The pandemic has shuttered factories nationwide, at a cost of many jobs, but the people who make custom mosaic artworks for the Boston company Artaic are still hard at work: They’ve taken the factory home with them.
Ordinarily, Artaic assembles mosaics with robots. Its complex and colorful designs have been featured in Architectural Digest magazine and have earned it contracts with the hotel chains Hyatt and Marriott, as well as with airport operators in Boston and Philadelphia.
He's Braying about the $ick dystopian world they are about to foist on us.
When founder Ted Acworth realized the coronavirus outbreak would sharply restrict production at his factory, he and his workers assembled a portable computer-aided system that lets them do their jobs by hand, at home. Now, instead of them collecting unemployment insurance, 13 Artaic manufacturing workers are as busy as ever, even as they shelter at home.
“It was that or nothing,” said Acworth, a former post-doctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. “They all wanted to work, and we had the work to give them.”
Ah, MIT again!
The template for the new normal has already been laid out.
Artists have been making mosaics for at least 5,000 years. They’re works of art made by assembling bits of glass, stone, or ceramic tiles into large and colorful images, often to decorate floors, walls, and ceilings, but making a mosaic is slow, tedious, and costly.
Artaic seeks to automate the most tedious and expensive part of the job, using software to plan the placement of every tile in a mosaic. This digital plan is fed to a robot that builds a mosaic in square sections, which are then shipped to the construction site and assembled into a complete image.
That is the "art" of the future! AI created!
I'm not liking the mo$aic the Globe is promoting.
In March, when Acworth learned about the need for social distancing, he knew that his small factory couldn’t be made safe for the entire workforce. Two workers are still going into the factory to operate one of the robots, which Acworth said is permitted because it is supplying construction materials for projects that are allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, 13 other workers were sent home..
Luckily, Acworth had been working for years on a manual workstation to let workers quickly assemble sample mosaics by hand for inspection by clients. The team quickly assembled smaller, lighter versions of the machine. “It was really this crisis of COVID-19 that jumped us into making a quick-and-dirty desktop version,” Acworth said.
The Artiac workstation features a 30-inch computer monitor that rests face-up on a table. It has been hardened so the screen can act as a work surface. A custom-built computer, plugged into the monitor, displays a foot-square section of mosaic, with the color and code number of each piece of tile. Next, the worker places a see-through plastic grid on top of the screen. The grid has hundreds of chambers that line up exactly with the on-screen image, which acts as a map that guides workers into putting each little tile in its correct location, using batches of tiles delivered from the company.
A digital camera shoots an image of the finished section and compares it to the blueprint for the mosaic, revealing if any tile is out of place. Once finished, the section is covered with adhesive to seal the tiles in place. The foot-square section of the mosaic can now be shipped to the client, usually a building contractor who will assemble the handmade sections, like giant jigsaw pieces, into a complete mosaic that might decorate a hotel lobby wall or a hospital floor.
“It’s super easy and it makes it real convenient," said Jill Lydon, an Artaic worker in Jamaica Plain. About the only downside is the tedium, but Lydon’s learning to live with it. “That’s why I listen to a lot of podcasts," she said.
These poor suffering people in the Globe!
17mosaic - Jill Lydon, Production Specialist for ARTAIC, builds the company's mosaics at a home workstation. (Handout)
I'm so glad the $kank has a job with time to listen to podcasts.
Nick DiVirgilio, a production supervisor who lives in Quincy, said it took just two days to distribute the systems to workers’ homes and resume manufacturing. Divirgilio said that making mosaics in his apartment didn’t come naturally at first, but by the second day, he literally felt right at home.
“It’s just very relaxing," he said, "and it beats taking the train in every day.”
Artaic did lay off two workers in early March, but Acworth blamed said this was due to a downturn in orders, not the pandemic. He said the company has plenty of work for those who remain, and until he can power up all of his robots once more, Acworth plans to fill orders the old-fashioned way — by hand.
“We got broadsided like everybody with this coronavirus crisis," he said, but in response, "we used good old American ingenuity.”
--more--"
Late$t related:
Americans Bulli$h on Economy
Mnuchin is the Man
Better go $ee him $oon.
Oops, too late:
"A flood of business bankruptcies likely in coming months" by Associated Press, April 26, 2020
NEW YORK — The billions of dollars in coronavirus relief targeted at small businesses may not prevent many of them from ending up in US Bankruptcy Court.
Haven't they been reading the Globe?
Small business was shut out of the loot, as intended.
Business filings under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy law rose sharply in March, and attorneys are seeing signs that more company owners are contemplating the possibility of bankruptcy.
McConnell would be pleased.
Those forced to close or curtail business due to government attempts to stop the virus’s spread have mounting debts and uncertain prospects. Even owners receiving loans and grants aren’t sure that will be enough.
Most vulnerable are thousands of restaurants and retailers that shut down, many of them more than a month ago. Some restaurants have brought in a bit of revenue by serving meals for takeout and delivery, but even they are struggling. Small and independent retailers, including those with online stores. are similarly at risk; clothing retailers have the added problem of winter inventory that they are unlikely to sell with summer approaching.
Jennifer Bennett, who closed one of her San Francisco restaurants Wednesday, was still waiting for financial aid she sought from the federal, state, and city governments. Even with the money, she doesn’t know if the revenue will cover the bills when she’s finally able to reopen Zazie — especially if she’s required to space tables six feet apart for social distancing. “Our occupancy is going to be cut 60 percent to 65 percent,” she said. “I fear bankruptcy is a possibility.”
Other small companies have similar anxieties, said Paul Singerman, a bankruptcy attorney in Miami. “There is no reliable visibility into when business operations will be able to resume the pre-COVID normal,” he said, including already struggling retailers who had to shut their stores.
The number of Chapter 11 filings rose 18 percent in March from a year earlier, versus a 20 percent decrease in February, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The numbers don’t break out filings by company size, but given that the vast majority of companies are small to mid-size, it indicates that smaller companies are struggling.
There were over 160,000 bankruptcy filings from 2008 to 2010, during the Great Recession and its aftermath. The numbers don’t break out filings by company size. The majority were for liquidations, though some companies restructured their debt and continued operating under Chapter 11.
The federal government has already approved or given out more than 2 million loans and grants to small businesses totaling nearly $360 billion; another $310 billion is on the way to one of the programs. Still, the money may be at best a stopgap for companies with little to no revenue coming in, and the new funds are expected to go so quickly that thousands of owners won’t get loans.
More goddamn lot for the corporations and Wall $treet banks.
This hei$t is f**king cata$trophic!!
Many companies, however, just shut their doors, and that’s likely to be the case again, Singerman says. According to some estimates, 170,000 companies failed during the recession, but the Small Business Reorganization Act, which took effect in February, may encourage more companies to seek Chapter 11. The law is aimed at allowing owners to retain their ownership rather than lose their companies to their creditors; that is generally what happens in Chapter 11. The law also streamlines the reorganization process so a company is not wiped out by attorneys’ fees, says Edward Janger, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York whose expertise includes bankruptcy law. Another change under the law is that a bankruptcy judge can approve the reorganization over creditors’ objections, Janger says.
I'm glad the lawyers will be taken care of because that helps keep up property values in Bo$ton.
