By that point, we had gone through a few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was working full time for a company here in NYC that makes a marketing data aggregation and reporting platform. I was already feeling burnt out from my career, and having to do daily standups (at one point, I was on two different teams, with two different sets of daily and weekly status update meetings 🙄) for a product I wasn’t excited about while dealing with a whole pandemic had me rethinking what I was doing with my career.
So I quit the company I was working for and started an LLC for freelance development.
This August marked a full year of self-employment. And the end of this year will be the first entire year I did it on my own.
Here’s how it went:
Eh. I haven’t make all that much so far. Revenue wasn’t really my main goal for the first few years of this thing, so no surprise there. I was able to pay for my NYC apartment, my own health insurance, and all my bills (with some help from my partner Monique, my family, and a few contributors to the website 🙏🏾), so I did well enough.
I’m trying to balance client work, which pays very well, with working on my own projects, which does not (yet).
When it comes to expenses though, luckily this is a profession that doesn’t cost all that much to do, besides some hardware costs. That’s good for my bank account, but probably not so good for my tax bill I’m guessing.
I only worked with 4 clients this year. When I first started doing this, I thought I might end up doing a lot of small projects through Upwork or Fivver, or from people I knew who needed small websites made. But that route is way more work and pays way less than working on the bigger (and more enjoyable) projects I like.
Some of the client work was tough, like with a smaller client who was trying to get a site done on a tight deadline, but didn’t really know how they wanted it to get done. Or with very design focused agency that didn’t seem to fully understand or respect the development process. But it was a good kind of tough, because it was just me fighting for myself and doing what it takes to deliver good shit and get paid. I think I’ve done a pretty good job so far.
I love that I got to work with few different languages/platforms for clients this year:
This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping would happen when I started freelancing. I like working with all different kinds of tech and figuring out what the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches are.
I’m a freelance developer who still genuinely loves writing code, so work and life kinda end up being the same thing. Most of my time (post-COVID) is spent on a computer building stuff. But I made sure that I balanced how much of that time building was for someone else or for myself. And if I planned this well enough, the stuff I end up doing for myself should be able to bring in enough income that I won’t have to do much client work at all.
So this year, I’ve actually had a lot of time to do what I wanted (besides going out and exploring/hanging out in the city, which has been way too rare these last few years).
Hopefully next year I can actually comfortably work somewhere other than in this apartment and enjoy the mobility I’m supposed to have while doing this kind of thing.
One of the things freelancing was supposed to help me with is with focusing on networking with people. I was really excited about pushing myself to go out and talk with people more often to make my living. But then waves of COVID infections kept hitting, and I stayed inside and focused and didn’t really put that effort in. I ended up accomplishing a lot on my own, which both feels good and kinda sucks at the same time.
For a few years now, I’ve kept hoping the next year’s situation will be better. Here we go again with 2022. Networking (and generally working on my friendships and social circle) will be a big focus for me next year.
Freelancing is a pretty uncertain and stressful thing sometimes. But I definitely prefer it over having a steady income but feeling stuck in a position (or company) I don’t really want to be in.
This year, I’ve felt really good about how I made my money and really happy about the freedom I have to choose the projects I want to take on.
Of course, all of this is in the shadow of this terrible COVID situation we’ve all had to deal with. The pandemic is what pushed me to change how I do things, and reflecting on how happy I am after adjusting my life to cope with something like this is awkward.
But I do feel like I was able to adjust pretty well, and I’m very happy about the decisions I’ve made these last few years, so I would say overall happiness has been pretty good.
Luckily I feel very nicely setup to continue down this path and accomplish even more next year. I’ll be continuing to work with one of my clients through the new year, and I have some potential agency work coming up in a few months. 2021 was obviously difficult in a lot of ways, but overall things turned out okay for me. 🙂
I hope 2022 is a much better year for all of us.
]]>At some point when I was adding to the website homepage, I decided to put some pressure on myself to write regularly by putting how long it’s been since my last post right at the top of the list of articles. It’s been a constant reminder this week that I have not been getting my shit together.
So partially to make sure that text never says anything more than 1 week (and mostly just because I think it’s a good idea), I decided I’ll try doing weekly posts where I write about some of my thoughts during the week.
