Frozen banana makes a good ice cube for hot cereal.
Rolled oats with soy flour mixed in water, microwaved.
The milk I added after was not enough to cool it so I could eat it without burning my tongue.
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Churn for Churn's Sake
Google's Blogger (Blogspot) editor has suddenly become 'new'.
(Okay, not really 'suddenly'. And 'Help' is no help, whether the 'user community' or the official help line.)
So I'm trying out the 'new'. But all the worst old bugs are still there, and they've added some new bad bugs, as well.
One thing that drives me nuts is that I can't discard an edit. Even if the bugs have destroyed my work, the destructive results are automagically saved over what I had before. This is a bug in the design -- a design flaw. A failed design.
I haven't yet figured out how to leave off editing without publishing, except for hitting the browser's back button or just closing the browser window. To me, that feels too much like shutting the computer down by pulling the power cord.
The Enter key now means paragraph break instead of line break. To get a line break, you have to use shift-Enter. That's arbitrarily changing the meaning of the Enter key -- and why? Turn 40 years of tradition upside down, just because some college intern has been indoctrinated in the ideals and idolatries of that perversion of markup languages, XML? (Once upon a time, I thought XML was a good thing.)
Arbitrary changes are another of those practices direct from the worst practices handbook.
Too many things have changed without explanation, too much expects the user to understand the new metaphor (like the hamburger mark meaning something specific), too much expects the connection to be constant, undelayed, and following the latest changes to the Internet Specifications. (If your Internet connection coughs, be patient. It'll either bomb out on you or recover, eventually.)
Importing images into a blog that was started with the legacy editor will do stupid things. The image won't drop where the cursor is, it will drop at the next paragraph break, which is probably at the end of the document. Here's how I fixed that with the chapter of the novel that I'm currently working on:
- The pencil at the top left -- click the tiny triangle to its right and select HTML view.
- Click in the edit window, then right click and select all.
- Copy the HTML and paste it into an open, empty Gedit window. Any plain text editor that can match and replace on end-of-line/newline will do.
- Type a paragraph start
<p>
at the beginning of the document and a paragraph end</p>
at the end. - Replace all line break pairs with paragraph breaks split by newline. In Gedit, that's
- ctrl-H,
- check the "enable regular expressions" button,
- and replace
<br /><br />
with</p>\n<p>
- Check that the results are sane before selecting all and copying to a new blogger document. Keep the old document in case it doesn't work well.
- Now you can insert an image at any paragraph break.
The new editor was was supposed to have table editing, but that appears to have disappeared. As it usually does. HTML tables are too ambiguous for a general editor. Can't college students be given a preview on the implications of NP-completeness in their freshman year?
And it looks like Google has decided pop-up windows are no longer a vulnerable feature in web browsers or something, because the 'new' way to do previews, and, apparently, interact with the user about what to do with an open document, has Firefox asking me if I want to change pop-up settings. I have to give blogspot/blogger permission to impersonate Firefox to interact with the editor.
I'm not going to do that. That's yet another from the worst practices handbook.
Reporting bugs? How do you take a screen shot of yourself hitting the Enter key? How do you get the pop-up blocker in the screen-shot when the screen-shot is limited to the active window? And how do you get feedback, to be sure that anyone has even looked at your bug report, much less understood it?
And let's not forget that intermittent Internet access just makes all the bugs more prominent.
And Blogger/Blogspot/Google is now going to force everyone using Blogspot to use the new editor. You can still revert to the 'legacy' editor, but it is no longer functional. And the next time you log on, it has you back in the 'new' editor. And you get the message saying "You will be moved. Resistance is futile."
Why is new necessary if it doesn't fix anything?
You may wonder why I use Blogspot if I have so many complaints about it.
It was convenient. That's the only reason.
It was convenient. No longer. Apparently, I will now be migrating my blogs away from Blogspot. I've migrated before, I will do so again.
And I suppose that means my gmail account will be terminated within a few years.
Why does a company as rich as Google feel it necessary to force us to accept churn for churn's sake?
Sunday, September 6, 2020
F*** Is a Euphemism for Foul
When I was in my twenties, and realized that swearing in the privacy of my own car at the other drivers and their bad driving habits was getting me into bad habits of my own, God taught me how to divert the Tourette's reaction:
(If you're curious, the lyrics from The Fixx's hit song probably helped me focus on saying what one means -- one thing does lead to another. But I had been aware of the idea well before then, as from Matthew 5: 37 -- "Yea (for) yea, nay (for) nay".)
But the lesson of saying what I mean has helped me to divert myself from Tourette's syndrome-like behavior on a number of occasions, and has actually helped me learn to communicate better. (I'm still pretty bad at communicating.)
(BTW, you do know that "Oh, my God!" is actually the beginning of a prayer -- usually for help, right? "Oh, my God, please help me not to be so jealous of my neighbor!" or some such.)
Recently, stress has been building up again, and I find myself referring to Bill Cosby's euphemistic substitutions
And I say things like
although those are all a bit more judgemental words than I should be using, especially the last one.
Well, maybe
is not so overly judgemental.
The thing is, when we say what we mean, we often find that we care more about other people and what happens to them than we think we want to admit. What we really mean is
And I recall today something that occurred to me many years ago -- that "fuck", "shit", "hell", "damn", etc. are actually the euphemisms. We use them when for some reason we are too tired, too embarrassed, too lazy (or too something!) to say what we really mean, or (especially) what we really should mean.
