Same taste/smell story! Had Covid March of 2020, lost taste/smell and now most mustards, Dijons and greens (cabbage, iceberg) taste "acrid". This is the first time I've read someone else having this specific taste change. DM me because I'd like to collaborate to find what the common ingredient might be.
Have you also gotten phantosmia with smoke/cigarette smell? The initial reports that Covid was a respiratory disease turns out to be insufficient to describe what goes on. The virus gets into your brain and scrambles it up a bit, with varying severity. (Thankfully most people don't get it so bad.) Part of that damage occurs to the part of your brain that interprets smells - hence the phantosmia. Others have had luck retraining their brain using a collection of smells in jars.
This is what SEO has become. Free audience comes from Google as long as you make "free," targeted content. The authors are trying to extract every ounce of value they can from making that free content. I'm hesitant to suggest Google interfere even more with publishers' autonomy but they're the only ones who can incentivize them en masse to change how they collect information after the clickthrough.
Currently the gold standard for this kind of FI simulation is OnTrajectory. There’s a learning curve but it’s so much more comprehensive than any spreadsheet you could build. I consult it every time I make a big decision.
Get in touch with your email and I can provide a referral link.
Totally agree. I had to bail on it years ago because of how nervous I would get every time I built a new campaign. Every button-press you're walking on egg shells.
So many "trend" type presentations like this one take for granted that streaming will eat TV. Sure, cord-cutting is a trend. But Covid-19 isn't necessarily accelerating it. A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Smart marketers will figure out how to leverage TV as digital advertising gets more competitive and streamers go on without ads.
streaming in inferior in a lot of ways. It used to be I could turn on the TV and it powered up instantly. Now it takes about 30 seconds to turn on my TV, open streaming app, and click play. There's a real benefit to some analog mediums.
There is a lot of content I have passed up on watching, because it required firing up an app on my phone, searching for the content, turning on the tv, finding the Apple Play icon. And some apps still don’t support AirPlay. And some work directly with my TV, and some only with Apple TV.
Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.
> Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.
Which is great until the answer is "nothing worth watching", which is pretty common in my personal experience with my personal tastes (i.e. take this as a valid datapoint, but only a single datapoint).
A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle.
Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA.
The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription.
It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
As a millennial, there was a "golden age" for video streaming that has now passed where Netflix was the biggest game in town and had most of the desirable content. Now that there are 6 or 7 streaming services each with their own exclusives (and regional differences) streaming is becoming much less appealing.
Netflix was never that great for movies but you could always subscribe to their DVDs. Unfortunately, more and more titles are becoming unavailable. (I resubscribed for a while during the pandemic but just canceled it again.) Of course, you can often just rent a la carte as well.
It is a very fragmented landscape. On the other hand, I find I can subscribe to a few services and get access to far more good content than I have time to watch. There's very little that I just have to see and, if there is, I can just spin up some service for a month.
Circa 2007-2011, before their deal with Starz expired, Netflix streaming usually had any movie, new or old, I ever wanted to see. The catalogue was massive. Now, around 3/4 of the time (my estimate) I'd be forced to rent or stream elsewhere.
I guess we have different tastes. I actually canceled Netflix streaming when they started charging separately for it and only picked it up again when House of Cards came out. And I still remember telling a Netflix exec I knew that their streaming movie catalog wasn't very good. His response was that people come to Netflix for movies and stay for the TV shows.
I read people saying what you did but it just doesn't match my experience; I kept a DVD subscription the whole time until fairly recently.
But I don't think any of the streaming services are great for movies. I watch what they have and then either rent from RedBox, buy a disc if it's something I think I may want to rewatch, or pay for a streaming rental.
No, Netflix had a massive catalogue at one point. It was even much later than 2011. Probably up until 2015, was when they really started losing content.
>Netflix had every movie when the production companies viewed streaming as a minor distraction.
That is simply wrong. Why would they even have maintained a DVD rental service under those circumstances? All my "movie buff" friends always maintained a DVD rental subscription.
Sports alone are a huge reason that keeps many people on their cable bundle--and it tends to be something a lot of people want to watch on their TV rather than a computer.
>It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
I'm a bit skeptical of a lot of generational stereotypes. I think many people are having some subscription fatigue especially with video. But I can't say that I've seen a lot of evidence that Gen Z is particularly addicted to accumulating "stuff" especially media in physical form.
I think sport is the next thing the streaming services will look at. Amazon has started to do this, and now has some (a small percentage) of the England premier league soccer matches in the UK.
