Twitter broke out in a few hours of hilarity yesterday when celebrity accounts were taken over by a bitcoin scammer.  But it’s also terrifying, too — this was a social engineering attack that targeted Twitter employees who had admin access to the backend systems.  Sure, a bitcoin scammer is pretty harmless all things considered, and the mess was cleaned up quickly, but people have been taking orders from Trump’s twitter feed for years.  A smarter hacker, or one who thought more strategically, could have used his feed to tweet out attacks on foreign countries, or ordered the military to mobilize — or made some larger economic pronouncement that moved markets in a way positive for cryptocurrency.

This is why the President — and all these high profile leaders — need to stop running their countries through social media.  And put down their phones.  And get back to work.  There’s a pandemic on out there.

We’re taking steps to fortify Kate’s areas in the house for school in the Fall.  She cannot do school from her big box in her bedroom.  (For Christmas, we built her a PC to spec for all her adobe applications and her art workchain.  It worked too well, and now it’s a big distraction machine.  It would be like me trying to work from the laptop that has Stellaris installed on it.)  We’ve been building a dedicated work area for school in the basement that we also use for gaming.  Now we’re adding a dock for her Surface 4 with some hardwired ethernet for Zoom classes.

I’m not sure what else we can do.  The school told us they are doing partial in-class in the Fall for the High School students, but we don’t actually know what that means.  She was supposed to do competitive Tennis this fall, so I guess that’s done.  And she was going to do Advanced Stagecraft and work on learning art and set design, which are her real passions.  What about Chemistry and soon-to-be AP Chemistry?  How does one do lab from home?

I cannot imagine what people who don’t have their entire homes wired and 15,000 computers just “lying around” and a big pile of Amazon points to burn on equipment are doing or going through.  We acknowledged we are crazy privileged in this regard.  The house is literally full of computers.  We will stop eating before we turn off the Internet.  What are other people doing?  This can’t possibly work for everyone.  32 million people are on unemployment.  How are they supposed to pay for all this equipment?

The school thing is a) the only conversation in town right now and b) a worry that is punching right through every spectrum in US society because no one knows what is going on.  It touches everyone.  It’s the only thing on the table right now.  The conversation is tinged with an aura of: “You had plenty of time to fix this pandemic, and you didn’t, and now you are putting our kids at risk!!!!”

Like everyone else, we’re pretty frustrated with this.  The kids are uber frustrated — they want to see their friends.  We’re frustrated — I want to send my kid to her school and get her back on track.  The school is frustrated — they have no good guidance of how to open safely.

This is all crushingly, insanely bad.  Threatening to defund schools and demand kids go back is not the answer.  At all.  It’s an anti-answer.  A non-answer.  A complete dropping of responsibility for an answer on the floor.

We’re doing everything we can do.

It’s so awful.

I’m taking a break from all this misery to playtest SHAAAARK tonight.

Stats:

  • 42,521,027 tests completed.
  • 3,518,026 confirmed infections.  Is this really up 106,000?!?!?  I think some numbers came in late.
  • 139,698 dead.  That’s a big spike, too.  Data weirdness.
  • 75,576 cases in MD with 3,443 dead
  • 1 out of 110 people have it in Howard County

It’s getting worse everywhere.  Sheesh.  At least the voters are planning to punish Trump but even a President Biden will be too little, too late for an awful lot of people.