(There is some non-literary irony in this. Erstwhile expletives are developing new, softer semantics. For instance, in many cases, in the local vernacular,
no longer means
Say what you mean!
You don't really mean you want that driver who cut in front of you to be condemned to hell. You mean you wish he'd drive better. So that's what you should say:And the conversation continued, with a little discussion of some priorities I had misplaced that were causing me stress.
Drive better!You don't really mean you want to rape the car (or the driver) that turned left in front of you and would have caused a really bad accident if your reactions had been slower. Even if he or she won't hear you, instead of "F*** you!" say,
Quit that!"And you really, really, really don't mean you want the stop light that turned red when you thought you wanted to go through it to melt down into excrement. This one is a little harder. Instead of "S***!", Say,
Slow down!
Drive safe!
Getting there a couple of minutes later is better than having someone call from the hospital to tell them I won't be making it into work any more.
(If you're curious, the lyrics from The Fixx's hit song probably helped me focus on saying what one means -- one thing does lead to another. But I had been aware of the idea well before then, as from Matthew 5: 37 -- "Yea (for) yea, nay (for) nay".)
But the lesson of saying what I mean has helped me to divert myself from Tourette's syndrome-like behavior on a number of occasions, and has actually helped me learn to communicate better. (I'm still pretty bad at communicating.)
(BTW, you do know that "Oh, my God!" is actually the beginning of a prayer -- usually for help, right? "Oh, my God, please help me not to be so jealous of my neighbor!" or some such.)
Recently, stress has been building up again, and I find myself referring to Bill Cosby's euphemistic substitutions
Fow! Fi-eau! Fow-fau!(I forget from which routine.)
And I say things like
- Foul!
- That's a foul! (red card)
- (Things are all) fouled up!
- You (committer of) foul (deeds)!
although those are all a bit more judgemental words than I should be using, especially the last one.
Well, maybe
I call foul!
is not so overly judgemental.
The thing is, when we say what we mean, we often find that we care more about other people and what happens to them than we think we want to admit. What we really mean is
- Play fair!
- Let's do that again, right this time.
- What a mess! Let's try to clean it up.
- Is doing that going to make you happy?
And I recall today something that occurred to me many years ago -- that "fuck", "shit", "hell", "damn", etc. are actually the euphemisms. We use them when for some reason we are too tired, too embarrassed, too lazy (or too something!) to say what we really mean, or (especially) what we really should mean.
(There is some non-literary irony in this. Erstwhile expletives are developing new, softer semantics. For instance, in many cases, in the local vernacular,
F*** off!
no longer means
Go somewhere I don't have to watch and play with your genitals by yourself!so much as
Go take a time-out.Still, since the expletives are somewhat ambiguous, I think it's better to try to understand what we mean and say it.)
Sunday, August 23, 2020
A Not-quite Typical Day for the Mail
3000 apartments.
130 items of tracked mail,
roughly 3000 items of untracked mail.
Direct visits to fifteen apartments for registered/priority mail or mail that wouldn't fit in the mailbox or the parcel lockers.
Ten hours – two hours longer than usual, about 25% more mail and apartments. (We each took extra to cover for co-workers who had family taken down by dehydration and the heat and such.)
And it rained about 4:30 in the afternoon, but mostly cleared up while I was in the mail rooms of the apartment blocks I was working in at the time, which cooled things off -- which was nice.
And it rained about 4:30 in the afternoon, but mostly cleared up while I was in the mail rooms of the apartment blocks I was working in at the time, which cooled things off -- which was nice.
My body hurts.
[JMR202009061938:
This one took me down a bit. Haven't quite recovered, even though I haven't yet had to take an unscheduled day off. haven't been able to match my speed for this one yet. Hopefully the heat will cut back after this typhoon passes. Would be nice if I could turn my writing into a career instead.
]
[JMR202009061938:
This one took me down a bit. Haven't quite recovered, even though I haven't yet had to take an unscheduled day off. haven't been able to match my speed for this one yet. Hopefully the heat will cut back after this typhoon passes. Would be nice if I could turn my writing into a career instead.
]
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Fake Account Activity Phishing (Was it really you?)
Lately, I've been seeing an increase in a certain type of social engineering -- aka, phishing for confirmation that my email address is live or phishing for passwords, etc.
Generally the subject line is something designed to cause you to feel alarmed:
It might be more low key, though:
Of course, it could be Twitter, or it could be Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Line, Zoom, TikTok, Youtube, or any popular SNS service. Or a chat service like Discord. Or it could be an on-line merchant or delivery service -- Amazon, Kindle, Apple, eBay, DHL, FedEx, UPS, your country's post office, whatever. It might even be your country's tax or immigration agency.
It could be any service that operates on-line.
That is to say, it might claim to be any of the above or more. People can claim anything.
Here are some typical messages:
Or, similarly,
Or, in a slight variation,
And this is kind of sneaky:
And it could be for other things than password reset, like an order confirmation:
Or a delivery time confirmation:
Of course, if you're not expecting these, you immediately suspect it's phishing. Don't you?
Maybe not the suspicious account activity?
