Politely ending a conversation

I tend to be somewhat business-like in my conversations with people other than close friends and thus I often find myself in conversations with people, either face-to-face in the good old days or nowadays via phone or video or audio chats, in which the time has come when I want to end the conversation but find it awkward to do so without implying that I am tired of the other person’s company. Since we are now confined to home, the old standby of saying one has another engagement to get to is no longer credible.

Rat has decoded a common technique used to end calls.

(Pearls Before Swine)

A very stable genius discusses combating the pandemic

At the eight-minute mark in this segment from Seth Meyers, we find Trump saying antibiotics used to be able to combat all kinds of diseases but that Covid-19 is such a “brilliant enemy” that is so “very smart and invisible” that antibiotics do not work against it.

Yes folks, the person who has described himself as a “very stable genius” does not know that antibiotics only work against bacteria and that the coronavirus is, you know, a virus.

Trump is a textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Another excellent show from John Oliver

In the latest episode, he focuses on the people who are most affected by the pandemic, those who have lost their jobs and those who are deemed to be essential workers, and why their current plight is a strong argument for permanently providing the kinds of protections that the government is now trying to temporarily meet, such as universal free health care, paid sick leave, better unemployment benefits. In fact, conservatives, and businesses like Amazon, are worried that the demand for such things will be too strong to resist.