These events occurred on February 24, but I didn’t want to post then because it is a trivial story compared to what was happening in Ukraine.
Our local CVS had a sign on the door promising “free” (taxpayer-funded) masks from the central planners:
The clerk tried to give me 10. “Don’t you have a large family?” she asked, hopefully. I asked for 3, explaining that I just wanted to brag to friends about having gotten them, and settled for 5. “We have 35 boxes of these in the back,” she added, and then pointed out that the anti-SARS-CoV-2 masks are “not evaluated for antiviral protection.”
Should I feel bad about writing on a non-Ukrainian topic? Here’s today’s email from McKinsey, the world’s leading business consultancy:
How to fix the broken rung on the career ladder for women in tech
Women are promoted at a slower rate than men across all industries and roles. But in technical roles‚ including in engineering and product management‚ the gender gap is even more pronounced: just 52 women for every 100 men are promoted to manager. Diversity is crucial in technical roles because it helps debias the technologies that are an intrinsic part of modern life. Early‐career promotions are critical to success‚ so this broken rung on the leadership ladder means that companies end up preparing fewer women for senior roles. What can leaders do? Don’t miss our article on repairing what’s broken.
The email includes a photo of a person, gender ID unspecified, doing Ph.D.-level soldering (Ph.D. level because his/her/zir/their other hand is not introducing any solder near the iron’s tip):
Ukrainians are suffering right now, but an American still has mental space, apparently, for all of his/her/zir/their pre-war concerns.
Loosely related… Shutterstock shows us another world in which soldering happens without solder:
Note bare fingers on the hot part of the iron. Could this be an example of what Joe Biden was talking about in the State of the Union speech?
We’re the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we’ve faced into an opportunity, the only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities.
Interesting.
I’ll probably ask my wife to pick up a dozen of N95s as I am going to paint a room myself (due to labor shortage), rather than buying them at the HD.
Looks like after she burned her fingers, soldering iron girl recently got a job fighting Russians in Ukraine:
https://media.communities.win/post/RgGaE3itzQdY.png
Never saw any women with wedding rings doing any manual labor. The lion kingdom got some free masks for working with fiberglass. Suspect Bide’s original intent was to help millennials renovate their $5 million garden sheds & prop up US’s only real currency, home equity.
It’s fascinating, after all this time to see the disclaimer regarding antimicrobrial/antiviral protection. I wonder what internal advisory/communique finally prompted that, because I’ve noted it from almost the beginning. Even though Aegle, my preferred N95 supplier, is NIOSH-rated, it also does not mention that fact. Since the beginning of the Plague, it has been left as an exercise to the buyer/wearer/stakeholder/bearer to do the math regarding the efficacy of a mask guaranteed to filter 95% of particles 0.3 microns in diameter – when target is a virus only approximately 0.1 micron in diameter.
I know, this is a sophisticated and detailed argument. However, the questions remain:
1) Were such test ever conducted to estimate the real effectiveness of even a “properly fitted N95” against airborne transmission of SARS-CoV2?
2) Why at this very late date was that sentence tacked on to the end of the flyer, and who promulgated it?
@Philg: Heh. It’s also interesting to note the misregistration/clipped (left side bottom “P” in “Please”) printing on the mask flyer on the front door of the CVS. Kind of an inside joke. Lol.
1) there’s a large body of evidence, collected pre-COVID piinting to the fact that face mask do next to nothing to protect agaist airborne viruses. Incidentally, the people who know the most – i.e actual virologists, work with viruses of this kind in BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs, in full-body suits, and rooms with negative pressure differential (so that the viruses won’t get blown out of the rooms through the tiny cracks).
2) they just didn’t bother to remove that sentence, has been on dust mask inserts for as far I can remember.
> Should I feel bad about writing on a non-Ukrainian topic?
No, apparently none of the current leaders care about Ukraine. The “adults” in the Biden administration don’t negotiate. Macron (another adult who married his teacher) was “confident to avoid the war” on February 6th (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/06/emmanuel-macron-says-can-prevent-conflict-russia-ukraine-ahead/). He is still leading the negotiations with no success!
If they cared, they’d send Trump or even Merkel (who at least speaks Russian and knows how ex Soviets operate).
@ philg
“The email includes a photo of a person, gender ID unspecified, doing Ph.D.-level soldering (Ph.D. level because his/her/zir/their other hand is not introducing any solder near the iron’s tip):
“Note bare fingers on the hot part of the iron. Could this be an example of what Joe Biden was talking about in the State of the Union speech?
Between the solder fumes, burned fingers, and partial differential equations it’s no wonder the ladies prefer sales and marketing, law and medicine. PhD EE will be a hard sell.
> Should I feel bad about writing on a non-Ukrainian topic?
No, not at all. Because:
1) There are many other close-to-home topics that you should naturally be interested in.
2) The likelihood that any opinion or analysis expressed here – by any of the loyal readers or its host – will affect any outcomes in Ukraine is virtually nil! The really important decisions are being made by European bureaucrats, NGO officials, their counterparts in this country, and elsewhere in the world, and of course the combatants themselves. They are the ones running the show, and their decisions have almost infinitely more influence than anything said here does.
Which is not to say that it isn’t valuable to me as a mental workout – I just know when I’m truly a member of the Peanut Gallery. For example, this man’s words mean approximately 200 million quadrillion times as much as mine:
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-03-22/h_e27835f2bd93d456654860007dfae0b0
“European Council president: No-fly zone over Ukraine is “one step too far”
https://youtu.be/uki4lrLzRaU?t=145
You are people not supportive. If it were not incompetent PR photos it could be following:
1st lady could be removing already soldered part.
2nd lady could be demonstrating superior female endurance.
Really, I have seen women to check how hot steam iron was by touching its hot base and picking up boiling metal part by metal handle.
And I know women who can solder and had female auto-mechanic.