Cardinal rule #1:
Always check the message headers.
Make sure the from: line has something reasonable. Random freemail accounts are not reasonable for this kind of message:
is clearly not an address Apple Care would use. Also, long to: long lists of people you don't know are red flags, even if your name and your e-mail server is in there:
Ask yourself, are you expecting some message related to this? If you do not participate in Pinterest and you get a message from them about your account, it almost certainly is not a valid message.
If you aren't sure, and you feel you need to be sure, you can always contact the claimed source by some other means. Find their phone number or e-mail in their website and contact them directly.
And there usually is no good reason. Live links in e-mail messages are just bad practice, even though almost everybody uses them now.
If necessary, you can right-click the link, use the context menu to copy it, and paste it into an empty text editor document so you can give the link the benefit of attention from your eyeballs.
Again, look for reasonable URLs. A message from Pinterest should not contain a URL for a free website server in China or Russia:
Is just not a link you should ever try to jump to, with a direct click or otherwise.
Again, go to the website in question using publicly known URLs to find somebody to ask, if it's important. If it's not important, ignore it.
People can claim anything. One of the first rules for protecting yourself is to doubt claims you have no reason to believe.
Another important rule is to do the hard part of the research yourself. Learn how to look at headers and the contents of URLs.
This post is not intended to teach you how to do the hard part, just putting out a heads-up:
Be careful what you click.\
Generally the subject line is something designed to cause you to feel alarmed:
Subj: SUSPICIOUS TWITTER ACCOUNT ACTIVITY
It might be more low key, though:
Subj: Confirmation request for Zoom password reset.
Of course, it could be Twitter, or it could be Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Line, Zoom, TikTok, Youtube, or any popular SNS service. Or a chat service like Discord. Or it could be an on-line merchant or delivery service -- Amazon, Kindle, Apple, eBay, DHL, FedEx, UPS, your country's post office, whatever. It might even be your country's tax or immigration agency.
It could be any service that operates on-line.
That is to say, it might claim to be any of the above or more. People can claim anything.
Here are some typical messages:
XYZ tried to log in to your Google account. Is this okay?
- Ignore
- Report
Or, similarly,
A login to Facebook was attempted from phone number 123-4567-8900.
- This was me. it was safe.
- This was not me. Report it.
Or, in a slight variation,
Confirm your password reset for Pinterest.
If this was not you, you may safely ignore this message.
- Reset.
- Do not reset.
And this is kind of sneaky:
Click here to confirm unsubscribing from the PQR mailing list:
- UNSUBSCRIBE ME NOW!
- Please keep my subscription valid.
- Report SPAM
And it could be for other things than password reset, like an order confirmation:
Please confirm your order for frozen pizza dough.
- Yes, please send it.
- No, I did not order it.
Or a delivery time confirmation:
You have requested delivery from Ebay user MNO between
10:00 and 12:00 this morning.
- I can receive it then.
- I can't receive it then, please reschedule me.
Of course, if you're not expecting these, you immediately suspect it's phishing. Don't you?
Maybe not the suspicious account activity?
Cardinal rule #1:
Always check the message headers.
Make sure the from: line has something reasonable. Random freemail accounts are not reasonable for this kind of message:
from: applecare_2349fasdfer43234@pink.freemail.com
is clearly not an address Apple Care would use. Also, long to: long lists of people you don't know are red flags, even if your name and your e-mail server is in there:
to: jack.rees09@sannet.ne.jp,joel.rees52@sannet.ne.jp,
joel.ross12@sannet.ne.jp,jill.russet69@sannet.ne.jp,
janehaskel314@sannet.ne.jp,jody35@sannet.ne.jp,
james7734@sannet.ne.jp,...
Ask yourself, are you expecting some message related to this? If you do not participate in Pinterest and you get a message from them about your account, it almost certainly is not a valid message.
If you aren't sure, and you feel you need to be sure, you can always contact the claimed source by some other means. Find their phone number or e-mail in their website and contact them directly.
Never click a link in an e-mail message without a really good reason.
And there usually is no good reason. Live links in e-mail messages are just bad practice, even though almost everybody uses them now.
If necessary, you can right-click the link, use the context menu to copy it, and paste it into an empty text editor document so you can give the link the benefit of attention from your eyeballs.
Again, look for reasonable URLs. A message from Pinterest should not contain a URL for a free website server in China or Russia:
https://bot5773857734.serversrus.cn/asdkj324w34asd334/confirm-password
Is just not a link you should ever try to jump to, with a direct click or otherwise.
Again, go to the website in question using publicly known URLs to find somebody to ask, if it's important. If it's not important, ignore it.
People can claim anything. One of the first rules for protecting yourself is to doubt claims you have no reason to believe.
Another important rule is to do the hard part of the research yourself. Learn how to look at headers and the contents of URLs.
This post is not intended to teach you how to do the hard part, just putting out a heads-up:
Be careful what you click.\
Monday, May 4, 2020
Vector Multipliers
I guess I'm being too oblique.
My cousin just shared this onBassHook Facebook:
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-03/what-do-you-do-with-a-billion-taters-and-the-folks-who-grow-them?
(If you load it too many times, it'll throw up a paywall.)
Billions of potatoes, no place to put them.
What is missing from the picture?
