Covid 19: Pandemic Lessons To Learn
Well, it’s Thursday night, I’m sipping on some Wild Turkey 101, I Just polished off some mini eggs, and I got to thinking about the future – post Covid19 (assuming there is a future after this mess).
Come on now – let’s keep this positive!
I started thinking the other night – perhaps this pandemic will change the way we as humans think about life, how we live, how we treat each other, and what we value. The pessimist in me – tells me nothing will change – but I hope I’m wrong! With that said, here are my top 5 things I HOPE, we as a society decide to change when this is all over!
Corona Virus: Positive Changes Moving Forward
Universal Basic Income
This is usually a hot topic whenever it is brought up. Most conservatives, older folk, and even myself when I was younger would argue that a UBI will reduce productivity, create a generation of lazy video game playing bums, and cost WAY too much. As I’ve gotten older my opinion on a Universal Basic Income has definitely shifted. First of all – who cares if “productivity” takes a dip. The human race is more productive than at any time in history, life is short – we should spend it doing what we enjoy, helping people, not trying to spend every possible minute earning and hoarding as much cash as possible. So we may not produce as many useless items we no longer need – but perhaps we now spend time doing things that are truly beneficial to society. I can only speak for myself, but if I had a “safety net” or UBI to fall back on, and no worry about making mortgage payments, I would 100% take a paycut to switch careers and do something that I truly feel good about. Perhaps I’d be a financial planner (who doesn’t make money selling his clients high cost mutual funds), or work for a non profit, a homeless shelter, etc.
Will everyone become a lazy video game playing slob? Obviously not. Sure some people may take advantage of the system, but that happens now. Who cares. A universal basic income would also reduce stress levels across the board, saving our health care and police services a TON of money. Poverty rates would plummet, crime would go down, and most importantly we’d get to spend the very limited amount of time we have on this planet doing something we are truly passionate about, without having to worry about a roof over our heads, or feeding our kids.
The cost would be high. Yea…it would. Nobody is denying that. It’s not about a lack of money though, it’s about priorities. We could cut military costs (the USA especially), healthcare budgets could come way down, less poverty, less stress, less strain on the system. Police budgets are already way too high – less poverty/crime would be an easy argument to reduce these. With a UBI, you could scrap: EI, OAS, CPP, Welfare and a myriad of other programs, plus all the administration costs associated with these programs. At the very least we need to test a UBI on a large enough sample, for a long enough period of time and measure the results. Come on!
Permanent Increase In Working From Home
Hopefully a lot of companies realise that employees are more than capable and mature enough to work from home. Working from home has a ton of benefits for both employee and employer:
- Less office space needed/lower costs for employer
- Breaks can be used to get stuff done around the house, more free time in evenings to spend with friends and family
- Less people commuting – better for the environment. To me, this is by far the biggest benefit. Imagine 20-30+% of the workforce all of a sudden starts working from home. What would that look like in every major city in the world. 30% less cars on the road, twice a day, five days a week.
- The crazy thing is, a LOT of companies could easily allow employees to work from home – with zero change in productivity (in fact, employees may be happier, work harder and have less turnover), yet for no reason other than tradition, they continue to force employees to drive into an office every day.
Universal Healthcare
I’m Canadian, most of my readers are as well…but if Covid 19 teaches the world ONE thing for the future, I hope it’s that illness, viruses, cancer, etc are NOT YOUR FAULT. You should never have to stress about paying for something like this, and NOBODY should ever go broke for getting sick. Covid 19 is showing the world just how ridiculous it is having health insurance tied to employment.
Online Voting
I saw some people posting about how senators may be able to vote on bills remotely due to Covid 19. Here is an idea…how about give EVERYONE the option to vote online in elections. Voter turnout in North America is pathetic (partly due to certain parties making it difficult for certain people to vote). That said, it’s 2020, you can seriously do EVERYTHING online. Just let us fuckin vote online*.
*Regular voting would still be open, for those without access to internet, computers, etc.
Wash Your Fuckin’ Hands
I cannot believe this made the list…but hopefully this whole washing your hands thing catches on. I cannot believe how many people didn’t do this before (people in the washroom at Jets games I’m looking at you). Hopefully everyone now realizes that washing your hands is actually super easy, and kills those pesky germs!
Lastly, hopefully we learn electing a senile, narcissistic, petty reality TV star which controls the world’s largest economy, military, and has the biggest global influence is a terrible fuckin’ idea. Unfortunately, based on the fact Joe Fuckin’ Biden is going to be the person running against Trump….i’d say we are fucked regardless.
On that positive note – I’m going to pour myself one more bourbon, jump in a vanilla scented bubble bath and get some sleep.
Cheers!
Moneymaaster 