I keep seeing people talking about finishing their taxes by next week. I usually wait until the last possible moment to do mine every year (sometimes literally the day before it’s due), but I actually got it done it last month.
Normally taxes are due on April 15th, but it was extended this year. But I think I heard at some point that the extension doesn’t apply to companies or people with LLCs, so I made sure to do it by April 15th just to be safe. So for once I get to see people talking about getting their taxes done in time and not feel the anxiety of another big thing on the todo list.
Speaking of taxes, this is the first time I’ve done taxes while being self employed and while owning an LLC. I was nervous enough about it that I figured I would go to an actual accountant instead of using TurboTax like I do every year. But then I figured I would start it in TurboTax and see what the process looks like and then I just ended up finishing it. It really wasn’t that bad.
Shout out to my Mom for talking through some of it with me. ❤️ She retired from the IRS a while back and told me about some memories of having to work with people with LLCs.
I’m doing some work for an agency that designs and builds websites for clients. Their usual stack is CraftCMS running headless, using GraphQL and a React frontend. I’ve been using it for one of their clients and it’s actually really nice to build with.
With all the (still ongoing) news of the Israel-Gaza conflict this week, I felt like I really should read up on the history of the region. It’s amazing how much we can passively take in about a thing (over decades) and still not really know enough about it.
It feels like I’ve been on Wikipedia the whole week, reading most of each of these:
It felt like there was a point on every single one of these articles where I went “wait a minute, what? why?” and opened another link in a new tab.
It feels like you end up hearing and reading about world events but these things don’t really stick until you’re truly trying to figure out why something happened the way it did or why people were motivated to do a certain thing. And once you’re really trying to get to the why, it’s easy ending up with 27 tabs open and the feeling that things are still even more complicated than you know.
All that being said, none of the searching for why should leave you without the ability make a moral judgement on what’s happening and the resolve to fight in solidarity with what’s right. The violence against Palestinian people by the IDF is horrifying. I’ve been encouraged by reading some of the thoughts of both Palestinian and Jewish people (both inside and outside of Israel) who agree that the IDF’s actions are inexcusable.
I got a message from someone about the website this week. They mentioned liking what I’ve done so far and wanting to do more digital gardening, saying:
For me, a digital garden has a dual purpose, to be an expansion of ones mind, but also to be a personal statement of ones skill and aptitude.
I really like the way that sounds. I heard the term digital gardening before, but I never really thought about it enough to look into it. After the message, I spent some time reading what people were saying about it (Maggie Appleton, Joel Hooks, Amy Hoy). My quick summary:
Blogging, but with an emphasis on non-chronological and unfinished thoughts/posts that are linked (and back-linked) together into more of a map than a basic stream or feed. Digital gardening is about displaying and tending to your thoughts instead of just publishing finished articles or writing tweets in a timeline.
When it comes to personal notes, I really liked what Obsidian was trying to do. It’s less about digital gardening specifically, and more about the idea of keeping notes that you link between and map together like a knowledge base instead of just flat files. I think there’s a plugin that lets you export any of your Obsidian vaults to a static website that you can deploy somewhere.
For web based digital gardening tools/services, there are a couple of popular apps, one called TiddlyWiki (I will always laugh when I see that name), which I’ve seen a few sites using already.
This stuff really got me thinking about my notes and writing. I don’t write down a lot of my random ass thoughts, and I’m constantly thinking about writing more of them as blog posts, but writing all your incomplete thoughts as articles is really not sustainable at all.
I’ve been thinking about maybe doing 1 of 2 things around the concept:
As of Thurs next week, I’ll be fully (including the two week wait after the second shot) vaccinated! And Summer just arrived here in NYC. Lots of people around here are talking about going out a lot and doing the whole wild sexy summer thing.
I’m happy a lot of people are feeling ready to celebrate things getting better (and yes, I am definitely ready to enjoy this city and actually be able to grab a drink with people again), but I’m not feeling all that optimistic about things right now. I just know this story isn’t over yet.
My partner Monique bought it last week and just beat it. She was into it! Maybe not as much as the Resident Evil 2 remake, but more than the others she’s played. I watched some of her playthrough, and we’ve watched a few Youtubers play here and there, so I feel like it was a part of my life this week.