Similar volumes of lettuce, cabbage, wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, ..., beef, chicken, ...
All of this food must be moved from the source to some sort of consumer, or they will spoil. (Yes, with our current methods of production, we are going to have to slaughter a lot of meat that will not be going to the usual markets.)
Spoil? Is that so bad? Lakes of vodka, whiskey, .... What can be bad about that?
If only the spoilage would be so tame.
Rats. Flies. Fleas.
Germs. Bacteria.
More virus.
How did this pandemic start?
Well, let's look at history for clues. Spanish flu? Going back even farther, the black death and the bubonic plague?
It's rather simple. (Yes, I'm repeating myself.) When you get too many people in one place without proper hygiene, with too much stress from overwork, in too close quarters with the cattle, various biologically active material brews up disease vectors. Then the vermin (Remember, everyone is too busy to be clean.) and cattle spread those vectors every direction they go.
Why do people live in such conditions? Because there's no room for them on the planet?
No, there is plenty of empty space on the planet, if we used it well. They are just too poor to go there, or their governments (or pseudo-governments) are too unwilling to let them go, or both.
But overpopulation!!!!!
... is also primarily a feature of large populations without sufficient material means, and many of the reasons for that are known.
And, as I say, overpopulation is more a problem of people in power being unwilling for the poor to go away, because they depend on the population of the poor to prop up their illusions of power.
We live in one of the most materially productive periods in history.
How productive are we?
Even without the problems of having no market to sell potatoes and other products, we, as a planetary society, dispose of enough product to feed all the poor people on the planet, and then some.
If I have not mistaken the math, even with about half our total population not being directly involved in producing the basic material necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, we are productive enough to feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate twice the current population, if we were only effective at distributing it all.
In spite of that level of productive, our leaders in the industries are still engaging us in a race to the bottom, still trying to raise production levels so that they can compete for even more power (as they imagine it).
If you think that your politics is clean from this, look again. Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Communists, Socialists, everybody is in on it.
Why? politics requires power. Power requires profit. Profit is most easily generated in a hurry by a race to the bottom.
I commented earlier that the universal pseudo-quarantine had some good side effects, in terms of giving families time to get acquainted with one another again. It was a good thing, for a week -- or even a month. We could have recovered from it at that level.
Now farmers, who can least afford it, are paying from their own pockets to move the potatoes, not to the usual markets, but to anyone who will claim them. This is actually not a bad thing, if the lenders come to their senses and accept responsibility for creating the situation that requires this in the first place -- if they will simply accept the right and proper financial burden of their own fixation on hyper-competition.
How can we prevent the coming pandemic aftershocks? How can we stop the death toll at the current projection of 350,000?
Let's be serious.
The current supply chains are rather pathological. They rely on unbalance and excessive consumerism.
We are the most productive this planet has ever seen, but a huge piece of our production is wasted moving product halfway around the world. (Or farther. We are really, really inefficient.)
We are the most productive this planet has ever seen, but well more than half of us are suffering from lack of material necessities and, at the same time, suffering from overwork.
We are destroying enough product to provide for everyone on the planet, and yet we are still trying to find ways to work harder.
And we are squelching the planet's ability to be productive. See the lakes drying up, etc.
What is wrong with this picture?
Could we provide enough if we depended more on local production?
Would the current pandemic have spread so much if we weren't ordering things from all over the globe?
My current job is delivering things. If I have a symptom-less case of the 2019 version Coronavirus, I'm going to bring something like a hundred households a day into contact with the infection vectors.
After the first week, the universal pseudo-quarantine has actually been magnifying the epidemic.
Does this mean we should have lots of raves?
Does this mean we should give up the sudden shift to education methods that are more home-centered with on-line support and reporting?
Does this mean we should go back to sixty-hour work weeks? Or even forty, when twenty will do plenty?
Twenty hour work weeks would give us time to learn the things that will help us avoid the next pandemic, you know. From history.
Twenty hour work weeks would also give us time to learn about the traditions we have received from our ancestors, and honor our ancestors by learning to keep the good traditions and discard the bad ones.
Twenty hour work weeks would put less pressure on us to try to force ourselves and our families to conform to meaningless norms.
Twenty hour work weeks would give us time to work on the supposedly non-profitable problems, like reducing the negative ecological impact of our economic activities.
In the immediate cause, twenty hour work weeks would give us time to help farmers move excessive potatoes from the places where they are going to cause problems to places where they can be usefully and meaningfully consumed.
And twenty hour work-weeks would give us time to learn how to take care of the basics of nutrition and hygiene, the lack of which is one of the reasons the virus spreads so easily in the first place.
Twenty hour work weeks would give us more time to make life meaningful, and would still leave us producing enough for other people's needs.
How could this be done?
Speaking in the ideal, Bill Gates is easy to pick on. I'm not going to enumerate his sins here, but he clearly made excessive profits on his ephemeral products. He should not be "donating" hundreds of millions to charities (mostly profitable to himself). He should not have that money, period. And he should have gotten himself out of the way long ago, so more talented men of better vision than he could have advanced the information industry much, much farther along than it is today.
But Bill Gates is only one very prominent among many.
No one is justified in amassing more than enough to retire five times over. When you have that much, you should boot yourself out of the industry you made your money in and devote the rest of your life to service without remuneration.