--more--"
Related:
"Richard Branson is seeking a buyer for Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. as he struggles to secure a 500 million pound ($618 million) government bailout, the Telegraph reported. Branson has set an end-of-May deadline to save the UK airline from collapse and is focused on securing new private investment from more than 100 financial institutions, the newspaper quoted people as saying. “Houlihan Lokey has been appointed to assist the process, focusing on private-sector funding,” a Virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said. “Discussions with a number of stakeholders continue and are constructive, meanwhile the airline remains in a stable position.” Virgin’s application for government aid has effectively been shelved, though negotiations could be revived, the newspaper reported. Delta Air Lines Inc., which owns a 49 percent stake in Virgin Atlantic and is consumed with its own pandemic-related problems, has already bumped up against UK limits on foreign airline ownership, the US company’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said last week."
I thought he was putting his private island up as collateral so what is the problem?
"A British newspaper publisher fought back against the duchess of Sussex at a court hearing Friday, rejecting allegations that it deliberately stoked a dispute between Meghan Markle and her father. The preliminary hearing at Britain’s High Court was the first stage of Markle’s legal action against the Mail on Sunday and its parent company, Associated Newspapers, for publishing what she describes as a “private and confidential” letter to her father in August 2018. Excerpts from the letter she wrote appeared in the newspaper and online six months later. Markle’s civil lawsuit accuses Associated Newspapers of copyright infringement, misuse of private information, and violating the United Kingdom’s data protection law. The company denies legal wrong-doing, and its lawyers argued that the specific claims of “dishonesty and malicious intent” should not be part of the case. The duchess’s lawyer, David Sherborne, said during Friday’s hearing that the publisher “disclosed to the whole world the detailed contents of a private letter of a daughter to her father.” A lawyer representing the publishing company said in court papers that Markle’s lawsuit alleged conduct ‘‘to the effect that the defendant’s motive was to seek to manufacture or stoke a family dispute for the sake of having a good story or stories to publish.”
Who cares about $kank celebrities $tinking up my jew$paper?
Who cares about $kank celebrities $tinking up my jew$paper?
"The British government’s online system for “essential workers” and their families to book appointments for coronavirus tests got off to an inauspicious start Friday. Barely three hours after launching, the link stopped accepting applications for the day following “exceptional demand” and said more tests, both for drive-through sites and home delivery, will be made available Saturday. Clicking on the link, aspiring applicants were greeted with the brief message: “Coronavirus test: capacity reached for today.” In a tweet, the Department of Health and Social Care apologized for any inconvenience caused and said it is “continuing to rapidly increase availability.’’ The self-referral site is a key element of the government’s plan to meet a target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month, and will likely play a big role in how lockdown restrictions, which are due to last till at least May 7, are lifted. For now, changes to the lockdown are not being considered given that the UK’s coronavirus-related death toll in hospitals is fast approaching 20,000....."
I have about reached my capacity to continue taking this crapola, sorry.
"British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is returning to work after recovering from a coronavirus infection that put him in intensive care, with his government facing growing criticism over the deaths and disruption the virus has caused. Johnson’s office said he would be back at his desk in 10 Downing St. Monday, two weeks after he was released from a London hospital. Britain has recorded more than 20,000 deaths among people hospitalized with COVID-19, the fifth country in the world to reach that total. Thousands more are thought to have died in nursing homes. Johnson, 55, spent a week at St. Thomas’ Hospital, including three nights in intensive care, where he was given oxygen and watched around the clock by medical workers. He has not been seen in public since, as he recovered at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat outside London. Opposition politicians say Britain’s coronavirus death toll could have been lower if Johnson’s Conservative government had imposed a nationwide lockdown sooner. They are also demanding to know when and how the government will ease the restrictions that were imposed March 23 and run to at least May 7....."
Yeah, they could have been more like Italy:
"As virus lockdown eases, Italy ponders what went wrong" by Nicole Winfield Associated Press, April 26, 2020
ROME — As Italy prepares to emerge from the West’s first and most extensive coronavirus lockdown, it is increasingly clear that something went terribly wrong in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region in Europe’s hardest-hit country.
Italy had the bad luck of being the first Western nation to be slammed by the outbreak, and its total of 26,600 fatalities lags behind only the United States in the global death toll. Italy’s first homegrown case was recorded Feb. 21, at a time when the World Health Organization was still insisting the virus was “containable” and not nearly as infectious as the flu, but there’s also evidence that demographics and health care deficiencies combined with political and business interests to expose the 10 million people in the northern Italian region of Lombardy in ways unseen anywhere else, particularly the most vulnerable in nursing homes.
COVID-19 is providing cover for a cull of the elderly, and it turns out that 88 percent of patients who have died had at least one underlying health condition, with many having two or three in the most polluted area of Italy.
Yes, dear readers, you have been lied to by the pre$$. Again.
Virologists and epidemiologists say what went wrong there will be studied for years, given how the outbreak overwhelmed a medical system considered one of Europe’s best.
That was one of Europe's be$t medical $y$tems?
Then $ociali$m mu$t $uck, too.
Prosecutors are deciding whether to lay any criminal blame for the hundreds of dead in nursing homes, many of whom aren’t even counted in Lombardy’s official death toll of 13,325. By contrast, Lombardy’s doctors and nurses are being hailed as heroes for risking their lives to treat the sick under extraordinary levels of stress, exhaustion, isolation, and fear.
F**k the hero idolatry, and neglect of the elderly is not a crime in Italy?
Seeing as it was state-sanctioned murder, I suppose not!
Even after Italy registered its first homegrown case, doctors didn’t understand the unusual way COVID-19 could present itself, with some patients experiencing a rapid decline in their ability to breathe. “This was clinical information we didn’t have,” said Dr. Maurizio Marvisi, a pneumologist at the San Camillo private clinic in hard-hit Cremona.
They killed the global economy over s**t like that.
Because Lombardy’s intensive care units were filling up within days of Italy’s first cases, many primary care physicians tried to treat and monitor their patients at home, even putting them on supplemental oxygen. That strategy proved deadly, since many people died at home or soon after being hospitalized, having waited too long to call an ambulance.
People died from being given oxygen, huh?
Did anyone think to check the tanks?
Maybe it was carbon monoxide in there, huh?
Damn right I'm fuming!
Italy was forced to rely on home care in part because of its low ICU capacity: After years of budget cuts, Italy went into the emergency with 8.6 ICU beds per 100,000 people, below the average of 15.9 within the developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
So one of Europe's be$t health care $y$tems had half as many beds as they should have after years of budget cuts, huh?
No doubt they were EU-IMF austerity measures.
As a result, Italy’s primary care physicians became the front-line filter of COVID-19 patients, an army of mostly self-employed general practitioners who work outside the public hospital system.
One of Europe's be$t health care $y$tems looks wor$e with every paragraph.
Since only those showing strong symptoms were being tested because Lombardy’s labs couldn’t process any more, these family doctors didn’t know if they themselves were positive, much less their patients.
Well, if they didn't even know how deadly can this thing f**king be?
C'mon!!!!!!!
The doctors also had no guidelines on when to admit the sick or refer them to specialists and didn’t have the same access to protective equipment as hospitals.....
