Multidystopian

Recently, I read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's a piece of dystopian fiction, and it's interesting in that about midway through the book, the character of John, otherwise known as "the Savage" or "Mr. Savage," is introduced, seemingly as an avatar for the audience. It seems that his role in the story is to allow the audience to see the problems with the perfect society that has been created and maintained, and he does so, mainly (to me, anyway) by making it clear that despite the conditioning that the World State applies to make its citizens happy with their assigned lots in life, they were unable to engineer away the craving for novelty. This craving eventually pushes them to pursue John to the point of his suicide. This was interesting in the fact that John had effectively advocated for the right to be unhappy; but it really seemed that he sought the right to encounter the world on his own terms, and when that proved impossible, he takes his own life.

While the World State's aims are somewhat banal; being social stability and a level of consumption that keeps factories humming and people employed, it's never portrayed as openly evil. The measures that it takes, while they would strike many people as authoritarian and repressive, are seen as trade-offs in order to achieve a goal that is itself understood as good for the public at large. And in this, it's an interesting contrast with 1984 and the Orwellian school of fiction that posit that dystopian societies are a result of an élite class that understands that it is entitled to a good life at the expense of "the people." The result is a society that one can understand the attractions of. John's out-and-out resistance to it comes across as being indicative of a level of conditioning less directed, but no less thorough, than what the citizens of the World State have endured.

And in this, it becomes a reminder that to someone who has different ideas of how a society should be organized, anyone who supports a given system may be described as "conditioned," even if they demonstrate that they understand the choices, trade-offs and price that they are subject to. The World State is not a dystopia because it is evil. It is a dystopia because the bargains that keep it running are imposed upon its citizens by a regime that thinks for them. But if all societies work that way, to one degree or another, perhaps the label of "dystopia" is misplaced.

Distanced

I went for a walk today, as maintaining one's exercise regimen is permissible under Governor Inslee's "Stay Home, Stay Healthy" order and the last thing I need is to put on weight. Things were, of course, quite a bit quieter than "normal," but downtown wasn't quite the ghost town that one would expect. This is in large part, I suspect, due to the number of new apartments that have gone in recently, so now there is a pretty sizable population in downtown Bothell that wasn't there a few years ago.

Still, one wonders what the place will look like when everything is said and done. To allow commercial life to resume is going to require that testing for COVID-19 become both widely available and ubiquitous. Contrary to some media reports that I've come across, distancing, in and of itself, cannot directly suppress the virus. Without some other way of either providing mass immunity or carefully tracking cases, community mitigation strategies (otherwise known as nonpharmaceutical interventions) can only buy time to develop pharmaceutical interventions, such as a vaccine. And while I think that society can sustain the current measures for some time, if the only option is waiting until a vaccine can go into mass production and distribution, that might be a problem.

I say might, because I don't have enough information to say anything else. I presume someone does, but I haven't had the time to sift through everything to find it.

New To You

As much as the pedant in me may find the word "unprecedented" to be wildly overused, it's reasonably clear to me what the news media is driving the definition of the word away from genuinely "having no precedent," which is how Merriam-Webster online currently defines the term, to something more akin to "unusual (perhaps highly so) in the current cultural context." Used in this way, "unprecedented" can be thought of as a form of neologism, although semantic shift is the proper name of the process taking place.

And this shift seems to be driven by the fact that in modern American English, "unusual," is a fairly mild world, since it can refer to anything that lies outside of the speaker's experience, even if it it commonplace for others. And so "unprecedented" is being moved into the open space left by the fact that there isn't word that means "(highly) unusual to more or less everyone." Or, at least, the speaker believes that it's unusual to their entire audience.

And it makes sense that this shift would be driven by the news media. Time is often at a premium, hyperbole often comes with the perception of genuine importance and there wasn't another readily-accessible word to be used. Interestingly enough, it fits the precedent.

Happy Stones

Like Magic

I picked up Enough - The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It, by former NPR and Fox News personality Juan Williams, and read it. This was some time ago, considering the book was still new when I picked it up.

