virusfest 2020 (part 4): in which we pause.

When I was a kid and first learned about the Great Depression, I couldn't understand it. People were rich, and then suddenly everyone was poor? How can wealth just vanish from the entire world? Where did the money go to?

Some years later, my studies caught up to my questions–for some reason this wasn't covered in grade school–and the answer is that money is a social construct, not a real thing. The glib, dismissive response is to say "If you think money isn't real, try living without it," but saying that money isn't real isn't to say it isn't necessary. Deluded people will tell you different, but gold and silver have very little inherent value, most of which has arisen in the past 200 years. In reality, it's just that they're relatively rare, and extremely shiny.

(And durably shiny, since neither one corrodes over time in the atmosphere, which must have been magical in the ages of copper, bronze, and iron, which definitely do. Silver tarnish, besides not being corrosion, is actually silver sulfide, usually reacting with the sulfur dumped into the air by human industrialization.)

Our intuition rebels against the idea that our lives depend, usually all too literally, on a collective fiction; but as with everything true, it's true whether we believe in it or not.

Money may be the greatest human invention, because barter is a royally inefficient pain in the ass. How many chickens do you get for a cartload of wheat? Whose cart do you use? Is it the same number as last week? Why? Look, I know last time I said two sheep for an ingot of copper, but three sheep died on my way here, and I have expenses, so now it's four sheep.

What money and goods have in common is that they need to move in order for the system to work. Money does most of the traveling in modern times, with conversions into and out of goods and services at various points. Fundamentally, though, it's the labor of consumers, exchanged for money and then spent, that powers the global economy. The unimaginably vast amounts of incorporeal money that flow around from day to day, bigger than any nation's GDP, ultimately rely on people working and spending money.

Most of that labor and spending and services ultimately relies on interactions between human beings in the same room. And so we come to the present day.

(We are still, collectively, working our way through the euphemisms. "Situation," "current state of affairs." We're phasing in "pandemic," at least in California. I expect we'll reach "plague" eventually, whose non-metaphorical usage–except for incredulous responses to the rare incidents of actual bubonic plague–is mostly restricted to the AIDS pandemic. "Between the Pill and the plague" is the most succinct description I've ever seen of the enablement and curtailment of sexual liberation and promiscuity in the 1960s and 1970s.)

We've never tried this before. The unemployment forecasts are still looking at 40% or 50% or even more; by comparison, at the most depressed of the Great Depression, unemployment was around 25%. The billionaires are pushing for everyone to get back to work, helping conservatives adopt the belief that the control of lethal infectious disease is oppression, because people who are busy working and worrying about killing themselves or their friends or family are too busy to think about how broken the whole system is.

Not everyone is buying it. As long as we don't have a treatment or vaccine–neither of which is visible on the horizon–the health risk just doesn't diminish in a way that lets everything go back to normal. This isn't measured in months, it's measured in years.

I am not excited about this.

the hard way.

Revolutions are nasty things, explosions of human angst overcoming human fear. A lot of people die, but more importantly, as Americans we go through our education thinking the American Revolution was normal. Usually they turn out much worse. I put them on a spectrum, based on how bad the revanchist counter-revolution is, and whether it eventually shakes out to a government that actually addresses the underlying causes of the revolution.

• Worst - Iran (1979) swapped out one murderous terror-regime for another, almost before you could blink, and that government is still in place.
• Very Bad - France overthrew the monarchy and executed Louis XVI in 1793, promptly followed by the dictatorship of the Reign of Terror, after which Napoleon created his own monarchy. France went through a few more monarchy/republic cycles before settling down.
• Okay - The American Revolution (1776-1789ish) had a moderate amount of bloodshed, and things were a little wobbly until the War of 1812 or so, but we didn't revert to a monarchy (notwithstanding the vast unobstructed powers of the modern Presidency).
• Good - The Velvet/Gentle Revolution (1989) managed to democratize Czechoslovakia and eventually amicably separate Czechia and Slovakia, without violence.

COVID-19 means seismic shifts in society are inevitable; I had hoped we would do things the easy and humane way, and re-tool everything to support and help people. Instead we have what may be the worst possible leadership for this crisis. Eventually you have 50% unemployment and food being dumped and people starving while the billionaires tell everyone else to get back to work, and something's gotta give.

The problem with The Hard Way™ is that you don't know what's going to break, only that something has to. More often than not, it means a lot of people dying, without even the payback of the underlying problem being addressed.

virusfest 2020 (part 3)

Here is why I bought a bunch of food, slightly before everyone else did (or tried to).

In the summer of 2003, my aunt died, of mysterious complications related to breast cancer. Her widower capped off decades of being a bad husband by refusing to release the medical records to her brother the cancer researcher, who might have been able to make some sense of the whole thing.