--more--"
Maybe they should have gone to Spain for care:
"Spain reported the most new coronavirus cases and fatalities in almost a week, a day after the government secured parliamentary approval to extend a state of emergency through May 9. There were 4,635 new infections in the 24 hours through Thursday, taking the total to 213,024, according to Health Ministry data. The number of deaths rose by 440, compared to Wednesday’s increase of 435, to 22,157. Almost 90,000 have recovered from the disease in the world’s most extensive outbreak other than the United States."
"Shrieks of joy rang out in the streets of Spain as children were allowed to go outside and play Sunday for the first time in six weeks, while people in Italy and France were eager to hear their leaders’ plans for easing some of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns. Wary of igniting new infection flare-ups, nations have been taking divergent paths to reopen their economies after weeks at a standstill. The official death toll from the virus topped 200,000 worldwide, with 2.9 million confirmed infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Spain, Italy, and France, which have Europe’s highest death tolls from the virus, all imposed tough lockdown rules in March. All have reported significant progress in bringing down infection rates and are ready — warily — to start giving citizens more freedom....."
I found out today that Johns Hopkins is funded by biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as genoicidal "philanthropi$ts" like Bloomberg.
Also see:
"Greeted by relieved parents, pet dogs, flares, and a cloud of orange smoke, a group of 25 Dutch students with very little sailing experience ended a trans-Atlantic voyage Sunday that was forced on them by coronavirus restrictions. The children, ages 14 to 17, watched over by 12 experienced crew members and three teachers, were on an educational cruise of the Caribbean when the pandemic forced them to radically change their plans for returning home in March. Instead of flying back from Cuba as originally planned, the crew and students set sail for the Dutch port of Harlingen, a five-week voyage of 4,350 miles, on board the 200-foot top sail schooner Wylde Swan. The teens hugged and chanted each other’s names as they walked off the ship and into the arms of their families."
Back in the USEU!
You don't know how lucky you are!
"As the spread of the coronavirus eases and people gradually return to work pondering the impact it might have on their jobs, Europe’s second-biggest port is getting ready to test a device aimed at helping thousands of people employed there to respect social distancing. At Antwerp in Belgium, where some 900 companies operate in an area the size of a small town, two teams of port workers next month will be wearing a bracelet originally designed to find tugboat crew members who have fallen overboard but which are now modified to help stop the spread of the disease. The bracelets are worn like a watch. Coated in black plastic, they vibrate when they move to within 3 meters (about 10 feet) of each other. The vibration strength, similar to that of a mobile telephone but more obvious when attached to a wrist, increases the closer the bracelets get and warning lights flash. The bracelets ensure physical distancing and collect no data."
"The European Union group that regulates medicine is warning that malaria drugs used experimentally to treat the new coronavirus have potentially serious side effects, including seizures and heart problems. The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Thursday that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — two medicines embraced by President Trump and others as a potential COVID-19 treatment — are known to cause heart rhythm problems, especially if combined with other drugs. There is currently no licensed treatment for COVID-19 and dozens of trials are underway globally. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have long been used to treat malaria and anti-inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. In addition to the heart problems, the two drugs can also cause liver and kidney damage, seizures, and result in low blood sugar."
Better tell Trump, and tell the doctors to stop pre$cribing them.
"European Union leaders agreed Thursday to revamp the EU’s long-term budget and set up a massive recovery fund to tackle the impact of the coronavirus and help rebuild the 27-nation bloc’s ravaged economies, but deep differences remain over the best way to achieve those goals. With more than 100,000 Europeans known to have died from the virus, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and business only slowly starting to open in some countries, the urgent need for funds in hard-hit countries like Italy and Spain has never been starker. While no figure was put on the recovery plan, officials believe that 1-1.5 trillion euros ($1.1-1.6 trillion) would be needed. Northern European countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, generally remain reluctant to share too much debt out of fear of having to foot the bill for others. Even before these funds are agreed upon, the EU’s institutions and member countries combined have mobilized around $3.6 trillion for overburdened health services, suffering small businesses, embattled airlines or wage support....."
Where they will be getting all that money from is anyone's gue$$, and “when this crisis is over, economic conditions will get back to normal. We are not looking at any scenarios where this debt is a problem. It’s not a scenario I’m considering.”
These guys never have to foot the bill for anything:
"Israel’s embattled health minister on Sunday said he would step down following a public uproar over his handling of the crisis and his own COVID-19 infection. Health Minister Yaakov Litzman informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would step aside as the country forms a new government. In a statement, he made no mention of his much-criticized performance at the Health Ministry, which he has led for most of the past decade, and instead said he would take over the Construction Ministry. Litzman, an ultra-Orthodox politician with no formal medical training, has come under criticism for appearing ill-prepared at news conferences and reportedly resisting proposals to tighten lockdown measures that would affect the country’s religious community. Early this month, he was diagnosed with COVID-19, apparently after ignoring his own ministry’s orders to avoid group prayer in public places."
Their health minister had no medical training, huh?
Same as the guys running the nursing homes(?).
The flip side of it:
"Authorities closed all entrances to a Palestinian refugee camp in eastern Lebanon on Friday after four more people tested positive for the coronavirus, heightening concerns the virus could further spread among its overcrowded population. The four infected with the virus are relatives of a woman who tested positive earlier this week and are isolating inside their home, according to a statement from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. It said they were so far not in need of hospitalization The Palestinian woman who was taken to a hospital in Beirut this week became the first refugee living in a camp in Lebanon to contract the virus, a finding that triggered a spate of testing in the camp. The five confirmed cases are residents of the Wavel camp in the city of Baalbek, known locally as the Jalil, or Galilee camp. Lebanon, a tiny country of 5 million people, is home to more than 1 million Syrian refugees and other Syrians who are residents. It is also host to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, most of them living in squalid camps with no access to public services, with limited employment opportunities and no rights to ownership."
The reason they are there is because they were ethnically cleansed by Israel, and over three generations have now been raised in those refugee camps.
Where are you, JU.N.?
Speaking of genocide:
The Moralistic Mauvaise Foi of “Planet of the Humans”
Dissident Voice(?) missed the point on that, and I am surprised!
You know, when some white-coated thugs, backed up by sub-machine gun toting mercs, come to inject you with that Bill Gates vaccine, keep this doc in mind....."
"Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., the rig contractor controlled by Loews Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection amid the crash in crude prices that’s wrecking demand for oil exploration at sea. The company listed $5.8 billion of assets and $2.6 billion of debt in a Chapter 11 petition filed in Houston, citing year-end 2019 data. It has about $434.9 million of cash on hand. Diamond owns rigs that can drill in water more than two miles deep, but offshore oil is among the most expensive to produce, putting the company at a disadvantage when prices plunged to less than $30 a barrel. While newer deepwater projects are less expensive, they still take longer to develop than shale wells. What’s more, a global glut of offshore vessels has squeezed profit margins. Conditions worsened “precipitously in recent months,” the firm said, citing a price war between OPEC and Russia and the pandemic. Diamond Offshore adds to the more than 200 oilpatch bankruptcies dating from 2015, according to a tally by the Haynes & Boone law firm. About 2,500 jobs could be at stake at Diamond."