It looks like a game I would really like (although I think I like Resident Evil more in third person than first person), but I’ve seen enough now that I probably won’t end up playing it myself. But speaking of Resident Evil games I like, I’ll rank my favorites and where this probably would end up:
Resident Evil (1996) was the first game I ever played on the Playstation and I think the first 3D game I ever played. It’s always gonna be high on my list of favorite games.
I think Code: Veronica is ranked above the original RE 2 mostly because of Dreamcast nostalgia. I remember just being really happy about gaming during pretty much the entire Dreamcast era.
Resident Evil 7 isn’t on the list because I just really do not like first person jump scares. I just never got into the game. I think I would have liked it if I got past all that so I don’t know how to rank it.
]]>The coronavirus is most transmissible in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where the aerosolized virus can linger in the air before latching onto our nasal or bronchial cells. In outdoor areas, the viral spray is more likely to disperse. One systematic overview of COVID-19 case studies concluded that the risk of transmission was 19 times higher indoors than outside. That’s why wearing a mask is so important in, say, a CVS, but less crucial in, say, the park.
At the restaurant, however, I saw an inversion of this rule. Person after person who’d dutifully worn a mask on the uncrowded street took it off to sit still, in close proximity to friends, and frequently inside. I felt like I was watching people put on their seatbelts in parked cars, then unbuckle them just as they put the vehicle in drive.
I’m still gonna wear masks when I’m out of my apartment most of the time, even after being fully vaccinated, for a few reasons:
That being said, yeah taking into account what we know about the virus, outdoor mask mandates aren’t very necessary. But it probably still helps the situation though.
]]>Jinshan Hong at Bloomberg:
The worrisome trend, just days after the world surpassed 3 million deaths, comes as countries are rolling out vaccinations in an effort to get the virus under control. The data from Johns Hopkins University showing a 12% increase in infections from a week earlier casts doubt on the hope that the end of the pandemic is in sight.
The weekly increase surpassed the previous high set in mid-December. While infection rates have largely slowed in the U.S. and U.K., countries in the developing world – India and Brazil in particular – are shouldering surging caseloads.
I’m glad parts of the world are figuring out the vaccine situation and starting to get back to some kind of normal, but overall we are nowhere near done with this thing.
]]>Around 7:00 AM - Wake up and lay in the bed using my phone for a while.
For most of my life, my natural wake-up time was around 10 - 11 AM (I’ve had a pretty consistent 12 - 3 AM bedtime). Lately though, whether it’s from stress or just too much on my mind, I always end up waking up around 7 or so, unable to go back to sleep. I don’t actually want to be up at 7 though so I just lay there. My phone is usually around on my bed/nightstand somewhere, so I just look at RSS feeds or Twitter for a while.
Sometime around 9:00 AM ~ 10:00 AM - Get up and shower.
I take a 10 - 15 minute shower every morning. I do a lot of thinking in there. If I’m actively working on some kind of project/feature/article, I’ll end up doing some planning while my mind wanders. Since most of my time being awake these days involves staring at a screen, it’s good to have a block of time where I actually have to be in my own head. I definitely miss my subway commute for more of that.
About 10:00 AM ~ 11:00 AM - Make breakfast.
Either I or my partner Monique will make oatmeal and coffee most mornings. It’s pretty random who will end up doing it, but we kinda alternate.
Oatmeal: Steel cut oats. The kind you cook over the stove for like 10 mins. We usually dice apples while the oatmeal cooks and add that, cinnamon, honey, and some berries if we have any.
Coffee: We usually have some coffee from Starbucks/Peet’s/etc (whole beans, dark roast) around and we’ll grind and use a french press while the oatmeal is finishing up.
From around 11:00 AM until like 1:00 AM - Development, writing, video games, TV shows, etc.
After breakfast, most of the rest of my day just rotates between programming/development (either for a client or my own projects), writing articles, watching TV shows, and PC gaming. Usually in blocks of a couple of hours. And the order usually depends on what I was thinking about the most in the shower.
Meetings: Depending on the client I’m working with at the time, I may have meetings throughout the day. But luckily since I haven’t worked as an employee for a while, I don’t have as many as I used to.
