Episode 1231 Scott Adams: Merry Christmas and Pass the Pork. Trust Science and Pretend the Republic Still Exists
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Content:
Whiteboard1: American Political System
Whiteboard2: Trust Science
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Yep, that's why I'm a cartoonist and not a famous singer.
Because you wouldn't want to hear any more of that, let me tell you.
Merry Christmas! Merry Merry Christmas, ho ho ho ho!
How's everybody doing?
It's an awesome day today.
And if you would like to participate in the very special Christmas version, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Today only, you can fill it with hot chocolate or eggnog.
But use your favorite beverage.
I still like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, The holiday sensation, it's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! Did you hear angels singing?
I feel like...
Try that again. Hold on.
Try it again.
One more sip.
Yeah, I think I heard it.
Angels sing every time you take a sip.
Amazing, really.
Well, we got news today.
Joe Biden, he's got a new saying, which he broke out at one of his events, in which a journalist shouted a question, and Joe Biden said, and I quote, you're a one-horse pony.
So that's going to be my new catchphrase.
Oh yeah? Well, you're a one-horse pony.
So, that's the leader of the free world.
You're a one-horse pony.
Nothing to worry about.
I wouldn't be worried about that at all.
Shall we go to the whiteboard?
Would you like to go right to it?
I know that's why you're here.
Come on. You didn't come here for me.
You came here for the whiteboard.
Just admit it. I think I can handle it.
Well, I was listening to a YouTube video in which Phil Klein, a former Arkansas AG, was talking about the election.
And he explained the election in a way that I thought I would like to, let's say, find some inspiration from it and put my own spin on it.
Okay? By the way, those of you who are asking, yes, I do still have my wedding ring.
I take it off to work because it's sort of bulky, and when I type, it sort of moves my fingers in the wrong direction.
But let us go to the whiteboard.
Let me tell you what kind of a system we have here in these United States.
Some of this might apply to you non-United States people.
So, Apparently, I don't know how to spell the word democracy, but if you could pretend that I had spelled that correctly, it would be a much better presentation.
Watch me write it with my left hand, because if I use my right hand, I'm going to rip my microphone out.
All right. Damn it.
It's all falling apart.
It's all falling apart. Democracy.
Left-handed writing. Come on.
It's the best I can do. So, if you ask people in the United States, you walked up to an average citizen, and you said, hey, average citizen.
And that citizen would say back to you, why are you calling me average?
And you say, it doesn't matter.
This is just a story.
You're not even real.
And then the guy says, okay, what's your question?
You say, well, average citizen, what kind of a political system do you live in in the United States?
And that person would say...
Democracy. Well, of course, you're all smart enough to know it's not exactly a democracy because we have a republic, meaning we elect representatives to make decisions for us.
So really, we're one level away from a pure democracy.
But our democracy, our republic, is determined by the electoral college vote, not a direct vote.
So the vote goes to the electoral college.
But the vote isn't really in our current system.
It's not really about all of the votes.
If you're in California...
Your vote may not matter that much.
But if you're in a swing state, it probably matters a lot.
So it's really about the swing state votes.
They're the only ones that end up making a difference.
And of course, the swing state votes are mostly driven by voter turnout.
It's not driven by policies or politics per se.
I mean, those are all part of the mix.
But it's really driven by turnout.
How many people physically vote?
And turnout, it turns out, at least this year, was determined by rules changes.
So there were a whole bunch of rule changes about who can vote, where the ballot boxes are, satellite voting stations that had different rules than regular voting stations, deadlines about when the votes could be counted, ballot boxes, where they could be placed, how people can observe, all of those things.
We're the subject of a bunch of rules changes, which everybody who looks into it, I think, would agree, drove turnout, which drove the swing state votes, which caused the Electoral College to go the way it did, which caused our republic to have a presumptive president-elect Biden.
But it turns out I didn't know about this part.
This is the part that Phil Kline filled in for me.
I didn't realize that Zuckerberg had donated over $400 million to a number of non-profit entities who were behind the voting rule changes.
Did you know this?
I found this out this morning.
Now, I knew all of the parts of But I didn't see them pulled together until just this morning.
So I knew that Zuckerberg had donated a bunch of money and it had something to do with election integrity.
And of course I knew all these other parts, but I didn't quite know that the only thing that caused the rules changes was Zuckerberg and his money.
And the only thing that caused the turnout, the way it was, was the voting rule changes.
