Thur. April 30, 2020 – Month’s gone, and we’re still here

By on April 30th, 2020 in ebola, prepping, WuFlu

Cool and nice, let’s hope.  [62F and sunny at 9am]

Yesterday finally got nice in the afternoon.  Sun came out and it was very pleasant.  Best part was low humidity and a breeze so things actually dried.

Since it was nice and rain is forecast, I did some outdoor work.  I did some sprinkler work in the front yard, some work on my ‘window box’ planters, and some driveway cleanup.

Slowly but surely there is some progress being made.

I’m a bit surprised by how slowly some of my stuff is progressing.  From casual comments on other blogs, some other people are finding the same thing.  It must be a side effect of the ongoing disaster.  I’m finding it hard to get motivated.

That despite the fact we now have over 61K deaths and over a million ‘confirmed’ cases.  I’m willing to accept the case diagnosis in a clinical setting, so I don’t need tests for every case to be counted. YMMV of course.

With summer getting closer, and weather nice, and the mostly invisible nature of this disaster, it’s hard to stay focused.  Make no mistake though, the knock on effects have started, and they will continue to get worse for some time.  Weeks, months, or forever, I’ve got no idea.  But some things have changed.  For example, what would it take before you felt comfortable in a ballroom full of sweaty strangers?  Or even a movie theater, or a restaurant? 855K active cases in the US that need to resolve before this is over, with more cases added every day.  18K are listed as ‘critical’.

It’s pretty safe to say there will be disruptions in the food supply.  Pretty safe to say that imports from countries that are just now starting to have cases explode up the curve, are going to be affected.   Actual shipping on ships will be affected.   Bankruptcies in industry, retail, and personal are bound to increase.   I’ve been a proponent of income streams for retirement vs saving cash in the bank, but a rent strike will hurt landlords big and small.  I’m not leveraged but people that are, or who depend on that income for current expenses  are going to be in a world of hurt if renters stop paying.  And who the heck can provide a valuation for anything in the current climate?  House, car, job, case of Mountain House, who really can say what it will be worth in a month or 3.

All that uncertainty tells me to keep prepping.  Stack what you can, while the brown truck and amazon are still running.  Focus on stuff you’ll need to get by in the next six months.  Any maintenance or repairs coming up?  Projects you’ve been putting off?  Or things that could improve your safety or livability?  Start thinking about what you’ll need and if you need to get it now to be sure you’ll have it later.

Stay in, stay safe,

n

(dinner was baked chicken legs, from the freezer, at least 4 years old.  Tandoori seasoning, bed of onion, bake in BBQ grill at 500F+ for 25 minutes, rice from the bucket, 2014 BB date, birthday cake for dessert.)

67 Comments and discussion on "Thur. April 30, 2020 – Month’s gone, and we’re still here"

  1. Greg Norton says:

    For example, what would it take before you felt comfortable in a ballroom full of sweaty strangers? Or even a movie theater, or a restaurant?

    Not in Austin this weekend. Movies and restaurants are fetishized parts of the culture now, especially around here. Alamo Drafthouse knows the score — their theaters are going to stay closed.

    I might risk a haircut at a local independent place next Friday.

    If we go anywere, I’ll keep an eye on expanding our non-perishables. There are too many stories about the food situation with quotes from union thugs for me to believe that the “shortage” isn’t an election related stunt, but the stores, even non-union, may still have supply issues regardless.

    Polls this morning show Plugs and Trump within the margin of error in Texas. Really?

    If Texas goes a crash route to an all vote-by-mail election, the Dems may well prevail in the state this time, but that would interfere with what Cuomo and Newsom are trying to learn from the Senate race in 2020 — how to win statewide under normal circumstances even if Cornyn survives. I’m not sure if we’ll see vote-by-mail outside of, possibly, the Senate primary runoff in July.

    Again, if the Dems even hint that they are going to abandon Plugs or put Moochelle in the VP slot, I don’t believe Cuomo will sit idly by and wait to run when he’s 73.

  2. Chad says:

    Some of these places may find it difficult to get the staffing they need to reopen. Entry-level hourly part-time employees aren’t especially loyal and after haven been given the boot 6 weeks ago (many weren’t even furloughed but just plain laid off) and making much better money on unemployment may not be all that motivated to return to work.

