I should note that this letter seems egregious enough that I wonder if it's entirely fictional. For one thing, that's an awfully big advance.

If everyone wrote books, there would be too much to read. So by the Categorical Imperative she's a monster.

All advice letters are fictional, no one cares as long as they're done well. Agree that the advance is too large, if she's getting $100K advances why is she working a day job? The other verisimilitude problem is that the letter writer seems to think she could just leave an hour earlier if she worked during lunch, but I don't think that's how most jobs work.

Clearly something is off about their relationship. It's hard not to wonder how freely she actually agreed to this deal. Why couldn't they just agree to her writing over lunch break? It seems like an extremely reasonable compromise that everyone could agree to. So why did it have to be secret?

Where gender plays a role is that one assumes in this situation that she's more than pulling her weight when she is home. If the genders were swapped we'd assume that this is just one of a hundred corners he's cutting and that maybe the letter writer has good reasons for resentment even if the letter doesn't include those reasons. When there's clearly something wrong in the relationship but the letter doesn't get into it at all it's hard not to let stereotypes fill in those reasons.

But yes, if real, a huge non-gendered asshole.

The link doesn't seem to be working, but judging from the quoted text, I'm not sure either of them is an asshole. They did have an agreement, and she didn't exactly stick to it, but she didn't exactly break it either. The fact that she made a bunch of money is nice, but doesn't really address the trust issue created by the fact that she went into this grey area of breaking their agreement. So he probably doubts whether he can trust her now, and that's somewhat reasonable, but she probably feels like she kept to the spirit of their agreement, and that's also reasonable.

The subtext is "how dare she improve herself to the point where she can do better than me."

Fixed the link. To 5, I guess I'd read an agreement that someone wouldn't write on their lunch hour as so unreasonable (in the absence of some explanation I can't really come up with plausibly) that I'd think the letter writer was in the wrong for negotiating the agreement, much less being upset about the breach.

You can just sorta see that if the genders were reverse, we might think it's the man shirking domestic duties (in contravention of their agreement) to pursue his own interests, but no matter what your agreement is, writing your novel over your lunchbreak (impressive!) is not a hanging offense.

I think to get to shirking, you'd need more narrative of shirking that had been perceptible before the letter-writer knew about the novel. What hits me about this (again, almost certainly fictional) setup is that their agreement was that she expend literally all her effort on her job or childcare. He was fine with her domestic participation as long as he thought she didn't have an ounce more to give, but he found out she was capable of anything on top of her domestic responsibilities, that demonstrated she could and should have been working harder (or more cheerfully, or more energetically) at home. That's impressively creepy.

That's creepy but I think it's much simpler. She's won the marriage by writing a book and he knows he's now the lesser spouse. He doesn't like that so he says she cheated.

Yeah, the impression the (fictional! Got to be!) letter gives is of a man thinking "goddamn it, I thought I'd successfully hobbled her when I got her pregnant."

Which is still creepy, but fits in a long line of Simpson's episodes.

12 to 11 and 10.

This person sure is optimistic about the cost of a college education.

The "all advice letters are fictional" thing drives me kind of nuts, because it is either an actual article of faith for people or there is some way to verify the claim that I've never seen. Or the claim is something like "the vast majority are fake, a few might be real, and it doesn't really matter." For real though: *are* all advice letters actually fake? Is it just an "always assume fakeness" heuristic?

14: Or the stock market since they have 16 years to earn returns.

I think it's overstated, but I think enough of them are that it's a solid first guess explanation for implausibility. And this letter, irate as it obviously makes me, hits me in the implausibility pretty hard.

Obviously, I'm fictional. But I don't ask for advice often.

By all I meant most.

That reminds me, I think my wife wrote a real letter to Dear Prudence. I don't recall if she got answered. I think it was about how big of an asshole was her cousin.

if she's getting $100K advances why is she working a day job?

Now, really. When you sell a book, it comes with no guarantee you're going to be able to sell future ones, or if you do, at any kind of consistent rate. It makes sense to keep a day job for benefits as long as you can juggle it. It doesn't even say she made similar amounts of money prior to this book, just that she's an accomplished author; she could have sold books for less, or written for magazines.

Anyway, it seems likely there was a clash between letter and spirit of the couple's agreement. The goal they were supposedly working toward was to take care of the baby. The means to that goal they established was for her not to spend a great deal of time writing. But he seems to have taken that intermediate step and recast it as a solid commitment, as much a part of the spirit of the agreement as the baby's welfare, which is bananas. If he's a life partner who cares about her as a whole person as opposed to an appendage, he should be happy she figured out a way to do both. And she's probably correctly looking back and saying "I didn't promise not to write, I just thought it made sense at the time, why would I make a promise like that?"

I feel like some of my reaction -- huge, non-gendered asshole -- is rooted in an assumption about their family finances. I assumed the LW personally benefits financially from the author's windfall, which is part of what makes anger such a goofy reaction.

Does the case change if they don't share bank accounts? I'm not at all sure it justifies anger, but at least the "you lucky duck" answer is less applicable if the author/wife is keeping all the money in her own personal account. It may make the creepily controlling aspect worse, though.

And yes, this is hard to accept as real, but whatever.

