Voting is an obligation of citizenship

 Dear editor,

Duty is what you do so you like yourself in the future.  Necessity is what you do so you are in the future at all.

Civilization exists to keep us out of necessity. In a civilization, when you die, on the odds it wasn't from violence, starvation, or preventable diseases.

We've seen all the parties respond to a pandemic, a thing governed by necessity.  This tells us how well we can expect them to respond to other constraining necessities -- climate change, inequality, supply chain failures, a housing market that does not provide for all Canadians, and the consequences to the medical system of containing the pandemic.

In this election, we have no excellent choices.

We do still have choices; we can pick the candidates who will act to keep us as far from necessity as these present times allow.

Vote, so it's a little easier to like yourself in the future.  You will have tried.

Sincerely,

Graydon Saunders

The purpose of the system is what it does

William Gibson quote-tweeted someone musing about supply chains in a context of "is this going to delay necessary change?" and it makes me want to scream into the void.

You can't control an economy in detail past a certain size.

What you can do is pick your tradeoffs; the long-supply-chain economy we've got is that way because it maximizes profits not through detailed control (which, remember, does not work) but by biasing the system to have small numbers of any particular community of practice, which tends to improve returns on investment in any particular community of practice.  If there's one factory on earth making titanium cookware, investing in the factory is both more reliable (there's demand, this is the whole supply) and more profitable (there's no competition).  This pattern extends to everything.  It relies on cheap shipping, so that shipping resin from the US Gulf Coast to China makes sense as a way to manage your industrial inputs.

Cheap shipping relies on nothing going wrong; if stuff goes wrong, you have to build in margin for it, and margin costs.  Competitive shipping prices -- one of the few areas where real competition remains -- rip out all the margin.  ("Just-in-time scheduling" is a palatable term for "zero-resilience manufacturing"; it's a cost optimization that deliberately choses systemic fragility to raise profits.  This was and is policy, just as much as not paying labour is policy.)

The other thing is that you're substituting a reliable schedule for having a system.  Systems have feedback.  Price signals are not sufficient feedback. (Prices can't reflect events people do not know about.  "Where does the hurricane land?", and so on, aren't predictable.  Resiliency has a cost, but it's a structural cost, you can't price it into a low-resiliency system.)

Necessary change is NOT "infrastructure resilience".  Necessary change is stuff like performing the experiment to answer "how small an economy with zero fossil carbon inputs can provide critical services?" (the stuff like refrigeration and anesthetized dentistry and a comms infrastructure).  It's a completely different world (at a somewhat higher elevation).

We can't get there from here; the only route involves coming down off this local maximum, and the sooner you do it, the less it costs.  The more deliberately you do it, the more survivable it is. (With machine agriculture, failed supply chains can result in a failed food supply just as easily as general agricultural failure due to climate shifts.)

Society is a machine.  The machine we've got is there to make sure the rich get richer.  It is not capable of doing anything else. (As we can see from the comprehensive failure of a pandemic response, including the "I have no obligations to something that doesn't exist" responses about social duty.)  It's absolutely not capable of resilience.

We need something resilient.  We can have it as soon as we decide we're going to have it, instead of this.  It's not an "and" question; it's an instead.

That's where my sense of doom went

 I'm not real happy about the election.  If this was a fairytale, everybody in the incumbent government who stayed in Cabinet rather than resign over approving new fossil carbon infrastructure would be last seen gnawing the dry bones of their children in a vast expanse of desolation.

They are, however, also the people who took obtaining vaccines seriously and who are trying, against substantial provincial incompetence, to get people vaccinated more and faster.

There are those failures in public life where you leave it, and never talk to anybody again. (Merely starting the Great War, as observe the later life of Mr. Hohenzollern.)

There are (supposedly) the kind of failures in public life where you apologize to the Empress;  we're already well past the point where Dougie's corpse ought to be discovered at the feet, or at least before the plinth, of the Queen's Park statue of Queen Victoria.

If you look at the Ontario COVID dashboard, for awhile there the "estimated percentage caused by Delta" was 100%.  Which is kinda expected; Delta displaces the other known variants.  It's such a problem precisely because it spreads better.

It helps to know that the testing for variants is minimal; Ontario tests for two (2) mutations, and classifies variants on that basis.  Right now, if it has neither the N501Y mutation nor the E484K mutation it's presumed to be Delta.

The current "estimated percentage caused by Delta" number is 99.5.  It was 99.6 yesterday.

There's been that daily tenth-of-a-percent tick down for a few days now.

My (rather numb) sense of doom looks at this and says "if something is displacing Delta, Ontario is not doing enough testing to be able to tell what it is."

If it's a Beta descendant (it could be; having N501Y would get it off the Delta list, and that was and is a marker for Beta (as well as Alpha and Gamma)), one is reminded that Beta was the one you could almost be glad Delta out-competed it because Beta was the one looking like it was headed at vaccine escape.

And here we are at 75% vaccinated, no mandatory vaccination, and lots of virus circulation. Pretty much precisely the environment to produce selection pressure for vaccine escape.

If that's what we've got happening, some historian is going to have coin a novel term for the magnitude of the failure.