Well, maybe it wasn’t so little, but still, as of today one of four households are still without power in the greater Washington area. A lot of people outside the US don’t know that, really, Dee Cee is a Southern City, and like most places in the south is one sweaty son-of-a-gun in the summertime. (And is it just me, or had any of you guys heard of a “derecho” before this?)
This is the kind of thing that makes a woodturner salivate. Shame it’s too far away – hell, I’d clean this one up for nothing, and just haul off the wood.
So right now about 400,000 people are getting an object lesson is just how fragile the comforts of modernity are, and how urban modernity in particular becomes uninhabitable very quickly when the power goes out.
Without climate control, the elderly and the very young are in immediate peril, just a matter of hours in many cases. Gas stations close, cash registers don’t work, food spoils in refrigerators that immediately stop working and are so poorly insulated that they can only hold their contents cool for a short while if you open the door at all regularly, which of course you have to do to get shit outtathere.
This outage is not city-wide by any means, and is just a couple of days old, but listen to this;
The prolonged outage in the mist of a sweltering heat wave has provoked widespread frustration. The local power utility, Pepco, has said it will take a week before power is fully restored.
In north-west Washington, many local businesses remained shut. Supermarkets and gas stations ran out of bagged ice, or began rationing one per customer.
Workers at a local supermarket still without power spent the morning Monday scanning perishable items before disposing of them. Then the lights flickered back on.
Traffic lights remained out at major crossings. Navigating local roads remained tricky, with roads closed off by yellow tape because of downed trees or live wires. Crews have yet to clear away large trees that toppled on homes, crushing roofs and downing power lines. Many city streets remained littered with branches and other debris.
People tend to come together in crises of this kind, of course, and I well remember being without power for almost 3 weeks in ’83 after a hurricane hit the Texas coast. Folks did pull together and figure things out as best they could. Gasoline was pooled and used in pickup trucks dispatched for ice runs. Folks lived out on their porches, those that still had porches, and cooked outside. Other folks went fishing and brought their catches back to the neighborhood and distributed them generously. Kids ran hither and yon pretty much unsupervised, and were fed without questions at any of the multitude of backyard BBQ operations that sprung up to cook meat before it spoiled. I even saw people playing checkers on porches by oil lamplight.
Folks managed, but it completely disrupted normal routines and many people didn’t have a job to return to for a couple of months.
Then the power came back on, and everyone went back to watching TV behind closed curtains again. By now I’m sure they no longer know most of their neighbor’s names once more.
But that was ’83, and some problems didn’t even exist back then;
Customers at a local Starbucks began yanking out cords of people who overstayed a 30-minute deadline for charging phones and devices.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m still laughing at that, a good 30 minutes after I first read it.
Looks like folks are helping each other out in DeeCee too, stringing power cords around from places where power is still on to power neighbor’s freezers and so on, and good for them, but as usual there is howling from idiots who have no clue at all how the power gets to their house, and how fragile the infrastructure can be in situations like this;
Isiah Leggett, the chief executive of Montgomery County, which includes the leafy suburb of Bethesda, has been slamming the utility for taking a week to get the lights back on, saying that was unacceptable.
“Having our citizens having to go through seven days without utilities is not in my opinion the kind of level of services that we should expect,” he told the local WAMU station.
On the local morning radio on Monday morning, callers were furious at Pepco officials. “This is not one storm,” complained one caller from Clinton. Others lambasted the authority for failing to modernise the system, or bury power lines.
Yeah, well Isiah obviously never climbed a power pole in his life, or has any notion at all of how long it takes to dice up a big tree and get it out-of-the-way without killing someone. Oh, and sure burying the power lines would render the grid more robust in bad weather, plus it would put a lot of people to work in a time when work is hard to find, but that falls under modernization of the infrastructure. It falls in the category of thinking ahead. It also falls in the category of investing in the future, and someone has to pay for that, either through taxes for public works, or through jacked-up utility rates in the case of private companies.
There’s still no appetite for anything like that is there? There used to be, there used to be real enthusiasm for modernizing and upgrading almost everything in the US. Not anymore though. There may be a flurry of short-lived interest in such schemes as a result of this mess, but my bet is in a week or so the debris will be gone, the power will be back on, and everyone will be back behind their curtains watching TV.
It’s as if we’ve decided that modernity has been achieved, and that we’ve arrived at a place where it will not longer need anything but minor tweaking to keep pace with conditions. The idea that we’re at a point where what we need is a shift in the way we do things—a shift that’s every bit as great a change as was switching from horses to the internal combustion engine—is not an idea with any wide currency at all.
But that is where we are.