15: Have you read this article?https://www.gawker.com/media/dear-prudie-it-was-me-all-along

I realize this isn't actual proof that all advice letters are fake, but after I read it, I find myself assuming any advice letter that strikes me as preposterous is fake.

The only problem with that is that most real people are preposterous.

23: Actual hyperlink https://www.gawker.com/media/dear-prudie-it-was-me-all-along

For a married couple, money earned is a marital asset. That is, she might be controlling it as a practical matter, but it'd have to be divided if the marriage ended. But you could be right about there being issues about who practically controls the money.

24: Maybe the whole QAnon thing is just phony advice letters.

it's hard to be mad at someone when they casually tell you your son's college education is now paid for,

Well, apparently, she's not using the money to go on a fabulous vacation with her lover.

Jesus whining Christ, does no one who writes to an advice column have any shame at all?

Assuming 26 was to me, I know that's how it works if the marriage ends and it's time to divide assets. But it's perfectly possible for people to live in a marriage in which each partner has, for all present purposes, their own money, from which each of them contributes to shared expenses. I'm pretty sure my sister does this. In that scenario, the angry husband wouldn't see any personal benefit from the big fat payday (until he files for divorce in his rage, or she does because he's such an asshole).

This is insane and is gender neutral. A parent is not allowed any time of recreation of their choosing? Their recreation hour must be re-dedicated towards managing the household?

What if she hadn't written the book and had just, like, eaten lunch and commented online?

I'm sure the past 30 comments say this exact thing but I had to say it, too.

This can't be real. I'm also sceptical of the one that follows ("our nanny is secretly a porn star").

That one sounds entirely plausible, mostly because there are no embellishments, and also because it seems like everyone has an OnlyFans these days. Don't you?

I decided to look it up: there are 1.5 million "content creators" on OnlyFans. 0.5% of the US population, but let's make a reasonable assumption that almost all those accounts belong to women between 18 and 40. That's about 45 million people. So, about 3.5% of young women have an OnlyFans account. That's a lot!

Does OnlyFans allow foreigners (do we still call them that?) to produce content? Seems like it could be legally tricky, but that would make my numbers useless, obviously.

Because I'm devoted to the truth, I did more searching, and apparently I have no idea what I'm talking about. OnlyFans isn't even an American company. It's based in London, and there seem to be plenty of male content creators on the site. Well, now the world is much less exciting...

The one OnlyFans creator that I know (well, that i know I know) is male, so I'm glad you discovered that yourself before I had to scold you about it.

I feel like I would have known all about this when I was younger, but I have to admit I've only ever heard of OnlyFans. oldmanwithcaneemoji

33: Actually, it seems especially fake, because it poses the kind of moral dilemma the Gawker writer discusses. It puts into conflict two core moral principles of Woke Twitter - 1)Sex work is work and 2)Extremism in the prevention of Covid is no vice.

Well, you see, they probably have a housekeeper.....

If this is real, he's nuts. Lunchtime isn't peak care for the baby time so he and baby lost out on nothing and gained $100k.

Next week: The housekeeper steals the $100k, prompting a follow-up letter.

Just wrote an appalling letter to Dear Prudence complaining about my wife's novel in a diabolical attempt to manipulate the Internet into making it a bestseller. Best work I've ever done tbh.

https://twitter.com/DBGerrard/status/1463165884625739786

This letter cannot be real, but if it is, holy shit, she wrote a book and sold it in 200-250 hours?* All I did during my lunch breaks was argue about housekeepers on unfogged.

*Realistically if anyone has a grievance against this woman, it's her employer, since her personal writing is almost certainly being done not just while she's on break, but also while she's supposed to be on the clock. (I may or may not have argued about housekeepers with internet strangers while I was supposed to be generating value for my employer.)

No one wants to argue 'we had a deal not to do this and she did it so I've lost trust?'. I don't especially, primarily because it is so implausible that they had a deal for her to not-do a productive thing that cost nothing and earned them money. But, like, if they did, is it cool that she broke the stupid, stupid deal?

I don't actually care much or want to represent his (stupid pointless) side, so I won't be arguing it. But if we can't rely on explicit deals (if there was one), there's only observed behavior left to tell us what our partner will do.

If there were a deal, the way for the novel writer to take Right Action is for her to summarize the dilemma on AITA, get thousands of internet strangers to call the deal ridiculous and her husband the asshole and then to present that to her husband and tell him that the deal is off.

No one wants to argue 'we had a deal not to do this and she did it so I've lost trust?'.

It's just so implausible that they had a deal that explicitly said, "you are not to write a book for the next year." It's much more likely that they had an agreement that she would have to put her writing aside for a year because the baby would come first. There's nothing in the letter to indicate that she didn't do her share of baby-tending. Faulting her for being resourceful enough to write a book at the same time is idiotic and insane.

M and I have a deal that he does the yardwork, including watering the garden once a week. The point of the agreement is to make sure the garden is taken care of, not to give me control over his time. If it rains for a week and so he doesn't water, I guess he's technically violating our agreement, but how nuts would it be to write in to Slate.com to complain about it?

Fuck. I *am* arguing this and I don't want to be.

I totally stipulate that the deal is entirely stupid. Also that it is so stupid that it is implausible that they both understood it the same way. That they were wrong to make a stupid deal that diminishes them both. Sure. All those things.

