Friday day off stuff
I don't have the entire day off, there are a few tasks I need to do that won't take long -- less than an hour, maybe less than a half hour. But then I'm off until Tuesday.
I slept poorly, feeling embarassed about yesterday's panel presentation not going as well as I'd hoped, even though objectively I do not think it was my fault at all. But it was not my role to lead the group -- as the person from the government my role is strictly limited. But the group should've had a leader who kept track of time and moved things along appropriately. That's Panel 101.
Taking part via Zoom, I found it impossible to "read the room" -- I never even saw what the audience looked like. This made my comments feel less responsive, from my point of view. Perhaps it all went better than it felt to me.
But I feel that flying to LA to take part in a one hour presentation would've been overkill in this age of COVID and global warming. I do not wish I'd gone there in person instead. I just wish the panel had been properly led, the way I'd have led it, heh.
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The federal shutdown drama was resolved last night, apparently by two Republican Senators leaving town, which made it impossible for the three Republican shutdown artists to get what they wanted -- blocking Biden's vaccine mandates -- by holding the federal budget hostage. The vote to block lost 48-50.
But we still won't have an actual budget, just another short-term patch, this one for two months, because Democrats have been spending all their spare time fighting over what should be in the BBB, rather than what should be in the regular annual budget. And the debt ceiling still hasn't been lifted, so the federal government may soon run out of cash before running out of authority to spend the cash. It's government by clown car. A clownocracy. We suck. I mean, Trump was a Clown President, and now we have a Clown Congress nominally run by Democrats, where every bill is held hostage by clowns of one party or the other.
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Apparently I'm the David Brooks of LJ, his NYT opinion piece about the abortion debate sounded a lot like my own take on things. That both sides ignore the arguments of the other side, "It's a woman", no, "It's a baby". But he added one point to my take -- although he thinks this issue should be resolved by legislatures not courts, our present-day state legislatures are often too polarized (because gerrymandered) to come up with compromise solutions. Instead we'll have states where abortion is effectively banned, and states where abortion is legal through the third trimester, and pregnant people in banned states will either have to travel to get abortions or smuggle in abortion pills.
Smuggled abortion pills will make a huge difference if/when abortions become illegal again, as compared to pre-Roe v. Wade illegal abortions. But they aren't perfect, and will result in some deformed babies when they don't work and there's no professional follow-up abortion.
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Data on the Omicron variant is still too limited to draw conclusions or make predictions, other than to repeat that we should've known all along that COVID will continue to evolve, based on what was already known about coronaviruses in general, and what is already known about COVID. We should've already been updating the vaccines/boosters to cover the latest variants (Alpha, Beta, and Delta). There has been enough time, we could've been receiving Delta boosters already, but the powers-that-be decided the orignial vaccines worked "well enough" against Delta. If they don't work well enough against Omicron then next year those of us who care will get Omicron boosters. Meanwhile, we're obviously not doing enough mitigation to keep COVID from spreading, so of course Omicron will spread also. But we don't know yet whether it is more or less dangerous or more or less contagious than previous variants.
Early evidence from South Africa points to Omicron being more contagious, but perhaps less dangerous, which is an interesting combo, more like the common cold (which has always been caused by, among hundreds of other viruses, some coronavirus cousins to COVID). But we need more data.
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Most of the school teachers I know, especially the men, have been hating their jobs since COVID popped up.
Ditto for the health care workers I know who have been working the ER/ICU side.
And we all know how there are now labor shortages at restaurants, among schoolbus drivers, etc.
This virus has taken its toll not only in sickness and death, but in stress for those who are repeatedly exposed to the virus and to our ongoing fights over mitigating -- or not -- its spread.
I know it has also been tough on parents, who haven't had consistent patterns for managing their children's lives. I know one family of two school teachers and two school-aged children -- I have no idea how they haven't murdered each other over the past two years.
Perhaps our polarizing social media and hyperpartisan politics have caused us all to forget how much stress everybody else has been under.
