Avoid engaging with rationalizations

 Rationalisation is infinite; you're not.

The stuff under the rationalisations is simple; it's affirming a hierarchy.  The thing wrong with AOC's photo shoot is that it accords AOC the trappings of status, and the people complaining know that AOC cannot have status, so it's wrong, and will rationalise why it's wrong -- they're not good at thinking clearly about the system they're embedded in -- infinitely.  The real problem is that the hierarchy is not functioning correctly.

The hierarchy, the ability to say what is prescriptively normal and derive social power from control of that definition, is the simple core of everything in authoritarian systems.  It's simple; it copies itself effectively.  That's about all it's got going for it.

This is where the disdain for facts comes from; facts are an understanding of a consistent material world.  You can't have facts as an individual; it requires the ongoing collective effort, it requires falsifiability, and it requires discounting feelings.  (If you've put twenty years of career and life and effort into something, and you've just falsified it, you have to tell people.  That's difficult.  It's not what how you feel about it wants you to do.)  If you accept the utility of facts -- facts are useful, enormously so, but you don't have to accept that -- you oblige yourself to accept that "what does this do?" is a more important question than "How do I feel about this?", which is corrosive to the structures of authority.

Eventually -- it takes generations and centuries, but eventually -- it comes down to a core political conflict over "What does this do?  Do we want that?" versus "How do I feel about this?" as the mechanism for reducing public and personal insecurity.

There is no possibility of coexistence when the decrease of insecurity on one side increases it on the other.  You can disagree about barbeque, sportsball, Abrahamic god, or vi vs emacs and co-exist happily, but you can't finesse increasing insecurity.  This does not and cannot end with getting along.

And, yes, it's a little more complicated than that; mammonism as a construction of authority is particularly awful, the end of the Carbon Binge is excessively dread, and there's a whole lot of collapsing imperial power increasing the insecurity of the great.  But underneath it does all come down to whether we're going to take the collective-determination-of-present-understanding-of-facts approach, or the stable-social-hierarchy-derived-from-an-authoritative-declared-prescriptive-norm approach.

I'm a materialist and pro-facts, if that's not obvious.  I'd think it was, but then again I'd think it was plenty obvious what the relative utility of the two systems of social organisation are based on the outcomes of pandemic public health efforts.

Necessity and the northern winter

 We're heading into the boreal winter with Canada, the UK, and the US seeing rates of COVID infection increasing.  This is likely due to sending children back to school. American Thanksgiving, and from the sound of things UK Christmas, are going to be additional clusters of spreading events.

We know a few things about COVID-19.  Dose -- how many virus particles you were exposed to -- matters to severity.  Most people who get infected don't infect anybody else, but about one person in five is a super-spreader and infects many people.  Aerosol spread is much, much more likely inside, if there's talking, if there's singing, and as the time spent inside increases.  

With less understanding, we know you can get COVID-19 twice, and nothing says it's less severe the second time.  And various learned persons have pointed out that there's no actual reason to suppose COVID-19 isn't seasonal -- worse in the winter -- just because it demonstrated greenfield spread in the summer.  

My take is that this winter the ongoing or pending mass evictions due to COVID-19 related job losses are going to push people into tight quarters with inadequate sanitation at best, and that we're going to see people caught in multiple super-spreading events between forced job attendance, winter forcing people inside, and the inadequate testing to identify the infected.  Exposure to multiple super-spreader events will make back-tracking or contact-tracing impractical even if the infrastructure to do it is in place (it's not), and the ability to control spread cannot now be implemented in time to prevent this.  The dose increase from being caught in multiple events will push mortality and morbidity up.

Am I wrong?  Hopefully.

However locked down you can get still seems only prudent through at least March.

Even if COVID-19 goes away tomorrow out of some inexplicable miraculous mercy, try to remember,  next summer and the next time you vote, that this didn't have to happen; that we've got ample demonstration that a competent public sphere has several effective options for containing this disease.  Try to remember that the purpose of a system is what you see it do, not what might be claimed about it.  The "Western democracies", especially and particularly the English-speaking ones, are now sufficiently mammonite that they care considerably less about the health and well-being of their citizenry than traditional communist Vietnam or the dystopian autocracy of the PRC have been seen to do.  (Never mind Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore.  Or New Zealand, who have apparently escaped the mammonite curse through being small and agrarian.)

Insidious hazards

 An insidious hazard is one which is easily overlooked and ignored because they are not usually conspicuous (seen, tasted, smelled, or felt).

People in general have trouble with insidious hazards because there are only two things you can do about an insidious hazard; you can ensure that the hazard isn't present, or you can continuously maintain precautions for the hazard.  And it's usually not there, so it involves a lot of effort and attention over nothing.  Basic brain wiring tries to insist that this thing that doesn't happen isn't important.

Carbon monoxide is only mostly insidious (you can tell it's there, but you will probably mis-attribute your symptoms); there are laws about carbon monoxide detectors anywhere there's a combustion furnace because of this.  Inert gas suffocation (when you walk into a cloud of, say, methane and pass out before you realise what's wrong) is another insidious hazard.

Mercury is an insidious hazard; actual things containing mercury have mostly been dealt with via the first method, by getting rid of the thing with mercury in it.  This is only somewhat helpful because while there are sometimes regulations designed to limit the amount of mercury released into the environment by industrial activities like burning coal, these are generally not effective because they're seen as an intolerable limitation on profit.  (I suspect this would be true even if it was readily possible to point to specific corpses.)