TV: If Monique and I are actively watching a show (lately it’s been The Strain and 12 Monkeys), we’ll watch a few episodes during the course of the day. Usually after 6:00 PM or so, but it depends on our schedules. We mostly use the Apple TV - Hulu, HBO Plus, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Cooking: If we don’t order out (which is probably about half of our lunch/dinner meals), we mostly alternate cooking, sometimes for both of us, sometimes individually. Monique is more into it than I am, so she does it more than I do. We don’t have much of a schedule for food though. Usually we just start planning whenever one of us is feeling hungry enough.
Games: I realized recently that I’ve been playing a lot of games that need the same type of brain activity as building software. Mostly base building or strategy games like Civilization, Valheim, Grounded, or No Man’s Sky. Also some Magic The Gathering Arena. And Elite Dangerous. I play (and stream sometimes) randomly throughout the day, and some of them with Monique in the evenings.
Anywhere between 12:00 AM ~ 3:00 AM - Wind down and sleep.
I don’t have a specific bedtime. Depending on what I’m working on or playing, (or if I’m running behind on a deadline) I might be up pretty late. Sometimes I smoke too much and go to bed at like 10:30 PM.
Most nights, when I’m done with code/games, I get into bed and read the exact same stuff I do when I wake up in the morning (RSS/Twitter), or I watch YouTube videos of people playing video games like Civ 6 or whatever, which will usually immediately put me to sleep.
Some things you might be noticing:
Flexibility. There’s a giant 14 hour block of time where most of the things I do every day happen. That’s exactly the way I like it.
I didn’t say anything about outdoor activities/exercise. And that’s because I pretty much haven’t been doing any of that this past year. I live in a very walkable neighborhood that I like a lot but… you know. COVID. But now that vaccination is in full swing, I’m expecting that part to change and I do things that require walking around the city and seeing people in person.
There is no work/life balance.
The things I enjoy doing (solving technical problems with code and documenting/talking about those things) happen to be really valuable. But like most people, I don’t really love doing these things as an employee. Over the past few months I’ve tried to organize things so I can do those things in a way that isn’t like what we think of when we think of work, and make enough money to enjoy my life. I switched to freelance development (working mostly by myself instead of on a team so far) late last year, and I think I got pretty close to what I was looking for.
Now I “work” at pretty much any time: weekdays, weekends, afternoons, late at night, whenever. But at times that work best for me, in the priority/order I think makes sense, doing things I actually want to spend my time doing. I’m happy so far.
I’m tagging Ru Singh, Jacky Alciné, and Monica Powell.
]]>I mean, considering we’ll be wearing masks for a while still (right??? please wear your masks), I definitely appreciate any attempts at making them better. I like the idea of having your mouth be visible but illuminated tho? Also, I thought there was kind of an unspoken agreement that relying on people to replace filters on masks like these is not a good idea.
It sounds like it’s still very early in the concept phase, so I guess they have time to figure things out but… I’m not really expecting this to go anywhere.
]]>At the very beginning of the year (I think January 3rd), I started renting a web server and database. I deployed the first version of this website on January 30th. For the first part of the year, it mostly existed as:
It worked very well for all of those things. Overall, I felt some negative feelings about the people I knew not being as interested in what I was doing as I hoped, but I was reaching my goals so I felt pretty good. Then around March, everything started changing.
I feel very lucky that I was able to stay physically healthy. Fortunately for me, I haven’t felt too strong of a pull to be out with groups of people or travel, and I had a stable, full-time web development job since late 2019 that I was able to work for from home, so I was able to stay indoors for a large part of the year.
But the year kept getting worse and things kept getting harder. Through the summer and early fall, I really struggled with a combination of dissatisfaction with my job (and the tech industry in general), processing the events of the year, and not being able to do any real planning for the future. Not having a group of people who were into the things I wanted to focus my attention on wasn’t helping the situation.
Sometime in July, I decided I really needed to change things if wanted any kind of acceptable level of mental health.
I haven’t been feeling all that good about the tech industry and the modern tech working environment. I’ve been doing software development for over 15 years, and I’ve never felt any draw in moving “up” (towards management) in the types of companies I’ve worked for.
During the events of this year, it started to become more clear to me what wasn’t working. And working from home on a project that didn’t keep me interested while participating in the modern webdev work environment I don’t care for while having no ability to make meaningful future plans and being effected by some of the terrible events going on in the world really wasn’t ok.
