March, 2020 archive
Held Heath Hostage
0
Afterthought:
Last night, we watched an episode of Cheers, a sitcom from the ’80s, in which a subplot involved a $683.00 emergency room bill.
Good times.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Yet another responsible gun owner discharges his responsibility.
Lurking from Home 0
El Reg reports on the intrusiveness of the Zoom app, which is trending as more and more persons use it to work from home in these viral times. A snippet:
“What makes this extra creepy is that Zoom is in a position to gather plenty of personal data, some of it very intimate (for example with a shrink talking to a patient) without anyone in the conversation knowing about it. (Unless, of course, they see an ad somewhere that looks like it was informed by a private conversation on Zoom.)”
Read the rest, then pick up the landline.
Remain Calm. There Is Nothing To See Here. 0
However, our nearby Waffle House is among the closed.
Republican Family Values, “Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father” Dept., Reprise 0
Connie Schultz takes issue with the notion promoted by some right-wing nutjobs figures that old folks should off themselves via the coronavirus for the sake of the Dow-Jones average. A snippet:
The craft company also told its managers to “make every effort to continue working the employees” while denying those same employees sick leave.
Afterthought:
The phrase, “working the employees,” tells you all you need to know about how Hobby Lobby views the persons they employ.
The Cost of Living 0
Werner Herzog’s Bear argues that it’s lower than you think in the United States. In fact, suggests he, life is cheap in America.
Don’t Look! 0
This is a classic example of treating the symptom, not the cause.
Words fail me.
A Glimmer of Sunshine 0
Bob Molinaro. sportswriter extraordinaire, looks on the bright side:
Masked Marauding 0
Farhad Manjoo investigates why an item so simple as a medical face mask is suddenly unobtainable, and the answer is all about the next quarterly report. It’s what Harry Shearer’s guest on Le Show, Matt Stoller, referred to as the “financialization” of business.
Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest.
I am sorry to say that digging into the mask shortage does little to assuage one’s sense of outrage. The answer to why we’re running out of protective gear involves a very American set of capitalist pathologies — the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing, and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Ensure that your children have the opportunity to be polite to each other.
