Folks around here grumble harsh comments about the arrival of a lot of people from away, who don't usually arrive until the most beautiful part of summer, and leave just as it ends. While most of them come from our neighboring state immediately to the south, I've seen some New York license plates as well, especially around Wolfeboro.
Given that we've been advised to avoid each other for weeks now, due diligence should continue to carry us through. But someone did point out that any infected incomers will put additional strain on our meager health care resources. It's poignant that we've already sold them all of the waterfront and, in some places, let them build gaudy palaces on hillsides and ridgelines. They already monopolize the best of the warm weather. Now they're liable to suck up all of the medical supplies and sicken our front-line medical personnel before most of us get a chance to.
Even the uninfected among them will get to see what it's like to live here during the months that they have not been able to. I remember the late 1980s, when it seemed like every immigrant was a city dweller who had racked up a few quick bucks in the early 1980s surge and was going to go live in the country and have either an inn or a village store. I arrived here in 1987, when this was at its height, like an airplane that had climbed too high and too steeply, and was about to stall and plunge. And so it came to pass. Northern New England went down first in that recession. Part of the blame goes to the economy in general. The rest of the exodus happened after thousands of fantasizing flatlanders got to see just how bugger ugly the place is for months and months.
They'll be going nuts within a couple of weeks, whether they've quarantined themselves or ventured out to mingle with a local population they may believe is untouched and unconcerned. There's nothing to do here.
There are locals who do act as if they are immune, or as if we all have nothing to worry about. Hey, the fatality rate is only 1-2 percent. A very small local deli is supposedly only doing carry-out, but the space is so small that people waiting inside have to take turns inhaling and exhaling, because a full house can't all inflate their chests at once. And the work space is so small that a six foot distance between the staff is utterly impossible. They are not concerned. One of them is the mother of an infant. She still comes to work. This whole thing is overblown. New Yorkers welcome.
Other businesses have shut completely. They did so before the governor's order to close non-essential businesses. The ones that remain open do so with varying degrees of stringent procedure in place.
The response from governments at the state and national level has been abysmal. We needed to be testing wide swaths of the population more than a month ago to determine where the virus was, so it could be contained. Supposedly focusing on minimizing economic disruption has guaranteed massive economic disruption. The general disregard for the welfare of citizens has gone unchallenged for decades. Will that change? The representatives of concentrated wealth hope that a beleaguered citizenry will be so grateful once the mess is over that they will fall into line and continue voting in favor of the plutocracy. At the same time, dismantled environmental protections will make it easier to dump your waste oil down a storm drain and burn a pile of your old tires without any social stigma, so that will make it popular with rank and file voters. No more will someone try to guilt trip us about throwing our trash out the car window whenever we feel like it. Good times are coming! What's a few thousand dead? They'll mostly be people we never even met.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
COVID-19: Foraging in a dangerous world
We're still allowed to go out to get food and other necessities, but will you find them?
The nearest grocery store to my house is about seven miles away. It's on my way to work, or home from work, depending on the time of day. It's your typical modern supermarket, complete with pharmacy. On a normal day I would find almost all of what I was looking for.
In these abnormal days, the smart shopper gets there when the doors open. Even then, don't expect to find everything on your list. So then what?
There are other stores in just about every direction, mostly farther away. On social media, people share their reports. Those reports are seen at least by their friends, if not by an unlimited audience. Also, we're told to limit our exposure to other people and public contact points. Personally, I like to limit how much gasoline I use anyway. This is reinforced by the information that gas pump handles are some of the most contaminated surfaces. It was always true, but the new virus appears to be pretty hardy. Anything a lot of people touch is more likely to spread infection.
All this takes place in a buzz of information, some warning of dire risk, some dismissing the concern of millions of people as a panic over nothing.
The designated forager in a household has to decide how far to venture in search of whatever was not available at their first stop. How many door handles is it worth? How often do the workers in this emporium wash their hands and clean their work stations? How much should you worry at all?
Are Americans more self conscious than other nationalities about looking stupid? It seems like a lot of what goes around the internet these days counsels looking cool at all costs. The "be cool" posts mostly minimize those costs, but some of them are now saying, "go ahead and die, you're helping the economy." So we have two strains going: the It's Nothing strain, and the Bleeding Lungs of Courage strain. The most important factor for both of them is that you not look like you were worried when this is all over. There's even a batch of apparently scientific information going around to the effect that the virus isn't as bad as we think, and that it will wind down sooner than later.
