perfectly apropos link, just read to the end where the author says they are not a medical expert

I don't know why you skipped the beginning.

"I’m an expert on online disinformation, misinformation, and mathematics relevant to disease transmission. Recently I’ve been answering a lot of common questions about Covid-19 on social media, trying to dispel misconceptions and falsehoods. I’ve compiled a list of the most common responses, with the hope that this makes this information more easily accessible to others. Note: I am not a public health or medical professional, however, I have taken extra care to square all my responses here with official guidance and medical advice."

so, not a licensed professional? someone with knowledge of mathematics "relevant" to the situation?

Are you okay? You don't think a scientist with a relevant understanding mathematics and disease transmission is professional enough to suss this out in a cogent manner?

Limes are for gin and tonics.

If ever I've been forced to drink Corona, I prefer lemon.

If ever I'm forced to drink Corona, I prefer Dos Esqui.

This seems illegal.

Wow...

I do feel a slight tingle in my throat. perhaps we need to quarantine this response.

resumes for what? you think some office somewhere won't get hit?

Where's your office?

why worse? just curious of that assessment

Can't run to China/Dubai for jobs? Not sure, eager to hear more of the assessment.

Have you noticed the quality of leadership in the White House right now?

good point, but remember we had dubya in 2008, and many of the same actors on wall street. If I were conspiranoid, I'd say the system is trying to shake down DJT and get a biden to miraculously recover/get a bail out. vote bernie.

Dubai and China (especially) are screwed right now. Lots of firms with international work laying off people.

They are going to have a conference in May? In Los Angeles? No shaking hands the AIA info screen sez. No sneezing either, I guess. Why not have a teleconference? They could find some way to charge - like one of those hideous pay-per-view boxing matches.

We're not allowed to use our own equipment due to all the security crap they put on our work laptops, so I'll be working on an OK to pretty good laptop while sitting next to the high-power workstation I have at home...fortunately, I was already on the schedule for a new laptop, so at least they'll be replacing the current clunker with a shiny new one.

BIM 360 is about to get a BIGGGG bump.

we have a meeting to discuss contingencies on friday. I work from home whenever I want to without any formal infrastructure but we have a big QC problem here. My prediction is that QC will drop significantly when red-line drawings and in-person coordination meetings become even more sparse. Personally, I prefer to not have work at home. it's my home, not my place of business.

b3 - do we think Autodesk is prepped server-wise for the increase load? Some birdies have told me that even the big tech companies have had to cobble together and online the appropriate systems to support entire staffs working remotely.

NS - ditto for bringing work home. I hope this situation doesn't create precedents...

my company's VPN is way too slow to connect remotely to a revit file. maybe bim360 will be faster.

I already communicate electronically with people sitting 20 yards away, and work with teams spread out over 5 offices. The only question I have is whether our VPN can handle all the added traffic.

NS - We've been shifting our QA/QC to Bluebeam Studio with considerable success.

Oh dear. Hang in there, Non. I hope for good news for you.

Thanks Donna. His mother took him in... no point sitting the whole family in a hospital and risk getting something. results in 24/hr.

Sorry to hear that Non. Hoping for the best.

Fingers crossed for a good report, NS.

Cheers.

Non, please keep us posted.

Oh man NS. I'm sorry to hear this. Let me know via PM if you need anything. I can ship you toilet maple scented tp if you need. Seriously though, take care and I hope you wee one gets better soon.

Kids don't normally get the coronavirus. Hope your kid is found to be OK soon.

Thanks guys. nothing suspicious came back from xrays so not sure on cause of illness and breathing issues tho. For the record, I was not suspecting corona beer virus (the first 2 cases in my city were confirmed yesterday), just worried about additional headache in hospitals due to it.

My wife got croup last year (long story). She couldn't speak for a week.

It was extremely weird.

If you're locked down for weeks you wanna make sure you have a healthy supply.

I stocked up on beer.

I got whiskey, cigarettes and saltine crackers.

Got a month's supply of beef jerky, diet Raspberry Fanta, and 'Murder She Wrote' dvds. I'm good.

sorry to hear that NS, best of luck.

For me: TP. whiskey. Wine. Sanitizers. All the important ones! And a whole bunch of stuff for the slow cooker. Looks like NYC might also become a gong show very shortly. Been considering heading back up north and working remotely from there.

Hoping for the best NS. 

I went to the store tonight to get some groceries--fruits, veggies, the crackers my kiddo eats, cheese, drinks--nothing crazy. We are getting low on TP and I knew it would be a long shot but I rolled my cart down that aisle ... shelves were empty as suspected. I'm not worried yet, but give it a week without finding some in the store and my wife will probably put my kidney up on craigslist as a trade for a Costco-sized pack of Charmin.

