Benefits of Covid-19
 

This is not a thread to downplay the seriousness or danger of Covid-19. It is simply to show that there are some temporary benefits.

The major benefit I see is that lower pollution levels are being seen around the world due to factory closings and less traffic of all combustion vehicles. Skies have turned blue in places where they are normally brown or yellow. Google pollution and coronavirus and you can read all the stories you want about this. The hope would be that at least a few of our leaders would see and understand that this could be normal if they had the vision and guts to eliminate fossil based energy as soon as possible. The oil and coal industries know it too. That's why they fight so hard to block renewable industries and technologies from the world. Enough of this topic.

The next benefit I've seen is on a more local level. I see families getting to spend more time together. Moms and Dads are home from work and kids are home from school. While we know the economic costs of this it is still nice to be able to watch families enjoy more time together.

Seeing people helping each other more. There are always going to be people who volunteer their time on a regular basis. But from my observations on some of the social media sites, more people than average are coming out to help their neighbors. And to me that is a good thing. Too many folks don't even know their next door neighbors these days but in this crisis they are meeting them and helping them.

Does any one else have positives to this disease?
JJ

I had a sniffle and was ordered to get it checked out. So I played "react to possible coronavirus".

It was glorious. I've never been able to take care of a cold by resting at home. Cold symptoms hit late Monday morning, I got sent home Monday afternoon, by Wednesday night it was almost entirely gone. On Thursday it was entirely gone.

That, and most dogs in the country probably think they're in heaven.

This may speed the rate at which we move toward distributed work. As companies are forced to implement remote work solutions, they may find that it works out well, and since they have already invested in facilitating work from home, they may retain that model once the crisis abates.

If that happened, it would have knockon effects. There would be less need for people to live in dense cities, so housing prices would fall. Less gridlock on roads due to less commuters. Less fuel consumption due to less commuters. Less time wasted commuting. The demand for office space would decline...

My big hope is that prestigious universities lose a bit of their value, exclusivity. If we're really serious about education, then offering extremely cheap online classrooms is the way to go. I've always dreamed of hiring the top educators in their respective fields, recording their lectures, and offering online courses based on those lectures. There's simply no reason why these top educators need to repeat the same lectures every semester to a new group of 400 people crammed into a lecture hall when you can do it once, and distribute to an infinite number of people. Not only that, but the lecture can be revisited as needed.

Why do banks close? It's the computers that do the important work, and they don't rest. I hope we demand that the banking system catch up to the 20th century, let along the 21st.

We probably should abandon the handshake as a greeting, as much as I like it. I've always liked the Japanese bow.

Then there's the unspoken societal benefits, such as providing some relief to our social security, medicare, and other tax draining systems. The disease tends to cull the least productive in the population. That isn't to say we should be happy that people are losing loved-ones for the greater good of society, but it is a benefit to society as a whole nonetheless.

I have to work from home and besides working in my pjs and cooking at home it actually sucks.

I am “on call” since many aspects of my job aren’t possible remotely.

The trouble I foresee is that I am much less efficient even on items I can do remotely, if I have questions I can’t simply interact with the equipment to find solutions, it’s more difficult to find anyone that knows anything and overall slower to do everything.
I can see some companies taking a knee jerk reaction like you suggest but everything will go down hill if they aren’t very careful in who/how/when they do it.

Hopefully this is understood

True, I work 95% from home and miss social interaction and find it difficult to collaborate on something because people can ignore IMs and emails, but cannot ignore someone standing in a cubicle. It's also not healthy to wear lounge clothes while working since there's something about that routine that prepares one to work.

I'm not more productive from home, but one podcast said on average people are 30% more productive working from home. They talked about 5 levels of distributed work:

I'd say my company is somewhere between level 2 and 3. I do have a sweet headset, an electric standing desk (standing now), printer/scanner, and 3 displays.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/member-r...8-img-0284.jpg

So are you new to work at home guys increasing your power usage?
JJ

I've been working from home for 3 years. My electricity consumption may have gone down due to my awareness of it.

I turn the thermostat off when it's just me, and instead have a 100w heat lamp pointed at me. The office is consuming ~210 watts at the moment, and that includes my laptop, 3x 24" displays, heat lamp, and desk light.