I have about reached my capacity to continue taking this crapola, sorry.
"British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is returning to work after recovering from a coronavirus infection that put him in intensive care, with his government facing growing criticism over the deaths and disruption the virus has caused. Johnson’s office said he would be back at his desk in 10 Downing St. Monday, two weeks after he was released from a London hospital. Britain has recorded more than 20,000 deaths among people hospitalized with COVID-19, the fifth country in the world to reach that total. Thousands more are thought to have died in nursing homes. Johnson, 55, spent a week at St. Thomas’ Hospital, including three nights in intensive care, where he was given oxygen and watched around the clock by medical workers. He has not been seen in public since, as he recovered at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat outside London. Opposition politicians say Britain’s coronavirus death toll could have been lower if Johnson’s Conservative government had imposed a nationwide lockdown sooner. They are also demanding to know when and how the government will ease the restrictions that were imposed March 23 and run to at least May 7....."
Yeah, they could have been more like Italy:
"As virus lockdown eases, Italy ponders what went wrong" by Nicole Winfield Associated Press, April 26, 2020
ROME — As Italy prepares to emerge from the West’s first and most extensive coronavirus lockdown, it is increasingly clear that something went terribly wrong in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region in Europe’s hardest-hit country.
Italy had the bad luck of being the first Western nation to be slammed by the outbreak, and its total of 26,600 fatalities lags behind only the United States in the global death toll. Italy’s first homegrown case was recorded Feb. 21, at a time when the World Health Organization was still insisting the virus was “containable” and not nearly as infectious as the flu, but there’s also evidence that demographics and health care deficiencies combined with political and business interests to expose the 10 million people in the northern Italian region of Lombardy in ways unseen anywhere else, particularly the most vulnerable in nursing homes.
COVID-19 is providing cover for a cull of the elderly, and it turns out that 88 percent of patients who have died had at least one underlying health condition, with many having two or three in the most polluted area of Italy.
Yes, dear readers, you have been lied to by the pre$$. Again.
Virologists and epidemiologists say what went wrong there will be studied for years, given how the outbreak overwhelmed a medical system considered one of Europe’s best.
That was one of Europe's be$t medical $y$tems?
Then $ociali$m mu$t $uck, too.
Prosecutors are deciding whether to lay any criminal blame for the hundreds of dead in nursing homes, many of whom aren’t even counted in Lombardy’s official death toll of 13,325. By contrast, Lombardy’s doctors and nurses are being hailed as heroes for risking their lives to treat the sick under extraordinary levels of stress, exhaustion, isolation, and fear.
F**k the hero idolatry, and neglect of the elderly is not a crime in Italy?
Seeing as it was state-sanctioned murder, I suppose not!
Even after Italy registered its first homegrown case, doctors didn’t understand the unusual way COVID-19 could present itself, with some patients experiencing a rapid decline in their ability to breathe. “This was clinical information we didn’t have,” said Dr. Maurizio Marvisi, a pneumologist at the San Camillo private clinic in hard-hit Cremona.
They killed the global economy over s**t like that.
Because Lombardy’s intensive care units were filling up within days of Italy’s first cases, many primary care physicians tried to treat and monitor their patients at home, even putting them on supplemental oxygen. That strategy proved deadly, since many people died at home or soon after being hospitalized, having waited too long to call an ambulance.
People died from being given oxygen, huh?
Did anyone think to check the tanks?
Maybe it was carbon monoxide in there, huh?
Damn right I'm fuming!
Italy was forced to rely on home care in part because of its low ICU capacity: After years of budget cuts, Italy went into the emergency with 8.6 ICU beds per 100,000 people, below the average of 15.9 within the developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
So one of Europe's be$t health care $y$tems had half as many beds as they should have after years of budget cuts, huh?
No doubt they were EU-IMF austerity measures.
As a result, Italy’s primary care physicians became the front-line filter of COVID-19 patients, an army of mostly self-employed general practitioners who work outside the public hospital system.
One of Europe's be$t health care $y$tems looks wor$e with every paragraph.
Since only those showing strong symptoms were being tested because Lombardy’s labs couldn’t process any more, these family doctors didn’t know if they themselves were positive, much less their patients.
Well, if they didn't even know how deadly can this thing f**king be?
C'mon!!!!!!!
The doctors also had no guidelines on when to admit the sick or refer them to specialists and didn’t have the same access to protective equipment as hospitals.....
--more--"
Maybe they should have gone to Spain for care:
"Spain reported the most new coronavirus cases and fatalities in almost a week, a day after the government secured parliamentary approval to extend a state of emergency through May 9. There were 4,635 new infections in the 24 hours through Thursday, taking the total to 213,024, according to Health Ministry data. The number of deaths rose by 440, compared to Wednesday’s increase of 435, to 22,157. Almost 90,000 have recovered from the disease in the world’s most extensive outbreak other than the United States."
"Shrieks of joy rang out in the streets of Spain as children were allowed to go outside and play Sunday for the first time in six weeks, while people in Italy and France were eager to hear their leaders’ plans for easing some of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns. Wary of igniting new infection flare-ups, nations have been taking divergent paths to reopen their economies after weeks at a standstill. The official death toll from the virus topped 200,000 worldwide, with 2.9 million confirmed infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Spain, Italy, and France, which have Europe’s highest death tolls from the virus, all imposed tough lockdown rules in March. All have reported significant progress in bringing down infection rates and are ready — warily — to start giving citizens more freedom....."
I found out today that Johns Hopkins is funded by biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as genoicidal "philanthropi$ts" like Bloomberg.
Also see:
"Greeted by relieved parents, pet dogs, flares, and a cloud of orange smoke, a group of 25 Dutch students with very little sailing experience ended a trans-Atlantic voyage Sunday that was forced on them by coronavirus restrictions. The children, ages 14 to 17, watched over by 12 experienced crew members and three teachers, were on an educational cruise of the Caribbean when the pandemic forced them to radically change their plans for returning home in March. Instead of flying back from Cuba as originally planned, the crew and students set sail for the Dutch port of Harlingen, a five-week voyage of 4,350 miles, on board the 200-foot top sail schooner Wylde Swan. The teens hugged and chanted each other’s names as they walked off the ship and into the arms of their families."
Back in the USEU!
You don't know how lucky you are!
"As the spread of the coronavirus eases and people gradually return to work pondering the impact it might have on their jobs, Europe’s second-biggest port is getting ready to test a device aimed at helping thousands of people employed there to respect social distancing. At Antwerp in Belgium, where some 900 companies operate in an area the size of a small town, two teams of port workers next month will be wearing a bracelet originally designed to find tugboat crew members who have fallen overboard but which are now modified to help stop the spread of the disease. The bracelets are worn like a watch. Coated in black plastic, they vibrate when they move to within 3 meters (about 10 feet) of each other. The vibration strength, similar to that of a mobile telephone but more obvious when attached to a wrist, increases the closer the bracelets get and warning lights flash. The bracelets ensure physical distancing and collect no data."
