Happiness is readers who record political phone calls and send me the audio. Please consider doing this if you listen in on an #Iowa elected official's telephone town hall related to #COVIDー19. I don't name sources unless they want credit for the tip. https://t.co/5qftcBJwsk
— Bleeding Heartland (@LauraRBelin) April 10, 2020
U.S. Representative Steve King asserted on April 7 that publicizing the names, addresses, and medical history of those who test positive for novel coronavirus (COVID-19) would help the country overcome the pandemic by allowing people to “make better decisions.”
King advocated revealing identifying details about COVID-19 patients during his April 3 telephone town hall with residents of Iowa’s fourth Congressional district and discussed the idea at some length during his latest call with constituents on the evening of April 7…
After Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, “the confidentiality rules were set in,” and the country “shifted pretty significantly away from open access information,” King said. Now “we don’t know enough” about who may be sick in our communities…
… People will say, well, there’s a stigma attached with that today. There may be. But I don’t know why there should be a stigma attached with it. You don’t know where you get it, how you get it. But if you have it, then you need to be staying away from other people and self-quarantining.
And so if we’re going to address this and eradicate this virus, then if, say in our neighborhood we don’t know who has it, we only see that maybe one person in the entire county has tested positive. And then no one knows who that is, or that’s supposed to know, according to the rules we’re living by today. And when that person is now recovered, we don’t know that either.
And–so I don’t think that we can make very good decisions without information. The first thing I would like to have, I’d like to have age, I’d like to have pre-existing conditions. I’d like to know whether they’re male or female, and then on down the line. What town they live in, what their address is, what their name is…
Medical privacy rules exist for many reasons. Letting the community know who tested positive for COVID-19 could make patients targets for harassment, vandalism, scams, or burglaries. And while it’s important for public health authorities to collect and analyze data on COVID-19 patients (such as their age, gender, race, ethnicity, and underlying conditions), no one should have to fear that their health problems will become a matter of public record…
That’s the only reason I can see for the man so proud of his ‘Worst Person in Congress’ title to be demanding names & addresses.
Maybe I’m just a cynic, but if I were one of King’s constituents, I’d worry any prayer from him would come crashing through a window wrapped around a rock.
The Two Numbers I Am Watching Before Things Open Up
Baud
Since this is an open thread and Steve King is an uninteresting pig, here’s an interesting Vox post mortem on a certain independent senator that can also be filed as readership capture.
TaMara (HFG)
I haven’t been around enough to know if this has been front paged. But I enjoyed it.
The Thin Black Duke
It didn’t sound any better in the original German.
Poe Larity
We could have little stars you can pin to your clothing. We must all be willing to sacrifice for the Fatherland.
scav
“No National ID cards!” scream the Greatest and Only True Americans! “Tattoos and/or distinctive patches for the ill!” And just won’t they be surprised when it’s Elmer and Beryl down at the coffee shop and not those evil outsiders sipping lattes.
Mike in NC
Let’s all support the Lincoln Project in removing this cancer on our democracy.
Roger Moore
I would be worried that it would be about 9mm in diameter and be coming quite a bit faster than a rock.
donnah
I thought Louis Gohmert might retire the Biggest Idiot Trophy, but Steve is snatching it and running away. It seems impossible that Steve-O could even say anything more stupid than the last thing he said, but here we are.
People have got to stop voting for these morons.
Baud
@donnah:
Didn’t he almost lose last time?
anon
The first 30 seconds of this famous Reagan 1980 campaign speech are a little too on the nose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EvFQLhqWPQ&t=1s
?BillinGlendaleCA
@scav: Nonsense, it’s always those evil outsiders sipping lattes(sushi eating, tongue piercing…).
donnah
@Baud: Almost. But the chuckleheads voted him in again.
King had 50.4 percent of the vote, followed by Scholten with 47 percent. Iowans apparently needed some more Nazi lovin’.
Martin
This will shock exactly nobody.
Baud
@donnah: Every other Iowa rep is a Dem now. Hopefully, 2020 will be the year they go 4 for 4.
Baud
@Martin:
Why are farmers struggling? People aren’t going out to eat, but they’re still eating food.
dmsilev
@Martin: Also, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia faces blowback as he curtails scope of worker relief in unemployment crisis
His dad would definitely be proud of him.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Guessing they’re having trouble getting workers to pick the crop, lowering wages always helps attract workers*.
*A theory taught in no Economics class in the world.
Duane
@Martin: Meadows and Purdue will work to reduce food benefits next. Republicans never learn. It’s like they want people to hate them.
hueyplong
@Baud: Weren’t farmers getting killed in Trump’s tariff wars?