I just read a Twitter thread explaining toilet paper as highly susceptible to panic buying because the shelves look empty very quickly as compared to smaller items. So people have a perception of scarcity that may not be real.

Sweet Jesus, you're all making me dream of bidets.

LB - Yeah, Ive actually not seen these crazy rushes for TP. Stores around here all seem to have it. Everything restocks overnight, so if you're really desperate just get there first thing.

The only thing you need to stock up on is firearms and ammo. Those two things can get you anything else you need in case of an emergency. J/K.

Wiping my ass with my gun.

Make sure the safety is on.

Panic is a sneaky thing. Almost without thinking, I moved my piece from back of the closet to front of the closet last night and checked I had the key to the trigger lock close by.

you have to defend your toilet paper cache somehow.

I'm a classic single male: I have enough rolls of TP left in the last 12-pack I bought to last me the rest of the year, but I'm screwed for food - nothing but condiments and beverages in my fridge.

Apparently it just blasts water at your bunghole, and then you pay it dry. I still haven't tried it but my wife is a big fan.

Related aside: one of the funniest things I've ever witnessed involved my boss during a residential punch-list walk. He leaned down to turn on the water supply line when a plumbing fixture wouldn't work. The fixture was a bidet, and the move worked. He took a vertical jet of water to the face, and it was a contest which was louder: his exquisitely creative profanity or his assistant's explosion of laughter. Good times.

CIA plot!

must be. it's the only logical answer.

I'll admit it took me a full minute to realize you were talking about "Trudeau" not "Timberlake"

revit over a VPN sucks. Today is the BIM360 gets real.

Yes it does, how does BIM 360 ease this?

I'm beginning to worry about a lot of you. Don't you have showers at home?

yeah... but showers aren't as funny as, "visit your local hand car wash"... :D :D :D

Honestly - I dont know a single architect or engineer from my social groups that was not told to work from home and dont come back in until further notice. Every office has totally shut down for remote work. That's really shitty if there is an employer out there demanding attendance in an emergency area...

in middle of america, we think we have at least a few days before it's a problem. If no one at work has the virus, then there's no one to transmit it. We are getting everyone set up to work from home when it does hit though.

Curt, that means it's already spreading and by the time someone does have it, it's too late.

"If no one at work has the virus, then there's no one to transmit it."

That .... seems like a terrible approach ...

We're not closed as we have many large projects across the country and those are still ongoing. Our clients are not shut down and neither is construction . With that said, we have the ability to work remotely but we're hesitant to deploy it to everyone since it's a perk previously only reserved for ownership and management. There is also a high security risk on some of the projects that make working from home impossible. Honestly, most of the projects could be managed by a skeleton crew of senior staff for the next few weeks with little impact on schedule but I don't think many want to use up their vacation days to stay home.

Quality control is an issue here as we've never had to supervise production outside of the office. My colleagues in other offices in the city appear to be split 50/50 between those in office and those working at home. Schools and all public places are closed and outside of a few idiots stealing masks from hospitals and plenty of idiots fighting over toilet paper (which is manufactured literally within an hour of the city), there is little panic here.

I think that unless you're essential to the survival of the project, you should just take the day(s) off instead of struggling to coordinate remotely. I'm expecting to be 50% at home by end of week.

volunteer, to be fair, the Boomer Remover (tm) was not designed to take out the proles.

"unless you're essential to the survival of the project, you should just take the day(s) off"

Here in the US, the problem is who pays for those days off - is the employee forced to use their limited sick/vacation/PTO time? Does the company provide additional paid days off? Does the employee file for unemployment (which only replaces 1/3 or less of wages here in the USofA)?

^from my POV, the office should allow for some sort of combination of vacation time and IOU time meaning staff could take 2 weeks paid time off without dipping into vacation/pto time and when business is back up and running, either make up the time via OT or by taking a cut (say paid 8days instead of 10). Or somthing like that. We're not at this point yet but it's something I can see us doing.

They've said we are allowed to go negative on our PTO balances, but still have to work it off later. Better than nothing, I suppose, but I'm quite sure both of my grandfathers (business owners and staunch Republicans) would've given their employees extra PTO.

What happens if they lay you off when you've gone negative on your PTO balance? Are they going to make you pay the firm back for those hours?

EA, the idea here is that they are not expecting layoffs. Not that type of place where large swings in staff are common. Anyways, the office just made it known yesterday that they will cover all salaries regardless of work completed (in office or at home) for anyone affected by the restrictions. So if you work a few hours per day at home... well you still get a full day's compensation.

