Tag: mailvox

A nurse-practitioner from the Midwest:

The hotline for this medical system has been receiving 1500 to 2000 calls per day. It is the job of the various Providers to respond to these calls with a general medical prognosis and directions based on the symptoms the patient has described over the phone. Coronavirus has very specific symptoms and unless those symptoms are present it is unlikely the person has it. If they do have that list of specific symptoms, the patient is then told that they “likely have COVID19 and to continue to quarantine themselves for at least 14 days, and if symptoms get worse to go to the ER.” These patients are NOT being actually tested, nor recorded officially.

This specific medical system is big enough that they have developed their own, internal test for the Coronavirus, however patients are not actually tested unless they have to symptoms sufficiently severe to place them in to Tier 1/ER/ICU levels of care. Such symptoms would be a either a very high fever or problems breathing. Medical Professionals who have been exposed to the Coronavirus are also being tested. The phone system is a fairly effective way of dealing with patients at the volumes that medical professionals are needing to wade through them.

The main takeaways from what I have overhead and know is that Coronavirus cases that aren’t severe aren’t being tested, so what effect this will have on the reported numbers, I’m not sure. Also, that larger hospital and medical systems have developed the tests internally, so whether or not the CDC/HHS or any other Federal agency acquires them in bulk isn’t as urgent as it is being portrayed.

A medical security officer, also in the Midwest:

I went into the EOC and suggested that they push the idea up that since there are literally HUNDREDS of vacant restaurants all over, that they rent them for a song (using eminent domain or even Trump’s emergency declaration) and institute drive-through testing like they have in Korea… Literally powerwash them, slap your signs over theirs and use the drive-through and mic hookups already in place…

The lady who I told, who is a senior nurse and emergency response director, paused, thought for a few seconds and said “Well, that could work, but there’s so much more we have to do than just driving through, we have to take temperatures etc”

All I could think was, “bitch, that’s what the WINDOW is for!  Have a tent by the lane, have them rub the stupid thing on their own forehead!  Jesus, use your goddamn imagination!”

We’re fucking doomed… And it’s due to the same stupidity I saw in the senior leadership in the Army that led me to leave…

A nurse in the Southwest:

I can confirm that ED nurses have been instructed to forgo masks. In our particular situation, I believe that it is mostly due to supply issues. People off the street have come in and stolen boxes of masks that we usually leave sitting around and non-clinical people have come onto the unit and taken them as well. Nevertheless, it is frustrating because, prior to now, we have all worn masks on a regular basis during flu season.

The real idiocy is that our N-95 masks, for which we were all fitted upon hire into the ED, have been slated for provider-use only. We nurses do not have any, yet we are the people that go face-to-face more often than any other. However, there are some options, less than ideal, being made available. I am not completely sympathetic to these decisions but the supply matter has hit us hard and I have some understanding of the motives behind them.

A doctor from the South:

I am a medical doctor and I believe both my wife and I have contracted corona. We were unable to test for it because it was unavailable given the strict guidelines in place at the time. One of the things I noticed on a pathology report I saw from a patient in China are these so-called thick mucous secretions in the lungs . This reminded me of what happens to an asthmatic’s lungs when they are having an attack. For asthmatics, they die because they cannot oxygenate their bodies because there is so much mucous in their lungs.

I thought, why not treat these lung symptoms from corona  the way you would for an asthmatic .The reason for the mucous shouldn’t matter.  One of those ways is to use a medication called albuterol which you nebulize and give yourself a breathing treatment several times a day if necessary.

I had been listening to my wife’s lungs for several day,s and on one day I noticed a decrease in breath sounds in one of her lobes along with some wheezing. This is an indication that mucous was plugging up the bronchiole. A worrisome sign and a harbinger of pneumonia potentially coming. I started her on two treatments a day which immediately caused the mucous to break up. We knew this because she started coughing it up. One day later, her lungs were clear and there was no wheezing. I did it to myself just as a preventive measure one time a day. We continued this for about a week before stopping it. It appears we have recovered from the infection.

A retired nursing director from the South:

The corona virus has exasperated the shortage of nurses.  Many of them are mothers and now that schools and daycare are closed they must stay home to take care of their children.  The state medical system is now short hundreds of nurses. Observation – this is what happens when you have to have two parents working in order to be average middle class, no margin.  Not only have we leaned our supply system with no inventory buffer, but we have done the same to our labor pool. 

