Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

He leaves out examples that contradict his thesis, like the 1977 New York blackout which lead to widespread arson and looting. (1) Plus similar widespread rioting in Montreal in the 60s when the police went on strike. (2) Wiki also suggested a page for 'list of incidents of civil unrest in the US', which appear to number in the hundreds. (3) My guess would be that whether your city 'panics' or not just depends on a bunch of different circumstances, and that there's no one conveniently pat answer.

I used to follow Tanner on Twitter and he seems like a nice guy, but he's definitely part of this new generation of self-appointed 'intellectuals' that got famous on social media, have no actual subject-matter expertise in any 1 field, and just handwave stuff. He is the director of what's apparently a 1 man think thank, and he supposedly 'focuses on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia' despite having no graduate degrees or military/intelligence record that I'm aware of. (Also has nothing to do with this piece). Again, nice guy who I'm sure means well, but basically a self-appointed Twitter 'expert'. Call me old-fashioned but I'd like to see my experts have some actual qualifications in something

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...

Another example: the hoarding of toilet paper after the pandemic lockdowns. Granted, this was panic writ very small, but it was panic nonetheless. Suddenly everyone was hoarding TP because everyone thought there wouldn't be any available, thus turning the TP shortage into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not sure what counts as hoarding. I've always bought it in bulk and prefer to have at least a 6 months supply, even 12 months seems reasonable. It does not spoil, I can buy when it's on sale, and it's relatively compact and stacks well without wasting storage space.

Though, I suppose there were people who were buying it when they did not expect to use it personally. Fuck those people.

When the store shelves are empty for months despite the fact that nothing has actually changed in terms of underlying supply or demand, that's hoarding.

Demand did change though - people weren't pooping as much at offices, restaurants, and retail stores. All those places tend to use "commercial" toilet paper that is not available in your average grocery store.

If you looked at commercial suppliers during 2020, you were much more likely to find available supply, though it may be a bit awkward using one of those giant rolls at home when it won't fit on a standard dispenser.

In more ways than one.

All my friends just installed bidets instead. Now we need far less toilet paper. It started as a bit of a joke but we're now believers. Try it.

It was my understanding that because most businesses were closed for an extended period of it the TP-production companies had to shift their production lines from the god-awful paper typically used in commercial settings to the paper typically used in homes.

A few weeks into the shelter-in-place order, I did see commercial TP appearing on the shelves in my local corner stores. A while later, I started seeing household TP appearing again.

I'm not claiming that there was no hoarding, nor that there was no profiteering by folks buying up lots of stock and selling "on the street" at inflated prices. I am definitely claiming that closing most businesses for an extended period absolutely changed the underlying ratio of crappy commercial TP to better home TP required... which apparently isn't something one can respond to overnight.

"For months" is surely an exaggeration? What has changed in supply and demand is that much less toilet paper had to be distributed to workplaces, and much more close to people's to homes.

> "For months" is surely an exaggeration?

Not where I live (San Francisco Bay area). It was literally months. Fortunately, we always buy in bulk and had a pretty good supply in stock when it hit the fan, and I was able to get resupplied through Amazon once. But lockdown happened in March and it was May before I saw a roll of TP on a shelf again, and then stores were limiting purchases for many months after that.

> less toilet paper had to be distributed to workplaces

Yeah, that's what everyone said. But I couldn't find industrial TP either, either in person nor on-line.

> But I couldn't find industrial TP either, either in person nor on-line.

Did you try the smaller corner stores? A few weeks into the shelter-in-place order in San Francisco, I started seeing the crappy single-ply commercial TP appearing on their shelves. (And throughout shelter-in-place, there was somewhat-lower-than-usual-but-nonzero amounts of paper towels.)

At that point in time, larger places like CVS/Walgreens and Safeway were usually totally out of all paper -er- cleaning(?) products... the difference in stock levels never ceased to amaze me.

(Luckily, I happened to have enough household-grade TP to last me until household-grade stuff started appearing on those shelves again.)

> Did you try the smaller corner stores?

I live on the peninsula. We don't have small corner stores.

Oh bummer. I take it convenience stores were also plumb out?

The one in our neighborhood was. I didn't do an exhaustive survey. But I did check a lot of drug stores and found nothing.

