Orderly Shutdown, Orderly Startup
Happy Tuesday!
Orderly Shutdown, Orderly Startup.
Helpful. The other day I tried to be helpful by shining light on the power of I don't know. There is going to be a ton of economic quarterbacking in the coming days due to a lack of having a plan. There is power in committing to I don't know. I don't understand the economy. Never will. Which plan is better, the Democratic plan or Republican plan? I don't know.
I have also been helpful by expanding on our lack of preparedness for the inevitable, the inevitable of this pandemic. We knew this pandemic was going to happen. We just didn't know when. Preparation is the best response to disaster chaos.
Today's help comes as a discussion of economic shutdown as an orderly shutdown and orderly startup.
First some history. In the 1990s after the Chernobyl disaster the International Standards Organization, or ISO, adopted the ISO 9000 standard for businesses. This standard is a series of protocols businesses were legally obligated to adopt. These standards are for disaster recovery plans or business resumption plans. As I stated previously the best disaster response is preparation. This means business computers must have backups and these backups must have offsite storage. These standards mean that in California a secondary data center in a state like Arizona can keep your business running in the event of an earthquake in California. The US adopted the ISO 9000 standards. Unfortunately no such standards exist for shutting down the US economy or starting it back up again. As a result today when we do start the economy back up it again it will be as haphazard as the shutting down was. People will panic. Trump just wants to turn it all back on at once. That's where we are at. How's that work? Now that we are all germ-a-phoebes? You don't just go, "forget everything we just said about social distancing, back to crowded spaces and cubicles zero feet apart!"
To bad our government does not have economic shutdown disaster preparedness. What would it look like though, if we did?
Well, for starters we'd have drills. Imagine that every year for one week the US economy shutdown for one week for disaster preparedness. Further imagine that every decade we shut down for one month for pandemic disaster preparedness. Just think, if we had executed a series of such drills for the last twenty years then we'd have been prepared. We didn't. We aren't.
Since we were not prepared then the leaders of this country are blaming everybody but themselves. In the words of Donald Trump, "I take no responsibility for this at all." So who is getting the blame? Mainstream media and Facebook are two obvious targets. Damn those capitalists meeting supply with demand. Blaming hysteria on the media is like blaming someone's alcohol addiction on alcohol manufacturers.
No, the hysteria is here because we are not prepared. We have not drilled and conditioned our society for such a shutdown.
Our government deserves no approval whatsoever for its pandemic response precisely because there was no preparation of shutting down the economy. None whatsoever. Shutting down the economy was a shit show.
Okay, so what would it look like if we had this plan? If we were to attempt to have an orderly shutdown of the economy so as to be responsible then what would happen?
Here are some ideas.
The first step in an orderly shutdown is to acknowledge we need to do drills just like with your local fire department.
First we need conditioning.
1. Every American citizen would have disaster savings of at least a month or the equivalent thereof.
2. Employers would go through a regular cycle of shutdown to condition there businesses to such things. These shutdowns would not be in sync. At any given time throughout the year a segment of the economy would be shutdown for disaster drills.
3. Annual drills of shutting down the entire economy for one week.
4. Decade drills of shutting down the entire economy for one month.
Second we need certainty.
Pause the economy?
1. Freeze stock prices. This is not the same as stopping trading. Stocks can be traded, just the price remains the same. This dampens the panic trading. People can still sell but the price will not be going down.
2. Freeze retail prices. This not only prevents gouging but allows people to rely on prices during a crisis.
3. Freeze debts. Debts don't go away, payments just get suspended and no interest is compounded.
You get the idea. People panic. It is our human nature. How do we manage that panic nature. Hit the pause button so as to maintain certainty in uncertainty. If the economy is on pause then some certainty exists that assuages panic.
Third we need to shutdown in an orderly fashion.
What is the order? Well, in some respects no matter what you plan up front you will get it wrong. This why the first priority is a commitment to drill. In many respects a disaster plan is an experiment. You start with a hypothesis and then you run that hypothesis as in experiment in a lab. This is why the commitment to drill comes first. Your initial plans are a hypothesis will mostly likely not go as planned. You'll need to revise them based upon drill experience.
Now that admitting our initial plans will suck is out of the way then let us take a stab at one.
Orderly shutdown.
The idea here is to define a period of time needed to shut down. Naively let's try for eight weeks to start. It will take many drills to find the real period of say one week or two months.