Normally, I would have just planned to start job searching again for the usual full time roles I always come across, but the feelings I were feeling about this job weren’t new, and they weren’t all that specific to this company. I realized I just didn’t want to work like this anymore. So I decided to switch to freelancing.
The goal for me was to realign the way I work around my strengths and weaknesses. I’m a very independent person, and I’m driven to come up with my own plan to solve a problem and then to execute it well. I like to do that with other people when it makes sense, but I still want to retain the ability to solve something my own way.
So I figured I would focus on the following:
Freelancing made a lot of sense to me.
I made the decision to leave the company I was working for, and put a lot of the nervous energy I had into researching and preparing for the best way to actually be successful with this. And I decided to fold the work I was putting into this website into the freelancing plan too. I quit my job and created a LLC for myself around mid August.
From August until now, I’ve been spending most of my waking hours on networking, client projects, and this server (configuration, writing code, writing articles, preparing for monetization, etc). The rest of the time is spent PC gaming. So I’m celebrating the following 2020 accomplishments:
I bought a new graphics card in July (RTX 2070) and installed it. Then a few weeks later the system started acting weird. I found out the CPU kept throttling itself but it took me a while to figure out why. Eventually I figured out it was the liquid cooler so I bought a giant Noctua CPU fan and tried to install it.
Everything I looked up online told me that I shouldn’t have to do too much besides taking the old cooler out, adding some thermal paste, and then attaching the fan. The way things were installed weren’t really great though, and one of the wires was running through the wrong place and I had to move the entire motherboard to get it installed.
There were so many screws. And this was mid July, so it was hot.
But I did it though.
I’m not gonna try to write a nice summary of 2020. I think we’ll all be processing this year for a long time. But for everything that happened, it’s nice to be able to look back and appreciate the good things along the way. I hope 2021 turns out to be a much better year for us all.
]]>]]>But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long – or, in older versions which PHE may have still been using, a mere 65,536. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That means that, once the lab had performed more than a million tests, it was only a matter of time before its reports failed to be read by PHE.
I read an article today on all the reasons why we lost so badly to this virus. It’s a great article, and I think you should read it. But I want to summarize some of the points here, which overall can be summarized as:
But the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.
This article and the points on this list focuses on the Federal government. There are things to say about other levels of government and individuals themselves, but that’s for another time.
I think we can all very obviously see how willing the people in our government are to be completely ignorant of and disinterested in facts. But to me, at this point it seems like you have to actually work hard to be this ignorant.
Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.
A defunded CDC then went on to fumble on testing:
The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested. The official data were so clearly wrong that The Atlantic developed its own volunteer-led initiative—the COVID Tracking Project—to count cases.
Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,” she told me.
I think the single biggest thing that bothers me about the US Federal Government’s response is that when it comes to actually investing in, spending time on, or putting effort into helping American people, they have literally done nothing.
Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,” she told me.
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldn’t find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldn’t cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.
There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to America and punishment/prison. I’ll just leave this quote from the article.
The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.
Nursing homes:
Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID‑19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.
It’s terrible how we treat our old, sick, or misunderstood people.
America’s neglect of nursing homes and prisons, its sick buildings, and its botched deployment of tests are all indicative of its problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.
We all know healthcare is bad in this country. But it’s obviously completely broken at this point.
Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.
Of the 3.1 million Americans who cannot afford health insurance, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black. This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID‑19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. Three times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to fatal cases of COVID‑19. When they go to hospitals, they’re less likely to be treated. The care they do receive tends to be poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek aid for COVID‑19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in sicker states. “One of my patients said, ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital, because they’re not going to treat me well,’ ” says Uché Blackstock, an emergency physician and the founder of Advancing Health Equity, a nonprofit that fights bias and racism in health care. “Another whispered to me, ‘I’m so relieved you’re Black. I just want to make sure I’m listened to.’ ”
Technology is powerful. Technology in the hands of companies operating under America’s brand of capitalism is very very bad.
Sure enough, existing conspiracy theories—George Soros! 5G! Bioweapons!—were repurposed for the pandemic. An infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. “The social internet as a system is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.
