COVID-19 2.0: No Politics edition

[JSngry]

A not tonally random thought - since we're not right-sizing of demands of Earth, maybe Earth is right-sizing us, just to show s who's really boss here?

This could take a while...especially since the current existential paradigm has long(eternally?)  been built on humans (with a slowly but exponentially increasing acceleration) thinking that they get the final say.

[Dan Gould]

 

4 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

Brutal. This sure as hell isn’t “just like the flu.”  Also suggests—as do other factors—that the reported # of deaths linked to Covid-19 is an undercount. 

I was thinking that same thought - I don't think that there's any doubt that deaths are undercounted because of the surge in deaths at home - but is it a case of so many dying from strokes while hanging out at home, afraid of going to the hospital?

What it does show is that the virus can kill you in many different ways, and that must complicate the success of different treatments as well as the ability to ultimately generate a vaccine. 

I know I'd feel better to know something about the true number of cases that are mild, and really just like the flu, if we could test accurately for anti-bodies and know what percentage have had it and recovered. I see the numbers on the news of how many have recovered but if so many more had it and weren't tested, that number must also be higher. How much higher is one known-unknown. 

 

 

[BillF]

3 minutes ago, JSngry said:

A not tonally random thought - since we're not right-sizing of demands of Earth, maybe Earth is right-sizing us, just to show s who's really boss here?

This could take a while...especially since the current existential paradigm has long(eternally?)  been built on humans (with a slowly but exponentially increasing acceleration) thinking that they get the final say.

In my brief lifetime (80 years) global human population has increased more than threefold, from 1.9 to 7 billions. Strangely, overpopulation is never mentioned in the global warming debate and the current pandemic is a reminder that human numbers may be more than nature finds tolerable.

 

 

[JSngry]

7 minutes ago, BillF said:

In my brief lifetime (80 years) global human population has increased more than threefold, from 1.9 to 7 billions. Strangely, overpopulation is never mentioned in the global warming debate and the current pandemic is a reminder that human numbers may be more than nature finds tolerable.

I've been mentioning this conversationally amongst my off-line friends for the last 5 years or so, that maybe the planet is just not build to hold this many people, at least not this many living this way, refusing to alter the way they deal with natural resource demand/delivery systems, and even my most "liberal" friends, the ones who love nothing more than to get all emo about "saving the planet" look at me like I'm loony.  My saying "we will never destroy Earth, Earth will destroy us first"...many people just don't like to hear that. I suspect at some level there's a hard-wired vanity involved, because, you know, we humans like to think that we're masters over every damn thing, some of us over each other, but all of us over our basic resources.

Well, we're not. Any agrarian society knows that. And if the enlightenment of science has gone a long way towards rightfully destroying the various superstitions that sprang from that realization, I think it's a damn fool who at some point doesn't contemplate that destroying a superstition doesn't destroy the reality that generated it to begin with.

I had a conversation once about this with somebody and said something like maybe we don't have room for any more people, and their response was all roll-eyes Seriously? Do you realize how much empty space there is on the planet? And we can always build vertically!

Not once considering that all these people take up, not just space, but resources, stuff like, you know, water. We ain't 3D-priniting water yet, ok?

I mean, nobody wants to think that they're one of the people "taking up too much space", and I totally get that. But...whatcha' gonna do when something bigger than yourself doesn't care what ANY of us thinks?

[jcam_44]

1 hour ago, clifford_thornton said:

Was out for a run yesterday, sticking to side streets, and as I ran past a park it was plainly obvious that social distancing, masks, etc. were viewed as quite optional. 

The stroke shit is terrifying.

I've been doing my running at around 5 am, to avoid others. Its basically when I ran before all this because of work but I've decided to maintain it since no one is out. But yesterday I had placed an online order from a record shop trying to do my part in supporting only to go to pick it up and find they were just open for business. No mask, there was one customer in there that I saw. I was asked if I wanted to look around and honestly the proposition did not appeal to me and i grabbed my order and left. I'm probably done shopping there due to this experience. 

[jlhoots]

3 hours ago, bresna said:

Too bad that this is the "no politics" edition or else I'd post Randy Rainbow's latest video. It's a riot. It's titled, "A Spoonful of Chlorox".

Hilarious & easy to find.