Amazon (and netflix, apple, etc) has way deeper pockets than the current rightsholders (Sky, which was owned by Murdoch until he sold to Comcast recently, and BT Sport, which is also completely dwafered by Big Tech).
It's difficult to see them not going big for this next time the rights are up for renegotiation. Amazon and Netflix have extremely high household penetration already, with their apps prebundled on so many TVs.
Cable operators already offer skinny bundles with only news/sport for lower cost, so you'll get a new leg down just from that + full cord cuts. But that's just delaying the inevitable I think - they'll abandon cable TV when margins turn negative (half a decade or so), and live off their broadband businesses.
I would hope they keep it as an option. Sports make up a big chunk of an overall cable bill. So if Disney bundles it in, expect that to put big upward pressure on the price of a subscription.
Gen X and older Millenials are the most technologically adept age cohorts if we're talking about computers. Younger Millenials and Gen Z grew up with computers as appliances.
It took me a long time to get over the hump of canceling cable TV. But, then, I don't get any OTA. If I got good broadcast TV signals, I'd probably have taken the leap much sooner.
I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.
> I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.
Expect one you can cancel and purchase within seconds whenever you want or need to, and can watch on any device you want, and deal with fewer ad breaks.
Cable TV is on no way a comparable product to the streaming services. People complaining about the horror of clicking a few buttons to cancel and resubscribe on a website gave no idea of the type of horror that awaits when dealing with a cable company.
Fair enough, although that only applies if you want to dip in and out or watch on different devices. Had I actually watched cable TV latterly sufficient to justify what I was paying for it, I'd have had very little reason to switch to YouTube TV or whatever. The content is pretty comparable and the issue for me was that I just wasn't watching it nearly as much as other services that cost a lot less. I still wish I had live TV now and then but not enough to pay for it.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that when I canceled cable TV and my landline from Comcast they didn't even put up a mild fight. (I still have Internet from them.)
This. And I refuse to watch serials anymore, just feature-length films. Why? Because I’m tired of being strung along. Here, watch this season now. But wait 12-18 months for the next season. Repeat. By the time that next season rolls around, I just don’t care about the characters anymore.
Fiction writers love to play this trick with book trilogies and book series. So I don’t start a book series unless all books are already in print.
So you loved True Detective then? Beginning, middle, end, all crystalized in the writer/producer's mind before they even began shooting?
I also don't like the season-after-season thing you're referring to, but I am encouraged that over the last 3 or 4 years we've seen a small increase in the number of stories being told with a defined story arc, and no sequels.
They're just different forms. Films, multi-film series and connected series, miniseries, episodic TV, serialized TV, blends of episodic and serialized, anthologies, shorts, etc. are all different and have their own pluses and minuses.
It's obviously fine to prefer some and not others.
You can equally see TV seasons as giving the opportunity to take a break from something for a while.
Xer here. If by joke you mean it's brainwashing and propaganda, I'm with you. A joke, randomly oriented, I could take, the one sided preaching that news, TV and movie broadcast 24x7 is just infuriating.
Netflix (and later amzn video and to a slightly lesser extent hulu) was the way out of that hellhole, and I don't see even boomers like me "going back".
I vaguely remember having slack time when there was truly nothing to do, everything was humming along, nobody was asking for anything. It's been a really, really long time.
I don't think I've ever worked at a company that did not have an infinite, ever-growing backlog. Still, slack time has always been plentiful, but that is not because there is nothing to do; it is because a low stress level is good for the individual and is good for the company.
Reminder that if you're in a lockdown or want to help prevent the spread of Covid, stay at home. Travelling to and using holiday homes still contributes to the spread even if you maintain social distancing.
No judgement on lesinski, I do not know the guidance or prevalence of Covid where they are, but this thread is explicitly about lockdown environments so I think it's important to re-iterate that these are sadly not suitable things to do for many of us.
Serious question: the numbers are completely out of control as of right now (at least in the US). I'm not really seeing any benefits from any lockdowns so far (albeit we did do well in the summer). Most of the outdoor seating is just security theater. The outside areas are just cacooned indoor tents. There are indoor basketball games being run (here in NYC) and the rules are: 'wear a mask while you walk around the gym but youre allowed to sweat all over each other without one.' It all seems like a complete joke at this point.
I'm one hundred and ten percent on board with wearing masks and being cautious about what to do, but it's been a year of this already. It feels like renting a lakehouse for some much needed mental health recuperation is at the bottom of the barrel as far as risk factor goes. Considering California is seeing 30,000 a day Covid numbers, it feels like "stay home" when 50% of the country doesn't give a shit anymore is like throwing a cup of water on a house fire at this point.