But if they did make the deal as described, the thing to do is call it off. Not sneak around because one party rightly decides it is an exceedingly stupid deal.

47: Agreed. Not a huge violation in those circs, but some sort of violation.

In contrast to advice columns, I think the best indicator of fake Reddit relationship content is stuff that ends up with an abuser humiliated and punished, with lots of juicy updates.

I think for that to work we need a better reason for them to enter this deal than the stated "something had to go with a new baby at home." Evidently it didn't! What he falls back on as actual harm to himself is that "she could have been home an hour earlier," which as many have noted is not how lunch hours work, and "when I think back on all the times she's been tired or grumpy, I now blame the book," which is not how new parenthood works. If anything having a creative project to work on, a life outside of the baby, would make a new parent *less* grumpy.

So, yeah, for the sake of discussion let's say they made this agreement. There was a contract, then, and she breached it. He has no plausible damages whatsoever, and all that's left is that what he actually cared about was jealousy or control over her life, which do not deserve respect.

And maybe in a perfect marriage she'd talk to him about the project rather than sneaking around, but based on what he reveals of himself in this reaction I don't think we can blame her for avoiding that conversation.

I might be sympathetic to "she violated an explicit deal" if the letter were more detailed about the deal having been explicit enough to literally rule out lunch hour writing. Any plausible deal I can imagine would have been phrased something like "you won't be able to take time for writing" not "you must not write even in time that wouldn't otherwise be available for childcare". He's interpreting it broadly in a way that wouldn't be that weird if it weren't a weird deal, but I doubt there was a conversation where a reasonable interpretation of the literal wording would have barred her from writing on her lunch hour.

And if the deal were tight enough to literally bar her from writing on her lunch hour, I think I'd still think he was the asshole for negotiating a deal that tight. Her word should be her bond, sure, but the furthest I could get would be that he was a controlling freak and she had dealt with it by acting wrongly.

I want to say onlyfans is a Canadian company?

I did have a job where a shorter lunch meant a shorter day, so that's a possible thing. Even so, I'm not sympathetic to the guy; I think he should realize he underestimated how much writing means to his wife (and how good she is at it). Reading over his letter again, he seems to realize all this, but is having a reaction like Megan describes: but we had a deal! So maybe he's just superduper rule-follower type.

Middle-aged guys spend lunch break trying to determine where OnlyFans is incorporated. Partners find out...

I have no idea if he's the asshole or not; but for sure he's a shitty, shitty husband. Christ, your wife did a great thing, you should be proud.

Well, he's thinking the (stupid, stupid) deal is "all our focus on The Baby for a year", which is plausibly 'not an extensive creative other project' and she's thinking "don't cost the baby any time or energy". We all agree that we like the second interpretation (me too!). But if you think it is 'all our focus' rather than 'all my non-work time', then she broke the deal he should never have asked her for and she shouldna agreed to.

I suspect she did know how he interpreted it, because she hid the effort from him. Nearly every step of this whole this is stupid wrongness, but I do think that for full integrity, she should have been explicit about not keeping the deal (and told him to lump it and not whine at her because now that they were actually doing it, it was clear that there was capacity left over after caring for the baby and keeping her job).

Then if you take it one more step back to "can't tell this fucking whiner that the deal is off because he'll be too unpleasant to be around", well, sure. It is whiny turtles all the way down. All that said, I still think she wasn't acting with integrity and he has some appropriate grievance.

I am absolutely not a super-duper rule follower type, no way no how. But if I make a promise or a deal, I keep it or explicitly re-negotiate. I try not to make deals because they mean a lot to me.

Yeah, I can see a reading like that which, while it leaves him completely in the wrong, leaves her somewhat in the wrong too.

Ok, he's a superduper dealkeeper.

leaves him completely in the wrong, leaves her somewhat in the wrong too

Done!

Strong work, everyone.

Well, we worked through lunch.

I think the deal was "yes, you're smarter and more talented than me, but you aren't allowed to rub it in"

Although, to put her in the wrong, I have to assume that whatever she literally agreed to barred her writing at lunch. Under the plausible possibility where whatever she actually did agree to with the words coming out of her own mouth didn't prohibit her from writing at lunch, but she did get the correct impression that he was thinking of it like that and so she kept quiet about it to avoid the fight, their marriage is awful but she isn't a dealbreaker. One party can't broaden a deal unilaterally.

I'm assuming he's (to the extent he's real) an unreliable narrator, but he's enough of a controlling weirdo that it seems likely.

Reasonable people can take quite a bit of consolation from an extra $100K.

But I can still kinda see an angle for him.

Perhaps he correctly felt himself ignored during her earlier writing projects. (For which he should develop inner resources, not resent her.)
Perhaps he doesn't want The Baby to feel similarly ignored at least for a year.
Perhaps during the year of lunchtime work, he accurately detected an air of abstraction in her that he recognized from her writing efforts (distinct from baby fatigue).
Perhaps he gave her the benefit of the doubt because they had a deal.

Then she revealed she'd been breaking the deal and he was hurt. He'd been trying to achieve something (un-distracted parents) that he thought they had agreed on and been undermined and deceived. The goal (undistracted parents) is not achievable and maybe he hadn't been undermined or deceived. Maybe in the midst of a novel writing project she was nevertheless fully present for her baby every evening. But maybe her novel writing did impinge on what he was trying to do for the first year of the baby's life. We know that's fine, but they'd agreed to do it.

