Especially because they can’t make profit on those margins. Unless you’re super high end you have got to fill the place most days to make a decent profit
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I don’t know about how it is where all of you guys live…but the delivery, drive-throughs and pick-ups of at least the franchises (KFC’s, Burger Kings, McDonald’s, Taco Bells, Popeye’s, Chipoltle’s, etc,) seem to going INSANE… The lines and those waiting on pick-up sometimes make some of these places look like Saturday Tailgating at an SEC football game!
Now its seems to be another story for like the Chile’s, Applebee’s and independent restaurant’s whose primary business pre-COVID was sit-down.
Anyone know if the former (eg- the KFC’s, Burger Kings, etc.) are financially at or near pre-COVID levels? (I know the latter are not and are really suffering).
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I don’t eat at any of the fast food chains, but every time I drive home from work, the lines wrap around the building, if not almost into the street. Its insane.
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Any lunchtime drive around my town confirms this, but I don’t find it surprising. They’re open and serving in close-to-normal drive-thru conditions, which is a HUGE competitive advantage right now.
Social distancing may be the death-knell to a lot of local joints. Bars, restaurants, gyms, all kinds of people I’m personally connected with are unsure of whether they can go on under the type of framework being proposed. If I open up my facebook I’m inevitably greeted with variations on the meme of “I’ll just start running my business at Wal-Mart so it will be okay”.
I’ve seen this meme or variations thereof posted by a gym owner, a BJJ gym owner and several bar owners. I think they’ve got a point when it comes to everything that isn’t “safe” unless you happen to do it in a massively-wealthy and powerful retailers’ premises. Let’s all put on our gi’s and go train in the ladies underwear section!
Other local concerns include the summer population. Normally my state’s population SWELLS in the summer. We go from 1.3 million people (our normal population) to (I’ve heard) upwards of 10 million people in the state all at once. Where do our visitors and economy-feeders come from?
Coronavirus hot-spots!
I agree with your assessment based on my observations. Drive through has been good business in my estimation.
My kids resumed their judo classes this week. They’re training outside in the park, on individual mats placed six-seven feet apart grouped into pairs from the same family/household.
Not great, but not terrible either. They can practice throws and techniques, the only major drawback is that they cannot switch partners for sparring.
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I’d go to class as long as I can pair up with at least one person. I don’t think that is going to fly here, but martial arts gyms are basically at the bottom of most people’s list of things they give a damn about. I don’t think many people will show up to a contact-free jiu jitsu class, let alone pay full price for months on end.
There’s whispers and rumors from unsubstantiated sources that I cannot name, of establishing and maintaining an underground network of low-risk trainees who take the situation seriously and follow extremely strict protocols, all in private locations. This would also require a great deal of trust and discretion if it were true, which it isn’t. It would be unethical to defy our governor’s orders. She has our best interests in mind, after all.
When jiu jitsu is outlawed only outlaws will know jiu jitsu!
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These trainees, had they decided on such a approach (which they obviously didn’t) would have had to watch out for a Dagestani scenario where a bunch of local wrestlers as well as Khabib’s training partners and relatives (same thing in the Caucasus) ended up in the ICU due to Covid-19. So far three of them died, not to mention the more famous case of Khabib Sr. who is currently unconscious on a ventilator.
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We’ve got two higher-level healthcare professionals in the instructor pool. They are the gatekeepers now, not our senior belts, which is why we continue to follow our governor’s orders. These are well-educated and informed people, not CNA’s pretending to be epidemiologists on facebook.
Strange times, indeed.
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Apparently Dagestan is being hit really hard. Khabib made a personal plea to Dagestani people to stay at home. Per his account hospitals are overflowing and many have died. In the video he says that twenty close relatives of his are in the ICU. Apparently casualties among wrestlers are very high as they continued training well into the outbreak.
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I’ve seen references to this, but what do they refer to?
Dagestan is a small country not talked about much; but aren’t they also involved in a Civil War that seems to overlap with and spill over into Chechnya? (They both are small. I’m not sure why Chechnya is the one that is better known. More organized? More fierce fighting? Other?).