Mr. Williams' book strikes me as a fairly bog-standard example of modern Conservative writing, from the long-winded title to the simplistic remedies it offers to complex problems. For all that, it's not a terrible book, and I enjoyed reading it. I'd written the following as sort of a book report on it, but never posted it here for some reason. I'm not sure why I'm bothering to remedy that now, more than a decade after the book was first published. Perhaps because I have nothing else better to write about at the moment. But I also think that the book, and my thoughts about it, help me to better understand why I spend a lot of time in the wilderness of American politics, never really landing with a political party.

Enough takes the famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint), "Pound Cake Speech" given by Bill Cosby on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, and defends Cosby's position and criticisms. I like most of this book. I feel that it's well written, and, given that I have something of a small-government and respectability politics streak in me, it also happens to somewhat agree with many of my own views on the subject. Until, that is, the final chapter.

In typical Conservative fashion, Mr. Williams wraps up his book with the assertion that conservative family values are the simple and self-evident answer to all of the problems of black America. On the question of poverty, he claims that the "magical" (his word, not mine) formula to avoiding destitution is to 1) get at least a high school, but preferably a college education, 2) get a job after graduation (so far, so good), 3) get married, and 4) put off childbearing until steps 1 through 3 are completed. He goes on to say that the poverty rate for Blacks that follow the formula is only 6.4 percent. Which is all well and good, but he presents this as a causal relationship - as if otherwise poor people who follow the program are suddenly lifted out of poverty. But it's just as likely that people who followed the program weren't poor to begin with - the children of the well-off are likely to follow that pattern in any event.

It's difficult and, perhaps more relevantly, pointless to argue with the idea that education leads to more choices, and thus, better opportunities for wealth and advancement. The idea that better education leads to better outcomes is a given. Lost in this is that higher education costs money, but that's also a given, so Mr. Williams can be forgiven for not wanting to rain on his own parade by introducing a sour note into the proceedings.

The value of having a job is obvious enough that Mr. Williams simply skips over it, and jumps straight to step 3 - getting married. This is a somewhat muddier topic, and it takes a few re-readings of the space devoted to it for it to really make sense. Like most authors who are not statisticians, Mr. Williams isn't especially rigorous about consistently making apples-to-apples comparisons. For instance, he compares the 35% poverty rate among Black women who had children outside of marriage to a 17% poverty rate for married women. Since these two conditions are not mutually exclusive - single mothers are not barred from ever marrying - the same women could be counted twice. Accordingly, Mr. Williams avoids making the statement that marriage cuts poverty in half, even though its fairly clear that he wouldn't be disappointed if the reader came to that (perhaps incorrect) conclusion themselves.

And in the end, this is what makes for a weak closing to an otherwise interesting book. Mr. Williams is selling his magical four steps to a middle-class lifestyle as a package - and so he avoids breaking them out individually. He contrasts the poverty level of those who complete all four steps to only a general population - preventing the reader from making determinations as to which steps might be the most effective

The book is also not lacking in partisan cheap shots and motivated misreadings. One page 118, Mr. Williams makes a criticism of William Bennett that seems unfounded and almost deliberately calculated to deflect criticism of Mr. Williams himself as a conservative. While, taken in a vacuum, it is understandable to say that Mr. Bennett's comments on the abortion of Black fetuses to lower crime has "genocidal overtones," in the very next sentence, Mr. Bennett himself says: "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down," but Mr. Williams chooses to ignore that follow-on. Mr. Bennett's entire point is that the idea that abortion could be a viable tool for reducing the crime rate is wrong-headed.