I fully agree this is all weak and a better father and husband has a million better solutions for each step (including 'be happy for her' or 'have the ability to self-soothe'). But I can make it make sense for someone as literal and rigid as he seems to be.

(OOooohh! I have an analogy! But we're not allowed.)

Ooooh gawd I want to do the analogy.

Oh, go ahead. Analogy away.

I WILL!

What if they had agreed to be super COVID-strict and she varied from that in some way that was probably harmless and never got COVID so it didn't matter anyway and also earned $100K.

I think people here would still see harm from that.

To be clear, I'm not impressed with him and I think their marriage is bad and I wish him extensive personal growth and her more fulfillment than she seems to be getting from the marriage.

But I can see how he felt himself sufficiently in the right that he thought an advice-giver would see his side.

I feel like the 100K is unnecessarily confusing -- that is, I'd think all the rights and wrongs would be the same if she was writing non-commercial poetry or Pinky and the Brain fan fiction.

Let's stay off my turf.

Well, it makes him a little more ridiculous. People who were wholly in the right have gotten over worse for less.

Well, the money is presumably what forced her to tell him. If she'd just been writing random stuff on her lunch break for fun there's no reason he would ever need to find out. It would be hard to hide a hundred thousand dollars though, at least if she wanted to do anything with it.

Agree with 69. If the 100K is relevant to the judgement then obviously he's a terrible person.

You guys are awfully pure about $100K. I wouldn't hold it against someone if $100K greased their rationalizing somewhat.

I think 69 is dead wrong: the money isn't unnecessarily confusing, it's at the core of what he's upset about. Writing something non-commercial would not have constituted continuing her "writing career," which is what he complains about.

Or, again, if his beef is that she's not allowed to have her own thoughts or to write them down, then she needs a speedy divorce and a restraining order.

That it's worth a serious amount of money, makes the writing significant as opposed to just something to pass the time during lunch hour.

"She promised not to write, but I found out she was writing comments on an eclectic webmagazine during her lunch hour" may be even sillier than the original letter.

72: Presumably, she was excited to share the good news.

It does suggest a project hefty enough that it could distract her in non-lunch hours, when she was supposed to be gazing into the baby's eyes.

I don't actually think it does the baby any harm. I don't think he's got a real grievance there. But there are surely parents out there who are that batshit.

Sillier or more sinister? I think this is the hole in the backstory that Megan has (admirably) filled in to find a way for this guy's anger to be justified. She's supposing that in the past, our guy felt neglected because his wife was distracted by her work, and didn't want that same fate to fall on their baby.

Rephrasing slightly, he insists that she abandon the work that she finds meaningful, instead devoting all of her attention to her domestic duties and himself. This is not okay! And there's no claim that her parenting has been in any respect unduly distracted or otherwise deficient, only that she's been tired and grumpy sometimes.

seeing 78 on preview: yes, this position is batshit.

Moby is definitely winning this thread.

In case I haven't been clear enough, I think he's gone about this wrong and there were a million better solutions out there for someone who understood themself and people better.

What if they had agreed to be super COVID-strict and she varied from that in some way that was probably harmless and never got COVID so it didn't matter anyway and also earned $100K.

I was thinking of a similar analogy, based on this article in which the vaccinated husband goes to a wedding, catches COVID, and the disease itself is not as difficult as trying to negotiate the fallout of, "what, exactly, had we agreed to when you decided to attend the wedding, and how do we negotiate appropriate protocols while your quarantine." It's another example of the trickiness of negotiating behavior within a marriage.

Bad analogy, bad HTML . . .

I don't think 73 disagrees with 75.1. That is, if 75.1 is right then there's nothing to argue about, he's a terrible person and she should leave him. The question is only interesting if you posit the money isn't at the heart of the matter.

My choices here are to keep arguing this or to clean out a rat nest in my walls.

The link in 82 is wild to me. No one would treat another mild respiratory illness like that. When are we going to realize that covid is here to stay?

Dude. I'd rather clean out the rat nest than poke that bear.

The wife's big lapse of judgment was marrying an asshole. She made no other material mistake.

86: I'm super careful, because I don't want Long COVID, and a I want to keep cases down to protect the unvaccinated (even if some of them are assholes)

That said, I think a lot of normal people are waiting until their kids are vaccinated. More kids have died of COVID than most vaccine preventable illnesses before the advent of highly protective vaccines. So, it isn't necessarily a mild illness -even in healthy kids - UNTIL they are fully vaccinated.

How long after putting a giant scratch in your own car (not your spouse's car) do you have to tell them before you're explicitly hiding it from them as opposed to just waiting for the right moment.?

Asking for a friend.

But you're going to get covid eventually, right? Do you think you're somehow going to dodge it forever? Or the point is that one fewer year of having long covid is super valuable to you?

For that matter, do we think long covid lasts forever?

Long covid lasts a long time.
Forever covid lasts forever.

But you're going to get covid eventually, right? Do you think you're somehow going to dodge it forever? Or the point is that one fewer year of having long covid is super valuable to you?

I'll catch the flu eventually, but it's unusual, I don't catch it every year.

