We Usually Get the President We Deserve

Trump has been a far better president than we had any right to expect.

What? you say, No! Trump didn't implement any of your favorite hobby-horse ideals!

That's actually a good thing.

We have heard, over the last fifty years, how "The perfect is the enemy of the Good."

Pure and utter mental waste.

Perfect and ideal are two separate things, although it is easy to confuse one for the other.

Let's borrow some ideas from arithmetic. 

One added to one is two, right?

It's a perfect rule -- built on ideal principles. Some people think it a fundamental fact. 

But it isn't.

One crabapple added to one Fuji apple does not make two Fuji apples. Nor does it make two crabapples. 

One balloon's worth of air plus one balloon's worth of air may be two balloons' worth of air, but the volume does not double.

0.6 volts rounds up to 1 V, but 1 V + 1 V is not 2 V, if both 1s are actually 0.6 rounded up.

There are all sorts of ways one added to one might not result in two.

In order for this perfect rule to work we have to start with the assumption of an idealized non-compressible unit vector which adds linearly.

(Wrap your head around that before the next time you berate a pre-school child for having trouble with your mathematics. Arithmetic does not work without mathematics.)

Without the idealization of a non-compressible unit vector and the implicit single dimension in which it adds to itself, without the idealization of a number line, the arithmetic that we think is so basic just falls apart. 

It is basic. It is real. It's useful to understand. It is also limited in scope of application. In order to make it work for us, we have to get used to remembering to add Fuji apples to Fuji apples and crabapples to (the same subspecies of) crabapples. And it's still approximate, because not every apple on the tree is as big or as sweet -- or as small and as sour.

Each apple is different. 

A tree is a calculus of fruit, branches, and leaves.

A beach is a calculus of grains of sand, and when you look close, each grain of sand is different. 

Snowflakes? But a ski slope is a calculus of snowflakes.

Society is a calculus of individuals. We are not all our president. 

There it is. Say it big.

We are not all our president.

A president is not a king-for-four-years on whom we hang all our problems. At least he or she shouldn't be. Nor should we elect a man or woman to four years of taking the blame for all our own problems. 

We elect a president to represent us as a group, and, while he or she does not represent any one of us well as individuals, he or she usually represents us as a group pretty well. That's what the election process is about, finding someone who represents us as a group.

Recent elections have gotten us all excited about whom we choose for president. Most elections seem to be rather close. And then a winner is celebrated and installed into office.

But if you study statistics, you know that elections are a statistical experiment. And less than 2% difference in statistics is generally considered not statistically significant. Often, less than 5% is not significant.

Statistically, it made no difference whether we installed Trump or Clinton in the White House four years ago. And it will make no difference whether we install Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years, because the United States of America is a calculus of individuals, and the president of the country is just one more of those individuals. And less than three percent is not statistically significant.

We think of the president as our leader, but we have it backwards. The president does not lead us.  

The choice of president is a synthesis, a projection of the public or social identity.

The president represents us.

Now do you understand why Trump was installed in the White House four years ago? 

All those contradictions are a synthesis of the calculus of the country, a reflection of the individuals that compose the country. We are a country of contradictions, and we have been focusing a lot on our contradictions lately. So we elected a president of self-contradictions.

And he represented us, complete with our internal contradictions.

As Biden and Harris's less optimal traits become clear, we will find something similar, because we currently compose a nation of factions.

And it wouldn't have mattered if Trump had won a second term. Less than 5% is not statistically significant.

What matters in the calculus of society is what each individual does. Biden/Harris, if the current numbers are confirmed, will represent us as a group. Biden is a politician, and Harris will soon feel the reality of what politics outside the California bubble is like, and know the burden of learning what a real politician has to do. (California's bubble is weakening, as well, but that's a topic for a rant for another day.)

For four years, we have been polarized. The choice of president was not what mattered. It was the calculus of individual discord that produced the polarization. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it would still have been four years of polarization, because we chose to focus on how are differences don't fit together according to our ideals.