Two pages earlier, Mr. Williams himself had pointed out: "By 2004 federal data showed that Black Americans - 13 percent of the population - accounted for 37 percent of the violent crimes, 54 percent of arrests for robbery, and 51 percent of murders." He uses these statistics to illustrate "the need for Black Americans to take up their own war on drugs and on crime as a matter of personal responsibility," seemingly missing the fact that personal responsibility is just that - personal. Policing other people for criminality and drug use simply due to a shared skin tone has nothing to do with taking responsibility for one's own actions. And while Mr. Williams accuses Mr. Bennett of speaking "as if crime and blackness were genetically linked," there is nothing in Mr. Bennett's statement that implies this at all. Mr. Williams taking Mr. Bennett's comment out of context, or even ignoring the broader context of the statement, demonstrates some of the same knee-jerk defensiveness that he accuses the Black leadership and community of. And that leaves aside the fact that here again, Mr. Williams shows himself to not be a statistician. Federal data cannot show which groups account for what percentage of crimes unless there is both a 100% clearance rate, and a 100% accurate conviction rate.

Another hint of this can be seen on page 136, where Mr. Williams takes on the fashion statement of "sagging." (Letting one's pants ride very low on the body.) He says that the baggy pants "mimic the garb of black prisoners, who are forbidden to have belts." Why are "black prisoners" specified? Are non-black prisoners allowed to keep their belts?

In the end, my single primary quibble with the book is that while it takes pains to break down the idea that the Black community is helpless in the face of external pressures like poverty and White racism, it does seem to settle into the idea that Black individuals are helpless in the face of the negative social messages they receive from other Blacks, and can't be expected to reject or rise above them. This lends the book an air of fault-finding that may appeal to a White audience looking for absolution, but that does nothing to advance the understanding of a fix.

And when Mr. Williams speaks of White perceptions of Blacks, it's uncertain if he's referring to those people whose frame of reference on Blacks is almost entirely through the media, or if he's claiming that some of the negative images of Blacks that hip-hop and gangster culture have created are so corrosive as to be able to shout down people's face-to-face experiences, which seems unlikely.

In the end, it's kind of too bad. There is a point to be made that many of the problems that plague the Black community can be solved by the Black community. But breezy invocations of magical processes aren't a useful blueprint.

Definitions

Flying Blind

While the current coronavirus infection disease 2019 outbreak of acute respiratory infections is a problem, I'm not sure that it is the biggest problem that we're having here in the United States. Rather, the problem is the overall inability to understand how big the problem is. A lot of the measures put in place to slow the spread of the disease, along with the idea that slowing the spread is all we can, are predicated on an assumption that when any two people get together, that one of them is infected and the other is not. (Because if both of them are either infected or not infected, then contact between them can't spread the virus.) But while it makes sense to assume that any given person one encounters is both infected and not (one could call this Schrödinger's Infection) when there is no available information to guide the choice, once that information is available (at it generally is in South Korea), such imposed distancing and isolation make a lot less sense.

But at this point, it's not clear that this is being communicated. Granted, I don't spend much time following the news recently. A lot of what people are talking about seems to do a better job of frightening people than informing them. For instance, I don't mind radio reporters asking one another about "how they're doing." But if this is simply going to result in a chorus of people saying "I'm scared and don't know what to do," it's unsurprising that this would transmit itself to the audience. Also, headlines that do nothing other than proclaim how unready we are aren't helpful. They may prompt a click, but they also prompt anxiety.

But overall, it seems that once the initial finger-pointing over the lack of testing availability subsided, the topic was dropped. And so there seems to be an understanding that testing may never become widespread. I'm not sure that this was a good note to end that part of the discussion on. Improved access to information is going to be important; remaining in the dark forever is a recipe for disaster.

Please and Thank You

Yascha Mounk is unhappy that there are people who are not engaged in isolating themselves in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak here in the United States. He explains this behavior, which he considers dangerously risky and irresponsible by offering up four theories:

• Simple, honest ignorance of the threat.
• Selfishness.
• Callousness due to perceived distance from those potentially harmed.
• A deficit in people's moral instincts.

"This" Professor Mounk notes, "helps to explain why so many people have been ignoring public-health advice."