Great direction this thing has taken here. Have thought about class a great deal since returning to the scene of the crime some 12 years. Got a friend – pretty broken individual I’ve known since early childhood – who gives a lot of thought to surviving the apocalypse. Morbidly obese and living in a very seedy trailer park below one of the major freeways connecting the central valley and the Bay Area – and he’s worried about the freaking apocalypse. And he’s not exactly atypical.
What most people fail to recognize – even the smartest among us – is that the system is not particularly amenable to management. Technology and finance and language and 7 billion of us – each with its own little way of being an embodiment of some ineffable “Being IN Time.” (Sorry, Natasha, the old Nazi just refuses to leave me alone. Perhaps the spirit of Hannah Arendt has taken up residence in my viscera.)
Just watching it all from the window of a San Diego Hilton this 4th of July, kind of thankful for the whole mess, grateful for last night’s quinoa salad, wondering how long it will all last, knowing only “not forever.”
Well, I always knew we were fucked.
On the bright side: One of our diner waitresses, who also cleans houses to make ends meet, just won $50,000 in some lottery. Even after taxes it ought to be a goodly sum for someone who’s waited tables her entire adult life.
Huh.
Looks like I got canned from TDB.
The password/ID combination no longer works anyway, so I guess that’s the end of that.
Probably for the best, it sure was frustrating over there.
Too bad.
Bluth -
May well solve some big problems we’re talking about. Think of the federal dollars saved that could be rechannelled.
Gunny -
It’s not you. it’s server problems there, it’s fucked up. Same thing happened to me the other day (i thought at first it was because that douche Bill Fish reported me). I re-registered again under the same name and password and got on no problem. But yesterday was the same thing – no one could post. Apparently many hours later all of the posts showed up – some of us have quadruple posts on there.
I figured it was happening on there again today as i got the first post on, but there aren’t any others.
Great direction this thing has taken here. Have thought about class a great deal since returning to the scene of the crime some 12 years. Got a friend – pretty broken individual I’ve known since early childhood – who gives a lot of thought to surviving the apocalypse. Morbidly obese, bad health problems, and living in a very seedy trailer park below one of the major freeways connecting the central valley and the Bay Area – and he’s worried about the freaking apocalypse. And he’s not exactly atypical.
What most people fail to recognize – even the smartest among us – is that the system is not particularly amenable to management. Technology and finance and language and 7 billion of us – each with its own little way of being an embodiment of some ineffable “Being IN Time.” (Sorry, Natasha, the old Nazi just refuses to leave me alone. Perhaps the spirit of Hannah Arendt has taken up residence in my viscera.)
Just watching it all from the window of a San Diego hotel room this 4th of July, kind of thankful for the whole mess…wondering if there’s a free treadmill and if the breakfast buffet includes smoked salmon.
Sorry. Double post. The thought of a breakfast buffet with smoked salmon is messing with my head.
Amy;
Oh, ok.
Nevertheless, I’m taking it as a Sign From God®, that I need to quit wasting my time over there. It’s about impossible to have anything approaching a conversation in the middle of that food fight.
Gunny -
True, but as CiFA is basically a no go, the temptation remains. It’s more fun to just dip in there to say hi to Jabs and Lefty.
Porn,
you could make a good argument that we mainly use our bloated military budget to procure energy supplies, and that if we diverted that money into R&D into alternative energy we could make the need for such a huge military redundant.
And cheap, secure, plentiful and climate-neutral energy certainly would go a long way to secure basic living standards in the coming century.
But reducing the size and cost of the military really isn’t going to alter the problems convergence is bringing.
Of course if you worship the Hand Invisible, they aren’t problems at all. If you worship the Hand Invisible a human life, and human dignity, and human suffering, is worth exactly what the market says it is worth. So what is an urban peasant’s life worth in Shanghai these days? Or on the back streets of Mumbai?
Or in the USA, if you’re one who has slipped through the net.
I would make the futile argument that military funds could be transferred to, say, single payer healthcare. That would require federal funding, after all.
Crappy buffet. Not unlike The Daily Beast: not terrible, but little that is truly enticing – and you have to wade through a lot of boxes of raisin bran to get to what is. Not that there’s anything wrong with raisin bran.
porn,
I agree, but that is a discussion about how to cut the pie. Which is an important discussion, but doesn’t address the convergence problem, which is about where will the pie come from in the first place, never mind how we cut it.
bim
Even when I was a little kid I could never get over a feeling that those single portion size boxes of breakfast cereal were… only word that’s even close is immoral. A whole box for a few bites!
But then I was pretty strange kid.
