Hard News: Together Alone
193 Responses
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
What are they supposed to do?
At the intersection of the cash economy and neutralising surface borne pathogens, there must literally be a place for Money Laundering...
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Moz, in reply to
That made me laugh. Thankfully we have plastic money that’s designed to be laundered… the government was even more prepared than we knew!
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#saferCommunitiesApart
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Welcome back, everyone. While we're all in lockdown, I have my Steam account to fall back on. And, of course, my 3D art hobby...
https://www.deviantart.com/deepred6502/art/Prepare-Not-Panic-833572227
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/prepare-not-panic/2927830/?phttps://www.deviantart.com/deepred6502/art/Coming-like-a-ghost-town-834964173
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/coming-like-a-ghost-town/2929811/?p -
Neil, in reply to
Yes, some unexpected consequences. Less meth consumption will free up resources in EDs and acute mental health units. As people high on meth pose significant risk to health professionals that’s one safety issue that should reduce dramatically.
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WaynePhillips, in reply to
Walking around leafy suburbs of Christchurch earlier in the week pre lockdown there were loads of people obviously packing up and leaving for their bolthole (on the peninusula? castle hill?). Burglars on bikes
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Robert Urquhart, in reply to
@Moz - A client in admin at a significant business association told me at the beginning of the week that their (mostly closed up of course) members had already seen a significant spike in break-ins and they were working hard to help increase security for their member's premises over the pending shut down; so there's your answer. Whole high-density burglarising fields have effectively opened up :(
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Moz, in reply to
I work for a company that manufactures burglar alarms, and we are seeing a slight increase in installs, but I expect our actual installers are going to start copping it if Australia follows Aotearoa down that path. Lots of burglaries normally means lots of alarm system responses and repairs.
Our Italian customers are already grumpy because air freight is “we’ll see what we can do” right now so their just-in-time ordering habits are not working well for them. But we don’t exactly have a paratroop wing of the company so there’s not much we can do for them.
The good news is that I write software so I've been working from home for the last two weeks. I visited the office once, on Saturday, to enable remote desktop on my work PC (and turn it on, normally I turn if off when not in the office since I can work from home without it).
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Robert Urquhart, in reply to
I'm a web-dev, our whole company including reception/phones has been working from home since Monday (and preparing to work from home for the previous two weeks). I visited the office on Monday to pick up an extra monitor and am remoting to my office PC as needed for various things, but most staff ended up taking their entire computer setups home.
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Hi Russell and other PAS people! First time caller here but Russell you’ve been a big influence on my life since a friend introduced me to your Friday emailer in the mid 90’s. I’ve always found your intelligent and nuanced views on a whole variety of topics really interesting.
I am (was?) a commercial airline pilot in Papua New Guinea so my income prospects have inverted in a small space amount of time. I fear aviation won’t ever recover from this so I have to consider the prospect of never flying an aircraft again. It’s pretty scary trying to think about how to make a living in the future for me.
Isolation is going well so far, in fact I feel very guilty about the beauty of my surroundings. I live on my boat, an 86 year old cutter built in Port Chalmers. She was the Lyttleton Harbour Board Pilot Boat for nearly 50 years. We are anchored near Man O War bay at the eastern end of Waiheke. There are about a dozen other live aboard sailing vessels in the bay. Saw a beautiful sunrise over Coromandel this morning. Exercise will be walks on the shore and swimming off the boat while the water is still warm enough.
We will stay put as far as practicable but will eventually have to move to better shelter if the wind changes and possibly a trip to oneroa or coromandel for supplies in a few weeks.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Yes, some unexpected consequences. Less meth consumption will free up resources in EDs and acute mental health units. As people high on meth pose significant risk to health professionals that’s one safety issue that should reduce dramatically.
I think there's also the prospect of restricted access to drugs (including the legal ones) driving drug-seeking behaviour that increases transmission risks. We want to keep people stable, not throw them into withdrawal.
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Moz, in reply to
I live on my boat
I have a few friends and follow some youtubers on boats, and you lot who are already in place are in many ways lucky. The poor sods who were mid-ocean are finding it tricky to get into port if they’re not arriving in their country-of-citizenship. Most lockdown laws don’t account for the literally ones of people so affected.
Sailing Zatara crew just got back into Aotearoa before the lockdown but now they can’t get into most places if they leave, and even sailing within the country is a bit tricky. So they might be spending the lockdown in Auckland.
Which beats one couple I know who were on a two day mooring on an island in Italy when the lockdown hit. They legally couldn’t stay there, but also couldn’t leave. And they didn’t have provisions for more than a few days anyway. They got out of it, but because they’re a mixed-citizenship couple they don’t have a home country to go to – wherever they go one of them will probably be rejected (and is that a bet you’d take… sail for a week, get told “you can come in, the other can’t”). So now they’re in a marina in Italy for as long as it takes. Well, until their money runs out and then who knows what will happen. Marinas are expensive!
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Went out for a walk today, more people walking in the neighbourhood than usual, people carefully keeping distance, walking into the street – but absolutely everyone said “hi!” and smiled
It's the same in our neighbourhood. And the really cool part of the daily bike-ride is that it's not only possible to ride down the middle of the damn road – it's the responsible thing to do!
