Damn you, coronavirus. Damn you. Now you've gone too far: James Webb Space Telescope, Moon mission work paused NASA has temporarily suspended operations for its James Webb Space Telescope – and halted testing of its Space Launch System, a rocket due to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 – amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Lockdown measures are in place across California, as well various other US states and countries, and that’s …
The Moon will remain up there for a while, going there can wait, and isn't worth risking lives for (beyond the inherent risks of travelling through an environment that is trying to kill you, on top of a machine that could undergo a rapid, unplanned disassembly, resulting in something resembling the icon)
Whilst I agree the steps are necessary, and that the moon is likely to be up there for some time (assuming Seveneves was not a prophesy), there is a problem. The James Webb space telescope was already running behind schedule and is fighting to make a launch window. If it misses the window, I don't know when it will launch.
If budget cuts happen (looks likely) then its just possible JWST could be another victim of COVID
If anything its an easily learned lesson. The virus itself is easy to defeat, what's hard are the twats propagating it.
Fox News spent weeks pretending it was all a hoax. A Democrat meme to make Trump's inaction look bad. But it's *their* viewer demographic that is dying from it. The older Americans that die the most from it are a Fox News staple. Fox News viewers, you're being trained to respond to dog whistles, "socialism", "antifa" etc. They blow the whistle and you jump up and do your trick. Nazi's are the good guys now, and health-care is what we fought against in WW2. 'Bail outs for billionaires' is capitalism, 'food for school kids' is the new Nazis. No, its a lie and Fox News is the liar. It's product is it viewer, trained-up and sold to its sponsors.
TV Evangelists think its a great money making opportunity. Pray away the virus. If you die, well, you didn't donate enough! Ring now with your credit card details. No, its a lie, and they are the liar.
Republicans are practicing their messaging for cancelling the elections. With Ohio Republican governor already cancelling one election, rather than running a postal only vote, or opening more voting stations spread out over longer voting time. No, they can run elections, its a lie and they are liars.
Bill Barr is trying to remove the judicial branch completely. If he gets his way, he can arrest anyone, and they will never be allowed a court hearing because that would be 'Covid' risk. Even though hearings are done by video from the prison these days, somehow the virus transmits over the airwaves! Any bill to give the DOJ more powers, should require Bill Barr to step down and the DOJ to be run by a person chosen by Congress. You cannot give someone in defiance of the law, more power and expect him to suddenly obey the laws. He's already ignoring the judicial rulings and House subpoena powers, already undermining prosecutions. Bill Barr needs to go and rule-of-law needs to be put back into the DOJ.
Mnuchin and the Fed are funneling free money to billionaires and investment banks to buy up temporarily distressed assets. As if the temporary stock market drop is the real problem! Those assets will bounce back when the problem is fixed, a massive transfer of value from poor to rich is bad. Mnuchin's shit needs to stop.
So they don't test people in the USA, and as a result the Covid infections number is lower. That didn't help. It's an exponential growth curve, the shape of the curve cannot be hidden even if the relative scale can be reduced. You can see from the Italy vs USA curve shape, the USA hid the numbers. Executive branch staff needs to report to Congress, subpoena powers for Congress need to be restored. Oversight needs to be restored.
When the vaccine is available can people afford it? Will it be a mass market cheap thing, or will it be a high priced, rich mans luxury?
Will it be like Medicare? Available to the Republican voter demographic but not the rest? Medicare for some? Like the US has now?
If the vaccine is available in Canada, but not USA, will Americans have to trek across the border to get it, because of the USA closed market with inflated pharma prices? Will Americans be allowed even to cross the border for vaccines or will that be made a crime too? Like buying drugs from Pharmacies across the border is now?
The Koreans and Chinese have defeated it already. It's an easy lesson to learn!
/rant
I agree with much of your comment – and in particular you are right about the massive fuckwittery and, in fact, evil behaviour by the some of the US administration.
However you also say this:
The virus itself is easy to defeat [... most of your comment elided ...] The Koreans and Chinese have defeated it already.
And both of these statements are false and it's important that people understand that they are false.
What the Koreans and Chinese have done is suppressed the virus: they've got the reproduction number, R, below 1 so that infections decline, asymptotically to zero. But they've done this by taking very extreme measures (probably measures which can't be taken in many countries). At some point they will need to stop these measures, and at that point R will increase above 1 and infections will return, unless everyone, everywhere in the world, has managed to suppress the virus for long enough that the virus dies out. That is extremely unlikely to happen.
The 16th March Imperial paper describes this pretty well, and has really good graphs from the output of their model. It is kind of out of date now, as it's over a week old, but I'm not aware that anything they say is wrong. In particular, from the introduction to the paper:
The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced.
Not extreme, Koreans are wearing masks and testing like fuck. Wear masks. Test like fuck. I get that the West is short of masks, this is not true of the East. We have smog caused by crop burning. We have masks. They are easy to make. You can make masks. I even told you how to make a mask from a wet wipe. Stop the excuses. Make the mask, wear it. You are the risk now. Your whiny crap is deadly.
I get that my comment was blocked by a moderator, so I say it again. Use soap, spray soap everywhere, wear the mask, make a mask from wet wipes if you need to. Do it. Stop expending effort explaining to me how you cannot do it. It's whiny crap, you can do it. So do it.
South Korea was testing 15,000-20,000 people a day on the 13th of March. On the 24th of March the UK had tested 90,436 people in total, and were testing at under a third the rate South Korea was ten days earlier. The UK has 1.5 times the population of South Korea. So, yes, testing in huge numbers.
South Korea is also publishing the GPS coordinates of people who test positive: I suspect that might not go down too well in some countries.
No-one (other than you) is talking about masks having made a difference there, that i I can see.
And again: they have suppressed it, not fixed it: they have to keep on doing this until there is a vaccine.
Well, I'm sorry, but I think you're a troll, a crank or both: I'm done here.
This must give them the opportunity to review all that code again (and again). Run the simulations, find out what is broken so they don't have yet another issue due to some parameter being wrong or a piece of code not doing what is expected. Sure, they cannot do the physical stuff, although a load of that testing when you cannot get into the build might focus minds on what happens when it is at L2.
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