In other words, turnout Includes mischief, right?
Because it's the number of votes that matter, and some of that might be mischief.
We don't know if it's a trivial amount.
We don't know if it's a big amount.
But we know that turnout was driven by things like that, and targeting certain inner-city voters, etc.
So a lot of it, a lot of the turnout wasn't just rules changes.
This was a very big part of it.
But it wasn't all of it.
Some of it was just this money went toward Getting the turnout and did a good job.
Now, as some smart people said to me when I said something like this on Twitter, they said, well, what about 2016?
You know, really? 2016 was a turnout election.
The only reason that Trump won is he got this turnout right.
And the only reason he got the turnout right was...
Probably the way he campaigned, maybe the way they directed their advertisement, perhaps had something to do with better data.
Where do you see anywhere on here the will of the people?
So I'm not saying that the Trump election was good, bad, legitimate, illegitimate, or anything else.
I'm just saying that he was also...
Part of a similar system in which we are six to seven layers away from a democracy.
We are six to seven layers away from a democracy.
We're not even in the ballpark of being a democracy or a republic.
You know, on paper we are.
But in reality, our election is really driven by, say, a Zuckerberg or a billionaire, etc.
That's what the political system looks like.
But should we worry about the political system at all?
Because if you think about it, our politics should be driven by experts, right?
So our politicians shouldn't be just independently making decisions without consulting people.
And a lot of our decisions are based on economics and based on science.
So it shouldn't matter too much What kind of system gets you to your elected leaders so long as those elected leaders are transparently following science?
Wouldn't you agree? Would it matter if you had a Democrat who followed the science or a Republican who followed the science?
As long as it was the same science, they'd have the same decisions.
Same with economics.
If they followed the experts, wouldn't it be kind of similar?
No. No.
Of course not. No.
Here's why. Let's say you wanted to trust the science.
Everybody tells you you should trust the science, right?
But how do you trust the science?
You didn't do any science.
How much science did you do this year?
Do you remember that randomized control study you set up and operated on your own?
No. I didn't do any science this year.
You didn't do any science. I didn't even directly observe any.
Did you watch any science experiments being conducted?
I didn't. I've never seen any science.
Indeed, I would say I've never seen science in my life.
Except maybe, you know, in a science class in school or something.
No, what we see is what these scientists...
Tell us happened when they were doing science.
So here's your problem.
Scientists are, and a lot of you don't know this, but they're actually human beings.
And human beings are...
Okay, here's a little quiz.
Fill in the blank.
Human beings are, and your two choices are A, reliable, or B, unreliable.
There's your test.
Human beings are reliable or be unreliable.
Yeah, most of you got the right answer.
That's right. They're unreliable.
Because they have biases, they can be bribed, they might be paid by somebody, they could just be wrong.
So, trust science, except that the only view that we're getting of science are from the scientists, And they're unreliable.
That's kind of bad, but it's worse than that, because I don't usually hear from the scientists.
I hear from the journalists who talk to the scientists.
Now remember, the scientists are unreliable.
Because why? Because why?
Does anybody remember? Why are these scientists unreliable?
That's right, they're humans.
They're human beings. And human beings, all of them, are unreliable.
Now, what happens if you take an unreliable scientist and he tells his story to an unreliable journalist who, and again, a lot of you don't know this, but journalists, human beings.
It doesn't look like it sometimes.
Lots of times you'll look at journalists and pundits and you'll say, I don't think that's even human.
But they are, surprisingly.
As far as I know, every journalist is actually a human being.
There are no demons or monsters or animals who have ever done this job successfully.
So human beings.
So now you're two levels of absurdity away from this thing called science, which is pretty good.
As a process, as a system, science is pretty good.
We all like it. Now, the other part that I didn't put here is that when you read the journalists, there's a third problem, right?
You've got this unreliable human being who happens to be in the job of a scientist.
You've got this unreliable human being who's translating that.
So now it's been translated twice.
Translated by a scientist?
Translated by a journalist?
Are we done? No.
It gets worse.
Then you read it.
That's three humans in this system so far.
How reliable are you at reading things and understanding them?
You know, right?
How many of you are human beings?
Are there any human beings watching this today?
Yeah, most of you.
Probably human. If you're a human being, are you A, reliable, or B, unreliable?
It's B. It's B. Even you, even me, have I ever read something and misinterpreted it?
Three times this morning so far?