But I think that there's also a point that perhaps Professor Mounk is overlooking. He touches on it when he notes that in some places, people were acting in defiance of explicit orders. Public-health advice is different from a legal mandate.

When I worked with children, one of the things that I learned to do early on was to be very clear as to whether I was giving a child an instruction or making a request. And maintaining that separation improved my relationship with them, because they understood when they could say "no" to me and I would accept that.

The nature of a request, or the nature of advice, is that the recipient is still free to choose whether or not they comply. After all, public-health officials also advise that smokers to whatever they must to kick the habit, and we know that second-hand smoke carries risks. But I am not aware of anyone who expects that those people who still choose to smoke should be treated as if they unjustifiably flouted a politely worded command. The fact of the matter is that, for the most part, public-health officials are not empowered to demand the compliance of the public on specific issues. They can advise, and they can recommend, but they cannot simply order.

And perhaps more importantly for this situation, commentators shouldn't treat them as if they had that authority. Because it lets the people who do have the authority off the hook. If going out for coffee or meeting up with friends is so dangerous that it shouldn't be an option, then it shouldn't be an option. And those people and agencies that have been duly empowered to make such calls should formally make them.

The difference between ethics and law is that while ethics may seek to explain why the options for behavior in a given circumstance are limited or non-existent, law (and its close cousin, regulation) grants to power to demand obedience and exact punishments when disobeyed. Professor Mounk references a thought experiment by ethicist Peter Singer:

If you went for a walk in a park, and saw a little girl drowning in a pond, you would likely feel that you should help her, even if you might ruin your fancy shirt. Most people recognize a moral obligation to help another at relatively little cost to themselves.

But a "moral obligation" is still, in the end, a choice. There are likely some people out there who are convinced that allowing the child to drown would earn them the ire of whichever deity they follow, and it's likely that the Court of Public Opinion would have something to say about it, but the collective "we," as a society, have not determined that prioritizing one's "fancy shirt" above the life of someone else's child is an offense. There is no general, universal, duty to rescue in American jurisprudence outside of individuals or organizations that one may expect have taken some responsibility for another. (Note that there are different rules in different jurisdictions, and some do have laws on the books that require providing assistance to a person in danger, but typically, the United States does not define inaction on the part of a random member of the general public as either a tort or a crime.)

None of this is intended to be a call to leave people to drown, or to potentially infect them with a disease of widely variable consequences. But it is sort of a call to acknowledge that "public-health advice" and "executive or legislative actions" are not the same, and that invoking morality to justify an expectation that they be treated as if they were is not helpful.

What You Pay For

A system can, generally speaking, be Efficient OR Resilient. It cannot be both at once, although it can be neither. American society, again, generally speaking, is optimized for efficiency. The overall idea is for the metaphorical "pie" to be as large as possible; the reasoning behind this being the (disputed) idea that the larger the pie, the better off all of the stakeholders are, regardless of the relative sizes of their individual slices. (It's that last part where the dispute arises.)

And while the implementations of efficiency and resilience may have ethical implications for some (especially where broader social policies are concerned) the positions themselves are functional, rather than ethical concerns. That is to say that a resilient system is no ethically better or worse than an efficient one. There may be ethical concerns with allowing (or forcing) important systems to be neither, but again, that's a separate issue from choosing between the two.

There are a number of factors that go into the choice of making a system either efficient or resilient, and one of these is risk. Because whatever choice is made, part of the opportunity cost of that choice is the risk brought about by forgoing the other. And in this sense, whichever choice is made is generally not a solution. Instead, it is a trade-off.

Which can be a problem, in a society that doesn't care for trade-offs. Although it should be noted that on the scale of an entire society, especially one comprised of more than three-hundred million individuals (who all have their own interests to look after), a distaste for trade-offs is understandable. Historically speaking, the United States has hidden trade-offs by cost shifting. In effect, mainstream America could have its cake and eat it, too, through the simple expedient of taking someone else's cake. That someone else was either simply forgotten about, or cast as some lesser form of humanity that was not entitled to the cake that had been taken from them. But while recent history has seen an end (mostly) to the historical patterns of cost shifting that served in the past, the distaste for trade-offs has remained. And this has lead to the rise of a class of people who understand their occupation to be telling people that actually, a system can be perfectly Efficient and perfectly Resilient simultaneously. Just leave it to them.

