Strategic rate errors

 There's apparently a fair bit of talk about Wilhelmine China.  It collapses into tactical neepery or remote psychoanalysis really fast.

The Great War --  millions dead, Zone Rouge aftermath, death of empires, social convulsion, mechanized warfare, the oil commitment, queuing up the next world war, all of it -- kicked off in the universal presumption that it would be, by necessity, a short war.

It would be a short war because Imperial Germany required imports of nitrates -- bird guano -- to make agricultural fertilizers and nitrocellulose propellants.  Once stocks were exhausted, the war would be over.  New stocks could not be procured because Imperial Germany did not have and could not get control of the sea.

Imperial Germany went with artificial nitrogen fixation via the newly invented Haber process. They didn't run out of propellants. Imperial Germany expected they could avoid a blockade; they'd put immense investment into a battle fleet.  Surely there would be enough time to accomplish their territorial objectives.

In the end, Imperial Germany disintegrated.  It took a lot longer than anyone thought.  The distant blockade worked; nearly all else was corpse-stacking.

This sets the pattern; wars take a long time, people will not stop trying to substitute blood for treasure, and substitution of overlords is impossible in the presence of the existing force-multipliers. (One determined person with explosives can decide there's no peace.  Couldn't do that before explosives.)

So the rule for post-1870 wars is "this takes longer, costs more, and has more lasting consequences than anyone expects".

China's experience of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th has almost nothing to do with the Great War.  It's a long struggle to establish sovereignty and reverse colonization.  It's become a rationalization for territorial ambition -- it must not be possible for that to happen again -- but the viewpoint of the PRC and any colonial power on strategic questions will split sharply between constructions of security from sovereignty and constructions of security through profit.  (Remember you're sovereign when you can shoot someone who is on your territory without your permission and the other sovereigns agree that was right and proper for you to do.)  The PRC is existentially committed to recovering the entirety of its rebellious province of Taiwan.  Until it does that, its legitimacy as unquestionably sovereign is in some sense fake.

The rule for climate change is "this is worse, sooner, than you expect".  The projections are relentlessly optimistic.

Everybody doing strategic analysis right now is caught between these two things; climate is about to prevent the possibility of action on strategic scales while all conflict is protracted.  It's impossible to tell if the window for effective action has closed.

You know that thing with prices? as soon as you know they'll go up, they do go up?

An economic resiliency contest -- even one without shooting, pure blockade by insurance regulation -- takes a long time, cause permanent unpredictable change, and (as COVID-19 has been making clear!) cannot have a clear winner. (Where the anxious traders know/Each is surety for his foe,/And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.) All the branches of the decision tree go to strategic exchange (because the alternative is losing), and the best time to have a strategic exchange is immediately, before other causes have diminished capability.  That way you come through with the largest possible remnant capability.

This pushes any open conflict to immediate full strategic exchanges.  Everyone on the planning side knows this.  To a first approximation, no one on the political side does.  They have trouble with the domain of necessity at the best of times, which these are not.

Extremely public proxy competition by decarbonization would be a much better idea, but the US would have to go first and no one seems prepared to start shooting US senators over decarbonization just yet.

Vaccination as saving throw

None of the available covid vaccines are sterilizing vaccines.  They've always been (in effect) saving throws against the worst effects of becoming infected.  If you've been vaccinated, you're less likely to die.

That's all we can say with confidence.

Omicron is less likely to kill you than Delta, we think, on present data.  What happens to an older population than the one from which the South African data is drawn from is not well understood.

That would be good news if Omicron didn't spread so fast.  Infectiousness is worse than severity because severity is linear and infectiousness is exponential.  Even if the median case is milder, many more cases give you a substantial pile of corpses.  Many more cases gets you more damaged people with curtailed agency, and there's no evidence Omicron is less damaging than other variants.  Truly many more cases, the million-infections surges that are entirely plausible in a lot of places, crash the health care system and then people die because they can't be treated for other things.

Against wild type, if there had been a fast, mandatory rollout of the mRNA vaccines, these vaccines might, stress might, have been sufficiently effective to stop spread.  This was never a possibility against Delta and (in the same conditions, presently, in Ontario) Omicron has a doubling time one tenth that of Delta.

We have no immediate prospect of a vaccine that can stop spread.  (That is, a sterilizing vaccine.)  It's not impossible; there's several lines of research that might get there by 2030.  But for planning purposes, we don't have one and won't get one.

Covid always hurts you; that's what comes out of the UK wild-type initial wave.  Maybe a small amount, maybe massively, but any covid-19 infection comes with damage.  There's a little bit of anecdata that repeat infections are worse.  The damage is poorly understood and currently untreatable. Unconstrained spread of the covid-19 clade of viruses -- which is a widespread policy position! -- means you catch it every year until something kills you.  It might not be covid, but something will and it'll be rather sooner than would otherwise have been the case.  That's the Uncommon Cold scenario, where the outcome is like that of a major plague in antiquity and the population shrinks by a quarter with dire economic consequences.

What can you do?

Get vaccinated; get boosted.  Induced immunity isn't durable -- just like the common cold! -- and it doesn't last more than six months.  It's less if you're older.  It won't keep you from getting infected and it won't keep you from getting hurt and it won't keep you from transmitting the disease, but it might keep you from dying.  (It might reduce your odds of being hurt badly; given that no one has figured out the mechanism for "long covid" yet, this one is open.)

Remember -- and this is a conscious, considered, ongoing effort kind of remembering -- that it's a virus.  This is the domain of necessity, like needing potable water and not eating arsenic.  How you feel about it, your moral stance, your loneliness, none of them have any primary meaning.  Duty requires that necessity be respected.  (There being no just way to value your convenience above the lives of others.)

Part of what duty requires is recognizing that the status quo ante pestis shall not return; it is one with Thebes the Golden.  Insist on this understanding in yourself and from politicians.

Wear a mask.  Wear the best mask you can get; N95 -- real ones -- is the minimum ante against Omicron.  Better is to be prefered.  Wear means you put it on, properly fitted, before you leave your house and it stays on, continuously properly fitted, until you return.  None of this "oh I am outside, outside is safe" nonsense. (Outside is not as risky.  Equating "not as risky" with "safe" is what is known as a mistake.)

Children are not protected by childhood innocence; children get infected, transmit, and are damaged about like adults.  Sometimes they die.  If the kid can't wear a mask, they stay in the bubble.

Act like you know you're infected.  Act like you know everyone else is infected, too.

Stop trying to negotiate with a virus.  It doesn't care if you've been virtuous.  It exists to convert the amino acid guts of your cells into more viruses.  It has no awareness of you as an organism; to a virus, you're landscape. If it helps to think of it as killer alien nano machinery, do that.  (Only "alien" is wrong.)

The two long-term policy options are extirpation and the Uncommon Cold.  Demand recognition of this choice from yourself and effective extirpation measures from politicians.  ("effective" does not mean "provided it continues to permit doing a mammonism"; it means "the disease is extirpated at the lowest cost in human agency, and we don't weight the agency, everybody's counts the same".)

Don't move around.  The virus can't spread if people do not come into contact.  Go home and stay home.  (If we could arrange for absolutely everyone to be able to do this for three weeks, that'd do it. It's way cheaper than the Uncommon Cold.)

Remember that the bill comes due.  The common good and the public peace and the civil order aren't free; there's a cost.  Usually that cost is remember to behave peaceably.  Sometimes that cost is higher, and this is one of those times.

Edited: s/about/above/, remove second instance of an adjectival phrase.