We are Spirits in the Material World (Source: “Betty Boop in Snow White”, 1933)
Back in the 90s, while I was still on active duty, I joined a Compuserve online forum for active and veteran military members. I remember a post by an Air Force captain retelling an incident that happened in the skies over Iraq during Operation: Desert Storm.
This occurred during the initial combat missions while the Coalition Forces were establishing air supremacy. On one mission, the captain was flight commander for about half a dozen fighters. They were flying above the clouds when his wingman reported a radar contact underneath the clouds. The IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) transponders did not indicate that these were friendly planes, so his wingman recommended attacking (which, under the rules of engagement at that phase, was the correct response).
Something about the whole thing felt off to the captain. He instructed the flight to wait for visual confirmation.
I haven’t owned a television for the last fifteen years.
Call it an odd twist of fate, but I was gradually weaned off of television since college. A lot of people, especially in the younger generation, find the concept of life devoid of TV as inconceivable.
However, instead of television, I do watch a lot of YouTube, especially by independent content creators covering diverse fields such as pop culture, Slavic hardbass music, law, and cooking. And since the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams about the entertainment industry.
And one metaphor that’s been popping up lately is the analogy of Schrödinger’s Cat.
At the lowest point in my life, I had less than twenty dollars to my name.
It was 2004, and I had been unemployed for nearly a year. Due to the circumstances under which I was terminated, I was denied unemployment insurance, forcing me to live on meager savings that ran out within a couple of months. I ended up selling almost all of my gaming and science fiction books and toys on eBay just to have money to pay the mortgage. As for food and gas, I did the dumbest thing you could ever do: max out my credit cards and play the balance juggling game to stay solvent.
It was so bad, I almost got arrested for bouncing a check on a speeding ticket.
For most people, 2021 will be remembered as 1 PC (post-COVID). Some people have spent this year resigning themselves to the New Normal. Others have been struggling to return to the Old Normal, life before social distancing, masks, and vaccines.
For me, however, 2021 was the watershed for the New Old Normal.
In this year that’s just ending, I left Kentucky, the place I had been living for half my lifetime, and moved back to New Hampshire, my childhood home. Since announcing my departure back in August, many people have asked what made me decide to leave. The answer I gave was simply, “After COVID, I decided it was time to come home.”
This works fine for small talk over cocktails. But much like the rest of 2021, the truth is much more complicated.
Not too long ago, I happened to hear about an old friend from school. We had corresponded off and on for a while, but I hadn’t really seen her for over 18 years.
(Out of respect for her privacy, I’m not mentioning her name. If you’re reading this, and I hope you are, know that I’m writing this for you out of the best faith. Tough love is as hard on the giver as it is on the recipient.)
Kentucky drivers are the dumbest drivers in the world.
Driving in and around Louisville is way too stressful. Most drivers lack situational awareness and put themselves in a situation where they’re holding up traffic and won’t let you pass. And even worse, they realize at the last minute where they are and suddenly swerve, making themselves a danger not only to themselves, but everyone else around them.
At least back in Massachusetts, they really mean it when they try to run you off the road.
If you aren’t prepared for what life can throw at you, you may be in for a great fall.
As I’m sure everyone understands all too well by now, life has a way of throwing monkeywrenches into the system. If there’s anything that’s been consistent about 2020, it’s that every month seemingly has a new surprise to spring upon humanity.
Instead of traveling over smooth ground, we are on precipitous terrain. Any kind of long term forecast is currently impossible.
When chaos is the order of the day, you must be able to make and act on snap judgements without overcommitting on your previous decision. How do you do that?
Right now the world is practically at a standstill in self-quarantine against the Coronavirus. While some people may be working remotely, a lot of businesses are actually closed for operation. A lot of people are out of work right now, and there’s no guarantee they’ll have a job when the pandemic eventually passes.
As I was folding my laundry tonight, I was thinking about everything that’s happened over the past few days, at the national level, but more importantly what was going around me in my local city. And some things aren’t adding up.
(As I’m writing this, President Trump has just declared a national emergency over the spread of COVID-19, aka the Coronavirus. It’s been only a few days since major sporting events were suspended and cancelled, most notably the NBA and March Madness. So I don’t know right now how things are going to play out over the next few weeks or months.)
Over a decade and a half ago, I used to be a manufacturing engineer in the automotive industry. One of my regular duties was to conduct something called an FMEA, Failure Modes Effects and Analysis. It was a risk assessment over what could possibly go wrong in a car (or a component of it), which guided what type of preventive measures and quality checks had to happen.
The Big Three automakers had a pretty standard system: there were three measures, rated on a scale from 1 to 10. You multiply the three numbers to get anything between 1 and 1 thousand. The bigger the number, the bigger the risk. If it was something under a hundred, you almost didn’t think about. However, if it was close to a thousand, it was all hands-on-deck, the-company-could-go-out-of-business bad.
These were the three measures: severity (what’s the worst case), occurrence (how often does it happen), and detection (how quickly can it be spotted).
I’m going to add in a fourth factor to the calculation: contagion. The automotive FMEA doesn’t account for this, because when a tire blows out on one Ford Explorer, it doesn’t cause three or four other Explorers to crash. So now our scale goes from one to ten thousand.
In thinking about the virus, I decided to apply my FMEA math. So let’s go:
(Disclaimer, I’m going to throw out some numbers, but all of these are second-hand with no references. This is a thought experiment, not a policy paper.)
If this doesn’t give you a sick feeling in your stomach, it should.
Seven years ago I received a rude awakening.
My workplace at the time was having a wellness screening, which I participated in. When the results came back, I was diagnosed as being at risk for Type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, my blood pressure was abnormally high, as was my cholesterol.
My health is a lot better now, but to get out of the danger zone, I had to make a lot of drastic changes.
