Here's the thing. A lot of important Guelph issues are really complex. And to understand them we need more than "sound bites" and knee-jerk ideology. The Guelph Back-Grounder is a place where people can read the background information that explains why things are the way they are, and, the complex issues that people have to negotiate if they want to make Guelph a better city. No anger, just the facts.
I recently heard to an epidemiologist talking about the recent decision by the Ontario government to go back into some form of lock-down because of spiking COVID-19 variant infections. He mentioned that he thought the reason why Ford waited too long is simply because so many people have a hard time understanding geometric progressions. In effect, the only way to deal with things like this epidemic is by taking actions that would seem to a lot of people to be "over-reacting".
As I see it, there are two very important things working here. First of all, people need to understand that there are two very, very different ways that a natural process can advance: arithmetic progression, and, geometric progression. In a nutshell, an arithmetic progression is one where a quantity is built by adding a fixed amount over and over again: [{(A+X)+X}+X]+X and so on. A practical example of this would be someone who is using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground. The pile of dirt grows only one shovel-full at a time.
In contrast, a geometric progression is one where the amount that is added in each iteration changes based on the amount of the previous one. Let's use the example of cats having kittens. If one mother cat has a litter of six kittens and three of them are females, and each of them has three female kittens the next year, and those kittens grow up and have three females the year after, and this continues forever, we'd be tripling the population of female cats every year: (A+Ax3)+(4Ax3)+(12Ax3)+(36Ax3)+(108Ax3) and so on. It should be obvious that if all cats are allowed to reproduce and there isn't a massive "cull" of kittens (like there is in the wild), we could quickly end up with far, far, far too many cats. This is why all humane societies have "spay your cat" programs.
Sure, they're cute. But there can be too much of a good thing---.
Here's a pretty good video that explains geometric progression.
Well, what's the problem then? What this article is about is the fact that many people---like the king who played chess with Krishna---simply don't understand the implications of geometric progressions.
I sometimes meet people who don't understand how interest compounds on debt---which is another example of the phenomenon. Years ago I met someone who'd gotten an interest-free home mortgage from a wealthy uncle and he didn't seem to understand what a tremendous thing this was. This was back about 25 years ago, and at that time the five year fixed mortgage rate was something like 10%. If that sounds freakishly high, how about we do a very simple calculation at less than that, 7%, over 30 years.
The results were a monthly payment of $2,000 and total interest paid out over 30 years came to $260,000. At zero % interest, that changes to $1200/month and, of course, zero total interest.
(This is a classic example of how "inter-generational wealth" has a tremendous impact on the lives of middle and upper class people.)
As I hope people now realize, the result of exponential growth can be a lot more than people intuitively realize---like the interest on their mortgage being almost as much as what they paid for their house, or, a geometric progression of rice grains on a chess board can eat up the entire world's food supply.
There's one more thing that counters people's intuitive thinking: where the biggest hit kicks in. Consider the chessboard and rice example. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't realize that three quarters of the entire amount of rice that gets used up happens on the last two squares. That's because the second last square is double what came before, and the last square is double that. This means that the time for the Raja to kick over the board and have the chess master sent to the dungeon is when the progression is still just a few grains of rice on a square. By waiting until what is happening becomes obvious to everyone, it's just about too late to avoid bankrupting the kingdom.
It's exactly the same thing with the pandemic. If we wait until it is immediately obvious that the virus is getting out of control, it will totally engulf the province. That means that in order to avoid a catastrophe, the province needs to look like it is totally "over-reacting". That's just intrinsic to the nature of geometric progression.
And that's the problem with Doug Ford---as suggested by the unnamed scientist I mentioned in the beginning. He is obviously "going with his gut", and it is telling him that if he shuts down the province while there is still room in ICUs and only a few thousand people getting the bug every day, he's wildly over-reacting . But the truth is, by waiting so long, he is really wildly "under-reacting"---and this will create a lot of unnecessary misery.
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I was surprised to see that I've been putting out this news blog since 2016. Time seems to go by faster as I age---which is far from a novel observation. But it is a long time to be putting out stories on a regular basis. If you think these posts are useful---and you can afford it---why not subscribe? You get to decide how much you pay every month, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.