It’s difficult to keep up with Trump’s FUBARs.
debbie
@TaMara (HFG):
Wow, that is great!
debbie
@Baud:
Tariffs?
Glidwrith
@Baud: Dropped down the memory hole: shitgibbon trade war where he destroyed our agricultural sector before helping to destroy our society as we knew it by ignoring the impending cv epidemic.
And three people beat me to it. Damn you people are fast.
catclub
I am not getting that either. But I suspect that the supply lines to restaurants are not being filled anymore. and Have not been switched over to grocery stores.
But I feel that only explains fancy items? Wheat, milk, pork? I got nothing.
Baud
@hueyplong:
@debbie:
@Glidwrith:
The article says coronavirus though.
A Ghost to Most
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
You might want to check the course offerings at Liberty U. first.
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
They’re open!
Just One More Canuck
@A Ghost to Most:
or George Mason
The Thin Black Duke
@Duane: Why should they learn to do anything different? Too many people keep voting for them anyway.
Cameron
@donnah: Matt Gaetz is warming up in the bullpen.
Duane
@catclub: Trumpov claimed today that he had paid the farmers. Guess he found that 28 billion in his couch.
Martin
@Baud: Mostly due to distribution, I imagine. If you’re an egg grower you probably either directly, or though a distributor have a contract for a shit-ton of eggs to go to McDonalds, and then another contract for a distributor/packager who serves the grocery chains.
So problem 1 is getting the restaurant distributor eggs into the grocery distribution chain. Problem 2 is convincing people who would normally go to McDonalds to make their own eggs instead of eating corn flakes because they don’t know how to eat eggs.
Consider the sheer number of hamburgers we eat in this country vs how many hamburgers are being made at home. i imagine the processed food industry is doing gangbusters, but the foods (probably a lot of what California produces) that normally go to restaurants most people just don’t know what to do with.
Everything is out of balance.
Baud
Relevant to Steve King
lamh36
President Obama’s call to faith leaders for holy week! Remember when we had a calm, cool and collected POTUS…SMH
‘President Obama’s Holy Week Call with Faith Leaders’ on #SoundCloud #np https://soundcloud.com/obamafoundation/president-obamas-holy-week-call-with-faith-leaders
jackmac
@anon:
From the grave, Ronald Reagan nails it.
Baud
@Martin:
Even though California farmers are GOP, I don’t mind some money going to your state because it’s been a rock. Cutting wages is bullshit though.
Anne Laurie
Crops have to be picked, beasts have to be slaughtered, the resulting food-products need to be shipped (mostly trucked) from those farms to the grocery warehouses. The humans responsible for the picking & slaughtering & trucking are mostly sheltering-in-place, now. The ‘guest workers’ who’d be coming in from Mexico / Jamaica / Canada couldn’t get past our border agents — assuming they’d want to, now.
Farmers were suffering before the pandemic, as a result of Trump’s BSD tariff idiocy. Now they’re looking at a situation where, once they can get workers, those workers are going to be able to demand higher wages & better conditions. (Remember what they taught us in fifth grade, about social change after the Black Death?) Outside the giant agricorp factories — some of which pay Rep. King’s electioneering expenses — most farmers really can’t afford to keep feeding livestock and/or watching crops rot in the fields while they wait for a bailout.
Articles I’m seeing are already predicting widespread failure at least on the scale of the Reagan ‘Farm Aid’ disaster, if not the full-metal Dust Bowl abandonment of big chunks of the Midwest.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Cameron:
With a brewski in the other hand.
Brachiator
Do Republicans dream up stupid shit on their own, or do they employ a team of idiot experts to come up with stupid shit for them?
Martin
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I suspect there’s an ulterior motive here – if we have 9 hojillion unemployed, and we lower the farm wages so Mexicans won’t come in and work, then out of work Americans can prune fruit trees for $6/hr instead.
It’s just like this group to simultaneously hold in their head the idea that Mexicans are subhuman, and also that gun-toting white protestants will work for lower wages than Mexicans, provided we can lower wages enough.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jackmac:
Just try and avoid the rattlesnakes when you visit.
Mary G
This California taco shop operator is awesome (LAT):
Jackfruit vegan posole is my new band name.
catclub
I am putting on the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: Well, I’ll charitable and just say that’s a unique view of Economics.
catclub
But I would suspect they are categorized as essential.
debbie
@Mary G:
That’s really great to read. Thanks!
