FWIW, about half of my friends are medical, and I’m hearing a lot of positive reactions to it. I think my friend who is a pediatric pulmonologist explained it well: she said that she would be happy for the new normal to be that one ‘day’ of clinic per week be allotted to telemedicine, and the clinician be allowed to determine their hours for that. For example, she said she has a lot of patients whose parents have to take time off of work to bring them in for routine appointments, when she’d be perfectly happy to check in with them at 6:00am (before work for the parents) or 9:00pm (after work and dinner). In exchange, she’d have to come in to clinic one less day per week. Seems like it could ultimately be better coverage for the patients and their families.
There are situations that lend themselves to telemedicine. Routine follow ups, for instance, work great as telemedicine visits. Lots of things don’t, and like most good things, if taken too far, become detriments. Also really brings out the tech divide between wealth and less wealthy communities. Some do not have access to computer tech sufficient for good quality video calls. And it is much harder to read body language and nonverbal communication over a video link, and not lossible at all if the camera is pointed away. Also, I am a little bit of a throwback in relying on clinical judgement and not so much on labs and xrays, which is harder to get over a screen. And, yes, it’s different and I am not big on change. 30 years of experience is tough to wrench into a whole new model.
Focusing on my friends, family, city and I is all I can really do right now to stay in good spirits.
Once the pandemic reaches the lowest possible levels that it can, I would like to go out with my friends and have some drinks somewhere. There are a few new places that had opened up a few months before the pandemic hit that I hope will be open once things return to whatever new version of normal we get. The silver lining of any foreclosures is that, at the very least, new places may pop up in the space where those old places once stood.
As for my family: Our extended family may need to help get a couple of my cousins off their feet. We also have a grandma that’s 92 years old and we’re unsure of whether or not she’s going to get COVID-19 or not, since she has caretakers that come there every day to help her. They may disinfect and wash their hands frequently but one stray infected door handle or elevator button at her building could spell the end for her.
The city is gonna take a while to get back off of its feet since it’s an oil-centric city and we’re in the middle of an oil crash and a recession at the same time. We’re gonna need to pivot hard to new sources of employment. We’re aiming to become carbon-neutral in 30 years’ time, but we may have to move that plan up by quite a bit thanks to this to create enough jobs.
Because the pandemic pauses the present, it forces us to live in the future. The question I asked myself walking east through D.C. is the question so many Americans are all pondering today: Who will emerge intact from the pandemic purgatory, and who will not?
In the past three weeks, I’ve posed a version of that question to more than a dozen business owners, retail analysts, economists, consumer advocates, and commercial-real-estate investors. Their viewpoints coalesce into a coherent, if troubling, story about the future of the American streetscape.
We are entering a new evolutionary stage of retail, in which big companies will get bigger, many mom-and-pop dreams will burst, chains will proliferate and flatten the idiosyncrasies of many neighborhoods, more economic activity will flow into e-commerce, and restaurants will undergo a transformation unlike anything the industry has experienced since Prohibition.
This is a dire forecast, but there is a glimmer of hope.
…and they could open tins which contained delicious stuff. Also, we apparently could make them do ridiculous things. Ask your granny, she’ll tell you stories you wouldn’t believe.
The strike fund.
MIT Technology Review posted an article this last Saturday that discussed how COVID-19 has essentially busted the myth of Silicon Valley innovation. The subheader of the article makes a crucial point about what that means: “The pandemic shows that the US is no longer much good at coming up with technologies relevant to our most basic needs.”
After reading the article through several times, my understanding of the premise of the article is this:
COVID-19 has proved that Silicon Valley, both its companies and its “move fast and break things” model, are incapable of delivering the innovations in fields like health tech, agriculture, education, manufacturing and so forth that we should’ve had in the pre-pandemic world, and are absolutely going to need in a post-pandemic world.
After this pandemic is over, we’re going to have a lot of people out of work, and many of those jobs aren’t gonna be coming back any time soon, if at all. Snazzy venture capital and hedge fund/incubator style funding and buzzword-laden pitches regarding ‘growth-hacking’ isn’t going to fix the big problems that need fixing. It’s going to take good old-fashioned investments in infrastructure for manufacturing in the U.S./reshoring, R&D, and paying workers a living wage to solve things like the climate crisis, create affordable housing, increase our healthcare infrastructure, enable people to get a good education, and so on.