The media made things worse of course:
In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by two studies published in top medical journals—The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine—that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The papers relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere. Both were retracted in June.
No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
This pandemic is showing America that we have a lot to do to get better. We all need to accept and understand just how far we really have to go so we can start making some real changes.
]]>COVID‑19 is an assault on America’s body, and a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection. America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.
Aside from testing, the plan lays out six possible situations involving confirmed infections. They range from a single positive case, in which a classroom will close for 14 days and students and staff with close contact will self-quarantine, to more than two cases in different classrooms. Under the latter scenario, the entire school would shut down and transition to remote learning.
So we’re going to open and close individual schools all throughout the year? Really?
]]>Here is the internal narrative that dictates this state of affairs: “I am the only thing that matters; what I want is the only thing that it is valid to want; what you want is so unimportant that is is not worth discussing. I see you, but I am not convinced that you exist in any significant way, except as a potential blocker to what I want. This is your only real importance. Your assertion of personhood is irritating to me, because it gets in the way of what I want. Which is more money, more power, more self-gratification, at any cost, by any means necessary. The end always justifies the means, and if this means your end, that means nothing to me. My rights trump your rights, always, molehills to mountains no matter. I am not open to discussion of my position. I will become angry if you attempt to discuss this with me, then if you persist, I will kill you, because you are getting in the way of what I want. How dare you disagree with me.”
And:
Internal narrative #2: “I do not recognize that I am part of a society, even though I am wholly dependent on society for my continued existence. My actions, whatever they may be, are justified, because they are what I want. To shed any residual guilt I may have, I will deny evidence as conspiracy. I am, by design, so poorly educated that this does not trouble me at all. So I will not wear a mask in public, and I will not socially distance, because to do so inconveniences me, and I do not want to be inconvenienced, and what I want is the only thing that matters.”
Selfishness in its purest form.
]]>According to Gallup research, having a close work friend increases fulfillment, productivity, and even company loyalty; on the flip side, loneliness in the office can affect both professional and personal well-being. The absence of casual hallway chats and long lunch breaks during the pandemic could potentially make workers feel more isolated, according to Hilla Dotan, an organizational-behavior researcher at Tel Aviv University. “What we’re doing through virtual work is we’re neutralizing the social aspect of [work],” she told me.
I don’t maintain relationships well when I don’t see people regularly. It’s been a struggle.
]]>]]>There were no serious side effects associated with the vaccine at any of the dosing levels, though more than half of the study participants who received the vaccine experienced minor events including fatigue, headache, chills, and pain at the injection site. All of the participants produced antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And when researchers tested these antibodies against a lab version of SARS-CoV-2, they found these antibodies neutralized the virus as effectively as antibodies taken from people who were naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. They also tested the antibodies taken from a smaller group of study participants against actual samples of SARS-CoV-2 and found their ability to neutralize virus was at least equivalent to that found in people who had recovered from infection.
I am very concerned about a few looming catastrophes coming up, and I’m not really hearing any kind of reasonable solutions for any of them:
School. I do not understand how September will bring in anything other than complete disaster for the country. Parents were already in a unworkable situation since the spring, but now they have to decide between having time to work by sending their kids into danger (which of course increases the risk of catching the virus for students, teachers, AND parents) or home schooling and being unable to work. Some teachers are thinking about retiring early because of this garbage situation they’re in. (Side note: this country’s treatment of teachers is terrible and we should be ashamed of ourselves.)
Rent. I keep seeing the “25% of NYC renters skipped rent this month” stories and I don’t understand how people (many of which are currently deeply in debt) will be able to get out of months worth of additional debt to landlords. And eviction relief just ended.
The President. He’s obviously getting more and more desperate and out of control as this goes on. Everyone loves to drop the “But we’ll beat him in November! Vote!!” statements at the end of political comments but we don’t have until November to beat the education crisis. On top of that, it should be very obvious at this point that the government itself will not fix its own corruption (and voting results are affected by said corruption) so I really don’t know where the confidence in voting him out is coming from.