Curious to hear at what point does your mental well being become more of a concern? 1 year? 2 years? 5 years of lockdown? while you have people in Florida going to nightclubs then flying elsewhere? I'm starting to feel like one of those people tying themselves to a tree with a "save the planet" t-shirt while other people walk by and laugh and continue to ignore the damage and live their lives. I'm not trying to sound defeatist, but I am seriously at a loss here.
Bad lockdowns are bad, yes. Good lockdowns have had amazing impacts in many places.
Australia is a good example. Victoria had out of control community spread (~100 infections a day), so locked down for 3 months. This meant no visitors at home, no going to work unless one of a few specific reasons, no general retail, masks mandated at all times outside the house, no travelling more than 5k for any reason, no travelling for exercise.
They got rid of it. This is what lockdown means. This is what the science shows us is effective. Wearing a mask and office jobs being done from home is not a lockdown.
Saying badly implemented lockdowns don't work so why bother is the attitude that is killing thousands of people a day.
I dont disagree with the theory of a lockdown when necessary, but now that I look back at our year in the US...it now seems so obvious that this was never going to work. This place is simply too big with too many selfish idiots that want to do their own thing for how virulent COVID is. Leadership is a huge failure that didn't help at all, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we'd be in the same exact position of an uncontrolled spread even if we had a different sitting president with different views. 330 million people spread out across 50 states, across various local governments, some of who might not care as much is just too many people to get on the same page regardless of the message from the top.
Australia is 7% of the population of the US. Barely a comparison
Strong lockdown is literally illegal in the US, violating freedoms that have been through the courts many times. It has nothing to do with selfishness. The government could never impose it, and they knew that. In the US many rights are near absolute in almost all circumstances, including the current ones.
You may disagree with those freedoms but they are a matter of law. They cannot be erased when they are inconvenient, it would render the judiciary irrelevant.
We shouldn’t be saying “Lockdowns don’t work,” because thanks to the idiots we really aren’t doing any kind of real lockdown. We should instead be saying “Uncoordinated and unenforced public health policy and lack of federal leadership doesn’t work.”
If your policy depends on everyone doing the right thing, it's awful policy.
Lockdowns have never been done in human history. They've never been possible, really; if there were no internet, it wouldn't even have been considered as a possibility. It takes a lot of hubris to claim that lockdowns were/are guaranteed to work. It is totally uncharted territory.
Lockdowns have been done repeatedly across the full time and space of human history. HN had a link just last week about one of the most well known, for bubonic plague, in Sardinia In 1582: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210107-the-432-year-old...
They've just been used incredibly successfully in AU and NZ.
You could just read the article to understand that this wasn't an isolated case, but the start of a general approach to public health, indeed even the phrase "quarantine":
>Lockdowns were not unique to Alghero. "In Florence, for example, they imposed a total quarantine of the city in the spring of 1631," says John Henderson, a professor of Italian Renaissance history at Birkbeck, University of London. And just as today, rule-breaking was common.
>"Over the year from the summer of 1630 to the summer of 1631, I found something like about 550 different cases that people were prosecuted for, for various infringements of the public health regulations," says Henderson. For most of that time, the city wasn't in full lockdown, but people were expected to self-isolate for 40 days if a member of their household was suspected of having the plague, and taken to hospital. This is where the word "quarantine" comes from – "quaranta giorni" means "40 days" in Italian.
Lockdowns like this have continued to be a part in public health approaches to infectious disease around the world.
The fact that a majority of Americans, convinced of their exceptionalism in every way, would oppose such an approach doesn't mean that it is inherently impossible or nonfunctional.
Unenforced policies depend on everyone doing the right thing, and we agree they are doomed to fail. If there was any enforcement at all they could have made a dent. There are plenty of other policies in the USA that are effective because we manage to enforce. Do you know anybody who got a ticket for violating stay-at-home? I don’t.
All of those policies were developed over time and required buy in over a long period of time.
There is no timeline where the American public buys into the lockdowns that would be necessary in February 2020, which is when they would have had to happen.
I don’t believe that. The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily, and likely would have supported a real stay-at-home order if it would mean the idiots also had to behave. We just didn’t try it because we are cursed with cowardly leadership.
> The vast majority of people this past year understood the seriousness, behaved well, did the right thing voluntarily
I don't buy that. Where do you live? I spent a couple of months over the summer in Texas (in a non liberal part) and there were like a grand total of 2 people who took any of it seriously. I think its evident based on what happened here that the majority didn't really care, but even if you happen to be right, we don't need a majority, we need 100%. Just go back to early February 2020 and remember that timeline. It only took 1-2 people, then there were 10, then 100, etc. It's exponential.