The problem with the quest for treasures in the retail wilderness is that the threat is not from visible monsters. It's from that person next to you in the bread aisle, or a spot you missed when disinfecting your shopping cart. It's a random sneeze cloud over a sidewalk that looks deserted by the time you get there. You can't put on your armor and grab your magic sword. You can't zap it with your death ray, dive and roll, and draw a bead on the next bogey coming out of an alley as you pass. At most you might have rubber gloves and a paper mask, which you must throw away as soon as you return to your pod, there to decontaminate before entering. How important was it to go out in the first place, and into every other place that you investigated in your search?
The nearest grocery store to my house is about seven miles away. It's on my way to work, or home from work, depending on the time of day. It's your typical modern supermarket, complete with pharmacy. On a normal day I would find almost all of what I was looking for.
In these abnormal days, the smart shopper gets there when the doors open. Even then, don't expect to find everything on your list. So then what?
There are other stores in just about every direction, mostly farther away. On social media, people share their reports. Those reports are seen at least by their friends, if not by an unlimited audience. Also, we're told to limit our exposure to other people and public contact points. Personally, I like to limit how much gasoline I use anyway. This is reinforced by the information that gas pump handles are some of the most contaminated surfaces. It was always true, but the new virus appears to be pretty hardy. Anything a lot of people touch is more likely to spread infection.
All this takes place in a buzz of information, some warning of dire risk, some dismissing the concern of millions of people as a panic over nothing.
The designated forager in a household has to decide how far to venture in search of whatever was not available at their first stop. How many door handles is it worth? How often do the workers in this emporium wash their hands and clean their work stations? How much should you worry at all?
Are Americans more self conscious than other nationalities about looking stupid? It seems like a lot of what goes around the internet these days counsels looking cool at all costs. The "be cool" posts mostly minimize those costs, but some of them are now saying, "go ahead and die, you're helping the economy." So we have two strains going: the It's Nothing strain, and the Bleeding Lungs of Courage strain. The most important factor for both of them is that you not look like you were worried when this is all over. There's even a batch of apparently scientific information going around to the effect that the virus isn't as bad as we think, and that it will wind down sooner than later.
The problem with the quest for treasures in the retail wilderness is that the threat is not from visible monsters. It's from that person next to you in the bread aisle, or a spot you missed when disinfecting your shopping cart. It's a random sneeze cloud over a sidewalk that looks deserted by the time you get there. You can't put on your armor and grab your magic sword. You can't zap it with your death ray, dive and roll, and draw a bead on the next bogey coming out of an alley as you pass. At most you might have rubber gloves and a paper mask, which you must throw away as soon as you return to your pod, there to decontaminate before entering. How important was it to go out in the first place, and into every other place that you investigated in your search?
Monday, March 23, 2020
Coronavirus response fails due to ADD
As congressional Democrats maneuver against the GOP to get an effective and supportive response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the current occupant of the Oval Office appears to be losing interest in the whole concept of helping ordinary citizens to survive in the greatest possible numbers. This dovetails nicely with the news that white supremacist, anti-government groups are telling their followers that any of them who get infected with COVID-19 should go cough on Jews and police officers.
The proponents of letting the thing run rampant point to the considerable economic benefits of massive casualties, provided that we waste as little as possible on trying to treat the sick. Ration care. Ration materiel. Focus on the higher economic brackets, where the real value to society lies. Sure, we depend on the lowly worker bees, but there are plenty of them. With a good dose of fear, they'll be more compliant. With a good thinning, there won't be as many of them to whine and vote Democratic. Because the supporters of the current regime tend to come from more dispersed populations in rural areas, they do stand somewhat better odds of avoiding the plague as long as they drive away refugees from the infected areas, and take a few minor precautions. Or so it may appear to them. And if it kills grandma and granddad, that's a big savings on long term care, as long as you don't get soft and blow a big wad on a fancy funeral.
Whatever happened to the real good old days, when an elder would realize that they were a burden on the tribe and wander off into the wilderness to get eaten by wild animals? Good times, man. And there was no friggin' estate tax, either. Oh wait: there were no friggin' estates.
My neighbors indulge in bursts of gunfire at irregular intervals. It provides a comforting soundscape as we shelter in place.
If the administration withdraws all support for an extended shutdown, it will mean that any business or worker who chooses individually to stay home and keep distance will have no legal backing. Lost income will simply be lost. Meanwhile, the outside world will become rapidly more dangerous as the foolhardy and the dutiful go out and mingle, giving the virus the freest possible rein. Any public spaces will become more of a Petri dish than they are already. Gas pump handles are supposedly oozing with viruses even now. When you go out for groceries you will get lots of added value to challenge your immune system. Your weekly church service to get closer to God might actually send you to meet Him. It's okay. Earthly life is just pain and suffering anyway. Death is a mercy.
If this life is such shit, and death is a mercy, why have children? Why subject anyone who does not yet exist to the misery of existence? Sharing the joy?
