General Road and Highway Discussion

[SammyOES]

My thoughts on tonight were that society is starting to fall apart. This covid-19 is going to bring out the worst of people and may make Mad Max seem like a church picnic.

There's tons of good happening out there too. (Just like always). If anything I'd argue it brings out the best in more people than it brings out the worst.

Even the "hoarding" types stories are mostly hype. Obviously there's a very small minority that are actively hoarding/profiteering but that's a very small part of the story. The shortages on the shelves are more about people stocking up a reasonable amount given the circumstance.

Let's say the average amount of food/essentials that people stock at home is around 1 week then at a random point in time people will be distributed from the low end of that (need to go shopping tomorrow!) to the high end (just got back from Costco!). Given the circumstances two totally reasonable things happened: People decided they needed to increase their average amount of supplies (more time at home, less eating out, want to reduce number of grocery trips necessary, etc.) and people decided they needed to be at the high end of what they want to stock. These are all things that we want people to do.

So of course that's going to mess up store inventories! Add in some supply change disruptions, and it's just a massive logistical problem that's going to take time to settle out. There's no great evil hoarding happening. People are generally pretty reasonable and we're living through crazy times.

Anyway, a bit of a tangential rant, but the "mad max" type comments always bring out my "People aren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be" rants.