I think your only bet here with a majority (let's conservatively say 60% of people in agreeance with the severity of the virus) is to stop all international/domestic travel completely for a few months. Stop all flights, no interstate travel. Nothing at all, a complete military lockdown. That is the absolute only way to have stopped the spread, akin to what China did. And I simply don't buy that the USA in 2020 would do that without anything short of a revolt.
We never quite did enough in NYC. One gym in Williamsburg stayed open even during March and just kept paying the fine.
There just hasn't been that much enforcement. We came to the conclusion that we experienced a real lockdown instead of a short stint of heightened delivery use. It's absurd that indoor/outdoor dining is still allowed (also that restaurants can't get support). In my experience as a 20-something, most of my friends have been hanging (even house-partying!) indoors maskless, and it too leaves me at a loss for words. The "well I already tested positive" mentality is pretty common. Meanwhile my partner and family in Asia participate in heightened levels of lockdown when getting a fraction of the cases we get on a good day.
I've had an unusual amount of travel during covid, so I've had occasion to be in sf (2 mos), SD (1 mo), LA (3 mos), and NYC (3 mos). Leaving compliance aside, since my skewed samples wouldn't be very helpful, policy and enforcement in NYC seem to have been way more lax than all the parts of CA I was in.
When were you in NYC? During the first 3-5 months of COVID, NYC was a complete ghost town with nothing open aside from essential stores. Once we got our numbers down to some of the lowest in the country (compared to other cities with similar populations), everything then became lax again, and now it's sort of this half-assed situation as I described above. Cases out of control, but you're still allowed to do various things that seemingly havent been very well thought out
On the policy/enforcement side, NY had indoor dining open until wayy later than CA did in early winter, despite having worse numbers and a much worse trajectory. (CA overtook NY again and now SoCal is screwed, but this was before that).
I do think that there's some non-trade-off potential here via the micro-targeting approach they started while I was there. I was living in Soho around the time that Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn were having outbreaks, and I really appreciated that neighborhoods super far from me with relatively little cross-travel (esp with the low subway ridership at the time) didn't unnecessarily fuck up my ability to go for dinner with a friend. By contrast, LA/CA tends to shut things down at a much higher level, so outbreaks in East LA affect policy in my parents' neighborhood on the Western border of LA County.
I might feel the same way if we weren't rolling out some very effective vaccines over the next several months. Just from a personal safety perspective, loosening up now risks being the soldier who dies in the last week of the war.
Depends. I know for me, under 50, not an essential worker or healthcare employee, in mismanaged California, I’m probably not eligible for the vaccine for another year, so I’m not really in the last week of the war.
>Reminder that if you're in a lockdown or want to help prevent the spread of Covid, stay at home. Travelling to and using holiday homes still contributes to the spread even if you maintain social distancin
It's a virus and doesn't spread outside very easily, especially during even a little wind.
Telling people to stay indoors is damaging to their physical health, damaging to their mental health, and is more of a political action than a scientific one.
Get outside as much as you can, go for walks, mask up if you walk through crowds or indoors.
Completely agreed. The mental and social instability that comes from "stay indoors" orders is far worse, and arguably contributes far more to societal issues, than the (arguably minimal or none) additional deaths incurred by going outdoors, especially in suburbs and rural areas.
Zero-tolerance lockdowns are the logical equivalent of abstinence-only sex education programs, and it's amazing that the advocates of each seem to be disjoint sets.
But don't go inside at the golf club, don't travel more than maybe 5km, don't use public transport, deep-clean the rental house when you arrive and leave.
Seriously, it's easy to think that sitting in a rental house for 3 weeks is harmless, but then you go shopping, and even with a mask you still have a ~10% chance of spreading it, and then you're spreading it to a community likely a significant distance from your own.
How would going to a beach house contribute to spreading corona? The poster is probably American, so he's most likely going there in a private car. Not to mention that he's almost certainly not infected.
Look at Norway, they have very low numbers, but are not anywhere near this paranoid.
It's not consistent. It only seems to trigger after a few site visits. (So I don't see it if using a private mode browser, Safari, or temporary containers in Firefox.) Obnoxiously, if you're configured to visit in a fresh browser/container, you have to click away the dickbars on every visit. (And they use similar html obfuscation as facebook, so the dickbar element can't be blocked with uBlock.)
Other sites like Outdoorgearlab do this as well, although, I could be wrong, it seems like they strongly favor items that can use affiliate links to make them money, which makes sense.