The best response from the working class would be a general strike. Refuse to come out and join the dance of death being advocated by the corporate tools pushing heartless policies. Hardasses will call it some kind of tough love, and our duty, like storming ashore on a beach raked by gunfire, knowing that 25 percent of you will never make it all the way across. Do it for the economy, people! Here's your chance to be a real capitalist hero, and die for the American way of life.
Hey, the fatality rate isn't that bad. Relax! You'll probably be fine. Some people have no symptoms at all! Anyone who died was already a weakling. We're better off without them.
We're seeing a new War Between the States, only this time it's states of mind. The only way voluntary efforts could prevail in the face of official indifference would be for the vast majority to go along. So many people would have to join that it became the official position simply because there were too few people left to enforce the murder-suicide of business as usual. This seems highly unlikely. Our next best hope will be that a support bill passes that actually provides support to the job-doers, without whom the "job creators" have nothing to crow about.
If investors get bailed out every time the economy crashes, what is all that bullshit about the risks they take? The people who are losing are the ones with small holdings in their little retirement accounts, that they were told would be so much more desirable than stupid old Social Security. Within my own lifetime I have seen those crash at least three times, while the mega fortunes just twitched a bit and kept lumbering forward.
It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. Insist that it not be this way. Rational plans are circulating, but they still need to be adopted and put into play. It will require big moves, national-size moves as detailed in a piece from Forbes contributor Laurence Kotlikoff on March 21.
There is almost no support for a human-based response from the Senate majority or the White House. Those who can are preparing to save themselves. It's entirely consistent with the philosophy of social disintegration that they call "individual responsibility and liberty." Translated, that means, "You're on your own, chum."
The proponents of letting the thing run rampant point to the considerable economic benefits of massive casualties, provided that we waste as little as possible on trying to treat the sick. Ration care. Ration materiel. Focus on the higher economic brackets, where the real value to society lies. Sure, we depend on the lowly worker bees, but there are plenty of them. With a good dose of fear, they'll be more compliant. With a good thinning, there won't be as many of them to whine and vote Democratic. Because the supporters of the current regime tend to come from more dispersed populations in rural areas, they do stand somewhat better odds of avoiding the plague as long as they drive away refugees from the infected areas, and take a few minor precautions. Or so it may appear to them. And if it kills grandma and granddad, that's a big savings on long term care, as long as you don't get soft and blow a big wad on a fancy funeral.
Whatever happened to the real good old days, when an elder would realize that they were a burden on the tribe and wander off into the wilderness to get eaten by wild animals? Good times, man. And there was no friggin' estate tax, either. Oh wait: there were no friggin' estates.
My neighbors indulge in bursts of gunfire at irregular intervals. It provides a comforting soundscape as we shelter in place.
If the administration withdraws all support for an extended shutdown, it will mean that any business or worker who chooses individually to stay home and keep distance will have no legal backing. Lost income will simply be lost. Meanwhile, the outside world will become rapidly more dangerous as the foolhardy and the dutiful go out and mingle, giving the virus the freest possible rein. Any public spaces will become more of a Petri dish than they are already. Gas pump handles are supposedly oozing with viruses even now. When you go out for groceries you will get lots of added value to challenge your immune system. Your weekly church service to get closer to God might actually send you to meet Him. It's okay. Earthly life is just pain and suffering anyway. Death is a mercy.
If this life is such shit, and death is a mercy, why have children? Why subject anyone who does not yet exist to the misery of existence? Sharing the joy?
The best response from the working class would be a general strike. Refuse to come out and join the dance of death being advocated by the corporate tools pushing heartless policies. Hardasses will call it some kind of tough love, and our duty, like storming ashore on a beach raked by gunfire, knowing that 25 percent of you will never make it all the way across. Do it for the economy, people! Here's your chance to be a real capitalist hero, and die for the American way of life.
Hey, the fatality rate isn't that bad. Relax! You'll probably be fine. Some people have no symptoms at all! Anyone who died was already a weakling. We're better off without them.
We're seeing a new War Between the States, only this time it's states of mind. The only way voluntary efforts could prevail in the face of official indifference would be for the vast majority to go along. So many people would have to join that it became the official position simply because there were too few people left to enforce the murder-suicide of business as usual. This seems highly unlikely. Our next best hope will be that a support bill passes that actually provides support to the job-doers, without whom the "job creators" have nothing to crow about.
If investors get bailed out every time the economy crashes, what is all that bullshit about the risks they take? The people who are losing are the ones with small holdings in their little retirement accounts, that they were told would be so much more desirable than stupid old Social Security. Within my own lifetime I have seen those crash at least three times, while the mega fortunes just twitched a bit and kept lumbering forward.