I'm still quite cautious, but I'm open to the question of, "at what point is it no longer justified." My primary fear, like BG, is long COVID -- I know somebody who's been dealing with it for over a year and it sounds bad.

I'm hoping that, (a) case counts will eventually decline and that when it becomes endemic it will be at a lower level than the current rates and (b) there will be more information about long covid and treatment.

I also think that the link in 82 is an example of not managing expectations/negotiations successfully.

Should I be embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of OnlyFans?

Not that I believe the letter is real, but I think some people are being too hard on the husband. He realizes that his reaction is ridiculous, and he's trying to work through his sense of confusion and betrayal (which, okay, is ridiculous), and he's asking for a second opinion. As several people have already noted above, there's a good deal of consolation to be found in an extra $100K, so no doubt he'll get over it sooner rather than later, especially given Prudie's reply.

I think the fact that bad covid feels like a lottery is what has made it so scary. I'm also on team no-long-covid, and my thinking has been that it's less likely to be a problem the more times someone has been vaccinated (or exposed post-vaccination). Is this scientifically sound? Not sure, but it seems plausible, so I was very careful with the kids (one got it anyway) and with myself until I was recently boosted. At this point, I'm willing to be chill for six months and see what post-boost protection looks like.

Maybe a hypothetical piece of trim is now poorly attached too.

How long after putting a giant scratch in your own car (not your spouse's car) do you have to tell them before you're explicitly hiding it from them as opposed to just waiting for the right moment.?

Imo: you have hours, not days. If it happened more than a day ago, and you haven't yet told your spouse, you are already explicitly hiding it from her (or him, as the case may be). There's no such thing as just the right moment.

my thinking has been that it's less likely to be a problem the more times someone has been vaccinated (or exposed post-vaccination). Is this scientifically sound?

It is a reasonable belief, but the studies to date have not supported it -- vaccination offers protection against having sufficient infection to test positive, but it's not clear that it offers _additional_ protection against long covid for a "breakthrough" case (annoyingly).

But there's really not much good data out there. The best overall study I've seen is this one: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/technicalarticleupdatedestimatesoftheprevalenceofpostacutesymptomsamongpeoplewithcoronaviruscovid19intheuk/26april2020to1august2021

There are, obviously, scarier numbers as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58726775

101.last is my viewpoint. I think way more health problems are caused by prior infections than we realize, but long covid specifically doesn't scare me as much as it scares other people.

100 is more or less explicitly saying tomorrow is fine.

Again - parents not wanting their unvaccinated kids infected seems totally reasonable to me.

In addition to Generic Long COVID, losing taste and smell for several months sounds pretty horrifying.

I've never had symptomatic influenza. I'd like to try to avoid symptomatic COVID. I'd also like to get to a point where it was really easy to get a rapid test if I felt sick and get my PCP to prescribe an antiviral - both hoping to feel better, get back to life/work quicker AND avoid Long COVID.

Wait, what? You've never had the flu? I'd figure that makes you an invincible super-human who shouldn't be worried about covid at all.

92: I just got boosted and the kids got their first round of shots. I figure it's likely I'll get it at some point but "don't be the first person to get a novel virus" seems like a good rule of thumb, and the longer it takes, the more likely we have effective treatments.

105: I've had plenty of stomach bugs (probably Noroviruses) but I've never had documented influenza. I, mean, pre COVID, I never went to a doctor to get tested for any respiratory illness, because the result would not affect my treatment. Now that I work for a hospital I probably would get tested - if only b/c we have long been required to stay home from work w/ flu until we are fever free without medication, so you needed to know that was what you had.

I get colds. I also don't spend a lot of time around kids who are big drivers of flu infections.

103: But if the hypothetical spouse were to discover the damage (either tonight or early tomorrow morning) before having been told about it, that might prove a bit tricky (and/or might prompt a letter to Prudence).

Some people write books, others crash cars. We all need hobbies to hide from our spouses for as long as possible.

Look at Teo, so experienced with spouses!

It's really the new, mobile pillars in parking garages that get my friends.

I'm not sure I'd acknowledge an obligation to tell my spouse I'd damaged my own car, or for her to tell me she'd damaged hers, unless there was some significant shared consequence (needing to be picked up, significant repair bill, etc.). In practice we'd mention it sooner or later, and probably sooner, but it wouldn't be a betrayal not to.

My spouse owns and pays the insurance on both of our cars, so she would definitely want to know immediately if I damaged one of them.

111: Those things are nasty. They used to reach out and bite my wife's car with some regularity when she parked in garages. And you have to watch parked cars carefully. They can jump out at you.

(She's a very good driver once her mind is in the car, but has occasional lapses in transition from the previous task to driving.)

I've never had flu that I know of. Lots of colds, pneumonia once or twice, but never the flu. I hope to avoid Covid, too, and that doesn't seem impossible with reasonable precautions.

I'm curious whether the actual post-infection treatment options (the newish Pfizer drug, monoclonal antibodies etc.) are effective at reducing long covid. I mean, maybe no treatment of that kind helps with any post-infection syndrome, but still.

I do think it will be a turning point when you can pretty much rely on getting decent treatment for covid at any hospital if your case goes south. I am maybe in a small minority in having been incensed by the way monoclonal antibodies were (portrayed as?) a VIP treatment for a limited number of people, all of whom seem to recover easily after taking them. They still aren't super-widely available, right? Or are they?