Martin
@Baud: None of that is going to affect CA anyway. We pay pretty high farm wages here because of the kind of work. Picking celery is hard but not terribly skilled. Pruning fruit trees, maintaining grape vines, that’s a lot harder and if you fuck it up you haven’t just ruined a few loads of celery but the tree you spent 4 years growing and expect to get produce off of for the next 20 years. It’s a big investment.
And most of the CA ‘farmers’, like so-called farmers in the rest of the country don’t know dick about farming. They’re just the ones who made the capital investment in the land and serve as landlords and contract out the farming to someone else. A lot of these bailouts are effectively just money to some private equity group. It’s just rent-seeking the whole way down.
Martin
@?BillinGlendaleCA: And of humanity.
Mary G
Ugh, LA Times has a less heartwarming story about Covid19 leaving behind long lasting damage to areas of the body:
I ordered six cloth masks from a lady on Etsy, because I think I’ll maybe have to social distance for a long time.
A Ghost to Most
@Just One More Canuck: Nailed it.
Kirk Spencer
@Martin:
Time for a side rant.
So my opinion is that one of the big things that killed cooking at home was the increased need for two (or more) incomes in a household.
I’m a halfway decent cook and I really enjoy my cooking – as do more than a handful of other people. But by the time I get home after my 9-10 hours plus hour each way commute, I have a choice where to spend my precious few hours of relaxation. And frankly, an hour on my feet in a hot environment just isn’t near the top of those choices. Fortunately I know enough tricks of prep and off-time labor and other shortcuts it’s maybe 20 minutes — or less, some days. Even so, I’m tempted to just grab something from curb-side on the way home more often than not. (I don’t for various reasons, but I”m tempted.)
If I were still trying to learn how to boil water and bake bread on top of all that, not knowing the tricks and techniques, well, I probably wouldn’t. Not unless forced.
So yeah, a lot of people don’t cook at home, but it’s for a very understandable reason imo.
Van Buren
@catclub: needs an upvote
Brachiator
@Martin:
Any labor is “skilled” if it is not easy to get sufficient numbers of workers to do it. And so, as you note, the relatively high wages.
Anyone who is laid off as a result of the economic shutdown, who is healthy enough, can go and get a job picking celery, if they wish.
MomSense
How is everyone feeling?
Martin
@Kirk Spencer: Yeah, I agree. We’ve been fortunate that Ms Martin has been able to stay home with kids/work from home, so there’s still a lot of cooking going on here, and I take the holidays and some of the weekend cooking. I was fortunate to learn cooking from my retired grandparents, but my mom didn’t because she was working.
Took me a long time to recognize why I turned out to be a better cook than her.
But habits play into it as well. I contend NYers do a better job at that multitasking because for them a trip to the grocery store isn’t an event – you figure out what you want for dinner and grab the stuff on the walk back home from the subway. Suburbs involve some trade-offs we don’t fully appreciate the cost of.
trollhattan
@donnah:
Thee of the four Iowa US Reps are Democrats. C’mon Iowa, clean sweep in 2020!
Baud
@MomSense:
My glutes are tight because I can’t get my massages. Are you doing better?
Brachiator
@Kirk Spencer:
Cooking at home is overrated. I guess many people needed two incomes. But a lot of women (mainly, not exclusively) wanted to work outside the home. And, oddly, enough, probably not a lot of men wanted to add cooking to their other duties.
Also, middle income households had more disposable income, so eating outside the home could become more than a rare luxury.
And recently, children and adolescents were no longer expected to sit down every evening at a set time and have meals with the family. Eating outside the home accommodates varying times that people want to eat.
ETA: I love eating at restaurants and other places. One of the joys of life is to have people who cook well professionally prepare dishes that I can dig into and enjoy. So, my comment also reflects my biases.
Also, I had an uncle who was an excellent cook and loved cooking. His wife happily let him run the kitchen. And friends and family would look for any reason or excuse to come to his house and get a meal. Sometimes they would bring stuff for him to cook. I admired the hell out of him.
Martin
Oh, shit.
So, a lot of public hospitals don’t do a ton of Medicare billing because they’re often the only recourse for the uninsured, and because they may be the only Level 1 trauma center in the area. And it’s the public hospitals that are generally going to get hit hardest in an outbreak like this. They’re not doing a zillion hip replacements and shit like that, they’re mostly an ambulance catch basin.
Felanius Kootea
@Just One More Canuck: Yup. George Mason scares me more than Liberty U because they have more of an aura of legitimacy (helps when your econ department’s libertarian head wins a Nobel Prize in spite of his seriously anti-democratic bent). I don’t work with anyone who takes Liberty U seriously but George Mason is another story.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: I would propose the real problem is Trump’s race based immigration policy is starving those farms of the workers they need and competition for labor is driving the wages up.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@TaMara (HFG):
That’s a great ad.