Are we going to continue to waste time and energy fighting each other? Or are we going to go back to finding unity in differences? We've done that before, you know. We have found unity in difference.

It takes many different types of people to make the world go 'round. 

We need our garbage collectors. We need our doctors. We need our farmers. We need our philosophers, including those who make rhyme and rhythm for their philosophies. We need our poor people and our rich people. 

I'm not sure we need our billionaires, their existence is a huge burden to society, warping the weave of social fabric around themselves in excessive and unnatural ways. But if they can quit trying to impose their visions of perfection -- their ideals -- on all of us, using the logic of the weight of their supposed personal worth, we should be able to get along with them.

We definitely don't need to keep our desperately poor in their condition of desperate poverty. If we can learn to let them be different, we ought to be able to find a way to let them get out of their desperate circumstances. (Let them out, not force them out.)

I had no preferred candidate in this election. I have had no preferred candidate in any of the last several presidential elections. (No, not even Romney was that close to what I would consider an ideal president. Maybe Reagan? It's been too long, but I think he represented our country pretty well as we navigated the world conditions that resulted in the breakup of the old Soviet Union. But still not my ideal.) It doesn't matter. I've continued to do the things I think are most important for me to do.

Society is made up of a lot of individuals. Society cannot exist without the individuals. 

Society cannot function if each individual does not do what that individual understands to be the best thing for that individual to do.

I can't do what you think is best for me to do, because your idea of what is best for me is, at best-formed, only a collection of "NO! NOT THAT!" and "YOU GOTTA DO THIS!" opinions -- uninformed opinions, since you have at best only a superficial view of what I'm up against.

If I were wasting time worrying about what is best for you to do, it would be the same. 

None of us really has any time to get more than a superficial view of the struggles others are having. You have to make your choices. I have to make mine.

To the extent we fight each other over the choices we make as individuals, we interfere with the functioning of society.

Sure, there are some choices which themselves interfere with a functional society. Taking bread from the poor man and giving it to the rich man is a wrong choice. And trying to persuade the rich man to share his bread with the poor is a far more functional choice than trying to force him to do so. (And, as individuals, choosing to fight each other instead of looking for places and ways we can work together -- can't we see how destructive that quickly becomes?)

Gender confusion? Yes, that's another place both (all) sides try to force others to conform to their own ideals. I think I could, if we could sit down and discuss it rationally, convince you that most gender confusion is derived from society's imposition on the individual of Machiavelli's false ideals. But we would argue about what that means. It's more functional for me to let you figure out what it means to you, if you will let me figure out what it means to me.

Insurance. Borders. Etc. There are lots of things we could fight about, if we choose to fight. But we don't all have to be thinking, doing, and saying the same things. 

Lasers are useful, but if laser light were all we had, we would have no colors, no warm spread of sunlight, just a bunch of idealistic monochrome beams randomly scanning the darkness, interfering with each other.

Everything we fight about, we can find ways to let each other be what we are -- different. 

And that is how we achieve unity, because it takes a lot of different wavelengths to light up the world, a lot of different people to make the world go 'round.

The Problem of Electronics Waste and Health

First, you may be hiding your eyes from the problem.

Here are some links to articles on it:

• https://greencitizen.com/learn-more/harmful-effects/
  

 This is kind of an overview of the problem.

 

• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/magazine/e-waste-offers-an-economic-opportunity-as-well-as-toxicity.html

(NYTimes is likely to hit you up for a subscription.) This is a bit more in-depth:

Lots of "recycling" is cover for shipping to countries in Africa, east Asia, South America, and other countries with poor economies, where really poor people are paid dirt wages to poison themselves, shorten their lifespans, and mess up their children's genes.

And that is in spite of the fact that the materials in electronics waste are rather valuable.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412014002116

This talks about why it's a hard problem. Even in a developed country like Sweden, even with more advanced recycling methods, workers are exposed to the poisons.