Monthly consumption for both the garage and office (same circuit) is 60 kWh, or about $6.

By working from home, I've developed a routine after my wife leaves to turn off lights, turn off hair or clothes irons, and open blinds to maximize solar heating. All the most commonly used stuff are on smart switches, so I have routines set to turn off fans/lights at the time my wife leaves. When she gets home I have a "I'm home" routine that turns on everything we use when home.

Certain lights are on motion sensors such as the garage, game room, laundry, pantry, and closet. No need to remember turning those lights off. All lights are LED, some on dimmers. The instant hot water heater is on a smart switch that has a schedule to turn it off at night and during the workday.

Highlights all the flaws of globalism. Looks like outsourcing all our manufacturing jobs to Asia wasn't the great idea everyone thought it would be and a good chunk of out sourcing everything to China for the last 25 years is about to be undone.
Suddenly no one thinks open boarders are a good idea, just look at Rhode Island, the ultimate sanctuary state that supports open boarders, don't want new yorkers fleeing to their state. Oh the irony, it is not lost on me.
Mexico wants to close the boarder.
For a brief moment people actually started to question how government employees on a low six figure salary rapidly become multimillionaires.
It looks like for the first time in generations large numbers of people are realizing the government doesn't exist to take care of them. When stuff goes sideways you are responsible for you. AntiGun and Gun hating liberals suddenly see the need to own a gun.
Biden is irrelevant.
The house sets up a covid19 investigation panel to Monday morning quarterback every decision made by the trump administration. Showing how petty and hateful they are.
The bail outs are supposed to have strings attached for multinational companies to bring jobs back home.
Stimulus checks are about the be cut and no one's screaming "not my president".
Last Gallup poll 60% of Americans approve of trumps handling of the virus.
I have only received 1 call about extending my cars warranty in the last month, I think the death toll in Asia is far higher than what we have been told.

Ha! I have the same system except that I am retired. My roommate heads off to work and I go around turning off all the things she has left on. I put her desk top in sleep mode or it will continue to pull 100 watts for another 15 minutes unless she is running some program that won't let it automatically sleep.
JJ

I'm undecided on this one. China in particular is a danger to global freedom because they are Communists and don't respect the rule of law. Intellectual property and health standards/inspections don't ring high on their priorities. Any company doing business there should expect their intellectual property to be forfeited to the Chinese. There's a reason why I can get knock-off Gillette razor blades that are identical in every way for a fraction of the price.

The problem with supply isn't outsourcing, it's not having a sufficiently diverse outsourcing. If we can get the same thing from 3 different countries, it reduces dependence on any single source and increases competition.

Globalism has the potential to unlock new efficiencies. For example, a development cycle can run 24/7 by moving pieces of development to various time zones. There are language and cultural barriers that can increase inefficiency, but it's possible to realize a net benefit to globalized development.

https://i.postimg.cc/CKjCcxBD/F8323-...6051221-A8.gif


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The Chinese absolutely steal any intel property they can and buy everything they can't steal.
Another thing that doesn't rank high on the Chinese governments "to do list" is take care of the environment.
Make everything here and that just about eliminates language and unit boundaries

I'm one of those folk who still commutes for work, due to being a hands-on position and being deemed an "essential" industry.

I'm loving the really light traffic.:)

I'm no fan of the Chinese government, but not everything they do is terrible, and credit for things they do to improve environmental quality needs to be given. As consumers we're complicit in allowing the Chinese to "steal our jobs" and "steal our IP" and "poison the environment". We traded all that for getting goods extremely cheap. Every day I remark "how could they make this widget, ship it from China, and make a profit from the $2 price tag". I want for nothing because the Chinese have made everything cost so little (except for helicopters).

When you start from poverty, you don't have the luxury of concerning yourself with clean environments. As China increases economically, I expect environmental concerns to become more important. Their resource consumption will skyrocket though, because that's what happens when you prosper economically.

I agree strongly with the rest of your post, but I don't think this part is working out the way you think it is. The economic damage is worse than the pension money saved, and the government printing money to pay for the bailouts does inflate away some of the federal financial obligations, but that was going to happen anyways.

What communist society in the history of the world ever developed a sense of environmental stewardship because it was the right thing to do?