@Baud: King’s constituents mostly grow corn and soybeans, so it’s not going directly to anyone’s table. The trade wars were killing them because soybeans especially are shipped to Asia. I suppose the pandemic could affect supply chains and shipping even more. I don’t know.
Also, I’d add those crops are harvested mechanically. There used to be a field behind my house in Iowa that alternated between corn and soy, and one person on a tractor can do most of what was needed.
Martin
@Brachiator: A lot of my cooking is sitting next to the grill with a beer for an afternoon. You can add cooking to your repertoire and get a lot of good side benefits along for the ride.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yeah, that’s been the problem. A number of CA farmers have actually packed up and moved their farm to Mexico because of the lack of workers, just freeing up more land for the Resnicks to scoop up who specialize in high margin, exportable crops on the theory that man can live on pomegranates and pistachios alone.
Brachiator
@Mary G:
I would like to know how this breaks down with respect to age of the patient and other factors.
JMG
When I was in my 20s, I never thought I’d get married. So I figured I’d better learn to cook. Married for 38 years, kids grown, still like to cook. I do miss going out, so tonight I made bar food. Buffalo wings. They came out pretty well if I do say so myself.
Brachiator
@Martin:
There has never been anything about cooking that ever interested me. But I love eating at restaurants, and discovering places.
One of my joys in life was making friends with some cab drivers when I visited India and being invited to go to a local dive frequented by a variety of late-shift workers late in the evening, or very early in the morning.
I would be bored out of my mind sitting next to a grill with or without a beer.
A former girlfriend is an excellent cook, but was my partner in crime in hitting the Southern California restaurant scene.
I can cook when I need to. Have even come up with award winning chili. But otherwise, I believe that one of the purposes of civilization is the development of places where you go to eat.
Eric S.
@Martin: A lot of this. I saw / read an example with cheese. Producers of cheese only have so much capacity to package cheese at consumer levels, i.e. for grocery stores. A lot of their capacity was aimed restaurants.
Jerzy Russian
I haven’t read the comments, so forgive me if this is been pointed out before: Mr. King needs the names of people infected so he know who to pray for. He is therefore implying that God Himself does not know who these people are, and therefore He needs a bit of help.
Brachiator
@Jerzy Russian:
Good point. Surely, any self-respecting deity would at least have these people’s email addresses.
scav
@Jerzy Russian: More than that. God is not merely incapable of healing the sick without King’s help, He is also inattentive if not utterly indifferent to the well-being of the sick unless pushed, given the recommendation of King’s personal recommendation. It’s always who you know in their world.
NotMax
@Brachiator
Everyone ought to learn how to whip up at the minimum two different things, if only to have in reserve as an option. Don’t have to become Escoffier or Julia Child to turn out something palatable and satisfying. I sort of understand people who don’t cook but don’t grok for a second those who say they can’t cook.
For example, relatively fast and uncomplicated, an omelette (so many possible variations for additions, toppings or fillings).
For a somewhat more time intensive hearty dish, perhaps lasagna, which is at its core building a big sandwich which must be baked. I maintain there really is no such thing as a truly bad meat lasagna, only lesser lasagnas. With tasty packaged sauces and no-boil lasagna noodles now available, even simpler than in years previous.
karensky
Steve King would sell that medical info to the highest bidder as he will be out of a “job” in November.
Feathers
The food is rotting in the field for much the same reason as why we have no toilet paper. Completely different supply chain, with different quality requirements, processing factories, packaging, distributors, and so on. The food as ingredients going in the back door at a restaurant is a very different product from the food as groceries you buy at your local megamart.
@Martin: This is complete bullshit. Picking crops is highly skilled. Maybe not doing it at weekend gardening levels, but doing it all day, very fast, and using a method that produces undamaged, uniform vegetables is something that takes as long to master as getting a college degree. And to make a living at it, you have to know how to pick many different crops.
Follow Sarah Taber for a while on Twitter and learn some hard truth about America’s “family farms.” They basically land barons, semi-feudal, with practices still patterned after farms run on slave labor. Their profits come through being landlords and tax write offs, with no upside to actually being good farmers and stewards of the land. They actively impoverish the communities they live in so that there will be nobody to challenge them or their self-mythologizing about “family farms.”
In short, the skilled labor is the farm workers actually doing the work, not the farmers who simply inherit the land, generation after generation.