Continually keeping your electronics hardware modern has a huge cost. The purchase price is the tip of the iceberg.

Even just learning how to separate your data from the OS and the applications so you can periodically back it all up, wipe the disks, and do a clean re-install will allow you to keep using your hardware at least twice as long. If we could all do that, we could easily cut the electronics waste in half.

If you are willing to give Microsoft the boot, there are many operating systems based on the Linux kernel or one of the BSDs, which can give you efficient and effective use of computers too old to run MSWindows at all -- five, ten years, or more.

Up until last year, China accepted a lot of our electronics waste.

I can no longer find the references, but the initial reports I read about where the most recent Corona virus came from indicated that it had crossed the species gap from animal to human in the kinds of towns in China where electronics and other poisonous waste was regularly being processed, and was first recognized in the Wuhan district of China, where a lot of those who would have contact with the impoverished workers would be concentrated for logistics and management purposes.

This would be no surprise. Overwork, crowded conditions, lack of hygiene, shortfalls of nutrition, immune systems already taking damage from other causes create a ripe field for the jump.

China has since banned imports of electronics waste, and has been stonewalling on the topic of the virus, so much that their total mortality numbers are impossible to believe, and the source of the initial outbreak of record has moved to the Wuhan capital itself.

Yeah, this sounds like a conspiracy theory. And? Have we some reason to believe the Chinese government has become less willing to alter the flow of information to serve their purposes? I don't think so.

Statistically, if you are healthy, you are less likely to catch it. If you do, you are less likely to become seriously ill. There are statistical outliers, of course. There always are. But, statistically speaking, being healthy is your best defense, a defense not really available in impoverished communities.

It's easy to think you can't afford to do what's necessary to keep your electronics around. Competition won't allow it. The bottom line won't allow it. If you take time for these kinds of things, you won't be able to keep yourself in the billionaire club.

 But it comes back to you. This pandemic is not going away until we can learn to slow down and take care of these kinds of things.

Magical Solution to Debate Lack of Quality

(That this is repeat of a four year-old blogpost needs to be posted again is quite a disappointment. Trump has been a much better president than the country deserved, and he stepped up to the responsibilities quite a bit, but it's still pretty much a game of king-of-the-hill to him.)

Invite the top three third party candidates to the next one.

If they'll come.

(They might prefer to avoid the noise fight.)

If they would join the debate, the Donald couldn't just focus on Biden's perceived weaknesses.

Frankly, that the debate organizers have failed to go out of their way to invite the third party candidates again this year says something to me about the debate organizers' motivations and goals.

I said this last time, as well, but I'll say it again, also: a vote for third party candidate you can support is not a throwaway vote. Every vote for someone else tells them they're messing up. The major political parties need to get the message that they have long since ceased to represent any real constituency.

Sustainable Development and Sustainable Economics -- Sustainable?

I had a dream yesterday morning, jut a little before I woke up to get ready to go deliver the mail.

I was visiting a young boy in a wheelchair.

I could tell his body wanted to do something active, so I lifted him up onto my shoulders and let him use his arms to climb around on my back and shoulders and swing from my arms, helping him when his strength was insufficient.

When he was played out, I turned my back to his wheelchair and let him slide back down to sit.

He wanted me to come back the next day, and so did his physical trainer and his parents. The trainer pointed out that it seemed to be a good alternative approach to helping him develop the muscles that were not developing.

I had to explain that I could not visit every day due to other obligations, and there was some discussion of how often I could visit.

There were several limits to my ability to visit every day. One was that I had other obligations. Another was financial limits, in that making a regular commitment would require me to refrain to commit to other activities -- activities that would bring in pay.

A third limit was that making the visits regular would quickly relieve the visit of its novelty, equalizing it in effect with other, more normal methods.

In other words, making it a planned regular activity would rob it of its effect.