"The European Union group that regulates medicine is warning that malaria drugs used experimentally to treat the new coronavirus have potentially serious side effects, including seizures and heart problems. The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Thursday that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — two medicines embraced by President Trump and others as a potential COVID-19 treatment — are known to cause heart rhythm problems, especially if combined with other drugs. There is currently no licensed treatment for COVID-19 and dozens of trials are underway globally. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have long been used to treat malaria and anti-inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. In addition to the heart problems, the two drugs can also cause liver and kidney damage, seizures, and result in low blood sugar."
Better tell Trump, and tell the doctors to stop pre$cribing them.
"European Union leaders agreed Thursday to revamp the EU’s long-term budget and set up a massive recovery fund to tackle the impact of the coronavirus and help rebuild the 27-nation bloc’s ravaged economies, but deep differences remain over the best way to achieve those goals. With more than 100,000 Europeans known to have died from the virus, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and business only slowly starting to open in some countries, the urgent need for funds in hard-hit countries like Italy and Spain has never been starker. While no figure was put on the recovery plan, officials believe that 1-1.5 trillion euros ($1.1-1.6 trillion) would be needed. Northern European countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, generally remain reluctant to share too much debt out of fear of having to foot the bill for others. Even before these funds are agreed upon, the EU’s institutions and member countries combined have mobilized around $3.6 trillion for overburdened health services, suffering small businesses, embattled airlines or wage support....."
Where they will be getting all that money from is anyone's gue$$, and “when this crisis is over, economic conditions will get back to normal. We are not looking at any scenarios where this debt is a problem. It’s not a scenario I’m considering.”
These guys never have to foot the bill for anything:
"Israel’s embattled health minister on Sunday said he would step down following a public uproar over his handling of the crisis and his own COVID-19 infection. Health Minister Yaakov Litzman informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would step aside as the country forms a new government. In a statement, he made no mention of his much-criticized performance at the Health Ministry, which he has led for most of the past decade, and instead said he would take over the Construction Ministry. Litzman, an ultra-Orthodox politician with no formal medical training, has come under criticism for appearing ill-prepared at news conferences and reportedly resisting proposals to tighten lockdown measures that would affect the country’s religious community. Early this month, he was diagnosed with COVID-19, apparently after ignoring his own ministry’s orders to avoid group prayer in public places."
Their health minister had no medical training, huh?
Same as the guys running the nursing homes(?).
The flip side of it:
"Authorities closed all entrances to a Palestinian refugee camp in eastern Lebanon on Friday after four more people tested positive for the coronavirus, heightening concerns the virus could further spread among its overcrowded population. The four infected with the virus are relatives of a woman who tested positive earlier this week and are isolating inside their home, according to a statement from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. It said they were so far not in need of hospitalization The Palestinian woman who was taken to a hospital in Beirut this week became the first refugee living in a camp in Lebanon to contract the virus, a finding that triggered a spate of testing in the camp. The five confirmed cases are residents of the Wavel camp in the city of Baalbek, known locally as the Jalil, or Galilee camp. Lebanon, a tiny country of 5 million people, is home to more than 1 million Syrian refugees and other Syrians who are residents. It is also host to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, most of them living in squalid camps with no access to public services, with limited employment opportunities and no rights to ownership."
The reason they are there is because they were ethnically cleansed by Israel, and over three generations have now been raised in those refugee camps.
Where are you, JU.N.?
Speaking of genocide:
The Moralistic Mauvaise Foi of “Planet of the Humans”
Dissident Voice(?) missed the point on that, and I am surprised!
You know, when some white-coated thugs, backed up by sub-machine gun toting mercs, come to inject you with that Bill Gates vaccine, keep this doc in mind....."
"Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., the rig contractor controlled by Loews Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection amid the crash in crude prices that’s wrecking demand for oil exploration at sea. The company listed $5.8 billion of assets and $2.6 billion of debt in a Chapter 11 petition filed in Houston, citing year-end 2019 data. It has about $434.9 million of cash on hand. Diamond owns rigs that can drill in water more than two miles deep, but offshore oil is among the most expensive to produce, putting the company at a disadvantage when prices plunged to less than $30 a barrel. While newer deepwater projects are less expensive, they still take longer to develop than shale wells. What’s more, a global glut of offshore vessels has squeezed profit margins. Conditions worsened “precipitously in recent months,” the firm said, citing a price war between OPEC and Russia and the pandemic. Diamond Offshore adds to the more than 200 oilpatch bankruptcies dating from 2015, according to a tally by the Haynes & Boone law firm. About 2,500 jobs could be at stake at Diamond."
At least the price of gas dropped to $1.93, and who cares if all the oil tankers are floating off the coast of California?
"Tesla Inc. is calling some workers back to its lone US vehicle-assembly plant this week, before San Francisco Bay Area stay-home orders are scheduled to expire. Supervisors told some staff in the paint and stamping operations of the factory in Fremont, Calif., to report April 29. In messages seen by Bloomberg News, plant leaders asked workers to reply and say whether they plan to show up. Tesla representatives did not immediately respond to a weekend request for comment. Tesla had previously communicated to workers that it expected to resume normal production at US facilities May 4, the day after Bay Area health measures are slated to end. The electric-car maker clashed with Fremont officials last month over whether its factory was an essential business exempt from shutdown orders. The Fremont plant builds every vehicle in Tesla’s lineup and last produced cars on March 23. Credit Suisse estimates the factory’s shutdown has been driving about $300 million of cash burn per week. Carmakers including Volkswagen, Toyota, and Hyundai have said they intend to restart operations early next month, but the United Auto Workers union has said that’s too soon and too risky."
I agree. Everything should be locked down even tighter or a second wave will roll over the country and devour us all. Let the richer's have their Teslas.
"Stop & Shop said Sunday that it will extend a pay hike for unionized workers through May, in what it said is a gesture of appreciation for the employees who have been continuing to report to work during the coronavirus crisis....."
That reminds me, it's time for lunch:
"At ezCater, they got a dreaded e-mail, and then 420 lost their jobs; Here’s how it went down at the catering startup, from the perspective of the boss and an employee" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, April 23, 2020
I've already lost my appetite.
On Tuesday, April 7, employees of the Boston company ezCater woke up to an e-mail from their chief executive, Stefania Mallett: Be available this morning for a call from your manager. All 945 employees who received the e-mail knew what it meant. This was the day they would find out who was being laid off, and who would still have a job.
This is how the layoffs played out for Mallett, a 64-year-old who traces his career back to the Massachusetts tech “miracle” of the 1980s, and Lily Cohen, a 24-year-old marketing staffer who joined ezCater last year — her first job after college.
Kirsner, Cohen, etc.
The company was founded in 2007, with a mission of making it easier to get reliable catering for business meals. In recent years, it had become one of Boston’s fastest-growing companies. The ezCater website features a roster of menus from restaurants that will deliver a big order for a company meeting. Schedule the date and time you want, and the food appears, with ezCater taking a 15 percent commission on every transaction.
Last April, the privately held company raised $150 million in a funding round that brought its valuation to more than $1 billion — making ezCater what’s known in startup circles as a unicorn. To celebrate, there were unicorn cupcakes all around, but precisely a year after all that sweetness, the company was watching as office closings and shelter-in-place policies brought its fast-growing business to a crawl. It had just launched a national marketing campaign, with highway billboards and mass transit ads bearing the slogan “Food has to work for work.” Suddenly, almost no one was at work, and the idea of eating from communal salad bowls and pans of lasagna had lost all appeal.