[kinuta]

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

I've been mentioning this conversationally amongst my off-line friends for the last 5 years or so, that maybe the planet is just not build to hold this many people, at least not this many living this way, refusing to alter the way they deal with natural resource demand/delivery systems, and even my most "liberal" friends, the ones who love nothing more than to get all emo about "saving the planet" look at me like I'm loony.  My saying "we will never destroy Earth, Earth will destroy us first"...many people just don't like to hear that. I suspect at some level there's a hard-wired vanity involved, because, you know, we humans like to think that we're masters over every damn thing, some of us over each other, but all of us over our basic resources.

Well, we're not. Any agrarian society knows that. And if the enlightenment of science has gone a long way towards rightfully destroying the various superstitions that sprang from that realization, I think it's a damn fool who at some point doesn't contemplate that destroying a superstition doesn't destroy the reality that generated it to begin with.

I had a conversation once about this with somebody and said something like maybe we don't have room for any more people, and their response was all roll-eyes Seriously? Do you realize how much empty space there is on the planet? And we can always build vertically!

Not once considering that all these people take up, not just space, but resources, stuff like, you know, water. We ain't 3D-priniting water yet, ok?

I mean, nobody wants to think that they're one of the people "taking up too much space", and I totally get that. But...whatcha' gonna do when something bigger than yourself doesn't care what ANY of us thinks?

I'll break radio silence to say how much I agree with that. My thoughts are much the same.

[BillF]

16 hours ago, BillF said:

In my brief lifetime (80 years) global human population has increased more than threefold, from 1.9 to 7 billions. Strangely, overpopulation is never mentioned in the global warming debate and the current pandemic is a reminder that human numbers may be more than nature finds tolerable.

 

 

They're copying my ideas! 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/halt-destruction-nature-worse-pandemics-top-scientists

[David Ayers]

2 hours ago, BillF said:

They're copying my ideas! 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/halt-destruction-nature-worse-pandemics-top-scientists

Sue!

[Dave James]

I have a really bad case of the DT'S (and I don't mean delirium tremens).   

[kh1958]

From this week's Smalls/Mezzrow email from Spike Wilner:

This is a critical time for the survival of the clubs.  Our landlords have been unequivocal in not bending on the rent.  They won’t accept advanced payments at a discount and will not tolerate not getting paid, regardless to the fact that we haven’t earned a dime in 40 nights.  So – take it or leave it.  If Smalls and Mezzrow are to survive then we must float the ark until we can resume.  We have some funds but not nearly enough to get us into the late summer.  It’s day by day.  The SmallsLIVE Foundation has already been active in getting some emergency funds to some artists who are in serious financial straits.  Our goal now is to raise enough to float the clubs rent-wise, at least through the summer.  Please consider becoming a supporting member.  By making a tax-deductible donation to our foundation, you gain access to our extensive audio/video archive of past performances at Smalls and Mezzrow (nearly 18,000 shows).  A portion of your gift is distributed directly to the artists through our royalty system.  Please go to our website, www.smallslive.com, and join.

Edited April 27, 2020 by kh1958

[ghost of miles]

11 minutes ago, kh1958 said:

From this week's Smalls/Mezzrow email from Spike Wilner:

This is a critical time for the survival of the clubs.  Our landlords have been unequivocal in not bending on the rent.  They won’t accept advanced payments at a discount and will not tolerate not getting paid, regardless to the fact that we haven’t earned a dime in 40 nights.  So – take it or leave it.  If Smalls and Mezzrow are to survive then we must float the ark until we can resume.  We have some funds but not nearly enough to get us into the late summer.  It’s day by day.  The SmallsLIVE Foundation has already been active in getting some emergency funds to some artists who are in serious financial straits.  Our goal now is to raise enough to float the clubs rent-wise, at least through the summer.  Please consider becoming a supporting member.  By making a tax-deductible donation to our foundation, you gain access to our extensive audio/video archive of past performances at Smalls and Mezzrow (nearly 18,000 shows).  A portion of your gift is distributed directly to the artists through our royalty system.  Please go to our website, www.smallslive.com, and join.

Wonder if they have a landlord who's been looking for a reason to push them out.  My understanding (which could be incorrect) is that residential and commercial evictions are currently banned in NYC through late June:  New York eviction moratorium  (And hopefully that will be extended, since I don't think anybody thinks NYC will be anywhere close to being back to "normal" by then, whatever the new normal will be.)

[clifford_thornton]

they can't be evicted now but they can in a few months if they aren't able to pay. there needs to be a rent freeze starting now.

