Routine

Weekend Edition – A weekend version of Rink Rats this week, our topic routine.

This writer is three weeks without wearing pants, no problem there, in fact I am getting a nice tan on the old gams. Every day is the same; 5:45 am make the coffee, read the newspapers, wipe down the kitchen, and we begin our remote teaching day at 8:00 am.

Online teaching is not new to me but dealing with students who have never done this before has been an experience. I use all platforms; Zoom, WebEx, Skype, Jabber, Facetime, enough to make your head spin. Overall, students have been just great; engaged, attendance has been 100% and they have maintained their community spirit and sense of humor. I wish I could say that about my colleagues. The subject of a future blog.

Afternoon has daily office hours, a short walk around the neighborhood and then back to the remote classroom in the evening. Honestly, though I despise the circumstances, I enjoy the challenge and look forward to the effects of the virus to test the future for higher education serving their various constituents.

This routine is generally the same every day – even on the weekend there are office hours and prep time for the week ahead and grading.

But I do miss sports, a tough one. I do miss not seeing my friends, colleagues and family, a tough one.  Not hanging with the boys at the golf club, I forgot what the inside of my local pub looks like, a tough one.

Hang in there, I miss you all, be well and safe.

COVID-19 NOTES – Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and cost an estimated $161 billion in current dollars, making it the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. But those affected could find safety and aid outside the disaster area, and America's economy barely experienced a blip.

For decades,­ people in the 11 states that seceded during the Civil War -- America's poorest region -- have suffered from a scourge of obesity and hypertension, which intensify the danger of the coronavirus and the Covid-19 respiratory disease that it causes. Four of the five states with the highest diabetes rates are in the South. And eight didn't expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving thousands of families without access to routine care, even as financially troubled rural hospitals wither away. Those factors give the South a special vulnerability, as did the haphazard response from some governors as the disease began to course through the country.

The virus's spread in Louisiana is among the fastest in the world. Beaches in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas all recently drew crowds of non–socially distant spring breakers. Reports of raucous partying in Southern cities such as Nashville, Tennessee, continued long after New York and the West Coast showed just how bad things could get. And churches remained stuffed with congregants, while some deeply conservative Southerners swatted away concerns about the pandemic, labeling it a liberal hoax meant to damage President Donald Trump, who has downplayed the severity of the pandemic.

Something surprising is unfolding amid the finger-pointing and war-gaming about the coronavirus threat to America: A general consensus is forming about the next 60 days of wait and pain:

Virtually every state will be in some form of quarantine for at least April and likely much of May.

Death tolls will rise high, possibly beyond 100,000. But the combination of increased testing, social distancing, medical supplies and public awareness should avert the worst scenarios.

The $2 trillion rescue package will float the U.S. economy through this month. Unemployment will skyrocket — before the stimulus, projections topped 30%. But help is on the way to blunt some of the damage, making the chances of catastrophic collapse much lower than a few weeks ago.

Businesses will still be destroyed, more than most realize. But the days of either party caring about Fed actions, congressional spending or simply doing too much are over, for now. Another big rescue package will be needed as we sort through the wreckage — and it could be bigger than the first.

College students are home for the rest of the academic year — and now face questions about employment and internships. And while it hasn't been made official for all K-12ers, it's hard to see any school reopening before summer.

America has a chance to return to some semblance of normal in late May or June, gradually and perhaps geographically. Anything beyond that would be too catastrophic to consider.

The threat of a post-summer resurgence is real, and likely. But the country will also be far better prepared to test, isolate and potentially heal.

A realistic vaccine produced and distributed at scale likely won’t be a reality until at least 2021, though there is hope experimental versions will be fast-tracked before.

It will take years, if not a generation, to dig out of the debt, lives and jobs lost. But those conversations will be punted until coronavirus is behind us.

One thing to watch: A growing number of Fortune 500 CEOs worry this consensus underplays the danger to the U.S. economy, if America stays at home beyond April.

