On Friday, July 31, 2020 at 8:26:51 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, July 31, 2020 at 12:01:42 AM UTC+1, wrote:
On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 11:41:48 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
Robert Redfield, Director of the CDC, at the Buck Institute on July 14th:
“There has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID,” Redfield said.

Looks like someone is keeping an eye on the "excess deaths" and analysing them.

Hey, Tom, now that your viewpoint has been official for more than a fortnight, do you think the resident obstructionists and bullies will apologise to you for their libellous calumnies?

Andre Jute
Time to kick butt

I figured this group out long ago. I can put in 20 messages about bicycle related things and they couldn't care less. There won't be a single reply unless it is something that Andrew has had a different experience with.

But they will post off subject things and then complain that I'm changing the subject. I spend my mornings listening to one or two hours of hours of lectures from the Hoover institute from people I admire such as Dr. Walter Williams or Dr. Thomas Sowell. These are people who started out correctly - they were in families that lauded achievement and Dr. Sowell got more education than anyone in his family when he graduated from the 7th grade. So he was pushed pretty hard. And his view of discrimination and economic distribution matches my own experience pretty closely. I reached a point where I didn't ask for more money I was satisfied with what I was making - it was forced upon me. When I found pay stubs showing that I had been making $233,000/yr I was astonished because I remember the job but I didn't remember the pay. By that point the job was far more important to me than the pay. Some of those jobs I would have done gratis. The cancer detection and treatment devices for instance.

Money's useful for keeping score. But that of course assumes that there are other people who do exactly the same job -- for instance, college teachers are on the whole interchangeable -- to compare with.

How do you manage to write a book of more than 100 pages or such? I peter out and lose interest before getting much more than a short story.

A hundred pages is a novella, like Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. Unless you're Hemingway, there was until recently no market for novellas. A proper literary thriller in its hardcover edition is 256pp octavo, somewhere between 80K and 100K words. I don't start a novel until I know all the major characters and their problems, the solution to their problems being worked out in the course of the book being the "plot", which I don't know when I start because I don't care about the plot, and let my characters create it in their interactions as they try to solve their problems. (Aspirants should not do as I do. I have over sixty books of experience, and never lacked intellectual confidence. Instead aspirants should choose from the far more certain methods recommended in my WRITING A THRILLER.) Of course, sometimes it goes wrong, but I have no hesitation in murdering my darlings, once throwing out 1.2m words or about twelve novels' worth and then taking my wife to dinner without giving it a second thought.

Well, my writings are more pointed to real life and historic occurrences. Since paperbacks seem to be the only thing selling anymore and the younger generation incapable of reading, I don't know that there would be much of a market.