In other contexts, fixing stuff down manholes or dealing with silage could, in principle, use expensive laser spectroscopy or other detection mechanisms to ensure an inert gas hazard isn't present; one could, in principle, always wear breathing apparatus if there might be an inert gas hazard.  In practice, people don't; it's too expensive and it's too slow.  The occasional death is seen as preferable to the cost of mitigating the insidious hazard.

COVID-19 is an insidious hazard.  You won't notice when you catch it; you won't notice who might spread it, because people are most infectious before they have any symptoms at all.

I find myself thinking that the Ontario government's response to COVID-19 is exactly like their response to air pollution (for most, most of the time, an insidious hazard); yes, this kills a lot of people.  Not killing those people would be expensive, in the immediate term, for those presently wealthy.  We won't do anything about it.

(Note that this policy position is, from a long term financial perspective, flat wrong; the economic case for not killing those people is simple and obvious and strong.  So there's no "grim monetary need" case to be made for the necessity of accepting the deaths.  It's nothing but preference.)

Wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying away from other people -- never mind the specific distance, the thing is airborne; "as far as you possibly can, and if that's not far enough, don't" -- are the second response to an insidious hazard; always take the precautions.  You don't know and won't know and can't know when you're going to need them, so you always need them.  Put the mask on before leaving your dwelling and leave it on until you return.  If you can't do that, don't do the thing.  (If the employee can't do that, don't you go and make them do the thing.  If they work for you, fix it.)

Annoying, inconvenient,  unwelcome?  All of the above.

Sensibly avoidable, heading into a boreal winter where we're severely uncertain we're going to avoid overlapping super-spreader events?

No.

Duration of food security

 Canadians spend a bit more than twelve to a bit more than fifteen percent of their income on food.  (It varies by quintile.)  The overall is just over fourteen percent. (14.1%).  Canadians spend about half of their income on shelter and transportation.  (If you ever wonder why real-estate developers seem to have infinite political power, roughly 30% of everything goes to housing.)

I'd argue that food security is iffy now for the bottom quintile; I'm further going to argue that food security won't matter politically until the upper quintile is experiencing a standard of living drop due to increased food expenses.

That's somewhere around doubling the real price of food; the food budget expanding to about 30% of total expenditures.  I figure that'll happen by 2030; we're not getting nice linear climate change.  Someone with a real data set could probably predict this much better; the linear extrapolation is the outer/upper bound.

The essential question remains whether we can replace agriculture before hitting that bound.  (And we have to have a de-carbonised replacement if we want it to actually help.)

Could wish there was a lot more political focus on this.

A just-so story

 SARS-CoV-2 is not a bat disease; it reproduces in humans, and is a human disease.  It's descended from a bat disease, and may thereby retain some characteristics of bat diseases.

Most bats are tiny and have trouble meeting their metabolic needs; you'll see stylised facts about how bats can eat their own body weight in insects every night, and so on.  What this means to a bat is that it is bradymetabolic, with two metabolic states; the fast one for flapping around, actively hunting flying insects, and the slow one for roosting.  If the bat (tiny, big heat loss area from its skin-covered wings) tried to maintain the fast metabolism all the time, it would starve to death because it couldn't eat enough to get itself through a long summer day.

What this means for bat viruses is that they're a virus; they don't have enough DNA or RNA to carry one set of biochemical machinery for the warm temperature and one set for the cool temperature.  It's one or the other.  Either way, the bat won't stay in that state for long; it will switch by going out to hunt or to come in to roost, and then the virus gets subjected to the equivalent of a high fever or a medically induced coma depending on whether it's got the biochemistry for conditions in a cool bat or a warm bat.  It means bat viruses are hasty; the time window to reproduce enough to spread is short.

COVID-19 isn't that contagious, except when it is; a disease that doesn't spread very well most of the time spreads like measles sometimes.  The average comes out to worrisome, but the distribution has a "meh" arm and a "red alert!" arm.

We're not bats.  We are automatic endotherms; we're not as warm or as cool as a bat. The "go for it, go for it, now now now" mechanism in SARS-CoV-2 doesn't trigger all that often or all that reliably.  When it does, and the person the virus is going into maximal-shed-mode in happens to be inside with other people, we get a super-spreader event.

One also has to note that the super-spreader events we know about don't correlate to anything in terms of the person who arrives infected; the event requires people being inside, lots of talking, poor air circulation, etc., but there's absolutely nothing about the infected person that indicates why they might be a greater source of contagion.  In this just-so story, it's pure bad luck; their infection happened to trigger "go for it!"  mode at just that time.

Couple-three things to watch out for:

1. Some estimates put 80% of the total number of COVID-19 infections as happening due to super-spreader events.  That's an obvious source of selection pressure to produce strains of SARS-CoV-2 that are better at triggering their "go for it!" levels of shedding in humans.
2. severity of the disease correlates with viral load; a virus strain better at doing rapid reproduction in humans will move the average dose up in those infected by shedding more on average compared to current strains
3. further adaptation to humans includes the possibility of an always-on strain of SARS-CoV-2

I'm not kind of medical professional, biochemist, or virologist.  I don't know any of this applies; it's a just-so story built out of public statements about how bat viruses in general and SARS-CoV-2 in particular work.  And for all my numerous character flaws, optimism is not one of them.

Still find myself much inclined to avoid taking chances this boreal winter.