It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. Insist that it not be this way. Rational plans are circulating, but they still need to be adopted and put into play. It will require big moves, national-size moves as detailed in a piece from Forbes contributor Laurence Kotlikoff on March 21.
There is almost no support for a human-based response from the Senate majority or the White House. Those who can are preparing to save themselves. It's entirely consistent with the philosophy of social disintegration that they call "individual responsibility and liberty." Translated, that means, "You're on your own, chum."
Monday, March 09, 2020
There is no Davos for workers
It's a lot easier to organize a small number of rich people than a large population of workers. The rich have the advantage of not having to work. They may put in long hours, but those hours are devoted to consolidating and exerting their power. The actual workers have to put in their hours at toil they mostly did not choose. Then they have to be their own servants to maintain whatever sort of home they have.
There is no Davos for workers. Organized labor needs preparations as if for nuclear war, or a famine, or a catastrophic storm: shelter and sustenance for all, ready to deploy on short notice when a collective action cuts off everyone's income.
We don't have massive strikes and demonstrations in this country because our population is so dispersed. People would have to get to the nation's capital to swarm it. We've had a few, but they require extreme provocation. Movements are hard to sustain. Swarming in your own area is only as effective as the media coverage of it. And a mess in any major city is only a mild curiosity to anyone 15 miles away. Simultaneous actions in many cities might draw notice, but would further alienate the rural populations that control the US Senate. And before too long you have to get back to gainful employment: that thing we call work.
From the standpoint of the wealthy, our greatest age was the Gilded Age, when we emerged as a global power. Only when a member of the privileged class finally came down with an advanced case of noblesse oblige did we manage to get FDR's New Deal, and its struggling descendants into the 1960s. The 1970s were the neutral moment in the swing of the pendulum, as its return began almost imperceptibly. It has been sweeping back as a wrecking ball since 1980.
Social movements develop their own internal logic. The movement back toward centralized authority controlled by the wealthy will not stop until that status is achieved. And the pendulum may stop right there as the petty kings of corporatocracy metaphorically stop the rotation of the Earth. They will have vastly more advanced weapon and surveillance technology than their ancestors had, with which to quell uprisings. Good, obedient citizens will applaud the mass murder of dissenters. Because the internal logic for this has been building for decades, we can't vote it away. Its supporters will vote their beliefs, their feelings, their desires for a strong hand. Sure, they want a small government, but that government will still have the job of crushing dissidents. Among the free and armed citizens, the plutocrats will smile indulgently as their unofficial enforcers do the wet work. Freedom is for those who conform.
This could be stopped by peaceful means if enough swing voters would realize -- and care -- where things are headed, but they don't.
The occupant of the Oval Office from January, 2017 to January, 2021 was the greatest thing to happen to the right wing since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he is the logical heir. Along the way have been many contributors to the rise of the right. Listeners to right-wing talk radio can feel like badasses without having to do anything. The minority who do want to do things can join militias and maybe some day get to shoot some people or blow something up. But the movement is mostly supported by chickenshits who want to make lots of money, pay little in taxes, and take no real risks.
You want common ground to build a coalition? That's it right there. Those same desires have fueled corporate Democrats now labeled as neoliberal. Make lots of money. Don't get shot at.
I'm with you when it comes to not getting shot at. But we diverge over the money. The pursuit of wealth automatically destroys the environment and the well-being of the ecosystem. It tramples on the rights of indigenous peoples to live in their environmentally balanced ways. You may destroy slowly, thoughtfully, and with a measure of regret, but you will destroy. And competition -- a cornerstone of the capitalist philosophy -- guarantees that the destruction will be neither slow nor regretful. Too many people will be shoving and grabbing to get their pile.
I'll still dangle the hope that a slim majority will vote together to put the brakes on what looks like a killer avalanche. Even then, that alliance will have to hold its ground and defend its perimeter long enough for the benefits to become obvious to a more reliable majority. And every generation will have to have the same arguments over and over.
There is no Davos for workers. Organized labor needs preparations as if for nuclear war, or a famine, or a catastrophic storm: shelter and sustenance for all, ready to deploy on short notice when a collective action cuts off everyone's income.
We don't have massive strikes and demonstrations in this country because our population is so dispersed. People would have to get to the nation's capital to swarm it. We've had a few, but they require extreme provocation. Movements are hard to sustain. Swarming in your own area is only as effective as the media coverage of it. And a mess in any major city is only a mild curiosity to anyone 15 miles away. Simultaneous actions in many cities might draw notice, but would further alienate the rural populations that control the US Senate. And before too long you have to get back to gainful employment: that thing we call work.
From the standpoint of the wealthy, our greatest age was the Gilded Age, when we emerged as a global power. Only when a member of the privileged class finally came down with an advanced case of noblesse oblige did we manage to get FDR's New Deal, and its struggling descendants into the 1960s. The 1970s were the neutral moment in the swing of the pendulum, as its return began almost imperceptibly. It has been sweeping back as a wrecking ball since 1980.
Social movements develop their own internal logic. The movement back toward centralized authority controlled by the wealthy will not stop until that status is achieved. And the pendulum may stop right there as the petty kings of corporatocracy metaphorically stop the rotation of the Earth. They will have vastly more advanced weapon and surveillance technology than their ancestors had, with which to quell uprisings. Good, obedient citizens will applaud the mass murder of dissenters. Because the internal logic for this has been building for decades, we can't vote it away. Its supporters will vote their beliefs, their feelings, their desires for a strong hand. Sure, they want a small government, but that government will still have the job of crushing dissidents. Among the free and armed citizens, the plutocrats will smile indulgently as their unofficial enforcers do the wet work. Freedom is for those who conform.
This could be stopped by peaceful means if enough swing voters would realize -- and care -- where things are headed, but they don't.
The occupant of the Oval Office from January, 2017 to January, 2021 was the greatest thing to happen to the right wing since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he is the logical heir. Along the way have been many contributors to the rise of the right. Listeners to right-wing talk radio can feel like badasses without having to do anything. The minority who do want to do things can join militias and maybe some day get to shoot some people or blow something up. But the movement is mostly supported by chickenshits who want to make lots of money, pay little in taxes, and take no real risks.
You want common ground to build a coalition? That's it right there. Those same desires have fueled corporate Democrats now labeled as neoliberal. Make lots of money. Don't get shot at.
I'm with you when it comes to not getting shot at. But we diverge over the money. The pursuit of wealth automatically destroys the environment and the well-being of the ecosystem. It tramples on the rights of indigenous peoples to live in their environmentally balanced ways. You may destroy slowly, thoughtfully, and with a measure of regret, but you will destroy. And competition -- a cornerstone of the capitalist philosophy -- guarantees that the destruction will be neither slow nor regretful. Too many people will be shoving and grabbing to get their pile.
I'll still dangle the hope that a slim majority will vote together to put the brakes on what looks like a killer avalanche. Even then, that alliance will have to hold its ground and defend its perimeter long enough for the benefits to become obvious to a more reliable majority. And every generation will have to have the same arguments over and over.
Thursday, March 05, 2020
COVID-19 could be anywhere
With coronavirus in the news, everyone is figuring out how to react. Habitual preppers hardly have to change a thing, but the rest of us have to decide how much we can afford to do, and what we can't afford not to.
I live in a rural area with a low and fairly dispersed population in the winter. How much do I need to worry? I don't discount it. I really wonder.
I went to the grocery store last Tuesday, thinking to stock up on a few items with long shelf life, like brown rice and canned beans. I'd read that hand sanitizer is a good idea, so I was going to get some larger containers of it to supplement the little ones that mostly lie around drying up in my car or in my traveling shaving kit that gets used maybe twice a year.
The rice was gone. The beans weren't completely gone, but the shelves had some gaps. Forget hand sanitizer. I bought a bottle of alcohol to keep in the car to clean the gas pump handle, and rinse all the oil out of my skin after touching it.
I'm a lousy prepper, because I can imagine too much and have the budget for too little. Fatalism kicks in. I fall back to my old standby, social isolation. It's not as stringent as quarantine. I just indulge my natural introversion and avoid people. It's virtually indistinguishable from the way I live my normal life. The major difference would be some degree of food stockpiling, but I try to eat mostly fresh food. I need to figure out what will provide decent nutrition for an extended period of shortage should a buying panic deplete shelves, or an actual epidemic cut supply lines for real.
I saw one person wearing a mask. I don't know if she was feeling sick and containing her own germs, or hadn't gotten the memo that a mask won't protect you from incoming pathogens. It wasn't even the recommended N95 model. I gave her no wider or narrower passing clearance than I give anyone.
In the produce department, some private thought made me laugh in a way that sounded like a cough. A store employee shelving vegetables darted a look at me. I tried to continue the laugh longer than was really called for, to prove that I hadn't just puffed out a disease cloud, but that just made me look like a crazy person. I moved away from her only slightly faster than she moved away from me.
Only a couple of cases have been reported so far in New Hampshire. It's been such a weak winter that we haven't seen large numbers of tourists. Here in central New Hampshire, summer is the busiest time of year. Second home residents and long-term vacationers come for the liquid water. Winter brings its own category of tourism, but the local population is at its lowest. Winter visitors come in waves: weekends and the notorious Massachusetts Vacation Week in February. The volume depends on whether the snow and ice are good enough to attract them. Even then, the biggest numbers tend further north and closer to the major downhill ski areas.
Local people travel. New Hampshire's winter school vacation usually comes the week after the Massachusetts break in most school districts. In the tourist business we notice that Massachusetts people come up here, but New Hampshire people go someplace warm. People are going to be in airplanes. They're going to visit places that may have reported a higher incidence of infection. More and more information emerges every day. And residents travel for other reasons, on their own schedules. Have they been exposed? Meanwhile, not much around here looks any different except for the few shortages noted above. How rapidly might that change?
At our bike and ski shop, we're all pretty germ-phobic already. Even when a new weird plague isn't stalking the land, there's influenza, the common cold, and norovirus. Our staff is tiny. Any absence due to sickness seriously hampers our ability to operate at all. We do our utmost to stay healthy. But up to this point the perils we faced were known evils with established courses of treatment. It is the unknown that makes coronavirus more fearful. You alternate between reassurance when you hear that the fatality rate is relatively low, and stabs of anxiety when you imagine being one of the ones who ends up gasping for breath while a helpless medical staff just watches you die. We all have to die of something, but most of us are in no hurry to meet that obligation.
Yesterday, a customer came in to discuss a future bike purchase. This guy is a retired physician, and he spent the whole time coughing all over the shop owner. One of New Hampshire's COVID-19 cases works for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and the idiot ignored the order to isolate himself, choosing to go expose a bunch of other people and force them into quarantine. What do you do about oblivious, selfish people who blunder around smearing whatever they've got all over every surface, as carefree as a snot-dripping toddler?
As much as a densely populated area provides much greater risk of exposure just because more people are crammed more closely together, such areas also automatically tend to come with more densely located services. A widespread outbreak in an area of dispersed population such as the one where I live would present much greater challenges for treatment as well as self-care if you had to endure either protective isolation or ride out the course of actual disease.
Beyond just money, due diligence takes time. Routines fall prey to the need for more elaborate procedures. Most people will weigh the risks, do little or nothing, and hope. It's easy to tell everyone to wash their hands constantly. You never realize how scarce public facilities are, or in what gross shape, until you feel that you need them dozens of times a day. As for hand sanitizer, it's already in short supply, as noted.
How worried do you need to be, to avoid an illness that could be trivial or fatal, that's contagious before symptoms appear, for which there is no vaccine and no treatment other than amelioration of symptoms as your body fights it with only whatever your immune system can provide? And how aggressively are you going to have to compete against people who were more worried, sooner?
I live in a rural area with a low and fairly dispersed population in the winter. How much do I need to worry? I don't discount it. I really wonder.
I went to the grocery store last Tuesday, thinking to stock up on a few items with long shelf life, like brown rice and canned beans. I'd read that hand sanitizer is a good idea, so I was going to get some larger containers of it to supplement the little ones that mostly lie around drying up in my car or in my traveling shaving kit that gets used maybe twice a year.
The rice was gone. The beans weren't completely gone, but the shelves had some gaps. Forget hand sanitizer. I bought a bottle of alcohol to keep in the car to clean the gas pump handle, and rinse all the oil out of my skin after touching it.
I'm a lousy prepper, because I can imagine too much and have the budget for too little. Fatalism kicks in. I fall back to my old standby, social isolation. It's not as stringent as quarantine. I just indulge my natural introversion and avoid people. It's virtually indistinguishable from the way I live my normal life. The major difference would be some degree of food stockpiling, but I try to eat mostly fresh food. I need to figure out what will provide decent nutrition for an extended period of shortage should a buying panic deplete shelves, or an actual epidemic cut supply lines for real.
I saw one person wearing a mask. I don't know if she was feeling sick and containing her own germs, or hadn't gotten the memo that a mask won't protect you from incoming pathogens. It wasn't even the recommended N95 model. I gave her no wider or narrower passing clearance than I give anyone.
In the produce department, some private thought made me laugh in a way that sounded like a cough. A store employee shelving vegetables darted a look at me. I tried to continue the laugh longer than was really called for, to prove that I hadn't just puffed out a disease cloud, but that just made me look like a crazy person. I moved away from her only slightly faster than she moved away from me.
Only a couple of cases have been reported so far in New Hampshire. It's been such a weak winter that we haven't seen large numbers of tourists. Here in central New Hampshire, summer is the busiest time of year. Second home residents and long-term vacationers come for the liquid water. Winter brings its own category of tourism, but the local population is at its lowest. Winter visitors come in waves: weekends and the notorious Massachusetts Vacation Week in February. The volume depends on whether the snow and ice are good enough to attract them. Even then, the biggest numbers tend further north and closer to the major downhill ski areas.