Yutsano
This goes back to being a Navy brat. Mom worked nights. Originally my older brother was supposed to be in charge of cooking dinner but he was a useless lump back then. It fell to me at 10 to feed us kids. So I started with the easy stuff. Then Mom started charging me with harder challenges. Between her and necessity I got to be pretty decent at cooking. This turned out to be a big asset in college. It’s no wonder my YouTube feed is full of various recipe videos. I won’t ever claim cooking is for everyone. But a few core recipes are always a good thing to pull out of your pocket especially in a situation like this.
lumpkin
Is there some crazy-ass rightwing theory behind this or did King dream this up on his own? Isn’t this from the AIDS playbook? But I don’t get where the hate comes from, unless they think only liberal city dwellers get it.
Feathers
@NotMax: No boil noodles really change the game on lasagna. You can make it in a 8×8 pan, or even better, do a deep dish lasagna in a bread loaf pan. You end up with two generous portions, plus one more as leftovers. Makes it feasible as a weeknight family supper or for one or two people. I’ll try to drop the recipe into a recipe thread.
One of the real problems is that TV and magazine recipes are just too damn complicated. When Rachel Ray started, she actually did simple weeknight stuff, but as the show went on, the only way to not be repetitive was to add more ingredients. Same with Alton Brown. He makes fancier stuff now, but it isn’t necessarily better than it was the first time around. Ina Garten is so popular because her thing is what her husband Jeffrey likes, so she actually does do the same thing over and over again, but the same difficulty level and a different flavor, lemon, cumin, tarragon, etc. The cooking methods are the same, only the cocktails really change.
Yutsano
@NotMax:
You don’t even have to boil the noodles. Just lay them flat in a large baking dish (like a 13×9) and cover with boiling water. Let soak for 20 minutes. They’re perfectly soft.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Everyone ought to learn how to whip up at the minimum two different things, if only to have in reserve as an option. Don’t have to become Escoffier or Julia Child to turn out something palatable and satisfying. I sort of understand people who don’t cook but don’t grok for a second those who say they can’t cook.
Never said I can’t cook. Just said I have absolutely no interest in cooking. I do not find any joy in it. I learned to cook growing up, and can even make a few tasty dishes. But again, I find cooking to be a dull, boring, tedious task, to be avoided whenever possible.
Also, I do know a few souls who try to cook, but who absolutely cannot make a dish worth eating.
Martin
@Feathers: What I mean is that any rando can learn how to pick celery properly in a matter of minutes. It’ll take weeks to be fast at it but you can do it properly in a short period of time. You may not be profitable for your employer if you’re slow as shit at it, but if you need to replace that worker you don’t need to wait for someone with a credential, etc.
But pruning a fruit tree to maximize harvest amount, access, etc. takes a lot longer just to learn to do well, and of course, more time on top of that.
Skilled vs unskilled is more a measure of competent or incompetent, not a measure of proficient or unproficient. Even highly skilled work that requires a lot of training (like doctors) to even do the job has proficient and unproficient individuals. A doctor doing their first hip replacement is skilled but not proficient. A farm worker picking celery is relatively unskilled but perhaps very proficient (and therefore valuable because their $15/hr is probably cheaper than paying me $5/hr because I’d be so damn slow).
Kent
Fuel prices are also at record lows. That is one of the biggest costs for most crop farmers. Those massive tractors burn enormous amounts of fuel.
It’s probably the export markets that are in the tank.
Kent
In a much earlier part of my life I drove combines for a harvesting crew. Those monster corporate farms that grow corn and soybeans need pretty large crews to harvest their thousands of acres. One guy can’t come close to doing it. Typical big farm probably needs a crew of at least 10 with 5 running combines and 5 running trucks. Those used to be college students or locals in the 80s when I was doing it. Now they are mostly Mexican-based crews.
Martin
@Brachiator: Yeah, I’m not food motivated. I’ll contently eat a PB&J sandwich every day until I die. I only cook because the people around me like it. When I’m single, I never, ever cook. It’s not worth the effort for me. But I’ll spend 12 hours making my wife her favorite dish and two days for a thanksgiving spread for friends and family.
I’m probably the target market for Soylent – just give me the Jetsons shake that provides all of the nutrients I need so I can do other stuff.
danielx
Always have done cooking at my house, which doesn’t mean I don’t tire of it from time to time. It does help to learn some workarounds – for example, if you substitute brown gravy from an envelope for demiglace in chicken Marsala nobody will know the difference, especially after the second glass of wine.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kent: I did not know that. I’m a city girl so the only thing I know is what I saw out my living room window. The field looked big to me, but I guess some of them are gigantic.