If April becomes May, many fear the chances of America's economy snapping back fades.

TOP FIVE WORST PANDEMICS –

1. The Black Death

A plague so devastating that simply saying “The Plague” will immediately pull it to the front of your mind, in the middle of the 14th century—from 1347 to 1351—the Black Death remade the landscape of Europe and the world. In a time when the global population was an estimated 450 million, at least 75 million are believed to have perished throughout the pandemic, with some estimates as high as 200 million. As much as half of Europe may have died in a span of only four years. The plague’s name comes from the black skin spots on the sailors who travelled the Silk Road and docked in a Sicilian port, bringing with them from their Asian voyage the devastating disease, now known to be bubonic plague.

2. 1918 Spanish Flu

Approximately 90 years before the 2009 swine flu pandemic killed more than 200,000 people, reports of an especially dangerous form of influenza began to appear around the world. Kansas was the site of the first U.S. case, in March 1918. Appearing in multiple countries around the world, the disease spread quickly, ushered along even faster due to the close living quarters of troops fighting in World War I. This first instance of an H1N1 pandemic would be dubbed The Spanish Flu (despite the fact that it didn’t actually come from Spain). It burned out quickly and suddenly, by 1919, with the explanation still unknown today. But it left the global population decimated—with a mortality rate as high as one in five and an estimated one-third of the world population afflicted, as many as 50 million people are believed to have died. Approximately 25 million of those deaths came in the first 25 weeks of the outbreak.

3. HIV/AIDS

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is one we’re still battling. And while medicine has made great strides, making HIV in many ways a chronic condition that can be managed in many countries, the end of the pandemic still seems to be a long way away. Originating in Cameroon and first recognized as a disease in 1981, the earliest documented case is believed to be in 1959 in the Congo. As of 2011 at least 60 million people had been infected by AIDS and 25 million had died. Today its impact varies widely across the world—while in 2008 an estimated 1.2 million Americans had HIV, Sub-Saharan Africa alone was home to 22.9 million cases, with one in five adults infected. About 38 million people were believed to have HIV in 2018.

4. The Plague of Justinian

In the year 541, rats on Egyptian grain boats brought a pestilence to the Eastern Roman Empire that would ultimately leave approximately 25 million people dead. The Plague of Justinian quickly tore through the empire. Even the emperor himself—Justinian I, for whom the plague was named—contracted the disease. While he lived, many didn’t, with modern scholars estimating that at one point as many as 5,000 people died per day in Constantinople, the empire’s capital. By its end, about 40 percent of the city’s population was dead—so many and so quickly that bodies were left in piles—joined by about one-fourth of the eastern Mediterranean. Modern experts believe the outbreak to be the first recorded case of the bubonic plague.

5. The Antonine Plague

The Antonine Plague was named for Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who ruled during the outbreak along with co-regent Lucius Verus, the outbreak began in 165 and lasted until 180. An estimated five million people died from what is now thought to have been smallpox. It’s believed to have begun in the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia (in modern-day Iraq) and spread to Rome by soldiers returning from the city’s siege. At one point during the extended pandemic an estimated 2,000 Romans died each day. This isn’t a plague that discriminated—both emperors mentioned above are believed to be among its victims.

Honorable mention:

Cholera

There’s no one outbreak of cholera to point to that’s on the level of any of the above five pandemics. However, since first spreading from Calcutta along the Ganges Delta in 1817, it has killed millions. The World Health Organization estimates that each year that passes sees between 3 and 5 million new cholera cases, killing as many as 120,000 people. Untreated, it can kill in a matter of hours.

Cholera is also notable for the role a specific outbreak played in the development of modern epidemiology. English physician John Snow published his “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera” in 1849, updating it in 1855 with lessons he’d learned the year before. During the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London, Snow had—based on his theory that cholera was transmitted by exposure to contaminated water—used extensive interviews and intricately plotted maps to trace the source of the outbreak to a single water pump. Disabling the pump ended the outbreak almost immediately, in a poignant example of an early, effective public health intervention.

