Joe Giddens/PA Wire via ZUMA

Well knock me over with a feather:

Four months ago, employees at many U.S. companies went home and did something incredible: They got their work done, seemingly without missing a beat. Executives were amazed at how well their workers performed remotely, even while juggling child care and the distractions of home….Some companies even vowed to give up their physical office spaces entirely.

Now, as the work-from-home experiment stretches on, some cracks are starting to emerge. Projects take longer. Training is tougher. Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how they do their jobs.

Months into a pandemic that rapidly reshaped how companies operate, an increasing number of executives now say that remote work, while necessary for safety much of this year, is not their preferred long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis passes.

No kidding. Anyone with a room temperature IQ could see this coming, but we’re so enthralled with Silicon Valley boosterism that for a while it became conventional wisdom that Zoom was our future. I guess the prospect of making workers pay for their own office space (aka their homes) was so tantalizing that it wiped out common sense for a while. Welcome back to reality, American businesses.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 23. Yesterday 1,114 people died of COVID-19 in the United States. In Germany, 8 people died.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Jay Godwin/Lbj Library/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Jonathan Alter thinks Joe Biden should choose Susan Rice as his vice president:

Yes, President Trump still has time to stage a comeback but the new state of the race suggests that Joe Biden is free to shift from a tactical to a strategic approach in choosing his running mate. Biden’s longstanding prerequisite —a “strong” vice president who is “ready to be president on Day One”—should now be more than a platitude….By that standard, Susan Rice is his best option. He already knows and trusts her (their offices were next door in the West Wing during Obama’s second term) and she possesses a cool, commanding gaffe-free public presence that can fairly be called “presidential.”

This is a very mature approach to the vice presidency. I, however, am not as mature as Jonathan Alter. I could imagine Biden choosing Rice because it would send Republicans into spasms of indignation so severe it would probably cause a few radio hosts to have heart seizures. Fox News might literally melt down. That’s because, aside from Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice was probably the single biggest Democratic punching bag among Republicans during Obama’s second term. The conservative frenzy over Rice would be spectacular.

She’s also very well qualified, and mature observers will certainly consider that more important. I’m just not feeling especially mature at the moment.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth noting that choosing Rice would also give liberals a chance to redeem themselves for their lackluster defense of Rice over the Benghazi affair. This is not a matter of explaining her actions with additional nuance, either. She did absolutely nothing wrong. Ditto for the unmasking “scandal.”

Nothing. Period.

Is it time to reopen?Kevin Drum

Donald Trump has gotten his wish: The CDC just released a note suggesting that schools should reopen next year. But check out the waffling in the section about the dangers of COVID-19:

Scientific studies suggest that COVID-19 transmission among children in schools may be low. International studies that have assessed how readily COVID-19 spreads in schools also reveal low rates of transmission when community transmission is low. Based on current data, the rate of infection among younger school children, and from students to teachers, has been low, especially if proper precautions are followed.

Even in a letter caving in to Trump’s school reopening demands, the CDC is only willing to say that it might be safe among younger children in areas where the virus is already under control. This is considerably less clear-cut than Trump might have hoped for, but you have to read carefully to see it. Put it all together and I’ll bet it applies to no more than about 5-10 percent of all schoolchildren in the country.

Everything is fine. My M-protein level was 0.4 last month and is down to 0.35 this month:

On the other hand, this is perfect timing to whine about something else. You know how you’re not supposed to break a fall with your hands? I’ve internalized that advice and never do it, so hooray for me! The laws of physics being what they are, however, you have to break your fall with something, and in my case recently it was the left side of my chest near my left lung. I was sensible about the whole thing and checked into the ER for an X-ray, which showed that nothing was broken. But damn, it hurts. It also made me sleepy. Or something has, anyway. I think I slept about 15 hours yesterday.

On the good news side of things, my mother is almost entirely recovered except for some weakness in her legs. We’re doing PT for that, but it looks like whatever the mystery disease was, it’s going away completely.

I’m not sure I would ever have chosen this photo, but Marian was in charge of curation today and she picked this purple daisy growing on the campus of UC Irvine. I suppose I must have taken it during a frisbee golf outing last year. I hope that someday I’ll be able to do that again.

Josh Barro tries to explain why the stock market has been doing so well in the middle of a global pandemic:

First, stock prices are supposed to reflect market expectations of the future profits of corporations….There has been news in recent weeks that gives us good reason to believe companies will be less profitable this year than we would have thought a few weeks ago. But there has also been news about medical research developments that provides reason to believe companies will be more profitable in future years than we might have expected a few weeks ago.

….Second, the most commonly discussed measures of stock prices, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, focus on very large companies. Large companies have more financial resources at their disposal than small ones do, and may be better positioned to weather a bad 12 months as they wait for vaccine hopes to come to fruition.

….Third, interest rates have continued to fall, and low interest rates boost the prices of many kinds of assets, including stocks.

That’s all reasonable enough, but I think my answer might be different. Instead of using a thousand words to explain it, though, here’s a single picture:

The red line is the trendline of the S&P 500 from 2015 through February of 2020. As you can see, the S&P 500 today is exactly on that trendline.

In other words, the stock market hasn’t soared recently, it’s merely made up its panic losses and gotten back on its old trend. Investors have apparently decided that 2021 will be about the same as they had always expected before COVID-19 struck. If you look at stock indexes around the world, you’ll see a pretty similar pattern everywhere.

So I wouldn’t say that investors are especially exuberent or anything. They’ve just decided that the early panic over COVID-19 probably wasn’t justified. I hope they’re right.

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

With only a week to go until benefits run out, Republicans can’t even agree among themselves on a new coronavirus relief package:

Senate Republicans killed President Trump’s payroll tax cut proposal on Thursday but failed to reach agreement with the White House on a broader coronavirus relief bill. This set off a frantic scramble with competing paths forward, as administration officials floated a piecemeal approach but encountered pushback from both parties, and the entire effort appeared to teeter chaotically on the brink of failure.

…If the bill is not released on Thursday, it would likely slip to Monday, giving lawmakers just a few days to reach some sort of agreement before enhanced unemployment benefits will expire for more than 20 million Americans.

What a worthless bunch of cretins. I mean, forget the details. Forget percentages of GDP. Forget 11-dimensional campaign strategies. We have millions of working-class Americans who are barely hanging on to their lives thanks to a pandemic they obviously have no control over. So just pass a goddamn bill. I don’t care if it’s means tested or not. I don’t care which party it “helps” more. I don’t care if it increases the national debt. People are suffering and they need help. Small businesses need help. States and cities need help. Schools need help.

So for God’s sake, help them. Just do it. If Republicans aren’t willing to help out Americans during the biggest pandemic of the past century, what the hell good are they?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 22. The US mortality rate has increased more than 60 percent in the past two weeks.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here’s the latest on the brutal muzzling of free speech in America:

A new Cato Institute/​YouGov national survey of 2,000 Americans finds that 62% of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. This is up from 2017 when 58% agreed with this statement.

That’s an increase of . . . 4 percent! Clearly George Floyd and the forces of political correctness have wreaked havoc on American culture.

On a more serious note, polls like this would be a lot more useful if they tried to dive into what people are afraid to say. If it’s something like “Black people are lazy” then I’d say the increase to 62 percent means that Americans are increasingly wary of expressing racist ideas in public, and that’s a good thing. On the other hand, if it’s something like “Class-based affirmative action is a good idea” then we might have a real problem. So which is it?