I don't remember if I explained clearly to them that I was sure that they would end up making my visits part of his "new training schedule plans", where I knew such plans were not appropriate. If such visits ("sessions") did lead to progress, progress would be in fits and starts and reversions. And the boy would need freedom to not play some days.

It was about this point that my eyes opened and I checked the alarm clock.

Most of the jobs I have had in my varied and spotted career have been the sort that do not result in sustainable family economics. 

Many of my jobs just haven't paid enough.

In many of my software and computer related jobs, the company was looking for a superman, but what they needed was for everyone in the company to buckle down and learn what they were actually selling, what they were actually producing, and devote time and resources to closing the gap. And to learn what computers cannot, in principle, do, so that the sales group would quit trying to sell things that were impossible.

They thought I could be their superman.

People don't want troubleshooters. They want magicians. 

-- and that's not a sustainable economic model for anyone.

In my private tutoring in English in Japan, some of the parents and students understood what I was doing and approved. But most could not let the bait of improving test scores alone long enough to let their children or themselves really relax and learn to communicate in English. 

Side-track on test scores -- If you design a test to display what one group of students has learned, there are other groups of students who were progressing in different but equally important areas, and the test fails to show their progress. The test rewards the two groups unequally. And there is much more to be said on the limits of tests which will have to be discussed elsewhere.

The English lessons themselves are a case in point. The best way to help a child who has not been progressing in school is to let that child explore the subject on his or her own. The student knows where he or she is getting stuck, and it may be in a blind alley or it may not, but the gaps can't be bridged if the student is continually being forced to study for the test instead of being allowed to fill in the lacks. 

You can't plan lessons in advance for the kind of teaching that is needed.

But without a plan, you can't have a sustainable activity.

Without a sustainable activity, in the current economic environment, you can't have sustainable development or sustainable economics.

Which brings me to my point, but does not bring you to the same point, I suppose. Let's try another tack.

A common complaint about popular songs is that (at any particular point in time) so much of it sounds the same. And well it should. The captains of the industry are devoted to that great principle of sustainable economics -- if it sells, make more of it.

Every now and then, some artist breaks out of the mold in just the right way to catch a wave of interest, and you get another big hit, and then everybody works on figuring out ways to copy it without infringing on the laws on intellectual property.

In case you aren't aware of how those breaks (hit songs, boom cycles) happen, here is how it happens: there will be groups of artists who are willing to set aside the principles of sustainable economics and forego immediate profit. (Willing to, as a technology teacher warned his students, "eat dirt and go naked".) The new hits come out of a few of those groups. 

But the profits are rewarded (somewhat randomly) to individuals from those groups (who are then dragged away from those groups by management). The profits do not return to the groups where the hits came from.

Maybe that brings you closer to the point.

Is sustainable sustainable?

Yet a different tack on the concept -- 

Ideals are good, right? But every ideal humans have developed in all our recorded history sooner or later leads to a dead or violent end. 

${White_supremacy} was an ideal that many found perplexingly reasonable -- mostly many ${whites}. But, surprisingly, many non-${whites} who preferred, perversely, to let someone else take the burdens of being socially superior. 

That preference may have been fear of retribution against contrary opinions in many cases, but in others was something else -- Leading is hard, and even most individual ${white_supremacists} perversely want someone else to lead the movement.

And basically, every political movement and ideal can be substituted in the place of ${white_supremacy} in the above paragraphs and it comes out the same.

Ideals adopted by the crowd quickly turn divisive and violent.

Should we get rid of ideals, then? 

Apparently, they are necessary. Otherwise people can't seem to see which way to head. But they are also necessary to abandon when the time comes. It is necessary to be ready to discard previously held ideals in favor of better ones, one at a time, when each ideal is no longer beneficial to the individual who has been holding it.

And society works much better when we don't all have to have the same ideals at once.

Sustainable development and sustainable economics seem like really good ideas. Okay, they are really good ideas. But in the end they are just another ideal.

The terms themselves contain an internal contradiction (just like all ideals, really). 

