Occupying a volume of doubt

There are standing-up-to-peer-review study results out that various COVID variants are more infectious and more lethal; there is not yet a variant which evades the current vaccines, though the measurable decrease in vaccine efficacy suggests that such a variant is possible.  Various variants are headed at being more than half the COVID cases everywhere the disease has not already been extirpated.

There are a couple of reported events -- not tendencies, emphatically not study results -- where vaccination cures someone's Long Covid symptoms.  That in turn suggests that Long Covid is indeed a case of someone's immune system being unable to entirely clear the virus.

Since there's an existing suspicion that the variants arise from long periods of infection in individuals, where mutations that make the virus more infectious have a chance to be conserved, confirming that Long Covid -- which about 10% of people who get COVID develop -- is a potential variant generator would be disturbing.

Having careful graphs of lethality versus infectiousness that suggest some of the variants are now about as bad as smallpox is likewise disturbing.  Anyone who thinks about it will recognize that it's hardly likely that the worst possible variant has already evolved.

Thing is, none of this is information to a private person.  (It absolutely ought to be information to someone with responsibility for public health or pandemic planning.)  Information causes change, and none of this changes what a private person should be doing. Those stay the same; get vaccinated as soon as you can, never leave your domicile without masking and staying masked the whole time, go inside nowhere you are not compelled by necessity to go, as much as you can, cover your eyes. The more readily you can do this materially, the more you should do it.  The more infectious the variant, the more important it is to do these things.

Vaccination makes you safer; safe, or at least safe from this specific disease, happens when the disease is extirpated and everyone is safe together. That's going to be awhile, and post-covid normalcy -- whatever normalcy remains to the Anthropocene --  must wait on extirpation.

Pronouns

 So there's a species of obnoxious going around where the very idea that there's choice about what pronouns you should prefer to be addressed by is a calamity and obvious error and ill intent and so on, and nigh-all of the pushback to that position is structured around politeness and self-determination and rights and so on.

This is a mistake.

So at one time, there was a religious dispute over protestantism; you can find a lot of economics and moral philosophy and history of religion and so on about this.  That to some extent misses the point; it was a dispute about who gets to say what's normal, the prescriptive, enforced, social norm that decides who must be obeyed and who can complain and so on. (Hence the focus on who gets to claim the status of priest and speak for God; there is no arguing with God, so you must. It's a claim of authority when constructing social definitions.)

The material basis of the dispute is completely irrelevant; the point about the "only two pronouns" position is that people are defending their perceived position as someone who is an arbiter of the prescriptive social norm.  They're quite willing to go completely Thirty Years War about it if they have to, because all their status rests on it -- their construction of status requires that prescriptive norm to exist, so without it, there is no status -- and band-forming primates don't put anything ahead of relative band status.

(I think it's entirely possible to decide that gender has no business in the public sphere; legitimately treating someone differently on the basis of gender involves negotiating sexual attraction, an inherently personal and private subject.  Everybody is they outside that specific intimate context, and certainly in any public context.  This is the Egalitarian Party working document part of this post.)

If you construct status differently, say on the basis of not being the problem, you can conclude that it's a problem of bounds, rather than norms.  We don't know, and don't care, what normal is; figuring out what constitutes normal takes a carefully designed study and peer review and you can't get real-time results.  You can much more readily say "these are the borders of polite society" and not worry about the internal distribution.

If you can avoid constructing your status as someone who decides what's normal; where you're placed in your local authoritarian hierarchy.  If you can't, this whole thing is intolerable, and no matter how silly it looks from a perspective of facts, remember that the "only two genders" position is also a position that there shouldn't be facts, facts give incorrect answers.  Then remember that the full failure mode isn't extra legislative paperwork or increased political activity, it's Thirty Years War.  It's best to avoid presenting authoritarians with a prospect of success.

The copyright wrangle

 So a corner of the net I pay attention to is having the usual round of "that should be free!" about books and is descending into copyright yargling.

I find the general pattern of analysis generally lacking for two reasons; one is that it's trying to get capitalism to produce fairness, and two is that it's focused on an amorphous abstract taxonomy of mythological rights, rather than the basic purpose, which is to pay the creator enough to keep creating.  (This is more than "to live".)

So, one. Copyright shouldn't exist.  It did a sort of plausible job of paying the creator in the era of laborious manual typesetting; it's totally pointless now.

Two.  No corporation ever created anything.  Creation is a function of natural persons, and solely natural persons.

Three.  There is no legitimate barrier to creating transformative work, but commercial transformative work with immediate derivation should pay the creator of the work from which it is derived.

One implies things about distribution.  

The post office, or the ministry of culture, or the regional arts council, or the national archives, or the public library, becomes the repository of your work in its legally meaningful archival form.  (NOT inherently "electronic form".)  Someone who wants to produce material artefacts of that kind of work can select a work from this canonical repository and proceed.  For every copy they make, they owe a fee.  (The amount of the fee is an implementation detail; enough for the creator to keep creating, past a certain threshold of popularity.  And possibly varying by type of art, but flat within a type.  Your fee for one copy of a book and the fee the most popular author in the world gets for one copy of a book are the same.)  The fee goes to the creator or the creator's estate for life + 20 or median age of death + 20, whichever is longer.  After that time, the fee goes into the system to reduce its need for direct funding from taxes.  There is never, ever, in any way, a fee to register  your work or to maintain the archival copy.  This is a public service.

(Note that there's no right of alteration involved or implied.  And book covers, album art, etc. is a separate creative work incurring its own fee.)

Two implies things about collaboration.

If it takes eighty seven people to produce an opera -- to sing, to make costumes, to play in the orchestra, to write the score, to write the libretto, to manage the lighting, etc. -- every live instance of that opera is something to which they all contribute.  Their share of the fee must be paid to each of them for each time.  If there's a recording, the share of the fee is due each of them for every copy.  (How the shares work is another implementation detail.  It should be legislatively constrained to be flat; not more than an order of magnitude between the star tenor and the apprentice scenery painter.)

Living creators cannot surrender their fees; these will be paid.  They will be paid to all creators, the mad, incarcerated, addicted, or appalling included, without exception.   No contract can be made concerning the fees, and a contract found to be de facto concerning the fees is unlawful and void. "Work for hire" ceases.

Three says that if you make a direct transformative work with a living creator (when you start!)  and sell it some amount less than half of the fee goes to the living creator whose work you are transforming.  (Let us say three eighths.)

You can't say "based on" without their permission; they may exercise a moral right to make prefatory remarks up to five percent of the length of work absent their remarks, which will always be included in the work (which become part of the official archive copy), so the library will tell them when you register your archival copy of the completed work.  Deceptive marketing has to be defined and prevented, which is another one of those implementation details.

Fee-evading distribution is of course fraud and tax evasion, and by treaty the government in whose territory this takes place is obliged to pay the fees which are being evaded.

So, yes, lots of implementation details, but it keeps the creators creating.  It makes it easy to create transformative works.  It puts the culture back in the public sphere.  It keeps cops from using copyright as a means of avoiding being recorded.