I feel like I'm reasonably good at interpreting things, and I've already had two or three misinterpretations this morning.
So, trust the science, as described to you by unreliable scientists, as reported by unreliable journalists, as read and understood by unreliable readers.
Are we good so far?
So far, it's a pretty good system, isn't it?
But, do the journalists tell you their own opinion of stories?
Well, they can under the special condition that their own opinion of the story matches their corporate media overlords.
Can a journalist write a story that their boss would fire them for?
Well, they can write it, but they can't get it published.
So it's really not about the journalist, or the scientist, or the science.
It's really about what the corporate media will allow.
And who runs the corporate media?
Oh, look, it's billionaires again.
It's billionaires again.
It's your heads of the media.
And, of course, it's advertisers.
I'll just put Big Pharma in there as a representative advertiser for a lot of stuff.
So this is our system.
And what the Democrats tell you every day is that you should trust science.
Trusting science might be the dumbest thing that's ever been said.
You've never seen science.
You've only seen unreliable people talk to other unreliable people that you've then unreliably filtered through your own brain.
And even that's not anything, because it came from the corporate media, so you don't even see the whole story.
Right? So that's your system.
Let us review. We've got a political system.
In which the will of the people is completely irrelevant.
In this particular example, Zuckerberg probably was the only one who voted this year.
Let me say that again.
In all likelihood, from a practical perspective, the only person who voted this year was Zuckerberg.
Let that sink in.
I don't even think that's an exaggeration, is it?
Because if you took him out of the system, You wouldn't have had the funding for the rules changes, you wouldn't have had the turnout, the swing states, the votes, the whole thing.
There was only one vote this year.
The richest guy in America, he voted for you.
Now, what do you make of the fact that, in effect, it's kind of a dictatorship, right?
Because one person voted effectively.
Well, there's a really weird red sky out there.
That's scary looking. All right, let's not talk about that yet.
Is that bad?
You know what's interesting about this is I couldn't decide how much I cared.
You know, if you told me generically, hey, you know, a billionaire is running the country, your republic and your democratic system are all just illusions.
If you told me that generically, I'd say, oh, that's bad.
That's really bad because you don't want a billionaire in control of everything.
But what if the billionaire happens to be Mark Zuckerberg?
You have a specific billionaire.
He's not every billionaire.
He's just Mark Zuckerberg.
Here's the interesting thing about that.
If the country of the United States were managed and led as well as Facebook, would we be better off or worse off?
We'd be better off.
I'm not saying we should turn over the country to Mark Zuckerberg.
That feels like a little dangerous idea, right?
So I'm not advocating it.
But the truth is, if you're being a Our current messy system with God knows what flaws.
Or you say, just for a while, maybe not permanently, but for a while, Mark, you're pretty good at running big organizations.
You're super smart.
I feel as if you care about the country.
Could you just run it for a while?
What would happen? I don't know that you'd get a worse result.
So I'm not sure that we should panic over any of this, because Mark Zuckerberg's actually a smart guy who knows how to get stuff done, and I don't think he has bad intentions.
Do you? I see somebody saying in the comments, I was expecting this, China owns Zuckerberg, because China might have something to do with their Their fortunes, and he's married to a Chinese-American woman, etc., blah, blah, blah. But here's what I think.
I don't think China owns Zuckerberg.
He's too rich. He's too smart.
I feel as if they might try to own him.
I just don't think they can.
What are they going to do to him?
Cut his fortune from a gazillion dollars to 90% of a gazillion dollars?
I mean, what exactly can China even do to Zuckerberg that would make him any less happy than he is now?
Probably nothing.
He's actually somewhat invulnerable to everything, relative to everybody else in the world.
Would you rather have a Joe Biden in office, running everything, and whatever influence China has on Joe Biden, or a Mark Zuckerberg running everything, sort of a shadow government situation, But it's Zuckerberg.
And China is still trying to, let's say, influence him because they would influence everybody, right?
China wouldn't not try to influence.
So whoever is in charge, they're going to try to influence.
And I feel as if Zuckerberg would have way more ability...
To resist Chinese influence than Biden would, I don't think it would be even close.
Do you? I don't even think you could say those were in the same neighborhood of being a good idea.
I would much rather take the billionaire, put him in office.
Now, the big problem, of course, is you don't want one person having that much power, they become a dictator, power corrupts, etc.
I don't know. It's not any worse than our current system.
I'm not recommending it, but objectively, it's hard to find out what's wrong with it compared to the current system.