    It’s going to be a complete clusterfuck when everything reopens. Everything will be packed as everyone rushes out to do the stuff they haven’t been able to do for a couple of months. Places will be short-staffed, former staff will be off their game, there will be lots of clueless new hires. It’ll be a customer service train wreck.

  3. ITGuy1998 says:

    I might risk a haircut at a local independent place next Friday.

    My wife’s hairdresser lives in our neighborhood. She’s going o come by tomorrow and giv ethe boy and I haircuts. It’s been almost two months. We could survive, but i don’t want to risk the normal haircut place when they finally open the middle of next month..

    It’s going to be a complete clusterfuck when everything reopens. Everything will be packed as everyone rushes out to do the stuff they haven’t been able to do for a couple of months. Places will be short-staffed, former staff will be off their game, there will be lots of clueless new hires. It’ll be a customer service train wreck.

    +1

  4. Nick Flandrey says:

    My barber called me yesterday. I’ve been going to him for 18 years. He’s thinking about reopening, and what he can do to minimize risk for himself. Happens that I’ve got some masks so I offered him those, and also some PPE aprons. He could change an apron every customer. We also talked about positioning a fan to blow across his face and the customer, to move anything away.

    We’ll talk some more in the next couple of weeks and get something working to help him reopen. The key is that he knows wuflu will be still out there, and will probably walk into his shop. He’s been doing a friend here or there at home, and he’s nervous as heII about reopening.

    He’s only heard of one friend’s child being sick. People have stopped asking each other if they know someone sick, or if they’ve been sick. Somehow it’s become a stigma, and that’s not good because it will hide the true extent of the spread…

    n

  5. Nick Flandrey says:

    “making much better money on unemployment may not be all that motivated to return to work.”

    –until that runs out. Then there’ll be a scramble to find a job with whatever businesses are open. So if you want to work, act early.

    n

  6. Nick Flandrey says:

    One change I’m seeing that will be very hard to roll back is free delivery, curbside pickup, and expedited in store pickup. All kinds of places have made the change.

    Think about all the retail techniques that won’t work in the new environment. Put the staples at the back of the grocery so people walk thru the store and grab impulse items or are reminded to get something extra? Load up the check out lanes with very high margin impulse items? In aisle ‘special’ displays? Loss leaders just to get you into the store?

    For that matter, all the studies of shelf positioning, number of ‘faces’ to display, the higher value of ‘end caps’, and the way people move thru a store will all change. How about fitting rooms? When are those sanitized? How about returned items? Already many stores just dump ALL returns into the auction and reseller market. Heck other than economic reasons (and those might be primary soon) will anyone WANT used items?

    Throw away packaging materials have been decreasing, despite the japanese fetish for new, untouched stuff (which is one reason every single thing in a box is in a bag or shrink wrap). Will that trend reverse? Will there be a new “sealed for your protection” wrapper on everything?

    Some things to think about as some of the changes will stick with us, and we’ll change in ways we don’t expect.
    n

  7. Mark W says:

    Polls this morning show Plugs and Trump within the margin of error in Texas. Really?

    Combination of TDS and pollster bias? Dems can’t feel good about voting for Biden. They must be aware of the rape allegation even if their TDS lets them ignore it. Polls usually show a lefty bias too.

  8. MrAtoz says:

    Ann Coulter’s latest column asks some questions. An example:

    What do you think of the media’s coverage of the Wuhan virus?

    It’s like a nonstop “War of the Worlds” broadcast, which in 1938 panicked more than a million Americans into believing Martians had landed in New Jersey, sending people fleeing to the mountains, loading their shotguns and barricading their homes. And that was a single radio broadcast!

    Today we have nearly all of media — which I notice are doing fantastically well during the crisis — terrifying the public about an apparently indestructible, omnipresent virus.

    This is exactly what our goobermint and the MSM have presented. An apparently indestructible, omnipresent virus. “Stay inside or you’ll die!” “Stay inside or we’ll arrest you!” “It will be back with a passion this Summer!” “It will be back this Fall!” “It will be back EVERY YEAR!”

    Meat packing plants are closing because everybody has COVID. What is the fracking difference? They all have it, keep packing meat, biatches. I guess I will have to hand-till my new/old back yard and start planting survival potatoes ala The Martian.

  9. Greg Norton says:

    “making much better money on unemployment may not be all that motivated to return to work.”