Local people travel. New Hampshire's winter school vacation usually comes the week after the Massachusetts break in most school districts. In the tourist business we notice that Massachusetts people come up here, but New Hampshire people go someplace warm. People are going to be in airplanes. They're going to visit places that may have reported a higher incidence of infection. More and more information emerges every day. And residents travel for other reasons, on their own schedules. Have they been exposed? Meanwhile, not much around here looks any different except for the few shortages noted above. How rapidly might that change?
At our bike and ski shop, we're all pretty germ-phobic already. Even when a new weird plague isn't stalking the land, there's influenza, the common cold, and norovirus. Our staff is tiny. Any absence due to sickness seriously hampers our ability to operate at all. We do our utmost to stay healthy. But up to this point the perils we faced were known evils with established courses of treatment. It is the unknown that makes coronavirus more fearful. You alternate between reassurance when you hear that the fatality rate is relatively low, and stabs of anxiety when you imagine being one of the ones who ends up gasping for breath while a helpless medical staff just watches you die. We all have to die of something, but most of us are in no hurry to meet that obligation.
Yesterday, a customer came in to discuss a future bike purchase. This guy is a retired physician, and he spent the whole time coughing all over the shop owner. One of New Hampshire's COVID-19 cases works for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and the idiot ignored the order to isolate himself, choosing to go expose a bunch of other people and force them into quarantine. What do you do about oblivious, selfish people who blunder around smearing whatever they've got all over every surface, as carefree as a snot-dripping toddler?
As much as a densely populated area provides much greater risk of exposure just because more people are crammed more closely together, such areas also automatically tend to come with more densely located services. A widespread outbreak in an area of dispersed population such as the one where I live would present much greater challenges for treatment as well as self-care if you had to endure either protective isolation or ride out the course of actual disease.
Beyond just money, due diligence takes time. Routines fall prey to the need for more elaborate procedures. Most people will weigh the risks, do little or nothing, and hope. It's easy to tell everyone to wash their hands constantly. You never realize how scarce public facilities are, or in what gross shape, until you feel that you need them dozens of times a day. As for hand sanitizer, it's already in short supply, as noted.
How worried do you need to be, to avoid an illness that could be trivial or fatal, that's contagious before symptoms appear, for which there is no vaccine and no treatment other than amelioration of symptoms as your body fights it with only whatever your immune system can provide? And how aggressively are you going to have to compete against people who were more worried, sooner?
Sunday, March 01, 2020
Everything You Always Wanted from Your Government, but were Afraid to Ask
Joe Biden's victory in South Carolina shows that the forces of reason are reasserting themselves in the topsy-turvy Democratic Party. The moonbats of progressivism are being brought to heel by the adults in the room.
Realpolitik rules. It's what makes government work, and what makes it a constant disappointment. As I observed in the previous post, what makes a politician on the nominal left electable is the assurance that he or she will continue the inexorable pull to the right.
In the quest for electability, candidates like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigeig all in varying degrees make sure that the broader electorate knows that they will not support things like an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income. They don't use the word "free" to refer to education. Nothing is socialistic.
Socialism is a scare word with good reason. It has much less power now than it did when our global nemesis was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the USSR did plenty to tarnish the brand, which -- in its purest form -- is a recipe for just another kind of heavy-handed government. The negative stereotype has wide, deep roots and a dense, hard grain that you won't cut just by insisting that this socialism is democratic, and doesn't really mean what one definition of the word has always meant: government ownership of the means of production. It's been politically risky from the outset to try to turn socialism into a proud badge of American identity. It was one of those things that you would try to ignore, while focusing on the actual good things offered by the movement. But too many people can't overcome their ingrained visceral repulsion at the term. And then there are the wealthy, who stand to lose, bigly, with the institution of any form of widespread democratization in the workplace and the economy at large.
Small business owners may be even more afraid of humanitarian movements, because small businesses are much more vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces. Technological developments or social trends may kill demand for your product or service with no quick route to regain your revenue stream. Rising wages not coupled with other social improvements like universal health care and affordable access to education and retraining may make employees too expensive, even though your business volume calls for more personnel. But because universal health care has been widely reviled for decades, you know as a business person that it's too risky even to try. Because everything in this country since 1980 has been based on the pursuit of profit and the glorification of wealth, it's un-American to suggest that education should be subsidized and expanded.
Tax policy could be designed to extract much more from the big earners, especially the corporate behemoths that profit inversely to their social responsibility, but that would require an overhaul of investment culture at its most basic level. Good luck with that.
This is why we can't have nice things: because the people with lots of nice things don't want to give any of them up, and the people who have managed to scrape together a few nice things know from sad experience that they are the ones who will get squeezed if any pie-in-the-sky programs get adopted. The wealthy who control the government will make sure that they get their preferential tax policy no matter what crazy bills manage to crawl all the way through an accidentally and temporarily progressive majority in Congress and get signed into law by the odd and occasional Democratic chief executive.