This apparently impossible scheme works quite well in reality. Mainly because most systems, and that includes most societies, can simply pick one and go with it, often for very long periods of time. Because while there are risks to optimizing for either position, risks are not the same as inevitabilities, especially over relatively short timeframes.

The United States has been able to optimize for efficiency for quite some time, because it hasn't needed to be particularly resilient. Although one could make the case that it isn't particularly efficient, either; at least not as efficient as it appears to be on the surface. The ability of the United States to borrow vast sums of money at vanishingly low rates of interest has been able to quite effectively disguise the fact that resources haven't kept up with what the level of public goods and services that people and organizations (especially businesses) want. And a willingness to believe that some future burst of prosperity will provide the capital to painlessly repay those loans has been deployed to forestall serious examination or questioning.

But while any given risk may not be inevitable over a short timeframe, some risk will invariably pop up over an arbitrarily long timeframe. And sometimes, that arbitrarily long timeframe comes to pass at the worst time. It's like investing in stocks. Stock investing is best when done with a long time horizon, because over most given periods of time over a certain length, the investment will increase in value. But if that investment falls suddenly the day before one is due to sell, that's a problem.

There are ways to insure against this. To make the investment more resilient. But that directly impacts its efficiency. And if the investment wait until the day after one cashes out to go into a nosedive, that insurance becomes, effectively, deadweight loss.

I'm not sure if current events will make people any more amenable to the potential costs of lowering efficiency to purchase resiliency that they were before. After all, the people who have made it their occupation to convince people that cakes can be both had and eaten are still out there. And the idea of a world that Just Works, and in which neither lack of knowledge, non-participation or simple misfortune can upset the apple cart, like any attractive nuisance, will remain enticing.

Consequences

Matt Colvin, a Tennessee man who saw an opportunity when COVID-19 fears sparked panic buying of hand sanitizer, is facing an investigation for his actions, and the stockpile that he didn't donate has been confiscated for redistribution.

“We will not tolerate price gouging in this time of exceptional need, and we will take aggressive action to stop it,” Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III of Tennessee said in a news release.

Because Attorneys General like to be able to stand up and slap someone down in the name of protecting the public.

[Mr. Colvin] said the outpouring of hate has been scary for him and his family. He said people have incessantly called his cellphone, posted his address online and sent pizzas to his home. His inbox was flooded with ugly messages, he said. One email he shared with The Times said: “Your behavior is probably going to end up with someone killing you and your wife and your children.”

It remains to be seen if any investigation will be opened into the threats and harassment. I'm not holding my breath.

Death threats have become just a part of the online landscape in the United States. And for people who do Bad Things, like selling things for lots of money that people think should be inexpensive, the threat of murder is often spoken of as justified.

But in the end, the calculus is simple. Taking advantage of a panic to make a few bucks (or even a few hundred thousand bucks) is taken more seriously than threatening to kill someone. I wonder if, as a society, there is an understanding as to why.

Wind and Waves

For the most part, the greater Seattle area is not windy. There may be a breeze (typically when, for whatever reason, one would rather the air be still), but high winds are uncommon enough that they generally wreak havoc when they do put in an appearance. And winds that are fairly strong, yet not enough so to risk damaging anything, seem to be particularly rare. Today, such winds generally contented themselves with blowing along the shores of Puget Sound, stirring up the waves, and prompting people to wrap themselves in their coats and jackets.

Problem List

I was listening to the radio, and a local radio program has devoted pretty much the entire week to COVID-19. One thing that stood out for me was how, even though everyone on the program was calm while on-air, the whole exercise seemed primed to stoke people's fears. Mainly because the focus seemed to be squarely on what wasn't being done, who wasn't being protected and the other shortcomings of the response thus far. And this seems to be what drives people to panic.