Remember, folks, don't leave your kids enough money to skate through life as alcoholic wastrels.

Anyway. The funeral was more stressful than it needed to be, and after a few days of eating out in a region where half the menu was deep-fried and a "salad" was a wedge of iceberg lettuce coated in ranch dressing, my immediate family, at least, escaped to our ancestral village, relatively nearby. It's a good place to decompress, being a Rust Belt town with, I think, the same population and pace it had when my parents were growing up.

I think the day after we got there, we decided to grab some ice cream and go stare out at the very large lake outside town. We drove to the ice cream place, and discovered the power was out, much to the annoyance of the staff, who said "We just got the insurance check from last time." Ice cream was on sale, anyway.

As we drove away, we turned the radio on, and...there wasn't any radio, just static. As we got to the lake, we eventually picked up some faint Canadian stations, which had enough information to know that this was nothing like an ordinary power outage. Details were hazy, but it seemed the power was out from New England to Ohio, at least. In 2003, 9/11 was still pretty fresh–kids born in 2001 are now midway through college–and mobile technology still sucked, a lot, and mobile Internet ranged from "poor" to "theoretical," and that was in big cities. We followed the only rational course, eating our ice cream and enjoying the view, before heading back to the B&B.

Through intelligence-gathering around town, it emerged that it was actually just about impossible to buy food! For reasons I'm hazy on, all the stores responded to the absence of electricity by not selling anything, even the stuff that didn't need electricity. I don't know if they didn't trust their employees to handle transactions without the registers, or if it was corporate policy, or the law, or they all just preferred the idea of going home for the day, but it meant we couldn't even feed ourselves on snack-sized bags of Cheetohs.

It's not that we were going to starve to death–that takes a while, and we had water–but this was supposed to be less difficult than the funeral.

The streets were mostly empty, but I saw a pizza delivery car go by. Thinks me, "Why would they bother driving around, if they weren't delivering pizzas?". I called them, and they delivered what they said was the last pizza before they shut down. Voilá! Food!

That's, right, folks. I flew in for a funeral and just happened to be around for one of the biggest blackout events of the past 50 years.

The things we need can become unexpectedly unavailable. We don't normally keep a lot of food around: we mostly eat stuff that doesn't keep very well, we're not prone to long power outages or snowstorms, and we've always been more like 75% prepared for an earthquake, and food was a weak point. I did some shopping in stores and on Amazon, and we have various tranches of food durability and desirability, emptying out our freezer until we land on piles of pasta and sauce, cans of beans, and finally emergency rations, which I'm sure are better than both hardtack and starvation, though I'd rather not find out for sure.

Speaking of hardtack, I could make some, except that ironically, by the time I got serious today about stocking up on flour and yeast, lots of food deliveries are either suspended or operating at capacity and with delays. I seem to have a bag of self-raising flour, although I don't know why: it came from a couple we're friends with, who have two incomes, no kids, impeccable taste in everything, and now live in Dublin. Some kind of old-school scones, maybe, the same way one might have fond memories of Bisquick pancakes?

You can survive on homemade chocolate chip cookies, right? Asking for a friend.

virusfest 2020 (part 2)

One of the mysteries (and mercies) about SARS-CoV-2 has been that it hasn't affected children: at one point, there had been no one symptomatic under the age of 10, and I've since heard 12. We don't know why, but there are some indications that kids can just hang out with the virus until whenever: one preliminary case study from China was a 6-month old boy, asymptomatic, who entered the hospital with his symptomatic mother. He tested positive for 16 days without ever showing symptoms, while his mother recovered.

I don't know if there's been a documented transmission from asymptomatic children to adults yet, but. Uh.

It's a bit of a truism that any pandemic contagion must be getting a bunch of parameters just right to nail us so well. Setting aside the many opportunities provided by a narcissistic Republican President with dementia, SARS-CoV-2 has:

1. Long incubation time.
2. Long time to symptom onset.
3. High, but not too high, fatality–given proper treatment, which leads to...
4. Very high health system resource usage.

#4 is the really striking one. It seems pretty clear that a whole lot of us have been exposed, and developed cases of COVID-19 that don't need a trip to the hospital, but the virus generates enough hospitalizations, and those hospitalizations can require such intensive and specialized care (ventilators and ICUs and things so exotic I'd never heard of them), that it can overwhelm a health-care system. This seems to have already happened to Italy, so around here, the hospitals and clinics are already at battle stations, getting ready.

In computing, we call this a "denial-of-service attack." It sucks.