That's quite generous NS. More than I would expect from my office. As of now, my office is indicating that they expect us to work the same from home as we would at the office. I'm interpreting that to equal billable hours because they've also acknowledged productivity will be down based on having kids at home, etc. I suspect that if I asked for it, they'd let me go negative on PTO balances like atelier nobody's office. They let me go negative on mine last year due to some medical procedures for my wife where I had to be out of the office for an extended period ... I'm only recently back in the black on my balance, but I'm not concerned about my productivity at the moment.

Is that not why you carry 9 firearms on your person at all times? Joking aside, good for you for helping. I've avoided the grocery stores since last Thursday when our city & province issued several shut-down measures.

I was carrying 'stubby' my short barreled 45.

@Chad Miller is your name acutally chad or are you just a chad in real life? or both?

MOAR GUNS!

when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

morons

leonizer, this is my real name.  I have nothing to hide.

I don't think more guns are the solution to this crisis. Some basic human compassion and kindness are. Also wash your damn hands!

Oh stop it jla-x. If the craziness comes we're all fucked, regardless if we have firearms.

jla, who says I won't join the crazies?

God bless you and your posse for helping that old guy, Chad.

People like jla-x are why i love having my expat passport - emergency parachutes are always good to have, just in case.

I'll just stay in my zombie proof house with my wife and dog.

Every bad guy with a gun thinks they're a good guy with a gun.

Hope you are right... as for laws... well, math is pretty inflexible https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

The CDC says we are NOT over the worst of it.

Jla, I'm pretty sure the scientist said this jumped from animal to human in November

Trust the CDC over my suspicions any day. 

This is an old article that outlines the failure to get adequate testing in Seattle and how they discovered community transmission had been occurring for weeks. With Seattle and other hard hit communities locking (almost) everything down at this point, I'm hoping that it isolates those who have been infected and the total people infected (unverified of course without testing) levels out and then begins to decline. If you live in an area that hasn't mandated social distancing with measures like they have in Seattle, you should stay home anyway to help "flatten the curve." It's less about preventing infections at this point and simply about making sure that your hospitals aren't overwhelmed with a surge of new cases. 

jla-x, I hope your wife can get the testing and treatment she needs, you as well. We've been fighting quite a nasty cough in my family. It hasn't manifested with symptoms that would indicate COVID-19 and the doctors we've seen have not recommended testing for it. I'm not too worried that we caught it, but if testing was more available I would definitely push to get myself tested just to know for certain because it does make me wonder why it has taken us so long to kick it.

They probably do have cases, it just hasn't been confirmed via testing.

West Virginia? They don't have any computers with which to report the cases.

They are the next county over from my Augusta County, VA, location. There are worse places to be. Quite a few places, actually. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNoZtIPWpyE

Finally got one of those Mountaineers.

Sorry to hear that. If you don't mind sharing, what the area/region are your projects are in and what type of work it is? Also what type of work do you do for the firm (production, management, making it rain, etc.)?

No prob. Senior project architect (production) in Metro detroit area. Firm's Clients are primarily big 3 automakers and public utilities. People aren't around to push projects forward.

That would be adorable! Post the video if it happens!

We did a remote work stress test last night too - for our office of 20+ it worked smoothly.

custom desktop. 8-)

What I hear is that you need a "gaming laptop" whatever that means (I am an old).

I'm thinking a Lenovo ThinkPad that all these business types carry around. Any experiences?

We could drop the typical "search the forum" because there are 8 million similar posts... but if I were in the market for a laptop, I'd likely look at either the Lenovo (mostly due to sexy red mouse dot) or current Asus Rogue. Unless portability is top of your list, look at 17" models because cooling will be better and they often have more space for the GPU.

I'm not a rep for them, but if you are looking for a beast of a machine, look at BOXX, look at their refurb's. They're desktops in a laptop form.

^yes. I've not looked at BOXX in a while but I was very close once at pulling the trigger on one of their rigs. $4k was a little steep to play assassin's creed tho. 8-)

REBOXX

good stuff in there.

I have a t-shirt that says "My BOXX is faster than yours". Got it at AU

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaptopDeals/

I found this laptop on sale for $799 by browsing that subreddit and the machine has run great after a few months.

Ma ma ma My Corona!

++ "The 'rona"

I made one jokey comment on the call - I said "C'mon now!" in response to a slam on Philly - to absolute silence. I honestly think half the call thought they were hearing a voice from beyond the grave beckoning them closer....

That's funny!

Haha nice Donna. Today on a conference call I said "hopefully everyone is still feeling ok because this design is already totally sick!" No one laughed.

NOW that is fucking funny! I would've laughed.

LOL archanonymous that’s very funny! Gallows humor is my favorite.

Nice to see you ivorykeyboard!

