Linked List: March 16, 2020

Monday, 16 March 2020

Follow-Up on Soap and Hand Sanitizer 

Don Schaffner, a Rutgers professor who specializes in, well, exactly this sort of thing, refutes the notion that soap is more effective than hand sanitizer when it comes to combating the spread of coronavirus. It’s a good short Twitter thread, with several sources. Worth reading.

But the bottom line is this: we have two good tools for cleaning our hands, and we should all use both frequently. Wash your hands with soap and make frequent use of hand sanitizer.

Speaking of handwashing, after my post linking to the CDC saying it’s just as effective to use cold/cool water (and arguably better, because it causes less skin irritation when washing frequently), I’ve also started following their recommendation to turn off the water after initially wetting my hands. It’s very clear to me after just two days that doing so makes it far more natural to spend more time actually sudsing your hands up. When you leave the water running, it subconsciously puts you in a bit of a rush, because you know you’re wasting water.

‘Take Control of Working From Home Temporarily’ 

Glenn Fleishman:

We’re in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the middle of a global viral outbreak, you were told or asked to work from home — and you’ve never or rarely had to be productive where you live before. What to do? We’re here to take at some stress out of your life with a new, free book that details how to set up a home office and balance work and home life for those not accustomed to it.

Free 55-page e-book from Fleishman and assorted contributors. Some of this stuff sounds basic, but if you’ve never worked from home — particularly for an extended stretch — everything about working from home is new territory.

I’ve spent most of my life working from home. Much of what I can suggest are the basics:

  • Make work time work time. I suspect this is one of the hardest things for folks who, until now, consider “home” and “work” to be places not modes.
  • Spend the time and if necessary, money, to create a comfortable productive workspace. You’ll get uncomfortable quickly spending long hours at the keyboard if your desk (or worse, “desk”) is not an appropriate height and if you don’t have a good chair.
  • For collaboration with a team, however big or small, make the official modes of collaboration crystal clear. If work communication is spread across an ad hoc collection of mediums — just randomly spewed across, say, Slack, iMessage, and email — that way madness lies.
  • It’s good to have a virtual water cooler. For me, that’s a Slack group with a bunch of friends, most of whom have long worked from home. It absolutely combats loneliness, but it’s essential to treat it like a break room. Hang out in bursts, not all day long.
Apple Fined Record $1.23 Billion in France for Price-Fixing Scheme 

Chris O’Brien, reporting for VentureBeat:

The case has its roots in a dispute between Apple and one of its leading French resellers, eBizcuss. The latter accused Apple of abusing its position, and in 2012 the reseller shut down in France as a result of what it claimed was unfair competition. The company was part of the Apple Premium Reseller program, whose participants sell only Apple products.

The French competition agency said that under the APR program, partners were told in advance how many of each product would be allocated to their stores. Apple published “recommended” prices and then tightly restricted promotional materials a distributor could use. One distributor said if it ran a promotion Apple didn’t like, the company would retaliate by limiting product supply.

The result limited pricing competition for about half of the retail market for Apple products in France. In addition, the agency found that Apple limited supplies to APR partners during moments of heavy demand around the launch of new products to steer customers to its own stores. Because Apple knew that its APR partners operated on very thin margins, any shortfall in supply could be fatal, the French agency said in its announcement.

I’m no expert on this, but it sounds like Apple’s way of dealing with resellers has always been illegal in France.