Will

Wow! That's by far the highest I've seen. Wish I'd have been able to sell at that price.

With Japanese I found doing a little bit of everything was most productive. The school I went to would teach us a sentence structure, then we'd learn all sorts of vocabulary that could go inside the framework and at the same time practice the kanji to write them in complete sentences. That was all propped up by A TON of speaking to each other using the structures we'd learnt. As an example we'd learn something like: [verb1た] ばかりなので、[sentence]。 Because I just did [verb1], [sentence]. The red parts are the set structures and then we'd fill in the square brackets with stuff that made sense. They'd then give us a ton of examples where we'd learn the kanji and have these as set phrases we could us in a lot of situations. Looking through my notes I think I've forgotten more than 50% of the Japanese I learnt, really need to get back on it. Without a doubt I think the number one thing you can do is just speak as much and as often as you can.

From hero to zero in the space of a week. Just kidding, still damn impressive, I wish I had that sort of pace.

It's under business discretion. If the company can't afford to pay you due to the drop in business they would usually make you redundant. For the next three months, they can choose to 'furlough' you instead. This basically means you remain an employee, but do not do any work, and the government pay 80% of your salary up to 2.5k. Your employer could choose to top this up. At the end of the furlough period, you would return to work as normal. This is good if the company expects business to pick back up after the virus outbreak as they can get back to regular operations without all the issues having a series of redundancies brings up. You can decline to be furloughed, but given this is an alternative to redundancies, you'll probably be made redundant. Dependent on your work status and your contract this may be preferable, but probably not.

Ha, they worked those deals out quick!

Also on the Olympics thing... I imagine they have already agreed behind closed doors that it's not going to happen this year. The big problem is that there are so many commercial deals that will have an impact on it and in different ways they can't just come out and say it. This four weeks will be for them to sort all of those deals out and present a united front when they inevitably make the announcement that the games are cancelled or (hopefully) postponed.

I have no idea what it is but quotes ALWAYS mess up for me. Weird that it moves on and affects it on the other end too. Maybe I need to use a different browser? Singapore is getting more and more locked down, just announced that entertainment venues will be closed from Thursday and groups cannot be larger than 10.

South East Asia/Asia is definitely going through the same craziness as the UK and other countries. Singapore - a few months ahead, but we had crazy panic buying back in February and the shelves were empty Malaysia - Very recently crazy panic buying and shelves empty Philippines - Basically under martial law, only one person can leave each household and this is monitored via pass Japan - panic buying and nothing available The stuff in the UK is insane, but it's happening everywhere. I think the best starting point is here: https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

Anyone needs apples my gates are open. Nighttime here too if you want to catch insects or go fishing.

Looks like the party was fun! If anyone is around a little earlier today I'm in for any group sessions. @Sheikah - Sorry if you got booted off my island when you visited earlier. My internet started playing up and it was past midnight so I didn't load back up.

This is the case whichever island you pick, all part of the opening phase of the game.

First visitor:

I'm: ウィツ - 2081-4391-3641 - Apples

You're definitely on mine when I search for you - I tried to see your island and couldn't either.

Done about as much as I can without visiting other islands but seems no one on my friends list is open. My island is open if anyone wants to visit me.

Haven't played an Animal Crossing game since the Gamecube so it's been really nice to come back to the series. Seems like I go through everything that was open to me today, looking forward to opening more up tomorrow. I didn't even realise you could pay it with bells, I thought it was one of those "options" where you just have to do what it's told you. I think the main thing is to pay off that first loan as fast as possible (within the first day) so that you have the upgrade ready for when you next play as well as unlocking the new features that go alongside it. For what it's worth it didn't take me very long to pay it off with Nook Miles and it seems like you get the the same point afterwards no matter what.

Bought the new 11 inch iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. Have wanted one for a while and they offer crazy 0% finance deals here so I thought I may as well.

Enjoyed the talk, as expected Sony are going for system throughput efficiency in something that doesn't cause the crazy fan action of the PS4 lineup. You can tell it was a GDC talk and I'm surprised they didn't add any more 'public-friendly' information like some images of the machine or something. I'm sure a lot of people will feel a bit disappointed by not seeing more than this. The main thing for me was that he mentioned it was due this year, no sign of any delay.

I think it's easy to see where you're coming from, you're not sure you'll be able to buy this for a while so you've stocked up a little more than usual. But this is exactly the same as what those families are doing. You'd be amazed how much stuff a family goes through - they may not be buying any longer of a supply than you are. Unless you have some dietary requirement to drink milk regularly then you could have just gone without or bought the usual amount. Luckily here the panic buying has stopped, but we seem to be getting more and more strict on people control so it could well come back again. Luckily it seems the government is ridiculously paranoid here and all supermarkets have to keep a three month supply of everything they sell + there are emergency stockpiles held by the government so we should be OK.

The non-expert talking about what happened in Singapore and Taiwan is just plain wrong. I can't speak for Taiwan but in Singapore there wasn't a two week lock-down, everyone isn't (and wasn't) wearing masks, and the cases are still coming in thick and fast. They have done a good job of isolating people once it's confirmed that they have it, but it's not like it's some amazing case of we haven't had it. It's also much easier to control in a tiny very rich country with amazing public healthcare compared to anywhere else.

It's going to be really weird. I can't quite imagine a wrestling event without a crowd, especially something like Wrestlemania. Actually quite excited to watch such a weird event.

That's really good! Seems to me you want to be somewhere in the middle on the actions taken. Too little and the thing just goes crazy, too much and you spend too long in the compromised position. Hitting that middle part properly is the real trick - I'm glad I don't have to handle anything important like this.

I agree, it does seem totally crazy to go at it like this, especially with long-term effects unknown. The problem is until a cure/vaccine is found there is also an unknown on how long this is going to go on for. I guess there are two viable strategies: Get everyone to catch it, have a short period of no productivity and move on Contain it, have a long period of low productivity but not so much as to cause an issue The problem is if you fall in the middle of that and have just enough people catch it to bring you below a viable threshold of productivity but because of some control measures it continues for a long period of time. Singapore is exactly the same. The government is definitely doing more to contain it, though that's far easier here than it is there, at the end of the day, people want to live their lives. I'd say it's been going on for almost two months here now. If it wasn't on the news I don't think I would even know apart from the temperature checks at offices and malls. If it's controlled to the same extent in bigger countries like the UK it will be going on for the rest of the year. I'm not sure how viable that is if business is grinding to a halt.

The UK plan is an interesting one. I guess the thinking is that the people who will most likely catch it in this situation will be healthy enough to beat it without hospitalisation and once they're immune, the disease can't spread any further. Essentially let the virus burn out quickly. I guess it could work, but if it gets out of hand and they can't control it then there could be real trouble. Over here we're being hit just as much as anywhere else, and it's hotter than it will get during the European summer. I'm no scientist, but it really doesn't seem likely it is viable to survive to the summer, and the virus will go away. @Ashley - sounds like you have some interesting decisions ahead. For what it's work everyone I know that has been travelling during this thing has been covered by insurance. From what I understand it hasn't hit South America yet - is that right? If so expect all the panic buying madness to come when it does - that's been the case everywhere else in the world. If you're willing to risk it you might be able to get a lot of cheap travel while this thing is going on. Over here, I'm on my first day of working from home. Kind of feels a little late, this thing has been going on for months over here.

Update on my targets: Run 1,000km over the course of the year - Currently at just over 250km Do a 5km run in under 20 minutes - Current best 21:35 Do a 10km run in under 40 minutes - Current best 48:34 I'm well ahead on 1 and 2 and on track for 3. Haven't missed too many runs so confident I can keep bringing those times down.