In a past life, when I worked with children, one of the veterans told me the basic problem with attempting to give children a "don't do drugs" message. "All they hear," he told me, "is 'do drugs'." And a conversation of the response that gives equal time to the level of effort and the shortcomings of those efforts seems to work in the same way. And there are so many examples of stories that enumerate perceived or actual shortcomings of the response that they've become hard to avoid. Recently I read an online posting by someone effectively accusing every mid-sized or larger business in the area that was still open of gross negligence, because of something that they had read online in which someone had crunched some numbers and concluded that one in every four-hundred people in Washington State was likely infected with the virus. Well, crunched some numbers and made a number of assumptions, it turned out. When I pointed out that some of those assumptions (like the one that the deaths that had taken place were more or less evenly distributed across the state) were demonstrably untrue, there was silence. Which I understand. I'm not a public-health official, and don't have the initials "M.D." after my name. Another voice in the noise isn't what people need or want when it comes to lowering their anxiety.

I wonder if it's possible to escape. Any response less than a perfect one is going to have shortcomings. And since one can't please all of the people all of the time, there are going to be people for whom whatever response is enacted is not the right one. And their recitation of the the problems that they see becomes the basis for people understanding that not enough is being done, because it may not be evident to them that not everyone is on the same page.

Read All About It

I have been watching, with some interest, the "Today's news and views" feature on LinkedIn for a little over a week now. COVID-19-related stories have dominated the feed off and on, and for a time yesterday, they captured all ten slots on the list.

Without understanding how the algorithm works (or if there is an algorithm at all), it's impossible to determine why these particular stories made the list. Were these things that LinkedIn members had shared, or were they drawn from sources that were trending more broadly. Some of the stories appear to be specifically selected for presentation, so there's also that angle of things, but in the end, it's all opaque.

And so there's no way of knowing if this list is the chicken or the egg, especially with a sample side of a single event. It will be interesting to watch this going forward, and see what other events capture the imagination (of machines or people) in the same way.

At Any Speed

"The absolute and complete absence of the potential to come to harm" is a poor definition of "safety." But it seems to be the one that much of our society has settled on. And this unrealistic expectation is now biting society at large, as people attempt to ease their anxieties about the COVID-19 outbreak, through doing something, whether or not they actually understand how efficacious (or not) their actions are.

Fear, as in the feeling of alarm and/or anxiety caused by the anticipation or perception of danger, is adaptive. After all, the utterly fearless are likely to find themselves overmatched, at times with fatal consequences, by certain life circumstances. Lions and tigers and bears have many more natural weapons than we humans do. But fear is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to actually taking action to either forestall or alleviate danger.

But fear is motivating, and that is, perhaps, why it is so prevalent in our society. Prompting people to fear has proven itself to be an excellent way of driving change, especially for those people who are insulated from the collateral damage that may also occur. And because the difference between feeling safe and being safe is difficult to discern, responding to fear in a way that removes it often feels like having done something concrete and productive, even if, objectively, nothing is different.

Perhaps a broader understanding of a reasonable level of "safety" would serve to reduce the role of fear in day-to-day life, but that's only a guess. And it may be an impossibility in any event. Because society's fears have bitten it before, yet each time, society manages to forget. Perhaps because "safety" is simply a label that is applied to a sufficiently clement situation, rather than a genuine state that people are motivated to work towards.

Plum Blossoms

So the 2020 Primary election is officially tomorrow, which mainly means just that it's the start of vote counting, since it's a vote-by-mail election, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people who plant to vote have already mailed or dropped off their ballots.

And while the panic buying has calmed down, the local area is still freaking out about COVID-19.

But I'm burning out, so it's flower photo time.

