So who do you dummies like for vice-president, anyway?

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 10.

Sir Kraab writes: Let's assume the Mineshaft is appointed as the Council to Reopen America.

What should we do next?

Is the idea of an immunity certification totally insane? In a benevolent world, an "immunity card" is just a doctor's note that helps people make smarter decisions, like which doctors and nurses you assign to which parts of the hospital, which teachers you put back in the classroom first, which WFHers go back into the office, which pilots and flight attendants you put in the air. In theory it benefits everyone because it would allow us to reopen businesses and restaff government offices on a controlled schedule with a lower chance of reigniting the pandemic. In our world -- especially now when people are desperate for work -- it's incredibly ripe for fraud by and abuse of individuals.

What about a vaccine certification (stipulating that vaccines are free and easily accessible)? We require them for schools and camps. Could we allow employers to require either a certification or medical exemption? Anti-vaxxers would flood the legal system, but could it otherwise be reasonable?

Heebie's take: For the sake of conversation, let's assume widespread testing and network-tracing are available.

Here are some of my big questions:
- Do you put a cap on the size of gatherings?
- What do you do about the schools? Is your cap on gatherings bigger or smaller than, say, a 25 person classroom? If the cap is 10 people, then do schools have to double their number of teachers, or stay online? (If you don't get some sort of babysitting portion of schools up and running, then you haven't meaningfully opened up society, IMHO.)
- What plan should be put in place to allow people to more flexibly move back and forth between periods of stay-at-home and move-about-cautiously? Like, during the next wave, does everyone flood the unemployment websites again and lose their precarious work situation, or can we stabilize things so that we can transition back and forth more easily, and sometimes just regionally?
- What do you do about nursing homes?
- What do you do about public transportation?
- What's your plan for keeping an eye on civil liberties, so that the network tracing doesn't become a permanent feature?
- Can we please open up the park near my house?

With most of these, the first thing you have to decide is if we're pretending to live in a glorious society where healthcare and UBI and other collective action solutions are available for implementation. Or you can live in the current world, in which case I think only the first two questions get answered, and for the rest, (at least in the US) the answer is "Nothing, they can suffer and/or die."

LW writes: Building a miniature fantasy world seems potentially lovely- it can be artistic, a balancing escape, sort of an inanimate garden. Rod Stewart has apparently got a toy railway the size of Saipan in a garage/warehouse somewhere, good for him.

But then ads for the stuff appear (I bought a toy dinosaur a couple of years ago, maybe that's why?) and the impulse seems both less innocuous and also weirder. A detailed diesel generator reproduction thats kind of pricey? Miniature hotties standing by a car? What the hell.

In other news, there's a multi hour cab view video of a train traversing Yugoslav mountains in the winter. Better than the Norwegian one, which was quite good. Quite relaxing.

Heebie's take: I have two simultaneous emotions when I think about worlds of elaborate miniatures: first, the dreamy flow of getting lost in creation of such a world, and marveling at it's details, and second, the clausterphobia. It's a sort of fear of getting trapped in details - like I anticipate many times that I'll get halfway through and want to bail on the project and the cleaning up process will be so daunting that I'd better not start on the project in the first place.

(If you really want to know: all my best hobbies are what I call "easy in, easy out": reading, puzzles, showing up for a gym class or going for a jog. All of those are things that you can start doing about 2 seconds after you decide to do it, and you are done doing it the moment you decide to end. Whereas painting, say, has a bunch of things to get out and a bunch of clean up afterwards. I've gotten reasonably good at cooking, which is not "easy in, easy out" but really, there's a whole room dedicated to making it as close to that as possible. And I probably wouldn't bother to cook for myself. Miniatures: Kind of easy in/easy out while you've got the space dedicated to it, but also the type of thing that would sit 1/3 done for years, like a bad dissertation about an albatross.)

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 9.

Can someone please explain to me why the stock market is doing so well? How could it be so untethered to reality?

Witt writes: The work that makes all other work possible.

That's the slogan of the nonprofit National Domestic Workers Alliance. I always think of it as akin to "An army marches on its stomach."

It was brought to mind for me twice today:

First was this tweet from journalist (and not incidentally, woman of color) Stacy-Marie Ishmael, giving a shout-out to the nanny who got literally ONE LINE in this glowing newspaper profile of two married TV journalists working from home and juggling care for their young child.

Second was these two tweets from (apparent) editors of academic journals, noting dramatic drop in recent article submissions from women as compared to men.

If my own and my family/friends' lives are any example, the women I know are doing substantially more work (both professional and domestic) than pre-pandemic, while men are doing the same or less amount work, even if the type of tasks has changed. And that's in relatively affluent, left-leaning families.

In conclusion, donate to NDWA, y'all. This army needs a well-nourished stomach, and its frontline service members are mostly women of color who don't have much of a safety net at the best of times.

Heebie's take: It reminds me a bit of the Atlantic article that came out at the beginning, which started:

Enough already. When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities.

My mom occasionally rolls her eyes at the notion that monks are these blissed out, even-keeled meditative souls and says, "Sure, they live in a monastery. I'd like to see them be so chill in a daycare, surrounded by three year olds for eight hours a day."

Also: are all the rich people keeping their nannies? I suppose many must be. After all, my parents are (mostly) keeping their housekeeper. And unless they're, er, woke enough to keep paying their nannies to stay home, the nannies probably need the income.

I don't know what the answer is, on the childcare issue. Expectations for people with childcare responsibilities have got to be loosened during a pandemic. And yet, of course people without children have the capacity to be massively more productive during a pandemic, if they're so inclined. Which means that the workload is no longer evenly distributed, but then what do you do with wages? There is just no answer (since we're compelled to ignore all the sensible ones, like UBI).

On a slightly different note, my current book club book is The Power. First, I'm not done, so no spoilers. But it's a pretty fun read: what if women all developed the ability to send electrical shocks from their fingertips, and therefore had a physical advantage over men? How would society respond and adapt?

It's so much fun to visit this world where women have ultimate dominance over men. Where, when push comes to shove, the women can say "fuck you" and know in their hearts that they can compel the men, if they so choose. It's a bit of wish fulfillment, and so far it reads like candy. (It reminds me vaguely of reading If Men Could Menstruate in college.)