That would leave men of better vision than you (because they are not buffered from their lacks by excessive money) to take the lead.
[JMR202007121717:
(I've failed to repeat the conclusion. Perhaps I thought it would be obvious enough if I just said it once.)
If those who have amassed such fortunes weren't sitting on their fortunes and driving the race to the bottom, ordinary individuals could be paid more to work less.
Now, some people think that paying people more to work less is some sort of sin.
But when it means people don't have to destroy their own health to keep food on their families' tables, it is most definitely not a sin. Or a crime.
When people can take care of their families' needs without destroying their own health, most of the paths that disease vectors follow in turning into epidemics are naturally closed off, and the remainder can be more easily closed off without disrupting external society -- without disrupting business.
]
My cousin just shared this on
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-03/what-do-you-do-with-a-billion-taters-and-the-folks-who-grow-them?
(If you load it too many times, it'll throw up a paywall.)
Billions of potatoes, no place to put them.
What is missing from the picture?
Similar volumes of lettuce, cabbage, wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, ..., beef, chicken, ...
All of this food must be moved from the source to some sort of consumer, or they will spoil. (Yes, with our current methods of production, we are going to have to slaughter a lot of meat that will not be going to the usual markets.)
Spoil? Is that so bad? Lakes of vodka, whiskey, .... What can be bad about that?
If only the spoilage would be so tame.
Rats. Flies. Fleas.
Germs. Bacteria.
More virus.
How did this pandemic start?
Well, let's look at history for clues. Spanish flu? Going back even farther, the black death and the bubonic plague?
It's rather simple. (Yes, I'm repeating myself.) When you get too many people in one place without proper hygiene, with too much stress from overwork, in too close quarters with the cattle, various biologically active material brews up disease vectors. Then the vermin (Remember, everyone is too busy to be clean.) and cattle spread those vectors every direction they go.
Why do people live in such conditions? Because there's no room for them on the planet?
No, there is plenty of empty space on the planet, if we used it well. They are just too poor to go there, or their governments (or pseudo-governments) are too unwilling to let them go, or both.
But overpopulation!!!!!
... is also primarily a feature of large populations without sufficient material means, and many of the reasons for that are known.
And, as I say, overpopulation is more a problem of people in power being unwilling for the poor to go away, because they depend on the population of the poor to prop up their illusions of power.
We live in one of the most materially productive periods in history.
How productive are we?
Even without the problems of having no market to sell potatoes and other products, we, as a planetary society, dispose of enough product to feed all the poor people on the planet, and then some.
If I have not mistaken the math, even with about half our total population not being directly involved in producing the basic material necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, we are productive enough to feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate twice the current population, if we were only effective at distributing it all.
In spite of that level of productive, our leaders in the industries are still engaging us in a race to the bottom, still trying to raise production levels so that they can compete for even more power (as they imagine it).
If you think that your politics is clean from this, look again. Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Communists, Socialists, everybody is in on it.
Why? politics requires power. Power requires profit. Profit is most easily generated in a hurry by a race to the bottom.
I commented earlier that the universal pseudo-quarantine had some good side effects, in terms of giving families time to get acquainted with one another again. It was a good thing, for a week -- or even a month. We could have recovered from it at that level.
Now farmers, who can least afford it, are paying from their own pockets to move the potatoes, not to the usual markets, but to anyone who will claim them. This is actually not a bad thing, if the lenders come to their senses and accept responsibility for creating the situation that requires this in the first place -- if they will simply accept the right and proper financial burden of their own fixation on hyper-competition.
How can we prevent the coming pandemic aftershocks? How can we stop the death toll at the current projection of 350,000?
Let's be serious.
The current supply chains are rather pathological. They rely on unbalance and excessive consumerism.
We are the most productive this planet has ever seen, but a huge piece of our production is wasted moving product halfway around the world. (Or farther. We are really, really inefficient.)
We are the most productive this planet has ever seen, but well more than half of us are suffering from lack of material necessities and, at the same time, suffering from overwork.
We are destroying enough product to provide for everyone on the planet, and yet we are still trying to find ways to work harder.
And we are squelching the planet's ability to be productive. See the lakes drying up, etc.
What is wrong with this picture?
Could we provide enough if we depended more on local production?
Would the current pandemic have spread so much if we weren't ordering things from all over the globe?
My current job is delivering things. If I have a symptom-less case of the 2019 version Coronavirus, I'm going to bring something like a hundred households a day into contact with the infection vectors.
After the first week, the universal pseudo-quarantine has actually been magnifying the epidemic.
Does this mean we should have lots of raves?
Does this mean we should give up the sudden shift to education methods that are more home-centered with on-line support and reporting?
Does this mean we should go back to sixty-hour work weeks? Or even forty, when twenty will do plenty?
Twenty hour work weeks would give us time to learn the things that will help us avoid the next pandemic, you know. From history.
Twenty hour work weeks would also give us time to learn about the traditions we have received from our ancestors, and honor our ancestors by learning to keep the good traditions and discard the bad ones.
Twenty hour work weeks would put less pressure on us to try to force ourselves and our families to conform to meaningless norms.
Twenty hour work weeks would give us time to work on the supposedly non-profitable problems, like reducing the negative ecological impact of our economic activities.