Mallett says the declining orders were hardly a secret; she prides herself on having created a “radically transparent” company culture. “People could see the business results,” Mallett says. “They knew bad things were happening.”
The company was hustling to get its network of caterers to shift to individually packaged meals, rather than family-style ones, so that it could effectively sell to the essential businesses — such as factories and hospitals — that were still operating. On several all-hands videoconferences that Mallett led, there was talk of cutting costs on software spending and marketing, and the possibility of furloughs or layoffs.
As business deteriorated in March, several outside advisers suggested that Mallett move quickly to eliminate jobs, she says, but she didn’t want to be rushed, especially since there was so little information about when people might return to work. May? September? “What if it comes back in pockets around the country,” she wondered. Mallett says she and other company leaders created a financial model to think through “the best assumptions you can make about what you don’t know.”
Mallett says two things guided her decision-making. The first was her own experience being laid off earlier in her career. “I was asking people, ‘Are we going to do layoffs?’ And the management of that company lied about it until the day it happened,” she recalls.
She also wanted to try to avoid a series of layoffs throughout 2020. “The second layoff is the really bad one,” she says, “because everybody looks over their shoulder all the time,” worrying about what will come next. “We tried very hard to make this one painful and deep, so that we wouldn’t have another one. We cut as deep as we could work up the courage to do.”
By the time April arrived, Mallett was telling employees on a Zoom videoconference that a decision on layoffs was coming soon. She recommended they take any personal photos or files off of their company laptops. It seemed like she was struggling to hold back tears, according to several former ezCater employees.
Lily Cohen had started working at ezCater in February 2021 as an intern, just after graduating from Northeastern University. The internship turned into a job in June. Cohen worked as a brand marketing associate, helping ezCater manage its trade show appearances, marketing events, and the annual company holiday party.
The job was the reason she stayed in Boston. Cohen felt it was designed especially for her skills and interests: “They hired me for me,” she says. “I loved the company so much. It was a place that made me really happy.” In January, she helped plan an offsite meeting for the marketing team: There was brainstorming and talk about big goals for 2020. At the end of the day, everyone went to Flight Club in the Seaport to have drinks and play darts.
On April 7, when Cohen checked her e-mail around 9 a.m., the note from Mallett was already in her inbox: The layoffs were happening.
“You are always hoping that it’s not going to be you,” Cohen says. “I was picturing all the reasons why it wouldn’t be me. I was a lot cheaper than a lot of the more senior people there.”
Cohen knew she’d need to be on Zoom, and she “wanted to look presentable,” so she took a quick shower and put on a favorite sweatshirt.
Cohen then got a message from her manager’s boss, asking her to join a Zoom meeting around 9:45. Before it took place, she got a text from a colleague who had already been laid off and had her access to the company’s computer systems shut off. At that point, Cohen says, “I kind of knew — I just had a feeling.”
The videoconference was led by her manager’s boss, and another executive. Cohen was being laid off, as was her manager. All told, 420 employees would lose their jobs.
They will never be coming back, either.
Hope having to please Bill Gates and the greedy genocidal globalists was worth it.
“We spoke to every single employee,” Mallett says. “You did not get laid off by e-mail or a Slack message. You had a face-to-face conversation” over Zoom.
Yet it was tough to do layoffs remotely, she acknowledges. “There’s a dimension of warmth that you could only project through your voice.” There were no hugs and no handshakes to thank people for the work they had put in. “I couldn’t have been as warm as I would’ve liked to be,” Mallett says, choking up a bit.
In the span of about a month, she says, “We went from being this tremendously fast-growing company to having to lay off half our people.”
Mallett writes via e-mail that she and the rest of the leadership team at ezCater took pay cuts: “It feels right for the execs to kick something in, even though what has happened is in no way the fault of anyone in the company.” (People at other levels of seniority didn’t have their pay cut, she adds.)
Employees couldn’t go out at the end of the day to have a last drink together at a favorite bar, as often happens at companies when there are job cuts, but there were alumni chat groups set up quickly on the messaging system Slack, and former colleagues made dates to connect for coffee or wine over Zoom.
The layoffs affected almost everyone at the company that Cohen interacted with daily, so it was “a little bit comforting that it happened to so many other people," she says, and it was “maybe less embarrassing” for having happened over Zoom, rather than in a conference room, but the hardest part, Cohen says, is that she was by herself. After the Zoom call, she was alone. There was no one to hug, that day or since. Cohen, who like others is sheltering in place because, occasionally goes on walks with her sister, who lives nearby, but she has not been near the rest of her family.
Well, she can join 30 million other f**king Americans who didn't get a hug!
F**king eliti$t $hit!!!!
Cohen got about four weeks’ pay as severance, and she has applied for unemployment compensation. She has some savings and is not too worried about how soon she will find her next job. “I want to wait for something I know I’m going to really enjoy,” she says. “I’m trying not to put a ton of pressure on myself.”
None of the colleagues she worked most closely have yet found new jobs.
They expect to?
Shortly after she was laid off, ezCater shut off her company laptop, but it hasn’t sent instructions about how to return it. “I put it up in my closet, so I don’t have to look at it every day,” Cohen says, and everything she left at her desk is still there — the photos, the string of holiday lights, the certificates she received at company events — right where she left them on March 10, the last day most employees went into ezCater’s office.
This poor girl must have serious emotional problems.
The plan is that when it’s safe to be back in the office, there will be a day when everyone who lost their job can go in and pick up their belongings. No one can guess when that will be.
--more--"
Okay, back to work:
"Birx says social distancing will continue through summer" by Marisa Iati and Kim Bellware Washington Post, April 26, 2020
White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx on Sunday said social distancing will continue through the summer, as the governors of two US states defended their decisions to reopen their economies.
Birx also defended President Trump’s comments on disinfectants as treatment, which continued to draw criticism from governors.
She is as poisonous as a snake.
Birx appeared to contradict Vice President Mike Pence’s comment that the epidemic would be mostly ‘‘behind us’’ by the end of May, when she said social distancing will continue beyond that.
Really?
‘‘Social distancing will be with us through the summer to really ensure that we protect one another,’’ she said on NBC News’s ‘‘Meet the Press.’’ Birx added that the country needed to have a ‘‘breakthrough’’ in testing for antigens — molecules or molecular structures that trigger an immune response — to get on track for normalcy.
During a radio interview with WTAM in Cleveland on Friday, Pence said, ‘‘I think honestly, if you look at the trends today, that I think by Memorial Day weekend we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us.’’
XXXXX
Although she said social distancing would continue, Birx expressed optimism that the United States would recover more quickly than earlier global data suggested.
Because the models she was basing everything on were pieces of crap!
‘‘If you look at these outbreaks over time and you look at places like Louisiana,’’ Birx said, ‘‘if you look at Houston, if you look at Detroit, if you look at how they’ve reached their peak and come down and what those cases look like as they come down, it gives us great hope when you project out Boston and Chicago and certainly the New York metro.’’
White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx said social distancing could last months. (Jabin Botsford/Washington Post)
What an evil looking monster!