Loffer sold 19 million dollars worth of stock in the days after the classified house briefing from businesses about to be hit hard in a bad way by the virus shutdown and bought dupont stock along with others such as bio medical and tech stocks who would appear to benefit from the medical industry being overwhelmed by a pandemic.
I think she should be fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.

Humans value living in a clean, safe place, and the value of your real estate and by extension many other things goes up when you protect the environment. Food comes first since that's acute health, so that has to be taken care of before pollution, but as societies grow richer they care more about their longer term health.

Good point. I expect the economic fallout will be much worse than the gains.

Even card carrying kool-aid drinking jackasses are questioning why everything comes from china.

Well, even LitesOut had contempt for China, which surprised me.

I may have less contempt than "it".

So the government doesn't accomplish its task to promote the general Welfare, and when one branch tries to establish why that occurred, they're petty and hateful?

Not all threats drive tanks, and there used to be a biodefense office in the NSC. That's great, it keeps every state, town and hospital from having to prepare on its own for every possible pandemic. Sadly, that office was created by guy who was from Kenya, so it had to go. Looking into things like that doesn't strike me as petty.

It happens whichever party's in charge, and both parties have to own the underfunding that left the national stockpile less than fully stocked. None of this happened overnight, and most of it didn't originate in the Oval Office. Dragging it out into the light is a good thing.

So he’s from Kenya, not Hawaii...???





:turtle:

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At least according to a loud tangerine that told me this virus thing was a hoax.

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https://i.postimg.cc/3rXx7V9g/B8-B5-...-E9-BB9313.jpg

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Funny how that works. It seems like the only time the Democrats worry about the general welfare and establish accountability is during a Republican administration.

Funny also that the only times Republicans care about spending is during Democratic administration. Can you imagine the libertarian outcry if Dems spent 2 trillion on anything?

I'm good with no stimulus or bail outs. To quote star wars "let it die".
The only thing they agree on is spending more money. Democrats spend it like a drunk sailor and Republicans spend like it's about to go out of style.

I agree with you there. Save more spend less, you'll be golden.

It's not just government spending and bailouts, it's also the Fed's ever decreasing interest rates and QE (aka free money). Capitalism is an illusion when the too-big-to-fail (investment grade credit) and people with access to Congress get to eat from the free money pie first.

And things actually get ugly when one of the parties controls everything. Then there isn't even a need for a coverup.

When one party controls the house, senate and presidents office we always get screwed.
Last time that happened we got the "affordable care act" that made health care more affordable by quadrupling the price in a decade.
And they almost pasted carbon cap and tax. Which by now would have likely doubled energy costs and made the 2008 recession never ending.

Please get the politics out of this thread. I see enough of it everywhere else in the news. Thanks.
JJ

You can't get much cheaper than free. MIT has hundreds of courses online for free.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/

The first great lecture I can remember watching on Youtube was a Harvard ethics class by Michael Sandel. I thought it was fantastic; way better than sitting in my community college classroom. I suppose there would still be a need for Q&A and shared student interaction since often we don't know the smart questions to ask and other students do. Still, this could be provided at a fraction of the cost online. An expert would still need to host the online classroom, but having not wasted their time giving the lecture, they can spend that time engaging the students. Best would probably be having students teach each other through discussion with an expert merely keeping things on track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdf...C13C91CFFEFEA6

Good things from COVID 19

1. I don't have to waste 1 1/2 - 2 hours a day commuting to work
2. I can pump my own gas in Oregon (but don't need to since I'm not driving)
3. We will likely save about $500 a month from not visiting restaurants / taphouses.
4. My work travel is cancelled through the end of May.

I wonder how many fewer animals will be killed due to less transportation.

Only had about 1 call this year about extending my cars warranty.

I have noticed that a number of the homeless "communities" are no longer where they once were. I don't know if they were ran off or if an indoor place was found for them to live while the virus continues. Either way it is cleaner in the area I travel through.

Another thing I have noticed is how quiet things have become. Coming from a country setting 20 years ago one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the city is how much noise traffic made. I live two miles from a freeway and although I have gotten used to the constant background sound, I can still hear it all the time. The last week or so I have just barely been able to hear the noise even in what would normally be peak travel times.
JJ

Fewer gender reassignment surgeries will led to a drop in the suicide rate.

When I hear 'the new normal' I think more like 'everything normal is new again'.