In the immediate cause, twenty hour work weeks would give us time to help farmers move excessive potatoes from the places where they are going to cause problems to places where they can be usefully and meaningfully consumed.
And twenty hour work-weeks would give us time to learn how to take care of the basics of nutrition and hygiene, the lack of which is one of the reasons the virus spreads so easily in the first place.
Twenty hour work weeks would give us more time to make life meaningful, and would still leave us producing enough for other people's needs.
How could this be done?
Speaking in the ideal, Bill Gates is easy to pick on. I'm not going to enumerate his sins here, but he clearly made excessive profits on his ephemeral products. He should not be "donating" hundreds of millions to charities (mostly profitable to himself). He should not have that money, period. And he should have gotten himself out of the way long ago, so more talented men of better vision than he could have advanced the information industry much, much farther along than it is today.
But Bill Gates is only one very prominent among many.
No one is justified in amassing more than enough to retire five times over. When you have that much, you should boot yourself out of the industry you made your money in and devote the rest of your life to service without remuneration.
That would leave men of better vision than you (because they are not buffered from their lacks by excessive money) to take the lead.
[JMR202007121717:
(I've failed to repeat the conclusion. Perhaps I thought it would be obvious enough if I just said it once.)
If those who have amassed such fortunes weren't sitting on their fortunes and driving the race to the bottom, ordinary individuals could be paid more to work less.
Now, some people think that paying people more to work less is some sort of sin.
But when it means people don't have to destroy their own health to keep food on their families' tables, it is most definitely not a sin. Or a crime.
When people can take care of their families' needs without destroying their own health, most of the paths that disease vectors follow in turning into epidemics are naturally closed off, and the remainder can be more easily closed off without disrupting external society -- without disrupting business.
]
Masks, Protection, Courtesy, and the Virus
I learned the custom of masks here in Japan about 40 years ago, back when it was definitely an unfamiliar sight outside Japan, and when many fellow 外人 (gaijin) here made fun of the practice.
The first guy who explained it to me was my trainer as a missionary. As most missionaries are, he was not perfect, but his explanation was later confirmed by Japanese people I trust. This was not one of the things he misunderstood.
I am not an expert. I know what I'm talking about, but there are many things I don't know. Nonetheless, I think many people are operating without even this much knowledge about masks.
One, they are not, by any means, perfect protection.
Even the best masks, the ones used in surgery when the patient is immuno-compromised, are not much use long-term. Just as needles should never be re-used, the masks worn in surgery should be disposed of after finishing the surgery (and sometimes replaced periodically even during a single surgery).
[JMR202005261910 added:
I had a surgical nurse tell me I'm wrong about the above. I guess she wasn't in the operating room where I was operated on. Not every operation requires the same level of protection. But she does acknowledge washing her mask daily.
]
Why? Spattered blood or other body fluids quickly soak through the mask. Likewise, moisture, spit, phlegm, etc. from the breath of the person wearing the mask soaks through the other direction.
Faces itch under the mask, and the mask slips, so the mask tends to be touched by either the wearer's hands or an assistant's hands. This offers opportunity for transferring biologically active matter both ways across the barrier.
(Biologically active matter -- virus particles, bacteria, infected body cells, etc.)
Ordinary masks are much more porous than surgical masks, and the wearers tend not to replace them every fifteen minutes to half-an-hour. (That would be rather difficult, really, both economically and logistically -- and ecologically, come to think of it.)
[JMR202005261925 added:
I know I'm speaking in extremes in the above. The point I'm trying to make is that masks are not magic shields that block all the bad stuff and let the good stuff through no matter how long you wear them. Don't go to a rave wearing a mask and expect the mask to protect you.
]
Using terminology from information security, masks are a low wall or a speed bump.
Like the low wall and the speed bump, they can actually make problems worse when we refuse to use sense when we use them.
So why wear them at all, other than wearing true surgical masks in surgery?
[JMR202005262020 added:
Someone might bring Japan's infection and fatality rates up as empirical evidence. Yes, it is evidence, but you should understand that Japan has a long tradition with masks and other habits than help to limit the spread of aerosol spread diseases.
You do know about bowing instead of shaking hands, right? Well, even that is not that simple, but it's there. You aren't getting the whole story about Japan in the news.
Japanese people have been effectively voluntarily limiting a lot of the more dangerous activities.
Yes, there was an order, but it had, in the western mode of expression, no teeth -- other than social pressure, which is pretty powerful in Japan. Many of the less necessary businesses have been shuttered for the last couple of months, and, while there were a couple of the "live events" that Japanese entertainers, artists, comedians, etc., sometimes hold in the days after the order, people came away infected, and that fact was heavily reported and made the topic of talk shows and comedians' acts. Serious social pressure not to hold any more.
Sumo and professional baseball put on hold. The national high school baseball tournament, which is as big as the Japan Series in the fall, canceled for this year. (Probably. It might get revived if things go well now the order has been lifted.)
]
Japan is a country of mixed-mid-to-high population density. Masks tend to be used more commonly in population centers.
Close quarters requires building walls that don't make sense in less densely populated places.
Many of Japan's differences in customs have to do with common-sense differences between low-density environments and high-density environments.