It's difficult to have empathy for others when we're under a lot of stress ourselves.
I slept poorly, feeling embarassed about yesterday's panel presentation not going as well as I'd hoped, even though objectively I do not think it was my fault at all. But it was not my role to lead the group -- as the person from the government my role is strictly limited. But the group should've had a leader who kept track of time and moved things along appropriately. That's Panel 101.
Taking part via Zoom, I found it impossible to "read the room" -- I never even saw what the audience looked like. This made my comments feel less responsive, from my point of view. Perhaps it all went better than it felt to me.
But I feel that flying to LA to take part in a one hour presentation would've been overkill in this age of COVID and global warming. I do not wish I'd gone there in person instead. I just wish the panel had been properly led, the way I'd have led it, heh.
-----
The federal shutdown drama was resolved last night, apparently by two Republican Senators leaving town, which made it impossible for the three Republican shutdown artists to get what they wanted -- blocking Biden's vaccine mandates -- by holding the federal budget hostage. The vote to block lost 48-50.
But we still won't have an actual budget, just another short-term patch, this one for two months, because Democrats have been spending all their spare time fighting over what should be in the BBB, rather than what should be in the regular annual budget. And the debt ceiling still hasn't been lifted, so the federal government may soon run out of cash before running out of authority to spend the cash. It's government by clown car. A clownocracy. We suck. I mean, Trump was a Clown President, and now we have a Clown Congress nominally run by Democrats, where every bill is held hostage by clowns of one party or the other.
-----
Apparently I'm the David Brooks of LJ, his NYT opinion piece about the abortion debate sounded a lot like my own take on things. That both sides ignore the arguments of the other side, "It's a woman", no, "It's a baby". But he added one point to my take -- although he thinks this issue should be resolved by legislatures not courts, our present-day state legislatures are often too polarized (because gerrymandered) to come up with compromise solutions. Instead we'll have states where abortion is effectively banned, and states where abortion is legal through the third trimester, and pregnant people in banned states will either have to travel to get abortions or smuggle in abortion pills.
Smuggled abortion pills will make a huge difference if/when abortions become illegal again, as compared to pre-Roe v. Wade illegal abortions. But they aren't perfect, and will result in some deformed babies when they don't work and there's no professional follow-up abortion.
-----
Data on the Omicron variant is still too limited to draw conclusions or make predictions, other than to repeat that we should've known all along that COVID will continue to evolve, based on what was already known about coronaviruses in general, and what is already known about COVID. We should've already been updating the vaccines/boosters to cover the latest variants (Alpha, Beta, and Delta). There has been enough time, we could've been receiving Delta boosters already, but the powers-that-be decided the orignial vaccines worked "well enough" against Delta. If they don't work well enough against Omicron then next year those of us who care will get Omicron boosters. Meanwhile, we're obviously not doing enough mitigation to keep COVID from spreading, so of course Omicron will spread also. But we don't know yet whether it is more or less dangerous or more or less contagious than previous variants.
Early evidence from South Africa points to Omicron being more contagious, but perhaps less dangerous, which is an interesting combo, more like the common cold (which has always been caused by, among hundreds of other viruses, some coronavirus cousins to COVID). But we need more data.
-----
Most of the school teachers I know, especially the men, have been hating their jobs since COVID popped up.
Ditto for the health care workers I know who have been working the ER/ICU side.
And we all know how there are now labor shortages at restaurants, among schoolbus drivers, etc.
This virus has taken its toll not only in sickness and death, but in stress for those who are repeatedly exposed to the virus and to our ongoing fights over mitigating -- or not -- its spread.
I know it has also been tough on parents, who haven't had consistent patterns for managing their children's lives. I know one family of two school teachers and two school-aged children -- I have no idea how they haven't murdered each other over the past two years.
Perhaps our polarizing social media and hyperpartisan politics have caused us all to forget how much stress everybody else has been under.
It's difficult to have empathy for others when we're under a lot of stress ourselves.