Even if there weren’t a coronavirus pandemic, it would still be a peculiar moment for the global energy market, where many conditions are rapidly changing. The debt-fueled shale oil bonanza has hitherto enabled the U.S. to flood world supply and weaken the revenues of perceived geopolitical rivals. That leverage is now gone. Furthermore, as John Dizard of the Financial Times has observed, “Asian LNG prices have collapsed much faster than U.S. prices. That means it no longer pays to chill American natural gas, load it on to LNG tankers, ship it across the Pacific, and re-gasify it. So U.S. LNG exports are ex-growth.” That shifts the balance of geopolitical power in the energy markets in the near and mid-term back to countries like Russia and Tajikistan, as they are likely to re-establish a pipeline primacy that it looked like they had lost.
By the same token, the relative position of the major oil-consuming economies has improved. And all the petroleum producers continue to see their necessity undermined by the day with the growth (and rapidly improving economics) of renewable energies, climate change policies that encourage de-carbonization, and what looks like a rebirth of the nuclear industry. Although Russia and China now dominate the export of nuclear power plants, national security considerations are likely to push the United States more aggressively toward reviving its own nuclear industry. Uranium could over the next decade join the cadre of traded energy commodities with crude oil and natural gas as a geopolitical flash point. In any case, there is no need to lament the loss of a phony U.S. energy independence, which was built on the mirage of a credit bubble that artificially skewed the market toward otherwise uneconomic and environmentally degrading modes of production.
We are going to see a new set of political imperatives guiding the energy policy of the industrialized world. Much like needed medical supplies, or sensitive high-tech developments, new crude realities will force a similar discussion over national interest versus overreliance on multinational supply chains, as well as forcing ugly geopolitical compromises, vast increases in research and development, and a growing distaste for being at the mercy of any one energy source.
No real shock that he would reject objective facts because “he doesn’t want it to be” and denying saying what he said on tape the day before is pretty much on point for him. Still, bodes ill for any hope for leadership in the remainder of this year, at least, since anyone attempting to do so would be going directly against Il Douche.
A fifth issue is the broader digital disruption of the economy. With millions of people losing their jobs or working and earning less, the income and wealth gaps of the 21st-century economy will widen further. To guard against future supply-chain shocks, companies in advanced economies will re-shore production from low-cost regions to higher-cost domestic markets. But rather than helping workers at home, this trend will accelerate the pace of automation, putting downward pressure on wages and further fanning the flames of populism, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Yup, there is some precedent for this, and it seems that bad outcomes are pretty much a given if left unchecked. November, people.
As a historian, I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “history repeats itself”, in part because it ignores the role of humanity in being the actual producers of said history. However, when you have people who actively seek to replicate structures of the past (in this case, the pre-New Deal unregulated economy and pre-Holocaust race relations), you’re going to get very similar outcomes!
Desert Island Comics have been sharing a huge range of utopian visions submitted by artists to their RESCUE PARTY project https://www.instagram.com/desertislandcomics/
I really liked this one :
How about, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”?
Or “History does not repeat, but it does tend to rhyme.”
Not a huge fan of that one, either, but it’s better than the history repeats trope. I like the one @docosc said best of three. But if it assumes history happens somewhere that is not within our social relations, then I sort of feel like it’s hiding more than it’s revealing about how we should think about history.
On my syllabi I always put quotes, and one is from a Gogol Bordello, “Nobody learns no nothing from no history” which is true on an individual level and on a meta level. And I find it less removed from human agency.
This is gonna be true of any pithy little saying. Why I find the current political climate so frustrating (among so many others!) is that so few people have the attention span for more than a bumper sticker length investigation of any topic, nor the curiosity to seek the necessary info. And if you actually know a subject, it almost impossible to speak in exclusives and definitives, so you get interpreted as “wishy-washy.” Even discussing it makes me furious. And it’s a hell of a long time till November.
Well, that’s the point of ideology, yeah? To seem common sensical enough and pithy enough to elide truth. Gramsci wept… And Bernays did a jig. And Foucault is saying I told you so. And Guy Debord.