1. Tourism & Entertainment
2. Restaurants
3. Education
4. Manufacturing
6. Transportation
7. Communication
8. Government
Why is communication on that list? Well, governments have already requested streaming video platforms to shutdown HD content due to overload the communications network.
Orderly startup.
The reverse order of the shutdown.
Things are not this simple. All businesses intersect and so the cascade of shutdown will be complex if it is ordered in a managed fashion. This is the point of having drills. We have to finesse which businesses need be shutdown first before we shutdown something like transportation that every industry depends on.
Once you have your ordered list then some things become apparent. For example, since the entertainment industry is going to bear the brunt of shutdown being the first to shutdown then they should have so financial accommodation. For example mandate that entertainment and tourism workers should get the largest percentage of disaster payout because they shutdown most often, then restaurants, etc. This is done to offset the fact that they will shutdown more.
Okay enough of this. This has been just a thought experiment.
This thought exercise was really just meant to put you in the frame of mind of control. This control prevents panic. This panic today is being blamed on everything but the lack of disaster preparedness. That lack of preparedness responsibility falls on the government. None of our governments deserve any of our approval given we had zero preparation for an economic shutdown.
If we had started an eight-week shutdown back in January when it was first suspected but not certain that the coronavirus was going to be a pandemic then we could have managed our economic shutdown. If it wasn't a pandemic then it is just another drill. A drill we've been through many times before. If it is a pandemic then we continue the shutdown in an orderly fashion that prevents panic and provides for planning.
I like to use the word catastrophe to mean something specific. To me a catastrophe is any disaster that overwhelms or defies any and all disaster plans and preparation. Even then though we would still be better mentally prepared. If we go through enough drills then we become conditioned to not panicking in an emergency. So even in catastrophe when the plan is scrubbed or irrelevant we are still better mentally prepared for having done the drills.
We don't have this drill conditioning today to fall back on because our government has failed us. Our government has failed disaster preparedness.
They deserve no approval. None of them. Our governments deserve a 0% approval rating for their lack of preparedness for the economic shutdown.
Who's to blame for the panic? Panic is human nature. It needs to be managed at a group level. Government is our group level organization. It is government responsibility to manage societal panic. They failed. Don't let them shift the blame onto anyone else. In the future we need to demand a disaster recovery plan for economic shutdown that includes ongoing drills.
Like what you see? Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Orderly Shutdown, Orderly Startup.
Helpful. The other day I tried to be helpful by shining light on the power of I don't know. There is going to be a ton of economic quarterbacking in the coming days due to a lack of having a plan. There is power in committing to I don't know. I don't understand the economy. Never will. Which plan is better, the Democratic plan or Republican plan? I don't know.
I have also been helpful by expanding on our lack of preparedness for the inevitable, the inevitable of this pandemic. We knew this pandemic was going to happen. We just didn't know when. Preparation is the best response to disaster chaos.
Today's help comes as a discussion of economic shutdown as an orderly shutdown and orderly startup.
First some history. In the 1990s after the Chernobyl disaster the International Standards Organization, or ISO, adopted the ISO 9000 standard for businesses. This standard is a series of protocols businesses were legally obligated to adopt. These standards are for disaster recovery plans or business resumption plans. As I stated previously the best disaster response is preparation. This means business computers must have backups and these backups must have offsite storage. These standards mean that in California a secondary data center in a state like Arizona can keep your business running in the event of an earthquake in California. The US adopted the ISO 9000 standards. Unfortunately no such standards exist for shutting down the US economy or starting it back up again. As a result today when we do start the economy back up it again it will be as haphazard as the shutting down was. People will panic. Trump just wants to turn it all back on at once. That's where we are at. How's that work? Now that we are all germ-a-phoebes? You don't just go, "forget everything we just said about social distancing, back to crowded spaces and cubicles zero feet apart!"
To bad our government does not have economic shutdown disaster preparedness. What would it look like though, if we did?
Well, for starters we'd have drills. Imagine that every year for one week the US economy shutdown for one week for disaster preparedness. Further imagine that every decade we shut down for one month for pandemic disaster preparedness. Just think, if we had executed a series of such drills for the last twenty years then we'd have been prepared. We didn't. We aren't.
Since we were not prepared then the leaders of this country are blaming everybody but themselves. In the words of Donald Trump, "I take no responsibility for this at all." So who is getting the blame? Mainstream media and Facebook are two obvious targets. Damn those capitalists meeting supply with demand. Blaming hysteria on the media is like blaming someone's alcohol addiction on alcohol manufacturers.