And then obviously we have the virus itself. I knew very early on that once the US government decided it wasn’t worth trying to do anything to address the virus, individual Americans were going to completely drop the ball too. My faith in people doing the right thing here evaporated long ago, so most of my hopes rested on a vaccine. But we apparently don’t know the full story on coronavirus antibodies (there are still questions about how long they last), so maybe that’s not gonna get us out of this mess either.
Those are just the most pressing issues on my mind right now. Meanwhile, discourse on the internet (specifically in the places I spend my time) sucks, people seem to really prefer staying ignorant of things around them until they start to fail, and lots of Americans still support a lying, corrupt, racist, reality TV show star who doesn’t understand that letting the country succumb to a deadly pandemic isn’t a good plan. I don’t have any kind of optimistic summary here. This situation sucks and I’m not really seeing how it gets any better.
]]>“Our findings suggest that any direct decrease in social distancing among the subset of the population participating in the protests is more than offset by increasing social distancing behavior among others who may choose to shelter-at-home and circumvent public places while the protests are underway,” the report reads.
So based on what we can tell, people protesting outside in open air (with a lot of masks as far as I could see from the pictures) causing everyone else to stay home leads to a better outcome than people doing stuff inside buildings together. That seems to line up with the facts we’ve been hearing.
]]>As of midnight tonight, travelers to New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut coming from Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Texas, and Washington state will all be asked to quarantine for two weeks.
Cuomo talked about enforcement, but I still don’t get how it’s supposed to work. Once you found a person from one of those states, how would you know if they were heading into the state for the first time, done with their own quarantine process, or just ignoring it completely?
]]>From the article:
]]>Those people, healthy volunteers, made antibodies that were then tested in human cells in the lab, and were able to stop the virus from replicating — the key requirement for an effective vaccine. The levels of those so-called neutralizing antibodies matched the levels found in patients who had recovered after contracting the virus in the community.
]]>The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty. Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens. Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy. Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.
]]>Masks can be worn to protect the wearer from getting infected or masks can be worn to protect others from being infected by the wearer. Protecting the wearer is difficult: It requires medical-grade respirator masks, a proper fit, and careful putting on and taking off. But masks can also be worn to prevent transmission to others, and this is their most important use for society. If we lower the likelihood of one person’s infecting another, the impact is exponential, so even a small reduction in those odds results in a huge decrease in deaths. Luckily, blocking transmission outward at the source is much easier. It can be accomplished with something as simple as a cloth mask.
According to the article, they were able to “flatten the curve” by staying indoors, but because they did, they don’t have herd immunity (and therefore most of them are still susceptible). So they’re gonna relax because they did a good job, open everything up, and then game over.
I agree with most of the analysis, but it leaves out the fact that way more people had it than we first thought. If people can’t get reinfected and the virus doesn’t mutate much (those are both big ifs) then it’s possible this isn’t as dangerous a moment as the article is suggesting.
Either way, there are way too many unknowns right now (when we’ll have adequate testing, if we can get reinfected, how long the virus lasts, when we’ll get vaccines/treatments, etc) to feel comfortable opening things back up.
]]>Also from the article, here’s a look at how long the virus lasts on different surfaces (you can see why there was hesitation around recommending mask use):
]]>https://www.inputmag.com/tech/where-are-elon-musks-promised-ventilators
]]>These new numbers represent a seismic shift in work culture. Prior to the pandemic, the number of people regularly working from home remained in the single digits, with only about 4 percent of the US workforce working from home at least half the time. However, the trend of working from home had been gaining momentum incrementally for years, as technology and company cultures increasingly accommodated it. So it’s also likely that many Americans who are now working from home for the first time will continue to do so after the pandemic.
I can definitely see this happening:
There’s a lot more at play than what employers and workers want, of course. The economic impact of the pandemic will likely force many employers to cut costs. For companies to reduce their rent obligations by letting workers work from home is an easy solution, one that’s less painful than layoffs. In Lister’s words, “The investor community is going to insist on it.”
Lots of interesting predictions in this article.
]]>https://time.com/5819887/coronavirus-vaccines-development-who/
]]>https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/nyc-coronavirus-deaths-race-economic-divide/
]]>An antibody test could show whether a person was recently exposed to the coronavirus. Fauci says the test would say “that you were infected and if you’re feeling well you very likely recovered.”
Yes!
https://time.com/5819068/fauci-coronavirus-antibody-test-us/
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