It is also, I think, going to be hard to communicate to kids that we're just going to live with covid from now on. I am not sure there's any kind of public health communications strategy in place for that. My poor daughter is kind of terrified of covid.

I have more to say about the fake-letter question but I'm undermotivated and visiting family, and no one else seems to care. (And to be fair I also don't really give a shit about advice letters at all, although for some reason I did read that Gawker article, an example of how carefully I spend my free time.)

AIHMB, the duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it -- and nothing else.

What are asshole husband's damages? Nothing. De minimis non curat lex.

The estimate in 34 makes me wonder how much the overlap could be with this previous population estimate.

If he wanted to keep his fancy wife under control, he should have just moved her to a farm.

i just keep on remembering how we ended up with our current delta variant - unrestrained replication of a *novel* virus in host human bodies. so, added to my desire to reduce community transmission in order to protect those under 5, immunocompromised or otherwise medically unable to benefit from vaccines, and in the absence of widely available effective treatments that can lighten the horrific load on healthcare workers, i want to minimize the virus' opportunities to replicate its way into greater effectiveness. if that means wearing masks indoors in public spaces and not socializing indoors with eligible but unvaccinated adults, i'm fine with that being the new normal for some time.

there isn't anything in san francisco that is closed to the eligible-vaccinated. the schools are open and not a source of rampant transmission (and maybe they'll get to go unmasked once the students are all vaccinated - the staff are already subject to a vaccine mandate). the restaurants and bars are open to vaccinated people eating and drinking unmasked and have likewise not been a source of rampant transmission.

we wear masks indoors in shops, on transit, etc., as those are open to the unvaccinated and that is fine with me - the unvaccinated need to shop for food, take the bus, etc.

we recently had a brief uptick in cases, i suspect it may be a result of the outside lands festival and associated partying; it seems to be going right back down and with wide uptake of boosters will hopefully just keep on heading down.

a desire to keep community transmission low at this moment, while 5-11 are still getting vaccinated and the rest of us are getting our booster (aka third dose of a three dose vaccine?), with potentially effective treatments just coming into view but not yet widely available, seems entirely consistent with accepting that the virus is endemic. no one is obliged to throw themselves at the microbe's feet as a willing petri dish for natural selection.

119: Heh.

the restaurants and bars are open to vaccinated people eating and drinking unmasked and have likewise not been a source of rampant transmission
Why do you think that you know that to be true?

MA cases have doubled in the past three weeks, for no terribly obvious reason. Other than my kid going to school, which is big, we're pretty much still living like it's April 2020 over here, despite being vaccinated and boosted. Kid gets dose #2 on Saturday.

I look forward to going to a restaurant or bar again, someday, but this month and probably this year won't be it.

About an hour ago, I opened an email from the admin at Temple U (which school my son currently attends): something about "a tragic day for Temple," but all very vague...

So of course, I googled.

A man in South Jersey brutally attacked his wife and daughter (the daughter a Temple student) with a baseball bat; succeeded in murdering his own daughter, while only seriously harming his wife; and then shot himself to death in the nearby woods. I am speechless with disbelief, dismay, fear, horror, sorrow: I just don't have any words.

122: in mid august, sf restricted access to restaurants, bars, gyms, clubs, etc., to those vaccinated. it's not a dead letter requirement - i had to show my vaccine card to get a to-go cup of tea at peet's this last saturday (i stayed masked indoors). my club deactivated the key cards of those who did not provide proof of vaccination.

you can see the case data here: https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths
cases have been below 100 per day since mid-september. they're low enough that, were restaurants, bars (or clubs and gyms) a source of rampant spread, we'd know about it by now. my club's lease is from the city - it is very clear that if we had any kind of widespread transmission the city would shut us down.

scroll further down the page and you can see that vaccinated people generally account for half or fewer of the cases, and case rate for vaccinated people has been below 10/100,000 since the third week of september. that low level of community transmission *and* keeping schools open seems totally worth the inconvenience of persisting with pretty mild restrictions for the time being.

117: I wouldn't want to conduct my marriage or other close relationships based on purely legal principles. Contract law doesn't award damages for how shitty it can feel when someone breaks a promise or an agreement, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

That said, I agree with LB in 50-51.

Contract law doesn't award damages for how shitty it can feel when someone breaks a promise...

Didn't it used to? You could sue for breach of promise if someone didn't marry you in some circumstances.

Or criminal conversation.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that works anymore except in the south.

122: Many of them are among kids. I think a lot of schools are not being careful with precautions. Also maybe Halloween parties. I think if kids get it at school, their vaccinated, Unboosted parents are likely enough to get it at home where they are in close contact for a while.

I'm hoping the 5-11 vaccinations will make a big dent in the issue, though I think daycares are also a problem but less of an issue than schools. Unfortunately, and predictably, uptake of pediatric vaccines is not uniform across the state.

Further to 129. Despite being a highly vaccinated state, hospitalizations are up too. Not like in Michigan. And while it's mostly among the unvaccinated, there are a fair number of breakthroughs. We are dealing with hospital capacity issues too due to the delayed care, and hospitals are having trouble taking transfers, so it looks like some non-urgent procedures are ging to start being delayed again per an order that came down from DPH. This isn't strictly due to being overrun by COVID, but is a downstream effect, and we still need to reduce the burden as much as possible.

