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March 23, 2020



Yes, we got a phone call from someone who normally only *calls* when something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. But no: it was just cabin fever.

Peoples' perceptions of who curses and who should/should not curse are very interesting. And weird.

Congratulations on being able to turn the bleepity-bleeping dinging off. ;-)


KC - today I told the boss of my boss that I was too introverted for all this attention. Too much checking in.


Yep. It's... a lot.

(which makes me wonder if there might be a way of posting some sort of meter, ranging from "not enough social interaction" to "too much social interaction" - that said, social interaction is not all equivalent, so even when a bit overloaded, one still is potentially excited about hearing from very specific people. But still.)


KC - I can’t imagine anyone needing all the attention I am getting. That said, I Know very few people who call themselves extroverts. Usually it’s “people think I’m an extrovert, but really I’m very shy.”

And I always like a scale. Everything is a scale. Nothing is black or white. (Except that statement.)


I've known a number of people with extrovert tendencies, and yes, I'm pretty sure some people would totally need it (I am not exactly sure if it is extroversion or whatever the mental illness-ish thing is that is the opposite of social anxiety, but I know people who are never happier than when in a crowd of people clamoring for their attention, two or three people deep all around them).

Eh, I think some things are black or white, but *almost* everything is a scale. (that said, I think some people need things to be black or white because when they try to think of things as on a scale, they can't and end up in the Land of False Equivalences, where stealing a million dollars or so is the same as stealing a hundred dollars or so, or where a politician lying about something trivial because they don't know what to say to a particular press question about a bill they'd forgotten is equivalent to a politician setting up a press release deliberately to lie about things that will end up killing lots of people so as to improve chances for re-election.)


KC - I like that last phrase best. Painfully true.


KC - I mean, I generally find myself questioning Gary when he says things like that, but I have stopped. I suppose cruel decisions like that are part of what presidents and generals have to do, but ...


I think a decent test is whether you'd be shocked and appalled if Obama did the same thing, or not.

It is true that leaders sometimes have to make "will *these* people die, or will *those* people die" decisions. When the leader's decisions have previously been predicated on "do *these* people die, or do I lose some prestige/money; that's not even a question, can't have the latter!" then I am more skeptical of other "heavy" decisions, especially those which could likely be partly fixed by money.

(I mean, yes, for coronavirus distancing reasons, we probably can't hire all the unemployed to fix up national parks or do roadwork as during the Great Depression, *but* if the government did a big digitization-of-historical-records push, I bet they could employ an absolute ton of people to check the digitization and tag the documents, with a duplication of work to catch errors. [for lots of things, we've got plain image scans, but not really good tags or text; send each scanned page out to 5 different people for them to do the work, digitally compare the results and retain the "consensus"; much like Google does with image captchas, but paying people rather than using their labor for free]. It would be real work, and we'd end up with some archives in a shape a lot easier to use by researchers, government workers, and the general public.)


KC - today the boss pointed us toward the New York Times, was has an app -which you cannot run in IE - that measures deaths when you choose variable such as percent infected and percent death. I would like to imagine politicians and generals are using that, instead of what state donated the most campaign money.


With some of these politicians, I'd bank on them diverting US healthcare resources to the areas where they personally have income-generation which additional survival would assist. They already have the campaign money. (now, if they do models based on who is likely to die and which of *those* people are likely to donate in the future, then that might affect things as well)

(this sounds cynical, but I honestly have seen zero evidence so far that the current individual in the Oval Office has any interest in human survival beyond what affects him personally in terms of prestige, power, or cash [outside of his direct family and/or people he wants to sleep with]; if you have any evidence to the contrary, I would be delighted to be less depressed about this.)


KC - I have no such evidence. It amazes me that he has no one who reigns him in after these press conferences. “Stop talking about yourself.” I know every president has flaws but seriously, now that he make the Virus Briefing all about him, it is horrifying.

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