love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

I don’t Deliveroo or order online because I feel like I’d be allowing a certain class of worker to carry risk for me

this is tricky cos if everyone piles into the shops then that also carries a risk. and all the background warehousing and distribution stuff is going on whichever path you take. definitely important to think about this stuff though. don't know what the answer is - maybe do as big a load of shopping as possible at any one time and maybe that will cut down the number of potentially hazardous interactions?

Much more into people that want to get back to office discourse. Which is having its own moment (and something we talked to on here yesterday).

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jul/14/end-of-the-office-the-quiet-grinding-loneliness-of-working-from-home

This report does actually cover quite a few sides of the issue. From the lack of space at many home to perhaps greater invasion of privacy from new apps attached to work computers.

(The people who talk about how much they like the office is a thing, but I assume that's younger people who have just started working...I find that one weird but I'm old)

I was the only person wearing a mask in small local food shop yesterday (the owners were doing it during the first weeks of lockdown only) but tbh have been very slack when it comes to mask-wearing in small places I'm in and out of within a few minutes.

Where I live (WC1) the shops are queue-free for the most part - maybe five people waiting, tops, on a Saturday - so I don’t feel uneasy about popping in for milk and Interesting Reductions a couple of times each week, or buying replacement items from eg. Superdrug in person. I get the bulk of my food from my local veg stand or the farmer’s market and the latter has very short supply chains.

Yeah I think being physically in the shop might be more dangerous for workers, our supermarket delivery drivers have just been leaving things outside the door, knocking and moving to a safe distance before we open. It's not risk free, particularly I suspect at the pick-up points, but it's probably safer than being in a space with hundreds of people going in and out every day. Otherwise we have a butchers and a fishmonger and a bakery nearby who club together and send someone round on a bike with a basket on the front to leave stuff in front of your building, which the most middle class thing I've ever seen but it works pretty well in this scenario.

I wouldn't use Deliveroo or any other rent-a-slave start-up even in a pandemic.

Meals I've ordered from one company that isn't Deliveroo is actually turning up from people with Deliveroo-branded bags as if there has been some sort of loosening up of things and more and more people have signed up with multiple operators, regardless of which one you actually order the food from. Might've been a thing before the pandemic but didn't notice until recently.

I have never used Deliveroo or Uber and obvs won’t be starting now.

'He’s like a political Roy Cropper' – What Conservative MPs make of Keir Starmer’s first 100 days

I've spoken to members of the government and Conservative MPs to get their verdict on the new Labour leader so far:https://t.co/i8CtuksCLR

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 14, 2020

Labour source gets in touch to point out that Roy Cropper (played by David Neilson) actually had a winning streak - won best actor at the 2013 soap awards 🥇

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 15, 2020

^the kind of rapid-reaction response so sorely missing from the Corbyn years.

I don't think there'll be that many people kicking off about wearing masks as long as they're freely available and inexpensive. The right-wing reaction seems like an attempt to jump on to the coattails of what's happening in the US.

oh that has made my day!

RAPID RESPONSE TEAM! wow team labour should be 20 pts ahead with that kind of setup!

Yeah it's an import from the US. There will probably be the odd video or two of someone getting kicked out of a supermarket for not wearing one but that'll die pretty quickly, I reckon xxp

Roy Cropper famously married to a trans woman, of course.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/matt-hancock-rules-out-mandatory-face-masks-offices-health-secretary-england

Stuff like this is going to be the biggest point of contention - weird discrepancies in the rules.

I think it might still be mandatory to wear masks in offices in Beijing and they don't have any active cases. It's really interesting to see how other countries have approached offices - Beijing and HK iirc have strictly limited them to 50% of capacity, India - which is just as aggressively capitalist and even more right-wing than the UK, has set it at 33%. The UK approach seems to be 'do your best and have some hand sanitiser available if you can'.

It's bullshit because you're stuck in a smaller space for a much longer time at work, school, down the pub etc

Pubs are good for free hand sanitiser tbh, shots of it with pint chasers are the future

I guess you could argue that shops make contact tracing impossible and offices and pubs don't but, again, it's not actually looking to stop anyone from getting it, just making it slightly easier to find them if they do.

tbh if you'd stuck with only bit supermarkets you could probably do a better system of contact tracing via store cards

Big supermarkets, sorry

Also we're assuming this about protecting people rather than persuading reluctant shops to reopen.