Reasons

People's fears of COVID-19 is, as one might expect, leading to interesting... theories as to how to deal with it. An acquaintance informed me that Purell hand sanitizer was a foolproof defense against the disease. And the reason that it was now in short supply wasn't panic buying (despite what one may have heard or seen with one's own eyes); rather, Purell production had been shut down in order to allow drugmakers to produce a vaccine; one that would then be forced on the public in the name of corporate profits.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it's kind of lame. But it does illustrate something that a lot of these theories have in common; the pitting of different interests against one another; in this case, a trusted brand versus an untrusted industry. Of course, it's not much of a conspiracy without a villain. And these villains point to who people are afraid of, as much as the stories as a whole point to what people are afraid of.

And in this sense, these sorts of conspiracy theories not only provide a sense of order and control, but a sense of importance. The pharmaceutical-industrial complex needs something from the public that the public won't willingly give, and so the government is enlisted to force it from them. Presumably because this is easier than simply raising taxes and cutting someone a check. But conspiracies are emotional, rather than intellectual, constructs. The needs they serve are emotional, and so their composition matches.

Under Control

“This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying

This drama was in full effect over the weekend here in the Seattle area, with people rushing to local stores to buy up bottled water, rice, chicken, toilet paper, face masks, hand sanitizer and, judging from one cart I watched being pushed out of the local Costco, Jack Daniels. It all struck me as more than a little nuts. But if University of British Columbia professor Steven Taylor is correct as I've quoted him above, then it kind of makes sense.

Interestingly, for me, anyway, there didn't seem to me much of a middle ground between "Keep calm, it's not that big a deal" and "Oh my God, we're all going to die." I have several good laughs with store employees, as we wondered together just what all of the fuss was about. There was a consensus that it was too bad that aliens weren't invading; that, at least, would have resulted in an interesting show. To be sure, I live not far from "ground zero" of the local outbreak. The old-age home where residents and staff alike have become ill is only about five or six miles south of where I live.

But there's a part of me that wonders if there isn't something bigger at work in all of this. According to the BBC article I was reading, panic buying, ironically, is something that people do for feel in control. And while the coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak seems tailor-made to trigger people's fears that an out-of-control epidemic is about to sweep through their communities, perhaps there is a greater feeling of being out of control that people are attempting to manage. Of course, panic buying doesn't seem much like being in control, hence the irony, but people cope with things in the ways that make sense to them, not to observers.

I was curious about how much of the food that was being purchased, especially the fresh food, would end up in a landfill when it was all said and done, and the general consensus was "a lot of it." On the other hand, however, I did learn that there are places that will accept returns of unopened nonperishables. Presumably, the once-common fear of food tampering has abated.

Out Of Sight

South, and a bit East, of downtown Seattle, in the International District (sometimes also called Chinatown), Interstate 5 is above ground level, but not by much. There is a parking lot there. And there are tents. The number varies, but there are usually a least a half-dozen. It's one of the smaller of the many encampments that homeless people have created around the city. And this one is particularly visible. There are more tents further south, but they're scattered among the trees along the side of the expressway, and so while they are somewhat visible in the Winter if you look up, when the foliage is out, they're much more hidden.

These tends are out in the open. I don't go to the International District all that often, so I don't know if the residents rotate in an out, or if there are some people who are always there. Their tents are memorable only in the aggregate; I doubt I'd recall one if I saw it again, unless I had a picture, like this one, to compare it to.

We've come to treat homelessness as some sort of intractable problem, which really isn't true. The intractable problem is how to end homelessness, without imposing costs on people who a) don't want to pay them and b) can vote out of office anyone who attempts to make them pay. As a region, there is a desire to have the cake of big employers with well-paid workforces yet eat the cake of having land-use restrictions that prevent housing from scaling as quickly as hiring can. And since those land-use restrictions have resulted in a lot of legacy homeowners being very "house-rich," policies that negatively impact their home equity will be enacted over their dead bodies.

And so there are tents. For the simple reason that more people want to live here than there are homes for. And no-one has found a way to solve the problem that doesn't change one of those things.