Well the email was sent out that everyone companywide was to go back to remote working through at least January 18th starting on Monday. Well, I can tell you this much...I just ordered a 32" widescreen monitor. No more dual screens that take up all that desk space.
Kids are still in-person schooling, but I am sure that will change too. However, their small catholic school has been doing very well with everything and all the kiddos stay masked up and grades are not allowed to intermingle so who knows, maybe they will be able to ride it out. Working remotely without the kids doing remote learning would definitely be a better experience than this spring.?ÿ
Good luck and stay safe. In NC, we've seen a surge. My humble little model puts the state-wide effective reproduction rate at a minimum of 1.15. Using only the last 7 days, it's 1.27. Even my professor acquaintance whose model was showed R = 1.02 ten days ago is now at R = 1.15 after taking his website down for a day to restructure his model. As late as September 23, R was below 1. Yesterday, we had our all-time high of daily reported positive tests and we're back over 1,100 in the hospital.
Hunker down if you can, wear the mask, social distance (that was never a problem for me; I hate most people!), and wash your hands. It's just going to continue to surge and resurge until we have a way to kill it or stop it.
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Ugg...I hated working from home more than a day a week or so.?ÿ
Luckily I'm now in a new branch office and it's just me and the business development manager here, so it's easy to keep our distance.?ÿ?ÿ
I thought I'd hate working from home but it's quite the opposite. I'd work from home all the time if they'd let me. Most of my work is through a remote connection to someone else's computer anyway so no big change for me.?ÿ
Plus, I went in a restaurant the other evening to pick up my to-go order and while standing there, a fellow walked in a wasn't wearing a mask. The host reminded him of his mask and his response was, and I quote, "Oh yeah?!". That settles it for me, I'll stay home, wear a mask and keep as far away from people (who aren't in my "bubble") that I can.?ÿ
Hang in there everyone!
I've been working from home since March and I love it. In fact, I will never go back to the office. Cohorts won't wear masks?ÿ in spite of company policy requiring it. I have worked too hard for too long to let others risk my life!
@squirl I agree, I like working from home. Never understood why they sent us back to Zoom call with the guy in the next office.
I like working at home, quiet, few distractions.
I'm using my 17" field laptop and have gotten used to it. Extra monitors would be nice but not absolutely necessary.
One State department has replaced all desktop computers with laptops and docking stations. Employees are allowed to take everything home. I suggested to my bosses we do the same. I have a desktop computer in my office that I am not using except rarely. My office mostly functions as a file room and equipment storage closet. Everyone needs a smartphone too. I have a landline that I haven't picked up in months.
We did get an employee survey on this, I said come to the 21st century and ditch the landlines, desktop computers and workstation specifications (how big your desk is, etc). They make us certify our home work space meets state requirements, like who cares if my desk is only 3' wide or I use my sofa, hello! It's called a "laptop".
Working from home is a total blessing for me. Management just moved my office into an oversized basement broom closet. I only go in to use the plotters and grab whatever plats and files I need. Everything else is accessed via a remote connection. The real problem will be going back to the way things used to be.?ÿ
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I suppose that I could work from home but I rent an 18'X30' office space and that seems to work out.?ÿ The rent is nominal insomuch that I only need to do a couple of surveys a month to pay it and it affords me time away from the distractions of home and the wife. I don't have any "if I only had that file or drawing" wishes and the telephone line is dedicated to my work and mail to my site.?ÿ?ÿ
That said, I lock the door when I am here and have multiple masks and sanitizer pumps at hand when needed.?ÿ I have a tube outside for pickups and a slot in the door for drop offs. My partner visits one day a week and wears a mask. I probably should too when he is around.
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Both my youngest daughter and her husband have been working from their home since about March or April.?ÿ They were recently told to not expect a return to their standard offices until June or July 2021.?ÿ The only reason they live where they do is so they can get to the dead center of mega-downtown to their respective office buildings within reasonable drive times.?ÿ The just as well move a hundred miles out into the boonies and avoid the high-dollar home rent.?ÿ Another son-in-law has been told the mega-corp where he works may never return to the standard office setup.?ÿ The remaining son-in-law won't come out of his basement for any reason.
@mathteacher Reading that and thinking to myself if this isn't one of the more complicated statistical/actuarial modeling exercizes there was, given the limits of testing and what medical experts understand of covid.?ÿ That's a lot of moving parts involved.
Indeed. If you go back through the predictions from the spring and summer, peaks in numbers of infected people were forecast for almost every month. There were two big problems, in my humble opinion. First, nearly perfect models can be developed AFTER the pandemic is over, all of the data are in, and the fitting algorithms are relevant. This one is ongoing, values assumed to be constants are still evolving and they are NOT constants. Second, many, many analysts have misinterpreted the data. The classic SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Removed) model is effective in describing this pandemic, but you have to put the data in the right place.?ÿ
When a health department reports a new person testing positive, that person is a reduction to the Susceptible group and an addition to the Infected group, but he is only part of the change in the number of Infecteds. People who recover or die also come from the Infected group and they reduce the number infected. Many models I have seen skip the reduction in Susceptibles, estimate Susceptible numbers by some method they read in a non-peer-reviewed paper, make up a number for the time period before an infected person either recovers or dies, and carry on. Couple that with all kinds of schemes to estimate the lag time between actual infection and positive test and we get a variety of forecasts, each claiming to be "the one", that miss horribly.
