A Few Remarks on How the Pandemic May Catalyse Longer Running Changes

You know how this goes: possible link fu, probably extensive edits. A Few Remarks is your warning for going on and on and on ...

15 or so years ago, the trend of ever extending rooftops was approaching its furthest reach into rural areas. We did not know that then, of course -- it would become incredibly apparent and the subject of endless commentary about 3 years after that. Drive Till You Qualify Ended in a cataclysm of spiraling commodity prices (high fuel costs making driving further or increasingly at all untenable, bringing beater cars out of driveways to new use as cheap commuters when people could no longer afford gas for their SUV or other truck) and the catastrophic exposure of endemic hidden risk in financial instruments.

But another, counter trend was occurring. While some people were Driving Till They Qualified, others were moving closer in: first buying bungalows in city neighborhoods (reaching back to the late 1980s for that one, but the trend continued for a while) and as those priced up, others were torn down and replaced with more denser housing. Meanwhile those committed to a single family, free standing house moved out to the inner ring of suburbs, recapitulating earlier waves of settlement, gentrifying, and forcing reinvestment in public transit (and financing private group transportation options).

We probably reached peak Move Into the City at a High Cost a few years ago. A few hardy commentators have already been noting that plug in hybrids, especially the larger ones, in conjunction with tele-commuting, has brought back some of the exurbs.

Other trends that happened in this time frame. Blackberries were a feature of exurbanites driving everywhere in their cartoonishly large SUVs. They were entirely supplanted by smartphones (the iPhone being a late, but compelling, arrival in 2007), beginning the transition from email and texting to Video Everything Everywhere All the Time. The problem with the latter, of course, is the bandwidth demand. In the city center, that was mostly fine. When enough people moved a layer out, the bandwidth would come with them. But pioneering exurbanites were forced to resort to all kinds of weird patchwork solutions to get any kind of meaningful bandwidth. I deeply resented Netflix for hogging all the bandwidth; I felt there were better uses.

But Netflix was something that exurbanites of yore, trapped in their upside down mortgages, but still somehow hanging on throughout the Deep Recession and the tepid recovery, wanted badly, and clamored for and lots of solutions were tried and each one worked a little, for some people, and eventually, we have now reached a point where you really can live in Skagit Valley and, when the state wide shelter in place happens, you noticed that your broadband in Skagit is way less sluggish than your broadband in your pied a terre on Capitol Hill. How have the times changed. Well, I mean that is exactly how the times have changed.

Living in the city has its many charms, but those charms are basically erased if you are stuck in your dwelling except to go get groceries and a walk or run or (maybe) a bike ride. The schools are still problematic because of decades of post-white flight disinvestment that have only been partially addressed, and federal mandates to only do things that can be done equitably hit urban school districts with sharp pointy lack of wifi in the places where homeless children live, and the lack of affordability of broadband for a wider group of students. And, honestly, still pretty shitty broadband in some cities, and parts of many more.

The bars and restaurants, museums, concerts, all closed for the duration of the shelter in place orders, have some poor replacements: takeout and delivery, or webcams. But if you are in your country house, and you have good broadband, and you are showing your Not At School Kids the penguins roaming an aquarium in another city (or the elephants or puppies or whatever) looking at all the other exhibits, or you are looking at the art available remotely at cultural institution on another continent, you are going to start wondering why you ever want to be back in your city place. If you are lucky enough to have two, or if you are a college kid home from college and seeing various options and thinking about what you want your post-college life to be like.

You have to get pretty fucking far out into the country to not have a grocery store. And even most of those places still can receive timely deliveries from Amazon and other online retailers. When you are stuck in a city, with the challenges of socially distancing when leaving your tiny and very expensive apartment or condo, and thinking about the size of farmhouse you could buy, and have decent broadband and now that you can all telecommute, plus you are already surfing the web looking for better education options online for your kids because what the schools are doing so far is not looking like what you had in mind for them. Well.

