California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday he has put the California National Guard on alert to help protect communities and fight the spread of COVID-19.
Suddenly unemployed, San Diego workers grapple with how to pay rent and utility, grocery bills
The Atlantic: America’s Restaurants Will Need a Miracle
Social distancing could prove devastating to the restaurant industry, as restaurants are becoming vital economic infrastructure.
Americans now spend more at restaurants than at grocery stores—something they had never done before 2015. This modern dining revolution has made restaurants one of the country’s most important sources of work. In 1990, manufacturing employment was almost three times larger than the food-service industry, but today there are about as many jobs in food service as in manufacturing. Restaurants are the new factories, and without them state and local economies across the country would fall to pieces. Food-preparation and food-service jobs now account for more than 10 percent of all employment in Nevada, Hawaii, and Florida.
Scientific American: Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole
On the research vessel, Polarstern, at the North Pole, time zones, seasons and even day and night are meaningless.The sun rises and sets once a year, and 24 times zones converge on a single point.
The captain changes the ships time zone arbitrarily, to communicate with other ships on different clocks.
“There is nothing in this world that occurs to you that has not occurred to me first. That is the affliction I live with.”
Charter employees are fuming as the Internet and phone provider prohibits working from home, despite coronavirus.
One engineer sent an angry mailblast to a SVP and hundreds of engineers. He doesn’t work at Charter anymore.
Cory Doctorow: Be sure to fill out your census. Do it online or by phone.
Filling out your census is important to your community getting its share of federal representation and services.
Cory Doctorow’s Twitter account was suspended for a day, because of a list of trolls he created called “colossal assholes.”
Says Cory: “‘Colossal assholes’ got me suspended, but not its companion list, ‘Toe-faced shitweasels’”
But he’s back now.
Family Room Decor, 1970s retropopcult.tumblr.com/post/6128…
Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now
The qualities that make him a problematic governor in normal times are right for a crisis like the one we’re in.
Andrew Sullivan: Reality Arrives to the Trump Era
Andrew Sullivan finds similarities between the initial public reactions to the coronavirus, the gay community’s initial reaction initial to the AIDS epidemic – which, as a gay man, Sullivan lived through – and the 1918 Spanish flu.
In all three cases, the initial reaction was denial and complacency. Even people who accepted the reality of the situation failed to gauge its seriousness and react appropriately.
Ira Glass, at this American Life, compared the current period to waiting for biopsy results from the doctor.
www.thisamericanlife.org/696/low-h…
Julie and I have been through biopsies a few times and the metaphor is perfect. You walk around living your life as usual – eating, working, watching TV, etc. – and not even feeling particularly scared most of the time. But in the back of your head is this little bubble of fear. You know that everything could turn awful very soon. Or it could all be … nothing.
Also, this from Sullivan:
With Trump, we have a deeper crisis, of course. Trump is incapable of admitting error, numb to any form of empathy, narcissistic even in a communal crisis, and immune to any kind of realism. He simply cannot tell anyone bad news. And he cannot keep a story straight, which is essential for public health. His only means of communication is deceptive salesmanship.
(Emphasis mine.)
At the end of this weekend’s This American Life, Glass announced that he’d been exposed to the virus and was going into self-quarantine.
A white Republican mayor seeks the truth about Tulsa’s race massacre a century ago
Two more seasons of Bosch, then no more. Alas!