    –until that runs out. Then there’ll be a scramble to find a job with whatever businesses are open. So if you want to work, act early.

    The politicians will make sure the unemployment runs through the election at a minimum.

  10. CowboySlim says:

    When will the MSM bend from the totality of telling us what the first responders are doing and mention the second responders?

  11. Mark W says:

    When will the MSM bend from the totality of telling us what the first responders are doing and mention the second responders?

    The people they call first responders usually are second responders, in that a “lay person” has often done some initial work. Respect to EMTs etc, my issue is with the the way the MSM defer to them and never question them seriously.

  12. Nick Flandrey says:

    Since they claimed the title of “first” they’ve had to come up with a new phrase to describe what they are finally acknowledging in their training and doctrine, “Immediate Responders” which means those people on the scene who help.

    the phrase should get a lot of good Google hits for policy papers and after action reports.

    n

  13. Greg Norton says:

    Meat packing plants are closing because everybody has COVID. What is the fracking difference? They all have it, keep packing meat, biatches. I guess I will have to hand-till my new/old back yard and start planting survival potatoes ala The Martian.

    With all the quotes from union thugs in articles about the shortages, I’ve come to the conclusion that the games at the meat packing plants are part of leadership nest feathering, but, regardless, the end result is the same.

    I also believe some stores had to be brought in line with the fear mongering or risk having their supplies cut off so the shortage stories cover that. Publix in Florida went from a “Oh, hell, no” policy on enforcing the mask kabuki last week to introducing their own line of store logo-embroidered masks this week.

    Tyson definitely has a political agenda. And Costco must be protected regardless of their stupidity.

  14. Lynn says:

    My website is a combination of static html and several C++ programs using flatfile databases. One of my databases is up to 300 MB, I really need to split it apart.

    Berkeley DB

    fgets and fputs. Read and write a line of ascii at a time. The flatfile databases are actually logs

  15. hcombs says:

    Here in Oklahoma nail & hair salons were opened last Friday. I got a badly needed haircut at Supercuts yesterday. I had to make an appointment, was the only customer in the room, and felt very comfortable. Tomorrow they are opening restaurants with restrictions on number of customers in a dining area and special satitization rules. I am not afraid to take my wife out to our local. They are planning on opening bars up later in the month and that will make me VERY busy as almost half my ATMs are in bars and have been shut down. They will all need to be serviced and filled. At least the Self Storage facility is still providing income. I’ve had one tenant move out because he lost his import business but three more have moved in. It’s enough to keep me going without worries.
    Here, local ranchers are working with small butchers to sell beef directly to the public at a discount. I am looking to buy half a beef and fill my chest freezer.

  16. CowboySlim says:

    Oh yeah, also heard “initial” responders, but never “final” responders. Just a bunch of babbleheads…..the MSM talkers, bureaucrats and politicians. OK, they all, one time or another, will have claimed to have prepositioned something; OTOH, you will never here “post”positioned.

  17. Nick Flandrey says:

    The “final responders” are the guys throwing your cold corpse into the back of the Ryder reefer truck….

    n

  18. lynn says:

    “Top coronavirus model predicts 100,000 Americans dead by the end of this summer’s first wave – as death toll passes Trump’s best case scenario of 60,000 dead”
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8273607/Top-COVID-19-model-predicts-100-000-dead-end-summer.html

    We are all going to die.

    #explainyoursneeze

    Hat tip to:
    http://drudgereport.com/

  19. lynn says:

    “Texas A&M, Texas Tech universities plan to reopen campuses this fall”
    https://www.chron.com/coronavirus/article/Texas-A-M-Texas-Tech-universities-plan-to-reopen-15237087.php

    Dad is really looking forward to TAMU playing Arkansas in Jerry’s World in Arlington, Texas on Feb 26, 2020. I figure about 85,000 of our new friends will be there. Me, I am nervous.

  20. Mark W says:

    Top coronavirus model

    Could she be America’s Next Top Model?

  21. lynn says:

    “Jobless claims: Another 3.84 million Americans file for unemployment benefits”
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-covid-weekly-initial-jobless-claims-april-25-184820691.html

    “In just the previous six weeks, more than 30 million Americans have filed unemployment insurance claims.”

    That is real hurt. People are not getting their paychecks. People are having trouble getting unemployment. The state unemployment funds are going to go broke.