No, the hysteria is here because we are not prepared. We have not drilled and conditioned our society for such a shutdown.
Our government deserves no approval whatsoever for its pandemic response precisely because there was no preparation of shutting down the economy. None whatsoever. Shutting down the economy was a shit show.
Okay, so what would it look like if we had this plan? If we were to attempt to have an orderly shutdown of the economy so as to be responsible then what would happen?
Here are some ideas.
The first step in an orderly shutdown is to acknowledge we need to do drills just like with your local fire department.
First we need conditioning.
1. Every American citizen would have disaster savings of at least a month or the equivalent thereof.
2. Employers would go through a regular cycle of shutdown to condition there businesses to such things. These shutdowns would not be in sync. At any given time throughout the year a segment of the economy would be shutdown for disaster drills.
3. Annual drills of shutting down the entire economy for one week.
4. Decade drills of shutting down the entire economy for one month.
Second we need certainty.
Pause the economy?
1. Freeze stock prices. This is not the same as stopping trading. Stocks can be traded, just the price remains the same. This dampens the panic trading. People can still sell but the price will not be going down.
2. Freeze retail prices. This not only prevents gouging but allows people to rely on prices during a crisis.
3. Freeze debts. Debts don't go away, payments just get suspended and no interest is compounded.
You get the idea. People panic. It is our human nature. How do we manage that panic nature. Hit the pause button so as to maintain certainty in uncertainty. If the economy is on pause then some certainty exists that assuages panic.
Third we need to shutdown in an orderly fashion.
What is the order? Well, in some respects no matter what you plan up front you will get it wrong. This why the first priority is a commitment to drill. In many respects a disaster plan is an experiment. You start with a hypothesis and then you run that hypothesis as in experiment in a lab. This is why the commitment to drill comes first. Your initial plans are a hypothesis will mostly likely not go as planned. You'll need to revise them based upon drill experience.
Now that admitting our initial plans will suck is out of the way then let us take a stab at one.
Orderly shutdown.
The idea here is to define a period of time needed to shut down. Naively let's try for eight weeks to start. It will take many drills to find the real period of say one week or two months.
1. Tourism & Entertainment
2. Restaurants
3. Education
4. Manufacturing
6. Transportation
7. Communication
8. Government
Why is communication on that list? Well, governments have already requested streaming video platforms to shutdown HD content due to overload the communications network.
Orderly startup.
The reverse order of the shutdown.
Things are not this simple. All businesses intersect and so the cascade of shutdown will be complex if it is ordered in a managed fashion. This is the point of having drills. We have to finesse which businesses need be shutdown first before we shutdown something like transportation that every industry depends on.
Once you have your ordered list then some things become apparent. For example, since the entertainment industry is going to bear the brunt of shutdown being the first to shutdown then they should have so financial accommodation. For example mandate that entertainment and tourism workers should get the largest percentage of disaster payout because they shutdown most often, then restaurants, etc. This is done to offset the fact that they will shutdown more.
Okay enough of this. This has been just a thought experiment.
This thought exercise was really just meant to put you in the frame of mind of control. This control prevents panic. This panic today is being blamed on everything but the lack of disaster preparedness. That lack of preparedness responsibility falls on the government. None of our governments deserve any of our approval given we had zero preparation for an economic shutdown.
If we had started an eight-week shutdown back in January when it was first suspected but not certain that the coronavirus was going to be a pandemic then we could have managed our economic shutdown. If it wasn't a pandemic then it is just another drill. A drill we've been through many times before. If it is a pandemic then we continue the shutdown in an orderly fashion that prevents panic and provides for planning.
I like to use the word catastrophe to mean something specific. To me a catastrophe is any disaster that overwhelms or defies any and all disaster plans and preparation. Even then though we would still be better mentally prepared. If we go through enough drills then we become conditioned to not panicking in an emergency. So even in catastrophe when the plan is scrubbed or irrelevant we are still better mentally prepared for having done the drills.
We don't have this drill conditioning today to fall back on because our government has failed us. Our government has failed disaster preparedness.
They deserve no approval. None of them. Our governments deserve a 0% approval rating for their lack of preparedness for the economic shutdown.
Who's to blame for the panic? Panic is human nature. It needs to be managed at a group level. Government is our group level organization. It is government responsibility to manage societal panic. They failed. Don't let them shift the blame onto anyone else. In the future we need to demand a disaster recovery plan for economic shutdown that includes ongoing drills.
Like what you see? Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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