outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Rudy Gobert: a play in three acts pic.twitter.com/bKWLufKH8K

— Mike Beauvais (@MikeBeauvais) March 12, 2020

i know i know. It was a whole thing on the other thread. TBF we don't cook meat or bake things often so it's never really an issue. xpost

:)

i dunno, i may just be lucky. I go out in the winter with wet hair and sleep with wet hair too and I am 41 and have never been to the ER or had a serious illness or missed a day of school and missed like one day of work from being sick. maybe my insides are already dead.

dead inside.

We worked from home on a trial today and though it has since upsides it's emphatically not the dream for me. My work is fiddly on a small laptop screen and I don't have a decent office chair or ergonomic set up, let alone a standing desk. And comms with people at work via Slack and Hangouts is not the same as a live office at all.

Maybe try a long-running Zoom that people can drop into and out of, with sidebar channels if required. It's definitely not the same, but it makes you feel like you are "somewhere"

My largest client just went work from home today. Makes no difference to me as I’m the only one in Melbourne anyway. For me it least it levels the playing field as now everyone has to deal with slack and hangouts interactions only.

Also fuck trump for calling it a ‘foreign virus’

did he only call it a foreign virus? That's pretty subtle for him.

Stephen Miller says only targeted xenophobia can stop this foreign virus. Europe, go die. UK, you cool, come on over and let's party.

Virus appears to be spread by payroll taxes.

wait....tom hanks has coronavirus?

https://deadline.com/2020/03/tom-hanks-rita-wilson-test-positive-coronavirus-elvis-presley-movie-1202880431/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

sorry, sic

i was so excited i forgot to strip it out (which i normally do!)

...but tom hanks has coronavirus?

Not Tom Hanks

It's funny how much more seriously Americans took Coronavirus when they were using it as an excuse to rip on the Chinese via some really impressive concern trolling.

A slew of far right rags like the Moonies, Daily Caller, et al ran an article suggesting the Coronavirus came from bat soup, and while it was zoonotic and *possibly* did originate in the street food market, nobody knows definitively where it came from, it was just an unfounded rumor. so naturally readers were calling Chinese nationals backwards assholes who spread the virus due to their savagery.

I’m sure there’s still plenty of anti-Chinese racism in the offing.

you guys might want to know that actually the coronavirus was a biological weapon invented in a collaboration between the chinese military and french intelligence, and it accidentally got out. any reporter who tries to write about this gets fired. according to my father in law.

oh there is still totally anti anyone who looks east asian racism about it.

I.... don't entirely disagree with the Trump travel ban?

Like it's not much more than a bandaid given his bungling in the states but.... probably not a good idea to fly to countries of higher infection if it's a round trip?

Idk...

The real problem is more likely the huge amount of untested CV circulating in the US already, but eh. And excluding the UK is weird. He knows we have an open border with the rest of Europe, right? Maybe they really, really believe in Brexit.

I mean i think it will not accomplish much because we're already too late for containment.

The open border scenario came up at my rehearsal tonight

the US is, at this point, either a country of higher infection now or well on it way

Yea after i read further...

Trump made the decision in order to "keep new cases from entering our shores."

Nevermind. fuck him.

New cases are already happening you dipshit! What do you think COMMUNITY SPREAD is, something you put on bagels?

The UK exclusion was almost certainly a nod of solidarity directed at BoJo & Co., yes? It doesn't have anything to do with anything real or, y'know, potentially beneficial to the lives of others.

Can we rename this the MAGAvirus

Lakers are good
NBA season suspended

lol that was meant for hoops thread

Virtual work is bliss btw

Dying sounds better to me than working from home for a year. Work is fucking work, home is home. Also I have a lousy Verizon connection that's been esp dicey this week.

And i'm restarting chemotherapy Friday, what beautiful timing. Please wash your hands ie don't kill me.

Unreal

Good luck, Morbs!

Work feels less unbearable at home. I can put on the TV in the background!

I can lead class naked, as long as I don't turn my Webcam on!

I saw a tweet joking that Trump just wanted to announce the ban on EU travel before the EU could do the same to us, which feels like it has about an 80% chance of being true.

My manager seemed cool with my WFH request but then he talked to HR and came back to me with a canned statement saying the office remains open and we are expected to be onsite supporting the business, the company is monitoring the situation and an announcement will be made if blah blah blah

So I guess I’m using vacation days! I’d rather be supporting the business but not at the cost of riding the fucking subway right now!

but do you have a year of vacation days, Jon?

Fuck your company. Wgat bullshit

Mine just banned in person meetings of 10 or more. But tbh social responsibility was never the problem with my company. They even gave paid days off during the 2004 hurricanes.

Lol

No but I only need as many vacation days as it takes before they get to whatever trigger point the company has in mind and send everyone home

Xpost

whatever trigger point the company has

at the rate things seem to be moving i don't think it will be long

Physics Nerds

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ljkz1woed8mv34n/IMG_7103.JPG?raw=1

There's technically no part of my job that I couldn't do from home but because I'm hourly I've never been given that option and I don't expect to be given that option even if things go pear-shaped so although it will suck to have to dip into my PTO if circumstances dictate that I'm out of the office for an extended stretch I can at least take solace in the fact that my very essential job functions getting very much not done will result in my place of work getting powerfucked.

Most of my friends and family can't do their jobs from home. My bro is a paid actor at a theme park.

Man if they shut that down he will freak, tho he has a contract

I have no PTO, other than the ludicrous 40 sick hours/year I can use for, y'know, cancer treatment

I can lead class naked, as long as I don't turn my Webcam on!

― sorry for butt rockin (Neanderthal), Wednesday, March 11, 2020 8:55 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

prelude to a Florida Man headline

There'd have to also be a gator or crystal meth

my work—i don't know if it's because of its union contract or being a state institution or what—actually has ~sick day drives~ where they implore people with unused time to give it to for instance cancer patient coworkers whose treatment makes them run out their own sick time. they even have an automatic web page set up where you can target the individual recipients. which in the obvious way is good and in the cynical way is zeitgeisty-typical. as if there is an imperative from on high, so many days Shall Be Worked by Someone or Other and Only So Many Shall Be Exempt From Work.

Starting to suspect Microsoft is behind all this, we just got Teams at work a couple of weeks ago, noticing tons of commercials for it lately on TV.

my state job has a leave bank. you can donate 8 hours a year to be a member so if you run out of sick leave you can draw from it. sometimes we get an email asking for donations for a sick person. i have 1100 hours! it is absurd though. just pay them and don't worry about the bank imo. must be some sort of regulation behind it.

yeah i think a lot of our rules about what we can and can't do, especially can't, are ultimately regulated and hence subject to political contestation, primarily making sure no one gets more than they 'ought to' from taxpayers

Australia giving out stimulus payments