I had enough around the house to give some away and still made it several months. If you're at the store and your brand is on sale, and you can't remember if you have plenty, buy some more. No big deal, it stores easily. At some point you're like, wait I have a lot, and then you don't buy anymore until you run out in one bathroom and realize you're getting low.

Everyone likes the toilet paper example for that time period because of how absurd sounding it is, but that's not all that happened. Lots of other things also vanished off the shelves because people suddenly started buying a ton more than usual - bread and peanut butter being the two that stood out most to me.

There was a shortage of five-gallon buckets. I still haven't figured that one out.

toilet

Exactly - the reporting on hoarding fucked me off because it inevitably led to more hoarding.

News media made that happen by putting the idea in peoples' heads via telling them not to do it.

I thought the main reason of the shortage was that suddenly everybody worked from home which disrupted the finely balanced "just in time" production and distribution? (eg highly simplified, there was always enough toilet paper produced, just of the wrong type, and the rest got stuck in "transit")

I heard it was just that TP is cheap and large, so you can take home a lot of it and once you've done so it feels like you've done quite a lot to prepare and now you have permission to stop preparing. A pacifier, basically.

My experience of a natural disaster confirms this from the article:

> He concluded that disasters “result however temporarily in what may be regarded as a kind of social utopia.” “While the natural or human forces that precipitated the disaster appear hostile and punishing,” Fritz observed, “the people who survive become more friendly, sympathetic, and helpful than in normal times.” In disaster scenarios, shared fear and suffering create “an intimate group solidarity among the survivors.” When the world suddenly falls apart, people do not grow more selfish, violent, or irrational, but more altruistic, caring, and calm.

After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, killed 185 people, devastated large sections of the city [0], suddenly everyone was nicer, for about 3 months - giving way more in traffic, smiling more at strangers, checking on neighbours they'd never spoken to before.

Then one day, an old lady starts ramming my shopping trolly at the supermarket checkout because she thought I was going too slow, and I thought to myself, "Ah, Christchurch is getting back to normal".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

The New York City blackout and the Murray Hill riot are examples of criminals taking advantage of a situation where the police were on strike or unable to respond, not of a panic. I'm not going to go through the entire list of incidents of civil unrest in the United States, but the first entry is described as an anti-government protest, not a panic either.

Who do you expect to appoint intellectuals?

> Who do you expect to appoint intellectuals?

I figured it was the magic dragon MENSA keeps in their vault.

Was the arson and looting because the power outage provided panic, or because it provided opportunity? Same question about the police strike.

If you're living in a state where the social contract is not functioning and people's behavior is constrained by some other thing, then their behavior will change when the constraint goes away. That's different than panic.

Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency.

Civil unrest is not the same as panic.

You can tell from France that French people just naturally like rioting.

(Americans have a highly mythologized idea of protesting based on misunderstanding the Civil Rights movement, so they think that 1. all protesters have strong morally correct political causes and 2. protesting does something good for those causes, and therefore think the French are noble workers fighting for their rights here. In fact they don't accomplish anything, the government just ignores them and are never voted out for this, and they're mostly advocating for wild conspiracy theories anyway.)

That's a not widely held belief of the French protesters in America. I suspect most of us (certainly most of the people I know) see the various strikes in the news and are happy we don't live there.

On a personal anecdote, I recall a French student who attended my university in America comment at one point how surprised he was by the amount of content our courses got through, since we weren't frequently interrupted by strikes of one sort or another.

That said, I do agree with the most of the rest of your points. Plenty of people here have overly romanticized views of protest and civil disobedience.

Even Duolingo repeatedly cites French workers being on strike (en grève) in its examples. They sound peaceful, but inconvenient.

The same America that's legalized hitting protestors with your car?

The protestors are there because they think they have an effect. The people trying to legally kill them want to stop them, because they also think they have an effect (and oppose it). Both of them are wrong.

(I should say this also comes from a misunderstanding of Vietnam War protests. Namely, they think they stopped the war, when in fact they didn't do nothin.)

Those protesters are clearly being noticed. That is the intended effect.

Being noticed isn't the same as changing anything. They may have lowered their expectations, but I think they mostly want to actually change things.

(Though like anything else with a lot of young people, some of them just want to get laid, and it works for that.)

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