You could have a playset around your farmhouse, and the kids would not miss the playground so much. You could have, not just a hoop on your house in your driveway; you could pave a fucking half court. You could have a pool. You could get a bubble for your pool if you lived in a place where you cannot swim year round outdoors. And if you cannot go to the bars and restaurants anyway, and are going to be stuck with the kids indoors forever, cooking and eating your own food, making and drinking your own drinks, well, what the hell. Why be all crowded into a city anyway?

Me, I do not care so much. I am stuck in the middle ground of Middlesex suburbia. My house is huge. My lot is large. If I really wanted chickens I suppose I could have them. We talked about where we would put a garden years ago and still have not (perhaps this year!). As it is, I feel no such temptation and my kids have outgrown the indoor playset we had as a compromise to deal with weather, bugs and a town that has a lot of land use restrictions. Our school district is ramping up nicely, and the stars seem aligned for them to have learned more than enough to satisfy my desires for them, partly through curriculum and partly through the experience of living through Particularly Interesting Times. My broadband is excellent and we each have a room to retreat to. About the only changes I might make to my house would be doors on the dining room and, some day, when I am decrepit, an elevator to the second floor.

Nevertheless, it is easy enough to see how rapidly we have moved from This Job Cannot Be Done At Home to, hey, actually, we can do all of this from home and you damn well better. We are moving from We Cannot Teach School Remotely to, drive to this building to pick up a device, send email here if you need a hot spot for your home. We have already moved through Meals Through School to, ok, you do not even have to have a kid to have school lunches delivered to your home by the school bus. The hoarding has moved from TP, pasta, beans and the particularly inexplicable bottled water rush, to pancake mix, frozen waffles and now flour, chicken and eggs. Buying home gym equipment is a Trend.

I cannot wait to see what the home buying season is like this year. Mortgage rates at an all time low. Couples with two incomes who are able to telecommute looking at a MUCH larger range of options and feeling a powerful desire to not be crowded into where they are and no longer giving much of a shit about the day care quality since they are all closed anyway.

They will not be touring homes in person, tho, probably. I guess we will see in a month or two.

We Call It The Supply Chain

The Supply Chain is not really a unitary thing. There is Costco, for example. Small commercial enterprises buy from Costco, to stock their restaurant with ketchup or their coffee station with creamer or whatever. Households buy from Costco, to stock their pantry with ketchup, and their freezer with meat. But there are also grocery stores, like Kroger's which mostly sell to households and only occasionally to commercial enterprises. And then there are a whole bunch of things unfamiliar to me other than as names on trucks that sell to commercial enterprises, and institutional settings like school lunchrooms.

One of these chains has had a massive cliff in demand that fell, and the other has had an enormous cliff in demand. We moved most end use food production and consumption into the household supply chain, stranding a bunch of supply throughout the other supply chain.

There are not very many factories that make toilet paper. Some make for one chain; others for the other. Right now, the household market is attempting to draw from the away from home makers, but not totally successfully.

Probably what happened in part is a bunch of inventory went to hotels, schools, etc -- places that have consistently sized orders at consistent intervals. And then they shut down, stranding that inventory in those stock rooms. And there may well have been further orders overflowing those stock rooms, because they could not be turned off in time. Meanwhile, all the people who would have been wiping in those locations are not, and need more supply at home.

Etc.

It is not just TP. Almost anything exists in one form in one chain, and in another form in the other. And there is a lot of stuff that is stranded. Some of the perishables will be going to waste (milk products at the coffee station not donated before closing down the site, for example).

A large number of meals are consumed away from home: coffee and a breakfast pastry, a sandwich and more coffee, a burger and a beer, or fancier. When people eat from home only rarely, they often have a limited repertoire of things they can prepare themselves. This is leading to shortages of prepared items like canned stew, mac and cheese in a box, frozen waffles, pancake mix. Over time, and with the abundant aid available online, people will improve their repertoire, but we are now forcing a whole lot of people to figure out how to prepare meals for 1-4 people, and there is going to be some waste. Waste due to Oh That Did Not Work At All, through I Do Not Want to Eat That Much Of It. It is easy to think that switching people from drinking their coffee at Dunks or Starbucks to drinking their coffee at home is No Big Deal. I am wondering if that is actually true.