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It's always hard to ascribe motivations to public figures simply because you never really know what is going on between their ears. That's why many groups will immediately censor an individual for suggesting a reason why a person does a certain thing. But I'm my own person and sometimes why people do what they do is key to the story---and I think that this is one of those instances.
Watching the entire Ford saga from Toronto city Council to becoming the Premier I couldn't help but think that this is a classic example of someone who thinks he knows better than all those damn "pointy-headed experts". But to give the man his due, he is a successful politician who got elected Premier. That means he has his "finger on the pulse" of a lot of citizens in this province. More's the pity.
On one level I "get" what is going on here. I sometimes do calculations based on my research that produce results that I feel "in my gut" can't possibly be true. One example is a story I wrote about the real cost of "free" parking. I sweated over various calculations---including the one that suggests that that in Guelph the cost of below-ground parking adds something like $66,000 to the cost of the average condominium. I still feel a little weird using that number, but whenever I look at the calculations I can't find any mistakes.
But I think the difference between myself and someone like the Premier (I'm speculating here) is that I have learned to "suck it up" and live with the anxiety that I feel when my "gut instinct" conflicts with the information I see before me. I don't think the Premier worries about stuff like this. Instead I can only assume he is used to following his instincts and just bullies anyone who disagrees with him until they give up trying to change his mind. Unfortunately, he's the Premier of the province and we all have to live with the results of way his brain works.
I want to explore this issue in a little more detail, but this post is already long enough. Next week I hope to expand on the issue of why some people see the world so differently than others.
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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!
I've been watching the responses of a variety of public officials plus the public during this pandemic. The rich and varied tapestry of humanity has been, IMHO, somewhat depressing to watch. It appears that quite a few of our provincial premiers have been more concerned about keeping the economy humming than how to keep more people alive. I've also noticed a lot of folks treat the regulations designed to keep spread under control as silly impositions that should be ignored whenever there is a good chance to get away with it. And others seem to be convinced that this is yet another conspiracy by "dark forces" bent on oppression.
I'm thinking about things like Jason Kenney's unwillingness to condemn---let alone encourage the police to charge---anti-mask protests that simply ignore the province's medical order to limit outside gatherings to 10 or less individuals.
Jason Kenney c/o Wikimedia
“We would ask people not to engage in large-scale protests, and if they
do so, please wear masks,” said Kenney, adding enforcement of any
measures under the order Hinshaw signed is up to police, not the
government."
"I can't get angry at any business person right now," Premier Ford says about Adamson BBQ
I'm also thinking about the abysmal way some members of the clergy have responded to the epidemic. The Mennonite community in Wellington and Waterloo counties seems to have totally "fumbled the ball" when it comes to the pandemic. If their leaders are anything like the ones from Steinbach Manitoba and Aylmer Ontario, I can certainly understand why they had an outbreak. Here's a CBC news clip that talks about the protest in Steinbach.
If you want to know who was the inspiration for this mess, all you need to do is watch the following video of Rev. Tobias Tiessen (the organizer) being fined in Manitoba and which another "plague rat" pastor named Henry Hildebrandt supposedly posted on his FaceBook page. (I got the video from the Steinbachonline.com news blog. I couldn't find the video on either Tiessen or Hildebrandt's pages, so I assume it's been removed.) The video quality is abysmal, but the audio is pretty clear---and I believe worth listening to simply because of the arrogance that drips from this "man of God".
Generally this is the point where I make a shameless appeal for readers to send me money. If you want to, please do. But this time I'm going to ask that you send Adam Donaldson some money too. (I do, $10/month.) Here's the link.
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All of the above is just to "set the stage". What I want to make a fuss about in this op-ed is that I think that far, far too many people seem to be incapable of understanding that the current situation isn't "business as usual" and shouldn't be approached the same way that they approach everything else in their lives.
Jason Kenney is someone who's built his brand in Alberta by playing up to the conspiracy theorists who blab on about how 'evil foreign foundations' are funding an anti-tarsands conspiracy. Could it be that he views the plague rats as part of his "core constituency"?
Similarly, Doug Ford is someone who build his brand around what he sees as straight-talking, small business types---presumably like the jerk behind the "Barbecue Revolution".
And, having grown up in a community that had far, far too many churches---all of the evangelical variety---I know from experience that most of their "brand" is build around peddling various conspiracies about how dreadful the "mainstream" world is and how it is riddled with secret conspiracies, satanic pedophiles, how Hell is packed with Jesuits, Rabbis, Mullahs, how environmentalists are all evil pagans, feminists are predatory lesbians, etc, etc. (I had a few years of Sunday school myself before I gagged. I also had friends who got polio because of their anti-vaxxer church.)
Generally most people tolerate this idiocy as a type of "background noise". But during some exceptional times---like now---these people become threats to the public good and need to be constrained. That's because some things simply aren't a question of "individual freedom" but rather "collective rights". And the people of Canada have a collective right to limit the spread of a potentially lethal virus. And the only way to protect that right is by limiting the right of plague rats to thumb their noses at reasonable medical guidelines.
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The problem with the leaders I've identified above is that they seem incapable of understanding that this is a point in time where the old ways of doing things are no longer appropriate and it's time to act totally different.That's not hard to understand, however, because these particular politicians have built their lives around an ideology (libertarianism), and, the pastors around a superstition (fundamentalist Christianity). You can stumble through life on this basis and generally not create too much chaos for the people around you, but when times require quick adaptation, there's really no substitute for logic and evidence. Let's just hope that not too many people end up suffering from our leader's inability to adapt.
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Moreover I say unto you, we must deal with the Climate Emergency!
Over the last few months I've been paying attention to the local "Yellow Vests" Face Book page. I see it as a window into a world that I know absolutely nothing about.
In case you don't know, the yellow vests originated in France where they were opposed to unpopular fuel taxes plus the removal of a wealth tax that the Socialists had imposed on the very wealthy. In Canada, among other things, they seem to be mostly concerned about a grab bag of issues such as immigration, any attempt to limit industry to deal with climate change, and, more recently, attempts by the government to mandate public health measures such as wearing masks in public.
I haven't seen any scientific research that would describe exactly who these people are and what makes them tick. Moreover, I don't know how a social scientist could study them because researchers are pretty much limited to using voluntary surveys to collect their data. This means any group that is concerned about secret government conspiracies and holds science in contempt is bound to not produce useful info if you ask them to tell you something about themselves in either a face-to-face interview or a list of boxes they are asked to check off.
But baring any sort of academic study, I will hazard a hypothesis based on what I've been reading from a wide variety of sources. Take it for what it's worth, but I think that what we are seeing is an inarticulate response to massive social changes. In times past, this would simply be something "below the surface", but because of modern social media and populist political parties it has learned to "punch above it's weight" and become more influential than it should be able.
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First, I'll ask you to try to look at the world through the eyes of some of the people I knew when I was young. I don't think that many young people realize how appallingly nasty a lot of people were even a few decades ago. Let's me explain what I'm talking about with the following examples.
A lot of people used to be very open about their hatred of gays. To cite one extreme institutional example, in 1981 the police targeted the gays of Toronto through "Operation Soap". This was a huge simultaneous raid on four bath houses under the old "bawdy house" law. This was a vague statute that allowed police to raid and arrest the owners and inhabitants of a building where acts of "indecency" were happening. Since gays were discriminated against in mainstream society, they had created their own subculture, part of which involved the bathhouses. In effect, the police were "creeped out" by gays, so they kicked the doors down of their private clubs, handcuffed them, threw them into jail, and, gave them a criminal record. If any of the people involved resisted, the officers could then beat and potentially kill them.
That's the way mainstream society treated gays back when I was at university.
I can remember when Rod Stewart's song The Killing of Georgiecame out and I heard a lot of vicious, nasty, homophobic things said about him. At the time I didn't think much about this (I was pretty naive and didn't even realize the song was about a gay person until I was older). But in retrospect I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a closeted gay who had to endure this blizzard of hate-filled nonsense. Take a look at Stewart's official video and try to understand how people who had grown in a society that was tremendously homophobic might have experienced it. I suspect a great many thought that this was the absolute end of the world as they knew it.
Now we are used to this sort of thing, but at the time this sort of conscious "gender bending" was absolutely terrifying to a great many folks.It still is for some people, who describe the growth of gay rights not as a move towards making society kinder and gentler, but rather as becoming "immoral".
I suspect that it's this general sense of fear and disgust that underlies the weird theory that people like Hilary Clinton and other top Democrats have created an enormous pedophile ring that kidnaps, sexually abuses, murders, and, drinks children's blood. (It's supposed to prolong a person's life. If you've never heard of this---read up on "pizzagate" and "QAnon".) If you are so strongly and emotionally repelled by the concept of gay rights, it is possible to create some sort of "fever dream" that suggests an evil, child-abusing cabal running society.
I don't know about you, but I watch Netflix for old Star Trek series and Turkish soap operas---.
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Another way in which society has become different in my lifetime is our racial makeup. When I was young, I never saw a black person until I was in my late teens. There was one Asian family in my village---they ran a Chinese restaurant. There was just one family of First Nations people and one of French Canadians that were at my local school. Racist jokes, use of the "N-bomb", anger against having to learn French at public school, stereotypes about First Nations, etc, sometimes came up in ordinary conversation among the adults. That wasn't very often, though. The fact is that we were pretty much an entirely white community.
Fast forward to about fifteen years ago and my mom was showing some family Christmas photos to her neighbour---including my then partner from Bombay, my nephew's French wife of Algerian descent, my niece's black son, and, my brother's Mohawk wife and their two daughters. The comment "What the Hell is this? The United Nations?" was made. The photo reflected the fact that the racial composition of the country has changed, and my family was pretty much indifferent to the whole thing. But unfortunately, like my mom's next door neighbour, lots of people aren't very happy about the change.
This isn't just about race, because race and culture are deeply intertwined. That was what the residential schools were all about---they weren't primarily opposed to people with a specific skin tone. Instead, they wanted to make all First Nations people into slightly darker carbon copies of their white neighbours. That's why they were forbidden to speak their own languages, why their hair was cut, etc. Many of the problems we identify as "racist" aren't per se about the fact of skin colour so much as the cultures that people follow that aren't considered "mainstream".
This manifests itself among people as fear that immigrants are planning to take over the country and get rid of its "traditional values" and "culture".
I enjoy eating different types of food. I enjoy learning about different cultures. I like to learn new things about world history. I also believe that there is much room for improvement in both my country and my civilization, and that we could benefit from following the example of others. But if you are someone who believes that the English Canada that you grew up in was pretty much the best that any society could ever be, then you are going to be really creeped-out by multiculturalism.
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I have friends in business who get absolutely frothing mad about the way "heavy handed bureaucrats have made it impossible to make a living". This ranges from the way they have to fill out their taxes, to safety rules, to the minimum wage, to environmental regulations, and, more. I'm the last person to defend the way the Canadian bureaucracy works. But I do believe that I can see a reason why there is such a problem.
The world is a lot more complex than when I was younger. There are a lot more people. Our technologies are a lot more powerful. And, we've learned that we can catastrophically damage the environment if we aren't really careful. We've also decided that injured workers aren't completely disposable, which means that we don't allow people to do all the crazy dangerous things that working people just used to take for granted. As a result, we've passed a lot of new rules and regulations to cut down on the carnage.
Unfortunately, this increased regulation costs money. And we have periodically elected governments who want to cut taxes, which means that the civil servants who regulate a lot of our lives have to do so with budgets that are usually frozen if not in decline. What this tends to mean is that small businesses who cannot afford to hire lawyers to help them wade through the complex regulations tend to suffer a lot more than large corporations that can simply "swallow" the costs.
If you are someone like me who thinks he can see a reason for all of this, it is still profoundly annoying to have to wade through mountains of paperwork and wait months (if not years) for something that in recent memory could be dealt with through a face-to-face conversation and an hour of time.But for a person who guides their life by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and sees business people as heroic figures, this can seem like a perfidious conspiracy against freedom itself.The difference between the two of us is that I can see how much of this is either necessary or the result of decisions by political parties who are supported by the people most annoyed by the glacial speed to which it has been reduced.
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I grew up in a community that had a LOT of churches. Generally this didn't intrude too much on my life as even though we were nominally Baptist, my family wasn't terribly religious. (I'm told the one time a minister came to visit my dad crawled out the window of his study and hid in the barn until he left.) But we did have a Dutch Reform congregation in town that were anti-vaxxers. A child born the same year as me in the next farm behind us died of tetanus from a horse bite because he was never vaccinated against lock-jaw. In high school I had several friends who got polio---again, all members of that one congregation.
People in the community were pissed. "Why", we asked, "can the old-order Amish take their horse and buggies down to the clinic and get their vaccinations, yet these dweebs in their cars and modern lifestyle think that there was something 'ungodly' about it?" I still get annoyed, myself, when I think about it.
In the middle of this current pandemic I find it really difficult to put myself in the shoes of the people who are fighting against our public health orders. But when I have the required patience and internal clarity, I can remind myself that the world can be a pretty scary place for people who have lost their sense of personal agency.
Of course, the really big issue is that we really don't have much control over our lives. If we get born with some sort of disability, that defines much of our life. If our parents are poor or rich, white or black, intelligent or dumb, caring or dysfunctional, etc, has a huge impact. So does where we are born: Indian reserve or nice suburb? Canada or Afghanistan? When we come into this world has a huge impact too. (If you doubt this, consider how much more expensive buying a house is now versus thirty years ago.)
Our health is much the same thing. We can exercise, eat right, etc, and WHAM! you get cancer, a heart attack, mental illness, or, hit by a bus. It's all a question of probabilities and random chance. Most human beings have a problem with this, they want to at least maintain the illusion of control over their life. But the fact of the matter is that human life can be relatively good or bad, often for reasons beyond our control. And it always ends in death---more than sometimes nasty, random, and/or, totally unexpected.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of very important parts of our culture that are designed to fool people into thinking that if they just work hard enough they can achieve anything that they want.
Play by the rules? How about the ones against using steroids? This comes from an entire page of "inspirational quotes". Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.
The problem with this idea, of course, is that it's errant nonsense. But unfortunately, we have huge swathes of the population that believe that this is literally true. It's what the whole Conservative movement in North America and our economic system is based upon. But it's also what a great many people increasingly reject.
Consider, if you will, the Black Lives Matter protests. How can you believe that if you just work hard you can achieve anything while at the same time understanding that if you meet the wrong police officer on the wrong day, you will just end up getting killed? How can you teach your children that if they work hard they can do anything---but that when they buy a candy bar in a corner store they should always ask for a bag because that way they can prove they didn't shoplift it if they get accused? (If memory serves, I remember hearing a local black person tell me that this was part of "the talk" that he gave one of his children.)
Underlying this delusional mythology is the great, grand daddy of delusional thinking: religious faith.
A lot of people have been told that there is life after death, and that if they just believe in God strongly enough, they will end up in paradise. Some of them also believe that this faith will also provide them with happy, wealthy lives on this earth too. (This last bit is called "the prosperity gospel".) These are both ridiculously twisted misunderstandings of a point of view that could make some sense, yet they have---unfortunately---been heavily promoted in modern society. And as such, they help a large fraction of the population become totally unprepared to live their lives with any semblance of serenity or wisdom.
First, let's start off with the original idea.
The problem with knowing that we all die, often in an extremely unpleasant way, is that if we fixate on it, it could cast a pall on every moment of our life. And who wants that? So paradoxically, if you really want to live a good life you need to, on some level, think that you are going to live forever. But if you actually believed that there would be a tendency to keep putting off today in favour of tomorrow---which would create a whole new set of problems. That means that at the same time you need to act as if today is the last day of your life.
Run this paradox through popular religious culture (And don't forget that until very recently people would be treated very harshly for publicly being at odds with Christian orthodoxy) and you end up with the idea that when we die we go to paradise as long as we really, really, really believe in God.
The issue for the people of my childhood who refused vaccinations was that their church hierarchy told their congregation that part of the "really, really, really believing in God" was not being vaccinated.
Remember that "prosperity gospel" thing? Well, one of the pillars of capitalist society is the idea of the "invisible hand" which says that if people really believe in the free market all the individual choices that each consumer and business person makes will equal out and create the best of all possible worlds. Add this idea to the "faith thing" from a confused sort of pop spirituality, and you get the idea that if you really, really, really believe in the invisible hand it will make you rich and your country "Great!" or "Great Again!"
The problem for people who believe in this nonsense is that it paints you into a corner. You aren't supposed to have any doubts or investigate any evidence that might undermine this worldview. Unfortunately, they really, really, really want to believe all this stuff but they can also see evidence to the contrary. So to prove how much they really, really, really believe they will make a big fuss about how completely wrong the evidence really is. (The psychologist Bob Altemeyer who spent his career studying conservative leaders and their supporters wrote that he's found out that a surprising percentage of the most vocal supporters of fundamentalist Christianity actually will admit that they don't really believe in God or life after death. They just say so to be part of the "group think".)