Despite the encouraging data, Birx added that during conversations with governors about cautiously reopening, ‘‘they talk about this not as turning on a light switch, but slowly turning up the dimmer. Very slowly.’’
Birx defended Trump’s comments about ingesting disinfectants and using ultraviolet light as a potential coronavirus cure, saying that he was ‘‘musing’’ about a study on sunlight and that the media should move on.
They dutifully have!
Birx went on to say that Trump’s remark was him thinking out loud about a study that found that sunlight killed aerosolized coronavirus particles.
During Friday’s briefing, Trump did not mention the study but instead walked back the remarks by telling reporters that his comment about disinfectants was sarcastic.
See: Trump Poisons COVID-19 Cure
I saw a video that said it was in no way sarcastic!
Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, defended his decision Sunday morning to start reopening his state.
On CNN’s ‘‘State of the Union,’’ Polis said a recent apparent spike in cases was attributable to previous tests that were just confirmed and added to the total, and don’t reflect what is happening.
He said he is focused on social distancing measures that are sustainable for weeks and months.
Like FOREVER because the SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS need us to be 6 feet apart!
Of course, being close together would give us heard immunity and completely pull the rug out from under their nefarious and evil plans.
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, also defended his decision to begin reopening businesses in his state on Friday. Stitt said the original purpose of the closures was to build hospital capacity, acquire personal protective equipment, and flatten the curve. The closures gave the government time to do so, he said, but it’s time to reopen.
‘‘The facts in our state are: March 30, we peaked in hospitalizations, with 560 across the state,’’ he said on ‘‘Fox News Sunday.’’ ‘‘Today we have 300 across the state in our hospitals. We think it’s time for a measured reopening.’’
You guys are being set up!
See: What Will Happen Next in the Corona Crisis?
Basically, a "second (and third and fourth and fifth . . .) wave will be blamed on protesters who complained about being put under house arrest, and what we are seeing is actually a push by YouTube and other tech companies to ensure widespread promotion of certain views questioning the official Covid-19 narrative precisely so that they will have the excuse to move ahead with the online purge, probably during that second (or third or fourth or fifth . . .) wave of the crisis. Think of it as an information warfare false flag: push all sorts of "conspiracy" content—from the well-grounded to the utterly outrageous—so that it is a very visible presence in people's online experience of this crisis. Then, as the pain deepens and things go south, the conspiracy theorists can be blamed before a real bioweapons is released."
Kevin Hassett, an economist temporarily advising the administration on economic policy during the pandemic, painted a dire picture on Sunday.
‘‘Make no mistake, we’re looking at a really grave situation’’ in economic terms, he said on ABC News’s ‘‘This Week.’’
Over the past five weeks, more than 26 million Americans have filed unemployment claims.
‘‘This is the biggest negative shock that our economy, I think, has ever seen,’’ Hassett said. ‘‘We’re going to be looking at unemployment rates that we saw during the Great Depression.’’
He noted that during the recession that began in 2008, a total of 8.7 million jobs were lost.
‘‘Right now, we’re losing about that many jobs every 10 days,’’ Hassett said. ‘‘So the economic lift for policy makers is an extraordinary one.’’
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that contrary to some predictions, he expects a quick and robust economic recovery.
‘‘As we begin to reopen the economy in May and June, you’re going to see the economy really bounce back in July, August, September,’’ Mnuchin said on ‘‘Fox News Sunday.’’ ‘‘We are putting an unprecedented amount of fiscal relief into the economy.’’
He's the MAN!
I feel so rea$$ured now!
Mnuchin also responded to criticism that the federal relief program for small businesses had run out of money so quickly in part because large chunks of it had been taken up by large businesses. He said that larger companies are returning the money and that the next phase of the program will be more focused on smaller companies.
That guy is a disgustingly evil piece of $hit, and my printed paper didn't even bother to flush.
Republican and Democratic governors on Sunday, speaking on ABC News’ ‘‘This Week,’’ pushed back against the suggestion by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, last week that states hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak should be allowed to seek bankruptcy protections rather than be given a federal bailout.
‘‘It’s outrageous for Senator McConnell to even suggest that,’’ said Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. ‘‘He’s wrong, and we need Congress to step up and help states. . . . It’s because of this global pandemic that we are all having to make tough decisions. We need the federal government to have our backs.’’
McConnell may be evil, but she is at bottom a servant of Israel!
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association, said the money is ‘‘critical to the rebounding of our economy.’’ He noted a bipartisan bill in the Senate would send $500 billion to the states and ‘‘we have a commitment from the president and the vice president’’ to provide the support.
‘‘I thought Mitch McConnell probably would regret making that comment the other day — I think it just slipped out,’’ Hogan said, ‘‘but I’m hopeful that we will be able to convince Senator McConnell to go along with the bipartisan bill in the Senate and the administration’s commitment to the states.’’
They going to break his arm again?
--more--"
Time to go shopping on Main Street:
"How will coronavirus change the way we shop? Here are 10 predictions about the future of retail" by Janelle Nanos Globe Staff, April 26, 2020
In a time of pandemic, every purchase feels fraught with purpose. Is a trip to Market Basket worth the risk? Does an online order put delivery drivers in danger? We are thinking more than ever of what we don’t have enough of — toilet paper, anyone? — and how much we really need.
As we all look ahead to the still-distant day when we can indulge in simple pleasures like grabbing coffee in Harvard Square, browsing Back Bay boutiques, or ordering drinks with friends at a favorite neighborhood haunt, we wonder: What will the new normal feel like? How will coronavirus remake us as consumers, changing what we buy, where we buy it, and why?
“There’s an old phrase, it takes 30 days to make a habit,” said Erik Rosenstrauch, the founder of Fuel Partnerships, a retail marketing firm. “Now we’ve all had 30 days stuck at home to begin developing new habits.”
Related:
"It doesn’t take long for something that starts as strange to feel more natural, said Katherine Milkman, a behavioral science professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and, she added, humans’ social needs also mean that they care deeply about fitting in with their “herd.” Seeing friends on Facebook homeschooling their children, for example, reinforces that staying home is the social norm, and the right thing to do. “People are actually quite adaptable,” Milkman said. “Doing a thing that’s unpleasant day in and day out gets easier over time, and gets easier when we see that everyone else is doing it.”
She is a sick totalitarian pushing her group think social conditioning and brainwashing!
I think the "Milkman" should stop making deliveries because that $h!t is $our.
Long before the pandemic upended American consumption habits, there was already a coup underway. Downscale malls were dying, and retail bankruptcies were becoming commonplace, though some brick-and-mortar stores, long undermined by e-commerce, were adopting new ways to compete. Direct-to-consumer brands were building audiences and loyalty. Mobile shopping was on the rise. Grocery stores were dabbling in deliveries and pickups.
The pandemic is likely to accelerate all of these trends, and leave a landscape littered with retail casualties, putting more power in the hands of the powerful few.
Globe doesn't have a problem with that, huh?
Here’s a glimpse at what the future might look like.....
She says we’ll care more about prices with more take-out and fewer food halls as grocery shopping will feel more nostalgic with fewer deliveries and more pickups at stores. Mobile payments and e-commerce will thrive during the 'mother of all clearance sales’ as department stores are DOA and malls may be next:
Both Neiman Marcus and JCPenney are close to filing for bankruptcy protection, and other department stores that have been on the edge are likely to topple, Marcotte predicted. “Macy’s, Sears, I can see them basically declaring bankruptcy at this point, for justifiable reasons,” he said. "They have no means of recovery, and they don’t have the buffer to survive this.”