    Cost of the SARS-COV-2 to the federal government per anticipated death = $6,000,000,000,000 / 100,000 deaths = $60,000,000 / death

    Cost to the USA citizens per death = ???

    This is crazy.

  22. Rick Hellewell says:

    The problem with the CV infection rate models is that they are based on bad or incomplete data.

    This from the “Cliff Mass” weather blog, which I have found to be useful in discussions on weather and weather data.

    Things are not going well these days regarding predicting the future of coronavirus in the U.S., with the epidemiological community, including critical government agencies, not succeeding in these important areas:

    They do not know the percentage of the U.S. population with active or past COVID-19 infections.
    They do not have the ability to quality control and combine virus testing information into a coherent picture of the current situation. This is a big-data problem.
    The epidemiological simulation models used by U.S government agencies or American universities have a poor track record in their predictions, with their quantification of uncertainty unreliable.

    Until there is accurate data, all of the models and predictions are worthless. And that worthless data is being used to decide how to respond.

    The entire article is here https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/04/still-flying-blind-can-meteorologists.html .

    And you can trot out all the snarky about weather forecasts/forecasting, but the weather guys know how to analyze tons of data. The forecasting models are usually accurate, with better accuracy for short-term than long-term. Yes, area micro-climates make it harder, but there are many data models that are pretty good, considering all of the data and variances involved.

    So I don’t panic at all of the predictions – because the data is not there to support things. GIGO. The article linked above has some useful analysis.

  23. MrAtoz says:

    Kalifornia to close beaches today. Nuisance gonna Nuisance. Plus, more goobermint assistance to crimmigrants. How long will people take it? Can’t go to the beach. Watch your tax dollars go to crimmigrants.

  24. lynn says:

    Kalifornia to close beaches today. Nuisance gonna Nuisance.

    So is he gonna arrest all those people and throw them in jail ?

    The nanny state is upon us.

  25. SteveF says:

    The primary Chinese Flu death projects come from Neal Ferguson, a serially wrong researcher at Imperial College London. He predicted 200,000,000 deaths from Bird Flu, that forecast being off by about 199,999,500, or 39,999,900%. More tellingly, he refused to share out the source code for his prediction model, claiming it’s old and undocumented and too difficult to pick apart and look for errors.

    Sound familiar? You’ve heard much the same from Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Martin A Armstrong.

    I’m a hardliner on this: if the data, the computer models, and the analysis are not open for review, it’s not science.

  26. JimB says:

    I know 32 vs 64 bits, memory usage, speed, blah, nicer interfaces, blah, more graphics, blah, less errors to debug in an local IRS change of rules, ok, but, who pays?, is there a business case?

    My 2 cents (yes, I know, PHB at his best )

    @ayjblog, I’m with you. Some things need to stay constant. I am tired of relearning stuff that isn’t any better, sometimes worse, but always different.

  27. JLP says:

    I badly need a haircut. I’ll even settle for a bad haircut. At the current length it is just messy. If it gets a lot longer I can pull it into a pony tail, as I did for a while in my callow youth. I doubt I’ll let it get to that level. I might just grab the beard trimmer and take it all down to 3/4 inch and just wait for it to grow back.

  28. paul says:

    I am looking to buy half a beef and fill my chest freezer.

    I see this comment somewhat often. What I have never seen is “how much beef is half a beef?” That is, if starting with an empty chest freezer, what size?

    Not trying to be a jerk off. Just wondering. And yeah, I know the size of the critter makes a difference. But, roughly…..

  29. SteveF says:

    No, JLP, you don’t want a ponytail. What you want is a mullet.

  30. CowboySlim says:

    How long will people take it? Can’t go to the beach. Watch your tax dollars go to crimmigrants.

    I’m 1 1/2 crow miles from Californication State Beach which closed a while back has not reopened.

    Our local county jail released a convict in accordance with Gov. Screwsom’s advisement. He got on our local public bus (80% covered by tax dollars), got off at end of line (near my house) and started breaking into cars and stealing. Was seen, police called and back in the slammer. Thanks Nuisance!

  31. CowboySlim says:

    I frequently get mail from credit card outfits that say on the envelope: “You have been PRESELECTED”

    Still waiting to have been “Postselected”.

  32. Nick Flandrey says:

    Dad used to buy a half, and it didn’t fill an upright freezer. The problem is that you get a lot of cuts that are less desirable.