Single payer:
The first practical step – assuming the ACA takes hold and is widely accepted – is to remove the employer/employee exemption, which is why I’ve been arguing for that from the outset. Neither money nor the minutiae of implementation are obstacles. It’s really about encouraging a somewhat coherent worldview.
Hah! That makes at least two of us. (And a no less strange adult…)
I just got a breakfast buddy on a bagel from the diner in my backyard. It was tasty.
Bluth -
No one ever knows where the pie will come from. No one ever has. All of a sudden a new pie comes. Sometimes it’s a genuine pie (Apple, even) and sometimes it’s a few berries with a lot of air (dotcoms, mortgages, social networks) and the pie collapses. Sometimes the pie is so big (creative industries) and the slices so small, it’s nowhere enough to feed everyone.
For old people like me, just missed the photography boat after learning the technology, caught the tail end of the web, contemplating whether or not it’s worth learning the tech to develop apps, we’re just trying to hang on by our teeth.
But it’s not all hopeless. I work directly and indirectly with a few small to medium scale American manufacturers and printers who are doing very well. Lots of handmade and sustainable products too. I think it looks pretty good for small manufacturers and craftsfolks. I don’t think it’s ever been a better time to be a small scale entrepreneur either – technology has helped that considerably.
Lots being covered here.
Bluther is right about a growing global convergence. For the most part though it is not driven by exploitation but by recent have nots building a more comfortable working/middle class for themselves by doing stuff that others want and at a price they are willing and able to pay. For now they are exporting a lot of that stuff and building wealth but eventually they will want and be able to afford to keep more of it for themselves. (And by stuff I don’t just mean desirable artifacts converted from material hewn from the earth by the application of energy. It can include intellectual and service stuff – everything from entertainment to personal care.)
Convergence doesn’t have to mean a permanent decline to today’s lowest common denominator. At the very least the emerging global middle class won’t accept that. It does mean that growth to meet that demand for a better life will become more natural resource efficient and less new artifact or trinket centered. Pricing – with some smart regulation – will be the quickest way to drive that. (But if that proves too slow to react to a looming disruption then revolution or war isn’t out of the question. I sincerely hope not.)
The working/middle class is the core of our society. They are the ones that need to be providing for themselves and their families and contributing a surplus – along with progressively bigger surpluses from their wealthier brethren – to pay for shared needs and aspirations. They form too big a block to be net personal beneficiaries over anything less than a short term. They will of course share in the overall, and hopefully highly leveraged societal benefits of the shared endeavors that they contribute to. The working/middle class needs work. That has to be a priority. Reclassifying more and more of them as needy and extending ever more permanent benefits to them is unsustainable.
btw, if anyone cares to lament the manufacturing of Apple products overseas (and if it’s possible, ignoring the Foxxconn abuses for the moment, and the fact that we don’t have the type of workforce required anyway), Apple has spawned countless entrepreneural auxiliary businesses. Apps, ebooks and audiobooks, graphic design, iTunes music, cases and sleeves, it’s pretty endless really. I’d like to see some sort of calculation as to how much Apple has spawned in auxiliary income and revenue in dollar terms. Anyone and his brother can put music on iTunes, publish an iBook on there, develop an app to put up for sale on the apple store. Folks who used to design websites for companies now develop apps for companies in addition or instead. I’m involved with a couple of companies who produce cases, sleeves, and skins for Apple and other devices.
We’re becoming more and more a contract economy. A viable national healthcare system is one way to prepare for that. Some sort of revision of the unemployment compensation system would be another.
Should of course have read ….anything more than a short term.
Expat -
What exactly do you mean by middle-class benefits? I’m not being snotty here, i genuinely have no idea what benefits you have in mind.
Amy – everything from SS and pensions to tertiary education and healthcare. It needs to be paid for some how.
So how does that work? Getting rid of it all? If you want to get rid of it, you need a plan.
And also, if you’re saying that we should get rid of SS and Medicare and tertiary education, then you know what i’m going to say. Get rid of K-12 as an entitlement too. See, the argument usually goes that everyone pays for this because we need those kids around to pay for our SS and Medicare and to be doctors and professionals that will provide needed services to us in our old age. But if we’re going to cut those benefits and leave those kids exempt from paying into SS and Medicare, and not bother to provide post-secondary education even, there’s no real benefit to us of having those kids around. They’d actually be rather a burden.
Not at all Amy. I don’t want to get rid of anything. Just saying that it has to be paid for and that means the people on the receiving end need to be working and paying taxes.