None of this, of course! is an argument for reopening sooner than is appropriate. It is a set of observations to consider, when you are assuming the supply chain disruptions which are pervasive and obvious are the result of those annoying jackasses with a year's supply of TP in the three carts they are hauling around. Or were, a few weeks ago. I mean, they probably did not help! But I suspect the problem is a bit more complex, and will continue to manifest in more ways, in the weeks to come.

Crowding and Infectious Disease

We have all been getting immersive history lessons in the 1918 flu pandemic, and the outbreaks which preceded and followed the one(s) that ended The Great War. Yay, history! Might as well try to learn something from it when we are motivated.

The people (I suppose we have to call them that) who ran The Great War were quite proud of themselves for finally having definitively licked (ewwwwww) diarrheal illness in camps. Sooooo many battles were defined by which side had the worst runs currently or recently in previous wars. Wars had ended because of the impossibility of continuing.

Well, the Great War was the first one (probably -- but feel free to correct me in the comments!) to be ended NOT by mosquito borne disease, or diarrheal illness, but rather by respiratory illness. Ya gotta really crowd people in persistently in order to do that, but they did, and they resisted all efforts to stop.

How did we get back to this place?

My husband's jobsite recently told everyone to work from home for a period of time (before this crisis), so they could remove all the cubicles and replace them with smaller cubicles. He likes to describe call centers with multiple shifts a day, no assigned seating and company supplied keyboards, headsets, etc. He points out that this is as petri dish as it gets, and people cannot stay home when sick because they will be fired if they miss a day, and then they will not pay the rent and they will be evicted. The End. Recently, coverage of our current crisis has brought to my attention that there are people who drive a different truck every day. The cleverer drivers figured out a while back that if they did not want to have the sniffles or worse every day forever, they should sanitize all surfaces first thing in the morning. But then I saw a sad, sad tale of someone who lost his partner to coronavirus. She drove rental cars to reposition, and she had not been clever enough to figure that out, suffering from years of bronchitis before finally felled by this outbreak.

We rent cars several times a year. I never, ever thought of them as a meaningful vector. I mean, I am not licking things in there. But you do not have to.

We have packed ourselves into coastal cities, sure, fine. But I am only half convinced that the size of our residences is the problem. I think we have a lot of work practices (call centers, the rental cars, the newly assigned truck each day, etc.) that are going to wind up regulated by the health department. Once, it was restaurants that were the vector of disease, and were subject to mandatory training, licensure, inspection and regulation. But anything that gets touched by a new person every day is going to be looked at with a lot of suspicion and a fair amount of statute going forward.

That whole sharing economy that rose from the ashes of the Great Recession is apparently going to experience a trial by fire in the Pandemic. We shall see which are phoenix like and recover, and which go the way of flop houses of days gone by.

Sunday: catching up on school email

Since last Friday, there have been email and text messages from both kids' schools, the superintendent, etc. The message is clear and consistent: registration for next year (ignore, per the directions from the kid in question's teacher), next week is the week we transition to Real School at home (not their words), tell us if you need equipment (computer or hot spot) oh and here are the actual requirements for the equipment (camera, mic, for each kid between 9 and 12:30, IIRC). All in line with what I was expecting.

I had a visit but no walk with M.; it is kinda drizzly and gross out.

I stripped, washed and remade 3 beds.

I roomba'd downstairs.

We had a bone in lamb chop for dinner. Yummy! With mushrooms. I also had some of the leftover masa and sourdough quick bread, and cole slaw.

And I did some blogging on topics, as opposed to daily activity updates; that was fun.

I encouraged R. to call his father. This is not the time to let days and weeks go by and then regret not having called. I think it took me this long to remember to remind him, because his regret minimization strategy is so different from my own, at least in this particular relationship phone call case.

I called J., my nephew to wish him a happy birthday; yesterday I called his mother, to do the same. birthday calls are so much fun, especially when people are not so crazy busy it is impossible to reach them. Not that I would wish this version of Not Busy on anyone, of course.