I’m just referring to snarky personal observations. Lower-level healthcare workers are not the only ones pretending to be epidemiologists and virologists on facebook. Experts on infectious diseases can be found everywhere nowadays. Even among the unemployed and those who failed to finish high school.
Regarding the jiu jitsu, the conversations have been interesting. Nobody being included in the conversations is a dumbass, for one, and it has been interesting to see how different individuals assess both personal and collective risk in a place like Maine in a time like NOW. In essence we’ve been having an ongoing thought experiment (that we would never EVER follow through on, btw) about what the most ethical training possible would look like given our immediate options.
Oh! I’ve seen a lot of this too. I thought maybe someone had thrust themselves into the meme-o-sphere with an incident of some sort.
Yeah. One sure sign of a return to normalcy will be when CNAs go back to stealing pills and jewelry. Until then though, rest assured we’re all gonna get schooled on “some science & shit.”. 
You’re though experiment could work. It would require rigorous honesty, stark self assessment, and maybe a pre-workout hygiene regiment, but yeah. Believe me, cuz I’m a welder, and if there’s one thing I know about viruses…
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Don’t worry about the details - Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and others are one of the 22 federal states of Russia. Actual borders and who lives in which republic do not matter because the people living there (Chechens, Ingush etc.) are collectively known as the Vainakhs.
Think of it as the Russian Wild West if the Native Americans were radical Islamists, the terrain consisted of impassable mountains and the locals were probably the most fearsome warriors in the world. So Russian colonial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries proceeded slowly as each square foot of land had to paid in gallons of (ethnic) Russian blood.
Chechnya declared independence from Russia, fought two wars in the 1990s (one against drunk Yeltsin they won, the second one against sober Putin they lost). Putin killed a quarter of all Chechens and bought them off with oil money in 2000s.
Basically, the Vainakh can do whatever the fuck in their federal republics (Chechnya, Dagestan…), including radical Islamism, sharia law, child brides and camps for gay people as long as they fly the Russian flag. Putin also recruits them for his colonial wars in Ukraine and elsewhere. Other career choices for Vainakhs are wrestling/judo/MMA and organized crime.
A minority of them does not approve this deal with Putin and have joined the IS, occasionally launching domestic terror attacks. These Vainakhs also provide the elite troops for AQ and ISIS.
Sounds like a real clusterfuck, @loppar.
Thanks for the info.!
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Your post had me thinking about one more question, @loppar: WW 2.
With all of these strong ethnic groups and ties; were they folded into the “regular” Russian Army, or were they in segregated Units much like in the U.S.?
Back to New Norms:
Opening Colleges, Universities and Grade Schools…Concerts…Sporting Events…Theme Parks…Commercial Flying…
These are all proving to be much harder things to bring back to some “norm” than many thought. Two things are being knocked around that I’d like you guys thoughts on:
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You slowly, but methodically ramp up numbers allowed (Note: That would be VERY tough to do with Schools and Universities it would seem. And for Concerts; what promoter or entertainer is going to take that kind of financial risk?).
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Go for it. Things get risk-stratified; and we make our own decisions on the risk we are willing to take.
Have you guys heard any other ideas being knocked around?
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From what I understand, everyone was just thrown into the meat grinder, including women
There was definitely discrimination within units, but anyone, regardless of background, could earn respect if enough Nazis were killed.
“Asiatic” troops from Siberia were especially fierce and definitely played an important role in pushing the Whermacht from Moscow
In the brotherhood of Soviet peoples differing people based on their ethnicity was officially frowned upon. However in practice discrimination was rife, with ethnic Russians at the top, Ukrainians and Central Asians in the middle and Caucasians (see my post above) at the bottom.
Armies and corps were usually filled with recruits from specific geographical locations so that there was some prevalence of one ethnic group or the other based on that, but quick personnel turnover due to massive casualties meant that it was only fleeting.
In contrast, the Germans did form specific “ethnic” units for recruits from the Red Army.
In total, around a million Soviet citizens served in the German armed forces.
Among the frontoviki, yes. But to be officially honored you had to be from an “acceptable” peasant/worker stock and of correct ethnicity. The best Soviet submarine commander Alexander Marinesko posthumously received the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union only in 1990 because he was half Romanian and therefore considered not suitable.
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