The first rule of forecasting is: Anyone who thinks he can predict the future is a damn fool. That was always my first guiding principle for the 15 years I made my living forecasting economic ups and downs. My second one is: Simple is better. I'd far rather have a simple model whose relationships I know than have a complicated one where relationships have been distorted by PhD mathematics and results overpromised. I can make judgmental adjustments to the simple output to account for the things left out, but I have no way to assess the complicated ones other than how well they fit historical values. In an evolving pandemic, that assessment is worthless because prior fit has little to do with the future course.
My little effort, which takes health department data at face value, uses least squares to determine the infection rate and the removal rate simultaneously, and resides in an Excel spreadsheet, shows the chart below for the numbers that North Carolina tracks, as of 10/31. The population is the number of tests administered (about 4 million, the population of NC is about 10.5 million), and the output is the expected number of infected North Carolinians identified by the testing and still infected. The inference is that the whole NC population will follow the general path of this sample, which is biased in a number of ways, but is the best that I have.
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It's worth slightly less than the paper it would take to print it, but note the ups and downs in the infected numbers. That smooth curve show on TV that rises, peaks and then falls is full of ups and downs, surges and resurges. And that smooth forecast curve will likely show a similar pattern when that time period becomes history. What causes those ups and downs is a matter of speculation, as are where the "peak" will occur and what the final effect on the world will be.
Dr. Fauci, love him or hate him, would likely focus on the chart up to 10/31, make a judgment call about the future path, and then formulate a recommendation. Facts stop and speculation begins at 10/31, but some actions need to be taken if for no reason than to show that we're doing something.
My effort is strictly hobby level, so don't please don't attach any real importance to it. However, yesterday I had an exchange with a data scientist for one of our largest health care providers (hospitals, docs, nurses, clinics, you name it, they have it in multiple counties). The provider releases data to the news media that show hospitalizations up maybe 30% over the last month, but his number on their website for the R value has been between 0.99 and 1.05 for the last umpteen days. What we get for information is just nuts.
Thanks for taking the time out to explain the framework. It's the 'Bins' that Brian Moynihan spoke of in an interview, when he took over as CEO of BoA - current assets, current liabilities, future liabilities ...
It's probably impossible to know for sure.
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"I hate most people!"?ÿ....... Hell, I hate everybody! we'd get along fine.
As far as Covid numbers go, I think it's like chasing rainbows. It won't go away because now the mask represents something other than it was intended for. It is way beyond my thinking capabilities (or my refusal to believe) that there are that many stupid?, hostile?, uneducated?, whatever? people in the United States. All of the leading world countries are looking at our society as full of fools hell bent on winning the race to perdition.?ÿ
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Learned of some friends and acquaintances this week who have been infected. One fellow is about as remote as you can get from people every day but his wife has a secretarial position in a hospital.?ÿ Somehow she became infected and brought it home to him.?ÿ Now he's attempting to suck on oxygen under his welding hood as he runs his business.?ÿ Another case is a couple with three kids and everyone but one kid (at this time) are infected.
The big issue no matter how careful you are is to be wary of those you spend your private time with.
Its just been me and the "Boss" since March. Even kid's and their offspring's just call (which is fine with me, because SWMBO always finds a way to give them money when they visit) ?????ÿ
Again, indeed! I have a universal life insurance policy that is guaranteed to provide coverage until my age 100 as long as I continue to pay the scheduled level premiums. To do that, the company has to credit 3.5% annual interest to my cash value. If you've followed bond markets, you know how hard it is for them to net 3.5% interest on new investments, which they have to do with my monthly premiums. Thus, they've offered to buy my policy from me for double its current cash value and eliminate their future liability. Never mind the adverse publicity from cancelling life insurance during a pandemic!
That's tempting, but the vast majority of universal life policies do not include that guarantee to age 100. Instead, the monthly mortality charge just keeps going up until it overwhelms the premiums and cash value. I have two aged (+95 years old) aunts who got trapped by that phenomenon. One had a $250,000 policy that the premium had increased to $40,000 per year. She cut the face amount (her deceased husband had bought that, so she could?ÿNEVER drop it). The other one let the charges eat up the cash value and died with no insurance.
I'll just keep paying and let those pros figure out how they're going to survive.
But life insurance has been pretty much a sure thing for insurance companies for what, two centuries? Even so, uncertainty rears its ugly head every now and again.?ÿ
With Covid-19, everything is uncertain.
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