That’s how it already works, Expat. You get back from SS based on what you pay in over the course of your working life. I should get this year’s accounting next month sometime. I’m up to around $800 or so / month at retirement based on what i’ve earned so far as of last year. If i don’t work for a year, the amount doesn’t increase. It’s not obscene either – I’m guessing that although we’re around the same age, as a lawyer Mr. Willikers has made a whole lot more in life than i have. But think he said he’s only up to around $1200 / mo.
Hope everyone had a pleasant 4th. I spent mine down on memory lane, with some people I worked — in so-called public welfare — with in the ’70s: and their children and grandchildren and the rest of the afflictions of old age.
One guy (mine host) that I worked with in 1970 is still unretired. He’s now working in the euphemistically named Quality Control unit of the Illinois Department of Public Aid (which is now mostly called Healthcare and Family Services for the same reason statues wear fig leaves). “Euphemistically named” because the quality of the work is now more wretched than it’s ever been (something I would have thought downright impossible). Nobody has even the faintest idea how the standard might be raised and the QC function’s role is now seen as collecting statistics about just how bad it is.
But even that is mostly beyond them: they audit and audit and mostly just collect anecdotes. The local offices are now so overwhelmed that reaching any particular employee by phone is just about impossible. Overwhelmed by what, you ask. We’ll, mostly by a popular healthcare initiative that is supposed to cover pregnant women through childbirth and the three months following it, with a full year of medical care for the child. The average caseworker (or whatever they’re called these days) has about a thousand of these cases (officially: actually, it’s more, as I’ll explain).
(For comparison, I was responsible for a mere 400 ADC families when I quit in ’75. Each was supposed to get a two-hour “redetermination of eligibility” every six months; none did, because I spent all my time – actually, way more than all my time – dealing with one kind of emergency or another. Many of these emergencies came screaming into the office and wound up as little yellow “waiting slips” on my desk [20 or 30 a day] because they actually belonged to the one in two or three caseloads that had no caseworker to “manage” them: because, even in those days, reducing staff was seen as the key to controlling costs. All of which, in a nutshell, was why, when we did manage to start sending checks out to someone, they kept on going out forever…)
But two-and-a-half times impossible isn’t really any less possible than impossibility itself, so today we have caseloads of a thousand, with just as many of them “uncovered.” More, in fact, because everyone is obliged to follow the Wisconsin model, which is violated when we look at anything except reducing staff, what the remaining staff is paid, and the benefits of former staff. Therefore everyone working there spends all of every day scrambling to catch up on late paperwork that is preventing this operation from being covered and that baby from getting a test. And therefore we have uncomplaining mothers covered for a year or two past the end of their eligibility, and their children covered up to the age of four or so. Not that they don’t need care, but they just aren’t entitled to it under the current law. (Not to mention that many of the mothers have gone back to work in insured jobs, even today.) Thus the hemorrhage continues, and when it finally proves impossible to stem it by laying everybody off, the state will be left with the only possible choice, and will regretfully cancel the whole program entirely.
This is the drift of public policy today, and it’s mostly what I mean by scapegoating: choosing an invariably unionized symbol for the problem and just wailing the living shit out of it.
Amy
I’m probably not making my self clear.
There are two types of government benefit – those that cover the unfortunate and needy and which we all hope we shall never need – and those that we are all entitled to eventually.
We aren’t paying enough in taxes to cover the growth of the latter. And I don’t just mean that if only the rich paid their fair share it would be fine. Eventually it will fall on the rest of us too.
Natasha – That is one heck of a system indicting story. Have they looked at streamlining the paperwork – paying on trust by default and then doing spot checks for example? Industry does that these days with suppliers who deliver directly to the shop floor, fill the parts bins, submit an invoice and get paid automatically.
Expat-
It ain’t allowed and never has been. What has passed for public debate my entire life has been a binary shouting match between “burn it down!” and “save it!” The villains on the “burn it down” side have changed, of course. In the ’70s and ’80s the wicked people were Welfare Queens (if a few old people or babies starved to get back at those monsters, well [and y'all remember who could say "welllll,,," better than anybody], it was a small price to pay.) Today they’re the Marauding Public employees who are supposed to make it work with the little fingers of their left hands.
Against this, decade after decade, have been the Organized Apologetic Mumblers of Compassionate Concern.
Incremental process improvements have been entirely left to the people charged with making it all “work” full time, while somehow learning to Do More With Less.
In November of 1970, our Director, a career civil servant named David L. Daniels, issued a memo to staff in response to one of the regularly occurring Defining Crises of Our Time. After a steady diet of four years of philosophy classes it was a revelation of simple profundity, and I still remember every word exactly: “The conditions under which we work are constant, but the causes of these conditions change from time to time.” That was all of it then and it’s all of it today. The rest is just the shifting odor of the bullshit of the moment.