Kent
These days many of them don’t even live in the same state. They hire a manager to run the farm in Nebraska while they live in some no-income tax state like Florida.
NotMax
@Brachiator
Was responding generally, not specifically at you.
;)
Would then posit they’re attempting cooking the wrong dishes. Hard (not impossible, mind you) to screw up something like a tuna noodle casserole using canned cream of mushroom soup, for example. Not haute cuisine, but suitably filling.
Omnes Omnibus
@MomSense: I’m fine.
bluefish
@catclub: Yes!
zhena gogolia
@TaMara (HFG):
Great ad.
zhena gogolia
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
My minister loved the tweet!
Kent
A typical combine might be able to harvest about 100 acres in a day. Maybe more now. I did this in the 80s. If your farm has 10,000 acres and you have say a 1-week window to get the soybean harvest in before it rains or hails or something then you are going to need a big crew and a LOT of machinery.
The rural plains are divided into 1 square mile grids with at least a gravel or dirt road every mile. 1 square mile = a “section” which is 640 acres. Most corporate farms are many square miles large. And a lot of so-called family farms are actually run like small corporations. Farmers tend to either get bigger or get out due to economies of scale.
danielx
@TaMara (HFG):
it may be a good ad, but if I have to watch Trump’s fat ass playing golf I’m giving it a pass
zhena gogolia
@danielx:
Yeah, there’s a lot of that.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: I had a friend who felt that way about pizza. He likened pizza to sex, in that…
“Even the worst sex I ever had was still pretty good.”
rikyrah
I am watching Hayes.He has a doctor on who had COVID-19.
She said
‘ I have antibodies, but I don’t know if I am still contagious’
????
NotMax
@danielx
Alton Brown may show up to flay me with homemade six foot long strands of fettucine for saying it but can knock off significant time with chicken marsala by using frozen pre-cooked fried chicken pieces and 90% of people will not glom onto a difference worth mentioning.
Although now with Instant Pot available, dishes such as chicken marsala are, if not a snap then a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Aleta
@MomSense: What a day. What a storm. We had a lot of bright lightning last night and also transformers blowing out. A corkscrew willow I planted years ago broke. . The top branches are on the ground now; their shape is beautiful. (I wonder if I could do something with them.) The big old basswood lost two boughs, and a Japanese maple I planted lost its upright part. Around the neighborhood much worse damage. No power of course. Two years ago we bought a little generator and hired an electrician to put in an outdoor outlet and wire it to the furnace. She tested it when she was done and it worked. Today the generator worked fine but furnace didn’t come on. Called the electrician and she was going to come in an hour. Assured her we’d been isolating for 3 weeks + … then she mentioned she’d been very sick about a month ago with what she was sure was the virus. And she would wear a mask. My partner has 3-4 high risk conditions, plus age. If he or first I got the virus there’s a chance he wouldn’t make it.
But he really wanted the heat on. And he really wanted his new little generator to work. So he didn’t say no. When he told me, first I struggled and then I called it off. I didn’t want to be so swayed by the desire to get the thing working that the risk seemed reasonable, when actually we could tough it out for at least one night at 28 degrees. Now it’s cold, dark, and I feel bad. But I think it was the right decision, or at least a good experience for other times when something I really want makes my mind tell me it will probably be fine. It’s supposed to be in the 40s tomorrow, then get even colder that night, but it’s worth waiting 24 hours to see if the power comes back I think.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
When my father was courting the woman who was to become my stepmother, he asked her “Can you cook?”
“No,” she replied, opening a cookbook, “but I can read.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@zhena gogolia:
Oh good! In that case, we probably escaped the lightning strike. Anyone who’s been in Zoom meetings these last few weeks has to laugh, I think.
Jay Noble
@Kirk Spencer: At some point, personal economics becomes the cook in vs dine out/delivery option. At the most basic level, the joy and savings you get cooking times your hourly wage must be greater than the cost of dining out or delivery. As my paycheck grew over the years, I cooked less ate out more. And then there were a few anomalies where it was cheaper to get what I wanted from a restaurant than make it myself.
rikyrah
@Mary G:
I have ordered 9 masks. Sigh.
danielx
@NotMax:
been thinking about an instant pot, but…one more appliance taking up counter space, etc
Brachiator
@NotMax:
RE: Also, I do know a few souls who try to cook, but who absolutely cannot make a dish worth eating.
Life is too short to spend time trying to figure out what dishes you might be able to cook when you can skip the entire thing and go out and have a good meal. Or call and have something delivered.