    There are groups that will split a couple of cows, and some people will pay less and take more of the lesser cuts, but that’s a lot of messing around. IF I could buy a freezer right now, and someone offered me a half beef, or half pig, I’d take it. Everything I’ve seen on line says freezers are hard to come by atm.

    n

  33. JLP says:

    SteveF, I didn’t think of a mullet. All business up front, party in the back.

  34. CowboySlim says:

    SteveF, I didn’t think of a mullet. All business up front, party in the back.

    Used to be a website of photos of mullet wearers. Gone now.

  35. Greg Norton says:

    Used to be a website of photos of mullet wearers. Gone now.

    peopleofwalmart.com

    No lack of mullets (or any other strangeness) there.

  36. lynn says:

    “Over 70% of tested inmates in federal prisons have COVID-19”
    https://apnews.com/fb43e3ebc447355a4f71e3563dbdca4f

    “And even though officials have stressed infection and death rates inside prisons are lower compared with outside, new figures provided by the Bureau of Prisons show that out of 2,700 tests systemwide, nearly 2,000 have come back positive, strongly suggesting there are far more COVID-19 cases left uncovered.”

    “As of Wednesday, 31 inmates, including Fleming, had died of the coronavirus at federal correctional facilities since late March. About 600 have recovered.”

    There are 170,435 inmates in federal prisons according to:
    https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.jsp

    I don’t know what to think about these results other than don’t be in a prison.

    Hat tip to:
    http://drudgereport.com/

  37. lynn says:

    Used to be a website of photos of mullet wearers. Gone now.

    http://www.peopleofwalmart.com

    No lack of mullets (or any other strangeness) there.

    Firefox 75.0 does not like that website. When I click on go to page 2 or next page, I get an XML file downloaded.

  38. CowboySlim says:

    peopleofwalmart.com

    Yeah, I remember that one. Used to check it in the same era. Real amusing and how true.

  39. lynn says:

    I badly need a haircut. I’ll even settle for a bad haircut. At the current length it is just messy. If it gets a lot longer I can pull it into a pony tail, as I did for a while in my callow youth. I doubt I’ll let it get to that level. I might just grab the beard trimmer and take it all down to 3/4 inch and just wait for it to grow back.

    Another week or two I figure that I will look like this:
    https://www.peopleofwalmart.com/year-of-the-rat/

    “Baby, where is my tie dye hoodie shirt ?”

  40. ~jim says:

    @SteveF
    Neil (not Neal) Ferguson and *Niall* Ferguson are two different creatures.
    You had me worried for a second because I’ve read and respect the works of Niall!

    An eloquated summary of GregH and SteveFs’ expostulations showed up today, here:

    https://babylonbee.com/news/scientists-who-whiffed-on-every-covid-19-prediction-confident-they-know-what-the-weather-is-going-to-be-like-in-100-years

  41. MrAtoz says:

    Ha ha! Houston PD report a *bazooka* found during a raid. News reports it. Later PD says “uh, not a bazooka.” News keeps tweet up. I love the term bazooka. It sounds funny. But, I only use it to mock people who don’t know the term is from WWII.

    ProgLibTurd: Look, that pipe! Is it a weapon.

    Me: It’s a bazooka! It can take out a building!

  42. pcb_duffer says:

    [snip] The “final responders” are the guys throwing your cold corpse into the back of the Ryder reefer truck…. [snip]

    Plug for my current employer: Or the crew from your local Servpro, who come in to clean / sanitize / deodorize. We have and use a lot of personal protective equipment (PPE) and chemicals to kill any bacillus or virus. We’ve had some proactive sanitizing jobs, and anticipate a lot more as the state slowly opens up – businesses who are going to want to be sanitized before they open, and then once a week for the next few months.

  43. pcb_duffer says:

    [snip] “how much beef is half a beef?” [snip]

    In terms of volume, I don’t know. My folks used to buy a full beef every fall from a local “gentleman farmer”, and split it with my older sister and her family. It would essentially fill my mother’s full sized upright freezer. As it slowly emptied, mom would fill it with seasonal veggies. She also had a chest type freezer for other storage. She never did shake the Depression era rural poverty she was raised in. She lived the last few years of her life in a one bedroom apartment, but she still had a freezer in the garage.