Monoclonal antibodies are available more easily in some places than in others. MA was quite limited compared to NY, partly because our leaders seemed tonthin'they would not really be needed post vaccine. Hopefully the pills will help too, but in the short term the piles will only be available to the unvaccinated. So, high risk vaccinated will still need to seek out monoclonal.

The pills will only be available to the unvaccinated? Like, antiviral pills? Why? Doesn't that create an incentive for people to remain unvaccinated because they'll have better access to treatment if they do catch Covid? I can totally see someone who was in doubt about getting vaccinated deciding not to do so for that reason.

It's "the piles. " They get hemorrhoids.

BTW I'm on the road near Amarillo. Might be hard to get a post up until we get to Raton, NM. Only name-dropping that because this place has a collective fondness for NM.

123 is awful. I'm sorry, JPJ. Did your son know her?

131:That will change eventually, but in the short term they will be rationed to where they will do the most good and that's among the unvaccinated.

I only look at unfogged on my phone or iPad, because I don't want to use my work laptop and opening it up on the desktop is too much work. But autocorrect is vicious. Thus, "piles".

That's ghastly, JPJ

Yeah, don't know how to respond personally. You wonder where these things come from. Like, was there a disturbing history or did he just have some kind of break?

Omg, JPJ. That's horrifying. How is your son?

116: I think you're right that the treatment is the key. If the data holds up it is a massive reduction in fatalities and the need for hospital resources. Still don't want it but it's a lot more like not wanting the flu. (Long COVID sucks but I'm not convinced it's materially different from post-viral shenanigans that usually resolve.)

I'm not as worried about the kids. We've been lucky that no one we know personally has died and we've pretty aggressively shielded them from our worries. But it sneaks out in weird ways. Lots more roleplaying "shots" in preschool, Pebbles overslept her nap at school and awakened to find her friends making her cards because "she fell asleep and got the virus.". We've returned to a lot of normal activities with a vaxxed immediate circle so I think the transition back won't feel as big.

I thought one problem was that the treatments work best early and the same kind of person who won't get vaccinated also doesn't go to the doctor in time for early treatments.

Well, I was indoors at a restaurant last night, not in a jurisdiction with vax requirements, so I guess I'm starting to feel comfortable with a hair more risk myself. Partly based on the differential death rates I calculated.

I saw a horrifying Tiktok about someone with parosmia (they eat 72 Cliff bars a week because that's one of the only things they can stomach, plus other apparently random stuff like bottled iced tea and pulled pork sandwiches; even filtered water tastes bad to them), but those kinds of outcomes seem rare enough they're not going to influence me much.

Pulled pork sandwiches are pretty great.

This was it. 72 a month, not a week.

We're having significantly more cases this year than this time last year. I think the difference is that the schools are open. It seems to have been tearing through my kid's high school.

Right now 35% of our local hospital admits are vaccinated, so, in addition to people being idiots, maybe vaccines aren't the silver bullet we had hoped.

Make new bullets.
Keep the old.
One is silver
and the other gold.

"Right now 35% of our local hospital admits are vaccinated, so, in addition to people being idiots, maybe vaccines aren't the silver bullet we had hoped."

Right now 35% of people hospitalised after car crashes were sober, so maybe drink driving isn't so bad.

145: Utah's health department has done a lot of work breaking down the cases, and while vaccinated admissions are rising, it's also true that those who are vaxxed and in the hospital tend to have five comorbidities. Unvaxxed, one.

Everyone has one comorbidity at least.

But, it's clear we missed whatever window we had to protect the vulnerable.

maybe vaccines aren't the silver bullet we had hoped

I think I mentioned this, but declining efficacy is a real thing. Would love to see numbers for people within, say, four months of their last dose.

The antivirals have only been studied in unvaccinated people, so that's what will come to the FDA for approval first. The FDA does have some discretion to allow other uses, but there's no data on how well they work for breakthrough infections. Pfizer is now running a study that includes vaccinated participants, so there will at some point be some data to figure this out. It's much more difficult to establish efficacy in vaccinated patients because severe outcomes are so much rarer to start with. STAT has a good rundown of what we do and don't know about the antivirals so far.

I should never have mentioned COVID.

151: yes. Winter over here was looking bad for the over 60s for a bit but now the booster shots have gone in we should be more or less OK.

I should never have mentioned COVID.

"As a USENET discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving [COVID] approaches one. "

https://www.ft.com/content/974487ab-54be-4b43-945c-597277aa1292

re: boosters, winter rises in cases, etc.

TLDR: UK is actually doing OK compared to much of Europe, partly because of an earlier booster program, partly because a lot of people have been infected already, and partly because of different schedules for opening up. But that has happened at a cost (in terms of lives).

156: I think Portugal (and maybe Spain) look ok. My cousin lives in Portugal. Maybe that's where I will go for my next vacation.

153: This was a classic example showing why there is an Analogy Ban.

My own fault.

The analogy ban is like a guard rail on the road.

159: We had exhausted the topic of the fake advice letter, and people wanted to talk about Covid. No need to beat yourself up.