A reader writes about leaving his job. He’s doing the right thing, because he has correctly assessed the situation and that place is going to go out of business with or without the assistance of Corona-chan.

Today I handed in my resignation at my current work, after the situation the last few months has turned from bad to intolerable.

I am currently reading Corporate Cancer, and it has become quite obvious that I myself am working in a converged company. In this case it is the HR department that is leading the convergence. Interestingly, they are not going against the wish of the customers, but rather their own employees, more specifically the most valuable ones. I guess they are too difficult to work with because they have an opinion of their own?

This is a very new company without any revenue yet, but here are some examples of the HR-led convergence craziness:

• They are now doing all the hiring, even though none in HR knows anything about the industry
• One colleague went from pre-HR employee of the year to “Drama King” within a few months, and was subsequently forced to quit. All because a young women at work that was in love with him repeatedly made complaints about him to HR because he did not reciprocate her feelings.
• The same young woman, with no prior work experience – except for one year where she did less than what was required, spending most of her time complaining that her job was boring – was promoted to [a junior executive position].
• They required that we should have transgender bathrooms, which resulted in unisex bathrooms instead, to the dismay of all the women.

In the last four months four key employees have resigned, but they do not seem to understand the problem, or even be willing to see that there is one.

In general, however, I recommend always finding a new job before leaving the old one. But regardless of the ideal sequence, the point is to understand that a company’s convergence is a flashing red sign to start looking for work elsewhere.

I am a boomer and an ER physician and I agree completely with your prioritizing younger people over older people when resources are limited and given that all other factors are equal. Unfortunately, they almost never are.

Except, of course, they already are now in many countries, and if events follow the expected course, they will be in the USA too. There are 5,000 respirators in the UK available to serve as many as 7.9 million cases. The Italians are already adopting triage practices and other European nations are anticipating the need to do so.

And frankly, this relentless boomer bashing and treating the worst of my generation as exemplary gets really annoying.

This sensitivity is downright amusing. My generation has found the relentless Boomer boomering to be really annoying for as long as we can remember. You Boomers were annoying when you were getting divorced and our friends were returning to elementary school in the fall with haunted expressions and new last names. You were annoying when Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was named the #1 most-requested song on the main rock station for the 25th year in a row. You were annoying when you first proclaimed 40 the new 30, then 50 the new 30, then 70 the new 50.

And Boomers are still every bit as annoying today. I recently saw a grotesque television commercial that literally showed incontinent old Boomer women rolling around in their underwear, with the tagline OUR BODIES CHANGE, BUT WHY SHOULD WE? The name of the commercial? Of course, it’s AGELESS. Companies wouldn’t still be marketing to the Boomer’s trademark generational narcissism if it didn’t continue to work for them.

The Boomers haven’t changed. They don’t want to change. They are still proud of who and what they are. And that is why the younger generations, particularly Generation X and the Zoomers, will continue to relentlessly despise them. The thing is, we’ve been doing it all along, they were just too self-absorbed to even notice. But now that the media culture no longer caters solely to them, they’re shocked to discover that they weren’t considered cool, they aren’t admired, and no one else wants to be like them.

This email tends to demonstrate, as if it was necessary, the utter inability of Boomers to imagine that everyone else isn’t as relentlessly narcissistic as they are:

After reading the “boomers need to be left to die” post I was reminded of something. Logan’s Run seemed to advance this basic strategy. Now though, facing another of the inevitable crises that blindside everyones cool plans, age has been upped to about 65+.

Allow me to exaggerate:

Sure sounds neat if you are younger. Because all the points you make are largely true. What you and the bulk of the responses put forth as the logical solution seems incredibly dangerous.

On one hand, if you really believe this, the consequences of the consequences may well roll right over you once it becomes the culture. Perhaps you could volunteer to self extinct upon achieving that benchmark age, because that is at the bottom of the slope you are promoting.

Second, when you successfully implement this “boomers must die” program, the message is: Now that you have spent your life paying and paying not only for your own family, but every unproductive fellow citizen the state could force upon you, just die already, now you are useless and unfortunately expensive.

Please, explain to me why anyone witnessing this regime would feel eager to work to support it, as any contribution in the positive you have made is deemed worthless at the cut off age.

