“This is a critical moment for OPEC + as a holdout tomorrow by the Russian’s could drive oil prices to their financial crisis lows,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, in a note. “The demand destruction that stemmed from the coronavirus will be a bigger shock than what happened in 2007-2008, so any failure from OPEC + could warrant another massive selloff with crude prices.”
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now is a great time to tell all of your friends(and finance people) to devest from fossil fuel investments.
before they lose more money.
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Our cleaning service only comes through every Friday night, so by Monday the viruses should be dead, I’d assume. As to how they go about cleaning, I don’t know, other than they never put stuff back where it was when they finish. I found my mouse upside down once.
Since you brought up Google, Google prohibits employees use of personal computers (including laptops) for work purposes. Employees are issued a laptop, a desktop, and cloud computing resources. There is a refresh policy, and a way to acquire more then one of each if needed.
Other companies I have work for in the past were similar, they want employee work on employer owned (and generally managed) devices. Working at Apple was the only time they didn’t mandate Apple managed devices, but they did need to be Apple owned.
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I agree with you about the hard work before us.
I am grateful for less air pollution anywhere.
I hope the Chinese who are sick with COVID19 and/or other respiratory illnesses will benefit from this small mercy–however brief–of having cleanish, breathable air.
I have traveled in China along their east coast, and even in their self-described “small” cities of 5 million souls, the air there can be pretty challenging to breathe.
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Which I’m not.
Honestly, outside tech and finance I don’t think companies will be so scrupulous. If they can avoid paying for office space and also for tech they’ll be happy. Gradually pushing everyone into “self employment”? Happier still.
The problem is: both are true. This is a more deadly virus than anything this country has had to deal with in the last century and we’re especially vulnerable to it (thanks to a variety of reasons, including that it survives in the environment a lot longer than even the 1918 flu virus). The problem is we’ve got a president going on television denying all of that. As many of his followers are in high-risk groups, they have a high chance of realizing his information is wrong - briefly, at least.
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That’s usually a sign that it’s dead.
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stores here are oddly busy and I don’t understand how there are kids around at 10am
but I only fill my car once a year (just can’t completely give it up but I bike everywhere else) so kinda thrilled I’ve got a few gallons left, wonder how low it will go
ps. imagine how climate change, predictably causing more viruses to spread (read that years ago) also incidentally causes climate healing
All that said (and you won’t get an argument from me), it’s just a shitty thing to say.
If we want to solve the problem of an oil-based society, that will take a lot more than a pandemic…
Not this way. I am not grateful for people dying, whatever the outcome, especially if it’s only short term.
This is part of how we got here in the first place, our modern sensibility that if it solves a problem, that human life can be expendable. It’s both malthusian AND Stalinist…
It’s horrible, no doubt. They absolutely need to address the issue, but can we at least agree that saying a pandemic is worth it, if it gives us a short term respite is bullshit?
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Supremely so.
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Maybe, but I expect it would fall into more of a public v. private company thing. It is easy to argue that you can’t be sarbanes oxley compliant if you don’t control all the software on computers, or more accurately if you can’t recreate the environment. So allowing me to personally use a personal machine would be tough for someone to recreate that environment. So if you worked for exxon, sure they are happy to dump oil into the water, poison the workers, and hire them for under 30hrs/week so they don’t need to pay insurance…but they also need to supply the computing resources so they can stay soxley compliant.
I know a lot of law firms that aren’t subject to soxley also work this way with all staff and contractors, so it is probable more general then just soxley.
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Pandemics are bad.
I am not in favor of pandemics.
I am not in favor of people dying in pandemics.
I am not in favor of the suffering of living beings, and the causes of suffering.
Clean air is good.
I am in favor of clean air in all places, in all times.
I am in favor of living beings having clean air to breathe.
Both of these conditions obtain, in China and elsewhere.
Both can be true. I am not rejoicing. I am not doing a happy dance over here.
I am not prepared nor am I willing to put a value on either of these conditions. As some have posted upthread, air pollution kills people and causes suffering, and has been underway a lot longer than COVID-19.
I can only hope that the people who may be experiencing weeks of clean air for the first time in a very long time (excepting Spring Festival aka “Chinese New Year”), will retain vivid memories of their experiences. May these new experiences and memories provide motivation for China to further clean up its industrial fouling of the public commons.
May the brave Chinese environmentalists who work for environmental-and-social justice find new allies and succeed, for the benefit of all.
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Are you sure? COVID-19 is around position 50 of that list:
And for for many of those the cure or vaccine has only been identified in the last century.
Oh, my mistake for not being clear what I wanted to say: the virus is pretty much the same anywhere (different strains, maybe, but even that is not clear yet). I was referring to the vulnerability that is specific to the US, mainly a fucked up health system that is also pretty expensive, a social system that exposes the vulnerable part of the society even more than elsewhere, and institutions that have recently been crippled by a moronic president.
Admitting that vulnerability is the first step towards improving things.
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I should have said a more deadly epidemic. It’s not the most deadly virus, but we’ve not had a smallpox epidemic in the last century, for example, so the two aren’t exactly comparable…
Yeah, I wasn’t being very clear - that’s absolutely the case, because of the health care/social system as you say, but also because it’s a highly transmittable virus that we aren’t taking seriously, unlike other infected countries.
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Exactly. It doesn’t take a pandemic to improve air quality. It takes the will to change behavior. In the case of large cities in China, the outbreak caused a change in behavior that, coincidentally, led to a temporary improvement in air quality. Maybe that change in behavior due to the virus can inspire a change in behavior that codifies an improvement in air quality. But the former isn’t necessary for the latter.
What has been getting on my nerves are the people who seem to welcome the virus for it’s secondary or tertiary effects, which can be accomplished without death and misery, as if it’s the only way to accomplish them. That goes just as much for the “silver lining” folks.
A casket with a silver lining still houses a corpse.
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I fear that people will shy away from mass transit to keep away from other people. Maybe justifiably so for now, but they will persist in avoiding mass transit long after covid-19 has run its course.
That probably means increased private automobile use in the long term, maybe balanced off a little by not driving to be parts of large gatherings of people.
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“But this is the easy way to accomplish it, nobody need do anything and only those other people will die leaving it better for us!”
I swear there are people out there right now that think there is nothing wrong with that thinking.
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Yeah, hah! have you ever seen zombies take a train? … (brain wave) where’s Samuel L?!