Also note I have a friend who can make a new feast from leftovers. On the few times when I have had to cook I throw leftovers away. Cooking is boring. Leftovers are hell.
This is why you have friends who cook.
NotMax
@danielx
Doesn’t have to perpetually sit on the counter.
Not something I say lightly – it’s been a life changer. (Can’t comment about brands other than the original.)
@Brachiator
Understood, and nothing wrong with that at any level, down to and including the sub-atomic.
Between you and me the vast majority of the meals I prepare at home turn out better tasting than the same thing ordered in a restaurant.
/humble is my middle name
:)
Brachiator
@Martin:
Totally agree that cooking for others can be enjoyable and rewarding.
ETA: I have come to the conclusion that Thanksgiving should be catered. When I was growing up, everyone participated in Thanksgiving. Some of the men would bring fish that they caught or game that they had actually hunted. Kids would help crack pecans and clean and help prepare vegetables.
Then, for a time I would attend Thanksgivings where the ladies cooked and the men sat and watched football.
I figure that if we now live in a time where a group of people only have to provide their presence, then everyone should be able to relax and enjoy a meal without the work.
Martin
@Brachiator: I make the turkey on the barbecue, so yet another case where I get to sit outside with a beer. ;)
MomSense
@Aleta:
I’m so sorry. We had a lot of damage in our neighborhood with many trees and limbs down. We got our power back sometime in the night, but it’s been flickering off and on most of the day. My son didn’t have school because so many are still without power and internet. Hope you get your light and heat back soon!!!
MomSense
@Baud:
I’m doing fine. Had a long talk with my son in CT today which was nice.
danielx
@Brachiator:
It’s true – there are people who can burn water trying to boil it, or fuck up a microwaveable tv dinner.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Listening to any good music?
Doc Sardonic
I like to cook, it helps me relax and I enjoy the process. Sharp knife and a pile of clients….uhhh vegetables, yeah vegetables to chop up great for clearing the mind. My cooking origin story is that of a young man leaving for college and deciding he needed to learn how to cook. So I was sitting in a recliner in the family room and told my Mom that I needed to learn to cook so you need to teach me. She says okay and next thing I know she walks up behind the chair I am sitting in with a brand new red/blue plaid covered Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, drops it in my lap and says “ here, you can read at a college level you can learn the same way I did. You can read and follow directions you can cook”
Omnes Omnibus
@MomSense: I discovered Meg Myers recently and am planning on hurting the people who knew about her before and didn’t tell me.
And, for some reason, I have been revisiting John Prine.
Kent
I use mine all the time. We have a big kitchen with lots of gear and the instapot gets more use than anything else. But I also make a lot of soups and stews and I frequently use it to make shredded chicken or pork.
You can find them very cheap on sale at Costco from time to time.
There are a LOT of good cookbooks and recipe web sites devoted to the instapot as well so you aren’t left wondering what to do with it. I never use it for sauteing. Only for pressure cooking. If the recipe contains a saute step I just do that in the stove and dump the results into the instapot. But if you are very space constrained or in a tiny apartment it might be OK for that too.
Brachiator
@Martin:
My BIL is an absolute barbecue master. The last time I went to visit my sister in Texas, he cooked up some of the tastiest ribs I ever tasted. Brought my sister a recipe for turkey which came out very well.
Double OT, but related. I saw that Yelp laid off 1,000 people and put another 1,100 on furlough. This is about 17 percent of their labor force. They obviously depend on people eating at restaurants and submitting reviews. I wonder if the eventual lockdown recovery might have a long term impact of these types of companies.
HumboldtBlue
@Mary G:
Rock on!
zhena gogolia
@Aleta:
Oh, I hope it does!
catclub
I wold like to know why the case fatality rate varies from 14% (italy)
to 1.7% in Norway, for advanced western nations. I don’t think testing rates explain it.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ooh I don’t know Meg Myers. I’ll have to check her out. Michael McDermott has a new recording coming out I think.
I can’t get over John Prine.
NotMax
@Kent
Have found it sautes quite well, plus you get every particle of that luscious brown fond when you deglaze.
Martin
Ok, data time. I didn’t do it yesterday because I was working through a thorny data thing at work and just didn’t have the mental bandwidth. Didn’t get that sucker figured out until about 2AM.
Anyway, generally things are improving, but the rate of improvement is the real news.
Two really big things of note:
NY has stated that they are undercounting to the tune of hundreds of deaths per day. I think any place struggling is doing the same – Italy, Spain, Detroit, New Orleans, etc. This will look like a premature peaking as their growth simply goes uncounted, and extends the apparent recovery as they catch up and either inflate the numbers, or simply stop undercounting. Because these large urban areas are such a large part of the national count it may give the appearance that things are improving when really they’re just breaking in different ways. ICU number declines, case declines, all reinforce that things are getting better, so make sure you look for all numbers pointing in a consistent direction.
