To be sure, there can be no halfway re filling stadiums. Either all or nothing. Having people sit six feet apart is a non-starter, deprives others of their seats. Have heard Major League Baseball also plans start in July to play without fans. Believe this is being done solely to satisfy various contract obligations.
I expressed the same sentiment over in the
Quarantines thread. Season ticket holders pay a significant amount for their tickets (and associated fees) and there is no way to have them take turns missing games that will be fair to all of them. So all or none seems all but inevitable with sporting events. We'll see which sports are able to make it through their next season without live audiences.
The biggest concern might be intercollegiate sports. A sport such as football brings in enough money to fund teams that always operate at a financial loss but are needed to satisfy Title IX requirements. Anything that has a negative impact on football revenue can hurt the rest of a college's sports programs, especially for NCAA Division 1 schools (the biggest division for those outside the US). That's going to be a shit show because you know the moment any women's team facing cuts due to reduced overall budgets will be quick to file a Title IX complaint even though less money means all other sports have to share the losses.
Owosso barber Karl Menke, 77, has had his personal license and business license revoked, and may face $1,000 fine and 1 year in jail per haircut. Mr. Menke was unavailable for comment when the article went to press, as he was still cutting hair.
I had thought I read here he won a lower court case that the state planned to appeal. Today, however, someone told me his case didn't end in his favor. So I have no idea what's going on
. Assuming he did win the lower court case, his attorney might have grounds for a TRO while the case is under appeal because it's easy for his attorney to argue the loss of his license during the appeal is harming his ability to support himsellf when he's not eligible for any assistance while the appeal is ongoing. Unless the facts are different, the state currently seems like a bully more interested in making his life miserable than enforcing the current orders -- orders whose statewide enforcement is spotty and inconsistent at best.
I've been critical of Cuomo, but I'll say this--the process seems transparent and based in numbers as opposed to feels.
Let's just hope the goalposts don't move as they seem to do when it comes to plans that would lift restrictions based on certain metrics and milestones.
Here in Michigan, Governor Whitmer and Chief Medical Executive Dr. Joneigh Khaldun have decided not to give hard and fast numbers for reducing restrictions.
I heard that part of the press conference and I was glad the reporter asked the question. Of coruse, it quickly turned to horror when Whitmer's response suggested that using numbers is unrealistic. It felt as if she was acting like a parent towards a little kid when the former tells the latter, "I'll do it when I'm good and ready." That may work on little kids, but not on a state full of citizens who want to get back to work and want something concrete and measurable they can look at to know how close they are to having fewer restrictions.
Why did the government kick in the extra 600 dollars in the first place, if it thought that half pay was already adequate enough for us to live on?
Trump being a businessman, he probably knows that people being out of work for any extended indefinite time through no fault of their own is a bad thing. Most importantly, it's detrimental to the economy at all levels. So, it makes sense he'd want to initiate Federal Unemployment benefits (including the extra 13 weeks that usually come with this) right away to help people be able to better stay on top of their major monthly expenses. While I'm not too keen on the $600 resulting in people making more per week in unemployment than they did in weekly wages (the maximum amount should have been capped at their average weekly wages), I'd rather see people paying their bills without worry than losing their livelihoods -- especially those living in areas where restrictions might not end until the fall at the earliest.
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In other news, some restaurants are adding surcharges of approximatel4 5% to their bills as a "COVID-19" surcharge to address increasing food/supply costs. Some people are OK with it if they know in advance. In other places where it was an unexpected line item, the fee has been quite unpopular even when patrons are sympathetic. Although the restaurant owners in question claim this is temporary and the surcharges will disappear when prices "return to normal," such a comment is so open-ended that it would be easy to keep the surcharge indefinitely under the guise of things never returning to normal -- akin to gas stations that started charging 10 cents a gallon extra for credit cards to recover the added processing costs when gas hit $4/gallon only to keep the extra 10 cents per gallon in place even when prices dropped back below $2.50 and haven't reached the $4 mark ever since.
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