Make good choices. Stay home. We haven't actually hit the really hard part yet.

virusfest 2020 (part 1)

The COVID-19 virus is justifiably all over the news, as we've failed to contain it, but at the same time it doesn't look like the kind of virus that can be fully contained. It's true the U.S. is doing a terrible job, what with the lack of testing and all, but it's also true that with an incubation period of 14+ days–I've also heard 24–and unknown levels of asymptomatic transmission, that there's only so good a job to be done, as it were. The WHO didn't think very clearly and blithely announced a significant fatality rate (3.4%) and is now learning why you don't just say shit like this without embedding it in the context required to interpret it correctly.

Which is to say: you can be alarmed about a 3.4% fatality rate, and/or you can be alarmed by a lack of testing that doesn't tell us how many infections there, but neither of those facts is really meaningful until you put them together in the equation

[fatality rate] = [# of fatalities] / [# infections]

which tells us that we don't actually know what the fatality rate is. It's starting to look like it might be endemic here already–in the U.S. and especially here in the West Coast Asian travel crossroads where we live–which might explain various unknown-but-not-fatal respiratory illnesses that folks have been getting over the past few months.

As half-assed as our response is being, though, it is most definitely having effects, as some very large conferences are canceled or delayed, and sizable companies like LinkedIn and Microsoft are not only canceling travel, but telling people to work from home. Consumers have been buying up freeze-dried food, and toilet paper, but probably not for the right reasons: they seem to be thinking "zombie apocalypse" or "FEMA declares martial law" or "we're all going to die," but the problem addressed by stockpiling is just the disruption of supply chains in a globalized world that is even more interconnected than we usually notice. Being reliably able to buy stuff whenever, we tend to keep a relatively small amount of food around.

Next time: the story about why I've been building up our stocks of durable food (without panicking or otherwise working very hard).

tick, tock, tick.

Tick, it's 2019. Tock, it's 2020. Not that I have any ticking clocks working in the house. All of my analog-face watches need new batteries.

I finished considerably fewer text-only books than 2018: 59, vs. 97. I read a lot of comics, but really I was watching TV and movies. I think that, among other things, this actually reflects a wider engagement at work, leaving me with less energy for complex intellectual stuff outside of work.

I dug into musicianship even more. I went to Fiddle Tunes over the summer, which wasn't really restful at all, but I am a much better violinist now. And I got to hang out with my beloved old friends.

I finally sent my first violin off to a new home as a viola in the grade-school orchestra. The remaining musical instrument population at the end of the year:

1. nice rental violin (what I usually play)
2. electric violin
3. travel violin
4. regular mandolin
5. solid-body electric mandolin
6. big mandolin
7. tenor guitar
8. regular acoustic guitar
9. electric guitar

As with the Kindle and ebooks, I may have discovered how many instruments I can do at once.

J is pushing 6'2", and mostly comfortable enough that I can make jokes about it. I did warn that this would happen if we fed him.

2019 had a lot of tension and uncertainty, but also a lot of hugs and music. Let's call it a wash.

and to all a good night.

We had a very mellow, low-key Christmas here in California. J has been with us 100% since March--without any change to the official court-ordered custody arrangement, which is a thing that can happen--so this is the first Christmas we've had him for the entire day. Historically he's gotten a present on each of the "12 custody days" (our house) leading up to Christmas, so he got up on Christmas Day and asked, "Wait, is it actual Christmas, the day? I have no idea." He's never been a calendar-watcher: the only exception that comes to mind is when he was waiting for me to come back from Chile.

(He asked so often that Anna used an aikido calendar to mark off the days. Not the usual behavior for 5-year olds. Anna just today unearthed and tossed the calendar.)

The gifts this year felt well-chosen, with lots of good surprises coming from knowing each other well. J got some excellent games, and gift certificates to buy more games. I got Anna a scholarly book on RPGs, which hopefully isn't terrible, and a gift card for the art store, where she will have to buy things for herself. Anna got me a basic Swedish textbook, because while Duolingo is entertaining, it's unable to teach the rules for things like making plurals or (much worse) combining plurals and definites:

• en kvinna = "a woman"
• kvinnan = "the woman"
• kvinnor = "women"
• kvinnorna = "the women"

It's funky and different from English, without being excruciatingly difficult, but reverse-engineering it from examples is tiresome.

Anna also got me my own set of metal dice for our family Dungeons & Dragons game, including a bright red one for my character who has some sort of fire elemental in his ancestry, and really enjoys and is quite skilled at setting things on fire. (J created him for me some years back. His name is Sneaky McStabStab, he has a pet rat named Bitey, and he hates seagulls because seagulls killed his parents.) Anna also took pity on my musical obsessions and got me a tenor guitar, an obscure instrument experiencing a bit of a revival.

I can't play that, but I'll eventually be able to play this:

It's a lovely, fun little thing to play.