How will your personal life change as a result of COVID-19 after the pandemic passes? And what do you think our country should learn that will make it a better place going forward? Envisioning our post-COVID future…this time on Right Angle with Stephen Green, Bill Whittle and Scott Ott.
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20 replies on “Your Post-COVID Future: How It Will Change Your Life and the USA Going Forward”
Steve, I’m with you on jeans! If you think men’s jeans are bad, try women’s! I challenge you to find 100% cotton women’s jeans. They don’t exist anymore. But the real decline in both men’s and women’s jeans is that the denim is much lighter weight than it used to be. That is, it’s much thinner. Being thinner, it’s cheaper to make, and also cheaper to work because your sewing machines and needles don’t have to be as heavy-duty or replaced as often, and since it’s easier to handle, it’s also faster to make a pair of jeans with thin denim than with heavier denim.
Credit cards are good if….. You pay off the whole thing each month. Until recently I did. Bunch of unusual expenses. It’s going down, as I am still working. If you use cards and keep the money to pay them off in in interest paying account, you experience something called “float”. You get interest and pay none. Cards are even better if you use one that does cash back. (I do)
Back in the 90s before banks caught on and had free balance transfers I paid off my car using credit cards and kept surfing my balance (less what would have been my normal car payment) until I was in a position to pay the balance off.
Today we try gaming whatever the latest teaser car is offered – we’ve been building points across a few cards to hopefully take a nice vacation
I like the term kudzu. Takes over everything.
Steve is going to be Charleton Heston in The Omega Man
Sorry Scott, but the “both sides” is far more prevalent on the Left than from our side. Part of why I don’t do Facebook anymore is I got tired of making thought-out, researched arguments to make my points. In return I got dopey straw man arguments, bizarre talking points that ten seconds of critical thought would debunk (and these talking points come from highly educated Leftists), and I’ve been called, just off of the top of my head – Misinformed and Dangerous, an Nazi Sympathizer, a Racist, a Trump Worshippper (odd coming from people who know that I’ve personally disliked Donald Trump as a person since I was a kid), and many others.
What both sides need to do is stop indulging one side’s behaving like malevolent children.
I think becoming a werewolf would be cool.
Steve the best example of your last point is something that has come up on this site multiple times: DE Shaving.
The handle is made well often from Germany. the blades are sharp and functional and much cheaper than cartridges made in China or Indonesia and even if you change every week, you come out way ahead. And you get a better shave. Why we don’t apply this same logic to everything is way beyond me. As an engineer, I will pay for quality so that I buy it once.
Steve – As someone who has taught Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University 3 times, credit card living is the biggest change I would like to see made from this.
Remember Pournelle’s Iron Law of bureaucracy. Any government department, over time, becomes more interested in preserving itself than doing it’s job. Insidious mission creep is one result. And, heaven forfend ever eliminating the problem that caused the department to be made.
Administrivia is generated by the barnacles (aka bureaucrats of the deep state) of government the purpose of which is to keep things from happening. Especially things that have never happened before. They exist to enforce a totally smothering mother-may-I administration of everything. To do, you must get their arbitrary permission to act.
The lowest of the low barnacles of government are guided only by their sense of existence that to deny or delay permission is to feel alive. Yet, they contribute NOTHING of value to the economy to pay for the obscene burden they place upon it. They pretend that it is-worth-it if it saves only one life. All without consideration of the lives it destroys or what it does not allow to come into existence. The barnacles are only a drag and have no will, ability, nor power to bring something into existence that never existed before but assume the power to stop the people who do.
A free people do not need to be protected from themselves. They do desperately need to be protected from the power of government to inhibit what they can accomplish by layers upon layers of rules, regulations, and standards of what they must do, how they must do it, and how the results must perform. Nothing new can come from such restrictions. This brings life and living to a halt. THAT is the primary purpose held by the barnacles of government.
Well said, sir. When the majority of people realize that they do not need permission to live from faceless bureaucrats, the world will be a freer, happier place.
Excellent post.
Interesting take on barnacles, and I do agree with that point. I just always thought they delayed and denied everything more because to follow the rules is to not get fired and to do anything of your own initiative means the penalty falls on you. Since there isn’t much of a bonus or benefit for positive action, they just pass the buck and make sure someone else has to say Yes. Since no one wants to risk anything, nothing gets done… not even saving lives.
Its similar to that very old adage, “no one got fired for buying IBM”.
No bureaucrat was ever fired for saying no. On the other hand, a yes can put ones career in danger.
Positive take: Change is often good, because it promotes out-of-the-box thinking. In this case, it has forced my employers to reconsider its restrictive stance on working from home as a viable option for many of its employees. As an on-the-job-trained software engineer, I’ve always been aware of the fact that I can do most of my job remotely. It has taken this so-called “crisis” (regardless of its debatable severity) to awaken the bureaucratic behemoth to the idea that people can be as productive offsite as onsite.
Negative take: Scott’s notion that we should all learn to be nicer to each other and stop referring to the “other side” of the political aisle as the “idiots” trying to take down the country is contrary to the fact that the leftists of the world have been trying to destroy the American way of life for nigh a century. We would be sorely remiss if we naively ignored this fact and continued unprepared for the inevitable onslaughts against individual liberty and pursuits for happiness, upon which our Republic is formed. The leftists of the world are, in fact, anathema to our nation and they are the idiots to whom we must never submit.
Yes. The Left has taken advantage of the “get along, go along” GOPe bipartisanship for decades upon decades. One little compromise every few years and foundational principles become quaint relics of history.
Remember, the definition of “Bipartisan” is that Republicans get to be Bi, while Democrats get to be Partisan
Antlers would be cool. I’d have to get a convertible though.
Just as the media is still living off Watergate the FDA’s foot dragging that inadvertently saved us from the birth defects caused by Thalidomide in Europe Is the reason for the excessive caution now.