Many of the common-sense customs have been altered against reason and sense over the last three-quarters of a century, and here is one. Wearing a mask and going to work is actually a self-contradictory behavior. If you need to wear a mask, you shouldn't be going to work, whether you are trying to protect yourself or your co-workers.
Well, unless your job is important.
(Ahem.) Unless your job is especially important, because every job is important. And unless your job is not so important that passing a common cold among your co-workers would be a bad thing.
Hmm. Maybe I'm getting sidetracked, doing a bit of hand-waving at topics this post doesn't have room to tackle. Back to the point.
Okay, so the traditional use of the mask was for cases where you were a wee-bit sick, but your need to be at work or to go to the market outweighed your need for rest and isolation. (And outweighed their need for you to be getting rest and isolation.)
Wearing a mask every day, long term, was neurotic behavior, but your friends would put up with it because they had their times of paranoia and neurosis, as well.
And, here's the kicker: Even though the mask can be counter-effective if you misuse it, for such things as the common cold, the speed-bump has regularly helped slow the spread until everybody developed resistance. This is repeating in the current case.
What kinds of behavior are counter-effective?
Counter-effective mask behaviors include such things as when you fail to wash your washable mask at least once a day, or dispose of your disposable mask in an appropriate garbage pail. Or regularly take it off and set it down where it can aid in the spread of germs.
Or such as wearing a mask so you can go out when you're coughing up so much that it gets soaked by your phlegm before you get home. Or decide that, because you are wearing the mask you don't need to wash your hands or stay home from work or stay away from public places like the market.
[JMR202005262040 added:
And there is also the recent news from China about a couple of students who were made to wear masks while they were given exercise tests, who died from respiratory/circulatory failure which was likely induced by the high-filtration masks. Wearing a mask with excessive filtration is another mistake.
]
(Masks can be good while you're sleeping, to keep the throat and sinuses moist -- until the mask slips down, anyway, and if they aren't too tight to let you sleep. And if you aren't reacting to the inevitable lint. In this particular use, it's good to get the mask wet before you go to bed.)
For the individual, wearing a mask probably does not stop you from getting infected. It does slow the infection process down enough that your body can often fight it off, or you can get by with just catching a mild case.
(In surgery, if a doctor has symptoms, he or she is going to postpone the surgery or get someone else to do it, instead of depending on even surgical masks, etc.)
[JMR202005262045 added:
Related information, one medical study estimates that the rate of asymptomatic infection of SARS-CoV-2 in Kobe is probably 3%.
]
In groups (in the calculus of social behavior), having many speed-bumps and low walls helps slow the rate of spread down enough to prevent an epidemic. (Or slow down an epidemic to prevent it becoming a pandemic.)
If people behave sensibly.
If and only if people behave sensibly in the aggregate.
Aside from such things as cancelling raves and other high-attendance, close-encounter activities, what kinds of behavior are the common-sense behaviors I'm talking about?
Well, I've posted twice on this, if you want some more light reading:
For what it's worth, I wear a mask when I'm out working. (I'm currently working as a long-term temporary postal delivery person for Japan Post.) It is required for the job, but I do not wear it because of the requirement, and I do not wear it because of social pressure.
I wear it for courtesy.
I recommend wearing masks for the duration, in general. I do not recommend trying to force everyone to wear them. Too many people have problems with masks that they are unable to express or explain.
If masks cause you problems, I recommend restricting your close-quarters contacts as much as you can.
]
In summary, masks are an example of the fact that individual behavior does matter, and that being courteous does come back to you.
The first guy who explained it to me was my trainer as a missionary. As most missionaries are, he was not perfect, but his explanation was later confirmed by Japanese people I trust. This was not one of the things he misunderstood.
The mask is a custom of courtesy, less to protect the wearer than to provide partial protection for the people around him or her.(I mention the fact of his misunderstandings because it is a fact of life, as a stranger in a strange land, that one must assume that information is, at best, incomplete, and often wrong. I guess it's even more of a fact of life when you think you are not a stranger.)
I am not an expert. I know what I'm talking about, but there are many things I don't know. Nonetheless, I think many people are operating without even this much knowledge about masks.
One, they are not, by any means, perfect protection.
Even the best masks, the ones used in surgery when the patient is immuno-compromised, are not much use long-term. Just as needles should never be re-used, the masks worn in surgery should be disposed of after finishing the surgery (and sometimes replaced periodically even during a single surgery).
[JMR202005261910 added:
I had a surgical nurse tell me I'm wrong about the above. I guess she wasn't in the operating room where I was operated on. Not every operation requires the same level of protection. But she does acknowledge washing her mask daily.
]
Why? Spattered blood or other body fluids quickly soak through the mask. Likewise, moisture, spit, phlegm, etc. from the breath of the person wearing the mask soaks through the other direction.
Faces itch under the mask, and the mask slips, so the mask tends to be touched by either the wearer's hands or an assistant's hands. This offers opportunity for transferring biologically active matter both ways across the barrier.
(Biologically active matter -- virus particles, bacteria, infected body cells, etc.)
Ordinary masks are much more porous than surgical masks, and the wearers tend not to replace them every fifteen minutes to half-an-hour. (That would be rather difficult, really, both economically and logistically -- and ecologically, come to think of it.)