I would like to do the most Christmassy thing you've ever seen in your whole life.
I'm going to defend Dr.
Fauci. Yes.
Now, I know some of you are not fans of Dr.
Fauci. I get it.
I get it. I know all the complaints.
I've heard them all. They're not wrong.
But I'm going to defend him on this particular thing.
Apparently he is somewhat admitted that he is suspected for some time that the number of people who would have to get the vaccination to make it really work could be a lot higher than 60 or 70 percent of the public.
Now Fauci is saying it might be as high as 90 percent.
You might need to get 90 percent.
And he said that when people were afraid of the vaccination, early on people were saying maybe they wouldn't take it, he was sort of downplaying his pessimism.
But now that people are much more likely to say that they would take the vaccination, and I think the early people who take it will probably show it's safe enough that the later people will get talked into it.
So now Fauci is saying...
That he can be a little bit more forthcoming with his concerns, and now he's willing to say it might be 90%, but we also could get there.
And people are saying, Dr.
Fauci, you horrible person, because why would you say the science is different?
Did the science change, Dr.
Fauci? Or are you just being political?
Are you manipulating us with your messages?
Are you trying to manage our public opinion instead of just doing science?
Dr. Fauci, we want the science, and you just admitted you kind of lied about the science, right?
Do you trust somebody who lies to you about science?
In this case, it would be his opinion of science, his opinion that we might need more herd immunity from the vaccinations.
Here is my defense of Dr.
Fauci. Dr.
Fauci is not just a scientist.
He is a scientist, but if you were judging him on the basis of a scientist, That's pretty bad, right?
If all he were was a scientist, that's all he is, an independent scientist working in a private company or for himself, then lying about his opinion of science would be pretty bad.
Would we agree on that?
Do we agree so far that if he were in private anything and he had said something that wasn't scientifically his actual opinion, it's pretty bad.
But Dr.
Fauci is not just a scientist.
He is a government-paid scientist.
He has two responsibilities, and they are both really important.
Number one is the science.
Number two, he has to manage public opinion.
You don't think that's his job?
If you're paid by the government, it is your job.
It is your job.
If the government gives you your paycheck, managing the public opinion...
That's your job, in addition to whatever your main duties are.
So judging Dr.
Fauci by the standards of a generic scientist who is not being paid by the government, not fair.
Is it a good thing that Dr.
Fauci managed our opinion of the virus the way he did?
I would say it's very likely that he played it just right.
Meaning that the ultimate thing we need to accomplish is to get a lot of people vaccinated, per Fauci.
And if the way he managed our opinions, which he is completely transparent about now, he's telling us, I just managed your opinion back there, but I did it for your own benefit.
What do you think of that? He just told us, honestly and in public, I was managing your opinion.
That wasn't my exact opinion.
I was just managing the public opinion, and I think it worked.
I think we got a better result because I managed your opinion.
Is that bad? I don't think it is.
I don't think it is. I think that he had two responsibilities, and I think he balanced them just right.
So while I respect your opinion that you don't like that, I'm going to say my personal opinion is I'm backing Dr.
Fauci because he has two roles, not one, and I think he merged them as well as you could.
Here's a correction on yesterday's live stream.
I said that Sam Harris had written an article I was talking about losing trust in institutions, but he had just retweeted it.
It was actually written by Yasha Mouk.
M-O-U-N-K. So credit where credit is due is a good article.
It's in my Twitter feed from yesterday if you're looking for it.
Let's see. So the House Republicans have apparently blocked this bill, the coronavirus bill.
And the reason they blocked it is because it had a bunch of pork in it, primarily.
So let's talk about that.
Now, on social media, social media is ablaze with people saying, why don't we just make a clean bill without pork?
Why do we have pork in bills?
Why don't we get the names of all those people, the politicians who insisted on the pork?
We'll make a list of all those bad pork people, and then we'll vote them out.
Or, why don't we just give a clean bill with none of the pork?
All those things are in social media, right?
Now, here's the problem that people are not understanding about the pork.
The pork is not a flaw on top of a good system.
Because if you think it is, then you'd say, hey, we've got a good system except for this pork.
Why don't we take the pork out And leave the good system.
Makes sense, right? Right?
Keep all the good stuff.
Nobody likes pork.
I've never even met one person who was in favor of pork put into bills.
Pork being the things not related to the main thing.
And here's the problem.