You cannot plan real progress, and without progress there is neither development nor economics.

Now, someone will point out that what is currently being called sustainable development in the international community is making use of our ecological resources in renewable ways.

Renewable?

How many people understand that all energy in our world comes, ultimately, from a very radioactive nuclear reactor in the center of the solar system? We are protected from it by distance, by atmosphere, and by a convenient magnetosphere. But without that huge source of (ultimately, non-renewable in a universe subject to entropy, but that's a long time away) energy, none of our economic activities are renewable.

Nuclear energy.

We have a lot of radioactive materials spread out all over the world. This was true well before such as the Curies, Einstein, Dalton, et. al. helped us understand the atomic nature of matter -- even well before Leucippus and Democritus. In some places they are naturally concentrated in ways that are dangerous to our safety there.

We also have a lot of nuclear reactor waste that has been concentrated by human means. And it's not going away anytime soon, either. 

Leaving it all there to slowly radiate away into the darkness is actually a waste of a good resource, a waste demanded by those who fear what happens when we mishandle it.

We are mishandling it now. 

We should be researching ways to use it safely, instead of sweeping it under the metaphorical rug of some mountain or desert in some remote part of the world we think we're safe from.

Most of the waste of our current economic activities is not radioactive. But it is still quite poisonous, quite dangerous to our health, and quite wasteful. 

Consider our old computers and portable phones. At least subliminally, you have to be aware that most of that ends up in highly toxic industrial dumps somewhere.

And the irony of it is that some of the very resources we are running short of are hiding in those dumps.

In too many of the ways it is used today, "sustainable" means "doing what we are already doing". That means continuing to call dumping waste "renewable", as long as we can find another place to dump most of it after a little processing to remove something currently of value.

And that isn't sustainable. Not in the long run.

So what is the answer?

Is sustainable not sustainable?

Or is it only temporarily sustainable and then you have to do it again?

Laws don't work. People always find loopholes so they can keep doing what they know how to do.

Right now, the answer is this: 

Those who have amassed great wealth by promoting the economic activities that generated the waste must learn to invest in their children's future by supporting the currently unprofitable activities of finding and developing safe ways to recover our waste -- preferably ways that don't entail seriously underpaid people working in slave conditions in distant countries poisoning themselves to got it done.

What if they insist on keeping their wealth instead?

What good will their wealth do if the next pandemic comes before we have proper vaccines for the current? 

Or if the slowly degrading plastics building up somewhere in the confluence of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean ends up poisoning all the food-grade fish in the world? 

Or if the radioactive waste dumps in the deserts and mountains start leaking into the very place where rainwater for the continent is absorbed back into clouds to rain on the rest of the continent?

I don't see very many of our multi-billionaires jumping on this.

Popular movements, popular charities, popular areas of technological development -- things everyone is already doing, mostly activities that indirectly support the companies where they have their fortunes salted away, sure, they jump on those. 

But not on the unsustainable activities that will lead us back to a new round of sustainability.

We can't be sustainable with short-term views of sustainability, and five and ten years is way too short-term.

WEAR THE MASK, FOR *** SAKE, YOU FOOL!!!! (a Response)

More people are getting sick for several reasons. 

The changing of the seasons is only part of the equation. 

Use of masks is also only part of the equation.

Masks never could be more than a low wall, and if they are not kept clean they quickly (three days or less) begin to defeat their own purpose. A dirty mask helps neither the wearer nor the people he is around.

The materials masks are made of become allergenic after long term use.

And I could go on about masks, but they are only part of the equation.

If you believe in God, may I ask you to consider that God may be trying to get us to slow our collective pursuit of the rat race down.

If not, let me tell you about how excessive and inappropriate competition is weakening all the foundations of our society, including our bases for maintaining health.

As best we can understand it, and much to the Chinese government's dismay and embarrassment, the virus made the jump from animals to the human population in slave-labor populations in China, where it is impossible for people to maintain nutrition, hygiene or other necessary conditions for health.