  44. Nick Flandrey says:

    If you’ve ever wondered where your next meal was going to come from, and your circumstances change, you will probably have a fair amount of food “put back”.

    Being hungry leaves a mark.

    n

  45. SteveF says:

    Yep. Forty-five years later and I still make sure there’s a few cans or boxes tucked away in odd corners. That’s separate from the calculated decision to have food and cash and tools in case of problems.

  46. Greg Norton says:

    If you’ve ever wondered where your next meal was going to come from, and your circumstances change, you will probably have a fair amount of food “put back”.

    Being hungry leaves a mark.

    Trump will lose in a big way if the food mess persists.

  47. mediumwave says:

    Ha ha! Houston PD report a *bazooka* found during a raid. News reports it. Later PD says “uh, not a bazooka.” News keeps tweet up.

    The “bazooka” revealed in all its bazook-ish glory!

    Bazooka! Bazooka! Bazooka! 😀

  48. Ray Thompson says:

    Ha ha! Houston PD report a *bazooka* found during a raid

    Could have been a Bazooka Gum wrapper? Or am I just showing my age. Ask Slim. He would know what I am talking about.

  49. Greg Norton says:

    Could have been a Bazooka Gum wrapper? Or am I just showing my age. Ask Slim. He would know what I am talking about.

    Bazooka was around well into the 80s, but it got softer and more expensive.

  50. Nick Flandrey says:

    I’m pretty sure I had some Bazooka gum in the last couple of years. Gets hard to chew and loses its flavor pretty quickly.

    n

  51. Pecancorner says:

    “how much beef is half a beef?” That is, if starting with an empty chest freezer, what size?

    My dad and stepmother gave us half a beef last fall. We only had to pay the processing costs, which is why I know about how much the “hanging weight” was … charge was so much a pound. It was a young animal, not a lot of marbling, “hanging weight” was about 500 lbs and we got half of the animal. I *think* Daddy told me they usually dress out to about half the hanging weight.

    I don’t know how many pounds of wrapped beef that worked out to, but it filled our ~ 8 cu ft chest freezer to the brim. I’d spent the previous month frantically canning everything that was in it in order to have room for the beef and it just barely fit. There were scads of steaks, roasts, lots of ground (which we like), some ribs but not too many, and we had asked for the tongue so we also got the heart and the liver.

    That said… we’ve “bought” “half a beef” in times past, just going through the processor and not knowing who raised the beef, and once half a pig, and all three times, I suspected the processor shorted us in both weight and in the cuts included. So know your processor, or go in halves with someone who has used a processor before and trusts them.

    The beef that Daddy slaughtered for us was smaller and leaner than they usually take in – he had several processed at the same time so that he could share it out among all the family. We being a two-person older couple, the smaller steaks and roasts are a better fit for us.

  52. William Quick says:

    Worth a thought or two:

    ‘A’ Did Not Cause ‘B’ by Tyler Durden Thu, 04/30/2020 –

    A = coronavirus. B = economic meltdown. A caused B.

    That’s the mainstream narrative when it comes to the economic pain we’re feeling right now. But in reality, A did not cause B. B was in the works long before A came along.

    I’ve been thinking about this for a while – back to 1999, approximately.  I think the US economy was the equivalent of the 90 year old geezer in the nursing home with stents, aretrioscloerosis, diabetes, and COPD.  And then along came the Wuhan Kung Flu from China.

  53. Harold Combs says:

    Dad used to buy a half, and it didn’t fill an upright freezer. The problem is that you get a lot of cuts that are less desirable.

    When we were young dad would buy half a beef and have it all made into ground beef. Everything. We never had steaks or ribs or roast, just ground beef.
    You can tell the processing guy exactly how you want it cut.

  54. Nick Flandrey says:

    Thanks PecanCorner, that is solid info. I was pretty young when my dad did it. All the cuts came in butcher paper wraps, and these days I’d prefer vac seal.

    Speaking of vac seal, after dinner I processed another 10 pounds of chicken quarters my wife picked up last week. Man were they cheap. Rib and backbone still attached. I cleaned them down to leg and thigh, took off the skin if it was loose, and then vac sealed them in groups of six. That’s just a bit more than we can eat for one meal, but 4 is too little. That’s a lot of loss if there was really 10 pounds in the bag.