Along comes COVID-19. Whether or not we shut down society, ask everyone to wear masks, and, eventually tell everyone to get vaccinated all comes down to science. The virus couldn't care less about the spiritual values that you've built your life around---it just "is". And just like death, poverty, and, injustice it requires some sort of spiritual "work around" for the people who have never reconciled themselves to the fact that life isn't fair and that they are going to die. So they flail around looking for evidence either that the virus is a conspiracy or that it just isn't all that bad. And Face Book is quite happy to supply all the nonsense they are willing to consume.
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There's more to this story than just the way a minor segment of our society thinks. There's also the question of how they are being whipped into a frenzy by shysters, mega-corporations, and, questionable political organizations. But this is article is already long enough. I'll have to continue the story some other time. Until then---.
Moreover I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
I've been trying to avoid adding to comments about the plague we are living through, but I had a conversation with a friend recently that got me thinking. She was going on about the economic catastrophe that many people are facing. I commented that I hadn't really thought much about it---that's just not how my mind works. Moreover, I'm retired, my house is paid off, and, I've spent my life living very frugally so I would minimize the chances of getting into financial trouble during "hard times". (That's the result of seeing the human turmoil that came about when we lost the family farm in the 1970s.)
Anyway, shortly after this talk I came across a really fascinating clip from a CNBC business show that has been reposted around the Web. (I'm using this clip under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copy Right Act.)
What I was interested in was the clash of worldviews between the television host and the guest. Most business journalists tend to "drink the Kool Aid" when it comes to what passes for conventional wisdom among the moneyed classes. And very rich people, as a general rule, tend to carefully align their own personal interest with what they consider to be good public policy.
Imagine his surprise to find out that a very wealthy man---Chamath Palihapitiya, who owns a private equity firm and was one of the founders of Face Book---suggests that government aid should be going to poor people and small businesses instead of large corporations. But here's the reason why, Palihapitiya grew up poor. His family immigrated from Sri Lanka and his mother worked as a housekeeper and his dad was chronically unemployed. They lived on welfare for at least part of his childhood. As a result, he knows something about life that the vast majority of middle and upper-class people don't.
Moreover, as a high-powered business person he also knows some things that the vast majority of poor and middle-class people don't. As he alludes to in the exchange, the fact is that bankruptcy for large corporations is totally different from what happens to poor people and small businesses. That's because they have access to something called "pre-packaged insolvency". The idea behind this is that it really doesn't make any sense to totally destroy a company when it becomes bankrupt. Instead, the idea is that a court-appointed administrator is brought in to manage the process. If an outside partner comes along who wants to buy-up the company, the administrator is able to negotiate a take-over, including a price. That means that a company can go bankrupt and the administrator can sell it without the employees even missing a day's work.
The second point that Palihapitiya is making is that when large businesses take on debt it isn't all governed by the same rules. What happens is that it gets broken up into different "tranches" or slices. These different types of debt are governed by different rules. As a general point they are more or less risky---which means that if the company goes under, the debts that are less risky get paid first and the more risky ones last. To compensate for this, the less risky debt fraction generally pays less interest than the more risky one.
Graphic created by Thomas Splettstoesser and registered as a Public Domain Image under the Copy Left rule.
Image c/o the Wiki Media Commons.
As a matter of fact, the majority of loans that pension funds make to large corporations tend to be low risk/low return, whereas the "Wolves of Wall Street" types tend to make high risk/high return ones. That means that when business commentators blather on about people's "pension funds" or "jobs", they are generally trying to create a smokescreen to hide their appeal for the government to bail them out for the dumb investments that they made.
Incidentally, one interesting thing I noticed was when the host suggested that employees often own shares in the company they work for. I'd ask you, dear readers, how many of you have ever owned shares in a company that you worked for? I've worked for a couple large corporations in my life---Consolidated Building Maintenance and Eatons---and I didn't know a single person who did. Palihapitiya called the host on this and I think the shock on his face explains how completely and utterly "out of touch" with ordinary people a great many television media hosts are about how the "other half" lives. The thing to remember is that any journalist you see on a big audience, legacy media channel has precious little in common with ordinary working people---instead, he's an extremely well-paid member of the ruling class. And it usually shows, like it did in this interview.