From there, it traveled first among populations in poverty, and communicated to the upper middle class where those populations touch -- ergo, from the slave-labor conditions where it jumped to the relatives and friends in slightly better conditions who work in sweatshops making our high-tech gadgets and such, and from there to their managers. 

Their managers have the means to go traveling, and it was a large group of vacationers who first brought it from China to Japan, to places like the snow festivals in Sapporo and Hokkaidō. 

In the developed world, it was the people with compromised immune systems who picked it up first (and whom it hit worst). This is not a surprise, really, since it is the immune systems' job to defend us. 

We were surprised when the methods of kicking certain parts of our immune systems into high-gear backfired, and excessive immune system reactions began to turn deadly.

Think about this carefully. These are partially immuno-compromised individuals who have adopted the habit of taking various drugs to help them keep working in spite of having really bad colds. In times past, a cold that bad could be deadly, but we have drugs to deal with the cold symptoms now.

Well, it turned out that those drugs had side effects that turned against us in this version of the cold virus. (Corona viruses are cold viruses, remember?) This should also be no surprise. 

When you push your body too hard with those drugs (including antihistamines and excessively high doses of vitamin C, and such), you go down, and the doc has to take you off those crutch medicines and convince you to get rest and nutrition. Even if the doctor can't convince you to go off the drugs, he or she really tries to convince you to get some rest. 

(Take notice of this: It's the rest and nutrition that heals you.)

A virus that kicks up a high-level response in the body combining with drugs that kick up a high-level response is going to result in a violent reaction, and the violent reaction can result in death and debilitating disease.

Now, a rudimentary understanding of epidemiology tells us that these kinds of pandemic continue until we develop herd immunity. 

We develop herd immunity in several ways. 

One is die-off. Horrible as that is, it is reality.

Another is by letting our bodies develop natural immunity by exposure. The low walls like masks slow the contagion down, which gives individuals more time to develop immunity. But if we then fail to strengthen our general health, to be ready for increased exposure, we lose the benefit of the low walls. 

Pre-exposure through vaccines is similar to the low-walls in this -- if we fail to keep our health up, vaccines have limits.

In modern society, we have often been able to dodge die-off by hygienic practices, by improving our overall health, and by the pre/faux-exposure of vaccines. But all of that also slows down the development of herd immunity, which means the viruses mutate and come back.

They don't go away until we develop herd immunity, both by exposure and by giving up the behaviors which enabled the virus to make the mutation jump in the first place.

The virus jumped in slave-labor conditions where it is impossible for people to maintain health.

We pick it up and pass it on when our behavior causes us to have dropped immunities.

Those behaviors include bad nutrition, lack of sleep, high levels of inappropriate stress, use of mood-altering substances, poor social hygiene, etc. 

How sick we get is also in no small part determined by our overall health, including whether our immune systems are within appropriate functional parameters -- we have seen clearly this time that kicking (some of) our immune systems into overdrive is another bad habit of modern society, and can cause a virus infection to turn fatal or debilitating when it otherwise wouldn't.

Even if you don't believe in God, you have to understand that nature itself is effectively telling us as a civilization, and me and you as individuals, to slow down.

-- to give up the bad habit of excessive competition, and the bad habit of trying to force everyone around you to compete in the games that you think you can win.

This is why this post is in my political blog. The causes of the pandemic, and the cure, happen to coincide with the causes and cure of our current social, political, and economic distress.

If we don't change what caused the pandemic, hanging on to your mask will be no better than trying to hang on to a clump of grass when you're dangling over the edge of a cliff. 

Sure, wear the mask sensibly, but fix the other problems. 

Slow down. Learn to give others a chance to live.

Cap in Hand

The Atlantic ran what I assume was an opinion piece, showing a picture of Donald Trump walking cap in hand in the dark with his top button unbuttoned, his tie hanging loose, captioned with the label "loser".