Istm (I think mentioned in other words upthread) the problem with infection-based immunity is when COVID tears through a population it has a lot more chances to mutate into something that comes back later just as bad. Trevor Bedford recently examined some data and tentatively concluded it seems less likely to mutate all told in a vaccinated population.

156. Portugal is a fantastic country. Go and enjoy.

163: I went for his wedding and loved it, but I also want to go to Spain.

The analogy ban is like a guard rail on the road

The analogy ban encourages a false sense of security and paradoxically leads to riskier commenting.

The analogy ban is the glue that tears us apart

166:. I thought it was love.

Ew, we're covered in love-glue.

145: The rate of vaccination affects this ratio, so it's more complicated than drawing a conclusion that vaccines are losing efficacy at preventing hospitalization. The higher your vax rate, the more vaccinated hospitalizations you will see vs unvaxxed.

There's a tweet today (maybe yesterday?) from saiselgY where he points out that all the letters in Slate are fake.

Snoop Dog is selling Soda Stream on the TV.

Legolas looks like a blonde Kyle McLachlan.

Shame on Snoop Dogg for not showing solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine.

That's what I was thinking. But he is showing solidarity with plastic bottles.

134: No, my son did not know her. But he is upset. Just a horrendous story.

The Hobbit movies are annoying me because they are so different from the books and because they took out all the dwarves constant shouts of "mother fucking dragon" for broadcast TV.

Movies these days seem really over plotted.

Wonder Woman seems even more over the top but at least Lupin gets to be a villain.

These are my issues. (Tl;dr: quit saying "all" if you don't really mean "all." That's all I want.)

To know that the overwhelming majority of advice letters are fake, we must have some idea of who is writing the overwhelming majority of advice letters. Like: everyone knows someone who knows someone who sent a fake advice letter to a column and got it published. Or: a rumor mill has credibly established that there are a few very prolific fake-advice-letter writers (possibly including the guy in that Gawker article, but he didn't seem that prolific). Or: advice columnists over the years have acknowledged writing fake letters themselves, using known fake-letter sources, etc. etc.

Alternately, given spotty evidence along the lines above, people are making the parsimonious assumption that almost all letters are fake, because there's enough isolated data to show that fake-letter-writing is common. This only gets you to "all letters are fake" if you like rounding up in general.

Alternately alternately, it's a knee-jerk way to disavow gullibility and seem savvy, and hey, it's at least as likely to be true as not.

I definitely don't feel that I know enough verifiable facts about writers of advice letters to make the "all are fake" claim. This meta-issue bothers me unreasonably. "A whole lot of advice letters are fake" -- no reason not to buy that. But "most" or "all" really seems like a shit-ton of fake advice letters. There are that many people who find this pastime amusing, vs. almost no people who write to advice columnists sincerely wanting advice?

Evidence mustered in this thread: peep notes a confessed faker's confession; Moby notes that his wife maybe wrote a real letter to Dear Prudence but it never got published; DaveLMA notes that that goddamn guy with the backwards last name says that all Dear Prudence letters are fake, except Mrs. Hick's. Anyway, this is all leading to a question that every one of you is dodging, namely: is every ATM fake?

The 90s were a different time.

Movies today so suck but Billy Connelly in armor and riding on a battle pig is kind of genius.

Movies today are generally awful, but TV has gotten so much better. Totally psyched about season/series 6 of Shetland, especially since I learned that Mark Bonnar (Scottish actor who basically elevates every scene in which he appears) is amongst the cast of Shetland 6.

Back in the 90s there were some kids at my school who got on Jerry Springer, and would you believe they had invented the entire story they'd been brought on TV to talk about? One would think Jerry Springer had higher standards.

Judge Judy pays the damages out of their own pocket in exchange for just a little personal humiliation for the responsible party.

Part of me thinks I should watch Shetland, and part of me is too grumpy that it's not shot in Shetland.

179: This is all right, I think. All I'd hold onto is the idea that it's a very reasonable guess that any given implausible letter might be fake.

179. My actual takeaway from backwards-name-guy was that if there aren't enough interesting letters sent in, the Slate staff made some up to fill the gap.

I never understand why they have to fake reality TV. I mean, I get molding the episodes into a recognizable pattern because viewers like that, but beyond that, why is the forced script preferable to whatever they'd naturally say? My friends were on house hunters. One of the houses wasn't even on the market. They applied before they started looking for a house, but the producers got back to them after they'd bought their house already. They had to re-take scenes if their reactions didn't match what was wanted.

The white people in the working class and lower middle class seems deeply attached to seeing that people's reactions match what they want. Apparently cutting sarcasm is virtually unelectable and light fascism looks reasonable.

Anyway, watching regular TV while doing holidays with the olds is a reminder how anyone who doesn't stream video is living in a different world, a really fucked up one with like 10 minutes of ads every hour.

This is like really off. Mr. T is selling rent to own furniture.

They had to re-take scenes if their reactions didn't match what was wanted.

I've long suspected that the house hunters have to exaggerate their pickiness, even though it makes them come across as ridiculously spoiled and entitled (Empty-nesters, downsizing to a 3,000 square foot house, turn down House No. 2 because the guest bathroom doesn't have a double sink...).

185: Toronto really can stand in for any place.

You hate to see a local business brought down by legal troubles.