Good morning, RVA! It's 65 °F and windy and rainy. We’re under a tornado watch until 12:00 PM today, so please stay inside if you can and keep an eye on your weather service of choice for further alerts.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 5,274 positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth, and 141 people in Virginia have died as a result of the virus. VDH reports 759 cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 209, Henrico: 379, and Richmond: 154) VDH also has this notice to pair with this morning’s numbers: “The count of new cases on Sunday, April 12 may be underestimated. The report on Monday, April 13 will return to normal procedures, including all cases identified by 5 pm the previous day. This effort will enable VDH to provide more detailed data on COVID-19 in Virginia moving forward.” If you look at the graph of the number of new cases reported each day you can see what they’re talking about and how yesterday saw a big dip in positive cases. As for the number of tests results reported over the weekend, Virginia still seems unable to report more than 2,500 per day—which has been the case since about April 4th. I haven’t updated my spreadsheet with data from over the weekend, but the Commonwealth is near the very bottom of all states in tests results reported per capita and about middle of the pack in total tests. I’ll try and get that graph updated and share it with y’all tomorrow. But! Maybe there’s relief on the way, though, as Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury says Virginia has signed a contract with McKinsey & Company to “procure more personal protective equipment and testing supplies.”
The Governor signed one million bills into laws yesterday, including but not limited to, the Virginia Clean Energy Act, repeal of voter ID, making Election Day a state holiday, protections for LGBTQ folks (the Virginia Values Act), a bucketful of gun laws, and legislation allowing localities to teardown their Confederate monuments. He only vetoed one bill, the weird one about milk labeling. Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has the details on the six “big-ticket bills Northam wants to amend” and that does include pushing the minimum wage start date to May 1st 2021, five months further into the future. I’m not an economist, and I know economists have a lot of opinions they’re about to share with me on this, but seems like we could use an increase in the minimum wage sooner rather than later? Finally, @rjmarr on Twitter reminds us of how exactly a bill becomes a law in the State of Virginia—a good refresher!
Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says the Governor also has a plan to “delay a ban on electronic skill games for a year, tax their profits and use the money for a COVID-19 response fund to help small businesses, protect people’s housing and support nursing homes and other health care providers.” So wait a second, we’re pushing back the minimum wage increase while taxing “electronic skill games,” something that’d primarily impact people with lower incomes? What if—and I know this is some real out-of-the-box thinking here—what if we taxed people with a lot of money a little bit more?? 🤯
Richmond’s City Council will meet today for one of their precious few budget work sessions (at 1:00 PM) and a regularly scheduled meeting (at 6:00 PM). Remember! You have until 10:00 AM today to weigh in on any of the remaining items on Council’s agenda via email (
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says plans are in the works to replace the one-story building and surface-level parking lot next to the Hofheimer with a 7-story apartment building. I guess folks are still buying and building things, despite the pandemic? Life/real estate finds a way. If this project does go through, it’d add some new density on the Pulse corridor adjacent to a station.
Last week, Oakland announced the Oakland Slow Streets program which closes 10% of their city’s streets to through traffic. They did this to “support safe physical activity by creating more space for physical distancing,” and they did it with saw horses and signs at major intersections. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive, just an easy way to keep people safe during a time of crisis. We should do this in Richmond! There’s no reason not to!
This morning's longread
Is COBOL holding you hostage with Math?
Here’s an extremely fascinating yet nerdy read about COBOL. I learned a ton while skipping all the math and programming parts I didn’t feel like understanding.
But back when I was working with the IRS the old COBOL developers used to tell me: “We tried to rewrite the code in Java and Java couldn’t do the calculations right.” This was a very strange concept to me. So much so that a panicked thought popped immediately into my head: “my God the IRS has been rounding up everyone’s tax bill for 50 years!!!” I simply could not believe that COBOL could beat Java at the type of math the IRS needed. After all, they weren’t launching men into space over at New Carrollton. One of the fun side effects of my summer learning COBOL is that I’m beginning to understand that it’s not that Java can’t do math correctly, it’s how Java does math correctly. And when you understand how Java does math and how COBOL does the same math, you begin to understand why it’s so difficult for many industries to move away from their legacy.
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