[Dan Gould]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/we-still-dont-know-how-the-coronavirus-is-killing-us.html

Pull quote:

In a fantastic survey published April 17 (“How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes,” by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Catherine Matacic), Science magazine took a thorough, detailed tour of the ever-evolving state of understanding of the disease. “Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”

[catesta]

On 4/26/2020 at 2:33 PM, JSngry said:

I've been mentioning this conversationally amongst my off-line friends for the last 5 years or so, that maybe the planet is just not build to hold this many people, at least not this many living this way, refusing to alter the way they deal with natural resource demand/delivery systems, and even my most "liberal" friends, the ones who love nothing more than to get all emo about "saving the planet" look at me like I'm loony.  My saying "we will never destroy Earth, Earth will destroy us first"...many people just don't like to hear that. I suspect at some level there's a hard-wired vanity involved, because, you know, we humans like to think that we're masters over every damn thing, some of us over each other, but all of us over our basic resources.

Well, we're not. Any agrarian society knows that. And if the enlightenment of science has gone a long way towards rightfully destroying the various superstitions that sprang from that realization, I think it's a damn fool who at some point doesn't contemplate that destroying a superstition doesn't destroy the reality that generated it to begin with.

I had a conversation once about this with somebody and said something like maybe we don't have room for any more people, and their response was all roll-eyes Seriously? Do you realize how much empty space there is on the planet? And we can always build vertically!

Not once considering that all these people take up, not just space, but resources, stuff like, you know, water. We ain't 3D-priniting water yet, ok?

I mean, nobody wants to think that they're one of the people "taking up too much space", and I totally get that. But...whatcha' gonna do when something bigger than yourself doesn't care what ANY of us thinks?

I've always had the thought, that the best case scenario is you can slow a few things down, but that the earth will reclaim itself no matter what we do.

There is a mad dash for all renewable, but yeah, nobody talks about the amount of space it consumes. Those little 12 acre sites you see in Indiana are cute, but those fuckers aren't going to power a city. A 300 MW utility scale solar plant is likely to be around 2000 acres in size for the panel portion and at full production will power 60,000 homes. Today we all think they build the big ones on the middle of nowhere but what will it look like 10-20 years from now?

Traditional/old school power generation has a much smaller foot print. By comparison, the Bowen plant in Georgia is around 2000 acres but can power almost 2 million homes.

Edited April 27, 2020 by catesta

[Dave James]

THE SITUATION: You are in Palm Beach with chaos all around you caused by a hurricane. There is a flood of biblical proportions. You are a photojournalist working for a major newspaper and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot career-making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you. Some are disappearing under the water. Nature is unleashing all its destructive fury.

 

THE TEST: Suddenly you see a man in the water. He is fighting for his life trying not to be taken down with the debris. You move closer. Somehow this man looks like... OMG,...

Edited April 28, 2020 by JSngry
NO POLITICS, NO MATTER HOW FUNNY!!!!!

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, catesta said:

A 300 MW utility scale solar plant is likely to be around 2000 acres in size for the panel portion and at full production will power 60,000 homes. Today we all think they build the big ones on the middle of nowhere but what will it look like 10-20 years from now?

Or ask this question - what would it look like today if we had started seriousass R&D 30 years ago?

Too late for that question now!

[jcam_44]

17 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Or ask this question - what would it look like today if we had started seriousass R&D 30 years ago?

Too late for that question now!

As someone who works in the utility industry and has a very solid foundation in solar, I don't believe the solar would have evolved any quicker, and the problem now is panels installed 20 years ago are so inefficient they need replaced but what do you do with old panels? Dump 'em? There is very limited recycling of panels now and they aren't able, at least to my knowledge, extract the most valuable components at this time. Wind generation destroys the ground below the turbine, hence why they are always in the desert and how would you store energy for future use when the sun ain't out or the wind ain't blowing? Batteries? That's a whole issue of itself. Its so easy to say lets be green when you don't have to figure out how to do it.  

Edited April 28, 2020 by jcam_44

[JSngry]

Just now, jcam_44 said:

As someone who works in the utility industry and has a very solid foundation in solar, I don't believe the solar would have evolved any quicker, and the problem now is panels installed 20 years ago are so inefficient they need replaced but what do you do with old panels? Dump 'em? There is very limited recycling of panels now and they are able, at least to my knowledge, extract the most valuable components at this time. Wind generation destroys the ground below the turbine, hence why there are always in the desert and how would you store energy for future use when the sun ain't out or the wind ain't blowing? Batteries? That's a whole issue of itself. Its so easy to say lets be green when you don't have to figure out how to do it.  

