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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.03.30

I reached out to a lawyer friend in the Toronto area today. It'd been his 40th birthday on the 17th, and I wanted to catch up. It turns out that his law firm has laid off half their staff and that things were looking grim for his earnings. He'd (wisely) stocked up on food in January (seeing the end coming from not really that far off) but was as worried about what he'd do as anybody; everyone's got a mortgage to pay.

Here at my place, I've learned of another casualty. The company from whom we're leasing the tiny apartment I'm staying in sent an email saying that they realized that everyone was working from home and relying on their Wifi-to-4G service a lot more than usual. So they're crippling that service. Yes, for the next 13 days I'll be without the network service that I rely on to do many hours of video conferencing every day. I guess the sudden surge in usage must have been costing them a fortune, because they're shipping out new Wifi/4G solutions to everybody. Well; me, anyway.

Happily, I had some fumes left on my "pocket Wifi" and used that to inform some of my colleagues. One of them immediately told me that I could use my company-provided iPhone as a tether. So that, for the first time in my life, is what I'm doing: connecting my laptop(s) through the work phone's Wifi and from there through the phone's 4G service to the Internet.

rand()m quote

Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

—Hermann Goering