It's about persuading reluctant shoppers to get back out spending money

Gotta reluctantly go to Aldi shortly on account of I need to eat

they don't have no cultural problems with face masks in Japan where even if you haven't got one on outside you'll get some stares. They are almost double our population and their urban zones are among the most densely populated in the world, they have half our death toll. The UK government can't highlight successful health policies from other countries in their messaging because it just highlights how shit and useless they have been.

shit, 982 deaths in Japan. Is it really that low or am I misreading data here?

yeas that is the UK c-19 death toll 45.79 times worse than Japan's!

(The people who talk about how much they like the office is a thing, but I assume that's younger people who have just started working...I find that one weird but I'm old)

Well I think with the younger crowd the issue is partly one of the space they can afford, but as you say people like the chat, and the socialising for a drink after work (as told to me once when we talked about it, whereas I was for very much only ever going for a face to face meeting when necessary, and from experience you seldom need it with the video tools we have).

I think you could get rid of the big office but also have a social now and then. Obv I'm happy never setting my foot into an office again but I know people want contact.

as you say people like the chat

Just clock in clock out for me thx

It depends entirely on who you work with obviously but sitting at your kitchen table for months on end is dull and it must be a million times worse if you have three other housemates competing for space and bandwidth.

If you're working in a city centre there's also the way the working there makes you feel plugged into that city and what you can do there after work. I miss weekday evening socialising more than proper weekends - not with work people per se, just the ability to wander out of the office and meet a friend who lives on the opposite side of town.

Yeah the issue is one of space, that's as much to do with how fucked rental property is (I wonder if offices become more obsolete that space could be freed up to be converted to spaces people could live in). Like if we had the space would wfh be easier for the people struggling? I'd like to think so.

And if more ppl were living closer to the centre they could also log off and meet ppl after too (that's been the case for me in the last few years).

Anyway the commuting in and out of London is such a fucked up thing and that's where I'm coming from. Might be different in other cities.

convert the offices into flats but leave some office stuff in them, problem smashed

I've always wanted to have a lounge with a suspended ceiling with office style lighting, aircon and a fax machine next to the toilet!

It's not even a problem of rental property per se, houses are designed to have three or four people living in them, they're not designed to have that many people working in them all the time. Not to mention there are parents looking after kids etc. I don't get the sense there's any great clamour to getting back to the office right now, but when it's safe to commute again people are going to go back.

Kinda hoping the small portion of people wfh increases. The office cost saving is huge and hopefully the capitalists will not miss this trick.

Anyway the commuting in and out of London is such a fucked up thing and that's where I'm coming from. Might be different in other cities.

I guess you could argue that shops make contact tracing impossible and offices and pubs don't but, again, it's not actually looking to stop anyone from getting it, just making it slightly easier to find them if they do.

― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Wednesday, July 15, 2020 12:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

get your contact tracing agency access to credit card payment systems and GPS records and bob's your uncle. of course people will consider that a greater infringement on their rights than being ordered not to leave the house, you could probably turn that into one of those clown memes

Yeah, for a lot of people the benefits of being able to socialise where they live immediately after work are equal to the appeal of the Z1 mix MDC describes. School events, neighbourhood stuff, parent pal socialising, these all become much more accessible if you're not commuting an hour away every day. It's a reconfiguring of our assumptions about socialising as well as about working

I think ideal for me personally is a mix of a small percentage of time in a shared location, the rest from home.

Keep the show defund the host

@LondonEconomic
4m
Unknown
The Andrew Neil Show has been cut, as the BBC announces more than 500 job cuts.

It's amusing when you hear tories and Labour melts pretending to have heartfelt concerns about mental health/domestic abuse issues relating to homeworking when you know they have landlord friends and taken many sizable donations from Big property concerns who are shitting it over lost rent income

The government response to Gove being papped coming out of a Pret without a mask is to announce that you don't need to wear a mask if buying takeaway food.

Same but weirdly I miss it as well, I used to use the train journey to sort of get over anything I was angry about/start fights on ilx/listen to that album I’d been looking forward to all day.
― scampos mentis (gyac), Wednesday, 15 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Sure I get that, my "calmly posting" was posted was on a train from Leeds I think :-) And I've read a ton on the commute in the past but idk, we'll (to borrow from stet) reconfigure. I've actually got round to doing a ton of stuff during lockdown (including reading through my pile of books).

No fucking way re the Pret thing

The Conservative Party fast-response leaves its Labour equivalent in the dust again!

Isn't Pret also a sit in eatery like Greggs?

Lol we are all going to etc.

Away in a Pret a Manger, no bib for a pleb

if the price we must pay for deplatforming brillo pad is tens of thousands dead, is it still too high

getting sick of having to think of a breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week

Sounds like Johnson admitted at PMQs that he hasn't read the second spike report yet.

Pret is not good, change my mind.