 

Point is just this - yes, we know now what we know, but what we know is not the result of 30-40+ years of previous  hardass all-in Mission to Mars R & D. It just hasn't been there.

We have devolved into a culture that is very piss-poorly motivated to imaginate first, monetze second (and in the spirit of no politics, no comments about where that monetization could have come from....) That's always been a hurdle, of course, but...it's worse now than at any point in my lifetime.

At this point, not all at once, but slowly/inevitably, we are going to have fewer and fewer choices. They're going to be made for us. that's what happens when available options continue to decrease, right?

IMO, of course, and who knows when these Psaplusians are going to come down and put us back in their box, having gotten bored with this round of their game.

[jcam_44]

32 minutes ago, JSngry said:

 

Point is just this - yes, we know now what we know, but what we know is not the result of 30-40+ years of previous  hardass all-in Mission to Mars R & D. It just hasn't been there.

That’s a real piss poor argument. By your logic massive resources should be used towards all endeavors no matter their feasibility. If I keep trying to throw rocks over the Atlantic Ocean every day maybe one day my arm will become strong enough to do it. 

[David Ayers]

13 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/we-still-dont-know-how-the-coronavirus-is-killing-us.html

Pull quote:

In a fantastic survey published April 17 (“How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes,” by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Catherine Matacic), Science magazine took a thorough, detailed tour of the ever-evolving state of understanding of the disease. “Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”

Thanks Dan. This is similar ground to what was covered (in French) in the article from Le Monde that I linked to. Yikes. 

[JSngry]

10 hours ago, jcam_44 said:

That’s a real piss poor argument. By your logic massive resources should be used towards all endeavors no matter their feasibility. If I keep trying to throw rocks over the Atlantic Ocean every day maybe one day my arm will become strong enough to do it. 

That's certainly one way to look at it.

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, bresna said:

Humans from every country, every religion, every race should be more concerned about renewable energy. Our current energy sources are not infinite.

And one way to save energy is redirect what we use it for.  Telecommuting reduces gasoline consumption, but increases demand on servers and such. So...try washing dishes by hand and hanging laundry out to dry, when possible. Yes, we have a clothesline in our back yard, and no, we don't use it nearly as often as we could/should.

There's probably literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of little lifestyle tweaks than if done to scale would redirect energy consumption.

At this point - no, there's not one BIG BANG moment around the corner that's going to end our dependence on fossil fuels. But out current behavioral patterns are only making The Wall Of Impossibility higher, not lower. It's not a question of "going green" nearly as much as it is one of maximizing personal efficiencies relative to the collective availability.

[medjuck]

12 hours ago, jcam_44 said:

That’s a real piss poor argument. By your logic massive resources should be used towards all endeavors no matter their feasibility. If I keep trying to throw rocks over the Atlantic Ocean every day maybe one day my arm will become strong enough to do it. 

IIRC in the early '60s London bookmakers were giving 1000 to one odds that man wouldn't be on the moon within a decade. 

[jcam_44]

2 hours ago, bresna said:

Maybe you have a point. But standing on the shore saying, "Shit, I'll never do it, so why try", is definitely not a good answer either. Maybe if you thought outside the box, as Jim said, and thought, "Hey, maybe if I start building a bridge, I'll get close enough to that other shore and then I'll be able to throw that rock across".

Humans from every country, every religion, every race should be more concerned about renewable energy. Our current energy sources are not infinite.

But then you're not throwing a rock from one side to the other. You've changed you goal to only reach the other side. 

50 minutes ago, JSngry said:

And one way to save energy is redirect what we use it for.  Telecommuting reduces gasoline consumption, but increases demand on servers and such. So...try washing dishes by hand and hanging laundry out to dry, when possible. Yes, we have a clothesline in our back yard, and no, we don't use it nearly as often as we could/should.

There's probably literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of little lifestyle tweaks than if done to scale would redirect energy consumption.

At this point - no, there's not one BIG BANG moment around the corner that's going to end our dependence on fossil fuels. But out current behavioral patterns are only making The Wall Of Impossibility higher, not lower. It's not a question of "going green" nearly as much as it is one of maximizing personal efficiencies relative to the collective availability.

So we have gone from research and development on alternate energy sources to changing our consumption habits. If we continuously change the goal we will continuous be chasing something different. 

 

 

My only point is, its much easier to want renewable energy than actually practical give energy needs. Solar and wind are cheaper to build and maintain, but are as useful when their energy source is not predictable. Most if not all major utilities are utilizing them in some capacity and are attempting to increase as they can.