    While moving stuff around in the freezer to make room, I noticed that one of the pieces of elk had the vac bag leak. There was a bit of air inside. I had to re-bag it, so I decided to cut it in half too. One 9 pound roast became two 4+ pound roasts. Honestly, they wouldn’t have fit in the bag as a whole roast. So now I have a roast small enough to actually cook. I’ll have to find a good recipe in one of my wild game cookbooks. First time I used the meat hacksaw I picked up a couple of years ago. Worked well, wasn’t that hard to cut, and cleaned pretty easily. I guess I should study up and figure out how to cut the sirloin roast into steaks…

    n

  55. jenny says:

    @paul
    What I have never seen is “how much beef is half a beef?”
    A lot, but less than you might think. Our experience has been about 60-70% of the beef winds up in your freezer in nice white packages.

    It takes a fair amount of space – our chest freezer seems very full once we add half a beef or a whole pig to it. I prefer a whole pig. We have farmer friends that will sometimes raise one for us, and we take care of the slaughter, etc, then take it to a trusted individual to put it in packages (man it’s a lot of work to put a big animal into little packages if you don’t do it often and have the tools to be efficient!). Our processor likes when we bring in animals because I do a really clean job with the carcass and he doesn’t have to clean up my mistakes. Apparently (especially with sheep) not everyone is as meticulous about keeping the carcass clean and he has to tidy up the parts that have gotten dirty with hair or feces (gross! and careless!). I have often wondered if that contributes to people complaining that the processor shorted them, particularly with wild games. We always give a portion of the beasty back to the processor as a thank you, kind of a tip and show of appreciation. I don’t know if that is customary but it feels right to do so. He’s a one man shop, don’t know if I would feel compelled to do so with a big operation.

    And it’s all tasty, if you cook it right. Even the nasty bits. Nothing nicer than heart eaten as dinner the night the animal was slaughtered. Nick, your youngster has excellent taste.

    These guys say you need 7 cubic feet of storage for half a beef. Sounds about right.
    http://www.blueroosterfarm.com/purchase-a-whole-half-or-quarter-beef

  56. lynn says:

    Worth a thought or two:

    ‘A’ Did Not Cause ‘B’ by Tyler Durden Thu, 04/30/2020 –
    https://www.zerohedge.com/health/did-not-cause-b

    A = coronavirus. B = economic meltdown. A caused B.

    That’s the mainstream narrative when it comes to the economic pain we’re feeling right now. But in reality, A did not cause B. B was in the works long before A came along.

    I’ve been thinking about this for a while – back to 1999, approximately. I think the US economy was the equivalent of the 90 year old geezer in the nursing home with stents, aretrioscloerosis, diabetes, and COPD. And then along came the Wuhan Kung Flu from China.

    The oil patch (15,000,000 direct and indirect employees in the USA alone) has been in the ditch for over a year. Maybe two years. And it just went out of the ditch and into something worse, much worse. But the problems have been there since 2008 when everyone noted George Mitchell was using directional drilling and fracking to make shale oil reservoirs flow like the old oil finds of the 1910s to the 1960s. By 2012 ??? everyone was doing it. And borrowing big money to drill the wells and frack them. Shoot, the cost of the fracking is sometimes more than the initial well.

    The Chinese Flu did pop the bubble though. It was not an easy pop, whistling air for minutes long, it was a horrendous explosion of air. I guess that the bubble was the entire economy. That is why the economy won’t come back quickly when we decide to let it come back. If a person has lost their job since March then I don’t expect for them to get the job back. People are going to be very unhappy come the federal election in November.

    My son keeps on saying that we will call this The Greater Depression. I am beginning to think that he means it.

    My biggest customer is splitting their company in half in the fall. 330,000 employees across the world. I sure do hope that they will honor the six figure invoice that I am sending them in June. They usually don’t pay it until October, right when the divorce is suppose to become final.

  57. lynn says:

    “Yuan Crashes After Trump Weighs Blocking Retirement Fund Access To Chinese Stocks As War Of Words Escalates”
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yuan-crashes-after-trump-weighs-blocking-retirement-fund-access-chinese-stocks-war-words

    Wars have been started for less.

  58. lynn says:

    I have been wondering something for a while. Did New York City get a more viral version of the Chinese Flu than the rest of the USA ? I know that there are at least two variants of SARS-COV-2 out there. I have seen claims that there are up to 31 variants of the Chinese Flu which I find hard to believe.