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Moz, in reply to
I was struggling a bit with the shared path. Fewer pedestrians but it's hard to leave a decent distance when there's more than one of them.
I felt that as well as ringing my bell I should be crying "unclean, unclean"
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Gabor Toth, in reply to
Meth prices have skyrocketed.
What about meths? There may still be some for sale in certain supermarkets and grocery stores (of course all the hardware shops are closed).
Take 7 parts of methylated spirits, add 3 parts clean water and (ta dah!) you now have a 70% ethanol solution which is the same concentration as standard hand sanitiser. Apart from the gelling agents and the purple colour, it’s essentially the same stuff. Stick it in a small atomising spray bottle and you can also squirt it over supermarket trolley handles, ATM buttons etc. Methanol (which was used as a toxic ‘denaturing’ agent) hasn’t been used in NZ meths for about 20 years after the government took the sensible approach that if some alcoholics were going to drink the stuff, it wasn’t in society’s best interest to poison them. Methanol was replaced with c. 0.01% denatonium benzoate (aka “Bitrex”) which isn’t toxic but is bitter enough to ruin any attempt to turn a slug of meths into a base for a vodka and tonic. -
Walter Nicholls, in reply to
Methanol ... hasn’t been used in NZ meths for about 20 years
Now that's useful information I'd forgotten - not that we have a lot of meths (unlike turps!) but at least supermarkets sell it. Although at home, soap is pretty good, given we're not going out anywhere. (I'm working on various video & audio footage from the times when we could go to venues, planning a virtual choir, and things like that to support our communities via online methods. Could be fun).
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Hi dude, looks like you have that 3d rendering pretty sussed out now. What’s the software you’re using?
Mainly DAZ Studio 4.12, with occasional touch ups in Blender & GIMP.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
We want to keep people stable, not throw them into withdrawal.
I assume methadone distribution (or modern equivalent) continues as well...
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
I felt that as well as ringing my bell I should be crying “unclean, unclean”
Here's a sartorial suggestion for contemporary outdoor-wear...
(even if the 'beak' is slightly redolent of a pangolin!)For some months I've been dropping in on a wee corner of Venice - via this live webcam
- I'm getting to recognise the locals, marvel at the rubbish pick up system - I even know where they hide the key for one of those shops!I realised a while back that I had actually walked through this 'opera-set-waiting-to-happen' 5 years ago, on our way to the Peggy Guggenheim museum - it was a small world, but I suspect that the days of easy 'faster-than-life' global travel is a thing of the past now.
I was watching when the lead up to Carnavale began, people in costume wandering about - I was looking for a Plague Doctor, I'd seen the mask in shops there - but then they pulled the plug, there was one gondolier who sat there forlornly for hours waiting for a job - and then the full lockdown kicked in.
I read that the canals are clearing up - they sure look cleaner - and fish are returning to the inner city as well.
I'd love to organise an online event there somehow, even just someone holding up a sign - I also love that it is exactly 12 hours behind us...
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Moz, in reply to
For my simple brutal stuff inkscape is awesome. But not everyone likes their graphic design done by an engineer. For images paint.net works surprisingly well, at least at the bumblefunkery level I live at..
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Moz, in reply to
The beak mask thing works quite well as a DIY filter mask as well, lets you have thicker filters with more area to increase effectiveness. Filling the void with sweet-smelling herbs is optional. And the look definitely encourages social distancing :)
I also love that it is exactly 12 hours behind us
I don't. We have customers in Italy and they occasionally ring us to explain their problems. So now we have an on call phone that gets... {ahem} left in the office during the pandemic. I suppose technically we still have it.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Presumably if the weather is not too bad they can just sail around to save marina fees?
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Moz, in reply to
They’re not allowed to come back in once they leave. So they have to be really, really certain that they have somewhere to go before they leave the marina. They could probably enter Aotearoa, since we’re not quite as sticky about being legally married as France is, but Aotearoa is quite a long way to sail in one go.
There's a lot of stuff being sorted out on the fly for edge cases like small boats, and while it's generally the case that people are being reasonable it's also possible to hit a series of not-reasonable in a row if you're unlucky. I get the impression they were ringing marinas and negotiating with quite twitchy cops for most of a day before they found somewhere. Negotiating as in "driving in circles just off a visitors dock while two cops made very sure they did not touch land or anchor"
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Oh how I've missed you guys. I went for a walk today. I live on a massively busy T3 route. It's mostly empty apart from the odd goods truck. But we can hear tui and kereru flapping about now. I stopped at the dairy and bought an ice cream to take home to the kids as I came out a man was waiting patiently outside. One in one out. The postie had been and we'd had a covid-19 flyer delivered..when I'm not stressed out trying to figure out how my partner and I can both work from home and keep two littlies occupied, I have to pause and admire our government. This is scary as shit. But I'm so glad to be in NZ and not the UK, US or Oz.
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Neil, in reply to
I think there’s also the prospect of restricted access to drugs (including the legal ones) driving drug-seeking behaviour that increases transmission risks. We want to keep people stable, not throw them into withdrawal.
That would be true of opiates but not of P. There is no stable use of P as there can be with some other drugs such as marijuana and opiates. Less P use would result in freeing up resources in the acute health services which most likely will be placed under enormous pressure.
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