PET PEEVES — The good news: Scientists say there is still no conclusive evidence to suggest coronavirus can be passed from pets to humans. On that front, a new Chinese study has shown cats are not a major factor in spreading the disease. The bad news: Cats can be infected, and they appear to be more susceptible to Covid-19 infection than dogs, with kittens at possible higher risk than older cats. Pets in both Belgium and Hong Kong have tested positive. Dogs, pigs, chickens and ducks in similar experiments have shown low susceptibility, while ferrets showed similar risk levels to cats. But scientists agree the results should raise no alarm with pet owners. "Take care of your pets much the same as you would any other day. If your pet is ill, seek professional assistance," Beijing veterinarian Edgar Wayne Johnson said.

BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK – Birthday wishes and thoughts this week to Russell Crowe (56), John Madden (84), Dennis Quaid (66)

COLLEGE CHRONICLES – Two weeks ago, during the coronavirus pandemic, a group of about 70 students from the University of Texas at Austin partied in Mexico on spring break. Now, 44 of the students, all in their 20s, have tested positive for the virus and are self-isolating. More are being monitored and tested. The Austin outbreak is the latest to result from a group of college students who ignored social-distancing guidelines on spring break, many under the impression they were unlikely to be affected.

Look out for our college students. This has disrupted them at a formative part of their lives. They're the future and will need a pathway back to campus. Some of them have shared with me that they just won't go back, at least in the short-term.

The readjustment of college kids -- is a very interesting point.

DIGITIAL CASH - Money has a lethal power to expose our transactional nature. It matters, then, how we understand money, because we are talking about not just the means to spend, save and invest but the very essence of human relationships, from the interactions of nations and banking systems to the pocket change we give to children.

The emergence of digital cash, including bitcoin and Facebook’s recently announced cryptocurrency, Libra, is about more than security, privacy and making payments easier. As Finn Brunton writes in “Digital Cash,” these new forms of money challenge “an implicit set of assertions about value, time, history, and social structure.” The pioneers of digital cash didn’t start by simply considering the technical challenges of establishing currencies outside the established systems of government and banking. They were guided by “philosophical and social commitments on authority, sovereignty, and the nature of value.”

The bitcoin story begins with emergence of low-cost, powerful computers in the 1970s and the communities of academics and programmers who saw the possibility of new kinds of social organization. As data became digital and power over information changed hands, governments, companies and individuals would have the chance to renegotiate their terms of engagement. At the heart of this change would be money.

For digital cash to work it must satisfy “a set of seemingly paradoxical and impossible demands: it must be available but scarce, unique and anonymous but identifiable and reliable, and easy to transmit but impossible to copy.” One major influence was the “Extropians,” a loosely affiliated group of crackpot futurists. Their philosophy, which took shape in the late 1980s, was built on the belief that humans were on the cusp of technological and scientific advances that would make us immortal, in which case we would need stores of value that could outlive passing fads like banks and paper money.

Economists like Friedrich Hayek had believed in classical liberalism and the value of the individual over the collective. The Extropians adopted those ideas to bolster their own contempt for the boneheaded bureaucracy of governments and corporations. To achieve their wild ambitions would require liberation from established systems, including traditional money. They experimented with small-scale versions of digital cash that had names like GhostMarks and DigiFrancs.

You hear echoes of this way of thinking throughout the history of Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and later the first outside investor in Facebook, said of PayPal’s platform that it would enable “the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution—the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were.” Mr. Brunton also describes groups of “crypto anarchists” who believed that digital money would lead to “global, networked black markets of untraceable, untaxable commerce, after which governments, of necessity, would collapse.” Their ideas fed projects like Silk Road, an online black market that was a popular venue for illegal drug deals for a couple of years, until it was shut down in 2013 and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Bitcoin emerged in late 2008 and early 2009 out of the rubble of the financial crisis, and it solved key problems of scale and security. Mr. Brunton writes that “the first few years of bitcoin’s adoption were shaped by the circumstances of contemporary crisis and the particular fantasies of libertarian escape that provided a framework for its value: scarce cryptomoney to offset ‘the perils of fiat money,’ emergency coinage for extraordinary times.”