That’s bad news for malls that have those department stores as anchor tenants, particularly the lower-end malls, Cheris said. “Vacancy rates at lower-quality malls were already high. Does that create a doom loop where 10 to 20 percent of the doors are closed? It feels like this could really accelerate the demise of the lower-tier malls,” and David Marcotte, senior vice president of cross-border retail at Kantar Consulting, said malls will feel different in other ways. He predicted more security will be in place to discourage group gatherings, and temperature checks of people on their way in to the stores may become common.
Then $tay the f**k away from the MALLS!
They would be perfect to repurpose as a COVID-19 concentration camp, though. Store have gates on them and everything!
She also says the pandemic may have sartorial implications and that we’ll care more about workers (who does she mean by "we?"):
“You’re going to see a resurgence of union activity,” Marcotte said. “They have the upper hand right now. They’re not being nasty or confrontational, they’re saying, ‘Our members need to be safe.’ ”
They may be e$$ential for now, but Bezos is already firing those who dared protest and there are legions of unemployed ready to take their place.
--more--"
Time to head for the hills of Maine:
"In remote Maine, the coronavirus is a distant threat" by Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff, April 26, 2020
DOVER-FOXCROFT, Maine — The pandemic has transformed the homespun face of this former mill town of 4,200 people. Nearly all the stores are closed in its small center. The theater, a hair stylist, a laundromat — all shuttered. Few pedestrians walk the streets near the Piscataquis River.
“The biggest problem we’ve had is trying to get people to think that everybody has it. People are getting antsy," said Tom Capraro, the county’s emergency management director. “You’ve got a lot of tough old Mainers, and it’s tough to change people’s minds.”
That frustration boiled over in the state capital last Monday, when 300 people protested the state’s mandatory business closures and stay-at-home order through April 30. Many stood shoulder to shoulder, hoisting President Trump reelection signs and disregarding the familiar recommendation to stand at least 6 feet apart.
I applaud them for their brave act of defiance in the service of Liberty and Freedom!
The only problem is Trump seems to have finally been worn down by constant attack by the media to the point of disintegration.
In Piscataquis County, some locals say with a straight face, standing 6 feet apart is almost close enough to dance. That natural separation helps explain why the virus took so long to migrate to the county, home to Mount Katahdin and Moosehead Lake. Elsewhere in northern Maine, Aroostook County had confirmed four cases by Sunday, and Washington County had two.
Overall, the state on Sunday reported 50 deaths and 1,015 cases. Cumberland County, which includes Portland, had a state-high 454 cases. York County, which borders southeastern New Hampshire, was second with 196.
Piscataquis County, always proud of its geography, now has another reason to appreciate its distinctiveness.
“Every time I saw our number on TV, I knocked on wood and thanked God," said Lillian Billington, an older woman here who wore a mask and used hand sanitizer before opening her car door.
Despite the advantage of isolation, Piscataquis County carries built-in risks for the virus. The county’s median age is 52, the oldest in a state whose median age is the highest in the nation. Nursing homes here, like others across the country, have barred visitors.
Although anxiety appears low generally, many seniors are heeding the warnings that danger might be coming. Nearly all of the older customers at Will’s Shop 'n Save, a downtown grocery store, wore masks as they shuttled in for food and supplies. More than a few younger shoppers did not.
I applaud those not wearing the silly, ineffective masks!
“I thought it was rather strange that we didn’t have any cases," said Penny Boone, an older resident who wore gloves as she carried her grocery bags. “I guess this is the new norm.”
“You never feel you’re all set. You always look at the worst-case scenario,” said Capraro, who worked for the Providence Fire Department for 23 years. “We definitely feel fortunate here."
Capraro said two of his cousins, 82 and 79, had been living in Rhode Island nursing homes and died of the virus.
Did they have underlying health conditions?
Although no such deaths have been recorded here, Dr. David McDermott, senior physician executive for the county’s two small hospitals, said the solitary case has dented a false sense of security.
“Is there really a reason to believe that Piscataquis County is this isolated county, and that everyone around us has the virus but we don’t?" McDermott asked.
Apparently, some people do believe that. Out-of-staters have begun coming to their summer homes earlier than usual, residents said, and visitors from more-populated parts of Maine reportedly have driven for hours just to shop in Dover-Foxcroft.
Those out-of-staters are never going back, you know?
“Someone is said to have come up from Scarborough and bought $800 in groceries and supplies here,” the doctor said, shaking his head slightly at the thought of a food run from the Portland suburb, 150 miles away.
Residents can laugh off such extremes, but there’s a clear undercurrent of concern about the virus.
“My gut feeling is that it has been in Piscataquis County for quite some time,” McDermott said. “People are worried about the uncertainty of this. There is a lot of fear of the unknown, and there are a lot of unknowns about the coronavirus.”
Why was an economy killed over it then?
McDermott said he has stopped making predictions about its potential spread; however, he added, the calendar in northern Maine could be a boon.
“We’re normally isolated anyhow, but this is the worst month of the year in getting out and seeing people," McDermott said with a smile. “This is mud season."
Still.....
Always a could be, even if, still, but, however, whatever, in my $tink pre$$.
--more--"
Related:
"A Maine man who opened fire on responding officers has been shot and killed by police after a 12-hour standoff at his home, authorities said Saturday. Police originally went to the Hiram home of Reed Rickabaugh, 59, on Thursday to investigate a report of gunshots, including a bullet striking a neighbor’s house, according to a statement from Steve McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. Two Oxford County deputy sheriffs returned Friday night to continue the investigation and Rickabaugh answered the door holding a handgun, police said. After being ordered to drop the gun, he opened fire, striking a police vehicle. Rickabaugh refused to come out of his house and fired at police again, twice striking an occupied police vehicle, McCausland said. Rickabaugh finally came out of his home at about 10:45 a.m. Saturday, initiating an armed confrontation that ended with two members of the State Police Tactical Team shooting and killing Rickabaugh. No officers were hurt. The death is under investigation and, per protocol, the two officers were placed on paid administrative leave."
I was going to leave a light on for you but they cut the power.
Good night, dear readers, and thank you.
MORNING UPDATE:
"A spring snowfall brought up to half a foot of snow in some areas of Maine and New Hampshire on Monday. The deepest totals by mid-day Monday were in Randolph, N.H., and Carrabassett Valley, Maine, the National Weather Service said. Both communities had six inches of snow and it was still falling. The weather system was heavily dependent on elevation. Other communities with snow included Rangeley, Maine, which had 2 inches, and Bethel, Maine, which had an inch. Temperatures in northern New England are expected to rise in the coming days, so the snow could be short lived. For the moment, the heavy snow was sticking to trees and giving the appearance of winter despite it being nearly May. There was also high wind in some areas, such as Bar Harbor, where Route 3 was closed to traffic because wind downed utility poles and lines."
That doesn't fit with the anthropological global warming/climate change garbage so it was buried at the bottom of the regional briefs.
