Infinite Quack

America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes. This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours (1) . So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowi...

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them "Retail arbitrage", better known as hoarding and price gouging. It's one thing to do that with dolls or something. It's another to do it with a product whose purpose is to slow the spread of a deadly infection. The grocery store near us has had no hand sanitizer on its shelves for a while. (Side note: You can make your own sanitizer with aloe vera and isopropyl alcohol. See How to Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer .) In a country so in love with capitalism, it's unrealistic to expect people wouldn't try to profit off the tragedy. But it's basically no different from war profiteering. One would wish that people's conscience would tell them they're crossing a line. Someone's always going to be willing to cross it, though -- whether out of greed or desperation, or just not caring very much that what they're doing harms society. This also exemplifies what's wrong with the libertari...

Microsoft, Amazon Advise Staff to Work From Home as Coronavirus Spreads, Facebook Contractor Confirmed Infected Though COVID-19 is ultimately going to affect everybody, this particular outbreak, the first significant one in the US, has had a particular impact on me -- though I'm not aware of anyone I know having caught it. A few years ago my wife and I took a vacation in Hawaii (on the Big Island) with family. We discovered her breathing was easier. We took a second trip to test it, and confirmed that she felt better on the island, worse again in the Seattle area ("east side", to locals). So we set out to make it permanent. We bought a house on the island a couple years ago, got our Seattle-area house sold last year. But I had to maintain a presence in Seattle for the sake of my employer Amazon, who were cautious about granting me broad approval to work remotely. I was permitted to do that for one week per month at first, then two. I got an apartment in downtown Seattle a...

Andrew Yang on Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) Of all the Democratic presidential hopefuls, Yang is the only one who seems to fully understand this. I heard him speak on NPR not long ago, and agreed with everything he said. In terms of his likelihood of securing the DNC slot in the general election, among that wide field of candidates Yang is pretty far down the list -- Business Insider puts him at #9 , just ahead of Jay Inslee. The most likely picks currently appear to be Biden, Sanders, and Warren. Biden rejects the idea of UBI. Sanders is in favor, but seems to think it's too soon to talk about it. Not sure what Warren believes. ( Democrats Tiptoe Around Universal Basic Income ) Sure, education is great; free college and forgiving student debt are fabulous ideas and could shift more of the workforce into the high-paying high tech job sector. It just isn't going to be enough, not by a long shot. You won't get a majority of those millions of 50-year-old truck drivers, havi...

The End Of The Line You can't help but feel bad for people in this situation. Setting aside the question of who to blame, there is no arguing with the fact that seeing families thrown into chaos and doubt is terrible. "I understand it’s a business, and they have to make decisions when it comes to business. If this is what they feel they have to do, then I’ll have to accept it. But it’s hard when you see money going to other places, when you see C.E.O.s making the money they’re making." - Jonathan Achey Jr. This is capitalism. When people on the right, especially, talk about how the market can fix everything, that it's the solution to all problems, episodes like this should spring to mind. Dave Green says “We need  G.M. It’s the last thing standing around here.” But employees' needs do not signify here; they do not determine what a corporation will ultimately do. Corporations do whatever their owners and shareholders need, and that need is always about profit. ...

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two Still beating this drum. People need to understand this dynamic because Trump and his followers either don't have that understanding, or are deflecting, when they blame it all on immigrants. John Oliver recently did a piece on automation -- also worth watching. Let me try and explain what I'm doing in my current job. I work for Amazon (standard disclaimer: I don't speak for them). Amazon used to make all its money from selling to customers, but now makes billions from AWS, Amazon Web Services. This is a tech company leasing its tech to other companies. What for? So those companies can do their own buying and selling online, and whatever else they do. It's safe to assume that part of what they're doing is automating their own processes. Netflix is a well-known AWS customer. If you're on  Netflix, go find Hasan Minhaj's excellent show Patriot Act . There's an episode about Amazon, in which--to turn the whole thi...