Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020
Today was largely wasted on data migration issues. As always when transferring from one to another system data was lost.Thank goodness for my lack of trust in IT, I have back up on a hard drive so can manually restore. This is a very frustrating experience and I have spent hours with IT support to try and resolve the problems. As a result, I did not get to half of what I had planned to do done. I guess tomorrow is another day.
Also, EM had her wrap up discussion with the career councilor today. Seems that she should study psychology and pursue a dual major with for instance economics and then do an MBA afterwards. The analysis of her persona was spot on. It was quite amazing. They will now send a list of universities/ courses recommended for her. Very curious to see what they come up with. It appears that many of the universities we had chosen they would be suggesting as well, which is rather reassuring.
Today is also election day in the US. More than 100 million people have voted early. Nonetheless, and despite the pandemic, social media shows long lines at polling stations. No one really expects conclusive results tonight though and counting all the mail in ballots may take days. This comes as a surprise as surely States should know how many people are registered to vote and hence how much staff is needed to count the ballots. Certainly, in Germany, where all voting is by paper ballots, most votes are counted by 22:00 and reasonably reliable predictions are available about two hours after polling stations close, which would be 3:00 in the morning on East Coast time as polling in California does not close until 23:00 Pacific time. Given California is solidly blue (democratic), the nation should have an idea of who has won, if they managed to count all of the mail-in ballots which have arrived on election day, so 100 million plus whoever voted today. Apparently it is not that straight forward as every States has different rules, which makes it rather complicated. I doubt we shall know in the morning who the new president is. It is beyond my comprehension that it even is a close race, but alas it is. I am hoping for America!
This all amidst a pandemic out of control. New reported cases are nearing the 100.00 mark, with 93.000 new infections reported in the USA yesterday. This brings the total tally to 9.6 million with 500.000 new cases being added every wee, 61.000 of which are children. One does not need to be rocket scientist to see the health system fail.
Scientists agree that lockdown fatigue is real. Here are some tips on how to deal with it. Also, the FDA would allow vaccine if it proved at least 50% effective. That does not sound like a super success to me, but maybe it is better than nothing.