 

I won't comment on the contents of the piece. I saw it repeated all over the internet, with a unanimous, "TRUMP HAS DONE HIMSELF IN THIS TIME FOR SURE YOU CAN TELL BY HOW DEFEATED HE LOOKS!" refrain. Back in July.

Uhm, guys, if anyone is listening, I know what it's like to walk home cap-in-hand. I know what it means to loosen my tie. I know what it's like to wear myself out fighting battles when the people I want to help insist on beating me. 

I know what it's like to hear people using mockery to try to push me out of their way so they can promote their agendas. 

I also know what it's like to watch the mockers sink their own ship when they succeed in pushing me out of the way. It's not something that makes me happy. And it's not something I want to see happen to my country.

I don't agree with a lot of things Trump has said. Hey, after he shoots off at the mouth and takes some time to think about it, even he doesn't agree with a lot of the things he has said. 

I don't think it's necessary to have a president who only says and does things I agree with. In fact, considering all the other opinions necessary to keep the country running, I think it would be a very bad thing to have a president who only said and did things I agreed with.

But I consider the mockery he faces, and I definitely can't agree with that. And I think the mockery is a bad enough thing that I feel it necessary to say so in public.

When everything you say is mockery, it becomes really hard to communicate.

If you are going to criticize him, find something of substance to criticize. (But criticizing people is surely not a constructive use of your time.)

If you are going to criticize his record, find something of substance to criticize. (Better yet, quit criticizing and start trying to help find real solutions to our problems that aren't pie-in-the-sky. And quit blaming him for everything when you are at least partly to blame.)

If your continual harping on his humanness doesn't seem to be winning you anything but echos from your echo chamber, consider opening yourself up to opinions outside your echo chamber.

If the politics you promote don't seem to be winning in the polls, maybe you should reconsider your politics instead of blaming him for your lack of popularity.

Or maybe you should just state your opinions and let others state theirs, like I do. (Notice that I am not mocking you, just telling you I don't think mocking people is constructive dialog. I can see a difference.)

Real-world Mask Use

(This belongs in my Random Eikaiwa blog, but it's too political to put it there without annotation.)

Alfeo: "Why are you looking at my neck?"

Betty: "Sorry. I'm not a vampire, just wondering if you have a tracheostomy."

Alfeo: "Huh? Oh. You mean why is my mask down around my neck?"

Betty: "Not meaning to be rude or anything."

Alfeo: "Just sarcastic is all."

Betty: "No. Seriously. Masks are sometimes used to protect stomas."

Afleo: "Nothing like that. I just forgot to pull it back up over my face. There. Is that better?"

Betty "Yes. Covering both the mouth and the nose is much more effective at blocking potential vectors."

Alfeo: "True."

Betty: "So why do you pull it down?"

Alfeo: (Breathes through the mask.) "Haaahhhh."

Betty: "Oh. Your glasses get foggy."

Alfeo: "Yep. All steamed up. And that makes it hard to read the addresses on the mail I have to deliver. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the glasses."

Betty: "I see."

Alfeo: "So I pull the mask down when no one's around. And then I sometimes forget to pull it back up."

Betty; "What do you do when people are around?"

Alfeo: "Take the glasses off."

Betty: "Then how do you read the addresses?"

Alfeo: "Slowly. And when the address is in fine print like this one --"

Betty: "Wow! That's tiny! I have a hard time reading that with my contacts in."

Alfeo: "Yeah. So I lift the glasses up to read it. It takes extra time, but it allows me to keep the mask on when people are around."

Betty: "Why do people print addresses so tiny?"

Alfeo: "I don't know. Maybe the address was too long for the label? The people who write the addressing software didn't want to take the time to deal with really long addresses?"

Betty: "Why would systems engineers do that?"

Alfeo: "Deadlines. Speaking of which, I have to get back to work."

Betty: "I'd better get out of your way so you can work fast. It looks like you still have a lot of mail to deliver today."

Alfeo: "Thanks. I do."