- Over the next few weeks, we’re going to see more and more absurd, or cruel, or counterproductive practices revealed. Pay attention when they are. Notice the statements the people in charge make when they effortlessly roll back their surcharges and threats, their punishments and impediments. Remember them. And when the time comes that the danger from the virus is no longer as severe, and those people try to quietly reinstate the policies that hurt so many around you, remember that for a lot of Americans, a “return to normal” is a scary prospect.
I was thinking, if people are sent into mass quarantine and they have some kind of "forced holiday" where they are not distracted by the daily treadmill to survive, whether they would notice all of this. And I also can't stop thinking what an insane break this is for climate change... Did anyone quantify what such a "break" of 3-4 months does to carbon dioxide levels?
I suspect this whole "you have to be in the office 50 hours a week or you're not a team player" death cult is gonna disappear. The fact that the entire planet is figuring out how to work from home means the entire planet is gonna keep working from home. That's pretty much what broke male domination in the workplace in the '50s - a whole bunch of women who kept the country running while the men were off fighting a war realized that actually, it's a lot more empowering to spend your day earning a paycheck than fluffing the pillows. I'm less optimistic that the whole "we're allowed to be cruel to you in times of peace" thing is going to go away, but we'll see. It has occurred to me that this is the first global pandemic that selects for political affiliation. Those of young, progressive persuasion are going to be hit much less hard than those of old, conservative/populist persuasion. That's going to change some things. Governance has been drifting older worldwide. If demographics is destiny there are going to be a lot of jobs whose occupants are decades younger after this. And I suspect that we're a year, maybe eighteen months before people start saying "we mobilized the world to defeat coronavirus, why can't we mobilize the world to defeat climate change" and when the population takes a sudden discontinuous shift away from the geriotacy they might just get their way.