Even Democratic and unaffiliated voters who might want those nice social policies are afraid to ask for them because they know they will get hammered by the opposition from the GOP, corporate Democrats, and right-leaning unaffiliated voters.
The unifying factor among the majority of voters is that they want to make plenty of money, pay as little as possible in taxes, and take no real risks. Even the lefties who say they don't mind if their taxes are high only accept the taxation as long as the money goes to the kinds of social programs they believe are ultimately good.
Policy fails because its proponents can't convince enough people that it is ultimately good. Because any policy usually takes a long time to show results, the waiting period often spans an election cycle, giving disappointed voters a chance to flip the party dominance in retribution. This generally derails beneficial social policies more than destructive ones, because nurturing and growth are slow processes that require patience. Destruction often shows quick profits, even if they're only a benefit to the rich getting richer. Economic pundits can still point to positive numbers as evidence that this is the way we should have been headed all along. That goes back to the fundamental toxicity underlying investment for profit. And the conservatives gravitate more readily to a warlike model of political interaction, which bolsters gerrymandering and dark money contributions to advance the glorious cause of unlimited wealth on a finite Earth.
Realpolitik rules. It's what makes government work, and what makes it a constant disappointment. As I observed in the previous post, what makes a politician on the nominal left electable is the assurance that he or she will continue the inexorable pull to the right.
In the quest for electability, candidates like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigeig all in varying degrees make sure that the broader electorate knows that they will not support things like an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income. They don't use the word "free" to refer to education. Nothing is socialistic.
Socialism is a scare word with good reason. It has much less power now than it did when our global nemesis was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the USSR did plenty to tarnish the brand, which -- in its purest form -- is a recipe for just another kind of heavy-handed government. The negative stereotype has wide, deep roots and a dense, hard grain that you won't cut just by insisting that this socialism is democratic, and doesn't really mean what one definition of the word has always meant: government ownership of the means of production. It's been politically risky from the outset to try to turn socialism into a proud badge of American identity. It was one of those things that you would try to ignore, while focusing on the actual good things offered by the movement. But too many people can't overcome their ingrained visceral repulsion at the term. And then there are the wealthy, who stand to lose, bigly, with the institution of any form of widespread democratization in the workplace and the economy at large.
Small business owners may be even more afraid of humanitarian movements, because small businesses are much more vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces. Technological developments or social trends may kill demand for your product or service with no quick route to regain your revenue stream. Rising wages not coupled with other social improvements like universal health care and affordable access to education and retraining may make employees too expensive, even though your business volume calls for more personnel. But because universal health care has been widely reviled for decades, you know as a business person that it's too risky even to try. Because everything in this country since 1980 has been based on the pursuit of profit and the glorification of wealth, it's un-American to suggest that education should be subsidized and expanded.
Tax policy could be designed to extract much more from the big earners, especially the corporate behemoths that profit inversely to their social responsibility, but that would require an overhaul of investment culture at its most basic level. Good luck with that.
This is why we can't have nice things: because the people with lots of nice things don't want to give any of them up, and the people who have managed to scrape together a few nice things know from sad experience that they are the ones who will get squeezed if any pie-in-the-sky programs get adopted. The wealthy who control the government will make sure that they get their preferential tax policy no matter what crazy bills manage to crawl all the way through an accidentally and temporarily progressive majority in Congress and get signed into law by the odd and occasional Democratic chief executive.
Even Democratic and unaffiliated voters who might want those nice social policies are afraid to ask for them because they know they will get hammered by the opposition from the GOP, corporate Democrats, and right-leaning unaffiliated voters.
The unifying factor among the majority of voters is that they want to make plenty of money, pay as little as possible in taxes, and take no real risks. Even the lefties who say they don't mind if their taxes are high only accept the taxation as long as the money goes to the kinds of social programs they believe are ultimately good.
Policy fails because its proponents can't convince enough people that it is ultimately good. Because any policy usually takes a long time to show results, the waiting period often spans an election cycle, giving disappointed voters a chance to flip the party dominance in retribution. This generally derails beneficial social policies more than destructive ones, because nurturing and growth are slow processes that require patience. Destruction often shows quick profits, even if they're only a benefit to the rich getting richer. Economic pundits can still point to positive numbers as evidence that this is the way we should have been headed all along. That goes back to the fundamental toxicity underlying investment for profit. And the conservatives gravitate more readily to a warlike model of political interaction, which bolsters gerrymandering and dark money contributions to advance the glorious cause of unlimited wealth on a finite Earth.
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