The other is that these numbers are not dropping anywhere near the rate they climbed. That’s what flattening the curve is ultimately about. We will not get to 0 on this strategy, we’ll just get down to a bearable steady-state. That means that you’re likely to have this slow asymptotic curve. If we open a little, it’ll just slow that rate, if we open too much, it’ll reverse it. Every place will have a different steady state in terms of % of population. NYC will be very hard to open at all given how socially connected the city is (subway, etc.) where places like Los Angeles with primarily a car culture will be at least a little bit easier.
I’ll add a third thing. We determined that a large instructional space – a lecture hall, sped reproduction by roughly a factor of 10 and there was no way to get that down to a safe level – masks weren’t enough. Churches are exactly the same kind of space. Don’t go to a physical church. There are services online – attend those instead.
horatius
@donnah: White Supremacy is a hell of a drug.
Kent
Fair enough. I have a big kitchen with a 6-burner gas stove and lots of saute pans so seems kind of ridiculous to saute in the electric instapot. But I might try it sometime.
Gvg
@Baud: farmers don’t get all,the food money nor should they. First, they have costs before they make a profit. Next the food has to be processed. At least that is washing and packaging, but it may be quite a bit more like turning grain into flour then bread or cereal or other things. Those steps cost money too for factory’s and workers, supplies and transportation. Then they get distributed all over the world or locally and that costs money and equipment and wages for all those workers. Then it turns up in stores, and some of it spoils and a shocking amount gets stolen. Those stores have wages and payments for buildings and equipment too.
my relatives farm and it’s a common thing for them to think they are being ripped off because the food they grow costs so much more in the stores however they are ignoring all the other costs and wages of the whole food supply chair. Everybody is working hard, not just the farmers and if the chain breaks everybody in the chain of production loses money. Grocery stores profit margin is just a few%. Farmers go bankrupt a lot, so do stores and sometimes even big chains.
this pandemic is going to reveal some serious weaknesses all over the world.
Gvg
@Dorothy A. Winsor: not only that, those machines cost an ungodly amount. They have to be worth it, which means their have to be enough crops to need that big a machine. 20 years ago my grandfathers farm being run by my uncle had amazing automatic machines that milk a huge number of cows at once all sanitary, pump the milk to a chilled tanker. Another machine scoops out all the poop (don’t ask or look city girl you don’t want to know) anyway it turned out that at that time the profitable point between machine cost and the market was a farmer needed a farm 4 times the size than the areas traditional homestead size of their ancestors. So the best successful farmers bought out their neighbors. As I recall the best size herd was 120 cows. A lot of the kids wanted to move to the city anyway.
the best size to make a profit changes according to market prices, technology changes and changing demand. The ideal size for a profitable dairy farm in Wisconsin May be quite different now. That area was still really family farms though. They still exist, though corporate does too. Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s a big wide varied country not all alike.
Origuy
@Martin: You might be interested in the Santa Clara County Coronavirus Dashboard. It goes into great detail, showing the availability of ICU beds, ventilators, etc. I think you need to enable Flash to see the displays.
Fair Economist
@Martin: The LA 7-day new cases average dropped the past two days, so there is hope. “Stay at home” is certainly taking a lot more time to show benefits than we’d all thought, though. I’m favoring in-household transmission as the explanation; after a lockdown or similar there’s still another round or two of transmissions within households. Perhaps somebody with access to detailed data will put out a paper on it soon.
debbie
@MomSense:
Schools are back in session in Maine?
leeleeFL
@Baud: They are still in the shit because if their messiah, tRump, and his tariffs and such. They won’t ever admit it.
My Daughter wants to know why Dairies a pouring out 1000s of gallons of milk. Restaurants are closed, but ppl are still drinking milk at home I bet
leeleeFL
@dmsilev: Stunning, I gotta lie down!
I said this the other day about Bill o’Reilly’s BS but it’s good here as well. My hatred for these ppl us incandescent!
Jim Parish
@dmsilev: Eugene Scalia has been a dick for more than twenty years. He was the business community’s point man in the struggle to keep repetitive stress disorder out of OSHA’s reach. After more than a decade, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, rules were promulgated – and immediately repealed when Dubya became president. Dubya then appointed Scalia as Solicitor of Labor – the guy who files suits on behalf of workers in connection with OSHA or other violations. Fox, henhouse, y’know?