The mark of bitcoin’s success, though, has not been widespread adoption but rather the way it has become “suitable for hoarding, display, begging, conspicuous waste, and status competition.” As Mr. Brunton writes, “It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness . . . except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity.”

Facebook now hopes to use its global scale to launch a broadly usable and trusted digital currency, built on a blockchain technology similar to the one that underpins bitcoin. But given the beating the company has taken in recent months for its seemingly cavalier approach to privacy and user data, this may prove a bigger challenge than it anticipates. As lumbering as the existing system of money may be, it remains the enemy we know.

The digital currency’s turnaround this year has offered hope that the worst is over after last year’s steep slump. When bitcoin first crossed $10,000 in November 2017, it took just 18 days to hit its all-time high of nearly $20,000 before it came crashing down. The latest rebound has come with less hype, and perhaps more hope that the market is showing some signs of maturing.

“There are more reasons to believe in bitcoin now than there were the last time [bitcoin was at $10,000,] though I’m still not convinced that the price is sustainable,” said John Sedunov, an assistant professor of finance at Villanova University who published an academic paper in December analyzing whether bitcoin was more than just a speculative asset. Bitcoin has outperformed most traditional asset classes this year, with investors citing more institutional support for cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology that underpins them.

Large investors and corporations now play a greater role too, as exemplified by Facebook’s plans. JPMorgan Chase is developing JPMCoin, even though its Chief Executive James Dimon once called bitcoin a fraud, a comment he later said he regretted. Fidelity Investments has developed a custody service to store bitcoin. Online trading platforms such as E*Trade Financial Corp. and Robinhood also offer cryptocurrency trading to clients.

The industry is still plagued by hacks, security lapses and fraud. One of the largest exchanges, Bitfinex, tried to cover up a loss of $850 million in customer funds. The largest Canadian exchange, QuadrigaCX, collapsed as its founder was using customer funds for personal expenses.

A bitcoin rally just wasn’t in the stars, it seems.

As Facebook’s proposed Libra payment system took its lumps in congressional hearings for a second day, the leading cryptocurrency already in circulation suffered some serious sympathy pains. Bitcoin had more than doubled between early May, when the Libra project was announced, and late June. Since then, as doubts have crept in about Libra, it has lost nearly a third of its value. While bitcoin may recover, Wall Street is less confident about Libra generating much revenue for the controversial social network company.

There’s been a lot of positive trends and signs, but there are still many negative issues which continue to plague the industry. My opinion give me a pocket of Sawbucks any time.

MARKET WEEK - A record-smashing 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, thrusting the nation deeper into economic armageddon. Combined with the 3.3 million people from the week prior, roughly 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment in two weeks. That's the population of Michigan.

The speed and scale of the job losses is without precedent. Until last month, the worst week for unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982. By shuttering businesses and forcing vast layoffs, the coronavirus outbreak has in two weeks wiped out more jobs than the worst months of the last recession.

The hardest hit? Jobless claims in New Hampshire, Indiana, North Carolina, Michigan, and Louisiana rose 4,000% or more. In terms of actual volume, over 878,000 Californians, 366,000 New Yorkers, and almost 406,000 Pennsylvanians filed. Ohio logged more claims in the last two weeks than it did in all of 2019.

While the pandemic initially whacked sectors like tourism and hospitality, job cuts are now getting deeper in industries that had been more shielded, like education, healthcare, law, and tech.

One silverish lining: As part of the rescue package, the government is allowing more types of workers to apply for pandemic relief funds, such as independent contractors and the self-employed.  