But I don’t want you to think that they’re haven’t been technical process improvements along the lines you suggest. There have been, but they haven’t been (and never could be) enough. I’m very familiar with sampling “suppliers who deliver directly to the shop floor, fill the parts bins, submit an invoice and get paid automatically.” I know that it works and I know why it works, which is simply that you can keep a working process working by auditing it regularly. The operative word being “working.” You can no more fix a broken process by auditing it than you can make a broken car run by inspecting it. And administering programs like these requires an irreducible amount of contact between people, some of whom don’t have time to speak to anybody (and some of whom simply don’t exist).
It’s not so much that we aren’t paying enough taxes for SS but that there are fewer and fewer workers supporting ever more retirees. In 1950 about 16 workers paid 1.5% of their pay into SS for every one retiree drawing from SS. Today there are 2.9 workers for every retiree drawing payments, and the workers are putting in 6.2% of their pay plus the employer is matching that amount, meaning individuals are basically paying 8 times as much today if you consider the employer match part of their compensation.
The payments we will eventually draw will actually represent a pretty lousy rate of return on our investments. If you remove the earnings cap on SS (currently around $107K) then you also remove any pretense that there should at least be some correlation between what you put in vs what you get out.
Most younger workers would be far better off with their own accounts. If it is deemed that such accounts could only be invested in ultra safe securities then it could be structured that way. Obviously, there would need to be a transition period. Ultimately guaranteed investments will have to be means tested. The old saying that that which can not last won’t comes to mind.
I enjoy working and am able to set my own hours and generally take vacations as I wish, so I don’t really want to retire. Perhaps other factors may one day require it, but I’m hoping to hang in there long enough to where there is one worker for each retiree and I hope to meet mine. I thinking Jabsco. I’ll send him a thank you card at Christmas from some exotic locale.
I should have said that “ultimately guaranteed SS payments will need to be means tested”
Tommy -
I like to work (for myself, anyway) and don’t especially figure on literally retiring either. I’m also assuming that by the time we get there, it’s going to be a lot later than they’re telling us now. If i’m so incapacitated that i can’t sit in front of a computer, it’s time to go anyway. But i don’t think you can pull it altogether, good luck trying.
I do think that Medicare is going to have to be, if not means tested, at least rationed to some degree. I don’t really have a problem with that, the cost of medical care in the retirement years is for most people far going to outstrip what we put in. I certainly don’t think i’m entitled to be on the shortlist for a new heart if i’m pushing 80. I think i read the other day that around 33% of Medicare expenses occur in the final month of life. That would be something to work on. Maybe work on some sort of a hospice type system for some situations to replace hospitals. Dunno.
You’d also have to deem that they couldn’t be touched under any circumstance too. Even IRA’s can be and are cashed in if needed. If i had one of those accounts it would have been raided many times over already, and not to pay for vacations or a new dress. For my own circumstances, i’m happy to trade a lower rate of return for the relative safety of government administration.
The baby boom bubble won’t last forever. Once we all die off and the numbers start to look a lot better. And yes, cost of end of life care is going to plummet once our kids get hold of the purse strings. Not least because expensive end of life care is usually far more painful and unpleasant and soul-destroying and miserable than hospice care. I’ve seen loved ones go both ways, and I would move heaven, earth and everything in between to get anyone I love into a hospice once she or he reaches end game. Of course the hardest part is often getting the doctors to to speak honestly about when that moment is come. One of the best things about the ACA is (or was if they yanked it) the provision that makes sure all the carers and doctors sit down together -and get paid for it so they show up- to work out what is the best plan for the whole patient (instead of merely for his left lung or her lower bowel). The right shrieked up and down the country DEATH PANELS!
Of course. More fools them, though. Lots of them are gonna be in need of a thoughtful death panel sooner than most.
porn,
Not just the safety of gov administration, think of the vultures that will start circling around the money if everyone gets to invest it themselves! I bet not ten cents on the dollar, overall, would get past their fitly lying greedy beaks.
In a perfect Hand Invisible Utopia, where all information is available, and everyone knows where to find it and how to apprise it, and no vultures are allowed to dine, it might work. Maybe…
In the real world it would be nothing more than a job scheme for stockbrokers and lawyers. And when they were done getting fat on 9/10ths of the carcass, we’d all have to pay to look after the grizzled paupers left behind without substance.
Bluth -
I would certainly rather be in a hospice type situation than a hospital. I’d make a good bet that most people would, all things considered.
Bluth (2:57)
yep, bingo.