The way we live now - how will covid-19 change us?

I've been meaning to sell a bunch of records because I never listen to vinyl any more and it's just a big box of stuff I bang my toe on sometimes (plus some more boxes hidden in cupboards) but yeah, as you say it's not really the time now

― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 25 March 2020 11:55 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fwiw I relisted a bunch of previously unsold eBay shit right before this pandemic really escalated and half of the items have bids on them at the moment, so you may wanna try anyway. I mean, you have the time!

― Paul Ponzi, Wednesday, 25 March 2020 13:22 (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

up till now when i've considered this (as a sometime music writer with a lot of unplayed vinyl, some of it in not-terrible condition lol) i've assumed it meant taking parcels to the post office (as i do with books and ABE)

not sure this is now possible under UK lockdown conditions? are there alternatives? (i do indeed have time to start listing things tho)

(not really the thread for the conversation maybe but since the discussion was started)

I see that off-licences are now allowed to open as "essential". now, I like a good booze and wouldn't have argued if they hadn't shut in the first place, but opening them especially does seem a bit odd

(I guess it's not good for their survival if people get even more used to going to the supermarkets for booze instead, but then that's true for other kinds of shop currently closed)

anyway I hope the wine shop near here will still go ahead with the home delivery scheme they just announced, as I was mentally drawing up a list & don't fancy my chances of making it half a mile down the main road without passing anyone. there's also a microbrewery nearby doing home deliveries, but their beers are 90% sour beers that mr spacecadet doesn't like - so, hello, fellow sour-beer-dislikers. (me, I don't even like beer...)

My final batch of CDs for the time being finished on Monday night, and I still have some packages to take. If you have a lot it's better to use the Drop & Go facility where you just stick it behind the counter and they do it all for you, but maybe not the most practical time to be signing up to that? But post offices will remain open I guess, otherwise how will OAPs send letters of complaint to their local newspaper about all this lockdown nonsense?

Also, auctions are doing very well right now as everyone's stuck at home, just saying.

xpost

they're keeping the govt-run wine&liquor stores open in Quebec so people don't ram the grocery stores just trying to buy alcohol

my brother in Georgia also just told me that gun stores have been deemed "essential services" there

Yes, how else are you going to fight off the brown people coming for your canned goods

post offices are still open as an "essential service" under lockdown, but it might not be the time to do regular journeys with armfuls of things requiring individual attention, it's true

I think there's some service where you can weigh parcels yourself and buy prepaid postage labels online to print at home? or where you can start an account online and just drop them off to be weighed and posted without waiting and get billed online? (xps, I think the latter is "Drop & Go" as Matt #2 says, not sure if the former still exists as I can't find it on their site)

there's a thread for discogs sellers/buyers - discogs marketplace? - where people would probably know more, or maybe everyone's reading these threads more keenly than their usual threads anyway

Yes some offies are delivery hubs. Ours (booze and expensive snacks shop) has started selling loo roll etc and is delivering essentials to people.

i took the parcels query to the discogs thread

It seems obvious that the ability to travel is going to change massively? Like we already knew how bad it was for carbon emissions but we've also glorified it so much for so long, and tbh it's hugely enjoyable if you can do in the way that seems best to you. But it's not a "right" and it's not good for places that are more tourist attractions than places for people to live (Venice, Dubrovnik, et al?). Maybe it will be un-normalized and we'll all stay home/local more, and go back to driving to Natl Parks for recreation instead of flying to Cabo.

it's kind of weird because i've never, like, flown to cabo?

we were planning to fly to georgia to visit my wife's sister. that seems to me like a more prevalent flight use case than cabo. so, i don't know, my wife never seeing her sister again? too soon to think about.

heh, yeah. i haven't taken a "real" vacation in a few years, since my honeymoon - by "real vacation" i mean an instagram vacation where your pictures astonish your friends. a lot of my friends make it a priority, though, visiting lovely beaches around the world several times a year somehow.

by "a lot of my friends" i mean people i once who knew but who i still follow on instagram

(xposts) I had a split-second of panic coming out of the post office yesterday (I've got a PO box and drop in every couple of days); it was empty when I went in, but exiting there were people on either side of me about 2-3 feet away. What a way to live.

I live 800 miles from my parents so I'm not un-affected. I do, though, think about what it meant to move away from yr fam before the internet, or before telephone service was common, or when you got in a wagon and drove away and maybe never saw your parents again. I have also read a lot of frontier novels and diaries and personal histories, tbf.

Had a moment of genuine panic thinking about what would happen if the expected winter epidemic happened around Christmas time.

xp Paul Ponzi: I buy nearly all physical media used. On my Amazon "wishlists", third party seller offers haven't been listed, only new prices from Amazon.

less fucking in cars?

Malgré les mesures de confinement, un couple de trentenaires s'est retrouvé dans un véhicule pour partager du bon temps sur une base de loisirs située à Muret, au sud de Toulouse. Ils pensaient être à l'abri des regards...

Ils n’ont pas résisté à l’appel de la chair. Mais ça va leur coûter cher. Ce lundi après-midi, lors d’une opération de contrôles d’attestation déployée à Muret, les gendarmes de Haute-Garonne ont repéré un véhicule suspect stationné sur l’aire de loisirs du lac des Bonnets. Même pas vraiment à l’écart.

En s’approchant de l’habitacle de la Mini, les militaires n’ont pu que constater l’évidence. Âgées d’une trentaine d’années, ces deux personnes à moitié dénudées passaient manifestement du bon temps. Écourté par les forces de l’ordre. Vite, on se rhabille.

Mais plutôt que de faire profil bas, l’homme a quelque peu invectivé les gendarmes de Muret. « Pays de merde ! », a-t-il notamment lancé. Lui, comme sa douce, ont été verbalisés : 135 € d’amende. L’histoire ne dit pas quelle case ils avaient cochée sur l’attestation de sortie...

xxp tbh the latest news - that the virus isn’t mutating much - means that if spread is high enough over the next few months, enough of the country should be immune to prevent this. The minor mutations mean the vaccine, when it comes, will be more akin to vaccinating for measles than the flu.

Yeah there is middle ground between "never seeing again" and "every year"

Yeah but iirc there are environmental guidelines that suggest ppl limit flying to 1x per year, and in theory if we moved closer to that norm, if you use your flight to visit your family then all your vacations are gonna be not European/not tropical/not lovely beaches around the world like Karl said. I'd be happy if train travel got a big boost actually.

I was thinking today about my grandfather and how obsessive he was about always having extra food around because he lived through the Depression, and realizing that we're all going to be like that from now on.

too early to tell. Depression lasted over a decade!

It seems obvious that the ability to travel is going to change massively? Like we already knew how bad it was for carbon emissions but we've also glorified it so much for so long, and tbh it's hugely enjoyable if you can do in the way that seems best to you. But it's not a "right" and it's not good for places that are more tourist attractions than places for people to live (Venice, Dubrovnik, et al?). Maybe it will be un-normalized and we'll all stay home/local more, and go back to driving to Natl Parks for recreation instead of flying to Cabo.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Wednesday, March 25, 2020 10:55 AM (six hours ago)bookmarkflaglink

It's not just carbon emissions.

Even before the cause of white-nose syndrome was identified, Al Hicks and his colleagues suspected an introduced species. Whatever was killing the bats was presumably something they’d never encountered before, since the mortality rate was so high. Meanwhile, the syndrome was spreading from upstate New York in a classic bull’s-eye pattern. This seemed to indicate that the killer had touched down near Albany. Suggestively, when the die-off began to make national news, a spelunker sent Hicks some photographs he’d shot about forty miles west of the city.
The photos dated from 2006, a full year before Hicks’s coworkers had called him to say “Holy shit,” and they showed bats with clear signs of white-nose. The spelunker had taken his pictures in a cave connected to Howe Caverns, a popular tourist destination which offers, among other attractions, flashlight tours and underground boat trips.

“It’s kind of interesting that the first record we have of this is photographs from a commercial cave in New York that gets about two hundred thousand visits a year,” Hicks told me.

Re: driving to National Parks, flying to Cabo and "rights" http://fvjzk13ui2.pdfcloud.org/dl2.php?id=60737078&h=ee3b9d54b996c8087973382fda02d72a&u=cache&ext=pdf&n=The%20sixth%20extinction%20an%20unnatural%20history%20by%20elizabeth%20kolbert#page189"> see Chapter X - The New Pangea

Out of choice, I haven't flown anywhere since 2002 so if this all results in fewer people flying, then good cos I will feel like less of a freak.

On my Amazon "wishlists", third party seller offers haven't been listed, only new prices from Amazon.