  59. Greg Norton says:

    I have been wondering something for a while. Did New York City get a more viral version of the Chinese Flu than the rest of the USA ? I know that there are at least two variants of SARS-COV-2 out there. I have seen claims that there are up to 31 variants of the Chinese Flu which I find hard to believe.

    New York City is a perfect storm of risk factors — insanely high density, extreme dependence on public transportation, and an arrogant mindset of “it can’t happen here”.

    Plus, the only way to survive a 350 sq ft apartment with your sanity intact is to never be home.

    Seattle got a taste of what New York got, but the increasing denisity of the city only started within the last 10 years as Amazon moved to Lake Union and sent the real estate into the stratosphere.

  60. nick flandrey says:

    NYFC is a hive, and if you’ve seen the pix of the homeless on the subways at night, and the commuters packed in cheek by jowl, then you get an idea why it might have spread so far and wide in NYFC…

    No way was the subway ‘cleaned’ or ‘disinfected’ at night.

    Plus, the whole city’s a stinking filthhole on the best of days. Dogsh!t in the curb in front of every building, trash overflowing from alleys. Leachate and mystery fluids everywhere.

    Gross and grubby.

    n

  61. nick flandrey says:

    Had to restart firefox. Drive was hammering away at 100%, mostly pagefile and my mozilla profile, memory was at 89% (of 16G) with hard faults at max.

    Kill ffox, watch the graphs settle. Took a long time (minutes) before all the ffox crap quit writing to the disc and all the memory faults dropped to zero.

    Started back up, loaded tabs one by one, and everything is still very low or zero. You just can’t let it run for weeks with open tabs.

    n

  62. JimB says:

    I used to use Chrome on my Android phone. It seems to unload tabs not currently viewed from RAM, because when I go to an “open” tab I haven’t viewed in a while it reloads it, but doesn’t refresh it; I have to do that manually. I have had about 100 tabs open for more than a year with no apparent problems. I switched to Brave about five months ago, and it seems to behave the same way. I think it is built on the codebase of Chromium.

    I use Chromium on Mint Linux, and it tends to leak RAM. I can only have a couple dozen tabs open, or the same total in multiple windows. Closing tabs does not recover all RAM. Closing the browser and restarting it with the same tabs (automatic with that option selected) restores the RAM. Some web sites (not very many) drive Chromium crazy, with huge RAM and CPU use. Closing those almost always restores the RAM. Go figure.

    I increasingly like Brave. I use it for almost all my browsing on Android. I can’t use it on my Linux version because it needs 64 bit, and I am too lazy to switch. Watching YouTube on Brave, there are no ads. There are practically none on all the sites I visit. Can’t say that for Chromium. When I used FF, I used ad blockers, but had lots of problems with sites that blocked ME. Don’t have that problem with Brave (not so far, even once,) and only very occasionally on Chromium. I rarely go to some of the really bad sites, such as the Brit tabs, but Brave handles them better than anything I have tried.

    The only browser I really ever liked was Mosaic, but that might be because it was before all the bad stuff today. Netscape was variable. I had good luck with early versions of IE, much to the amazement of some friends. Don’t have a production Windows system right now, so can’t comment on the latest versions. My wife uses IE and Edge on W8, and says she has no problems, but that is on a heavily filtered proxy server. For the record, I have more trouble with browsers than any other type of software, by far.

  63. ayj says:

    everything inside a beast was a grossing up to our processors back in 20s, heart at dinner? true?
    ok

  64. nick flandrey says:

    @ayj, in the old days, food was food. Poor people ate offal. Guts. Whatever was cheap.

    Still true in China last time I went there.

    n

  65. ech says:

    I have seen claims that there are up to 31 variants of the Chinese Flu which I find hard to believe.

    There are. That is how they know that the NYC outbreak came via Europe, and the Seattle strain from China. But the differences in the genetics are very, very minor and unimportant.

  66. Nick Flandrey says:

    And by “came from Europe” they mean, AFTER it was brought from China to Europe and mutated into a distinct strain….

    A lot of the writing about strains uses language to imply that there was a European wuflu and a chinese wuflu… which isn’t what the known facts support.

    I see it as a conscious decision to influence peoples’ thoughts on the origins of the virus.

    n

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