Month: March 2020

Here in the USA, every organization considers it their duty to inform their clients that they are closely monitoring the situation and doing everything possible (and often listing what they are doing). Is it the same in Russia?

For example, this applies to banks and auto insurers who don’t really have walk-in offices.

I received such a letter from the bank that gave me a car loan (I am no longer their client, but they still remember me and write to me). Or another letter from TurboTax. This is a service for filing tax returns. Or another one from Groupon.

Sometimes these messages are useful, but mostly they all say the same thing. I understand why this might be necessary for a fitness center. But why a bank needs this, with which clients interact 100% through the website, is unclear.

And yes, this is not about general advice like “stay at home,” but about how “we are vigilant, everything is under control.” Their marketers probably can’t miss an opportunity to write something seemingly useful once a week and thus ostensibly maintain contact with clients. I don’t know about others, but with each such letter, I get the feeling that companies are using the information as an opportunity for their marketing purposes.

Probably, their motivation is the same as mine with this message to you 🙂

Here’s what I thought just now. Here we are, IT people, designers, and journalists, relatively confident about tomorrow: there will always be work for us. If everyone is locked in at home, there’s always a way to earn money, and then spend it right away in online stores. But all this hope and confidence are based on the fact that there is the internet. And yet, it’s a resource that can be quite easily shut off. Theoretically, if a lot of people lose their jobs (and they have already started losing them), self-organization online will move to a new level, and many governments might see this as a threat. Ultimately, all our work depends on a single point of failure without the possibility of hedging.

In general, quarantine has two possible outcomes: a bright one (as much as we can apply this term) and a dark one. The bright side is associated with the explosive growth of e-commerce and remote services, more money will circulate among participants, and there will be happiness for everyone. The dark side is associated with using problems in the interests of strengthening the power of the elite and obtaining a lot of free or even slave labor in exchange for security and maybe even food.

In Baltimore, the mayor has asked people to temporarily stop shooting each other so that the injured do not occupy hospital beds needed for COVID patients. Apparently, if you’re going to shoot, you might as well go all the way. Or let them run.

https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/03/18/we-need-those-beds-baltimore-mayor-urges-people-to-put-down-guns-after-violence-continues-during-covid-19-pandemic/

Interesting to hear a hello to the coronavirus from the year 2015 (Bill Gates)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI

I’m not a medical professional, but perhaps (a question to the medical community – are there any?), it might be worth buying Plaquenil or Immard (Hydroxychloroquine), while it is still available in pharmacies (though it is prescription-based). It is used, among other things, for malaria prevention, and seems quite safe. However, a recent article at the link claims it may be useful for treating the ill. Costs only 300 rubles in Russia.

If there are any medical professionals – I would appreciate comments.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32150618

Will it help?

Decided to drive to the Italian supermarket 20 km away from home and back. #thisthewhatquarantinesleadto

Oil prices are falling – and, it turns out, so are our gasoline prices. I didn’t know that could happen

What would be really useful is the probability of dying from COVID-19 in a specific place at a specific time for a specific age considering coexisting diseases.

It seems that there is enough raw data for this. Maybe it exists somewhere and we can play with it ourselves?

For example, there is a population density map. Of course, New York has a density of 10,000 people per square kilometer. In our area, it’s 700 people/sq. km. In Milan – 2,000 people per sq. km.

What we have

* A = unknown ratio of all sick/total population, and it is definitely much less than 1

* B = unknown ratio of known sick/all sick, and it is definitely much less than 1

* C = known ratio of deceased/known sick, and for my age it turns out to be 0.02%, which means every 500th out of the known infected.

If B = 0.5 (meaning, half of the infected do not know it’s COVID-19), then every thousandth dies. If B=0.25, then every two thousandth of the sick and so on. How to calculate B is unclear, but there is some methodology available at the link. https://m.habr.com/ru/post/491974/

More about the spread. Understandably, it spreads fastest in hypothetical metro during rush hour. Closing the metro is difficult, it will lead to rampant growth. But how quickly does it spread in places with a density 10 times lower than New York? where there is no metro. Like our places. It is likely that the virus will not work with the necessary speed in such places to maintain the rates, and the rates will drop. But where is the actual threshold of density above which to worry?

Then, there is no distribution by diseases anywhere. Let’s suppose a healthy person of my age gets infected and another similar one but with diabetes. It is claimed that diabetes greatly increases the likelihood of a fatal outcome. How then to calculate the probability? How many of the deceased had comorbidities and how many did not? Maybe we should have calculated mortality separately for healthy and unhealthy? Maybe for a healthy person, mortality is lower than that of the flu?

Commerce Cloud Tips & Tricks for developers:

There is a well-known complexity: how to frequently update a large volume of products (in a complex data model). As soon as the issue of multithreading and clustering arises, questions about how to manage locks, which locking mechanism to choose—optimistic or pessimistic, etc., also emerge. In developing for SAP Commerce Cloud, you also encounter the peculiarities of the built-in ORM, which sometimes doesn’t behave as expected. I recently dealt with this, found the right approach, and described it in an article. The solution is very simple but might save someone time and effort.

Many people ask me – why do I share knowledge that took me hours or days to acquire. It’s simple: knowing the solution (which the article is about) gives a hypothetical five points to an architect, but knowing the path to this solution gives a hypothetical fifty. And yet, the path to the solution is not something you can easily detail in blogs and on the internet.

https://hybrismart.com/2020/03/12/concurrent-update-of-sap-commerce-cloud-item-relations/