― Sanpaku, Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:46 PM

If you go into the item pages, the used sellers are still listed. Amazon has done this before and I hate it because I regularly browse to see what's getting scarce or changing significantly in price and my wishlists are colossal, so I hope they change it back. Seems a bit shady.

A friend, a father of three (grade 6 girl, a couple of younger boys), wondered today, "I get depressed in particular thinking about ______ (and to some extent, ______)--what kind of 'developmental' time is this? How many kids are going to grow up completely screwed up by all this? Socially, at least." I didn't have an answer.

Two things will definitely change in my own life. One I posted about in the economic thread--a fund I invested in that I will extricate myself from pronto, if it ever gets back to par.

The other is so basic I'm almost embarrassed to say so: if it's not too cold out (probably not often in the winter as a whole), I will leave the car in the driveway and make short trips to the grocery store or for coffee on foot. Understand that I've had a life-long love affair with driving, very much tied in with the experience of listening to music in a car--really, it's the only place I ever listen to music anymore. But I've come to love the twilight-turning-dark walks around town I've gone on every night for the past two-plus weeks, in spite of (I hope not because of) how desolate it is out there.

This is a how-will-COVID-19-not-change-the-world post, but there (thankfully) isn't a thread for that, so I'll put it here: people will still argue about Dylan's-back pronouncements.

I mean, there's a chance this will stop that!

As someone who lives about 10 minutes (by car or train) from a major airport, I gotta say it's kind of nice to hear almost no planes and to hear lots and lots of birds.

the air has gotten better here and I hope it is a significant next step toward banning cars

I mentioned on Facebook how quiet it is when I go out walking after 8:00 at night. I've never experienced anything like it. On the rare occasion a car passes, it's like a train going through.

i feel sad for anybody who grows up completely screwed up but given that i grew up completely screwed up myself, and so did a fairly sizeable chunk of the people i know and love, i feel like this is more of a quantitative change than a qualitative change?

I also, perhaps chimerically and naively, believe that some of those kids will come out of this with a better appreciation of things they took for granted (hey, if it's happening with me, maybe it'll happen with some of them). Two middle-school kids, out for a walk in 2024: "Remember that bizarre time when we couldn't leave the house for six months, and we were stuck playing the same dumb video games and looking at the same dumb Instagram pages over and over and over?"

(Preemptive flash of self-awareness: not a knock on ILX! I'm glad it's here.)

Loved those recent posts clemenza and kate. Lots chiming with my own thoughts about how this will play out socially and emotionally.

Appreciate that. Walking is very conducive to writing in your head before you get home.

I think my kids will remember these as glory days. “Remember when we didn’t have to go to school and got to play video games every day?”

Getting paid to do nothing for 3 months is gonna be hard to come back from I think. God knows I hate working for a living.

I mean I find returning to work after paid 2 weeks vacation depressing enough as it is.

Getting paid to do nothing for 3 months is gonna be hard to come back from I think. God knows I hate working for a living.

I'm actually working (if managing the social media accounts for a medical school counts) but I'm curious how many people who have office jobs that are now doing those jobs via video-conferencing and email, and seeing no drop in productivity other than that attributable to COVID-19 generally, are gonna want to stay on WFH status permanently? I know I vastly prefer it, but I've been doing it for close to five years already.

I’m definitely switching to 3 days a week telework. I need to be in the office for certain things, though, and my wife already WFH’s nearly every day of the week.

Getting paid to do nothing for 3 months is gonna be hard to come back from I think. God knows I hate working for a living.

Haha so true. I have all the natural human responses to global peril, but at the same time whenever I hear "We're closer to a vaccine!" or "Deaths are down!" part of me shivers at the thought of returning to the office.

will all the de-lurking ilxors still post once this is over?

count me as the opposite -- I need some measure of externally imposed routine in my life

Wearing shoes all day every day again is going to feel really weird.

When I'm out walking now, and I see anybody do anything that's even remotely out of the ordinary--stop in the middle of the street and stare at something for a few seconds, signal for a right-hand turn and then change their mind...okay, if I see anybody do anything except walk forward in a straight line--I grumble "What the fuck are you doing?" Hopefully that will pass.

private health insurance won't survive this. millions are being thrown off their healthcare at the time they need ti most.

finally getting out of my pyjamas will feel odd

haha I was properly dressed bar wearing pyjamas today, but I haven’t worn shoes in two weeks

What's a shoe?