People don't understand that the pork is not a flaw on top of a good system.
The pork Is the system.
You can't get rid of the pork and keep the rest of the system because the pork is the system.
And here's why. If people were just going to vote without pork, a lot of politicians whose votes you needed to get something through would say, no, that won't help me get re-elected.
Now, how can you expect somebody to vote for something if it won't help them get re-elected?
Our system requires people to try to get re-elected.
We want that. So the politician says, no, I'm not going to vote for it because it will lower my chances of getting re-elected.
Then nothing gets through.
Because there aren't enough Democrats, there aren't enough Republicans.
If there were a supermajority of either one, you'd be fine.
But as long as it's close, which it is, you need to bribe people to vote against their own interests.
So you need to say to somebody, all right, if you're going to vote for this, we know that's bad for you for elections, but we'll give you this other thing with the pork so your state will come out ahead.
So we're going to bribe you with some pork and say, all right, we hate this pork.
We hate that it's only for one state.
It's, you know, just for this one deal.
We're going to put it in there. Now, the foreign pork...
Are based on individual arguments about, does it make sense?
Can we effectively bribe this government with this foreign money?
We as citizens never hear those arguments.
Have you ever heard the argument for funding, was it gender studies in Pakistan?
When you heard that we were funding gender studies in Pakistan in a United States coronavirus bill, What did your brain do?
Your brain just caught on fire, right?
That's completely unrelated.
But suppose if you heard it, there was a good argument for it.
Suppose if the CIA... I'm just picking a random example here.
Suppose if you could ask the CIA, why do you want this thing?
They might say something like, well, it's actually just a way to launder money for bribes for some key people we want to control in Pakistan's government or their military or something.
Now, suppose you'd actually heard that argument, and it made sense.
You said, yeah, bribing some key people in Pakistan might actually keep us safer.
It's actually not a bad use for that amount of money.
It's not that much money.
Now, if you had heard that argument...
You might say yes, but it's not a kind of argument necessarily that can be presented to you.
If the real reason is they're just laundering bribes to Pakistan, that might be it.
And I don't know if that's it.
I'm just saying that would be an example of why you couldn't hear the pork argument.
But it might be a good one.
Now, how do you get that passed?
Could the CIA do a separate bill?
It's called the Pork for Pakistan Bill to help them with gender studies.
Nobody would vote for that thing.
So there you would have a, just hypothetically, a CIA requirement, something very important for the health of the country, and there wouldn't actually be any legislative way, none, to get it done.
And so, to compensate for the fact that there's no way to do a thing like that, it gets tacked on to these larger bills for other purposes, so that people can't say no.
Because they'd say, if I got to vote on this one, I would say no.
But I don't get to vote on it, and I don't want to kill the whole package.
So I've got to say yes.
Now, does that mean that all the pork in it makes sense?
No. It's bribes.
Do bribes make sense?
Well, if you have to bribe a politician to get any kind of bill passed, it's suboptimal, but it's the best of the two options, because the other option is you don't get anything done.
So you have to understand that you can't remove the pork from the system, because if you did, it wouldn't work.
The system doesn't work without the pork.
That's why it's there.
You could replace all of the people, and the new people would just say, uh, I don't want to vote for this.
And then somebody says, how about if we give you this bribe in the form of pork for your state?
And then the politician says, all right, and I'll vote against my party.
You got me. So if you don't understand that, you're confused about this whole pork business.
And here's my issue.
Of course Democrats in Congress know how the pork thing works.
Of course the Republicans know how the pork thing works.
They all complain about it in public because the regular public is not educated enough to know that you can't really get rid of it without getting rid of the whole system, essentially.
And so, the argument I've heard for the Republicans rejecting this package at the last minute that would have included either $600 or ideally $2,000 for individual payments, for people who really need it, the argument for opposing it was that there's so much pork in it that you have to draw the line somewhere.
You have to draw the line.
Too much pork. That is not real.
It's not real.
It's not a real argument.
Because you can't get rid of the pork, number one.
And number two, they had, what, nine months to get rid of the pork.
If getting rid of the pork were a real thing, they had nine months to do it.
If what happened was that the Republicans painted themselves into a corner, and now they're saying, oh no, we don't like being in this corner, It's their own frickin' fault.
Because they painted themselves in this corner over the last nine months by entertaining pork, right?
They probably put their own pork in there, too.
So, Republicans get no pass.
This was the biggest screw-up I've ever seen, certainly in 2020.
It's the biggest political mistake.
What should they have done?
I heard some people say you can't respond to blackmail.
So some people are saying that the pork is sort of a blackmail part.
It's like, if you want your checks, you're going to have to accept all this other stuff you don't want.
So we're kind of blackmailing you.
And somebody said, you should never pay a blackmailer.
Do you agree with that?
Do you agree you should never pay a blackmailer?
You probably shouldn't negotiate with a terrorist, but is it the same with a blackmailer?
Same kind of concept.
What do you think? Let's see in the comments.
Should you never pay a blackmailer?
Let's see your comments.
Somebody says, yes, they'll come back.
Never pay them.
They'll just come back. Never pay them.
Depends. Thank you.
One person got the right answer.
Two so far.
Depends. Here's when you do pay a blackmailer.
If paying the blackmailer gets you what you want, let's say your family member is released or you get whatever it is you want.
So that's the first good part.
You've paid them and you've got what you wanted.
If, under this special condition, paying them allows you to figure out who they are, which could often be the case, right?
Because you might need to write a check to somebody.
I mean, there might be something in the process where you learn the identity of the blackmailer or where they live.
Now, if you put me in a situation where I'm being blackmailed, and in order to pay the blackmailer, I will necessarily learn their identity, do I need to say the rest?
Do I need to finish where this is going?
I have indeed been blackmailed.
I have been blackmailed.
I paid the blackmailer.
In so doing, I learned the identity of the blackmailer, And that person might take a while, but they're going to hear from me.
Might be this year.
Might be next year. Could be five years from now.
But there is a blackmailer who's going to have a really bad day.
Nothing illegal. I don't do illegal things.
But suffice to say that if you can get the identity of your blackmailer, that might be worth it.
You know what I mean? Might be worth it.
So I wouldn't take it as a given that you don't pay the blackmailer.
And in this case, I would say that what we should have done, the Republicans, which would have been the smart play, this horrible package, they should have voted for because they put themselves in that position.
They should have voted for it because it's better than the alternative, and they should have voted for it to out the blackmailers.
In other words, they should have said, look, the Democrats put us in this position.
We're going to vote for it so you get your, let's say, your $2,000 payment, But here are the names of the pork people who put you in this position.
Here are their names, the ones who supported this pork.
But it won't make a difference, because the pork has to exist for the system to exist.
But since the Republicans were put in that position, they had a terrible choice, which was to say yes to a blackmail package.
That's a terrible choice.
But it's better than putting your boot on the poor and saying, hey...
We're going to torture the poor more than you will.
That's the game, right?
The game in Congress right now is who can torture the poor the most without giving up.
At the moment, the Republicans said, oh, Democrats, you think you can torture the poor?
Watch this. We'll veto the whole damn bill.
You'll not only not get $600, they won't get anything.
How about that? We can torture the poor better than you can.
But here's the problem.
It's Christmas.
Republicans, in one of the most stunning displays of incompetence I've ever seen, decided to stand on principle on Christmas when that principle requires poor people to get screwed.
On Christmas.
On Christmas. If they had done this in February, would I feel the same?
Not so much. I mean, it's still not good.
But if you can't read the room well enough that you do this on Christmas, this is the most stunningly incompetent thing I've ever seen in my life.
The Republicans should have just grinned and signed that thing and then complained about it after the fact.
That's all you can do.
Alright. How much difference does $600 make after 10 months?
You know, there's a big mystery in all of this that I have not heard an answer for.
And I don't know if any economists are figuring this out.
And it goes like this. All of these people who lost their jobs for the coronavirus, how are they staying alive?
I honestly don't know.
Because if you told me, oh, are they just not paying rent and they're getting food from food banks?
Is that the whole story?
Because it feels like we couldn't possibly be doing as well as we are under the circumstances.
There's a disconnect between the news I'm hearing and the economic outcomes, you know, the stock market doing well, etc.
It's disconnected. There's something missing...
In the story. And I wonder if what's missing is this, that the people who had those jobs as, say, bussers and servers and whatever, it could be that they earned so little money that it didn't make that much difference to the economy that all of them lost their jobs.
For example, How many of them also had another supporter?
You know, they're living at home or they have a spouse who has a job so they can still eat, they just can't go on vacation.
It could be that because of the nature of which kind of workers were most affected, they were the lowest income types of workers, that surprisingly they added so little to the economy that you could wipe out their entire contribution to the economy and it didn't make that much difference.
Alright, somebody says essential workers are still getting paid.
That's true. But only if they're working.
I'm talking about unemployed people.
There are two economies.
There's the poor... Yeah, the poor are invisible.
The poor are kind of invisible.
I think, in a sense, that's what I'm saying.
And I don't know how much of this is my isolation, right?
If you have a certain lifestyle, you end up not talking to people who are living a different kind of lifestyle.
So let me ask in the comments.
Do you know anybody who lost their job during coronavirus?
And let's say it was a low-end job.
Low-end meaning a server or something in that economic group.
How many of you know somebody like that who can't figure out how to eat?
I feel like we did a really good job of taking care of people, one way or the other.
You know, there's also a hidden...
And here's part of what I suspect.
There is a hidden thing going on, and I'm just going to speculate that this is what's going on.
When the country looked like it was falling apart and our government couldn't necessarily help us during the beginning of the pandemic, even if the government did everything the government can do, it did feel as if maybe it wouldn't be enough in time, right?
And there could be some dire consequences.
Here's what I believe may be happening and did happen.
Just speculation, right?
And I'm not even sure what percentage of credibility I would put on my own speculation, but I'll put it out there.
And it goes like this. The first thing that people who had money, and I'll put myself in that category, did, the first thing I did was I surveyed my circle of people that I know and have a relationship with.
Surveyed meaning I made sure I knew how everybody was doing.
And then I made sure that if there was anybody who wouldn't be able to eat, that I would handle it.
In other words, and it turns out I didn't have to do very much.
I was helpful in, I'm going to say, non-specific ways, which is the point of my story, is that people like me, who independently and privately helped other people, don't want to talk about it.
Do you know why we don't want to talk about it?
Because you'll ask me for money.
I can help the people that I'm close to, I know, they're part of my circle, I've worked with them, I've got some ongoing relationship, whatever.
And I've got a feeling that that may have happened massively all over the country.
I have a feeling that private individuals just massively stepped up.
Completely confidentially.
Because you have to do it confidentially.
When you're rich, the first thing you figure out is that if you do any kind of charity, then you get eaten alive.
Doing public charity is just one of the worst things you can do If you want to control the rest of your life, because you're just getting bombarded with new requests.
So unless you're doing it like a Bill Pulte, who is actually making that sort of a mission and a project, so that's worth doing, because he wants people to interact.
But everybody else needs to do it way under the notice of everybody else.
So I'm just going to put this out there.
There is some possibility, and I don't know how likely, That one of the biggest unreported forces is the private charity of regular Americans.
And I'm not talking about the rich, either.
I'm talking about the parents who said, you know, hey, my son is okay, but my son's best friend from childhood is not okay.
You can stay here for a while.
Right? I'll bet you there's all kinds of that happening all over the country, and just people don't talk about it.
Because it wouldn't be wise to talk about it.
Just guessing. So that's your Christmas good thought for the day.
I would like to believe, at least today, that I live in a country in which those who can give do give.
And I think we are in that country.
I think that anything that I say about our political system and our economy and all that, it looks like it's a mess on paper.
Doesn't it? If you were just to draw it on paper, it just looks like a hot mess.
But there is something about the goodness of people.
Of course, they have their bad side, their selfish side.
We talk about that more than the good side.
But since it's Christmas, let's talk about the good side.
There is some kind of force, and I talked about this yesterday more, there is some kind of force that holds us together that we don't quite understand.
And we think it's all these things like the Constitution and our laws and blah blah blah.
I don't think it's that.
I think it is whatever caused, and I think this is true, lots of individuals to help other individuals.
I feel like whatever that is, is the larger force that keeps us together.
Sure, we fight little battles.
You know, we like to fight the little battles because we're a competitive kind of species.
But the big battle about being a country, I feel like we're just all on the same side on that for the most part.
All right. So here's someone in the comments saying, I paid my cleaning lady even though she was not cleaning my house.
You are not the first person who has said that.
All right? Do you know how many rich people continued to pay their people that they couldn't do any work?
I would guess most.
I'll bet you most rich people continue paying everybody that they had paid before and just didn't talk about it, just didn't mention it.
So that's what I think happened, and that will be your positive thought for the day.
I hope you're all going to have a terrific Christmas.
I'm planning to have a terrific Christmas myself.
Well, I'm seeing somebody saying that they were reminded to do that, and I hope you do.