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What got them started was with regard to the airline industry, which leads me to my second point.
The guy who interviewed Palihapitiya was shocked at the idea that businesses should suffer from the effects of the Corona Virus outbreak. It's obvious that that he thinks no one in their wildest dreams could predict that something like this would happen. The thing is, this is total nonsense. Human history is full of pandemics. There may still be people alive today who went through the Spanish Influenza. Everyone has heard about the Black Death. Lots of experts have been warning that we are going to inevitably going to have something similar. For example, here's a TED talk on the subject.
The above talk is really worth watching, especially towards the end. That's because it describes how a small Canadian government program called GPHIN managed to use web crawlers (something that the computer companies use to develop statistics on things like websites) to stop the SARS outbreak from becoming a global pandemic like COVID-19. The speaker, Larry Brilliant (I know, a great name---he really lives up to it!) was also involved in starting a group titled InSTEDD ("Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases and Disasters") which uses technology to help organizations from governments to grassroots citizen groups detect problems early, before they become too big to easily deal with.
The thing to remember about Brilliant is that he gave this TED talk in 2006 and as a major league expert on the subject of communicable diseases, he didn't say "if there is another pandemic", he said "when there is another pandemic". The problem with the guy interviewing Palihapitiya and most of the business people who he's spent his life fawning over is that they think that people like Brilliant are total and complete ass-hats that they don't have to listen to. "What do they know?" "If they were that smart, they'd be rich, right?" And the Wall Street and Bay Street "Masters of the Universe" use their money and influence to make damn sure that no elected politician every listens to complete and utter jerks like Larry Brilliant. See, that's the problem with our society, it isn't that no one can predict problems before they arise---it's that our leaders separate themselves from said experts so they never hear from people like them. And if by some weird fluke they do hear something, they dismiss it out of hand because it would make their lives a little difficult to put into place their advice.
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I'm working away at these stories in the hope that people will learn to support local independent media. If you want good news stories that aren't designed to pander to your prejudices or get you angry so you will click on ads, you are going to have to pay for them. All I'm asking for is a dollar a month, which is easy to do through the micro-payment option provided by Patreon and Pay Pal. Don't see this as you buying these articles, instead see them as a public service you are offering to everyone. These articles will never go behind a pay wall, so money will never be a problem. In effect, your subscriptions are providing an on-line library of research that allows people to learn the background of the important issues that dominate their life. Is a dollar a month too much for that?
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Here's one lesson we should be learning from the present pandemic. We need to cut down dramatically on activity that makes us susceptible to pandemics. That means a lot less jet air travel, period. As I pointed out in a previous blog post we are cooking ourselves to death with all the damn jet fuel we are burning. The tourism industry is simply too dangerous to allow it to continue at it's current size. Suck it up. Get used to it. The government needs to wean communities off it. No civilization in human history up until now has had this much physical mobility and it needs to be dramatically reduced.
Another big industry that needs to crash and burn are cruise ships. We've known for quite a while that if an infectious disease gets on them it can rip through the passengers and crew like a wildfire. Moreover, they are an ecological nightmare. So why exactly do we have to have them? Really?
One last thing. I've read that part of the way the Asian countries have been able to trace and tamp down their epidemics has been through using cell phone telemetry to do automatic contact tracking when someone tests positive for the virus. Invariably, I've heard Western critics suggest that it might be hard to get around people's privacy notions to do that here. My response to that is "bullshit"! We lost a great deal of our privacy already the moment we decided to let our population grotesquely over-shoot the carrying capacity of the earth. We have to have hugely complex governments and economies just to keep our collective heads above water. That means we've already "painted ourselves into a corner" and need to give up whatever fantasies we might have about the world we live in. There's no room for privacy when you live in a "global village". By all means work towards a better world, with a smaller population, more in harmony with nature, and based on respect for human liberty. But don't let whining about present compromises with that ideal get in the way of dealing with global emergencies like pandemic diseases!
These things---and a whole lot more---are how the human community will build itself a new collective immune system that will protect us from a great many potential problems. I understand that it's a nightmare to libertarians. Ayn Rand is no doubt rolling in her grave. But the fact of the matter is that it is what we need to do if we are going to have any semblance of a decent life living with the "new normal".
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Moreover, I say unto you, we need to deal with the Climate Emergency!