This isn’t some butt hurt defense of being older. This crisis isn’t some Titanic sinking unexpectedly, this is simply life being random and deciding your new and better form of socialism is kill the old. How old is too old? When the bottom really drops out, is 65 too old? How about 40?  30?

Triage is fine, and necessary in short term disasters with small populations of a common culture and will obviously be employed until resources are found to save the remainder. Once you cast aside the elderly, you define life not worth living. Pick a demographic, demonize it. Replay Zimbabwe. $$$$$$$

And yes, boomers are not your friends and yes they have created a lousy situation. Many generations do. Are you promising your way is better? Because that is clearly what they thought.

First, we know perfectly well that we will experience the consequences. So what? We don’t care! We have known we weren’t going to be collecting much, if anything, in the way of social security since literally the very first day we paid into it. We have known that our selfish, self-centered predecessors weren’t going to leave us any inheritances since we first started saving money. Our only mistake was to believe that they would at least leave us a functioning society. The Boomer’s very questions reveal his total ignorance of the generation that follows him, let alone the subsequent generations.

 Second, this isn’t The Day of the Pillow. This isn’t a “Boomers must die” program. This is merely the time-honored, eucivilizational concept of “child-bearing women and children first”. Only a Boomer could possibly assume that not being prioritized is tantamount to a death sentence.

Third, the Boomer again reveals his narcissism. Who would work to support such a regime? The very same sort of men who have planted the acorns for the mighty oaks under whose shade they never sat for generation after generation. The fact that this is not only an alien concept, but one that is actually perceived as a negative one is something that damns the Boomer far more comprehensively than anything I can possibly say.

Fourth, we’re not those who “cast aside the elderly”. We loved our grandparents. We prioritize our children. The Boomers are those who adopted the twin philosophies of “never trusting anyone over thirty” and “he who dies with the most toys wins”. Yes, I promise that our way is better, because our way is the old way, the way of our ancestors, the way that you Boomers proudly rejected.

And fifth, whether what I have put forth as a logical solution is dangerous or not is irrelevant, because it is inevitable. The math doesn’t lie.

You made your beds. Now die in them, preferably with some dignity if you can muster it for the first time in your cursed dyscivilizational existences.

An emailer reveals a number of assumptions:

Emails. The gamma can’t help but type novels. So, help me understand this about the hierarchy: I’ve always thought that most people ignore emails out of passive-aggressiveness, to control conversations, and because they’re cowards.

Clearly though, there’s a time to ignore people. However, I hate to do it, because I don’t want to be the above mentioned things. I’m fine being an asshole, but a coward… no.

How do you choose when and who to ignore? You obviously engage annoying people privately at length. Why?

I’ll leave it to the readers here to point out the obvious ironies here, but I will correct a misapprehension and point out that I do not engage annoying people privately at length, ever. Most of my private replies are very short and I very seldom respond to a second email. The only place I provide longer responses is here on the blog.

And for any even modestly public figure, the correct time to ignore emails is every single freaking day. You know those people who say that although they don’t respond to every email, they do read all of them? Rest assured, most of them don’t even do that.

An industry veteran explains why it doesn’t make sense for us to create a game review site and channel:

Hey Vox – There is a hole in the community, but it’s not a hole in the market. Because there’s no market for games journalism.

Games journalism traditionally offered three things:

One son of a Delta has some unpleasant childhood memories stemming from his attractive mother:

The part about alpha trying to hit on the very attractive wives of lower status men resonates with me. My mother was always a very attractive woman and she was married to my father, a delta. Alpha men were always hitting on her, including my father’s boss at a Christmas party that later devolved into a huge argument when we all returned home. 

It’s a difficult situation because it’s almost inevitable and is going to be hard on the Delta husband even if his attractive wife is entirely faithful to him. First, it’s always pleasant to know that people are drawn to you, and second, it’s actually the Delta’s lack of confidence in his ability to keep his attractive wife that tends to undermine the relationship.

Because if he gets his panties in a bunch every time over the behavior of others that she can’t control, eventually she’s going to decide that she might as well do the crime if she’s going to do the time anyhow.

The father shouldn’t have argued with his wife after the Christmas party, he should have complained to the boss’s boss. The most effective weapon against an alpha is a bigger alpha.

The talking mouse always was my favorite character in The Chronicles of Narnia:

I am reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for the first time and I am reading chapter 12, the Dark Island. It has made me love Reepicheep and he reminds me of you, the dread Ilk, VFM et al.