Or the "hurry up and finish this, we need to requisition it" order?

Ha, actually they just asked if we could move UP the completion date by a month. And im now staffed on another medical project... hmm

I would think that if the economy goes into a prolonged recession it will be difficult to find work for recent grads. Also I doubt telecommuting would work with such an inexperienced new hire.

My firm has just instituted a hiring freeze, except for critical senior hires. Not looking good for new grads.

I find it odd that we're supposed to have six months of living expenses saved up but banks and the airlines require bailouts.

It's not a funny joke either. More like 'grandma's going to die because people are morons' ha ha joke.

tintt, I've heard two different people on NPR say something along the lines of "The suggestion is to have three months of living expenses in savings, but we all know no one really does that..." which IMO points to a huge problem in our economic society. It's more expensive, in may ways, to be poor than to be rich, so the people with less money truly can't save. I know lots of people with decent 401ks but no immediately liquid cash savings (I'm one of them).

I think a lot of us did not grow up with good financial behavior being modeled, and most of our friends and family don't exhibit good financial behavior currently.

An approach I learned at some point during adulthood is that instead of feeling broke when I had $0, or perhaps $100 or $500 in my account, I convinced myself to feel broke when my bank account dropped below $1,000. Once I reached that point, I increased it to $5,000. Then $10K. Then $20K.

I am not wealthy--far from it--but I am fortunate to have been able to save at least enough to get us through a few months without incomes. We have not had vacations, we drive older and/or non-fancy vehicles, don't go out to eat often, etc.. But I've convinced a few other people of the benefits of this strategy. It works.

My partner is great with money and keeps me from 'impulse buying' stuff. She's also a great saver and thanks to her we have the 6 months saved and could even survive on only one income (we had to do that during the 2008 recession because I sucked and couldn't find work. ) Regardless, I am worried about the economy. Just today a couple of big jobs got put on hold - on is an actual project with the city, the other is a proposal with the school district.

most adults don't eat their veggies either.

good observation that most corporations don't follow the financial advice us peons get, then still get bailouts. where's my bailout?

I eat my veggies tinnt. Mostly with ranch dressing . . .

Funny, jla-x, I noticed the opposite at my grocery store - all the "real food" has been picked over pretty well, but the junk food is still plentiful. And, trust me, I've done much more disgusting things in my life than living on nothing but shelf-stable pastries and chips for a few weeks.

OMG jlax saying that avoiding sugar is a way to prevent *viral infections* is akin to depending on crystals for healing. Such woo. JFC!

^Ha... classic woo.

And I didn’t say that eating sugar *isn’t* bad. It is. Sugar is awful for you. But it has NO RELATIONSHIP to viral infections and also NO RELATIONSHIP to one’s political leanings.

Shut up jla-x. Go eat a carrot and load up a shotgun.

Chad, I'm sure his shotguns are already loaded.

Chambered if you're carrying. Loaded but not chambered - if you don't have kids. Unloaded, locked, ammo and firearms stored separately and out of reach if you have children or they visit your home.

^or none at all, because. 8-)

That is always a valid option. Figured I didn't need to add it as it's rather obvious. :)

"Yes, true, but a certain breed of Americans are quick to dismiss the totality of what someone says based on political disagreements...even simple statements like veggies are good for you. Shows the tribal instincts" jla-x

Or it shows you're such an insufferable tool that they would rather troll you.   

jla-x comments read best when ignored.

You seem to

It's funny, I un-ignored jlaxative, just so i could read what Ayn Rand would say during a slow moving apocalypse. I have to say, Ayn Rand still would've been a raging cunt. Oh, we're all Socialists now. Capitalism is dead. Finally. If only this happened 5 weeks later, Bernie and crew might be leading us out.

Ms. Rand, tell me, how does Nixon's circumcised dick taste? I love it, now it's engineered by China? I kept wondering why when I went to Costco they were out of foil sheets. Thanks laxative!

Shut the fuck up looser.

take whatever job you can get.

^ absolutely take ANY job. if you get an offer now, take it. one of my friends who started in 2008 as a junior designer ended up filing papers for a PM for 3 months. He's now a design director.

Just be wary of people offering independent contractor status for what should be a regular employment position. That kind of garbage always seems to happen when the economy turns south.

My firm froze new hires, except for really experienced. Don't know how long it will last.

what markets are you seeing negatively affected? Obviously restaurants, entertainment, anything where people gather. is there a bigger run from financing? investing in a REIT would be safer than the stock market now

If the current distress persists, there's a good chance REITs could fry. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/real-estate-billionaire-barrack-says-230309693.html

But I think REITs, unlike small businesses, can get the attention of Washington D.C. and get bailed out.