even to wonder about it.
*sigh*
* * *
Anyway, for me, today was not too shabby, all told. Work was work, but it was not too hard, and I managed to get somewhere with a couple of things. The best part of all this is that tomorrow is Friday.
Looking forward to getting a little sleep this weekend. Supposed to hit 60 on Sunday, so tomorrow night I'm going to buy oil change supplies on my way home from work. That ought to do it!