[JMR202005261925 added:
I know I'm speaking in extremes in the above. The point I'm trying to make is that masks are not magic shields that block all the bad stuff and let the good stuff through no matter how long you wear them. Don't go to a rave wearing a mask and expect the mask to protect you.
]
Using terminology from information security, masks are a low wall or a speed bump.
Like the low wall and the speed bump, they can actually make problems worse when we refuse to use sense when we use them.
So why wear them at all, other than wearing true surgical masks in surgery?
[JMR202005262020 added:
Someone might bring Japan's infection and fatality rates up as empirical evidence. Yes, it is evidence, but you should understand that Japan has a long tradition with masks and other habits than help to limit the spread of aerosol spread diseases.
You do know about bowing instead of shaking hands, right? Well, even that is not that simple, but it's there. You aren't getting the whole story about Japan in the news.
Japanese people have been effectively voluntarily limiting a lot of the more dangerous activities.
Yes, there was an order, but it had, in the western mode of expression, no teeth -- other than social pressure, which is pretty powerful in Japan. Many of the less necessary businesses have been shuttered for the last couple of months, and, while there were a couple of the "live events" that Japanese entertainers, artists, comedians, etc., sometimes hold in the days after the order, people came away infected, and that fact was heavily reported and made the topic of talk shows and comedians' acts. Serious social pressure not to hold any more.
Sumo and professional baseball put on hold. The national high school baseball tournament, which is as big as the Japan Series in the fall, canceled for this year. (Probably. It might get revived if things go well now the order has been lifted.)
]
Japan is a country of mixed-mid-to-high population density. Masks tend to be used more commonly in population centers.
Close quarters requires building walls that don't make sense in less densely populated places.
Many of Japan's differences in customs have to do with common-sense differences between low-density environments and high-density environments.
Many of the common-sense customs have been altered against reason and sense over the last three-quarters of a century, and here is one. Wearing a mask and going to work is actually a self-contradictory behavior. If you need to wear a mask, you shouldn't be going to work, whether you are trying to protect yourself or your co-workers.
Well, unless your job is important.
(Ahem.) Unless your job is especially important, because every job is important. And unless your job is not so important that passing a common cold among your co-workers would be a bad thing.
Hmm. Maybe I'm getting sidetracked, doing a bit of hand-waving at topics this post doesn't have room to tackle. Back to the point.
Okay, so the traditional use of the mask was for cases where you were a wee-bit sick, but your need to be at work or to go to the market outweighed your need for rest and isolation. (And outweighed their need for you to be getting rest and isolation.)
Wearing a mask every day, long term, was neurotic behavior, but your friends would put up with it because they had their times of paranoia and neurosis, as well.
And, here's the kicker: Even though the mask can be counter-effective if you misuse it, for such things as the common cold, the speed-bump has regularly helped slow the spread until everybody developed resistance. This is repeating in the current case.
What kinds of behavior are counter-effective?
Counter-effective mask behaviors include such things as when you fail to wash your washable mask at least once a day, or dispose of your disposable mask in an appropriate garbage pail. Or regularly take it off and set it down where it can aid in the spread of germs.
Or such as wearing a mask so you can go out when you're coughing up so much that it gets soaked by your phlegm before you get home. Or decide that, because you are wearing the mask you don't need to wash your hands or stay home from work or stay away from public places like the market.
[JMR202005262040 added:
And there is also the recent news from China about a couple of students who were made to wear masks while they were given exercise tests, who died from respiratory/circulatory failure which was likely induced by the high-filtration masks. Wearing a mask with excessive filtration is another mistake.
]
(Masks can be good while you're sleeping, to keep the throat and sinuses moist -- until the mask slips down, anyway, and if they aren't too tight to let you sleep. And if you aren't reacting to the inevitable lint. In this particular use, it's good to get the mask wet before you go to bed.)
For the individual, wearing a mask probably does not stop you from getting infected. It does slow the infection process down enough that your body can often fight it off, or you can get by with just catching a mild case.
(In surgery, if a doctor has symptoms, he or she is going to postpone the surgery or get someone else to do it, instead of depending on even surgical masks, etc.)
[JMR202005262045 added:
Related information, one medical study estimates that the rate of asymptomatic infection of SARS-CoV-2 in Kobe is probably 3%.
]
In groups (in the calculus of social behavior), having many speed-bumps and low walls helps slow the rate of spread down enough to prevent an epidemic. (Or slow down an epidemic to prevent it becoming a pandemic.)
If people behave sensibly.
If and only if people behave sensibly in the aggregate.
Aside from such things as cancelling raves and other high-attendance, close-encounter activities, what kinds of behavior are the common-sense behaviors I'm talking about?
Well, I've posted twice on this, if you want some more light reading:
- talking about learning from the virus that competition is not a good excuse to forget to live,
- and discussing some specific measures to take.
For what it's worth, I wear a mask when I'm out working. (I'm currently working as a long-term temporary postal delivery person for Japan Post.) It is required for the job, but I do not wear it because of the requirement, and I do not wear it because of social pressure.
I wear it for courtesy.
I recommend wearing masks for the duration, in general. I do not recommend trying to force everyone to wear them. Too many people have problems with masks that they are unable to express or explain.
If masks cause you problems, I recommend restricting your close-quarters contacts as much as you can.
]
In summary, masks are an example of the fact that individual behavior does matter, and that being courteous does come back to you.
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