A Friday the 13th Sundry Assortment

Tl;dr?! Wash your hands. Be kind. Check on your neighbors.

Will read? This post is not the text I’ve been working on, but overcome by the interesting times we live in, this is a collection of a sundry assortment of observations of life in the COVID-19 virus era.

In no particular order, let’s go!

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Facts & Faith

Facts are transferable. If a fact is true for you, the fact remains true for me.

Faith is non-transferable. Faith is a personal belief.

If you believe your faith shelters you from the Coronavirus, fine. Believe your faith.

But we — you and I — share facts. Don’t touch your face. Wash your hands and self-isolate even in public places to the extent possible.

$1,500,000,000,000

One.point.five trillion dollars or $1.5X10**12. Scientific notation!

Within hours of Wall Street — the Dow Jones, the S&P, the NASDAQ — meltdown the Fed was able to pump $1.5 trillion dollars into the financial system.

The Federal Reserve was designed to keep the economic boat afloat and upright during times of distress and upheaval. Their response time is quick and corporate. Their intervention is important to keep the big institutions aright. Banks, corporations. The dollars tinkle down to Main Street.

Yes I wrote that. Tinkle. Not trickle. Dollars tinkle. Tinkling dollars. It’s Friday the 13th.

$1,000,000,000,000

One trillion dollars or $1.0X10**12.

$One trillion USD is the estimated amount of student loan debt but student loans are individual. People walk Main Street with their backpacks full of student loans.

Student loan forgiveness or buyback or restructuring would jack the economy. Main Street spending would gush up to Wall Street. Think of the water flowing money that would be put in play if student loan payments were directed by individuals to transportation, housing, hard goods and services, fancy lattes. It’s a long list.

Society benefits from an educated citizenry. Financial institutions benefit from student loan debt. Main Street waits.

And the House of Representatives is the institution that needs to propose relief for individual student loan debt relief and that body has to negotiate agreement on policy before throwing it over the wall to the Senate.

And all that takes time. And elections. Student loan debt is an economic drag. Time to address it as such.

COVID-19 Coronavirus

In an effort to contain or manage or reduce the spreading contagion of the COVID-19 virus, the collective ‘we’ is removed from public venues and events — crowd control in the sense of no crowds — and we are encouraged to self-quarantine or isolate ourselves for two or more weeks while … well, we’ll see where we are in a couple of weeks.

My observations on potential long-term societal pivots and impacts follow.

Separation of Employment from Health Insurance

Pandemics don’t discriminate on who has what and how much. I mean, President OTUS has been exposed to two individuals testing positive for COVID-19 and he didn’t need to leave home his resort! The Coronavirus doesn’t check your address, bank account, health insurance status or lack thereof.

In the US, in our worship at the tower of the capitalist dollar, healthcare is dependent on insurance. Health insurance depends on employment.

And so maybe as a society, this would be a good time to acknowledge that healthcare is a basic human need regardless of employment status. Break the capitalist notion that your health is worth the dollars you’re paid for the work you do.

Separation of Health Insurance from Health Care

Health insurance is part of the healthcare industry.

Health care — two words — is provider action. (Source: Arcadia.io – (a healthcare & analytics company), The Final Word: Healthcare vs. Health Care)

The pandemic underlines the gap in care that those with insurance receive versus those who walk among us without. As a preventative to limiting the spread of the Coronavirus, large public gatherings, businesses, etc. have been shut down. We limit our exposure to each other as much as possible — insured or not.

This would be a good time to take healthcare on the road and provide health care. Mobile health care units. As far as we know, they are not widely available or deployed. They would address accessibility and focus on care. Not insurance. Actual service. Actual CARE.

Let’s do it for the health of it!

The Home Work Economy

Businesses that can are encouraging, nay, even requiring employees to work from home.

We note that this will result in a more accurate measurement of what percentage of the economy and the workforce is based on information transfer, data management, gigs, etc. and not based on physical handling of goods and services.

Outsourcing of call centers to foreign countries happened. Will this be another self-identifying out-sourcing opportunity? If I can do my job from Podunk anywhere, why not make it Podunk as cheap as Englishly or <insert language here> possible?

And, or will businesses shed themselves of some square footage after the COVID-19 passes and they realize it is cost-effective to have employees use their home square footage?

And home, sweet home.

With work from home, I wonder if reports of a hostile work environment will spike?

Asking for a friend Mr. Viva …

Separation of Education from Location

Colleges and universities are expanding spring break, sending students home to study and “attend” classes remotely. We question both the cost of a higher education — what exactly are we paying for? And the location of the education attained — where exactly are we paying for it?

Students pay for knowledge and learning but most importantly for being taught how to learn. By reducing the university experience to online learning, what are universities not providing? What are students missing out on with a virtual environment?

This virus is going to break the link between education and location.

We posit that a lions share of education IS location. Education is more than textbooks. Education is contextual. Education is cultural immersion. As proof, we offer regional differences between East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, South, Southwest, Northwest, Northeast, Texas. You get the idea. Local customs, behaviors, language — bubbler? or drinking fountain? — infiltrate and permeate the way people think and make meaning.

And so education. Place matters.

Until it doesn’t. Until we find out the new twist Coronavirus makes on spring break and school attendance and graduation and how much it doesn’t matter or how much it DOES matter. The new classroom is online in a sanitized COVID-free environment and we don’t have to meet anyone new ever. But full circle. Sanitized from physical germs, an online-only world is a virtual toilet of horrible and deplorable human psyche. Misunderstandings, communication complicated by the screen and keyboard between the you and me, the student and teacher. (See also: Reflections on Twitter.)

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Societies change. Sometimes change is slow. Sometimes it is rapid — a sea change, a typhoon, a monsoon, a big blue wave.

But remember, even after COVID-19 passes, don’t touch your face. Wash your hands and above all be kind.

Peace.

-Viva E.

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Another picture, why not?

Pictures add interest or 1000 words so I’ve been told.

So here are more words: