The mystery of toilet paper and why the economy should be more like the brain
Yesterday I visited a local sight...
The supermarket. And why this ordinary place suddenly became such an attraction to me was because of the empty shelves, because people are freaking for, you can probably guess, the coronavirus. Now, why I thought it was an interesting place to see at 11 pm, I'm not completely sure, but I did find out that people really value bread, eggs, canned beans, frozen vegetables, meat and toilet paper which were almost all gone. The latter of which I have a hard time grasping why it should be hoarded, because most homes in Finland have that bidet shower anyway, which is a more hygienic way of dealing with stuff instead of wiping the shit all over the place. I don't know, seems strange to me how desperately people want to have the ability to wipe shit with paper even during a catastrophe - who came up with that anyway?
The 24/7 supermarket is usually quiet during the night, but I was anticipating that this would no longer be the case. And indeed, upon entering the store I saw a decent lineup waiting to check out their groceries. Not all were there hoarding though, because one dude was casually buying some pizza, coke, bacon and couple doughnuts. He just wanted to enjoy the Friday evening.
As for myself, I was lucky because peanut butter was well on stock - which I wonder to a great degree, because peanut butter is the shit! Much better apocalypse spread than margarine in my opinion. I was in no shortage of food, because I already had a good 20+ kg of rice at home, before the virus. Oh, and I almost forgot: still have a good 10 kg of dried fruit, which I have a bit of a hard time consuming though, for obvious reasons (spoiler: the reason being that I had 60 kilos of it a while ago). So if I need to fortify at home for a while, I'm well prepared already. Should shit really hit the fan, I have a water filter that enables me to get consumable water from wherever there's some water. That's some post-apocalypse type of stuff though, and at that point I'd probably have other worries, too, such as other people killing me.
The whole corona makes me think that what a house of cards we seem to have built, because it is already tanking the global economy into recession, albeit it was promised to happen soon anyway. Either way, it seems like the economy isn't set in an ideal way when a crisis in the States caused by some greedy bastards on the Wall Street can drive the whole world into recession, the effects of which we still haven't managed to brush off here in Finland, for example. And here we go again, with the same setup, with central banks already having pushed interest rates down already in order to stimulate the economy. Get people to consume, apparently that is what's keeping up the economy, not sure if that is the ideal way, not sure what would be an alternative though - I am not that wise - but that is little besides the point anyway.
To me it appears that there should be more modularity with the economy, similar to how the brain has "modules" that run separate processes but still communicate with each others enough so that a certain amount of integrity is reached to make it all function as a whole. Roughly speaking, left hemisphere is specialized with known categories, analytical processes, detailed motor actions, positive emotion etc. Right hemisphere deals with categories that are unknown and comes up with ways on how to deal with them. How to deal with something you don't know? Emotions. That of which you don't know is represented as a threat, because sometimes it really is a threat, and then a quick emotional reaction - fight or flight - is useful. But on the other hand, beyond the limits of our understanding lies an area which we can master. This idea is represented with the dragon of chaos that hoards treasures in mythologies. A threat, but the confronting of which provides a treasure for the one who has the courage to confront it successfully. I didn't come up with this stuff myself though, I've just listened Jordan Petterson's lectures which are quite interesting to me.
Anyhow, right hemisphere makes abstractions and stuff and every now and then gives little bits and pieces of that new information for the left hemisphere through corpus callosum - the thing connecting the hemispheres. Why aren't the hemispheres just one big brain? Probably because if everyday your mental schemes were shattered you probably wouldn't be able to function in any type of coherent way in this life.
Uncertain times were living in, and no wonder when a random virus can/will cause massive ways of unemployment just because the world has to stop for a while to prevent a virus from spreading. Seems like we didn't figure a way how to safely stop and pick up from where we left without the whole world going down.
No, I don't think it's all gonna go down, just being rhetoric for a bit, but the corona is surely going to have a big change on the world.
Haha, love it! I would say the toilet paper thing is just the proof of the collective stupidity in the richer countrys. The economy can only be fixed by throwing more printed money at it, and also to get the people to spend more money, funny how a potential disaster makes that all happen 😜 Great post dude, here in Spain its as if like millions have died already by the way the shops are and the tv channels
The whole corona deal is a bit out of proportion at the moment, but I get that it can get pretty bad, but the preparation should've happened on an institutional level and health care, food isn't going to run out of the world.
I think it's the exposure issue.
we are also like this with the toilet paper in Sydney .... I'll be doing a post about the stuff we are short on over here tomorrow .... changes every day cos people find new things to haul lol
Luckily they didn't yet realize the peanut butter here :D
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Great Post!!
Only a wise person can admit to not knowing things
To me it seems like the more you learn the more mysteries appear.
Also true
"I only know that I know nothing"
-Socrates-
Smart bloke
Classic :D
Its just bog roll in the UK, everything else is a little more empty but not like what you portray!
It's not like the food is going to run out, people have all just stocked up at the same time so then this happens before more comes from central warehouses.
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Toilet paper? The Chinese invented it. Eeeeeeverything is their fault.
Don't forget that in almost every movie and tv-series about post apocalypse world, there will be cults. At least in North America. Someone will demand you to join their cult. And perhaps that includes killing people. You or someone else. Perhaps now there is a toilet paper cult slowly rising it's head.
People are crazy.
Damn Chinese.
I think toilet paper will be the holy grail of currency in post-apocalypse. Cigarettes? Nah, toilet paper.
I am glad people are putting an emphasis on toilet paper that's just because I know they've found the virus in fecal matter. If people are left to shower their bottoms not only is there a lot of other bacterial concerns involved but the virus is also present in. If people don't have the proper disinfectant(s) or knowledge to how long they have to sit on the surface to kill the virus it can become concerning with households that have elderly or vulnerable people. Even if they decide to try and shelter grandma, grandpa and others as separately as possible taking a bath or shower could become a huge issue as some people will only show minor ailment with this virus, none worse than a cold and they may actually think they don't have the virus until they crap it out in the shower than try and figure out exactly how grandma, grandpa could have gotten it since they took extra precautions to isolate and function away from them as much as possible.
I admit I was completely overwhelmed by the stores myself. I did the same thing you did late last night as I walked through our largest retailer. Pondering the various items people grabbed. I am so thankful here for the conspiracy crowd as it gave me insight and time to decipher and sort through enough to pick the "conspiracy" parts out of the "facts" parts enough to get my family up and moving the last three weeks. It wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, they'd tell me to stay off the internet, stop blogging, hang up on me, threaten to take my computer when I wasn't looking, lol, but finally they started listening to me as I'd just start to text them instead saying this is another thing I've never seen before in my life. By that time I had researched and I knew what they needed to do, like being able to make your own bread, there's no room in the freezer in a time like this to store bread and if it came to not wanting to exposure yourself to get a loaf you'd need to be able to make it....and yeah, totally in agreement on that peanut butter, nice warm baked bread with peanut butter sounds pretty good to me. If it comes down to not needing all this stuff then the bakers in the family can buy it from the non bakers to make all those holiday deserts this coming holiday season. Hopefully all's well that ends well but if so we'll all be well stocked for the holidays.
It is a weird situation, now the schools are closing here in Finland too. Now the hope is that these actions are enough to prevent the overloading of health care.
Wish you well during this corona happening.
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