The scene is set when Caspian is deciding on whether to sail into the darkness and all advice is to the contrary:

But all at once the clear voice of Reepicheep. “And why not?” he said. “Will someone explain to me why not?”

No one was anxious to explain, so Reepicheep continued: “If I were addressing peasants or slaves,” he said, “I might suppose that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark.”

“But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that blackness?” asked Drinian.

“Use?” replied Reepicheep. “Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.”

But this was the best reminding of your stout defense of friends such as Owen:

There came a cry, either of some inhuman voice or else a voice of one in such extremity of terror that he had almost lost his humanity. Caspian was still trying to speak his mouth was too dry-when the shrill voice of Reepicheep, which sounded louder than usual in that silence, was heard.

“Who calls?” it piped. “If you are a foe we do not fear you, and if you are a friend your enemies shall be taught the fear of us.”

Long live the spirit of Reepicheep! May we all aspire to it.

Reepicheep represents the indomitable spirit, the unconquerable spirit, of Man. He kneels only to the king and to Aslan, he fears no evil, and to say that he embraces conflict would be a serious understatement. In my opinion, it is he, not Caspian, Edmund, Lucy, or Eustace, who is the true hero of the tale.

My owns plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be head of the talking mice in Narnia.

A reader observes that Gammas never leave, they always linger about in the corners like a noxious fog:

I was reading the comments on your post yesterday on creating omegas. It struck me that last year I had someone I thought a friend who turned on me in a very public way for noticing uncomfortable facts. Then there was some cyber-stalking that struck me as rather creepy. Gamma behavior. You said Gammas will turn on you sooner or later.

Do they ever try to ingratiate themselves back into the good graces of the person they turned on to begin with? The faux-sincere apology or do they dig in that they were right? I was thinking that gammas are somewhat opportunistic and will try to get back into the circle if they think it is to their benefit.

Gammas will absolutely try to work their way back in, but they always do so in an indirect manner. They will try praising you or making positive, supportive comments, without ever admitting the fact that they were previously condemning you or apologizing for their past behavior. Of course, they will only take the ingratiation route until it becomes obvious that the tactic is not working, then they will revert to attacking you again.

Gammas are not “somewhat opportunistic”, they are EXTREMELY opportunistic, which means that even when they are silent, they are always lurking about, looking to either ingratiate themselves or seek revenge, depending upon which opportunity happens to present itself first. I have witnessed Gammas lurking silently for years before taking the opportunity to strike back; for example, one Gamma troll whose name would be familiar to the Dread Ilk recently surfaced for the first time since 2014 in an attempt to glom onto the /r/Owen anklebiters and their campaign against UATV.

This is why you should never forget a Gamma or fail to observe his inevitable reappearance. Because you can be absolutely certain that he will never forgive nor forget anyone who has rejected him or publicly bested him, not until the heat death of the universe.

An Irish reader writes about the current status of Ireland:

A note as to whats happening in Ireland, the western fringe of Europe. In 2016, the Irish wing of Pegida was routed from the streets of Dublin by Antifa, which was a black pill for the nationalists at that time. Things have grown, massively since then, possibly exponentially. There is a General Election for our Parliament here on the 8th of February 2020, and there are just shy of 40 nationalists from the three nationalist parties running for seats. This is obviously a tremendous rate of growth and is a clear sign of the shift away from globalism.

The Irish still tend to love the EU, and view Brexit with disdain, but on the other hand we have a character of nationalism and have an immunity to white guilt.

We have deep connection to the swamp, the Clintons, Haiti, the (((Global Finance System))), and have had the best of the worst try to De-Christianise, abort,and replace us. Yet it seems that this trend has peaked, and is slowly rolling back.  Small countries like ours can be converged quickly, but we can fix ourselves quicker too. This little island is a microcosm of the wider struggle and if we can do it, so can anyone.  All we need is faith and a steady supply of white pills.

I have to admit, I have never understood how the Irish could fight so hard and so long for their independence from the British, only to immediately turn around and hand over their sovereignty to the European Union. It was one of the most ridiculous, most inexplicable things I’ve seen in my lifetime. Here is hoping that the Irish will soon learn from their disastrous mistake and will follow the lead of the British in exiting the EU and reestablishing their sovereignty.