Unemployment numbers could get worse. Just this week, over 300,000 retail workers were furloughed. And the St. Louis Fed recently predicted job losses could total 47 million.

The March jobs report will be released this morning, but it’ll paint an incomplete picture since surveys were conducted the second week of March (before all those record unemployment claims).

The April report should provide a better indicator of how the pandemic has affected the U.S. job market. Citi economists told CNN they predict 10 million lost jobs this month and unemployment rising above 10%.

WHAT’S ON MY iPHONE PLAYLIST? - five songs we are listening to this week:

1). “Gravity”, 2005: John Mayer

2). “Pick up the Pieces”, 1974: Average White Band

3). “Three Little Birds”, 1977: Bob Marley and The Wailers

4). “My City Was Gone”, 2006: The Pretenders

5). “Right Place Wrong Time: 1974: Dr. John

OUT AND ABOUT – Though we do not get out and about these days, before when we could this writer had the honor of speaking at the memorial service in January for Pris Schroeder (1956 St. Lawrence). Lennie McKinnon (1958 St. Lawrence) came all the way from Florida to honor her longtime friend Pris. Here we are celebrating Pris picture taken from world famous Tick Tock Inn (closed 2018). Lennie looks great, still playing golf, summers in Canton and her children Mike, Kristy and Kitty are all well.

RINK RATS DAILY QUARANTINE PLANNER – (click on the link)

Morning workout

Here’s a seven-minute workout that requires nothing but a chair and the will to keep going when the side plank kicks in.

Work playlists

Poolside in Your Mind is perfect for those aching for summertime. Alternatively, Christmas Peaceful Piano is what I, a person always aching for the holidays, listen to during work.

Lunch break, but make it productive

Do good: We’ve been writing a lot about people losing their jobs. Here’s a list of companies hiring right now.

Level up: Behold this Twitter thread from Merriam-Webster of “beautiful, obscure, and often quite useless words.”

Or don’t: Ina Garten makes a convincing case for “it’s always 5 o’clock in quarantine.” Also, she makes cosmos.

Correspondence

Write, email, text, at least two friends, co-workers, family a day and ask how they are doing and you are thinking about them.

Dinner plans

Check out Half Baked Harvest on Instagram for a mix of both health and hedonism. I’m eyeing the cheesy herb-stuffed naan, anyone with me?

Evening activities

No screen: Birdwatching has become one of my favorite socially distanced pastimes. Check out local feeding times (which often conveniently coincide with cocktail hour), read up on the dos and don’ts, grab binoculars, and start calling yourself an amateur ornithologist.

Screen: Settle in for these nine extremely good, extremely long streamable movies The Ringer rounded up. If that’s not enough, The Atlantic has the perfect film for every stay-at-home mood.

SWAMI’S WEEK TOP PICKS – No more sports for a while, The Swami tries his skills elsewhere:

1).  Over and under when we can go back to the workplace – August 1, The Swami likes the overs.

2). Over and under when I can get a haircut – July 1, The Swami picks the overs.

3). Over and under on when we pay attention to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates explaining the coronavirus management AND not President Trump – June 1, The Swami says the under on this one.

2020 Season to Date (3-3)

Next Blog:  Leadership

Until Monday April 13, 2020 Adios.

Claremont, California

April 3, 2020

#X-16-405

4,030 words, ten minute read

CARTOON OF THE WEEK – Jon Adams, The New Yorker

RINK RATS POLL – Last time you visited a barber or hair salon?

______   last week

______   last month

______   two months

______   last year

______   I don’t

QUOTE OF THE MONTH – “I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against.”

—    Damon Runyon

Rink Rats is a blog of weekly observations, predictions and commentary. We welcome your comments and questions. Also participate in our monthly poll. Rink Rats is now viewed in Europe, Canada, South America and the United States.

Posted at Rink Rats The Blog: First Published – May 3, 2010

Our Tenth Year.

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